The Place of Holy and Unholy Bishops in Byzantine Hagiographical Narrative (Eighth-Twelfth...

Bibliotheca Hagiotheca ∙ Series Colloquia

II

Saintly Bishops and Bishops’ Saints:

Proceedings of the 3rd

Hagiography Conference organized by Croatian Hagiography Society

'Hagiotheca' and International Hagiography Society, Poreč, 27-30 May 2010

Edited by John S. Ott and Trpimir Vedriš

Copy-editing: Marina Miladinov

Bibliotheca Hagiotheca ∙ Series Colloquia, vol. 2.

Series editors: Ana Marinković and Trpimir Vedriš

First published 2012

Croatian Hagiography Society 'Hagiotheca', Vrbanićeva 6, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia

Humaniora d.o.o., Rakovčeva 19, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia

Copyright © 2012 by the publisher and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 978-953-56205-1-8

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National and University Library in

Zagreb under number 815948.

Saintly Bishops and Bishops’ Saints

edited by

John S. Ott

and

Trpimir Vedriš

h HAGIOTHECA ∙ HUMANIORA

ZAGREB

2012

Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Abbreviations v

Introduction

Between Heaven and Earth: Saintly Bishops and

Bishops’ Saints

John S. Ott vii

Papers

1. Shifting Identities: From a Roman Matron to Matrona

Dei in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis

Thomas J. Heffernan 1

2. Martyr Bishops and the Bishop’s Martyrs in Fourth-

Century Rome

Marianne Sághy 13

3. Public Displays of Asceticism: Holy Bishops and the

Conversion of Gaul in the Vita Sancti Martini

John Marcus Beard 31

4. A Self-Made Living Saint? Authority and the Two

Families of Theodoret of Cyrrhus

Ville Vuolanto 49

5. Putria tecta, the Bishop and His Martyr: Mutual

Patronage and Configuration of Power in Byzantine

Istria

Marina Miladinov 67

6. Benedict, Father of Monks, in the Chronicle of Mellitus,

Bishop of London

Luciana Cuppo 87

7. Where He Is, Thither Will the Eagles Be Gathered Together:

The Metropolitan Status of the Bishop of Spalato from

the Decline of Salona until the Councils of Spalato in

925 and 928

Vadim Prozorov 103

8. The Businessman Saint: Bishop Æthelwold in the Liber

Eliensis

Rachel S. Anderson 123

9. In the Apse or in Between: The Benedictional of

Engilmar and Traditions of Episcopal Patronage in the

Apse at Poreč

Evan A. Gatti 137

10. The Place of Holy and Unholy Bishops in Byzantine

Hagiographic Narrative (Eighth-Twelfth Centuries)

Stephanos Efthymiadis 169

11. No Way to Salvation for German Bishops? The Case of

St. Engelbert of Cologne

Victoria Smirnova 183

12. Episcopal Authority and Disputed Sanctity in Late

Medieval Italy

Janine Peterson 201

13. Bishops Fighting with Demons in Swedish Canonization

Processes

Sari Katajala-Peltomaa 217

14. Popular Images of Saintly Bishops in Late Medieval

England

Sherry L. Reames 235

15. The Pastor Bonus: Saint Stanislaus of Cracow in Sermons

and Bishop-Saints as Exemplars in the Late Middle Ages

Stanislava Kuzmová 253

Contributors 275

Acknowledgements

This volume arose from the conference held in Poreč (Croatia) in May 2010.

The conference was co-organized by the Croatian Hagiography Society

‘Hagiotheca’ and the International Hagiography Society, and financially supported

by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia.

Remembering the event, we are grateful to all the organizers, participants,

and guests who made the conference successful and enjoyable. The list of

those to whom we are particularly indebted opens with thanks to Sherry

Reames and Ana Marinković as the “first ladies” of our two societies, whose

contacts and initiative put the conference in motion. We hope that they will

also enjoy this volume as the fruit of their own labor. Further thanks are due

to the members of our common Organisational Board, who had the

unrewarding task of choosing the contributions from the great number of

proposals we received. We would like to express our special gratitude to the

Bishopric of Poreč and Pula and to thank personally His Excellency, The

Right Reverend Bishop Monsignor Ivan Milovan, for making the conference

possible in the unique space of the Episcopal complex of Poreč. This and

many other details which gave the conference its special flavor would be

missing without the enthusiasm and help of Ivan Matejčić, to whom we

express our warmest gratitude. We are further thankful to Mirko Sardelić and

others who helped us with the conference organisation.

When it comes to the volume production, we are (once again)

indebted to Gábor Klaniczay and Neven Budak for having financially

supported the publication of this volume through their respective projects:

EuroCORECODE ESF-OTKA project Symbols that Bind and Break

Communities: Saints’ Cults and Stimuli and Expressions of Local, Regional, National

and Universalist Identities and Monumenta Medievalia Varia, a project of the

Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia. Further

thanks are due to the reviewers, who generously invested their time and

efforts in reading the articles and suggesting possible improvements. We are

grateful to Ivan Landeka (and his Print4U) for his unfailing technical and

human support, which made the task of preparing the final version of the

publication manuscript so much easier. The editors would, finally, like to

acknowledge the collaborative and friendly spirit with which they compiled,

edited, and produced this collection of essays.

