Sleeping souls and living corpses: Patriarch methodius' defence of the cult of saints

Abstract

In his Life of Euthymius of Sardes Patriarch Methodius accepts that the souls cannot function once they have been separated from the bodies. However, he then contends that in the case of the saints this link is never severed because their corpses remain uncorrupted and even capable of movement. The article offers an in-depth analysis of the text and makes the case that during the Second Iconoclasm there was not only opposition to the cult of saints but also a more wide-spread anxiety that dead saints might not be active after all. © 2015 by Byzantion. All rights reserved.