John's Writings

Amidst his many activities, John was also an important writer. Most of his two major works, the Ecclesiastical History and the Lives of the Eastern Saints , remain extant, but large parts of the Ecclesiastical History , as well as other pieces, have been lost.

John's earliest work appears to have been a description of the first Monophysite persecutions, perhaps in particular those conducted in the 530s by the patriarch Ephrem of Antioch and Abraham bar Kaili, bishop of Amida.^[12] He may also have written a few years later an account of the Great Bubonic Plague that struck the empire in 542, but whether he left this as an independent work is unclear. A further work that has not survived seems to have dealt with theological negotiations in the early 570s, focusing on the general formula of unity discussed by Chalcedonian and Monophysite authorities in 571.^[13]

Scholars have long held John's Ecclesiastical History as a work of major import for the sixth century. It consists of three parts, the first covering the period from Julius Caesar until the death of Theodosius II, the second spans the period to 571, and the third to 588–589.^[14] A few citations from part 1 are incorporated by Michael the Syrian in his Chronicle ; considerably more of part 2 is quoted in large sections by pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre in his Chronicle, as well as by Michael, and these segments have been supplemented by further scattered references.^[15] Part 3 has survived intact.^[16]

John's early writings on the persecutions and Great Plague doubtless provided much of the material about those events in part 2 of his Ecclesiastical History . For these matters, his accounts of natural disasters, his intimate knowledge of the imperial court under both Justinian and Justin II, his provincial ties, and his detailed rendering of the internal Monophysite disputes, we are most indebted to his History .

A careless writer at the best of times, John's enthusiasm outweighed his patience. In the parts of his History composed while he was in prison or in exile, this tendency was aggravated by the circumstances. But John shows little regard for the discipline evidenced by fellow Syriac historians of the same time. Both the meticulous concern for detail (of prices and dates in particular) shown by "Joshua the Stylite" in his Chronicle and the careful preservation of documents found in pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor's Ecclesiastical History are missing in John's History .^[17]

Yet by virtue of their fervor, John's writings provide an honest record that counterbalances the official (and Chalcedonian) histories, whether "secular" or "ecclesiastical," left by his Greek contemporaries.^[18] Perhaps best exemplified by those of Procopius, Agathias, and Evagrius Scholasticus, these formal histories by Greeks constitute works in which literary protocol was at times more important than what was being reported.^[19] Despite its many inaccuracies, John's History proves true to the nature and experience of his times in a way not possible for those writers more officially or literarily minded.^[20]

In the late 560s John wrote and then expanded the Lives of the Eastern Saints , a collection of fifty-eight stories of Mesopotamian and Syrian ascetics whom he himself had known or met during his life, and whose religious careers were particularly inspiring.^[21] The stories are told as vignettes interspersed with hearsay; their presentation resembles those of the Historia Lausiaca by Palladius, the Historia religiosa of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and the later Pratum spirituale of John Moschus. E. W. Brooks has called the Lives John's "most characteristic" work;^[22] it is certainly a personal one.

The major focus of the collection falls between the 520s and 560s. John anchors the chapters primarily by references to each subject's life before and after the commencement of the Monophysite persecutions, his pivotal landmark.^[23] The order of the chapters follows the chronology of John's own life, and the shape of the whole reflects the influences at work on John in the development of his career. John's stories, then, are in part his own story.

The fifty-eight chapters of the Lives can be divided into two basic clusters: the first revolves around John's experiences as a youth in the

monastic communities of Amida's regions (chaps. 1–23), and the second concerns his experiences after leaving Mesopotamia, primarily in Egypt and Constantinople (chaps. 24–57). The final chapter (58) is devoted to the history of the Amidan monastery of Mar John Urtaya, to which he felt his greatest bond throughout his career. Odd chapters are out of sequence with this arrangement but probably indicate John's own lack of organization rather than mishandling in transmission.^[24]

The first twenty-three chapters are set mainly in Mesopotamia. They are, by and large, longer, more detailed, and more personal than the subsequent chapters. These accounts describe the monastic setting in which John grew up, the kind of ascetic practices that provided his models, and the individuals who particularly influenced his vocation.

This portion of the Lives includes the following:

Habib (chap. 1), an efficacious monk whose career fits well the pattern that characterized the holy man of late antiquity;

Z'ura (chap. 2), Habib's disciple who became a stylite but went on, because of the persecutions, to provide an influential presence in Constantinople;

Abraham and Maro (chap. 4), two brothers whose careers as stylites dominated the religious life of northern Mesopotamia for many years;

John the Nazirite (chap. 3), Paul the Anchorite (chap. 6), Harfat (chap. 11), and Simeon the Solitary (chap. 23), whose anchoretic careers forcibly came to accommodate the altered context of persecutions;

Abraham the Recluse (chap. 7) and Mare of Beth Urtaye (chap. 9), who came to the ascetic vocation late in life;

Simeon the Hermit and Sergius (chap. 5), a solitary and his disciple who served as vigilanti of Mesopotamia's villages;

Some who undertook the solitary life only to find it leading to involvement in the affairs of the outside world—Addai the Chorepiscopus, who instituted a profitable wine industry (chap. 8); two monks who could not avoid their callings as exorcists (chap. 15); Simeon the Mountaineer, who inadvertently became a missionary (chap. 16); Thomas the Armenian (chap. 21) and Abraham and Addai (chap. 22), who discovered their true vocation in founding monasteries;

Virtuosi of private labors in the tradition of Syrian asceticism, who visited Amida's monastic communities to pay them homage (the traveling monks in chaps. 14, 17, 18, 19, and 20);

Mary and Euphemia (chap. 12) and Thomas and Stephen (chap. 13), accounts of paired careers that integrate the life of contemplation and the life of service; and

Simeon the Persian Debater (chap. 10), notorious bishop of Beth Arsham in Persia.

In the second cluster John expands his setting. Like himself, most of these subjects have their roots in Mesopotamia and were forced out into the larger Roman Empire because of persecution. This section includes a number of Monophysite leaders; in the first section, only Z'ura and Simeon of Beth Arsham fit this mold. Yet John does not allot these two the same detail that he gives to his "local" celebrities, such as Maro, Euphemia, or Simeon the Mountaineer. This second section is approximately the same length as the first, but where the first section dealt with twenty-nine holy men and women, the second treats more than fifty. These chapters reflect too John's own altered position. He writes with more assertiveness, appropriate to his increasing authority in Monophysite circles during the years covered by these chapters.

This second section comprises the following:

Eminent Monophysite bishops—John of Tella (chap. 24), John of Hephaestopolis (chap. 25), Thomas of Damascus (chap. 26), the Five Patriarchs (chap. 48), Jacob Burd'aya (chap. 49), who is again treated with his comissionary Theodore (chap. 50), and Kashish (chap. 51);

Accounts of the ascetic community in Egypt, and particularly of the Monophysite refugees who fled there—the spiritual leader Susan (chap. 27), Mary the Anchorite (chap. 28), a hapless monk who stole and was rehabilitated by John of Ephesus (chap. 32), the wealthy patrician Caesaria (chap. 54) and the members of her household who followed her model John and Sosiana (chap. 55), and Peter and Photius (chap. 56);

Laymen who practiced asceticism in their "worldly" careers—Elijah of Dara (chap. 30), a second Elijah and Theodore (chap. 31), Tribunus (chap. 44), and Theodore the Castrensis (chap. 57);

Monophysite refugees who came to Constantinople and performed the ministry of service among its needy populace—Hala (chap. 33), Simeon the Scribe (chap. 34), Mare the Solitary (chap. 36), Aaron (chap. 38), Leontius (chap. 39), Abraham the Presbyter (chap. 40), Bassian and Romanus (chap. 41), Mari, Sergius, and Daniel (chap. 42), four deacons (chap. 43), and Isaac (chap. 45); some of these individuals assisted John on his missions to Asia Minor;

Accounts of what happened to the Amidan monasteries during their exile in the eastern provinces (chaps. 29 and 35), and to those monks who fled to the Monophysite monastic communities in Constantinople (chap. 47);

Paul of Antioch (chap. 46), who established a sizeable network of social services in a number of Byzantine cities; and

Two accounts, one set in Amida and one in Constantinople, of holy fools (chaps. 52 and 53).

John did not intend to use his Lives , as he did his History , to record the Monophysite story, but there is necessarily much overlap between the two works. Both for him and for his subjects, the persecution of the Monophysites marked an irrevocable turn in their lives. Further, the persecution was fundamental to the vision of asceticism John propagated, for his purpose was to show how this drastic change had impact on the ascetic vocation as he knew it.

In his collection John writes of holy men and women whose ascetic activities give evidence of power in the temporal as well as spiritual realms. Often, their capacity for power has been gained in the testing of abstinence and withdrawal. But it is brought to fullness, as John presents it, only in the context of others: in the congregation of the ascetic community and, above all, in the needs of the lay society. What we find in John's Lives is a situation that belies an other-worldly focus for asceticism, and indeed the fundamentally timeless, ahistorical concerns of the hagiographer. Thus the Lives must be seen in their context, both literary and historical. John of Ephesus as author offers important clues.