Zagreb, September 19, 2012

On the feast day of Remigius of Rheims

Abbreviations

Apart from the following, most frequently used titles, all works are cited in

full at the first reference and subsequently in short-title form in each paper.

Well-known sources (such as the Bible or the Church Fathers) are cited in

their commonly accepted abbreviated forms. Other, more specific

abbreviations (used by a single author), are given in the footnotes of the

particular text.

AASS Acta Sanctorum, Antwerp – Brussels.

AB Analecta Bollandiana, Brussels.

BHG Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, Brussels.

BHL Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, Brussels.

CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout.

CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna.

MGH AA Monumenta Germaniae Historica Auctores Antiquissimi, Berlin.

MGH EP Monumenta Germaniae Historica Epistolae, Berlin.

MGH SS Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores, Hanover.

MGH SRM Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores rerum

Merovingicarum, Hanover.

PG Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Graeca, Paris.

PL Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, Paris.

THE PLACE OF HOLY AND UNHOLY BISHOPS IN

BYZANTINE HAGIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE

(EIGHTH-TWELFTH CENTURIES)

Stephanos Efthymiadis

Today hardly anyone who views the iconography of an Orthodox parish

church can be surprised by the thematic orientation and hierarchy of its

frescoes and icons. Scenes taken from Christ’s life as narrated in the

Gospels take precedence in size and location over episodes from the life of

the Virgin Mary, or the figures of the evangelists, apostles, and Old

Testament prophets. When it comes to the saints, the distribution looks

equally fair: martyrs, male and female, prevail over the Church Fathers,

monks, patriarchs, emperors, and bishops.

By and large, a similar proportion is found among the saints

registered in the thick volume of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca.

Passiones, Miracula, and Enkomia celebrating the early Christian martyrs by

far outnumber the vitae and Enkomia of later saints, whether these were

monks, patriarchs, or bishops. This impression does not rest solely on late

antique textual evidence, when the stories and cults of the martyrs were

still recent, but derives from a diachronic and panoramic view of Byzantine

hagiography. As a matter of fact, more than any kind of saint, early

Christian martyrs did not cease to inspire hagiographers from medieval

Byzantium and after, whether those authors were simple anonymous

monks or among the finest pens of Byzantine letters. Along with the

Church Fathers, martyrs – some of whom, we should not forget, were

bishops – were regarded as the perennial defenders of faith, thereby

deserving to be celebrated on different occasions and praised by orators and

learned writers.1

1 There are well over fifty saintly bishops among the martyrs commemorated in the

liturgical calendar of Constantinople. See Vera von Falkenhausen, “Bishops,” in The

Byzantines, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 173. For

the priority that Byzantine hagiography assigned to martyrs and Church Fathers, see

Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Two Gregories and Three Genres: Autobiography,

Autohagiography and Hagiography,” in Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed.

Jostein Bjørtnes and Tomas Hägg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 239-

240 [repr. in idem, Hagiography in Byzantium: Literature, Social History and Cult (Farnham,

Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), x].

170 Stephanos Efthymiadis

If Byzantine hagiography privileged martyrs throughout its long

history, this was not the case with other kinds of holy men and women,

for, in terms of the selection of saints, a clear-cut dichotomy (or

discontinuity) marks the Byzantine millennium, not to say the concept of

sainthood itself. Along with the crisis of urban culture in the mid-seventh

century and the ensuing shifts in the economic and social spheres,

sainthood came close to being totally identified with the ascetic and

monastic ideals of life. The disintegration of urban centers, which mostly

came about as a result of Persian and Arab expansion in the East, as well as

Avar, Bulgarian, and Slavic invasions in the Balkans, led to the devaluation

of local, decentralized authority. Thus, episcopal power in cities and towns

in lands that were still included in the empire’s orbit dwindled. Bishops

may not have been totally divested of the authority which they had

enjoyed and the “overtones of secular power” which they were associated

with in Late Antiquity, yet they could no longer compete on equal terms

with the holy prestige of the monastic abbot or the anchorite.2

The

imposing representation of the bishop-patron that we admire today on the

mosaics of the cathedral of Eufrasius at Parentium/Poreč was not

reproduced in any medieval Byzantine church.3

What we find instead is

the portrait of a secular donor-patron or that of a monastic abbot.

Not only with the hindsight of modern historians who study

eighth-century Byzantine society, but also in the eyes of the ninth-century

authors themselves, the iconoclastic controversy came about, among other

things, as a reaction to the rising power of monks in Byzantine society.

What is more, in the interim period between the First and the Second

Iconoclasm (787-815), this opposition was projected within the iconophile

camp as the monks of Stoudios in Constantinople resisted the lenient

policy of the patriarch Tarasios (784-806) and his successor Nikephoros

(806-815) regarding a number of ecclesiastical matters. A clear opposition

2 For a survey of the bishop’s authority in Late Antiquity, see Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in

Late Antiquity. The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2005). For the ensuing period see Benjamin Moulet, Evêques, pouvoir et

société à Byzance (VIIIe-XI

e siècle). Territoires, communautés et individus dans la société provinciale

byzantine (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011).

3 The most recent studies in English and German on Eufrasius’ cathedral include Ann

Bennett Terry and Henry Maguire, Dynamic Splendor: The Wall Mosaics in the Cathedral of

Eufrasius at Poreč, 2 vols. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007);

Yiannis Theocharis, “Die Darstellung des kleinen Eufrasius in der Basilika von Poreč,”

Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 58 (2008): 209-216; and Rainer Warland, “Der

Knabe im Apsismosaik der Basilika Eufrasiana in Poreč und die visuelle Repräsentation

frühbyzantinischer Bischöfe,” Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 60 (2010): 173-179.

The Place of Holy and Unholy 171

between what has been termed secular and monastic clergy divided the

Byzantine Church until at least the first decades of the tenth century.4

All in all, the rise and imposition of monastic power in society

typified much of Byzantine culture in the period from the eighth through

the tenth century and had its impact on proclaiming new saints.

Calculations have shown that from a total of ninety saints dating from this

and the ensuing period of the eleventh to the fifteenth century, and about

whom a work of hagiography survives, only fifteen were bishops,

presbyters, or laymen, all the remainder being monks or nuns.5

Four of

these bishops were occupants of episcopal sees in Asia Minor and another

five or six were active in towns of Greece, Bulgaria, southern Italy, and

Cyprus. Interestingly, this quantitative imbalance between monks and

other types of saints was not confined to the identity of the hagiographic

hero, but was also a question of focus in the hagiographical narrative itself.

If one compares the textual passages referring to a saintly bishop’s urban

activity to the space accorded to a saintly bishop’s ascetic feats and to his

life in isolation, the change is felt as qualitative too. In other words, in the

Life of a saintly bishop references to his episcopal career are brief, often

vague, and insignificant, whereas episodes and anecdotes drawn from his

“monastic experiences” are rich in detail and extensive. By the same token,

the biographers of monastic saints were reluctant to mention even the

existence of local bishops, let alone their jurisdiction over the local

monasteries where those saints were active.6

This is in marked contrast to the lively picture of cities recorded in

late antique hagiography.7

As may be inferred from a fair number of texts,

the episcopate was considered the culmination of years lived in ascetic

isolation, yet hagiographers provided their listeners/readers with many

highlights from the activity of holy bishops as patrons, wonderworkers,

and city benefactors.8

By contrast, their medieval counterparts tend to

represent urban space in the abstract terms of a writer who is relying more

on clichés and literary reminiscences than on his personal experience and/or

concrete information provided by others.

4 This rivalry between influential monasteries and the patriarchate was first discussed by

Ernst von Dobschütz, “Methodius und die Studiten,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 18 (1909): 41-

105.

5 See Peter Charanis, “The Monk as an Element of Byzantine Society,” Dumbarton Oaks

Papers 25 (1971): 63ff.

6 See Rosemary Morris, Monks and Laymen in Byzantium, 843-1118 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), 149-153.

7 On this picture see Helen G. Saradi, The Byzantine City in the Sixth Century. Literary Images

and Historical Reality (Athens: Society of Messenian Archeological Studies 2006), 102-117.

8 Recapitulation of the power and authority assumed by bishops in Late Antiquity, with

references to previous bibliography, in ibid., 181-185; and Rapp, Holy Bishops, 6-16.


In sum, in many respects medieval Byzantine hagiography severed

its connection with the late antique literary types of the holy bishops and,

what is more, sometimes reserved an utterly negative portrait for them. As

the holy monk now lived in proximity to the world or even within it – the

Egyptian and Judean deserts were no longer part of Byzantine territory –

the bishop assumed the role of an opponent, usually disputing the

protagonist’s saintly identity. A typical example is St. Peter of Atroa (d.

837), whose healing activity was met with scepticism and animosity on the

part of bishops. In his Life, the latter are said to suspect him of sorcery and

of being a servant of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. In the same vita,

Peter meets an ascetic by the name of James, who was a former bishop of

Anchialos, a town in modern Bulgaria, and who abandoned his see and

retreated to Mount Olympos in Bithynia “because he was extremely fond

of God and the anchorite’s life.” Clearly, as Peter’s biographer, the monk

Sabas, would have it, the ascetic life by far wins out over the episcopacy.9

Though a rarity, however, the holy men who in medieval

Byzantium were consecrated bishops, remaining in office for a shorter or

longer period, deserve particular attention. Their hagiography is worth

surveying especially because it exemplifies continuities and discontinuities

in the figure of the medieval holy man, is indicative of anti-monastic and

centrifugal tendencies, and points to a spirit of secularization which,

among other things, opposed the recognition of new saints. We should

always bear in mind that, when read between the lines and placed in a

historical context, hagiography may be regarded as representing the

dissident or the sceptic’s voice, and it is in this light that the Lives of saints

and other texts falling into this period will be read in the following

paragraphs.

