Crisis of Empire. Phil Booth
Origenism should be considered an adherence not to the more controversial and speculative Evagrian doctrines concerning Christ but rather to the contemplative tradition represented, above all, in Evagrius’s writings.
In support of his spiritual reading of the crisis, Hombergen indeed demonstrates that Cyril effects a subtle damnatio memoriae both of Evagrius and of the contemplative ideas of which he was the champion. On the one hand, for example, he puts into the mouths of his heroes pronouncements against Origen that in fact derive from or recapitulate the later anti-Origenist anathemas of 553,64 and he claims that Origen’s and Evagrius’s teachings were the main issue at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, which was in fact devoted to the Three Chapters.65 But on the other hand, he also eschews an Evagrian influence within his hagiographies despite, as Flusin has demonstrated, the pervasive influence of previous monastic literature.66 Hombergen, therefore, reinterprets the Origenist crisis as one between a more intellectualizing group—that is, those who were accepting of, selective within, or indifferent to, the spiritual doctrines of Evagrius—and a more fundamentalist group, those who repudiated the same doctrines and with them the tradition of individualistic monastic contemplation. Within that latter group is of course the hagiographer Cyril, whose Lives set out a radical new vision of the ascetic life, for the most part indifferent to the interior life and focused instead upon the institution. Hombergen thus places at the root of the Origenist crisis “a clash of two competitive ideals of the spiritual life: a somewhat collectivist current, focusing particularly on external aspects, and a more individualist current, concentrating primarily on the development of the interior life.”67
This of course assumes that the Origenist label used in a range of texts was in essence a phantom, devoid of doctrinal meaning and disingenuous in intent. But as István Perczel has insisted in a string of recent publications, it is difficult to suppose that the widespread anxieties and anathemas expressed toward Evagrian (or post-Evagrian) dogma did not have some basis in an actual Evagrian circle.68 At the same time, however, we need not assume that different observers applied the same criteria as to what constituted Origenism or that those whom contemporaries identified as Origenists did not themselves admit a vast degree of variation in their reception, reappropriation, or refusal of various Evagrian doctrines. However we wish to regard the real inspiration behind Leontius’s doctrine, therefore, it is perhaps best to assume that the label “Origenist” might be applied to a wide of range of individuals who might or might not recognize that same label: from Evagrianists proper—that is, those who championed the same protological, Christological, and eschatological positions alleged and evidenced within a range of contemporaneous literature—to intellectual liberals with an interest in, or indifference to, the same theologian’s dogmatic vision.
Hombergen’s fundamental insight on the spiritual dimension to the crisis must nevertheless be allowed to stand. That such tensions informed (though they did not determine) the crisis is indeed borne out in various texts associated with it. As we shall see, however, those tensions were more complex than a simple dichotomization of individualizing or Origenist versus institutionalizing or anti-Origenist can capture. For we shall discover that fundamental differences concerning conceptions of the spiritual life and its relation to wider institutional structures operated also within those groups that sought to suppress Evagrian doctrine and its spiritual inheritance. The hagiographer Cyril’s response to such differences, therefore, was but one institutional response to the problem of monastic individualism. It competed, however, alongside others that shared the desire to subordinate ascetics but that nevertheless adopted a quite different approach, based less upon the integration of ascetic endeavor within the monastic institution and more upon its orientation around and subordination to the sacraments of the Church.
MYSTICS AND LITURGISTS
As we have seen, a notable feature of Evagrius’s thought is his minimal interest in ecclesial life, and in particular in the eucharist. Were differing approaches to the eucharist also a feature of the Palestinian Origenist crisis? Cyril’s hagiographies do not suggest so, although it is nevertheless notable that all his subjects, at the pinnacle of their coenobitic careers, are ordained as priests, emphasizing their integration within a wider ecclesial context outside the hagiographic desert.69 In certain cases, this leads to some anecdote concerning the eucharist: the Life of the Palestinian ascetic pioneer Euthymius, for example, contains two consecutive anecdotes in which he is, as celebrating priest, said to inspire or experience miraculous visions, and the latter of the two develops into a sermonette on the need for a pure heart while approaching the eucharist.70 In terms of a developed sacramental (though not institutional) emphasis, however, we have progressed little from the comparable emphases contained within the History of the Monks in Egypt.
It is nevertheless possible that there was indeed a eucharistic dimension to the intellectual tensions that informed the Origenist crisis. In that aforementioned series of letters on Origenism contained with the Questions and Answers of Barsanuphius and John, the elders’ interlocutor makes a striking statement:71
For indeed, we find even in the books of the elders that there was a certain great elder, and he said out of simplicity [idiōteia] that the bread of which we partake is by nature not the body of Christ but its antitype [antitupon]. And if he had not prayed to God on this matter, he would not have known the truth.
The statement might reference a number of spiritual tales in which monks appear to denigrate the real presence in the eucharist (and which indeed appear, in their original context, to respond to the perceived teaching of Evagrius).72 But embedded here, amid a series of issues connected with Justinianic Origenism, one must also wonder whether this defense of the real presence does not recapitulate, in a new context, concerns over a continued Origenist deviation from proper eucharistic doctrine.
That the eucharistic minimalism we have identified within the corpora of Evagrius and Pseudo-Macarius continued to dominate the works of ascetic theoreticians is clear.73 But one such theoretician we can also associate both with Palestine and with the Origenist crisis. According to a letter of Philoxenus of Mabbug, in the same period (ca. 510) there entered within the monastic circles of Jerusalem one Stephen bar Sudaili, a controversial ascetic who the later Chronicle of Michael the Syrian claims came to Palestine after a meeting with Philoxenus had resulted in a suspicion of heresy.74 The doctrine that Philoxenus attributes to Stephen in the same letter is Origenist in inspiration: in particular, he presents him as an adherent both of apokatastasis—that is, the belief that all beings will, in the end, return to a primordial union with divine nature—and, in line with that, of a two-stage eschaton, a period of punishment or reward before the final, universal consummation. Philoxenus himself dismisses those notions, pointing out that both undermine all efforts at holiness on earth (including, we should note, both asceticism and participation in the eucharist);75 but in his critique of Stephen’s notion of a double consummation, he also refers to the latter’s dependence on an Evagrian notion of motion (kinēsis).76 As Irénée Hausherr long ago observed, the predominant influence on Stephen’s doctrine, as Philoxenus presents it, therefore appears to be not Origen but his spiritual heir Evagrius.77 Philoxenus, we should note, was himself an enthusiast for Evagrius,78 but used a Syriac version of the Kephalaia Gnostica that had removed or sanitized the same cosmological and eschatological doctrines of which he disapproved in Stephen.79
Philoxenus’s Stephen has long been identified as the author of an extant ascetic tract entitled The Book of the Holy Hierotheos.80 Therein the author indeed sets out the doctrines that Philoxenus refutes: he describes the fall of all beings from a primordial union with God; the ascent of the mind toward God, and its identification with Christ; its subsequent descent into hell, there to pronounce upon the souls of sinners; and its final consummation in the original Essence, in which all distinctions are dissolved and even the damned return to union.81 The content of the treatise, therefore, confirms on the one hand both Stephen’s authorship and the substance of Philoxenus’s critique but on the other, as several scholars have demonstrated, the pervasive influence of Evagrian thought upon his theological scheme (including, we should note, the doctrine that resurrected souls will become Christ).82