Angels in the religious imagination of late antiquity

ANGELS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF LATE ANTIQUITY

Ellen Muehlberger

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University April 2008

3315920 Copyright 2008 by Muehlberger, Ellen All rights reserved

2008

3315920

Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Doctoral Committee ________________________________________________ David Brakke, Ph.D. (Chair)

________________________________________________ Steven Weitzman, Ph.D.

________________________________________________ J. Albert Harrill, Ph.D.

________________________________________________ Constance M. Furey, Ph.D. April 14, 2008

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©2008 Ellen Muehlberger ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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For my people

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Acknowledgements

My dissertation committee deserves my warmest gratitude. It has been a privilege to work with David Brakke, a tireless and engaging scholar and advisor. His approach to the writing of history and the study of late antiquity has shaped my thinking in ways that are difficult to number, and I am very grateful to have been his student. Steve Weitzman taught me both to read with an eye to the subversive and to write with a light touch, two skills he exemplifies in his own work. Bert Harrill graciously joined my committee upon his arrival in Bloomington, and this project has been much improved by his lively questioning. Connie Furey, with her keen ability to give voice to ideas yet latent, has helped me to clarify and develop my project and to consider its implications. While these four were my most involved readers, others have read and commented upon parts of the project. I am grateful for the help of Charlie Cosgrove, Mark Graham, Clayton Jefford, Andrew Hofer, Blake Leyerle, and Anders Klostergard Petersen. Two of my colleagues at IU, Brad Storin and Diane Fruchtman, deserve special mention for the astute comments and unstinting encouragement they offered me. Sections of this project were bettered by the questions and comments I received from multiple audiences, including the faculty at Sewanee: The University of the South, the faculty at Scripps College, the Indiana University Ancient Studies Colloquium, the North American Patristics Society, and the Society of Biblical Literature. The College of Arts and Sciences and the Borns Jewish Studies Program

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both provided travel grants for me to present my work. Additionally, Andy RaddeGallwitz and Mark DelCogliano offered linguistic expertise at a pivotal moment, and Stephen Emmel generously shared unpublished material with me. There are others who have supported me during my education that I would like to thank. Four previous mentors stand out for the influence they have had on me: Andy Mollema, who taught me how to construct an argument, among many other things; Stanley Henderson, for showing me the importance of understanding one’s audience; Tim Light, for introducing me to the study of religion and for his confidence in me; and Tom Lawson, for his thoughtful, but infectious, interest in the critical theorizing of religion. My mother, Clare Muehlberger, has always been my champion and continues to encourage me, both in my education and in other dreams. A select group of Bloomingtonians (and former Bloomingtonians) helped me change gears when necessary: Joy Brennan, Momi Ford, Laurie Hoover, Rich Miller, Ann Smith, and Linda Woods all got me to put my writing aside for a moment and enjoy other pursuits. Their companionship and lightheartedness were invaluable as I worked through the problems of my project. My most heartfelt thanks are reserved for my partner, Gina Brandolino. We met during my first year in Bloomington, and she literally taught me how to write. Her unfailing support and love kept me afloat during all sorts of storms. It is to her and to our handsome boy, Sweet Pea, that I dedicate this project.

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Ellen Muehlberger ANGELS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF LATE ANTIQUITY In the earliest Christian writings, the nature of angels appears difficult for humans to discern: unstable, intermediate, and shifting. Christian writers of the fourth and fifth centuries grappled with this basic instability by relying on both contemporary philosophical considerations of divine beings and the resources available in Jewish and Christian Scripture. Notions of angelic natures were tightly interwoven with ideas about the interiority of humans; because of this proximity, representations of angels were intertwined with Christian hopes—and fears—about humanity. This is evident in two areas of Christian tradition. First, it is manifest in the role that thought about angels played in the ascetic movement. While most ancient Christians expected a personal angel who might nudge them toward their better natures, for ascetic practitioners, the acquisition of this companion angel became proof of their moral accomplishment. Additionally, ascetics were often praised by urban Christian leaders as “living the life of the angels.” Such a characterization had both constructive and destabilizing consequences for these renunciant Christians and the social order they were attempting to create. Second, early Christian speculation about angels also clarifies elements of ecclesiastical structure, both ritual and theological. Ancient Christian catechists asked catechumens to imagine angels at rituals. While once thought heavenly ritual specialists to be imitated, angels became spectators who departed heaven to observe Christian ritual on earth; thus, Christian catechists signaled their increasing confidence in the authority of the priest. With respect to

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theology, fourth-century writers concerned with Trinitarian issues rejected previous characterizations of the Son by the title “angel.” Through novel strategies of reading the Old Testament, they created angels well-suited to be mediators to humanity, at a moment when the Son’s mediating capacity was overshadowed by emphasis on his unity with God the Father. The fervent speculation among Christians regarding angels and their natures was short-lived. Dionysius’s fifth-century Celestial Hierarchy—its structure, its approach to language, and its almost immediate acceptance as an apostolic work—had the effect of discouraging further speculation about the angelic world and its relationship to human beings. Although Christian writers after Dionysius lent their attention to angels, they most often did so by commenting on Dionysius’s text, thus remaining within the parameters laid out by Dionysius. ________________________________________________

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ANGELS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF LATE ANTIQUITY Table of Contents

Introduction PARADOX AND PRESENCE: ANGELS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF LATE ANTIQUITY

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Chapter 1 ANGELIC NATURES: PARALLEL CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN NEGOTIATIONS OF SUBJECTIVITY

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Chapter 2 MARKING MORAL APTITUDE: COMPANION ANGELS IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION

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Chapter 3 ANGELS AT RITUAL: THE CREATION OF A SPECTATOR CLASS

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Chapter 4 THE FATE OF ANGELS IN THE TRINITARIAN ERA: FOURTH-CENTURY READINGS OF THE SON

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Chapter 5 AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THE ANGELIC LIFE: THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF AN EARLY CHRISTIAN DISCOURSE OF ASCETICISM

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Chapter 6 THE BEGINNING—AND END— OF ANTIQUE ANGELOLOGY

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Epilogue

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Appendix ANCIENT VERSIONS OF LIFE OF ANTONY 10

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Introduction PARADOX AND PRESENCE: ANGELS IN THE RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION OF LATE ANTIQUITY You see how I get dizzy about this subject, and how I can’t make any progress! Except to say that there are angels and archangels, thrones, dominions, rulers, powers… —Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Theological Oration

Gregory of Nazianzus was not a timid writer. His Five Theological Orations, presented during his short term at the head of the Christian community in Constantinople, evince a highly articulated style and a fearless attention to describing a complex and etherial subject: the nature of the Trinity. When confronted in these orations with a question about the nature of angels, something necessary to his argument about the incorporeal nature of God, Gregory offers the few tidbits of information that one can glean from reading the New Testament. He reminds us that angels are made as “spirits” and “flames of fire,” described in Hebrews 1, and that they can be identified with the “thrones, dominions, rulers, and authorities” of Colossians 1, in addition to the “powers” mentioned in Ephesians 1.1 Poised atop these scriptural references, Gregory stops and asks his listener to sympathize with him, overwhelmed by the sheer number of angelic orders. He cries, “You see how I get dizzy about this subject, and how I can’t make any progress!” Yet, make progress he does, laying out an exposition of the nature and function of angels more intricate than his “dizziness” would indicate. Angels,

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Or. 28.31 (Paul Gallay, ed., Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 27-31 (Discours théologiques), Sources chrétiennes 250 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978], 172-74). For a more detailed account of Gregory’s approach to angels, see J. Rousse, “Les anges et leur ministère selon Saint Grégoire de Nazianze,” Mélanges de Science Religieuse 22 (1965): 133-52.

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subjected to the divine will, relay the illumination given them from above, appear anywhere in the universe to enact their service, and “bring unity to all things, at the single nod of the demiurgical director of all things.”2 Because angels are available to accomplish the divine will, God himself need not have a body with which to act; thus, he remains free of any hint of corporeality. It would be difficult to agree with Gregory that the communication of divine light through the orders of angels and their action at the sign from the “demiurgical director” are notions directly inspired by the scriptural hints about angels that he evokes, because his ideas resonate so strongly with contemporary neoplatonic cosmology. Even though his description of angels is far more developed than the suggestive names culled from Scripture, Gregory still subsumes this novelty under his “scriptural” knowledge of angels. Gregory was not the only late antique Christian to express dismay about his knowledge of angelic beings. No one would call Augustine “reticent,” yet he too offers a rhetorical balk when confronted with a discussion of angels. In general, Augustine is aware of the same scriptural references to angels that Gregory cites; however, he presents himself as one content not to know what these ranks might mean. In his Enchiridion, he writes: What order has that supremely blessed society, and what the differences of rank are, which explain the fact that while all are called by the general name angels, as we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews, “but to which of the angels said God at any time, Sit on my right hand?”[1.13] (this form of expression being evidently designed to embrace all the angels without exception) we yet find that there are some called archangels; and whether the archangels are the same at those called hosts, so that the expression, “Praise ye Him, all His angels: praise ye Him, all His hosts” [Ps 148.2] is the same as if it had 2

Or. 28. 31 (SC 250:174): πάντα εἰς ἓν ἀγούσας, πρὸς μίαν σύννευσιν τοῦ τὰ πάντα δημιουργήσαντος.

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been said, “Praise ye Him, all His angels: praise ye Him, all His archangels;” and what are the various significations of those four names under which the apostle seems to embrace the whole heavenly company without exception, “whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers” [Col 1.16]—let those who are able to answer these questions, if they can also prove their answers to be true; but as for me, I confess my ignorance.3 Augustine understands the problems associated with the various scriptural references to angelic orders, yet he chooses not to solve these problems by exegetical or other means. Rather he stops and admits his ignorance. This protest is not only a matter of keeping things simple for the Christian who might be reading the Enchiridion, which was a handbook of Christian answers for its lay recipient. Elsewhere, in his short piece To Orosius against the Priscillianists, Augustine takes up his position of measured ignorance again, even though his addressee has pressured him to provide a more certain answer: The apostle, of course, says, “Thrones or dominations or principalities or powers” (Col 1.16). And so, I firmly believe that there are thrones, dominations, principalities, and powers in the heavenly array and that they differ from other another in some way. But as for the point because of which you look down on me, whom you suppose to be a great teacher, I do not know what they are or how they differ from one another. I certainly do not think that I am in danger because of that ignorance as I would be by disobedience, if I neglected the commandments of the Lord.4

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Augustine, Enchir. 58 (PL 40:259-60; Henry Paolucci, trans., The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love [Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1966], 69-70): Quomodo autem se habeat beatissima illa et superna societas, quae ibi sint differentiae praepositurarum ut cum omnes tanquam generali nomine Angeli nuncupentur sicut in Epistola ad Hebraeos legimus: Cui enim Angelorum dixit aliquando, Sede a dextris meis? hoc quippe modo significavit omnes universaliter Angelos dici, sint tamen illic Archangeli: et utrum iidem Archangeli appellentur Virtutes; atque ita dictum sit, Laudate eum, omnes Angeli ejus; laudate eum, omnes Virtutes ejus; ac si diceretur, Laudate eum omnes Angeli ejus, laudate eum omnes Archangeli ejus: et quid inter se distent quatuor illa vocabula, quibus universam ipsam coelestem societatem videtur Apostolus esse complexus, dicendo, Sive Sedes, sive Dominationes, sive Principatus, sive Potestates, dicant qui possunt, si tamen possunt probare quod dicunt: ego me ista ignorare confiteor. 4 Augustine, Ad Orosius contra Prisc. 14 (PL 42:677; Roland J. Teske, SJ, trans., Arianism and Other Heresies, Works of Saint Augustine I/18 [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1990], 112): Certe ait Apostolus, Sive Sedes, sive Dominationes, sive Principatus, sive Potestates. Et esse itaque Sedes,

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Augustine goes on to explain that Scripture did not give a full account of the angelic orders and that sometimes, a “more profound revelation” may be given; this, however, should not lead the person who receives the revelation to think himself better than the writers of Scripture, because “however far anyone advances in knowledge, he will find that he stands beneath those writings which God has set as a firmament over all human hearts.”5 The parameters set by scriptural descriptions of angels are boundaries Augustine is not willing to cross. They deter him—and “all human hearts”—from speculation. Augustine adopts the position of ignorance far more often than his fame as a theologian would indicate.6 This is the case even in a “mature”—one might say “magisterial”—treatise such as On the Trinity. When it comes to the question of how angels directed the theophanies and prophetic visitations of the Old Testament, Augustine compares himself to the neophyte Christians who do not yet understand the mystery of the Eucharist. Just as they should remember that they do not know what is happening, Augustine adjures himself, Now it is just as well for me to remember my own limitations, and to remind my brothers to remember theirs, in case we should wander into deeper waters than human weakness can safely bear. How do angels do these things, or rather how does God do them through his angels, even through bad angels when he chooses, by permitting, commanding, or compelling them from his supreme and hidden seat of

Dominationes, Principatus, Potestates in coelestibus apparatibus, firmissime credo, et differre inter se aliquid indubitata fide teneo: sed, quo me contemnas, quem magnum putas esse doctorem, quaenam ista sint, et quid inter se differant nescio. Nec ea sane ignorantia periclitari me puto, sicut inobedientia, si Domini praecepta neglexero. 5 Augustine, Ad Orosius contra Prisc. 14 (PL 42:677; Teske, Arianism, 113). 6 See Catherine Conybeare’s observations about Augustine’s embrace of “uncertainty and indeterminacy”and how this stance flies in the face of Augustine’s later reputation, both in her preface and her introduction to The Irrational Augustine, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vii-xi, 1-8, phrase here from viii.

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empire? I certainly lack the acuteness of vision to tell by observation, or the confidence of reason to work it out by calculations, or the range of intellect to grasp it in such a way that I could answer all the questions which might be asked here, with the same assurance as if I were an angel myself, or a prophet or an apostle. 7 His “human weakness” is evident: he has neither the “vision,” the “reason,” nor the “intellect” to figure out the mechanism by which angels appeared to the patriarchs. For this reason, he prefers to rely on what is confirmed by Scripture, and leave it at that. It is not indifference that keeps Augustine from pressing further on these issues. It is rather a sense that speculation itself, beyond the limits of Scripture could be harmful. We can see how Augustine heightens the sense of peril by looking at another part of the Enchiridion, in which he discusses angelic bodies and considers whether they appear in a material form (as they seem to, say, in the case of Jacob’s wrestling match of Genesis 32) or an immaterial form (like the Matthean depiction of an angel coming to Joseph “in a dream”). He does not offer an answer, however. Augustine explains that to do so would run a risk that comes with no great reward of its own: To ask questions like these, and to make such guesses as we can at the answers, is a useful exercise for the intellect, if the discussion be kept within proper bounds, and if we avoid the error of supposing ourselves to know what we do not know. For what is the necessity for affirming,

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Augustine, de trin. 3.3.21 (PL 42:881; Edmund Hill, trans., The Trinity, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century [Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990], 140): Mihi autem omnino utile est ut meminerim virium mearum, fratresque meos admoneam ut et ipsi meminerint suarum, ne ultra quam tutum est humana progrediatur infirmitas. Quemadmodum enim haec faciant Angeli, vel potius Deus quemadmodum haec faciat per Angelos suos, et quantum fieri velit etiam per angelos malos, sive sinendo, sive jubendo, sive cogendo, ex occulta sede altissimi imperii sui; nec oculorum acie penetrare, nec fiducia rationis enucleare, nec provectu mentis comprehendere valeo, ut tam certus hinc loquar ad omnia quae requiri de his rebus possunt, quam si essem angelus, aut propheta, aut apostolus.

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or denying, or defining with accuracy on these subjects, and others like them, when we may without blame be entirely ignorant of them?8 There is little to lose, it seems, by leaving angelic nature indeterminate, and perhaps not much to gain by clarifying it. As Augustine describes it, there is only one situation that allows for safe—and productive—speculation about angels. He warns his readers in On the Trinity that the consideration of the nature of angels may be a “difficult, nay, impossible” project for humans. The one instance that Augustine knows of any human successfully considering the nature of angels occurs as part of Paul’s discussion of spiritual gifts in 1 Cornithians 12. “It is difficult” for Augustine to understand what angels are able to do and what they are kept from doing by divine will. “Indeed, it is impossible to ascertain this except by the gift of God, which the apostle alludes to when he says, ‘To another is given the discernment of spirits.’”9 Without such spiritual help, thinking about angels seems as if it were too much for Augustine, and, in turn, most patristic writers.10 Despite these persistent claims of ignorance, or frustration, Augustine was an innovator in Christian thought about angels. He almost entirely reworked Christian readings of the theophanies of the Old Testament in On the Trinity. While previous

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Augustine, Enchir. 59 (PL 40:260; trans. Paolucci, Enchiridion, 7): Cum ista quaeruntur, et ea sicut potest, quisque conjectat, non inutiliter exercentur ingenia, si adhibeatur disceptatio moderata, et absit error opinantium se scire quod nesciunt. Quid enim opus est ut haec atque hujusmodi affirmentur, vel negentur, vel definiantur cum discrimine, quando sine crimine nesciuntur? 9 de trin. 3.2.18 (PL 42:878-79; trans. Hill, Trinity, 137): Quid autem possint per naturam, nec possint per prohibitionem, et quid per ipsius naturae suae conditionem facere non sinantur; homini explorare difficile est, imo vero impossibile, nisi per illud donum Dei, quod Apostolus commemorat dicens, Alii dijudicatio spirituum (1 Cor 12.10). 10 See, for example, John Chrysostom’s unsuccessful attempts to categorize the angelic orders he knew, discussed by Joseph Turmel, “Histoire de l’angélologie des tempes apostoliques a la fine du Ve siècle,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 3 (1898): 288-308; 407-34; 531-52; at 431-33.

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interpreters had seen Christ in the appearances of the Lord, or, less frequently, the angel of the Lord, Augustine turned the hermeneutic tradition on its head, arguing that the Son did not participate in any appearance of the Lord, the angel of the Lord, or any other divine actor. Instead, angels took various forms in order to appear to humans, even presenting themselves as “the Lord.”11 Augustine further explored the ramifications of this reading technique in his City of God, where he makes clear that angels truly have no will of their own. His profile of the angelic self, a divine drone, is a much different character than any other Christian writer presents, but it became the foundation for later Christian, especially Latin, ideas about angels. In works as important as On the Trinity and City of God, it is not surprising to see him lay out such developed and influential ideas. However, it is remarkable to see Augustine also display in such works his “constant insistence on his lack of privileged access to knowledge.”12 If Gregory and Augustine were both so innovative in their thinking about angels, why do they make such noise about not being able to understand angels? Pointing out one’s imagined intellectual shortcomings is, of course, a rhetorical device at least as old as Moses. One could say that all Gregory and Augustine were trying to do by their words was to avoid hubris by admitting their inadequacy from the start. Yet they are both expansively imaginative writers with respect to other divine topics, and both manage to create new understandings of angels, often in the very same texts that register their protests of ignorance. Such claims stand in tension

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For Augustine’s logic about how an angel might appear as the Lord, see chapter 4. Conybeare, Irrational Augustine, vii, where she notes its presence in his Cassiciacum dialogues, written at the start of his Christian period, even before the Confessions.

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with the innovations these writers introduced to Christian thought about angels, creating a paradox: their rhetorical humility contradicts their deft redefining of angels to ease theological problems. This is not to say that angels were akin to the Trinity, a focal point of sustained theological investigation. Neither Augustine nor Gregory, for all their attention to other matters of the immaterial, undertook a sustained treatment of angels or their nature. Nor, for that matter, does any other major Christian writer of the fourth or fifth centuries. There are only a few treatises dedicated to angels or other cosmic persons (aside from the Trinity) among patristic sources, and these few are relatively late. Only one early Christian, Clement of Alexandria, even proposes to write such a treatise, but if it was ever written, it does not survive.13 Even though Christian interest in the nature of the divine world was said to be almost insatiable in late antiquity, it is remarkable that no other early Christian author ever attempts to satisfy that hunger with a treatise on angels.14 The juxtaposition of the absence of works dedicated to angels with the presence of speculation about angels at the center of the most significant developments of late antique Christianity represents the same tension preserved in Augustine and Gregory’s work; here that tension is manifest on an historical scale.15 That is, the Christian approach to angels—both in the works of individual writers and in the literary culture as a whole—can best be described as

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Friedrich Andres, “Die Engel- und Dämonenlehre des Klemens von Alexandrien,” Römische Quartalschrift 34 (1926): 13-37, 129-40, 307-29; cf. Clement, Stromateis 6.3. 14 See, for example, Gregory of Nyssa’s complaint that it was difficult to get away from christological speculation, even in the streets; de deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti (PG 46:554-76, esp. 557; cited in W.H.C. Frend’s The Rise of Christianity [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985], 636). 15 Rousse observes that, aside from Clement once promising a work on angels and the eventual appearance of Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy, “les Pères ne parlent des anges qu’incidemment, ce qui ne veut dire ni rarement ni distraitement” (“Les anges et leur ministère,” 133).

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dichotomous, paradoxical: claiming ignorance and directing attention to other matters even while continuing to innovate, expand, and reimagine notions of angels. The use of paradox in theological speculation has a context in late antique Christianity. Averil Cameron has observed the deliberate use of mysterious or incongruous, even obscurantist, language and argues that “the rhetoric of paradox…., far from being the strange abberation it seems to modern taste, constituted a strength that contribued a great deal toward the process of Christianization.”16 Its contribution, Cameron writes, is to inspire fascination with the subjects that could support such incompatible discourses, a fascination that held the interest and attention of Christians and pagans alike. For example, the figure of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, “furnished a subject around which it was possible to create a whole world of paradox and symbolic language, capable of sustaining the Byzantine imagination for centuries to come.”17 To consider Mary, one who had given birth yet retained her virginity, held explanatory discourses about her at a standstill. Her double status was inexplicable and at the same time made her the object of rapt attention. The fact that patristic writers apparently could not and did not innovate thought about angels beyond what Scripture said stood in direct contrast to their often innovative ways of speaking about angels. The tension has had a dampening effect on scholarly approaches to the study of late antique Christian notions of angels. There are a number of studies about early Christian ideas of angels, lending attention to the subject, but these often argue in conservative ways that there is nothing new to be

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Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 155-56. 17 Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 166.

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discovered in early Christian angelology after Scripture. This is particularly the case with respect to scholars who also have a confessional attachment to their subjects. As a case in point, consider Joseph Gorman. Writing his master’s thesis for St. Joseph’s Seminary, Gorman detailed the variety of opinions among early Christian writers about the office of the guardian angel. Even as he notes the wide variance of thought about the guardian angel reflected in the works of Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, Gorman writes, “The doctrine [of the guardian angel] exposed in the Old and New Testament was virtually unchanged up to the fourth century. So clear was this doctrine that the Fathers and early writers of the Church saw no need to make any notable additions.”18 Any “additions” that do become manifest he explains away as abberations; even though Gorman complains that Origen wrote of a second figure, an evil demon to counteract the guardian angel, and that some fourth-century writers followed this lead to create new ideas about the guardian angel, such development away from the very clear scriptural idea began, but eventually “died.” As he writes, “it will be noticed that since these writers were very close to the original source of this doctrine, the development followed closely the limits set by Scripture.”19 Gorman, who would observe through his own meticulous research the diversity of opinions regarding the guardian angels, nonetheless strikes the same tone again and again: patristic writers, in his view, do not depart from scriptural ideas about angels.

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Joseph Gorman, “The Development of the Doctrine of the Personal Guardian Angel,” (MA thesis, St. Joseph’s Seminary [Yonkers, NY], 1956), 13. 19 “The Development of the Doctrine of the Personal Guardian Angel,” 26. He continues, “It is only as the doctrine is removed from temporal association with this source that speculative development is noticed.” Origen was likely influenced by the Shepherd of Hermas, Mand. 6; see in this study chapter 2, n. 24.

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While Gorman does not identify for us the reason for his emphasis on Scripture as the unshaken foundation of Christian thinking about angels, other scholars are more explicit about their assumptions. The most recent scholar to treat Christian notions of angels in the fourth and fifth centuries in a systematic way expressed doubts about the necessity of his work at the very beginning of his project. Jean Daniélou, writing in 1953, opened the introduction to The Angels and Their Mission by observing that “to devote an entire book to the subject of angels might seem at first glance unwarranted.”20 His work, he argued, was nonetheless necessary to correct those who might misidentify the angels spoken of in Christian tradition, people who might “group angels and demons together as personifications of psychological realities and who would like to see in them a mythical interpretation of data to which psychoanalysis would furnish the key.” Likewise, he also wanted to redirect the energies of those who might take angels too seriously as independent beings, who “show a lively interest in the invisible world,” and attempt to parse it by means of “spiritism or theosophy,” rather than accepted ecclesiastical methods of interpretation.21 Daniélou’s justifications for writing his seemingly “unwarranted” work, then, were explicitly theological: The Angels and Their Mission was written as a remedy, a way to bring investigation of Christian angels back from the opposite— but equally troubling—fields of sociological interpretation or overly fervent investment. His work in this direction led him to trace the places in Christian tradition where angels were sent to humanity, both before the coming of Christ and after it. By

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Jean Daniélou, Les Anges et leur Mission (Chevetogne: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1953); David Heimann, trans., The Angels and Their Mission (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1976), vii. 21 Daniélou, Les Anges et leur Mission; trans. Heimann, Angels and Their Mission, vii-viii.

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showing how Christian conceptions of angels were both founded in Scripture and internally consistent over time, Daniélou hoped to lay out an intermediate, yet orthodox, understanding of angels and to lead others to acknowledge the traditions that affirmed the continued presence of angels in the patristic period, after the arrival of the one expected mediator, Christ. Before Daniélou, other scholars had written treatments of the patristic period and its approach to angels, and these treatments often shared the remedial goals of Daniélou’s work.22 For example, Eric Peterson’s book The Angels and the Liturgy was, in his words, an “attempt to arrive at a theological understanding of the status and significance of angels in worship”; it was written in part as a reaction to those who might study liturgy errantly for its meaning in terms of “pure history.”23 Peterson was, like Daniélou, concerned that angels might become fodder for speculation on the part of those motivated by goals other than the explication of Christian theology—the “pure history” that Peterson disdains being equivalent to Daniélou’s “psychoanalysis.” Invested in the study of angels for the sake of the church, Peterson shares Daniélou’s two-fold perspective, first arguing that “holy Scripture provides evidence that the Church’s liturgy is a participation in the liturgy celebrated in heaven by the angels and the saints,” then turning to patristic literature

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There are a large number of works that discuss the role of angels in Jewish texts from the Second Temple period, in the New Testament, and in the texts of the apostolic period of early Christianity. For a comprehensive review of these texts, see the notes 2 and 12 in chapter 4, “The Fate of Angels.” 23 Eric Peterson, Das Buch von den Engeln: Stellung und Bedeutung der heiligen Engel im Kultus (Leipzig: Hegner, 1935); Ronald Walls, trans., The Angels and the Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), vii, emphasis in original. Cf. the chapter on Peterson’s theology in Dieter Heidtmann’s Die Engel: Grenzgestalten Gottes: über Notwendigkeit und Möglichkeit der christlichen Rede von den Engeln (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1999).

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to validate this result.24 Peterson found in his research justification both in Scripture and patristic tradition for the frequent presence of angels in the ritual life of the church, making clear his view that practicing the presence of angels had already been laid out in Scripture and could not have been an historical development. What is interesting about these two works—beside their being the only two monographs to treat angels in the first five centuries of Christianity taken as a whole—is that The Angels and Their Mission and The Angels and the Liturgy are both projects that address and attempt to defuse ways of understanding angels that are not subordinate to a privileged Scripture. The question comes to mind: if Christian notions of angels lie latent in Scripture and do not deviate from it, why would scholars treat later expressions of thought about angels at all? One answer may be the ubiquity of angels in Christian religious life. Even though Glenn Peers was writing about the patristic period in particular, his observation about the ubiquity of angels in late antique Christian thought may equally apply to contemporary writers interested in clarifying Christian angels. Figuring out the patristic approach to angels is so difficult, Peers writes, because “agreement among theologians about the specifics of angelic nature was not possible given the transcendence of the objects of speculation, but angels figure so large in scripture and devotion that the subject could not be avoided.”25 Angels are so widely present in the Bible and in the life of Christians that they require comment; at the same time, the sheer diversity of opinions—both in Scripture and in early Christian literature—about angels makes a comprehensive

24

Peterson, Das Buch von den Engeln; trans. Walls, Angels and the Liturgy, 13. Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 32 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 2. 25

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retrospective theology about them almost impossible. One cannot document a clear early Christian approach to angels, but for scholars like Peterson and Daniélou, one must document a clear early Christian approach to angels, one that is based in Scripture. It is perhaps this dilemma that prevented other writers from following Peterson and Daniélou to create more recent works on angels across the span of early Christianity.26 The tension between the multiplicity—and in the case of the later appearance of works by the fifth-century Dionysius, sheer inventiveness—of thought about angels in the fourth and fifth centuries and the insistence by both contemporary and patristic writers that thought about angels reflects only that information revealed in Scripture is what drew me to this subject. Such tension suggests cultural maneuvering and interpretation at work. There is no single angelology of early Christianity. This project cannot report definitively what early Christians thought of angels, for two

26

Those few other works that do attempt to account for early Christian ideas about angels provide evidence, in their limited scope, of the truth of Peers’s observation. Rather than attempt to provide a comprehensive account of early Christian approaches to angels, a large number of scholars chose instead to focus their work on one author, one region, or one genre of writing within early Christianity. There are scholarly accounts of the “angelology” of such as Clement of Alexandria (Andres, “Die Engel- und Dämonenlehre des Klemens von Alexandrien”), Origen (C. Blane, “L’angelologie d’Origene,” Studia Patristica 14 [=TU 117] [1976]: 79-109), or Lactantius (Emil Schneweis, Angels and Demons according to Lactantius [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1944]), later writers from far East, Ephrem (P. Winfrid Cramer, Die Engelvorstellungen bei Ephraem dem Syrer, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 173 [Rome: Pont. Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1965]), and far West, Augustine (Karl Pelz, Die Engellehre des heiligen Augustinus [Münster, 1913]; B. Lohse, “Zu Augustins Engellehre,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 70 [1959]: 278-91, and Jean Pepin, “Influences païennes sur l’angélologie et la démonologie de saint Augustin,” in Entretiens sur l’homme et le diable, ed. M. Milner [Paris: Mouton, 1965], 51-74). There are accounts of notions of angels in linguistic and geographically select parts of Christianity (C. Detlef G. Mueller, Die Engellehre der Koptischen Kirche: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der christlichen frömmigkeit in Ägypten [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1959]), angelologies for particular subsets of Christian literature (Friedrich Andres, Die Engellehre der griechischen Apologeten des zweiten Jahrhunderts und ihr Verhältnis zur griechisch-römischen Dämonologie [Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1914]), and angelologies for selected thematic works (R. M. M. Tuschling, Angels and Orthodoxy: A Study in Their Development in Syria and Palestine from the Qumran Texts to Ephrem the Syrian [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004] treats only the Dead Sea Scrolls, Origen, and Ephrem).

