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Introduction

In the course of the seventh century, the Eastern Roman empire underwent a profound transformation. As first the Persians and then the Muslims swept over and seized the valuable provinces of the Roman Near East, the inhabitants of the now reduced empire experimented with a series of structural and cultural changes that responded to the dramatic curtailment of Roman power. The structural elements of that change—that is, the series of administrative, economic, and military reforms imposed by the emperor Heraclius and his successors—are now for the most part well known; and aspects of the cultural change (in particular, the decline in secular literature, the explosion in anti-Jewish and apocalyptic texts, and the heightened interest in, or anxieties over, religious icons), have also occupied a prominent position within scholarship. Other elements within this cultural change, however—in particular, the debasement of monasticism as the guardian of ascetic virtue, the rise of the eucharist as the central, aggregating icon of the Christian faith, and the renegotiation of competing ascetical and liturgical narratives—are less well appreciated. This book explores them in greater depth.

The story of the Christian religion in late antiquity is in many ways the story of a religion struggling and failing to overcome its ancient roots. From the conversion of Constantine onward, court theologians articulated a grand vision of a new Christian empire under a Roman emperor presented as God’s pious vicegerent on earth. The Christian faith, however, had been conceived and developed in opposition to the political culture of the Roman state and, as such, carried within its intellectual inheritance the conceptual potential for a full ecclesial dissociation from the secular realm. As the pagan provincial convert was exposed to the new political ideals emanating from Constantinople, therefore, so too was he or she exposed to a Christian culture cut through with political ambiguity, one that held forth the possibility, to some for the first time, of a political identity distinct from, and even antipathetic to, that of Rome.

As the imperial authorities wrestled with the inherent ambiguities of Christian empire, so too did they struggle to mediate those divergent methodologies of Christological exegesis that had developed in the pre-Constantinian period. Emperors aspired to the spiritual and political consensus expounded in the new rhetoric of Christian rule, and in this forced or, at least, precipitated attempts to reconcile the different Christological positions. As a result of those attempts the more extreme doctrinal ideas conceived on both sides were marginalized, but the more important, and more permanent, effect was nevertheless to crystallize the different tendencies into distinct and intractable traditions with their own formulas and Fathers, languages, and hierarchies. As the imperial position became more focused on particular definitions, and as the number of official heretics ever expanded—in particular after the divisive Council of Chalcedon (451)—some alienated communities therefore began to invest in patterns of thought that never abandoned the ideal of pious Christian rule but could nevertheless conceive of an orthodox Church once again divested of the Roman empire.

We first observe this distinct shift in emphasis among miaphysite communities of the late fifth and the sixth century, when their leaders, faced with an imperial power that lurched ever more toward official condemnation, placed a distinct emphasis on eucharistic miracles as the proof of sustained doctrinal righteousness and on eucharistic participation as the touchstone of membership within the orthodox group, irrespective of the constant oscillations in imperial opinion. Within Chalcedonian communities of the same period, communities that benefited from more consistent imperial patronage, comparable concerns are notable for the most part for their absence. But when in the subsequent century the Persian and then Muslim invasions of the Eastern provinces forced Chalcedonian Christians to confront a situation in which some of their co-religionists were placed outside the confines of the Christian empire, here too Christian intellectuals began to explore more integrated ecclesiological models that also looked to the eucharist as the great aggregating icon of an embattled but unified orthodox faith and emphasized the sustained power of eucharistic communion as the ultimate proof of the Church’s transcendence of the caprice of temporal politics.

A notable feature of this process of sacramental reorientation within Chalcedonian thought was an advanced attempt to reconcile long-standing ambiguities over the relationship between the charismatic and the collective, the ascetical and ecclesial, lives. Since the inception of the monastic enterprise, a profound disinterest had marked ascetic attitudes to the eucharist, both in hagiographical and in anthropological narratives. In the period after Chalcedon, however—as ideological and institutional pressures served to blur the boundaries between cleric and monk, and as the fragmentation of doctrinal consensus encouraged a differentiation between the sacramental dispensations of competing sects—commentators both Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian began to assert more liturgified, more sacramentalized visions of ascetic practice, challenging the dominant strands of ascetic thought inherited from previous centuries (chapter 1). But it was not until the seventh century, and the dramatic Christian reversals that it witnessed, that elites within the Chalcedonian Church articulated a more pervasive and more comprehensive reconciliation of the competing imperatives of ascetical and sacramental theologies. Those seventh-century Chalcedonian elites thus presided over a marked and seminal shift in emphasis within the Roman East, in which the more differentiated and polycentric Christian culture of the late-antique period transformed into the more integrated and ecclesiocentric Christian culture of Byzantium.

