and in particular the Kephalaia Gnostica of Evagrius. A monk asks the pair about the Origenist doctrines of preexistence and universal salvation—making specific reference to the Kephalaia of Evagrius—and when both elders condemn those doctrines, he asks whether it is therefore harmful to read Evagrius’s works. In his response John draws a distinction between the more speculative and more useful aspects of the Evagrian corpus: “Do not receive such doctrines. But nevertheless, if you wish, read in him what is beneficial to the soul.”57 The same monk then asks, “So how is it that some of the present fathers accept these [doctrines], and we hold them to be good monks and give them our attention?” and John responds again with specific reference to the Kephalaia, confessing that “certain brothers accept these things as gnostics [hōs gnōsitkoi]” but warning his interlocutor to avoid them.58
Were the Origenists of Cyril’s hagiographies also adherents of Evagrius’s Kephalaia? He does not mention Evagrius himself, and his exposition on the beliefs of the Origenists is a simple recapitulation of the anathemas of 553 (or their source). But an alternative route into the question is provided through his description of one Leontius of Byzantium as a leader of the Origenist faction within Palestine.59 This same person has been identified with another contemporaneous Leontius, the author of at least three extant tracts: Against the Nestorians and Eutychians, Thirty Chapters against Severus, and Solution to the Arguments of the Severans.60 Critics remain divided as to the potential Origenist content of those same treatises: some (in particular David Evans) have suggested that Leontius’s Christological pronouncements in effect recapitulate but disguise those of Evagrius;61 whereas others (in particular Brian Daley) have defended Leontius as nothing more than a staunch proponent of the neo-Chalcedonian position, suggesting that the Origenist label applied to Leontius and his allies within Cyril’s hagiographies should be appreciated not as an accurate description of the group’s theological inclinations but rather as indicative of its adherence to the spirit of intellectual freedom enshrined within the Origenist tradition.62
In a more recent contribution, however, Daniel Hombergen has opened up a new perspective on the crisis, one less dogmatic than spiritual. Eschewing (with others) the attempt to locate the Christological or cosmological fingerprints of Origen within Leontius’s thought, Hombergen points to a passage in Against the Nestorians and Eutychians in which Leontius cites a spiritual axiom taken from none other than Evagrius in the Kephalaia Gnostica and shows that the citation is embedded in a section of text that recapitulates the vision of the spiritual life as contained within the Evagrian corpus.63 For Hombergen, therefore, Leontius’s Origenism should be considered an adherence not to the more controversial and speculative Evagrian doctrines concerning Christ but rather to the contemplative tradition represented, above all, in Evagrius’s writings.
In support of his spiritual reading of the crisis, Hombergen indeed demonstrates that Cyril effects a subtle damnatio memoriae both of Evagrius and of the contemplative ideas of which he was the champion. On the one hand, for example, he puts into the mouths of his heroes pronouncements against Origen that in fact derive from or recapitulate the later anti-Origenist anathemas of 553,64 and he claims that Origen’s and Evagrius’s teachings were the main issue at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, which was in fact devoted to the Three Chapters.65 But on the other hand, he also eschews an Evagrian influence within his hagiographies despite, as Flusin has demonstrated, the pervasive influence of previous monastic literature.66 Hombergen, therefore, reinterprets the Origenist crisis as one between a more intellectualizing group—that is, those who were accepting of, selective within, or indifferent to, the spiritual doctrines of Evagrius—and a more fundamentalist group, those who repudiated the same doctrines and with them the tradition of individualistic monastic contemplation. Within that latter group is of course the hagiographer Cyril, whose Lives set out a radical new vision of the ascetic life, for the most part indifferent to the interior life and focused instead upon the institution. Hombergen thus places at the root of the Origenist crisis “a clash of two competitive ideals of the spiritual life: a somewhat collectivist current, focusing particularly on external aspects, and a more individualist current, concentrating primarily on the development of the interior life.”67
This of course assumes that the Origenist label used in a range of texts was in essence a phantom, devoid of doctrinal meaning and disingenuous in intent. But as István Perczel has insisted in a string of recent publications, it is difficult to suppose that the widespread anxieties and anathemas expressed toward Evagrian (or post-Evagrian) dogma did not have some basis in an actual Evagrian circle.68 At the same time, however, we need not assume that different observers applied the same criteria as to what constituted Origenism or that those whom contemporaries identified as Origenists did not themselves admit a vast degree of variation in their reception, reappropriation, or refusal of various Evagrian doctrines. However we wish to regard the real inspiration behind Leontius’s doctrine, therefore, it is perhaps best to assume that the label “Origenist” might be applied to a wide of range of individuals who might or might not recognize that same label: from Evagrianists proper—that is, those who championed the same protological, Christological, and eschatological positions alleged and evidenced within a range of contemporaneous literature—to intellectual liberals with an interest in, or indifference to, the same theologian’s dogmatic vision.
Hombergen’s fundamental insight on the spiritual dimension to the crisis must nevertheless be allowed to stand. That such tensions informed (though they did not determine) the crisis is indeed borne out in various texts associated with it. As we shall see, however, those tensions were more complex than a simple dichotomization of individualizing or Origenist versus institutionalizing or anti-Origenist can capture. For we shall discover that fundamental differences concerning conceptions of the spiritual life and its relation to wider institutional structures operated also within those groups that sought to suppress Evagrian doctrine and its spiritual inheritance. The hagiographer Cyril’s response to such differences, therefore, was but one institutional response to the problem of monastic individualism. It competed, however, alongside others that shared the desire to subordinate ascetics but that nevertheless adopted a quite different approach, based less upon the integration of ascetic endeavor within the monastic institution and more upon its orientation around and subordination to the sacraments of the Church.
MYSTICS AND LITURGISTS
As we have seen, a notable feature of Evagrius’s thought is his minimal interest in ecclesial life, and in particular in the eucharist. Were differing approaches to the eucharist also a feature of the Palestinian Origenist crisis? Cyril’s hagiographies do not suggest so, although it is nevertheless notable that all his subjects, at the pinnacle of their coenobitic careers, are ordained as priests, emphasizing their integration within a wider ecclesial context outside the hagiographic desert.69 In certain cases, this leads to some anecdote concerning the eucharist: the Life of the Palestinian ascetic pioneer Euthymius, for example, contains two consecutive anecdotes in which he is, as celebrating priest, said to inspire or experience miraculous visions, and the latter of the two develops into a sermonette on the need for a pure heart while approaching the eucharist.70 In terms of a developed sacramental (though not institutional) emphasis, however, we have progressed little from the comparable emphases contained within the History of the Monks in Egypt.
It is nevertheless possible that there was indeed a eucharistic dimension to the intellectual tensions that informed the Origenist crisis. In that aforementioned series of letters on Origenism contained with the Questions and Answers of Barsanuphius and John, the elders’ interlocutor makes a striking statement:71
For indeed, we find even in the books of the elders that there was a certain great elder, and he said out of simplicity [idiōteia] that the bread of which we partake is by nature not the body of Christ but its antitype [antitupon]. And if he had not prayed to God on this matter, he would not have known the truth.
The statement might reference
