Introduction: Tales from Another Byzantium

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Introduction: Tales from another Byzantium

The motto “think globally, act locally” has long been popular among social and environmental activists. It stands for a cluster of ideas which take as their starting point the interdependence of all life on earth, and asserts that global problems such as poverty and environmental degradation affect everyone, and should be everyone’s concern, but are best tackled through small-scale, local initiatives, and personal conversion towards a more mind- ful lifestyle. A strikingly similar moral ecology underlies the two medieval Greek “apocalypses” which form the subject of this book: the Apocalypse of the Theotokos and the Apocalypse of Anastasia. Their anonymous medieval authors were moral activists, who sought to raise consciousness and change behavior. They conceived their project in the broadest possible terms: at stake was the well-being, not just of the created world, but of the entire universe. Convinced that earthly and heavenly well-being were intimately bound together, the apocryphal authors were animated by a fervent desire to rectify and fortify the moral environment of their own communities. They thought “cosmically,” but worked locally. The literal meaning of apocalypse is “revelation,” and both medieval texts claim to be revelations of the Other World. Composed in Greek sometime between the ninth and eleventh centuries, they narrate visionary journeys through the otherworldly places of blessed reward and terrible punishment. One otherworld traveller was the Virgin Mary, venerated as the Theotokos (“God-Bearer”) by Eastern Christians. The second visionary was a ﬁctional, typological character called Anastasia. Led through the Other World by the Archangel Michael, both women were shown the throne of judgment, the angelic host, sinners undergoing gruesome, ﬁery punishments, and diverse other wonders. Such is the outward form of the tales, which preserve early stages in the development of ideas about death, judgment, and the afterlife in medieval Greek Orthodox thought. They also bear witness to realities of this world, since the visionary compilers constructed their Other Worlds in the image of the world they knew best. Thus, both visions offer historians glimpses, not only of an Other World, but also of an Other Byzantium. This book is about an “Other Byzantium” in several related senses. It concerns the relatively understudied Middle Byzantine period, rather than Late

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2 Tales from another Byzantium

Antiquity or the late Byzantine (Palaiologan) period. It focusses broadly on the earlier part of the Middle period – the Macedonian era (867–1056) – rather than on the later Komnenian and Angelos dynasties (1081–1204), which typically attract greater scholarly attention. It examines mostly life in theprovinces,notthecapital,andeverydayvillagematters,ratherthanaffairs of empire. It contemplates humble spiritual visions associated with women, compiled by unpretentious, anonymous authors, rather than elevated theological discourses, composed by learned, renowned men. It investigates the world of ordinary souls on the receiving end of imperial and ecclesiastical governance, rather than the world of the elites who administered church and state. Most fundamentally, the study introduces an “other” type of evidence for the study of Eastern Christian society and culture, so far little used by historians: the corpus of medieval Greek apocryphal religious literature. This corpus comprises what may be called “paracanonical” works, those texts that developed and circulated alongside the standard, approved canon of Orthodox writings – and not always perfectly in step with it. Medieval Greek apocrypha come in many forms, of which three in particular will be discussed in this study: the apocalypse, the celestial epistle, and fantastic hagiography. Finally, the apocalypses that form the book’s evidential base are an “other” type of apocalyptic from that which is normally studied. They are concerned more with moral behavior than with political prophecies or messiahs, and with the eschatology of the individual soul rather than that of earth and its kingdoms. The medieval apocalypses open up these various “other Byzantiums,” especially the everyday and the local, to an extent that few other kinds of source can match. When searching for some awareness of how life was lived by the broad mass of Byzantine society, away from the imperial and episcopal palaces,scholarshavetypicallyturnedtobiographiesofsaintswritteninlow- level Greek, to the material culture of domestic life, and to the archaeology of popularcultandpilgrimage.Theapocryphalvisionaryliteratureis,however, qualitatively different from these more commonly used types of source. The visionary genre is notable above all for the imaginative freedom it affords for working particular concerns into the texts, and its high moral purpose compelled the medieval authors to grapple seriously with their local moral ecology. The tales were often reworked, and each new version freezes a particular moment in the moral, social, and ritual life of the community within which it was written. The apocalypses thus put the study of small- community life in the Byzantine Empire on a new level, offering access to the mentalit´es of non-elite, provincial society from a novel direction.

