Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 783
That sanctity, when achieved, should show itself at all to the world in the
form of popular and much sought-after physical ‘signs’ – such as healing,
exorcism, successful intercessory prayer for safety from natural disasters,
prophecy, blessing and cursing – was an issue that caused the finest representatives
of the selfsame ascetic tradition that produced the overwhelming
majority of holy persons to think carefully about what such a gift might
mean to those who had received it, and how it should be best deployed.
Thus Gregory the Great, in Rome, would ‘draw ever new refreshment’
from tales told by old men of the deeds of the holy men and women of his
native Italy, in his Dialogues (Gregory, Dialogi i.10.20). Yet, in the same years,
he could write to warn the monk Augustine in a.d. 601 of the very real spiritual
perils involved in living up to current expectations as a wonderworking
missionary among the barbarians of Kent:
for the weak mind may be raised up by self-esteem, and so the very cause for which
it is raised on high, through honour from outsiders, may lead, through vainglory,
to an inner fall. (Gregory, Registrum xi.36; also in Bede, HE i.31)
No agreement was reached on such matters by Christian writers of the
period. From the Iona of Columba (who died in the same year, 597, as
Augustine reached Kent from Rome) to the Nestorian communities of
Mesopotamia, Iran and central Asia (whose representatives reached China
in the same generation) an unmistakably late antique Christian language of
the holy, that expected ‘servants of God’ to make themselves known to the
world at large by ‘signs’, was spoken in a number of quite distinctive local
dialects. Given this situation, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First,
to use the abundant evidence for attitudes towards the activities of living
holy persons in various Christian regions to bring into clearer focus,
through significant contrasts, the principal outlines of a human geography
of the holy within widely differing Christian communities. The second
follows from this: it is to seize the characteristics of the period as a whole,
from a.d. 425 to around 630, as one stage among many in the long process
of Christianization. For the activities of the Christian holy man provide
precious evidence for the slow building up, in different ways and in different
regions, of what Norman Baynes once called a ‘thought-world’, 1 a thoughtworld
that came to form the basis of the religious culture of Byzantium,
of the medieval west and of the Christian communities of the middle east.
It is easy to forget how slowly this thought-world took on unambiguously
Christian features in the late antique period. Yet part of the fascination
of the Christian hagiography of these centuries is that it enables us to
glimpse Christianity itself against its wider background. Christianity
1 Baynes (1960) 24–46.
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