Introduction The Ornament and Intellect of the Desert

Transcription

1 Introduction The Ornament and Intellect of the Desert Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki In the early thirteenth century, the learned monk Kirakos of Erzinjan in Armenia completed a large commentary on the Kephalaia gnostika of the fourth-century teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Kirakos was a vardapet, or religious teacher, and he knew Evagrius s works in those Armenian translations available in his native language for nearly eight hundred years. Learned Armenian Christians, like their Syriac-speaking comrades to the south, had for all that time called Evagrius a holy man and had revered and learned from his works. Kirakos elaborately praised him as Saint Evagrius, the bodiless man-in-a-body, who is called the ornament and the intellect of the desert. Kirakos s brief encomium touches on three aspects of Evagrius s presence in that Armenian library his teaching, his intellectual accomplishments, and his Egyptian asceticism. First, Evagrius was known both in his own day and in later eras as a teacher of monks and a brilliant pedagogue of the soul. He had assembled that pedagogy from the oral traditions of his own monastic teachers and philosophical 1

2 2 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki techniques common to both pagans and Christians in late antiquity, writing a guidebook for an endeavor that Pierre Hadot has memorably called philosophy as a way of life. By Kirakos s time, Evagrius s peda - gogy had proven a reliable form of training for nearly a millennium, and had spread far beyond the Greek culture in whose language it was expressed. In this pedagogy, it was believed, the body s troubles yielded to the direction of a healthy soul. Second, Kirakos celebrates the noetic goal of that same pedagogy. Its more advanced training aimed to restore a human s natural intellectual powers to allow knowledge and contemplation to grow and, through prayer and the deep understanding of scripture, to guide the mind to union with God. Finally, Kirakos s encomium praises the Egyptian desert itself, which all medieval monks, from the Atlantic to the eastern stretches of the Silk Road, believed to be the origin of the monastic life. The desert was the source, they thought, of their ascetic traditions and the dwelling place of the fathers of monasticism Anthony, Ammon, Macarius, and other abbas from whom Evagrius himself had learned during his residence in Nitria and Kellia from 383 to 399. In the monks own historiography, the complex origins of Christian monastic life had been simplified: the angelic life of the monks had begun with one founder, Anthony; the first abbot and the first rule had come from there; and pilgrims who wanted to learn how to live that life visited first the early monastic houses of Egypt. From Kirakos s vantage point, Evagrius was an exemplary monk of the first generations of monasticism; that he was a reliable teacher went without saying. But in the west, over the border and beyond Armenia in the eastern Roman Empire of the sixth century Evagrius s work had been condemned, and his more advanced writings had been obliterated. For most Latin and Greek speakers, Evagrius was not the ornament and intellect of the desert, but a dissident who spread the heresy of Origenism; even during his lifetime, some thought him a bad influence on monks. For this reason there are two problems that continue to afflict the study of Evagrius and his legacy. The first is that he was not only a monk, even measured by the conventions of his own time; thus his

3 Introduction 3 work has been interpreted too narrowly. As a cosmopolitan intellectual and former habitué at the imperial court, his was a thorough and sophisticated education. The second problem is that after the Second Council of Constantinople (553) condemned Origen and his teachings, his supposed follower Evagrius began to be considered a heretic, too, and his works were destroyed, or no longer copied, in their original Greek or in any place where the edicts of the council had force. Only in churches beyond the borders of the empire could Evagrius s works be copied; but they were usually copied in translation, and those translations were often imperfect. Elementary works survived in Greek, and others, esoteric and advanced, that were still considered too useful to lose, survived under pseudonyms or in fragments. In the modern study of Evagrius, the first and second problems tend to overlap. Interpreting Evagrius first as a practitioner of monasticism has tended to deprive him of the rich and complex world he inhabited, and restrict his study primarily to a kind of monastic history. This often means that he and his work are compared to an author and monastic founder like Pachomius or to the complex collections called Sayings of the Desert Fathers. But the second, interpreting Evagrius as a heretic or trying to rebut that charge both reinforces his apparent status as a monastic teacher (misguided or not) and diverts attention from the intention and scope of his entire work. Of course, both concerns reflect the customarily ecclesiastical orientation of Evagrian scholars but just because they predominate in the scholarly literature, categories like monk and heresy have been just as frequent among those students of Evagrius who have little interest in justifying and preserving church tradition or condemnations. The present volume cannot avoid having to deal with these two aspects of Evagrius s legacy both because they have formed the body of works that survives to the present and because they have dominated prior scholarly discussion. But the editors and authors hope to contribute to shifting the focus away from the conventional lines of discussion, and toward a richer appreciation of the influence, despite his condemnation and misinterpretation, of Evagrius the Christian thinker. To introduce these essays, then, it is useful to understand more deeply the two problems mentioned above. Was Evagrius a monastic

