73 Mobility, immobility and sainthood The following brief exposition of the scholarly insights into the meanings of hesychia in late-antique monastic literature will allow to establish whether the middle-Byzantine understanding of the term in monastic literature is specific to that period, or whether the middle-Byzantine understandings largely remained the same as those in late antiquity. At the end of this chapter it will become apparent that the usages of hesychia in the middleByzantine period mostly stand in the tradition of late-antique monastic literature. Two literary corpora have been discussed most frequently in the scholarly literature on hesychia in late-antique monastic literature.232 These are the collections of the Apophthegmata Patrum (collected sayings of desert fathers and mothers, compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries, but based on material of the fourth and fifth centuries) and writings by Evagrius Ponticus (330-399). Whereas there is some disagreement among scholars on the correct interpretation for Evagrius’ usage of hesychia,233 scholars generally point out the same aspects of the meanings of hesychia in the Apophthegmata Patrum. Similar observations are also made based on works by Evagrius and other (earlier) authors.234 To illustrate the connotations of hesychia in late antiquity let us therefore turn to a saying in the Apophthegmata, while recognising that many of the points made have also been seen reflected in other late-antique texts and recognising that there also was diversity in the usages of hesychia between and within various texts and authors. The following saying is attributed to Anthony in the Apophthegmata Patrum: Εἶπε πάλιν· Ὥσπερ οἱ ἰχθύες ἐγχρονίζοντες τῇ ξηρᾷ τελευτῶσιν, οὕτως καὶ οἱ μοναχοὶ, βραδύνοντες ἔξω τοῦ κελλίου, ἢ μετὰ κοσμικῶν διατρίβοντες, πρὸς τὸν τῆς ἡσυχίας τόνον ἐκλύονται. Δεῖ οὖν, ὥσπερ τὸν ἰχθὺν εἰς τὴν θάλασσαν, οὕτως καὶ ἡμᾶς εἰς τὸ κελλίον ἐπείγεσθαι, μήποτε βραδύνοντες ἔξω ἐπιλαθώμεθα τῆς ἔνδον φυλακῆς.235 Abba Antony said: ‘Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of hesychia.236 So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lose our interior watchfulness’.237 232 See e.g., Hausherr (1966a); Sinkewicz (2003); Bitton-Ashkelony (2005), pp. 158–160; Vos (2016); Müller (2017). 233 See footnotes 234 and 241 below. 234 Although Barbara Müller disagrees with these interpretations for some texts, see Müller (2017). 235 PG 65, p. 77. A very similar saying is also found in the Life of Anthony the Great (85.3-4) by Athanasius (295 – 373). 236 There is some discussion whether hesychia in τὸν τῆς ἡσυχίας τόνον should be understood as an object genitive (whereby the emphasis is on τόνος - ‘tension, straining’, translated here as ‘intensity’) or a subject genitive (whereby the stress is on hesychia, and τόνος the manner in which hesychia is practiced) ; although it can make a difference in the interpretation of hesychia in this passage (see Müller (2017), p. 158.), it does not affect the general observations that are highlighted following this citation. Moreover the observations singled out are also based on other late-antique texts. This passage merely serves as an illustration and starting point for discussing the general conclusions of recent scholarship on the meaning(s) of hesychia in late-antique monastic literature. 237 Based on the translation by Benedicta Ward (Ward translated hesychia with ‘inner peace’, but I have left it here untranslated); Ward (1984), p. 3. 2
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