Download PDF | ( Oxford Studies In Byzantium) Lucy Parker Symeon Stylites The Younger And Late Antique Antioch From Hagiography To History Oxford University Press (2022)
287 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book began its life as an Oxford D.Phil. thesis. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my doctorate. I finished the book while working as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, still in Oxford, and would like to thank the British Academy for their support of my research. The book is therefore a product of the rich and stimulating environment of the History Faculty in Oxford.
I am grateful to all the students and tutors in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies with whom I have discussed Byzantine religion over the years, and to David Taylor for inspiring tuition in Syriac. I cannot imagine a better place to have worked on this project. Of many debts, two stand out. I was first introduced to Byzantine history as an undergraduate student by the late Mark Whittow. Mark was a wonderfully engaging and kind tutor, and remained a source of support, wisdom, and good humour long after my student days. Like so many others, I miss him greatly. I am also very indebted to my supervisor, Phil Booth. Phil has been unfailingly generous and supportive to me, and his advice has greatly improved my work. Among many kindnesses, he took the time to teach me the basics of Coptic.
I am very grateful to everyone who has helped me in the process of converting my thesis into a monograph. My doctoral examiners, Averil Cameron and Vincent Déroche, gave me very helpful suggestions and constructive criticism; I greatly appreciate their support. After finishing my doctorate, I began working on the ‘Stories of Survival’ project in Oxford led by John-Paul Ghobrial. John-Paul has been a wonderful mentor and friend, and I have learned a great deal from him. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Jeffreys, who was very encouraging when I first considered publishing this book with Oxford Studies in Byzantium. I am very grateful to Charlotte Loveridge and Cathryn Steele, my editors, and to all the team at Oxford University Press for all their help throughout the process of publication.
I owe a great deal to the support of my friends and family. I cannot name them all here, but would especially like to thank Otone, my house mate throughout most of the time I worked on this project, for her unfailing friendship, support, and enthusiasm about stylites. It has been a joy to talk about history, religion, and the ancient world with Anastasia, Rosie, and Laura. My husband, Paul, has been a constant source of encouragement. We first met each other a few months before I finished my doctorate. Several years later, we were in Scotland on our honeymoon when I found out that my book had been accepted by OUP! I am so grateful for the love and happiness that he has brought into my life.
My greatest debt is to my parents, Jo and Robert, for the support of all kinds which they have given me over the years. I could not have written this book without them, and I dedicate it to them with love and gratitude.
Note on Transliterations and Conventions
Any author of a book treating an area which used a range of languages faces difficult decisions in terms of transliteration conventions. I have tried to follow some clear principles, but, like the scribes of Syriac manuscripts, I beg the reader to forgive any mistakes. For names which have common English equivalents, I have used these (thus John not Ioannes/Yuhanon, George not Georgios/Giwargis, Cyril not Kyrillos). When a name does not have a widely used English equivalent, I typically use a simplified Greek transliteration (Amantios, Dorotheos, Evagrios Scholastikos).
I do, however, use a Latinized transliteration for authors who wrote in Latin (Marcellinus comes), for emperors (Tiberius and Heraclius), and for martyrs whose names are paired with common English names (thus Cosmas and Damian, not Kosmas and Damianos). For place names, I typically use the commonly known English version. For places with both Syriac/Arabic and Greek names, I use the name most widely used in scholarly literature. For obscure place names mentioned in hagiographies, I use a simplified transliteration from Greek.
In the main text of the monograph, I provide all quotations in English translation. If I have made the translation myself, or adapted it from a published translation, I provide the original-language quotation in the footnote, so that readers may check my translations. If I have quoted from a published translation, I do not provide the original language text, although I do provide a reference to the relevant edition as well as the translation. For the Bible, unless otherwise indicated quotations from the Old Testament are from the New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford, 2007), accessed online through http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ nets/edition/, which includes updates from 2009 and 2014; quotations from the New Testament are from The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, 4th edn (Oxford, 2010).
Introduction
Shortly before the Persian sack of Antioch in 540, a local holy man received a troubling vision. This holy man, Symeon Stylites the Younger, was, according to his hagiographic Life, warned by God that He was angered by the sins of the Antiochenes and was planning to deliver them to the Persians. Symeon cried out to God, imploring Him to change His mind and spare the city. The hagiographer reports, however, that the saint received no response from God, because His anger was at its peak. Symeon then prayed again, fervently, and God provided an uncompromising reply:
I will surrender the city and I will not hide from you what I am going to do. I will fill it with enemies and I will surrender the majority of those living in it to slaughter, and many of them will be led off as prisoners.’
