Literary Composition and Monastic Practice in Early Byzantium: On Genre and Discipline

1The genre hagiography emerged in late antiquity both to describe and to prescribe patterns of monastic life. From its origins with Athanasius’s Life of Antony, Christian monastic biography asserted a normative power, calling its audience to the imitation of narrated models. The Antony to be emulated was the textual persona of his vita. Athanasius used writing to create a monastic type, “a sufficient picture for monastic practice.”1 Cuing his readers to the suasion of his own text, Athanasius explains of Antony that “simply by seeing his conduct many aspired to become imitators of his way of life” (47). The text replaces vision because now “seeing” Antony’s conduct can occur only through report. Antony can be seen only in représentation. The narrative of Antony’s life effects the production of monks and monastic institutions, setting the patterns of piety and practice.

2Seeing monks in texts, as textual subjects, also featured in the Life of Antony’s regulatory instructions, where textuality functioned as a critical tool. In Athanasius’s account, Antony encourages his disciples, “Now daily let each one recount to himself his actions of the day and night [...] Let each one of us note and record our actions and the stirrings of our souls as though we were going to give an account to each other [...] Let this record replace the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that, blushing as much to write as to be seen, we might never be absorbed by evil things” (55).2 Displacing onto Antony’s lips his own normative rule that monks should keep diaries of the movements of their soul, Athanasius imposes writing as a exercise of monastic witness, a mode in which monks see and are seen, even if only by themselves. Writing is prescribed as a mode of discipline, as a form of chastising vision. The slippage between the literary and the visual rests on the idea that reading is a form of seeing and that writing is analogous to arts such as painting. The bishop, overseeing his flock, institutes writing as the instrument of survey and surveillance, an epistemological tool both for knowing the self and for forming the self. The faithful monk would rewrite himself until he read properly. In writing as he did, Athanasius granted monks the mandate to author themselves. Or more precisely, Athanasius called on monks to govern themselves in conformity with his story of Antony, who was himself “governed by the logos” of God (14). Athanasius set textual boundaries on either side of the monk, one of shame, and one of desire. Monastic life took place in the territory between Antony’s textualized ideal and the dreadful honesty of a written diary. Within this space the monk faced the dazzling narrative of the holy exemplar with fervent longing. Asceticism navigated between textual possibilities.3

3In the Athanasian ideal, monastic identity is thus the identity formed in and by text - and disciplined in and by text. The impact of such a link between writing and monasticism ought not to be underestimated. Due to the wide dissemination and popularity of the Life of Antony, subsequent hagiographers inevitably wrote in the tradition of Athanasius, following his model. Moreover, the introductions and conclusions of saints’ lives quickly became places where authors presented textualized performances of their own ascetic virtues, particularly humility and obedience.4

4Early Byzantine monasticism is in large part a product of texts and textuality. To the extent that it can be the object of modem study, the writings, together with archeological remains and surviving art, are subject to our own carefully guided acts of interpretation. The disciplined historian no longer (or - a textual confession - rarely) engages in the romantic notion that the surviving texts provide unmediated access to monastic persons. Hagiography did, and does, offer images of holiness embodied, textual identities invested with cultural value. No diaries of the sort that Athanasius’s Antony prescribes survive among the papyrus discovered in the Egyptian desert, but a significant number of biographies of monastic heroes do. The texts provided an instrument in the formation of monks, and even when consumed by lay audiences provided an instrument in the formation of the idea of monasticism. Hagiography served to set boundaries, establish patterns, and to inflame desire.5

5Asceticism pervaded early Byzantine Christianity. Through a piety of self-restriction monks and laity alike fashioned themselves to conform to the body of Christ. In the Life of Antony, Athanasius called distant monks to imitate Antony; but in his festal letters, he called ail the Christians of Egypt to a temporary monasticism of fasting and prayer during Lent.6 As a cultural performance, ascetic practice deploys power over the subject to produce identities conforming to established ideals.7 Preaching exhorted Christians to emulate the virtues of biblical exemplars; ascetic theorists such as Evagrius of Pontus and Dorotheus of Gaza called on Christians not only to train the movements of their bodies but to edit the movements of their soûls.8 Performances of fasting, vigilant prayer, and the resistance to demonic temptation, presented a visible spectacle, directed toward the laity, other ascetics, or toward the ascetic self, but always depending on an audience for their meaning. Ascetic achievement was a text to be read.9 The rise of local holy men and women, together with the rise of holy narratives recounting successful efforts, presented a great number of spectacles upon which Christians might gaze and subsequently emulate.

