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537 Pages
Acknowledgements
This two-volume Research Companion began with a volume dedicated to the periodisation and geographical distribution of Byzantine hagiography. This one aims to explore the wide variety and variations of the literature on saints. It brings out the research potential and literary aspects of a representative number of authors and texts, not only those appreciated by the Byzantines themselves but those that modern readers rank high because of their literary quality or historical relevance.
Volume II deals almost exclusively with Byzantine hagiography written in Greek. Apart from being a constant source of inspiration for any other hagiography in the Christian East, its production was tenacious throughout the Byzantine millennium, and fell into several phases according to developments in the political and social spheres. Despite its self-contained and repetitive literary character, which grafted a mask of timelessness onto many texts, Byzantine hagiography reflects the transformations of Byzantine society in several respects. The selection of precise saintly heroes, the interest in depicting the social landscape in a particular fashion and the preferences for specific linguistic and stylistic registers echo the voice of the homo byzantinus over the course of eleven centuries with all their continuities and discontinuities.
As a field of literature that reached its creative potential long ago and ceased being important centuries ago, hagiography can still inspire those who no longer accept the sweeping negative generalisations of past scholars; even more it can aspire to find readers who study it with a sympathetic eye. The past admits new readings informed by more recent perspectives and the application of new methods of reading classical and post-classical literature; yet what is central to the understanding of Byzantine hagiography is a careful look at its ‘world within’, that of its authors’ ‘working laboratory’, their contexts and means of expression. It is my hope that re-animating the cause of hagiography from the perspective of literature will contribute to the study of Byzantine culture as a whole.
The completion of this two-volume collective endeavour ends a period of ten years of personal commitment to its cause. I feel much relieved and grateful to those who supported this project on various occasions and by different means. For the present volume, I must first thank the international cast of experts in the field for their patience and readiness to collaborate, which made this collection possible. Several of them acted as readers to the others’ chapters, thereby contributing to the team spirit that such a work requires.
Apart from them, I thank Professors Augusta Acconcia Longo (Rome), Paolo Cesaretti (Bergamo), Vincent Déroche (Paris), Antonis Petrides (Nicosia) and Drs Olivier Délouis (Paris) and Fotis Vasileiou (Athens), for having read and commented on various chapters of this volume. I am also indebted to Mr Christos Rodosthenous (Open University of Cyprus) who helped me with the electronic drawing of maps. Last but not least, I thank Dr John Smedley for his long collaboration and overall assistance to this project.
Like volume one, this volume is dedicated to my wife Sophia and our children Eva and Pavlos, for their endless love and support all these years.
Note on Transliteration and Citation
The proper names of persons and the toponyms cited in this volume are given according to the spelling conventions of the Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Nonetheless, exceptions were inevitable. Also, as the book focuses on the literary aspects of hagiographical texts, the reader should expect to find cited in the footnotes and the bibliography more studies of a literary than of a historical character. Editions of texts are cited only at the end of each chapter. If precise passages need to be quoted, their citation is given in a parenthesis in the main body of the text preceded by its relevant BHG, BHL or BHO number, unless this is not yet available or missing.
Contributors
André Binggeli holds a permanent research position in the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, in the Institute for Textual Research and History (IRHT). He specialises in Greek, Syriac and Arabic hagiography as well as in monastic literature and manuscripts during the first centuries of Islam and the cult of neomartyrs in Syria and Palestine. His most recent publication is L’hagiographie syriaque (Paris 2012), and he is currently finishing his edition of the Narrationes of Anastasios of Sinai.
Stavroula Constantinou is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests focus on Byzantine narratives, especially saints’ Lives and miracle collections. She is the author of Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women (Uppsala 2005). She has also published articles which explore Byzantine texts from the perspective of genre, gender, ritual, body and friendship.
Nathalie Delierneux holds a PhD in Byzantine history (2004) from the Université Paris I-La Sorbonne (France) and the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). She has published several articles on Byzantine nuns and gender history of Byzantium.
Marina Detoraki is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Crete and member of the Centre d'Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance (College de France, Paris). The main field of her interests is late antique hagiography. Her critical edition of St Arethas and his Companions (Martyrs of Najrah) was awarded the Prize of the Academy of Athens in 2008. She has also treated questions of levels of style in Byzantine hagiography and issues on hagiographical text tradition.
Stephanos Efthymiadis is Professor at the Open University of Cyprus. He has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography and prosopography. He co-edited the volume ‘Niketas Choniates: a Historian and a Writer’ (with Alicia Simpson, La Pomme d’or, Geneva). A volume of collected articles on Byzantine hagiography appeared in the Variorum Reprint series (2011). He is currently working on Trends and Techniques of Rewriting in Byzantium and on the Social History of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople.