4 4 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki founder? Was he a heretic? In both these areas, it is essential to try to investigate how Evagrius s work looked in its contemporary setting, without the benefit, or the drawback, of historiographical retrojection. The Problem of Retrojection Because Evagrius used the term monachos, or solitary, to describe himself and others for whom he wrote, it is natural enough to depict him as the member of a community of single men like the monasteries of Pachomius to the south, where monks lived in a large community with an abbot and a rule. But in his own day, Evagrius was not what we have come to think of as a monk of the fourth century. He was unlike those of his contemporaries who were shaping and occupying models of monasticism familiar through their survival in the various cultures of the Christian world. Compared to such communities, the settlements of Kellia and Nitria, where Evagrius lived after donning the monastic schema, allowed for relative autonomy within a weekly cycle. During weekdays, monks lived in freestanding dwellings with one or two companions; they joined other residents on Sundays for the Eucharistic synaxis and for study and discussion. Evagrius composed instructions for both experienced and inexperienced monks but no rule has survived and he did not mention one. No doubt the literary elegance of Evagrius s writings, and their usefulness for building a foundation for later forms of the ascetic life, guaranteed their wide reproduction and diffusion in later settings, in the languages of the ancient and medieval Christian monastic world. Presumably at the direction of monastic leaders and teachers, various works were copied and remained available in Latin, Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and even Soghdian translations. Monks from all these cultures evidently considered Evagrius s works important aids in monastic training and therefore ensured they remained in monastic libraries. Among some monks, portions of Evag - rius s writings are used to the present day, and since the appearance of modern translations, even nonmonastic readers have both studied and found guidance in them. Just as later readers could, and do, read the

5 Introduction 5 Bible for instruction and inspiration, they may do so without being limited by the context of those ancient works or the forms of life that inspired and shaped them. Evagrius s own style has contributed to the situation, too. For the most part, he composed collections of short statements that either gave moral instruction to readers presumably duplicating oral instruction that he gave to his own students or provoked contemplative meditation upon scriptural verses or images. His statements technically, kephalaia, or sentences imitate biblical proverbs, and they are meant to linger in the memory as a guide to conduct and thought. Evagrius combined philosophical terminology and biblical language in his kephalaia, as he did in his similarly lapidary glosses on scriptural books Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Psalms. Evagrius also wrote more discursive works, and his letters are elaborate depictions of mutual spiri - tual guidance among friends. But in all this work, Evagrius reflects not a later monastic setting but the setting of an ascetic Christian philosophical circle attached to prayer, liturgy, and the spiritual interpretation of scripture, of course but not enclosed in a monastic setting. He could not have been so enclosed, for Evagrius lived in a busy exurb of Alexandria. In a period when there were many experiments with the single, ascetic life, the settlements in which he lived were in some ways like the cities whence their inhabitants had largely come and from which their numerous visitors traveled to see the monks. Nitria, his first stop after concluding his visit to the ascetic couple Rufinus and Melania in Jerusalem, had been a tourist or pilgrim site for decades. Its inhabitants lived in pairs or threesomes, in single houses, supporting themselves as tradesmen or merchants. Even the archaeological remains of both Nitria and Kellia, explored in the second half of the twentieth century, are sufficient to indicate that there was no uniform, self-sufficient, and abbatially ruled community in those locations. In the slightly more remote Kellia, to which Evagrius moved shortly thereafter, there were only hundreds of monks living in this style, instead of the thousands living in Nitria. Here too, it was necessary to work, earn money, and buy the necessities for a life disconnected from that of the nearby agricultural villages. Doubtless, though, pilgrims and would-be students brought contributions, both in money and in kind,