Introduction: Tales from another Byzantium 3

Part of the story of the apocalypses is also the story of how they have been bypassedinthewritingofByzantinehistory.Immenselypopularintheirown times – copied, recopied, frequently reworked – they provide a vital historical witness. Yet they hardly figure in standard secondary accounts of Byzantine society, religion and culture. Why? Past generations of scholars commonly regarded apocrypha more as trivial curiosities than as serious source material. They were typically scorned by historians as banal and derivative; by theologians, as adding nothing useful to the history of Orthodoxy; by philo- logists, as execrable in style and degenerate in language. In recent decades, even as scholarly attitudes have changed to embrace many types of source previously thought marginal, apocrypha are still largely invisible to historians. The problem is now one of access rather than attitude. Popular apocrypha such as the Letter that Fell from the Sky and the Apocalypse of the Theotokos are victims of their own success. For example, the Theotokos apocalypse survives in hundreds of manuscripts, each presenting its own version of the tale. Such fecundity renders the creation of a conventional critical edition virtually impossible – and the lack of an easily accessible, standard edition renders a text virtually invisible. The irony of the medieval apocrypha is thus that some of the best-known texts of their time – to judge from the large numbers of surviving manuscripts – are among the least used by modern historians. The protean nature of most apocrypha, which renders them liable to mistaken identities, has also complicated their scholarly reception. Historians have simply not known where to place such texts – chronologically, culturally, regionally, or theologically. This study is the first to propose a coherent historical context for the Apocalypse of the Theotokos and the Apocalypse of Anastasia. It is a context that takes us far away from the imperial intrigue, self- conscious literary elites, and high culture of Constantinople – the more typical venue of Byzantine history writing – and into the empire’s bedrock of hundreds of small village communities. We see the Byzantine masses, not as a faceless crowd, but differentiated as individual sinners, whose failings weigh heavily on their local networks of kin, village and parish. We see the resurgent empire of the Macedonian era, imposing its financial and ecclesiastical regime with new vigor on all citizens, through the eyes of those upon whom it imposed itself. The apocalypses project the viewpoint of people who lived on the margins of imperial power, and take us into the center of their reality, not that of Constantinople. The vices they deplore (such as ploughing or reaping out of one’s furrow) and the virtues they promote (such as respect for the local priest) are those of interest to local communities. The apocalypses were written to serve such communities, to

4 Tales from another Byzantium

reinforce local values. Utilitarian in nature, straightforward in form, style, and content, written in simple Greek, they were meant to be read aloud, and taken directly to heart. They reveal a face-to-face society going about its daily negotiations of power, status, and survival – with each other, and with God. This is indeed an “other” Byzantium from that encountered in most standard accounts, primary or secondary. The present study falls into three parts: Texts and contexts, Other worlds, and Morals. Part One, Texts and contexts (Chapters 1–4), introduces and explicates the apocalypses themselves: what they are, what has been made of them in previous scholarship, what this study makes them out to be, how they reproduced themselves and circulated, what sources their authors used, and how they fit into the larger literary and spiritual culture of their time. Chapter 1, “What is an apocalypse?”, after introducing the texts, examines (and rejects) most previous characterizations. It maintains that the apocalypses are most fruitfully understood, first, as medieval exemplars in a long tradition of “Tours of Hell,” originating in the Biblical pseudepigrapha and apocrypha; and second, in contemporary context, as “normative fictions”: stories composed to reinforce moral norms. “Normative fictions” can derive from many sources, but the two medieval apocalypses, it is argued throughout the study, were generated from within lay communities, to bolster their own fundamental moral and social values. Chapter 2, “Apocryphal biology,” surveys the apocalypses’ development and circulation, and compares different versions of the same tales, to see how the medieval authors understood and adapted their material. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the tales in broader literary context, probing both their ancestors and their peers. Chapter 3, “Transformations,” locates the apocalypses within the family of texts spawned by the Late Antique Apocalypse of Paul. It demonstrates that while the two medieval “female” apocalypses follow the outward form of the traditional Tourof Hell, inwardly they radically subvert its spirit. Chapter 4 assesses the visions within Mid- dle Byzantine literary culture. Comparison with contemporary Byzantine otherworld visions written on a higher level (stylistic, intellectual, and literary) reveals the apocalyptic Other World to be an entirely different world from that imagined by elite, erudite authors. The apocalypses share more common ground with a sub-genre of fantastic, fictive hagiography which flourished in the tenth century, works such as the Lives of Basil the Younger and Andrew the Fool. Part Two, Other worlds (Chapters 5–7), explicates the content of the visions: the imaginative structures and personnel of their Other Worlds, and how these intersect with this world. Chapter 5, “Passages,” examines the texts in various interpretative modes: allegorical, iconic, architectural,

