ROUGH DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION 2011 WILLIAM R.

CARAHER

Liminal Time and Liminal Space in the Middle Byzantine Hagiography of Greece and the Aegean William Caraher University of North Dakota Delivered at the International Anchoritic Society Conference September 16-18, 2011 University of North Dakota Grand Forks, ND My paper today will look at four relatively understudied saints lives dating from the Middle Byzantine Aegean World: Ay. Ioannis "O Xenos", Os. Theodoros of Kythera, Ay. Theoktiste of Lesvos, and Ay. Nikonas "O Metanoeite". Each of these texts - which I regard as more or less typical of the genre - deals with a saint who goes off into the wilderness. During their time in the wilderness, these saints all encounter ruined buildings around which the saints have mystical, ascetic, or otherwise religious experiences. I'd like to argue today that the presence of ruined buildings suggests that the wilderness was not just a place, but also (at least in the context of the hagiography of the Middle Byzantine Aegean) a time. The wilderness not only marked out the limits of civilization and population, but also the limits of the present and its connection with lived and experienced time. This argument will draw upon work done over the last 30 years on time in both the field of anthropology and archaeology. Anthropologists like Johannes Fabian have made it clear that it is impossible to think of space without time and time without space. Archaeologists (and I am a field archaeologist as well) have long recognized that interlacing of time and space in the practice of stratigraphic excavation and the lively debates surrounding the limits of concepts like "formation processes" for understanding the relationship between archaeological evidence and past behaviors. Like their colleagues in anthropology, archaeologists have increasing recognized that time scale, periodization schemes, and chronology play vital roles in establishing the relationship of the researcher to the evidence upon which their arguments are based. Critiques of time, most recently by post-colonial theorists, have emphasized that the relationships framed by time are not value free and carry with them deep seated assumptions about human nature, social structure, economies, politics, and even culture. The four Middle Byzantine saints' lives that I will analyze here will not provide the final word on the limits of the present in Byzantium. Their provenience in the politically, administratively, and militarily unstable world of the early Middle Byzantine Aegean provides a distinct backdrop against which to reflect on how space and time intersect to frame the limits of the present.

Theodore of Kythera The Life of St. Theodore of Kythera most likely dates to the very early 10th century, and it was likely written in the significant provincial city of Monemvasia in the southeastern Peloponnesus. The life tells the story of St. Theodore who fled from his marriage to become a monk. After a suitable period of training in Rome, and a time as an anchorite in Monemvasia, he and a companion chose to engage their ascetic vocation more rigorously on the island of Kythera off the south coast of the Peloponnesus. The island, the

ROUGH DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION 2011 WILLIAM R. CARAHER

life tells us had been completely abandoned as a result of activities of Muslim raiders based on Crete. In fact, Theodore barely made it to the island because of a Muslim raiding fleet despite hitching a ride with a Byzantine warship. According the life, the island was abandoned when the two arrived, and this allowed Theodore and his companion to settle around the ruins of an old church dedicated to Sts. Sergius and Bacchus - two Syrian soldier saints whose cult had spread across the Mediterranean at the end of antiquity. After a time at the site where they subsisted on locust and roots, Theodore's companion, ironically named Antonius, returned to the softer life of the mainland. Theodore lived amidst the abandoned church for another year before succumbing to rigors of ascetic life. To show he had achieved a significant level of spiritual knowledge, he inscribed on a broken potsherd the date of his own passing. The abandoned church and the broken pot sherd represent particularly useful objects for thinking about time in the context of Middle Byzantine hagiography. Both objects stand outside of their primary "use context". In other words, both objects have a present function that is somehow distinct from their past use. As a result, placing both the church and the discarded pot sherd in the context of the wilderness, it reinforced the island of Kythera as being not only somehow disconnected with civilization but also out side of the continuous flow of the present. The final use of the potsherd reinforced this temporal dislocation when it received an inscription that dated to after the death of the inscriber. This kind of temporal rupture challenges the basic understanding of human mortality and reminds the reader that divine knowledge of life and death is not dependent upon human time.

