The Great Spiritual Fathers.

An Origenistic spiritualism and Messalian pseudo-prophetism — in which prayer and visions are supposed to replace the sacraments — were the two main temptations of Eastern Christian monasticism. The examples of Evagrius and Macarius showed that in the fourth and fifth centuries it may not have been easy to draw a line in the monastic milieu between the orthodox and the sectarians. After several conciliar decrees against Messalianism (at Side in 390, at Constantinople in 426, and at Ephesus in 431) and the condemnation of Evagrius in 553, confusion became impossible; but clarification had begun to emerge in the monastic milieu itself at the very time when the councils were legislating on the issue. We will mention here briefly three authors of major importance who after assimilating the major contributions of both the Evagrian and the Macarian traditions gave to Eastern Christian spirituality its classical forms.

Diadochus, a bishop of Photice in Epirus in the fifth century and a participant at the Council of Chalcedon (451), is the author of Gnostic Chapters and of a few minor spiritual works. The title of his principal work betrays his relation to Evagrius; still, the major inspiration of Diadochus’ doctrine of prayer approximates Macarius’ though at a greater distance from Messalianism than that of the author of the Spiritual Homilies.

Baptism for Diadochus is the only foundation of spiritual life: “Grace is hidden in the depth of our mind from the very moment in which we were baptized and gives purification both to the soul and to the body.”¹⁰ This concern for the wholeness of man is expressed by a mysticism of the “heart” as opposed to the Evagrian insistence on the “mind.” Actually, Diadochus, just like Macarius, locates the mind, or soul, “in the heart”:

Grace hides its presence in the baptized, waiting for the initiative of the soul; but when the whole man turns toward the Lord, grace reveals its presence to the heart through an ineffable experience... And if man begins his progress by keeping the commandments and ceaselessly invoking the Lord Jesus, then the fire of holy grace penetrates even the external senses of the heart…¹¹

Diadochus on several occasions in his Chapters clarifies the ambiguity of the Macarian tradition on the issue of the coexistence of God and Satan in the heart; but he is fully in agreement with Macarius in affirming that Christians must experience consciously and even “externally” (i.e., not only “intellectually” in the Evagrian sense) the presence of the Spirit in their hearts. His definition of the Christian faith as a personal experience is appropriated by Symeon the New Theologian and other Byzantine spiritual writers. In the writings of Diadochus, the teaching on incessant prayer, adopted from Evagrius and Macarius, presupposes a constant invocation of the name of Jesus;¹² an essential orientation of spirituality toward the Person of the Incarnate Logos with a resurgence of the role played in Biblical theology by the concept of the “name” of God thus replaces in Diadochus the much more abstract and spiritualistic understanding of prayer in Evagrius.

Better known in the West since the Middle Ages and more exalted in the East (where a special celebration in its honour takes place on the Fifth Sunday of Lent), the personality of John Climacus, “the author of The Ladder” and an abbot of the monastery on Mount Sinai, is another great witness of monastic spirituality based upon invocation of the “name of Jesus.” Very little is known of his life, and even the date of his death is not solidly established (it is generally believed to have taken place some time around 649).

His famous book, The Ladder of Paradise, has more definite leanings toward Evagrianism than the Chapters of Diadochus does as can be seen from its detailed classification of the passions and from the extreme forms of asceticism, which John required from his monks and which certainly denote Origenist spiritualism. This extremism pleased the French Jansenists of the seventeenth century who contributed to the popularity of The Ladder in the West. But John’s positive teaching about prayer like that of Macarius and Diadochus is centred on the person and the name of Jesus: it thus denotes a purely Christian incarnational foundation and involves the whole man, not just the “mind.”

“Let the memory of Jesus be united to your breathing: then you will understand the usefulness of hesychia.”¹³ In John, the terms “hesychia” (“silence,” “quietude”) and “hesychasts” designate quite specifically the eremitic, contemplative life of the solitary monk practicing the “Jesus prayer.” “The hesychast is the one who says, ‘My heart is firm’ [Ps 57:8]; the hesychast is the one who says, ‘I sleep, but my heart is awake’ [Sg 5:2]. Hesychia is an uninterrupted worship and service to God. The hesychast is the one who aspires to circumscribe the Incorporeal in a fleshly dwelling...”¹⁴

The terminology, which John uses, will gain particular popularity among the later Byzantine hesychasts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries with their practice of connecting mental prayer to breathing; it is not a priori impossible that the practice was known in Sinai in the time of John. In any case, he understands “deification” as a communion of the whole man with the transfigured Christ. The “memory of Jesus” meant precisely this, not a simple “meditation” on the historical Jesus or on any particular episode in His life. Warnings against any evoking, through imagination, of figures external to the “heart” is constant in Eastern Christian spiritual tradition. The monk is always called to realize in himself (his “heart”) the objective reality of the transfigured Christ, which is neither an image nor a symbol, but the very reality of God’s presence through the sacraments, independent of any form of imagination.

At this point one should understand the necessary and unavoidable link, which exists in this tradition between spirituality and theology. If any single author succeeded in formulating this link that was Maximus the Confessor.

We have already seen the heroic and lonely role of Maximus in the Christological controversy and his ability to integrate into a consistent Christological and anthropological system the issues, which were at stake between the orthodox and the Monothelites. His ability to view the problems of the spiritual life as they arose in his time in the light of the Evagrian and Macarian heritages, on one side, and of orthodox Christology, on the other, was similarly remarkable.

Origen and Evagrius certainly occupied the first place in Maximus’ readings and intellectual formation. In his doctrine of the spiritual life, he adopts the Evagrian hierarchy of passions as well as the concept of “passionlessness,” as the goal of ascetic praxis. In Evagrius, the detachment from passions” is a negative achievement through which a total emptiness from any sensation of the soul or of the body is supposed to be achieved in order for the mind to realize its divine nature and recover its essential union with God through knowledge; this concept obviously implies an Origenistic anthropology in which any connection of the “mind” with either a “soul” or a “body” is a consequence of the Fall. As a result in Evagrius, true detachment is also detachment from virtues; and active love itself is superseded by knowledge. In Maximus however love is understood not only as the highest virtue but as the only true result of detachment. Because of “passionlessness,” love can be perfectly equal for all since human preferences are the result of imperfection.¹⁵ Ultimately, human love, which necessarily includes an element of desire (eros), must be transformed by a gift of God and thus become agape.¹⁶

This transformation of the Evagrian spirituality parallels in Maximus a basic modification of Origenism in the doctrine of creation and implies a positive view of man whose ultimate destiny does not consist of an absorption into God’s essence, but in a “natural activity” made possible through a God-given active love. The total transcendence and inaccessibility of the essence of God becomes, — in Maximus as in Gregory of Nyssa before him and in later Byzantine theology after him, — a matter of Christian faith fundamental for spiritual life.¹⁷ If love but not “essential gnosis” is the highest goal of spiritual life, man while united with God remains totally himself in his nature and activity; but he also enjoys communion with the activity of God, which alone can guarantee his total liberation from “passion” and transform his eras into agape. In Byzantine monastic spirituality, to “follow the commandments,” i.e. active love, will therefore remain both a condition and a necessary aspect of the vision of God.

To achieve his balanced understanding of spiritual life, Maximus did not rely only on the monastic spiritual tradition. He was a consistent Chalcedonian first of all, and thus he approached the problem with a fundamental conviction that each nature of Christ keeps as nature its characteristics and activity. “Deification” does not suppress humanity but makes it more authentically human.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 518