Antonia Giannouli is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. Her research interests have focused on hymnography and religious poetry, theological commentaries and homiletics, rhetoric, questions of textual criticism and editorial practice. She is the author of a study on the Byzantine Commentaries on the Great Canon of Andrew of Crete, and the co-editor of the collective volume From Manuscripts to Books. She is currently preparing a critical edition of the Exegetical Didaskalies of the twelfth-century scholar Leon Balianites.
Martin Hinterberger is Associate Professor of Byzantine Literature at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on emotions in Byzantine literature (he recently published a book about envy), the language of Byzantine literature, as well as on autobiography and hagiography. He is currently working on a study of the learned Byzantine language.
Christian Hegel is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense) and senior researcher at the Centre for Medieval Literature (Odense and York). He has worked on hagiography, translations from Arabic into Greek and on the concept of humanitas from antiquity to the Renaissance (forthcoming). His current projects concern various aspects of Byzantine literature, especially hagiographical romances and the issue of fictionality in medieval literature.
Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. He has published extensively on many aspects of Byzantine culture, including literature and the reception of the classical tradition, and has published many translations of Byzantine texts. His most recent monographs include Hellenism in Byzantium, The Christian Parthenon and Ethnography after Antiquity. His next projects include a translation and monograph on Laonikos Chalkokondyles.
Nikos Kalogeras holds a PhD in History, University of Chicago (2000). He teaches History at the Hellenic American Educational Foundation, Athens College. His major research interests and publications have focused on education, childhood, family and literary criticism in late antiquity and Byzantium.
Michel Kaplan is Professor of Byzantine History at the University Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Director of the Institute of Research on Byzantium, Islam and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages (IRBIMMA). He recently published Pouvoir, Eglise et Sainteté : essais sur la société Byzantine, Les classiques de la Sorbonne (Paris 2011). He is currently working on the miracle shrines of Constantinople.
Eleonora Kountoura-Galaki is Main Researcher at the Institute of Historical Research of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. She is the author of a book on Byzantine Clergy and Society in the Dark Ages (1996). She is the creator and coordinator of the Database ‘Late Byzantine Hagiography (1204—1453)’. Her recent publications have dealt with the hagiographers of Late Byzantium. She is currently completing a book on the literary tradition and the cult of St Theodosia.
Andrea Luzzi is Associate Professor of Byzantine Civilisation at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’. He has participated in several national and international Congresses of Byzantine Studies. Since January 2011 he has been the scientific director of the Journal Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici. He has also collaborated in the editing of the ‘Bibliographische Abteilung’ of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift. His research is mainly oriented towards the study of Byzantine religious literature (hymnography and hagiography) and, in particular, to the analysis of the complex transmission of the Synaxarion of Constantinople.
Charis Messis holds a PhD in Byzantine history and literature from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (E.H.E.S.S.). He has published several articles on subjects pertaining to the literature and gender history of Byzantium.
Helen G. Saradi is Professor of Byzantine History and Civilisation at the University of the Peloponnese. She worked and taught Classics and Byzantine Studies at various universities (Université de Montréal, Trent, Queen’s, Guelph in Canada, and University of Athens and of Patras in Greece). Her research interests include the Byzantine cities, society and institutions, the acts of private transactions and the notaries, the classical monuments in Byzantium. Her more recent monograph is The Byzantine City in the Sixth Century: Literary Images and Historical Reality (Athens 2006). She has also held various administrative positions at academic institutions.
Introduction
Stephanos Efthymiadis
The literary genre is usually understood as a way of classifying writing by more or less strict conventions of theme, approach, language and composition, which forms a part of the total literary output of specific historical periods. As such a genre reflects individual authors’ intentions and equally meets the expectations of a specific audience.' Imitation and/or cross-fertilisation in the works of different authors and a critical mass of texts assembled over a long period of time are likewise required before stability of form and characterisation are finally achieved. Acting as rituals through which certain modes of expression enact, handle and display precise values and points of interest, genres originate in particular historical periods and societies and underlie the creation, preservation and renovation of literary works of a similar kind.
Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece first witnessed the genesis of different genres of poetry and prose; and this process continued in Republican and Imperial Rome. Some withstood the test of time while others gradually fell into decline and disuse and became extinct; a few were short-lived.” The most viable literary genres were no doubt those which could elicit renewed interest in audiences. In that respect, the persistence of any given genre in both ancient and modern times has been largely contingent upon set factors: the authority and topicality of particular literary heroes and leitmotivs, the availability of skilful authors, a certain flexibility and experimentation in matters of form and substance, an openness to mixing with other genres (an innovation that was first introduced in Hellenistic poetry), and soon. Although it may be that ‘there are no genreless texts’,? there are equally texts which still puzzle us with their generic ambiguity. The Gospels are arguably the most prominent example of this from the Greco-Roman world.‘
The emergence of Christianity and its expansion from the fourth century on played a crucial role in the survival, renewal and re-orientation of several kinds of writing. Moreover, the dissemination of Christianity was the generative force behind new forms of religio-literary expression, one of which was hagiography. It burst into life, spread remarkably quickly to the four corners of the Christian world and has become the only form of Christian writing to have survived in any quantity: these are all remarkable phenomena not only from a literary but also from a socio-cultural standpoint. In particular, its sheer quantity and endurance over time were characteristic of the extensive territory over which the Greek versions of Christian spirituality established dominion. With its political and cultural heart in the Byzantine Empire, Greek hagiography managed to span the Byzantine era with only some short intervals forming cracks in the edifice of its continuous production.°
The reasons for this continuity in writing about saints and the criteria whereby it was assessed by authors and audiences during Byzantium’s millennial existence have seldom been properly assessed. To begin with, unlike developments in the spiritual and material sphere, which can be instigated by political change or encouraged by cultural contact, literature needs time to gather momentum. It is slow to shape new identities, to attract new and influential contributors and to accept innovative modes of expression. Words must rest upon a pile of other words before something new is brought into life. As a part of the Christian discourse, hagiography proceeded not by means of revolutionary novelty but by working through the familiar and by appealing from the known to the unknown.° In late antiquity its literary debts were directly or indirectly traceable to biography, panegyric and the novel. In later centuries it was by and large inscribed in the, by then, firmly established rhetorical tradition of Byzantine literature as a whole.’
Yet, in addition to the appropriation of extant literary forms, the creation of new ones is absolutely essential to build up the identity of an unprecedented literary genre. From the outset, namely Athanasios’ Life of St Antony in the fourth century, to the much less celebrated figure of Makarios Makres and his fifteenth-century enkomia, hagiography was quick to adopt narrative forms from genres developed in the pagan world, adhering to their themes and patterns, without ever losing its own tendency for renewal.
The literary strength of hagiography was no doubt underpinned by its two large resource tanks, both of which strongly marked the historical origins of Christianity: martyrdom and monasticism. As reactions to the social status quo, they straddle the divide that splits Christian history into a period of persecution and marginality and a period of state sponsorship that led to Christianity’s rise to the status of a world religion. Despite being extreme reactions to the values of the Roman world (or, arguably, because of that), martyrdom and monasticism were the driving forces behind a literary output on a scale unparalleled by any other historical phenomenon before or afterwards.
The strong appeal to Christians of a literature inspired by the idea of renouncing the world in one way or the other should not come as a surprise. Passions, charged as they were with emotion and graphic intensity, and monastic narratives, which explored the power of the extraordinary tale to the utmost and celebrated the feats of the mortified ascetic, broke with conventional descriptions of human experience and involved a close engagement with the emotions of their audiences.
If today we consider hagiography one of the most stereotyped and easily recognisable literary entities, this is largely due to the replicated integration of its hero, the saint, into a sequence of topoi and clichés woven into a highly encomiastic discourse.* However, what we now perceive as a uniform and unvarying landscape, populated by antithetically good and evil characters devoid of nuances, was not seen as such in the formative period of hagiography. In the first place, it must be stressed that the modern reader and researcher's access to a multitude of texts was unavailable to the late antique audience. Until hagiographical works were copied into collections, which were by and large integrated into the liturgical service books of the Church (a development of the ninth century and later), consumers of hagiography would more often than not have the opportunity to listen to or read only a small number of such texts. These mostly referred to holy men and women of relevance to a precise geographical milieu, which was associated with their cult as either the site of their martyrdom or the place which received their relics after their ‘translation’.° The state of affairs for which St Basil of Caesarea argued in the introductory paragraphs of his Homily on the Forty Martyrs of Sebasteia, namely that the martyrs should be equally venerated on an ecumenical and local footing (BHG 1205 — col. 505), was wishful thinking that did not reflect the reality of any Christian population’s adherence to their local martyr or saint.
Apart from extolling the feats of the early martyrs and infusing their flock’s faith with a heroic spirit, what St Basil and the other Church Fathers achieved was to rhetorically rework a given story and promote the cause of the martyr’s cult on the occasion of his or her commemoration, namely, the celebration of their death.’ At the dawn of the Byzantine era, in the first half of the fourth century, Passions were already a genre that could rightly claim to be a genuine form of Christian writing, betraying no significant traces of pagan influence." In turn, the Homilies of the Christian orators, which drew inspiration from the heroic acts of the martyrs but were modelled on the genre of the Roman panegyric, constitute the first attestations of hagiographical reworking. A primary distinction between the Passio and the enkomion was thus introduced. Encomiasts of the holy martyrs were expected to treat their subject in accordance with current rhetorical standards, proceeding, inter alia, to a stylistic elaboration and enhancement of their model text, the corresponding Passio.'* Unlike the Passions, these enkomia would bear the clear mark of Roman epideictic oratory, whether they were funeral orations or some simpler form of panegyric.’®
Being by far the best preserved forms of hagiographical narrative, Passions and the enkomia that were based on them constitute the only texts classified as hagiography that pose no issues of generic or structural ambivalence. Nonetheless, the illusion that it might be easy to categorise all hagiography, just because it is not difficult to identify a Passio or an enkomion, is quickly dispelled when we turn to the rest of the corpus of Byzantine hagiography in Greek. We begin to note a great deal of fluidity in the structure of the narrative as well as a good deal of confusing terminology in the headings given to these texts. For a start this applies to two of the pioneering works of Greek hagiography, the vita Antonii and the vita Macrinae, which have come down to us under the heading and in the form of Letters. This instability in terminology affected texts devoted to holy men and women throughout the Byzantine era. Works more akin to the genre of biography can be entitled enkomia, while the word enkomion often appears in the heading of texts which hardly seem to justify such a characterisation. Even in the Middle Byzantine period, when hagiographers largely adopted the rules and structure of the enkomion as a standard model for writing about saints, the versatility of their terminology can be still seen in the various combinations that they devise. Finally, we cannot avoid noting the introduction of the all-embracing rhetorical term Logos in the compositions of the Palaiologan era."
