Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

holy men 809
Symeon maintained, as if in microcosm, the fundamental boundaries on
which all civilized life was held to depend throughout the near east. 47 The
clutter of stuffed deer, lions and snakes at the foot of the column spoke of
notable breaches in the boundary between the animal and the human world
healed in the name of the saint (V. Sym. Anton. 15 and Appendix 21, Doran
(1992) 93 and 225). Further from Telnesin, the blessing of Symeon on the
crosses set up in his name around villages in the mountains of Lebanon
maintained the boundaries of the settled land against the encroaching disorder
of the wild woods. The sexes, also, were held apart. In the women’s
enclosure at the foot of the terrain that rose towards the column, a female
dragon would take her place, along with the five wives of a visiting Yemeni
sheikh, demurely receiving her hnana, not from the hands of Symeon, but
from the mouth of her male companion (V. Sym. Syr. 79 and V. Sym. Anton.
Appendix 25, Doran (1992) 161 and 227).
Symeon was very much a ‘revivalist’ of a Syrian Christianity that had
always been marked by a strong sense of cosmic order and with a consequent
concern for the proper separation of the sexes. But an Adam might
also pass beyond, as well as reinforce, boundaries that bulked so large in the
minds of contemporaries. An ‘angelic’ man, the holy man trembled on the
borderline of those divisions that usually pitted one segment of late
Roman society against the other. Not invariably ordained, he was a layman
to whom bishops bowed in reverence, as one above whom the hand of
God had appeared. Priest or not, his blessing echoed faithfully the domestic
practices of any Christian household. He was studiously accessible to
both rich and poor, listening attentively to the humble and surprising the
cultivated with his untutored spiritual insight. Even the charged barriers
between the sexes opened at his touch. When Sabas passed through
Scythopolis in 531–2, his attention was drawn to a woman who lay in the
colonnade of the main street, isolated even from her fellow beggars by the
stench of an uncontrolled menstrual haemorrhage.
He came over to her in the colonnade and said . . . ‘This my hand I lend to you,
and I trust in the God that I worship that you will be cured.’ Taking the saint’s hand,
she applied it to the hidden part, and immediately the flux of blood ceased.
(Cyr. Scyth. V. Sabae 62, Price (1991) 173)
By such persons, the ‘world’ itself – that dark place of ‘abominations’ so
often decried in the monastic literature of the time – was healed. In this
sense, the holy man was a truly ‘angelic’ figure. Like the towering angels, he
raised his eyes from his clamorous human clientele to contemplate the rich
earth, teeming with the possibilities of life. He was responsible to God for
all created things. Shenoute was able to stir the tardy Nile to give life once
47 Well characterized by Doran (1992) 43–5.
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