Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

792 26. holy men
For a human being to stand, in such an unambiguous manner, as an
‘angel’ among men required a gift of the Holy Spirit more all-consuming
and definitive than that bestowed upon each Christian by the grace of
baptism (or, to put it differently, a more robust emergence of that grace
than was the case with the average believer). Belief in the fervour of the
Spirit, that had stirred in Patricius on the coast of Mayo, was taken for
granted in Syria. It rested on the firm foundations of a prestigious and
long-established theological tradition. It was as bearers of the Holy Spirit,
their whole nature ‘mixed’ with its inspiring energy as inseparably as the fragrance
of myrrh penetrated the heavy oil base of a perfume, that Syrian
Christians had been accustomed, for centuries, to make Christ present and
palpable in this world.
As a result, claims to which Greek bishops had reacted with instant suspicion
in the early fifth century, when made on behalf of nameless groups
of believers – who earned from their enemies the heresiological label of
‘Messalians’ (persons who were held to believe that the deep-seated force
of evil might be irrevocably driven from the human soul by unremitting,
fervent prayer) – were taken for granted as underlying the spiritual achievements
of the nouvelle vague of stylite hermits and, a little later, despite initial
resistance, of the analogous Syrian phenomenon of the ‘Sleepless’ monks
(monks, that is, devoted to unceasing prayer). The holy man settled down,
throughout the eastern Mediterranean, as a ‘licensed Messalian’. 23
In both cases, practices that originated in Syria broke through previous
cultural frontiers, creating an ‘international style’ of demonstrative Christian
sanctity. ‘Stylite’, ‘hermit’ and ‘recluse’ tended to merge in the terminology
of the times. They could be found everywhere. A female stylite is recorded
outside Amasea (Amasya) in Pontus. In Egypt, a male stylite is found,
according to one papyrus, arranging for a donkey driver to bring water in
daily instalments to the monastery that had grown up, apparently at the foot
of his column, at Antinoe. Far to the east, in the foothills of the Zagros
mountains, Monophysite stylites perched ominously, ‘like carrion vultures’,
on the edge of hostile Nestorian villages. 24 They had come to stay. Consulted
by a Muslim leader in the course of the civil wars which accompanied the
end of the Umayyad dynasty in the mid eighth century, a stylite attached to
a Palestinian monastery answered:
If I tell thee the truth, thou wilt slay me; yet I will declare what God has revealed to
me. With the measure with which thou hast measured it shall be measured to thee.
He was proved right on both counts.
23 Stewart (1991) and Escolan (1999).
24 Anderson and Cumont (1910) no. 134, 146; Papyri Greek and Egyptian: In Honour of Eric Gardiner
Turner (1981) no. 54, 198–203; Thomas of Marga, Book of Governors iii.8, tr. E. A. W. Budge (London
1893) 330–3 and 363.
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