Twenty years ago, for an earlier conference volume on late antiquity and early Islam, John Haldon contributed an essay entitled “The Works of Anastasius of Sinai: A Key Source for the History of Seventh-Century East Mediterranean Society and Belief”. He took advantage of the recent labors of philologists on the corpus of Anastasius of Sinai and, as a cultural historian, used this corpus to sketch some of the great changes undergone by all levels of society during the turbulent seventh century. He saw Anastasius as a theologian upholding the venerable tradition of Byzantine Chalcedonian Orthodoxy in an area where this confession was a minority even among Christians, and was now challenged by the rise of Arab Islamic power. Anastasius was depicted as a kind of Chalcedonian circuit preacher travelling from one isolated Orthodox community to another, exhorting them to maintain their faith and attempting to answer their perplexities and anxieties about a world in upheaval. I wish to pick up where Haldon left off, benefiting also from more recent critical editions, and also from some subsequent work in the same historical vein. The focus of my research is on lay piety, and Anastasius is a gold mine of information on this topic. As Haldon wrote:

While Anastasius was Cypriot in origin and had spent time as a monk in Jerusalem, he is remembered as Anastasius of Sinai, and Sinai is an important anchor for his thought. It was a bastion of the old imperial church structure that was being swept away throughout much of the rest of the former Roman Near East. Its isolation in turn allowed it to resist the new imperial doctrine of Monotheletism being promoted from Constantinople. In addition to adhering to strict dyothelete theology, the Sinai monks produced a mature ascetical synthesis to express their experience of the spiritual life. This doctrine was crystallized in t he Ladder of John Climacus, the Abbot of Sinai around the turn of the seventh century. The Ladder is uncompromising in setting high the goal of the spiritual striving of monks, and has little to say directly to laypeople.