Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
I argue that for these Chalcedonian authors the development of a sacramental discourse that emphasized the integration of ascetics within the Church partook of a wider Christian response to the reversals suffered at the hands of Eastern invaders, and all the ideological introspection that those same reversals demanded. Through that same discourse, Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus emphasized the sustained unity and integrity of the orthodox Church, preserved not in the fluctuating fortunes of the Christian Roman empire but in the continued power and righteousness of the gathered eucharistic rite. For our three protagonists, therefore, the crisis of the Chalcedonian empire and the occupation of its territories compelled a far more thorough and thoughtful renegotiation of ecclesiological thought than had hitherto been attempted within ascetic circles, whether Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian.
As a response to the crisis of empire, that same elevation of the eucharist and its rites would be replicated in the works of other Chalcedonian observers of the period. But in the context of our three protagonists, it came to serve a more immediate function, as Sophronius and Maximus emerged as Constantinople’s leading doctrinal antagonists and looked westward to Rome for support. In the second half of this book (chapters 5–7), therefore, I examine how the ecclesiological renegotiation that the group attempted in response to Eastern crisis came also to provide the ideological underpinning for its dissidence against the emperor’s attempts to achieve a new communion of the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches.
Contemporaneous with Heraclius’s triumph over the Persians in 628, and in a bid to cement that triumph in the achievement of an elusive doctrinal consensus, the emperor and patriarch at Constantinople had promoted the doctrine of monenergism—that is, the one operation in Christ—as a means of compromising with anti-Chalcedonian communities throughout the Near and Middle East. The new initiative met with considerable success but from its inception encountered the vociferous resistance of Sophronius. Both Sophronius and Maximus had in the same period proved somewhat reluctant to accept the triumphalist Constantinopolitan rhetoric of imperial and cosmological restoration, and as that rhetoric was undone in the spectacular rise of an expansionist Islam, Sophronius developed an explicit doctrinal opposition that aimed to undo the recent unions. Here, then, the group’s ever-deepening eucharistic orientation assumed a more immediate target, for Sophronius’s dissidence was constructed on an ideological basis that would brook no doctrinal compromise for the sake of union and regarded such compromise as a pollution of the Church’s sacramental ordo, a cause of sin and thus also of the divine anger manifested in Roman defeat.
In the face of Sophronius’s opposition, the emperor and patriarch retreated on the question of Christological operations and instead promoted the doctrine of monotheletism—the one will in Christ—as a means of restoring peace within Chalcedonian circles. As the successes of the first caliphs became more entrenched, however, Maximus from Western exile developed and launched a further doctrinal assault upon the position of the capital, an assault that won over successive Roman popes to the antimonothelete cause and that, it appears, several times lurched into open political rebellion. In this context, the ecclesiological revisionism that I have identified as a prominent feature of the group’s output came again to complement its doctrinal dissent. On the one hand, the consistent resistance to imperial doctrinal decree was validated as an assertion of ecclesial independence from secular interference, for the emperor fulfilled none of the functions of the priesthood and therefore had no right to debate or to define the faith; but on the other, the recognition of clerical privilege that had marked the circle’s earlier pronouncements was extended a step further, to a recognition of Roman preeminence within the Church.
Within this circle, therefore, we witness not a devolution of the sacred from bishop or emperor to ascetic—as has sometimes been said of the period—but rather the integration of ascetic holiness around an established ecclesial pole. The ideal ascetic who emerged within the writings of Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus was not the withdrawn outsider, standing above the demands of imperfect terrestrial institutions. He or she was a person of the Church, subordinate to its sacramental mediation, respectful of the priesthood, and mindful of the various pollutants that swirled around it. In articulating this model, our three abandoned the spiritual independence of earlier monastic generations but at the same predicted both the consistent eucharistic orientation of later centuries’ most prominent Greek ascetics and the ideological basis on which those same ascetics would come to construct their own political dissent. This, then, was a new asceticism for a new age, in which ascetics at last embraced their spiritual subordination to clerics but in so doing constructed both a new vision of a Church liberated from temporal disasters and a less transient and more threatening basis from which to expose the inherent ambiguities of an empire founded in the Christian faith.
1
Toward the Sacramental Saint
At some point in the 350s A.D., an ecclesial council was convened at Gangra in Paphlagonia. The disciplinary canons that that council produced were the first to legislate on the nascent monastic enterprise and constitute a classic expression of the anxieties that that enterprise engendered among clerics. The council had been convened to examine the activities of the Eustathians, a monastic sect whose leader had been the erstwhile ascetic mentor of Basil of Caesarea. The charges leveled at the Eustathians at the council can be categorized to constitute three central purported abuses: first, the introduction of ascetic innovations against established practice;1 second, the disparagement or active dissolution of conventional social relations;2 and third, the marginalization or denigration of the hierarchical and sacramental structures of the Church. From our perspective (and perhaps that of the presiding clerics) it was this last accusation that was most salient: “If anyone teaches that the house of God and the liturgies performed there [tas en autōi sunaxeis] are to be despised,” one canon proclaimed, “let him be anathema.”3 Another legislated that “If anyone holds private assemblies outside the Church [para tēn ekklēsian idiai ekklēsiazoi] and in his hatred of the Church wishes to perform ecclesiastical acts [ta tēs ekklēsias etheloi prattein], when the priest in accordance with the bishop’s will has refused permission, let him be anathema.”4 This assumption of clerical privilege, and with it the repudiation of the structures of the Church, represented a fundamental challenge to episcopal notions of a Christianity formed within, and mediated by, the episcopate. The Gangran legislation sought to reinforce those same notions through subordinating monks to clerical authority and ritually orienting the entire Christian community around the assemblies of the Church.
Despite sporadic legislative measures against monastic groups at both the local and imperial levels, the tensions between monks and clerics evident in the Gangran legislation nevertheless recurred throughout the late-antique Mediterranean. Clerics responded to such tensions through two principal (and quite discordant) means. The first such approach was to blur the intellectual and institutional boundaries between the two institutions, incorporating and redefining ascetic principles within the clerical ideal, and thus both clericizing monasticism and asceticizing the episcopate.5 The second approach, however, was not so much to blur as to strengthen the boundaries between the two vocations—not so much to bring ascetics within the world but rather to force them from it. As Daniel Caner has demonstrated in a seminal monograph on monasticism in the period up to 451, ecclesial authorities across the Mediterranean responded to the emergent monastic enterprise through attempting to impose paradigms of proper ascetic practice that were more congenial to clerical claims to leadership, and thus also economic support, within Christian communities.6 The monastic model enshrined in episcopal sermons, letters, and hagiographies emphasized that real monks were not those who wandered in cities and begged for alms—ascetic practices that in fact had a long and illustrious pedigree, in particular in Syria—but rather those who remained in the deserts and were self-sufficient, a model associated with Egypt and enshrined, of course, in Athanasius’s Life of Antony.7 Practices through which ascetics encroached upon the social and economic jurisdictions of clerics were thus stigmatized as impious; and in successive controversies involving the conflict of monks and ecclesiasts, those who did not conform to these normative paradigms of monastic practice were branded as heretics and relegated from the religious mainstream.
Caner regards the canonical legislation of the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) as the apogee of this process, for here the ideological