On defining the holy man

Abstract

Abstract It falls to few of us to write an article that justifies the epithet ‘seminal’, but Peter Brown’s ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man’ was certainly that. Appearing in 1971, the year after The World of Late Antiquity, it represented a major change of direction from Augustine of Hippo (1967), the importance of which is evident for Peter Brown himself as well as for his readers. The World of Late Antiquity moved away from the close textual analysis and the psychological interpretation which are the marks of the book on Augustine towards a broader sweep, even if still in the same chronological period. Its horizons were vast, its energy enviable. Brown was staking out a new field. With the article on the holy man he could be seen stepping more confidently into the territory of social anthropology, using a wide range of ‘data’ to construct a social definition, not of a saint, but of the ‘holy man’ in late antiquity as a typically interstitial figure exercising a patronage role based on the symbolic capital of his perceived authority. Such figures were presentedmainly on the basis of Eastern, and especially Syrian, sources-as rural patrons, able to mediate between town and country, and between the powerful and the poor. There was to be more to say.