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.

Juan Antonio Jiménez Sánchez - The Monk Hypatius and the Olympic Games of Chalcedon

A passage of the Life of Hypatius, written by Callinicus of Rufinianae about 450, provides interesting information concerning the pagan cults and spectacles in the Bithynian countryside in the first half of the 5^th century. According to Callinicus, Leontius, praefectus Vrbis of Constantinople in 434-435, decided to establish again the Olympic Games at the theatre of Chalcedon. This local festival might be composed by athletic, literary, and musical competitions. The pagan elements in these festivals did not exist in that time, because paganism had been banned by Theodose the Great in the previous century. However, the response of Hypatius, the founder and first abbot of the monastery of Rufinianae (near Chalcedon), was forceful. He affirmed that these games promoted idolatry and, having assembled twenty monks, marched on Chalcedon with the intention of entering into the theatre and killing the praefectus if it was necessary. Frightened, Leontius revoked his decision of offering games and Hypatius appeared as a champion of the faith. This conflict between Leontius and Hypatius represent a good example of the struggle between a victorious Christianity and a dying paganism in the Later Roman Empire.