We must interpret this inconsistency in terminology and lack of coherence between heading and content in the light of two considerations that arise sequentially from a chronological point of view. We must first understand that the literary figures who were later deemed the pioneers of hagiography, i.e. Athanasios of Alexandria, the Cappadocian Fathers and other anonymous authors, found difficulty in presenting their holy subjects — other than the martyrs — by simply relying on the literary template of biography. This genre had, after all, been marginal in the literary landscape of pre-Christian antiquity and offered no fixed narrative pattern for narrating an individual's life from birth to death. From a wider perspective as regards the later stages of the development of hagiographical writing, we must acknowledge the striving for literary originality on the part of important hagiographers of late antiquity and after.
It is no accident that the inaugural text of Christian hagiography, the vita Antonti by Athanasios of Alexandria," reflects a multiplicity of discourses and endowed its hero with more identities than that of a simple ascetic (e.g. martyr, healer, wanderer, apologist for the faith). In this long narrative we come across nearly all the varieties of monastic literature that developed in late antiquity: the edifying stories, the sermon, the Passio relating the sufferings caused by tyrannical demons, the healing miracle, the polemic against the pagans, not to mention the theme of wandering from place to place, a narrative feature that marked the progress of the saint’s own spiritual advancement. These take up the bulk of the narrative, whereas the important constituents of encomiastic discourse and commonplaces of biography (genos, birthplace, parents) are allotted minimal space. Clearly Athanasios’ intention is to bypass the latter and concentrate on his hero’s deeds (praxeis). The vita Antonii no doubt owed much of its success to this variety in discourse and, as a model text, it played a decisive role not only in promoting the anchoritic ideal but also in assigning a new dynamic literary identity to edifying story-telling.”
Almost twenty years after Athanasios, Gregory of Nyssa proposed a different paradigm of holiness in his encomiastic portrayal of his own sister Makrina.'* The ascetic model of sanctity, it transpires, could manifest itself not only under the hot sun of the desert but also in the pious shade of a secluded household. Unlike the vita Antonii, whose generic character, as mentioned above, has puzzled scholars, Gregory’s composition has led, among other things, to a discussion of the extent to which it can be classed as hagiography, if at all. The same question has been raised about other equally rhetorical compositions by the other Cappadocian, Gregory of Nazianzos, compositions once again written in praise of family members, yet also in honour of celebrated hierarchs and theologians such as his friend St Basil and St Athanasios of Alexandria.”
All subsequent Byzantine vitae and enkomia with rhetorical pretensions trace their pedigree to these model works of Christian rhetoric.” As discourses inspired by Roman panegyric, the enkomia of the Cappadocian Fathers paved the way for one of two modes of expression that Greek hagiography was to pursue from late antiquity to late Byzantium. We may call this rhetorical mode of writing ‘urban’, as it was adapted to the education of the urban elite. It was precisely this model that came to prominence and finally prevailed after the ninth century, when it was overwhelmingly applied to the lives of saints who had excelled as prelates or been monastics from an aristocratic background. Still, in late antiquity the social identity of the holy hero was not critical in determining the style and content of the hagiographical writing dedicated to him or to her. A simple style was used not only for the rugged holy ascetic, but for any holy figure portrayed as keeping a low and humble profile.”!
Whereas encomiastic discourse, such as that promoted by the Cappadocians, imposed a precise model that was faithfully imitated by those who followed it in praising a saint, Athanasios’ vita Antonii was open to more creative and selective usage. Specifically, it allowed authors to carve out literary niches from its miscellaneous narrative in order to develop new, shorter and easier-to-digest forms. In one way or another, the biography of St Antony lent itself to dismemberment and thereby broke new ground by authorising a variety of literary formats such as the vita, the edifying story (as a separate text or in the form of a collection), the Apophthegmata Patrum and the hagiographical travelogue.
