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5 The Ideological and Cultural Dimensions 137

history, this is treated “hagiologically” (Russian raid of 941, Hungarian raid of 943: pp. 146—169) so as to prove the Saint’s proorasis and the thesis that the Evil can be defeated only by religioa in its apocalyptic version linking harmoniously the Old and the New Testament (pp. 170 — 177, 32—95) and to show the hagiographer’s dynastie prejudices (pp. 112—146); even here folk tale motifs are assimilated into the story. The visions have much in com-mon with those in the Vita of St. Andrew the Fool who supposedly lived at the time of Leo I (457 — 474); L. Ryden asks whether the supposed authors of the two, Gregorios and Nicephoros respectirely “Were not one and the same person, N. being iiwented for the purpose of the historical fiction of VA” (H. Uhr. St., p. 585); even the name Nicephoros may have been symbolic, like the name Proionike of the Syrian legend attributing the -finding at the True Cross to her, the First Yictory three centuries before St. Helen (J. W. Drijvers, Helena Augusta, 1992, pp. 147—163), and the Cross called Nikos Aniketos by Heraclios according to a 7.—8.c. tradition fLj Ryden, Bemer-kungen ziim Leben des H. Narren Symcon von Leontios von Neapolis, 1970, p. 37). Theognostos, the master of Andrew before the latter became a fool, is eąually symbolic. The vision of Theodora in St. Basil’s life describes the “other World” including the celestial customs liouses and monasteries, demonie Ethiopians encircling the dead woman’s bed (as in St. Andrew's life), angels, Death as a surgeon, the main sins, etc., all based on old motifs and occurring in many other apocalyptic texts, e.g. in the ‘Awesome and Edifying Vision of the Monk Cosmas’, a Chamberlain of the emperor Alexander (912— 913) and later a monk, as from 933 the abbot of a monastery on Sangarios (C. Mango, Byzantium the Empire of New Romę, 1980, pp. 151 — 155).

7.    Though the buildings and institutions of the Other World resemble those on earth, the eschatological concepts attached to them express a deep metaphysical anguish that permeates Byzantine mentality and religious ideology, especially over the fate of man’s soul after death, the Last Judge-ment and the restructuring of the menaced Roman Empire in the context of international politics presented somewhere between imagination and rea-lity (e.g. in Andreas’ vision about “the end of this world”, Mango, pp. 201 — 217). The Life of St. Niphon, BHG 1371z dated in the late 10. or eady 11 c., i.a., describes his two week vision of the Last Judgement, as long as Andrew’s journey to heaven (P.G., 111, 664C) and calls the man who out of pity took a starving young man to his home Nicephoros, the symbolic name of Andreas’ master: the similarities, which are many, point to common sources rather than to interdependence of the two lives; their differences (Andrew’s historical fiction is complex and sophisticated, Niphon’s loose, unsophisticated and fuli of anachronisms: L. Ryden in Greek and Latin Studies in Memory of Cajus Fabricius, 1990, pp. 33—40) result from the respective hagiogra-phers’ literary and structuring methods rather than from interdependence, which is not impossible. The pseudo-historical Life of St. Iretie Abbess of Chrysobalanton (ed. by J. Rosenqvist, 1986), dated to c. 980, is a "mixture of historiography, hagiographic themes and fairy tale” exposed “with a nar-rative skill which leaves the average Byzantine hagiographer far behind’» and with a techniąue reminiscent of the Verfremdung known from Berfold Brecht (pp. XXIX, XLVII, XXVIII).

8.    Among the apocalyptic experiences of the fictitious “Cappadocian” St. Irene in her nunnery inConstantinople isthe receipt by her of three apples