Black boys and holy monks: the Chapters VI of the Life of St. Anthony and IV of the Life of St. Benedict and the Christian discourse about the black in Late Antiquity

Abstract

During the Late Antiquity, the Christian monastic movement and the cult of saints sprang up around the Mediterranean. Both were the object of attention of the clerical authorities, interested in keeping the two phenomena aligned with their own political and institutional interests. In this context, hagiographic literature emerged, in which sometimes the protagonist was a holy monk eventually antagonized by a black man. This work considers two passages from two hagiographies of the period in which the holy monk faces a black boy: chapter VI of the Life of St. Anthony by Athanasius of Alexandria; and chapter IV of Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. The purpose of this article is to evaluate how the interactions between black boys and holy monks in the two documents fit into the current Christian discourse on blacks.