Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 805
formed human consciousness as a fragile thing, perpetually ringed by
demonic mirages. In dreams the demons could take the form of holy
figures, Barsanuphius told a worried layman: only the sign of the cross they
could not bring themselves to imitate (Barsanuphius, Correspondance 416,
Regnault (1971) 290). Not every miracle that happened was a true miracle.
The power of the demons, and the imminent presence of Antichrist, had
deprived mankind of the binocular vision needed to discriminate between
holiness and illusion. In the 430s, a monk appeared in Carthage. He applied
to the sick oil poured over the bone of a martyr.
He brought hallucinations to play on the blind and the sick . . . so that they thought
that they had recovered their sight and ability to walk. But in departing from him,
the illnesses in whose grip they were held remained.
(Quodvultdeus, Liber promissionum vi.6.11)
He left the city in a hurry. Yet just such cures, also performed with the ‘oil
of saints’, only a generation later made the reputation of Daniel, a Syrian
recluse and later a famous stylite, established beside the busy ferry across
the Bosphorus (near Arnavutköy and Rumeli Hısar) a little to the north of
Constantinople (V. Danielis 29, with Festugière (1961) ii.111 n. 41).
Epidemics of healing could be demonically inspired. They might be provoked
by false relics – that is, by relics associated with rival Christian factions
– such as was the ‘polluted’ oil left by mistake by a Monophysite monk
in the chapel of a great Nestorian monastery (Thomas of Marga, Book of
Governors vi.6; Budge 612–14). A stampede of sick persons to a holy man
might be no more than a plot on the part of the demons to disturb the
peace of his monastery (John Eph. Lives of the Eastern Saints 4, PO xvii.65).
Belief was never an easy matter, and in times of acute crisis the explanatory
system which usually rested on the figure of the Christian holy man
might collapse like a pack of cards. A massive public catastrophe, such as the
onslaught of the plague, swamped the ministrations of the holy man. It was
reassuring to believe that the cloth from the tomb of St Remigius, carried in
a litter around Rheims, had created a sacred circuit that held the bubonic
plague away from the city (Greg. Tur. De Gloria Confessorum 77). But Rheims
was fortunate. When the plague first struck the eastern Mediterranean in 542,
resort to the prayers of the saints was not the only – indeed, not the first –
reflex of the afflicted populations. Demons in the form of angels appeared
in Palestine, urging the inhabitants of one city to resume the worship they had
once paid to a prominent bronze statue. Elsewhere, the word got round that
If one throws pots out of the house the plague will go from the city,
so that it became unsafe to walk in the streets by reason of the crockery
raining down from every window (Chronicum Anonymum pseudo-Dionysianum,
tr. R. Hespel, CSCO 507, Script. Syri 213 (Louvain 1989) 64–5 and 81, trans.
Witakowski (1996) 79 and 97).
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