Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
to the sacred people, and to the orders being purified, and reveal, according to worthiness, the divine things that were well protected and undefiled, until through your invasion you forced the Holy of Holies, against its will, to be exposed.
Demophilus’s intervention is, therefore, not only a disruption of proper liturgical protocol but a destructive subversion of the entire divine dispensation through which ascetics receive their perfection from the sacraments and bishops set over them.
There is here an emphatic and unambiguous elevation of the eucharist, which is the supreme sacrament, “sacrament of sacraments [teletōn teletē].”101 Thus the Areopagite’s introduction to his exposition on the eucharistic rite:102
But I proclaim that perfection [teleiōsis] in participating in other hierarchical symbols is possible only from the divine-ordered and perfecting gifts [teleiōtikōn dōreōn: i.e., of communion]. For scarcely one of the hierarchic sacraments [teletēs] can be completed [telesthēnai] without the divine eucharist as the summation of each rite [teloumenon], which divinely fashions a gathering to the One of the one being initiated [tou telesthentos] and perfects [telesiourgousēs] his communion with God through the God-granted gift of the perfecting mysteries [tōn teleiōtikōn mustēriōn].
In his subsequent description of the ritual, Pseudo-Dionysius insists on the moral righteousness required of the participants: thus, for the uninitiated, the rite—being a representation of the Last Supper, and a remembrance of Judas’s exclusion from it—“teaches in a pure and at the same time divine manner that the approach to the divine things that is true through habit [kath’ hexin alēthēs] bestows upon those who approach the communion that brings assimilation with them [tēn pros to homoion autōn koinōnian]”;103 whereas for the initiated, “if we desire communion [koinōnia] with him, we must look toward his most divine life in the flesh and in assimilation [aphomoiōsis] to its sacred sinlessness return to the godlike and unblemished state. For thus he will give to us, in a harmonious manner, the communion that brings assimilation [tēn pros to homoion koinōnian].”104 The subsequent distribution of the eucharist is then said to achieve a perfect communion among those who receive and participate in it.105
It must be said that Pseudo-Dionysius is by no means hostile to the ascetic tradition of contemplation—that is, he does not seem to reserve the full contemplation of God for the bishop, even if the latter is, among the Church’s members, the most receptive to divine illumination.106 Instead, the need to contemplate the hidden realities of the outward structures of the Church—and thus, while remaining fixed in one’s place, to be brought into closer union with God through the fulfillment of one’s role in that place, ascending “into the hierarchy rather than up it”—is an imperative placed upon all the faithful.107 The Areopagite’s departure from other representatives of that tradition is, instead, to make the ecclesial liturgy the sole point around which contemplation is oriented and to emphasize the structural (and thus spiritual) subordination of ascetics to clerics.108 His vision is, therefore, expounded from an episcopal perspective, acknowledging monks as preeminent members of the congregation but nevertheless recontextualizing ascetic advancement as an ecclesial endeavor, and thus offering a dramatic correction to the traditional monastic indifference to the structures of the Church as an effective medium of salvation. Indeed, this striking dissonance—between the institutionalized, sacramental, and hierarchical vision of the Areopagite on the one hand, and the individualized, sacramentally minimalist, and antihierarchical vision of Evagrius on the other—perhaps recaptures something of the former’s purpose. If, as has been suggested above, the writings of the Areopagite emerge from the same milieu as that of Stephen bar Sudaili, then his corpus can be appreciated as a direct challenge to an Evagrian “minimalist” conception of ecclesial structures. We may thus appreciate the Pseudo-Dionysian corpus as a corrective to that same conception, in the same manner as the Pseudo-Macarian corpus serves as a corrective to the more extreme Messalian inclination that operated around it.
We must be cautious, therefore, not to overstate the degree of correspondence between the Areopagite’s corpus and Stephen’s Book of the Holy Hierotheos. Indeed, in a challenge to some recent attempts to uncover a hidden Origenism in the Areopagite’s corpus, Emiliano Fiori has in a recent article demonstrated how the divergent attitudes to the sacraments revealed within the two works depend on their divergent cosmologies. Thus the Book, which posits the future restoration of an undifferentiated cosmos, cannot conceive a permanent place for the hierarchical order of the Church, which must be transcended;109 while the Areopagite—who does not in fact commit to the classic Origenist notions of isochristism or apokatastasis—in contrast believes in both a present and a future union in which the righteous retain their individualism and that is realized in and through the hierarchical, sacramental order of the Church.110 Thus the Areopagite is committed not to the abolition of terrestrial hierarchies but rather to their transfiguration.
The most important conclusion from comparison of the two authors, therefore, is not their similarity but rather their distinct difference, for the pair offer quite antithetical approaches to the nature of the cosmos and the place of the individual within it. Those antithetical approaches, moreover, are arranged along the same dividing lines that we have identified elsewhere in the same period: on the one side, ascetical enthusiasts emphasizing spiritual independence and the endeavor of the individual; on the other, the representatives of institutions emphasizing spiritual submission and integration within wider structures.111 It is in this sense that Alexander Golitzin has seen in Pseudo-Dionysius a response to sustained concerns about Messalian practice and belief;112 and it is in this sense also—and not in a clandestine commitment to the more controversial aspects of Evagrian doctrine—that he should be connected to the Origenist crisis in Palestine.
This tension between Pseudo-Dionysian and Evagrian schemes is not a modern observation, for it was obvious also to the former’s first translator into Syriac, Sergius of Resh‛aina (d. 536).113 Among his manifold interests Sergius, we should note, was an enthusiast for Evagrius, and was perhaps a commentator on the latter’s controversial Kephalaia Gnostica—one of his contemporaries, at least, went so far as to describe him as practiced “in the doctrine of Origen.”114 Indeed, Sergius attached to his translation of the Areopagite’s corpus an existing autograph treatise On the Spiritual Life that recapitulated the thought of Evagrius and then proceeded to set out how the Dionysian corpus might be reconciled to that same thought.115 Sergius here sees in the progression of the Areopagite’s texts the Evagrian program of spiritual progression from action to contemplation, so that, for example, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is related to the Evagrian stage of praktikē or virtuous action, and the Divine Names to the final, divine contemplation.116 This short introduction, then, should perhaps be appreciated as the first serious attempt to reconcile the two competing visions. It was an attempt that later generations were to replicate.
It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the Areopagite’s ideas also found a particular resonance within Palestine, and in none other than Scythopolis. The city indeed appears as something of a crucible for the same intellectual tensions that we have explored here, tensions that revolved around the competing imperatives of the individual and the institution. At the end of 552 the bishop of Scythopolis—one Theodore, a former Palestinian monk of the Origenist faction—submitted to the emperor Justinian a libellus in which he recanted various Origenist errors (errors that mirror the anti-Evagrian anathemas of 553);117 and, as we have seen, the hagiographies of Cyril of Scythopolis point toward a comparable interest in the suppression of Origenism and, with it, the traditions of individual contemplation enshrined within the Evagrian tradition.
Pseudo-Dionysius’s first substantial commentator was another Scythopolite, the sixth-century bishop John (most probably Theodore’s predecessor).118 As Paul Rorem and John Lamoreaux have noted in their compelling book on John’s commentaries, besides Christological observations, it is above all a concern for the preservation of hierarchical order within the Church that characterizes John’s comments on the texts.119 Within that same concern John, like Pseudo-Dionysius, demonstrates an acute concern with the