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 It is little surprise, then, that some have attributed to Stephen an obscure but nevertheless sure role in the origins of the Origenist crisis, the opening salvos of which occurred coterminous with his alleged arrival in Jerusalem.83
For our purposes, however, perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Stephen’s work is his attitude to the eucharist. In describing the spiritual ascent of the soul toward God he writes:84
Then the mind enters into the mystic and glorious holy of holies not made with hands, that it may accomplish mystically and divinely the glorious and holy mystery of the holy and hallowing sacrament; which is a kind of simple and unlimited power which is extended so as to include divinely the essences that are united with it: and those glorious angels display a kind of yearning of desire to receive the eucharist and to be made partakers in the mystery thereof; and [the mind] approaches divinely the spiritual altar; and sacrifices itself, holily and divinely, in most wonderful and ineffable mystery, and is raised again, divinely and holily, in the secret of holy mystery. . . . Know, O my son, that the material and bodily bread which is set upon the material altar is a kind of perceptible sign—and, to tell the truth, a small and unworthy shadow—of that glorious bread which is above the heavens; and the cup of mixture also that is in our world: it too, is (only) a material sign of that glorious and holy drink of which the mind is accounted worthy in the place that is above. . . . A material and bodily sacrament, then, is right for those who walk according to the body; and when the question is asked, whether those minds which have been accounted worthy to receive and to give the spiritual sacrament still need the bodily sacrament, I, for my own part, would say that those who have been initiated by water have yet to be made perfect and those who are in the body must also receive bodily nourishment.
Once again, therefore, we encounter that same ambiguous attitude to the eucharist that we have seen within the writings both of Evagrius and of Pseudo-Macarius. Stephen—much like Pseudo-Macarius—is aware of potential accusations of antisacramentalism and is thus careful to acknowledge the place of the material eucharist within the general Christian life; but at the same time it is clear that he regards that eucharist as a mere imitation of a far more glorious and efficacious spiritual equivalent, of which the mind partakes in contemplation.
Stephen’s text emerged from a context in which other contemporaries had formed a quite different perspective both on the spiritual life and on the eucharist. The Book of the Holy Hierotheos has often been noted for certain correspondences that it shares with the corpus of another contemporary author, the neo-Platonic theologian writing under the pseudonym of the first-century Christian convert Dionysius the Areopagite. As with the Hierotheos of Stephen, the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius first emerged in anti-Chalcedonian circles in the early sixth century85—a provenance that has inspired numerous attempts to identify him with prominent miaphysite theologians of the period86—and as with the Hierotheos again, those writings have been alleged to contain the Origenist protological and eschatological positions condemned in Justinian’s fifteen anathemas.87 (We shall return to this accusation below.) The extent and direction of dependence between Stephen and the Areopagite is a matter of much contention.88 Karl Pinggéra, in the most recent and most extensive salvo in discussions, has argued for a distinction between a Grundschrift and a Redaktionsschicht within Stephen’s extant text, the latter extending the Evagrianism of the former but offering an explicit response to the Areopagite (and redacted, Pinggéra proposes, in Justinianic Palestine).89 These are, then, two texts that emerge in conversation with each other, and from the precise same theological milieu.90
Both the similarities and differences between the Corpus Dionysiacum and the extant version of the Book of the Holy Hierotheos are perhaps best represented in their treatment of a striking shared theme: that is, their mutual conception of the ninefold arrangement of celestial beings.91 There are two crucial and informative differences: where the Book imagines a hierarchical ordering that is both flexible and permeable—that is, in which beings can alter their rank in ascent—in the Areopagite’s vision all such ranks are fixed and immutable;92 and where the Book seems to have no terrestrial equivalent to its hierarchical ranking of the angels, and thus no terrestrial mediation between the individual and God, the Areopagite situates beneath his angelic host a further hierarchical structure corresponding to the various orders of the Church.93
This is not the place for a full exposition of Pseudo-Dionysius’s complex vision of the Church and its rituals.94 But for our purposes, it is important to note his striking perspective on the place of monks within the world. In his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, an interpretation of the various Christian rites, the Areopagite propounds a vision of the cosmos as a strictly delineated terrestrial hierarchy, the function of which is to communicate divine illumination through its ranks, and for each rational being within those ranks to fulfill its hierarchical function and therein achieve divine union. He divides those ranks into three successive orders, defined through their closeness to God: first, the sacraments themselves; then those who initiate others in them; and then those who are initiated.95 He divides each of these ranks into three further divisions: the sacramental, into baptism, eucharist, and oil; the clerical, into deacons, priests, and bishops; and the laical, into the uninitiated, people, and monks. These threefold divisions also correspond to a neo-Platonic triad of purification, illumination, and perfection.96 The deacons offer
