128 Chapter 3 a marriage.412 This is the motivation of Gregory’s first represented journey from Eirenopolis to the mountains in the region (see appendices 3 and 4). Monastic training In addition to a break away from family and by extension the ‘secular world’, Gregory’s first represented journeys are an example of educational mobility (see appendices 3 and 4). He travels first to an ex-bishop to announce his desire to leave the world and become a monk, after which this ex-bishop sends Gregory to ‘some monks’ nearby so that he may be initiated in the monastic life under their guidance.413 Not knowing where her son is, Gregory’s mother searches for him, and when finding out he wants to become a monk, she urges him to enter in the monastery in which his brother was already tonsured. After a confrontation with the abbot, Gregory left this monastery and went to another.414 The abbot of this monastery was his uncle Symeon. Here he would have been educated in the ‘apostolic habit and canons’ and he would have developed ‘every virtue’.415 All these journeys are thus represented as inspired by Gregory’s desire to become a monk and find the proper monastic community for that goal. Spiritual maturation When Gregory is about to set on his fifth journey, according to the narrative, he had already received years of monastic training and lived as a monk in a communal monastery. He asks the abbot if he can leave the monastery in order to live by himself and solely focus on his spiritual state of being. He therefore moves from the monastery to a cave.416 This journey initiates a second step in his spiritual development.417 It may be seen as a transitionary stage between his previous monastic training in communal monasteries and his later travels. Only when in solitude in the cave, Gregory is portrayed as making progress in the transformational process from human to divine, that is, in the monk’s 412 Ibid., pp. 139–179. 413 The hagiographer informs us that the bishop ‘had given up’ his seat and was in exile in the mountains because the prevailing ‘heresy’ of the ‘fighters against icons, or rather against Christ’. The iconoclast context in which the narrative is set is thus apparent. The hagiographer at the start already makes clear on which side of the controversy he and his saint were, which is implied in the language used and in the description of Gregory going to the deposed iconophile bishop, rather than to the current (presumably iconoclast) bishop of Decapolis. Life of Gregory 3. 414 This journey could therefore be said to be motivated by strained relations during interpersonal conflict. The abbot of the first monastery, where his brother also resided, would have mingled with ‘heretics’ according to the narrative; this refers again to the iconoclast context. The abbot of the next monastery, Symeon, on the other hand was an iconophile, as later in the narrative we learn that Symeon was imprisoned in the capital for his iconophile views. Life of Gregory 5 and 77. 415 Life of Gregory 4-5. 416 See the previous chapter, especially section 2.3.2.1, on the significance of this type of space for the spiritual development of monks. Also see Della Dora (2016), pp. 176–202; Talbot (2016). 417 The first being trained as a monk in a communal monastery, mastering all kinds of monastic virtues – this learning period of embodying monastic virtues is also explicitly referred to in the narrative.
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