CRISIS
From around the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the relative hagiographic indifference to the eucharist and its rites begins to change. In part, this change must be considered as the product of real shifts on the ground: that is, on the one hand, the extension of the aforementioned phenomenon of monastic ordination, which blurred the lines between the monastic and clerical vocations;39 and, on the other, the increasing sacramentalization and liturgification of monastic practice itself, as that practice came to be reframed within an ever-growing set of prescribed rituals.40 In certain cases, therefore, we witness a simple continuation of the earlier inclusion within some hagiographies of casual references to monks’ attendance of the eucharistic rite; but in others, one detects a definite and deliberate emphasis upon those same rituals as a prerequisite of legitimate asceticism: that is, nothing less than an attempt to uphold a new model of monasticism itself. What we are interested in here, therefore, is not the disinterment of actual monastic practice from the scattered references contained within hagiographies so much as the delineation of the ideological model of that practice that such hagiographies seek to represent.
Post-Chalcedonian commentators offered various such models, but all shared a fundamental concern with the competing imperatives of individual and institutional ascetic endeavor. At stake was the status of the contemplative tradition represented in the corpora of Evagrius and of Pseudo-Macarius, and here we will examine two responses to it—clerical and sacramentalized on the one hand; monastic and desacramentalized on the other. The latter is contained within the collected Lives of the sixth-century Palestinian hagiographer Cyril of Scythopolis, in which we encounter an ascetic quite different from those exemplified in the texts of the pioneering generations, one in whom individual endeavor is subordinated to the demands of a wider institutional framework—monastic, ecclesial, and imperial. Where the most prominent monastic figures of the pre-Chalcedonian generation often found themselves in conflict with the secular authorities, Cyril’s conception of the ascetic’s place within the world forms a notable complement to that contained within the legislation of the emperor Justinian. Bernard Flusin has demonstrated how the stated doctrine of Cyril’s heroes retrojects and repeats verbatim the official doctrinal position of the Justinianic state;41 but these parallels in fact extend even further, to their respective political philosophies of the ascetic life.42 Justinian’s attitude to monasticism is summed up in his Novel 133 (published in 539), in which he proclaims the proper function of monasticism as the petitioning of God for the health of the state.43 It is thus of great interest to note an anecdote contained within Cyril’s Life of Sabas in which the eponymous hero encounters Justinian himself and in that encounter embodies the monastic ideal expressed within the emperor’s Novels. The narrative describes how Sabas once traveled to Constantinople on behalf of the patriarch in order to beg for a remission of taxes following a Samaritan revolt. “While our God-protected emperor was engaged in these matters with Tribonian the quaestor in the place called Magnaura,” Cyril reports, “the blessed Sabas separated himself off a little and began to recite to himself the Davidic psalms, completing the divine office of the third hour. One of his disciples—called Jeremiah, a deacon of the Great Laura—approached him and said, ‘Honorable Father, when the emperor is showing such enthusiasm in fulfilling your requests, why do you yourself stand apart?’ And the elder said to him, ‘Those men, my child, do their work; let us also do ours [ekeinoi, teknon, to idion poiousin; poiēsōmen kai hēmeis to hēmeteron].’”44
Through his various Novels Justinian provided a secular complement to the canonical legislation on monasticism at Chalcedon, insisting too on the subordination of ascetics to bishops, and on the same principles of proper ascetic practice: in particular, social withdrawal and stabilitas loci.45 Here, however, there is a new emphasis, for while Chalcedon failed to discriminate between ascetic types, in the Justinianic Novels it is the communal life that is regarded as the norm and duly legislated for.46 Cyril too repeats this emphasis on coenobial training as the sine qua non of more advanced ascetic endeavor. Indeed, as Flusin has shown, throughout his various Lives he develops an implicit but consistent cursus honorum of the ascetic life, which complements that envisioned within the Justinianic Novels: first, a prolonged period of communal discipline and submission within a coenobium, then progression to a semianchoritic laura; and then, having proved one’s ascetic credentials, progression again to the full anchoritic life.47 There is, therefore, a significant recontextualization of the process of ascetic legitimization set out, for example, in the Life of Antony: less of a progressive withdrawal from the world, and more of a progressive rise through successive monastic institutions. Miracles within the collection serve a similar, group-oriented purpose—still associated with an individual saint, but focused on the institution and sanctioned through that same saint’s progression within a hierarchical structure from which he receives sanctification, and which he in turn sanctifies.48 Flusin has thus spoken of “une sainteté institutionnelle” in Cyril’s hagiographies, a pervasive celebration of the holiness not of the ascetic as the perfect human but rather of the monastic institution as the perfect social group.49
Within this recontextualization of the monastic life—that is, in its shift from an individual to a collective emphasis—we also encounter an apparent condemnation of the traditions of monastic contemplation enshrined within the corpus of Evagrius. The conclusion to his Life of Sabas records how, after its hero’s death in 532, an Origenist faction among the monks of the Judean desert succeeded in sowing their doctrine among several of the leading monasteries, in securing significant episcopal appointments, and even in gaining the emperor’s ear at court. It then describes how the tide in Constantinople turned against that same faction, and how the emperor and patriarch then issued a condemnation of Origen’s doctrines. According to the Life, there then followed a period of resurgence before the rupturing of the movement when a doctrinal disagreement emerged between protoktists (who, we must assume, upheld the doctrine that Christ’s soul preexisted those of other beings) and isochrists (who, we must again assume, thought that the posthumous soul might become equivalent to Christ). The Life of Sabas reports that, following disturbances within the capital, Justinian once again turned against his former favorites, so that Origen—as also, with him, the teaching of Evagrius and Didymus the Blind on preexistence (prouparxis) and universal restoration (apokatastasis)—was again condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, in 553.50
We are fortunate that both sets of anathemas on Origen alleged in the Life of Sabas survive. The first set of nine, produced in 543, is drawn from Origen’s own writings and is aimed, for the most part, at classic Origenist errors—the preexistence of the soul and universal salvation, for example.51 The anathemas of 553, however, are of a different order.52 Here again standard Origenist doctrines such as preexistence and apokatastasis are condemned; but alongside these ideas we also encounter various others not included in the condemnations of the previous decade—for example, the restoration of a primitive and undifferentiated henad.53 Above all, however, there is a far more developed Christological dimension to the anathemas, including the condemnation of isochristism: the doctrine that all rational beings will become identical to Christ (attributed to the Origenists within the Life of Sabas).54 In a classic book, André Guillaumont demonstrated that the same Christological position in fact derives not from Origen but rather from the Kephalaia Gnostica of Evagrius, with which the anathemas share various doctrinal and literal correspondences.55 Within a decade of 543, therefore, the target of anti-Origenist polemic had undergone a notable transformation—from a somewhat clichéd and anachronistic condemnation of the master himself to a more pointed and nuanced condemnation of his most prominent late-antique heir and his interpreters.
In a letter of Justinian that prompted the fifteen anathemas of 553, he cited the opinions of “certain monks at Jerusalem” as inspiring his opposition.56 Were the Origenist monks of Cyril’s hagiographies, therefore, adherents of the Christological speculations of Evagrius? There can be little doubt that his cosmological and eschatological speculations were in the air in Palestine. Thus in the Justinianic correspondence of the Gazan hermits Barsanuphius and John, we find a series of letters
