Leaning on both banks of the Yeşilırmak, Amaseia in late antiquity was more than a fortress and an administrative centre. It was also a bishopric whose voice carried weight in the church life of Pontus. The man who occupied its pulpit in the late fourth century, Asterios, came to the ministry from the law courts, and the sermons that survive from him still show the streets, markets, clothing and moral controversies of his day with remarkable vividness. Very little is known about his life, while what he wrote is surprisingly rich, so that getting to know him is largely a matter of reading his own texts.

Life and Education

Nothing is known about Asterios's family. According to the most commonly cited view he was born in Cappadocia, with his birth given as about 350 and his death as about 410. These dates are not certain, and some modern catalogues place his life across a wider span, roughly 330 to 420. The only concrete fact we have about his early schooling is that his principal teacher was a Scythian slave. As a youth this man had been sold to a citizen of Antioch, whose master, a schoolmaster, had him thoroughly educated; he made extraordinary progress in learning and won a great name among both Greeks and Romans. Asterios was prepared for his life's work under the direct guidance of this celebrated teacher.

It is clear that as a young man he studied Demosthenes closely and became a skilled orator himself. Before becoming a bishop he practised law, and the profession gave him not just legal knowledge but all the techniques of persuading an audience. When he was made bishop of Amaseia, between about 380 and 390, he carried what he had gained in court into the pulpit. Amphilochios, the bishop of Iconium (Konya) in the same period, had likewise passed from the bar to the episcopate, and Asterios is counted as a younger contemporary of the three great Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa. It has also been suggested that the life of Basil, an earlier bishop of Amaseia, is probably his work.

In the church of his day Asterios belonged to the orthodox party, that is, the Nicene line. The point needs stressing because he had a contemporary of the same name, Asterios the Sophist, a pro-Arian controversialist, and in Migne's Patrologia Graeca the texts of this second writer are also printed under the name of Asterios of Amaseia. Tradition remembers the bishop of Amaseia as a dutiful pastor closely concerned with his flock and a man of blameless character, and it has always been said that there was no contradiction between his sermons and his way of life.

The Only Dated Event in His Life

The limits of Asterios's career are not known with certainty. He is accepted as having preached in the last quarter of the fourth century, perhaps stretching briefly into the fifth. The one text that gives a fixed date in his life is his sermon on the Festival of the Calends. In it the fall of the consul Eutropius is mentioned as an event of the preceding year. Since Eutropius was overthrown in 399, the sermon must have been preached in early January 400, just after the New Year festivities. In another text Asterios describes himself as an elderly man, and these two clues are enough to sketch the outline of his career. After this New Year sermon the sources fall silent. Where, when and how he died is unknown. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, and his feast day is 30 October.

The Surviving Sermons

The number of texts attributed to Asterios varies between twenty and thirty depending on the source, and some scholars have doubted the authenticity of all of them. The figure now generally accepted is sixteen homilies and panegyrics regarded as genuine. Fourteen of these were printed, with a Latin translation, in volume 40 of Migne's Patrologia Graeca (columns 155 to 480), and two more were found in a manuscript on Mount Athos by M. Bauer and first published by A. Bretz in 1914. The modern critical edition of the Greek text is by C. Datema; published at Leiden in 1970, it presents the first fourteen homilies with introduction and notes. Some of the sermons also survive in medieval Latin, Georgian and Church Slavonic translations, and eleven have been translated into German.

Part of this body of work consists of panegyrics delivered in memory of martyrs, that is, of those who died for their faith. Among the best known are the speech for Phokas of Sinope, delivered at Amaseia in the shrine that housed the saint's relics, and the sermon given on the feast of Stephen, the first martyr, on 26 December. Another is devoted to the martyrdom of Euphemia and is discussed separately below. The remaining texts are moral sermons that apply the parables and counsels of the Gospels directly to everyday life. All of them show a close familiarity with classical literature, a detailed handling of Scripture, and an unusual density of detail about daily life.

Asterios's sermons are genuinely spoken texts, far from the manner of an essay or treatise. The preacher speaks directly to his audience again and again, puts questions to them, and widens his subject with comparisons; he tries to convince the mind, to prick the conscience, to ridicule folly and to shame vice. In the Greek the sermons do not carry their own texts, meaning the passage of Scripture on which a sermon rests is not written at its head, and only the New Year sermon is clearly based on no verse at all. In this it resembles John Chrysostom's Homilies on the Statues, seizing on a passing event and bearing down on a single widespread evil. Asterios was a contemporary of Chrysostom, but while Chrysostom's sermons have been translated into English many times, the first English translation from Asterios appeared only in 1904, when Galusha Anderson and Edgar Johnson Goodspeed of the University of Chicago published five of the sermons as Ancient Sermons for Modern Times; the book was reprinted in 2007.

