Thorns in the Flesh

Illness and Sanctity in Late Ancient Christianity

Andrew Crislip

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780812244458, 9780812244458
• eBook ISBN: 9780812207200
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History

The literature of late ancient Christianity is rich both in saints who lead lives of almost Edenic health and in saints who court and endure horrifying diseases. In such narratives, health and illness might signify the sanctity of the ascetic, or invite consideration of a broader theology of illness. In Thorns in the Flesh, Andrew Crislip draws on a wide range of texts from the fourth through sixth centuries that reflect persistent and contentious attempts to make sense of the illness of the ostensibly holy. These sources include Lives of Antony, Paul, Pachomius, and others; theological treatises by Basil of Caesarea and Evagrius of Pontus; and collections of correspondence from the period such as the Letters of Barsanuphius and John.Through close readings of these texts, Crislip shows how late ancient Christians complicated and critiqued hagiographical commonplaces and radically reinterpreted illness as a valuable mode for spiritual and ascetic practice. Illness need not point to sin or failure, he demonstrates, but might serve in itself as a potent form of spiritual practice that surpasses even the most strenuous of ascetic labors and opens up the sufferer to a more direct knowledge of the self and the divine. Crislip provides a fresh and nuanced look at the contentious and dynamic theology of illness that emerged in and around the ascetic and monastic cultures of the later Roman world.

Chapter 1

Illness, Sanctity, and Asceticism in Antiquity: Approaches and Contexts

Preserved in the Nag Hammadi Codices, and thus copied and transmitted roughly contemporarily with many of the Egyptian texts discussed in this book, the Apocryphon of James records the risen Jesus saying to the apostles, “Know, then, that [the Son of Man] treated (afrpahre) you when you were ill (šōne) that you might reign. Woe to those who have recovered (mtan) from their illness, for they will relapse into illness. Blessed are they who have not been ill, and have known recovery before falling ill; yours is the kingdom of God.”¹ While Jesus’s secret words echo the blessings and woes of Luke’s Gospel, itself replete with healings by the savior and his disciples (especially the sequel Acts of the Apostles), his talk of sickness and healing points not to the bodily ill; this is no Lucan Gospel of faith healing. Rather, the language of treatment, healing, and recovery points to the process of gnōsis and salvation, much like the metaphor of newfound sobriety after a long bender, familiar also from the Apocryphon of James and other Valentinian texts.² Whether the healing is on the plane of the body or of the soul, the intuitive understanding expected of the reader is quite the same. Health is preferable to illness. Health is a blessing. Health signifies god’s favor and marks its possessor as among the elect, the saved.

While the meaning that the Apocryphon’s Jesus ascribes to health and illness as blessing and curse is straightforward, illness’s meaning for early Christians becomes considerably more slippery and contentious when the ostensibly elect, blessed, and holy themselves fall ill. We can witness the difficulty of making meaning of the illnesses of late ancient ascetics in two related stories from the Lausiac History, a hybrid memoir and travelogue by Palladius (c. 365–425, later a bishop in Bithynia) written around A.D. 420. In the last decade of the fourth century, Palladius lived as an itinerant among the monastic communities of northern Egypt (he also included a few stories from Upper Egypt and the Levant). One day as he sat in the cell of his spiritual master Evagrius (to whom I will return in Chapter 4), Dioscorus, the community priest, came by. “Come here,” Dioscorus said, “see a new Job who possesses boundless gratitude while in a state of great bodily swelling and incurable sickness (pathei aniatōi).”³ Away they went, says Palladius, to find Apa Benjamin, a respected elder in the community known for his charismatic power to heal others by the holy spirit. Palladius, Dioscorus, and Evagrius found Benjamin grotesquely disfigured with dropsy, the ancient term (and current through the nineteenth century) for severe water retention. He was so swollen “that another person’s fingers could not reach around one of his.”⁴ Eventually the saint was rendered wholly immobile, and his disciples resorted to constructing a wide bench to support his corpulent body. As a final indignity, after his death the monks had to disassemble the door jambs to remove his corpse.

The depiction of the saint hints at the symbolic power of the sick or disfigured ascetic noted by France, Cioran, and Harpham, but also its symbolic instability. Palladius is unwilling to narrate Benjamin’s illness in such a straightforward manner, to present the saint as transcendent in his illness, either a diseased flower or a desirable disfigured; he furthermore anticipates that his readers will not be inclined to embrace the paradoxical reading of ascetic illness generalized by Harpham. Rather, he recognizes a disjunction between sanctity and the spectacle of illness.

