Hagiographic Style: Issues of Language and Content

The inhabitants of the Syrian Orient lived through a harrowing series of natural and political calamities during John's lifetime; at the same time they were caught in severe religious persecution. It is in fact the conditions of his day that prompt John to set these lives and events down in writing. He writes a collection because he has encountered many men and women who acted through devotion to the divine. The simplicity of that fact belies its profundity in this particular work and its particular historical setting. Again, he includes accounts of the great Monophysite leaders of his day—subjects for formal vitae by others^[39] —but the majority of his chapters deal with a localized, geographically remote area and with people otherwise unknown to us.

With these choices, John declares his own understanding of the events of his times. The holy is not restricted to certain persons (nobles, leaders) nor to certain places (cities). It is found in the people and places of daily lives; it is found in the midst of the same events that would seem to deny God's presence. The Lives of the Eastern Saints are a restatement of one kind of world as another. So John's purpose determines his genre, hagiography, and also his hagiographical style, his use of the standard conventions of this literary form.

For John, action is the most important element of devotion to God. Hence writing is for him a functional task, an action he takes in response to an urgent situation. He sets for himself certain guidelines: the

appearance of familiar hagiographical themes, the use of material of specifically monastic intent, and the occasional pause to preach to his audience. But, unlike Theodoret, he is not mindful of his labors as a craft in themselves. When John uses the tools of the hagiographer's trade, he is simply being practical by using a language common to Christendom in order to make his point.

John's hagiographical style, his use of standard themes and images, is also subordinated to his purpose of re-presenting the events of his times through the lives of his subjects. In the context of hagiography, the tragedy, the calamity, the apparent defeat of the Monophysites all become the means by which God's grace is revealed. Hagiography as a literary form and the language of its conventions enables John to accomplish his task succinctly.^[40] But at a practical level, this also means that John makes no distinction between literary conventions and his own perceptions.

John's lack of artistic concern blurs the boundaries in his accounts between the topos as a literary device and the motifs common in a historical sense because they represent traits of the ascetic as a figure in religious and societal life. That is, John employs standard literary images to express the common understanding of a holy man or woman as a religious persona.

Thus, for example, John employs the topos of a hostile assailant suddenly frozen in midair,^[41] or likewise blinded^[42] or struck fatally ill,^[43] by the power of a holy man or woman—the standard means of presenting a saint's spiritual authority in tangible fashion.^[44] Elsewhere, John's solitaries do physical battle with demonic forces,^[45] in scenes reminiscent of similar ones from the Lives of Antony, Simeon the Stylite, and Daniel the Stylite.^[46] The scene is a common personification of the saint's battle against temptation and the test of fortitude that marks initiation into the ranks of God's chosen. However, John also enjoys telling us about the idiosyncracies of his subjects. He is committed, too, to portraying the cost in human terms of the tragedies around him. These interests conflict with the standardized nature of hagiographical formulae. Indeed, John seems unaware of the disjuncture in his narratives when a familiar formula clashes with the sensitivity of his portraits—as, for instance, in his chapters about holy women, where his stereotypic statements are at odds with the actual accounts he gives.^[47]

Thus John uses common themes not to make his stories fit popular tastes but to present a particular understanding of the lives lived by his subjects. When the holy woman Euphemia dies, exhausted after a career of service to the needy, the reader cannot fail to see her story in terms of

an imitatio Christi .^[48] But John has not molded her portrait to fit this typology; he tells us about so many quirks of Euphemia's personality that her individuality dominates the chapter throughout. Nor does Euphemia herself choose to present her dying in this light: her determination with regard to her vocation does not negate her humility. The parallel of Euphemia's life with that of the Gospels arises because John intends his audience to see what he himself has seen: Euphemia's life, and those like hers, can only be understood in relation to the work of Christ.

Similarly, John's two accounts of holy fools remind us that motifs might become popular, even standardized, and yet maintain their capacity to affect people's choices in their own lives.^[49] His first story on this theme is presented in terms familiar to hagiographic romance, so much so that some have questioned the reliability of this chapter.^[50] But the second story is clearly about a personal encounter that John has experienced. The text itself is awkward owing to John's memory of the incident. It is the task of the scholar to separate formulae from historic elements in a saint's life, but in John of Ephesus we see the reverse process: a formula or formulaic theme could help the Christian community to understand religious activity by expressing its meaning, and thematic legends could inspire genuine emulation (imitation) by real people.

In fact, the motifs that occur most frequently in John's Lives are not of a hagiographical character. They are traits that characterize the asceticism of the Syrian Orient. So John presents his ascetics as strangers in this world, an image that rests at the core of the Syrian ascetic vocation.^[51] He draws out, too, the concern for hospitality within the ascetic's works.^[52] Again, those monks or nuns truly blessed in John's eyes have the gift of tears^[53] and of foreseeing their own deaths.^[54] These and other features of the ascetic's activities have less to do with hagiographic portrayal than with describing what had become the trademarks of actual asceticism in this area.^[55]

In this vein, too, we can understand the repetitive features in John's accounts of healings. In his stories barren women do conceive,^[56] and sick persons are cured,^[57] in standard fashion: the vehicle for the miracle may be a relic, such as a holy man's toenail (as in the case of Maro), or the commonly employed hnana , a mixture of consecrated oil, dust from a holy place, and water used for liturgical as well as private devotional purposes. The possessed are exorcised by the sign of the cross or by a rebuke of the demon by the holy person.^[58] But these methods are those that the holy man or woman generally used in society and are not drawn from hagiography alone.^[59]

The use of familiar hagiographical language and tone provided John

with a convenient shortcut. The unmistakable literary conventions placed his subjects in the company of saints. John does not have to justify, as Theodoret did, the religious choices his subjects made; by John's time, hagiography had grown to be so much a part of popular piety that its language alone was sufficient to justify its content. John writes without contrivance; if his style includes hagiographical clichés, the earnestness of his effort fills them with fresh meaning. They represent the language in which he thinks and sees the world; they are the means by which he can enable his audience to share the same perception.^[60]