c Among non-Christians, “hairesis” had come to signify a school of philosophical thought.
d According to the Syriac writer Jacob of Serugh, there were actually eight sleepers: one who served as spokesman for the group, and seven others. Almost all other Christian sources, however, set the number at seven. The debate is pursued further in the pages of the Qur’an: “Only a few have real knowledge about them,” God admonishes, “so do not argue” (18.22).
e Or possibly “rustic.” The precise meaning of the word has long been debated, but there is a general consensus now that it relates to the sense that Christians had of themselves as milites Christi—“soldiers of Christ.” The term was first used by Tertullian, but it was only after the conversion of Constantine that it began to appear on Christian inscriptions.
f It remains to this day, in the words of Diarmaid MacCulloch, “the standard measure for discussion of the person of Christ, in Churches otherwise as diverse as Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mainstream Protestants” (p. 226).
g Western historians today are much more sensitive to the potential offensiveness of the title than they used to be, but have struggled to come up with a convenient alternative. “Anti-Chalcedonian” is even more of a mouthful than “Monophysite.”
4
THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM
Making the Desert Bloom
Hagia Sophia was not, nor intended to be, a modest building: “Every structure there has ever been,” so one enthusiast gushed, “must cower before it.”1 It was also, of course, the duty of mortals to cower before the god who was glorified there, and whose cross, fashioned out of brilliant gold, blazed from the monumental dome of the cathedral, to the awe and wonder of the worshippers far below. “Pantokrator,” the Romans of Constantinople termed Christ: “The Ruler of All.” In Hagia Sophia, and in churches across the Greek world, He was imagined as presiding over a dominion without limits, surrounded by an exquisitely graded hierarchy of angels and saints, unfathomably distant from the indignities of human existence. Precisely the kind of deity, in short, to appeal to Justinian.
But there were ways too of approaching Christ that did not require the sumptuousness of gold and purple. In 527, five years before work began on Hagia Sophia, a small boy named Simeon had trotted through the bazaars and shanty-towns of Antioch, out through the olive groves that stretched southwards of the city, and up the slopes of a nearby mountain. Its rugged heights were no place for a child, nor for anyone with a care for comfort. The wilderness was a realm of danger: the haunt of bandits, lions and bears. To settle amid its crags was to abandon all that made for civilisation, to become a monachos, or “one who lives alone.” Yet the fact was, of course, as the Christian people well understood, that no man was ever truly alone—no, nor woman either. Demons, like flies around a butcher’s stall, swarmed wherever there rose the stench of sin; angels, serried in fiery ranks, served as the legions of God. Veiled from the gaze of fallen humanity, they blazed no less brilliantly for that. Only a monachos—a “monk”—could hope to glimpse them. Those men and women who chose to abandon the perfumed filth of human company, to fix their gaze upon the heavens, to devote themselves exclusively to the service of God, might hope to become suffused with the fire of the Holy Spirit, flesh and bone though they were: “If you will, you can become all flame.”2
It took more than withdrawal from the world for a man or woman to attain this happy condition, however. One monk, asked how salvation could be attained, promptly stripped stark naked and raised his hands to the sky. “So should the monk be,” he declared. “Denuded of all things, and crucified.”3 But in a world where martyrdom was no longer an option, what precisely did it mean to be “crucified”? Here was a question fit to stimulate some truly spectacular feats of self-abnegation. Most monks were content to submit themselves to the communal discipline of a mone—a “monastery.” They would “strip for the contest, spending their days in physical toil and their nights without sleep in giving praise to the Lord.”4 Some, however, looking to go the extra mile, might make a point of mixing ashes into their gruel, or subsisting entirely on waste scraped off the soles of sandals, or living like cattle, chained to cowsheds, and feeding on grass. One particularly creative act of renunciation saw a woman confine herself to a cell with a spectacular riverside view, and then, for the remainder of her life, refuse even once to look out through the window. It required suffering as well as solitude to become a true athlete of God.
Yet when it came to the training—ascesis—required to attain a truly miraculous pinnacle of holiness, there were few who would have denied the palm to the “ascetics” of Syria. Spectacular feats of self-mortification had long been a speciality of the region. One particularly venerable tradition had seen pagans climb pillars—styloi—and stay there for a week at a time, “communing with the gods on high.”5 The bathing of Syria in the light of Christ, even though it had scoured the demons from their temples, had not banished the close association between pillars and access to the supernatural. In around AD 430, a whole century before the young Simeon of Antioch abandoned his home town, another Simeon—a shepherd—had climbed a sixty-foot column on the edge of the Syrian desert. There he had remained, precariously balanced, not for a week, but for thirty long years, until in due course his soul had been gathered up to heaven. The challenge aimed at the demons by this unprecedented feat had been quite deliberate. Simeon’s prodigious austerities had easily eclipsed anything achieved by the pagans. To a people only recently deprived of their ancient gods, the withered, worm-infested and quite fabulously hairy body of the “stylite” had served as an awesome manifestation of the power of their new deity.a Reports of the miracles achieved by Simeon’s prayers had spread as far afield as Ethiopia and Britain. In Rome, his adoring fans had taken to pinning pictures of his pillar to their doorposts. By the time of his death, he had become, quite simply, the most famous man in the world.
The lesson taught by a thoroughbred stylite could hardly have been more emphatic. Sumptuously though great cities might be adorned by monuments to Christ, it was in the wilds that God was likeliest to be heard. Even a child, if sufficiently precocious, might look to part the veil that obscured the realm of the angels and become a vessel for the transfiguring power of the heavens. This was why, almost seven decades on from the death of his illustrious namesake, the young boy named Simeon abandoned his home in Antioch and headed into the wilderness. His aim too was to spend what remained of his life on top of a pillar. Heavenly approval of this youthful ambition was manifest; only a short while before Simeon’s arrival on the mountain, a local monk had been granted a spectacular vision of “a child dressed all in white, and a glowing column, both of them whirling around in the sky.”6 Sure enough, when the boy finally mounted his pillar, after a whole year of heavy-duty training, he was formidably steeled. Not even the demons tugging on his arms, not even the spread of ulcers on his legs, could distract him from his course. Day and night, in rain and blazing sunshine, he kept up his prayers. The infant ascetic was seven years old.