Christian should strive to be a gnōstikos, Evagrius addressed the limited and self-selected circle of monks who made the attainment of gnōsis their life’s goal. Evagrius’s writing gives a concrete locus to the quest for gnōsis: it now becomes firmly anchored in the monastic environment. His lasting influence on monastic philosophy can hardly be overestimated. His ideas also laid the foundation for a potential competition between monks and clergy over the possession and administration of the Spirit. If, as Evagrius intends, the monk strives to be a gnōstikos, and if, as Clement and Origen have argued, the gnōstikos is also a true priest, this opens the door for the monastic rejection of the institutional clergy and the services it has to offer, especially the eucharistic liturgy. Some instances of this attitude and the attempts to contain it will be discussed below.
To offset these theoretical treatments by Clement, Origen, and Evagrius, it is useful to look briefly at a concrete description of a pneumatikos. The spiritual teacher in question is none other than Origen. The work in his praise was composed by his disciple Gregory the Wonder-worker. The Address of Thanksgiving to Origen is Gregory’s farewell speech to his beloved teacher, delivered in Caesarea in Palestine at the end of his studies in the presence of other students and Origen himself. It depicts Origen as the true pneumatikos who has the power to transform the lives of those who become his followers. Gregory had experienced this in person. True to the social standing of his family as part of the local nobility in Cappadocian Pontus, he had received an extensive education in the traditional vein, and was on his way to acquire further qualifications in jurisprudence in Berytus, when he met Origen in a chance encounter in Caesarea, where the latter was teaching at the time. Gregory immediately fell under the spell of Origen’s eloquent teaching and profound erudition, gave up all prospects for the career in the civil service for which he had been so carefully groomed, and dedicated himself to a life of Christian study. After five years in the classroom of Origen, he returned to Neocaesarea, where he led a monastic existence together with a few like-minded friends. It did not take long until the local community and the neighboring bishops recognized Gregory’s talents and he was made bishop of his city, a position he held for at least two decades until his death, which occurred sometime between 270 and 275. Gregory’s career follows a pattern that would become typical in the fourth century: a son of the provincial upper crust who is groomed for a position of civic leadership then adopts the monastic life, only to be recruited into a leadership role within the church. His Address of Thanksgiving presents Origen as a larger-than-life figure, whose sanctity radiated to all those around him, including Gregory himself, who probably found this speech a convenient literary vehicle to stake his own claim to holiness by association with his revered teacher.
According to Gregory, Origen “looks and seems like a human being but, to those in a position to observe the finest flower of his disposition, has already completed most of the preparation for the re-ascent to the divine world.”31 In their first encounter, Origen displayed the gift of discernment in teaching for which the desert fathers would become famous: “We were pierced as by a dart by his discourse even from the first.”32 His teaching was carefully tailored to suit the needs of his disciples, as Gregory explains by invoking the metaphor of his own soul as a rocky and overgrown Weld that first needed to be tilled to ensure that the seeds of Origen’s wisdom fell on prepared soil.33 Being with Origen afforded his disciples a foretaste of paradise. 34 To them, Origen’s personal example was as eloquent a lesson as his words, for he refused to lecture on anything that he did not himself strive to put into practice.35 Origen had attained such a level of intellectual acuity and purity that he could communicate matters of the Spirit directly and unsullied by the sluggishness of his own mind. Gregory expresses his boundless admiration:
He [Origen] is the only living person whom I have either met myself or heard others tell about who could do this, who had trained himself to receive the purity and brightness of the sayings into his own soul, and to teach others, because the Leader [i.e., Jesus, or the divine Logos] of them all, who speaks within God’s friends the prophets, and prompts every prophecy and mystical, divine discourse, so honored him as a friend as to establish him as his spokesman.36
As his oration winds down to a tearful close, and Gregory professes to be bracing himself for his return to the cares of the world, he asks one last thing of his teacher: “But you, our beloved head, arise and send us off now with prayer. As you saved us by your holy instruction during our stay, save us also by your prayers as we depart.”37 A true pneumatikos in the eyes of his devoted disciple, Origen passed on the divine Spirit through word and deed and inspired others to follow his example. In addition to his instruction, his prayers are also valued and sought after. This ability to pray connects the figure of the pneumatikos, who is prominent in the theological literature of the second and third centuries, with the holy men of the fourth century and beyond, who are known to us through documentary and hagiographical sources. These men will concern us next.
SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP AND PRAYER
In their strict asceticism and inspired teaching, the desert fathers of the fourth century claimed their place as heirs of the pneumatophoroi of early Christianity.38 The true pneumatophoros in whom the Spirit overflows is always also a teacher. His teaching, however, is different from that of the preacher who regularly addresses a large gathering of people in his homilies. The pneumatophoros instructs his disciples individually or in small groups, both by giving them words to contemplate and live by and by his example. Spiritual guidance is the foundation of monastic spirituality as it first took shape in Egypt and then spread to Palestine and beyond.39 The desert fathers who had left civilization behind in order to concentrate on a life of meditation and prayer soon attracted visitors who wanted to partake of their wisdom. Groups of disciples clustered around the “Old Men,” some staying for a few months before moving on to be inspired by another Old Man or returning to the world, others remaining for a lifetime. The sharing of the Spirit thus generated the nucleus of monastic communities joined in the common pursuit of personal perfection. The Spirit that was channeled through an Old Man could radiate even beyond his inner circle of disciples to the laypeople who simply wanted to reap the benefits of being loosely associated with him, but without making a dramatic change in their lives.
The activity that gives purpose and cohesion to these followers of a holy man—both the inner circle of monastic disciples and the outer circle of laypeople—is prayer. The ability to intercede for others before God is one of the distinctive marks of the spiritual individual, as will become clear in the following. The Greek term for this ability is parrhēsia, which literally means “the freedom to say everything” and is best translated “boldness of speech.” Parrhēsia is the common ground where the spiritual abilities of the pneumatophoros and the miraculous powers of the holy man overlap. For what else are miracles if not the result of successful intercessory prayer? This function of the holy man has not been sufficiently appreciated until recently and therefore deserves to be treated in some detail here.
Intercessory prayer is of vital importance in joining a spiritual father to his followers and vice versa. It is, as it were, the daily bread of their interaction. Spectacular miracles may sometimes be the result, but those are more like the icing on the cake. Essentially sensationalist in their approach, the hagiographers of late antiquity tend to overemphasize miracles. Their accounts are carefully crafted literary productions with the purpose of lionizing a particular holy man. Closer to the original setting of this interaction through personal conversation are the actual letters exchanged between a holy man and his followers. In some instances, the actual papyri or ostraca bearing such letters have survived; in other cases, we depend on the later compilation by an editor of the correspondence of a holy man. This kind of documentary evidence provides a useful corrective to hagiographical writing because it is largely unadulterated by literary embellishments. It gives us actual snapshots of a spiritual leader at work. What emerges from these texts with great clarity is the existence of prayer communities, centered around one or several holy men, which are conceptualized in kinship terms as a family of “brothers,” “sons,” and “fathers.” In view of the frequent emphasis, in the sources and in modern scholarship alike,
