Notes
1. On this subject see Peter Brown, “The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity,” Representations 1.2 (1983): 1–25.
2. Athanasius, Life of Antony prologue. Trans. Robert T. Meyer, The Life of Saint Antony (New York: Newman, 1978), p. 17.
3. On the generic elements of hagiography in Late Antiquity see Alison Goddard Elliot, Roads to Paradise: Reading the Lives of the Early Saints (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), pp. 77–130. Bernard Flusin (Vie et miracle dans l’oeuvre de Cyrille de Scythopolis [Paris: Ëtudes Augustiniennes, 1983], pp. 87–137) has identified similar motives in the works of the hagiographer Cyril of Scythopolis where he has seen Cyril conforming to models for relating the ascetic life found in Athanasius’s Life of Antony. See also Giulio Guidorizzi, “Motivi fabieschi nell’agiografia bizantina,” in Studi bizantini e neogreci: Atti del IV congresso nazionale di studi bizantini, ed. Pietro Luigi Leone (Galatina: Congedo, 1983), pp. 457–67.
4. Elliot, Roads to Paradise, p. 81.
5. Robert Browning (“The ‘Low Level’ Saint’s Life in the Early Byzantine World,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel [San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1983], pp. 117–27) has observed the following typology to which I am heavily indebted: The holy man withdraws from society; “does not share the needs of ordinary people” for sexual relations and for food; is able to “pass long periods without sleep, in prayer or psalmody”; has no need of shelter; has no need of clothing; “does not require the support of the family.” Browning bases his observations on a sample of full-length Byzantine lives ranging in date from the fifth to the eleventh century. Since the Life of Symeon is not included in Browning’s sample, its adherence to the model outlined is particularly significant. The article is on the whole excellent. However, Browning’s classification of the lives he examines as “low level” is confused. He wishes to use the phrase both to describe the saints’ origins as lower class, a characterization which does not hold for all of his examples, and to describe the audience intended for these texts, that is a “popular” audience, presumably in contrast to a highly literate or aristocratic audience. The audiences for Byzantine hagiography are insufficiently understood and require further study. They must be determined on a case-by-case basis before we can generalize. Neither the origins of the saint nor the level of language employed by the author appears to provide faultless criteria for determining a text’s audience.
6. James Goehring, “The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt,” JECS 1 (1993): 282.
7. Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3.
8. La légende syriaque de saint Alexis, l’homme de Dieu, ed. and trans. Arthur Amiaud (Paris: Vieweg, 1889). For a discussion of this text see chapter 4.
9. Life of Symeon the Younger 5; La vie ancienne de S. Syméon Stylite le jeune (521–592), 2 vols., ed. P. van den Ven (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1962–70). Trans. Browning, “ ‘Low-Level’ Saint’s Life,” p. 120. Daniel the Stylite’s parents dedicate him to a monastery where he receives a new name (Life of Daniel 3).
10. George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 12, cf. 15. Text: Vie de Théodore de Sykéon, 2 vols., ed. Festugière (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1970). Translation: in Three Byzantine Saints, trans. Elizabeth Dawes and Norman H. Baynes (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1977), p. 95. Cf. Mt 10:37, 19:29; Lk 14:26.
11. Athanasius, Life of Antony 47; trans. Meyer, p. 60.
12. Historia monachorum in Aegypto (hereafter HME) 2.9 (Abba Or), 8.6 (Abba Apollo), 11.5 (Abba Sourous).
13. Theodoret, Historia religiosa (hereafter Thdt., HR) 4.12; trans. R. M. Price, A History of the Monks of Syria (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1985), p. 55. Cf. 1.2, 16.1, 18.1, 21, 23. This is, of course, the case for the stylites Symeon (Thdt., HR 26; cf. Jacob of Serug, Homily on Symeon the Stylite, trans. Harvey, in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. Vincent Winbush [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990], pp. 19–20) and Daniel (Life of Daniel the Stylite, in Les saints stylites, ed. Delehaye (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1923], pp. 1–94; Eng. trans. in Dawes and Baynes, Three Byzantine Saints, pp. 1–71).
14. Athanasius, Life of Antony 3.
15. I take up this topic again in the next chapter. For the centrality of prayer in Syrian Christianity, see Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and The Lives of the Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 8–9.
16. Cf. Harvey, Asceticism and Society, p. 14.
17. Among the extraordinary powers of Early Byzantine saints, Browning (“ ‘Low Level’ Saint’s Life,” pp. 121–23) identifies endurance, prophecy and clairvoyance, the power to heal, the ability to overcome demons, control over the forces of nature, visions, ability to provide food miraculously, ability to punish those who question his powers, and longevity. Not all of Browning’s saints display all these features, but as he says, “all show some of them, and many show all of them” (p. 126). Again I acknowledge my debt to Browning’s typology.
