in some detail. To Clement, the person in a position to provide spiritual instruction is the gnōstikos. The word comes from the same root as gnōsis, true knowledge of the divine. Knowledge of the divine is coupled with love of divine wisdom. Hence the gnōstikos is also the true philosopher (the literal meaning of philosophia being “love of wisdom”). Here is Clement’s definition of the gnōstikos in a nutshell: “Our philosopher holds firmly to these three things: first, contemplation; second, fulfilling the commandments; third, the formation of people of virtue. When these come together they make the Gnostic Christian [gnōstikos].”21 All aspects of the individual are thus involved in being a gnōstikos: the soul and the mental capacities in order to attain knowledge of God, the body and the will that governs it in order to observe the teachings of Christ, and a man’s social ability to communicate in order to instruct others. Insight, practice, and teaching are intimately linked. The gnōstikos’s highest goal is to emulate Christ: “It is the Christian Gnostic [gnōstikos] who is ‘in the image and likeness,’ who imitates God so far as possible, leaving out none of the things which lead to the possible likeness, displaying continence, patience, righteous living, sovereignty over the passions, sharing his possessions so far as he can, doing good in word and deed.”22 According to Clement, every Christian should strive to become a gnōstikos, to observe the Christian teachings at all times and in every aspect of his existence.23
Yet Clement implicitly acknowledges a gradation in the attainment of gnōsis when he discusses those gnōstikoi who become teachers of others. It is unthinkable to Clement that the man who has been privileged with divine gnōsis would not pass his knowledge on to others: “Human beings learn to share as a result of justice; they pass on to others some of what they have received from God out of a natural attitude of kindliness and obedience to the commandments.”24 Just as the gnōstikos strives to become “like unto” God, the disciple desires to emulate his teacher. This involves a succession of several steps: faith, knowledge (gnōsis), love, and the “heavenly inheritance.” 25 The kind of spiritual love that Clement has in mind is a formative process in which the lover’s desire for the beloved makes him become like the beloved: “An ignorant man has sought, and having sought, he finds the teacher; and finding has believed, and believing has hoped; and henceforward having loved, is assimilated to what was loved—endeavouring to be what he first loved.”26
Clement’s definition implies not only that the gnōstikos is, by his very nature, a teacher, but also that he is, in the truest sense, a priest: “For it is possible even now for those who practice the Lord’s commandments, and who live perfectly according to the Gospels and who are gnōstikoi, to be registered in the list of the apostles. Such a man is truly a priest of the Church and a veritable servant (diakonos) of God’s will, when he practices and teaches the things of the Lord; and he is not ordained with the imposition of human hands, neither is he believed to be just, because he is a priest, but rather, he is enlisted in the priesthood because he is just.”27
Clement here draws a critical distinction between true priests and priests by ordination, a distinction that will continue to trouble the church through the ages. It allows for the possibility that true priests do not receive ordination, while those who are ordained to the priesthood may fall short of the mark for true priests. Both scenarios bear great danger, the former because people with spiritual gifts may operate outside the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the latter because the ranks of the clergy may be filled with unworthy men.
Origen, Clement’s disciple and later successor as instructor at the catechetical school in Alexandria, was the first Christian theologian to produce commentaries on most of the books of the holy scriptures. In Origen’s writings, the perfected Christian is usually called pneumatikos, although Origen sometimes also uses Clement’s designation gnōstikos. As the Greek word pneuma means “Holy Spirit,” the word pneumatikos has its exact correspondence in the English word “spiritual.” Origen follows Clement in recognizing the pneumatikos as the true Christian.28 The pneumatikos perfects himself through constant study of the scriptures; he practices asceticism in order to increase his spiritual and mental abilities in the same measure as he minimizes attention to the needs of his body; and he demonstrates his state of perfection through his actions. In other words, Origen identifies ascetic living and its visible effects as both the preparation for and the manifestation of spiritual authority. As the pneumatikos shares in the divine Spirit and continually lives in its presence, he is a true successor of the apostles; he is equal to the apostles; he is like an angel—indeed, he is a divine man (theios anēr) and a friend of God. These laudatory designations will later become a staple of hagiographical literature, applied in the praise of martyrs and saints.
Like Clement before him, Origen distinguishes between clergy by ordination and the “true priests” who, as partakers of the spirit, are imbued with divine authority to fulfill the priestly functions of preaching and teaching, and who can act as physicians of souls. But Origen exhibits greater boldness than his teacher in following this thought to its logical consequence. He proclaims that not only those who are seen to belong to the college of priests, but even more so those who comport themselves in a priestly manner are the true priests of God.29 He 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.
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