5

Hagiography and the Crises of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries

The natural and military disasters of the sixth century, and the military crises of the seventh, sent shockwaves across east Roman society. These crises left their mark on a wide range of sources from many genres.¹ To take but a few examples from the sixth century, the hymns of Romanos the Melodist, the novels of Justinian, and the letters of Barsanouphios and John of Gaza all contain efforts to explain and justify why God chose to inflict disasters on his empire.² From the seventh century, the Questions and Answers of Anastasios of Sinai perhaps best show the spiritual difficulties faced by Christians in coping with the defeats to Islam.³ These and other sources reveal that disasters provoked questions about causation, divine providence, and the special status of the empire, which Christian authors from diverse backgrounds sometimes struggled to answer. Hagiographers, however, faced particular challenges, since they had not only to tackle the question of theodicy but also to show how their saints were positioned between the will of God and the will of their supplicants. This was a conceptual problem at the best of times, but gained much greater urgency and emotional importance in the context of crisis.

This chapter, therefore, will focus on hagiography, looking first at sixth- and seventh-century Lives of holy men, in particular those of Nicholas of Sion, Theodore of Sykeon, and George of Choziba. Their hagiographers adopted a range of strategies for tackling the challenges facing saints in this period, all of which reveal the uneasy position of intercessors in times of crisis. The chapter will then examine long-term religious developments which had rendered holy men of this period particularly vulnerable to accusations of failure in the face of disaster. By the late sixth century, hagiographers were making far more ambitious claims about their saints’ capacities than had been the case in the fourth and early fifth centuries. In addition, saints had become increasingly implicated with emperors and the fate of the empire, making them particularly vulnerable to accusations of failure in times of military crisis. Finally, the chapter will consider the miracle collections of long-dead saints that became popular in this period, suggesting that certain features of this genre as it developed made it particularly suitable for a time of crisis. Most of the late sixth- and early seventh-century miracle collections focus on healing miracles for individuals or small groups of supplicants; more ambitious miracles are avoided, and responsibility for the success of the miracle is placed largely on the supplicant rather than the saint. This does not seem simply to be generic convention, as similar developments are found in texts of other genres, notably the Life of Martha, and since some miracle collections did transgress these norms. The chapter thus provides a broader context for the texts associated with Symeon’s cult, arguing that the tensions evinced in the Life of Symeon, and the reorientation of priorities visible in the Life of Martha, are not anomalous and unexpected, but rather reflect broader ideological developments in the period and across the whole of late antiquity.

Saints’ Lives and Disasters

The disasters of the sixth century are reflected in various saints’ Lives from the period. Thus, for example, Eutychios of Constantinople is said to have led a procession which successfully quelled an outbreak of the plague in Constantinople; he also predicts that disasters would later strike the capital ‘because of our sins and immoral habits’, asking that if the punishment could not be averted, he himself should be allowed to die before it took place.⁴ The earthquakes in Antioch had sufficient impact to be referred to even in Lives set in other regions: thus the Palestinian monk Theodosios is said by his biographer Theodore of Petra to have predicted one of the terrible quakes of the early sixth century.⁵ Even miaphysite hagiographies refer to military disasters: Elias, author of the Life of John of Tella, praises his saint’s family, who were from the city of Callinicum in Syria, and notes that Callinicum contained many other virtuous people. Elias seems worried, however, that people might deny that the saint’s family were particularly virtuous, anticipating them asking, ‘If some of [Callinicum’s] inhabitants are so adorned with virtue, why then was it struck by the Assyrian’s rod?’ (an apparent reference to the Persian victory at the Battle of Callinicum in 531); he produces a string of biblical citations to explain that God’s punishments have always struck the good as well as the wicked.⁶ He ends this digression with a warning that those who believe themselves to be virtuous should not think that this will protect them from divine punishment, ‘for the just are also afflicted when sinners are struck down’.⁷

Most hagiographers of this period, however, do not deal with the disasters in such great depth, and with such conflicted and competing measures, as the author of the Life of Symeon; this probably reflects the unique sufferings of Antioch in the sixth century.⁸ Yet one other, little-studied, sixth-century Life does betray some of the anxieties and tensions of the stylite’s biography: the Life of Nicholas of Sion, a Lycian saint who became bishop of Pinara.⁹ This text, which was perhaps composed soon after the death of the saint in 564, has a complicated transmission history and has not been fully critically edited.¹⁰ Like the Life of Symeon, it shows some signs of being a compilation, and contains a considerable amount of polemical material, in this case directed against the saint’s brother Artemas.¹¹

Most interestingly, again like the Life of Symeon, it contains an elaborate and complex account of an outbreak of plague in Lycia. The account follows several stories evincing hostility to Artemas.¹² The narrative voice abruptly shifts from the third to the first person; apparently Nicholas himself is relating the story.¹³ The holy man recounts that he once had a vision of an angel coming to him on horseback and saying, ‘Come here, O minister of Christ, behold what is going to happen to the whole world, for the time of harvest is at hand, by the command of the Lord God; and He sent me to you, to give you tools for the harvest’.¹⁴ Nicholas was terrified and questioned the angel, who repeated that he was going to give him a sickle to seal up the harvest for God. At this point:

I drew near to the angel, to see the tools, and I saw, as it were, three sickles, five cubits in width, and fifteen cubits in length and I touched the three sickles. And I said to my brother: ‘Come here, brother, let us give him three “blessings” [eulogiai].’ And he said to me: ‘Why do you want us to give him blessings?’ And he grumbled. And the servant of God said to him: ‘You do not want us to give him three blessings? Truly, he will take two doves as well, and so be on his way.’¹⁵

After this brief return to the third-person narrative voice, the first-person narration resumes again: Nicholas reports that he woke up, urged his brother to sing psalms with him, and told him about his vision, stating, ‘I saw that the world was about to end, and that the Lord required this to be sealed up through my hand’.¹⁶ Several days later he saw a frightening vision of the altar tilting to the side, and water pouring through the ceiling into the church. A week afterwards, the archangel Michael came to explain his visions, telling him that the angel he saw:

was sent to reveal to you what is about to come to the world, and how the souls of men will be given over to the holy men, and how the holy men will offer them to God. And it was given to you to pray for these souls that will be given over from Lycia.¹⁷

He then clarifies further: ‘the mortality [plague] has arrived like a harvest. For the harvest is the mortality coming to the race of men before the end of the world.’¹⁸

The narrative then returns to the third person, becoming less apocalyptic and more matter of fact. The author reports that the plague (still called ‘the mortality’, although a subsequent reference to the ‘bubonic’ disease makes its nature clear) started within forty days, in the city of Myra, and that local farmers were so afraid of the disease that they refused to go to the city, resulting in famine. A rumour broke out in Myra that Nicholas had forbidden the farmers from going to the city, so the governors and archbishop of Myra sent clergymen to Nicholas to arrest him. Some local villagers urged Nicholas not to go to the city, ‘for there is much wrath in the city because of you’.¹⁹ At this point, without explaining how Nicholas avoided arrest, how the plague developed and ended, or how the visions recounted by Nicholas were fulfilled, the narrative abruptly shifts to describing Nicholas travelling around to local shrines and performing sacrifices and processions; the plague plays no further role in the text.

Here again we find a hagiographer struggling to deal with a major disaster that posed a severe threat to his saint’s reputation. The importance of the plague is indicated by the eschatological tone of the visions announcing it; the saint and the archangel Michael both refer to it as heralding the end of the world.²⁰ The description of events in Myra, and the attempts to arrest Nicholas, show how greatly the disaster threatened the saint, prompting not only scepticism about his thaumaturgic powers, but also criticism of his social influence. Nicholas himself seems to have been scapegoated by certain authorities within the city. Like the author of the Life of Symeon, Nicholas’s hagiographer adopts several strategies to try to combat this hostility. First, in a manner recalling the scapegoating of Angoulas in the Life of Symeon, he shifts blame for part of the disaster onto the saint’s brother, Artemas.²¹ Here the saint’s vision, in which Artemas refused to give the scythe-bearing angel three eulogiai, and Nicholas says that as a result the angel will take two doves, is crucial. The fragmented nature of the narrative (probably the result of a clumsy process of compilation) means that the significance of this vision is never explained, and its realization never described. It seems almost certain, however, that in its original form the ‘two doves’ must have symbolized two special victims of the plague—quite possibly, although this must remain speculative, two monks from Nicholas’s monastery. As the Life of Symeon revealed, holy men faced especial challenges when they failed to protect their own disciples, and this could explain why the hagiographer named a scapegoat for these deaths in particular.