Taking texts in chronological order and standing at the starting

point, i.e. the verge of the eighth century, one hardly gets the impression

that interest in bishops died out with the coming of the Middle Byzantine

period. The picture of the holy man as urban patron is amply attested in

the Life of an eighth-century bishop, George of Amastris (BHG 668), a

maritime town in Paphlagonia, in northern Asia Minor. In essence,

George’s story reads as that of any late antique bishop. After a period of

solitary life, he left his homeland for Constantinople, where he became

noticed and ready for a promising career in the world of ecclesiastical

officialdom. Not long afterwards, however, he was called back to local

9 See Vitalien Laurent, ed., La vie merveilleuse de saint Pierre d’Atroa (+837) (Brussels: Société

des Bollandistes, 1956), 145 and 193. On the resigned bishop James, who appears in other

sources too, see Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Notes on the correspondence of Theodore the

Stoudite,” Revue des études byzantines 53 (1995): 146-148.


service by his fellow countrymen, who had nominated him as the successor

to the deceased bishop of their hometown. Despite the fact that this met

with the emperor’s opposition as well as the reaction of the metropolitan of

Gangra, a town located nearby, in ca. 790 George was elected bishop of

Amastris. Responding to the confidence he had inspired in the local

population, George developed an activity ante mortem encouraging his

people during attacks by the Arabs, as well as post mortem, when his town

fell victim to an onslaught of Rus’, a “barbarian” race which, as the

hagiographer has it, reminded one of the Tauroscythians of Euripides. In a

similar vein, the saint acted as the city’s patron in the case of several

merchants who were wrongly accused of public crimes in Trebizond in the

Pontos and condemned to death. Despite the reaction of the local officer,

the merchants were acquitted following George’s personal intervention. In

a sense, as a bishop George acquired the function of the medieval holy

man, who was to provide mental and spiritual support to a flock exposed

to raiders and looters.10

To be sure, on account of its large number of late antique

reminiscences, this vita was out of step with the subsequent literary history

of Byzantine hagiography. This biography of a rather provincial saint –

whose reputation did not spread far – never found its equal in the rich

hagiographic output that marked the Age of Iconoclasm and the ensuing

period.11

It may not be accidental that this vita, written in the first half of

the ninth century, raised the suspicion of having pro-iconoclastic

sympathies, or at least passing over in silence the debate regarding the

practice of icon-worship.12

As a matter of fact, the text unfolds on neutral

ground and is reticent on the issues of the controversy, unless it can be

further argued that the choice of a local bishop as the main hero was not

without a cause. Opposition to icon-worship definitely involved an open

clash with the increasing influence of monks in society, while the selection

of a bishop as its saintly hero and the writing of his sacred biography in a

traditional fashion, i.e., with his episcopal activity in focus, may suggest a

depreciation of monasticism.

10

For these episodes, see Vasilij Grigorevic, ed., Vasil’evskij, “Žitija sv. Georgija

Amastridskago,” Russko-Vizantijskija izsledovanija 2 (1893): 37-41 (Arabs); 42-47 (Rus’),

and 64-68 (Trebizond). Reprinted also in idem, Trudy III/1 (St Petersburg, 1915).

11 On the hagiography of this period see now Stephanos Efthymiadis, “Hagiography from

the ‘Dark Age’ to the Age of Symeon Metaphrastes (Eighth-Tenth Centuries),” in The

Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, Volume I: Periods and Places, ed.

Stephanos Efthymiadis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate 2011), 96–142.

12 As pointed out by Ihor Ševčenko, “Hagiography of the Iconoclast Period,” in Iconoclasm,

ed. Anthony Bryer and Judith Herrin (Birmingham: Centre for Byzantine Studies, 1977),

121-125 [= idem, Ideology, Letters and Culture in the Byzantine World (London: Variorum

Reprints, 1982), v].


As already hinted at, monks constituted the overwhelming

majority of heroes in the iconophile hagiography produced from the first

half of the ninth century onwards. Leaving aside the patriarchs and

empresses who gave their support to the iconophile cause and were

sanctified on this account, it was the monks who were hailed as the

confessors of the true faith, i.e., the victims of imperial persecution who

endured flogging, imprisonment, and exile. A prominent example of such a

monk and martyr is St. Stephen the Younger, who suffered persecution

and martyrdom in Constantinople during the reign of the “loathsome”

emperor Constantine V (741-775). His long Life was produced in the first

decade of the ninth century and was to find wide acclaim, judging from the

large number of manuscripts in which it has been preserved.13

This

triumph of monasticism is more than visible in the hagiographical and

other writing that was produced before and after 843. The official

restoration of the veneration of icons and the so-called triumph of

Orthodoxy, proclaimed in that year, meant in fact an accreditation of the

influential role of monks in the Byzantine state and Church politics. In the

so-called Synodikon of Orthodoxy, a liturgical document which was first

circulated after the Restoration of Orthodoxy in 843 and gave a list of holy

men who were deemed worthy of eternal commemoration for their

opposition to the iconoclastic policy of Byzantine emperors, the names of

monk-saints who opposed the imperial policy appeared after those of the

saintly bishops.14

Lives of saints and other documents underline the emergence of

what has been called the “monasterization” of sanctity,15

which, in many

respects, accompanied a declining interest in holy bishops in general and,

in the few cases in which the central hero was the holy bishop, a minimal

attention by the hagiographer to his episcopate. If these bishops were

deeply involved in the iconophile cause and later regarded as confessors,

this stance of the hagiographer may find a fair explanation; for, by and

large, the emphasis had to be laid on his struggle against heresy and

violence. As a matter of fact, in this age bishops outrivaled monks in terms

13

At least nineteen were used for the edition by Marie-France Auzépy, La Vie d’Etienne le

Jeune par Etienne le Diacre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 43-60.

