Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

810 26. holy men
again to the land of Egypt; and he did so, not simply as a favoured courtier
of God, but, with an ancient congruence, by first making the life-giving
liquid of his tears fall on the dead sand of his desert retreat beyond the
White Monastery (Besa, V. Shen. 102–5, Bell 72–3; see Thélamon (1981)
383).
Christian holy persons had been shot into prominence at this time by an
exceptionally stern and world-denying streak in late antique Christianity.
Those who approached them, and those who remembered their activities,
habitually assumed that they would act upon the spiritual world in terms of
expectations that echoed all that was most abrasively up-to-date in the hierarchical
and patronage-ridden social structure of the later Roman empire.
Yet by sharing through their prayers in the concerns of the mighty angels,
holy persons had come to embrace the world. They cradled it, in the
Christian imagination, in terms that did better justice to the notion of a
God who loved his own creation, and so to the tenacious hopes of an overwhelmingly
agrarian society locked in the tyrannical, warm embrace of the
earth. By their intercessions, the Christian holy men joined with St Michael
the Archangel to look with mercy on humanity in all its joys and cares:
[on] the strenuous work of our hands . . . the quietness of the oxen and the growth
of the lambs . . . the wool of the sheep and the milk of the goats . . . the growth
of all the fruits of the field . . . the body of the vine and the fullness [which is] in
the wine . . . the fatness and the savour of the olives . . . the slumber of a man and
his rest by night . . . the union of holy matrimony, wherein men beget their children
for a blessing . . . in war that destroyeth the ungodly, and establisheth peace,
and delivereth the righteous . . . in the midst of the brethren [who live together]
. . . and towards those who are weary, and when he giveth them strength.
(Discourse on the Compassion of God and of the Archangel Michael
tr. E. A. W. Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts (London 1915) 757–8)
By playing a role in the slow emergence of an imaginative model of the
world that had a place for such wide-arching prayers, the Christian saints
of late antiquity helped to make Christianity at last, and for a short
moment, before the rise of Islam, the one truly universal religion of much
of Europe and the middle east.
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