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reasons, one unsurprising, the other quite revealing. This is in part because of the diversity of evidence about angels, but there is an even more radical reason: early Christian ideas of angels, even those recorded in the earliest Christian works, emphasize the unstable, intermediate, and shifting position of angels. Thus, instead of writing a new angelology for late antique Christianity—a task which may be impossible—I instead argue that thinking about angels figured prominently in the negotiations of Christian identity and Christian tradition that occur in the fourth and fifth centuries. Christian Scripture does, in one sense, define a boundary for this speculation about angels. However, Christian representations of angels were also inspired by Jewish and pagan traditions. Using these components and their own capacities of imagination, early Christians theorized the position of angels in such a way that angels and their status affected the facility with which different religious institutions and dogmas—the office of the priest, the communities of ascetics, the person of Christ—were created for Christianity and gained status. This particularly rich time of speculation about angels came to a close—perhaps not coincidentally—at the same moment when Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy appeared near the end of the fifth century, a text that in its scope exhausted the inventive and expansive nature of early Christian thinking about angels, while itself claiming scriptural authority.

IMAGINING ANGELS This study is informed by research on all sorts of intermediate divine beings in antiquity, for such works have demonstrated the cultural importance of the religious

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imagination. For example, scholars of disciplines contemporary to mine have investigated the place of angels in their traditions. In the scholarly literature surrounding angels in antique Judaism there are several approaches to the subject. Michael Mach’s work on “pre-rabbinic” Judaism discussed the representations of angels from the Hebrew Bible up through Josephus.27 Carol Newsom has explored the role of angels in the liturgy of the Qumran community.28 Others have written on the appearance of new angel traditions in the translations of parts of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, the Targums.29 For the rabbinic period, seminal was the work of Joseph Heinemann on the traditions of angels in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds; more recently, Peter Schäfer’s work on rabbinic texts and the Hekhalot literature made the argument that the angelic community was disparaged for the purpose of elevating Israel.30 Lastly, the investigation into the role of angels in the Hekhalot literature as its own genre by scholars such as Rachel Elior, Rebecca Lesses, and James Davila has been helpful for me by the ways they conceive of angelic and human relationships, especially in a ritual context.31

27

Michael Mach, Entwicklungsstadien des jüdischen Engelglaubens in vorrabbinischer Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); see also the more specific study of Saul Olyan, "A Thousand Thousands Served Him": Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1993). 28 Carol A. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition, Harvard Semitic Studies 27 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1985), the introduction of which is an extended discussion of the role angels play in the rituals of the community. 29 Rimon Kasher, “Angelology and the Supernal Worlds in the Aramaic Targums to the Prophets,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 27 (1996): 168-91; Avigdor Shinan, “The Angelology of the ‘Palestinian’ Targums to the Pentateuch,” Sefarad 43 (1983): 181-98. 30 Joseph Heinemann, “The Works of My Hands are Being Drowned in the Sea,” Bar-Ilan 7-8 (1970): 80-84 (Hebrew), particularly his discussion of Is 6 on 81-82; Peter Schäfer, Rivalität zwischen Engeln und Menschen: Untersuchungen zur rabbinischen Engelvorstellung (Berlin: deGruyter, 1975). 31 Rachel Elior, Temple and Chariot, Priests and Angels, Sanctuary and Heavenly Sanctuaries in Early Jewish Mysticism (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2003), and her earlier article “From Earthly Temple to Heavenly Shrines: Prayer and Sacred Song in the Hekhalot Literature and Its Relation to Temple Traditions,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 4 (1997): 217-67. Cf.

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Even though New Testament scholars have not shied away from studying the place of angels, and others have considered the prospect of an “angelic”or “angelomorphic” Christology in the first few centuries of Christianity, there is a significant lack of secondary writing about angels in Christianity after that time.32 This dearth, though, coincides with the resurgence of interest in another late antique Christian entity, namely, the demon. Dale Martin has raised the issue of how, exactly, Christianity overcame the disparaging rhetoric of superstitio and applied that rhetoric to pagan traditions; much of his work follows the trajectory from daemons, pagan beings of ambiguous moral character, to demons, agents of moral corruption.33 In her study of demonology in Christian Antioch, Dayna Kalleres explored many of the themes I will touch upon in this project, particularly the use of intermediate divine beings to define human boundaries of space and society.34 She demonstrates that demons are literally brought into being by early Christian reports about them and that these created entities serve to delineate what is—and what is not—Christian space. More recently, David Brakke has argued that demons as understood in Christian late antiquity are brought into being through their combat with monks in Christian ascetic literature. In turn monastic selves are shaped by their contact with demons.35 Scholars of Christianity have long scrutinized the work of late antique Christians who

James Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People behind the Hekhalot Literature, Journal for the Study of Judaism Supplements 70 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 32 See the works cited in chapter 4, notes 2, 10, 11, and 12. 33 Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 34 Dayna Kalleres, "Exorcising the Devil to Silence Christ's Enemies: Ritualized Speech Practices in Late Antique Christianity" (PhD diss., Brown University, 2002). 35 David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also the collection of earlier sources in Adele Monaci Castagno, Il diavolo e i suoi angeli: Testi e tradizioni (secoli 1-3) (Fiesole, Italy, 1996).

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hammer out, in their writings and their councils, new ontologies for particular divine beings, especially members of the Trinity. What Martin, Kalleres, and Brakke have done is to turn their attention to the work of Christians as they create other nonhuman actors. They all trace the construction of novel ontologies for demons. And, all three scholars emphasize how the entity, demon, is created, shaped, and manipulated through other ontologies, each as flexible and malleable as “demon” itself. Kalleres, for example, shows that the cycle of ritual cleansing undertaken during exorcism produces two resultant beings: the purified Christian and the expelled demon, neither of which existed, even latently, before the ritual. In a parallel fashion, Brakke argues that the demon known to Christian tradition is a product of the struggles represented in monastic literature monks and these “demons.” There is no absolute demon to be found and described, only a being whose features come into focus as it exists in relationship with others. This coordinated creation takes place because of the work of a particular human faculty: the imagination. That is, neither demons nor angels express physicality or reality in the material world.36 Their nature is, quite literally, a product of the imagination, but this is not to dismiss these beings as mere “fantasy.” Rather, this observation acknowledges the role that imagination plays in the production of meaning for any being—those reliably present in our world as well as other, more etherial, beings.

36

At least not in any reliable way. This is not to say that demons and angels do not have bodies. Both types of beings are thought of as physical entities, but there is no agreement regarding the nature of their physicality. See Gregory A. Smith, “How Thin is a Demon? Matter, Science, and Self from Tatian to Evagrius,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, forthcoming, and Kevin P. Sullivan, “Sexuality and Gender of Angels,” in April D. DeConick, ed., Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism (Atlanta: SBL, 2006), 211-28.

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The imagination and its cultural force in late antique Christianity have been extensively explored by Patricia Cox Miller. In her early monograph, Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture, as well as her more recent collection of previously published articles, The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion, Miller has set out to describe the process of figuration—a generative interplay between text, metaphor, and image. She writes, reflecting on her own work, My own quest for the late ancient imagination has focused on theories of interpretation and language as well as on texts that, whether implicitly or explicitly, use images not as mere reflections of reality but as vehicles that generate meaning and, in so doing, transform the reader’s perception at the same time as they alter the conditions of meaning. The authors of the texts considered here did not use images simply as ornaments or rhetorical embellishments that could be discarded as secondary to their arguments. Rather, images were constitutive of the insights of such texts.37 Miller’s emphasis on the production of meaning from texts, including the basic grounding in visuality of many texts from antiquity, has opened a place in ancient studies of Christianity for others to consider how the imagination may have worked.38 Her contribution—in addition to the individual insights of her pieces—was to lay out the bounds of a field in which scholars could entertain a world not of texts, but a world created by texts—dynamic, effusive, productive of meaning—and consider that world real.

37

Patricia Cox Miller, The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 3. 38 Other scholars of late antiquity have followed Miller’s charting of the imagination. Peter Dronke’s volume, Imagination in the Late Pagan and Early Christian World (Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2003), studies, in turn, themes and images as they are progressively represented through Christian time.

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In her work, Miller has brought to the study of antiquity a sophistication about the imagination that has its roots in philosophy and the theory of visuality. Western understandings of the imagination after antiquity begin with Immanuel Kant, who defined imagination as “the power to represent in the intuition an object even without its presence.”39 Kant’s notion of the imagination is both mental and individual in scope, and other philosophers have followed Kant to study the representative basis of the faculty of the imagination; Jean-Paul Satre’s work is the most extended and critical treatment of the underlying eidetic structure of Kant’s way of figuring the imagination. In his “Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination,” Satre first theorized Kant’s imagination and then explored the darker side of an imagination so driven by mental representation. He revealed the disonnected nature of imaginative creations to be dangerous—brought into being as representations and seen from no actual perspective, objects in the imagination are profoundly unreal.40 This type of imagination can lead to entirely fantastical creations. Because the imagination is thus detached from reality, Satre argues that it can create detached, and detrimental, images, alienating the imaginer from society. Satre’s caveat about the potential unreality of objects conjured by the imagination should draw our attention to a feature that appears when the imagination is employed in religious contexts, namely, that we can distinguish the specifically

39

Critique of Pure Reason section 24, B151, translation in Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, eds. Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136-54, at 139. German: “Einbildungskraft ist das Vermögen eine Gegestand auch ohne dessen Gegenwart in der Anschauung vorzustellen.” 40 Jean-Paul Satre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (first published 1940; Jonathan Webber, trans. [New York: Routledge, 2004]), particularly part 4.3, “Pathology of the Imagination,” 148-58.

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religious imagination by the valence of reality individuals impart to its representations. The religious imagination is special in that religious adherents actively claim its contents to be real. Indeed, in ways important and various the representations of the religious imagination are often more real to a religious practicioner than those things immediately accessible to the senses. Both Kant and Satre rely on a figural imagination, but those entities that the religious imagination generates are more than just figures. Such entities are frequently invisible and often non-somatic. Thus it is not entirely sufficient to think that the religious imagination produces meaning through visual figures alone. Rather, the religious imagination peoples the universe, for lack of a more suitable term, with ontologies, assumptions about natures that are stable from interaction to interaction, and do not necessarily depend on visual representation in the mind. To consider the question, for example, “What is an angel?” is not just to conjure a mental picture of an angel, although figuration can frequently be part of the answer to such a question. In addition to figuration, though, the religious imagination works to create independent locations of agency, new ontologies with which a religious adherent can interact. To make clear what I mean, let me introduce the work of a recent theoretician of the imagination, Cornelius Castoriadis. Over the course of several articles, Castoriadis writes of the imagination as a capacity that yes, accomplishes the creation of images, but also constitutes the social world of an individual or group by producing the ontological nature of that world. There are, Castoriadis postulates, two levels of the imagination, the radical imagination and the social instituting imaginary.

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In the case of the radical imagination, he explains, “radical” removes the discussion from figuration as well as fantasy: The term radical I use, first, to oppose what I am talking about to the “secondary” imagination which is either reproductive or simply combinatory (and usually both); and, second, to emphasize the idea that this imagination is before the distinction between “real” and “fictitious.” To put it bluntly: it is because radical imagination exists that “reality” exists for us—exists tout court—and exists as it exists.41 This “radical” imagination grounds all other making of reality, is prior to the figurative imagination, and can, by its action, literally remake the meaning of the world as we experience it. Castoriadis’s theory of the radical imagination explains why I do not simply focus on the creation of images, but instead consider the imagination as a generative capacity. That is to say, it is through the imagination and its objects that actors in the world are real for us, whether they are present physically or not. Such a “radical” faculty may seem as if it could make any thing real, but Castoriadis acknowledges that there are “constraints” that act to limit the work of this faculty. In addition to his theorizing of the radical imagination, Castoriadis turns to the “social instituting imaginary” and the way it works within the faculty of the imagination to place people, objects, and institutions in a mental constellation of relationships. Because the social instituting imaginary produces our ontological surroundings, it is not a faculty of unlimited fantasy, but rather is limited by certain realities. This part of the imagination itself requires coherence with the physical constraints of the world, the constraints of the human mind, and what Castoriadis

41

Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in Robinson and Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination, 136-54, at 138.

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terms “historical constraints.” When the social imaginary is used in the terms of religious traditions, Castoriadis explicitly identifies sacred scripture as one primary historical constraint.42 Because of the importance of sacred texts to religious traditions, the radical imagination must work within textual traditions, or more precisely, must be interpreted as working within them; the work of the social instituting imaginary depends on sacred scriptures for its boundaries. For my purposes, this means that whatever early Christian thinkers might postulate about divine beings, those ontologies must cohere with interpretations of Scripture, a fact already recognized by scholars of Christian speculative theology. While Daniélou and others had implicitly considered Scripture a constraint on the religious imaginaton, other scholars of early Christianity have long argued that Scripture also acts as a wellspring for that imagination. In his study of the development of Trinitarian thinking, Lewis Ayres names Scripture as an important starting point for Christians, a well of information with which one can develop new interpretations. We might think of Scripture in the fourth century as the fundamental resource for the Christian imagination. The phrase recognizes the existence of a variety of other resources and the necessity of negotiating between competing attractions.43 That is, Christian thinkers had Scripture as one fount, among others, from which to draw knowledge about the divine. What Ayres does not explicitly voice—but what is exceedingly clear from the content of his book—is that Scripture itself was a

42

Even so, his figuration of the role of Scripture in early Christianity is notably crude; he figures that Christianity has been only the negotiation of the troubles and inconsistencies of Scripture. 43 Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 39.

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collection of “competing attractions,” comprising varied and often contradictory statements to be interpreted about divine actors and their abilities. It is only through a careful and painstaking engagement with the texts and the production of a particular set of hermeneutic principles, constituting a scriptural epistemology, that any Christian was able to create objects in the imagination in ways that cohered with his experiences. Plainly put, Christians first encounter angels in Scripture, and in many ways, scriptural parameters both bind and fire reproductions and refigurations of angels in the Christian imagination. In her Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, Averil Cameron writes that “Christianity’s effectiveness in the Roman Empire lay in its capacity to create its own intellectual and imaginative universe,” and although she begs off from studying scriptural interpretation, the use of Scripture and its reception, Cameron acknowledges that “Christians of whatever background in the early centuries formed their discourse on and around the Scriptures.”44 While Cameron chose to keep scriptural interpretation separate from the “imaginative universe” of Christians, such a division obscures an important point: it is the interplay between Scripture and the religious imagination that is the productive force behind the patristic period, a time when Christianity moved toward having its own Scripture and developing ways of reading that Scripture which affirmed and refashioned the institutions of Christianity.45 My project investigates this interplay between all the sources for the

44

Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 6-7. Seth Schwarz makes a very similar point with respect to the rabbinic notion of “Torah.” More than just the text of the Pentateuch, the entire Hebrew Bible, or even all of written rabbinic literature, “the ‘Torah’ was a series of negotiations between an authoritative but opaque text and various sets of

45

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imagination that Christians had at their disposal—Scripture being one of many—with respect to thought about angels. The first chapter, “Angelic Natures: Parallel Christian and Pagan Negotiations of Subjectivity,” locates a basic instability in the moral status and even identity of angels in some of the earliest Christian texts. Paul, for example, reports his anxiety about the identity of various interlopers who attempt to sway his communities by noting that “even Satan himself can appear as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11.14). The shifting identities of intermediate divine beings and the intertwining of these identities with the subjectivity of human beings underscores one trajectory of thinking about angels among early Christian writers. This trajectory, exemplified by Evagrius, understands angels to differ from human souls only by degree, and does not assume moral stability. Another trajectory, characterized by Augustine, imagines angels as beings unengaged with human subjectivity and thus morally stable. Each of these trajectories follows discussions and concerns present in pagan philosophers of late antiquity about daemons, a fact which demonstrates the clear correlation of imaginative speculation in Christian and pagan thought. The second chapter, “Marking Moral Aptitude: Companion Angels in the Early Christian Imagination,” elaborates on the connection between humans and angels by tracing a developing Christian idea that angels are not just guardians assigned to all but instead companions awarded to those who deserve them. Thereby I argue that the term “guardian angel” is inadequate to describe the phenomenon of personal angels as seen in early Christianity. While many patristic authors interpret

traditional but not fully authorized practices” (Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002], 68).

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Scripture to say that all Christians are assigned such an angel, some writers— especially within monastic traditions—present these angels as coming to protect Christians after their charges display virtue or moral accomplishment. I investigate the Life of Antony and, by comparing it to other traditions about Antony and his community, suggest that the Life itself contains evidence of such a companion angel. This chapter also links the Life of Antony to Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses based on the expectations of a companion angel voiced in the Life of Moses, thus allowing us to see Gregory’s text as more than just a reflection of Christian knowledge on God, but more specifically, a text which broadcasts its associations with ascetic endeavors. The third chapter, “Angels at Ritual: The Creation of a Spectator Class,” observes that while very early Christian communities (as represented in the books of Hebrews and Revelation) imagined themselves to be reproducing a heavenly liturgy, later Christians began to imagine that their earthly rituals were not just primary but so important as to draw angelic spectators from heaven. While some catechisms tended to see the Eucharist as a rite taking place both on earth and in heaven, John Chrysostom in his treatise On the Priesthood imagined angels to come down from heaven to watch the Eucharist, vacating their duties in heaven. Narsai of Edessa, a Syriac writer (ca. 500), was influenced by both Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, but his depiction of the Eucharist followed Chrysostom, portraying angels as willing spectators descended from heaven. The presence of these angels was an index for Christians by which to emphasize the importance of the priest who celebrated the ritual. Given that catechists called upon Christians to generate mental images of these angels each and every time they participated in the Eucharist, the

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status afforded the priest by this spectator class was continually reaffirmed in each liturgical event. In the fourth chapter, “The Fate of Angels in the Trinitarian Era: FourthCentury Readings of the Son,” I investigate three major thinkers from the Trinitarian period—Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine—and analyze their approaches to drawing knowledge about the Son from the theophanies of the Old Testament. I contend that the reading practices used by these thinkers to evidence their understandings of the Son create a more precise valuation of angels in comparison to the Son, casting them as mediators. Ultimately, I suggest the oft-repeated thesis that the cult of angels was overtaken by an increasingly widespread cult of saints may be causally inaccurate. Instead, the triumph of the Christian God, the Word's elevation to full divinity, and the withdrawal of the pagan gods may have opened a huge space for divine mediation, which angels and the saints are both rushing in to fill, from different ends of the gap between heaven and earth. In the fifth chapter, “Ambivalence about the Angelic Life: The Promise and Perils of an Early Christian Discourse of Asceticism,” which considers the identification of the desert ascetics of late antiquity with those described in Luke 20 as “equal to the angels,” I first document this way of talking about ascetics and see how it shaped expectations about the ascetic project. Then, I turn to consider the ways that the discourse of living “the angelic life” functioned both in constructive and destabilizing directions for those in ascetic communities. The chapter focuses on Greek and Coptic Christian monastic literature, but questions the utility of identifying

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ascetics as “angels” in both ancient and contemporary, religious and academic sources. The last chapter, “The Beginning—and End—of Antique Angelology,” treats Dionysius's Celestial Hierarchy as the first Christian attempt at a full categorization of angels and their orders—an angelology. I argue that this treatise dampened the ability of Christians to remake imaginatively their ideas of angels, in part by its exhaustive attention and obscuring vocabulary.46 Its presentation as an apostolic work may have been a way to subvert the kind of creative things Christians had done with angels in the preceding centuries. Indeed, if it had been an apostolic work, available from the beginning, Christians may not have made the kinds of powerful institutions (the office of the priest), thriving communities (the ascetic groups), and even perfectly-wrought ideas of the Son, because the decisive statement that Celestial Hierarchy makes would not have allowed space for such speculation about angels.

46

Here, I am inspired by Catherine Chin’s exploration of “textual exhaustion” in her article “Origen and Christian Naming: Textual Exhaustion and the Boundaries of Gentility in Commentary on John 1,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006): 407-36.

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Chapter One ANGELIC NATURES: PARALLEL CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN NEGOTIATIONS OF SUBJECTIVITY The angel had unveiled itself halfway in its magnificence, then on further unveiling a cloven hoof appeared and I ran away. —Albert Einstein, letter to Paul Ehrenfest, describing his rejection of a mistaken theory1

In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul warns the community he founded in Corinth that other teachers may follow him, bearing other messages contrary to the one which he preached. By the strength of Paul’s language when he speaks against these latecomers, it appears that such people have already visited the Corinthians and have already introduced a different gospel among them; Paul ridicules these teachers as “false apostles, deceitful workers, those who pass themselves off as apostles of Christ.” He cynically calls these interlopers “superapostles,” whom the community must detect as false and whose message they should distrust (11.5, 13). It is not easy, Paul suggests, to tell the difference between a true apostle and a false one. To demonstrate just how difficult this sort of discernment may be, Paul chides the Corinthians, “Do not be amazed! For even Satan can pass himself off as an angel of light” (11.14). If the highest of the fallen angels, the leader of demons, can masquerade as a good angel, so too can a “deceitful worker” appear to be an edifying teacher of the true gospel to one who is unsuspecting. Corinth was not the only one of Paul’s communities to be approached by other preachers with whom Paul disagreed; the Galatians as well, it seems, had been taken in by other apostles, other messages. In his vitriolic letter to the community at

1

Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 184.

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Galatia, Paul addresses the issue of the authority of his particular gospel again with the example of an angel bearing a false message. He threatens, “even if I or an angel from heaven proclaim something to you outside that which I have already proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” (Gal 1.8). By his report, Paul had been welcomed among the Galatians as an angel from God, and he—and his message—had been granted the authority of one sent from heaven (4.14). As compelling as his message may have been, any other heavenly being had the potential to disrupt it; if an angel could come and give the Galatians a new teaching, Paul’s gospel was, in his absence, unstable in the extreme. Aside from Paul’s obvious fears about the endurance of his message, also latent within the rhetoric of the letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians is the suggestion that it is difficult to grasp the identity of angels with any certainty, given how closely they may appear to demons, or humans for that matter. If the most evil of demons can appear to be an “angel of light,” then even Paul’s eternally true message—itself received by the Galatians as if it had come from an “angel of God” (4.14)—may be usurped by another, later, “angel” preaching a gospel at odds with Paul’s. His suggestion that an angel may come and preach another gospel calls into question the ability of Christians to discern the moral status of these messengers. Even as Paul attempts to reinforce his influence among his followers with rhetorical figures of angels, those same figures point to the dissolution of authority and entropy of Paul’s message, rather than its stability. Dissolution and entropy lie at the center of early Christian theorizing about angels. Even though tradition defines angels as morally “good” divine beings, the

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attention given to angelic natures by Christian thinkers suggests angels were morally and subjectly complex locations of divine agency. In this chapter, I investigate the theorizing of such writers as Augustine and Evagrius, who approached the problem of angels with more than just the tools of their own invention. Christians were latecomers to the conversation about the subjectivity of divine beings—a conversation first dominated by pagan philosophers focusing on daemons. Their work, in turn, was shaped by discussions of human subjectivity, I suggest, because in working out the natures of daemons and angels, writers in late antiquity were also working through the problems that plague theories of the interiority of humans: questions of will, constitution, and agency.

OUR DAEMONS, OUR SELVES Maximus of Tyre, a first-century philosopher and thus roughly a contemporary of Paul, considered daemons to be distinct entities that occupied a middle position between the divine and the human. Maximus found that the intermediate status of daemons was conveyed by their dispositions and characteristics. He writes, “the daemon is said to be both empathic and immortal, in order that it has commonality with the divine by immortality and it shares in commonality with humans by empathy.”2 What daemons share with the divine, immortality, is a special ability to

2

Maximus of Tyre Philos. IX 4e Hobein: λείπεται δὴ τὴν δαιμόνων φύσιν ἔμ τε εἶναι καὶ ἀθάνατον, ἳνα τοῦ μὲν ἀθάνατου κοινωνῇ τῷ θεῷ, τοῦ δὲ ἐμπαθοῦς τῷ ἀνθρώπῷ, cited by J. Den Boeft (Calcidius on Demons: Commentarius CH. 127-136 [Leiden: Brill, 1977], 27), who notes that this statement bears a resemblance to Plato’s claim that middle beings experience λύπη and ἡδονή (Epinomis 985a).

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continue in the same state, intact and uncorrupted by death. The quality that daemons share with humans is, in some ways, the opposite of immortality—if immortality is the state of remaining untouched or unchanged,3 “empathy” is the state of being touched, being changed, by one’s experiences and the experiences of one’s peers. That is, Maximus had defined the nature of daemons with one of the main heuristic categories that ancient philosophers applied to the human soul, that of “passivity.” Among Stoic writers, the quality of passivity had a technical definition; one who was passive could be guided and shaped by the experience of the passions, those states of being we might call “strong emotions” or “impulses.” Technically speaking, Stoic philosophy made a distinction between two different stages of the generation of a passion.4 First, a soul would receive a sense perception, and second, a soul might make a judgment about that perception, classifying it as pleasureful or painful. When the soul assents to the original perception, that assent is defined as a “passion”: it is “a movement of the soul necessarily consequent upon an evaluative judgement.”5 In saying that daemons are “empathic,” Maximus signals that daemons may have a mental structure and set of evaluative mechanisms like those posited by Stoics for human souls. He asserts that it is by their similarity with humans that

3

Compare the use of ἀϕθαρσία to refer to both incorruptibility and immortality. For more on the Stoic concept of passivity, the emotions, and the therapy of the emotions, see Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), particularly sections 1-3 (pp. 1-319). 5 Steven K. Strange, “The Stoics on the Voluntariness of the Passions” in Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Steven K. Strange and Jack Zupko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32-51, at 42. I thank Brad Storin for directing me to this reference and for sharing his paper, “Clement of Alexandria and the Adaptation of Greek Psychotherapies,” with me.

4

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daemons come to take an active interest in human affairs. “The passivity of these beings,” Maximus writes, “is the basis of their care for humanity.”6 This relationship of kind between daemons and humans was acknowledged by other ancient philosophers. A century after Maximus, Apuleius, the Latin writer most well known for his work The Golden Ass, wrote extensively of the shared psychological experiences of daemons and humans. Apuleius speculates about the structure that produces this likeness. Daemons are, he says, “influenced by pity, are indignant, solicitous, and delighted, and suffer all the mutations of the human soul and are agitated by all the ebullitions of human thought, with a similar motion of the heart and tempest of the mind.”7 These beings have the same experiences as humans because they have the same impulses in “heart… and mind.” It is because of this similarity that daemons are capable, in the same manner as we are, of suffering all the mitigations or incitements of souls; so as to be stimulated by anger, made to incline by pity, allured by gifts, appeased by prayers, exasperated by contumely, soothed by honors, and changed by all other things, in the same way that we are.8 According to Apuleius daemons are as vulnerable to outside events as humans, as they “suffer all the mitigations or incitements of souls.” Such a similarity to humans

6

Den Boeft, Calcidius on Demons, 27. de deo Socrati 146: igitur et misereri et indignari et angi et laetari omnemque humani animi faciem pati, simili motu cordis et salo mentis ad omnes cogitationum aestus fluctuare, quae omnes turbelae tempestatesque (Jean Beaujeu, ed., Apulée: Opuscules philosophiques (Du dieu de Socrate, Platon et sa doctrine, Du monde) et fragments [Paris: Les belles lettres, 1973], 31-32; trans. Thomas Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass or The Metamorphosis and Other Philosophical Writings [Somerset: Prometheus Trust, 1997], 242). 8 de deo Socrati 147: Nam proinde ut nos pati possunt omnia animorum placamenta vel incitamenta, ut et ira incitentur et misericordia flectantur et donis invitentur et precibus leniantur et contumeliis exasperentur et honoribus mulceantur aliisque omnibus ad similem nobis modum varient. (ed. Beaujeu, Apulée, 32-33; trans. Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 243).

7

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is not a matter of appearance, but depends on the inner experience of daemons being structured in ways like the subjectivity of humans. The list of “mitigations or incitements” of the soul that Apuleuis provides are examples of how daemons experience the passion that is common between them and human beings. Most of the phrases—“made to incline by pity,” “appeased by prayers”—describe both a stimulus and a resulting disposition. When a daemon hears prayers it is appeased; when a daemon receives honors, it is soothed. Apuleius’s portrait of daemonic subjectivity indeed fulfills the Stoic definition of passivity, that is, acceding to a stimulus received, but his description more richly paints the movements of the daemon. These examples provided by Apuleius suggest a particular kind of passivity: that of a powerful being whose will or intent can be directed by a lower being who pleads, appeases, honors, or soothes. Daemons respond to such acts just as powerful human beings might. Indeed, a simulacrum of human interiority standing at a remove from corporeality seems to guide Apuleius’s concept of a daemon: there exist many types of daemon, he says, but there is one that is simply a human soul which has departed from its corresponding body.9 The combined characteristics of independence from mortality and likeness with humans may have made daemons familiar and helpful as powerful beings that could assist humans with their lives; this particular combination, however, may have also introduced intellectual inconsistencies into the cosmology that assumed the existence of such beings. It was helpful to think about daemons as entities that shared

9

Taylor (Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 253 n. 4) again refers to Proclus’s remarks in his Commentary on the First Alcibades: “The soul, that, through its similitude to the daemonical genus, produces energies more wonderful then [sic] those which belong to human nature, and which suspends the whole of its life from daemons, is a daemon κατα σχεσιν [sic], according to habitude (i.e. proximity or alliance.)”

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in the vagaries of human souls—becoming angry, being pleased, having pity—in that it assured human beings that daemons took an interest in their problems, but these human states of emotion suggested that daemons might be open to persuasion and change, as human beings so often are. Such mutability allowed that daemons might turn from a helpful interest in human affairs to a harmful malevolence. In his recent work, Inventing Superstition, Dale Martin suggests that while early accounts of daemons unequivocally followed the assumption that “superhuman, divine, or semidivine beings cannot commit evil,” it followed from ideas like those expressed in Apuleius’s de deo Socrati that daemons, if they respond to propitiation, could possibly turn against humans if displeased and act in negative ways against them.10 It was this instability in the intent of daemons that forced human beings to pay attention to them and to cultivate their assistance.11 To those who were grounded in the philosophical rule that divine actors could not help but be helpful and who considered daemons to be only benevolent, this type of attention to the cultivation of daemons looked like “superstition,” an overweening, and vulgar, attempt to have control over the activities of the divine. In addition to this, the possibility of a daemon as unstable in moral intent as a human being raised the prospect of a fully evil daemon, one not just ambivalent with respect to the good, but actually predisposed to harmful acts. In Martin’s estimation, the shift toward thinking of daemons as morally ambivalent beings is reflected in

10

Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 204. 11 Martin, Inventing Superstition, 195.