Rich and Poor: The Sermon on Lazarus

Asterios's first sermon rests on the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The preacher notes that the two words saying the rich man was "clothed in purple and fine linen" carry a short but sharp mockery of those who squander. From there he returns to the true purpose of clothing. God made the sheep with a woolly fleece; you can shear it and give it to a craftsman to make a tunic against the winter cold and the summer sun, and for lighter wear in summer there is flax. One should give thanks for these things, but the man who gathers the thread of the Persian worm and has it woven into a fabric as fine as a spider's web, and who pays the dyer large sums to fish the shellfish out of the sea and stain his garment with its blood, is a man who does not know where to pour out his surplus and who misuses his wealth.

The part of the sermon that won fame is devoted to the decoration of the rich man's clothing. According to the preacher, some have found weaves that produce the effect of a picture, and have had the forms of every kind of creature worked into their tunics. When such a person goes out into the street he looks to those who meet him like a painted wall; children gather around, smiling at one another and pointing at the pictures on the garment, and follow him for a long time. On the cloth there are lions, leopards, bears, bulls, dogs, woods, rocks and hunters, every attempt to imitate nature in paint carried onto clothing. The more pious rich, by contrast, have handed the events of the Gospel to the weavers: the wedding at Cana and the water jars, the paralytic carrying his bed, the blind man healed with clay, the woman with the flow of blood touching the hem of a garment, the sinful woman at the feet of Jesus, Lazarus coming back from the tomb. Such people think that in doing so they are showing piety and wearing clothes pleasing to God.

Asterios's answer is blunt. He advises them to sell these garments and honour the living image of God, which is the human being. It is Christ's image, he says, that must be carried on the soul and not on the robe, and the humiliation he suffered once, in taking a human body, is enough. He then turns each picture into an action: do not embroider the paralytic on your clothes, go and look for the one who lies sick; do not keep retelling the story of the woman with the flow of blood, take pity on the widow in want; do not carry the blind man about on your robe, comfort with good deeds the one deprived of sight; do not work the jars of Cana into the cloth, give the thirsty something to drink. The passage is a good example of a preacher's skill in using concrete images in place of abstract exhortation.

This passage has misled some readers. The art historian Arnold Hauser, in his famous Social History of Art, counted Asterios as an opponent of images, but that reading is mistaken. Asterios's objection is not to religious pictures on cloth but to the expense, show and frivolity that they represent; the same preacher, in another sermon, describes a painting with great admiration.

The Other Moral Sermons

The second sermon rests on Luke's parable of the dishonest steward. Asterios opens with a false belief that drives people into wrongdoing and reduces the good they ought to do: the belief that they are lords and absolute owners of what they possess in this life. In truth no one owns a house here; they are sojourners, strangers and wanderers, and at a moment they do not expect they will be led where they do not wish to go. Every person is a steward of what belongs to another. The preacher makes the point with a concrete example. He asks anyone who holds an estate to recall who owned it before him and who will own it after, and says that if all of them could be called together the owners would turn out to be as numerous as the clods of earth. He compares life to a leafy tree beside the road in summer: just as you are about to leave its shade, another traveller arrives, lays down his own pack as you pick up yours, and takes over all the comfort you had enjoyed.

The third sermon was delivered at a martyr's feast, to a gathered crowd. At the outset Asterios asks his hearers why martyrs are honoured with notable buildings and annual assemblies, and answers his own question: these feasts are public schools for the soul, meant to make people imitate the martyrs' steadfast piety. But his audience, he says, has abandoned zeal for their souls and gone after the market and the passion for money. He defines covetousness not merely as being mad for money but, more broadly, as wanting in every transaction more than is one's due. He likens the covetous man to ivy, which coils around the trees beside it and does not die even when they wither, perishing only when someone cuts its serpentine coils with an axe. He also describes how such a man will gladly accept a cheap herbal remedy when ill, but when an expensive drug is prescribed would rather give up his life than open his purse. The covetous are grieved by general prosperity and delighted by general distress; if it rains they weep, and when famine is expected they turn their grain over so that it does not spoil, airing it in the night wind.

The fifth sermon is on divorce and rests on the passage in chapter 19 of Matthew where the Pharisees ask whether a man may put away his wife for every cause. Asterios interprets the question as an attempt to shake women's faith and turn them against Jesus. Turning to the men of his own day, he sharply criticises those who change wives like garments, who put up bridal chambers as one puts up festival booths, who marry money and trade in women, and who write a bill of divorce at the least provocation. Marriage, he says, ends only by death or adultery. He praises the wife's role in a long passage: she is a helper in sickness, a comfort in distress, the guardian of the hearth and the keeper of the household goods. When fortune turns and friends and servants flee, she alone remains; she follows her husband to prison, and if she is not allowed in she waits at the door like a faithful dog. The preacher also tells of a woman he knew who cut off her hair and put on men's clothing so as not to be separated from her husband while he was in hiding. Near the end of the same sermon he addresses men who think adultery acceptable because Roman law leaves it unpunished, and reminds them that God's law and men's statutes come from different sources, adding that Plato himself will be found ignorant in this reckoning.

The Sermon on the Festival of the Calends

Asterios's text that attracts the most interest is the sermon he delivered on the New Year festivities. It is regarded as the earliest New Year sermon to have survived. The preacher begins by saying that two festivals have been kept, yesterday and today: one the festival of the crowd in the street, bent on gathering money and bargaining, the other that of true religion, teaching knowledge of God and a purified life. Because many have been carried away by extravagance and stopped going to church, he wants the sermon to dispel the excess. For a public festival he sets two standards: it must have a clear object, and the joy must belong to everyone. The Calends fail on both counts, for the legends told about the festival's origin contradict one another, few are making merry, and most of the crowd is gloomy.

He then goes through the customs of the day one by one. The greeting is made in a faint voice, a kiss follows as the prelude to the New Year's gift, and though the mouth is kissed it is the coin that is loved. The transaction can be called neither a wedding present, nor alms, nor an exchange, nor a true gift, because the giving springs from compulsion. Gifts flow upward: the lesser gives to the greater, he to a greater still, until everything gathers in the purses of those of the highest rank, as small streams join larger rivers and these in turn the sea. Beggars and stage jugglers go from door to door and besiege the houses of office-holders in particular, clapping and shouting, until the weary householder throws out whatever he has, even what is not his own. The preacher calls this festival the source of debt, usury and poverty. He adds that it teaches children to grow up in a commercial spirit, carrying fruit wrapped in silver foil from house to house and receiving gifts of twice the value. Farmers flee the city on this day as a hare flees a net, and those found in town are beaten, subjected to drunken violence and robbed of what they carry.

The section on soldiers has special value for the social history of the period. According to the preacher, soldiers on this feast spend their whole pay on a single debauch, learn the habits of actors, lose their discipline and mock the laws they have been appointed to guard; they climb into a chariot as if on a stage, appoint sham lictors and play the buffoon. The lion-hearted warrior who lets his tunic hang to his ankles, winds a girdle about his breast, puts on a woman's sandal, arranges a roll of hair on his head, draws out the thread from a distaff full of wool and pitches his voice to a shrill feminine treble is described in the preacher's mocking tone. The part addressed to the consuls is harsher: the consuls scatter large sums on buffoons, dancers, charioteers and beast-fighters in order that their names may be written on contracts, while God promises to write the names of those who feed the poor in immortal books that no moth consumes. Since in the Byzantine period contracts were commonly dated by the names of the consuls of the year, the consul's name became the name of the year, which explains their eagerness to spend.

Asterios gives his counsel with considerable concreteness: give to the crippled beggar, not to the dissolute musician; give to the widow, not to the harlot; give to the holy virgins who sing psalms; feed the orphan and pay the poor man's debt. The final part of the sermon recalls, with examples from recent history, the fates of the consuls. One lost his head in a sudden uprising of an armed crowd, and another, fleeing, perished on the sands of the Egyptian and Libyan frontier. A third is kept alive in the Colchian country by the generosity of barbarians. A prefect saw his son beheaded before his eyes and, with the noose already about his own neck, was spared by imperial clemency, only to die in disgrace a short time later. The editors' notes identify the first of these examples as an allusion to Rufinus, who fell in 395. The last is the man who escaped his masters' rods and aspired to the rods of a consul, acquired land beyond easy description, and was buried only in as much ground as the pitying gave him; this is the allusion to Eutropius, and it is the mark that dates the sermon.

