Journal of Early Christian Studies

Over twenty-five years have elapsed since the publication of Peter Brown’s first article on “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity” in the Journal of Roman Studies. ¹ The effect of this article on scholars of the later Roman Empire and early Christianity was electrifying. On the one hand, it established its author, already known as one of the foremost scholars of Augustine, as a teacher in the “ancient and medieval” sense of the world, as a man who embodies and makes visible to others “what is exemplary in persons rather than in more general entities.” ² The article, on the other hand, effected a paradigm shift. It posited that the most significant shift in the Roman East of the fourth to fifth century occurred in the locus of civic and religious power from temples and institutions to the “holy man” himself as a “blessed object” mediating between the divine and the human. Later articles—“The Saint as Exemplar,” and “Arbiters of the Holy: The Christian Holy Man in Late Antiquity”—chronicle Brown’s own constant reassessment of this complex figure. Through them, we watch the “holy man” evolve from remote intermediary to the saint as carrier of paideia and hence cultural memory, and finally to one of several arbiters mediating religious and social change. ³

Peter Brown’s first article struck some like a lightning bolt out of the sky, yet it emerged, in fact, out of a rich matrix of historiographical traditions and theoretical approaches of which Peter Brown has continued to be aware in an extraordinary manner. Brown wrote primarily as [End Page 343] a classical historian, but one trained in and influenced by the study of the Middle Ages, a course that sharpened his eye for an area rarely of interest to scholars of classical antiquity, namely, sainthood. Saints had predominantly been a subject of theologians and those engaged in the study of religion; they had their own established historiographical traditions. ⁴ In the sixties, however, French scholars like Evelyne Patlagean and Gilbert Dagron, influenced by the concerns of the École d’Annales, found in the Lives of late antique and Byzantine saints the means to explore those strata and elements of society rarely represented by other types of sources, namely, rural peasants and urban poor. ⁵ Into this mixture of traditional historical analysis and new socially oriented [End Page 344] questions, Brown introduced the powerful explanatory models of functional anthropology. It was a bold methodological move, which allowed him to give the “holy man” a sharper profile by highlighting his central position in the day-to-day world of Syrian peasants. ⁶

Although fruitful in many respects and influential among scholars of more than late antiquity, the brave new “holy man” constructed by Peter Brown soon proved to be too two dimensional, “like a figure in a Chinese landscape, against a mist-laden and seemingly measureless background.” ⁷ Because of Brown’s emphasis on social function, the saint’s ties to the surrounding cultural matrix had received too short a shrift. In his subsequent article on the “Saint as Exemplar,” Brown, therefore, provided the methodological counterpoint by adopting a cultural anthropological model. ⁸ The “holy man” as saint now occupied the center, effective not primarily because of his “otherworldly” remoteness, but because he was the carrier of cultural memory, the Christian counterpart to the pagan wise man. In Authority and the Sacred, the interrelation between the holy man and his surroundings became even more densely woven through the inclusion of institutional structures. Influenced by his collaboration with M. Foucault, Brown now all but abandoned “straightforward” anthropological models and became increasingly concerned with notions of power and authority. As a result, his “holy man” gained yet another dimension: as the “arbiter of the holy,” who, “placed between Christian and pagan clients, aided the emergence of the new, religious commonsense.” ⁹

Firmly established on his pillar, Peter Brown’s “holy man” had proved a particularly flexible and mobile tool for the analysis of religion and [End Page 345] society. ¹⁰ As we read through “The Rise and Function,” “The Saint as Exemplar,” and “Arbiters of the Holy,” we witness the “holy man’s” transformation from a remote intermediary to a mediator of social and religious change. Brown’s articles are thus “seminal” in the truest sense of the word: they have been the seeds of new questions and perspectives on the interrelation between society and the holy, and the source of an analytical language of great sophistication and explanatory power. Using Brown’s articles as a springboard, the essays gathered in this volume represent a critical reflection upon the “holy man” and its evolution. Yet, even more, they attempt to enhance the fruitful dialectic between charisma and community articulated in Brown’s own work through a full recognition of the “holy man’s” textuality and its implications in the context of the later Roman Empire.