6 6 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki and Evagrius s frequent worry about the monks easy travel and intercourse with wealthy families testifies to Kellia s lack of enclosure. When Athanasius wrote earlier in the century that the monks had made the desert a city, he may have expressed a lifestyle in addition to an estimated population. If Evagrius was not a monk in the conventional sense, what was he? Most probably, a Christian philosopher of a more ancient type a man who aspired to live as a Christian intellectual in a society meant to compete with, and imitate, pagan societies, real and ideal, of the third century. As a student of Gregory of Nazianzus and, before him, of Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius may have heard first about this kind of society from those very men who had, in their youth, tried to live that way. Basil famously appealed to Gregory to live in such a style at their retreat in Pontus. Short-lived as it was, that attempt to live as an ascetic couple devoted to prayer and study is just one example of an experiment in the philosophical life that flourished in the fourth century, and that sometimes survived into the sixth century for example, in the lifestyle of the monks Barsanuphius and John of Gaza. But in the fourth century, Evagrius aspired to live as a Christian intellectual in a small society of philosophers, not unlike those of Plotinus in Rome, Iamblichus in Syria, Augustine s group of philosophical friends in Cassiciacum, or Hypatia and her circle (including Christian students) in Alexandria. Even his own guides, Rufinus and Melania in Jerusalem, lived more like members of a devout study-circle than as the leaders of a double monastery, as they are often described; and the same might be said of Jerome and his associates in Bethlehem. Evagrius was unlike all of them except Basil, though, in his decision following Melania s advice to live away from the city. The city had been the customary setting of late ancient philosophers, but Evagrius moved to an exurban retreat, and there he provided the services of an authoritative teacher, a kind of philosophical catechist like his Christian predecessors Clement and Origen, or his pagan analogues Porphyry and Iamblichus or, later, Proclus. He was at once ascetic, didaskalos, and gnostikos a sage in the mold of numerous third- and fourth-century writers. Even though he lived as a monachos, he understood that title in the light of contemplation of the metaphysi-

7 Introduction 7 cal One (monas) and guided like-minded monks who were building a new form of Christian institution. But when, in the fifth century, those monastic institutions settled into now-familiar forms, he began to look out of place because he was. Less than a year after he died, Evagrius s community suffered destruction visited upon it by a leader whose intentions remain puzzling. Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, marked the beginning of the late-fourth-century Origenist controversy by arranging for the expulsion of those monks who allegedly followed the teaching of Origen. The so-called Anthropomorphite monks of Egypt had vociferously objected, in an audience with Theophilus, to the study of Origen, and the bishop temporarily obliged them. Thereafter, Jerome who had already rejected Origen as an ecclesiastical authority also named Evagrius and his friends Melania and Rufinus as dissidents. The details of this controversy have been explored thoroughly elsewhere; for the legacy of Evagrius and his teaching, it is important only to note that this episode was the beginning of the end, both of his style of life and of the development of Origenian theology. It is also important to note that this theology found its opponent in the rise of the great urban bishop in the late fourth century a development made possible with the decisions of the emperor Theodosius. Bishops often came to regard ascetics as both rivals and resources, and they acted to control them. In the course of this development, the more independent style of teacher that had begun with Clement and Origen came to an end, replaced by episcopal teachers and more isolated monastic schools. Thus, even though Evagrius was by no means merely a duplicate of Origen, the latter s freer style of thinking and teaching in the church was transmitted among Evagrius and his friends. Origen and his Alexandrian predecessor Clement had crafted, in their own pre-constantinian era, similar approaches to the Christian life that drew from the training of philosophers developed among Stoics and Platonists in order to foster a deep appropriation of the Bible as interpreted through grammar and metaphor. Philosophy had been adapted to the Christian life but without any contemporary provision for monasticism. Perhaps more fatefully, the lifestyle of Clement and Origen made no provision for episcopal supervision, and because

8 8 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki its setting was the small group of Christian philosophers-in-training, it was prized among later solitaries and ascetics, but not prized among bishops, who needed different tools for the establishment of Christianity in their sees. Certainly Evagrius s appreciation of Origen and Clement, and his adaptation of their ideas to his new setting, did not win him friends among their latter-day opponents. But it was not primarily his style of life that made Evagrius problematic, either in his own day or in later centuries. Rather, it was the similarity of some of his teachings to those of Origen that guaranteed his later reputation as a heretic. The Making of a Heretical Monk Initially, Evagrius s literary works were not the target of the aggressors in the Origenist controversy of the late fourth century, in which Epi - phanius of Salamis and Jerome began to turn against the theology and biblical interpretation of Origen and of those alleged followers Epi - phanius had labeled Origenists in his compendious heresiological work, the Panarion. Their writings led to no official ecclesiastical condemnation. Yet their written attacks found contemporary targets John, bishop of Jerusalem, Rufinus and Melania, and Evagrius were all known to have studied Origen. Rufinus and Melania continued to read Origen after Jerome rejected him Rufinus, in particular, to translate and introduce his work for the West. Ironically, Evagrius was not, primarily, an Origenist either in the sense that Jerome or Epiphanius meant or in the later sense associated with the sixth-century monks of Palestine. He was an eclectic thinker, like many Christian intellectuals of the fourth century like Gregory of Nyssa, his contemporary and countryman, for example. He thought in the terms of contemporary philosophy, pagan and Christian, like his countrymen the Cappadocians and if he is represented accurately in The Disciples of Evagrius, purportedly a kind of table-talk assembled posthumously by his students, he knew that pagans drew from his work, too:

