Download PDF | (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 41) Ildikó Csepregi - Incubation in Early Byzantium_ The Formation of Christian Incubation Cults and Miracle Collections-Brepols (2024).
329 Pages
Introduction
The place is deserted and no one near me will hear the words which I speak. Believe me, men, I had been dead during all the years of life that I was alive. The beautiful, the good, the holy, the evil were all the same to me; such, it seems, was the darkness that formerly enveloped my understanding and concealed and hid from me all these things. But now that I have come here, I have become alive again for all the rest of my life, as if I had lain down in the temple of Asclepius and had been saved. I walk, I talk, I think. This sun, so great, so beautiful I have now discovered, men, for the first time; now today I see under the clear sky you, the air, the acropolis, the theatre.1
These words were pronounced by a character from a lost comedy of Menander and in a powerful image describe how sleeping in the Temple of Asclepius might have been a life-changing experience. From this sleep, the individual not only awoke healed but saw the world around as never before. Temple sleep or incubation was a religious practice with a long past and an even longer future.2 In many respects, it reached across the borders of religions and healing methods. It was practiced in ancient Mesopotamia and Asia Minor; in Greece and Rome as well as in pre-Christian Gaul; and it found its way into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.3 Islamic incubation was on the margins as well, since it is not found in the Qur’ān or the hadīth, and was never approved but always remained tolerated. Incubation was practised around the saints’ tombs and involved various rituals, before and during the pilgrimage, such as purification, almsgiving, sacrifice, bathing in or drinking from the sacred spring, and the characteristic ex voto rags tied to sacred trees as proof of the visit.
Healing in the dream was represented in the forms of direct treatment or prescriptions, and it was common for healing sites to be specialized.4 In parts of the Mediterranean world, especially rural ones, Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim, it has survived to the present day. I do not intend to suggest that we are dealing with a continuity of ritual, since the theological framework of each cult differed extremely, yet the practice itself was ubiquitous. One of the reasons for its tenacity and popularity was that in every period and geographical zone, it answered a fundamental demand for healing through communication with the divine, and yet it required so little: a sacred place and an individual who went there intending to sleep. From these basic requirements for incubation, there was plenty of iteration and differentiation.
The core element of the practice was that the worshipper voluntarily went to the sacred site (a cave, a tomb, a temple, a place with relics) with the intention of sleeping there (often in special circumstances, having performed specific rites, for example purification or abstinence, and wearing specific robes or waiting in specific circumstances for the appearance of a dream). During their encounter with the divine being of the place, pilgrims sought a cure or an oracle; this being might have been a deity, an animal-epiphany, a lesser-grade divinity, a hero, a nymph, a living holy man, or a martyr honoured after death. Although the oracular and healing activities of the incubation cult sites often ran parallel, the present study is concerned only with healing, and accordingly will use the term ‘dream healing’ as an equivalent of incubation / temple sleep. The emerging Christian Church had to face the challenge presented by this practice: it was ubiquitous, it was immensely popular, and it concerned important life situations. It had been so deeply rooted and efficacious that the Church could not simply ban it.
It was, however, an undeniably pagan practice. The Christianization of the incubation ritual is a lengthy and many-faceted success story. This long process involved so many aspects of the Church’s self-definition, including the social and theological issues of that era, which would alone render incubation to be a fascinating subject with a plethora of information to impart upon the interested scholar. The list of such topics is long: from deciding the fate of Greek temples and artistic representations to confronting Hippocratic medicine and the learned Greek intelligentsia that remained faithful to the old gods for the longest; accounting for the miracles happening among the pagans; embracing the healing ministry by the Church both in secular terms as well as in ritual healing; creating Christian theories on dreams; and confronting the notions of magic and divination. We have here a ritual inherited from Antiquity, the core of which is the healers’ appearance in the dream of those who seek their help by sleeping in the temple/church.
The healers then miraculously cure their patients, either with an immediate intervention or by giving some miraculous prescriptions. The ritual, however, is linked to the place; at the heart of the practice lies the patient’s presence at the sacred spot. When it undergoes Christianization, this paradigm changes because of three critical problems it presents within a Christian framework: (1) the healer’s being bound to a place (like the gods of Antiquity) was something definitely pagan and contradicts the fundamental Christian idea about God’s omnipotence and omnipresence; (2) the emerging cult of the saints presents a different paradigm, into which the figure of the incubation healer does not fit; and (3) the cult of images and other portable holy objects that could transfer thaumaturgic power also affected the incubation paradigm. To some extent, Christian incubation saints differ from other saints endowed with thaumaturgic gifts (popular living saints, ascetics, martyr saints venerated at their shrines, and saints in the form of relics — though these categories are not exclusive).
