Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

786 26. holy men
that commemorated the greatest rain miracle of his career. It was a verbal
accompaniment to the spectacular new architecture of the pilgrimage
shrine set up around the base of what was now an empty column – a shrine
complete with baptistery, monastery, guest-hostel and triumphal way
leading up from the plain, that had come to weigh heavily on a once open
site occupied by the living Symeon on the limestone ridge at Telnesin. 10
Besa’s Life of Shenoute of Atripe (385–466) was written for a similar occasion
– the annual festival of the great abbot, celebrated beneath the lowering
walls of the White Monastery. 11 From Iona to Telnesin and upper
Egypt, the Life of a saint was less a biography than a recital of virtutes, of
deeds of power. It was narrated in such a way as to keep alive the expectation
that such power would remain available to the pious for as long as the
respect once shown to its dead wielder continued to be shown by the
outside world to the monastery that guarded the holy man’s memory. 12
Apart from the precious letters of Barsanuphius and fragments of
sources, such as the ostraka of Epiphanius, a late-sixth-century hermit of
Thebes, we seldom catch a holy man in action through documents that
stem from himself – still less do we hear him talk about himself. As ‘servants
of God’, many holy men simply placed a high value on selfeffacement.
But there is more to it than that: a public man in an ancient,
epic tradition, the holy man as we usually meet him in his vita, was condemned,
by the writers of hagiography, to ‘utter externality’. 13 It is only
where we would least expect it, from the Atlantic coast of fifth-century
Ireland, that we learn from the Confessio of Patricius the Briton (now known
to us as St Patrick) of what it was like to respond, as a slave in Mayo, to the
call of holiness in its late antique Christian form:
But after I reached Ireland, well, I pastured the flocks every day and I used to pray
many times a day: more and more did my love of God and my fear of Him
increase, and my faith grew and my spirit stirred, and as a result I would say up to
a hundred prayers in one day, and almost as many at night; I would even stay in the
forests and on the mountain and would wake to pray before dawn in all weathers,
snow, frost, rain: and I felt no harm and there was no listlessness in me – as I now
realise, it was because the Spirit was fervent within me.
(Patricius, Confessio 16, trans. A. B. E. Hood, St Patrick.
London and Chichester (1978) 44)
What matters for our account, however, as it did for many contemporaries,
was how a closeness to God, gained preferably in the wild, was seen to
act in the settled world. On this subject each late antique writer of hagiography
had his own firm notions of what constituted an appropriate narrative
10 Doran (1992). 11 Besa, Vita Sinuthii 1, tr. Bell (1983) 41.
12 A fact seen most clearly in the reception of late antique hagiography in Ireland: Picard (1982) and
Herbert (1988). 13 Bakhtin (1981) 133.
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