6Ascetic practice and the making of texts were parallel enterprises. Both in-volved the manipulation of raw material to produce holy identities. Hagiography employed the technology of literary composition to render these ascetic performances acutely visible. But the production of collective biography by the second and third generation of hagiographers, in the History of the Monks of Egypt, in Palladius’s Lausiac History, and in Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s Religions History belies a movement toward holy individuals.10 Instead, collective biography demonstrates a movement toward the generic, a variety of people moving toward a similar ideal.11 The placement of Symeon the Stylite’s story (twenty-sixth out of thirty) within Theodoret’s extended travelog of north Syrian day-trips shows one bishop’s attempt to blend a particularly prominent ascetic into a broadly holy geography, where so many of the local mountain tops are theaters for ascetic achievement. Time and space, calendar and landscape, were quickly filled with broadly similar options for visits, vénération, and dévotion. Ascetic practice and hagiographical narrative strove toward imitation, and thus toward genre.

7What then of the relationship between the lives of the saints and the Lives of the Saints? Is the distinction merely typographic? Considération of hagiographie writings as textual performances of early Byzantine monasticism refracts an unhelpful distinction between monastic practice and hagiography, between positivist questions of what monks did and philological questions of what texts meant. Hagiography présents ascetics as conforming to models established by other ascetics, rendering asceticism an ultimately generic activity. The hagiographer’s task includes asserting or demonstrating that the saint is just like (and sometimes even better than) biblical types or previous monks, conforming to high ideals.

8The genre hagiography itself arose through imitation, through authors’ emulation of earlier texts. In some sense, hagiography as a practice begins not with the first saints’ lives, but with the subsequent generation of texts imitating the first. Significantly Athanasius’s Life of Antony and Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, two of the earliest saint’s lives, remark on their own generic instability, a mix of oration and letter.12 Only later can the genre emerge, iterative and mimetic. By the sixth-century, the Palestinian lives of Cyril of Scythopolis not only present monks excelling in established modes of life, but présent these ideals according to established patterns of generic composition. Cyril’ s extensive quotation and borrowing from earlier hagiographie texts, demonstrated by Bernard Flusin and John Binns, exhibits not only the rich contents of the library at Mar Saba, but also Cyril’s sense of genre through which he consciously produces a text of the same type, something belonging on the same shelf.13 The parai lel moves toward regularity and conformity of ascetic practice and its textual représentation depend in the final analysis on the creation of hagiography as a genre of authorial conduct.

9Through the deployment of hagiographical discourse in these narratives, ideas about holiness were widely disseminated and generalized. And in this process a new kind of authorship emerged. When Theodoret set out in the Religious History to “honor the celebrated life” of the saints in writing (prologue 2), he understood the preservation of their memory to demand both a new genre and a new kind of author. In accord with ancient divisions among literary forms, he regarded the work of poets and historians as appropriate to record “bravery in acts of war.” With less admiration, he explained that tragedians “make conspicuous [...] misfortunes that had rightly been hidden away,” while “certain others expend their words on comedy and laughter” (prologue 2). The new Christian genre has for Theodoret no name. Terming it neither “eulogy” (prologue 8) nor “panegyric,” his “narrative form, [...] a plain tale of some few facts” (prologue 9) emerges as a new literary discipline, fitting to the new achievements of those “lovers of the beauty of God,” who “bore nobly the revolt of the passions and were steadfast in shaking off the showers of the devil’s darts” (prologue 5).

10Authors, by definition, produce texts; less obvious perhaps is the paradox that texts produce their authors. A poet becomes a poet as he composes poetry, a historian’s identity is formed thought the production of historical narrative. Significantly Theodoret speaks initially not of genres, but of their agents: the identities which arise through the production of specific kinds of literature: of poets, historians, tragedians, and comics. If his new narrative genre has no name, neither has its production afforded him an established identity. Modern scholars write of hagiography and hagiographers, but these terms and their uses are of nineteenth-century origin. The production of saints’ lives made Theodoret a writer of saints’ lives, a specifically Christian identity which was relatively new and not yet entirely fixed.

11The ascetic revolution of late antiquity was a potent generative matrix. If an earlier scholarly discipline used hagiography as a window onto the newness of late ancient monasticism, more intensive study of the texts as texts yields the conclusion that in hagiography two new things are emerging: the new system of practice, and the new system of representing this practice in letters. Is the text a simulacrum of monastic practice, or is monastic practice a simulacrum of the text? Or do we break beyond the hermeneutic circle through an appreciation of a literary genre itself as discipline - as a following of complex and demanding rules?14