Symeon could not change God’s mind; destruction was unleashed on Antioch. The hagiographer continues to claim that Symeon was able to mitigate the damage wrought, and to protect some monks and prisoners who invoked his name, but his initial petition for God to spare Antioch went unheeded. This episode raises uncomfortable questions about the position of the holy man as an intercessor between God and his supplicants. Could a human, however holy, be expected to change the mind of God? How could he reconcile fulfilling his supplicants’ desire for protection with his obedience to God’s will? And, most strikingly, how would his supporters react to his failure to achieve protection for the community which he claimed to defend?
This is a book about the authority of the holy man and its limits in times of crisis. It investigates the tensions that emerged when increasingly ambitious claims about the powers of holy men came into conflict with undeniable evidence of their failures, and explores how holy men and their supporters responded to this. It takes as its central figure Symeon Stylites the Younger, who, from his vantage point on a column on a mountain close to Antioch, witnessed a period of exceptional turbulence in the local area. Symeon the Younger was born in Antioch in c.521.?
According to Symeon’s hagiographer, the saint’s father, John, was the son of two perfume-sellers from Edessa. Symeon’s mother, Martha, had desperately desired to remain a virgin but had to bow to her parents’ wishes to marry John.’ After her marriage, she supplicated John the Baptist to be granted a child to serve Christ; Symeon was born after this.* Symeon’s sanctity was foreshadowed throughout his infancy: he would only drink, for example, from his mother’s right breast, spurning the left (in an echo of Christ’s division between the righteous sheep on his right and the sinful goats on his left).* When Symeon was five, an earthquake struck Antioch; one of the victims was the saint’s father, John.° His life was thus marked from an early age by the disasters that afflicted sixth-century Antioch. Not long afterwards, a man in white appeared to Symeon and led him to a monastery in the mountains, led by another stylite, John. Symeon, now aged six, joined the monastery, and soon ascended a small column next to John’s.’ This was the start of an exceptional career.
The child saint received numerous visions from God, and surpassed the rest of the monastery in asceticism, provoking jealousy among the monks.*® He soon began to perform miracles. Ephraim, the patriarch of Antioch, came to visit him and spread his fame within the city.’ After some time, he moved onto a 40-foottall column, on which he stood for eight years.° He foresaw John’s death, and seems, although the hagiographer never states this explicitly, to have taken over the monastery after this took place."* After John’s death, Symeon redoubled his ascetic efforts, and performed yet more miracles. Indeed, most of his hagiographic Life consists of a vast array of miracle stories, with little clear narrative or chronological structure. But this is interspersed with several key events, some relating to Symeon’s own career and monastery, some part of empire-wide events. Symeon, as we have seen, is said to have prophesied the Persian sack of Antioch by Khosrow I in 540.’?
In an ultimately unsuccessful effort to avoid his crowds of admirers, he relocated his monastery to the “Wonderful Mountain’ (so named by Christ in a vision), where he arranged for a new column and new monastic complex to be built (see Fig 0.1).’* The base of this column still stands today (see Figs 0.2 and 0.3).
The plague, which afflicted the eastern empire in the early 540s, also affected Antioch and Symeon’s own monastery; Symeon had to appeal to God to bring back one of his best-loved disciples, Konon, from death.'* Symeon foresaw the death of Patriarch Ephraim and the succession of the wicked Domninos.’* He predicted further earthquakes which afflicted Antioch.’* He was ordained as a priest (unlike his famous predecessor Symeon Stylites the Elder).’” Justinian’s agent Amantios came to Antioch in response to Symeon’s prayer to punish the pagans and idolaters in Antioch.’* Symeon foresaw the accession of Anastasios as patriarch of Antioch, of John Scholastikos as patriarch of Constantinople, and of Justin II as emperor.’? He healed Justin II’s daughter, but when the emperor himself fell ill he refused Symeon’s advice to avoid wicked treatments and to entrust himself to God, and consequently turned mad.”° This is the last clearly dateable episode in the Life until it recounts Symeon’s own death in 592.