In non-incubation healing, the most common types of miracles were modelled after the gestures of Christ and provided cures through words, touch, the sign of the cross, eulogies, and sanctified objects in various contexts, but there was little differentiation for person or ailment. However, in incubation miracles where the dream functioned as medium, the impact of medical learning and of doctors and the reflection of scientific achievements in miraculous cures allow us to indicate some changes within the format that may have been paradigmatic. These insights into the mentality, the inner consciousness of the community or individuals may represent, in some cases, only a personal point of view, but in others, it may provide an insight into the thought-world of a spiritually and socially turbulent period of early Byzantine society. For the most part, I shall draw on the Christian incubation records as narrative sources. In order to fully explore cult practices in both their ancient and Christian forms, other types of sources need to be analysed as well, including the archaeological remains of cults and their artistic representations. Being neither an archaeologist nor an art historian, I have chosen to stick to the textual sources, focusing on the factors surrounding the emergence of the stories and compositional intentions that formed the narrative records of early Christian incubation healing into compositionally structured miracle collections. My survey focuses mainly on the miracles of Saint Thecla, the two versions of the miraculous cures of Saints Cosmas and Damian, the miracle collection of Saints Cyrus and John, and the healings of Saint Artemius.
I shall argue that these collections together constitute a well-defined group, one that differs in kind from other contemporary Byzantine hagiographical records. This focus on the narrative aspects of these sources is justified because as early Christian incubation emerged it adopted not only elements of the pagan ritual, but also ancient narrative records of temple sleep. The transformation of dream cures and their textual and literary expression developed in parallel, and both were rooted in the preceding pagan practice. Consequently, and rather oddly, these Christian collections of dream healing bear a closer resemblance to the incubation records of Antiquity than to contemporary Christian hagiographical genres (in the form of the narrative, not, of course, in their theology). The Byzantine miracle collections that record incubation proper (those dedicated more or less exclusively to temple sleep) form a small but homogeneous corpus. They were closely modelled not only on the Greek incubation records but also on each other. Their spatial and chronological distribution attests to the popularity of the incubation cult sites and confirms, beyond any doubt, that incubation was a firm and deeply rooted practice with its own unique aspects both in regard to cultic ritual and in the way this ritual was recorded. These incubation miracle collections form a significant proportion of Byzantine hagiography; hence our sources are far from being solitary examples.
The uniqueness of these miracle collections and how they developed is the subject of this study. The first step will be to broadly introduce the cult practice of ancient incubation (Chapter 1) and its literary background (Chapter 2): ancient pagan and Christian aretalogies (the narratives of miracles), ancient incubation records, the Gospel miracles, and the early Christian miracle narratives, the latter most often connected to the saints’ Lives. Scholars in the past few decades have radically reinterpreted the umbrella term ‘aretalogy’. Mark van Uytfanghe spoke of the chimera of aretalogy when he redrew the generic-thematic-theological definitions and literary traditions of subject.5 His hypothesis did not aim to define a single genre, but sought to bring a better understanding of the literary atmosphere of pagan and Christian Late Antiquity to the study. He therefore discarded the categories of genre-definition, introducing instead the concept of hagiographic discourse. Such discourse was limited neither to Christianity nor to literature, but was emblematic of a mode of expression for Greek, Christian, and Jewish thought of the time. In my work, a brief description of how genre categories (such as aretalogy or even hagiography) became superseded will be followed by an outline of the tradition of Greek incubation miracle collections (with special attention paid to the recent hypotheses of G. Guidorizzi and Marco Dorati),6 and by an enquiry into the literary characteristics and requirements of the dream-cure records. The impact of Jesus’s miraculous healing on the rhetoric of the incubation narratives will be addressed briefly. Certainly, there was another half-literary, half-cultic Christian precedent to the early Greek Christian incubation narratives, even if it was an indirect one.
The term libelli miraculorum referred to the custom of keeping a miracle archive in churches, a phenomenon that not only secured the memory and authority of the miracles but inevitably moulded them into a narrative. Through the process of authenticating and conserving the miracles, the local community were kept aware of the presence of such records. The non-incubational miracle catalogues of the early Church will be considered in their capacity as indirect models that served as a background for incubation narratives. Chapter 3 addresses the emergence of incubation rituals of Christian physician saints and their respective miracle collections: Cosmas and Damian, Cyrus and John, Artemius, and, in a different vein, within the cult of Saint Thecla. Throughout this work, but especially in the first three chapters, I make extensive references to other scholars’ views and often give a detailed outline of how these viewpoints evolved or were challenged. I chose to do so, at the risk of slowing the narrative of my own research, for two reasons.