Besides being a rare source for the street life of a New Year festival in late antique Anatolia, the text belongs to an argument. The sermon takes up and rejects, point by point, what Libanius had said in defence of the festival. The carnival atmosphere of the New Year celebrations and its relation to later European customs is among the topics studied under the heading of the Lord of Misrule, and Asterios's sermon is often quoted in that discussion.

The Painting of Euphemia and Ekphrasis

The best known of Asterios's texts is the sermon on the martyr Euphemia, numbered as the eleventh. There the preacher describes a painting displayed in the church near the saint's tomb. The picture is on canvas and shows scenes of the martyrdom. Asterios describes it in detail, moving through the order of the scenes, the colours, the expressions and the composition, and compares it with the works of the famous Hellenistic painters Euphranor and Timomachos. In ancient rhetoric the verbal description of a work of art is called ekphrasis, and this speech is one of the exceptionally detailed examples to survive from the period.

Scholars approach the passage with caution. It has been debated whether the painting described was a real picture at all and how closely the preacher's account matches an actual work. The manner of death in the picture, by fire, has also puzzled historians because it differs from other accounts of the saint's martyrdom. The audience, too, is uncertain, though the preacher addresses them as "gentlemen" (andres), which suggests that it was made up of men alone.

The real afterlife of this speech concerns the debates over icons. At the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which closed the period of Byzantine iconoclasm, the sermon was read twice as evidence in support of the veneration of images. In the council's proceedings Asterios is called, in a play on his name, a "bright star" illuminating the minds of all; in Greek, aster means star. The report shows that the words of a bishop of Amaseia were used as proof, three centuries later, in the gravest theological dispute of the empire.

The Later Fortunes of the Texts

The fate of Asterios's works is also a picture of Byzantine book culture. Photios, the patriarch of Constantinople, mentions in his Bibliotheca further sermons that are not in our hands today (codex 271); sources give the number of these lost texts as anywhere between four and ten. One of the lost sermons contains a hint that Asterios had grown very old, and this is among the chief supports for dating his career.

Among those who published Asterios's sermons in the age of print was Philip Rubens, brother of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. Philip died in 1611, and an edition of the homilies went into a memorial volume printed after his death, together with a short biography, a selection of his own Latin poems and poems written in his memory by friends. In Migne's Patrologia Graeca, as noted above, the texts of Asterios the Sophist were printed under the same name. In the twentieth century the two sermons Bauer found on Athos and Datema's critical edition made it possible to read the text reliably.

Readers are drawn to these texts from different directions. Art historians see in the Euphemia sermon and the passages on pictured clothing how widespread weaving and painting were in the fourth century. Social historians follow, in the Calends sermon and the speech on divorce, the ordinary life that rarely appears in written documents. For historians of religion the texts show how late antique moral preaching was built and how the interpretation of Scripture was joined to a classical education. In his 1904 introduction Anderson observes that Asterios kept so strictly to purely ethical topics that one cannot help wishing he had treated some of the great fundamental doctrines from an ethical angle too.

For Amaseia, Asterios is the most vivid witness to the city's Christian life in late antiquity. In a city with ancient tombs cut into the rock, the preacher joined a classical education to the moral teaching of the new faith and, as Anderson puts it, was a "live preacher," taking the problems of his hearers directly from his surroundings. The most detailed picture of social conditions in the city in this period comes from his texts.

Chronology

About 350: Believed to have been born in Cappadocia (some catalogues give 330-335).

About 380-390: After practising law, becomes bishop of Amaseia.

395: The fall of Rufinus (the first consular example in the Calends sermon).

399: The overthrow of the consul Eutropius.

1 January 400: The sermon on the Festival of the Calends; the only certain date in his life.

About 410: The usual estimate for his death; place and circumstances unknown.

787: The Second Council of Nicaea quotes the Euphemia sermon twice.

1904: Anderson and Goodspeed's English translation of five sermons.

1914: A. Bretz's first publication of the two sermons found on Athos.

1970: C. Datema's critical edition of the first fourteen sermons.

Sources

Books

  • Datema, C. (ed.). Asterius of Amasea: Homilies I-XIV. Leiden, 1970.

Other sources

Online sources