53 A reconsideration of the ideal of stability in Byzantine monasticism not found in Marcian’s proposal. These words therefore reflects the concerns of the bishops (specifically Anatolius), who added them to the Emperor’s draft. The phrasing reveals that Anatolius mainly targeted monks in an urban setting, most likely, specifically Constantinople.181 If the canon mainly aims to regulate monasticism by circumscribing the actions of monks and incorporating them in official church hierarchy, why is it used as evidence for purporting an ideal of stabilitas loci? One could see a principle of stabilitas loci reflected in the phrases related to the movement of monks in canon 4, although they are in support of something else (separation of monks from civic and church affairs; and placing monks under episcopal control). A closer look at the vocabulary, in my view, shows that the ground for this is not as stable as Herman and others might have us believe. The first phrase touching upon movement is right at the start of the canon, where we observed that the canon introduces a problem with insincere monks moving around cities. As noted above, the problem was not so much the moving itself, but the unregulated nature of it and the founding of new monasteries at will, without permission of the bishop of the city. Another phrase in the canon could be, and has been, interpreted to advocate monastic confinement to the monastery they entered: namely, monks should only fast and pray while ‘persevering in the places where they renounced [the world]’ (ἐν οἷς τόποις ἀπετάξαντο προσκαρτεροῦντας). Also this phrasing is not unequivocal. The term προσκαρτεροῦντας, translated as ‘persevering’ by both Caner and by Price and Gaddis,182 in the phrase ‘persevering in the places where they renounced [the world]’, does not necessarily literally have to mean staying at a place. In the meaning of ‘devote oneself to’, ‘be faithful to’ or ‘adhere firmly to’, the participle might also be meant to refer to where the monks’ loyalty and subordination was supposed to lie. So, the prescription may convey that monks should not necessarily stay at the same place at all times, but that they should not move (unregulated) to a different monastery. Instead, they should keep coming back and be loyal to the monastery where they became a monk.183 The next sentence in the canon equally leaves open the possibility that monks could actually leave their monastery. According to the canon, monks are not to cause annoyance or take part in ecclesiastical or temporal affairs by leaving their own monastery (μήτε δὲ ἐκκλησιαστικοῖς μήτε βιωτικοῖς παρενοχλεῖν πράγμασιν ἢ ἐπικοινωνεῖν καταλιμπάνοντας 181 Also other canons are targeted specifically to monks in Constantinople. E.g., canon 23 refers to monks who come to Constantinople without permission of their bishop ‘causing disorder, disrupting the state of the church, and upsetting the households of certain persons’. Schwartz (1933), p. 162. Translation in Price and Gaddis (2007c), p. 101. These canons were probably specifically targeted at monks like Barsauma, who has gone down in history as notorious for his violence in the context of the Council of Ephesus II, and at followers of Eutyches, whose Christological views were considered heretical by some and who was anathemized in the Council of Chalcedon. For Eutyches’ views, his condemnation and the theological controversies leading up to the Council of Chalcedon, see Price and Gaddis (2007a), p.48 and pp. 115-118. 182 Caner (2002), p. 206; Price and Gaddis (2007c), p. 95. 183 Note that the canon does not necessarily specify this place as a communal monastic establishment – so perhaps it also aimed to target hermits or other non-cenobitic monastic practices as well. 1
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