Bradley K. Storin: Monastic Identity and Violence in Callinicus’s Life of Hypatius

Callinicus’s Life of Hypatius is a little-studied fifth-century hagiography that traces the radicalization of a monk whose career begins in his rejection of family and wealth and morphs into a small series of ascetic relationships and ultimately into the formation of a small monastic community. With the community formed, the text highlights confrontation as one of Hypatius’s foremost monastic tasks. Conflict with local pagans, bishops, demon-affected individuals, and imperial officials dominates the narrative. In the midst of such stories, Hypatius gives a brief sermon that proclaims violent monks (biastai) will inherit the kingdom of God; violent conversion, or at least enacting violence on non-Christians with or without success in converting, is deemed “the work of God." Unlike other early Christian rationalizations of violence that argue for tolerating but not repeating past acts of violence (e.g. Ambrose and the Callinicum synagogue), and unlike other well-known accounts of physical violence against the bodies and sacred sites of perceived religious adversaries, Callinicus’s Hypatius inscribes a violent and confrontational disposition at the center of Christian identity, demonstrated in its most distilled form in the person of the monk. The text proffers a model of holiness based, in large part, on an individual's willingness to compel change in religious identity and landscape through sheer force. This vita, then, provides a model of sanctity built on enforcement of doctrinal purity, destruction of pagan cult objects and worship places, and rooting out lax members of the clergy.