We must nevertheless be cautious not to equate integration with simplification. Observers have sometimes been tempted to think of this period as one of collapse, of not only socioeconomic but also cultural contraction in which written sources become less diffuse, less complex, and less pluralistic. From the limited perspective of seventh-century Constantinople—which witnessed significant loss of territories and their associated revenues, dramatic social reorganization, and a marked break in the classicizing historiographical tradition—such a view might indeed be upheld. But elsewhere within the now reduced Roman empire, and even more so across former Roman territories throughout the Near East, the period was one of significant and diverse cultural production, much of it in fact driven through the political, economic, and cultural fragmentation contingent upon sporadic warfare and changes of regime. Indeed, if the historian is prepared to ignore geographic, linguistic, and generic boundaries in the circumscription of the available sources and to tread onto ground that artificial academic boundaries have for the most part preserved for theologians, then he or she is confronted with a vast amount of material. That much of this production was now religious in tone is not surprising and complements processes begun far earlier. But the striking predominance of (in particular) Christian themes and genres should not be interpreted too readily as an index of cultural regression, for in its various complexities the considerable religious literature of the period shows no signs of a marked decrease in originality, depth, or diversity. To think of this period as one of unambiguous cultural contraction, then, is not only to adopt a restricted, Romanocentric perspective but also to make monolithic a diverse (and still little-appreciated) Christian culture and to isolate a supposedly pure classicism as the sole measure of cultural efflorescence.

I have focused here on the corpus of three prominent and closely associated Palestinian monks: John Moschus, Sophronius of Jerusalem, and Maximus Confessor. Between them, these three are responsible for a quite extraordinary range and volume of Christian texts (hagiographies, poems, sermons, letters, commentaries, etc.); and there are, moreover, a multitude of further texts associated with them and their circle, not to mention a huge number of historiographical texts, in various languages, which describe the period through which they lived. I have here endeavored to encompass as much as possible of this diverse output. But at the same time I have chosen to give particular prominence to three substantial texts: Sophronius’s cultic Miracles; Moschus’s hagiographic Meadow; and Maximus’s liturgical Mystagogy. Although of diverse content and purpose, these texts are conspicuous for fundamental parallels and continuities in concern, and thus they point to broader ideological anxieties engaged and developed across the entire group. Through exploring each text’s distinct emphases in comparison with generic precedent and then placing it in conversation with the texts of the author’s associates within the group, I here attempt both to reveal the fundamental concerns of the individual texts and to situate such concerns within the wider pattern of the group’s sensibilities. What I advocate, therefore, is a more holistic approach to the cultural output of the circle, an approach through which comprehension of both individual texts and the collective corpus may be all the more enriched.

One concern that all our protagonists shared was that described above: that is, the place of ecclesiastical structures in relation to the life of the ascetic. This same tension is of course fundamental to the Christian monastic enterprise and would reappear throughout its future. In setting out to negotiate this tension, the Moschan circle—as I will sometimes call the group, after its most senior member—did not therefore resolve it but rather offered a compelling negotiation of it, a negotiation that, furthermore, constituted the first, developed, Chalcedonian attempt at its resolution. In Sophronius’s Miracles (ca. 610–14)—when we first encounter that circle—we discover an author for whom the eucharist has an emphatic role both in differentiating Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian, and in illuminating the converted. But it is nevertheless striking that Sophronius here affords both the eucharist and its associated clerical mediation a limited place in his conception of the Christian (ascetic) life, of which his narratives are an extended metaphor (chapter 2). Within both the thought of Sophronius and that of his associates, however, that quite traditional spiritual indifference to ecclesial structures was, over time, to undergo a striking alteration. Around 630 Sophronius’s spiritual master, John Moschus, penned the Spiritual Meadow, a hagiographic text that juxtaposed traditional monastic vignettes alongside the celebration of clerics and of eucharistic miracles (chapter 3); around the same time, Sophronius’s own disciple Maximus penned the Mystagogy, an interpretation of the eucharistic ritual that reconciled the competing visions of Evagrius Ponticus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (chapter 4); and, in the mid-630s, Sophronius himself delivered a series of sermons in which he insisted on the regular engagement of all Christians with the sacramental structures of the orthodox Church (chapter 6).

I have attempted to demonstrate how dependent that evolution was on the context in which it occurred: both in terms of the wider imperial stage (the Persian and then Muslim invasions of the Eastern provinces) and in terms of the biographies of our three protagonists (their own westward retreat from those same invasions). The Moschan circle lived through perhaps the most dramatic period in the late-antique East, as the East Roman state oscillated between brilliant triumph and unprecedented disaster. That period witnessed, for example, the invasion of the shahanshah Khusrau II (603), his capture of Jerusalem (614), and the occupation of the Eastern provinces (610–29); the incredible resurgence of Roman fortunes, culminating in the emperor Heraclius’s restoration of the captured Cross to Golgotha (630); and the explosion of the armies of the nascent caliphate into the Near and Middle East (634), signaling the end of both Roman and Persian rule in the region. These events were to have a profound effect on the lives of our three protagonists, who were forced as refugees to North Africa and Rome, there to contemplate the significance of recent events.