First, much of the important secondary literature, with indispensable contributions from scholars writing in Spanish, German, Italian, or Latin over a period of a hundred years, is hard to access, and the contrasting arguments are often difficult to follow. Second, I would like to articulate their research ideas fairly, even if time, new trends, or succeeding generations of scholars have shunted them aside. We owe to these past scholars the texts themselves, as well as their conviction that these texts and cults were unique and important to study. We should accept their invitation to build upon their views. Hopefully, this enquiry will demonstrate that there was not just one ‘cult of the saints’, even at the cost of challenging Peter Brown’s model, which (as fine as it is) has become the exclusive model for understanding the formation of late antique sainthood.
The development of the Christian incubation cult of these saints was clearly different from what is generally recognized in the cult of martyrs, holy bishops, or living ascetics. Moreover, as the cult practice of incubation took shape in the early Church in a particular fashion, so did the incubation records, which, in many ways, are quite unlike other specimens of Byzantine miracula. Once I have described the collections of miraculous dreams found in incubation records, in Part II I turn to the sources and formative processes that moulded these collections, asking how the early Christian incubation miracles were shaped into stories, texts, recorded narratives, and literary works. Based on what the sources themselves say about their background, I map out the layers of transmission that can be identified within the collections themselves. The analysis of the sources of miraculous cure is best begun with the textual and pictorial evidence provided by the most important material evidence of the cult experience, namely votive tablets and images (Chapter 4).
Besides examining the images as records and hence sources for the stories, I also show how pictorial representation shaped the narrative of the incubation dream. The next element in shaping the stories was the oral tradition that emerged around the site of the cult. These narratives were formed and directed by temple/church propaganda and by pilgrim word-of-mouth. Oral transmission was an important factor in narrative formation because it was not only a way of transforming events into a narrative or providing material for such, but also a significant aspect of the cultic experience. Chapter 5 examines the individual miracle collections in detail in order to address the following questions: (1) What are the textual indications that these miracles were transmitted orally? (2) What occasions (cultic or everyday) provided the framework for storytelling gatherings? (3) Who were the carriers of this oral tradition? Were they the tellers of miracles or the immediate identifiable informants of the hagiographers? (4) What narrative references attest to the spread of these stories? More importantly, how were these miraculous cures narrated and how did this telling of miracles, in turn, become part of the story itself? (5) What is the role of the real presence of orality and its narrative representation in the miracles? When the miracle collections were recorded, the purpose was not to establish an exclusive canon of texts, in contrast to the gospel tradition.
Two intentions were involved in the production of a written text: first, the desire to record past miraculous events to reinforce the believers’ hopes that such miracles would happen to them as well; second, depending on the personal aspirations of the hagiographer, the intention to compose a literary work. Besides the internal set of variables signalling the formation of the miracle collections, I shall use works on oral traditions from the fields of anthropology, classical philology, and New Testament studies that focus on separate aspects of orality. I then introduce the person behind the records: in the midst of shaping the narrative and moulding it into a compositional whole, into a proper collection, we find the person of the hagiographer — alongside others. Chapter 6 on the hagiographers will address how they reflected upon their own work of composition and research. Here, I will seek answers to further questions, such as, What is the relationship of the hagiographer to the text? or In what sense can the hagiographer be regarded as author, narrator, performer, and redactor? Are they the recorders of the texts or creative composers?
How did these particular Byzantine hagiographers depict their own role, what forms did their self-display or self-characterization take, and what emerges without their conscious effort? The hagiographers’ personality and their literary ambitions certainly left their marks on the structural development and compositional features of the collections. Part III complements the latter survey by focusing on a structural analysis of the texts and on the conscious shaping of the compositions, born out of literary ambitions that often aimed high and were marked by the hagiographers’ individual compositional styles. In the impressive literature on Byzantine hagiography, there are surprisingly few articles that treat hagiographical sources from a literary point of view, and even fewer that deal with them in terms of literary theory. Without subscribing to any such theory in particular, my analysis remains focused on the miracle narratives and includes a mapping of their structure, the miracle groups, and the narrative technique.