9 Introduction 9 If one of the outsiders speaks a true word, do not be astounded because this is the result of natural seeds [of wisdom], or from hearing [something said by] one of the saints, or he has heard it from a demon, because often they overhear [the saints] when they teach meditations about practice to their students. (Disciples of Evagrius 5 [Géhin, 106 7]) Here Evagrius s approach to pagan philosophy resembles Clem - ent of Alexandria s, and indeed he absorbed Clement s thought and terminology, liberally borrowing Clement s esoteric approach to Christian teaching. Like Clement, he taught that the attainment of gno sis, knowledge, came through diligent study and self-reform; he imitated Clement s use of an eclectic, pagan, and Christian moral and metaphysical philosophy interwoven with barbarian wisdom as Clement called it, in other words, the scriptures. Ironically, in the late fourth century, Clement s influence was uncontroversial; his work, eclipsed by the more prominent work of Origen, reflected an esotericism so profound and statements so ambiguous that it avoided the kind of doctrinal daring that would trouble later church authorities. It was Origen who tried to clarify Christian teaching, beginning with his On First Principles; and though he, too, presented a simplified form of his views in sermons to larger audiences, Origen was less interested in pagan philosophy, and also less interested in preserving eso - teric meaning. Evagrius s debt to Origen is nonetheless clear, and certain views of Evagrius were increasingly unusual in his own day, if not unorthodox. Most well-known among these is apokatastasis, the teaching that all rational beings could be saved eventually, even demons a teaching that made the increasingly popular teaching of a literal and permanent Hell temporary or less important, at least by implication. Jerome objects to the teaching of apatheia (calm, literally passionlessness) as shared by Evagrius with others he came to identify it with Pelagius s views. Yet Evagrius s teachings were not problematic generally until they became associated with a monastic dispute in sixth-century Palestine that led to the condemnation of Origen in the same century.

10 10 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki Evagrius s opponents took aim less at his program of training in the ascetic life and more frequently and intensely at his ideas about the meaning of certain teachings and scriptural interpretations increasingly elaborated at the end of the fourth century. In particular, these were his conception of Christ and the Christian s relation to him, the nature of providence and judgment, and the relationship of the contemplative s mind to God in the final stages of approach to the divine. But the most damaging criticisms of Evagrius came in the sixth century from the Great Lavra in Palestine, under the leadership of St. Saba. The monastic biographer Cyril of Scythopolis gave a detailed account of Origenist monks in the New Lavra, called isochrists by their enemies for their aspirations to be Christ s equals in the resurrection. A decades-long struggle between the Origenists and their opponents culminated in a decision requested from, and granted by, the emperor Justinian. His letter to Menas, patriarch of Constantinople, counts Origen as one of the worst of the heretics; a subsequent council in 543, in Constantinople, condemned Origen and received the agreement of the bishop of Rome. But it was in the wake of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, in 553, that Evagrius became linked to Origen on the list of the condemned. Yet among the monks who lived outside the Roman Empire, particularly in the churches of Syria and Armenia, Evagrius was for the most part not controversial. Numerous Syriac and Armenian manuscripts contain his writings and were, or still are, housed in monastic libraries in the Near East and the Caucasus, and they are the only surviving witnesses to some of his works those that were destroyed and lost to the Greek tradition. This situation means two things: first, it requires scholars interested in studying Evagrius either in context or in his reception-history to master the languages in which much of his most complicated and controversial work survives. Second, it requires exploration and explanation for its own sake. Both of these tasks are daunting, and in different ways. Mastering the languages in which Evagrian texts are extant requires a knowledge not only of the language itself, but of the differing cultural and religious contexts in which each developed, and into which Evagrius s works were received and absorbed.

