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782 26. holy men
Himself a total recluse, Barsanuphius was unusual in the emphasis that
he placed on the power of prayer alone, when offered by such saints. Of
the three that he mentioned, one was studiously anonymous, and the other
two are not known as ‘holy men’ from any other sources.
The modern historian of late antiquity, however, tends to approach the
issue of sanctity from another direction. He is interested in the well-known
phenomenon of the role allotted to living holy persons within the Christian
communities, and, more generally, within the religious imagination of the
period. What he wishes to find – and finds in impressive abundance – are
the writings of those who believed in no uncertain terms that certain
figures, ‘servants of God’, ‘friends of God’, ‘men of God’ (persons whom
for want of a better term we tend to call ‘holy men’), both existed and
should be seen to exist. The historian, in fact, concentrates on sources that
privilege the fully public deeds of holy men at the expense of the equally
intense and effective power of prayer frequently ascribed to more reclusive
persons, to holy women quite as much as holy men. This chapter will follow
the grain of a modern historiographical interest, in that it isolates for examination
one category only of holy persons: it will be about ‘holy men’, about
those ‘servants of God’, that is, whom contemporaries believed to have
been specially chosen by God, in their own time, as in past ages, to show
forth the power of his arm, through the coruscatio, the forceful lightningflash,
of visible miracles.
Holy men of this kind played a crucial role in the religious imagination
of many late antique persons. They made the Christian God present in their
own age and locality; and they did so to such an extent that disbelief came
to focus less on the existence of the Christian God so much as on his willingness
to provide a distant human race – and especially the unkempt
inhabitants of a given region – with the crowning mercy of palpable human
agents of his will. At the same time as Barsanuphius, near Gaza, was writing
his letters, a farmer on the high plateau behind the coastline of Lycia was
unimpressed when told by his neighbour of visits to the holy man,
Nicholas of Sion:
What is this ‘servant of God’? As the Lord God lives, I would not put my trust in
any man on earth. (Life, 22, ed. S ˇ evčenko and S ˇ evčenko (1984) 43)
Lapidary though such statements of belief and disbelief might be, their
very trenchancy served to veil – from contemporaries quite as much as
from modern historians – a whole range of conflicting assumptions that
surrounded the figure of the holy man in late antiquity. The very possibility
that such persons might exist raised basic questions on the relations
between God and human beings that received sharply different answers in
different Christian regions.
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