Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity. Claudia Rapp
also insists that the man who conforms to the Pauline injunctions about the ideal bishop (presumably those in the First Letter to Timothy) is a bishop not before men, but before God, having attained this rank without the need for ordination by human hands.30 Such proclamations could easily become the seed of conflict and competition between “true priests” and “priests by ordination.” One arena in which this conflict would flare up again and again is that of the formulation of Christian doctrine, when those who claimed to speak with divine authority were confronted by those who claimed to represent the ecclesiastical tradition. The complicated process by which heresy became heresy and orthodoxy became orthodoxy need not concern us here. Of greater interest to the present inquiry are Origen’s and Clement’s “true priests,” the gnōstikoi and the pneumatikoi. They were the holy men of late antiquity. They were the martyrs and the desert fathers who were endowed with special spiritual gifts of teaching, prayer, and miracle working.
There is one further area in which Origen stakes out potentially dangerous ground for conflict, and does so with greater clarity than Clement, and this regards the guidance of souls. One of the paramount tasks of the pneumatikos, as a follower of Christ, is to bring sinners to repentance through his love and compassion. This is accomplished not only through teaching and exemplary living, but also in no small degree through admonition. The pneumatikos weeps with sinners over their sins, shares the burdens of their misdeeds, prays on their behalf, and assures them of divine forgiveness for their sins. In other words, he exercises in concrete terms the power to bind and loose that Jesus granted to Peter (Matt. 16:18–19). Because the pneumatikos is imbued with the same spirit as Peter, he has a claim to the same authority. This, of course, places the pneumatikos in direct competition with the bishop, whose penitential authority is based both on the continuity of the institution that he represents and on the moment of ordination when the Spirit was passed on to him. The complex issue of penitential authority will be explored in the following section.
The most influential theorist of spiritual instruction during the flourishing of Egyptian monasticism in the fourth century was Evagrius Ponticus. He composed an entire treatise entitled Gnōstikos. Evagrius himself had chosen the life of a hermit in the Egyptian desert in a sudden and radical departure from the world. The son of a chorepiscopus from the Pontus region south of the Black Sea, Evagrius had been ordained as a lector by Basil of Caesarea, and as a deacon by Gregory of Nazianzus, whom he accompanied to Constantinople. His reputation and popularity in the capital received a harsh blow when he developed a strong and insuppressible affection for a married woman of the nobility. Guilt-ridden and encouraged by a dream vision, Evagrius made a hasty departure for Egypt. He lived there as a hermit for sixteen years, first in Nitria and then in Kellia, until his death in 399. Evagrius was equally famous for his ascetic practices as for his teaching. One of his disciples was Palladius of Helenopolis, who devoted a whole chapter of his Lausiac History to him. Evagrius’s thought was greatly influenced by Origen, and thus indirectly also by Clement.
Two centuries after Clement had declared that every Christian should strive to be a gnōstikos, Evagrius addressed the limited and self-selected circle of monks who made the attainment of gnōsis their life’s goal. Evagrius’s writing gives a concrete locus to the quest for gnōsis: it now becomes firmly anchored in the monastic environment. His lasting influence on monastic philosophy can hardly be overestimated. His ideas also laid the foundation for a potential competition between monks and clergy over the possession and administration of the Spirit. If, as Evagrius intends, the monk strives to be a gnōstikos, and if, as Clement and Origen have argued, the gnōstikos is also a true priest, this opens the door for the monastic rejection of the institutional clergy and the services it has to offer, especially the eucharistic liturgy. Some instances of this attitude and the attempts to contain it will be discussed below.
To offset these theoretical treatments by Clement, Origen, and Evagrius, it is useful to look briefly at a concrete description of a pneumatikos. The spiritual teacher in question is none other than Origen. The work in his praise was composed by his disciple Gregory the Wonder-worker. The Address of Thanksgiving to Origen is Gregory’s farewell speech to his beloved teacher, delivered in Caesarea in Palestine at the end of his studies in the presence of other students and Origen himself. It depicts Origen as the true pneumatikos who has the power to transform the lives of those who become his followers. Gregory had experienced this in person. True to the social standing of his family as part of the local nobility in Cappadocian Pontus, he had received an extensive education in the traditional vein, and was on his way to acquire further qualifications in jurisprudence in Berytus, when he met Origen in a chance encounter in Caesarea, where the latter was teaching at the time. Gregory immediately fell under the spell of Origen’s eloquent teaching and profound erudition, gave up all prospects for the career in the civil service for which he had been so carefully groomed, and dedicated himself to a life of Christian study. After five years in the classroom of Origen, he returned to Neocaesarea, where he led a monastic existence together with a few like-minded friends. It did not take long until the local community and the neighboring bishops recognized Gregory’s talents and he was made bishop of his city, a position he held for at least two decades until his death, which occurred sometime between 270 and 275. Gregory’s career follows a pattern that would become typical in the fourth century: a son of the provincial upper crust who is groomed for a position of civic leadership then adopts the monastic life, only to be recruited into a leadership role within the church. His Address of Thanksgiving presents Origen as a larger-than-life figure, whose sanctity radiated to all those around him, including Gregory himself, who probably found this speech a convenient literary vehicle to stake his own claim to holiness by association with his revered teacher.
According to Gregory, Origen “looks and seems like a human being but, to those in a position to observe the finest flower of his disposition, has already completed most of the preparation for the re-ascent to the divine world.”31 In their first encounter, Origen displayed the gift of discernment in teaching for which the desert fathers would become famous: “We were pierced as by a dart by his discourse even from the first.”32 His teaching was carefully tailored to suit the needs of his disciples, as Gregory explains by invoking the metaphor of his own soul as a rocky and overgrown Weld that first needed to be tilled to ensure that the seeds of Origen’s wisdom fell on prepared soil.33 Being with Origen afforded his disciples a foretaste of paradise. 34 To them, Origen’s personal example was as eloquent a lesson as his words, for he refused to lecture on anything that he did not himself strive to put into practice.35 Origen had attained such a level of intellectual acuity and purity that he could communicate matters of the Spirit directly and unsullied by the sluggishness of his own mind. Gregory expresses his boundless admiration:
He [Origen] is the only living person whom I have either met myself or heard others tell about who could do this, who had trained himself to receive the purity and brightness of the sayings into his own soul, and to teach others, because the Leader [i.e., Jesus, or the divine Logos] of them all, who speaks within God’s friends the prophets, and prompts every prophecy and mystical, divine discourse, so honored him as a friend as to establish him as his spokesman.36
As his oration winds down to a tearful close, and Gregory professes to be bracing himself for his return to the cares of the world, he asks one last thing of his teacher: “But you, our beloved head, arise and send us off now with prayer. As you saved us by your holy instruction during our stay, save us also by your prayers as we depart.”37 A true pneumatikos in the eyes of his devoted disciple, Origen passed on the divine Spirit through word and deed and inspired others to follow his example. In addition to his instruction, his prayers are also valued and sought after. This ability to pray connects the figure of the pneumatikos, who is prominent in the theological literature of the second and third centuries, with the holy men of the fourth century and beyond, who are known to us through documentary and hagiographical sources. These men will concern us next.
SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP AND PRAYER
In their strict asceticism and inspired teaching, the desert fathers of the fourth century claimed their place as heirs of the pneumatophoroi of early Christianity.38 The true pneumatophoros in whom the Spirit overflows is always also a teacher. His teaching, however, is different from that of the preacher