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philosophical approaches to them; the neoplatonic writing of the third and fourth century in particular had come to ignore, for the most part, the classical philosophical assumption that daimons, precisely because they are superior beings to humans, must be morally superior. The late ancient philosophers, much more than their predecessors, [had] become willing to admit the existence of evil daimons and allow them a role in causing at least some of the sufferings of human beings.12 This, Martin argues, was the moment when “cracks” appeared in the intellectual hierarchy of the pagan system of thought, and indeed, the moment when a new form of “superstition” was born.13 If daemons are subject to change in this way, so might gods be, and thus the philosophical integrity of the pagan system is undermined. Theorizing about daemons in a way that likened them to human beings, and to human mutability, ultimately proved to be more damaging than helpful, in part because it suggested that divine beings, while ontologically superior to humans, could be their moral counterparts: reactive and unstable.

HUMAN PERCEPTION While Martin locates the intial misstep that endangers the pagan philosophical system at the moment when thinkers begin to admit the possibility of a morally ambivalent daemon, at least one of the writers he treats in Inventing Superstition identifies a different source for the problem. Iamblichus, a third-century philosopher in the

12

Martin, Inventing Superstition, 189. Martin adopts of a different spelling of daemon that I, in part because he links the cult of daemons to the ancient charge of “superstition,” deisdaimonia. 13 See in particular Martin’s chapter, “Cracks in the Philosophical System: Plutarch and the Philosophy of Demons,” 93-108, in which he cites Plutarch’s acceptance of the possibility of an evil daemon as a “dangerous” slip that undermines the integrity of the system.

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neoplatonic tradition, is best known for his work On the Mysteries, a long and detailed text that reveals the “rather uneasy pupil-teacher relationship” he shared with Porphyry, supposed by many to be Iamblichus’s teacher.14 In it, Iamblichus writes as “Abamon,” a philospher who takes up the task of correcting the mistakes in a letter written by Porphyry to one “Anebo” on the subject of daemons, gods, and the practice of cultivating a relationship with the divine. The tension between “Abamon” and Porphyry is built into the text, which is set up as a series of sharp criticisms of Porphyry’s explanations to Anebo and edifying supplemental responses from “Abamon”/Iamblichus. In addition to correcting the problems Iamblichus perceived in Porphyry’s approach to the divine, On the Mysteries also serves a second purpose: to refute the charges, sounded by Iamblichus’s contemporaries, that his method of cultivating the divine was itself superstitious. What Iamblichus emphasized as “theurgia,” “religious ritual demonstrating supernatural power,” his counterparts saw as ambitious manipulation of the divine—unsightly for a philosopher.15 As such, the text challenges the idea that there is such a thing as “superstition” as Martin defines it; Iamblichus makes a distinction between beings like daemons of the divine realm, entirely good, and earthly beings, morally ambivalent. The idea Martin places at the

14

Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon, and Jackson P. Hershbell, Iamblichus: De mysteriis (Leiden: Brill, 2004), xix. For caution against the idea that Porphyry and Iamblichus had this relationship, see Henry J. Blumenthal and E. Gillian Clark, eds., The Divine Iamblichus: Philosopher and Man of the Gods (London: Duckworth, 1993), 1-2, cited in Martin, Inventing Superstition, 271 n. 9. 15 Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, xxvi.

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breaking point of the philosophical pagan system—that some divine beings are good and some evil—is, according to Iamblichus, “completely at odds with reality.”16 To start, he establishes that divine beings are not subject to the same passivity—both ontologically and in a general sense—to which humans are subject. There are four classes of divine beings: gods, daemons, heroes, and pure souls. About these beings, Iamblichus urges that “one should always assume one definite account of their essence, and reject the indeterminacy and instability characteristic of the human condition.”17 Each class has its own fixed essence, and humans should seek to adjust their cognition to this divine reality, rather than use unsuitable kinds of reasoning.18 There are multiple faults of human perception that can skew the ways in which the divine realm is understood. Iamblichus, as “Abamon,” warns against applying to divine beings the same categories that one might apply to animals, such as “rational” and “irrational,” because these dichotomies do not obtain among divine beings. Likewise the categories of “active” and “passive”: There arises at this point the question of active and passive motions, which involves a distinction most unsuitable for establishing the differentiating characteristic of superior classes of being. For in none of them is there present the contrast between action and passivity, but

16

de mysteriis 1.18 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 67). de mysteriis 1.3 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 12; trans. 13): καὶ γὰρ περὶ τούτων ἕνα λόγον ὡρισμένον τῆς οὐσίας ἀεὶ δεῖ νοεῖν, τὸ δ’ἀόριστον καὶ ἄστατον τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης ἀναιρεῖν δόσεως. 18 de mysteriis 1.3 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 15). Iamblichus makes a similar observation about the gods: humans tend to think of the gods with their own categories, and thus end up assuming that expiatory rites are designed to control the divine. Rather, he argues, their purpose is to change the human: de mysteriis 1.21 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 79-81). 17

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their activities are considered to be absolute and unalterable and free from any relation to an opposite.19 The paired categories of active and passive do not adequately describe divine classes precisely because they rely upon a duality; these classes are “free from any relation to an opposite.” They are also free, Iamblichus makes clear, from any relation to human beings: they cannot be acted upon or manipulated in any way. As Iamblichus explains, none of the superior classes is subject to passions, nor yet is it free from passions in the sense of being contrary to what is passible, nor as being of a nature subject to passion, but being freed from this through its moral excellence or some other good disposition. It is rather because they completely transcend the distinction between passible and impassible, because they do not even possess a nature that is susceptible to passion, and because they are endowed by their essence with inflexible firmness, that I postulate impassibility and inflexibility in respect to all of them.20 Daemons do not participate in the changes that come with passivity: their nature is fixed in “inflexible firmness,” an insistent phrase, the redundance of which indicates the stability of daemonic essences. Earlier philosophers like Maximus of Tyre and Apuleius had come to think of passivity as the quality that best allowed daemons to help humans, so we might expect Iamblichus’s assertion about daemons, and all divine classes, being “inflexibly

19

de mysteriis 1.4 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 16; trans. 17): Πρόσκειται δὲ δὴ αὐτόθι καὶ τὸ τῶν δραστικῶν ἢ παθητικῶν κινήσεων, ἥκιστα προσήκουσαν ἔχον διαίρεσιν εἰς διαφορὰν τῶν κρειττόνων γενῶν. Οὐδενὶ γὰρ αὐτῶν ἡ τοῦ δρᾶν καὶ πάσχειν ἔνεστιν ἐναντίωσις, ἀπόλυτοι δέ τινες αὐτῶν καὶ ἄτρεπτοι καὶ ἄνευ τῆς πρὸς τὸ ἀντικείμενον σχέσεως θεωροῦνται αἱ ἐνέργειαι· ὅθεν οὐδὲ τὰς τοιαύτας κινήσεις τὰς ἐκ ποιοῦντος καὶ πάσχοντος ἐπ’ αὐτῶν παραδεχόμεθα. As the editors of On the Mysteries point out in the notes to this section, Iamblichus employs a subtle arugment here, observing that it is not logical to identify as passive or impassive those entities which cannot be described as either one. 20 de mysteriis 1.10 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 42; trans. 43).

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firm” to mean that daemons do not assist humans. However, this is not the case. For Iamblichus, the way that daemons benefit humans is by providing them with divine knowledge; for this purpose, passivity or any instability of intent would be a liability. Daemons are perfect communicators of the divine—intermediary between gods and humans—precisely because of this firmness. That is to say, a daemon is not a primary initiator of action, but submits itself to the service of the good will of the gods it follows, revealing in action their indivisble goodness, while likening itself to it, producing creations which are in its image, giving expression to the ineffable and causing the formless to shine forth in forms, bringing out onto the level of manifest discourse that which is superior to all reasoning, and receiving already that degree of participation in beauty which is innate to them, while providing and conveying it unstintingly to the classes of being that come after it.21 Not only are daemons firm in their essence, not bending to the appeasements and pleadings of others because of their nature, but they also possess no independent agency to be cultivated. Thus Iamblichus defines daemons as a level of divine being whose primary function, the communication of that which is of the gods to those levels below the daemonic, is helped by their stability, their “inflexible firmness.” Given the certainty with which Iamblichus ascribes this unchanging status to daemons, how then could he also be, as Martin suggests, a primary example of the neoplatonic philosophers who “ignored” the classical assumption that daemons were

21

de mysteriis 1.5 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 22; trans. 23): ἅτε δὴ οὐ πρωτουργὸν οὖσαν, ὑπηρετικὴν δέ τινα τῆς ἀγαθῆς βουλήσεως τῶν θεῶν συνεπομένην, καὶ ἐκφαίνουσαν εἰς ἔργον τὸ ἀφανὲς αὐτῶν ἀγαθόν, ἀπεικαζομένην τε πρὸς αὐτό, καὶ τὰ δημιουργήματα ἐπιτελοῦσαν πρὸς τὸ αὐτὸ ἀφομοιούμενα, τό τε γὰρ ἄρρητον αὐτοῦ ῥητὸν καὶ τὸ ἀνείδεον ἐν εἴδεσι διαλάμπουσαν, καὶ τὸ ὑπὲρ πάντα λόγον αὐτοῦ εἰς λόγους φανεροὺς προσάγουσαν, καὶ δεχομένην μὲν ἤδη τῶν καλῶν τὴν μετουσίαν συμπεφυκυῖαν, παρέχουσαν δ’αὐτὴν ἀφθόνως τοῖς μεθ’ ἑαυτὴν γένεσι καὶ διαπορθμεύουσαν. In a note, the editors point out that by using the word διαπορθμεύουσαν, Iamblichus is clearly referencing the description of daemons from Symposium, which is the first in Greek literature.

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morally superior to human beings and instead began to admit the possibility of evil daemons?22 I agree that On the Mysteries contains more than one conception of daemons within the divine realm, but I do not agree that this signifies ignorance on the part of the Iamblichus. Instead, there may be multiple voices available to us in the text of On the Mysteries which represent more than one cosmology and more than one conception of the place of daemons in that cosmology. This can be seen in the stark change in the language describing the divine realm and its actors which begins in book 2, section 3 of the work. For the first time On the Mysteries introduces a different hierarchy of the cosmos.23 The text reads, “you ask, ‘what is the sign of the presence of a god, an angel, an archangel, a daemon, or of some archon or a soul?’”24 Here, instead of the fourfold division of the cosmos seen in the first book—gods, daemons, heroes, and pure souls—there are seven levels: archangels and angels inserted between gods and daemons, with archons between daemons and the soul.25 While the question is presented as external to the text—asked by an outsider addressed as “you”—its structure is quickly adopted as the prevailing structure of the cosmos. The book explains, at the request of the questioner, the appearances, natures, and manifestations of these beings in multiple litanies which recite the differences between the classes. Interestingly enough, in many of the reiterations of the

22

Martin, Inventing Superstition, 196-200. The editors of the text notice the change, but do not suggest any reason for it (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 87 n. 120). 24 de mysteriis 2.3 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 87); for a short note on the history of “archon” in Christian literature, see David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 283 n. 8. 25 In this question, angels come before archangels, but in all subsequent discussions in book 2, archangels are closer to gods than angels. 23

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sevenfold division, qualities of firmness, order, and benevolence begin to fall away as the text passes from the first three levels—gods, archangels, angels–to the next— daemons; these qualities continue to deteriorate in the last three levels. This is evident, for example, when the text addresses the appearance of each kind of being. [The] appearances of the gods are wholly unchanging in regard to size, shape, formation, and all things connected with them; while those of archangels, though very close to those of the gods, fall short of full identity with them. And those of angels are inferior in turn to these, but unchanging. And those of daemons appear to the view at different times in different forms, the same forms appearing great and small. And further, those of such archons as are administrative are unchanging, but the appearances of archons immersed in matter change into many forms. Those of heroes resemble daemons, and those of souls are inferior in no small degree to the changeability of daemons.26 Here, the daemonic is the first level in which change is manifest. This is also the case with respect to the quality of images produced by each class of being: the fire of the daemons is “unstable,” they exhibit an unsteady movement, and they appear in visions that are frightening, full of “tumult and disorder.”27 All of these qualities stand at a stark remove from Iamblichus’s earlier claim that daemons are characterized by “inflexible firmness.” (A later section of the same book introduces two classes of daemons, perhaps to bridge the gap between this new conception of daemons and the earlier one: there are good daemons and punitive ones.28) Additionally, it seems that the earlier explanation that daemons can use their firmness to serve humans by conveying information directly from the gods is in contrast with this second system, in which there are two intervening classes between gods and

26

de mysteriis 2.3 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 89). The mutability of the daemonic body here is in contrast to the nonchanging daemonic body cited in 5.10 (243). 27 de mysteriis 2.4, 2.5, 2.3 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 95, 97, 89). 28 de mysteriis 2.7 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 101).

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daemons. Finally, the perception of a new voice speaking in book 2 is borne out by a glance at the lexical frequency of “archangel,” “angel,” and “archon” in On the Mysteries. “Archangel” and “archon” appear only and frequently in book 2, and all but two instances of “angel” are confined to book 2.29 There is much to be investigated about the cosmology of book 2 of On the Mysteries: does the introduction of archangels, angels, and archons suggest a Christian redactor? if so, why would a Christian be editing a work of Iamblichus? what can we learn about the date and location of such editing? is the sevenfold division of the divine realm significant? —but for my purposes here, it is enough to conclude that book 2 represents a new, and variant, voice within the text. Even though “Iamblichus,” the unitary author of On the Mysteries, may not serve as the example of a thinker taken with changing ideas about daemons, the text itself appears to record a conversation about the stability of daemons as a class among the divine and one attempt to resolve the question by positing creatures above daemons exempt from such issues: angels.

29

The other two uses of “angel” in de mysteriis may have their own explanations. In 3.18 (ed. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, Iamblichus, 165), the interlocutor has asked a hypothetical question, “whether it is a god or an angel, or daemon, or some other such being who is present at the epiphanies, at the divinations, or at any of the sacred actions.” The two responses to this question follow the pattern and repeat “god,” “angel,” and “daemon.” The use of “angel” here seems dependent on the wording of the question and not related to the schema of book 2, in part because it leaves out archangels. In 5.25 (273), there is a reference to a single “god,” attended by “gods” and “angels,” with two references to the “angels and daemons” this god assigned to nations. This seems to be a scripturally-based change (whether Jewish or Christian is unclear). In any case, the origin of these two usages of “angel” is a matter for speculation, but my point here is to show that the language of book 2 is unique.

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DAEMONS AND DEMONS (OR, WHAT A DIFFERENCE AN “A” MAKES) The theorizing of daemons was not the project of pagan philosophers only; major Christian thinkers like Augustine also took up the task of describing divine actors and their roles. To understand Augustine’s approach to daemons, as well as his conception of angels, it is important first to recognize that the status of the will—and the question of whether it is aligned with the will of God—ultimately guides Augustine’s characterization of all beings. A section of a sermon discovered in the 1990s illuminates the role that the will plays in the eventual moral standing of daemons, and for that matter, angels and humans. “Pay attention and learn,” Augustine says in this sermon. Every life that can be illuminated and come to wisdom, as long as it is of a good will, loves the God that illumines it and turning itself toward him, it goes forward, and being a part of him it is formed to the integrity and perfection of wisdom, and the fullness of blessing according to its type: the rational and intellectual life, whether it be of angels or humans. And if such a life, being praiseworthy, loves its illuminator, but in any case, if this life deserts the life that illuminates it through an evil will, it becomes dark and full of pride. This is the life of the iniquitous angels and iniquitous humans. They did not want to adhere to God, but they wanted to be taken as God by their own arrogance.30 In Augustine’s estimation, all beings begin in alignment with the illumination of God. Certain creatures—angels and some humans—remain aligned with that illumination on account of a “good will,” while others—demons and some humans—fall away,

30

New Sermon (Dolbeau) 26.26 (François Dolbeau, ed., Discorsi Nuovi XXXV/2: Supplemento II (Dolbeau 21-31); Étaix 4-5 [Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 2002], 654-56): Attendite et intellegite. Omnis ergo vita quae illuminari potest et ad sapientiam pervenire, cum voluntatis bonae est, amat illuminantem se Deum et ad eum conversa proficit atque inhaerens illi formatur ad integritatem perfectionemque sapientiae, et in genere suo ad plenitudinem beatitudinis: vita scilicet rationalis et intellectualis, qualils est angelorum, qualis est hominum. Si ergo talis vita, cum laudabilis est, amat illuminatorem suum, omnis talis vita per culpabilem voluntatem deserens illuminantem se vitam tenebratur et fit superba, sicut est vel iniqui angeli vel iniqui hominis: non vult enim haerere Deo, se vult privato quodam fastu haberi pro Deo.

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driven by an “evil will”; thus they become “dark and full of pride,” morally suspect and “iniquitous.” The possibility of inquity is present in all human lives, but it is no longer an option for those illuminated angels who first chose to remain aligned with God. Having once maintained their adherence to the will of God, angels are granted the privilege of being sure never to fall away from it. Augustine’s clearest statement of this assurance is in his handbook of catechism, the Enchiridion; while some angels became rebellious, acting against God and falling away from God’s will, thus becoming “demons,” “the rest remained steadfast in piety and obedience to their Lord, and obtained, what before they had not enjoyed, a sure and certain knowledge of their eternal safety, and freedom from the possibility of falling.”31 These angels were rewarded with “unchanging purity and happiness.” Thus their status as angels is stable and impassive. This characterization of angels as eternally secure is present in Augustine’s major treatise decrying pagan traditions, The City of God against the Pagans. In it, Augustine specifies that angels and demons do not diverge in their natures, but in their wills; God did not create demons—essentially bad angels—for the purpose of being evil. “It is not permissible for us to doubt,” he writes, “that the contrasting appetites of the good and bad angels have arisen not from a difference in their nature and origin—for God, the good author and creator of all substances, created them

31

Enchir. 28 (J. F. Shaw, trans., The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961], 34-35).

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both—but from a difference in their wills and desires.”32 Demons are fallen angels and “perverse in will” even though they are “naturally good,” and the angels that did not fall away are both “good by nature and righteous in will.”33 Thus with recourse to questions of the will and of agency, Augustine made explicit a psychology behind the division that many Christian writers took for granted: demons, the Christian representation of pagan daemons, were evil, and angels were good. The text of City of God makes clear that Augustine worked through this separation in the terms of the conversation about daemons established by pagan philosophers, even as he worked to characterize the subject of those conversations, daemons, as the “demons” of Christianity, unambiguously evil beings. It is easy to make this case, in part because Augustine names many of his opponents as he attempts to draw a sharp line between the cosmology and philosophy developed by Greek and Latin traditions and those emerging from a newly-empowered Christianity.34 In the eighth book of City of God, for example, Augustine directly engages Apuleius, the Latin writer who presented daemons as subject to “all the mitigations and excitements” of the soul. As Augustine lists those philosophies he

32

Civ. 12.1 (Domenico Gentili, ed., La Città di Dio II: Libri XI-XVII [Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1988], 146; R. W. Dyson, trans., Augustine: The City of God against the Pagans, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 384): Angelorum bonorum et malorum inter se contrarios appetitus non naturis principiisque diversis, cum Deus omnium substantiarum bonus auctor et conditor utrosque creaverit, se voluntatibus et cupiditatiubs exstitisse dubitare fas non est. 33 Civ. 11.33 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio II, 136; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 495): nos ergo has duas societates angelicas inter se dispares atque contrarias, unam et natura bonam et voluntate rectam, aliam vero natura bonam, set voluntate perversam. 34 For a discussion of the multiple ways that Augustine was influenced by the pagan thinkers he engaged, consider Jean Pépin’s “Influences païennes sur l’angélologie et la démonologie de saint Augustin” in Entretiens sur l’homme et le diable, ed. M. Milner (Paris: Mouton, 1965), 51-59, as well as the ensuing discussion on 60-74.

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sees as failed predecessors to Christianity, he names Apuleius and more or less accurately reports his view of the passivity of daemons: When this same Platonist spoke of the morals of the daemons, then, he said that they are agitated by the same perturbations of mind as men: vexed by injuries; placated by obsequies and gifts; gratified by honors; delighted by the diversity of sacred rites; and provoked if any such rite is neglected.35 Even though Augustine’s list of those ways demons can undergo changes like those of humans is similar to Apuleius’s list, it is clear that Augustine does not see such mutability as a beneficial quality. His examples make demons out to be little more than impish dictators: they are first “vexed,” then “placated,” “gratified” and “delighted,” and can be “provoked” if not given the proper honors in ritual. Rather than the basis of common feeling for humans among daemons, as Apuleius figured them, these experiences—really, changing subjective moods—make demons out to be worse than humans. Having defined demonic passivity as akin to impulsiveness, Augustine argues that there is no reason for humans to try to cultivate demons, or to emulate them. “What foolishness it is, then, or, rather, madness, to submit ourselves to demons in the name of some religion we are set free from those vices in respect of which we resemble them!” Augustine points out that the presence of Apuleius’s type of daemon is antithetical to the pursuit of “true religion.” Apuleius himself, through he is in many ways lenient towards the demons and considers them worthy of divine honors, is nonetheless

35

Civ. 8.16 (Domenico Gentili, ed., La Città di Dio I: Libri I-X [Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1978], 578; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 335): de moribus ergo daemonum cum idem Platonicus loqueretur, dixit eos eisdem quibus homines animi perturbationibus agitari, irritari iniuriis, obsequiis donisque placari, gaudere honoirbus, diversis sacriroum ritibus oblectari et in eis si quid neglectum fuerit commoveri.

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compelled to confess that they are goaded to anger, whereas we are taught by the true religion not to be moved to anger, but, rather, to resist it. The demons are beguiled by gifts; but the true religion teaches us not to show favor to anyone on account of gifts received. The demons are mollified by honors; but the true religion teaches us on no account to be swayed by such things. The demons are haters of some men and lovers of others not because they have judged them in prudence and tranquility, but because of what Apuleius calls their passivity of soul; whereas the true religion teaches us to love our enemies also. Finally, the true religion commands us to lay aside all disquietude of heart and restlessness of mind, and all the tumults and tempests of soul with which, as Apuleius asserts, the demons seethe and boil.36 For Augustine, Apuleius’s approach to daemons is entirely wrongheaded. While Augustine acknowledges the similarity of daemons and humans with respect to the quality of passivity, he disagrees with the assumption that this similarity is productive. For him, it seems a waste of time to seek help from beings whose patterns of mind are so human, the very patterns that cause trouble in the first place. The tasks which Augustine defines as religiously necessary cannot be accomplished by working with a kindred being, only with one totally dissimilar from one’s human self. Furthermore, the way that demons differ from humans goes beyond their morality. Augustine adopts the traditional Stoic model of the human soul, which suggests that the rational mind can resist the impulses of the passive parts of the soul;

36

Civ. 8.17 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 582; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 337-38, slightly altered for spelling): Qua igitur insipientia vel potius amentia per aliquam religionem daemonibus subdimur, cum per veram relgionem ab ea vitiositate, in qua illis sumus similes, liberemur? Cum enim dameones, quod et iste Apuleius, quamvis eis plurimum parcat et divinis honoribus dignos censeat, tamen cogitur confiteri, ira instigenture, nobis vera religio praecipit, ne ira instigemur, sed ei potius resistamus. Cum daemones donis invitentur, nobis vera religio praecipit, ne cuiquam donorum acceptione faveamus. Cum daemones honoribus mulceantur, nobis vera religio praecipit, ut talibus nullo modo moveamur. Cum daemones quorumdam hominum osores, quorumdoma amatores sint, not predenti tranquilloque iudicio, sed animo ut appellat ispe passivo, nobis vera religio praecipit, ut nostros etiam diligamus inimicos. Postremo omnem motum cordis et salum mentis omnesque turbelas et tempestates animi, quibus daemones aestuare atque fluctuare asserit, nos vera religio deponere iubit. Augustine’s “true religion” here sounds very much like the apatheia that a Stoic sage might achieve.

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the Stoic sage—a rare creature—can by judicious use of his rational mind avoid being moved by the passions. This is impossible for a daemon, because the whole of the daemon’s interiority is taken with passivity. Augustine asks with incredulity: Can there be any doubt that, in these words, it is not some inferior part of their souls that is said to be disturbed like a stormy sea by the tempests of the passions, but the very mind in respect of which the demons are said to be rational creatures? They cannot, then, be compared even to wise men, who, when they are assailed in this life by such disturbances of soul—and human infirmity is not immune from them—resist them with an untroubled mind. Such wise men do not yield to the temptation to approve or do anything with might turn them aside from the path of wisdom and the law of righteousness. The demons, however, are like foolish and unrighteous mortals: not in their bodies, but in their characters. I might, indeed, say that they are worse; for they are more hardened, and cannot be made whole by due punishment. Their minds, then, are tossed upon a sea, as Apuleius puts it; nor have they in any part of their soul the truth and virtue by which such turbulent and depraved passions might be repulsed.37 Daemons, Augustine argues, do not have the same internal resources as the wisest of humans; they lack the most rational part of human subjectivity, an entity that can exert rational restraint against the impulses of the passions. The passivity that characterizes only the inferior part of human souls pervades all parts of the demonic constitution. This is the reason the daemonic experience of the passions is particularly disruptive: they do not have a mind to counter the troubling emotions of their souls.

37

Civ. 9.3 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 624; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 361): Num est in his verbis ulla dubitatio, quod non animorum aliquas inferiores partes, set ipsas daemonum mentes, quibus rationalia sunt animalia, velut procellosum salum dixit passionum tempestate turbari? Ut ne hominibus quidem sapientibus comparandi sint, qui huius modi perturbationibus animorum, a quibus humans non est immunis infirmitas, etiam cum eas huius vitae condicione paiuntur, mente imperturbata resistunt, non eis cedentes ad aliquid approbandum vel perpetrandum, quod exorbitet ab itinere sapientiae et lege iustitiae; sed stultis mortalibus et iniustis non corporibus, se moribus similes (ut non dicam deteriores, eo quo vetustiores et debita peona insanabiles), ipsius quoque mentis, ut iste appellavit, salo fluctuant, nec in veritate atque virtute, qua turbulentis et pravis affectionibus repugnatur, ex ulla animi parte consistunt.

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Because of the lack of a governing impulse, demons can only do harm to humans. Augustine explains how the daemons which pagans consider morally neutral beings—potentially helpful, potentially harmful—should actually be thought of as “demons” in the modern Christian sense of the word—malevolent beings who seek ways to injure or impede humans. This moral bankruptcy is a result of the composition of their being, which, rather than driving them to help humans, allows them to act out their ill will toward humans. “The minds of demons,” he says, are subject to the passions of lust, fear, anger, and every other such thing. What part of them, then, is free and in possession of the wisdom by means of which they may please the gods and encourage men to approach more closely to good morals? For their own minds are subjugated and oppressed by vicious passions; and, in proportion as they are possessed of the desire to harm us, so do they fiercely strive to use whatever reason nature has given them to mislead and deceive us.38 Demons are different from other divine beings, then, by the passivity that constitutes their subjectivity: not able to squelch the various impulses they have against humans, demons do evil without being able to stop themselves. Lacking in the sort of wisdom that motivates humans to seek higher goals and virtues as well as the impassive rational mind that allows humans to repel the passions, demons are left with their misanthropic desires and no way to curb them. With such a negative assessment of the demonic class, it is no wonder that Augustine takes issue with other writers and thinkers who do not understand the stark

38

Civ. 9.6 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 634; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 367): Subiecta est ergo mens daemonum passionibus libidinum, formidinum, irarum atque huiusmodi ceteris. Quae igitur pars in eis libera est composque sapientiae, qua placeant diis et ad bonorum morum similitudinem hominibus consulant, cum eorum mens passionum vitiis sugiugata et oppressa, quidquid rationis naturaliter habet, ad fallendum et decipiendum tanto acrius intendat, quato eam magis possidet nocendi cupiditas?.