Theoktiste of Lesvos The Life of St. Theodore of Kythera, placed the saint on an abandoned island surrounded by discarded objects. The Life of St. Theoktiste of Lesvos was also set against the backdrop of an abandoned island and an abandoned church building. This early 10th century life features a more complex narrative form of a story-within-a-story, but all the stories are set on the island of Paros and amidst the abandoned Katapoliane church which, as the text says, "preserved vestiges of its former glory". The island of Paros had, apparently, at the time of these stories reverted to a wilderness where monks lived among the abandoned church and meet with travelers who would come to offer their prayers there. The church on Paros, like the abandoned church on Kythera, serves as an useful backdrop to emphasize the wilderness conditions on the island. When a group of sailors stopped at the island to venerate the ancient church, a monk approached them from out of the wilderness and refused to divulge his parentage or homeland or "any of the other things that city dwellers pride themselves." He also stated that he lived alone in this wilderness appropriating the mantle of the desert fathers on his deserted island. The monk, named Symeon, goes on to tell the story of another ascetic, Theoktiste, who lived alone in the wilds of Paros. The story of Theoktiste is loosely based on the Late Antique Life of Mary of Egypt. The narrative structure of the Life and the setting for the stories reinforce one another. By drawing on older models likely familiar to the readers (or

ROUGH DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION 2011 WILLIAM R. CARAHER

listeners) to this Life, the author is grounding the Life of Theoktiste in a longstanding tradition of hagiography. At the same time, setting these stories within an abandoned church, the author juxtaposed the past and the present. The church of the Katapoliane stands in what modern archaeologists would call "secondary use" as a place of sanctuary for local ascetics and an occasional place visited by local pilgrims. The "vestiges of its former glory" clearly locate the church in the past and contrast it with a present where it stands surrounded by wilderness. There is an obvious contrast between the Godly life of St. Theoktiste which paralleled to the life of the better-known St. Mary of Egypt, and the manmade "life" of the church which stands neglected and surrounded by wilderness. Through this contrast, the author juxtaposed the sacred time of the saint and the human time of the church itself. In this way, the Life of St. Theoktiste finds clearly parallels with the life of St. Theodore who likewise defies the constraints of human time by knowing the hour his death. To make the comparison between the Lives of Theoktiste and Theodore more compelling, there are sufficient parallels between the two lives to suggest that the latter drew upon the former life. Both Theodore and Theoktiste settled around an abandoned church on an island and their bodies were later discovered and venerated by hunters who had come to the island for game. Moreover, both Lives present a model of desert-style asceticism that was rather less common in post-iconoclastic Byzantine lives, and, again, suggests certain parallels between the two texts.

St. John O Xenos The life of St. John "O Xenos" or the stranger represents a variation on the first two lives discussed in this paper. The life of John is among a small corpus of autobiographical saints lives from the Middle Byzantine period. The goal of the life was to document the founding of a group of monasteries on Crete sometime in the early 11th century. The saint described his wanderings into the mountainous regions and his work to both restore and found churches on Crete after the Byzantine reconquest of the island in 961. John describes a rugged wilderness complete with mountains and caves. The audience for hagiography would immediately recognize this kind of ascetic landscape as it evokes the mountainous interior of Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia where monks and hermits had fled for centuries to escape civilized life. John, in fact, explicitly contrasted his upbringing in the village of Siba to his life as a monk "wandering in the wilderness from mountain to mountain". In this mountain wilderness, John encountered abandoned buildings and religious sites which he set about restoring usually at divine urging. The first encounter featured the neglected tombs of two saints - Eutychios and Eutychianos - where a voice called on John to build a church. The next encounter was a "Greek building" where John had decided to spend the winter. During this time, he was struck blind and the voice once again called upon John to build a church. The church on the site was to the Theotokos, and it likely became the the katholikon of his monastic foundation called Myriokephala. The episodes recorded by St. John in his life provide some additional insights into the relationship between time and place in Middle Byzantine hagiography. Like in the Lives of Sts. Theoktiste and Theodore, we continue

ROUGH DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION 2011 WILLIAM R. CARAHER

to see the link between abandoned monuments and the wilderness that suggest that edges of civilization are populated with objects placed in a discontinuous relationships with the present. The visions and voice which featured prominently in the both of the episodes described above present another temporal variation in the life. Unlike the clearly defined world of the wilderness or the broken continuity of buildings neglected, abandoned, or in secondary use, the disembodied (and despatialized) voice evoke the mystical time of divine intervention. Just as the temporal dislocation associated with the potsherd of Theodore on Kythera represented access to the divine mind, the disembodied voices calling out to John, defy both spatial and perhaps temporal bounds. Like the complex temporal world of dreams, visions in the ancient world stood outside of both time and place and typically drew upon the atemporal character of the Christian God.

