Swimming against the Tide: How the Monks of Medikion Challenged Traditional Notions of Sainthood

Abstract

Byzantine monasticism is known to us chiefly through two types of texts, the lives of saints, and spiritual treatises. The two genres give us quite different impressions of what it meant to be a perfect monk. The spiritual tradition focused on the inner life, advising the practitioners to purify themselves from sins and contemplate God’s creation, and promising them visionary experiences once they had completed all the requisite steps. By contrast, hagiographical texts focused on visible actions, either ascetic feats or wonderworking. Yet this does not mean that the two discourses are completely unrelated. A common feature is the ability to read thoughts, even if its acquisition is explained in different ways. Both genres give the impression of changelessness. It seems as if all holy men and all spiritual paragons behaved in the same manner. This impression is not altogether wrong but one must be careful not to generalise too much. In this article I will show that two texts from the early ninth century, the Lives of the abbots Nicephorus and Nicetas of Medikion, go against the grain. The hagiographers reject important tenets of the spiritual tradition, as exemplified in the Climax, and criticise, implicitly or explicitly, qualities that were commonly considered to be indispensible for holy men. In order to make my case I will discuss in turn the following topics: healing, mourning, the vision of God, clairvoyance, and prophetic powers.