and monks, and led to the gradual formation of distinct, anti-Chalcedonian communities committed to a “one nature” Christological confession. In the post-Chalcedonian period, hagiographers within those same communities—confronted with a swathe of Chalcedonian bishops and oscillating if not oppositional imperial opinion—began to elevate the eucharist within the texts that celebrated their ascetic heroes, placing the sacrament and its rites at the center of new religious identities and shifting the orientation of their communities from the pious Christian emperor and his empire to the pious, “true” Church, the rites of which remained unsullied despite alienation from the secular authorities.
A wonderful example is provided in the Plerophoriae of John Rufus, a collection of anti-Chalcedonian vignettes composed in Palestine about 515.148 Rufus was a priest at Antioch who broke communion after the second deposition of the anti-Chalcedonian Peter the Fuller, and thence traveled to Palestine, where he entered the ascetic circle of Peter the Iberian (whose Life he also composed), later, perhaps, becoming bishop of Maiuma.149 Within the Plerophoriae we find a plethora of stories concerning the eucharist and its rites, in striking contrast to the relative minimalism of earlier hagiographic collections. The change of tone reflects a change of circumstance. For Rufus, the differentiation between efficacious and nonefficacious, true and false, eucharists is the ultimate dividing line between anti- Chalcedonian and Chalcedonian, true and false, doctrines. Frequent visions or miracles associated with the eucharist therefore serve to establish the righteousness of the anti-Chalcedonian position; while communion serves as the ultimate statement of membership within the orthodox group.150
The Chalcedonian eucharist is therefore presented as polluted; its anti-Chalcedonian equivalent, as exalted. Rufus relates, for example, how a woman at Alexandria once hesitated to commune after the circulation of the so-called counterencyclical (that is, the proclamation of the emperor Basiliscus that withdrew his previous support for the anti-Chalcedonians). Then in a vision she perceived a great church with two altars: one grand but somber, with a Chalcedonian bishop celebrating the eucharist; and the other small but ordained in gold and gems, where a small child (the Savior) was offering the sacrifice and proclaiming, “Receive communion at this altar.”151 Chalcedonian bishops are here presented as dishonoring the host or unable to transform it: thus in one tale Timothy of Alexandria relates how, at the time of Chalcedon, he had a vision in which he approached the altar to receive communion and discovered the bread to be stale, a portent that presaged “the abandonment of God’s grace from the churches”; in another Zachariah of Maiuma had a vision in which he perceived himself in a Chalcedonian church at Beirut and saw the priests offering the cup but treating it as miserable; while in one more, also situated at the moment of the circulation of the counterencyclical, one Abba John has a vision in which he perceives the altar of the Church to have been stripped and the eucharistic elements scattered on the floor.152
It is therefore unsurprising that Rufus throughout the collection rails against indiscriminate participation in the Chalcedonian eucharist. We read of a monk, Constantine, who at the time of Chalcedon was unsure whether to commune at the shrine of Saint John the Baptist at Sebaste, and thus to become an apostate; the saint himself then appears and warns the monk not to abandon the Church and not to lose his soul—“For,” John proclaims, “everywhere you go I will be with you.”153 In the subsequent notice, another monk, Zosimus, goes from Sinai to Jerusalem and en route rests at the shrine of Jacob near Bethel; he is reassured that taking communion there is not a problem, but once again the saint appears, rebukes him, and orders him to hate “the renegades.”154 Here, then, Rufus confronts a situation in which the Chalcedonian possession of prominent saints’ shrines presented a significant concern, in particular, as Cornelia Horn has demonstrated, amid the manifold sacred sites of Palestine.155 His position is nevertheless unambiguous: preservation from doctrinal pollution is more important than worship at specific sites.156 Thus, for example, he holds forth the vignette of a nun who goes from the Mount of Olives to the Church of the Ascension at Jerusalem but is there closed in during a Chalcedonian celebration. When it has finished, she returns to her cell but soon after falls ill and on her deathbed proclaims, “People are saying to me, How could you be counted among the orthodox, you, who decided to stay put during a celebration of the renegades and watch the unworthy partake of the holy mysteries?”157
As will be evident, there is a distinct anticlerical tone to Rufus’s collection, an indignant sense that most (though not all) bishops had abandoned the true faith at Chalcedon.158 Where Chalcedonian priests challenge or persecute anti- Chalcedonian monks there are disastrous consequences for the former,159 and Rufus draws a sharp distinction between the pure world of anti-Chalcedonian ascetics and the corrupt world of Chalcedonian bishops.160 One anti-Chalcedonian relates how he once saw, in a vision, a mob of bishops sealing in a lit furnace a small child (Christ), with the hero of the Latrocinium, Dioscorus of Alexandria, alone abstaining from their plans;161 another reports still another vision, in which he perceives Saint Paul standing amid a group of bishops and proclaiming to them, “Not one of you has been found to be pure.”162
Given that an alternative, anti-Chalcedonian Church had still to be realized at the time of the Plerophoriae’s composition, this repudiation of the episcopate has some significant practical consequences that Rufus attempts to address. Thus, when during a persecution at Alexandria a monk can find no orthodox priests to celebrate the eucharist, his entreaties to God precipitate the miraculous revelation of a piece of the sacrament in his hand; and when a secular pilgrim hesitates to receive from his own hand a host that has been preconsecrated and that he carries with him, his doubts are assuaged when he discovers it bleeding.163
In light of his celebration of anti-Chalcedonian asceticism, his perspective on the corrupted episcopate, and the evident difficulties in accessing the orthodox eucharist, it is quite remarkable that Rufus chose not to marginalize the sacramental structures of the Church but instead placed them at the center of his vision. The differentiation between true and false eucharists becomes a central marker of the wider differentiation between true and false doctrines, and orthodox communion becomes the superlative expression of anti-Chalcedonism.164 Thus Rufus records how a man in Cilicia who received the sanctified eucharist from Peter the Iberian married a woman who was devout but also a Chalcedonian and how that woman then fell into such a grave illness that the doctors despaired for her life; the wife, however, then had a vision in which angels revealed to her the heaven preserved for enemies of Chalcedon, and upon waking she received the anti-Chalcedonian host and was healed.165 Here, therefore, as elsewhere within the collection, it is the act of communion, more than a mere mental conversion, that is the most important expression of one’s adherence to one or other camp.166
The texts of Rufus’s anti-Chalcedonian contemporaries are also conspicuous for this same elevation of the eucharist. The various Letters of Severus of Antioch, for example, demonstrate a constant concern for both sacramental protocol and the preservation of the eucharist from heretical pollution. Like Rufus, Severus in several places addresses the problem of absent priests, sanctioning autocommunion but also chastising those who consider the worthiness of the celebrant to affect the oblation itself.167 A series of his Letters, furthermore, reiterates the point that anti-Chalcedonians must not commune with their Chalcedonian adversaries: one should commune with those who are like-minded, or else invite damnation (even monks, Severus insists, are not exempt from this imperative); nor should one admit heretics to the eucharistic service, lest the gift of pure communion be polluted.168
Volker Menze’s recent monograph on the formation of the Syrian Orthodox Church has highlighted this eucharistic discourse as one of the central means through which anti-Chalcedonian authorities responded both to the doctrinal fragmentation of the episcopate and to their creeping alienation from Constantinople.169 It thus had both a practical and an ideological dimension: for those living in Chalcedonian areas, issues of sacramental protocol were no doubt real and immediate concerns that authorities were forced to confront; but at the same time, in elevating the anti-Chalcedonian eucharist and disparaging that of their opponents,
