the maladies of state and society.”122 Heightened hostility to Hippocratic medicine thus represents a more pronounced differentiation of natural (rational) and supernatural (antirational) systems of causation, a differentiation driven by the perceived causes of, and supposed solutions for, the crisis of empire.
Haldon’s seductive argument, however, demands some qualification. For the proposed political metaphor to work, diseases within the Miracles of Artemius must all be (or must at least all be implied to be) the product of sin and divine punishment. Yet it is notable that the same text, like all other miracle collections, in fact preserves a dual etiological system in which certain diseases are attributed to natural derivation and others to supernatural derivation: some hernias, therefore, are said to be produced through lifting weights or stretching,123 whereas others are presented as a punishment for sin.124 No doubt all healing collections might still be read as political metaphor, for the message of all is to some extent the same: that the appeasement of God provides the solution to all maladies, whatever their precise origins. But in all the texts considered here (including the Miracles of Artemius), that same metaphor does not demand outright opposition to a rational system of causation (even if such opposition does occur in terms of modes of healing).125 Indeed, the maintenance of an etiological framework that recognizes both the natural and the supernatural derivation of diseases is crucial for Sophronius, for it provides him with the intellectual basis to construct an alternative metaphor, more soteriological than political. Here the suffering body, as we shall see, is not so much a microcosm of empire; it is instead the summation of postlapsarian man.
NARRATIVES OF REDEMPTION
In order to understand the soteriological analogies that the Miracles of Cyrus and John constructs around its narratives of divine healing, let us revisit once again Sophronius’s conception of disease. Miracles 16 distinguishes between involuntary illnesses, “those of the body and known in connection to the body” and voluntary illnesses, “products of our will,” “deliberately chosen and not of necessity” (tōn tēs psuchēs proairetikōn kai ouk anankaiōn pathōn).”126 This memorable distinction between somatic and psychological disease is an inheritance from the Greek philosophical and medical traditions, but it is presented here within a broader Christian scheme.127 Thus somatic disease is presented as a product not only of creation but of postlapsarian creation. “Her affliction was terrible,” Sophronius tells us of a patient in Miracles 21, “for it was not natural like those many diseases that are caused by an excess of humors or generated by other occurrences, and that the body by necessity is allotted to serve after the transgression in Paradise.”128 Such diseases, therefore, are emblematic of mankind’s broader corruption in the Fall. Thus in Miracles 14 Sophronius says, “Having tasted at origin from the tree of disobedience in Paradise, [the body] was naturally subjected to diseases, and while it lives it is a slave to corruption and to the pitfalls and properties of corruption, until the common resurrection of all.”129 Hence Sophronius’s insistence that somatic diseases are unwilled and without blame, for such are an immovable element of mankind’s postlapsarian nature.
Psychological diseases, however, are a product not of nature but of demonic temptation (and thus also the will). “Illness of the immortal soul,” Sophronius continues in Miracles 14, “is against nature, and is a kind of alteration of its nature, which is incorruptible by the grace of God its creator, and a disease similar to corruption, born in the abuse of demons and instituted by their hatred against us.”130 As the fallen nature of mankind retains the free will to resist such evil, however, willing submission makes us responsible and is therefore a sin.131 In Miracles 35 Sophronius claims that “The father of hatred among men and the teacher of hatred toward one’s brother [i.e., the Devil], he who from the beginning had deceived man and stripped him of whatever divine grace there was within him, is not satisfied with his own madness and anger toward men, and ceaselessly assaults them with a great number of disasters and misfortunes, as the divine Job says. But he continuously rouses them against each other, spreads among them the seeds of hatred toward one’s fellow man, and incenses them toward hatred of one another, so that they even choose him as an ally in their wrath, in the first place doing themselves a great harm (for the death of the soul is born from that consent) and thus also their brothers, whom we have been ordered to love as ourselves.”132 Sophronius’s distinction between somatic and psychological disease, therefore, captures the complex moral position of postlapsarian humankind.
Appreciated thus, Sophronius’s narratives take on a broader significance as Christian narratives of redemption. Indeed, the Miracles of Cyrus and John often presents the progression of its subjects from (voluntary or involuntary) sickness to health as parallel to the movement of humankind from (voluntary or involuntary) corruption to salvation. In Miracles 34, for example, Sophronius recalls the pilgrimage to Menuthis of one Dorothea and her two young sons, describing how the elder child fell sick after swallowing an egg: “When the author of evil [i.e., the Devil] saw them under a tree,” he tells us, “at once he remembered that ancient plan that he hatched against us under a tree, through which, in Adam and Eve, he killed the entire human race with his malign weapons, and through which it was commanded to slave under death. Hence he revealed to the boys a wind-egg of the serpent through which he had contrived our own destruction and showed it to the lads as it lay beside the tree trunk, which was neither good to eat, nor was it beautiful to look at, even if it appeared so to the boys, as it had to Eve, on account of the immaturity of their age, which had not obtained the trained eyes of the soul [gegumnasmena ta tēs psuchēs aisthētēria] in order to discriminate between good and evil.”133 Here, then, the temptation and subsequent sickness of the child is an explicit recapitulation of the temptation and subsequent corruption of Adam and of Eve.134
To those corrupted by the Fall, the saints bestow both health and the promise of future salvation. Thus, in Miracles 38, when a heretic patient informs his slave that he will rejoin his sect upon his return home, the saints punish him by renewing his former illness. “But the Christ-imitating saints,” we read, “in the excess of their love of man and desire that all men be saved [sōthēnai] and come to knowledge of the truth, showed the cause [of his illness] in a dream, so that he might come to recognition, and in recognition repent, and repentant be saved [sōtheiē].”135 The soteriological analogy, therefore, is further enabled by the ambiguity of recurrent words in the Greek. The saints offer not only health (sōtēria) and release (lutrōsis) but salvation (sōtēria) and redemption (lutrōsis).136
In curing the sick, therefore, the saints both inhabit and prefigure the redemptive role of Christ. In several instances their activities are an explicit recapitulation of cures performed by Christ within the Gospels. At the end of Miracles 5, for example, the patient whom the saints cure picks up his mat and runs into Alexandria, “imitating by this deed the sick man who lay in the sheep pool, whom Christ cured after thirty-eight years and ordered to pick up his mat [John 5:1–15].”137 Again in Miracles 46, the saints dispatch a blind man to wash his face in the pool of Siloam at Jerusalem, in direct imitation of Jesus in the Gospel of John. “For these [saints],” says Sophronius, “are imitators of the Savior, and use his words, in their haste to demonstrate, through all their cures, whence they draw their grace.”138 Cyrus and John, therefore, are “imitators of Christ” (Christomimētoi),139 “bearers of Christ” (Christophoroi);140 their involvement on earth is a sunkatabasis, “condescension.”141 Imitation, however, extends beyond the saints’ action to their metaphysical union, for in his Prologue Sophronius describes the posthumous pairing of the saints in the language of the (Chalcedonian) union of divine and human natures in the Incarnation.142
In addition to replicating both the historical deeds of Christ and his divine-human union, the saints also prefigure his eventual judgment:143
I remember saying in what preceded that I would write two or three tales through which the intensity and astringency of the saints would be made known, for the help of those who are rather indifferent,