This brief summary is enough to show that Symeon’s life was of exceptional historical interest. It spanned most of the sixth century, a century which has been the subject of intense historiographical debate, seen sometimes as the end of antiquity, sometimes as the start of Byzantium.”’ The reign of the emperor Justinian (527-65) was traditionally seen as a last golden age for the eastern Roman empire; recent studies, however, have depicted it as a time of rising social tensions and economic disparities, of Kaiserkritik, religious dissent, and increasing eschatological fears.”? Others have seen the later sixth century as a time of ideological change: of governments adopting an increasingly religious tone and becoming ever more reliant on saints’ cults, with, perhaps, a concomitant increase in scepticism towards the cult of saints.”*
All of these debates take place with an eye towards the military disasters of the seventh century: was the empire fundamentally weakened or riven with tensions that made it more vulnerable to devastation first by the Persian armies and, subsequently and permanently, by the new forces of Islam? Late antiquity as a field of study has sometimes been criticized for seeming to deny the possibility of any form of decline or catastrophe; scholars have recently pushed back against this with a renewed interest in crisis in multiple forms.**
Symeon’s life offers a new perspective on the religious and social developments of the sixth century, especially in the region of Antioch. Hagiography, more perhaps than other sources, can offer exceptional insights into living debates within society around questions of religious belief, theodicy, and the role of saints within the empire. This does, however, present a methodological challenge: how to write history from a body of materials largely concerned with glorifying the reputation of an exceptional individual, around whom legendary material accumulated rapidly?
This book seeks to explore the relationship between saints and society; between hagiography and history. Holy men have provided a topic of great interest for late antique historians since Peter Brown’s ground-breaking article of 1971 on the rise and function of the holy man. In 1971 Brown famously portrayed the holy man in anthropological terms as a mediator and patron within society; historians have subsequently uncovered various other roles played by holy men and women, from ‘commander’, to ‘teacher’, to ‘intercessor’, and combatant with demons.” Brown himself has shifted his emphasis from his original article, proposing various other ways of understanding the holy man, including as ‘exemplar’ and as ‘arbiter of the holy’.?° Others have emphasized the diverse behaviours of holy men, suggesting that we should not attempt to generalize about their roles at all.””
All of these approaches are fundamentally historical, seeking to uncover the reality of the lives and behaviours of holy men. But there is always a certain methodological tension that inevitably affects historical studies of hagiography and saints’ cults. The problem, of course, is that hagiography is not history, in the sense of quasiobjective modern historiography.”* It is very difficult to untangle the complex relationship between holy men, their cults, and their hagiographers. Since Brown’s original article, it has become very apparent that saints’ Lives cannot be read as straightforward, accurate reports of the lives of holy men or women, even when stripped of their more fantastic elements: hagiographers selected and shaped their material to fulfil a wide range of purposes, from the panegyrical to the personal and political.” Some holy men may have been entirely fictitious (although their Lives could still, of course, convey spiritual truths); many probably existed, but this does not mean that the majority of material found in their vitae is historically accurate.*°
Literary approaches to hagiography have proliferated in scholarship, revealing further aspects of hagiographers’ rhetorical techniques.** The concept of a genre of ‘hagiography’, which encompasses texts of a variety of forms, including biographic Lives, miracle collections, accounts of martyrdoms, collections of sayings, and homilies, has itself been called into question.*?
Even if a historian abandons the ambition to assess the historicity of the Life of a holy man and decides to focus instead on his cult and posthumous representations, the relationship between hagiography and cult remains complicated. Hagiography (whether in the form of a saint’s Life or a collection of miracles) creates a particular vision of a saint and his or her cult. This vision does not necessarily reflect a generally accepted interpretation of the saint, who could mean very different things to different people. Nor does it always represent the ‘official’ ideology of a cult, insofar as such an ideology ever existed.
This is perhaps most strikingly demonstrated by the fifth-century Miracles of Thekla: the work was written by a maverick ex-member of the clergy at her shrine at Seleucia in Isauria who had been excommunicated by local bishops.** But a whole host of examples could be adduced to show that hagiography often represents the interests of a particular individual, or group, rather than all of a cult’s devotees. The several Lives of the fifth-century stylite Symeon the Elder differ, sometimes significantly, in their accounts of his life and in particular his death; these differences seem to reflect the diverse interests of rival groups associated with his cult.**
The two surviving miracle collections relating to the cult of Cyrus and John at Menouthis, one written by the educated monk and future patriarch of Jerusalem, Sophronios, and the other by an anonymous, possibly non-clerical, devotee of the martyrs’ shrine, present drastically different visions of proper cultic practice, of the requirements for supplicants, and of salvation.**
Several saints’ Lives produced in monastic communities were written in the context of internal controversy, often relating to events following the death of the holy man. The Bohairic Life of Pachomios, for example, seems to have been intended in part to defend Theodore, a monk in Pachomios’s monastery at Pbow who later became leader of the Pachomian confederation in very controversial circumstances.*° The whole account of Pachomios’s life is bound up with that of Theodore’s, and appears highly partisan: it is difficult to believe that this emphasis would have been accepted by all members of the Pachomian confederation.
