The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity

To study the position of the holy man in Late Roman society is to risk telling in one's own words a story that has often been excellently told before. In vivid essays, Norman Baynes has brought the lives of the saints to the attention of the social and religious historian of Late Antiquity. The patient work of the Bollandists has increased and clarified a substantial dossier of authentic narratives. These lives have provided the social historian with most of what he knows of the life of the average man in the Eastern Empire. They illuminate the variety and interaction of the local cultures of the Near East. The holy men themselves have been carefully studied, both as figures in the great Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries, and as the arbiters of the distinctive traditions of Byzantine piety and ascetic theology. The intention of this paper is to follow well known paths of scholarship on all these topics, while asking two basic questions: why did the holy man come to play such an important rôle in the society, of the fifth and sixth centuries ? What light do his activities throw on the values and functioning of a society that was prepared to concede him such importance? It is as well to ask such elementary questions. For there is a danger that the holy man may be taken for granted as part of the Byzantine scene. Most explanations of his position are deceptively easy.