Introduction: Tales from another Byzantium 5

psychological. The goal is to understand the apocalypses as their contemporary audiences may have, filtered through their experience of allegorical preaching and story-telling, religious iconography, ritual use of church buildings, and even, just possibly, near-death experience. Chapter 6 examines “The inhabitants of Heaven” as represented in the apocalypses. The choice and depiction of otherworld personnel in both texts is seen to echo the visual and liturgical culture of the Orthodox Church. The visions offer understandings of God and the heavenly host in their most basic forms, as impressions absorbed through church-going rather than formal theological study. Chapter 7, “This world and the next,” scrutinizes the social, eco- nomic, and political realities which underlie the texts. The visions exude the political and social attitudes of small communities far from the centers of power where policy was formulated, and from which it was imposed. Their negative attitude towards otherworld punishments and elite, official sinners offers a glimpse of the long arm of the Byzantine penal code, fiscal regime, and corrupt officialdom, as seen from the underside. Part Three, Morals (Chapters 8 and 9), presents what for the medieval apocalyptic authors was the real heart of the matter: transmitting urgent moral lessons concerning transgression, repentance, intercession, forgive- ness, punishment, purgation, and judgment. What the “textual communities” of compilers, copyists, patrons, readers, and audiences involved with such texts hoped to gain was nothing less than the wholesale reformation of lives, personal and communal, and the salvation of souls. Chapter 8, “Intercession, judgment, and the Mother of God,” addresses explicitly the fundamental dynamic implicit in everything the two apocryphal authors wrote: the inevitability of divine judgment, and the pressing need for intercession to try to delay or influence it. In emphasizing intercession, the two apocalypses participate ina larger contemporary phenomenon, since the cult of Mary the Mother of God as the ultimate, invincible inter- cessor for sinners in this world and the next, supplanting Christ himself, came into full flower in the Middle Byzantine centuries. Chapter 8 situates the two apocalypses within the Middle Byzantine culture of intercession, as expressed in material as well as literary culture. Chapter 9, “Morality, culture, and community,” completes the task of grounding the two medieval apocalypses in their native environment. Ana- lyzing the types of sin and sinner treated in the apocalypses in detail, it finds the compilers describing the moral and religious tensions of a local, lay, face-to-face society. These are communities small enough that individuals, and individual actions, matter. The apocalypses teach that the behavior of individuals affects not only their own welfare, and that of their families and communities, but also the well-being of the entire cosmic moral ecosystem,

