Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 791
A loyal, if careworn, subject of the east Roman emperors, Gregory had
resided for some time in Constantinople. He knew that he did not write in
a vacuum. He was careful to enunciate his own, distinctively Latin, ‘dialect’
of the holy with all the more clarity because he knew that other, subtly
different variants of a Christian language of the holy existed in the east.
What we find, above all in Syria, but also in Palestine, Egypt and a little later
in Constantinople and Asia Minor, are dialects of the holy which, though
they differed greatly among themselves, tended to differ even more from
those current in the west. They invested living persons with a degree and,
above all, with a stability of sanctity that men such as Gregory of Tours
and even Gregory the Great preferred to ascribe only to the holy dead.
Even when we make due allowance for the fact that much of our evidence
reflects the state of mind of great pilgrimage sites, which needed to foster
stable and generous expectations of the powers of their wonder-working
heroes, we are confronted, in the hagiography of the eastern empire, with
a significantly different view of the human person.
The great holy men of the eastern empire were, indeed, ‘mourners’.
They were penitents, publicly crushed beneath the weight of their own sins.
Their fully visible self-mortifications played out, on a heroic scale, the contrition
and profound sense of human frailty which every believer was
expected to feel, but which few were called upon to experience with such
exquisite sensibility. But repentance of epic dimensions was widely deemed
to have brought holy persons to a state of loving familiarity with God. The
veil which, since Adam’s fall, had descended between mankind and the
angelic hosts around the throne of God had been worn thin by their
prayers. It had become transparent to their tear-worn eyes. Indeed, when
Symeon Stylites first mounted his column at Telnesin and, a little later,
began to sway backwards and forwards, bowing with a dizzying frequency
that riveted the attention of all onlookers – a servant of Theodoret of
Cyrrhus counted up to 1,244 such prostrations before giving up – it was
because, clearly visible to Symeon, an angel was perpetually bowing in just
the same manner before the eucharistic bread that was stored in a little
stone niche on one side of his column (Theodoret, HR xxvi.22; V. Sym.
Syr. 98, Doran (1992) 171–2).
For Symeon, perhaps, and certainly for those reared in a mature Syrian
tradition who came to watch him, the holy man was, in himself, a ‘living
sign’. His dramatic way of life was more than the distant blink of a signal
from God. It made present with almost perfect congruence in the visible
world realities that usually lay beyond human sight. It is as if the angelic
world itself had pushed through the veil, to become fully palpable in the
figure perched on his column above the plain at Telnesin. 22
22 Harvey (1988), (1998).
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