Palladius’s reticence in the face of Benjamin’s suffering may be due to the sheer grotesquery of his suffering. Yet I suspect more is at play here. The narrative echoes of such swelling evoke the punishments of sinners, even the very worst of transgressors. In his Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord, the second-century writer Papias described the demise of Judas as not from hanging but from dropsy, perhaps elaborating on his curious death by spontaneous disembowelment in Acts 1:18. In Papias’s telling, Judas Iscariot swelled so severely from dropsy that he could not squeeze through Jerusalem’s narrow alleys, a humiliation much like Benjamin’s inability to fit through his cell door. The parallels with the account of Benjamin are striking:

Judas was a terrible, walking example of ungodliness in this world, his flesh so bloated that he was not able to pass through a place where a wagon passes easily, not even his bloated head by itself. For his eyelids, they say, were so swollen that he could not see the light at all, and his eyes could not be seen, even by a doctor using an optical instrument, so far had they sunk below the outer surface. . . . After much agony and punishment, they say, he finally died in his own place, and because of the stench the area is deserted and uninhabitable even now; in fact, to this day no one can pass that place unless they hold one’s nose, so great was the discharge from his body and so far did it spread over the ground.⁵

Traditions of Judas swelling and bursting were widespread in antiquity, sometimes assimilated to the familiar Matthean version of his hanging.⁶ To an ancient reader familiar with common biblical and extrabiblical stories of Judas’s sickness and death, Benjamin’s death could evoke a narrative not of transcendent and expiatory suffering but of well-deserved punishment. Whether or not Palladius had such stories of Judas in his mind is unclear. Yet it is clear that it is reflecting these sorts of concerns—if not necessarily Papias’s narrative—that Palladius concludes the story with a revealing caveat: “I felt that I must tell about this sickness so that we might not be too puzzled (xenizōmetha) when some accident (peristatikon) befalls just men (andrasi dikaiois).”⁷ That is, while France or Cioran might have read this narrative as a customary reflection of the transformation of illness into ascetic transcendence, Palladius betrays no such confidence in the meaning of the saint’s decline. At the very least he anticipates that his audience might not know how to make sense of this bloated saint and to find the transcendent meaning in his grotesque end.

Later in his memoir Palladius includes a second story with the same pattern and same curiously dissatisfying conclusion. This time the sick saint, Stephen, suffers a cancer, which Palladius describes with such physiological clarity that at least one modern translator has felt it necessary to censor the passage: “He suffered from the condition called cancer, which produced ulcers all over his testicles and the head of the penis (kat’ autous tous topous tōn didumōn kai tēs balanou).”⁸ In the cultural symbolic codes of illness and suffering in antiquity, like today, venereal disease could evoke moral disapproval, or at least a suspicion of sin. The connection between venereal diseases and sin, not surprisingly, runs deep in Christian tradition. Again according to Papias elsewhere in the fragment quoted previously, even Judas was afflicted with disease of the genitals: “His genitals appeared more loathsome and larger than anyone else’s, and when he relieved himself there passed through it pus and worms from every part of his body, much to his shame.”⁹ More to the point, elsewhere in the Lausiac History, Palladius tells of another monk, Heron, who had sex with a prostitute and then developed a “carbuncle (anthrax) on the head of his penis (kat’ autēs tēs balanou),” echoing the very same language of Stephen’s case.¹⁰ In both cases venereal ailments are almost inherently symptomatic of sin, and not befitting a holy man.¹¹

Stephen’s story points not only to the difficulty in making meaning out of the illness of ascetics; it furthermore—unlike Benjamin’s sorry tale—points to the potential usefulness of illness in or as ascetic practice. Stephen also reflects the transcendent and transformative potential of illness that Cioran hints at, as he rises above any pain in his treatment: “We found him under the care of a physician. He was working with his hands and weaving palm leaves and he conversed with us while his body was undergoing an operation. He acted as though it were someone else who was undergoing the knife. While his members were being cut away like locks of hair, he showed no sign whatsoever of pain, thanks to the superiority of his spiritual preparation.”¹² By juxtaposing Stephen’s asceticism (mat weaving, the ascetic enterprise par excellence) with his surgery, Palladius equates the two activities as signifiers of his sanctity: his handiwork interweaving strips of palm fiber and his steadfastness as strips of his flesh are excised.

