HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor 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.
134 THOMAS J. HEFFERNANAlthough Christians had earlier fled to the desert to escape persecution,the movement to the wilderness was greater after Constantinethan before. The rise of monasticism is a complex phenomenon thatappears to have benefited from a number of factors—contemporarydisenchantment with the very success of the Church, earlier influentialbiblical models that promoted communal life, and possibly the prestigeof groups such as the Pythagoreans. For some, monasticism representedan alternative to the union of Church and State, a unionthat did not provide an apt model of the Christian life. For theseindividuals, the new Christian Empire lacked rigor; it turned its backon those who proclaimed the ‘name’ and died for the faith. Theywere ever mindful of Tertullian’s ringing comment “Quid AthenaeHierosolymis?”. In his prologue to the Life of St. Malchus St. Jeromeremarks “. . . [how the church] was crowned with martyrdoms, and,after it came into the hands of Christian emperors, how it becamegreater in power and riches indeed, but meaner in virtue”. 47 Theemergence and triumph of the ideology of these ascetic monasticswas an acknowledgement that suffering still held a central place inthe Christian imagination.The spirit of martyrdom was reborn in Athanasius’s Life of St.Anthony. 48 While Anthony’s life depicts the life of the ideal Christianmonk, the ancient ideal of suffering remains vigorous, as Anthony isrepeatedly referred to as a martyr. The figure of Anthony is indebtedto both Old and New Testaments, to depictions of Moses and Christ,and to images of the philosophical sage, e.g., Philostratus’s biographyof Apollonius of Tyana, Iamblichus’s study of Pythagoras, andPorphyry’s life of Plotinus. Unlike the earlier narratives of the martyrs,this new direction in a saint’s biography chronicles, albeit selectively,the deeds of Anthony’s life from birth to death. The entirefabric of his life—and by extension that of all Christians—bears testimonyto his witness. The life opens with a prologue urging thereader to admire Anthony and emulate his resolve. His conversionis presented as a literal imitation of Christ’s injunction to leave materialthings and follow him. Anthony’s asceticism is the new heroism.The monk is not a miracle worker but a “daily martyr to his con-47Jerome, “Life of Malchus”, in Early Christian Biographies, trans. M. L. Ewald, ed.R. J. Deferrari, in The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1964), 283–97, at 287.48Barnes (1993), 240 n. 64; but see Anatolios (1998), 166.
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134 THOMAS J. HEFFERNANAlthough Christians had earlier fled to the desert to escape persecution,the movement to the wilderness was greater after Constantinethan before. The rise of monasticism is a complex phenomenon thatappears to have benefited from a number of factors—contemporarydisenchantment with the very success of the Church, earlier influentialbiblical models that promoted communal life, and possibly the prestigeof groups such as the Pythagoreans. For some, monasticism representedan alternative to the union of Church and State, a unionthat did not provide an apt model of the Christian life. For theseindividuals, the new Christian Empire lacked rigor; it turned its backon those who proclaimed the ‘name’ and died for the faith. Theywere ever mindful of Tertullian’s ringing comment “Quid AthenaeHierosolymis?”. In his prologue to the Life of St. Malchus St. Jeromeremarks “. . . [how the church] was crowned with martyrdoms, and,after it came into the hands of Christian emperors, how it becamegreater in power and riches indeed, but meaner in virtue”. 47 Theemergence and triumph of the ideology of these ascetic monasticswas an acknowledgement that suffering still held a central place inthe Christian imagination.The spirit of martyrdom was reborn in Athanasius’s Life of St.Anthony. 48 While Anthony’s life depicts the life of the ideal Christianmonk, the ancient ideal of suffering remains vigorous, as Anthony isrepeatedly referred to as a martyr. The figure of Anthony is indebtedto both Old and New Testaments, to depictions of Moses and Christ,and to images of the philosophical sage, e.g., Philostratus’s biographyof Apollonius of Tyana, Iamblichus’s study of Pythagoras, andPorphyry’s life of Plotinus. Unlike the earlier narratives of the martyrs,this new direction in a saint’s biography chronicles, albeit selectively,the deeds of Anthony’s life from birth to death. The entirefabric of his life—and by extension that of all Christians—bears testimonyto his witness. The life opens with a prologue urging thereader to admire Anthony and emulate his resolve. His conversionis presented as a literal imitation of Christ’s injunction to leave materialthings and follow him. Anthony’s asceticism is the new heroism.The monk is not a miracle worker but a “daily martyr to his con-47Jerome, “Life of Malchus”, in Early Christian Biographies, trans. M. L. Ewald, ed.R. J. Deferrari, in The Fathers of the Church (Washington, 1964), 283–97, at 287.48Barnes (1993), 240 n. 64; but see Anatolios (1998), 166.