Symeon Stylites the Younger and Late Antique Antioch: From Hagiography to History by Lucy Parker;

Author:Lucy Parker; [Parker, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192688798
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2022-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

Funding the Monastery

Did this conflict really relate to the question of whether the monks should accept gifts from supplicants and pilgrims? This is difficult to answer and raises wider questions about the economic foundation of the monastery. There have been few comprehensive studies of the economic bases of early Syrian monasteries, although more has been done for Egypt and Palestine.181 Hagiography is notoriously problematic as a source for economic history, both because hagiographers were uninterested in a realistic appraisal of the subject, and because money and wealth were highly ideologically charged topics. We thus cannot necessarily take at face value Symeon’s hagiographer’s depiction of the financial workings of the monastery.

The hagiographer presents Symeon as being vehemently opposed to money and to economic transactions. This is shown not only by his repeated insistence that pilgrims should not bring gifts to thank him, but also by his unusual reply to a stone-cutter who asked for his help in regaining his stolen salary: ‘the Son of God did not send me to settle questions about money, but to heal those who are sick.’182 In this last instance, he does then help the man to find his money, but it is interesting to note that miracles relating to lost money, although popular in much late antique hagiography, are very rare in the Life.183 Strikingly, the same hostility to money is reflected in the Life of Martha: Symeon states that he was initially reluctant to engage in any building projects, only becoming reconciled to the idea once God had promised that no money would have to be involved.184 Both the Life of Symeon and the Life of Martha claim that the substantial construction works carried out on the ‘Wonderful Mountain’ were the product of voluntary work by pilgrims (many of them from Isauria) who had been cured and wanted to thank the saint.185

But is this picture of a radically money-spurning hegumen, who refused to accept gifts (apart from labour hours and construction materials for building) plausible? If a monastery was not to accept gifts, it could only provide for itself and its guests through its monks’ own labour. Symeon’s monastery does, like other monasteries associated with stylites, seem to have engaged in agriculture.186 The Life contains several references to cultivated gardens and fields attached to the lower monastery.187 The reference to conflict with leaders of nearby villages ‘because of the pasturings [?: νομὰς] of the Wonderful Mountain’ may also reflect agricultural activity.188 The monks appear to have performed at least some of the farm labour themselves.189 The monks thus provided for some of their own needs, and it is not impossible to believe that before Symeon’s rise to prominence, their monastery, under John, could have been largely self-sufficient, if their buildings (which do not survive) were modest and self-built.190

Yet comparative evidence would suggest that, at least by the time of the move to the ‘Wonderful Mountain’ and the building of a new monastic complex, Symeon’s monastery must have relied upon gifts as well as agricultural income.

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