129 Representations of travel motivation advance towards holiness.418 After fighting with demons and focussing on prayer and contemplation, Gregory is represented as radiating with a divine light.419 This is interpreted in the narrative as a sign of Gregory’s close connection to the divine and his spiritual maturation.420 Gregory’s move away from the communal monastery to a cave enabled this transformation and spiritual progress. Becoming a holy man and monastic leadership Having reached this close connection to God, Gregory is shown to be ready to go back into the world again and interact with others. We will see in the next section, travel as a divinely inspired quest, that the motivations for the immediate journeys that follow his sixth journey are often not specified and that Gregory does not immediately move from his acquired advanced spiritual state to monastic leadership. Before Gregory is properly portrayed as a monastic leader, he is first construed as a holy man, that is, as an individual with extraordinary talents and with an exemplary lifestyle whom members of a community seek out for help, who is recognised by this community as spiritually superior (in the human to divine-scale), and who enjoys moral authority.421 One of his journeys after the departure from the cave is to Rome, where he goes to reside in a monastic cell. There he performs his first miracle, an exorcism. According to the narrative, a man possessed by a demon had come up to him, presumably to ask for help, and Gregory had driven out the demon. After this event, the author tells that Gregory wanted to leave Rome immediately, because he could not remain anonymous anymore after having displayed his extraordinary powers.422 And indeed, after his stay in Rome, also at other places people come to him for help, he gives people advice, heals people, and inspires people to live a devout life. These people are not necessarily monks.423 In other words, in those passages he is construed as a holy man. Only later he becomes a monastic leader as well. When in Thessaloniki, he acquired followers and other monks come to see him as their spiritual father. He settles near the church of St Menas and it is clear that he is regarded as the monastic leader of the community that develops there.424 418 He is represented as being alone, but later in the narrative the audience learns that Gregory had a servant with him all this time, whom he at a certain stage uses to send letters and messages to other people. The idea that saints embody a transformational process from human to divine has been theorised in the subdiscipline of spirituality studies within comparative religion studies, e.g., by Waaijman: ‘Heilig is iemand die de overgang gemaakt heeft van het niet-heilige naar het heilige. Deze overgang onttrekt de heilige aan de sfeer van het niet-heilige’. And ‘Het werkelijkheidsgebied, dat door de spiritualiteitswetenschap bestudeerd wordt, is het godmenselijk betrekkingsgebeuren (materiaal object), dat beschouwd wordt als een gelaagd omvormingsproces (formeel object)’, Waaijman (2000), p. 321 and 423. 419 Fighting with demons is another hagiographical topos, explored in Talbot (2016). 420 The Life of Gregory 12-16. 421 On different types of spiritual authority and competition between them (such as between the ‘elder’ and the ‘hegumen’), see Delouis (2012). 422 Life of Gregory of Decapolis 25. Cf. discussion of this passage in the previous chapter, pp. 79-80. 423 E.g., he inspired a prostitute to change her way of life in Syracuse. Life of Gregory 28-29. 424 It is not evident from the narrative whether Gregory is also seen as the founder of this monastic community, or whether there were already monks living there and he at some point acquired or took over the status of monastic leader. 3
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