14 See Jean Gouillard, “Le Synodikon d’Οrthodoxie. Édition et commentaire,” Travaux et

mémoires 2 (1967): 53.

15 The term was launched by Rosemary Morris, “The Political Saint of the Eleventh

Century,” in The Byzantine Saint, ed. Sergei Hackel (London: Fellowship of St Alban and St

Sergius, 1981), 50. See also Evelyne Patlagean, “Sainteté et pouvoir,” in ibid., 98, who

underscores “la supériorité du monachisme sur l’épiscopat.” On the monastic revival which

came about in the ninth century see Alexander P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein,

Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1985), 11-14.


of their resistance to imperial policy.16

A good example is provided by

Theophylaktos, bishop of Nicomedia, an iconophile clergyman celebrated

in two extant but rather unnoteworthy vitae. In the earlier vita only a few

words are said about the years of his episcopate, focusing on his work as a

social benefactor who cared for the needy and the poor. More space is

allotted to the saint’s deposition and summoning to a trial in

Constantinople when the Second Iconoclasm broke out in 815.17

In the

later vita, more rhetorical than the first, the dialogue which the saint had

with the “tyrant” iconoclast Emperor Leo V is amplified and an interesting

detail is added. While a bishop, Theophylaktos had schools built and

instructors appointed so that the boys of Nicomedia could achieve

eloquence and drop their “barbaric tongue.”18

Providing his flock with

good schooling was an initiative befitting a good prelate.

Unlike their late antique predecessors, bishops in the Middle

Byzantine period were appointees of the patriarchate or the imperial palace

and, as men of social standing, were natives of or educated in the

Byzantine capital. Episcopal careers were reserved for men of learning, or,

differently put, men of learning would expect an ecclesiastical rather than

administrative career.19

Although it is hard to determine how many among

them were absentees or, in fact, titular bishops, it is plausible to assume

that the less distant sees from Constantinople were always the most

sought-after. At any rate, the functional, sentimental, and other bonds

which used to keep bishops very tightly attached to their own sees in Late

Antiquity had now dramatically loosened. Moreover, crises such as

iconoclasm and the division between the followers of Patriarch Ignatios

and the partisans of his successor Photios suffice to show that the whole

body of ecclesiastical hierarchy was expected to resign or be replaced along

with the political change. Bishops were the main participants of

ecclesiastical synods and their votes were always critical for reaching a

consensus. The Life of Patriarch Ignatios (847-858, 867-877), which reads

like a secular rather than a saintly biography and is permeated by a

concern for historical detailing, includes an impressive list of bishops who

were either adherents to his own party or his opponents. This text, written

16

This point has been emphasized by Michel Kaplan, “L’évêque à l’époque du second

iconoclasme,“ in Monastères, images, pouvoirs et société à Byzance, ed. Michel Kaplan (Paris:

Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006), 183-206.

17 See vita A (BHG 2451), ed. Albert Vogt, “S. Théophylacte de Nicomédie,” Analecta

Bollandiana 50 (1932): 74-75 (episcopate) and 75-81 (persecution, exile, and death).

18 See vita B (BHG 2452), ed. François Halkin, Hagiologie byzantine. Textes inédits publiés en

grec et traduits en français (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1986), 176.

19 The tradition of bishops as teachers and scholars no doubt goes back to the fourth-

century Church Fathers; see von Falkenhausen, “Bishops,” 176-181.


in the first decade of the tenth century, is a good pointer to how politically

ambiguous and unstable episcopal authority had become.20

It was around this time that signs of a rising centrifugal force were

manifested.21

To a certain extent, ecclesiastical and political centralization,

which was typical of the middle Byzantine period, was contested. Saintly

bishops came back to the fore, sometimes taking up the role of local

patrons and mediators. The Vita of St. Demetrianos, bishop of Chytroi

(Kythrea), a small town on Cyprus (ca. 829/830-911/913), a text couched

in a Greek language with sophisticated pretensions, relates the story of a

local holy man who, once wedded and widowed after a forced marriage at

the age of fifteen, followed first a monastic and then an ecclesiastical

career. His fame incited Eustathios, the local bishop of Chytroi, to ordain

him a presbyter. Before long, however, when the same Eustathios became

archbishop of Cyprus, he was offered the episcopate of Chytroi.

Demetrianos remained long in hiding from the archbishop’s assistants to

avoid the appointment, and it was only by force that he was consecrated

bishop of the small town. His service lasted for twenty-five years and

culminated in the early tenth century, when the saint travelled to Baghdad

to intercede with the caliph for the liberation of his fellow countrymen,

captured after an Arab attack on the island. According to his vita, he also

managed to expel a swarm of locusts which endangered the plants and

crops of Cypriot farmers.22

Consciously or not, the hagiographer here portrayed a local holy

man using vigorous brushstrokes. Granting as he did a long narrative

section to the saint’s ascetic feats, he underscored that ordination was the

result of personal virtue and spiritual perfection attained after a long

ascetic practice. Moreover, in overemphasizing the topos of the holy man’s

humility and reluctance to take up high ecclesiastical office, he conformed

to the spirit of his age, implying as he did that, for his hero, the

abandonment of monastic isolation would have meant deviating from the

path to holiness. Yet when writing this vita, his underlying purpose was to

promote a sort of decentralization, a switch to local efficiency and

20

See PG 105, 487-573. The most recent discussions of this text are those of Symeon A.