Yet the hagiographer also adopts a more general framework to explain the outbreak of the plague and the role of the holy man within it: angels repeatedly tell Nicholas that it is the time of the harvest and that the holy men must harvest the souls with scythes, ‘seal’ the harvest, and deliver the souls to God. The image of the eschatological harvest derives from the New Testament, where it occurs in both the Gospel of Matthew (13:36–43) and the Book of Revelation (14:14–20). In the Gospel text, the reaping is performed by the angels; in Revelation, by both angels and Christ himself. Nicholas’s hagiographer attempts to give holy men a role in this eschatological drama, by making an angel distribute scythes to the saints (the claim that Nicholas had the responsibility for the souls from Lycia implies that other holy men in other areas were performing the same task).

This model gives a completely different role to the holy man from that found in the Life of Symeon. There, when there was a tension between God’s will and the safety of the people, the saint was presented firmly as representing the latter; he repeatedly urged God to change his mind and never accepted the infliction of disasters without protesting. When an earthquake is about to hit Syria, Symeon sees angels in a boat about to hurl themselves against the coast; they, the ‘angels of wrath’, are the executors of God’s judgement, while he is an unwilling bystander.²² In the Life of Nicholas, in contrast, although the saint is very afraid and upset by what he has seen, he makes no attempt to change God’s mind. By receiving a scythe, he himself takes the place of the angel and becomes the executor of God’s command. Thus, even though Nicholas’s hagiographer uses some of the same techniques as Symeon’s, including the displacement of blame onto a disliked scapegoat, he displays a markedly different theological interpretation both of events and of the holy man’s position between God and earth. The text does, however, exhibit many of the same tensions as the Life of Symeon and shows how far a holy man’s reputation could be threatened by disasters afflicting his neighbourhood.

These signs of tension and crisis become still clearer in a hagiographic text written in the second quarter of the seventh century, after the Persian invasions of the empire: the Life of Theodore of Sykeon. Theodore of Sykeon died in 613, and his Life seems to have been written by his disciple George in the mid-seventh century, between c.640 and 680.²³ Theodore therefore died when Khosrow II’s Persian armies were already making major inroads into Roman territory, although before the conquests of Jerusalem and Egypt, whereas the Life was written after much of the empire had already fallen to the Arab invaders. The later parts of the Life are suffused with ominous warnings about the coming crises. Thus George recounts that once when Theodore was making the eucharistic oblation, steam rose from the bread even though it was stale; the patrician Photios asked the saint what this signified, whereupon Theodore explained that ‘the grace of the saints is drawing back and returning from us into the heavens, because of our unworthiness and our sins, so that our state will experience many afflictions and dangers’.²⁴ This seems in itself to be an apologia for the failure of saintly intercessors, living or dead, to prevent the coming military disasters; the grace of the saints was being drawn back to God because of the empire’s great sinfulness. During processions in the nearby towns and villages, the crosses carried by the participants started to leap around of their own accord; Theodore predicted that this too signified great dangers approaching the world.²⁵ During a visit by Theodore to Constantinople, the patriarch, Thomas, anxiously asked the saint if the stories about the jumping crosses were true, and, if so, what they foretold. Theodore was reluctant to reply but, when pressed, provided the interpretation:

The shaking of the crosses portends many painful and dangerous things for us—it means woe and apostasy in our faith, and the inroads of many barbarous peoples, and the shedding of much blood, and destruction and captivity throughout the whole world, the desolation of the holy churches, the cessation of the divine service of praise, the fall and instability of the empire and perplexity and critical times for the State; and further it foreshadows that the coming of the Adversary is at hand.²⁶

This eschatological prophecy (which echoes other eschatological predictions from Heraclius’s reign) almost certainly refers not only to the Persian invasions, but also to the subsequent Islamic conquests that must have been in the forefront of the hagiographer’s mind.²⁷

The rest of the Life continues this ominous tone: patriarch Thomas asks Theodore to pray for him to die before the catastrophes occur, and is replaced by Sergios, who protests his unworthiness for the role. Theodore tells Sergios that it is precisely because he is so young that God has chosen him as patriarch, so that he will be able to endure the terrible trials to come.²⁸ After his return to his monastery in Galatia, Theodore reassures the general Priskos that the rumours he had heard that Caesarea in Cappadocia was being starved in a siege by the Persians were false, but then warns that if the Romans failed to repent and appease God’s wrath, the Persians would return with a great army and destroy all the land up to the sea. He then states that he trusts in God that while he is alive, God will not let the barbarians attack his homeland; George comments that this indeed turned out to be the case.²⁹ This, then, provides a useful defensive argument for the hagiographer: it was only after the saint’s death that the worst incursions of the Persians took place, and therefore he could claim that his saintliness had held back the disasters for a while.

Nonetheless, the hagiographer does resort at times to more directly exculpatory tactics. Thus he recounts a story in which Heraclius visited the saint on his way to prepare a campaign against the Persians. Theodore embraced the emperor, prayed that God would protect him, gave him gifts of bread, apples, and wine, and offered to serve him dinner. Yet Heraclius, in a hurry, rejected the offer of dinner and asked him to keep the gifts for him to collect on his return. After the emperor left, Theodore was distressed that he had not taken the gifts, and told his monks:

If he had taken them, this would have been a proof of his victory and he would have returned in joy. His leaving them is a sign of our defeat, and if he had not come and received the prayer of the saints, then this misfortune would have reached to him and to all of us.³⁰

The hagiographer tries simultaneously to exculpate Theodore of guilt for Heraclius’s military defeat, by laying the responsibility on the emperor’s failure to take the gifts, and to suggest that the saint’s prayers had had some positive impact: if Heraclius had not visited him at all, he and the entire empire would have been lost.³¹

George of Sykeon’s task in writing was made somewhat easier by the fact that military disaster had not reached as far as Theodore’s home province by the time of his death. As the Life of Symeon shows, disasters which took place near the saint’s own person posed particular challenges to his authority. Seventh-century hagiographers writing about holy men who lived through the worst of the Persian invasions thus faced an extremely difficult task. There are not in fact many full-length saints’ Lives set in the eastern empire in this period, perhaps for this very reason. But the extraordinary lengths to which hagiographers could go in tackling these disasters are brought out with exceptional clarity in a short saint’s Life written after the early 630s: the Life of George of Choziba.³²

George, from the monastery of Choziba, near Jericho, lived through the Persian invasion of Palestine, which included perhaps the most emotionally devastating event of the entire war: the fall of Jerusalem in 614.³³ The hagiographer blamed these disasters firmly on the sins of the people, and, in particular, on their recourse to sorcerers, implying that this constituted idolatry. Thus, when a wrestler, Epiphanios, who had been afflicted by a demon after consulting a sorcerer, came to Choziba to seek George’s help, George launched into a passionate discourse to the brothers:

Look, dear friends, at what Christians do! Woe to this world because of its scandalous acts…. Although supposedly called Christians, we submit to the yoke of the enemy of Christ: some become sorcerers, while others seek out help from them! What fellowship does light have with darkness, what agreement does the temple of God have with an idol, or what agreement is there between Christ and Belial?…How, therefore, can God not be angry at our people? How can he not turn his face away from the evil generation that does these things? Who will persuade him not to bring cataclysm on the earth or once again rain down fire and brimstone, burning up the earth like Sodom and Gomorrha?³⁴

This, by itself, recalls Symeon’s hagiographer’s blaming of the idolatry of the Antiochenes for the Persian sack of 540. But George’s hagiographer (apparently his disciple Antony) continues to adopt a very different approach from that found in Symeon’s Life. We have already seen that hagiographers could take varying lines when handling the difficult question of the saint’s response to God’s decision to punish humanity. Thus Symeon repeatedly protested against God’s decisions, urging him to change his mind, whereas Nicholas of Sion reluctantly acquiesced with God’s plans and even became an agent of his wrath. George of Choziba, according to Antony, went still further: he actively urged God to punish his people. Thus, we are told, when the Persians had conquered land up to Damascus, George was praying to God to be merciful, but heard a voice telling him to go down to Jericho to see the actions of men. When he arrived, he saw over the city a crowd of ‘Indians’ fighting with each other, and told the brothers he was with to flee. At this point:

The old man returned to his cell, and he bewailed and mourned the people’s confusion, or rather their ignorance and impiety. He then went outside and sat on the rock…and called upon God and implored him, saying, ‘Lord God of mercies and Lord of pity, you who wish everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of truth, take up your staff and smite this people, for they walk in ignorance’. And suddenly he saw a fiery staff stretching in the sky from the Holy City to Bostra. And the holy man knew that the people would be severely disciplined. And he bewailed and mourned everything.³⁵

The saint is thus actually presented as calling for the Persian attacks to worsen. In this moment of crisis, George abandons the traditional role of the holy man, that of intercessor for a people, however sinful, instead demanding that they should be chastised. No story can better show how severely challenged holy men and hagiographers were by the disasters of the early seventh century.