Before long, several forms of narrative had been contrived in the context of this ‘post-Antonian’ literature, apparently to respond to the high demand from monastic and urban centres alike. We must credit this variety to a series of inspired writers, some of whom can be reckoned among the best authors of late antique letters, whereas others have remained anonymous. They excelled in tracing lines of continuity with themes reminiscent of the ancient novel, Greco-Roman biography and the travelogue; they also demonstrated their skills in experimenting with different techniques of narrating stories arranged in a sophisticated fashion which surprise the modern reader: for example, the use of multiple nested narratives, the introduction of a narrator (the holy man’s disciple or another holy man) who reports a first-person story, the adoption of a ‘first-person plural narrative’, the ample use of dialogue, and so on. Embedding a subsidiary account into a main narrative using the words dujyyoato pot or duyynoato Nutv is the customary technique that we encounter, firstly used to create a short, edifying story but then expanded in full-dress vitae of holy ascetics.
The popularity of these stories is borne out by their widespread oral transmission and accounts for the attribution of identical or similar stories and sayings to different solitaries in different collections. Arguably it was this that induced Theodoret of Cyrrhus to opt for a much tighter account, which was circumscribed in terms of the number of stories included and their geographical location. In his eloquent Philotheos Historia, he broke, on the one hand, with the requirements of a compact, full-scale biography, and, on the other, with the format of short anecdotal stories, opting instead for a concise and stripped-down account. In his preamble he declared that he would narrate each holy man or woman’s exploits separately and selectively; this, he explained, had to be done since each ascetic had a different gift. He further stated that his own account would proceed not according to the requirements of an enkomion, but by emphasising the narrative itself (Prol. 8). In this case the diegesis form, central to late antique monastic accounts,” is integrated into a biographical framework, which does not follow the tradition of Athanasios’ vita Antonii but that of a collective biography, as in Philostratos’ Lives of the Sophists.
If Theodoret’s work stands between full-scale biography and short-story-telling, there were instances where edifying stories about holy ascetics were deemed worthy of amplification; a long vita replaced a short story. We may suppose that this re-adaptation must have come about in response to the public’s need to hear more about a particular hero; and, one might add, in order to exercise control over the fluidity of a story being transmitted orally or to identify a previously anonymous ascetic with a specific named figure. The Life of St Mary of Egypt, the most famous late antique woman saint, is a case in point, for it elaborates on the technique of ‘a story within a story’: most of her biography is put in the mouth of narrators other than the author, including the penitent Mary herself and, before her, the ascetic Zosimas. Other texts such as those about saints Arsenios, Paisios and Onouphrios reflect the same narrative pattern: their biographical accounts are interposed in the narrations of other ascetics’ ‘reports’, which unmask cases of hidden sanctity, a recurrent theme in late antique hagiography.”
A few other examples of vitae narrated not by the author himself but by the protagonist or some subsidiary character may be mentioned. The core of the Life of St John the Almsgiver, the seventh-century patriarch of Alexandria, is not related by the hagiographer Leontios of Neapolis, but by Menas, a man whom the author had met at a street gathering. An act of philanthropy, that both the author and narrator had witnessed personally, sparked a discussion about the holy patriarch, prompting Menas to give a fuller account of his exemplary life. He starts with the holy man’s first and most remarkable achievement, which was that he had abstained from oath-taking during his entire life. Leontios then at once asked for ink and paper and wrote down what he had heard, word for word - or so he claims.
Leontios may be listed among the late antique hagiographers who were keen to record everyday reality and presented their heroes, especially the men, in the arena of daily life and oral culture. It was mostly thus that this group of authors conveyed edifying messages and highlighted the qualities and profiles of their heroes. Vivid pictures of late antique society and descriptions of the conditions in which people lived are meant to set the saint into his or her social context and delineate his or her profile. The cases par excellence of this type are miracle collections which parade an assortment of people, yet with the underlying aim of convincing their readers/listeners of the social potential of the healer saint’s cult. All in all, whether marked by a fluid narrative format or set ina more structured account, late antique hagiographical discourse was more performative than informative.”
In the three centuries separating Athanasios of Alexandria from Leontios of Neapolis, literary inventiveness in portraying holy men and women not only developed a variety of narrative techniques but promoted an unprecedented array of holy types, such as the holy fool for Christ, the cross-dressing nun, the holy man or woman fleeing his or her aristocratic family and the repentant harlot.” In a sense these ‘marginal’ holy figures invited authors to try out an unconventional narrative in order to impress upon their listeners/readers a non-conventional model of holiness. We may also surmise that those who read these stories, which combined edification and imagination, felt free to enlarge the fiction at will.
On different occasions and for different reasons, and with regard to the late antique period, Marc van Uytfanghe and Claudia Rapp have challenged the characterisation of hagiography as a genre. First, van Uytfanghe proposed that the term ‘hagiographical discourse,’ delineated by four different criteria, could more faithfully represent the late antique literary tendency for exalting the figure of the holy man both in the Christian and the pagan world. In addition to the Lives and enkomia of the Christian saints, examples of hagiographical discourse also run through the biographies of the late antique pagan philosophers and other Christian texts.
