Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
with visions of the eucharistic celebration;141 he composes liturgical troparia;142 and his ascetic practice is defined in the constant performance of the monastic office.143 Most striking, perhaps, is a notice that places the stylite at the heart of liturgical life:144
When Pentecost arrived and the synaxis had been completed, [Symeon] commanded the approaching crowds to be dismissed, and on the following Sunday, after the morning hymns, he commanded the brothers to close the gates of the monastery and to come together to him. And as he spread incense he ordered everyone to perform genuflections and then did so himself. He threw himself upon his face and in tears prayed for one hour along with them, and at the end of the prayer everyone said Amēn, and he told them to remove his leather cowl. In prayer he forgave them for their ignorance concerning every quarrel, speaking to them that Gospel saying. [There follows a brief sermon]. And when he had said these and many other things that turned and led them on the way to the eternal life, he entrusted them to the Lord, and having pronounced the Lord’s prayer that lies in the Gospel of John on behalf of his disciples, he placed his hands upon them and blessed them all. He spoke a universal prayer for the world and for the men who hate us in vain. [There follows another brief sermon]. And when he had prayed thus he gave himself to those outside the sanctuary’s railing, and receiving him they set him upon an empty throne and lifted unto his chest the holy Gospels, and as he went around he spoke a prayer in every place within the monastery and in the guardhouse. With great prudence the truly holy Martha, his mother according to the flesh, took the honorable and life-giving Cross and processed before him singing, “Save us, Son of God, who was crucified for us. Lord, glory to you, hallelujah!” And so the brothers raised the slave of God in their own hands like a holy vessel [hōs skeuos hagion], and singing hymns to God they bore him into the holy church of God that had been built by him. They prostrated themselves before him and asked that he recommend them to the Lord, and led him up both in peace and with hymns and installed him on his holy column.
In an important but perhaps neglected article on the hagiographies of Symeon and his synonymous predecessor, Susan Ashbrook Harvey has noted the “extraordinary emphasis on the integration of the stylite’s ascetic practice into the liturgical life of the worshipping community, both monastic and civic.” Pointing to the rituals of prostration, prayer, and psalmody through which these stylites are said to have practiced their labors, and through which their supplicants are said to have approached them, Harvey argues that the “stylite’s defining ritual context” was not a “ritualized activity [an individual ascetic practice]”—as in Peter Brown’s classic interpretation—but the “eucharistic liturgy of the gathered body of the church, the collective presentation of the Christian salvation drama.”145 In these texts, Harvey suggests, the ascetic endeavors of the individual stylite are brought within, and made relevant through, the communal ritual contexts in which they are practiced.
In the Life of Symeon the Younger, the remarkable emphasis on the ascetic’s ecclesiastical, sacramental, and liturgical context in part represents, no doubt, its hero’s actual sacerdotal status.146 But placed next to the Life of Daniel the Stylite and the Lives of Cyril of Scythopolis—whose subjects are also all priests, but where the liturgical aspect is far less developed—that emphasis appears also to indicate the hagiographer’s desire to underline his hero’s orientation around, and integration within, liturgical structures. In a context of ascetic redefinition, in which the models of the pioneering generation more and more proved discordant with the ideological constraints that beset ascetics both from outside and from within, these post-Chalcedonian authors presented their heroes as an integral part of a far wider worshipping community. But for the author or authors of the Life of Symeon the Younger, that same project involved a far more pervasive assertion of the stylite’s ecclesial credentials and, in particular, the placement of his ascetic practices within a distinct liturgical context. Thereby (in the memorable words of Harvey) “liturgy transfigured the ascetic body of the stylite into the ecclesial body of the church,” reconciling “the poles of charismatic and institutional authority” and presenting “a ritual practice dependent upon mutually inclusive ascetic and liturgical meanings.”147
The elaboration of this more sacramentalized, more liturgified vision of the ascetic life occurs also within another, interrelated context: less, however, in relation to tensions over the boundaries of the clerical and monastic vocations, and more in relation to tensions over doctrine and the formation of schismatic communities. The canonical reinforcement of a normative paradigm of ascetic practice had, of course, been marginal to Chalcedon’s actual purpose, which had been a decisive intervention in the doctrinal dissent concerning Christ’s “one” nature or “two” natures. The Chalcedonian definition, however, failed to convince large numbers of clerics and monks, and led to the gradual formation of distinct, anti-Chalcedonian communities committed to a “one nature” Christological confession. In the post-Chalcedonian period, hagiographers within those same communities—confronted with a swathe of Chalcedonian bishops and oscillating if not oppositional imperial opinion—began to elevate the eucharist within the texts that celebrated their ascetic heroes, placing the sacrament and its rites at the center of new religious identities and shifting the orientation of their communities from the pious Christian emperor and his empire to the pious, “true” Church, the rites of which remained unsullied despite alienation from the secular authorities.
A wonderful example is provided in the Plerophoriae of John Rufus, a collection of anti-Chalcedonian vignettes composed in Palestine about 515.148 Rufus was a priest at Antioch who broke communion after the second deposition of the anti-Chalcedonian Peter the Fuller, and thence traveled to Palestine, where he entered the ascetic circle of Peter the Iberian (whose Life he also composed), later, perhaps, becoming bishop of Maiuma.149 Within the Plerophoriae we find a plethora of stories concerning the eucharist and its rites, in striking contrast to the relative minimalism of earlier hagiographic collections. The change of tone reflects a change of circumstance. For Rufus, the differentiation between efficacious and nonefficacious, true and false, eucharists is the ultimate dividing line between anti- Chalcedonian and Chalcedonian, true and false, doctrines. Frequent visions or miracles associated with the eucharist therefore serve to establish the righteousness of the anti-Chalcedonian position; while communion serves as the ultimate statement of membership within the orthodox group.150
The Chalcedonian eucharist is therefore presented as polluted; its anti-Chalcedonian equivalent, as exalted. Rufus relates, for example, how a woman at Alexandria once hesitated to commune after the circulation of the so-called counterencyclical (that is, the proclamation of the emperor Basiliscus that withdrew his previous support for the anti-Chalcedonians). Then in a vision she perceived a great church with two altars: one grand but somber, with a Chalcedonian bishop celebrating the eucharist; and the other small but ordained in gold and gems, where a small child (the Savior) was offering the sacrifice and proclaiming, “Receive communion at this altar.”151 Chalcedonian bishops are here presented as dishonoring the host or unable to transform it: thus in one tale Timothy of Alexandria relates how, at the time of Chalcedon, he had a vision in which he approached the altar to receive communion and discovered the bread to be stale, a portent that presaged “the abandonment of God’s grace from the churches”; in another Zachariah of Maiuma had a vision in which he perceived himself in a Chalcedonian church at Beirut and saw the priests offering the cup but treating it as miserable; while in one more, also situated at the moment of the circulation of the counterencyclical, one Abba John has a vision in which he perceives the altar of the Church to have been stripped and the eucharistic elements scattered on the floor.152
It is therefore unsurprising that Rufus throughout the collection rails against indiscriminate participation in the Chalcedonian eucharist. We read of a monk, Constantine, who at the time of Chalcedon was unsure whether to commune at the shrine of Saint John the Baptist at Sebaste, and thus to become an apostate; the saint himself then appears and warns the monk not to abandon the Church and not to lose his soul—“For,” John proclaims, “everywhere you go I will be with you.”153 In the subsequent notice, another monk, Zosimus, goes from Sinai to Jerusalem and en route rests at the shrine of Jacob near Bethel; he is reassured that taking communion there is not a problem, but once again the saint appears,