HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHRISTIAN BIOGRAPHY: FOUNDATION TO MATURITY 133and death but, instead, celebrated individuals who best embodiedthe presence of God in their daily lives. Although the emphasis onliving for Christ rather than dying ideally enfranchised all walks oflife, the emerging popularity of the radical renunciate—who lived atype of living death—was the first to dominate the new paradigm.The new players in the pages of Christian biography are asceticmonks and monastic women. The origin of asceticism as a whollyChristian idea has been exaggerated. Abstinence was widely practicedin the Greco-Roman world. Sexual activity was believed bysome to be a disease, an internal burning of the vital spirit. Stoics,like Zeno or Seneca, went one step further and extended the metaphorof disease to the sexual desire itself. Self-control and well-being, eudaimonia,meant a rejection of desire, epithymia. While Christians suchas Tatian, Marcion, and Irenaeus supported a severe encraticism,many non-Christian contemporaries also approved of their efforts.However, there was a profound philosophic difference between theirideologies of abstinence. The Christian ideal of abstinence is bestexemplified in Paul’s understanding that Christians cannot achievea stoic-like self-sufficiency (hikanoi) since they are in all things dependenton God; our truest self is realized not in the achievement ofself-control over body and mind but in a union with God made possibleby grace (2 Cor. 3:5–6).Men like Anthony of Egypt, who lived lives of exoticized renunciation—practicingmorbid fasting, not bathing, and going about halfnaked—wereseeking not simply self-sufficiency and eudaimonia but,further, a greater intimacy with God on whom their every actiondepended. They became powerful intermediaries of the sacred, inPeter Brown’s phrase “arbiter[s] of the holy”. 45 The lives of thewomen, in contrast, like Macrina—known to us only through maleauthorship—depict women as domesticators of asceticism. Althoughdwelling in a social community, they nonetheless transformed conventionalmores. Gregory of Nyssa says that his sister Macrina “putherself on the level with the many by entering into a common lifewith her maids, making them her sisters and equals rather than herslaves and underlings”. 46 Despite the differing social contexts of theirrenunciation, these men and women were equally charismatic leaders.Like the martyrs, they rejected the world and all it represents.45Brown (1995), 60.46Petroff (1986), 79.