The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of my article, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” ¹ arrives and passes, I find myself increasingly in agreement with the great Origen of Alexandria. The Patriarchs, he insisted, never celebrated anniversaries. Wise men that they were, they realized that a birthday only served to bring to mind a regrettable accident: a disembodied soul, suspended above matter by rapt contemplation of eternal truth, had allowed its attention to stray, it had wobbled, it had crashed into the cramped particularity of an individual body. Articles are like that. They arrive on the pages of the Journal of Roman Studies as the result of just such a fall into particularity. Highly particular enthusiasms, intensely specific preoccupations, elicited by specific evidence and by cultural and scholarly traditions caught at an irremediably precise moment of time, make every scholarly contribution—even articles that appear in the Olympian, still air of the Journal of Roman Studies—gloriously “dated” the very moment they appear. They bear the indelible stamp of a given time and place. They are as clearly defined by their blindsides—by the many might-have-beens that came to be blocked to view as they took on their own, distinctive shape—as they are by their contents.

But Origen—for all his sympathy for the Patriarchs, as they contemplated, from the viewing-point of eternity, the tiny, crabbed thing that they had become in taking on a specific body—was a warm soul. Twenty five years, in his opinion, could not be better spent than in pushing resolutely against the limitations incurred by that first, fierce act of embodiment. Even in more torpid fields than ours, a quarter of a century is a long period of time. In the study of late antiquity it has taken us into a new age; and not least because of the efforts of those gathered on this occasion, whose work and friendship have constantly brought to my attention perspectives on late antiquity of which I could not have dreamed in 1970.

So if, in this paper, I concentrate on the precise circumstances in which I wrote “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man,” in around 1969 to 1970, I do not do this out of egotism. Still less do I wish to disown or to dismiss an article on which, I know, many have drawn creatively, following, reapplying and modifying its suggestions in ways that continue to surprise, delight and reassure me. But it is important to stake out, as accurately as possible and without the blurring induced by hindsight, exactly how far I myself intended to reach, and, indeed, how far I was capable of reaching, given both my own preoccupations and the limits of the scholarship that was available to me at that time. For only when that baseline is clearly delineated can we gauge the exact distance between ourselves, in 1997, and an article that was conceived and written, effectively, at the very end of the 1960s. It is enough to listen to the papers that have been presented in these few days to realize that this distance is enough to take one’s breath away.

Let me be content to evoke the enthusiasms and the preoccupations which drew me to the subject of the holy man in the first place and which account for the distinctive shape of the article itself, as it finally emerged in print at the end of 1971. There is much of this that I do not need to repeat here. Professor Tomas Hägg of the University of Bergen has recently devoted an issue of Symbolae Osloenses to a retrospective appraisal of The World of Late Antiquity, a work of synthesis that was commissioned at much the same time as I was working on the holy man. That book was written, if I remember correctly, immediately after I had handed in the manuscript of my article, in summer 1971. My own account of the writing of The World of Late Antiquity, in Symbolae Osloenses, covers...