The volume opens with Peter Brown’s résumé of his first encounter with the saints, and how he came, at first, to formulate their place within late Roman society on the train between Didcott and London-Paddington. Reflecting the main theoretical and historical lines of the discussion, the remaining contributions have been divided into two sections, Reading Texts and Creating Communities. This division also emphasizes the two major directions in the authors’ approaches towards textual analysis, which can be best characterized as “inward” and “outward.” In Reading Texts, our authors look towards the text, its production and interpretation as such, while in Creating Communities the focus shifts to the complex interaction between the “textualized” holy man and the individuals and communities that produced them, and were, in turn, produced by them. ¹¹

In the opening paper of Reading Texts, “The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Making of ‘Late Antiquity’: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983),” Mark Vessey [End Page 346] throws down the methodological gauntlet, as it were. By reconstructing the precise historiographical mold out of which Peter Brown’s own first article arose, Vessey implicitly challenges the extent of Brown’s use of anthropology in fashioning the “holy man.” ¹² Furthermore, he argues, “in the interest of a certain kind of vividness, or . . . social-historical ‘full-bloodedness’ of the products and procedures of ancient literature,” Brown killed the Christian writer. ¹³ The saint as writer, according to Vessey, gave way to the saint as man “among men” in order to integrate what had previously remained separate, namely “the social components of the problem of culture.” ¹⁴ In the process, the holy man became the late antique counterpart of the exemplary man of classical paideia, whose personal impact rendered all mediation through writing superfluous. However (and this is precisely Vessey’s point) Brown’s “holy man,” too, lives and breathes through the written text. “The work-a-day world” of the Syrian peasant, as much as that of his saint, comes through us via the text, and nowhere more vividly so than in Brown’s own effervescent prose. ¹⁵

Taking up the gauntlet cast down by Vessey, Elizabeth Clark utilizes recent feminist scholarship to offer a penetrating critique of textually naive approaches to holy figures, in particular holy women. Noting that “holy men” do not have a female equivalent, she argues further that this is so because “holy women” even more than “holy men” are literary constructs, serving as conduits and representations of an essentially male discourse about body, soul, and society. The reconstruction of holy women thus exposes a further dimension, that of gender and power, in the already complex interplay between history and theology.

The two subsequent essays concentrate on aspects of the production of [End Page 347] the text itself. Claudia Rapp highlights the relevance of the hagiographer’s self-presentation as “eyewitness” for the creation of a bond between text, saint, and audience; and Naomi Janowitz analyzes the strategies by which the Rabbis established control over the text through exegesis. All four papers thus articulate the importance and precise character of the textual problematic that surrounds the charismatic individual in late antiquity. It comes as no surprise, then, that the prevailing methodological tools used in the remaining essays are those of historiography, rhetorical analysis, textual criticism, and literary and gender theory. ¹⁶ As in Brown’s own work, the authors here combine and adapt approaches rather than dogmatically adhering to one, thereby formulating new solutions and perspectives on old problems.

Opening the section Creating Communities, Neil McLynn’s paper once again shines the spotlight squarely onto the Christian writer. Gregory Nazianzen’s writings, perhaps more than those of any Christian writer prior to Augustine, chronicle the self-fashioning of a “holy man.” But this holy man is a bishop, i.e., the quintessential representative of hierarchy, status, and, hence, community. Fashioning himself as a socially detached “holy man,” Gregory was in effect developing a new “job-description”: that of the bishop as saint and theologian. Teresa Shaw’s paper, “Askesis and the Appearance of Holiness,” addresses the same problem from a different angle. Whereas McLynn discusses a case in which an individual was reformulating a job, Teresa Shaw analyzes the prescriptions of the emerging literary genre of writings On Virginity to demonstrate how “the body for the job” was fashioned. Elucidating Elizabeth Clark’s point, Shaw notes how ancient men not only used women “to think with,” but also to construct the external representations of their own authority by “conferring identity through classifying lifestyle models.” ¹⁷

Just as McLynn and Shaw analyze ways of creating a new Christian hierarchy within the “world,” i.e., existing models of patronage and authority, Maud Gleason’s paper on “Visiting and News: Gossip and Reputation-Management in the Desert,” concentrates on similar processes in a society ostensibly already distant from the world, that of the “holy men” of the Apophthegmata patrum. “Retooling” established mechanisms of social interaction, these individualists who had eschewed established communities and structures used visiting and gossip to [End Page 348] construct a highly differentiated, fiercely contested counterhierarchy based on a “lowliness ethic,” and thus created a new community par excellence.