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line he has drawn between demons and other divine beings. In one case, he attacks one Labeo as a “demon worshipper” for suggesting that the difference between the “demons” of one tradition and the “angels” of another might be nominal. He scoffs, “some of these demon-worshippers, if I may so call them, assert that those whom they call demons are called angels by others. Labeo himself is one who says this.”39 The issue is not so much the identification of demons with angels—Augustine acknowledges that demons are fallen former angels—but the identification of angels with demons. Angels, as a class, have never been demons, and have never had the moral stain of the demonic class. External evidence suggests that other Christians did not immediately adopt the distinction between angels and demons that Augustine advocated. The philosopher Calcidius, who was familiar with parts of the the Hebrew Scriptures, demonstrated an interest in Christian themes, and sampled in his own work from Origen’s commentary on Genesis; if he was not a Christian, he was at least engaged with Christian material. As he discusses the necessity of middle divine beings, those that mediate between humans and God, Calcidius suggests that by any name, these beings are the same: that ethereal class of beings…which the Hebrews call the holy angels, saying they are standing before the countenance of God who ought to be worshipped, (beings) with the highest prudence and an acute intellect, also with a wonderfully tenacious memory, extending obedience toward divine things, with the highest wisdom, aiding human affairs prudently, also serving as investigators and executors, [are] called demons, I think, as they are “daëmones” (=experts); the Greeks call men knowing all things “daëmones.” 40

39

Civ. 9.19 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 662-64; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 384): Sed ne de verbis etiam nos certare videamur, quomiam nonnulli istorum, ut ita dixerim, daemonicolarum, in quibus et Labeo est. 40 Calcidius, On Demons 132 (J. Wrobel, ed., Platonis Timaeus interprete Chalcidio cum eiusdem commentario [Leipzig: Teubner, 1963], 195; trans. Den Boeft, Calcidius On Demons, 28): Huius porro

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Calcidius understands that there are those, like Augustine, who would take issue with confusing demons and angels and their respective moral standings. 41 Even so, he has no trouble saying that good angels are akin to “daemones.” Perhaps such indeterminacy is the reason why Augustine adds to his case about demonic malevolence by going beyond the argument he has given regarding the constitution of demons. To better support his claim that demons are evil, he turns to the offenders, so to speak, and their use of language. Even among pagans, he points out, there is no custom that refers to demons as good beings. Moreover, this custom of speech has been followed by so many people everywhere that even among those who are called pagans, who contend that we should worship many gods and demons, hardly any literate and educated man would venture to say, in praising his slave, “you have a demon.” For who could doubt that anyone to whom this was said would consider it an intentional curse? What reason compels us, then, to offend the ears of so many people by using a word which almost all men now understand only in a bad sense? For we are then obliged to explain the meaning of what we said, whereas, by using the word “angel,” we might have avoided the offense given by the word “demon.”42

generis est illud aetherium, quod in secundo loco commemoravimus esse positum, quos Hebraei vocant sanctos angelos, stareque eos dicunt ante dei venerabilis contemplationem, summa [prudentia] atque intellegentia acri, mira etiam memoriae tenacitate, rebus quidem divinis obsequium navantes summa sapientia, humanis vero prudenter opitulantes, idemque speculatores et executores daemones, opinor, tamquam daimones dicti. Daemonas porro Graeci scios rerum omnium nuncupant. 41 Calcidius, On Demons 135b (ed. Wrobel, Timaeus interprete Chalcidio, 197; trans. Den Boeft, Calcidius On Demons, 39): Reliqui daemones neque ita probabiles neque ita commodi....Hos quidam et huius modi daemonas proprie vocant desertores angelos, quibus nulla quaestio referenda est super nomine; “The rest of the demons are neither so laudable nor so friendly…some people call those and similar demons in a strict sense runaway angels; these people should not be brought before the court of justice on account of the name.” Most scholars think that Calcidius, the first Latin commentator on the Timaeus, read the parts of that treatise preserved in Porphyry’s commentary as his source. This particular passage shows similarities to Porphyry’s de abstinentia 39; cf. Den Boeft, Calcidius On Demons, 40-42. There are, strictly speaking, two options for “nulla quaestio quibus,” but Den Boeft makes a lucid argument for why the translation here is correct (45-46). For another ancient author unconcerned about the difference between demons and angels, see Macarius Magnes, Apocriticus 410. 42 Civ. 9.19 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 662-64; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 384): Et hanc loquendi consuetudinem in tantum populi usquequaque secut sunt, ut eorum etiam, qui pagani appellantur et deos multos ac daemones colendos esse contendunt, nullus fere sit tam litteratus et doctus, qui audeat in laude vel servo suo dicere: Daemonem habes; sed cuilibet hoc dicere voluerit,

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Even pagan descriptions of demons suggest that pagans understand the impish and malicious quality of such beings, given that the word “demon” is only intended as part of a curse. Thus, those who confuse the labels of “angel” and “demon” are not just ignorant about the psychology of demons, but are ignoring the obvious and everyday custom that obtains among both pagans and Christians.43 If the pagan customs of language were not enough, Augustine adduces a second argument: using Scripture as a lexicon, he asserts that no good demon can exist, because none are represented in the Bible. I see, then, that, if I am not to seem to be disputing merely about words, I must now say something of the good angels. The Platonists do not deny the existence of these, but they prefer to call them good demons rather than angels. We, however, find in the Scriptures according to which we are Christians that some of the angels are good and some bad; but we have never read of good demons. On the contrary, wherever the term daemones or daemonia is found in those writings, only malign spirits are signified.44

non se aliter accipi, quam maledicere voluisse, dubtare non possit. Quae igitur nos causa campellit, ut post offensionem aurium tam multarum, ut iam paene sint omnium, quae hoc verbum nonnisi in malam partem audire consuerunt, quod diximus cogamur exponere, cum possimus Angelorum nomine adhibito eamdem offensionem, quae nomine daemonum fiere poterat, evitare? 43 Even though Augustine attempted to mark a clear line between the categories of “angel” and “demon,” his readers did not always follow his instruction. In one of the “new” Augustinian sermons, discovered in the 1990s, Augustine explains how humans come to worship demons: they perceive that their souls are in need of cleansing, and because they are proud, “the False, Deceptive, and the Proud One” infiltrates their communities and promises purification through “some kind of rites.” Of the four manuscripts that contain part of of the sermon, three then specify the type of rites: these lost souls become “worshippers of demons, which are the evil angels.” Quia vero superbia erat in eis, interposuit se falsus et fallax et superbus, qui eis promitteret quod per artes nescio quas superbiae purgarentur animae eorum, et fecit cultores daemoniorum, id est angelorum malorum (New Sermon [Dolbeau] 26.32; ed. Dolbeau, Discorsi Nuovi XXXV/2, 668-69). 44 Civ. 9.19 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 662-64; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 384): eosdem perhibent ab aliis angelos dici, quos ipsi daemones nuncupant, iam mihi de bonis Angelis aliquid video disserendum, quos isti esse non negant, se eos bonos daemones vocare quam Angelos malunt. Nos autem, sicut Scriptura loquitur, secundum quam Christiani sumus, Angelos quidem partim bonos, partim malos, numquam vero bonos daemones legimus; sed ubicumque illarum Litterarum hoc nomen positum reperitur, sive daemones, sive daemonia dicantur, nonnisis maligni significantur spiritus.

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If Scripture represents the best of Christian language, then the cateogory of “good demons” is absurd, given that in no way are “daemones” treated as benevolent beings, nor is “daemonia” a good thing. In one stroke, Augustine takes away the equivocation of good angels and demons, denying any overlap between the two groups according to the evidence found in Scripture. This second method of guaranteeing the depravity of demons—turning to scriptural usage—may have created a difficulty for Augustine. To consider the stories of demons in Scripture would indeed establish that they are malevolent creatures. However, raising the example of Scripture calls the question regarding angelic appearances as well, and what might be learned from them. The language used of angels in Scripture does not portray them as the morally stable and unchanging beings that Augustine would want them to be: the angel Raphael in Tobit lies and disguises his appearance to help Tobit’s family, other angels are often “angry,” and we can recall Paul’s anxiety about the shifting—or shifty?—appearance of angels. By the lights of Scripture, angels have many of the same ambiguities of character as demons. To subvert this appearance, Augustine suggests that while humans suffer the passions in life, and we know that demons are susceptible to the passions, angels are free from the passions. In Augustine’s reasoning, the appearance of angels as beings subject to experiences like those of demons and humans is just a quirk of the language of Scripture, and not a reflection of the real interiority of angels. Note that as he explores the possibilities of human passivity, Augustine acknowledges that it may be fairly asked whether our being subject to passions of this kind even while doing good works belongs only to the infirmity of this present life. For the holy angels may punish without anger those whom they receive for punishment under the eternal law of God; and they

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may minister to the sorrowful without any fellow-feeling of sorrow; and when those whom they love are in peril, they may help them without themselves feeling fear. Yet ordinary human speech ascribes such passions to them also; for though they have none of our infirmity, their actions resemble the actions to which those passions move us. So too, according to the Scriptures, God himself is angered; yet he is not disturbed by any passion. For this word is used to indicate the effect of his vengeance, rather than any disturbance to which he is subject.45 Human logic makes the mistake of linking the actions undertaken by angels with a particular psychology. Angels may outwardly appear to act as humans act, but they do not share in the same mechanism of intention, or passivity, that fuels human action. Like God, angels can seem to be “angry,” but remain philosophically “undisturbed.” In this defense of the impassive integrity of angels, Augustine’s reasoning resembles that of Iamblichus as he defended theurgic rites from the charge of superstition: human perception is not adequate to understand divine beings, and thus mistakenly attributes to them qualities of interiority which are not appropriate to them. Speaking more generally, as well, it is clear that Augustine’s discussion of angels follows the terms of Iamblichus’s discussion of divine beings; they both find stability of character or nature to be the most important quality to be discussed regarding divine agency. Even though Augustine represented a major influence on Christian tradition, there were other late antique Christians who did not share Augustine’s focus on the issue of stability. Indeed, for someone like Evagrius of

45

Civ. 9.5 (ed. Gentili, Città di Dio I, 633; trans. Dyson, Augustine: The City of God, 366): Sed adhuc merito quaeri potest, utrum ad vitae praesentis pertineat infirmitatem etiam in quibusque bonis officiis huiusce modi perpeti affectus, sancti vero Angeli et sine ira puniant, quos accipiunt aeterna Dei lege puniendos, et miseris sine miseriae compsassione subveniant, et periclitantibus eis, quos diligunt, sine timore opitulentur; et tame istarum nomina passionum consuetudine locutionis humanae etiam in eos usurpentur propter quamdam operum similitudinem, non propter affectionum infirmitatem, sicut ipse Deus secundum Scripturas irascitur, nec tamen ulla passione turbatur. Hoc enim verbum vindictae usurpavit effectus, non illius turbulentus affectus.

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Pontus, the instability of angels—and of all rational beings—forms the foundation for his program of developing the advanced Christian.

JOINING THE BATTLE, GUARDING THE NOUS Evagrius of Pontus’s writing is distinctive within late antique Christianity, but as a writer less frequently read than Augustine, he had less of an influence on later Greek and Christian tradition.46 Even so, scholars recognize Evagrius as an important voice of early monastic theology and practice.47 His conception of the essence of angels depends on an account of the nature of all rational beings—including humans and demons—that stands starkly at odds with that of Augustine, yet shares with Augustine its indebtedness to pagan conversations about daemons. Thus, to see how Evagrius theorizes the relationships between angels, daemons, and humans, it is necessary first to understand the Platonic conception of the soul. Most philosophical thought about the composition of the human soul in late antiquity can be traced back to Plato’s description of it in The Republic (4.435-42). The interiority of humans, he says, can be divided into three parts: the reasoning part, identified by later thinkers as the nous, the spirited part, known as the epithumikos, and the appetitive part, the thumikos. In the Timaeus, Plato has his main speaker describe the highest part of the soul, the reasoning part, in more detail:

46

Mainly because of his condemnation alongside Origen in 553. See the recent renaissance in Evagrian studies, well-represented by Robert E. Sinkewiscz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, Steps to Spiritual Perfection: Studies on Spiritual Progress in Evagrius Ponticus (New York: Newman Press, 2005). 47

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Regarding the most lordly form of the soul that is in us, it is necessary that we think that God has given to each of us a proper daemon, one which we say lives at the highest point of the body and lifts us from the earth toward our kin in heaven, as beings thare are not earthly creatures but heavenly ones.48 The daemon is a part of each human, internal to it and constitutive of the highest part of the soul. Proper attention to one’s daemon is necessary for full awareness and even happiness, for Plato notes the linguistic connection between the name “daemon” and the idiom for happiness, “eudaemonia.”49 While the daemon resides within humans as a part of the soul, there are several indications in Plato’s description that this daemon is in some ways distinct from the human in whose soul it inheres. First, it is “given to us by God” and arguably belongs to the heavens. Second, it acts on us to “lift us toward” those heavens, a phrase which intimates that the daemon exerts an exterior force— suggesting something that a human, acting on her own, could not do. To accomplish this, the daemon has a connection to a different world: originating outside the soul, it directs our human attention away from ourselves and toward the heavens. In other texts, Plato attributes just such a daemon to Socrates, one that would advise Socrates

48

Plato, Tim. 90A (R. D. Archer-Hind, ed., The Timaeus of Plato [London: Macmillan, 1888; repr. Salem, NH: Ayer Company Publishers, 1988], 336): τὸ δὲ περὶ τοῦ κυριωτάτου παρ’ἡμῖν ψυχῆς εἲδους διανοεῖσθαι δεῖ τῇδε, ὡς ἄρα αὐτὸ δαίμονα θεὸς ἑκάστῳ δέδωκε, τοῦτο ὅ δὴ φαμεν οἰκεῖν μὲν ἡμῶν ἐπ’ἄκρῳ τῷ σώματι, πρὸς δὲ τὴν ἐν οὐρανῷ ξυγγένειαν ἀπὸ γῆς ἡμᾶς αἲρειν ὡς ὄντας φυτὸν οὐκ ἔγγειον ἀλλὰ οὐράνιον. 49 Plato, Tim. 90C (ed. Archer-Hind, Timaeus of Plato, 338): ἃτε δὲ θεραπεύοντα τὸ θεῖον ἔχοντά τε αὐτὸν εὖ κεκοσμημένον τὸν δαίμονα ξύνοικον ἐν αὐτῷ διαφερόντως εὐδαίμονα εἶναι. The earliest mention of this linguistic coincidence is Xenocrates’ Frag 81 Heinze— I learned this from the editors of Iamblichus’s de mysteriis, Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell, in Iamblichus, at 331 n. 464.

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when not to take a particular action.50 The fact that it could contradict Socrates’ original intent and direct him to an alternate course reveals the daemon’s independence from Socrates. While Plato imagines a daemon as occupying the highest part of the human soul, the purposes of a daemon as Plato describes them require that the daemon remain in some respects independent of a human being’s proper interiority. The notion of a daemon that could influence the inner workings of the human fascinated later writers.51 Apuleius, whose work earlier demonstrated the passivity of daemons when understood as independent creatures, also considered daemons as a part of human interiority. In his work de deo Socrati—perhaps better titled de daemone Socrati—Apuleius ponders the work of this internal impulse and how it might function in others. He first demonstrates the existence of this daemon, a being associated with the highest part of the soul. Instead of citing the Timaeus, however, Apuleius turns elsewhere, citing a few verses of the Aeneid as his proof to assert that the human soul is itself a daemon: The human soul, therefore, even when situated in the present body, is called, according to a certain signification, a daemon. O say, Euryalus, do Gods inspire In minds this ardour, or does fierce desire

50

See, for example, the description of this “voice” in Apology 30b, 31d, as well as Phaedrus 242b-d. On the philosophical inconsistencies caused by Socrates, the paragon of rationality, taking following the order of such an oracular voice, see Socrates' Divine Sign: Religion, Practice, and Value in Socratic Philosophy, a special issue of APEIRON: A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science, Vol. 38/ no. 2 (June 2005). 51

Dragos-Andrei Giulea has recently argued that Christian psychological figurings of daemons reach back as far as Athenagoras (ca. 177 C.E.). See “The Watchers’ Whispers: Athenagoras’ Legatio 25,1-3 and the Book of the Watchers,” Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007): 258-81.

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Rule as a God in its possessor’s breast?52 Even though Virgil does not use the word “daemon” in this passage, Apuleius sees in the passage a suggestion that the mind, marked by “ardor,” may be best described as a “god” that resides in humans. In the division of mind and “breast,” Apuleius telegraphs the division of human subjectivity into multiple parts—one mind, ruled by ardor, another the “breast,” ruled by fierce desire. It is in the mind that Apuleius locates the “daemon,” a positioning which demonstrates that he understands the daemon in much the same way as it was described in the Timaeus. Additionally, there are other signals that Apuleius, while he does not choose to cite the passage from the Timaeus in his work, draws from the same kinds of traditions as it does. For example, Apuleius writes of a connnection between daemons and the soul in the many ways of referring to the interiority of humans that he knows: his illustration is that those who are blessed are called “eudaemones,” suggesting that they have a good daemon as their disposition. Apuleius expands on this linguistic comparison which Plato reported to note that in Latin, we might know the daemon as a genius, he says, understanding that this genius is “the mind of every one.” Whether the language is Greek or Latin, there are indications of the connection between daemons and human souls in the very words used to refer human emotions and human subjectivity. In Apuleius’s thinking, the daemon that resides at the highest part of the soul is a shadow will, a self unburdened by the frailty of the human, yet granted access to

52

de deo Socrati 150 (ed. Beaujeu, Apulée, 35; trans. Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 244): Nam quodam significatu et animus humanus etiam nunc in corpore situs daemon nuncupatur: ...dine hunc ardorem m<entibus> .

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the human’s inner workings. The daemon assigned to each person, Apuleius says, is “a perfect guardian, a singular prefect, a domestic speculator, a proper curator, an intimate inspector, an assiduous observer, an inseparable arbiter, a reprobater of what is evil, an approver of what is good.”53 This “intimate inspector” has the best qualities of an objective observer, and yet is so closely linked to the human so as to understand all her mental processes. Even though a daemon may work “by dreams, by tokens, and perhaps also manifestly,” Apuleius exhorts his audience to know that “there is nothing concealed from those guardians either within the mind, or external to it; but… the dæmon who presides over you inquisitively participates of all that concerns you, sees all things, understands all things, and in the place of conscience dwells in the most profound recesses of the mind.” 54 Late antique Christians also understood the highest part of the mind to be aligned with a divine being; however, in these Christian schemata, it was an angel that championed the nous, rather than a daemon. As an example, consider Gregory of Nazianzus’s account of the human constitution and its relation to the divine. As humans were created, substance from the noetic realm (that which is immaterial) was

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de deo Socrati 156 (ed. Beaujeu, Apulée, 36; trans. Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 245): Hic, quem dico, privus custos, singularis praefectus, domesticus speculator, proprius curator, intimus cognitor, adsiduus observator, individuus arbiter, inseparabilis testis, malorum inprobator, bonorum probator. 54 de deo Socrati 155-56 (ed. Beaujeu, Apulée, 36; trans. Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 245, italics in original): nihil homini prae istis custodibus nec intra animum nec foris esse secreti, quin omnia curiose ille participet; omnia visitet, omnia intellegat, in ipsis penitissimis mentibus vice conscientiae deversetur. Taylor’s note to this phrase observes that this idea—that the daemon may also be called “conscience”—is preserved in a commentary on the First Alcibades by Olympiodorus (ca. 495-570): “It must be said, therefore, that the allotted daemon is conscience, which is the supreme flower of the soul, is guiltless in us, is an inflexible judge, and a witness to Minos and Rhadamanthus of the transactions of the present life. This also becomes the cause to us of our salvation, as always remaining in us without guilt, and not assenting to the errors of the soul, but disdaining them, and converting the soul to what is proper. You will not err, therefore, in calling the allotted daemon conscience” (L. G. Westerlink, ed., Commentary on the First Alcibades of Plato [Amsterdam: NorthHolland Pub. Co., 1956], cited by Taylor, Apuleius’ Golden Ass, 245).

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combined with substance from the sensory world.55 The way that Gregory chooses to describe the moment of Adam’s creation is telling: Adam was “a new Angel, a mingled worshipper, a full initiate into the visible creation, but only a neophyte in the intellectual.”56 Ideally, as humanity in general progressed from Adam forward, and as each human progressed in his own life, the combination of these substances would include more and more noetic material. As Dayna Kalleres explains, the purpose of creation was not properly to acquire more divine knowledge, but to acquire more divinity of self, expressed as the heightened concentration of noetic substance. The expectation is that, over time, the human would increase the influence of the intellectual, and decrease the influence of the aesthetic or sensual.57 Such anthropological assumptions are the context in which Gregory offers several prayers; these theurgical prayers, Kalleres argues, help Gregory in his battle against the demonic influences. Gregory’s words paint the picture of a human struggling to protect his noetic substance from the attacks of demons, and he comes to call upon angels to assist him in keeping his identity. Gregory taunts the demon, “Go away, go away, for I sense the battle. Even if you might possess my body, still in my mind [nous] I will not suffer.”58 In the battle against the demonic, Gregory is assisted by angels, who help him protect his soul.

55

See the discussion of creation and Incarnation in Gregory by Dayna S. Kalleres, “Demons and Divine Illumination: A Consideration of Eight Prayers by Gregory of Nazianzus,” Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007): 157-88, esp. 168-70 and her citations there. I thank Dayna for sharing an advance copy of this article with me. 56 Or. 38.11 (Claudio Moreschini, ed., Grégoire de Nazianze: Discours 38-41, Sources chrétiennes 358 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1990], 124-26), cited by Kalleres, “Demons and Divine Illumination,” 170. 57 Kalleres, “Demons and Divine Illumination,” 170. 58 Prayer 6.12-14 (PG 37:1403; text and trans. Kalleres, “Demons and Divine Illumination,” 166-67) .

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Go away, go away, evil one, manslayer; Go away, sight of terrible sufferings, raging evil; Go away, Christ is within, to whom I have offered and given my soul. Flee, giving up as quickly as possible. O help, angels standing by! O a tyrant, and a thief is approaching. From them take me away, yes, beloved ones, I am being stoned.59 Gregory evokes angels who watch the battle as his helpers; as demons attempt to drag Gregory away from his divinized state, angels help protect him in battle. Evagrius of Pontus, who refers to Gregory as his teacher, also depicts the life of a Christian as a battle in which angels and demons vie to influence the soul. 60 In the Kephalia Gnostica, he specifies the combatants in this battle: “the contenders are human beings, those who assist them are the angels of God, and their adversaries are the filthy demons.”61 The struggle is pitched, because angels and demons fight to influence more than the actions of humans; they work to change the composition of souls, making humans more like themselves. This is possible because human subjectivity exists on a continuum alongside angels and demons—all three are “rational beings,” separate by degree rather than kind. David Brakke signals the complexity of this arrangement when he says that all these beings are “closely imbricated with one another in a series of overlapping derivations.”62 More specifically, the differences between the three classes are a result of shifting elements of their constitutions of those classes. As Evagrius sees it, “angels have a

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Prayer 5 (PG 37:1403; text and trans. Kalleres, “Demons and Divine Illumination,” 166). Evagrius calls Gregory his teacher in Praktikos 89 epilogue, cited by Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 49. 61 G. Frankenberg, ed., Evagrius Ponticus, Abhandlungen der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen und philologisch-historische Klasse (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), 472, ll. 3-4. 62 Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 76.

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predominance of nous and fire, humans of appetite [epithumikos] and earth, and demons have more anger [thumikos] and air.”63 If different beings are marked by the predominance of one element over another, it implies that each being has all elements and could, at some moment in time, be marked by the predominance of another—thus shifting to another class. As Brakke observes, the “distinction between human beings and demons”—and I might add angels—“is not as clear and oppositional” as we may think.64 Further suggesting that the categories of rational beings are not stable, Evagrius notes that humans, who are located midway between angels and demons,65 may move toward one or another category by their actions. To start, Evagrius describes demons are those rational natures that, “on account of a predominance of thumikos [
], [fall] from the service of God.” 66 He notes that the same may happen to the “angry” man; “in the world to come, the angry man67 is not reckoned among the angels, nor is he entrusted with the primacy. For he does not see as a result of passion, and readily he is irritated about those who conduct themselves against him, and he falls from vision, and he casts them in danger.” The angry man is just like a demon because of the predominance of thumikos, and for that, both of these

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KG 1.68 (F. Guillaumont, ed., Les six centuries des “Kephalia Gnostica” d’Évagre le Pontique, PO 28 [Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1958], 49). Notice the expurgated version (S1 in Guillaumont’s edition, 49): “Among the holy angels, there is more of nous; among humans there is more of appetite, and among demons there is more anger.” 64 Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 76. 65 “Those who say humans are midway between angels and demons are right”: KG 4.13 (PO 28:141); notice the variance of the expurgated version, “It is right that humans say they are between angels and demons,” a change in syntax that emphasizes that humans claim this status without agreeing that it is correct to do so (PO 28:140). 66 KG 3.34 (PO 28:111). 67   , a man who has the same quality that presides in demons, likely thumikos.

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“are estranged from the order of the angels.”68 Even Evagrius’s delivery of praise and condemnation affirms the instability of rational beings. He points out that “we honor the angels, not because of their nature, but because of their excellence/virtue; we abuse demons on account of evil in them.”69 While the nature of angels is not praiseworthy in and of itself, their virtue is; demons certainly have “evil in them,” but it is allowable that they may not be permanently evil.70 The fluidity of these categories allows demons and angels to attempt to shape human efforts toward the development of a more advanced Christian self. Each class has its own methods of influence. Demons participate in this battle in many ways,71 but their primary aim is to influence negatively the nous within the human. Demons “do not cease from accusing the gnostic, even if he is not foolish. This is so that they draw his nous toward them.”72 Specialized demons of particular types approach this goal—the distraction of the nous—in ways aligned with their skills. Demons devoted to particular vices have special ways of inviting the nous away from prayer: Even when you seem to be with God, keep guard against the demon of fornication, for he is very deceitful and most jealous. He pretends to be swifter than the movement and vigilance of your mind so as to distance it from God while it is standing before him with reverence and fear.73

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KG 4.38 (PO 28:153). The expurgated verion is not as long. KG 5.47 (PO 28:197). The expurgated version is slightly different, saying, “We are honoring the angels, not on account of their nature, but their virtue(s).” 70 This implication of Evagrius’s system, that demons might at one moment regain some of their moral, thus ontological, status and return to the angelic order, aligns with one of the claims of Origen which gave other Christians the most trouble: that Satan himself might eventually repent and be restored, along with other souls, to God. 71 See Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, particularly the chapter on Evagrius, 48-77. 72 KG 3.90 (PO 28:135). 73 On Prayer 90 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 202): Κἂν μετὰ Θεοῦ δοκῇς εἶναι, φυλάττου τῆς πορνείας δαίμονα. Λίαν γάρ ἐστιν ἀπατεὼν, καὶ φθονερώτατος, καὶ βούλεται ὀξύτερος εἶναι τῆς κινήσεως καὶ νήψεως τοῦ νοός σου, καὶ ἀπὸ Θεοῦ ἀποσπᾷν αὐτὸν παρεστῶτα αὐτῷ μετ’ εὐλαβείας, καὶ φόβου. 69

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The instinctive human reaction against such demonic attacks can itself be used by the offending demons.74 Demons can play tricks on humans, appearing as angels.75 Angels, alternately, with the predominance of nous in their own constitutions, actively help humans defend their own nous. “When an angel attends us,” Evagrius writes, “all at once those who trouble us stand aside and the mind finds itself greatly at ease and praying soundly.”76 Even if the human cannot summon a great deal of effort, she can count on immediate help from angels. “When the angel of God is present, with a single word he puts an end to every opposing activity within us and moves the light of the mind [nous] to an unerring activity.” 77 This immediate help is evidenced in Scripture, as well: “The saying in the Apocalypse that the angel brought incense to offer among the prayers of the saints (Rev. 8:3),” Evagrius consoles his readers, “I take to be this grace which is operated through the angel; for it instils [sic] knowledge of true prayer so that the mind [nous] stands thereafter free of all turmoil, acedia, and negligence.”78 The help of angels may take multiple forms, once a “word,” once a “dream,” and even sometimes “blows.”79

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KG 3.90 (PO 28:135). On Prayer 95 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 203): Δίκαιόν ἐστι μηδὲ τὸν δόλον τοῦτόν σε ἀγνοεῖν, ὅτι ἐν καιρῷ μερίζονται ἑαυτοὺς οἱ δαίμονες, καὶ εἰ δόξης βοήθειαν ἐπιζητεῖν, εἰσίασιν οἱ λοιποὶ ἐν σχήμασιν ἀγγελικοῖς τοὺς πρώτους ἐξελαύνοντες, πρὸς τό σε ἐξαπατᾶσθαι ὑπ’ αὐτῶν, τῇ γνώμῃ, ὡς δῆθεν ἁγίων ὄντων ἀγγέλων. 76 On Prayer 30 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 195): Ἐπιστάντος ἀγγέλου ἀθρόον ἅπαντες ἀφίστανται οἱ ἐνοχλοῦντες ἡμῖν, καὶ εὑρίσκεται ὁ νοῦς ἐν πολλῇ ἀνέσει, ὑγιῶς προσευχόμενος. 77 On Prayer 74 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 201): Ὁ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἄγγελος ἐπιστὰς λόγῳ μόνῳ ἅπασαν τὴν ἀντικειμένην ἐνέργειαν παύει ἐξ ἡμῶν, καὶ κινεῖ τὸ φῶς τοῦ νοῦ ἀπλανῶς ἐνεργεῖν. 78 On Prayer 75 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 201): Τὸ λέγειν ἐν τῇ Ἀποκαλύψει κομίζεσθαι τὸν ἄγγελον θυμίαμα ἵνα δῷ εἰς τὰς προσευχὰς τῶν ἁγίων, οἶμαι τὴν χάριν εἶναι ταύτην διὰ τοῦ ἀγγέλου ἐνεργουμένην· γνῶσιν γὰρ ἐμποιεῖ τῆς ἀληθοῦς 75

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Because humans are also rational beings, they are expected to struggle on their own behalf. Instead of waiting helplessly as the angels or the demons prevail over her soul, the striving Christian can actively shape her status. Even those emotions that seem to reflect the influence of demons can be used, with angelic help, to repel demonic activity. Evagrius explains: The nature of the irascible part is to fight against the demons and to struggle over any sort of pleasure. And so the angels, on the one hand, suggest to us spiritual pleasure and the blessedness that will come from it, and they urge us to turn our irascibility against the demons. These latter, on the other hand, drag us toward worldly desires and compel the irascible part, contrary to its nature, to fight with people, so that with the mind [nous] darkened and fallen from knowledge it may become the traitor of the virtues.80 With effort, we can direct our anger in ways that contribute to, rather than detract from, our struggle. Such human effort does not go unnoticed by the other participants in the battle: “Know,” Evagrius writes, that the holy angels encourage us in prayer and stand present with us, at the same time rejoicing and praying on our behalf. If then we grow careless and admit contrary thoughts, we vex them greatly, because they struggle so hard on our behalf but we on our part are not willing to beseech God for ourselves; rather, disdaining their service and abandoning their Lord and God, we consort with impure demons.81

προσευχῆς, ὥστε ἑστάναι λοιπὸν ἐκτὸς παντὸς κλόνου, ἀκηδίας τε, καὶ ὀλιγωρίας τὸν νοῦν. 79 KG 6.86 (PO 28:253). 80 Praktikos 24 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 102): Φύσις θυμοῦ τὸ τοῖς δαίμοσι μάχεσθαι καὶ ὑπὲρ ἡστινοσοῦν ἡδονῆς ἀγωνίζεσθαι. Διόπερ οἱ μὲν ἄγγελοι τὴν πνευματικὴν ἡμῖν ἡδονὴν ὑποβάλλοντες καὶ τὴν ἐκ ταύτης μακαριότητα, πρὸς τοὺς δαίμονας τὸν θυμὸν τρέψαι παρακαλοῦσιν· ἐκεῖνοι δ’αὖ πάλιν πρὸς τὰς κοσμικὰς ἐπιθυμίας ἕλκοντες ἡμᾶς, τὸν θυμὸν παρὰ φύσιν μάχεσθαι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις βιάζονται, ἵνα σκοτισθεὶς ὁ νοῦς καὶ τῆς γνώσεως ἐκπεσὼν προδότης γένηται τῶν ἀρετῶν. Cf. the description of demons distracting the nous in On Prayer 10. 81 On Prayer 81(ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 201-2): Γίνωσκε, ὅτιπερ οἱ ἅγιοι ἄγγελοι προτρέπονται ἡμᾶς εἰς προσευχὴν, καὶ συμπαρίστανται ἡμῖν χαίροντες ἅμα, καὶ προσευχόμενοι ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν· ἐὰν οὖν ἀμελήσωμεν, καὶ δεξώμεθα λογισμοὺς ἐναντίους λίαν παροξύνομεν αὐτοὺς, ὅτιπερ ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν ἀγωνίζονται τοσοῦτον, ἡμεῖς δὲ οὐδὲ ὑπὲρ

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It is clear that even though angels help fight on their behalf, human beings should not act as hapless, helpless victims in the battle. Their imaginations and their management of emotion can shape the course of their development, and bring them closer to the predominance of nous that characterizes angels, if they skillfully use the help of angels to get there.

UNSTABLE CONCEPTS OF ANGELS Even though Christian cosmologies can be distinguished, for the most part, from their pagan counterparts by the presence of angels, Christian ideas of angels are not independent from pagan traditions. This chapter has argued that even the most wellaccepted account of angelic natures, that of Augustine in the City of God, did not define angels against pagan concepts of daemons so much as through pagan concepts of daemons. Augustine did not happen upon the stability of the will of angels as their defining characteristic; instead, his theorization of angels and of demons was part of a wider cultural conversation about the passivity of divine beings. In particular, the parallels between Augustine’s arguments regarding angels, their lack of passivity, and the foibles of human perception, on the one hand, and Iamblichus’s arguments about the stability of daemons, on the other, are striking. Even as Augustine’s trajectory eventually shaped later Christian traditions regarding angels, his was not the only conception of angelic natures available in late

ἑαυτῶν βουλόμεθα ἱκετεῦσαι τὸν Θεόν· ἀλλὰ καταφρονοῦντες τῆς αὐτῶν λειτουργίας, καὶ τὸν τούτων Θεὸν, καὶ Δεσπότην καταλιμπάνοντες δαίμοσιν ἀκαθάρτοις ἐντυγχάνομεν.