Hagiographic texts thus embody a range of more or less particular interests, which do not necessarily represent those of most devotees of the cult of the saint in question. This point should not perhaps be pushed too far: even if rival factions might have interpreted particular aspects of a saint’s career very differently, it is likely that they would all have shared some common ‘memories’ of his or her achievements, which are reflected in hagiography. Nonetheless, it is clearly of critical importance to establish, as far as possible, when, why, and by whom any given hagiography was written.
How, then, is the historian to tackle the problem of disentangling the saint as historical figure, from his posthumous cult, and from the version of him represented in a hagiographic text? One option is to avoid the pitfalls of hagiography by focusing on other sources relating to holy men, including letters and sermons. Powerful studies have been produced on, for example, the letter collection of the sixth-century Palestinian holy men Barsanouphios and John, and the various writings of the famous fifth-century Egyptian hegumen Shenoute of Atripe.*” Little such evidence survives relating to stylites, but Dina Boero has recently discussed the few letters attributed to Symeon the Elder.**
A contrasting approach to the problem of historicity is, in a sense, to discount it: to focus only on the reality of the hagiographic text, rather than trying to relate it to any real historical events or persons. This can be a very fruitful approach, and is often necessary, especially when dealing with Lives of saints which are almost certainly entirely fictitious.*° To my mind, however, it is not entirely satisfactory when examining saints’ Lives that do demonstrably bear some relationship to real historical events and persons, particularly if they were written for audiences who would have had some knowledge of the historical saint.
Even if a historian is interested in the hagiographer and his construction of the holy man rather than in the holy man himself, it is only possible to analyse fully the work of the former through an awareness of how far he is constrained by real events and how and why he may have distorted his account of the saint’s life. While the recent emphasis on the ‘literary’ qualities of hagiography is to be welcomed, hagiography is a form of literature which, perhaps more than most, cannot be dissociated from society and historical events, particularly given how often it is polemically or apologetically motivated.
The problem then remains, of course, of how to establish the relationship between hagiography and historical events. When other sources are available for comparison, the task becomes easier, but often this is not the case. Unfortunately, it is not possible to accept a hagiographic narrative on the grounds that it appears plausible: the divergent accounts of the death of Symeon Stylites the Elder all seem, independently, reasonably coherent and realistic, but they clearly cannot all be true.*° Nonetheless, there are elements in hagiography which I believe can be taken, with reasonable confidence, to relate in some sense to actual events.
In particular, it is likely that pressure points—that is to say moments of significant tension or opposition to the saint or his cult, which go beyond mere hagiographic stereotype—must in most cases reflect real instances of trouble, even if they are often recounted in highly misleading terms. It is not uncommon for hagiography to contain elements of apologetic, which would be unnecessary were they not a response to actual controversy and a reflection of genuine concerns about maintaining a saint’s reputation. It may therefore be possible, with care, to isolate moments in texts in which hagiography and history draw particularly close.
This is certainly not to suggest a return to the approach of extracting ‘historical nuggets’ from hagiography. Rather, it is to emphasize that a hagiographer’s literary strategies (from the structuring of the text to the use of biblical typologies) are often a response to historical realia and that the one cannot be understood without the other.**
There are other ways, too, of writing history from hagiography. One productive approach is to look at hagiography comparatively and systematically, and to trace developments in the genre over time. If a development can be noted across numerous texts of a similar chronological period, this must relate to some ideological or societal change. The modern study of hagiography and holy men has, however, too often adopted a synchronic approach: one flaw, for example, in Brown’s indisputably brilliant work is that he tends to speak interchangeably of holy men from the fourth to sixth/seventh centuries, without questioning whether their roles remained the same despite undeniable changes in the societies in which they lived.” It is, rather, necessary to adopt a diachronic approach, since evolving opportunities and pressures within a changing society had a determinative impact both on holy men’s careers and on how they were presented by their biographers; hagiography was never a static literary form.
