The Journal of Ecclesiastical History http://journals.cambridge.org/ECH Additional services for The Journal of Ecclesiastical History: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here The making of a saint. The life, times and sanctication of Neophytos the Recluse. By Catia Galatariotou. Pp. xvi + 310 incl. 13 plates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. £40. 0 521 39035 4 J. D. Howard-Johnston The Journal of Ecclesiastical History / Volume 45 / Issue 01 / January 1994, pp 131 - 135 DOI: 10.1017/S0022046900016560, Published online: 06 February 2009 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022046900016560 How to cite this article: J. D. Howard-Johnston (1994). The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45, pp 131-135 doi:10.1017/S0022046900016560 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/ECH, IP address: 138.251.14.35 on 05 Apr 2015 REVIEWS relation to the location of Calvary; and Jeanette Beer's discussion, with text and good translation, of Jean Sarrasin's letter of 1249, written during St Louis's first crusade. One is left wanting more: the papers are generally short and would have benefited from being expanded from their original form. Some could have been annotated more ambitiously. But this is a valuable collection which will be of interest to all those teaching courses on crusading and popular religion. UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL M. G. BULL The making of a saint. The life, times and sanctification of Neophytos the Recluse. By Catia Galatariotou. Pp. xvi + 310 incl. 13 plates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. £40. 0521 390354 The setting is the eastern Mediterranean, the time the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The era of Byzantine hegemony in the Near East is over, destroyed in the terrible years which followed the Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071. The gamble of calling on the vast reservoirs of manpower in the Latin West to reinforce beleaguered Christendom in the east has not worked. Instead of riding on the back of the Crusades and restoring their empire within its mideleventh-century limits, the Byzantines have to play a desperate game, balancing competing interests within and between the opposed worlds of Christendom and Islam, hoping to exploit available opportunities to claw back some of their lost lands. But as the twelfth century advances towards its close, a second decisive defeat at Myriokephalon in 1176 shatters those hopes and triggers a series of internal convulsions. Long before this, though, Byzantium - always as much a maritime as a military power - has become the creature of the West, since Italian fleets dominate the east Mediterranean and Italian merchants manage its markets. It is only a matter of time before the increasingly antipathetic West concentrates its forces and takes its vulnerable capital in 1204. The subject of Catia Galatariotou's book, Neophytos the Recluse, lived in a part of the Byzantine oikoumene which was particularly exposed to the troubles of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The very prosperity engendered in Cyprus by heightened naval and commercial activity in the immediate maritime hinterland of Outremer attracted a number of foreign predators. The most ruthless, though, appears to have been a Byzantine, Isaac Komnenos, greatnephew of the Emperor Manuel, who seized the island in 1184 and held it until 1191, when he was forced to surrender to Richard the Lionheart in the course of the Third Crusade. Thereafter Cyprus was to remain for centuries in Latin hands, its Orthodox clergy and population subject to gradually increasing pressure from a new Latin ecclesiastical hierarchy. Neophytos' life has to be pieced together from his writings, since there is no hagiography extant and none appears to have been written by any of his monks. His output was voluminous, consisting in the main of sermons which drew their material from Scripture and the lives of the saints. A full list of his writings is given in the revised Typikon which he issued for his monastery in 1214, shortly before his death. The appendix in which Galatariotou catalogues all those which are extant and establishes their chronology forms a solid foundation for her whole book. It also points up the disabilities under which the biographer has to labour. For the three works most likely to yield useful information are all lost - a collection of letters in two books (copies of only five letters are preserved independently), the Log-book of the recluse, and a small book of Poems of compunction. l 3l 5-2 JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY Relying, as she has to, on incidental remarks about himself included in works destined for public consumption, Galatariotou can only sketch the barest outlines of Neophytos' life. Naturally