The saint’s crucial role as both a living and a textual persona in the creation of community emerges clearly in Susan Ashbrook Harvey’s analysis of the hagiographical construction of the Lives of Simeon the Stylite (Elder and Younger). Through her focus on the liturgical elements of these Lives, the quintessential holy man of splendid isolation emerges as the very embodiment of the church as civic community, “enact(ing) in ritual the process by which the human person was redeemed from the diminished existence of fallen mortality.” ¹⁸ As the literal embodiment of the liturgy, the Stylite becomes effective not because he is set apart, but because his daily ascetic practice, despite its seeming remoteness, is fully integrated into the liturgical life of his surrounding civic and monastic community.

With Peter Brown once again as the forerunner and catalyst, what emerges in this volume is the demise of the now classic “holy man” as a methodological tool. Although Brown’s “holy man” provided a unique prism through which to diffract the various wavelengths of late Roman society and imagination—a “tool with which to think”—he never quite lost his two dimensional quality. Brown himself dismantled the “holy man” as solitary embodiment of otherworldliness. Yet, even as “arbiter of the holy,” the charismatic individual remained distant from its surrounding community because of a steady disregard for the very concerns that brought the saint to life, namely, those of his author and of his audience. The full-bloodedness of the saint continues to endure at the expense of the hagiographer’s anemia.

The essays in this volume balance this trend. It is now the author who emerges as full-blooded, and the power of the saint as a fully textual persona is explored. Authors, their social and intellectual milieu, and the communities they seek to influence through their hagiographies now occupy center stage. Having thus embedded the “holy man” into communities, the essays sketch in greater and lesser detail the creative dynamic between texts and human institutions.

This “retextualization” of the “holy man” and the resulting concentration on textual communities did not occur in isolation, but is indicative of a “new” type of social history, which may also be observed [End Page 349] in other areas of historical research, for example, in medieval scholarship. ¹⁹ This form of social history concentrates on textual analysis, but uses an apparatus of rhetorical analysis honed by prior methodological engagement with the questions, concerns, tools, and approaches developed in the social sciences and anthropology. These newly retooled methods of rhetorical analysis are then employed to keep visible the problematic tensions between people and institutions, and the texts that represent them, while at the same time recognizing the creative power exercised by those texts. ²⁰

The application of such approaches to the later Roman Empire yields particularly fruitful results. The later Roman Empire was a period of immense transformation that witnessed an outburst of textual productions and the corresponding development of new literary genres, which, in turn, elaborated new notions of sanctity and charisma. It was the period in which models of martyrdom and confessional sainthood emerged, created by fathers whose opinions shaped Western and Eastern traditions of thought and behavior. In short, men created texts presenting methods by which humans could fashion themselves into saints about whom texts were then written. Furthermore, the later Roman Empire was shaped by the coexistence of strong social and literary traditions and political and institutional structures with newly developing genres and institutions.

In applying these methods, the authors assembled in this volume use—and create—in effect a different analytical tool: asceticism. At issue are not the “holy figures” per se, but the debates centering on the historical, intellectual, social, rhetorical, and theological forces that shaped asceticism. Asceticism lies at the nexus between the two countermoving planes shaping the later Roman word, tradition and innovation. Through it we may watch old genres create new heroes, and long-standing notions emerge in radically different contexts. Asceticism thus offers a yardstick against which to measure with greater precision and qualitatively assess change and continuity. It thus enforces a continuous reworking of the [End Page 350] major historiographical and methodological categories in which the later Roman Empire itself has been framed for well over a thousand years. ²¹

The holy figures participate to a certain extent in these debates, but even more so, they are their embodiment, representing in their sheer inexhaustible variety the multivalence of the underlying phenomenon. In the figure of the saint and the writings of his or her hagiographer, issues such as control of the self, renunciation as claim to public authority, and imitation of Christ are elaborated in theory and represented in practice through a continuous reevaluation of traditional habits, structures, and literary genres.

The essays in this volume are “works-in-progress,” insofar as they represent the status quo of an ongoing discussion circling around the meaning of society and the holy. Although they approach the holy man’s social and textual persona from the vantage point of the late Roman world, the relevance of their insights is by no means limited to the peculiarities of the Greco-Roman world and nascent Judeo-Christianity. The tensions and dynamics discussed here pertain mutatis mutandis equally to the continuation of the Roman Empire both political and religious—Byzantium and the Latin West, Judaism, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, Islam—but also to entirely different religious and geographical contexts. What the authors of these essays—and first and foremost Peter Brown himself—attempt to define are the methods and mechanisms of “religious and thus political change.” ²² Asceticism as the nexus between authority and the sacred, the body and society, emerges as one particularly apt way of doing so.