6 Tales from another Byzantium

for good or ill. What holds true for the microcosm of the parish community goes also for the macrocosm of God’s universe: sin corrupts and defiles both, endangering their very survival. Protecting the moral and social ecology of each local community – and by extension, of the cosmos – is the primary goal of the apocryphal authors. Their answer to the cosmic problem of sin was to try to arrest moral and ritual decay in their local environments. The apocalypses operate in the same climate of lay activism for moral improvement, and concern for a good death, which animated confraternal associations in medieval Byzantium. Accordingly, the final chapter closes by examining convergences between the imagery and aims of the two medieval visions and the aims and activities of Middle Byzantine lay confraternities. The sphere of lay piety and moral activism epitomized by confraternities offers the most promising context for understanding the generation and circulation of morally improving popular texts that are not obviously monastic. While the apocryphal authors wrote about things cosmic and celestial (“think globally”), their feet were very much on the ground (“act locally”), the particular ground of their Middle Byzantine environment. The imaginative structures they built in the Other World uncover a new world for historians, and a new way of looking at Byzantine history in its middle centuries. This new view of Byzantine society and culture has wide implications. More broadly based within medieval Byzantine society and Eastern Chris- tian religious culture, it fills gaps created by conventional historiographical dichotomies which oppose elites and masses, learned and illiterate, power- ful and poor, Constantinople and countryside. It challenges in particular an influential view of Byzantium as a culture in which the dominant ties were vertical ones of power and patronage, extending down from the imperial and ecclesiastical hierarchy, and in which little else, apart from the nuclear family, held society together. The medieval apocalypses reveal an “other” Byzantium, one characterized by cohesion, not atomization, and bound together horizontally by ritual and moral ties, as well as vertically. They expose the broad mass of Byzantine society in the Middle period as a network of small, dynamic local communities, taking active responsibility for their own moral and spiritual welfare, rather than waiting passively for their betters to intervene. They project a self-reliant local society, accustomed to policing its own moral values and boundaries. Seeing Byzantine society as a network of sturdy and resourceful local communities has not been the most typical characterization in recent historiography, and may surprise. But it goes some way towards explaining the extraordinary resilience of the Byzan- tine Empire, and of Eastern Orthodox Christian culture more generally, over their long and often troubled history.

part i

Texts and contexts

I will concede to any critic that it is extremely monotonous, quite contemptible as literature, and even positively repulsive in parts. But it is a member, and was a very popular member, of a most noteworthy class of books. M. R. James (1893: 110), on the Apocalypse of the Theotokos

To dismiss this literature as monkish, as if its readership was conﬁrmed to monks, while laymen read secular literature, shows a complete ignorance of the situation. Of course, monks read it, but everyone else who was capable of reading read it, too, and, for the most part, read nothing else – barring again the Bible and the Fathers. I should like, therefore, to insist on the view that the conceptual world of Byzantium can most fully be appreciated only on the basis of lowbrow literature. Cyril Mango (1981: 53)

1 What is an apocalypse? Responses medieval and modern

1.1 The texts and their time

The Apocalypse of the Theotokos and the Apocalypse of Anastasia are sister texts, composed in Greek possibly within a century of one another. Both describe a supernatural journey through the terrible wonders of the Other World,seenthroughtheeyesofawoman.Bothareearlymedievalreworkings ofacommonLateAntiqueancestor,theApocalypseofPaul.Bothwerewritten anonymously, in unassuming, accessible Greek, for a broad audience. Both were translated into Slavonic early in their careers, and enjoyed a wide circulation beyond the Byzantine Empire: Anastasia, throughout the Eastern Orthodox cultural sphere, especially in Bulgaria and Serbia; the Theotokos apocalypse, throughout the world. Like most apocryphal texts, both apocalypses elude precise chronological assignment. Both present long and complicated textual histories, in which sometimes quite different versions of the texts have flourished, widely sepa- rated in time and place. This study focusses on the first phase of their careers, their early medieval composition and circulation. For the Theotokos apocalypse, this appears to have been between the ninth century and beginning of the eleventh; for Anastasia, around the turn of the tenth century. Both texts thus belong to the Middle Byzantine period. The conventional tripartite division of Byzantine history usually locates the emergence of a distinctively medieval Byzantium around the mid-ninth century. The settle- ment over icon veneration which proclaimed the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843, and the accession of the emperor Basil I in 867, provide two conve- nient benchmarks. Both events signaled the resolution of debates regarding the kind of society Byzantium would be. The first part of the “middle” centuries, a period of relative stability, prosperity, military success and cultural achievement, coincides broadly with the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056). During these centuries, while still beset by numerous internal and external challenges, the Byzantine Empire operated as a self-confident, fully inde- pendent political and cultural force. Scholars differ on when the “middle” period should end, but the loss of much of the Empire’s medieval heartland in Anatolia to Turkish control after the Battle of Mantzikert in 1071 marked

