205 Conclusion mobility allowed the celebrated individuals to become a monk and train in monastic virtues. Mobility for spiritual development allowed them to live an exemplary ascetic life and to gain spiritual authority. Mobility to found monastic establishments contributed to represent the monks as monastic leaders. Mobility that enabled contact with other people, both lay and monastic, enabled the holy men to give advice, communicate prophecies, heal people and inspire others to follow their exemplary lifestyle. These types of mobility were thus presented to have positive effects on both the mover and the communities he moved to. Other types of mobility were represented more ambiguously in terms of their positive, negative or neutral effects on the mover or society. One such example concerned involuntary mobility. While involuntary mobility was not presented to have disadvantages from a moral perspective, occasionally negative consequences for the mover from another perspective were represented. For example, the representation of Elias’ enslavement and deportation from Sicily to North Africa is represented as having both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, Elias’ deportation is framed as the unfolding of God’s plan and his divine destiny: as a child, Elias would have received a divine revelation that he should go to North Africa to convert people there. His enslavement is also represented as positive for his new owners, who profited from his servitude and admired his virtue, and as positive for the receiving society, since Elias converted Muslims to Christianity after his manumission. On the other hand, the narrative also provides a glimpse of a grievous emotional response to enslavement, particularly revealing Elias’ homesickness. Moreover, Elias’ residence in foreign territory is represented as having potentially endangered his life, when he was sentenced to death for converting Muslims. In this case, involuntary mobility is thus presented ambiguously in terms of the positive or negative effects it may have on the mover and on society. The question remains whether these representations also reflected the actual value judgements of authors and audiences. For the Lives of Gregory and Euthymius I have suggested that since mobility enabled hesychia and a transformative development towards sainthood and a monastic career, that probably the author did not expect a negative value judgement from his audiences on these types of monastic mobility. For the Life of Elias, on the other hand, I have suggested that the author anticipated critical discourses on mobility, specifically on pilgrimage and on the high degree of mobility of the saint. Patterns in metaphorical language use, shared by all three authors and probably reflecting a larger discourse community, suggested positive connotations with mobility and immobility, which were both linked to virtue. Simultaneously and contradictory, metaphorical langue use also suggested a negative connotation of movement, which was conceptually connected to temptation. The various approaches in this study thus revealed value judgements on mobility, both positive and negative, certainly on the level of representation, but probably also reflecting ways of thinking by authors and audiences. C
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