The latter, not traditionally categorised as ‘hagiography’, consisting of letters, hymns, sermons and epitaphs, nevertheless share all the ‘hagiographic’ traits identifiable in any saint’s vita: they sketch a portrait of holiness and godliness without confusing the identity of deity and human in their subjects.”° According to this revisionist approach, it is the function and analysis of the hagiographical material that matters rather than the literary constituents of a text. As a result, hagiographical texts must be examined in context and with regard to their transmission as well as to the audience they originally addressed. Taking this argument one step further, Claudia Rapp focused on collections of letters ascribed to renowned ascetics from Egypt and Gaza. Their hagiographical character resides in the fact that they are the channel for a literary correspondence between the living holy man and his followers. Again, in Rapp’s view, it is the subject matter that defines what we call ‘hagiography’, not the manner of its literary representation, which could take a plurality of forms.”
This emphasis on subject matter rather than form leaves considerable room for debate and re-assessment of how the blanket term ‘hagiography’ should be understood. The scope of this debate on whether texts about saints should be classified specifically as hagiography or as forming part of a more fluid ‘hagiographical discourse’ cultivated by both pagan and Christian authors in late antiquity, can be extended and becomes no less perplexing if we turn to Alexander Kazhdan’s approach to Byzantine literature. His open criticism of the most prominent and authoritative handbooks on this corpus of material, namely those by Karl Krumbacher, Hans-Georg Beck and Herbert Hunger, was directed against their reliance on generic classification and analysis.” Kazhdan instead privileged authors, literary trends and thematic motifs over genres.
He proposes that texts written in praise of saints, which make up a large part of the total literary output of the eighth to tenth centuries, should be discussed in context, as reflecting social trends and representing literary tendencies, not as pointing to generic developments as such. However worthy of merit it is for being the first comprehensive attempt to examine Byzantine literature from the viewpoint of authors and social trends, the approach followed in his two-volume History of Byzantine Literature sidestepped generic analysis, which undoubtedly constitutes an essential aspect of the literary analysis of a text.” The Patriarch Photios, for example, in his capacity of literary critic commenting on the content and style of most of the 300 plus works he mentions in his Bibliotheca, demonstrates a clear understanding of what genre is and how language and style must conform to it.”
More than any other branch of literature in late antiquity, hagiography was the spiritual product of an empire dotted from East to West with holy sites. A variety of literary forms responded to the needs of an audience that was both populous and socially diversified. In this context, the developmental force of hagiographical discourse exerted itself upon different kinds of narrative and did not confine itself to a uniform format with a fixed identity. Yet with the empire shrinking and faced with the cultural decline of the so-called Dark Age (ca. 650—ca. 800), hagiography too suffered a decline and critical transformation. Constantinople gradually absorbed almost all creative forces, causing a significant change in terms of style, language and literary form.
When at the close of the eighth century hagiography revived, it was written in the form of highly structured and homogeneous vitae, each unfolding a saint’s biography in a linear fashion and adhering to the requirements of high rhetorical discourse. Many of its practitioners were now literati who tried their hands at various other forms of writing.*' Hagiography, however, significantly contributed to their literary fame. Whether patriarchs or abbots, their holy heroes were enmeshed in contemporary history, a fact that accounts for the hagiographers’ tendency to remain as close as possible to social reality. This ‘hagiographical realism’ sharply contrasts with the late antique ‘hagiography of the desert’ and, to a certain extent, the hagiography that was later produced in the periphery, be it eighth-century Palestine or Southern Italy in the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. With its hagiography remarkably heterogeneous in content and generic character, the South of Italy in particular was a land of what might be called free-ranging inspiration, with, different types of texts for similar kinds of saints.”
Constantinopolitan realism resulted from the need to highlight the hero’s involvement in the major and minor crises that successively rocked the empire, such as Iconoclasm, the Moechian scandal, the Photian schism and the Tetragamy of the Emperor Leo VI. Even a text such as the Life of St Philaretos the Merciful, whose simplicity strikes a discordant note in the high-flown hagiography that prevailed in this period, ‘conflates’ its hero with the emperor and the palace in Constantinople in the end.
The enhanced prestige that these high-flown biographies acquired among members of the political and ecclesiastical elite, especially after the re-establishment of icon veneration in 843, explains their use as historical documents in their ownage. Signs of the authority that hagiography must by then have begun to enjoy can be traced back to 787 and the Seventh Council of Nicaea, where hagiographical texts were for the first time advanced as proofs of ancient liturgical practice and the cult of icons.* Later on, in the tenth century, this positive reappraisal of saints’ Lives and the historical veracity attributed to them would lead to their use as sources for the Histories of Joseph Genesios and the Chronicle of Symeon Logothetes.
Middle Byzantine hagiography was not only inspired by contemporary saintly heroes but also set the tone for a broad stylistic reworking of Passions and vitae from late antiquity. Stylistic reworking entailed upgrading the linguistic register of the original text with a series of rhetorical embellishments and a rearrangement of its structure. Long before the name Metaphrastes was ‘copyrighted’ by the eponymous Symeon, several other hagiographers could stake a claim to the same title for their efforts at stylistically polishing up older Passions and vitae.** We can fully grasp the change in literary taste and the contemporary preference for set patterns by distinguishing between two modes of ‘stylistic enhancement’. In most cases, rhetorical elaboration touched upon a text’s style and wording, but in some cases it extended to refashioning its narrative. Thus, the metaphraseis of the late antique texts that had told a saint’s story in a complex way now unfolded in linear fashion, moving straightforwardly from beginning to end. Structured according to these new simplifying models, stories such as those of Mary of Egypt, Arsenios, Paisios and Onouphrios were stripped of the embedding technique and dispensed with the distinction between author and narrator.
It would be unfair and misleading to regard this new dominance of a highly structured and homogeneous discourse, which relied to a great extent on stock components that we usually call literary topoi, as having eliminated creativity. Several examples that disrupt this monotony can be adduced. For instance, Ignatios the Deacon authored the Lives of two patriarchs of Constantinople in which the impact of the Enkomion of St Basil by Gregory of Nazianzos and other works of Christian and pagan high rhetoric is visible. His subjects, Tarasios and Nikephoros, had much in common as ecclesiastical and political figures, and he extolled them in an utterly rhetorical way.
Their biographies too were made up of distinctive rhetorical ingredients, the most idiosyncratic being a description of an iconographical programme inserted in the Life of Tarasios (BHG 1698) and a Platonicstyle dialogue between the holy patriarch and the emperor Leo V that occupies a good part of the Life of Nikephoros (BHG 1335). Hagiographical variety in this period entailed other literary devices. Before addressing his main subject, the biographer of Antony the Younger relates the story of the abba John who, prior to his Christian awakening, was a ruthless robber (BHG 142 — chs. 3-10). In similar fashion, in the early tenth century the two vitae of St Nicholas of Stoudios and St Blasios of Amorion were each embellished with the parenthetic insertion of an edifying story into the main narrative. Later on, as a blast from the past, literary antiquarianism made a brave foray into the writing of retro hagiography that revived the sub-genre of the edifying story (with Paul of Monembasia), resuscitated the holy fool as a saintly hero (in the Life of St Andrew the Fool) and restored the hagiographical travelogue (in the Life of St Gregentios).* Although these examples picked up on late antique trends, they could not hide their provenance in an age that differed from late antiquity in many respects.
Middle Byzantine hagiography was heavily marked by the systematic endeavour of Symeon Metaphrastes and his team, whose legacy was the so-called Menologion. This task chiefly entailed the reworking of old Passions and vitae, using older and more recent texts on the same saint.*° Incidentally, Symeon’s Menologion, consisting of both his own reworkings and the work of others, offers a straightforward view of how the hagiographical genre was understood in his age. The Metaphrastic Menologion is merely assembled from Passions, Lives, enkomia and Translations of Relics, that is, all kinds of texts pertaining to the commemoration of saints according to the ecclesiastical calendar.” In other words, without being defined as such, hagiography in the Middle Byzantine period was understood as a clear-cut category of fully fledged texts which demonstrated their generic identity in their titles and were of a specific length. Sermons or treatises that propagated the ideal of ascetic isolation and Letters that carried an edifying message did not fit in these collections for they lacked precisely the requisite structured narrative. By and large, the same perception of hagiography prevailed in the other collection that appeared at much the same time as the Metaphrastic Menologion. With its stock representation of saints in short entries, the Synaxarion of Constantinople practically obliterated any particularity in language, style and narrative sequence that the original texts might have had (e.g. that of Mary of Egypt).** Synaxarion notices were meant to be a new sub-genre inscribed in a, by then, delineated genre.
The Metaphrastic Menologion, the Synaxarion and the Menaia became the liturgical works that epitomised the triumph of book culture in Byzantium, which, as far as hagiography is concerned, saw its apogee in the eleventh century. In addition to synaxaria-in-verse, it was in this century that compilations of older edifying stories gained currency. Works like the Synagoge of Paul from the monastery of the Evergetis in Constantinople (BHG 1450s) offer further evidence of the kind of texts the Byzantines would still have understood as ‘hagiography’ in that age.* Aside from fully fledged texts pertaining to saints who received cult, the Byzantines, imbued as they were with nostalgia for the past, would constantly read their ‘hagiographical classics’, mostly collections of sayings and stories inspired by the late antique desert fathers, regarded as the sources of ascetic wisdom.
