63 A reconsideration of the ideal of stability in Byzantine monasticism Basil writes, but there are certain circumstances in which it is permissible. In both cases – staying or leaving – the concern is the spiritual integrity of every member of the community. The only type of monastic mobility that the advice evidently affects is mobility of a monk who moves away from the community and who breaks ties with that community. It does not necessarily seem to imply that brothers cannot physically travel, as long as they are still part of the community (and come back again). Several other questions in Basil’s Rules address mobility. Questions 38, 39, 44 and 45, all imply that members of an ascetic community might make (occasional) journeys. Although he does not forbid it, in questions 38, 39 and 44 Basil voices some reservations about travelling. These questions reveal that Basil saw several potential dangers of travel: disruption of lifestyle, interaction with society and lack of mutual control. Ensuring mutual control, by travelling in groups, and only sending the spiritually advanced brother on errands could counter these dangers. This chapter has argued that the ideals reflected in these passages do not so much concern a stability of place, but the stability of an ascetic lifestyle in a community. Nonetheless, an ideal of a degree of physical segregation from the rest of society is also reflected in the Rules. Council of Chalcedon Like Basil’s advice, canon 4 of the Council of Chalcedon was not mainly concerned with limiting monastic mobility. Rather, the canon reflects top down attempts to limit the influence of monks in church and state affairs. The strategy to achieve this was twofold. Firstly, the canon prescribed to delineate monastic life to prayer and fasting and to explicitly exclude monks from ecclesiastical and political affairs. Secondly, the canon placed monks under episcopal control. By the fifth century, monasticism was an established (albeit diverse) phenomenon and also the church had developed an organisational hierarchical structure. Monasticism was not yet integrated in this hierarchical structure, so that monks had a large degree of autonomy on how to organise monastic life. Canon 4 of the council of Chalcedon is one of the first attempts by the Emperor and the bishops to get a closer grip on monks, by making them subordinate to bishops and by limiting the range of activities they could do without the explicit approval of the bishop. This is not to say that monastic mobility was not a concern at all for the bishops, although it was a means to an end, and not a priority in itself. For Emperor Marcian, who proposed the canon, mobility was not even an issue at all. Considering that the bishops took over the proposal by Marcian almost word for word, as is recorded in the Acts, but added the phrases on mobility, they apparently considered monastic mobility important enough to make these alterations. As discussed in this chapter, none of these added phrases imply an issue with monastic mobility in general, but with unregulated mobility and the possibility of monks interfering in church and secular affairs. Staying at a certain place within the 1
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