149 Representations of travel motivation leadership, Brastamon and Peristera, are located near Mount Athos and Thessaloniki, where Euthymius mainly went to because of his search for personal spiritual development. So these different types of journeys do not play out in clearly distinct regions in the narrative.499 There is, however, some level of compartmentalisation of the various travel motivations in the narrative. That is, journeys motivated by a particular reason generally follow each other in the narrative, so that there are several blocks of journeys with the same travel motivation. Educational mobility concerns his journeys 1, 2 and 3; mobility due to loyalty to personal connections his journeys 5, 6, 7 and 8; involuntary mobility his journeys 12, 13 and 14; and finally, mobility motivated by monastic leadership concerns his journeys 15, 17 and 18. The only category that defies this compartmentalisation of travel motivations in the narrative is the saint’s pursuit for spiritual development, which involves eight journeys: 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 19, 20 and 21.500 So while other types of mobility centre on specific parts in the narrative, these journeys are dispersed throughout the narrative, so that both in number and in distribution spiritual development is the most prominent travel motivation represented in the narrative. Spiritual development as travel motivation The journeys in this category are motivated by the desire to move away from earthly concerns and focus on the divine, moving away from distractions and hoping to attain hesychia.501 The previous chapter already discussed that the state of hesychia was often connected to particular spaces and that this connection inspired mobility to these spaces. Due to the number and distributions of journeys in search of hesychia, this motivation is particularly prominent in the Life of Euthymius.502 In the category of mobility for spiritual progress, journeys for which the hagiographer does not explicitly use the term hesychia are also considered. Hesychia is for example not referred to for journeys 10 and 21, but these journeys are equally represented as being motivated by a desire to move away from (distracting) people in order to concentrate on his own spiritual state. The other representations of travel motivations for spiritual development do explicitly include the 499 So we may observe that particular places are often associated in the narrative with particular activities, but apart from his monastic training we do not see stages correlate to particular regions in the Life of Euthymius. That place and space matters for the type of activity/stage of monastic development Euthymius is looking for, was already established in the discussion on hesychia in the previous chapter, section 2.3. 500 Journey 15 and 16 actually consist of multiple journeys, but they are not narrated by the author as individual ones. Instead he describes a pattern of regular journeys with two main motivations corresponding to the two directions of the journeys. I therefore chose to list them as two journeys. 501 Since monasticism and a degree of solitude are inherently linked, the travel motivation of personal spiritual development overlaps with educational mobility: the initial move to live a monastic life is motivated by a desire to separate oneself from ‘the world’ in order to live a spiritual life. While recognising the overlap between categories, the journeys 4, 9, 10, 11, 16, 19, 20 and 21 might be distinguished by the emphasis on the desire to concentrate on a spiritual state of being individually, rather than in a communal setting. 502 The previous chapter and the brief discussion above (section other travel motivations, p. 125) also showed that in the Life of Gregory of Decapolis there are examples of mobility inspired by spiritual development and hesychia. 3
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