There have been few surveys of hagiography across late antiquity, although it is difficult to know whether this is a cause or an effect of this dominant synchronic perspective.** Recently, however, several important studies have emphasized the need to situate hagiography in its precise context, and shown that developments in hagiography relate to wider social, political, and ideological trends. Thus Phil Booth analyses the developing role of the sacraments in late antique hagiography, arguing that this was linked both to the growing dissociation of the antiChalcedonians from the imperial church and, at least in some circles, to the political and military crises of the seventh century.**
Matthew Dal Santo has shown that hagiographic sources produced in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, in both east and west, were characterized by signs of dissent and scepticism, particularly about the possibility of posthumous intercession by saints; he suggests that this was related to criticisms of the Byzantine emperors, and more generally to the political and economic tensions of the period.*’ There is still, however, much work to be done in assessing processes of change in late antique hagiography.
Dal Santo’s book also reflects another important development in studies of holy men: the realization that many Byzantines did not accept the claims made about some (or all) saints’ miracle-working powers and spiritual authority, on a wide range of grounds.** The ubiquity of references to scepticism about saints, which had earlier been highlighted in an important article by Gilbert Dagron, has also been emphasized recently by Antony Kaldellis.“”7 From a different direction, Mischa Meier, in his monumental work on responses to disasters in the reign of Justinian, has argued that crises in this period caused severe damage to holy men’s reputations.**
The insights of all these scholars have profoundly changed the way we understand Byzantine hagiography and holy men. There remains considerable scope, however, to build on this work. There is, for instance, a need for more detailed studies of individual holy men, to assess how the particular context of their careers shaped their opportunities and the challenges they faced, and for literary-historical analyses of hagiographies, to show how their authors attempted to deal with scepticism. And much analysis remains to be done of the development of hagiography across late antiquity, to show how particular trends created both possibilities and pitfalls for saints and their devotees.
These questions are at the heart of this book. Its primary focus is the cult of the holy man Symeon Stylites the Younger. The surviving material related to Symeon the Younger is abundant, and has received uneven scholarly attention.” This evidence includes a letter, a theological quotation, and thirty sermons attributed to Symeon himself; his lengthy saint’s Life, summarized above, which appears to have been written by a member of his monastery shortly after his death; a further hagiographic Life of his mother, Martha; several other references to Symeon in contemporary and near-contemporary sources, including the Ecclesiastical History of Evagrios Scholastikos and the Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos; and the physical remains of his monastery and cult objects associated with it (see Figs 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5, as well as 0.2 above).°°
Two of the Georgian Lives of the Thirteen Syrian Fathers claim that their heroes had contacts with Symeon (in a reflection of the strong connections established between Symeon’s cult and Iberia). The dating of these texts is uncertain, and most in their surviving versions are probably a product of the tenth century at earliest; nonetheless, some scholars think that the Lives have sixth-/seventh-century cores.*’ There is also a significant body of later Byzantine and eastern Christian material associated with the saint and his monastery.” Many of these sources have been almost totally neglected in modern scholarship; most notably, the sermon collection and the Life of Martha have never been translated into a modern language.”
This book seeks to make a major contribution to the study of Symeon’s cult. It provides a new perspective on Symeon’s relationship with Antioch, it presents a historically-informed analysis of the literary sources associated with the saint, and it makes accessible some materials—in particular his sermon collection and the Life of Martha—which have hitherto been little used by late antique historians. It does not offer a comprehensive study of the stylite’s cult; it focuses primarily on the literary evidence, only occasionally referring to the archaeological material, which remains in need of further specialist study.
Rather than synthesizing all the surviving evidence, it uses three key texts associated with Symeon—his sermon collection, his Life, and the Life of his mother Martha—to uncover a new perspective on the holy man, exploring the limits of his authority in times of crisis. It seeks to embed the study of the saint in the study of his environment: sixth-century Antioch and the natural and military disasters that it faced. It uses Symeon’s life as an entry point into exploring ideological responses to crisis in the sixth- and seventh-century Roman east. In a sense, the book is a study less of a particular saint’s cult over time than it is of a historical moment, when increasingly high expectations of holy men came into conflict with undeniable evidence of disaster and failure.
Any holy man’s career, and cult, can only be understood in its precise social, economic, political, and religious context: the first chapter therefore introduces Antioch and northern Syria in the sixth century, exploring the series of disasters which hit the city during Symeon’s lifetime. It addresses the scholarly debate about the state of the Roman empire in this period, arguing that the severity (or otherwise) of the economic and practical consequences of disasters did not necessarily correlate to the scale of their cultural, psychological, and ideological ramifications. After this, the main body of the book analyses three key texts associated with the cult. Chapter 2 discusses the sermon collection attributed to Symeon, which sheds light on how a holy man could construct his own spiritual authority.