18. HME 1.1–3, 10–11, 28; 6.1; 8.48; 10.12; 11.4; 12.11; 22.6–8; Thdt., HR 1.3; 2.14; 13.17; 15.4; 21.17; 24.19; cf. George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 54, 119.
19. George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 65, 67, 68, 69, 81, 85, 96. Cf. Athanasius, Life of Antony 56–64; HME 1.12, 16; 6.1; 7.2; 10.1; 13.9; 21.17; 22.3–4; 26; Thdt., HR 2.19, 20; 9.5, 7; 13.9, 13; 14.3; 16.2; 26.16; Life of Daniel the Stylite 74.
20. Life of Nicholas of Sion 33, 34. Text and translation: The Life of Saint Nicholas of Sion, ed. and trans. Ihor Šečenko and Nancy Patterson Ševčenko (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic College, 1984).
21. Life of Nicholas of Sion 26, 61, 63, 65, 66, 73, 74. George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 71, 84, 86, 87, 123. Cf. HME 2.6; 10.1; 15.1; 24.10; Thdt., HR 3.9, 22; 9.4, 9–10; 13.10; 16.2.
22. HME 8. For further discussion of miraculous feeding, see chapter 7.
23. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Saint Macrina, trans. Kevin Corrigan (Toronto: Peregrina, 1987), p. 61.
24. Thdt., HR 1.4–6, 8–13 (James); 2.21–22 (Julian); cf. 8.9; 9.12; 14.4; 15.3; 26.18.
25. On this common trope, see the discussion in chapter 4.
26. On the treatment of the insane in Byzantine society see Michael Dols, “Insanity in Byzantine and Islamic Medicine,” DOP 38 (1984): 135–48.
27. Foucault, The Care of the Self, vol. 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986), esp. pp. 99–144; Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 160–78; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. pp. 213–40, 323–38. Note also Arthur Vööbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient: A Contribution to the History of Culture in the Near East, vol. 3 (Louvain: Peeters, 1988), and Harvey, Asceticism and Society, pp. 43–56.
28. Rousselle, Porneia, pp. 177–78.
29. See Goehring, “Encroaching Desert,” pp. 281–96.
30. Consider the three epigrams of Agathias (late sixth century) which are said to have been written in a toilet in Smyrna, each of which relates painful defecation to excessive gluttony (Anthologia Palatina [hereafter Anth. Pal.] 9.642–44). See also Brown, “The Problem of Miraculous Feeding in the Graeco-Roman World,” Center for Hermeneutical Studies: Colloquy 42 (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1982), pp. 16–24, esp. p. 17. Artemidorus, author of a second-century book on the interpretation of dreams, believed that dreaming of defecation in public was particularly inauspicious, since it meant that the dreamer would become the object of hatred (Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 2.26).
31. Mary Douglas has distinguished between jokes and obscenity. As she says, “The first amuses, the second shocks” (“Jokes,” Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975], p. 106). Similarly she distinguishes “the taboo breaker whose polluting act is a real offence to society” and the “joker,” a person who is able to say certain things with immunity. In narrating the obscene, the joker transforms the obscene into a joke. This difference between doing the obscene and telling about it separates Symeon from Leontius. Nevertheless, Leontius appears compelled to explain to his audience that they should not be offended by the story he narrates.
32. If the first half of the Life of Symeon is the product of a second stage of composition, as I suggested in chapter 2, the defensive passages there may well reflect actual audience reaction to the earlier parts of the text. The possibility remains that the asides which fall (occasionally awkwardly) between anecdotes in the second half of the text are also part of a second stage of composition.
33. Life of Symeon, pp. 135.5, 168.23, 170.7; cf. Lampe, s.v.
34. On the angelic state in Late Antiquity see Brown, Body and Society, pp. 325–32.
35. Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 52; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian, 1970), p. 30. On the goals of asceticism in the writings of Evagrius see Elizabeth A. Clark, “New Perspectives on the Origenist Controversy: Human Embodiment and Ascetic Strategies,” Church History 59 (1990): 145–62, and Michael Wallace O’Laughlin, “Origenism in the Desert: Anthropology and Integration in Evagrius Ponticus” (Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 1987). The popularity of Evagrius, especially in Syriac-speaking circles, beyond 553 is well attested. Many of Evagrius’s teachings were condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 for their association with the teachings of Origen. (Cf. Antoine Guillaumont, Les “Képhalaia Gnostica” d’Ëvagre le Pontique et l’histoire de l’origénisme chez les grecs et chez les syriens [Paris: du Seuil, 1962].) Leontius’s treatment of Origen and the Origenist controversy fall far short of condemnation and might lead one to speculate that the character of Symeon the Fool is drawn with an Origenist model in mind.