This is not to argue that the crises of the sixth and seventh centuries created scepticism towards and criticism of holy men. Far from it: there had always been a conceptual problem surrounding the idea of saint as mediator between God and man.³⁶ So too there had always been sceptics about some forms of miracle-working, ranging from theologically minded clerics who were averse to anything that might bear the taint of paganism to ordinary lay Christians who observed that the saints sometimes made very human mistakes.³⁷ The holy man had never been accepted unquestioningly by Byzantine society. But it is to argue that widespread societal crisis crystallized these concerns, gave fodder to the saints’ critics, and ensured that the debate had far greater emotional and ideological significance.

Context for Crisis: Heightened Expectations of Holy Men

Holy men had in fact by this period become particularly vulnerable to accusations of failure in times of disaster because of ideological developments across late antiquity. Two related developments were key: first, rising expectations of the miracle-working powers of saints, and second, the growing association between holy men and the empire. In the earliest saints’ Lives, from the fourth century, hagiographers are often quite cautious about miracles, and avoid overstating the capabilities of their saints. Admittedly, not all hagiographers are equally restrained: Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Gregory Thaumatourgos places rather more emphasis on the miraculous than some of his contemporaries, although his claims are still less extravagant than those found in many later saints’ Lives.³⁸ But in the foundational texts of Christian monastic hagiography we find explicit acknowledgements of limitations on holy men’s thaumaturgic powers.

Thus Athanasios in his Life of Antony states that the holy man did not expect to have his every request granted by God, and that he did not become angry if he failed to perform a miracle: ‘[Antony] would suffer with those who suffered, and pray for them, and often the Lord hearkened to him concerning many of them. He was neither boastful when he was heard, nor did he grumble when he was not heard, but always gave thanks to the Lord.’³⁹ Athanasios’s generally ambivalent attitude towards miracles in the text may in part reflect his role as bishop: as a representative of ecclesiastical authority he may have been suspicious of the charismatic powers ascribed to holy men.⁴⁰ Yet similarly limited expectations are found in the Bohairic Life of Pachomios, a work usually thought to be of monastic rather than clerical origin: the hagiographer reports, probably inspired by the Life of Antony, ‘the Lord did many other healings through [Pachomios]. But if he prayed over someone for his healing and was not granted his request by the Lord, he was not afflicted at not being heard. On the contrary his prayer was always, “Lord, may your will be done.”’⁴¹ As long as expectations of miracle working were kept this low, and God’s overriding will was always emphasized, holy men were much less vulnerable to criticism in times of disaster.

Yet these caveats about the limitations of saints’ abilities soon disappear from most hagiography, and expectations of the scope and efficacy of their miracles become increasingly great. By the sixth and seventh centuries, we even find holy men becoming angry when God refuses to accept their prayers, in sharp contrast to the equanimity in the face of failure praised by Antony and Pachomios’s hagiographers. This contrast can perhaps best be illustrated by a comparison of reactions to outbreaks of disease within saints’ monasteries. An epidemic hit Pachomios’s monastic confederation towards the end of the saint’s lifetime. Many senior monks, including the abbots of some of the monasteries, died, yet Pachomios neither healed any of the monks nor seemed to be expected to. He displayed his holiness simply by refusing any special treatment when he too fell ill.⁴² The epidemic is described in sorrowful, but matter of fact terms, and is apparently a natural phenomenon.

This could hardly contrast more strongly with Symeon the Younger’s presentation of plague within his monastery, as discussed above; in this late sixth-/seventh-century source, the plague is presented as a manifestation of the Devil’s supernatural campaign against the saint.⁴³ The account of Symeon’s resurrection of his beloved disciple Konon shows how far expectations of holy men had changed. When Konon dies of the plague, Symeon prays to God for his life to be restored. His initial prayers seem to have no effect, at which point, far from displaying the composed resignation idealized by Antony and Pachomios’s hagiographers, he appears to grow angry and rebuke the heavens. He addresses the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and all the heavenly powers, saints, and martyrs, asking, ‘Have your prayers for me fallen silent; have you forgotten my love? Where now is your sanctification? Where now is remembrance of me among your phalanxes?’.⁴⁴ He insists, ‘If he does not live [again], I have toiled in vain; if he is not resurrected, I have not pleased the Lord nor earnt a share in the treasure house of his greatness in the heavens’.⁴⁵ The other monks are terrified, ‘because it could be seen, from these words, that the Heaven itself was almost frowning’.⁴⁶ Ultimately, Symeon’s impassioned pleas are successful, and Konon is resurrected. The contrast between this account and that found in the Life of Pachomios reflects a great increase in the claims of hagiographers about their saints’ powers: failure was no longer to be tolerated.

Later hagiographers also present their saints attempting and achieving more ambitious miracles than we find in the fourth century. Fourth-century holy men normally performed miracles for individuals or small local groups who came to visit the saint in person (or occasionally through representatives). Many later saints, however, are described performing miracles for whole cities, or for people in distant lands: thus the fifth-century Syriac Life of Symeon Stylites the Elder states ‘for what mouth could tell or recount about the miracles and glorious deeds which our Lord performed through him, not only nearby, but also far away, and at sea, and among the pagans, and among the Magians, worshippers of fire and water?’.⁴⁷ The sixth-century Life of Severos depicts its hero as guardian of the city of Antioch and its people against all disasters: ‘in times of drought, dearth of rain, rapacious pestilences, and the irruption of demonic attacks, like Moses he would stand against the wrath of God, appeasing Him by [his] intercessions for all the people.’⁴⁸ These highly ambitious claims about what holy men could achieve, together with the refusal to accept they might fail in their requests, undoubtedly had the potential to increase the influence and status of saints’ cults, and to attract more worshippers. Some saints may well have capitalized on disasters to bolster their reputations; disasters presented opportunities as well as challenges to holy people. But these ambitious claims also bore a potential downside: if the saints were always expected to achieve their requests, and defend large populations, they were much more vulnerable when they had clearly failed to do so.

In particular, military disasters for the empire became a threat to Byzantine holy men because of an increasing association, from the late fifth century onwards, between holy men and the security of the state. Fourth-century hagiographies generally display a reserved, or openly hostile, attitude towards the Roman emperors—perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the emperors in this period were either ‘heretics’ or pagans—and display no interest in the military successes or failures of the empire.⁴⁹ From the fifth century onwards, with the advent of ‘orthodox’ emperors, hagiographers engage more closely and favourably with imperial authorities, although they still play a limited role in comparison with later saints’ Lives.⁵⁰ The Syriac Life of Symeon Stylites the Elder contains perhaps the first reference in a saint’s Life to what becomes a crucial concept, the idea that the sanctity of holy men could protect the empire: thus it reports that Leo I tried to acquire the body of the saint for Constantinople, ‘in order to honour it there with him as his endeavours deserved, and in order for their kingdom to be protected by his prayers [emphasis mine].’⁵¹ Yet it is only with the Life of Daniel the Stylite, probably dating from the last decade of the fifth century, that the emperors become an important focus of interest in a holy vita.⁵² It would be excessive to list all the forms of association between saint, emperor, and empire in the Life, but again the link between the power of the saint and the prosperity of the empire should be noted: Daniel reassures Leo that God has promised to preserve Alexandria and the emperor against Vandal attacks.⁵³

In the sixth century, this connection between saint and state was thoroughly cemented, at least in the Chalcedonian tradition, to the extent that Helen Saradi has spoken of the appearance of the ‘national saint’.⁵⁴ Certain tropes emerge: Eutychios of Constantinople, Symeon the Younger, and Theodore of Sykeon all predicted the accessions of one or more emperors.⁵⁵ Symeon the Younger healed Justin II’s daughter of demonic possession;⁵⁶ Theodore of Sykeon cured Maurice’s child of ‘an incurable disease’.⁵⁷ Above all, crucially, the association between saint and the security of the state grew ever stronger. Thus in Cyril of Scythopolis’s influential Life of Sabas Justinian is said to have offered patronage to his monasteries in the desert, ‘so that they may pray for the state entrusted to our care’; Sabas also tells Justinian that if the emperor fulfils the saint’s requests he will regain Africa, Rome, and the rest of the lost provinces.⁵⁸ Theodosios, in his Life by Theodore of Petra, gives the magister militum per Orientem his hairskin vest as a phylactery on his way to campaign against the Persians; the general achieves a victory ‘so brilliant and so useful to the universality of the whole Roman state’.⁵⁹ Symeon the Younger, in his letter to Justin II, promises that if Justin follows his advice to punish Samaritan violators of a church harshly, God will bless and glorify his reign ‘beyond all former realms’.⁶⁰ Theodore of Sykeon is particularly closely implicated with the military fate of the empire. As mentioned above, Heraclius seeks Theodore’s prayers when on his way to fight the Persians. Theodore also heals the important patrician Niketas of a sickness rumoured to have been caused by poison, telling him, ‘Get up, my son, for it is the hour of toil and our government/state has need of you’.⁶¹ He even prays for various important members of the subsequently reviled regime of Phokas, although his hagiographer makes him warn both the ‘savage consul’ Bonosos and Phokas himself that their wicked deeds are likely to prevent God from favouring them with success.⁶²