she has considerably more success in recovering his views - her principal concern being with those on the changing world in which he lived rather than his ethical and theological concerns - and in tracing their evolution through time. Neophytos' life can be divided into four phases. First, his boyhood and youth (i 134-52), about which little is known, save for the fact that he was prompted to meditate on life and death by sudden changes of fortune in his village. Second, his escape, not without difficulty, into a cenobitic monastery (1152-8), where he learned to read and write (his reading matter probably consisting in the main of Scripture and saints' lives, which later provided the subject matter for most of his sermons). Further reflections on the transitoriness of human life were occasioned by the sudden death of fellow-monks. The third phase included his departure soon afterwards in search (inspired surely by hagiographic reading?) of a suitable location for pursuing the eremitic life (1158-9), six months in Palestine, a vain effort to journey to Mount Latros (in western Asia Minor), and the next eleven years spent in a cave in a ravine six miles from Paphos, in solitary pursuit of salvation (1159-70). These were, one would imagine, on the analogy with better documented lives (there is no direct evidence apart from the tantalising title of his book of poetry), years of extreme asceticism, prayer and private combat against internal demons. The main part of his life however, from 1170 to 1214+ followed his ordination and acceptance of a first disciple, at the insistence of his first patron, Basil Kinnamos, bishop of Paphos from 1166 to 1190 + . His immediate surroundings underwent dramatic change as a small monastery grew up in the cliffside. A church and sanctuary were excavated next door to his cell, all three being decorated with frescoes in 1183 and c. 1200. Eventually Neophytos, whose seclusion had probably been disturbed occasionally from the first (if only to supply him with food), was impelled in 1197 to excavate a new, less accessible cell, at a higher level. His writings show that, in this fourth phase, he was increasingly engaged in a battle for the spiritual welfare of others. Although most of his sermons were originally addressed to his own monks, they were probably from an early stage also intended for a wider audience, lay as well as monastic, thus providing the locality at large with the advice which grander lay patrons of the saint (none of whom is named, alas) received in person when they visited. Galatariotou's main achievement is to place Neophytos' life in context. This she does first in part 1, by giving a spare summary of what can be established about the externals of his career (ch.i), about the written and oral hagiographic sources to which he had access and which assuredly had considerable influence on his own behaviour (ch. ii), and about the history of Cyprus during his lifetime (ch.iii). She returns to the subject in part in, the longest and most substantial. Here she examines more closely Neophytos' interaction with his human environment. After discussing his educational attainments (ch. vi), and defining the main constituent parts of his audience (ch.vii), she quarries his writings for his views on contemporary affairs, whether social and economic conditions in Cyprus (ch.viii), or major items of news from the world beyond (ch.ix), or the growing threat from the Latin Church (ch.x). The picture which Galatariotou presents of this outward aspect of Neophytos' life is full, nuanced and generally convincing. Although Neophytos' confidence 132 REVIEWS grew with time (as did the volume of his output, especially after the move to his new quarters in 1197) and he proved readier to venture theological interpretations of his own, he never seems to have lost his initial admiration (and nervousness) of those who had received a proper education. A prickly defensiveness surfaces in his writings from time to time, one that seems quite unwarranted in so far as the reader can judge from the snippets of hectoring sermons quoted by Galatariotou, which are striking for their forcefulness, clarity and vivid phrasing. His views were for the most part conventional: he believed unquestioningly in the special, superior status of the Byzantine Empire, venerated the emperor as God's vicegerent on earth, and expressed violent opposition to all heretics and unbelievers. As disaster followed disaster - the collapse of the Komnenian enterprise at Myriokephalon in 1176, Saladin's capture ofJerusalem in 1187, the Latin seizure of Cyprus in 1191, and the fall of Constantinople in 1204 - Neophytos seems to have clung with increasing tenacity to the traditional world-view of Byzantines. He was less conventional at an earlier stage, when Cyprus was suffering from famine between 1176 and 1179: then he fulminated against the acquisitiveness of the rich and the corruption of officialdom. The principal developments thus discernible in his sermons are a gradual psychological reintegration into the contemporary Byzantine world - which ran parallel to his increasing involvement with it in reality — and a growing discretion in his utterances (to avoid antagonising the authorities or the Latin Church). By looking out through Neophytos' eyes at twelfth-century Cyprus and the world beyond, Galatariotou acts as a useful foil to the normal run of Constantinople-centred Byzantine history. The results of her careful investigation of Neophytos' work more than make up for a certain skimpiness in her general account of the period (among the surprising omissions from the bibliography are a number of important contributions on the east Mediterranean and Byzantium in the age of the Crusades: J . H. Pryor, Geography, technology, and war: studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 64Q-1571 [Cambridge 1988]; R.-J. Lilie, Byzanz und die Kreuzfahrerstaaten, 1096-1204 [Munich 1981], and the same author's Handel und Politik zwischen dem byzantinischen Reich und den italienischen Kommunen Venedig, Pisa und Genua in der Epoche der Komnenen und der Angeloi {1081-1204) [Amsterdam 1984], not to mention the writings of Ostrogorsky, Svoronos, Oikonomides and Jacoby on social and economic conditions in Byzantium). It is more to be regretted that Galatariotou does not include in this section a general assessment of Neophytos' qualities as writer and preacher and thereby help explain why he gained an audience outside his own monastery in the first place. There is, however, much that can be questioned in Galatariotou's analysis of Neophytos' spiritual development and religious role. For like the Byzantine hagiographers who are her distant precursors, she places her subject within a conceptual framework of her own making - in her case one which is quite alien to the mental world of twelfth-century Byzantium since it has been fashioned by a sub-culture of late twentieth-century European intelligentsia. For lack of a single sociological model which fits Neophytos' life, a lack which she laments, she constructs one by a process of bricolage out of a variety of sociological and anthropological theories and uses it to interpret the scanty information about Neophytos. The terminology which comes attached to the model ('personal idiom' for character, 'interstitiality' for special, super-human status, and an extension of the notion of economic exchange to embrace 'symbolic capital' which becomes 'interconvertible' with material capital) occludes rather than 133 JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY elucidates Neophytos' lifelong search for salvation and the odd, not entirely sane, self-image which established itself in his mind in his later years. Galatariotou's Neophytos strives from an early age to achieve the status of a saint, and later schemes to propagate a cult of himself both inside and outside his monastic community. There are numerous difficulties with this interpretation, apart from the fundamental problem of reconciling the egotism and arrogance presupposed with any normal conception of a devout life. Sanctity, which is only loosely defined as 'closeness to God' and 'partaking in divinity', is taken to be a definite status reached by a single route — whereas the evidence of Middle Byzantine hagiography suggests that there were numerous gradations of holiness in men recognised as holy and several types, ranging from the withdrawn contemplative to the interventionist guru moving in high social circles. Neophytos' search for salvation in his initial years of solitude is transformed into a calculated patterning of his behaviour on that of a single, slowly-evolving type of Byzantine holy man. The conviction which grew on him that he was under the special protection of God (his escape virtually unharmed from a rock-fall while excavating a privy for his new quarters in 1197 left him in no doubt of this), that his actions had been divinely guided from the first, and that his thoughts and words came from God is taken to be tantamount to recognition of his own sanctity (although this is not self-evident). Actions which look like those of an increasingly unbalanced character - the inclusion of three portraits of himself in the monastery's decoration (one depicting his own salvation flanked by two archangels), the designation of the Mother of God as his personal intercessor, the institution of a special liturgy to commemorate the miracle of the privy, and the cutting of a shaft from his upper cell into the Ascension scene in the root of the church where his words would issue forth next to Christ's face - these are interpreted not entirely convincingly as carefully devised attempts to impress his saintly status on others. Vanity (reaching an extraordinary level in Neophytos' old age) is surely a more plausible explanation, as was suggested long ago by Cyril Mango and Ernest Hawkins in 'The hermitage of St Neophytos and its wall paintings', Dumbarton Oaks Papers xx (1966), 119-206. Historical reality has to be remoulded rather more when Galatariotou turns to Neophytos' wider religious role. The troubles of Cyprus in the late twelfth and early thirteenth century are exaggerated into a condition of Durkheimian anomie, so that society is 'intensely insecure... preoccupied with rituals of cleansing, by the identification and expulsion of spies and witches within it, by the need for constant redrawing of its crumbling cultural boundaries'. Neophytos' stature is heightened to that of the Weberian charismatic leader required by a society in deep crisis. His unremarkable, because entirely conventional, views about Church and Empire are transmuted into a revitalised and revitalising ideology around which Cypriots can regroup and face grim times with more confidence. The development of a cult is then envisaged, one which seals this position of leadership in Cyprus, whereas the evidence, notably the absence of any hagiography, suggests rather that those contemporaries and nearcontemporaries who knew of him regarded him with a mixture of respect (for his earnest homilies and asceticism) and embarrassment (for the aberrations of his old age). Galatariotou has written an intelligent and provocative book. She both advances and retards understanding of Neophytos and his world. The intellectual energy put into defining Neophytos' function in modern sociological terms could 134 REVIEWS have been better invested in other areas. In the first place, there remain other facets of his character (or 'personal idiom') to explore, more particulars to be gathered and considered about him and the smaller and larger societies within which he moved. Galatariotou might then have approached him with a less clinical and judgemental attitude, might have got inside his skin rather than typecasting him from without, and could have traced with more sympathy the outlines of his psychological development, detecting self-deception and eccentricity where now she sees only calculation and scheming. In the second place there is room for further research on the roles of the holy man in Byzantine society. The single type, so brilliantly conjured up out of late antique hagiography by Peter Brown nearly a quarter of a century ago in his article on 'The rise and function of the holy man in Late Antiquity' {Journal of Religious Studies lxi [1971], 80—101, reprinted in revised form in Society and the holy in Late Antiquity, London 1982, 103-52), should probably be dissolved into a number of overlapping types, each of which is worth close sympathetic scrutiny. A first step would be to compare the Brownian interventionist with his antithesis, as envisaged by the greatest holy man of them all, Maximus the Confessor, the paradigm of the dissident intellectual, when he wrote his Liber asceticus (PG xc. 912-56). Certainly it was the latter with whom Neophytos had much more affinity. CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD J. D. HOWARD-JOHNSTON The Eadwine Psalter. Text, image, and monastic culture in twelfth-century Canterbury. Edited by Margaret Gibson, T. A. Heslop and Richard W. Pfaff. (MHRA, 14.) Pp. xvii + 228 incl. frontispiece+ 48 plates. London: Modern Humanities Research Association/University Park, P A : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 0 947623 46 9; o 271 00837 7 The twelfth-century monument which is now Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1 (987) was published in facsimile by M. R.James as 'The Canterbury Psalter' in 1935. 'The Eadwine Psalter' (Eadwine) is the better name, because amongst other Canterbury psalters its script shouts "Eadwine": Scriptor: Litlera: Scriptorum princeps ego, nee obitura deinceps Laus mea nee fama, quis sim mea littera clama. Te tua scriptura quern signat picta figura, Predicat: Eadwinum fama per secula uiuum, Ingenium cuius libri decus indicat huius, Quern tibi seque datum munus Deus accipe gratum. The inscription, around the miniature of a monastic scribe, sets the riddle, "Who am I ? " for a sumptuous volume of collaborative studies. The hexameter form seems worth restoring because it is mentioned only once: R. W. Pfaff (pp. 86-7) notes the rhyme-failure between 'Eadwinum' and 'uiuum' and suspects some reference to the eleventh-century calligrapher, Eaduuius Basan. This iconoclasm finds no support amongst other contributors, but its inclusion is symptomatic and commendable. With some healthy disagreement, specialists in many fields begin to define a team-leader-Eadwine?-whose genius it was to clothe in Romanesque splendour the intellectual and visual heritage of Christ Church, Canterbury. 135