36. Brown, Body and Society, pp. 334–36; text: Liber Graduum, ed. Michael Kmosko (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926). Kmosko has associated the Liber Graduum with Messalianism. But Robert Ratcliff has argued convincingly against identifying the Liber Graduum with the Messalian movement; see Ratcliff, “Steps along the Way to Perfection: The Liber Graduum and Early Syrian Monasticism” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1988), pp. 33–93; cf. Arthur Vööbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, p. 2. On the conception of human perfection in the Liber Graduum, see now Aleksander Kowalski, Perfezione e guistizia di Adamo nel Liber Graduum (Rome: Pontificum Institutum Orientale, 1989), pp. 35–115.
37. Brown, Body and Society, p. 335; with reference to Liber Graduum 7.15, 22.3, and 15.4.
38. Pseudo-Macarius, Spiritual Homilies 18.7; trans. George A. Maloney, Intoxicated with God: Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Macarius (Denville, N.J.: Dimension, 1978), p. 126.
39. Basil Sermo asceticus 1.2 (PG 31.873b); John Chrysostom, Homilia in Matt 70.5 (PG 58.660); Isidore of Pelusium, Epistulae 1.477 (PG 78.444a); Thdt., HE 3.24.1 (PG 82.1117).
40. Evelyne Patlagean, “Ancient Byzantine Hagiography and Social History,” in Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore, and History, ed. S. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 110.
41. Menologii anonymi byzantini saeculi X, ed. Basilius Latyšev (St. Petersburg, 1912), pp. 194–202. Shortened versions of saints’ lives were compiled from the middle of the tenth century in collections generally called menologia. These texts, often heavily edited, could be used as sermons on each particular saint’s day, and in their compilation reflect the tastes and concerns of Church leaders. Leontius’s Life of Symeon the Fool does not appear in the earliest of these collections, that compiled by Symeon Metaphrastes (who died c. 1000).
42. A similar process is also reflected in the manuscript tradition for the Life of Symeon. Cf. Rydén, Das Leben des heiligen Narren Symeon, esp. p. 116.
43. The menologium text follows Leontius’s order, with some noticeable gaps. The paraphraser leaves out two large blocks of material corresponding to pp. 157.11–159.15 and pp. 163.16–166.4 in Rydén’s edition. Although it is possible that pages were missing from the paraphraser’s copy, it is unlikely that page divisions corresponded neatly to divisions between episodes, and there is no evidence that any episodes were available to him only in fragmentary form. I suggest that the episodes left out were deemed superfluous given the volume of miracles already to be included in the epitome.
44. Found in the Armenian Synaxarium (properly a menologium) discussed in chapter 2. Le Synaxaire arménien de Ter Israel, pp. 751–58.
45. The Synaxarium of Constantinople probably dates from the tenth century. This collection contains briefer readings about the saints. The place of these readings within the liturgy of the period in which they were compiled remains uncertain. From the middle of the thirteenth century the Orthodox Church read these passages during the canon of matins (orthros) between the sixth and seventh odes, or occasionally after third ode, a practice which continues to this day. The Synaxarium’s second notice for July 21 gives an account of the lives of Saints Symeon “τοῦ διὰ Χριστὸν σαλοῦ” and John. Comprising forty-seven lines in the modern edition, the text gives a condensed version of the first half of Leontius’s Life of Symeon (23 lines). On the dates of various Byzantine synaxaria and menologia, see Delehaye, Synaxaires byzantins, ménologes, typica (London: Variorum, 1977).
46. Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, ed. Delehaye (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902), cols. 833–34. The next nineteen lines are devoted to relating the miraculous circumstances of Symeon’s death, including some material not found in Leontius. It is common for the notices in the Synaxarium of Constantinople to concentrate on the circumstances of a saint’s death, particularly in the case of martyrs.
47. A briefer text which probably derives from the no longer extant second half of the Menologium of Basil II (which is properly a synaxarium), and therefore is perhaps datable to the turn of the eleventh century, truncates the text of the Synaxarium of Constantinople concerning Symeon. Of Symeon’s strange behavior, this text relates only: “He returned to the city. And he played the part of madness, performing many miracles under this pretense.” Menologium of Basil II, PG 117.552.
48. Rydén, “The Date of the Life of Andreas Salos,” DOP 32 (1978): 129–55. For debate on the date of this text see chapter 1, n. 5.
49. See S. Murray, A Study of the Life of Andreas (Borna-Leipzig: Noske, 1910), pp. 54–63, and Rydén, “Style and Historical Fiction in the Life of St. Andreas Salos,” JÖB 32 (1982): 175–83. On the Life of Andrew generally, see also John Wortley, “The Vita Sancti Andreae Sali as a Source of Byzantine Social History,” Societas 4 (1974): 1–20.
50. Life of Andrew the Fool, PG 111.708.
51. PG 111.713.
52. Cf. PG 111.653 and 652.
53. Furthermore, there is no evidence that the author intended this text to be used in a liturgical context, and it seems more likely that the Life of Andrew is a literary novel intended for a lay audience outside of a religious setting.