In the first half of this book (chapters 2–4), I argue that for these Chalcedonian authors the development of a sacramental discourse that emphasized the integration of ascetics within the Church partook of a wider Christian response to the reversals suffered at the hands of Eastern invaders, and all the ideological introspection that those same reversals demanded. Through that same discourse, Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus emphasized the sustained unity and integrity of the orthodox Church, preserved not in the fluctuating fortunes of the Christian Roman empire but in the continued power and righteousness of the gathered eucharistic rite. For our three protagonists, therefore, the crisis of the Chalcedonian empire and the occupation of its territories compelled a far more thorough and thoughtful renegotiation of ecclesiological thought than had hitherto been attempted within ascetic circles, whether Chalcedonian or anti-Chalcedonian.

As a response to the crisis of empire, that same elevation of the eucharist and its rites would be replicated in the works of other Chalcedonian observers of the period. But in the context of our three protagonists, it came to serve a more immediate function, as Sophronius and Maximus emerged as Constantinople’s leading doctrinal antagonists and looked westward to Rome for support. In the second half of this book (chapters 5–7), therefore, I examine how the ecclesiological renegotiation that the group attempted in response to Eastern crisis came also to provide the ideological underpinning for its dissidence against the emperor’s attempts to achieve a new communion of the Chalcedonian and anti-Chalcedonian churches.

Contemporaneous with Heraclius’s triumph over the Persians in 628, and in a bid to cement that triumph in the achievement of an elusive doctrinal consensus, the emperor and patriarch at Constantinople had promoted the doctrine of monenergism—that is, the one operation in Christ—as a means of compromising with anti-Chalcedonian communities throughout the Near and Middle East. The new initiative met with considerable success but from its inception encountered the vociferous resistance of Sophronius. Both Sophronius and Maximus had in the same period proved somewhat reluctant to accept the triumphalist Constantinopolitan rhetoric of imperial and cosmological restoration, and as that rhetoric was undone in the spectacular rise of an expansionist Islam, Sophronius developed an explicit doctrinal opposition that aimed to undo the recent unions. Here, then, the group’s ever-deepening eucharistic orientation assumed a more immediate target, for Sophronius’s dissidence was constructed on an ideological basis that would brook no doctrinal compromise for the sake of union and regarded such compromise as a pollution of the Church’s sacramental ordo, a cause of sin and thus also of the divine anger manifested in Roman defeat.

In the face of Sophronius’s opposition, the emperor and patriarch retreated on the question of Christological operations and instead promoted the doctrine of monotheletism—the one will in Christ—as a means of restoring peace within Chalcedonian circles. As the successes of the first caliphs became more entrenched, however, Maximus from Western exile developed and launched a further doctrinal assault upon the position of the capital, an assault that won over successive Roman popes to the antimonothelete cause and that, it appears, several times lurched into open political rebellion. In this context, the ecclesiological revisionism that I have identified as a prominent feature of the group’s output came again to complement its doctrinal dissent. On the one hand, the consistent resistance to imperial doctrinal decree was validated as an assertion of ecclesial independence from secular interference, for the emperor fulfilled none of the functions of the priesthood and therefore had no right to debate or to define the faith; but on the other, the recognition of clerical privilege that had marked the circle’s earlier pronouncements was extended a step further, to a recognition of Roman preeminence within the Church.

Within this circle, therefore, we witness not a devolution of the sacred from bishop or emperor to ascetic—as has sometimes been said of the period—but rather the integration of ascetic holiness around an established ecclesial pole. The ideal ascetic who emerged within the writings of Moschus, Sophronius, and Maximus was not the withdrawn outsider, standing above the demands of imperfect terrestrial institutions. He or she was a person of the Church, subordinate to its sacramental mediation, respectful of the priesthood, and mindful of the various pollutants that swirled around it. In articulating this model, our three abandoned the spiritual independence of earlier monastic generations but at the same predicted both the consistent eucharistic orientation of later centuries’ most prominent Greek ascetics and the ideological basis on which those same ascetics would come to construct their own political dissent. This, then, was a new asceticism for a new age, in which ascetics at last embraced their spiritual subordination to clerics but in so doing constructed both a new vision of a Church liberated from temporal disasters and a less transient and more threatening basis from which to expose the inherent ambiguities of an empire founded in the Christian faith.