Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 793
When Marwan heard this, he commanded that the pillar should be overthrown;
and he brought down the old man, and burnt him alive in the fire.
(History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria i.18, ed. B. Evetts, PO v.156)
It is some indication of the shifting frontiers of many such Christian
dialects of the holy that the laus perennis, the ‘sleepless’ chant of the monks,
was soon established in Burgundy and in the Franche-Comté (then, as in
the sixteenth century, a frontier zone of piety between the Mediterranean
and the north). 25 By contrast, Wulfilaic, a Lombard holy man who had
grown up in northern Italy, close to the Byzantine exarchate of Ravenna,
received a cool reception in northern Gaul. The bishop of Trier told him
to get off his column. There was no place for a homo ignobilis such as himself
to become the Symeon Stylites of northern Gaul (Greg. Tur. Hist. viii.15).
Given the nature of our sources, it is relatively easy to evoke the various,
agreed local versions of the place that holy persons might occupy in the
memory and expectations of distinct Christian regions. It is less easy to
explain the rise and function of the holy man in terms of the wider social
and religious world in which he was expected to be active. Here we are
faced by a problem of perspective. The foreground of the life and activities
of the holy man is supremely well known to us. Vivid and deliberately
circumstantial evidence presents the holy man interacting with all manner
of persons. The emphasis is placed on specific incidents of healing, good
advice, cursing and successful intercession, both with God in heaven and
with the powerful on earth. Yet, seen in terms of these sharply delineated
actions, the holy man stands out, like a figure in a Chinese landscape,
against an indistinct and seemingly measureless background. How to relate
foreground and background, the known activities of the holy man with
their wider social and religious implications; and hence how to explain their
overall significance for contemporaries and their relative importance in
relation to other forms of religious activity has remained a tantalizing
problem. It is a problem that admits no single, unambiguous solution. Let
us, therefore, begin with what is easiest to know, with the foreground.
It must never be forgotten that the holy man’s activities, though usually
presented in the sources as dramatic and exceptional, were no more than a
highly visible peak in a spiritual landscape that rose gently upwards from
the expectations and activities of ordinary Christians in towns and villages.
A community of believers, endowed by baptism with the gift of the Holy
Spirit, all Christians were potentially ‘holy’. In late antique conditions, this
fact was expected to be shown by the possession of spiritual powers. To
take one well-known example: Augustine’s mother, Monica, took for
granted that she would receive God-given, premonitory dreams; and
25 Wood (1981) 16.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008