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antiquity. Evagrius and his predecessor Gregory of Nazianzus are important witnesses to the diversity of theological speculation about angelic natures. Christian cosmologies may have expanded upon the types of beings in the divine realm, fleshing out the knowledge of angels, but they did so with the categories of thought developed by pagan philosophers. The way that Evagrius and Gregory portrayed angels—and humans and demons—was, in its own fashion, influenced by pagan theories of the inner daemon and the nous. We will see in the next chapter that early Christians held a myriad of expectations about angelic protection.

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Chapter Two MARKING MORAL APTITUDE: COMPANION ANGELS IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders? and suppose one of them suddenly pulled me to its heart: I’d dissolve beside its stronger existence. —The Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke

The story of the emergence of the Duino Elegies is, as critic Kathleen Komar writes, truly an “irresistible gambit.”1 Feeling alone and unsure whether his poetic talents had followed him to the castle in northern Italy where he had agreed to stay for a time during the winter of 1911-1912, Rilke wandered out to walk in the mountains and heard a wan voice, thinned by the wind of a winter storm, speak the opening sentence of what would become the first elegy, those words reproduced above in the epigram.2 Rilke began the composition of the Elegies while he stayed at the castle in Duino, but it would be another ten years before they were completed—a decade which saw the publication of both Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land. The dis-ease expressed by these works mirrors Rilke’s own, the deep affliction of the modern. Brought to wonder at the divine and its power, all the while doubting the possiblity of connection with a realm so removed, Rilke yearns to be heard, to garner a response,

1

Kathleen L. Komar, Transcending Angels: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 1. 2 William H. Gass discusses the fifteen (!) different English translations of these words in his Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Knopf, 1999), 56-64. My own translation—now the sixteenth—is a combination of the phrases of Leishman (Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender [New York: Norton, 1939]) and Hammer and Jaeger (The Duino Elegies, trans. Louis Hammer and Sharon Ann Jaeger [Old Chatham, NY: Sachem Press, 1991]). The German reads “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.”

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but concludes that being chosen as the intimate of a particular angel might prove too much for him to bear. Humanity is perhaps better off without contact with the divine—left alone, but at least intact. By contrast, Christian tradition posits very optimistically that individual humans can indeed have communion with angels; more precisely, from the earliest centuries of Christianity, thinkers have assumed that each human is linked to an angel, which serves as a protector and guide. The idea has endured through two millennia: visiting a contemporary Christian bookstore, one can find an avalanche of pins, magnets, bookmarks, nightlights, and other items meant to remind us of the protection of our angels. The notion of a guardian angel is so persistent in Christian thought that the one scholarly work to examine it, Joseph Gorman’s study, thought the tradition entirely apparent from Scripture alone and perceived it to remain constant throughout the time of the earliest Christians. In his view, patristic writers “saw no need to make any notable additions” to the concept of the guardian angel laid out by stories in the New and Old Testaments.3 Even a more adventurous writer than Gorman, Jean Daniélou affirms in his monograph about The Angels and Their Mission that the office of such an angel is established very early and does not admit diversity. “It is on the guardian angels,” he pronounces, “that tradition seems to be the most constant and unyielding.”4 Despite the intent reexamination of early traditions undertaken by scholars and the production of “Christianities” where there was once a

3

Joseph P. Gorman, “The Development of the Doctrine of the Personal Guardian Angel,” (MA thesis, St. Joseph’s Seminary [Yonkers, NY], 1956), 13. 4 Jean Daniélou, Les Anges et leur Mission (Chevetogne: Éditions de Chevetogne, 1953); David Heimann, trans., The Angels and Their Mission (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1976), 68.

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single “Christianity,”5 these assesments still stand: to read about the office of the guardian angel in the early church is to read these two sources.6 However, the kind of relationship imagined in early Christian traditions between humans and the angels assigned to them personally does develop and change over the first several centuries of this era. I argue that the term “guardian angel” does not adequately reflect the complexity early Christians envisioned for this personal angel. Instead, “companion angel” better describes those angels with a special relationship to a particular human being.7 To demonstrate this, I will follow three lines of inquiry. First I will explore the cultural and scriptural sources from which Christians drew their ideas about such angels. Then I will examine the evidence from late antiquity that shows humans beginning to petition for the companionship of angels, even when the notion of a pre-assigned angel is yet common. Finally, I will argue that several texts from the fourth and fifth centuries reflect a new development in the tradition of angels assigned to individual human beings: that angelic companionship was not automatic, but rather was earned as a result of human virtue. While earlier Christians had expected angels to be assigned at a particular stage in life, there emerged in the fourth century a novel conception of the companion angel. Such an angel was a marker of moral aptitude, particularly when that aptitude had been proven by ascetic effort.

5

See, as the index of these efforts, Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 6 Nathaniel Deutsch’s Guardians at the Gate: Angelic Vice Regency in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 1999) briefly considers Gnostic traditions about the angel Sabaoth, but does not explore the guardian angel. 7 The term makes use of David Brakke’s description of the angel, acquired by means of magic, who could become “a more long-term, all-purpose ‘companion’” (Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 229).

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CHRISTIANS AND THEIR ANGELS: “See that you do not despise these little ones” In early Christianity, it was widely believed that individual humans were assigned angels to protect and help them. Writers saw in Greek traditions a predecessor of their own assumptions about these personal assistants.8 Eusebius the historian, for example, sees the angels provided by God for each human as something common to pagan and Christian alike. Plato, he reasons, represented the tradition of the protector angel without being aware of it; just as he speaks of hell, but in different geographic terms, Plato speaks of the angels Christians know from Matthew 18, but in different terms. Eusebius asks a rhetorical question: Again, does not Plato know also rivers of fire, and the deep of the earth, called by the Barbarians Gehenna, which he calls poetically Tartarus, and introduces Cocytus, and Acheron, and Phlegethon, and names of this kind, as places of punishment for correctional training? And representing, according to the Scripture, the angels of the least of the little ones which behold the face of God [cf. Matthew 18], and also His supervision extended to us through the angels set over us, he does not hesitate to write: “After all the souls have chosen their lives, according to their lot, they went forward in order to Lachesis, and she sent with each the genius of his choice, to be the guardian of his life, and the fulfiller of his chosen destiny.” 9 The way that Plato identifies the “guardian” of each soul here, as the soul’s “genius” or δαίμον, may have a particular negative connotation for Christians, but Eusebius

8

Compare the discussion in Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 68-71 and 89-91, cited by Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 286 n. 52. 9 Eusebius, prep. ev. 13.13 (Karl Mras, ed., Eusebius Werke, 8.2 [Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1956], 199-200.)

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does not hesitate to link this title to the tradition of companion angels assigned to humans. He readily connects Christian readings of Matthew 18 to Plato’s account of the soul’s “genius,” an entity assigned to it by Lachesis that helped the soul achieve its proper destiny. Eusebius likely recognized the similarity between his interpretation of Matthew 18 and Plato’s account of the entities given charge of humans on the basis of the way this δαίμον was identified, as the “guardian of life” (φύλακα τοῦ βίου). The references to the angels assigned to each individual in Christian texts contemporary to Eusebius are varied, but they offer a portrait of the companion angel as this “guard” and fulfiller of destinies. In his other writings, Eusebius likens these angels to “protectors and curators,” “captains and shepherds.”10 Basil of Caesarea considers these angels like human instructors: “Every believer has an angel to guide him as a teacher and shepherd.”11 The angel put in charge of each person “guards the soul like an army.”12 Basil can also call this angel an “overseer” or a “helper.”13 These epithets not only identified such angels, but telegraphed their responsibilities regarding humans; never yet taking full authority over a human, they yet could serve as helpful assistants, protect one from danger, and offer guidance for life. Aside from Matthew 18, other biblical passages reinforced Christian expectations of angelic protection. The multiple texts drawn together by the early fifth-century bishop of Cyrrhus, Theodoret, to interpret the claim in Psalm 33.8

10

Eusebius, dem. ev. 4.6. Basil, Contra Eunomius 3.1. 12 Basil, Hom in Ps. 33.6. 13 Basil, ep. 2; de spiritu 13.29.

11

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(LXX) that “the angel of the Lord will encamp around those who fear him, and will rescue them,” show the way these biblical passages coalesce in the Christian imagination. The Apostle’s words are also consistent with these, saying as he does about angels “are they not all spirits in the divine service sent to minister to those who are destined to inherit salvation?” [Heb 1.14] Likewise the blessed Jacob said in prayer, “The angel who rescues me from all evils” [Gen 48.16]. Likewise the patriarch Abraham said to his remarkable servant, “The Lord God will send his angel before you, and you will take a wife for my son Isaac from there” [Gen 24.7]. Likewise Zachariah said, “the angel talking in me” [Zac 1].14 The protection of the Lord offered to those who fear him is the same present in the angels “sent to minister,” the one who saved Jacob “from all evil,” that one who helped Abraham’s servant procure a wife, and the voice which reveals to Zechariah his visions. From these abundant scriptural sources—and others like them15— Christians derived information about the tasks and attitudes of their companion angels. Eusebius’s instinctive sense that Christian Scripture and Greek culture were interwoven pervades the way Christians envisioned the work of companion angels. We can observe the interplay and interweaving of scriptural exegesis and common late ancient cultural constructs in the extended discussion of these angels by the thirdcentury writer Gregory Thaumaturgus. A student of Origen’s, he composed a flowery

14

Theodoret Interpretatio in Psalmos 34 (PG 80.1104; Robert C. Hill, trans., Commentary on the Psalms 1-72, Fathers of the Church 101 [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000], 209). 15 Theodoret does not include two of the more popular reference texts for personal angels, Acts 12.15 and the book of Tobit.

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panegyric in which he expresses his gratitude for his beloved teacher. Gregory’s image of this angel reflects nothing so much as the human guide and protector of young students, the pedagogue. Traditionally, the pedagogue was slave or servant of a wealthy household, charged with governing a young person, directing his studies, and procuring for him the most prestigious teachers. At the same time, the pedagogue was responsible for the physical safety of the child when he went outside the family home; this meant that the pedagogue would walk with a child in public, deflecting unwanted sexual attention and safeguarding the child’s well-being, waiting for the child to finish his lessons and returning him to the safety of the household.16 These are the valences that Gregory brings to his depiction of his companion angel. He credits this angel with bringing him to Origen, calling it his “personal pedagogue.”

This one, who has been with me as a personal pedagogue (ἰδία παιδαγωγὸς) since I was small, who in all other ways was good, my protector and guardian of old—I and my close friends were not able to judge what was necessary, but by this one, the one who foresaw all things that were of benefit or useful to our souls, made them apparent—even now he yet raises and teaches me and leads me by the hand. And, along with everything else, he brought me into contact with this man [Origen]. This is the most important of all.17

16

For a discussion of the role of the pedagouge, see A. V. Yannicopolous, “The Pedagogue in Antiquity,” British Journal of Educational Studies 33 (1985): 173-79. Of course, the pedagogue was charged with sexual potentiality as well, as Chris Peers makes clear in his “What Does a Pedagogue Look Like? Masculinity and the Repression of Sexual Difference in Ancient Education,” Discourse 27 (2006): 189-208. 17 Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen 43-44 (Henri Crouzel, ed., Grégoire le thaumaturge: Remerciement a Origène, Sources chrétienne 148 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969], 112-14).

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Even though Gregory, like a young child, remains unaware of what might be best for him, the angel has been able to see those things which in the future will be to Gregory’s benefit and arranges for Gregory to meet his teacher. Gregory’s companion angel also embodied the physical security traditionally expected of a pedagogue, for it was not as if the angel were a distant overseer; it acted as a guide, literally bringing Gregory to Caesarea. Telling the story of how he came to travel to the city, Gregory relates that he had the assistance of a soldier. “It was not the soldier,” however, but a divine escort, a good guide and guardian, who had preserved me all the way through life as if a good journey, passing over other things…and stopping to set me up here [in Caesarea]. He did all things and organized by all methods so that we be together with this person who was cause of so many benefits for us.18 The parallelism Gregory sees between his angel and the human office of the pedagogue is even reflected in Gregory’s expectations for his angel, whom he asked to step aside upon his becoming Origen’s student. Once Gregory was in good hands with Origen, he felt he had a new pedagogue, and the companion angel who had delievered him to Origen was only required to return at the time of Origen’s death.19 Of course, the Greek social construct of the pedagogue was not Gregory’s only source; he also saw scriptural warrant for his portrait of the angel who guided him. His particular exegesis finds in Genesis 48.16 evidence that the patriarchs, too, had these angels as celestial pedagogues. Gregory directs his praise and hymns to

18 19

Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen 71 (SC 148:122-24). Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen 206 (SC 148:182).

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that one, of all those invisible and divine beings that are allied to humans, who was appointed by some great judgement to keep me safe, to tend me, and to be a guardian for me—this holy angel of God, the one who has “nourished me from my youth,” as the beloved man of God said, clearly referring to his own.20 Just as the revered patriarchs had their angelic companions, so too did Gregory, and his contemporaries—even his teacher. He considered that teacher, Origen, to be so brilliant a teacher and upstanding a Christian that he theorized him to have not just an angel as his companion, but the “angel of great counsel” itself, described in Isaiah 6, to guide him.21 This correlation between the status of the Christian and the rank of his divine companion is a notion Gregory may have learned precisely from his teacher, for Origen wrote in his Commentary on Matthew of a graduated system of divine protection. In his interpretation of Matthew 18, particularly as he interprets the angels of the little ones, Origen lays bare his ideas about the angels assigned to humans.22 In the array of scriptural passages understood to convey assurance about divine protection, Origen locates evidence that while angels guard “little ones,” more mature Christians are guarded by the Lord. So long as we are imperfect, and need one to assist us that we may be delivered from evils, we stand in need of an angel of whom Jacob said, “The angel who delivered me from all the evils” [Gen 48.16]. But, when we have become perfected, and have passed through the stage of being subject to nursing-fathers and nursing-mothers and guardians

20 21

Gregory Thaumaturgus, Panegyric on Origen 40 (SC 148:112). Panegyric on Origen 42 (SC 148:112).

22

Individual Christians may receive an angel at birth or at baptism; for each of these options, Origen cites supporting scriptural passages; Comm. in Matt. 13.26-27.

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and stewards [Gal 4.4], we are good enough to be governed by the Lord Himself.23 Thus, those who are more perfected in their Christianity can count on having the Lord as their companion, rather than an angel. The commensurate status of the divine protector extends even unto those who are not yet Christian. Origen was one of the first Christians to imagine human beings at the whim of not one, but two beings, a good angel and a wicked angel, a demon.24 For him, any person who had not yet become Christian was clearly at the behest of his wicked angel. Another way that Origen envisioned this scenario was to imagine one entity, always in charge of a person, but changing from evil to good as the person came to Christianity. That is to say, a conversion on the part of the human being could effect a conversion of sorts in that person’s companion. As it is possible for a man to change from unbelief to faith, and from intemperance to temperance, and generally from wickedness to virtue, so also it is possible that the angel, to whom any soul has been entrusted at birth, may be wicked at the first, but afterwards may at some time believe in proportion as the man believes, and may make such advance that he may become one of the angels who always behold the face of the Father in heaven [Matt 18], beginning from the time that he is yoked along with the man who was foreknown and foreordained to believe at that time, the judgments of God, which are unspeakable and unsearchable and like to the depths, fitly bringing together all this harmonious relationship—angels with men.25

23

Comm in Matt. 13.26 (Allan Menzies, trans., Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9 [Edinburgh: T & T Clark; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978], translation slightly amended). 24 Origen likely drew this notion from the Shepherd of Hermas, which he likely considered Scripture. See Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 286 n. 53 and the references cited there. 25 Comm. in Matt. 13.28 (trans. Menzies, Ante-Nicene Fathers).

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A later monastic source, the Lausiac History, records a story which reflects this belief of Origen’s. Abba Moses, a particularly impressive ascetic, was said to be so good that he was able to convert the “daimon” that had led him in his youth toward practicing evil. Because of Moses’ exemplary morals, his daimon “was led to Christ.”26 At least some early Christians thought that an upstanding human being might be able to lead his personal divine being also to be upstanding. As we saw in the last chapter, the prospect of a human being having this intimate a connection—and exchange—with a divine being is sustainable only in the most delicately reasoned and theologically progressive parts of Christian tradition. And, Origen was viewed by later Christianity as one of several too-skillful artificers, a thinker who readily—and mistakenly—allowed for the possibility of hierarchy among Christians which then manifested in their status in the cosmos. However, later Christianity preserved at least one echo of Origen’s complex ideas about angels by suggesting that a demonstrated moral fortitude was necessary for a Christian to acquire an angel.

26

Palladius, Lausiac History 19 (Cuthbert Butler, ed., The Lausiac History of Palladius, Texts and Studies [Cambridge, 1904], 59). See the Butler’s notes in the apparatus criticus, which indicate that this is a particularly difficult passage, both in Greek and in Latin translation; he admits that he is “unable to illustrate or explain this curious piece of demonology.” See also Brakke’s discussion of Abba Moses and his “repentant demon” in Demons and the Making of the Monk, 180, esp. at n. 75.

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ASKING FOR AN ANGEL Many ancient Christians assumed that an angel would be assigned them at birth or at baptism. Others took it upon themselves to ask God directly for such an angel. The most famous example of such a prayer is available to us among the hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (d. ca. 414). 27 His prayer demonstrates many of the assumptions Christians shared about these companion angels. Following is the petition he offers to God at the end of Hymn 4: [C]hase away the shameless hound of the nether world, the demon of earth, from my soul, from my prayer, from my life, and from my works. Let that demon remain outside of my body, of my spirit, and of all that is mine. Let him flee, let him leave me, material demon, the power of passions, blocking the upward path, misleading the efforts of those thirsty for God. But give me a companion, O king, a partner, a holy angel of holy power, an angel of divinely illuminated prayer, a brave friend, a protector of the soul, a protector of life, a guard over prayers, a guard over deeds. Let him keep the body purified of disease, and let him lead the soul to the neglect of the passions.28 Synesius’s request for an angel shows that he expects his God to give him respite from the perturbations of demons, those that interrupt all actions of his life, by giving him a “partner” (ξυνωνόν), “a holy angel of holy power.” He hopes that this angel might in some ways take the place of the demon that hounds him, to become his “companion” (ἕταρον) and “brave friend” (φίλον ἐσθλοδόταν). The angel might

27

Nicolaus Terzaghi, ed., Synesii Cyrenensis Hymni (Rome: Typis publicae officinae polygraphicae, 1949), 33-34. 28 My translation, although I am indebted to Augustine Fitzgerald, ed., The Essays and Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 386. Among other simplifications, I translate ἂγγελον in phrases like ἁγίας ἃγιον / ἂγγελον ἀλκᾶς as “angel,” whereas Fitzgerald uses “messenger.”

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guard his life, he asks, but also protect his body and soul. Such tasks and titles call to mind those discussed by Basil, Eusebius, and Theodoret, yet this prayer adumbrates the dependent nature of the relationship between the human and the angel: Synesius cannot assume its protection or loyalty automatically, without asking for the Lord’s help to send this angel. Synesius may appear an odd choice for a writer to represent mainstream early Christian thought about companion angels. While recently, scholars have taken Synesius’s Christianity as unproblematic, it has been habit to consider him less than entirely Christian for his commitment to and ease in the world of neoplatonic philosophy.29 But Synesius’s prayer hews as closely as any to the expectations expressed by scriptural exegetes investigating the role of these angels: that they protect and guide those to whom they are assigned by God. Other writers, those more securely within the bounds of mainstream Christianity, were not secure in the assignation of their angels, and instead were compelled to work toward a relationship with such an angel with their own efforts. The signals of this attitude of cultivation are manifold. Consider the position of utter humility assumed by the author of a prayer found at the beginning of a codex of works attributed to Macarius the Egyptian, who lived in the late fourth-century.

29

See Jay Bregman, Synesius of Cyrene: Philosopher-Bishop, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 2 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982); for scholars who demonstrate Synesius’s Christianity to be unproblematic, if different than a more traditionally canonical author, see Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics in the Court of Arcadius, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 19 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 19-39, and D. Roques, Synésios de Cyrène et la Cyrénaïque du Bas-Empire, Études d’antiquités africaines (Paris: CNRS, 1987), both cited by Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 41 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), 196 n. 161.

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Petitioning in the true sense, its speaker approaches the angel which, it is clear, has already been assigned by God to help: A prayer to the holy angel ordered by God to watch over us and diligently protect us: Holy angel, standing over my struggling soul and my miserable life, do not leave me, the sinner, in the lurch, nor go away from me because of my impurity, nor allow the evil daemon to exercise power over me by the dominion of this mortal body. Take my miserable and limp hand, and lead me on the road of salvation. Yes, holy angel of God, the one standing over my struggling soul and body, forgive me all things, anything that afflicts you all the days of my life, even if I sin in some way every day. Watch over me tonight and continue to guard me from every abuse and snare of the enemy, so that I not provoke God to anger in some sin. And pay honor on my behalf to the Lord, to prop me up in fear of him and to demonstrate me a worthy servant of his goodness. Amen.30

This Christian, whoever he may be, had a set of expectations about an angel assigned to watch his life. This “sinner” might hope that an angel would protect his body as well as his life, would help him defend himself against the demon that “exercises dominion” in “this mortal body,” and could render forgiveness to him. The angel could even work to help the supplicant avoid the very sins that might need forgiveness. However, both the act of pleading and the words of the prayer suggest that the angel could depart if offended. That is, the presence and protection of an angel were not assured; a relationship with this angel had to be developed and maintained through the avoidance of sin. Or, more baldly, it could be earned through the performance of good deeds. Some Christians ventured far beyond the notion of a cultivated friendship with an 30

PG 34:447. This prayer appears at the end of Macarius’s works in Migne’s edition, but with a note in Latin which says it appears at the top of the codex from which his works were taken.

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angel and proceeded directly to a model of exchange. As an example, weigh the fragments referring to a companion angel left to us in the works of Shenoute of Atripe. At the head of one of the largest monasteries in fifth-century Egypt, Shenoute made use of his homiletic time to rail against those he found to be in the wrong; he reserved at least part of his zeal for those who oppressed the poor. In a sermon titled de iudicio by its editor, Shenoute, singles out one rich man (likely Gesios, a local dignitary and frequent opponent of Shenoute’s31), listing among the worst of his sins the multiple and impressive ways this man has of mistreating his servants. Economic exploitation was the first of these, but the rich man also humiliates his servants, and worse, keeps them from the worship of God—that is, his servants are forced to work rather than go to church. In the midst of Shenoute’s condemnation, we find reflected the bare indices of his notions of an angel assigned to each human. In particular, this angel fills an important role in the judgement of the coming end. For example, even though the rich man creates miserable conditions for his servants, it is he, Shenoute argues, who will be miserable on the last day. Shenoute’s reasoning about this development is enlightening for our topic; he writes of the rich man: “I find that he alone will be punished by God with fire and frost, since he had not acquired for himself a helper.”32

31

Shenoute had a lengthy and acrimonious relationship with Gesios. See Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 97-100, 103-4, as well as Stephen Emmel’s discussion of their relationship in his article in Perspectives on Panopolis: An Egyptian Town from Alexander the Great to the Arab Conquest—Acts of an International Symposium Held in Leiden on 16, 17, and 18 December 1998 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), titled “From the Other Side of the Nile: Shenute and Panopolis,” 95-113. 32 Shenoute, de iudicio (Heike Behlmer, ed., Schenute von Atripe: De iudicio [Torino, Museo Egizio, Cat. 63000, Cod. IV], Catalogo del Museo Egizio di Torino, 1st ser., Monumenti e Testi 8 [Turin: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali—Sopraintendenza al Museo delle Antichità Egizie, 1996],

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Who is this helper? In another passage of the same sermon, Shenoute uses the same idiom, “to acquire for oneself,” but this time gives more detail. Taking the rich man to task for using his money to bribe government officials, rather than help the poor, Shenoute chides The one who is willing, in his arrogance, to give all his possessions until he defeats his enemy with whom he is fighting—he himself is defeated in every deception of injustice. The one who is a friend to the emperors on account of a gift, he is the one who is an enemy to the prophets of God and his apostles on account of lawlessness. And he has not acquired for himself an angel to rescue him from Satan.33

In both these passages, Shenoute uses the same construction to describe the one important task which Gesios neglects; busy with oppressing the poor and greasing his way through the Egyptian bureaucracy, this rich man forgets “to acquire for himself” an angel to help him at the moment of judgement, to rescue him from Satan.34 Shenoute’s requirements for getting such an angel are further illumined by a fragment from another of his homilies. In a moment of exegesis on Mark 4.25, “For to those who have, more will be given; and from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away,” Shenoute understands the passage to instruct Christians about the eternal significance of their temporal, everyday actions. Those who store up righteous deeds “as treasures in heaven” during their time on earth will

90: nGxe de erof xwwf eukolaze Mmof xitMpnoute xNoukwxT mNoujaf ebol jeMpFkaaf naf Nbohcos. 33 Shenoute, de iudicio (ed. Behlmer, Schenute von Atripe: De iudicio, 98): petexnaf xNtefmNtjasixht e+ Nnefyrhma throu ¥antFjro enefjaje et+twn Nmmaf. eujraeit xwwf erof xNapath nim NjinqonS. peto N¥bhr ennoq MpRro etbe dwron efo de Njaje eneprovhths Mpnoute. mNnefapostolos etbe anomia. auw MpFkw naf Nouaggelos etrefnaxmef epsatanas. 34 See the underlined phrase in notes 32 and 33, kw na=(reflexive) N=(object).

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be given even more at the time they enter the kingdom of heaven.35 The rest of the explanation of the passage suggests that, by the storage of such “treasures,” namely good deeds, one can by these deeds acquire an angel: “Those with whom the angels are secretly on earth because of their righteousness, it is they also who shall be in the kingdom with them.”36 Taken together, these three snippets outline a notion of a companion angel in Shenoute’s thought: acquired by the performance of good deeds, this angel has a protective function throughout life but also offers protection at the time when a human is most vulnerable, the day of judgement. While Shenoute—the sometimes violent and self-appointed enemy of pagans—may have bristled at the comparison, his scheme of deeds that help one acquire an angel to mount a defense against evil bears a remarkable similarity to practices recorded in the Greek magical papyri. Preserved in these collected pages are spells from the third and fourth centuries which detail several different ways to get oneself a supernatural assistant. None, however, are as vague as the “good deeds” and “righteousness” of Shenoute’s writing. Instead, the possibilities for getting a companion include drowning a cat,37 eating a raw egg on which one has written a secret formula in myrrh ink,38 or engraving a special message on an oblong stone

35

The phrase that Young translates as “treasures in heaven” occurs multiple times in de iudicio as well, a motif linking the two sermons. See Behlmer, Schenute von Atripe: De iudicio, index for axo, axwwr. 36 Michigan 158, 20d (ed. Dwight Wayne Young, Coptic Manuscripts from the White Monastery: Works of Shenute [Vienna: Hollinek, 1993], 167 [trans.], 163 [text]): Neterenaggelos ¥oop nmmau xIjmpkax xNoupechp etbeteudIkaIosunh. Ntoou on netna¥wpe nMmay xN tmNtero. 37 PGM 3.1-5 (Hans Dieter Betz, ed., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 18). 38 PGM 7.522-27 (ed. Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, 132).

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dropped by a passing falcon.39 The diversity of these methods of acquiring such divine helpers is mirrored by the titles they are given, as well as their roles: sometimes called “angels,” yet also sometimes “daemons” or “gods,” these beings could either appear once to help a practicioner with a particular event, or they could become “a more long-term, all-purpose ‘companion.’”40 Acquiring a companion in this way offered multiple benefits. In spell that begins with the engraving of the oblong stone, a practitioner is promised protection and wealth, if he or she can manage to become “a friend to the mighty angel.” When you go abroad, he will go abroad with you; when you are destitute, he will give you money. He will tell you what things will happen both when and at what time of the night or day. And if anyone asks you “What do I have in mind?” or “What has happened to me?” or even “What is going to happen?,” question the angel, and he will tell you in silence. But you will speak to the one who questions you as if from yourself.41 Having this “mighty angel” meant safety and financial security, but it also meant knowledge of the future, mindreading abilities, and, perhaps best of all, no way for others to detect the presence of such an assistant. The help one got from these angels was as close as one’s own thoughts. More importantly, while one might assume that an angel gotten by “magic” would then assist with magic, it appears that this is not the case with the “mighty angel.” Instead, the intent of the spell is to acquire the kind of personal guide, seer of the future, and helper that Christians saw in their companion angels.

39

PGM 1.65-68 (ed. Betz, Greek Magical Papyri, 4-5). The description is David Brakke’s (Demons and the Making of the Monk, 229). 41 PGM 1.171-78 (ed. Betz, Greek Magical Papryi, 7).

40

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Thus, the hope that human beings can (and regularly do) initiate and develop relationships with companion angels was common to pagan and Christian alike. Contrary to scripturally-influenced notions of angels being assigned to particular humans, Christians expected human beings to have to work for these angels, pleasing them and being worthy of them. Such ways, both pagan and Christian, of developing a relationship with a divine companion raise the question: if acquiring an angel requires the work of pleading and good deeds, is getting such an angel also dependent on the moral status of a Christian? The answer, especially in ascetic contexts, is yes.

PROVING WORTHY The Life of Antony did as much as any other single text to determine the way that early Christians thought of the project of asceticism taken up in the Egyptian desert. In it, Antony’s attempts to withdraw further and further from human society are met with increasing numbers of hostile encounters with demons. As Antony first learns more of the ascetic way of life from those whom he chooses to imitate, “the devil, the jealous hater of good, could not stand to see such determination in one so young, started to do to him those things he had the habit of doing.”42 First reminding Antony of the comforts of his former life, then outright attacking him, then appearing as different possible sexual partners (as a woman, then as a young black boy), then

42

Athanasius, Life of Antony 5.1 (G. J. M. Bartelink, ed., Vie d’Antoine, Sources chrétiennes 400 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994], 142).