Paschalides, “From Hagiography to Historiography: The Case of the Vita Ignatii (BHG

817) by Niketas David the Paphlagonian,” in Les “Vies des saints” à Byzance. Genre littéraire

ou biographie historique?, ed. Panagiotis A. Agapitos and Paolo Odorico (Paris: Centre

d’études byzantines, néo-helléniques et sud-est européennes, 2004), 161-173; and Irina

Tamarkina, “The Date of the Life of the Patriarch Ignatius Reconsidered,” Byzantinische

Zeitschrift 99 (2006): 615-630.

21 On this tendency see Efthymiadis, “Hagiography,” 121-125.

22 See Henri Grégoire, “Saint Démétrianos, évêque de Chytri (île de Chypre),” Byzantinische

Zeitschrift 16 (1907): 228-236; the text has also been edited by Hippolyte Delehaye in Acta

Sanctorum, Nov. vol. 3, 305-308.


patronage. The local bishop Demetrianos made himself a successful

ambassador in his own right rather than representing the right of the

central state, i.e., the emperor. A distant province could put up with

hardships independently of Constantinople.

The re-emergence of bishops in Middle Byzantine hagiography is

further illustrated in some rhetorical Enkomia celebrating the occupants of

sees in the Peloponnese. Saints such as Peter of Argos, Athanasios, bishop

of Methone (Modon), and Theokletos, bishop of Lakedaimon (Sparta),

anticipated an overall change of geographical emphasis which marked the

Byzantine empire after the late tenth century and which placed the

Balkans on an equal footing with Asia Minor, i.e., with what had until

then been the core of the empire. These hagiographies are poor in concrete

information, paying little attention to the bishop’s presence in the city; and

in terms of historical interest, they merely record barbarian invasions,

which, of course, are miraculously averted through the intercession of the

saint.

As the last representative of this group we should reckon

Nikephoros, bishop of Miletos in western Asia Minor, whose life spanned

the period from Romanos I Lakapenos’ reign (920-944) to the end of the

century. Nikephoros was castrated at a very early age and sent to

Constantinople to be educated and, as a eunuch, follow a career in the

imperial administration. At some point he was drafted into the imperial

clergy and it was perhaps in that capacity that during the reign of

Nikephoros Phokas (963-969) he accompanied the Byzantine fleet on an

unsuccessful expedition for the recovery of Sicily. Yet, as his biographer

would have it, the wanderings of this man of God knew no limit, a quality

for which he became famous. On account of this fame, he was entrusted

with the bishopric of Miletos where, we are told, he did not stop caring for

the needy and the poor to the point where he travelled to Constantinople

to demand from the emperor a sum of money seized by some imperial tax

officials. On his way back from the Queen of the Cities, soon after John

Tzimiskes was elevated to the throne, Nikephoros was escorted by a

notorious man by the name of Sachakios, who made an unsuccessful

attempt to poison him. Apart from this episode, the hagiographer found

nothing exciting to recount with regard to Nikephoros’ episcopate. For

unspecified reasons the bishop left his city for the adjacent Mt. Latros (or

Latmos), where, it was said, some ascetics originating near Mt. Sinai had

found refuge in olden times as a result of barbarian raids. It is at this point

of the narrative that the longest section of the vita (BHG 1388) unfolds,

filled with a succession of miraculous events and experiences relating, of

course, to his monastic path to holiness. What deserves to be singled out

among various stories is the former bishop Nikephoros’ conflict with a local


bishop. Although the latter initially promised to provide the former with

as much assistance as he could wish, under the influence of a demon, we

are told, he finally kicked him out of his diocese.23

The picture of a failed, resigned, or perhaps deposed bishop who

later became a perfect monk and was thus sanctified is reconfirmed in the

vita of an eleventh- or twelfth-century holy man. This is Gregory, bishop

of Assos, born as George on the island of Lesbos in either the reign of

Manuel I Komnenos (mid-twelfth century) or that of Konstantinos IX

Monomachos (mid-eleventh century).24

His elevation to the episcopal

throne of Assos, a small harbor town across from Lesbos, was preceded by a

long course in ascetic toils, which were made known to the imperial and

ecclesiastical authorities of Constantinople by his spiritual father Agathon.