11 Introduction 11 Such a limitation, imposed by circumstance, has also kept Evagrius s work somewhat isolated from the wider discussion of early Christian thought and made it the province of specialists. A wider question is why these two cultures, very similar in their theological beliefs to their Greek neighbors, preserved and used the texts of Evagrius with little concern for their alleged heresy. The two branches of Syriac Christianity differed primarily in their description of the union of the divine and human natures in Christ; one of them, the West Syrian, held virtually the same views on the matter as the Armenian. And all three of them were, in the fifth century, adherents of virtually the same traditions as the Greeks apart from their description of Christ. In fact, there were more differences of custom and expression between Greeks and their Latin-speaking Christian brothers to the west than between Greeks and the easterners. Understanding how Evagrius became a heretic on one side of Asia Minor and a saint on the other requires knowing a considerable amount about the fracturing Eastern Roman Empire of the sixth and later centuries. This, too, acts as a limit on the degree to which Evagrius has been discussed among scholars of late antiquity or of early Christian theology. Finally, apart from the question of divided judgments about Evagrius s work in the various Christian churches, there is the far larger matter of the unacknowledged reception of those works as the foundational and shaping influence on the very traditions that rejected him overtly the Latin and Greek (and, by extension, Slavic) monastic thought of late antiquity and the medieval and Byzantine periods. Even after imperial or ecclesiastical authorities condemned Evagrius or proscribed the copying (and therefore the reading) of his works, the main lines of his thought were replicated in other authors. Among Greek speakers, in particular, Evagrius s patterns of thought echo through Diadochos of Photikē, Maximus the Confessor, John Climacus (who simultaneously condemns Evagrius), and other, later authors like Gregory Palamas. It still remains to be explored how this obvious replication of ideas took place, even when it did not necessarily depend upon the copying of manuscripts.

12 12 Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki The Present Volume Thus scholars are left with the question of how and by what means did Byzantine, Near Eastern, and medieval Christian societies receive the complex and challenging work of Evagrius of Pontus even when he was considered dangerous? Evagrius wrote exclusively for male and female solitaries advancing in their life of reading and contemplation, and parts of his work have remained in the monastic curriculum to the present day. What did those later monastics accept of Evagrius s, and how did they use it? That question is among those addressed by David Michelson, who tantalizingly suggests that in the sixth century Evagrius was used to combat Origenism in the Syriac world. This, of course, is the inverse of the Latin world, where Origen s writings survive in translation and Evagrius s do not. The explanations for such divergence are explored by Columba Stewart, who charts the fate of Evagrius s corpus in Latin and Syriac through the medieval period. That later period, marked by Crusades and conflict, would seem to herald cultures equally divergent. But there was interchange, as noted by Anthony Watson, who explores the role of Evagrius s eight temptations in thirteenthcentury Syriac writers who traveled extensively in the West. Between Latin West and Syriac East lies Byzantium, which cannot be dismissed, even after the Fifth Ecumenical Council, for disregarding Evagrius s legacy. Dirk Krausmüller and Julia Konstantinovsky both argue that the circles of Evagrius s thought were alive and well in the sixth and seventh centuries, either in the enactment of praxis plus contemplation or in the theories about the fate of the soul after death. The notion of Evagrius s troubled Byzantine reception is further developed by Gregory Collins and Joel Kalvesmaki, both of whom focus on the middle through late Byzantine reception, either through explicit theological appeals or implicit adoption of literary modes. Although later associated with solitaries or monks in monasteries, the greater part of Evagrius s life was spent in the company of scholars, theologians, and urbanites, and so his work can be seen as part of a web of conversations among contemporaries in the regions of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, and likewise part of a chain of philosophical commentary from ancient Athens and Alexandria to the fourth century.

13 Introduction 13 The essays that consider Evagrius in his own day bring his thought together with contemporary theologians, as does Brian Daley s essay on the continuities and discontinuities between Evagrius and his Cappa - docian teachers. Kevin Corrigan shows how Evagrius uses the concept of cutting in his consideration of moral agency, extending a philosophical discussion rooted in the Phaedo and the Posterior Analytics, with reference to Stoic ideas showing how deeply Evagrius s thought is rooted in the philosophical tradition he loved, while at the same time is mingled with biblical expressions. Luke Dysinger, writing of Evagrius as a spiritual guide, shows how he understands biblical exegesis as an aid in reading the heart and rendering guidance in the drama of each soul s struggle. In a similar vein, Robin Darling Young discusses the aims of Evagrius s letters, now extant only in Syriac. Guillaumont called them the workshop of his thought ; possibly meant for wide circulation, they convey his friendship, his guidance (sometimes stern), and his own struggles. And Blossom Stefaniw urges that considerations of Evagrius s condemnation move beyond the discussion of Origenism to consider his own high sense of his authority, a sense that made conflict with developing conciliar authority particularly by the time of Justinian virtually inevitable. The essays in this volume can only begin to address the question of how later authors received Evagrius s work. After the sixth century, the church of the later Roman Empire reorganized itself, dividing into smaller groups with differing languages and theological traditions. In some, Evagrius was received as a saintly teacher; in others, he was rejected outright or preserved in truncated or concealed forms. We offer these studies as initial explorations into their reception of Evagrius s works, and his thought.