Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 795
the supernatural economy of any settled community as was the local well.
It was increasingly difficult to believe that men who had not, at some time,
vanished into the antithesis of settled life could be fully holy. But women
could not vanish from society in this way. Hence the peculiar charge of the
holy woman. Profound sanctity and efficacy in prayer was, as it were,
trapped by the constraints of society, in an almost uncanny manner, just
around the corner. It was enough to look down ‘with worldly thoughts’
from one’s rooftop on to Modegundis at prayer, in her back garden in
Tours, to be struck blind (Greg. Tur. Vita Patrum xix.1).
Female sanctity was an essential feature of urban life. It was good to
come with other married women on Fridays and Saturdays to listen to
Febronia read the scriptures in the chapel attached to the local convent (V.
Febroniae i.6: Acta Sanctorum, Jun.V. 19b, tr. Brock and Harvey (1987) 155).
It was reassuring for the matronae of Paris to join Genovefa in the baptistery
of the cathedral, to hold vigil as the Hunnish armies swept across the
plains of Champagne (V. Genovefae 12, ed. Krusch 219). Pious women, quite
as much as men, were indispensable nodal points, who transmitted the
energy of their prayers to a continuous circuit of well-known healing substances,
words and gestures which ran through every Christian neighbourhood.
A vine leaf moistened with her spittle and the sign of the cross made
by her fingers were enough to cure a little boy brought to Modegundis of
an agonizing stomach ache (Greg. Tur. Vita Patrum xix.3).
Thus, when believers went out to a holy man, they often travelled considerable
distances and arrived at a site associated, whenever possible, with
the wild antithesis to the settled land. They came as pilgrims, to find
in a ‘far’ milieu, the basic elements and structures of [their] faith in their
unshielded, virgin radiance. 27
What they usually got, in fact, was ‘home cooking’. The supplicants of holy
men received exactly the same banal remedies for their ills as circulated at
home. But these were now applied by hands known without doubt to be
holy, at a place shorn of the disillusionments of everyday life. Precisely
because he was thought to be a ‘living sign’, the holy man could make
present to the believer the fiery angels who were forever transparent to his
own eyes. Solemn angelic figures, that now stood largely unheeded on the
walls of the local churches, became, for an instant, present and active in the
sufferer’s cure (V. Sym. Jun. 39, ed. Van den Ven (1962) 39).
It was the same with the words of the holy man. Any student of the spirituality
of the Christian east, as it achieved classical form in this period,
knows the primary importance of the link between spiritual father and disciple
in the monastic tradition. Centuries of late classical and Christian
27 Turner and Turner (1978) 15.
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