Whereas Symeon’s hagiographer presents his healing miracles as the basis of his popularity, the sermons reveal the power of the stylite’s own rhetoric: starkly polarized in his thought, he eschews the compromises adopted by many clerical preachers, focusing on the opposition of demon and monk, rich and poor, and heaven and hell. Although the sermons are shorn of specific references to their social context, they do suggest that Symeon at times played a divisive role in society, exploiting social tensions to increase his authority. In particular, Symeon’s sermons are extremely hostile to the wealthy, going so far as to associate wealth with paganism, a theme which recurs in other texts associated with the stylite.
Chapter 3 examines the Life of Symeon the Younger, which shows how the recently deceased leader was memorialized by his disciples to perpetuate his cult posthumously and, particularly interestingly, how they dealt with controversial aspects of his career. It argues that at one level the Life can be read as an extended apologia for Symeon’s failure to protect Antioch and its environs from the natural and military disasters of the sixth century.
The hagiographer adopts various biblical models to attempt to exculpate Symeon of accusations of failure, but the difficulty of the situation leads him into inconsistencies and problematic theological claims. He also adopts a more aggressive approach, finding scapegoats to blame for the disasters: in particular, he targets the rich of Antioch, whom he depicts as sinful pagans. Chapter 4 addresses the Life of Martha, in which a new saint, the stylite’s mother, is created for the cult, revealing its continued need for development in the seventh century. The Life contains signs that the promotion of Martha’s cult was controversial, perhaps because of her exceptional position as the mother of an ascetic holy man. I argue that the promotion of Martha’s cult was intimately bound up with the desire to encourage liturgical participation at the shrine.
Thus her Life contains an original and inclusive vision of holiness, which eschews most traditional emphases of the Lives of female saints, such as celibacy and asceticism, focusing instead on the redemptive powers of liturgy and the sacraments. Martha’s hagiographer also steers clear of most of the polemical and apologetic themes so prominent in the Life of Symeon. He adopts a different approach to the challenges facing saints in this period of crisis, avoiding more ambitious claims about his subject’s miracle-working powers, and moving the responsibility for successful miracles away from the exceptional powers of holy figures towards the proper ritual and cultic behaviour of supplicants.
Chapter 5 takes a step back and situates the Lives of Symeon and Martha in the context of broader hagiographical trends in the sixth and seventh centuries. Symeon’s hagiographer’s struggles to justify disasters are echoed in other nearcontemporary saints’ Lives, including those of Nicholas of Sion, George of Choziba, and Theodore of Sykeon. I argue that holy men had by this period become particularly prone to accusations of failure in times of crisis because of ideological developments across late antiquity: in particular, growing claims about the thaumaturgic powers of saints and the increasing association between holy men and the empire. The Life of Martha reflects a different, but possibly complementary, development in hagiography: the emergence of posthumous miracle collections which, with the important exception of the Miracles of St Demetrios, do not describe extravagant miracles performed for the benefit of large groups of people but instead include only small-scale miracles (almost always healing miracles) which help only one or two people.
In these collections, the onus for performing the miracle tends to be shifted away from the saint and onto the supplicant; a miracle will only take place, usually, if the supplicant fulfils various preconditions, be they practical or spiritual. This narrower focus, as well as this change of emphasis, was certainly suitable for a time when the more ambitious claims of many living holy men’s hagiographers had been called into question by plague, earthquakes, and conquest. Taken together, these sources have considerable implications for scholarly understandings of the social position of the holy man, of Christian attitudes to theodicy, and of the state of the Byzantine empire in the sixth and seventh centuries.
This book thus takes hagiography seriously as a genre that is both literary and deeply historically embedded. It is committed to exploring new ways of writing history from hagiography. It presents the first detailed study of the unusually extensive literary material relating to an important late antique holy man, Symeon the Younger. It examines not only the Life of Symeon, a text which has received limited scholarly attention, but also the stylite’s sermon collection and the Life of Martha, both of which have been almost totally neglected.
It provides a new reading of these texts, arguing that while Symeon’s sermons and Life offer an aggressive approach to dealing with the saint’s critics, the Life of Martha reveals a reorientation for Symeon’s cult in the seventh century. It argues that this process reflected wider changes in approaches to the holiness in the late sixth and seventh centuries, as a result both of long-term religious developments and of the particular circumstances of this momentous period in eastern Roman history. It thus seeks to contribute to a diachronic understanding of the holy in late antiquity: to show how holiness evolved with the society that conceived it.
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