150 Chapter 3 term hesychia or a cognate.503 For journey 11 and 19, hesychia is not explicitly mentioned as travel motivation, but can be reconstructed as part of the motivation on the basis of the narrative context: hesychia is referred to immediately after the journey is narrated.504 The previous chapter discussed that hesychia was not considered a permanent state in which the saint could be. Reaching hesychia was considered difficult. Travelling in search of hesychia therefore expressed the saint’s perseverance in reaching spiritual perfection. The road to spiritual perfection, however, did not merely entail seeking the right circumstances to reach hesychia.505 Once he has arrived at a destination, the saint is not merely represented as finding hesychia, but he is also shown to engage in ascetical exercises, such as bodily mortifications, sitting on top of a column or fighting with demons in isolation.506 These activities served to highlight Euthymius’ progressive spiritual advancement as well. The idea that ascetical exercises are seen as steps in spiritual progress is most clearly expressed in the episodes after Euthymius’ first journey to Mount Athos, to which he travelled because of his love of hesychia.507 Here Euthymius and a fellow ascetic are represented as performing a succession of ascetical exercises. The first is called a ‘preparatory exercise’ (προγύμνασμα), which involved subsisting on grass like cattle for forty days.508 After completing the task, they are said to be already accustomed to ‘a sensation of enlightenment’ through their purification and they are said to ‘ascend in virtue as if on a ladder’.509 Therefore he and his companion ‘raised the level of their asceticism to another rung’.510 In these examples of preparatory exercises and climbing up a ladder, 503 Journey 4: φιλήσυχος and τῆς ἡσυχίας; journey 9: τὴν ἡσυχίαν; journey 16: φιλησυχίας; journey 20: ἡσυχάζειν. Life of Euthymius the Younger 14.1, 23.3, 27.2 and 37.3. 504 Life of Euthymius the Younger 24.2 and 37.2-3. 505 The idea that monks do not achieve the perfect ‘spiritual state’ at once is widely spread in middle Byzantine and earlier monastic sources. A progressive spiritual development was already observed in the discussion of the Life of Gregory of Decapolis above. 506 After journey 4 to Mount Athos: Euthymius engages in various ‘tests’ of bodily denial and various episodes of outsmarting or expelling demons. One of the self-devised tests was a test of immobility (not to leave a cave, not even for gathering food, for three years), which illustrates the tension between mobility and immobility in the saint’s spiritual progress, also observed in the previous chapter (see especially section 2.3.4); after journey 9 and 19: sitting on top of a column; after journey 11 the hagiographer refers to Euthymius’ ascetic practice more generally. Euthymius is here said to have ‘decided to remain anchored for a while as if in a harbor’ on an island due to the ideal isolation together with two monks who were similarly inclined to asceticism (Life of Euthymius 24; translation by Talbot in Alexakis (2016). This again illustrates the aforesaid tension between mobility and immobility (immobility is here suggested to be temporary: after a while, he would leave again the harbour). 507 Ascetical exercises as part of spiritual advancement are much more prominent in the Life of Euthymius compared to the Life of Gregory. Some of the ascetical exercises by Euthymius seem to be extreme compared to the corpus of middle-Byzantine monastic saints, but, as Krausmüller has observed, a degree of ‘agonistic’ asceticism, in which monks outdid each other in ascetical feats, was characteristic of post-iconoclastic hagiography. This would change from the middle of the tenth century onwards (first only for hagiography written in the Stoudios monastery, but from the eleventh century onwards an alternative ideal was adopted in other centres of hagiographical production as well). That is, in later hagiography we find a trend towards a moderation of asceticism, as ‘ascetical competition’ between monks came to be seen as vainglorious and contradictory to the virtue of humility and conformity. Krausmüller (2017). 508 Life of Euthymius the Younger 17. 509 ὡς ἐν κλίμακι τῇ ἀρετῇ ἀνυψούμενοι; Life of Euthymius the Younger 18. Referring to the popular text of The Ladder of Divine Ascent by John Climacus. 510 ἐφ’ ἑτέραν βαθμίδα τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀναβιβάζουσιν ἄσκησιν; Life of Euthymius the Younger 18.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw