The Origins of Monastic Thought: Evagrius and Macarius.

The role of Evagrius Ponticus († 399) in the shaping of early monastic spirituality was recognized by historians early in this century. The authentic text of his Gnostic Centuries with their quite heretical Christology explains his condemnation by the Council of 553. Seen as an expression of his metaphysical system — a developed Origenism, Evagrius’ spiritual doctrine itself becomes somehow suspect. But in the Byzantine tradition taken as a whole, it will be used for centuries out of its original and heretical context; and its extraordinary psychological relevance will be exploited fully. We will mention here two major aspects of Evagrian thought because of their permanence in later tradition: the doctrine of the passions and the doctrine of prayer.

According to Evagrius, the true nature of the “mind” is to be fixed in God, and anything, which detaches it from God, is evil. Thus since the Fall, the human mind is captured with self-love, which generates “thoughts;” “thoughts,” a definitely pejorative term in Evagrius, imply interest in sensible things and distraction from God. Acting upon the passible part of the soul, they can lead it to passions. These passions form a very definite hierarchy beginning with the casual attachment to the most inevitable of all human sensible needs, such as food, and ending with demonic possession, with love for oneself. The eight steps, which constitute this hierarchy are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, grief, wrath, weariness, vainglory, and pride.¹ With very slight variations, this classification of the passions and the psychological structure of the human mind, which it presupposes, are retained by John Cassian, John Climacus, Maximus the Confessor, and almost all the Eastern ascetical writers. The first goal of monastic “practice” is to subdue the passions and reach a state of “passionlessness” — a detachment from senses and “thoughts,” which makes a restoration of the true original relationship between the mind and God possible. Beginning with the elementary monastic virtues, fasting and celibacy, the life of the monk can gradually subdue the other passions and reach true detachment.

Union then becomes possible through prayer. It was Evagrius who first coined the term “prayer of the mind,” which became standard in Byzantine hesychasm. Prayer is “the proper activity of the mind,”² “an impassible state,”³ the “highest possible intellection.”⁴ In this “state” of prayer, the mind is totally liberated from every “multiplicity;” it is “deaf and dumb” to every perception of the senses.⁵ According to Evagrius, as we know now, prayer also means that the mind is in an “essential union” with the deity; thus, Evagrian monks of the sixth century could boast that they were “equal to Christ.” But Evagrius’ teaching on prayer will be understood in a much more orthodox way by generations of Byzantine monks, and the credit for this reinterpretation of Evagrian spirituality belongs in a large degree to the writings attributed to Macarius of Egypt.

Macarius of Egypt was a contemporary and teacher of Evagrius’ in the desert of Scete. Fifty Homilies and several other writings of an unknown author of the early-fifth century had been attributed to Macarius, who, it is now certain, was never a writer. The influence of this anonymous writer, conventionally called “Macarius,” was enormous.

While Evagrius identifies man with the “intellect” and conceives Christian spirituality as a dematerialization, Macarius understands man as a psychosomatic in whole, destined to “deification.” To the Origenistic and Platonic anthropology of Evagrius, he opposes a Biblical idea of man, which makes it inconceivable for the “mind” or the “soul” to have its final destiny in separation from the body. From this, anthropology follows a spirituality based upon the reality of Baptism and the Eucharist as ways of union with Christ and of “deification” of the entire human existence in all its aspects including the corporeal. “The fire, which lives inside, in the heart, appears then [on the last day] openly and realizes the resurrection of the bodies.”⁶

In Macarius, the Evagrian “prayer of the mind” thus becomes the “prayer of the heart;” the centre of man’s psychosomatic life, the heart, is the “table where the grace of God engraves the laws of the Spirit;”⁷ but it also can be a “sepulchre” where “the prince of evil and his angels find refuge.”⁸ The human heart is thus the battlefield between God and Satan, life and death. And the monk devoting his entire existence to prayer chooses, in fact, to be at the forefront of this battle in a direct and conscious way, for the presence of God is a real fact, which the “inner man” perceives “as an experience and with assurance.”⁹ In Macarius, just as in some books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, the role played by the heart is undeniably connected with a physiology, which sees in this particular organ the centre of the psychosomatic life of man. This means in practice that whenever the “heart” is mentioned the author simply means man’s inner personality, the “I” at its very depth. In any case, the “heart” never designates the emotional side of man alone as it sometimes is in the West.

The notion of the coexistence of God and Satan in the heart of man and the call for a conscious experience of grace have led some modern historians to identify the Homilies of Macarius with the writings of a Messalian leader. If this accusation is true, it would involve Macarius as well as much of the later monastic spirituality of Byzantium where Macarius enjoyed unquestionable authority and where his ideas, especially the notion of the conscious experience of God, remained dominant. But the exact definition of what Messalianism really means and the absence in Macarius of some basic Messalian positions — such as anti-sacramentalism — make the hypothesis highly improbable. Even if the unknown author of the Macarian Homilies belonged to a tradition, which eventually bifurcated between sectarian and orthodox spirituality, his anthropology and his concept of human destiny were certainly closer to the New Testament than was that of the Evagrian Origenists; and his influence acting as a Biblical counterpart contributed indirectly to salvaging for posterity the tradition of pure prayer, which, in Evagrius, had a rather dubious context.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 447