Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

798 26. holy men
Galicia, 29 through Benedict and his enemy, the priest Florentius, at Subiaco
(Greg. Dial. ii.8.1–4), to the three thousand monks settled in the Judaean
desert, 30 the huge convents outside Amida (all too easily devastated when
the Chalcedonian authorities cut off the food supplies usually offered to
them by a devout laity), 31 to Nestorian convents in northern Iraq, regularly
pillaged by the Kurds (Thomas of Marga, The Book of Governors v.17,tr.E.
A. W. Budge (London 1893) 563), where we do not meet examples of
savage competition for scarce resources, waged between the new ascetic
settlements and local leaders, clergy and villagers. When it came to the issue
of oblations – the gifts of agrarian produce and of other forms of wealth
(including, of course, small children) offered to the holy man in exchange
for his blessing – the assertion of holiness almost invariably locked the
saint and his disciples (usually more zealous in this matter than their
master) into a zero-sum game. 32
Holy men were frequently dependent on patronage – and often on the
crushing patronage of emperors, kings and great landowners. They had to
justify their position by standing, in the eyes of the world, as the quintessence
of good patronage. Hence the vividness and circumstantiality of
those accounts which show holy men rebuking the rich, protecting peasants
from extortion, arbitrating in local disputes, and facing down highranking
officials, even the emperor himself, in the name of the poor, the
oppressed and the condemned. As a result, it has proved tempting to
explain the rise and function of the holy man in many regions of the
Christian world in terms of the manner in which holy men were believed
by their admirers to have played the role of ‘the “good patron” writ large’. 33
To arrive at a more balanced view of the matter, it is worth while stressing
the overall tendency of the sources in which these incidents occur. It was
a tendency to render innocent the undoubted wealth and influence of the
holy man’s ‘establishment’. Put briefly: hagiography achieved its effect by
censoring one side of the gift exchange that took place around the holy man
– the steady, even disquieting, flow of gifts and favours from the outside
world that gave the holy man’s activities their appropriate degree of splendour
and public recognition. It presented the holy man’s activities in terms
of the other side of that exchange – the seemingly effortless, ‘gravity-free’
29 Valerius of Bierzo, Ordo Quaeremoniae and Replicatio, ed. Aherne (1949).
30 A world now brought alive by Hirschfeld (1992).
31 John Eph. Lives of the Eastern Saints 35, PO xviii.607–20; Chronicon pseudo-Dionysianum iii.8, tr.R.
Hespel, CSCO 507, Script. Syri 213 (Louvain 1989) 27–8; see also Palmer (1990).
32 V. Sym. Jun. 130, Van den Ven (1962) 122: a Georgian priest who had set up a healing shrine with
a hnana of Symeon was accused of working miracles through sorcery by the priests whose karpophoriai
had been intercepted by his shrine.
33 Brown, ‘Holy man’ 91 (now in Brown, Society and the Holy 129) succumbed with gusto to that temptation.
What follows should be read as a corrective to the views advanced in that article: see also Brown
(1983) 10–13,(1998), with Howard-Johnston and Hayward (1999) and Lane Fox (1997).
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