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multiple animals; the devil pulls out every stop in order to thwart Antony’s plans for withdrawal and ascesis. At a dramatic moment in the text, when a zooful of terrifying demons in the form of animals appear to “break down the four walls” of his house, seeking to harm Antony, and he is “being flogged and tortured by them, feeling the most terrible bodily pain,” and “groaning on account of that bodily pain,” Antony still manages to mock the devil while he is lying, breathless, on the floor. Then, all at once, his pains cease. Here is how the Life of Antony recounts the scene: And so looking up, he saw the roof as if it were being opened and a certain ray of light coming down upon him. And the demons immediately disappeared, the bodily pain immediately ceased, and his house was again set right. Antony, sensing the support, and breathing again now that his pains were lessened, questioned the vision that had manifested, saying “Where were you? Why didn’t you appear at the beginning, so to put a stop to my grief?” And a voice came to him: “Antony, I was here, but I waited to watch your struggle. Since you held out and were not bested, I will be to you always a helper, and I will make your name known everywhere.” Having heard this, he got up to pray. And he felt so much better, that he felt even stronger in his body than he had before.43

Though Antony was at the point of death, scarcely able to breathe or even rise off the floor, the appearance of this “ray of light” chases away the demonic attackers, relieves Antony’s pain, and even fixes the seemingly broken walls of his house. A voice announces its intention to be a “helper” to Antony for the rest of his life.

43

Athanasius, Life of Antony 10 (SC 400:162-64). I’ve left out the first phrase of section 10 for reasons that will become clear below.

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There have been many attempts to understand the nature of this “ray of light” that comes and has such a bold effect on the previously strong demons who terrorize Antony, as well as the voice that promises to make Antony famous. David Brakke in Demons and the Making of the Monk interprets the voice as that of God, yet leaves the identity of the ray of light unresolved.44 Another interpreter of the scene, Brian Brennan, leaves the identity of the vision and the voice unresolved, but attributes ultimate agency for the vision to God.45 Still a third interpreter, Tim Vivian, the most recent English translator of the Life, offers that the help Antony receives in this scene should be attributed to the Word, that is, Christ.46 In part, scholars are likely to attribute the cause of Antony’s vision to God or to “the Lord” because that is what the text itself encourages. The Life of Antony interrupts the scene of Antony’s torture by the demons to preface the appearance of this ray of light, saying that “The Lord did not forget Anthony’s struggle during that

44

Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk, 31 (ray of light: “the sudden appearance of a ray of light sends the demons away and ends his pain”) and 32-33 (the voice as God: “Antony’s quasi martyrdom in the tomb shows that he has successfully appropriated this benefit of the Word’s incarnation, to such an extent that he receives an extraordinary promise from God: ‘Antony, I was here…’”). In Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford Early Christian Studies [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995]), he has a slightly different take: “Athanasius' notion of the co-operation between divine grace and human effort stands behind the famous scene in chapter 10, in which the Lord provides 'assistance' to the struggling Antony by dispersing the demons with a 'ray of light.' 'Antony, I was here,' a voice tells the monk, who is relieved....” (225). 45 Brian Brennan, “Athanasius’ Vita Antonii: A Sociological Interpretation” Vigiliae Christianae 39 (1985): 209-27, at 212: “When, after repeated demonic attacks, Antony remains firm in his faith, God rewards him with a vision. The roof opens, a ray of light comes down towards him and his bodily pain ceases. Antony questions the vision, asking why aid had not come to him earlier in the contest. In answering, the voice both indicates the importance of the testing process and Antony’s reward for his endurance: The voice answered: I was there, Antony, but I waited in order to see your struggle (son agionisma, in Gk.). Since you have stood your ground and have not submitted, I will always be your helper and will make your name known everywhere. (Ch. 10).” 46 Tim Vivian, The Life of Antony: The Greek Life of Antony and the Coptic Life of Antony, and an Encomium on Saint Antony by John of Shmun, and a Letter to the Disciples of Antony by Serapion of Thmuis (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 2003).

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time, but brought him help.”47 It is important to note that even this line does not securely demonstrate that the Lord is the vision seen by Antony or the voice that speaks to him. Rather than say in particular that the Lord became a helper for Antony, the Greek is more roundabout: εἰς ἀντίληψιν αὐτῷ γέγονεν, perhaps colloquially best translated as the Lord “came to his aid.” While most scholars agree that the Greek life written by Athanasius is primary, the relationships between it and the versions in other languages that survive are complex and disputed.48 Even so, the two versions preserved in Coptic and Syriac agree with the Greek version in the majority of the scene recounted in section 10. They also agree with the Greek life in attributing agency for Antony’s experience to the Lord. That is, the most significant ancient versions of Life of Antony all bear witness to a strong interpretative impulse to consider both the ray of light Antony sees and the voice he hears as synonymous with the Lord. However, the Coptic and Syriac versions accomplish this exegetical direction in ways that are distinct from the Greek version.49 It is clear that all three of the versions are aimed at identifying the Lord as the source of the vision—and indeed, there is a fourth version, in Greek, as reported by Symeon the New Theologian (b. 949 C.E.), in which Antony asks the vision

47

Life of Antony 10 (SC 400:162): Ὁ δὲ Κύριος οὐδε ἐν τούτῳ ἐπελάθετο τῆς ἀθλήσεως Ἀντωνίου, ἀλλ’ εἰς ἀντίληψιν αὐτῷ γέγονεν. 48 While different scholars at different times have argued for the primacy of the current Coptic or Syriac versions, it is clear that neither preceeds the extant Greek version; see the exchange between T. D. Barnes and Andrew Louth (Barnes, “Angel of Light or Mystic Initiate? The Problem of the ‘Life of Antony’,” Journal of Theological Studies 37 [1986]:353-68; Louth, “St Athanasius and the Greek Life of Antony,” Journal of Theolgical Studies 39 [1988]: 504-9). 49 See Appendix.

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directly “Lord, where were you?”50 It is unlikely that the Coptic or Syriac versions would have stricken the more detailed additions to the Greek text, or, that it happened the other way round. Thus, while the extant versions of the Life of Antony all suggest that we should see the Lord as the agent in Antony’s vision, there is something problematic and unstable about that perspective. We could—and perhaps should— sniff out other ways of interpreting this scene. To do so, I follow a long line of scholars who have called attention to the constructed nature of the Life. Patricia Cox Miller has argued that the Life was shaped by Greek and Roman tropes of biography, and Samuel Rubenson has argued that the Life of Antony has so many parallels to Iamblichus’s Life of Pythagoras that it is fairly certain the Life was written to present Antony as a new, Christian version of the ideal philosopher.51 David Brakke has demonstrated that Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria who worked with earlier traditions in order to create the text we know as the Life of Antony, had shaped the text to foster his own particular vision of orthodoxy

50

Compare this to Evagrius of Antioch’s Latin translation: Non oblitus Iesus colluctationis serui sui, eidem protector est factus. Denique cum eleuaret oculos, uidit desuper culmen aperiri, et, deductis tenebris, radium ad se lucis influere. Post cuius splendoris aduentum nec daemonum aliquis apparuit et corporis dolor extemplo deletus est. Aedificium quoque quod paulo ante dissolutum fuerat, instauratum est. Illico praesentiam Domini intellexit Antonius, et ex immo pectore trahens longa suspiria ad visionem, quae ei apparuerat, loquebatur: “Vbi eras, Iesu, ubi eras? Quare non a principio affuisti, ut sanares uulnera mea?” Et uox ad eum facta est: “Antoni, hic eram, sed expectabam uidere certamen tumm. Nunc autem, quia dimicando uiriliter non cessisti, semper auxiliabor tibi, et faciam te in omni orbe nominari.” His auditis, exsurgense, in tantum roboratus orabat ut intelligeret plus se recepisse tunc uirium, quam ante perdiderat. Erat autem tunc Antonius annos natus tringinta quinque (Pascal Henricus Elisabeth Bertrand, ed., “Die Evagriusübersetzung der Vita Antonii: Rezeption - Überlieferung - Edition: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Vitas Patrum-Tradition” [PhD diss., Utrecht University, 2006], 164). 51 Samuel Rubenson, “Antony and Pythagoras: A Reappraisal of the Appropriation of Classical Biography in Athanasius’ Vita Antonii” in Beyond Reception: Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity, ed. David Brakke, Anders-Christian Jacobsen and Jörg Ulrich, Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 191-208.

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and of power in Egypt.52 All of these scholars have encouraged us to look past the propagandistic success of the Life, to investigate the relationship between it and the world it claims to represent. We may discover a new context for this passage, Life of Antony 10, by investigating those traditions from Antony’s own community. His monastic group expected angels to ally themselves with Christians who proved to be worthy. Ammonas, who was Antony’s successor as leader of this group, left behind several letters, and in one of them he describes a “power” (in Greek, a “dynamis”) that each person can acquire for him or herself. Ammonas encourages his readers, monks, to cultivate this “power.” Acquire for yourselves this divine power, so that you might live all your lives in freedom, and in order that the work of God be easily [accomplished] among you. It is the power itself, the one given to the human being, that leads him to rest, so that he passes by all “the powers of the air” (cf. Eph 2.2).53 Traditionally, the Greek word I translate as “power,” namely “dynamis,” in this letter has been translated as “virtue,” giving Ammonas’s discussion the feel of an exhortation to an abstract better nature. However, there are a number of reasons to think Ammonas had a more concrete goal in mind. First, keep in mind that the word “dynamis” often refers to a divine being in Christian and pagan sources. In Christian Scripture in particular, “dynamis” is the name of one class of angels, listed in Ephesians 1. This identification seems to have been behind the mosaic program of the

52

Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Ammonas, Letter on the Cultivation of Grace 2 (F. Nau, ed., Ammonas: Successeur de Saint Antoine, Texts grecques et syriaques, PO 11.4 [Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1916], 134).

53

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now-destroyed Church of the Dormition at Iznik (Nicaea), where depictions of angels included an emblem listing their rank, and “dynamis” marked one of these angels.54 Additionally, Ammonas’s suggestion that this dynamis can help one “pass by the powers of the air”—likely a reference to demons—may already lead us to think of it as a divine defender, but the function of the power as a defender is even clearer in an earlier part of Ammonas’s letter. Once a monk has his own power, he can repel demons and even Satan at the end of his life. The monk’s efforts in ascesis are thought of as a “fruit,” and Ammonas reports that If God sees that this fruit is beautiful, he will receive it as a fragrant smell, and with his angels he will rejoice in all things, and give to him a guard who protects him in all his journeys, so he can bring him to the place of rest, in order that Satan not overpower him. For when the devil sees the guard—this is the power around the soul—he flees, fearing to get near to the man, and respecting the power that is near him.55 The power that immediately encircles the soul of its charge can ward off attacks from Satan. Unfortunately, Ammonas acknowledges that not all monks have acquired this power. While there is grace from God to protect ascetics from the attacks of demons, Ammonas notes that The majority of monks and virgins do not know this great sweetness of grace, since they have not acquired the divine power,…for they did not cultivate the power, and because of this the Lord did not give it to them. For God gives it to those who cultivate it, for he does not respect persons but to those cultivating it in every generation, he gives it.56

54

Cyril Mango, “The Date of the Narthex Mosaics of the Church of the Dormition at Nicaea,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 13 (1959): 245-52. 55 Ammonas, Letter on the Cultivation of Grace 1 (PO 11.4:133). 56 Ammonas, Letter on the Cultivation of Grace 1 (PO 11.4:134).

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Even though Ammonas knows that the power must be given by the Lord, he acknowledges the role that cultivation plays in its acquisition. Ammonas hopes that God will eventually send each monk his own power and outlines the steps that will hasten its arrival. Until the power takes up residence in the human being, here is its cultivation: let him look down on the insults of humanity as well as every one of its honors, and let him hate all the ways of this world, which are thought to be honorable, and let him hate the leisure of the body, let him purify his heart from every dirty thought and from every vain opinion of this age, and let [the power] be sought in fasting and weeping night and day. And God the good will not tarry to give it to you and when he gives it to you, you will perfect your time in rest and with little burden and you will find a great confidence before God.57 The specific method each monk can use to cultivate his own power is to perform a number of ascetic deeds. Thus, here in this letter left to us from Antony’s successor, there is evidence of a tradition that expected monks to have divine help. At one point in their careers, after struggling and having their efforts become a sacrifice—“fragrant smell”—for God, they receive a “power,” one that helps them through their lives, protects them from demons, and keeps them from the judgement of Satan at the end of their lives. Such functions are reminiscent of the tradition we saw in Shenoute’s homilies, of an angel that is acquired by righteous deeds and can protect a person from Satan. It is as a reflection of these traditions, I argue, that we can understand the scene in Life of Antony 10 when Antony receives the ray of light. Antony had been practicing an ascetic life, having withdrawn from the world and doing battle with demons, when the vision came to him. Immediately, the demonic attacks cease and

57

Ammonas, Letter on the Cultivation of Grace 2 (PO 11.4:134-35).

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Antony regains his strength. When he asks the vision what took so long, the voice tells him that it needed to see his efforts before revealing itself. It promises that, because of the virtue Antony showed, it will become Antony’s helper, making him famous. All of these stages are evocative of the kind of assistance given by the “power” detailed in Ammonas’s letter.58 For these reasons, I suggest that we see in section 10 the moment when Antony receives his companion angel. Antony shows his virtue, and God notices and sends him a helper. If we return to the Life of Antony, there is evidence within the text that may also reinforce this tentative identification of the one who comes to Antony in the vision: we see that the “helper” acquired at that moment assists its champion in his later struggles on the spiritual battlefield against demons. Shortly after Antony’s vision, he leaves the house and is tested while traveling. In section 12 of the Life, Antony is on his way to the “mountain” and comes across a silver disk in the road. When he reasons it to be an illusion of the devil the silver vanishes. The Life relates what happens next: As he continued, he saw next no illusion, but actual gold thrown in his path. It is not clear whether the enemy pointed it out, or whether some more excellent power was training the athlete and demonstrating to the devil that he was not, in fact concerned about money—this he did not relate, nor do we know the answer—only that what appeared was gold.59

58

Indeed, the tradition we saw in the letter from Ammonas gives a new way to read even the problematic underlined sentence in the Greek. If you look at the way Ammonas speaks of acquiring this “power” that is so similar to Antony’s visitor, you see that he always says that God is the one who provides this power. However, God is not the power. And indeed, our Life of Antony does not say that the Lord is the vision, just that “the Lord came to Antony’s aid.” 59 Life of Antony 12 (SC 400:166, the underlined passage being Εἲτε δὲ τοῦ ἐχθροῦ δείξαντος, εἲτε τινὸς κρείττονος δυνάμεως γυμναζούσης τὸν ἀθλητὴν; trans. Robert C. Gregg, Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, Classics of Western Spirituality [New York: Paulist Press, 1980], 40).

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Antony had been promised by the vision that it would make him “famous everywhere.” It appears that the companion given to Antony took advantage of Antony’s travels to show off his newly-proven ascetic star. The Life of Antony identifies this moment as the time when a “more excellent power” works on behalf of Antony to make public his virtues. Thus, there is a web of textual references—both in the Life and in letters from Antony’s successor Ammonas—that show Antony, having demonstrated his moral statue through acts of renunciation, receiving what other monks in his community expected: the help of a companion angel. Other ascetic literature confirms this expectation, but warns that an angel, once acquired, may be lost through vice. The Lausiac History records a discussion abut how well-practiced ascetics happen to sin, even after a long career of virtue. Paphnutius60 suggests that those who fall had demonstrated pride in their own abilities, leading God to take “the angel of providence” from them.61 This “angel of providence” stands between a monk and moral failure. None can fall unless they are “left by the providence of God,” a phrase which in Greek appears to indicate the angel who deters monks from falling.62 Yet another story in the History echoes the importance of continued humility on the part of ascetics. One particular female ascetic became proud of her feats of sexual renunciation. Because of her pride, God

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Jeremy Driscoll, OSB, suggests that the identity of Paphnutius may be in doubt. See his Steps to Spiritual Perfection: Studies on Spiritual Progress in Evagrius Ponticus (New York: Newman Press, 2005), 95. 61 Palladius, Lausiac History 47.9 (ed. Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, 139): ἀφιστᾷ ὁ θεὸς τὸν ἄγγελον τῆς προνοίας ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ. Brakke (Demons and the Making of the Monk, 142) identifies this as a monk’s “guardian angel.” 62 Palladius, Lausiac History 47.17 (ed. Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, 142): μὴ ἐκαταλειφθέντα ὑπὸ τῆς προνοίας τοῦ θεοῦ. Cf. Lausiac History 2.25.

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removed “the guard of her chastity,” in this context presumably an angel, so that she fell into sexual sin.63 Another ancient text may help us complete the outline of the companion angel tradition we have been examining. In the writings of Gregory of Nyssa a companion angel is granted a particular human being because of his moral status. We find the story in Gregory’s Life of Moses, which examines the triumphs—and difficulties—of human siblings in its exploration of the cooperation between Moses and Aaron. We know from the biblical story that Aaron’s first appearance is as a helper to Moses: when God directs Moses to speak out on behalf of his people against Pharoah and the oppression in Egypt, Moses protests that he is “slow of speech and slow of tongue,” afraid that noone will listen to him (Ex 4.10). At first, God chides Moses for his lack of courage; how could Moses hesitate when he knows that he carries the words of God? (Ex 4.11-12). Moses persists, pleading that God send another, and God replies: “What of your brother Aaron the Levite? … He indeed shall speak for you to the people; he shall serve as a mouth for you, and you shall serve as a God for him” (4.15-16). As the biblical narrative relates, Moses and Aaron indeed end up working together to accomplish God’s plan, Aaron accompanying Moses to speak to Pharaoh and even speaking Moses’ words to the others among the Hebrew slaves (Ex 5.1, 4.29). At a moment when Moses felt unsure of his abilities, Aaron was provided as a gift from God, one who might strengthen him and, if necessary, help him speak.

63

Palladius, Lausiac History 28 (ed. Butler, The Lausiac History of Palladius, 84): ὁ φύλαξ τῆς σωφροσύνης.

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To illumine the “more figurative spiritual sense” of the story, Gregory links the brotherly cooperation between Moses and Aaron to the tradition regarding an individual angel appointed to each person.64 Gregory first emphasizes the authority and antiquity of the tradition: There is a doctrine (which derives its trustworthiness from the tradition of the fathers) which says that after our nature fell into sin God did not disregard our fall and withhold his providence. Now, on the one hand, he appointed an angel with an incorporeal nature to help in the life of each person and, on the other hand, he also appointed the corruptor, who, by an evil and maleficient demon, afflicts the life of man and contrives against our nature.65 Interestingly enough, Gregory was, like Origen, one of many patristic writers who saw humans yoked with not one, but two divine beings: one a good angel to encourage and exhort, one an evil demon to distract and spoil.66 Each human has a choice about which of these beings to follow; the good angel attracts and “shows the

64

Even though some readers may remember that Aaron was not always a good influence on Moses and the children of Israel, Gregory emphasizes the positive effect Aaron had on Moses in his dealings with Pharaoh and asks that we consider only those characteristics of the two relationships that are mutually informative. That is, astute readers may immediately remember Aaron’s role in the idolatry of Israel, recounted in Ex 32. Gregory answers this objection by saying that it is legitimate to make a link between selective aspects of Aaron’s career and the role of the “angel”; he does so in part by demonstrating that even the category of “angel” admits of evil actions, such as those of Satan disguised as an angel of light, 2 Cor 12.7 (Life of Moses 51-53). 65 Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses 45 (Jean Daniélou, ed., La Vie de Moïse, ou Traité de la perfection en matière de vertu, Sources chrétiennes 1c [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1968]; Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, trans., Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, Classics of Western Spirituality [New York: Paulist Press, 1978], 64). 66 Gorman lists the claim to two beings for each human as an aberrant, pagan-influenced, or alternately Origen-influenced, tradition that is “weak” and a “departure from the doctrine as found in Holy Scripture” (“The Development of the Doctrine of the Personal Guardian Angel,” particularly the chapter on “The Guardian Angel in the Patristic Period,” 13-20). Among the writers who posited two beings per person are Origen (de princ. [PG 11:309; Gorman, “Development,” 26 n. 3]), who assumes that only one being can be in charge of a human at a time, Chrysostom (in epist ad Coloss. [PG 60:322; Gorman, “Development,” 27 n. 13]), and Antiochus (Homilia LXI [PG 89:1615; Gorman, “Development,” 27 n. 17]). In the West, Gorman traces the two-divinity theory to the author of the Shepherd of Hermas (PG 2:927; Gorman, “Development,” 27 n. 19), followed by John Cassian (de principatibus seu potestatibus [PL 49:750]) and Gregory the Great (IV Moral [PL 75:665]). This schematization may be problematic, in that Origen cites the Shepherd, which would cross the EastWest line Gorman has created. See note 24 above.

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benefits of virtue” by “rational demonstration,” while the evil angel works through the senses to showcase “material pleasures.” When a Christian turns to the guidance of the good angel, he is not simply choosing virtue. Aligning oneself with this divine guide produces a change in the essential humanity of the person who does so: If, then, one should withdraw from those who seduce him to evil and by the use of his reason turn to the better, putting evil behind him, it is as if he places his own soul, like a mirror, face to face with the hope of good things, with the result that the images and impressions of virtue, as it is shown to him by God, are imprinted on the purity of the soul. Then his brother brings him assistance and joins him, for the angel, who in a way is a brother to the rational and intellectual part of man’s soul, appears, as I have said, and stands by us whenever we approach the Pharaoh.67 Gregory places control in the hands of the Christian. He may, by choosing to avoid evil, change the composition of his soul. With mechanics influenced by Stoic accounts of the senses and the impressions they make on the soul, Gregory explains that a Christian who focuses on the good can “imprint” good onto himself, thereby drawing the angel to himself. The practical way to turn to the good is described by Gregory as “diligent training,” which requires “stripping oneself” for “more vigorous contests.” At the moment when the human being becomes pure in virtue, his “brother,” the companion angel, joins him to offer assistance. Gregory acknowledges that

67

Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses 47 (trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 65).

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Truly the assistance which God gives to our nature is provided to those who correctly live the life of virtue. This assistance is already there at our birth, but it is manifested and made known whenever we apply ourselves to diligent training in the higher life and strip ourselves for the more vigorous contests.68 The vocabulary of these practices brings to mind the ways Christians spoke of ascetic practices—with words of athleticism and struggle and contest. In addition to confirming Moses’ inner changes, the arrival of Aaron signals external success for Moses as well. When Moses receives this brother, he is able to take on his assigned task with confidence. For Gregory recounts, “[Moses], who had been strengthened by the shining light and had acquired such a brother as an ally and supporter, boldly delivered to the people words of freedom.” It is true that none of these passages from the Life of Moses directly and explicitly refers to the Life of Antony. However, the combination of Gregory’s use of the companion angel tradition— his descriptions of how Moses proves his virtue, is illumined, then received his helper, and the highly suggestive language of struggle, athletic contest, and diligence—lead me to think that Gregory may have known the Life of Antony. This is not entirely implausible: so far, Gregory is practically the only well-known patristic writer from the turn of the fifth century for whom no allusions to the Life have been identified.69 At the very least, Gregory was likely aware of the tradition of an angel acquired by virtue among monks. If I am right in either case, it means that we must begin to consider that Gregory’s Life of Moses is not just a text

68

Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses 42-43 (trans. Malherbe and Ferguson, Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 64). 69 See the list of prominent Christian authors who cited from the Life of Antony in the centuries after its appearance in the introduction to Bartelink’s edition (SC 400:37-42).

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about Christian mysticism, but perhaps a text that reflects traditions of Christian asceticism.

UNDERSTANDING ANTONY, UNDERSTANDING CHRISTIANS While Athanasius’s Life of Antony presents Antony as a strong-willed, self-made ascetic, one who fought off demons, unwelcome human visitors, and temptations to create his extraordinary career, the Antony we encounter in the Apophthegmata Patrum, a text redacted a century and half after his death, is far less confident. Holy abba Antony, when he was encamped in the wilderness, was struck by accedia and a great darkness of thoughts [λογισμῶν]. And he said to God, “Lord, I wish to be saved, but the thoughts will not leave me. What will I do in my affliction? How will I be saved?” And going a little bit further outward (into the wilderness?), Antony envisioned someone like himself, sitting and working, then going away from the work and praying, then sitting again and working on a cord, then again going away to prayer. It was an angel of the Lord, sent to correct and secure Antony. And he heard the angel say to him, “Do this and you will be saved.” Hearing this, he felt much grace and courage; he did just that, and he was saved.70 Antony suffers from the “noonday demon,” acedia—a feeling of inattention and anxiety, inertia and indecision. When he petitions God for help, he has a vision of an angel that looks just like him, only different. On the outer edge of the desert, it appears, mirage-like, to demonstrate for Antony the work that he must do to be saved: manual labor and prayer. This story preserves the idea that an angel delivers the

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Apophthegmata patrum, systematic collection, 7.1 (Jean-Claude Guy, S.J., ed., Les apophtegmes des pères: Collection systématique chapitres I-IX, Sources chrétiennes 387 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993], 336). The story appears in the alphabetic collection as well, as Antony 1.

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means for Antony’s salvation, and it reminds us that it is difficult—in antiquity or even now—to understand Antony’s career without understanding the angels that came to help him and be his companions. The same may be said of Christian ascetics in general; they, too, measured themselves by the angels who came to be their companions. In the next chapter, we will see that new Christians were taught to measure the importance of their rituals by the angels who came to watch them take place.

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Chapter Three ANGELS AT RITUAL: THE CREATION OF A SPECTATOR CLASS “Oh, but,” said Lily, “think of his work!” Whenever she “thought of his work” she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew’s doing. She asked him what his father’s books were about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there.” —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

When Virgina Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse appeared in 1927, readers were not as pleased with the novel as they had been with Woolf’s earlier efforts, such as Mrs. Dalloway. However, even tepid reviews of the book acknowledged that Woolf had broken with the conventions of the novel and had depicted, with great attention, the inner lives of her characters as vividly as other novelists portrayed the actions and speech of theirs. For this, Woolf was recognized as a “writer of profound imagination,”1 providing for her readers a “long contemplation, a harmonious unwinding of images and emotions, of sentiments and thoughts in an interior world.”2 By its focus on the imagination, To the Lighthouse subtly asserted that our inner activity does as much to create narrative as our outer activity. Things such as thought and emotion, symbol and image may not be immediately observable, but they are as important, if not more important, than what appears to the eye. Indeed, Woolf’s novel portrays these products of the imagination as more concrete, more lasting than the very things that are said to constitute our actions in the

1 2

Edwin Muir, review, Nation and Athenaeum, 2 July 1927. Jean-Jacques Mayoux, review, Revue Anglo-Americaine (Paris), June 1928.

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world. In a situation where Lily, a young girl, cannot grasp the meaning of her father’s actual occupation, she is instructed to think of something concrete—a kitchen table. The mental image of the kitchen table is so permanent that it remains with Lily, such that “whenever she ‘thought of his work’ she always saw clearly before her” the image she had created for herself. The image of the kitchen table is, oddly enough, a product of the Lily’s mind, just as abstract as the concepts her father manipulates— “subject and object and the nature of reality”—but, unlike his work, it holds the promise of the real, being a depiction of an physical object that has an existence outside her imagination. Even Woolf’s language in the passage calls into question the reality of the table and Lily’s image of it; Lily, when she thinks of her father, sees the table “clearly before her,” not in her mind, but recreated in the world. It is this almost-real image that holds the place of the meaning of her father’s occupation for Lily. Instead of comprehending the work her father did in philosophical subjects, Lily consistently understands his work through an imagined kitchen table, one she had been taught by her brother Andrew to see. However far removed from twentieth-century writing in English, early Christian catechesis—instruction about ritual given to the newly initiated—shares with Woolf’s novel an interest in the workings of the imagination and the development of an inner visuality that supplements and even surpasses those things apparent to the eye. At the end of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth century, Christian orators tried to help new Christians, those about to be given full status in their communities, learn how to participate in the ritual life of their churches. By leading new Christians though several weeks or months of instructions, these

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orators hoped to equip their charges with both the knowledge and the mental disposition to make their first and subsequent experiences of Christian ritual meaningful.3 Catechetical treatises survive from Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nicetas of Remesiana, Ambrose, Augustine, and Narsai of Edessa. Such treatises are important, on a very basic level, for understanding the ritual life of Christians in late antiquity; the study of early Christian liturgy depends in part on the details contained in them.4 However, catechetical materials are more than simple stage directions for participating in baptism or the Eucharist. Most of the orators who were charged with teaching neophytes about their new participation in the church took the opportunity to instruct these Christians about points of doctrine as well the particulars of ritual. If these orators adopted a conventional form for catechetical instruction, it was to build upon the outline of the stages of a ritual, stopping at salient points to detail the theological ideas relevant to each stage and to offer to their students an appropriate mental attitude to adopt as they experienced each stage. The use of symbolism was an important pedagogical tool in their enterprise of teaching Christian doctrine, linking each visible part of a ritual with new images that evoked or explained doctrinal ideas. In an article treating several catechetical authors, Georgia Frank argues that by suggesting such images, writers like Cyril of

3

For the varying lengths of the catechumenate in different regions, see Edward Yarnold, “The Fourth and Fifth Centuries” in The Study of the Liturgy, rev. ed., ed. Cheslyn Jones, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 129-44. For a more general introduction to the catechumenate, see M. Dujarier’s A History of the Catechumenate: The First Six Centuries, trans. E. Haasl (New York: Sadlier, 1979). 4 Consider, for example, the place occupied by catechetical treatises in the collection of sources for the study of Christian liturgy cataloged in Paul F. Bradshaw’s The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1992), particularly in the chapter, “Other Major Liturgical Sources,” 111-30.

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Jerusalem, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and John Chrysostom hoped to teach catechumens to see the rituals they watched, the agents involved, and the actions accomplished with “the eyes of faith,” an attitude comprising several “visual strategies” which “generated a host of mental images that would reframe the physical perception” of the rituals in question.5 When catechumens participated in the Eucharist for the first time, for example, they would have a more complex experience than simply watching events unfold. Instead, by a “steady layering of imaginal bodies over physical perceptions,” new Christians could understand the Eucharist and its place in Christian theology, actively recreating the links between the Eucharist and an event like the Passion or the Eucharist and the birth of Christ by the use of their imaginations.6 Catechists of the fourth and fifth centuries took seriously the idea that faith was precisely that entity described in Hebrews 11—“the inner conviction of deeds unseen”— and instructed new Christians in a way that trained them to generate mental images of those unseen deeds as they participated in ritual. Because Christian catechists advocated the representation of certain images for those taking part in the ritual life of their churches—and in some cases, warned against the representation of other images—the study of Christian catechetical texts can allow us to approach and perhaps to trace a rather ethereal subject: the contents of the religious imagination of early Christians. At the very least, by reading and analyzing catechetical texts, we can observe how Christian leaders attempted to shape and prune that imagination. The imagination, once trained, can generate images

5

Georgia Frank, “‘Taste and See’: The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century,” Church History 70 (2001): 619-43, cited at 621. 6 Frank, “Taste and See,” 621.

