would attempt to subordinate them to regular submission to a priest.127 It is nevertheless notable that despite these difficulties, the hagiographers of these saints, rather than relegating a eucharistic emphasis in order to focus on their heroes’ superior ascetic prowess as in most earlier hagiographies, chose in fact to dwell upon communion in order to demonstrate their subjects’ integration within the wider Church. Within a context in which significant ideological constraints had been placed upon the practice of more singular ascetic feats, and in the light of the rather extreme ascetic singularity that stylites represented, it was no doubt now crucial that these same hagiographers demonstrate their heroes’ consciousness of, and place within, local ecclesial structures.
One such hagiographer is the anonymous author of the Life of Daniel the Stylite, that fifth-century disciple and imitator of Symeon the Elder who established a column outside Constantinople during the reign of the emperor Leo I.128 Within the Life Daniel’s integration within the surrounding world is above all emphasized in political terms, in the patronage of successive emperors, the saint’s predictions concerning the future of the state, and the supplications of foreign diplomats before him;129 but his radical ascetic practice is also offset through his integration within the local church through ordination and a subsequent emphasis upon the reciprocal bond that tied him to the Constantinopolitan patriarch. Soon after Daniel established himself in the capital, the Life reports, the emperor commanded the patriarch Gennadius to make Daniel a priest. The latter’s column then provides the stage for a quite remarkable scene expressing the mutual cohesion of saint and patriarch, for after the ritual of ordination Gennadius ascends on a ladder and the pair receive communion from each other’s hands.130 Although in the earliest stages of his career Daniel had fallen under criticism from local Constantinopolitan priests, he now becomes the patriarch’s companion and supporter.131 Thus, during the reign of the usurper Basiliscus, and in the context of an imperial edict abrogating Chalcedon, the patriarch Acacius summons Daniel, and the saint descends from atop his column and travels to the cathedral church, uniting with Acacius and writing to rebuke the emperor as a new Diocletian.132 Daniel then presides over the reconciliation of emperor and patriarch in church.133
In Daniel’s Life, however, as in the Lives of Cyril of Scythopolis, the saint’s or saints’ reported ordination above all emphasizes a commitment to the wider Christian ministration; the celebration of the eucharist itself, however, infringes little upon the narrative.134 We can nevertheless contrast this relative absence with another Life of the post-Chalcedonian period, that of the sixth-century Antiochene stylite Symeon the Younger, an imitator of his more illustrious fifth-century namesake.135 Like Daniel, Symeon is portrayed as the spiritual patron of an emperor (Justin II) and, like Daniel again, his life is presented as one of progressive integration within the wider ecclesiastical establishment.136 In his early career atop his column, he is frequented and feted by the bishops of Seleucia and Antioch, and ordained as a deacon;137 at some later stage, under pressure from his monks and the local population, he becomes a priest;138 and throughout his life, he predicts the careers of the great and the good of the Eastern patriarchal scene—Anastasius of Antioch and John the Faster, for example.139
At the same time, Symeon’s hagiography is notable for the constant intrusion of liturgical acts and contexts upon the narrative.140 Its hero’s life is marked with visions of the eucharistic celebration;141 he composes liturgical troparia;142 and his ascetic practice is defined in the constant performance of the monastic office.143 Most striking, perhaps, is a notice that places the stylite at the heart of liturgical life:144
When Pentecost arrived and the synaxis had been completed, [Symeon] commanded the approaching crowds to be dismissed, and on the following Sunday, after the morning hymns, he commanded the brothers to close the gates of the monastery and to come together to him. And as he spread incense he ordered everyone to perform genuflections and then did so himself. He threw himself upon his face and in tears prayed for one hour along with them, and at the end of the prayer everyone said Amēn, and he told them to remove his leather cowl. In prayer he forgave them for their ignorance concerning every quarrel, speaking to them that Gospel saying. [There follows a brief sermon]. And when he had said these and many other things that turned and led them on the way to the eternal life, he entrusted them to the Lord, and having pronounced the Lord’s prayer that lies in the Gospel of John on behalf of his disciples, he placed his hands upon them and blessed them all. He spoke a universal prayer for the world and for the men who hate us in vain. [There follows another brief sermon]. And when he had prayed thus he gave himself to those outside the sanctuary’s railing, and receiving him they set him upon an empty throne and lifted unto his chest the holy Gospels, and as he went around he spoke a prayer in every place within the monastery and in the guardhouse. With great prudence the truly holy Martha, his mother according to the flesh, took the honorable and life-giving Cross and processed before him singing, “Save us, Son of God, who was crucified for us. Lord, glory to you, hallelujah!” And so the brothers raised the slave of God in their own hands like a holy vessel [hōs skeuos hagion], and singing hymns to God they bore him into the holy church of God that had been built by him. They prostrated themselves before him and asked that he recommend them to the Lord, and led him up both in peace and with hymns and installed him on his holy column.
In an important but perhaps neglected article on the hagiographies of Symeon and his synonymous predecessor, Susan Ashbrook Harvey has noted the “extraordinary emphasis on the integration of the stylite’s ascetic practice into the liturgical life of the worshipping community, both monastic and civic.” Pointing to the rituals of prostration, prayer, and psalmody through which these stylites are said to have practiced their labors, and through which their supplicants are said to have approached them, Harvey argues that the “stylite’s defining ritual context” was not a “ritualized activity [an individual ascetic practice]”—as in Peter Brown’s classic interpretation—but the “eucharistic liturgy of the gathered body of the church, the collective presentation of the Christian salvation drama.”145 In these texts, Harvey suggests, the ascetic endeavors of the individual stylite are brought within, and made relevant through, the communal ritual contexts in which they are practiced.
In the Life of Symeon the Younger, the remarkable emphasis on the ascetic’s ecclesiastical, sacramental, and liturgical context in part represents, no doubt, its hero’s actual sacerdotal status.146 But placed next to the Life of Daniel the Stylite and the Lives of Cyril of Scythopolis—whose subjects are also all priests, but where the liturgical aspect is far less developed—that emphasis appears also to indicate the hagiographer’s desire to underline his hero’s orientation around, and integration within, liturgical structures. In a context of ascetic redefinition, in which the models of the pioneering generation more and more proved discordant with the ideological constraints that beset ascetics both from outside and from within, these post-Chalcedonian authors presented their heroes as an integral part of a far wider worshipping community. But for the author or authors of the Life of Symeon the Younger, that same project involved a far more pervasive assertion of the stylite’s ecclesial credentials and, in particular, the placement of his ascetic practices within a distinct liturgical context. Thereby (in the memorable words of Harvey) “liturgy transfigured the ascetic body of the stylite into the ecclesial body of the church,” reconciling “the poles of charismatic and institutional authority” and presenting “a ritual practice dependent upon mutually inclusive ascetic and liturgical meanings.”147
The elaboration of this more sacramentalized, more liturgified vision of the ascetic life occurs also within another, interrelated context: less, however, in relation to tensions over the boundaries of the clerical and monastic vocations, and more in relation to tensions over doctrine and the formation of schismatic communities. The canonical reinforcement of a normative paradigm of ascetic practice had, of course, been marginal to Chalcedon’s actual purpose, which had been a decisive intervention in the doctrinal dissent concerning Christ’s “one” nature or “two” natures. The Chalcedonian definition,
