his disciples individually or in small groups, both by giving them words to contemplate and live by and by his example. Spiritual guidance is the foundation of monastic spirituality as it first took shape in Egypt and then spread to Palestine and beyond.39 The desert fathers who had left civilization behind in order to concentrate on a life of meditation and prayer soon attracted visitors who wanted to partake of their wisdom. Groups of disciples clustered around the “Old Men,” some staying for a few months before moving on to be inspired by another Old Man or returning to the world, others remaining for a lifetime. The sharing of the Spirit thus generated the nucleus of monastic communities joined in the common pursuit of personal perfection. The Spirit that was channeled through an Old Man could radiate even beyond his inner circle of disciples to the laypeople who simply wanted to reap the benefits of being loosely associated with him, but without making a dramatic change in their lives.
The activity that gives purpose and cohesion to these followers of a holy man—both the inner circle of monastic disciples and the outer circle of laypeople—is prayer. The ability to intercede for others before God is one of the distinctive marks of the spiritual individual, as will become clear in the following. The Greek term for this ability is parrhēsia, which literally means “the freedom to say everything” and is best translated “boldness of speech.” Parrhēsia is the common ground where the spiritual abilities of the pneumatophoros and the miraculous powers of the holy man overlap. For what else are miracles if not the result of successful intercessory prayer? This function of the holy man has not been sufficiently appreciated until recently and therefore deserves to be treated in some detail here.
Intercessory prayer is of vital importance in joining a spiritual father to his followers and vice versa. It is, as it were, the daily bread of their interaction. Spectacular miracles may sometimes be the result, but those are more like the icing on the cake. Essentially sensationalist in their approach, the hagiographers of late antiquity tend to overemphasize miracles. Their accounts are carefully crafted literary productions with the purpose of lionizing a particular holy man. Closer to the original setting of this interaction through personal conversation are the actual letters exchanged between a holy man and his followers. In some instances, the actual papyri or ostraca bearing such letters have survived; in other cases, we depend on the later compilation by an editor of the correspondence of a holy man. This kind of documentary evidence provides a useful corrective to hagiographical writing because it is largely unadulterated by literary embellishments. It gives us actual snapshots of a spiritual leader at work. What emerges from these texts with great clarity is the existence of prayer communities, centered around one or several holy men, which are conceptualized in kinship terms as a family of “brothers,” “sons,” and “fathers.” In view of the frequent emphasis, in the sources and in modern scholarship alike, on the towering importance of the holy man within his community, it is perhaps surprising to note that these people offer prayers on behalf of each other. It is not only the holy man who prays for his followers, but his correspondents also offer up prayers for him. Still, they readily acknowledge and anticipate that the holy man’s prayers are more efficacious than theirs in bringing forth miraculous relief of all kinds of ills and ailments. In their view, there is a direct connection between the personal conduct, possession of virtues, and ascetic lifestyle of their “father” and the efficacy of his intercession, echoing the connection made by Clement, Origen, and others between spiritual gifts and ascetic living.
There are four clusters of such correspondence of living holy men from late antique Egypt, and an additional one from sixth-century Palestine.40 The Egyptian letters are documentary in character in that they are autographs, written by the authors on papyrus or pottery shards; the correspondence from Palestine has been subject to minimal editorial revision and was circulated in manuscript form. The earliest holy man to have engaged in such correspondence was Paphnutius, who lived in the mid-fourth century. Eight letters addressed to him survive. Most of his correspondents asked for Paphnutius’s prayers, sometimes offering their own prayers on his behalf,41 always using the standard formulae that are the staple of late antique epistolography.42 Some asked with a specific intention, hoping to obtain divine favor in illness or other tribulation through Paphnutius’s intercession.43 The establishment of personal relations and the exchange of prayers are to be expected in the context of spiritual guidance in the monastic milieu. Paphnutius’s correspondents, however, were not monastic apprentices, but pious people who lived in the world, such as the woman Valeria, the prefect of Augustamnica Ausonius, and perhaps even the patriarch of Alexandria.44 Equally surprising is that some of the prayer requests asked for Paphnutius’s intercession not for a particularly concrete benefit, but on behalf of the sins of his correspondents. Ammonius, for instance, wrote: “I always know that by your holy prayers I shall be saved from every temptation of the Devil and from every contrivance of men, and now I beg you to remember me in your holy prayers; for after God you are my salvation.”45
The boundless confidence of Paphnutius’s correspondents in the efficacy of his prayers was expressed by a certain Athanasius, who may be identical with the patriarch of Alexandria of the same name: “For the prayers which you offer are taken on high owing to your holy love, and according as you ask in your holy prayers so will our state prosper.”46 This mention of Paphnutius’s “holy love” indicates that, in the perception of his correspondents, the efficacy of his prayers was directly linked to his spiritual state. In the words of Justinus, another of Paphnutius’s correspondents: “For we believe that your citizenship is in heaven, and therefore we regard you as our master and common patron.”47 Valeria declared: “I trust by your prayers to obtain healing, for by ascetics and devotees revelations are manifested.”48 She addressed Paphnutius as christophoros, Christ-bearer, a designation that—as has been noted above—was often used for ascetics and holy men who through their life and conduct had acquired certain gifts of the Spirit. Another correspondent was confident that he could depend upon Paphnutius “by reason of your most glorious and most revered way of life, since you renounced the boasting of the world and abhorred the arrogance of the vainglorious . . . because God in abundant measure, it seems, granted you favour to find a fitting and salutary renunciation accordant with the times.”49 The letters addressed to Paphnutius thus show us with a concreteness and immediacy that is often lacking in the polished literary products of this period that there was a shared conviction about the dependence of efficacious intercessory prayer on personal conduct. Paphnutius’s correspondents confirm from a grass-roots perspective what the theologians discussed in the previous section had formulated in the abstract: that an elevated spiritual state is both a gift from God and a reward for ascetic efforts.
This nexus between intercessory abilities and asceticism is also evident in the letters addressed to other holy men: Nepheros, a holy man who lived in the mid-fourth century in the Herakleopolite nome of Egypt,50 received a letter from one of his numerous correspondents saying that because Nepheros was “just,” his prayers would be heard by God.51 More telling is the correspondence of the hermit John in the region of Hermopolis.52 One of the three letters addressed to him is a request for prayers on behalf of the author and his whole household. The author called John a “man of God” and expressed his hope that just as John’s prayers had relieved him in the past of a great “burden,” they would continue to do so in the future.53 It has been suggested that the “burden” may have been an onerous labor or an illness, 54 but it may also, in my view, refer to the burden of sins that weighed on the conscience of John’s correspondent. Those who had spiritual authority were often expected to intercede specifically for sinners, as the next chapter will show.
The most ample documentation for the concrete worries and prayer needs of a large group of followers is offered by the several hundred papyri and ostraca of limestone and pottery, dating from the turn of the seventh century, which were found at the monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes. Epiphanius was only one of several holy men to whom letters and prayer requests were addressed, albeit the most prominent one. Often, the letter writers specified their concerns. They either asked the “fathers” for help from the torment of their sins55 or they hoped to obtain more concrete benefits, such as the restoration of health in sickness.56 The men and women who approached Epiphanius and his fellow ascetics were emphatic and explicit in their belief that