Peter Gemeinhardt: What is the Benefit of Being a Saint?

In the First Greek Life of Pachomius (ch. 136), the writer describes “a threefold blossoming in Egypt” – the martyr-bishop Athanasius, the saintly Abbas Antonius and the Pachomian Koinonia – “to the benefit of all rational beings”. This paper investigates the notion of “benefit” (opheleia) in late antique Greek Hagiography: is being a saint of benefit only for the saint him- or herself or also for other people and the Church? In the Life of Antony, this notion is frequently employed; here, it is God who “renders the ascetics famous due to their virtue and benefit for others” (94.1). Such a benefit is also ascribed to saints in other Greek hagiographical works, like the Religious History of Theodoret, but not in all of them (it is lacking, e.g., in the Life of Macrina or Cyril of Scythopolis’ Lives of the Palestinian Saints). Therefore, the present paper will ask where and why the ascription of benefits to individual saints figures prominently. Based upon this survey, several types of holiness (with regard to the public engagement of saints) and thus different aims of hagiographical writings will be discerned.