Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

802 26. holy men
through possession by spirits, were far more fluid than our texts would lead
us to suppose. 41 Driven by the torrent of cultic experimentation that raced
through many Christian regions, it is not surprising that the mills of hagiographical
literature should have come to turn so briskly towards the end of
this period, in an effort to reduce the raw grain of so many, frequently
ambiguous, experiences of the holy to the fine flour of a few, dominant
Christian ‘oikotypes’. Such experimentation would not have aroused so
much interest if it had occurred only among the peasantry. What was at
stake was the putting in order of a Christian ‘thought-world’ that was, if
anything, a more urgent matter for the well-to-do than for the peasantry.
The wealthy and the educated were the patrons of holy men and the
readers of accounts of their lives. Seen in this light, the activities of the holy
man, and especially the manner in which these were recounted in retrospect,
represent one stage in the long schooling of the imagination of all
classes in late antiquity.
The average well-to-do and thoughtful person lived in many ‘thoughtworlds’.
42 Potentially exclusive explanatory systems coexisted in his or her
mind. The host of the monk Peter the Iberian, an eminent Egyptian, was
a good Christian; but he was also ‘caught in the error of pagan philosophers,
whose ideas he loved greatly’ (V. Petri Iberi, ed. R. Raabe, Leipzig
1895 72). He employed a magician to cure his daughter. Nor were these
systems parallel. They often interlocked as separate parts of a single
process of cure. A notable of Alexandria could go to the healing shrine of
Sts Cyrus and John to receive a cure from their hands. But he claimed to
have done so ‘in order that his horoscope should be fulfilled’ (Miracula SS.
Cyri et Johannis 28. 8, PG lxxxvii.3504b; and ed. N. Fernandez Marcos
(Madrid 1975) 296).
Holy men themselves did not see the matter in terms of a sharp antithesis
of Christian and non-Christian. They belonged to a category of
persons who were assumed by their supplicants to have access to knowledge
of the holy in all its manifestations. The expectations of the neighbourhood
committed them to far more than an exclusively Christian art of
prayer. A respected saint was a person who was allowed to have the last
word in what was usually a long and well-informed discussion of supernatural
causality, in which everyone had a say. When Theodore of Sykeon was
conceived, his mother, Maria, dreamed that a brilliant star had descended
into her womb. Her lover (an acrobatic camel-rider on an imperial mission)
was delighted. She would have a baby boy, he said, who would become a
bishop. Next, Maria went to a holy man with second sight in a neighbouring
village. He concurred.
41 A gripping incident in John Eph. Lives of the Eastern Saints 15, PO xvii.223–7; John Moschus in
BZ xxxviii (1938) 360; Barsanuphius, Correspondance 843, Regnault (1971) 501.
42 This is made particularly clear by Dagron (1981).
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