Yet despite the inspiring image of his self-control and thanksgiving in the face of illness and suffering, Palladius does not offer an unambiguous reading of the events. Witnessing his treatment, the monks Ammonius and Evagrius—who had told the tale to Palladius—note that they “were grieving at this (hupolupoumenōn) and were disgusted (siainomenōn) that a person who lived a life like his should suffer disease (pathei) and such surgical remedies.”¹³ Here, as in the story of Benjamin, Palladius’s narrative gaze betrays no desire for the disfigured or delight in the bloom of disease. He anticipates no desire on the part of his readers either—only confusion and disgust. So Palladius concludes with the same proviso as in the story of Benjamin: “Now I have told this so that we may not be puzzled (xenizōmetha) when we see holy people (hagious) falling prey to sickness (pathesin).”¹⁴

In one of the more intensive analyses of these episodes, Virginia Burrus interprets these two clearly linked episodes as demonstrations of Palladius’s overriding concern with shame and humiliation. She makes much of Benjamin’s swelling as a signifier of pride, “powerfully linked” with Benjamin’s “excess of fleshly humiliation.”¹⁵ To be sure, Palladius elsewhere reflects on shame and humiliation, against their antipode pride, as components of ascetic self-fashioning. Yet it is worth noting that Palladius never mentions shame or humiliation in the stories of Stephen and Benjamin. Burrus notes the lack of pride in the discussion of Benjamin as indicating his status as a “somewhat anomalous figure.”¹⁶ The anomalous absence of shame language in the story of these sick saints is important. While one might presume from an essentialist perspective that shame and humiliation must be at play, imputing emotions to historical actors or writers is slippery business, as Barbara Rosenwein argues in her history of early medieval emotions.¹⁷ If we accept that emotions are at least to some extent “constructed” (and not universal, biological features), it is imperative to attend to the words used (a subject I return to in the next chapter). With this in mind, in Palladius’s narration of Stephen’s cancer, the onlookers do not perceive shame on Stephen’s part nor express their own shame at witnessing his humiliation. Rather they are “saddened” and “disgusted,” very different emotions indeed. Of course we have no unmediated access to the “real” emotions of the actors in the story, only Palladius’s rhetorical telling. Whatever Palladius wishes to impart in these striking tales, a theological meditation on shame and humiliation—or the “instability of bodies” or “excess of flesh” for that matter—is subordinate to other concerns.

More important to Palladius’s stories of Benjamin and Stephen is his curious caveat at the close of each, that we should not be puzzled at the sickness of holy people. Burrus insightfully notes that “this justification is not fully satisfying, not least because it sits uneasily within the context of Palladius’s strong emphasis on a divine providence that does not usually seem to leave much room for accidents.”¹⁸ Such explanations (or failures to explain) would have been unsatisfying to ancient readers as well. These passages betray the contentiousness and ambiguity in the meaning and function of illness among ascetics at the turn of the fifth century. In each case Palladius fails to offer a straightforward attempt to make meaning of the ascetic’s illness. Rather, he defers interpretation. Modern literary or philosophical accounts, such as those of France and Cioran, not to mention numerous historical accounts, do not normally acknowledge such ambiguities of the role of bodily illness in ascetic practice. Yet Christian sources from the late Roman Empire are in fact rife with such ambiguities, even outright controversies over the meaning and function of illness within asceticism.

We may compare Palladius’s stories with the homilies of John Chrysostom (c. 347–407). Chrysostom—who had been forced to abandon the ascetic life due to his own declining health—devotes two homilies to precisely this question: Why do the saints fall ill?¹⁹ More specifically, what does it mean theologically and ascetically for the saint to fall ill? In the first Homily on the Statues, delivered in 387, Chrysostom takes 1 Timothy 5:23 as his prompt, as Paul encourages Timothy to drink wine for his many infirmities or illnesses (tas puknas sou astheneias). Chrysostom’s concerns point to the difficulties in making sense of illness among the ostensibly holy, as well as the disruption in social relations between the saints and their clients that ascetic illness causes. Why, Chrysostom asks, voicing his audience’s concerns, would God allow such a holy man to fall ill, especially a man whose relics were endowed with healing abilities? Why, furthermore, would he be allowed to suffer such chronic illness? Why did Timothy, if he was in fact so holy a man, not simply heal himself? And how could a man, on whom so many of God’s people depended, be allowed to suffer so, thus bringing hardship on the community as a whole?²⁰

Chrysostom is at no loss for answers, not all equally compelling. There are eight reasons why the holy fall ill: illness prevents the saints from falling prey to vainglory and arrogance; it proves to others that they are indeed human and not divine; it better reveals g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Illness, Sanctity, and Asceticism in Antiquity: Approaches and Contexts
• 2. Asceticism, Health, and Christian Salvation History: Perspectives from the Earliest Monastic Sources
• 3. Paradise, Health, and the Hagiographical Imagination
• 4. Choosing Illness: Illness as Ascetic Practice
• 5. Pestilence and Sainthood: The Great Coptic Life of Our Father Pachomius
• 6. Illness and Spiritual Direction in Late Ancient Gaza: The Correspondence of Barsanuphius and John with the Sick Monk Andrew
• Conclusion
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Acknowledgments