the ritual boundaries of their doctrinal group, without limiting participation to one particular social group (monks, clerics, seculars, etc.). It is, therefore, of little surprise that from the reign of the Chalcedonian emperor Justin I anti-Chalcedonian leaders, who had until then distributed the eucharist to the faithful through a disparate network of established or exiled clerics, began instead to ordain the leaders of an alternative, anti-Chalcedonian Church.170 Those ordinations were an intractable step on the path to the full fragmentation of the Eastern Church.
The intrusion of the eucharist within hagiographies such as the Plerophriae places the sacrament and its rites at the center of anti-Chalcedonian self-perception. In setting out this new vision, anti-Chalcedonian authors were also preparing the ground for a gradual dissociation of Christian faith and empire, in which the emphasis upon eucharisitc righteousness would come to provide the basis for self-definition in an imminent future in which both imperial politics and foreign incursion encouraged the exploration of new, post-Roman identities.171 But for our purposes here, we should note that a more immediate effect of this shift is to transport the eucharist—to a far greater degree than in the past—into hagiographic narratives, implicating hagiographic heroes within a broader ecclesial framework from which ascetics are not absent or excused. The presence of the eucharist therefore has a somewhat different purpose here than in, for example, the Life of Symeon the Younger (where doctrinal references are conspicuous for their absence).172 But the result is nevertheless the same: far from operating outside sacramental imperatives, in this post-Chalcedonian period some prominent ascetics are now presented as integrated within, and subordinated to, a far broader, sacramentalized world with the eucharist at its navel.
In a range of post-Chalcedonian literature we witness a series of interrelated tensions: between the individual and the institution, between asceticism and eucharist, between monasticism and Church. Although the process of ideological reorientation expressed and enforced within the Chalcedonian legislation had no doubt done much to reconcile the monastic and clerical vocations, it is evident that significant tensions remained. Not least, and despite legal and economic integration, no intellectual solution had been offered to the traditional ascetic indifference to the eucharist, an indifference so evident in the writings of the earliest ascetic theoreticians and hagiographers.
Throughout the post-Chalcedonian period various Christian commentators attempted to address those same tensions: the hagiographers of pillar saints emphasized the full liturgical integration, even ordination, of their heroes; anti-Chalcedonian commentators began to place the eucharist at the center of the orthodox monastic (and broader Christian) life; and, perhaps above all, the Areopagite set out a radical new vision that contextualized the ascetic tradition within the structures of the Church and made monks dependent upon the spiritual perfection offered through the eucharist and its episcopal mediators. Dissenting voices could still nevertheless be heard, and it is, above all, in the Palestinian Origenist crisis that we catch precious glimpses of a disparate group of monks who still clung to the mood of spiritual and moral freedom that had defined the earliest ascetic thinkers, against those who would subordinate monks to the demands of successive institutions (coenobium, church, and empire).
It is indeed in Palestinian circles that we will pursue such tensions in the remainder of this book, in the writings of three monastic authors trained in the coenobia and laurae of the Judean deserts: John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor (fl. ca. 610–60). These three authors were Chalcedonian in doctrine, and when we first encounter the group, in Sophronius’s Miracles of Cyrus and John, we discover an author who recapitulates the anti-Chalcedonian eucharistic emphasis notable, for example, in the Plerophoriae of Rufus, elevating communion as the preeminent expression of conversion to orthodox doctrine. This sacramental differentiation of orthodox and heretic, Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian, would continue to dominate the cultural output of Sophronius and his circle, but whereas the former would in the Miracles prove indifferent to the spiritual demands of communion outside contexts of conversion, in later decades, the same group would attempt a far more comprehensive and more urgent reevaluation of Chalcedonian ecclesiological perception. As the empire was pitched into a geopolitical crisis that placed some Chalcedonian communities under “barbarian” rule and that forced Chalcedonian Christians to explain evident divine disfavor, the same circle set about exploring a new model of the Christian life, pursuing a far more profound and pervasive renegotiation of the conceptual divide between asceticism and eucharist than had hitherto been attempted, either in Chalcedonian or in anti-Chalcedonian circles. Therein, Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus abandoned long-standing monastic claims to spiritual independence of ecclesial realities but at the same time asserted a more integrated model of the orthodox Christian community, guaranteeing its righteousness even as the Christian empire proved ephemeral.
1. Acts of the Council of Gangra, Canons 2, 7, 8, 12, 13, 17, 18.
2. Acts of the Council of Gangra, Canons 1, 3, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16.
3. Acts of the Council of Gangra, Canon 5 [Joannou 91].
4. Acts of the Council of Gangra, Canon 6 [Joannou 91f.]. See also Acts of the Council of Gangra, Canon 4 (against those who refuse to receive communion from a priest who is married); 11 (against those who refuse an invitation to a love feast); 19 (against those ascetics who disregard the fasts prescribed by the Church); 20 (against those who condemn the assemblies in honor of the martyrs).
5. See, e.g., in the East (Cappadocian fathers): Sterk (2004), esp. 35–140. In the West (John Cassian): Markus (1990) esp. 181–97; also P. Brown (1976).
6. Caner (2002).
7. On the Syrian paradigm see Drijvers (1981); Caner (2002) 50–82. On Athanasius’s Life of Antony and the normative Egyptian paradigm see Brakke (1995) 201–65; Caner (2002) 4–18.
8. Caner (2002) 206–12, 235–41; cf. Dagron (1970) 271–75.
9. Canons of the Council of Chalcedon [Joannou 72–74]; with the interpretation of Caner (2002) 210f. concerning the final sentence (Ton mentoi episkopon tēs poleōs chrē tēn deousan pronoian poieisthai tōn monastēriōn).
10. See esp. Caner (2002) 241.
11. On those texts see esp. the comprehensive treatment of Fitschen (1998), esp. 18–88.
12. For the Messalian synthesis of radical ascetic tendencies see Caner (2002) 83–125; Plested (2004) 17–27, esp. 21; Déroche (1995) 154–225.
13. See Theodoret, Compendium of Heretical Doctrines 4.11 [PG 83, 429C].
14. Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 4.11 [Parmentier and Hansen 229]. For the same antisacramental errors cf. the anti-Messalian lists of Timothy of Constantinople, On the Reception of Heretics [PG 86, 45D–52C]; John of Damascus, On Heresies 80 [PG 94, 729A–732B], with Stewart (1991) 52–69, esp. 63f.
15. See, e.g., Theodorus Lector, Tripartite History 2.74 [Hansen 37]; A. Gribomont (1957). For a full discussion see Fitschen (1998) 138–42.
16. On Macarius and his Syrian background see Stewart (1991) 9–11, 84–95; Fitschen (1998) 162–75; Plested (2004) 12–30. On the correspondences see esp. Fitschen (1998) 176–238.
17. See, e.g., Stewart (1991) 52–59; Fitschen (1998) 238; Plested (2004) 23–27.
18. Plested (2004) 40.
19. Ps.-Macarius, Collection I 52.1, 52.2.1–3 [Berthold vol. 2, 138–41].
20. Cf. Stewart (1991) 220. Ibid. 218–21 points also to Ps.-Macarius, Collection I 7.18, on the human person as temple and draws attention to important parallels between Ps.-Macarius’s conception of the structures of the Church and that of the Book of Steps, esp. Memra 12. For the same connections
