Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 807
conflict, the supremely wilful envy of the demons played a crucial role) and
that true order meant the ultimate submission of all wills to God, the
supreme emperor of the universe. The intimacy of holy persons with their
Lord could be as tender as that of a son, a familiar friend, even of a lover.
But the overwhelming weight of language, in our texts, presented the holy
man in his public persona as a courtier. For many regions, this attitude
involved far more than an unthinking projection on to the invisible world
of the observed working of patronage within the centralized structures of
the later Roman empire. To see the invisible world in these clear-cut terms
involved making conscious choices between available religious traditions.
In 370 Athanasius wrote that, of course, dreams of the future can be
vouchsafed to Christian devotees at the shrines of the martyrs. What mattered
was how this happened. Many Egyptian Christians seem to have
assumed that the martyrs, as ‘unconquered’ heroes who had overcome the
demons of the lower air by their heroic deaths, could now be prevailed
upon, by the prayers of believers, to torture the demons yet further (in a
long Egyptian tradition, by which higher gods bullied and threatened their
subordinates) to reveal their own unearthly knowledge of the future. It was
not like that, Athanasius insisted. God sent the dreams because the martyrs
acted as ambassadors – etreupresbeue – who bore the prayers of the faithful
to his court (Athanasius, Festal Letters, ed. T. Lefort, CSCO 150/151, Script.
Coptici 19/20 (Louvain 1955) 65/46–7).
The language of patronage at a distant court, of course, had its limits.
Only simple folk in Egypt believed, on the strength of an imperial model
of the supernatural world, that the Archangel Michael, rather than having
been forever present in his mighty role from the first dawn of the creation,
had ousted Satan in a coup d’état in the palace of heaven; and consequently
that, like any other Roman consul, Michael was obliged to scatter the
benefits of healing upon his people on the day of his festival, which was,
of course, the day when he had received from God the formal scroll of his
appointment. 45 But the emphasis on the clash of free wills implied in this
model brought a quality of mercy into an otherwise inflexible and potentially
profoundly impersonal cosmos.
With the notion of freedom came also the notion of sin. The holy man
was not only a favoured courtier of the distant emperor of heaven, he was
a preacher of repentance. Dramatic changes in health; dramatic changes in
the weather; dramatic shifts in the locus of wealth, as gold, precious
objects, robes, land, even small children passed from the world to the
monastic establishments associated with holy persons: all these highly
visible changes were held to have registered the most amazing of all discontinuities
– the stirring to contrition of the sinful human heart.
45 Van Lantschoot (1946).
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