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Hence one narrative records what must have been a common experience, the devil whispering to a monk, "You are more just than all the others. You have practised ascesis more than they. Jesus loves you and lives in you and speaks by your mouth .... "17 If eremitism is superhistorical, to recall Nietzsche's term, then cenobitism pursues the other "antidote to history," the "unhistorical": "By the word 'the unhistorical' I denote the art and the strength of being able to forget and enclose oneself in a limited horizon" (Advantage and Disadvantage of History 62).

Nor, for that matter, can it be imitated in the same sense as a human being can. The imitation of a text is imitation without devaluation. With its lengthy discussions of the deceptions and disorder of demons, about which I shall have more to say in later chapters, this text gives extraordinary rein to the voices that theology would silence. Indeed, from a certain point of view, the threat of Bakhtinian language is the dominant subject of The Life of Anthony. This text is also Bakhtinian in that it explicitly espouses the view that textuality is a locus of social judgments and processes.

It is the corrupt, the wavering, the kinetic, the historical. In the desert, no thought or gesture arises in response to a previous gesture in "the world," and so every thought or emotion was instantly revealed as a trace of selfhood, betraying a movement of desire that had to be specifically attended to. According to Origen, monks should "pray without ceasing," literal and specific advice repeated by Athanasius, the point of which was to leave no crevice in the day (or night) in which the merely personal could emerge.