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Life of Antony has been seen as the classic expression of the episcopal vision for proper ascetic practice: withdrawn from the world, self-sufficient, and obedient to episcopal power.28 But as various scholars have observed, the same Life is also notable for its hero’s total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of the sacramental life.29 There were of course practical difficulties for those who engaged in more singular or more withdrawn forms of asceticism in ensuring regular access to the eucharist, so that its absence might be explained in an actual indifference to communion.30 But one must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 OF SCYTHOPOLIS AND THE SECOND ORIGENIST 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