ABSTRACT
How intriguing it is, when one looks at the religious literature, to find the Christian Greeks developing the same concept that has elicited the interest of us post-moderns for our conference topic on the 'Outsider', or the notion of being 'Aliens to themselves'. Not only had the Byzantines considered it, but from an early stage had taken it to a pitch beyond anything comparable in the prior Greco-Roman philosophical or rhetorical tradition, before subjecting it to several variations around a central theme, and rendering it, finally, as a stock theme of all later monastic literature. Such an apotheosis is reflected in the way the notion achieves the status of a chapter to itself in that veritable manual of Byzantine ascetical theology, John of Sinai's Sacred Ladder. Xeniteia, that state of being foreign or other, even in one's own locality, what we could best describe as the position of living unattached, as a stranger would in that antique time and social condition, or the more interesting analogous (and highly paradoxical) inner state of being distant even to one's intimate self, that reflects upon itself in an exaggerated solitude - if not a uniquely Byzantine theme, is certainly taken to a uniquely specific peak in this literature.