In the early seventh century we even see the development of hagiography as imperial, patriotic, propaganda, as seen in the rewritings of the Lives of Golindouch and Anastasios the Persian by, respectively, Eustratios Presbyter and George of Pisidia.⁶³ This last development reflects an important fact: the association between holy men and empire does not seem to have been created only by hagiographers seeking to boost the prestige of their saints, and to win patronage, but was also encouraged by the imperial government itself to strengthen and legitimize its authority.⁶⁴ This identification of holy men and empire worked in the favour of both in times of peace and prosperity. Yet, inevitably, it meant that if the defences of the empire failed—as they did, spectacularly, in the seventh century—the protective powers of the saints became extremely vulnerable to criticism. Eustratios Presbyter’s Life of Golindouch, written in the last months of Maurice’s reign, reveals particularly clearly how quickly a hagiographer’s claims about his saint’s powers could be disproven: Eustratios describes Golindouch praying on her deathbed for Maurice’s success and prosperity, yet, within a year, Maurice had been overthrown by Phokas and the empire was facing disaster.⁶⁵

Again, therefore, it is clear that long-term ideological developments underlay the crisis in sanctity reflected in hagiography of this period. As hagiographers attributed more ambitious roles to their saints, depicting them as the mainstays of the empire and the defenders of the Christian people, they also faced a greater risk of embarrassment if their saints had clearly failed to fulfil their goals. It was in the late sixth and seventh centuries that expectations of holy men’s miracle-working reached their peak, and in the same period that holy men were most closely identified with the empire and its success. As a result, the disasters of the period—the sixth-century plague, severe earthquakes in some locations, and above all the destructive wars with the Persians and the Arabs which resulted in serious losses to the empire—posed an exceptionally strong challenge to holy men’s claims to authority to which some hagiographers, at least, clearly felt obliged to respond.

Miracle Collections

Was this sense of crisis confined to the biographies of living holy men? At the same time that some saints’ Lives evince the kinds of tension just described, another hagiographic genre was flourishing: the miracle collections of long-dead martyrs. Only one such collection survives in Greek from before this period: the miracles of the cult of Thekla at Seleucia in Isauria, written in the fifth century by a maverick ex-member of the clergy of her shrine, who had been excommunicated by local bishops.⁶⁶ But numerous miracle collections have survived from the late sixth and seventh centuries, including, from Constantinople, the several miracle collections of Cosmas and Damian, the Miracles of Artemios, and the Miracles of Therapon; from Menouthis in Egypt, Sophronios of Jerusalem’s Miracles of Cyrus and John; and from Thessaloniki, the two series of the Miracles of St Demetrios.⁶⁷ The relationship between this genre of hagiography, and the saint’s Life, is complex, but despite important differences the two undoubtedly share certain key concepts and concerns.⁶⁸ Some texts cross the boundaries between the genres, including, as argued above, the Life of Martha. We thus might expect to find in the miracle collections attempts to counter tension and scepticism provoked by natural and military disasters, similar to those found in the saints’ Lives mentioned above. But is this the case?

The miracle collections of this period do display certain signs of tension, and seem keen to rebut potential critics of the miracle-working powers of their saints. This phenomenon has in fact been studied more thoroughly than responses to crises in holy vitae, by Vincent Déroche and Matthew Dal Santo. Dal Santo focuses on the evidence in the texts of widespread scepticism about the possibility of posthumous intercession, while Déroche shows that many of the hagiographers struggled to reconcile the saint’s duty to his supplicants with that towards God, and often as a result show the martyr resisting God’s commands and messengers.⁶⁹ Both suggest that these tensions are similar to those displayed in the Life of Symeon; indeed, both count the Life as one of these miracle collections (a view which I have challenged above).⁷⁰ Neither, however, gives a central place to the disasters of the period when discussing these tensions. Déroche argues that they were caused by the particular process of compilation of miracle collections.⁷¹ Dal Santo does at various points suggest that the manifold difficulties facing the empire in the period may have encouraged the debates he describes, but this is not the focus of his attention, and he does not always explore the theme when discussing individual texts, even the Life of Symeon.⁷² While in the Life of Symeon this connection between disasters and scepticism and tension is clear, it is much harder to assess how far it is relevant in the case of the miracle collections.

It is a notable feature of the sixth- and seventh-century miracle collections (with one important exception, to be discussed shortly) that they are far more limited in scope than many contemporary saints’ Lives. Thus—and this is where their similarities to the Life of Martha are most striking—they generally contain nothing about major events in the empire, or even in the city where they are set; rather their focus is entirely on their cult site and on the private lives of their supplicants. They also focus almost exclusively on healing miracles, including only the occasional other form of small-scale miracle: thus, for example, the miracles of Cosmas and Damian are overwhelmingly dominated by healing miracles, but contain one reference to a miracle of conversion with no healing attached, and another to the saints’ miraculous procuring of a job for one of their supplicants.⁷³ So too forty-four of the forty-five miracles of Artemios deal with healing miracles (almost all of which relate to ailments of the male genitalia); just one recounts the saint’s success in helping one of his devotees regain his stolen goods.⁷⁴

Finally, their miracles almost always benefit only one (or sometimes two or three) supplicants; mass miracles for whole villages or cities are unknown. The saints are not presented as general protectors of whole regions, but as patrons of individuals who have turned to the saints and fulfilled the required conditions for healing (conditions which vary, sometimes relating to orthodox belief, sometimes simply to belief in the saints, and other times to particular ritual activities). All this means that disasters such as earthquakes and invasions are irrelevant to the preoccupations of these hagiographers; plague sometimes enters the accounts, but even then the hagiographers describe their saints healing particular victims of the disease rather than, like Symeon the Younger, attempting to avert the sickness from a whole area.⁷⁵ The genre of the miracle collection thus seems well suited to a time of crisis; the narrower horizons of these cults when compared to those of some holy men meant that their hagiographers did not have to deal with many of the challenges faced by the latter. It is particularly well suited because miracle collections, in comparison with saints’ Lives, tend to place more responsibility for the successful performance of a miracle on the individual supplicant than on the holy man or martyr; if a miracle does not take place it is the former who is to blame.⁷⁶

The question remains of whether these characteristics of miracle collections are entirely coincidental, and unrelated to the crises, or whether these hagiographers were responding, consciously or unconsciously, to the pressures of the time by narrowing their claims about their saints’ powers. It might be suggested that these limited horizons were somehow inherent to the genre of the miracle collection, or might reflect the realities of the incubation cults that produced them. Certainly collections like those of Cosmas and Damian and Cyrus and John do resemble in these respects the miracles recorded at the pagan cult of Asclepius.⁷⁷ Three texts, however, suggest that this is not a complete explanation for the phenomenon. The first is the Miracles of Thekla, which reveals that it was possible for a Christian miracle collection derived from the cult of an early martyr to be extremely ambitious in scope. Its fifth-century author certainly does not limit himself to recounting healing miracles or miracles benefiting individuals, instead presenting Thekla as the patron of the whole city, and even perhaps the empire, and as performer of a diverse range of miracles: ‘the great martyr…often halted famine, put an end to plague, quenched drought, terminated war, handed over enemies, saved cities, protected houses, and gave out bountifully, to the collective and to each individual, the very things which each asked for.’⁷⁸ In the fifth century it was, apparently, possible to conceive of a long-deceased martyr fulfilling the role of a living holy man. The Miracles of Thekla show that a miracle collection could assign a deceased miracle-worker broad and ambitious powers; limitations were not a necessary generic trait of miracle collections.

The second relevant text is the Life of Martha. The Life seems to date from a similar time to the classic miracle collections such as those of Cyrus and John, Cosmas and Damian, and Artemios. But the Life is of a rather different type from these collections. In terms of structure, it cannot be categorized simply as a miracle collection; it transcends any straightforward classification of genre, combining elements from various hagiographic norms.⁷⁹ In addition, its author gives no indication that incubation was common at Martha’s cult, and she was certainly not a long dead martyr. Despite these important differences, however, the author displays a similar focus on local, small-scale healing miracles to that of the authors of the more characteristic miracle collections. As discussed in the previous chapter, Martha’s hagiographer seems to avoid ambitious claims about miracle-working powers, and shifts the responsibility for the success of miracles onto the proper behaviour of the supplicants, as in the more standard miracle collections. This suggests that there was more than simply generic or literary convention behind this hagiographic development; it seems rather to have reflected wider ideological changes in this period.