10 Tales from another Byzantium

the beginning of the end of this self-confident autonomy, culminating in the capture of Constantinople by Western crusaders in 1204. The Macedonian era was a time of consolidation of institutions – political, military, legal, ecclesiastical, cultural, and social. The stability afforded by this consolidation encouraged an outpouring of high-level production in literature, scholarship, and the visual arts, which some have called “the Macedonian renaissance.” But renewal can occur at all cultural levels, and the medieval Greek apocrypha are in their own cultural sphere as much products of Macedonian renewal as the learned encyclopedias and treatises which enjoyed imperial sponsorship. The very compositional model of our two apocalypses, the medieval reworking and adaptation of a Late Antique text, recalls the metacharakterismos (“reconstruction”) emblematic of Mace- donian dynastic literary endeavor in general.1 Herbert Hunger’s characterization of this process as the “special interpretation of an antique model and its ‘reconstruction’ by a combination of mimesis and innovation,” originates in high culture, but also describes the spirit and method which led from the Apocalypse of Paul to the Theotokos apocalypse and Anastasia. The tenth century was a time of particular experimentation, with new techniques and new forms. Most notably, the period saw the emergence of a new genre: extended biographical compositions that blend seeming fact with fantasy, supernatural revelation, dreams and visions, romantic adventure, and moral fable.2 Some texts, such as the Vita Basilii, Constantine VII’s biography of the founder of the Macedonian dynasty, his grandfather Basil I (r. 867–1025), took undoubted historical figures as their subjects, but improved on the story by incorporating elements of adventure and romance.3 The historicity of other subjects, such as the holy man Basil in the Life of Basil the Younger, is ambiguous. Some of the vitae, such as those of Andrew the Fool and Irene of Chrysobalanton, are more likely outright fictions. The Apocalypse of Anastasia, as an extended pseudo-hagiographical revelation of otherworld secrets blended with moral teaching which centers on a fictitious heroine, is consistent with this productive surge of extended, fantastic biography in the tenth century. The value of the two medieval apocalypses for historians is that they repre- sent the Middle Byzantine cultural innovation and energy in the unofficial, non-elite sphere. This is a level different from that usually encountered in the surviving literary source material for Byzantium. Hagiography of all kinds has received increasing attention in recent years, but the bulk of scholarly

1 Hunger 1986: 509–11; quotation following is at p. 510. 2 See below, 4.2. 3 Kazhdan in ODB 1991: 2180–81.

What is an apocalypse? 11

attention still centers, understandably, on the impressive, sophisticated body of literature produced by Byzantine elites for elites. Our apocalypses clearly operated within a less exalted milieu, and were aimed at a broader audience. Designed to achieve the widest possible circulation, their ideas are straightforward and expressed without pretence, in simple, accessible Greek. The texts’ moral teaching is made at once more attractive and more com- pelling by their compilers’ choice of the Tour of Hell apocalyptic form. Few imaginative venues can match the gruesome ﬁery punishment places of the Other World as a showcase for the grim consequences of sin. Moral norms that might seem abstract as expressed in conventional preaching or canon law become immediate, personal, and unforgettable. The discourse of the journey naturally invites hearers and readers to accompany the visionary, seeing the awesome sights as if with their own eyes, and mentally review- ing their own moral state. The apocalypses lure hearers into their world by posing as travellers’ tales of the wonders of the Other World, and then use those wonders to drive home their moral agenda.

1.2 Travellers’ tales

The Apocalypse of the Theotokos The imaginative scene of the Apocalypse of the Theotokos is set early in the first century, during the post-Ascension lifetime of Mary. Mary goes to the Mount of Olives to pray, asking for the Archangel Michael (in one version, Gabriel) to descend, and reveal to her all things in heaven, on earth and under the earth (§1).4 Michael descends, accompanied by an angelic host. A series of formal salutations (chairetismoi) are exchanged. Mary then asks to see how sinners are punished, whereupon the Archangel commands the angels of the West to open Hades (§2–3). The first sinners Mary sees, those guilty of unbelief or heresy, sit plunged in darkness, lamenting bitterly (§3–4). In the southern regions of Hades, she sees individual groups of Christian sinners, being punished in gruesomely creative ways which correspond to the particular sins committed (§5–21). Mary weeps for the sinners, but Michael informs her that the worst is yet to come. Turning “to the left parts of Paradise,” they encounter a mighty river of boiling pitch: the dreaded “outer fire,” which torments sinners eternally cut off from the sight of God. Even Mary cannot find pity for these sinners, guilty

4 Section numbers for both texts correspond to the translations appended at the end of the book; Theotokos divisions follow James 1893.