St. Nikon The final of the four case studies in my paper today also comes from Crete. the Life of St. Nikon dates to about 100 years later than the life of St. John "O Xenos" and recounts the life and deeds of a saint committed to urging people in Crete and Greece to repent. During the early years of his mission he roamed the island of Crete. During one particular trip from the Cretan capital of Gortyn he spent the night among the ruins of a very ancient church. After falling asleep, he was met by a vision of St. Photeini who called on St. Nikon to rebuild the church on the site. St. Nikon ignored the vision and was struck blind like our other Cretan saint John. He then returned to the site of the church and rebuilt the monument with the help of neighbors in the area alerted to the holy man's fate by a column of fire in the night sky. The column of fire (stylos pyros) almost certainly evoked the image of the 40 years in the wilderness in Exodus (13:21-22). Like our other episodes, the saints journey away from the civilized center of the city ended at a "very ancient church". The wilderness, lit up by the column of fire, produced both a spatial and temporal discontinuity. The vision of St. Photeini in a dream compounded this further. Photeini was typically identified as the Samaritan woman from John 4:8-26 who according to Late Antique texts was martyred in Carthage under Nero. As is typical of mystical visions, her appearance to St. Nikon represents another moment of radical temporal discontinuity. The reference to her in St. Nikon's Life, however, probably does not refer to either the Biblical Photini or the stories associated with her martyrdom, but rather the well-known 11th or perhaps early 12th century account of the inventio and translatio of her relics in Constantinople. In these accounts, a epidemic of blindness infected the city. A pious man named Abraham, lost his sight and called out to God to save him. St. Photini appeared to him in a dream and led him to the location of her relics which then offered a cure. The wilderness of St. Nikon's Crete was punctuated by the Biblical pillars of fire, a New Testament saint, a very ancient church, and the saint himself. The substantial chronological disruptions present in this episode place the saint outside of the typical flow of time as much as the wilderness represents a place set apart from the normal bounds of civilization.

Conclusions

ROUGH DRAFT DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION 2011 WILLIAM R. CARAHER

The four episodes describes in this short paper demonstrate the intersection of time and place in Middle Byzantine hagiography. The wilderness seems to have marked not just a dislocated space set apart from the expectations and confines of the civilized center, but also a place where discontinuities of time are manifest in objects found there. Recognizing the disrupted time of the wilderness makes a contribution to how we understand the Byzantine notions of temporality. Hagiographic narratives tend to produce an ambivalent sense of time. The saint is typically juxtaposed with the historical models of sanctity to foreground the eternal nature of the sacred. At the same time, saints lives often locate the saint in a specific historical place, family situation, and even recognizable landscape. The wilderness serves as a space to mediate between these notions of time just as the space of the wilderness represented a space to mediate between the demands of the urban center of Byzantine life and the requirements of the soul The spirit of this contrast in the old monk Symeon's refusal to disclose his parentage and home town to reinforce the disjunction between the expectations of the city and like in the wilds. Like the tension between the timelessness of the sacred and the historical realm of the saint, the desert and the city form counter points that frame the ambivalent character of the saint as of the world but not in the world. If we are to expand our analysis, to consider the role of hagiography in Byzantine ritual and literary culture more broadly, it becomes clear that hagiographic notions of time draw heavily from the realm of the Byzantine liturgy. In the liturgy, the anamnetic and mystical intersect to create a similarly ambivalent space where the celebration of the Eucharist both commemorates the passion of Christ and reproduces on earth the simultaneous and continuous celebration of the holy meal in heaven. The parallel between liturgical time and the wilderness time of the hagiographic tales not only reifies the wilderness as sacred space specific to the Byzantine experience, but also evokes the feeling of the uncanny as familiar objects stand displaced from their expected time and place. The uncanny and sacred often overlap so the parallels between the liturgy and the wilderness should not necessarily surprise. (In fact, Freud in his famous essay on the uncanny noted that o xenos was the Greek word that best approximated the uncanny.) Moreover, the uncanny has come to play a key role in the notion of hybridity which is so important in post-colonial discourse. The ambivalent time of the wilderness offers a strong contrasts with the attitudes toward time common among Byzantine historians and chroniclers. The interest in time is a well-known feature in Byzantine chronicles beginning with the work of Eusebius and continuing in the Middle Byzantine period from the pens of George Synkellos and Theophanes. These authors rigorously arranged the past events according to years from the creation of the world and, later, of the incarnation. The use of the years of imperial rule, the years of bishops, and in the case of Theophanes, the Caliph, coincides with the larger urban focus of their accounts of relatively contemporary events to reinforce the urban character of their chronological horizons. If the city is the proper context for history, then the wilderness may be a proper context for hagiography.