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repeatedly and consistently. For example, in the passage from To the Lighthouse, Lily is able to come up with the image of a kitchen table any time that she thinks about her father’s work. For our purposes, it is important to note that because the religious imagination in particular is marked by the ways that its representations are “real” to religious practicioners,7 these representations almost demand to be brought to bear outside of explicitly religious contexts, to be generated repeatedly and in different contexts. The expansive nature of the religious imagination and its effect on religious teaching has drawn the attention of multiple scholars of early Christianity. For example, in a study of the catechetical works of John Chrysostom and Cyril of Jerusalem, Dayna Kalleres finds that both catechists focused a great deal of attention on the pre-baptismal ritual of daily exorcism, noting that this exorcism both created and simultaneously rebuffed a demonic world through ritualized speech acts. By urging the candidates for baptism to “experience the anti-daemonic efficacy of the exorcism formulae” and to, in turn, use these formulae “to combat through credal debate whomever their instructors identified as the Church’s daemonically aligned enemies,” both John and Cyril hoped to train their catechumens to reactivate and redeploy an “oral weaponry” they had acquired during their catechumenate in their confrontations with the non-Christian world.8 The highly visual character of John’s and Cyril’s descriptions of the daily exorcism and the demons turned back by it only enhanced the memorability of this “weaponry” and the ease with which Christians

7

See introduction, 19. Dayna Kalleres, “Exorcising the Devil to Silence Christ’s Enemies: Ritualized Speech Practices in Late Antique Christianity” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2002), 4-5.

8

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could call upon it, in situations both within subsequent rituals and in their everyday affairs.9 After experiencing the preparation for baptism and the ritual of baptism, new Christians could expect to be able to call up the images they had created for themselves as a result of their catechetical training. Those images, in turn, defined the ways that Christians thought about realms both supernatural and mundane. For my interests, the catechetical treatises of the fourth and fifth centuries— specifically, those left to us by Theodore of Mopsuestia, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Chrysostom, and Narsai of Edessa—are invaluable for tracing how Christians generated and represented images of angels. Even though none of these writers (nor their contemporaries, for that matter) claimed that angels were necessary to Christian ritual, they all asked their audiences to imagine angels present at sacraments, in particular, at the Eucharist. To train Christians to generate images of angels who attended the Eucharist alongside them each time they experienced it is to attach the angelic patina of divinity to the ritual and its celebrants, repeatedly affirming the sublimity of both. And because angels were considered inconsequential to the accomplishment of the Eucharist, unlike, say, the priest or the Holy Spirit, these catechetical writers were relatively free to use images of angels flexibly, portraying their presence at the Eucharist in ways that supported their specific pedagogical intentions. The angels that catechists asked Christians to imagine increasingly emphasized, in their attitude and their number, the power of the priest.

9

Mary Carruthers’ work on the highly visual devices of memory enhancement used in the Middle Ages supports my thinking here (The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990]). See also the collection of medieval sources on the memory that she co-edited with Jan M. Ziolkowski for examples of the way that repeated visualization helped cement memory: The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

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TRAINING NEW CHRISTIANS The fourth century witnessed a proliferation of catechetical texts, which emerged from a need to explain different theoretical concepts to new Christians. There were several social and political developments in the fourth century which contributed to the ecclesiastical interest in ritual education. One such development is the boom in the number of Christians after the time of Constantine. Paul Meyendorff observes that “the years that followed the recognition of the church and its transformation into the official state religion saw a massive influx of new members into the church, people of varied backgrounds and motives.” The sheer diversity within the Christian community was a motivation to “provide its new members with proper teaching,” Meyendorff notes.10 In addition, the fourth century was witness to a number of theological disputes, and the atmosphere of attention to theological issues made explaining the doctrine underlying Christian rituals an important task. Theodore of Mopsuestia was one of the writers who insisted his catechumens understand the theology associated with the rituals they were about to experience. While he was serving as a presbyter in Antioch near the end of the fourth century, Theodore wrote a series of sixteen lectures for new Christians that explained the various acts of worship at his church, including the creed worshipers said together,

10

Paul Meyendorff, “Liturgy and Spirituality I. Eastern Liturgical Spirituality,” in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, World Spirituality 16 (New York: Crossroad, 1985), 350-63, at 352.

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the prayer “Our Father,” the rite of baptism, and the rite of the Eucharist.11 Given the sheer length of these lectures—each would have taken at least ninety minutes to deliver— is it not surprising that Theodore stops often to inform his audience of the worth of the knowledge he is giving them, reassuring them that the detailed descriptions of the rituals are useful. To those about to be baptized, he says: It is right and necessary that we should explain before you the power of the sacrament and of the things which are accomplished in it, and the reason for which each of them is accomplished, in order that when you have learned what is the reason for all of them you may receive the things that take place with great love. Every sacrament consists in the narration of unseen and unspeakable things through signs and emblems. Such things require explanation and interpretation, for the sake of the person who draws nigh unto the sacrament, so that he might know its power. If it only consisted of the (visible) elements themselves, words would have been useless, or sight itself would have been able to show us one by one all the happenings that take place, but since a sacrament contains the signs of things that are taking place or have already taken place, words are needed to explain the power of signs and mysteries.12 Sacraments, for Theodore, do not accomplish a simple performative function, shifting the status of participants from unbaptized to baptized, or not-yet-communicant to communicant. These rituals also tell a story, consisting in the “narration of unseen and unspeakable things.” As Theodore sees it, rites are never a simple read—there are always more layers of meaning available to be mined in a sacrament, and it is his

11

The texts of Theodore’s Catechetical Homilies are in Syriac and are available in the Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, ed. A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies 6 (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1933); a facsimile of the manuscript from which Mingana worked is available in Les Homélies catéchétiques de Théodore de Mopsueste: Reproduction phototypique du MS. Mingana syr. 561, ed. Raymond Tonneau and Robert Devreesse (Vatican City: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana, 1949). The appoximate date of these homilies is from the article on Theodore in the Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Siegmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerlings, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000), 563, but see also Paul Bradshaw’s discussion of the date of the homilies—as well as the possibility that they were preached when Theodore was a bishop, not a presbyter—in Search for the Origins, 122-23. 12 Mingana, Commentary, 144 (text), 7 (trans., slightly altered).

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purpose and responsibility to equip his new flock with those layers of meaning. Christians must know the various levels of significance associated with ritual acts, because it is necessary for Christians both to understand the narrative associated with a particular ritual as well as to recreate that narrative in all its details each time they experience the ritual. Without the ability to generate those layers of meaning, Theodore implies, it would not be possible for a Christian to “receive the things that take place with great love” or “to know the power” of the sacrament. In short, Christian rituals are ineffective unless the participants can understand fully the meaning of the acts they see each time they watch. What are the events “that are taking place or have already taken place” to which the Eucharist refers? What kinds of “unseen and unspeakable things” are evoked by the ritual that Theodore describes? Georgia Frank has explored Theodore’s evocation of one layer of meaning associated with the Eucharist. As he explains the ritual to those preparing to receive it for the first time, Theodore associates the events of the ritual with the narrative of the Passion. Frank has noticed that for Theodore, each element of the eucharistic ritual corresponds to a part of the execution of Christ: the coverings of the altar bring to mind the burial shroud, the bread on the altar refers to Christ’s body laid out for burial, and the participants in the offering processional should bring to mind a funeral procession, again pointing to the Passion.13 Because he makes an effort to connect even the smallest details of the Eucharist to Christ’s death, it is not surprising to see Theodore claim to behold a “complete representation”

13

Frank, “Taste and See,” 638.

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of the Passion in the details of the Eucharist.14 Thus as new Christians witness the eucharistic liturgy, Theodore hopes that they watch for these signs that the liturgy is referring to the Passion and experience the events of the Passion as they also experience the ritual of the Eucharist happening before them. Even though Theodore calls the Eucharist a “complete representation” of the Passion, as Frank points out, he admits that the Passion tableau created by the eucharistic ritual is missing a piece—there is nothing within the Eucharist that corresponds to Jesus’ executioners.15 For Theodore, this omission has a purpose; he explains that to think of Jews—assumed to be those who brought Jesus to his death— during the Eucharist would be out of place. It is worth pausing here to consider exactly how Theodore describes the double tableaux of the procession to the altar in the Eucharist and Christ being led to death in the Passion. He urges his listeners with these words: We must also think of Christ being at one time led and brought to his Passion, and at another time stretched on the altar to be sacrificed for us. And when the offering which is about to placed (on the altar) is brought out in the sacred vessels of the paten and the chalice, we must think that Christ our Lord is being led and brought to his Passion, not, however, by the Jews—as it is incongruous and impermissible that an iniquitous image be found in the symbols of our deliverance and our salvation—but by the invisible hosts of the ministry, who are sent to us and who were also present when the Passion of our salvation was being accomplished, and were doing their service. Indeed, they performed their service to all the economy of Christ our Lord without any exception, and were present with their service at the time of the Passion, endeavoring to perform it according to the will of God.16 14

Frank also reports this phrase of Theodore’s (“Taste and See,” 638, citing Mingana, Commentary, 86); the Syriac text appears on 223, “    ”and is perhaps better translated as “complete perfection” or “a total accomplishment,” suggesting that Theodore has more in mind than a simple reference to the Passion; perhaps he considers the Eucharist a replication or reproduction of the Passion. 15 Frank, “Taste and See,” 638-40. 16 Mingana, Commentary, 222-23 (text), 85-86 (trans., slightly altered).

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Replacing the Jews are the “invisible hosts of the ministry,” a phrase that Frank comments on to say that their inclusion makes possible a full, but not jarring, presentation of the Passion in the accomplishment of the Eucharist.17 To picture what Theodore is describing, new Christians should replace the inappropriate-for-worship figure of Jews with angels, imagining such angels to be present when the eucharistic offerings are brought to the altar. If the Eucharist also tells the story of the Passion, then by inserting angels in the role of those who brought Jesus to his execution, participants are both cleaning up and filling out the narrative details of the Passion and the Eucharist as they are combined. One might wonder: Is Theodore suggesting that angels took part in the execution of Jesus, leading him to be sacrificed?18 Most likely not, but angels do seem out of place in the Passion narrative, at least if they are imagined as a replacement for Jesus’ executioners.19 The ambiguity of the angels’ purpose as an imaginal addition to the Eucharist is confusing, but may suggest that Theodore had a much larger and more complex set of referents for the Eucharist than the Passion alone.

17

This phrase most likely corresponds to the “λειτουγικὰ πνεύµατα εἷς διακονίαν” of Heb 1.14. It is possible that for Theodore, the idea that angels are to be imagined in place of Jews means that the angels’ service during the Passion encompasses much more than encouragement. Consider how ambiguous Theodore’s depiction is: the angels “were present with their service at the time of the Passion, endeavouring to perform it according to the will of God.” The editor of the Syriac text, Mingana, is compelled to place a footnote on the English “it” and identify the referent as “their service” (Commentary, 86 n. 2). The text in Syriac, if translated more literally, would read: “Even in the moment of the Passion, they [the angels] were near, in their service, diligently working to complete [it] according the will of God” (Mingana, Commentary, 223, ll.4-6):       
! " #  !    . If read this way, it is not entirely clear whether the angels are completing “their service” or “the Passion”; it is possible that Theodore’s imagined Passion becomes a moment when Christ has to be convinced or led to his death by angels. 19 Even Theodore seems to recognize this, listing instead the places where Scripture reports the presence of angels during the wider narrative of the Passion, not just the moment of the crucifixion (Mingana, Commentary, 223 (text), 86 (trans.). 18

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Theodore’s idea of Christianity was based on the assumption that a Christian’s time on earth was but a precursor for a later, more perfect life. Those who became Christian through baptism, he thought, enrolled themselves in a future life in the community of heaven, a community whose members Theodore deduces from Hebrews 12.22-23: they comprise “innumerable companies of angels and men who are immortal and immutable.”20 Thus, in his eyes, Christians live out their time on earth as a part of an earthly community, but should always be looking forward to their entrance into the heavenly community. They live a suspended existence, both “now” and “not yet.”21 The Eucharist, in Theodore’s conception, represented both of these modes, being “an imitation or memorial of the saving acts of Christ’s life and the anticipation of the heavenly liturgy.”22 The Eucharist reflects the Passion, but the sacrifice of the Eucharist is also a preview for Christians of the sacrifice that they will participate in when they reach heaven. Watching the Eucharist is like watching the heavenly service, however “dimly” represented: Theodore tells his catechumens, “We must picture in our mind that we are dimly in heaven, and, through faith, draw in our imagination the image of heavenly things.”23 Just as each actor in the eucharistic ritual had a parallel in the Passion narrative, each actor in the Eucharist also represents an actor in the heavenly service. For the priest, his person and actions are to represent Christ: 20

Mingana, Commentary, 151-52 (text), 23-24 (trans.). Arthur Bradford Shippee, “Paradoxes of Now and Not Yet: The Separation between the Church and the Kingdom in John Chrysostom, Theodore, and Augustine,” in Reading in Christian Communities: Essays on Interpretation in the Early Church, ed. Charles A. Bobertz and David Brakke, Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series 14 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 22 Paul Meyendorff, “Liturgy and Spirituality,” 358, emphasis mine. 23 Mingana, Commentary, 219 (text), 83 (trans.).

21

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We must think that the priest who comes to the altar is representing his image, not that he [the priest] offers himself in sacrifice, any more than he is truly a high priest, but because he performs the figure of the service of the ineffable sacrifice [of Christ], and through this figure he dimly represents the image of the unspeakable heavenly things and of the supernatural and incorporeal hosts.”24 In his actions, the priest is “a likeness of the service of heaven.”25 The priest who celebrates the Eucharist is served in turn by the deacons, who themselves represent actors in the heavenly service: they “represent a likeness of the service of the spiritual messengers and ministers.”26 In total, the priest and his processional are “dim” reflections of Christ and his servants in heaven, angels.27 The angels Theodore wishes his catechumens to imagine as a part of the precession are the axis around which he creates not one, but two, sets of referents for the ritual of the Eucharist. While Georgia Frank’s reading of Theodore’s presentation of the Eucharist is a helpful one, particularly in the way it demonstrates the supplemental visual expectations of Christian catechesis, her figuration touches but one part of Theodore’s imagined complex of symbols and referents tied to the Eucharist. This ritual does not have as its sole purpose a reenactment of the Passion; it is also a reflection of the liturgy of the heavenly community which Christians will join after their resurrection. Thus, each time that Theodore presents his listeners with a relationship between an action or actor in the eucharistic liturgy and an event or actor in the Passion, he is also making reference to the heavenly sacrifice: both

24

Mingana, Commentary, 220 (text), 83 (trans., slightly altered). Mingana, Commentary, 215 (text), 79 (trans.). 26 Mingana, Commentary, 84, see also 86, 70. 27 I assume angels because of the language of the previous two footnotes: “incorporeal hosts” and “spiritual messsengers and ministers” both refer to angels.

25

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narratives must be called to mind during the earthly ritual. Each celebration of the Eucharist, when supplemented by the imaginations of the Christians who attend it, is a multi-temporal event. It evokes the Passion as an event in the historical past and ties that Passion with the ongoing sacrifice in heaven, promising humans a place in that sacrifice in the future. In this way, the Eucharist looks both forward and back, and the angels who process toward the altar—whether they are the replacements for Jesus’ executioners or the actors in a heavenly sacrifice—are the common link between the two narratives. At least one of Theodore’s predecessors shared the idea that Christians will participate at some later moment in a heavenly ritual. Cyril of Jerusalem, whose catechetical materials are invaluable for the reconstruction of Christian ritual, certainly encouraged listeners to picture the heavenly liturgies in his catechetical works.28 However, the way that Cyril depicts these heavenly services and their participants reveals that he has a slightly different message for new Christians than Theodore; the angels that Cyril calls upon his audience to imagine are responsive to human action. For example, as they participate in the Eucharist, Christians are to imagine the heavenly ritual, but also to imagine themselves present at it: I urge you, turn your mind’s eye upwards: picture the choirs of angels, and God, the Lord of all things, seated there, and his Only-begotten Son seated there with him at his right hand, and the Spirit there with them, and the Thrones and Dominations celebrating the heavenly liturgy, and each of you, men and women, who is to be saved. Even

28

Cyril’s early catechetical texts, the Procat. and the Cat., were written in 350 C.E. (Edward Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, Early Church Fathers [New York: Routledge, 2000], 22); note that Alexis Doval advocates for 351 as the year of completion of these texts (“The Date of Cyril of Jerusalem’s Catecheses,” Journal of Theological Studies 48 [1997]: 129-32). Indeed, part of the way that Cyril pictures the Eucharist is as a reflection of heavenly ritual (Cat. 13.26); the singers of praise who participate in the Eucharist “imitate the angelic hosts”; Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 156.

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now let your ears seem to ring with that glorious sound which the angels will raise when you gain salvation.29 These hearers are to see themselves watching the heavenly sacrifice when the Son and Father are both being served. The rhetoric that Cyril uses here suggests that he, like Theodore, considers participation in the heavenly liturgy to be a benefit that comes to humans only after the resurrection: each of the hearers “is to be saved,” and they should let their ears “seem to ring” with the sound they will hear at the time when they become saved. These are things occuring in the future, not entirely manifest yet, but certainly coming into presence in the minds of the audience. His catechumens are to create for themselves a virtual experience of the heavenly sacrifice, both observing choirs of angels, God, Son, and Spirit with their own eyes, as well as hearing with their ears “that glorious sound which the angels will raise” when they join in the heavenly service. These angels are responsive at the moment of the Christian’s “salvation,” giving up a joyous sound of approval. In Cyril’s estimation, angels watch not only the moment of salvation for Christians, but the entire process of becoming a Christian. He suggests that angels watch the enrollment of humans in the heavenly community through baptism with anticipation and elation. He prepares those about to be baptized for the gravity of the rite, telling them that “This is truly a great matter, brethren; approach it attentively.

29

Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 85. Unfortunately, none of the passages relevant to this topic are paralleled in the Aramaic fragments published by Christa Müller-Kessler and Michael Sokoloff in The Catechism of Cyril of Jerusalem in the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Version, A Corpus of Christian Palestinian Aramaic 5 (Groningen: STYX Publications, 1999).

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Each one of you is to be presented before God in the presence of myriads of angelic hosts.”30 Describing the effects of baptism, he says The Lord will wash away the dirt from his sons and daughters in the “spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning” (Is 4.4). He will “sprinkle you with pure water and you will be cleansed of all your sin” (Ezek 36.25). The angels will dance around you saying: “Who is she who comes up clothed in white and leaning on her kinsman?” (Cant 8.5 [LXX]).31 In Cyril’s figuration of baptism, he expects—and teaches his audiences to expect— angels to observe the rite and to react with joy at its successful completion. Thus, at every turn, a new Christian is observed by and cheered on by angels, with their divinity and attention lending purpose and gravity to the Christian’s procession through the sacraments. If the presence of angels can amplify the divinity of a Christian’s training and preparation for the ritual life of the church, they may also enhance the status of the Eucharist itself. Cyril exhorts new Christians to imagine a panoply of divine beings present at the Eucharist: After this we call to mind heaven, the earth, the sea, the sun and the moon, the stars, every creature both rational and irrational, visible and invisible, the Angels, the Archangels, the Dominions, the Principalities, the Powers, the Thrones and the many-faced Cherubim, saying in effect with David: “Bless the Lord with me” (Ps 33.4 [34.3]). We also call to mind the Seraphim, whom Isaiah was inspired by the Holy Spirit to see standing round God’s throne , using two wings to cover his face, two his feet, and two to fly, saying all the time: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord Sabaoth.” For the reason why we recite this doxology which the Seraphim taught us is to share in the singing of the celestial armies. Then, when we have sanctified ourselves through these spiritual hymns, we call upon the God who loves mankind to send down the Holy Spirit on the offerings so as to make the bread Christ’s

30 31

Cat 3.3 (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 90). Cat 3.16 (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 95-96).

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body and the wine Christ’s blood, for whatever the Holy Spirit touches is made holy and transformed.32 By participating with the angels, humans can sanctify themselves and prepare for the offering, making themselves one with the “celestial armies.” Every available type of angel—from archangels to seraphim—takes part in the Eucharist and lends its divinity to the celebration. In a world that seemed demonic to Christians, set against their aspirations as new members of a religious movement, the newly baptized who took Cyril’s advice could always imagine for themselves hosts of angels who cheered their every move from heaven.33 A longer and more famous description of angels present at the Eucharist occurs in Chrysostom’s treatise On the Priesthood, one which emphasizes the place of angels as spectators to the ritual. Whenever [the priest] calls to the Holy Spirit and completes the aweinspiring sacrifice and reaches continually to the common master of all, where should we order ourselves, tell me. What purity do we ask of him and what piety? Think of what kinds hands doing such sacrifice have to be, of what kind the tongue that professes such words; the soul that receives the spirit who doesn’t it have to be purer than, holier than? Then, the angels stand around the priest and the bema and the place around the altar are all filled with heavenly powers in honor of the one laying (there).34 The angels completely fill the space around the altar and bema, their number being connected to the status of the transformed host. In addition to this, the proximity of Chrysostom’s comments on the purity of the priest leads one to believe that the

32

MC 5.6-7 (Yarnold, Cyril of Jerusalem, 183). For Cyril’s rhetoric constructing the world as “demonic,” see Kalleres, “Exorcising the Devil,” 18086. 34 On the Priesthood 6.4 (Sur la Sacerdoce, ed. Anne-Marie Malingrey, Sources chrétiennes 272 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1980], 316). Cf. In Act. Apost. Hom 21.5 (PG 60:170): Ἐν χερσὶν ἡ θυσία καὶ πάντα προκεῖται ηὐτρεπισμένα· πάρεισι ἄγγελοι, ἀρχάγγελοι. 33

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number of angels is also dependent on the status of the priest. Thus, angels are more than just observers; their presence, while passive, lends authority to the performance of the ritual and the performer, the priest. Chyrsostom’s arguments about the power of the priesthood and its superiority are not created without purpose. The treatise in which these arguments appear is, in part, an apology for why Chrysostom duplicitously avoided an appointment to the office of priest.35 The aggrandizement of the office by Chrysostom in On the Priesthood serves to make his purpose easier to achieve; if the priesthood is such a high and holy office, Chrysostom cannot be faulted for having avoided it. Rather, he is to be praised for being honest about his abilities and declining such a prestigious position. The priesthood was established by the Holy Spirit, and as such, it is celestial in its nature. As he says, “The priesthood is completed on earth, but it has its order in the deeds of the heavens. And this is rightly so: for it is not a human, nor an angel, nor an archangel, nor any other created power, but the Paraclete itself that established this succession and persuaded those yet remaining in the flesh to manifest the service of the angels.”36 Because of this, the office of the priest is partly divine; the presence of angels at the exercise of priestly duties in the Eucharist emphasizes that divinity. However, Chrysostom deftly avoids implying that these observers are lending their power to the priest, or that they exercise power at all. In his view, priests have been granted powers that surpass those of the angels. To reach this conclusion, Chrysostom cites the instructions to the disciples from Matthew 18, applying them

35

See Chrysostom’s description of his avoidance tactics in On the Priesthood 1.3 (SC 272:72-76). Thus J.N.D. Kelly dates this piece to 371/372 (Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom—Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995], 24-28, date on 28). 36 On the Priesthood 3.4 (SC 272:142).

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directly to the office of the priesthood. “For those who are dwelling on earth and passing their time here, they are given trust to administer the things of the heavens and they have an authority which God did not grant to angels or archangels. For it is not to them that he said, ‘whatever you bind on earth will be bound also in heaven, and whatever you might loose upon the earth will be loosed in heaven.’”37 To enact change in heaven is not the power of those residents of heaven, the angels and the archangels; that is the power of a priest, one who is granted authority by God to accomplish actions both heavenly and earthly. Chrysostom’s idea of angelic presence at the Eucharist is tied to his glorification of the priesthood and occurs in a text written rather early in his career; even so, later texts indicate that Chrysostom continued to press listeners to imagine angels present at several Christian rituals. The newly baptized are told that angels now watch their deeds; at the moment of their baptism, a great battle begins and the “arena stands open, the contest is at hand, and the spectators have taken their seats. Not only are humans watching the combats but the host of angels as well.”38 Citing Paul, Chrysostom continues to say that humans are a spectacle to angels; their rituals even attract angels to leave heaven and descend to watch. Consider how Chrysostom treats the exact moment of the offering in his homilies on Ephesians: Just so also here when the sacrifice is brought forth and Christ, the Lord’s sheep, is sacrificed, when you hear, “Let us all pray together,” when you see the curtain drawn up, then consider that heaven is opened on high and the angels are descending.39

37

On the Priesthood 3.5 (SC 272:148). Hom. Cat. 3.8 (Antoine Wegner, ed., Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites, Sources chrétiennes 50 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1957/58], 155). 39 In Eph. 3.5 (PG 62:29; F. J. Reine, trans., “The Eucharistic Doctrine and Liturgy of the Mystagogical Catecheses of Theodore of Mopsuestia” [S.T.D. thesis, Catholic University of America, 1942], 87).

38

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The Eucharistic sacrifice, taken by Theodore of Mopsuestia to be a reflection of heavenly service, is here portrayed by Chrysostom as a replacement of heavenly service; rather than wait for humans to come join them, angels choose to descend and join humans. These are not just any angels. Chrysostom further enjoins his listeners: “Think with whom you stand at the time of the mysteries: with the cherubim, with the seraphim!” 40 All these assertions about invisible angels coming to take part in human rituals may have been difficult for Christians to accept. In case Chrysostom’s audience for On the Priesthood was unwilling to believe an untested deacon, Chrysostom also relates a piece of lore about the presence of angels at the altar. An old man, whose identity is not entirely clear, has actually seen these hordes of angels. Chrysostom recounts: I myself have heard someone recount that there was an old man, a wonderful man and accustomed to seeing visions, he said that he was considered worthy of such a sight and that at a certain time, all of a sudden, he saw a crowd of angels, being seen in garments that shined, encircling the altar, and flowing down and, as if the king were present, standing in rows. And I am convinced.41 Being able to see their presence, this old man confirms that angels do indeed treat the eucharistic offering as the body of Christ. Chrysostom’s reassurance—“And I am convinced”—encourages his listeners to believe the vision of the old man and to envision these angels present at their own sacrifices. The fact that Chrysostom has to support his assertion with this “old man”’s knowledge hints that the idea of

40 41

In Eph. 14.4 (PG 62:104; F. J. Reine, trans., “The Eucharistic Doctrine,” 111). On the Priesthood 6.4 (SC 272:316-18).

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multitudes of angels filling the air around the altar may have been hard for his audience to believe. However, the idea that angels were observers of the exercises of priest was fully accepted by later Christian tradition. The Regula Magistri, a monastic text redacted two centuries after Chrysostom lived, warns priests to be careful how they blow their noses at the altar, lest they dirty one of the angels standing there.42 A fifthcentury inscription dedicating a church in Gerasa on the site of a former pagan temple boasts that where there was once idolatry, there are now “choirs of angels,” most likely referring to Christian worship.43 Finally, in a medieval codex from the monastery of Patmos, an illuminated initial depicts a priest incensing a structure with an angel watching over him.44 These pieces of evidence appear in diverse genres and geographical contexts, suggesting that the link between priestly duties and angelic spectators was well-diffused in Christian culture. Narsai of Edessa, a fifth-century catechist, affirmed this link and traced it back to Chrysostom’s portrayal. In his descriptions of the Eucharist, Narsai reveals his dependence on the text of On the Priesthood as well as his particular understanding of Chrysostom himself as the “old man” who saw the gathered angels. Recreating the celebration of the Eucharist for his audience, Narsai marvels at the “awful king, mystically slain and buried, and the awful watchers standing in fear in honor of their

42

RM 48.7 (Adalbert de Vogüé, ed., La règle du maître, Sources chrétiennes 105-7 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964-65], 106:218-20): Nam illud, quod superius diximus, et in orationibus caveatur, ut qui orat, si voluerit expuere aut narium spurcitias iactare, non inante sed post se retro proiciat propter angelos inante stantes. 43 Jason Moralee, “The Stones of St. Thedore: Disfiguring the Pagan Past in Christian Gerasa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14.1 (2006): 185-215. 44 Giulio Jacopi, “Le miniature dei codici di Patmo,” Clara Rhodos 6-7.3 (1932-33): figure 145, lower left.

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Lord! The ranks of the watchers surround the altar in that hour, as Chrysostom has borne witness who saw them.”45 Narsai was also aware of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s treatises on the Eucharist, as is evident from how closely some of his descriptions of the events of the ritual follow Theodore’s; Narsai sees the deacons who serve the priests during the ritual in the same way as Theodore.46 Summarizing the referents in the Eucharist to the Passion, Narsai treats the deacons as Theodore did: A symbol of His death these [the deacons] bear upon their hands; and when they have set it on the altar and covered it they typify His burial: not that these [the deacons] bear the image of the Jews, but [rather] of the watchers [i.e., angels] who were ministering to the passion of the Son. He was ministered to by angels at the time of His passion, and the deacons attend His body which is suffering mystically.47 The insistence that the deacons do not represent Jews but rather angels seems a particularly precise parallel.48 These coincidences suggest that Narsai’s catechetical homilies were influenced by both John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia with respect to angels present at the Eucharist. Narsai also follows Chrysostom in his use of angels to glorify of both the office and the person of the priest. Even so, Narsai goes beyond Chrysostom’s assertions about priests being more powerful than angels, speaking directly to the priest, whom he calls “a pen for the hidden Power,” in words so laudatory that it is worth quoting them in full:

45

The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai, ed. R. H. Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 7, slightly altered. 46 Narsai and Theodore can also be linked by a certain Theodolus, Narsai’s teacher, who was himself most likely a student of Theodore’s (“Narses of Edessa,” Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Döpp and Geerlings, trans. O’Connell, 429). 47 Connolly, Liturgical Homilies, 3-4. 48 Narsai seems to have absorbed the equation before deacons and angels well as he makes reference to it several more times, for example in Hom. 17 (Connolly, Liturgical Homilies, 4, 12): “all the deacons who standing ministering before the Lord”; “the deacons are hovering and brandishing fans in likeness of the watchers.”