The final, and most important, text is, however, a seventh-century miracle collection of a long-deceased martyr (that is to say, a text sharing the key characteristics of collections like those of Cyrus and John and Artemios): the Miracles of St Demetrios. The Miracles of Demetrios, like the Miracles of Thekla, shows that martyr cults could advance ambitious and broad claims—but it also reveals that it was very risky to do so in the fraught climate of the late sixth and seventh centuries. The Miracles of St Demetrios is in many respects an extraordinary text. It is in fact a composite work, containing two series of miracles, the first apparently written by archbishop John of Thessaloniki, perhaps in the early years of Heraclius’s reign, the second by an anonymous continuator at least some decades later.⁸⁰ Neither collection is remotely limited to healing miracles: in fact both are particularly preoccupied with the various sieges Thessaloniki experienced in this period at the hands of the Slavs and Avars. Demetrios is presented as the saviour of the city from plague, famine, earthquake, and these attacks.

In this case, therefore, we find a miracle collection which is very clearly affected by the disasters of the sixth and seventh centuries. Throughout the collection, as Déroche and Dal Santo have observed, there are signs of tension surrounding the thaumaturgic powers of the saint, his role as mediator between God and man, and indeed about divine providence and theodicy itself—all themes which were crucial in texts such as the Life of Symeon the Younger.⁸¹ The first of these themes, doubts about the saint’s capabilities, comes to the fore, for example, when John describes Demetrios’s healing miracles during an outbreak of the plague in the city. The hagiographer produces arguments to try to refute both sceptics who thought that the healings simply took place by chance, and critics who accused the saint of ‘impotence, hard-heartedness, or partiality’.⁸² This trio of potential accusations is very important, as it shows that the hagiographer was caught in a delicate position: it was difficult to avoid either acknowledging that Demetrios did not have the power to heal everyone, or that he was choosing which of his supplicants were worthy of assistance. In this case, John tried to deal with the problem by stating that Demetrios was confined by the decisions of divine providence; he thus deflects the problem from Demetrios to God, without exploring the implications of this for the martyr’s role as intercessor.

Elsewhere in the collection, however, John presents Demetrios as displaying a very different attitude to divine will: rather than accepting God’s apparent decision to condemn the city, he resists it. Thus in one account an illustris has a vision in which two men dressed like imperial guards (almost certainly angels) went to Demetrios and told him to leave Thessaloniki because ‘the master’ (that is, God) had declared that it was going to be given over to enemies. Demetrios refused, saying that either the city would be saved, or he would die with its inhabitants. The angels tried to argue with him but could not change his mind.⁸³ The hagiographer thus, like Symeon the Younger’s, firmly asserts Demetrios’s ultimate loyalty to his dependent people, even to the extent of opposing God’s expressed will.⁸⁴

This choice implicitly raises the question of whether the saint in fact loved the Thessalonikans more than God did. John does not address this question directly, but throughout the collection he does repeatedly stress not only that Demetrios always helped the citizens, but also that God himself was protecting them and coming to their aid (rather in contradiction to the claim that God had ordered Demetrios to leave the city). Thus, for example, in miracle 14, describing a major siege of the city by the Avars, John recounts several miracles without stressing Demetrios’s intercessory role; his focus is instead on proving that it was God who had saved the town. He provides various arguments to show that it must have been divine providence, rather than the Thessalonikans’ bravery or the incompetence of the attackers, that had saved the city. He emphasizes, for example, that although the citizens had been almost dead with fear during the first two days of the siege, on the third day they suddenly became very courageous, to the point of mocking their enemies. ‘Who would doubt’, he asks rhetorically, ‘that this success was caused by divine action…who can raise the dead, apart from God…who, if not God, could inspire their courage?’.⁸⁵

Some of the Thessalonikans seem to have doubted precisely this. John’s emphasis on the theme appears to have been a reaction to sceptics who thought either that the events were attributable to human causes, or that God had abandoned the city. Thus in the same chapter, he repeatedly anticipates and attempts to refute doubts that could be raised about God’s involvement in Thessaloniki’s rescue, commenting, for example, after attributing a sudden upturn in the city’s fortunes to God’s decision to heed the citizens’ prayers, ‘But perhaps you will say, “What is this clear from? Who saw God? Or who heard Him promising salvation, that He would assure that the city would be watered with goodness?”’⁸⁶ He subsequently claims that many people desire further proof that God had saved the city:

but since the mind of many desires that a narration should be supplied of other things that happened which establish that only the hand of God, through the intercession of the victorious one [Demetrios], saved the city at that time, we will not fail to fulfil your desire, as long as you eagerly promise to listen to me piously and faithfully.⁸⁷

The last clause of this passage seems to acknowledge that his proofs will only be effective for those who already have faith! John even refers to objectors who might claim that by attributing the salvation of the city to God’s providence, he was putting the Thessalonikans to shame, by denying their own bravery.⁸⁸ And while the disasters seem to have encouraged some to deny God’s determinative role in affairs, they may have led others to claim that God had turned against the city: John also condemns the view held by some citizens, ‘with the Devil causing this wicked suspicion’, that God actually wanted Thessaloniki to be taken by the enemy.⁸⁹ This is in fact what John himself had implied when he described the angels telling Demetrios to leave the city as God had decided it should be handed over to the enemies; he thus responds rather inconsistently to the pressures of justifying the roles of both Demetrios and God and of refuting scepticism about them.

These allusions to potential sceptics, many of whom doubted that divine providence was responsible for the events in the city, recall Symeon the Younger’s hagiographer’s claims that impious astrologists denied that earthquakes were the product of God’s will.⁹⁰ But John does not here accuse these sceptics of any recognized form of heterodoxy; there is nothing to imply that they are anything more than Christians who have come, perhaps as a result of the disasters afflicting their city, to doubt the direct and benevolent intervention of God in everyday affairs. John’s emphatic insistence on God’s determinative role in all events thus seems to have been intended to refute doubts about his providence among the city’s Christian population. The Miracles of St Demetrios appears to have been an (occasionally inconsistent) apologia not only for the saint’s role in defending the city, but for God’s goodwill and providence itself.

The Miracles of Demetrios thus shows both that the hagiographer of a martyr cult did not need to be restricted in his scope and that, if he did extend his claims about his martyr’s power, in a time of real crisis this raised the same kinds of challenges and dilemmas faced by the authors of saint’s Lives. Is it therefore possible that the more modest, or at least more narrowly focused, claims about the thaumaturgic powers of their saints made by the authors of most miracle collections, were in part the result of a desire, conscious or unconscious, to avoid facing these great challenges? In a world which must have seemed increasingly out of control, saints could no longer be said with any credibility to be regulating the cosmos; but they could still, perhaps, help individual supplicants regain control of their lives and bodies. At the very least, even if this argument is not accepted for the traditional martyr cults, it is surely not coincidental that the author of the Life of Martha, who was not writing about the long-established incubation cult of a famous martyr, but about a recently deceased, relatively minor figure, adopted a similarly narrow focus, concentrating on healing miracles benefiting small numbers of local monks and villagers, in a sharp break from the approach used by the author of the Life of Symeon.

Conclusion

The disasters of the sixth and seventh centuries brought to the fore conceptual and theological problems which were inherent within late antique Christianity, but usually submerged. In particular, they raised questions about the role of the intercessor between God and man, and about theodicy itself. When there seemed to be an inescapable conflict of interest between God’s will and the desires and safety of the Christian population—as when disasters threatened to punish large groups, irrespective of the piety of individual victims—the hagiographer was forced to choose, if not consciously, whether to present his saint as displaying ultimate loyalty to God, or to his supplicants. Both options were problematic: if the saint accepted God’s will, he had arguably failed in his duties to his devotees; if he resisted, then he ran the risk of accusing God of acting unjustly. The very idea of an intercessor trying to change God’s mind, although fundamental to late antique Christianity, was theologically challenging, as implied by part of Barsanouphios of Gaza’s response to a question about the plague: ‘There are indeed many people who entreat God’s loving kindness to remove his wrath from the world; and, of course, none is more kind and loving than God, who desires to have mercy and opposes the multitude of sins that occur in the world.’⁹¹ Although this was undoubtedly not his intention, Barsanouphios’s words raise the question of why an intercessor should be needed to deal with an all-loving, all-good God.

