The Message in the Model

By glorifying the ascetic's use of spiritual power in the temporal world, John is not advocating a "secularization" of a mode of action originally seen as an act of grace. Rather, John's ascetics display an outward manifestation of their inward spirituality—and here the crucial issue is touched because John's Lives differ from those written by Palladius and Theodoret in a most fundamental way. For John writes at the time when the Chalcedonian-Monophysite dispute had reached its highest pitch. It is a time when the needs of the temporal world have become so pressing that the ascetic cannot afford the luxury of complete withdrawal. Moreover, it has become essential that ascetic involvement, as an act of grace, be revitalized beyond the complacency of asceticism as institution. There is rarely a chapter of John's collection that does not mention the Monophysite persecutions, the refugees, the exiled, or the martyred. Further, the anger of the persecuted ascetics was compounded all the more by their wider circumstances: for the Byzantine East, the sixth century brought its succession of famine, plague, and war. The ascetic response to these capricious natural and political crises was transformed with new meaning in the context of persecution.

John's Lives are charged with politics: the affairs of the empire are inescapable; responses to them are mandatory. Time after time John reiterates the rhetoric of martyrdom. This is not the language that praises a distant past, as in the tales of martyrdom that Palladius tells.^[54] Nor is it the language spoken in the safely removed tone that Theodoret uses in his stories about the Arian persecutions.^[55] John merges the symbols of the martyr who dies for the faith and the ascetic whose life manifests the same strength. Martyr and ascetic are here a physically fused presence.

These ascetics are not dead to the world, nor is such a state the goal of their religious practice. John takes care to point out that strangers could not be admitted to the Amidan monasteries without swearing the required oath to anathematize the "heresy" of Chalcedon.^[56] And Elijah of Dara impressed John highly "as he stood and uttered anathemas and called the Chalcedonian bishops as well as those who wielded the authority of the crown, to their faces impious men, renegades, and new Jews."^[57]

Palladius and Theodoret had both written their hagiographical collections in contexts of ecclesiastical battle. But Palladius deals in his writing with the issues of his day by denying that there is any disagreement; his Historia Lausiaca describes a peaceful picture that hardly indicates the state of the Egyptian church at the time.^[58] Theodoret, for his part, wrote the Historia religiosa during a period of relative tranquility in his otherwise volatile career. His motives for writing it have been variously interpreted, but the work itself is calm and dignified and praises an asceticism of previously questionable validity in a literary format that grants it admirable respect.^[59] In both these cases, the polemical interests of the authors play an understated part in their hagiographical stories and at times are barely discernible. Nor is there a sense of unified ascetic vision that speaks to personal vows, public suffering, and religious unrest such as that portrayed by John of Ephesus.

Similar contrasts are apparent in the kind of attention, or lack thereof, given to the matter of lapses in ascetic commitment. Theodoret presents a portrait of holy men and women who never fail, figures of seamless perfection, and hence removes us from any real contact with them. Palladius, from the opposite perspective, often recounts stories of fallen monks or nuns to counteract the sin of pride so prevalent among ascetics, and perhaps also to acknowledge (sometimes compassionately, albeit grudgingly so) how genuinely difficult the monastic vocation could be. John of Ephesus gives little time to such stories, but not because he presents a perfect picture, such as Theodoret depicts. For example, John tells the story of a monk who stole the books and relics of another solitary. However, remorse soon followed, and John himself was the media-

tor in the reconciliation.^[60] It is a humane presentation, hardly a case of debauchery such as Palladius was prone to dwell upon; and it does not differ in tone from the rest of John's collection. He is too focused on the pragmatic needs of his world and the ascetic involvement in them for such distractions.

Nor does John express concern for the sin of accidie —the boredom one had always to fight in the Egyptian desert or Cappadocian monastery. Palladius knew the dangers of an asceticism so monotonous that this sin could lead to madness.^[61] John's ascetic vision led to opposite results: Mare of Beth Urtaye "used to behave with great and measureless arrogance, and he was haughty";^[62] but for Mare asceticism proved a cure. Not only did it redeem his disposition, it further enabled him to endure the persecutions courageously.

Again, the sometimes fantastic miracles recalled by Palladius and Theodoret have no place in John's work. Miracles there are, in abundance, but of a less histrionic kind: hearings, or feats of endurance. John's holy men and women are as much victims of their times as the suppliants they serve; they, too, suffer from plague and famine, the destruction of invading troops, and above all the hardships of exile and imprisonment by persecutors. They have no wondrous solutions for the hardships at hand, except to work as best they can to meet the needs of their populace. Lust, boredom, and miracles, these are themes that do not concern John and for which he has no time. The imperatives of the present world are of too great an import.

John's Lives present an institutionalized form of the holy person's cult that resulted in an increased acceptability, accessibility, and range of activity for the ascetic. At the same time, he sets his subjects in the context of a church rent by persecutions and separatist activities, and of a society engulfed by tragic conditions. In such circumstances, the old rules and the old values no longer work. A different kind of ministry of service and of action is needed, and, in the midst of such chaos, a fluidity in the existing structures becomes possible.

John's arena is twofold: the intimate locality of Amida and its territory, and the vast size of the wider Byzantine Empire. His sense of purpose can in fact be seen to emanate from the microcosm of human experience and holy presence he witnessed in the small world of Amida. The vision John developed in Amida, and its extension outward in the larger empire, must be considered first, before turning to the implications involved.