71 Mobility, immobility and sainthood In the three texts that this thesis focusses on, 18 out of 25 occurrences of hesychia or its cognates appear in an episode that involves mobility.224 In the majority (12) of these hesychia is represented as a motivation for monks to travel.225 Moreover, hesychia has been recognised as a spiritually charged term in the context of early monastic literature and in a spiritual and political movement in the late-Byzantine period: hesychasm.226 The introductory quote already illustrates that hesychia, mobility and immobility could be interrelated in the thought world of hagiographers. There is little research on the significance and meaning of hesychia in the middle-Byzantine period.227 Yet, considering the work done on the earlier and later periods, it seems plausible that also in the middle period hesychia was spiritually significant. The discussion of the three hagiographical texts in this chapter will support this assumption, which could be a basis for further research to the term in a broader range of middle-Byzantine sources. In short, this chapter will investigate whether we can come closer to Byzantine perceptions of monastic mobility and immobility in the middle-Byzantine period by studying how the term hesychia is connected to mobility and immobility in the three hagiographical texts that serve as the central case studies in this thesis. The chapter consists of two parts. The first part (section 2.2) will be devoted to a semantic analysis of the term. In order to find out how hesychia was exactly linked to immobility and mobility in these narratives, first there is the need to establish what hesychia meant for ninth- and tenth-century hagiographers and audiences. In this first part, the various layers of the semantic network of the term will be examined, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the semantic history of the term.228 As touched upon earlier, various studies have already discussed the meaning(s) and significance of hesychia in late-antique monasticism and in the late-Byzantine period, but such historical semantic research for the middle-Byzantine period is lacking. This chapter may serve as a starting point to fill this gap. The second part (sections 2.3 and 2.4) 224 See appendix 2. 225 See appendix 2. 226 For hesychia in early monastic literature see e.g., Hausherr (1966a); Sinkewicz (2003); Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), pp. 158–160; Vos (2016); Müller (2017). For hesychasm, see e.g., Hausherr (1966b); Papadakis (1991); Strezova (2014). 227 Irénéé Hausherr briefly referred to the usage of hesychia in Athanasios’ typikon for the Great Lavra monastery at Athos (written between 973-975) – according to Hausherr Athanasios uses it as a synonym for solitude – which would stand in a patristic tradition of e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa who used hesychia interchangeably with eremia (ἐρημία: desert, wilderness, solitude) to refer to a withdrawal from society. Hausherr (1966a), p. 169. In his studies on hesychia and hesychasm Hausherr mainly focussed on late-Byzantine authors and on what he saw as the origins of the hesychast prayer method, namely the writings of late-antique church fathers and early monastic literature, see Hausherr (1966b). 228 Drawing on conclusions of linguistic studies as summarised in the introduction of Peels (2015). Following Peels, a maximalist view of semantics of a lexeme is taken. This is the view that meaning is understood by language users (and hence can also be studied by historians to access meaning for medieval language users) by encountering the term in the various contexts in which it is used (i.e. the distribution of the term). That is, lexemes do not have one dictionary-style core meaning, but have multiple meanings defined by its usage; these meanings may be hierarchically organised in the understanding of a language user, so that certain meanings are more central and others more peripheral to the understanding of the lexeme: this may be called a semantic network. Lexemes may have partially overlapping meanings, but the organisation of the semantic networks will be different (e.g., a peripheral meaning of lexeme A may be central for lexeme B). As language use is competitive, there are no exact synonyms. 2
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