Thus, Chapter 7 looks at the collections’ compositional structures, individual characteristics, structural development, and thematic groupings, in addition to analysing the miracle stories in each collection. Before these structural investigations, I will briefly consider how each hagiographer establishes credibility, creating the literary and concrete reality of the narrative, as well as the reality of the miraculous. After analysing each collection as a whole, narrative techniques are the subject of Chapter 8. These include story patterns, folktale motifs, narrative devices such as wordplay and jokes, the function of dialogues, scenic duality, and the narrative compulsion to return to expected endings. I attempt here to identify the logic of the narratives. In 1960, Festugière raised the question of hagiographical folk motifs, and in the 1970s, other topoi came to the attention of scholars, while contemporary Byzantinists have analysed hagiographical motifs in a more literary-narrative context. In this chapter, I shall concentrate on some of the individually developed nuclei of miraculous stories such as the invitation dream, the finding of curative objects, and the narrative and theological role of repetition. Chapter 9 has two parts. The first one analyses the impact of medical knowledge on the dream content of incubation patients, illustrating what E. R. Dodds described as the culturally dependent dream pattern. The second part examines the narrative role of doctors in the miracles by highlighting the situations in which the medical craft is presented in dreams.
The closing chapter of this part (Chapter 10) looks first at the contemporary social reality represented in the stories, determined in part by the personal credo of the hagiographer, but also by the religious context around the cult place. I shall consider purposeful and accidental testimonies and attitudes towards pagans, heretics, and Jews, and explore the promotion of theological truths and the presence of contrasting orthodoxies. Certainly, the most articulated of these truths and orthodoxies reveals what this sort of hagiography shows about the ‘other’, in the broadest sense. Within the period of this study, these ‘others’ may include not simply Greeks (pagans) in their quality as non-Christians, but ‘others’ marked by their learning (philosophical, rhetorical, or — in the case of physicians — medical), the last guardians of paideia, the traditional Greek education.
The unbelievers present in the miracle stories posed a challenge to these miracles and the theological message behind them. They were resistant pagans, Greeks, or Jews, heirs to a great cultural tradition. Prominent among them were doctors, who presented a (perhaps more narrative than real) rivalry, or simply fulfilled a necessary role by viewing healing from a different perspective. Less unusual in view of later hagiography is the presence and representation of the many sorts of heretics of the day, hence the definition of an orthodoxy that can be quite varied.7 In this context theological propaganda is hardly surprising; what deserves particular attention is how the hagiographers chose to apply their anti-heretical measures. It is noteworthy how hagiography, this apparently fixed narrative form, gave resonance to contemporary sentiments and to changes in its immediate social surrounding. Here the position taken towards Jews and the surprisingly rapid accommodation of anti-Judaic rhetoric will be a key example. One of the aims of the collections was theological propaganda. This was accomplished by contrasting the faith of the saints to that of their patients, where both parties were ready to express a neat dogmatic credo. The uniqueness arises when the patients, the saints, and the cult itself could change their theological position; thus, two versions of miracle stories emerged, naturally with two differently interpreted orthodoxies.
The final part of the last chapter addresses the aim of the recording of these miracles, such as entertainment, local cult propaganda, or the dissemination of theological truths. Here I highlight the surrounding circumstances of telling and listening to the dream-miracle narratives. This communal aspect of the cult experience is all the more important because pilgrims not only underwent the rites together, but concurrently told and listened to miracle stories that instructed, oriented, encouraged (or discouraged), and entertained them. The instances of stories that direct our attention to their own mise-en-scène help us form an idea about how ‘informal’ this sort of performance was and incite us to ask how telling miracles was integrated into the customary practices of the cult place (or even into the liturgy). The mode of expressing the expected unexpected, that is, the logic of the miraculous events, brings us back to those characteristics of the narrative which arose simply by its being told. The worshipper was psychically prepared through the entertainment function of the narrative, through ‘becoming an audience’.
The conclusion sums up the broader hagiographical aims of the incubation narratives, and their cultic and narrative singularity. I shall summarize in what respects the Byzantine incubation collections differ from contemporary Byzantine miracle corpora, in what respects they conform to the hagiographical models of the time, and in what respects they reach back and draw on the ancient paradigms of incubation practice and literature. In several aspects, the records of incubation healers were closer to the (pagan) Greek narrative and cultic models than to the other Byzantine miracle collections or New Testament paradigms of miraculous cures. The Christian incubation miracles reflect the survival of a pagan practice with its own narrative tradition. This practice and its narrative left noteworthy traces in the Christian miracle stories, with elements foreign to mainstream Byzantine hagiography. However, the most fascinating development (and one not at all predictable with the arrival of Christianity) was this interconnectedness itself: that the existence of a ritual and its way of expression went on hand in hand.
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