offer quite antithetical approaches to the nature of the cosmos and the place of the individual within it. Those antithetical approaches, moreover, are arranged along the same dividing lines that we have identified elsewhere in the same period: on the one side, ascetical enthusiasts emphasizing spiritual independence and the endeavor of the individual; on the other, the representatives of institutions emphasizing spiritual submission and integration within wider structures.111 It is in this sense that Alexander Golitzin has seen in Pseudo-Dionysius a response to sustained concerns about Messalian practice and belief;112 and it is in this sense also—and not in a clandestine commitment to the more controversial aspects of Evagrian doctrine—that he should be connected to the Origenist crisis in Palestine.
This tension between Pseudo-Dionysian and Evagrian schemes is not a modern observation, for it was obvious also to the former’s first translator into Syriac, Sergius of Resh‛aina (d. 536).113 Among his manifold interests Sergius, we should note, was an enthusiast for Evagrius, and was perhaps a commentator on the latter’s controversial Kephalaia Gnostica—one of his contemporaries, at least, went so far as to describe him as practiced “in the doctrine of Origen.”114 Indeed, Sergius attached to his translation of the Areopagite’s corpus an existing autograph treatise On the Spiritual Life that recapitulated the thought of Evagrius and then proceeded to set out how the Dionysian corpus might be reconciled to that same thought.115 Sergius here sees in the progression of the Areopagite’s texts the Evagrian program of spiritual progression from action to contemplation, so that, for example, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is related to the Evagrian stage of praktikē or virtuous action, and the Divine Names to the final, divine contemplation.116 This short introduction, then, should perhaps be appreciated as the first serious attempt to reconcile the two competing visions. It was an attempt that later generations were to replicate.
It is perhaps unsurprising to discover that the Areopagite’s ideas also found a particular resonance within Palestine, and in none other than Scythopolis. The city indeed appears as something of a crucible for the same intellectual tensions that we have explored here, tensions that revolved around the competing imperatives of the individual and the institution. At the end of 552 the bishop of Scythopolis—one Theodore, a former Palestinian monk of the Origenist faction—submitted to the emperor Justinian a libellus in which he recanted various Origenist errors (errors that mirror the anti-Evagrian anathemas of 553);117 and, as we have seen, the hagiographies of Cyril of Scythopolis point toward a comparable interest in the suppression of Origenism and, with it, the traditions of individual contemplation enshrined within the Evagrian tradition.
Pseudo-Dionysius’s first substantial commentator was another Scythopolite, the sixth-century bishop John (most probably Theodore’s predecessor).118 As Paul Rorem and John Lamoreaux have noted in their compelling book on John’s commentaries, besides Christological observations, it is above all a concern for the preservation of hierarchical order within the Church that characterizes John’s comments on the texts.119 Within that same concern John, like Pseudo-Dionysius, demonstrates an acute concern with the subordination of monks to their clerical superiors. Thus when he comes to the Areopagite’s aforementioned Letters 8, to the rebel monk Demophilus, he reaffirms the structural relegation of monks to clerics, noting that “even if he sins, a priest must not be corrected by a deacon or a monk, or indeed by the laity . . . for [they are] above the order of monks and the liturgists—that is, deacons.”120 For John, the monastic rebellion that Demophilus epitomized was a resonant topic: “And so note,” he concluded in the opening scholion on the letter, “that these evils also took place in those times [kaka tauta kai epi ekeinōn tōn chronōn egeneto].”121
Contained within John’s scholia we also encounter a somewhat ambiguous and selective approach both to Origen and to Evagrius.122 Indeed, it has been suggested that the same prevarication places John within the Origenist camp in Palestine—that is, within the circle of those who pursued a spirit of intellectual liberalism—and moreover explains the otherwise quite remarkable silence of Cyril’s Lives, in which his fellow Scythopolite does not feature.123 I would propose a quite different explanation, however: if we accept that the label “Origenist” signifies more than mere dedication to theological experiment and in fact implies (at least) an interest in the Evagrian tradition of spiritual contemplation, then it becomes problematic to place John within the same camp, since the liturgical vision that he promotes is in itself antagonistic to the presumptions of singular monastic practice.124 Both Cyril and John, in effect, share the same desire to situate monasticism within a broader institutional context and thus also to deemphasize more singular spiritual endeavor; but each approaches the same tension from a quite different perspective, corresponding to their respective vocations, monastic and clerical. Thus, while Cyril (as Flusin has demonstrated) is careful to acknowledge the theoretical subordination of his heroes to the patriarch of Jerusalem, it is above all the institution of monasticism that for him constitutes the perfect terrestrial society;125 in contrast, for John (as for Pseudo-Dionysius) that same society is realized in the entire worshipping community, gathered around the altar of communion. In the end, despite their common purpose, the views of Cyril and John on the place of monasticism within the Christian cosmos are quite antithetical. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the former might prove hostile to the latter, refusing him the (inapposite) title “Origenist” but nevertheless condemning him through silence.
Within the Justinianic Near East, then, and in particular in Palestine, we witness something of the intellectual tensions that remained within and around monastic circles, tensions that the Chalcedonian legislators had failed to address. While the bishops gathered in 451 had lent an ecumenical impetus to preexistent notions of monks’ legal and economic dependence on their clerical superiors, those same bishops did not—indeed could not—legislate against the spiritual independence long enshrined within the dominant traditions of ascetic thought, in particular that of Evagrius. Those traditions were, as we have seen, indifferent (though not hostile) to the hierarchical and sacramental structures of the Church and located salvation in complex processes of ascetical self-transformation and spiritual contemplation, for the most part detached from wider dependences. In time, however, that independence would in turn be challenged, as various post-Chalcedonian authors attempted a theological renegotiation of ascetics’ relation to the wider world. Two authors are of particular note: first, Cyril of Scythopolis, whose hagiographies sought to reorient monastic practice around the monastic institution, deemphasizing the individualistic, contemplative tradition and demonizing its adherents or admirers as Origenists; and second, Pseudo-Dionysius, whose liturgical vision presented nothing less than the full institutional, cosmological, and spiritual dependence of monks upon the external realities of the Church.
HAGIOGRAPHY AND THE EUCHARIST AFTER CHALCEDON
If, as we have seen, the eucharistic minimalism of earlier ascetic thought is complemented in the general eucharistic minimalism of the earlier hagiographies, is the post-Chalcedonian shift toward a more sacramentalized vision of the ascetic life—so evident in the works of the Areopagite and his commentator—also paralleled within the period’s hagiographies? This might of course be expected, for the process of monastic ordination that various authorities promoted, and that served as a prominent medium through which ascetic charisma was integrated within ecclesial structures, was in this period far more advanced. But, to repeat, we are interested here not in fleeting references to monastic participation in rituals or sacraments but rather in the deliberate and developed attempt of hagiographers to articulate a new, more sacramentalized vision of the ascetic life. Thus, for example, Cyril of Scythopolis reports his heroes’ ordination but, coterminous with his moral elevation of monasticism above the clerical vocation, devotes minimal attention to the eucharist. In the same period, however, we do discover elsewhere hagiographic visions of ascetics-cum-priests that include an unprecedented eucharistic emphasis. Those visions are contained within the Lives of the stylites.126
Eucharistic participation presented a particular
