Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
to hate “the renegades.”154 Here, then, Rufus confronts a situation in which the Chalcedonian possession of prominent saints’ shrines presented a significant concern, in particular, as Cornelia Horn has demonstrated, amid the manifold sacred sites of Palestine.155 His position is nevertheless unambiguous: preservation from doctrinal pollution is more important than worship at specific sites.156 Thus, for example, he holds forth the vignette of a nun who goes from the Mount of Olives to the Church of the Ascension at Jerusalem but is there closed in during a Chalcedonian celebration. When it has finished, she returns to her cell but soon after falls ill and on her deathbed proclaims, “People are saying to me, How could you be counted among the orthodox, you, who decided to stay put during a celebration of the renegades and watch the unworthy partake of the holy mysteries?”157
As will be evident, there is a distinct anticlerical tone to Rufus’s collection, an indignant sense that most (though not all) bishops had abandoned the true faith at Chalcedon.158 Where Chalcedonian priests challenge or persecute anti- Chalcedonian monks there are disastrous consequences for the former,159 and Rufus draws a sharp distinction between the pure world of anti-Chalcedonian ascetics and the corrupt world of Chalcedonian bishops.160 One anti-Chalcedonian relates how he once saw, in a vision, a mob of bishops sealing in a lit furnace a small child (Christ), with the hero of the Latrocinium, Dioscorus of Alexandria, alone abstaining from their plans;161 another reports still another vision, in which he perceives Saint Paul standing amid a group of bishops and proclaiming to them, “Not one of you has been found to be pure.”162
Given that an alternative, anti-Chalcedonian Church had still to be realized at the time of the Plerophoriae’s composition, this repudiation of the episcopate has some significant practical consequences that Rufus attempts to address. Thus, when during a persecution at Alexandria a monk can find no orthodox priests to celebrate the eucharist, his entreaties to God precipitate the miraculous revelation of a piece of the sacrament in his hand; and when a secular pilgrim hesitates to receive from his own hand a host that has been preconsecrated and that he carries with him, his doubts are assuaged when he discovers it bleeding.163
In light of his celebration of anti-Chalcedonian asceticism, his perspective on the corrupted episcopate, and the evident difficulties in accessing the orthodox eucharist, it is quite remarkable that Rufus chose not to marginalize the sacramental structures of the Church but instead placed them at the center of his vision. The differentiation between true and false eucharists becomes a central marker of the wider differentiation between true and false doctrines, and orthodox communion becomes the superlative expression of anti-Chalcedonism.164 Thus Rufus records how a man in Cilicia who received the sanctified eucharist from Peter the Iberian married a woman who was devout but also a Chalcedonian and how that woman then fell into such a grave illness that the doctors despaired for her life; the wife, however, then had a vision in which angels revealed to her the heaven preserved for enemies of Chalcedon, and upon waking she received the anti-Chalcedonian host and was healed.165 Here, therefore, as elsewhere within the collection, it is the act of communion, more than a mere mental conversion, that is the most important expression of one’s adherence to one or other camp.166
The texts of Rufus’s anti-Chalcedonian contemporaries are also conspicuous for this same elevation of the eucharist. The various Letters of Severus of Antioch, for example, demonstrate a constant concern for both sacramental protocol and the preservation of the eucharist from heretical pollution. Like Rufus, Severus in several places addresses the problem of absent priests, sanctioning autocommunion but also chastising those who consider the worthiness of the celebrant to affect the oblation itself.167 A series of his Letters, furthermore, reiterates the point that anti-Chalcedonians must not commune with their Chalcedonian adversaries: one should commune with those who are like-minded, or else invite damnation (even monks, Severus insists, are not exempt from this imperative); nor should one admit heretics to the eucharistic service, lest the gift of pure communion be polluted.168
Volker Menze’s recent monograph on the formation of the Syrian Orthodox Church has highlighted this eucharistic discourse as one of the central means through which anti-Chalcedonian authorities responded both to the doctrinal fragmentation of the episcopate and to their creeping alienation from Constantinople.169 It thus had both a practical and an ideological dimension: for those living in Chalcedonian areas, issues of sacramental protocol were no doubt real and immediate concerns that authorities were forced to confront; but at the same time, in elevating the anti-Chalcedonian eucharist and disparaging that of their opponents, those same authorities used the same sacramental emphasis as a means of establishing the ritual boundaries of their doctrinal group, without limiting participation to one particular social group (monks, clerics, seculars, etc.). It is, therefore, of little surprise that from the reign of the Chalcedonian emperor Justin I anti-Chalcedonian leaders, who had until then distributed the eucharist to the faithful through a disparate network of established or exiled clerics, began instead to ordain the leaders of an alternative, anti-Chalcedonian Church.170 Those ordinations were an intractable step on the path to the full fragmentation of the Eastern Church.
The intrusion of the eucharist within hagiographies such as the Plerophriae places the sacrament and its rites at the center of anti-Chalcedonian self-perception. In setting out this new vision, anti-Chalcedonian authors were also preparing the ground for a gradual dissociation of Christian faith and empire, in which the emphasis upon eucharisitc righteousness would come to provide the basis for self-definition in an imminent future in which both imperial politics and foreign incursion encouraged the exploration of new, post-Roman identities.171 But for our purposes here, we should note that a more immediate effect of this shift is to transport the eucharist—to a far greater degree than in the past—into hagiographic narratives, implicating hagiographic heroes within a broader ecclesial framework from which ascetics are not absent or excused. The presence of the eucharist therefore has a somewhat different purpose here than in, for example, the Life of Symeon the Younger (where doctrinal references are conspicuous for their absence).172 But the result is nevertheless the same: far from operating outside sacramental imperatives, in this post-Chalcedonian period some prominent ascetics are now presented as integrated within, and subordinated to, a far broader, sacramentalized world with the eucharist at its navel.
In a range of post-Chalcedonian literature we witness a series of interrelated tensions: between the individual and the institution, between asceticism and eucharist, between monasticism and Church. Although the process of ideological reorientation expressed and enforced within the Chalcedonian legislation had no doubt done much to reconcile the monastic and clerical vocations, it is evident that significant tensions remained. Not least, and despite legal and economic integration, no intellectual solution had been offered to the traditional ascetic indifference to the eucharist, an indifference so evident in the writings of the earliest ascetic theoreticians and hagiographers.
Throughout the post-Chalcedonian period various Christian commentators attempted to address those same tensions: the hagiographers of pillar saints emphasized the full liturgical integration, even ordination, of their heroes; anti-Chalcedonian commentators began to place the eucharist at the center of the orthodox monastic (and broader Christian) life; and, perhaps above all, the Areopagite set out a radical new vision that contextualized the ascetic tradition within the structures of the Church and made monks dependent upon the spiritual perfection offered through the eucharist and its episcopal mediators. Dissenting voices could still nevertheless be heard, and it is, above all, in the Palestinian Origenist crisis that we catch precious glimpses of a disparate group of monks who still clung to the mood of spiritual and moral freedom that had defined the earliest ascetic thinkers, against those who would subordinate monks to the demands of successive institutions (coenobium, church, and empire).
It is indeed in Palestinian circles that we will pursue such tensions in the remainder of this book, in the writings of three monastic authors trained in the coenobia and laurae of the Judean deserts: John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor (fl. ca. 610–60). These three authors were Chalcedonian in doctrine, and when we first encounter the group, in Sophronius’s Miracles of Cyrus and John, we discover an author who recapitulates the anti-Chalcedonian eucharistic emphasis notable, for example,