The see of Assos being vacant, he was asked to journey up to the capital,

where he was consecrated bishop. His service, however, was blocked by

many obstacles and slanders, the harshest of which was the calumny that

he had sexual intercourse with his disciple Leo. Denounced and summoned

before the authorities of Constantinople, both the spiritual father and son

were acquitted. But this hardly discouraged his accusers from launching a

new set of slanders against him. The saint, escorted by his disciple, was

forced to abandon his bishopric during the night, and with his cloak and

the Bible alone he sailed to his native island of Lesbos. Not unlike that of

Nikephoros of Miletos, Gregory’s episcopate was a kind of short

parenthesis, outside the brackets of which his biographer related his two

superior periods of his life, those of a rising and an established monastic

father.25

Speaking of monastic fathers, the case of a more renowned saint

(perhaps more today than he was in medieval Byzantium), should not pass

unnoticed. Symeon the New Theologian, a Constantinopolitan monk, an

important church poet, writer of catechetical sermons, and a mystic, led a

23

See the edition by Hippolyte Delehaye in Theodor Wiegand, Milet: Ergebnisse des

Ausgrabungen und Untersuchung seit dem Jahre 1899, vol. 3/1, Der Latmos (Berlin: De Gruyter,

1913), 163-164.

24 This discrepancy is due to the two versions in which Gregory’ biography has come down

to us, that of a full-length vita of which two redactions survive (BHG Novum Auctarium

710a) and that of the Synaxarion notice (BHG Novum Auctarium 710c): see Demetrios Ζ.

Sophianos, “Ὁ ἅγιος Γρηγόριος ἐπίσκοπος Ἄσσου (β΄ μισό τοῦ ιβ΄ αἰώνα) καὶ τὰ ἁγιολογικά του

κείμενα,” Mesaionika kai Nea Ellenika 7 (2004): 307-318, 319-346, and 347-351; and the

previous edition by François Halkin, “Saint Grégoire d’Assos. Vie et Synaxaire inédits (BHG

et Auctarium 710a et c),” Analecta Bollandiana 102 (1984): 5-34.

25 For a full biographical sketch of St. Gregory of Assos, see Anthony Kaldellis and

Stephanos Efthymiadis, The Prosopography of Byzantine Lesbos (284-1355). A Contribution to

the Social History of the Byzantine Province (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2010), no.

87.


life full of tribulations, temptations, and confrontations with those who

disputed his spiritual gifts and his right to be reckoned among the saints.

His long vita unfolds as a series of confrontations with the incarnations of

evil.26

One of its longer sections is devoted to the saint’s quarrel with

Stephen, bishop of Nicomedia, a man of learning who became the synkellos,

i.e., the secretary of the patriarch of Constantinople. This Stephen accused

the saint of being illiterate, an uncouth and voiceless man unable to

pronounce a proper word in front of the wise men who were able to handle

speech critically and artfully. In a conversation they both had in the

patriarchate, and in response to a theological question posed by the bishop

as to how the Father is to be distinguished from the Son in the Holy

Trinity, that is whether mentally or really, Symeon humbly pointed out

that the responsibility to understand the mysteries of God falls upon

prelates and not those who, as disciples of fishermen, lack oral skills. In a

theatrical fashion, the bishop is presented as moving into the upper

chambers of the patriarchate while the saint joined his community and his

usual prayers, out of which he was able to compose a hymn responding to

and resolving Stephen’s theological puzzle. This quarrel lasted for six years

and ended in the denunciation that Symeon venerated his spiritual father

(also called Symeon) as a saint and had him painted as an icon. In what

followed, Stephen was able to convince the other prelates about Symeon’s

serious infraction, bring him to the patriarchal synod, and have him

condemned to exile and the icons of his holy father broken into pieces.27

His biographer Niketas Stethatos deemed this accusation similar to the

ones that were leveled at Jesus Christ and he regarded Symeon as a martyr

without persecution and the whole crisis as reminiscent of the iconoclastic

one.28

Forming the core and the central argument of the whole vita, the

section recounting the clash of the monk Symeon with Stephen exemplifies

two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, the strained relations between

the official Church and the monastics, and on the other hand, the

scepticism with which the recognition of new saints was greeted in

26

For the dispute between the monk Symeon and the bishop Stephen, see the Life of

Symeon the New Theologian (BHG 1692), ed. Symeon Koutsas, Νικήτα τοῦ Στηθάτου Βίος

καὶ Πολιτεία τοῦ ἐν ἁγίοις πατρὸς ἡμῶν Συμεὼν τοῦ νέου Θεολόγου (Athens; Akritas editions,

1996), 198-240.

27 The negative portrayal of Stephen of Nicomedia in the Life of St. Symeon should not lead

to the conclusion that he was not a prelate of scholarly and other merit; see Dirk

Krausmüller, “Religious Instruction for Laypeople in Byzantium: Stephen of Nicomedia,

Nicephorus Ouranos, and the Pseudo-Athanasian Syntagma ad quendam politicum,” Byzantion

77 (2007): 239-250.

28 See Life of Symeon (BHG 1692), ed. Koutsas, 238-240 and 272-274.


Constantinopolitan society. Bishops were the representatives of a more

rational, more down-to-earth attitude towards monastic authority and

power, which at times tried to re-affirm its central role in the guidance of

the Byzantine believer by favoring the admission of new saints into the

ecclesiastical calendar. Symeon the New Theologian came to be sanctified

in a century, the eleventh, which almost irrevocably declared that the age

of the saints had come to a close. Until the fourteenth century, when first

the opposition of Eastern to Western Christianity and then the Hesychastic

movement resuscitated an interest in new saints, the marks of which are

visible in the hagiographic efflorescence of the period, in practice Byzantine

society rather sided with the position of Symeon’s opponent, Stephen of

Nicomedia.

