Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Chapter 6: From the Pillar to the Prison: Penitential Spectacles in Early Byzantine Monasticism

C h a p t e r S i x From the Pillar to the Prison Penitential Spectacles in Early Byzantine Monasticism DaniEl F. CanEr “C ome, gather round, and i will speak to all who have angered the lord. Come see what He has revealed to me for your edification.” Thus John Climacus, author of the seventh-century ascetic treatise the Ladder of Divine Ascent, introduces readers to a place called the Prison. This was a monastery of penitents , “a land of true mourners,” belonging to a cenobium that John knew outside alexandria. Built a mile away from the cenobium, it was “dark, stinking, filthy, and squalid”—“Just seeing the place,” says John, “teaches complete repentance and mourning.”1 also called the isolation Monastery, it confined monks who, after entering the cenobium, had fallen into sin.2 Having heard about their “strange condition and humility,” John asked to visit, and what he saw there fills much of the Ladder’s fifth chapter on metanoia, that is, repentance/penance: “i saw some of those accused yet innocent men stand all night in the open, their feet never moving, driving sleep away with abuse and insults. . . . Others prayed with hands bound 127 128 Daniel F. Caner behind their backs, like criminals. . . . Some sat in sackcloth and ashes, beating the ground with their heads, [while] others constantly beat their breasts. . . . Often they would go to the [abbot] and beg that he place iron fetters and collars around their hands and necks, bind their feet . . . and not release them until death.” “Believe me, brothers,” adds John, “i am not making all of this up.”3 These penitential ascetics embodied what he called metanoia memerimnēmen ē, a truly serious repentance.4 Some of them seemed to have become “completely altered in their attitude and state of concentration.”5 indeed, after spending an entire month in that “land of metanoia,” John says that he returned to the cenobium “utterly changed and altered” himself.6 John Climacus provides our longest and most vivid description of the performance of penance in any early Byzantine monastery. no doubt he was describing a real place.7 The use of space in cenobitic monasteries for confining unruly monks (as well as heretics, prostitutes, court officials, and adulterous aristocrats) is amply attested from the fifth century onward.8 according to John, inmates of the alexandrian Prison, eating only bread and chopped vegetables, were forced to pray unceasingly while a supervisor supplied them with palm leaves to weave to ward off boredom.9 But for all such historical detail, John was not particularly interested in recording realia. He says little, for example, about the actual lapses that caused monks to be sentenced to the Prison: instead, he depicts all of them as holy sinners, “accused yet innocent men,” who have redeemed themselves through intense mourning (cf. Mt 5:4, “Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted”). His description must be treated not as a historical account but as an example of hagiographical enargeia, a rhetorical construct meant to turn readers into spectators. its purpose, notes John Chryssavgis, was to provide “an image of penthos, a living icon of repentance ”for readers of the Ladder.10 recent studies of early Byzantine monasticism have focused on the role of a spiritual master in hearing a disciple’s confession and sharing the burden of his sins.11 Climacus is an important witness to that relationship ,12 but the connection he draws between visualizing penitential acts and achieving “complete repentance and mourning” invites inquiry into the role of penitential spectacles in early monastic thought and practice. as is well known, Christian communities from the second to the fourth century had also featured dramatic rituals of penance that required sinners to perform confessions and prostrations before entire congregations. Public displays of humility were considered crucial to the efficacy of these rituals , providing at once both the means of acquiring, and a demonstration that one truly had acquired, contrition and repentance; indeed, the public humiliation involved was probably one reason why these rituals were abandoned in the roman East in the late fourth or early fifth century.13 Climacus and other sources show that they continued to be performed, at least occasionally, in monastic communities.14 Climacus is unusual, however , in drawing attention to the effect they had on their spectators: according to him, seeing such performances helped...