Lausiac History

The present article analyzes the narrative strategies and discursive conventions that Palladius of Hellenopolis employed in his works, the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and proposes the reasons why one author could produce two such disparate works. I use the concepts and approaches offered by reader-response criticism in order to differentiate between an implied audience of the historical narrative as the narrative itself mediates it, and the historical audience, i.e., real people of flesh and blood who read the book in the past. The ways in which Palladius chose to present certain topics (the attitude to wisdom and foolishness, eschatological expectations, the appearance of righteous men, male and female ascetics living together, and the attitude to pride) are important indicators of how he envisioned the audiences of the Dialogue and the Lausiac History, and that, to a larger extent, accounts for the impression of the remarkable difference between the two works. An attempt is made to correlate these implied audiences with the diverse groups in Palladius’s immediate milieu and to hypothesize about the real first-hand readers of his works, who were ready and willing to internalize his assumptions and expectations.

In his writings, Isaac of Nineveh outlines a phenomenology of pride. He identifies two forms of pride: the first results from a presumption concerning one’s ascetic virtue, and the second concerns one’s knowledge. This article focuses on this latter form of pride, through a close reading of passages selected from Isaac’s corpus. A particular emphasis is placed on the specific Syriac terms which Isaac employs. The main sources of his conceptions are also underlined: Evagrius and especially the Lausiac History. The article highlights the fact that the origin of a pride rooted in a presumption of knowledge is a misunderstanding of one’s ontological status. From this misunderstanding follows an incapacity to acknowledge what Isaac considers to be the real. As a consequence, a divergence between conceptions and facts takes place. “Practice”, which is a labour of body and soul that necessarily implies a relationship with suffering, and “rule” and “law”, which Isaac interprets as the rules of ascetic life, set a limit to the misunderstanding of one’s status in which pride is rooted, leading the subject back to what Isaac calls “the boundary of the creatures”. This makes it possible for one to gain access to an adequate relationship with reality. In this way, the subject can have a space which is his/her own, and can acknowledge the space which is proper to God.

The history of medieval literature knows the examples when a narrative, which originally appeared as a primarily orally transmitted story, got fixed in writing. Occasionally, this written story started to be widely read and listened to in public, and thus entered the sphere of a predominantly oral transmission once again, upon which a secondary written fixation sometimes followed.   
This study analyses the principles of interaction of oral and written texts in the Middle Ages, and focuses on the Lausiac History, written c. 420 C.E. by Palladius of Helenopolis (c. 363/364 – c. 431).

The article explores the Slavic translations of the "Lausiac History," a Greek hagiographical work written c. 420 CE by Palladius of Helenopolis. In particular, I focus on three main issues: first, the problem of Slavic translation of the "Lausiac history" as a single integrated composition; second, translations and adaptions of individual chapters and stories, and their incorporation in larger compilations; third, the popularity of the text, and how the title ‘Lausiak’ was understood.

Key words: Hagiography, Palladius of Helenopolis, “Lausiac History”, "Egyptian paterikon”, “Alphabetical Paterikon”, “Historia Monachorum Aegyptorum”, “De Gentibus Indiae et Bragmanibus”, “Apophthegmata Patrum”.