As we have seen, hagiographers adopted very different approaches to these challenges: Symeon the Younger was shown resisting God’s will, Nicholas of Sion as reluctantly enforcing it, and George of Choziba as actively calling for divine punishment for the people’s sins. The contrast between these approaches demonstrates that there was no pre-existing, agreed model of reacting to such pressures, perhaps because there was no perfect, unproblematic, response. The hagiographers are unlikely to have conceived of the problem in the terms in which it has been described here, nor, perhaps, to have realized that their solutions were sometimes theologically awkward. Yet, as we have seen, they did struggle, not always with success, to show that their holy men were neither impotent nor heartless; that they were both vessels of God’s will and effective mediators on behalf of their supplicants. These apologetic arguments must have been a response to real criticisms or doubts raised about the saints within contemporary society.

At a conceptual level, the problem of intercession was equally relevant to the authors of miracle collections of long-dead saints. Yet, because the authors of most such collections from this period restricted themselves to recounting healing miracles for individual supplicants, rather than treating earthquakes or invasions threatening entire populations, the difficulties were less sharply exposed, and their saints’ powers less seriously challenged. Natural and military disasters were ignored, rather than justified. As has been argued, this was not simply a question of genre, since the Life of Martha shares in this respect the characteristics of many miracle collections, whereas the Miracles of St Demetrios is much more similar to contemporary saints’ Lives. It could thus be argued that the Lives of Symeon and Martha embody two very different ways of responding to the crisis in holiness of the late sixth and seventh centuries. The author of the former adopted a clearly apologetic but also polemical tone, blaming the disasters in large part on Antioch’s wealthy ‘pagans’ as well as experimenting with various, sometimes contradictory, Old Testament explanations for events. The author of the latter, in contrast, refocused the goals of the cult, apparently avoiding ambitious claims that his saint could defend entire regions or cities, and instead focusing on the healings of individuals who devoted themselves to Martha’s cult and to the liturgical rituals at her shrine. Symeon’s hagiographer may well have been writing before the Persian and Arab conquests of much of the Middle East; if Martha’s hagiographer was writing during this period of high tension, it is perhaps unsurprising that the scope of the work was drastically reduced. In a climate of political and social uncertainty, during or after crises which raised serious questions not only about saints but about God’s providence itself, a reorientation of priorities was, in fact, only to be expected.

¹ On responses to the plague, see esp. Kaldellis 2007b; on those to earthquakes, Dagron 1981; on reactions to sixth-century disasters more generally, Meier 2003; Dal Santo 2012. On reactions to seventh-century crisis, see esp. Booth 2014.

² For Romanos the Melodist, see Kontakion 54 (pp. 462–71); in the first part of the kontakion Romanos argues, drawing on examples from both Old and New Testaments, that God has often appeared to act cruelly and angrily to bring about a good result. For Justinian, see esp. Justinian, Novels 77 and 141 (pp. 381–3, 703–4); for Barsanouphios and John, see esp. Barsanouphios and John, Letter 569 (III, pp. 730–4).

³ The Questions are suffused with discussion of theodicy and causation; some deal explicitly with the Arab conquests, including, for example, Question 101: ‘Is it true of all the evil things done by the Arabs against the lands and nations of the Christians, that they have done them against us completely at God’s command and with his approval?’: Anastasios of Sinai, Questions and Answers 101 (p. 161, trans. p. 230). On Anastasios, see esp. Haldon 1992.

⁴ διὰ τὰς ἁμαρτίας καὶ τὰ ἐπιτηδεύματα ἡμῶν τὰ μὴ ἀγαθά: Eustratios Presbyter, Life of Eutychios, lines 2510–11 (p. 80).

⁵ Theodore of Petra, Life of Theodosios (p. 87); see above p. 20.

⁶ Elias, Life of John of Tella (ed. p. 38; trans. Ghanem 1970, p. 48).

⁷ : ibid. (ed. p. 39. My translation).

⁸ As discussed in Chapter 1.

⁹ The Life of Nicholas of Sion has recently been discussed in Rizos 2019.

¹⁰ The date of his death differs in the surviving manuscripts of the Life, but Anrich has argued persuasively that 6 December 564 is the most likely option: Anrich 1913–17, II, pp. 214–16. The date of the text’s composition is less certain: Anrich argued that it must have written been shortly after Nicholas’s death, since the author seems to have been an acquaintance of the saint and recounts many details about his life: ibid. II, pp. 17–220. His contentions seem to have been accepted by the text’s partial re-editors and English translators (Ševčenko and Ševčenko 1984, p. 11). The argument is not certain—as noted elsewhere, hagiographers often claimed to be disciples of their saints and the provision of detail does not guarantee authenticity—but an early date for the text remains plausible, given, for instance, its hostility to the saint’s brother, which would be difficult to explain in a later Life. The transmission of the text was complicated by the fact that Nicholas of Sion was, from a fairly early date, confused with the famous early Christian bishop Nicholas of Myra: on this, and other problems in the textual tradition, see Anrich 1913–17, II, pp. 210–14. I have used the version of the text published by the Ševčenkos, which, as they discuss (Ševčenko and Ševčenko 1984, p. 17), is largely that of Anrich 1913–17, I, pp. 3–65, but with various corrections and emendations.

¹¹ In fact the case for the text being a compilation seems stronger for the Life of Nicholas than for the Life of Symeon: not only are there various incidents related multiple times in different versions, and abrupt changes of narrative voice, but also on several occasions the narrative breaks off mid-account and jumps to an apparently unconnected episode. For polemic against the saint’s brother Artemas, see Life of Nicholas of Sion 39 (pp. 66–8), 44–8 (pp. 74–80).

¹² Ibid. 44–6 (pp. 74–6).

¹³ It is tempting to suggest that the author is here integrating into his text part of a sermon or writing by Nicholas himself (in a similar fashion to that in which, I have suggested, the author of the Life of Symeon used the stylite’s sermons). Anrich was sceptical about this, preferring to see the use of the first person as a result of the author’s fondness for vivid prose (Anrich 1913–17, II, pp. 217–18).

¹⁴ Life of Nicholas of Sion 47 (ed. and trans. pp. 78–9).

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid. 48 (ed. and trans. pp. 78–81).

¹⁷ Ibid. 50 (ed. and trans. pp. 82–3).

¹⁸ Ibid. 51 (ed. and trans. pp. 82–3).

¹⁹ Ibid. 53 (ed. and trans. pp. 84–5).

²⁰ Ibid. 48 line 6 (pp. 78), 51 line 9 (p. 82).

²¹ Cf. Efthymiadis et al. 2011, p. 70 n. 91.

²² ἄγγελοι ὀργῆς: Life of Symeon 104 (p. 83).

²³ The date of Theodore’s death is given by his hagiographer: Life of Theodore of Sykeon 170 (I, p. 161). For the dating of the text, we have a terminus post quem of October 640: George says that Theodore’s prediction that Heraclius would reign for thirty years came true, implying he was writing at earliest in the thirtieth year of Heraclius’s reign, 640–1 (Life of Theodore 166 (I, p. 154)). There is a fairly certain terminus ante quem of 680: even if one does not accept George’s claim that he was a disciple of Theodore, he was probably writing before the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–1, which condemned patriarch Sergios of Constantinople as a heretic; George is extremely favourable to the patriarch (see esp. ibid. 136 (I, pp. 108–9)). A date around or shortly after Heraclius’s death in 641 seems most plausible.

²⁴ ἡ γὰρ χάρις τῶν ἁγίων συστέλλεται καὶ ἀνέρχεται ἀφ’ ἡμῶν ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς διὰ τὴν ἀναξιότητα καὶ τὰς ἁμαρτίας ἡμῶν, πρὸς τὸ πειραθῆναι τὴν πολιτείαν ἡμῶν πολλῶν θλίψεων καὶ κινδύνων: Life of Theodore of Sykeon 127 (I, pp. 102–3; my translation).

²⁵ Ibid. 127 (I, p. 103).

²⁶ Ibid. 134 (I, p. 106, trans. pp. 176–7).

²⁷ On eschatology under Heraclius (especially in connection with the Persian war), see e.g. Reinink 2002; Stoyanov 2011, pp. 55–71.

²⁸ George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 136 (I, pp. 108–9).

²⁹ Ibid. 153 (I, pp. 123–4).

