Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 801
the villagers were edged, a little more gently, through a language of sacred
violence associated with the blessing and cursing of the wonder-working
child-saint in the mountain above them, towards ‘behaving a little more like
Christians’, χριστιανοπρεπ�ς πολιτε�εσθαι (V. Sym. Jun. 221 and 223,Van
den Ven (1962) 191 and 194;cf.188–20, Van den Ven (1962) 166–9). When
the formidable Shenoute of Atripe prophesied to the villagers of Sment in
upper Egypt that they would lose their gods, they assumed the worst: ‘A
governor will surely come and will oppress us’ (Till (1936) 65). Instead they
got Apa Moyses, whose violence, though spectacular and disastrous for
their temples, partook in an ancient language of the sacred, which rendered
defeat, if not palatable, at least meaningful.
It is for this reason that, all over the Christian world, the countryside in
particular became ‘the locus for the elaboration of cultic choices’. 39 For,
unlike the European missionaries of a later age, the Christian holy men and
women of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages
appeared as representatives of a power superior to that of traditional faiths, but
not as purveyors of a dramatically different world view or type of religion. 40
Filled with the Holy Spirit and more certain than were most Christians of
their position in a hierarchy of heavenly powers, in alliance with which they
upheld the claims of Christ, their God, holy men (unlike those of us who
usually study them) knew spiritual power when they saw it. They frequently
engaged it at dangerously close quarters. Not only were long and intimate
duels with the local sorcerer almost de rigueur in the life of a successful saint;
sometimes one senses that the one is a doublet, rather than an enemy, of
the other (e.g. V. Theod. Syk. 37–8, ed. Festugière (1970) 32–4). At Néris, in
the Berry, Patroclus found himself faced at the time of the bubonic plague
of 571 by a woman, Leubella, who had received from ‘the devil, falsely
appearing as saint Martin . . . offerings which would, he said, save the
people’. But Patroclus himself had almost succumbed to the temptation to
come down from the hills to save the people as a wonder-worker. Only after
he received a vision of the ‘abominations’ of the world to which he had
been tempted to return did he go back to his cell, to find genuine ‘offerings’
– ‘a tile on which was the sign of the Lord’s cross’ (Greg. Tur. Vita Patrum
ix.2).
What is often ascribed, in the more pensive and monastically orientated
sources of the time, to the unhinging effects of elatio, of spiritual vainglory,
that led to madness in many failed wonder-workers, refers to a far more
gripping and specifically late antique phenomenon than mere conceit. We
are dealing with figures for whom the boundaries between exorcism and
possession, between power over spirits and a quasi-shamanistic power
39 Boesch-Gajano (1991) 115. 40 Kaplan (1984) 115.
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