Hagiographical collections thus became standard readings in church and monastic services. Obviously, the authoritative position of Symeon’s metaphraseis did not extinguish creativity even in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when hagiography suffered a new though not a sharp decline. It is worth noting that those new hagiographers who emulated Symeon in rewriting older Passions relied to some extent on the Metaphrastic Menologion themselves, yet they allowed their creativity free rein, largely departing from their model-texts. The efforts of Neophytos the Recluse and Constantine Akropolites, who belong to different geographical milieus, are cases in point. A last innovative reworking of the genre can be credited to the prolific hagiographers of the Palaiologan age, especially Nikephoros Gregoras and Philotheos Kokkinos. Neither of them inaugurated any fundamental changes to the structure of the genre, yet both infused a great deal of ‘new material’ into their narratives, whether in the form of lengthy references to Greek exempla or biographical details that added substance to what would have otherwise been dry and empty literary topoi.
The notion of genre is a much debated issue that tends to come under attack from contemporary criticism marked by a post-modern, deconstructive ‘generic agnosticism’.“” Hagiography is a modern term that responds to the need for taxonomy and classification; for this branch of Byzantine literature in particular, the issue of authentication was initially paramount. The issue of authenticity, from the point of view of Orthodoxy and literary prestige, was not unknown to the Byzantines. Canon 63 of the Trullo Council in 691/692 prohibited the publication of false martyrologia and anathematised those who accepted them as true. Twelfthcentury canonists, i.e. legal experts in canon law, endorsed this condemnatory tendency." Theodore Balsamon, in particular, extolled Symeon Metaphrastes’ endeavour in bringing together the toils of the holy martyrs, while he cited the case of a Life of St Paraskeve written by a coarse peasant who was condemned to be burned by Patriarch Nicholas Mouzalon (1147-1151). According to the so-called Constitutiones Ecclesiasticae, which address questions of heretical belief and have come down to us under the name of St Nikephoros the Confessor, i.e. Patriarch Nikephoros of Constantinople (806-815), a similar condemnation was issued (for unknown reasons) in respect of two Passions, one of St George and the other of Sts Kerykos and Julitta.*
In the last centuries of Byzantium, we once again find confirmation that for the Byzantines the hagiographical texts par excellence were those which, in one way or another, served the cause of a saint’s commemoration. As such they shared stock characteristics, which were, however, freely adapted by the most talented authors. What mattered for the generic classification of a text was the author’s intention to celebrate his or her subject specifically as a saint, not as a holy person in a more general sense. Michael Choniates in the Komnenian era and Nikephoros Gregoras in the Palaiologan era each chose to extol a metropolitan to whom they were personally attached, to wit Niketas of Chonai and John of Herakleia respectively. Both works can easily be deemed hagiographical, highlighting the holy profile of their heroes. Yet, to judge from the titles alone (Enkomion of our blessed Metropolitan Niketas of Chonai and Life and Conduct of our Father among the Saints John of Herakleia), it was only Gregoras who intentionally assigned a saintly identity to his subject.
Finding an umbrella term to cover the large variety of texts extolling the paradigm, the deeds and the sayings of saints is an issue for the post-Byzantine students of these texts; it did not concern the Byzantines themselves. Confusion and vagueness is found in other genres too, for instance historiography where we likewise observe a similar lack of consistency in terminology and a significant difference from one writer to another.“ Yet unlike hagiographers, historiographers did not need to efface their individuality, and could even claim to be superior to their predecessors, as the proem of at least one of these works (John Skylitzes) shows. Hagiographers had to conceal their egos, even when they took up the rewriting or the continuation of some earlier work. A notable exception is again Leontios of Neapolis who, in his prologue to the Life of John the Almsgiver, cannot hide a certain discontent with the work of his predecessors John Moschos and Sophronios of Jerusalem (BHG 886d — p. 344).
The history of Byzantine hagiography reveals strong lines of continuity, yet also a succession of literary tastes and trends, reconsiderations of older texts and erratic re-use of old models. Seen in this way, its history is very much akin to the history of Byzantine literature as a whole.* To a large extent, questions of genre arise from the wealth and variety of the texts available as well as from the difficulty we have in putting them in order and pinpointing a single line of continuity or succession. The constant need of the Christian community to venerate old and new saints by means of a lofty and exalting discourse was not always satisfied in line with contemporary literary fashions. The abundance of hagiographers who answered this call were conscious of the nature of their undertaking and knew which narrative patterns to follow and whom they were addressing.
The most gifted among them could resist the temptation of generic repetition, shuffle its clichés and produce works of literary value, devoid of mannerism. Regardless of the quality of any particular text classified as hagiography, examining these texts on their own terms (i.e. as the Byzantines saw them) and in the context of the age in which they were produced (in as far as we can achieve this) must surely be an improvement on the treatment hitherto meted out to them.” As is equally true of Byzantine literature as a whole, the idea that we are dealing with a textual industry reveals poor literary judgement on our part and, in the case of hagiographical writing, ignorance about what can be gathered from this vast literary meadow.
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