Pseudo-Macarius presents the Church’s services as an illustration of the workings of the Spirit within the heart of the ascetic,20 and emphasizes in no uncertain terms the presence of the Spirit within the sacraments, perhaps as a direct defense against accusations of an antiecclesial Messalianism.21 Nevertheless, even in that defense, it is clear that his focus remains on the cultivation of the spiritual life and that, for the advanced ascetic, the outward structures of the Church are subordinated to the development of the inner man—in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar, “at once something indispensable and something that must be outgrown.”22
It is therefore incorrect to regard Pseudo-Macarius as antisacramental; but at the same time, he conforms to a pattern in which the earliest ascetic theorists marginalized a developed sacramental, and in particular eucharistic, discourse in favor of a focus upon personal, ascetic transformation. Indeed, if the Pseudo-Macarian corpus constituted one prevailing strand of late-antique ascetic thought, the other was formed through the Egyptian monk and Origenist Evagrius Ponticus. Within the Evagrian corpus, spiritual progression is on occasion conceived in sacramental terms, with practical virtues corresponding to Christ’s flesh, and contemplation corresponding to his blood. Thus the famous tract To Monks:23
Flesh of Christ is practical virtues [Sarkes Christou praktikai aretai]; he who eats it shall become passionless [ho de esthiōn autas genēsetai apathēs].
Blood of Christ is contemplation of creation [haima Christou theōria tōn gegonotōn], and he who drinks it will thereby become wise [kai ho pinōn auto sophisthēsetai hup’ autou].
Although in passages such as these Evagrius appears to point to the spiritual benefits conferred through communion,24 we should be cautious not to overstate the extent of Evagrius’s eucharistic orientation.25 Contained within his quite vast corpus, there are but few comments on the eucharist; and even then, those comments are quite ambiguous as to the need for continuous submission to the rites of the Church.26 Evagrius’s approach, like that of Pseudo-Macarius, is perhaps best appreciated as a eucharistic minimalism.
It should be noted that this minimalism does not reflect a more general ambivalence toward the eucharist within Christian thought of the period, for contemporaneous with the ascetical speculations of Pseudo-Macarius and Evagrius there were various Christian intellectuals who devoted far greater attention to the eucharist and to the interpretation of its rites—Ambrose of Milan, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Cyril of Jerusalem, to name but three. In the precise same period that the great ascetic pioneers developed their complex, introspective anthropologies, so too, therefore, was there a veritable explosion of contemplation on the nature of the eucharist, the significance of its rite, and its spiritual effect on the communicant.27 Within that tradition—which admits a remarkable degree of variation in terms of emphasis—one sometimes encounters a concern to elevate the need for moral pureness when receiving the sacrament (in particular in the homilies of John Chrysostom); but there was nevertheless little interest in accommodating the complex spiritual anthropologies developed in monastic circles. In turn, developed contemplation on the eucharistic rite remained the preserve of the episcopate.
Throughout the period before Chalcedon, therefore—and thus coterminous with the continued separation of ecclesial and monastic institutions—these two great Christian discourses remained quite distinct. The effects of that continued intellectual separation can indeed be measured further, for in the hagiographies of the same period that describe anchorites or semianchorites, the ritual structures of the Church, and in particular the eucharist, are to a large extent absent. As noted above, Athanasius’s Life of Antony has been seen as the classic expression of the episcopal vision for proper ascetic practice: withdrawn from the world, self-sufficient, and obedient to episcopal power.28 But as various scholars have observed, the same Life is also notable for its hero’s total absence from the demands of the sacramental life.29 There were of course practical difficulties for those who engaged in more singular or more withdrawn forms of asceticism in ensuring regular access to the eucharist, so that its absence might be explained in an actual indifference to communion.30 But one must also nevertheless wonder if the emphasis upon monastic extrication from urban contexts within clerical hagiographies such as the Life had not also encouraged a relative ideological indifference to the regular submission of ascetics to the eucharist, which may also have demanded a regular infringement of those ascetics within the episcopal sphere.31
As we might expect, then, those monastic hagiographies that describe more settled or more concentrated communities are in general full of casual references to their ascetics’ attendance of the regular service.32 But here again we encounter a striking indifference to the spiritual effects of both the eucharist and its rites, so that in comparison to the vast amount of intellectual effort expended on material concerning the cultivation of the virtues and of mystical contemplation, speculation on the power of the eucharist is, in these texts, a marginal concern. Thus, for example, in Palladius’s Lausiac History—a work that derives from the circle of Evagrius—we discover a specific condemnation of antisacramental attitudes in two consecutive tales in which the protagonists’ descent into arrogance reaches its apogee with their refusal to attend communion and their dismissal of the eucharist as nothing.33 But the point of these stories seems not to be an emphasis upon the spiritual benefits to be conferred through the eucharist but rather a warning against spiritual arrogance, of which absence from the communal celebration is a classic manifestation.34 Here, then, we cannot explain indifference to the eucharist as a simple reflection of its actual absence from the ascetic life in practice (as we might for anchorites). Rather, it must reflect the same intellectual stance that we have witnessed within the earliest and most prominent ascetic theoreticians: an acknowledgment that the eucharist exists and cannot be dispensed with, but a simultaneous failure, nevertheless, to integrate regular communion within the spiritual vision.
From a later perspective, when the eucharist begins to infringe upon hagiographic narratives more and more, one text nevertheless stands out: the late fourth-century History of the Monks in Egypt. Once again we discover a sanction to regular eucharistic participation,35 but here that same insistence is more balanced: on one side, with an emphasis on the spiritual benefits accrued through the host itself; and on the other, with an emphasis on the need for moral virtue on the part of the participant. Thus one tale, for example, refers to “a custom among the great [ascetics] not to provide food to the flesh before giving spiritual food [hē pneumatikē trophē] to the soul: that is, the communion of Christ [hē tou Christou koinōnia]”;36 while in another an eminent ascetic avers that “Monks, if possible, must each day partake of the mysteries of Christ [tōn mustēriōn tou Christou koinōnein]. For he who removes himself from the mysteries removes himself from God. But he who does this frequently receives the Savior frequently. For the voice of the Savior proclaims, ‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him’ [Joh. 6:56]. It is therefore profitable for monks constantly to remember the Savior’s passion and always to be worthy to receive the heavenly mysteries [pros tēn tōn ouraniōn mustēriōn hupodochēn], since thus we also receive forgiveness from sin.”37
Here, therefore, not only is the eucharist emphatically present, and its spiritual efficacy emphatically acknowledged, but its spiritual effect is also made dependent upon the moral attainment of the participant. Rather than a prevailing indifference to eucharistic communion, therefore, the History of the Monks in Egypt—as well as the associated vignettes within the Lausiac History—suggests a not insignificant debate on the spiritual status of eucharistic communion amid monastic communities, mirroring the theoreticians’ attempts to counter the more extreme antisacramentalist tendencies of (at least some of) their contemporaries.38 Although there is no developed attempt, in this earlier period, to integrate the dominant focus upon ascetic virtue and contemplation within a wider ecclesial framework, the same texts nevertheless manifest evident anxieties over ascetics’ relation to the eucharist, anxieties that subsequent generations were to explore in far greater depth.
CYRIL