The revival of towns and the upsurge of urban life in eleventh-

and twelfth-century Byzantium went along with the emergence of

important figures who came to occupy provincial ecclesiastical sees.29

As

before, these were Constantinopolitan intellectuals and appointees of the

patriarchate, hardly fascinated by the behavior and the ideals of monastic

life. What is more, some of them demonstrated an utterly hostile attitude

towards the monks, either by judging the display of their excessive toils as

hypocritical or by treating their involvement in secular affairs in a

derogatory way. Distrust of these practices found its most eloquent

expression in the writings of Eustathios, archbishop of Thessalonike, no

doubt the most brilliant scholar in twelfth-century Byzantium. Eustathios

was a vitriolic critic of monastic hypocrisy, targeting the excessive aspects

of asceticism such as mounting a pillar or being engirdled in chains. He

showcased several cases of reproachable conduct that he saw emerging in

his time, both in his extensive treatise, in fact an invective, De emendanda

vita monastica, and in shorter works of a similar critical scope, such as De

simulatione (On hypocrisy) and Ad stylitam quondam Thessalonicensem (Address to

a stylite).30

More tactfully formulated but still similar ideas permeate his

single hagiographical work devoted to a contemporary saint, Philotheos of

Opsikion, a married man with no spectacular biography and an

insignificant miraculous record.31

This hagiography should be read in the

29

On the distribution of bishoprics in the Comnenian era (1081-1185), several of which

were occupied by members of some prominent families, see Michael Angold, Church and

Society in Byzantium under the Comneni 1081-1261 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1995), 139-147.

30 On Eustathios’ views on monasticism, see Angold, Church, 348-355.

31 Edition of this Life (BHG 1535) in Theophilus L. F. Tafel, Eustathii metropolitae

Thessalonicensis opuscula (Frankfurt am Main: Sigismundus Schmerber, 1832), 145-151 (=

PG 136, cols. 141-161). On the change of attitude towards the holy man as exemplified by

this Life, see Kazhdan – Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture, 93-95. On the


light of the anti-monastic hints it includes rather than as a eulogy of a holy

man se ipso.

Yet the most extensive portrayal of a model bishop in this age

comes from the pen of the most famous pupil of Eustathios, Michael

Choniates. An archbishop of Athens, a town he praised in an inaugural

speech but an appointment he finally came to regret, he offers us the most

rhetorical and realistic picture of a provincial bishopric in his Enkomion to

Niketas, who was his brother’s godfather and from 1143 metropolitan of

his native town of Chonai in Phrygia. Chonai, identified with ancient

Colossai, was famous for the cult of Archangel Michael in a shrine which

Niketas himself had repaired. Choniates’ Enkomion is made up of short

rhetorical treatises such as the praise of Niketas as a eunuch, the

description of St. Michael’s pilgrimage church, his attraction to ascetic life,

the annual trade fair taking place in his town, his miracle-working activity

which succeeded in averting drought and other plagues which threatened

the local population, etc.32

In thus praising a bishop, Michael Choniates re-

affirmed the crucial role of a bishop in running the affairs of the local

Church without disregarding its spiritual advancement. The

incompatibility of ascetic life with the secular concerns of the bishopric,

which came up as a serious question in late antique Lives of saints and

turned into an insurmountable contrast during the eighth to tenth

centuries, was no longer an issue in Choniates’ overall view.

At the end of these five centuries which span the Middle

Byzantine period, the picture looks reversed. Identification of sanctity with

monastic identity, which reached its peak in the ninth and tenth centuries,

was finally called into question. What could previously be read between

the rather few lines which Middle Byzantine hagiography reserved for holy

and unholy bishops was now, on the eve of 1204, pronounced in clear

terms in the writings of the intellectual elite. A spirit of renovation was

cultivated which despised monastic supremacy and monopoly in spiritual

decline of hagiography in the twelfth century, see Paul Magdalino, “The Byzantine Holy

Man in the Twelfth Century,” in Hackel, Byzantine Saint, 51-66; and for a reconsideration,

Symeon Paschalidis, “The Hagiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” in The

Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography, Volume I: Periods and Places, ed.

Stephanos Efthymiadis (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate 2011), 143–171.

32 Edition of the Enkomion to the blessed metropolitan of Chonai Sir Niketas by Spyridon P.

Lampros, Μιχαὴλ Ἀκομινάτου τοῦ Χωνιάτου τὰ σῳζόμενα, vol. 1 (Athens, 1879; reprint Groningen:

Bouma’s Boekhuis N.V., 1968), 24-71. On the role of Michael Choniates as bishop, see

Angold, Church, 197-212; as archbishop of Athens, see Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian

Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2009), 145-149. On the information concerning a town in the Byzantine frontier

zone to be drawn from this Enkomion, see Paul Magdalino, The Empire of Manuel I Komnenos,

1143-1180 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 129-132.


matters, without suggesting in return the proclamation of bishops as saints

and the writing of a new, say “urban” hagiography. As a matter of fact, the

monolithic picture of Byzantine sainthood in the Middle Ages was

shattered only for a while, this eleventh- and twelfth-century respite, and

at the expense of holy monks, not in favor of holy bishops.

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