³⁰ ἐὰν ἔλαβεν αὐτάς, τεκμήριον ἦν τῆς νίκης αὐτοῦ καὶ μετὰ χαρᾶς ὑπέστρεφεν· τὸ δὲ καταλιπεῖν αὐτὸν ταύτας σημεῖόν ἐστι τῆς ἥττας ἡμῶν, καὶ εἰ μὴ ὅτι ἀνῆλθεν καὶ ἔλαβεν τὴν εὐχὴν τῶν ἁγίων, ἐπεὶ καὶ μέχρις αὐτοῦ εἶχεν φθάσαι καὶ εἰς πάντας ἡμᾶς τὸ τοιοῦτον πένθος: ibid. 166 (I, p. 154).

³¹ On this passage see Dal Santo 2012, pp. 214–16.

³² The Life of George of Choziba has been dated to 631 by Binns on the grounds that it refers to the patriarch of Jerusalem as Modestus, who served in this position only briefly in 631: Binns 1996, p. 54. Vivian, in his English translation of the Life, seems to accept this argument, as he dates it to 631, without explanation (Vivian 1996, p. 53). This dating is problematic, however, as the text merely refers to an event taking place ‘in the time of our blessed father Modestus, patriarch of the holy city of Christ our God’ (ἐπὶ τοῦ ὁσίου πατρὸς ἡμῶν Μοδέστου, πατριάρχου τῆς ἁγίας Χριστοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἡμῶν πόλεως) (Antony of Choziba, Life of George of Choziba (p. 115)), which does not guarantee that Modestus was still patriarch at the time that the hagiographer was writing. Modestus’s patriarchate (the dates of which are, in any case, uncertain), thus serves only as a terminus post quem for the composition of the Life; its real date remains unknown.

³³ On the ideological impact of the fall of Jerusalem, see Flusin 1992, II, esp. pp. 129–49; Booth 2014, pp. 94–100.

³⁴ Βλέπετε, ἀγαπητοί, τί ποιοῦσιν οἱ χριστιανοί. Οὐαὶ τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ ἀπὸ τῶν σκανδάλων…Χριστιανοὶ δῆθεν λεγόμενοι, καὶ τῷ ἐχθρῷ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ὑποκύπτομεν, οἱ μὲν γινόμενοι μάγοι, οἱ δὲ παρ’ αὐτῶν βοήθειαν ἐπιζητοῦντες. Τίς κοινωνία φωτὶ πρὸς σκότος, τίς δὲ συγκατάθεσις ναῷ Θεοῦ μετὰ εἰδώλου, ἢ τίς συμφωνία Χριστοῦ πρὸς Βελίαρ;…Πῶς οὖν μὴ ὀργιασθῇ ὁ Θεὸς ἐπὶ τὸ γένος ἡμῶν; Πῶς μὴ ἀποστρέψῃ τὸ πρόσωπον αὑτοῦ ἀπὸ τῆς πονηρᾶς γενεᾶς τῆς ποιούσης ταῦτα; Τίς δὲ καὶ δυσωπήσει αὐτὸν μὴ ἐπαγαγεῖν κατακλυσμὸν ἔτι τῷ κόσμῳ, ἢ πάλιν ὑετὸν πυρὸς καὶ θείου, καταφλέγων τὴν γὴν ὡς Σόδομα καὶ Γόμοῤῥα: Antony of Choziba, Life of George of Choziba 18 (pp. 116–17, trans. pp. 84–5 with small changes by me).

³⁵ Ibid. 30 (p. 129, trans. p. 92). On this passage, cf. Booth 2014, p. 100.

³⁶ Cf. above pp. 152–6, and Dal Santo 2012, p. 181.

³⁷ On Christian scepticism towards holy men, see Dagron 1992; Dal Santo 2011a and 2012, esp. pp. 149–236; Sarris 2011c.

³⁸ It should be noted that the epithet ‘Thaumatourgos’, Wonder-Worker, was not used by Gregory of Nyssa himself for his subject; it does not seem to have been employed until the fifth century: see Slusser 1998, p. 1 (with n. 1). Rowan Greer has discerned some signs of tension in Gregory of Nyssa’s own attitude to miracles: Greer 1989, pp. 108–11.

³⁹ Athanasios, Life of Antony 56 (p. 286, trans. p. 179).

⁴⁰ For Athanasios’s ambivalent attitude towards miracles, see also e.g. ibid. 31–8 (pp. 220–38). On his ecclesiastical suspicion of charismatic powers, see esp. M. A. Williams 1982b, esp. pp. 33–40.

⁴¹ Bohairic Life of Pachomios 45 (p. 48, trans. pp. 68–9). The dating of the various versions of the Life of Pachomios is very difficult to establish: all probably contain fourth-century material, but with later accretions: see e.g. Goehring 1982.

⁴² This part of the Life is missing from the surviving Bohairic version of the text, but the gap can be filled by recourse to one of the surviving Sahidic versions (S⁷): Sahidic Lives of Pachomios (pp. 91–2). (See Veilleux’s discussion of the corpus: Veilleux 1980, pp. 1–18).

⁴³ See above pp. 156–61.

⁴⁴ ἐσιγήσατε δεόμενοι ὑπὲρ ἐμοῦ, ἐπελάθεσθέ μου τῆς ἀγάπης; Ποῦ νῦν ὁ ἁγιασμὸς ὑμῶν; Ποῦ νῦν ἡ μνήμη μου ἐν τοῖς συντάγμασιν ὑμῶν; Life of Symeon 129 (p. 118).

⁴⁵ εἰ οὐ ζήσεται, εἰς μάτην ἐκοπίασα· εἰ οὐκ ἀναστήσεται, οὐκ εὐηρέστησα τῷ Κυρίῳ οὐδὲ κοινωνίαν εὗρον εἰς τὸν ἐν οὐρανοῖς θησαυρὸν τῆς μεγαλωσύνης: ibid. 129 (p. 118).

⁴⁶ ἦν γὰρ ἰδεῖν ἐκ τῶν λεγομένων αὐτὸν σχεδὸν τὸν οὐρανὸν στυγνάζοντα: ibid. 129 (p. 118).

⁴⁷ 

⁴⁸ Life of Severus (p. 245, trans. p. 127).

⁴⁹ e.g. Athanasios, Life of Antony 81 (pp. 340–4); see Brakke 1995, p. 247; Bohairic Life of Pachomios 101 (pp. 125–8), 185 (pp. 164–8); Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory Thaumatourgos (pp. 44–5). On Athanasios’s attitude towards the political authorities in the Life of Antony, see Cartwright 2016.

⁵⁰ See e.g. Kallinikos, Life of Hypatios 37 (pp. 227–9).

⁵¹ .: Syriac Life of Symeon (p. 643).

⁵² On the extraordinary relationship of the saint and the emperor in the Life of Daniel, see Miller 1970; Lane-Fox 1997, pp. 178–9, 205; and esp. Trampedach 2013, pp. 189–207.

⁵³ Life of Daniel 56 (p. 55); on the historical context, see Lane Fox 1997, pp. 190–1.

⁵⁴ Saradi 1995, 102. The picture is, unsurprisingly, more complex in miaphysite hagiography, where holy men are sometimes depicted criticizing emperors’ religious policies, as in John of Ephesus’s Lives of Zʿura and Mare the Solitary (Lives of the Eastern Saints 2 (I, pp. 18–35), 36 (II, pp. 624–41))—though it should be noted that John’s attitude towards Justinian is far from uniformly hostile, and he often tries to show that his holy men did achieve influence over him. For a study of John’s treatment of emperors (although focusing particularly on his Ecclesiastical History), see Van Ginkel 1994.

⁵⁵ Eutychios predicts the accessions of Justin II, Tiberius, and Maurice (Life of Eutychios, lines 1842–1945 (pp. 60–3)); Symeon that of Justin II (Life of Symeon, 202–3, (pp. 176–7)) (Evagrios Scholastikos also claims that Symeon had foretold the accession of Maurice: V.21 (p. 217)); Theodore predicts the accession of Maurice (George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 54 (I, pp. 46–7)).

⁵⁶ Life of Symeon 207 (pp. 178–9).

⁵⁷ George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 97 (I, p. 79, trans. p. 153).

⁵⁸ Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas (p. 175, trans. pp. 184–5). Neary has argued that this language reflected Justinian’s own monastic legislation: Neary 2017, pp. 126, 136–7.

⁵⁹ Τῆς οὕτω λαμπρᾶς καὶ κοινωφελοῦς τοῦ παντὸς Ῥωμαίων πολιτεύματος: Theodore of Petra, Life of Theodosios (pp. 83–5, quote at p. 85).

⁶⁰ ὑπὲρ πάσας τὰς ἔμπροσθεν βασιλείας. Symeon Stylites the Younger, ‘Letter to Justin II’, col. 3217. On this letter see above pp. 111–12.

