54. Cf. on his earlier life, e.g., ibid. 10. See on Symeon and the eucharist Golitzin (1994) 386–89; Harvey (1998) 530–34; Binggeli (2009) 424–26. In contrast to Daniel and to Symeon the Younger, there is no contemporary indication that Symeon the Elder himself became a priest, despite the later assumption of Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.13.
147. Harvey (1998) 525.
148. For the date see Horn (2006) 19–21. There has been a spate of recent volumes on the Christian communities of late-antique Gaza. See also Hevelone-Harper (2005); Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky (2004), (2006). On John Rufus see Horn (2006) 12–44; Steppa (2002); Menze (2003).
149. Details on John Rufus’s life are dependent on his own words, esp. at his Life of Peter the Iberian 79, 81, and Plerophoriae 22. Evidence for his elevation to the bishopric of Maiuma comes only in the title to the Plerophoriae [Nau 11]. For discussion of his life see Steppa (2002) 57–61; Horn (2006) 30–44.
150. See also Menze (2003) 226–31.
151. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 86 [trans. Nau 76].
152. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 66, 73, 83. Cf. also ibid. 23, where John has a vision of Basil of Seleucia’s return from Chalcedon, in which a terrible figure stops Basil at the point of celebrating the eucharist and drags him from the church.
153. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 29 [trans. Nau 38].
154. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 30 [trans. Nau 38].
155. Horn (2006) 325–31 (on the theme in Rufus). For a specific warning in regard to taking the Chalcedonian eucharist in Jerusalem cf. Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 1.4.7.
156. Cf. also John Rufus, Plerophoriae 28, 74, 79. For discussion of this theme see Steppa (2002) 156–58; Horn (2006) 304–31.
157. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 80 [trans. Nau 74]. For further tales involving the revelation or assistance of saints see, e.g., Plerophoriae 37, 51, 57, 60, 74.
158. For this tension see also Steppa (2002) 138–40; Menze (2003) 220–23; Horn (2006) 217–21.
159. See, e.g., John Rufus, Plerophoriae 47–48.
160. Chalcedonians can be designated even under the convenient shorthand of “the party of the bishops.” See esp. ibid. 39 [trans. Nau 47] (“Claudian of Eleutheropolis was from the party of the bishops”); 70 [trans. Nau 67] (“Evagrius, who had been an adherent of the bishops, converted to orthodoxy”).
161. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 14 [trans. Nau 15f.].
162. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 60 [trans. Nau 63].
163. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 77–78. For the phenomenon of autocommunion see also Binggeli (2009) 425–29; Caseau (2002). For discussion of the intrusion of anti-Chalcedonian ascetics on the sacramental prerogatives of Chalcedonian clerics in Rufus see Steppa (2002) 156f.; Horn (2006) 222–25.
164. Se, e.g., John Rufus, Plerophoriae 20, 89; Steppa (2002) 153f.
165. John Rufus, Plerophoriae 38. Cf. also ibid. 39 for a similar vision and a subsequent act of communion.
166. See also, e.g., ibid. 1, 6, 36, 58.
167. See Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 1.3.1–4. Also the letter of Severus falsely attributed to Basil of Caesarea discussed in Voicu (1995).
168. See esp. Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 1.4.1–10. Cf. also ibid. 7.3 and Letters 44–45. On the eucharist and on sacramental protocol see also ibid. 30, 53, 104, 105, 107. For problems of sacramental protocol in other anti-Chalcedonian authors of the period see also, e.g., John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 5 [Brooks 102]; Ecclesiastical Canons 1–7; Ps.-Zachariah of Mytilene, Chronicle 10.4; John of Tella, Canons, e.g., 8, 13, 17; John of Tella, Rules to Deacons, edited in Menze (2006), with discussion. For an in-depth discussion of anxieties over the eucharist in Syrian circles, and in particular the respective prerogatives of laity, monks, and clerics, see the excellent discussions in Escolan (1999) 291–311; Menze (2004). For the place of the eucharist in fifth-century and sixth-century Christological debates see also Gray (2005) and (with reference to the Nestorian controversy) Chadwick (1951); Hainthaler (2005).
169. See Menze (2008) esp. 145–93.
170. On John of Tella’s ordinations and establishment of “eucharistic communities” in this period see Menze (2006) esp. 71–89.
171. For these broader processes within sixth-century miaphysite circles see Wood (2010).
172. See Déroche (1996) 76. Life of Symeon the Younger 226 concerns a Gothic Arian, a nonpartisan in Chalcedonian terms. The same politic silence is also mirrored in other texts; see Booth (2011a) and above n. 129.
2
Sophronius and the Miracles
John Moschus was born (ca. 550) at Aegae, in Cilicia, during the reign of Justinian I.1 According to the short biographical prologue attached to some manuscripts of his opus, the Spiritual Meadow, he became a monk in the coenobium of Theodosius, in the Judaean desert.2 Soon, however, he appears to have retreated to the Laura of Pharon, farther north, where Moschus himself claims to have spent a decade, and where several tales place him roughly in the period 568–78.3 It was perhaps here that he first encountered the sophist Sophronius, an educated Damascene who would become his disciple and lifelong companion.4 At the beginning of the reign of the emperor Tiberius II (r. 578–82), the pair visited the monasteries of Egypt, and upon their return Sophronius was in turn initiated as a monk of Theodosius.5 Thereafter, it appears, Moschus settled for another decade in the Laura of the Aeliotes, perhaps on Mount Sinai,6 and then spent the 590s in the Palestinian Nea Laura of Saint Sabas, where the biographical prologue places him in the same period.7 Upon the invasion of the Persians (603), however, he and Sophronius retreated from Palestine to “the region of Antioch the Great” and thence to Alexandria.8
At some point during this second sojourn in Alexandria, Sophronius contracted a painful disease of the eyes and was, according to his own witness, “tortured for many months” by a “sea of pain.”9 When Hippocratic physicians proved unable to alleviate his affliction and warned that blindness would soon result Sophronius set out for the shrine of Saints Cyrus and John at Menuthis, having heard of the saints’ reputation for miraculous healing.10 There, through a series of strange visions, he was eventually cured,11 and thereupon determined to record the saints’ miracles as a record and thanks.12
The Miracles of Cyrus and John—which appears to have been composed between 610 and 614—consists of seventy short miracle narratives, composed in a basic narrative style but nevertheless punctuated with frequent rhetorical flourishes.13 Unusually for a hagiographer, Sophronius makes no pretenses as to the simplicity of his style, for while “not unaware that in the sacred telling of the miracles, a loose and relaxed style is more appropriate,” he nonetheless adopts “an intense one, so that through this the fervor, gracefulness, and intensity of the holy men toward the healing of the sick may be known.”14 The narratives are divided into three distinct groups, in accordance with the geographical origins of the subject: supplicants within the first group (Miracles 1–35) are Alexandrians; within the second group (Miracles 36–50) they are Egyptians and Libyans; and within the third group (Miracles 51–70) they are from farther afield: Palestinians, Constantinopolitans, Romans, and so on.15 While all the miracles follow the same basic narrative pattern, and all
