According to the details included in the Prologue that Sophronius attaches to the Miracles (and that appear in two anonymous Lives), Cyrus and John were martyred at Alexandria during the Diocletianic persecutions.18 Following the saints’ execution the Christian community transferred their relics to the Church of Saint Mark, where they remained until the reign of Theodosius II. Then, according to Sophronius, an angel appeared to the patriarch Cyril and commanded him to transfer the saints’ relics to the Church of the Evangelists at Menuthis, in order to combat a popular pagan shrine within the region (possibly the famed cult of Isis). There the saints not only set the goddess to flight but also submerged her temple under sand and sea.19
Sophronius’s account of the shrine’s establishment is seemingly authenticated by three extant sermons on the saints transmitted under Cyril’s name.20 Critics of the Cyrillian tradition have nevertheless challenged that attribution, pointing instead to an alternative history of the shrine suggested in a Syriac source, the early sixth- century Life of Severus by Zachariah of Mytilene. Therein, in a digression devoted to religious activity at Menuthis in the late fifth century, Zachariah not only describes a (continuing) cult of Isis but conspicuously fails to mention Saints Cyrus and John, a failure that perhaps suggests that the shrine was in fact established later, and by an anti-Chalcedonian patriarch (hence Sophronius’s revisionism).21 In a magisterial study, however, Jean Gascou has not only challenged once again the Cyrillian attribution of the sermons but has also pointed to potential distortions within the account of Zachariah, whose picture of an un-Christianized Menuthis conveniently suits his purpose of demonstrating the antipagan zeal of the anti-Chalcedonians at Alexandria.22 Instead, Gascou has suggested that the shrine was first promoted in the late fifth century by the monks of the Metanoia, a monastery at nearby Canopus.23
For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that Sophronius’s account of the shrine’s establishment is but one among several potential foundational stories (both then and now). Indeed, Gascou’s deconstruction of the Cyrillian tradition has pointed to yet more competing myths within the saints’ hagiographic dossier and, furthermore, to several rival centers of their cult at Alexandria. Thus, for example, the Constantinopolitan synaxarion assigns the saints’ inventio not to Cyril but to his predecessor Theophilus, while the Coptic synaxarion locates their final resting place not at Menuthis but at Mark’s (where an Arabic miracle of Cyrus similarly situates the saint’s thaumaturgic activity).24 Immediately, then, the biographical details within Sophronius’s Prologue appear not as innocent statements of an uncontested tradition but as polemical claims designed both to promote Menuthis as the preeminent cultic center and to situate that center within a doctrinally clean history associated with the Chalcedonian Cyril.
This chapter, similarly, approaches the Miracles of Cyrus and John as a polemical text composed within a context of, and in opposition to, numerous competing discourses. It focuses, however, not on rival cultic centers or traditions within wider Alexandria but rather on competing models of cultic practice and belief internal to the Menuthis shrine itself. The saints’ clientele at Menuthis was both socially and culturally diverse, consisting of rich and poor, orthodox and heretic, believer and apathete.25 All these supplicants brought to the shrine their own expectations of the saints, their own suppositions as to how best they might be appeased. Amid that polyphony, Sophronius’s text attempts not merely to celebrate the saints’ cult but to impose and to perpetuate particular models of proper cultic practice and belief. Such models, however, compete not only vertically (with the expectations of a culturally diverse clientele) but also horizontally (with the rival visions of other impresarios of the saints’ cult). Thus, the Miracles does not so much describe the Menuthis cult as offer the vision of a specific commentator, a vision which can moreover reveal much about his particular ideological concerns.26
I argue here that Sophronius’s narratives of individual illness, saintly intervention, and final restoration are far more than mere entertaining tales. The fundamental questions that Sophronius is forced to address within those narratives—questions of cosmology, anthropology, soteriology—present his text not simply as a celebration of the saints but as a theological system that promotes both a model of proper cultic practice and a particular theological anthropology. Thus, when Sophronius’s subjects move from corruption (disease) through judgment (saintly intervention) to redemption (cure), they simultaneously replicate the soteriological movement of mankind. In expounding upon the mechanisms by which that movement is achieved, therefore, Sophronius sets out both a scheme for saintly appeasement and a strategy for salvation. From the perspective both of cultic practice and of soteriology, therefore, it is remarkable that the Miracles of Cyrus and John attributes minimal significance to liturgy and ecclesiastical hierarchy. In contexts where the saints’ supplicant is an anti-Chalcedonian heretic, the Chalcedonian eucharist here assumes a central function as a marker of conversion; but for an orthodox patient, the sole prerequisite of success before the saints is Christian virtue—perseverance, resistance to temptation, obedience—independent of communion. On the one hand, therefore, Sophronius recapitulates the concerns of his anti-Chalcedonian counterparts in the preceding period, who had elevated the eucharist as the central icon of the orthodox faith; but, on the other, he also recapitulates the eucharistic minimalism of Evagrius, Pseudo-Macarius, and their heirs, failing to conceive a permanent place for communion—and, with it, the outward realities of the Church—within the spiritual life. At both the practical and the theological level, Sophronius substitutes sacrament for asceticism, subordinating communion with Christ through the eucharist to communion with Christ through virtuous imitation.
IMPRESARIO OF THE SAINTS
Although the Persians did not cross the Euphrates until 610,27 an anacreontic poem of Sophronius suggests that he and Moschus had come to Alexandria earlier, during the reign of Phocas (602–10).28 If so, he and Moschus must there have witnessed nothing less than civil war, although both the Miracles of Cyrus and John and the Spiritual Meadow give no hint of it. In September 608, as a series of simultaneous provincial riots tore through the cities of the empire, an usurper, Heraclius, had launched from North Africa a coup against the emperor Phocas. That coup proceeded in two directions: Heraclius himself went across the sea to assail the capital while his cousin Nicetas went overland to seize Alexandria and thus to deprive Constantinople of the annona.29 On the basis of our extant sources, we would know little of this Egyptian phase of the campaign—the pro-Heraclian Paschal Chronicle, for example, simply records that “in this year [609] Africa and Alexandria revolted”—if it were not for the fortuitous survival of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, which describes a protracted civil war in which Nicetas, having first seized Alexandria, gained the upper hand over Phocas’s hated lieutenant Bonosus in a dramatic battle before the city’s gates.30 In the course of the war, we ascertain from elsewhere, the pro-Phocan patriarch of Alexandria,