⁶¹ ἀνάστηθι, τέκνον, ὅτι καιρὸς καμάτου ἐστὶν καὶ χρῄζει σου τὸ πολίτευμα ἡμῶν: George of Sykeon, Life of Theodore of Sykeon 154 (I, p. 125).

⁶² ἀνήμερος ὕπατος: ibid. 142 (I, p. 111). Theodore saved Phokas’s nephew, Domnitziolos, from a Persian ambush, and prayed and predicted successfully that his wife would bear three children: ibid. 120 and 140 (I, pp. 96–7, 110–11); he healed Phokas himself of an illness, although was more equivocal when asked to pray for his regime (133 (I, pp. 105–6)); he prayed for, but also rebuked, Bonosos (142 (I, pp. 111–13)).

⁶³ On the strongly pro-imperial line of Eustratios’s version of the Life of Golindouch, see Dal Santo 2011b. George of Pisidia’s reworking of the Life of Anastasios has yet to receive a detailed study, but does seem to reflect Heraclian propaganda: it contains—unlike its Palestinian source—aggressive attacks on Khosrow II (see e.g. 5 (p. 209), 35 (p. 245)), a military-religious ethos (see e.g. 18 (pp. 225–7)), and a possible effort to associate the saint with the emperor through imagery (ibid. 45 (p. 255), 47 (p. 257)).

⁶⁴ On Justinian, see Neary 2017, p. 126; for the later sixth-century empire, see esp. A. M. Cameron 1979 and Dal Santo 2012, pp. 321–4.

⁶⁵ Life of Golindouch 24 (pp. 171–2). In terms of the dating of the text, the Life must have been written after 12 January 602, the death of Bishop Domitian of Melitene, but before the revolt of Phokas late in the same year (Peeters 1944, pp. 81, 91).

⁶⁶ On the text’s author, see Dagron 1978, pp. 13–16. On the Miracles as a whole, see also Johnson 2006b.

⁶⁷ On the emergence of miracle collections in this period, see e.g. A. M. Cameron 1991a, pp. 211–12.

⁶⁸ Both, of course, are generally concerned with cult promotion, but they also seem to respond to similar ideological currents and even, sometimes, particular debates: see Dal Santo 2012, pp. 149–236 (though he notes, rightly, that we must be cautious when drawing links between texts with very different backgrounds).

⁶⁹ Déroche, 2000, pp. 145–54; Dal Santo 2012, ch. 3.

⁷⁰ See above p. 114.

⁷¹ A view which I have argued against above p. 152.

⁷² For references to disasters, see Dal Santo 2012, pp. 214, 216, 324–5.

⁷³ Miracles of Cosmas and Damian 10 (pp. 117–21), 18 (pp. 144–9). In miracle 25 the saints also prove that a man’s wife has not been unfaithful to him, but this story still contains a healing (pp. 164–6).

⁷⁴ Miracles of Artemios 18 (pp. 114–20).

⁷⁵ See e.g. ibid. 34 (pp. 176–82). The late seventh- or early eighth-century Miracles of Therapon might seem to be an exception to this rule, since the work contains, near its beginning, an account of the saint’s relics being transferred from Cyprus to Constantinople to escape the second Arab attack on the island (Miracles 6–11 (pp. 123–6)); during this section the hagiographer does urge Therapon to protect the Christians from the barbarians (Miracles 10 (p. 125)). Yet once the author begins to recount the saint’s miracles, again he focuses exclusively on healing miracles of small numbers of people, seemingly unrelated to the context of invasion (Miracles 12–24 (pp. 126–32)).

⁷⁶ Not only is the focus in miracle collections always on the individual supplicant—we perceive the saint through their eyes—but stress is usually laid on the need for the supplicant to approach the saint properly and to fulfil certain preconditions for healing; indeed, in some collections the healing is even presented as a reward, repayment, or as the ‘fruit’, of the supplicants’ proper behaviour, as in Sophronios of Jerusalem’s Miracles of Cyrus and John 1.12 (p. 246, ‘μισθὸν εὐπρεπῆ’), 2.3 (p. 247, ‘καρπὸν’), 15.5 (pp. 273–4, ‘ἀντάλλαγμα’), 19.3 (pp. 279–80, ‘τιμὴ’), 39.9 (p. 338, ‘μισθὸν’), 46.2 (p. 351, ‘μισθὸν’). The dramatic tension in the miracle collection thus revolves around whether the supplicant can persuade the saint to help him or her, whereas in a saint’s Life, the crux of a healing story is the moment when the saint petitions God to help the supplicant. This is not an absolute difference, but one of emphasis (since, for example, in some saints’ Lives supplicants are not healed because of their sins), but it is nonetheless significant.

⁷⁷ The relationship between Christian and pagan healing accounts, and cultic rites, has been discussed extensively: for some recent treatments, from various angles, see Csepregi 2002; Stewart 2004; Csepregi 2012; Graf 2014. Festugière 1973 has also discussed parallels between Asclepian miracles and some of the miracles recounted in the Life of Symeon the Younger.

⁷⁸ Miracles of Thekla 4 (ed. p. 296; trans. pp. 19–21).

⁷⁹ Boero and Kuper 2020, pp. 402–3.

⁸⁰ For the first collection, this is the dating proposed by Lemerle 1979–81, II, pp. 40–4, 80, although he suggests that John may have drawn upon earlier records. Lemerle notes in particular that John refers to the reign of Phokas as ‘the reign after that of Maurice, he of τῆς εὐσεβοῦς λήξεως βασιλείας’ (Miracles of Demetrios, 82 (I, p. 112)), suggesting that this formula would make most sense under Heraclius. This seems suggestive but not definitive; nonetheless, a date during Heraclius’s reign is likely, given that the miracles recounted seem to take place in the reigns of Maurice and Phokas, while the author of the later collection notes in his preface that John had failed to record the miracles that took place during his own episcopate (ibid. 176 (I, pp. 168–9)), implying that it succeeded the events recounted. For the second collection, the anonymous author states that, when recounting the events of John’s episcopate, he was following in the footsteps of Zorobabel in writing about the captivity and return of the Jews seventy years after it took place, and Philon and Josephus in writing about events under Titus and Vespasian (ibid. 177 (I, p. 169)). Lemerle takes this to mean that he was writing approximately seventy years after John’s episcopate; this may be taking the reference too literally, but it certainly suggests a period of some decades between the texts: Lemerle 1979–81, II, pp. 83–4.

⁸¹ On the miracles of Demetrios, see Déroche 2000, pp. 145, 151–3; Dal Santo 2012, pp. 183–95.

⁸² ἀδυναμίας ἢ ἀσπλαγχνίας ἢ προσωποληψίας: Miracles of St Demetrios 40 (I, p. 79).

⁸³ Ibid. 166–75 (I, pp. 161–5).

⁸⁴ Déroche 2000, p. 145.

⁸⁵ ἄρα τίς ἀμφιβάλλοι μὴ θεϊκῆς ἐνεργείας εἶναι κατόρθωμα…τίς γὰρ νεκροὺς ἐγείρει; οὐχὶ μόνος θεός;…τοὺς οὖν τοιούτους μεταβαλεῖν εἰς ἀνδρείαν, τίνος, εἰ μὴ θεοῦ; Miracles of St Demetrios 143–4 (I, p. 151).

⁸⁶ ἀλλ’ ἴσως ἐρεῖς πόθεν δῆλον; τίς εἶδε θεόν; ἢ τίς ἤκουσεν αὐτοῦ τὴν σωτηρίαν ὑποσχομένου, ὅτι διαβεβαιοῦσαι τὴν πόλιν ὑετισθῆναι τῇ ἀγαθότητι; ibid. 142 (I, p. 150).

⁸⁷ ἀλλ’ ἐπεὶ τῶν πολλῶν ὁ νοῦς καὶ ἄλλων τινῶν γεγενημένων προτεθῆναι διήγησιν βούλεται, τῶν συστησόντων ὡς χεὶρ μόνη θεοῦ ταῖς τοῦ ἀθλοφόρου πρεσβείαις τηνικαῦτα τὴν πόλιν ἐξέσωσεν, οὐκ ἀποροῦμεν ὑμῶν τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν πληρῶσαι, μόνον αὐτοὶ θεοφιλὴ καὶ πιστὴν ἀκοὴν ἡμῖν ὑποσχεῖν προθυμήθητε: ibid. 145 (I, p. 151).

⁸⁸ Ibid. 164 (I, p. 158).

⁸⁹ τοῦ ἐχθροῦ ὑποβαλόντος ἐννοίας πονηράς: ibid. 149 (p. 153).

⁹⁰ See above pp. 151–2.

⁹¹ Barsanouphios and John of Gaza, Letter 569 (II.II, p. 732, trans. II, p. 146).