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The priest is like a pen for the hidden Power; and in Its hands he writes the three names over the water. O writer, that writes the Spirit upon a weak tablet, and the ink of his words is not effaced by the liquid waters! How great is your art, O mortal, and no man knows how to examine it for its greatness. O how slender is the pen of your mind to depict the mysteries! And [yet] there is no painter that is able to copy thy drawings. O priest, how great is the order that you administer, of which the ministers of fire and spirit stand in awe! Who is sufficient to say how great is your order, that has suppressed the heavenly [beings] by the title of your authority? The nature of a spirit is more subtle and glorified than you; yet it is not permitted to it to depict mysteries like as it is to you. An angel is great, and we should say he is greater than you, yet when he is compared with your ministry he is less than you. Holy is the seraph, and beauteous the cherub, and swift the watcher: yet they cannot run with the fleetness of the word of your mouth. Glorious is Gabriel, and mighty is Michael, as their name testifies; yet every moment they are bowed down under the mystery which is delivered into your hand. On you they are intent when you draw near to minister, and for you they wait, that you would open the door for their Holies.49 Like Chrysostom, Narsai names several different types and orders of angels: “ministers of fire and spirit,” “heavenly beings,” angels, seraphim, cherubim, Gabriel and Michael, Narsai evokes them all. In Narsai’s estimation, angels are indeed present for the priest’s service, but that is because they are dependent on it. Despite being superior in nature, beauty, and holiness, these angels cannot compare to the power of the priest as a priest. They pay attention to the priest’s celebration of the Eucharist, indeed they wait for it, because they have no access to “their Holies” without the priest’s help. This catechetical writer has turned Christian expectations about angels on their heads, making angels subordinate to priests.50

49

Connolly, Liturgical Homilies, 47-48. Having been born in Ain Dulbe and spending a part of his time in Kfar-Mari before living in Mopsuestia and Edessa (“Narses of Edessa,” Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Döpp and Geerlings, trans. O’Connell, 429), Narsai inhabited some of the places central to the rabbinic movement in Babylonia. Peter Schäfer has noted that rabbinic literature made several clear attempts to subordinate angels to humans (Rivalität zwischen Engeln und Menschen: Untersuchungen zur

50

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ANGELS IN THE AUDIENCE Each of the four writers examined in this chapter considered the imagined presence of angels during the Eucharist important enough to teach to their catechumens and readers, and for each, these angels accomplished a different purpose. Theodore of Mopsuestia saw the priest and the deacons who served the priest as symbolically linked to both the angels who serve in the heavenly liturgy as well as the angels he thought present at Jesus’ execution. The dual nature of their presence—both in the past of the Passion narrative and the future of the heavenly sacrificed joined by Christians—allowed Theodore to emphasize both the “now” and the “not yet,” to borrow Arthur Shippee’s phrase. Cyril of Jerusalem told his catechumens that angels would be present at their Eucharist, as well as at their baptism, and indeed, would react positively to their increasing commitments to Christianity. John Chrysostom portrayed angels surrounding the priest during the Eucharist as a way to glorify the priesthood (and thereby be excused from it as one not worthy of it); his depiction had an influence on later Christian thinking about the liturgy and its attendants. Narsai of Edessa followed Chrysostom, but went beyond simply placing angels at the Eucharist; instead, he made angels dependent on the Eucharist. Why were so many different uses of the imaginary visualization of angels possible? First, angels are optimally imaginable beings, by dint of being somewhat like humans and yet divine. As the theologians of the fourth century found out, to

rabbinischen Engelvorstellung [Berlin: deGruyter, 1975]). It may be possible that Narsai and the rabbinic writers were participating in a common motif.

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imagine a being totally powerful and totally divine is a difficult prospect; to imagine something slightly powerful and slightly divine is easier.51 The presence of angels in Scripture also made the task easier for these writers: the different orders of angels, such as Thrones and Dominations, or seraphim and cherubim, all had their place either in the Septuagint or the New Testament, meaning that audiences had some familiarity with angels and could imagine them in new situations. The catechists discussed in this chapter call upon types of angels that already existed in Christian tradition and teaching. The second reason why these writers were able to ask their audiences to imagine angels in so many different ways has to do with the passivity of angels. Some early discussions of Christian ritual, particularly of baptism, place angels in an active role; however, all of these texts—including the Shepherd of Hermas, Tertullian’s On Baptism, and the Valentinian work excerpted in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis—were deemed by later Christians to be of questionable orthodoxy.52 Mainstream Christian ideas of angels in the fourth and fifth centuries centered on their passivity, either by emphasizing the purpose of angels as vessels of

51

Pascal Boyer (The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994], particularly 91-95, 100-119) discusses how beings that confirm several ontological expectations about their status (angels have the basic psychology of humans: they talk, they take orders, they give orders, they listen) while violating a few others (angels fly, appear at will, have strange appendages) are the most easily representable on a consistent basis. 52 For the Shephard of Hermas: R. Joly, ed., Le Pasteur, Sources chrétiennes 53 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1968). For Tertullian, On Bapt. 6, see E. Amman, “L’ange du baptême dans Tertullien,” Revue des sciences religieuses 1 (1921): 208-21. Amman points out “Cette conception de Tertullien a persévéré longtemps en Afrique. Optât de Milève conteste aux donatistes la possession de l'ange du baptême: unde vobis angelum (habetis), qui apud vos possit fontem movere aut inter ceteras dotes ecclesiae numerari? (Contra Parmenianum, II, 6; édition Ziwsa, p. 43).” For the Valentinian writer, see F. Sagnard, ed., Clément d’Alexandrie: Extraits du Théodote, Sources chrétiennes 23 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970).

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praise or by subordinating their will to the will of God.53 The four writers discussed here stay within the bounds of this tradition, asking that participants imagine angels as observers of ritual or even as partakers in ritual, but not actors in ritual. By multiplying the passive spectators of the Eucharist, these writers introduce nothing substantially new to the workings of the ritual, but they do teach their catechumens to produce new meanings for the ritual and, perhaps more importantly, its actors.

53

See, for example, Augustine’s discussion of angels in Civ. 12.1, where he defines angels as those who follow the will of God: “bad” angels have fallen away by executing rational choice, choosing to exercise their own power.

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Chapter Four THE FATE OF ANGELS IN THE TRINITARIAN ERA: FOURTH-CENTURY READINGS OF THE SON Once a story is told, it ceases to be a story: it becomes a piece of history, an interpretative device. —Carolyn Kay Steadman, Landscape for a Good Woman1

In the middle of the second century, the Christian apologist Justin Martyr constructed a philosophical dialogue between himself and a Jew, Trypho. This earliest of dialogue texts strives, through questions and answers carefully controlled by its author, to delineate and explain emergent Christian doctrines, in part to demonstrate Christianity’s superiority as a system of thought to its Greek and Jewish predecessors. Such a project necessarily focused on the person of Christ, and Justin correspondingly made sweeping claims for his identity: As I can demonstrate from all the Scriptures, Christ is king and priest and god and lord and angel and human and chief of the army and stone and a begotten child and the first to suffer, returning from heaven and again coming in glory, and is said to have the eternal kingdom.2

1

Carolyn Kay Steadman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 143. 2 Justin, Dial. 34 (Miroslav Marcovich, ed., Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, Patristiche Texte und Studien 47 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997], 125); cf. Dial. 61 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 174-75): “God begat from Himself (as a) ‘Beginning’ before all creatures a certain rational power, who is once called by the Holy Spirit ‘Glory of the Lord’, and (in another place) ‘Son’, and then ‘Wisdom’, then ‘Angel’, then ‘God’, then ‘Lord’ and ‘Word’, and once called himself ‘Commander-in Chief’ when he appeared in the form of a man to Joshua the son of Nun” (trans. Darrell D. Hannah, Michael and Christ: Michael Traditions and Angel Christology in Early Christianity, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2 [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999], 1), and Dial. 86 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 219): “also, he received from the father ‘king’ and ‘Christ’ and ‘priest’ and ‘angel,’ and other such as he has or did have.” See also Apol. 1.6, where Christ is identified as “like angels.” Silke-Petra Bergjan argues that Justin only refers to Christ as an angel in order to mark the modalist tendencies of others (“Qualifying ‘Angel’ in Justin’s Logos Christology,” Studia Patristica 50 (2003):353-57); however, it appears that all these titles, “angel” included, have meaning for Justin’s own idea of Christ.

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Justin’s unrestrained approach to the nature of Christ is supported, as he says, by his understanding of Scripture. Part of Justin’s project in the Dialogue was to demonstrate that Christ was the same entity philosophers identified as the Logos or Word; moreover, he wished to demonstrate that this Word was present at the theophanies recorded in the Septuagint. Such continuity would help Justin’s case that Christianity was not only available to Trypho as a Jew, but also expected of him, because the divine figure of Christianity had already appeared to Jews.3 Taunting Trypho, Justin holds that if only Jews understood these biblical appearances for what they were, they would not hesitate to accept Christ as Christians did: “if you had conceived of the things said by the prophets, you would not have denied him to be God, son of the only, the unbegotten, the ineffable God.”4 For early Christians, locating Christ in Scripture—particularly in the Septuagint, or Old Testament—is a complex process, one open to more vulnerabilities than Justin’s triumphant tone may lead us to believe. It is possible to see these vulnerabilities embedded in Justin’s Dialogue. In one instance, Justin directs Trypho to examine the identity of the three visitors to Abraham at Mamre, a scene depicted in Genesis 18. While Justin and Trypho agree that these visitors are angels, one of them, Justin argues, is also God. His view depends on a particular

3

Justin’s argument linking the God of Judaism to the God of Christianity may seem unnecessary (particularly to those of us used to the notion of a “Judeo-Christian” culture), but there were claims among Justin’s contemporaries that the divinity venerated by Christians was not, in fact, the divinity worshipped by Jews. See, for example, the subset of Nag Hammadi texts identified as belonging to the “Sethians,” known for seeing the god of the Hebrew Bible as a vengeful being, subordinate to the one God. See also the figure of Marcion, who, at least in the eyes of his opponents, considered the god of the Hebrew Bible to be separate from the god of Christians; cf. Tertullian, Adv. Marc., Irenaeus, Haer. 1.27, and Clement, Strom. 3.3. 4 Dial. 126 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 287-89). See also Dial. 75, 12728 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 200, 290-93).

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hermeneutic: that there is what I will term a “continuity of character” from one biblical story to the next. Operating under this assumption, readers should expect the divine to appear from scene to scene under different names. With reference to Genesis 18, Justin explains that one of the angels who visit Abraham vows to return, promising that Sarah will have a son (Gen 18.10). When the narrative turns to Sarah and her struggle with Hagar three chapters later, the passage specifically says that “God” appears and speaks to Abraham (Gen 21.12). Because the promise uttered by the angel in Genesis 18 is fulfilled by one identified as “God” in Genesis 21, Justin is satisfied that the angel who vowed to return and help Sarah in Genesis 18 was, indeed, God.5 More to the point, readers should understand that the angel who was also God is the Word, or Christ.6 Seeming to pose a challenge to Justin’s authority in a text Justin himself composed, Trypho points out that if Christ, the Word and God, is indeed present at Mamre as one of the three angels, he must have eaten what Abraham had prepared for those angels as his guests.7 After all, as he notes, the manna the Israelites ate in the wilderness is described as “the angels’ food,” so it is clear that angels do eat. Here, Trypho seems to have triumphed—how can this angel eat and yet be God in the form

5

Justin, Dial. 56 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 161-67); there are a few other appearances of God to Abraham between Gen 18 and Gen 21, but for Justin, the important detail is that the promise made in Gen 18 implies a visit near the time of Sarah’s giving birth to a son. 6 See Dial. 56 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 163), where Justin interprets Genesis 19.24 (“Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven”) to mean that “this one who is said and is written to have appeared to Abraham and Jacob and Moses is a different god than the god who made all things, by number and not by will.” That is, it is not the “ineffable Father of all” who appears to Noah, Abraham, or even Moses. Instead, it is the Word. See also Dial. 127. 7 For a discussion of the role of the Jewish Other in Christian dialogue texts, beginning with Dial. and ranging to fifth-century eratopokriseis texts, see Andrew Jacobs, "Dialogical Differences: (De)Judaizing Jesus' Circumcision," Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007): 291-335.

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of the Word? Is not Justin substituting an angel for God? Could this angel really be Christ?8 Justin hesitates, saying that the “eating” at Mamre must be symbolic, something that should “trouble no one” accustomed to poetic license, and suggests that the actions taken by the character portrayed in Genesis 18 have nothing to do with the person of Christ. Justin thus filters from Scripture knowledge about Christ using a set of reading practices, calibrated to support one conception of the Word and to obviate readings that do not support it or that outright undermine it. The hermeneutic principles that Justin employs to create this particular reading of Scripture are relatively simple—Christ the Word is the character to be read in all divine actions of the Old Testament, except when those actions are unseemly for him; at that moment, allegorical interpretation may be used to explain a difficult passage. Later Christians distrusted allegorical or symbolic solutions and instead developed much more complex methods for selecting knowledge about Christ from Scripture. These methods consistently limited the ways that the Son may be associated with the visible, knowable, or material aspects of God. This is particularly true of the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christians vigorously debated the relationship of Christ, the Son, to the Father.9 In this chapter, I investigate several major thinkers from the era of the Trinitarian controversy—Athanasius; Basil of Caesarea and his defender, Gregory of Nyssa; then Augustine—and describe their approaches to drawing knowledge about the Son from Scripture. However, my

8

Dial. 57 (ed. Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone, 167-68). And, less importantly for my purposes, the relationship of the Holy Spirit to both Father and Son. All the thinkers I consider in this paper also address the Holy Spirit, but I have chosen to focus on the Son and the way he is described, in part because it is most often in these texts that angels serve as a tool for defining another divine actor.

9

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interest is not primarily in the nature of the Son. Instead, I focus on the reading practices used by these thinkers to evidence their understandings of the Son and contend that the elevation of the Son they develop simultaneously creates a novel and more specific valuation of angels as divine mediators. Even though there are no treatises “On the Angels” extant from the fourth century to match the multitude of works “On the Trinity,” this does not mean that Christians were not generating ideas about angels, their nature, and their position in the cosmos. The development of fourth- and early fifth-century Christian notions of angels are available to us as a refraction of the scriptural epistemologies of the Son fashioned by authors who aimed to solve Trinitarian problems.

CREATOR AND CREATURES Justin Martyr’s list of titles for Christ in the Dialogue with Trypho was expansive, to be sure, but it represents some of the diversity of the earliest Christian understandings of the divine. Scholars have noted that Christians of Justin’s era often used language about angels from the Septuagint and from other apocryphal Jewish works to make sense of the incarnate Christ and his role as a mediator to humanity. For example, Michael Hannah updates a theory first voiced by Wilhelm Lüken in the nineteenth century, arguing with new methodological focus that Jewish traditions of Michael the archangel are the foundation of the earliest Christologies.10 His term, “angelic

10

Hannah, Michael and Christ, especially 2-4 and his conclusions, 215-20; Lüken, Michael: Eine Darstellung und Vergleichung der jüdischen und der morgenländisch-christlichen Tradition vom Erzengel Michael (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1898).

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Christology,” is meant as a corrective to the “angel Christology” of Martin Werner, who had argued that early Christians first understood Christ ontologically to have been an angel; Werner’s thesis met with sharp criticism.11 Other scholars have been more precise, undertaking to study the prospect of “angelomorphic Christologies” in early Christianity, that is, portrayals of Christ which use the visual imagery associated with angels.12 All of these studies, however, have concentrated on the first few centuries of Christianity. Choosing to investigate the New Testament and other firstand second-century texts, none of them venture beyond that. One possible reason for this dearth of studies regarding later Christianity is that, traditionally, scholars and theologians have argued that Christian understandings of angels have been entirely separate from Christian understandings of Christ, particularly after the third century. Formative in this regard have been figurations like Georg Kretschmar’s portrayal of the authoritative nature of the Council of Nicaea.

11

Martin Werner, Der Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas: problemgeschichtlich dargestellt (Bern: P. Haupt, 1941); Wilhelm Michaelis, Zur Engelchristologie im Urchristentum: Abbau der Konstruktion Martin Werners, Gegenwartsfragen biblischer Theologie 1 (Basel: Heinrich Majer, 1942). 12 The first to emphasize angel imagery was Christopher Rowland (The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity [London: SPCK, 1982]), but many have followed him, including Loren Stuckenbruck’s Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995) and Peter R. Carrell’s Jesus and the Angels: Angelology and the Christology of the Apocalypse of John, Society for New Testament Studies Monographs 95 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Charles A. Gieschen, Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents and Early Evidence, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 42 (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Recently, Kevin Sullivan’s book (Wrestling with Angels: A Study of the Relationship between Angels and Humans in Ancient Jewish Literature and the New Testament, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 55 [Leiden: Brill, 2004]), attempts to simplify some of this, but Sullivan ends up making a more complex system of classification. Samuel Vollenweider claims that references to Christ as an angel in early Christian texts cannot be meant to convey something about his qualities, as the qualities of angels and Christ described by these texts do not overlap to a significant degree (“Zwischen Monotheismus und Engelchristologie: Überlegungen zur Frühgeschichte des Christusglaubens,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 99 (2002): 21-44). The more recent article by Paul Foster, “Polymorphic Christology: Its Origins and Development in Early Christianity” (Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 58 [2007]: 66-99), provides a broader view of the range of Christologies in the early centuries of Christianity.

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Kretschmar was responding to Martin Werner’s thesis about angelic Christology when he concluded that Nicaea had put in place a “boundary between God and the world of angels, between creator and created,” making a theology of the Trinity that was more than just a recycled version of “a mythological idea of an apocalyptic hierarchy of angels.”13 Kretschmar’s insistence upon the decisive nature of Nicaea for the understanding of Christ was influential, particularly on more traditional scholars of Christian intellectual history, like Jaroslav Pelikan, who cited Kretschmar to characterize the contribution of Nicaea to the development of orthodoxy.14 However, Kretschmar’s own understanding of Nicaea may not accurately reflect the issues regarding the Son that troubled those at the council. It is true that the creed which precedes the canons of Nicaea represents an attempt at orthodoxy, ruling out certain conceptions of Christ. It anathematizes those who say, “There was when he was not” and “Before being born he was not” and that “He came into existence out of nothing” or who assert that the Son of God is of a different hypostasis or substance or is subject to alteration and change.15 The phrases that are singled out above for condemnation all express some view of the Son’s generation, either that it took place at a certain point in time, or that it was a

13

Georg Kretschmar, Studien zur frühchristlichen Trinitätstheologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1956), 222-23: “Damit ist auch zugleich eine Antwort gegeben auf die naheliegende Frage, ob nicht die Trinitätslehre der Kirche nur die Umformung der mythologischen Konzeption einer apokalyptischen Engelhierarchie darstellt. Gerade Nicaea hat die Grenze zwischen Gott und Engelwelt, Schöpfer und Geschöpf, die im hellenistischen Judentum Philos und in der jüdischen Mystik des dritten Henochbuches ebenso zu verschwimmen begann wie in dere hellenistischen Popularphilsophie, wieder mit letzter Konsequenz ausgezogen.” Kretschmar’s repudiation of Werner appears on this page as well and is discussed by Joseph Trigg, “The Angel of Great Counsel: Christ and the Angelic Hierarchy in Origen’s Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 42 (1991): 35-51, esp. 37. 14 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 140. 15 Nicene Creed (J.N.D. Kelly, ed., Early Christian Creeds, 2nd ed. [London: Longmans, 1960], 216; trans. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 3rd ed. [New York: McKay, 1972], reprinted in Bart. D. Ehrman and Andrew S. Jacobs, eds., Christianity in Late Antiquity 300-450 C.E.: A Reader [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 252).

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generation that used no prior substance, or that the generation made the Son to be an entity somehow lower than the Father. Such views, it seems, were held by a number of thinkers loosely associated with Lucian of Antioch, a group termed the “Eusebians” by Lewis Ayres, all of whom were interested in maintaining the immutability of God, even as he came to be “the Father” to the Son. While they shared convictions about the ineffable nature of God, these Eusebians did not espouse precisely the same theology or the same vocabulary. Eusebius of Nicomedia, for example, maintained that the Son’s generation did not require the use of any part of God the Father, and thus he argued that the Son did not participate “at all in the unoriginated nature [of the Father] nor in his substance, but [was] produced as altogether different in his nature and in his power….”16 Arius, the most (in)famous of the Eusebians, was less concerned about the Son than about what his generation meant for God. His theological hymn, the Thalia, treats the Son and his generation primarily as markers of God’s lack of generation; information about the Son’s participation with God is secondary to information about God’s lack of subordination: God then himself is in essence ineffable to all. He alone has neither equal nor like, none comparable in glory; We call him Unbegotten because of the one in nature begotten; We raise hymns to him as Unbegun because of him who has beginning; We adore him as eternal because of the one born in time. … [The Son] has nothing proper to God in his essential property,

16

Eusebius of Nicomedia, ep. to Paulinus (Hans-Georg Opitz, ed., Athanasius Werke III/1: Urkunden zur Geschichte des Arianischen Streits [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1934-1935], Urkunde 8, cited by Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 53).

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for neither is he equal nor yet consubstantial with him.17 Thus, it is the information regarding the Son’s status and the way this status reflects upon God that concerns Arius. In particular, Arius works to communicate through the Thalia that the fact of the Son’s generation is less important than what the Son’s being generated points out about the father: his “Unbegotten,” “Unbegun,” “eternal” nature. This is not to say that the Eusebians thought of the Son as not God. Mark DelCogliano investigates the variety of positions about the Son’s divinity among the Eusebians, finding two main lines of thinking. The first, represented by Arius as well as by Asterius the Sophist, claimed that “as a created essence external to the Father, the Son nonetheless was God through his preeminent participation by grace in the divine attributes of the Father.”18 The second, held by Eusebius of Caesarea and Acacius of Caesarea, rejected “speaking of the Son as created in any way and understood the Son as ‘made like’ or ‘constituted in likeness to’ the Father without participating in the divine attributes.”19 The primary aim of the theology of the “Eusebian alliance” was not to diminish the Son, but to describe his nature in ways that did not encroach upon the perfection of God the Father.20 Because the documents closest to the Council of Nicaea—both the creed itself and the various texts of the Eusebians—demonstrate that the concerns of those

17

Arius, Thalia, stanza 2 and 3 (trans. Stuart Hall, ed. J. Stevenson, A New Eusebius: Documents Illustrating the History of the Church to AD 337, rev. ed., W. H. C. Frend [London: SPCK, 1987]; repr. in Ehrman and Jacobs, Christianity in Late Antiquity, 158-59); the fragments of the Thalia survive only in Athanasius’s de syn. 15 (Opitz, ed., Athanasius Werke II/1 [Berlin: de Gruyter, 1939]). 18 Mark DelCogliano, “Eusebian Theologies of the Son as the Image of God before 341,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006): 459-84, at 460. 19 DelCogliano, “Eusebian Theologies of the Son,” 460. 20 The phrase “Eusebian alliance” is DelCogliano’s.

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involved centered around the generation of the Son and how this generation might affect the perception of the Father, it may be surprising to consider again Kretschmar’s characterization of Nicaea as the moment when “God” was separated from “the world of the angels.” The creed and canons of Nicaea do not speak of angels, nor do the surviving texts of the Eusebians. Indeed, some Eusebian thinkers vehemently rejected the idea that the Son could be described as something “created.” While other Eusebians did use the term, their interests did not lie with defining the Son as “created” so much as understanding how the Son’s coming into being could happen while still preserving the unity of God. Kretschmar’s claim that Nicaea drew a line between “creator and created,” then, is surprising as well. In recent decades, scholars have increasingly acknowledged that our understanding of the Council of Nicaea and its aftermath have been disproportionately colored by the polemical efforts of Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria and eventual champion of the pro-Nicene cause. Fifteen years after the council, Athanasius wrote what Ayres rightly termed “a masterpiece of the rhetorical art,” the first two of three eventual Orations against the Arians.21 In these works, Athanasius “redescribes the controversies …developing since 325” by creating “a complex genealogy of the ‘Arian’ heresy stemming from Arius himself.”22 Treating all of his opponents as theological followers of Arius, Athanasius argues that they are heretics on the order of Manicheans, an analogy that Ayres suggests is “not random,”

21

Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 107. Ayres terms this section of his work, “The Creation of ‘Arianism’ AD 340-350.” 22 Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 107.

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the label “Manichee” having been chosen for its capacity to stigmatize.23 It is because of Athanasius’s skilled polemical portrayal of Arius as an arch-heretic, the father of an entire litter of heretics, that we even speak of an “Arian” controversy centered on a Nicene definition of the Trinity. As we consider his Orations, we will see that Athanasius’s polemic also recast the Council of Nicaea itself. The pervasive notion that Nicaea divided between creator and created, and that this division is best represented in the dichotomy between the Son and angels, is an effect of Athanasius’s rhetorical skill. To understand how Athanasius’s creation of the “Arian” heresy also created a more precise role for angels, we must look at his methods of reading the Bible. Athanasius was, above all, concerned with the proper use of Scripture, especially the selective derivation from Scripture of knowledge about Christ. Not just any method for reading Scripture is sufficient, though. For example, as Athanasius rails against the “Arians,” he argues that the theological positions voiced by Arius are no less heretical because they appear to be supported by Scripture. After all, other “heretics”—Jews and Manicheans—read the Scriptures: If they think they can turn blasphemies into praise by the inclusion of certain words of the holy Scriptures in the Thalia, then they might as well deny Christ right alongside the present-day Jews, watching them read the law and the prophets. Or, they could deny the law and the prophets with the Manichees, since they read some part of the gospels. If they are ignorant, and thus are distressed and blurt out such things, then they will learn from Scripture that even the devil, the conceiver of heresies, through the same bad odor of evil has used words of Scripture, holding them as a cover for dispersing his own poison, so as to fool the guileless.24

23

Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 107. Athanasius, Or. 1.8 (William Bright, ed., The Orations of St. Athanasius against the Arians according to the Benedictine Text [Oxford: Clarendon, 1873], 8). 24

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In Athanasius’s estimation, Arius uses both the Old Testament and the New with abandon, apparently choosing to “disperse his poison” (τὸν ἲδιον ἰὸν ἐπισπείρας), “fooling the guileless” (ἀπατήσῃ τοὺς ἀκεραίους) by incorporating quotations of Scripture throughout his hymn in order to make it seem legitimate. The resulting theology Athanasius casts as so much stammering: the Thalia is rife with profligate uses of Scripture that are little more than signs of distress, overreaching attempts at theology—certainly not reasoned ways of knowing the divine. This invective implies that accurate knowledge of Christ can only be drawn from Scripture with the proper hermeneutics, reading practices determined in turn by one’s theology. Athanasius explains the proper reading of a number of scriptural passages in his first Oration, as he corrects the errors he sees in his enemies’ exegesis. He raises those passages that embody his view of the Son’s nature and rejects the statements he sees as integral to the “Arian” position: that “the Word of God is ‘creature and made thing and one of the originates’.” In section 53 of the Oration, however, Athanasius turns to a passage that he marks as especially significant for his cause: Hebrews 1.4, which says that the Son has “become as much superior to the angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.” We can deduce that Athanasius found this passage worthy of special attention because in his discussion of it, he resumes the characterization of heresy as a poison, “dispersed” among fools through the use of Scripture, linking this section of the Oration directly to his earlier charge that Arians are of a piece with Jews and Manichees. He suggests that when Arians ignore the sending of the Son, then, like the Jews, they should not deal with the New Testament; on the other hand, if they are to deny the fleshly reality of the incarnation, then, like 140

the Manichees, they should not interpret the Old Testament. By ascribing to certain propositions about the Son on the basis of Hebrews 1.4, Athanasius’s opponents have as good as changed their affiliations, not to mention their relationship to Scripture; no longer Christians, they take up the activity that Athanasius had previously reported of the devil: “Thus they deceive the brainless [ἀπατῶσι τοὺς ἀνοήτους], putting forth words and dispersing their own poison of heresy [τὸν ἲδιον τῆς αἱρέσεως ἐπισπείροντες] against the true interpretation.”25 Although Athanasius had turned to other matters of exegesis before arriving at Hebrews 1.4, the allusions in this passage (Or. 1.53) to his initial statement of concern about the proper interpretation of Scripture (Or. 1.8) make the reader aware that Athanasius has here taken up the meat of his argument against those who “disperse their own poison of heresy.”26 What is the devilish project of these “Arian” heretics? Athanasius understands them to be reading Hebrews 1.4, in particular its claim that the Son has “become…superior to the angels” (κρείττων γενόμενος τῶν ἀγγέλων), to support their insistence that the Son is originate, created like other creations. This he rejects with an interpretative argument: Things written this way do not indicate, O Arians, that the Son is originate [γενητὸς], but rather that he is other than things originate, proper27 to the father, existing in his bosom. And even the fact that

25

Athanasius, Or. 1.53 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 55, references to Jews and Manicheans on 56). 26 Here I do not develop a theory of the composition of the Orations and why this theme of the devilish dispersal of poison only reappears after a long interim. However, Charles Kannengiesser (Athanase d’Alexandrie évêque et écrivain: Une lecture des traités Contre les Ariens, Théologie Historique 70 [Paris: Beauchesne, 1983], 19-67) discusses the structure of the first Oration. 27 ἲδιον; for the use of this term in Athanasius, consult Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 114-15, and Andrew Louth, “The Use of the Term ἲδιος in Alexandrian Theology from Alexander to Cyril,” Studia Patristica 19 (1987): 198-202, cited by Ayres.

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[the passage] uses “become” [γενόμενος] does not mean that the Son is originate [γενητὸς], as you think.28 Athanasius insists that the linguistic similarity between “become” and “originate” is a false indication about the Son. To support this claim, he cites examples of Scripture where human sons are spoken of as “originate” (Job’s sons in Job 1.2, Isaac in Gen 21.5) alongside John 1.3, “through him all things came into being,” which suggests that the Son is himself the cause of all things originate. Thus, “since the Son is other than things originate, himself the only proper offspring of the Father’s substance, this notion about the word ‘become’ is worthless for the Arians.”29 The true meaning of the word, and thus the passage, relates the Son’s role adopted in time; “becoming superior to the angels” refers to the Son’s recent office as mediator to humanity at the moment of the incarnation.30 Even though Christians in previous centuries, like Justin, could express the Son’s role as a mediator to humanity by using language that suggested the Son was like an angel, Athansius is firm in his belief that the Son cannot be likened to angels. The problem Athanasius identifies in the “Arian” interpretation of Hebrews 1.4 resides in the use of language to generate knowledge. The word “superior” (κρείττων) implies comparison, and such relative language suggests that the Son is comparable to angels: like them, but somehow better than them. This Athanasius

28

Athanasius, Or. 1.56 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 58). Athanasius, Or. 1.56 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 59). 30 Athanasius, Or. 1.55-56 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 57-59); see James D. Ernest’s discussion of the “tripartite rule” of Athanasian exegesis (so named by Allen Lee Clayton, “The Orthodox Recovery of a Heretical Proof-Text: Athanasius of Alexandria’s Interpretation of Proverbs 8:22-30 in Conflict with the Arians [PhD diss., Southern Methodist University, 1988]) in his work The Bible in Athanasius of Alexandria, The Bible in Ancient Christianity 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 135-38.

29

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roundly rejects. First, he emphasizes the difference he sees in the nature of angels and the nature of the Son. There is no sameness shared between the angels and the Son. The word “better” is not used for comparison (συγκριτικῶς), but for differentiation (διακριτικῶς), because of the difference between his nature and theirs.31 A reader might logically assume that the comparative “better” indicates a relationship of some affinity between the things compared. Athanasius is thus careful to explain his position that there is no affinity between the nature of the Son and the nature of angels. In this way, Athanasius first introduces the idea that the Son’s nature can be made distinct precisely through an observation of how different it is from the nature of angels. Athanasius has two main lines of argumentation to support his point. First, he draws this conclusion in part from the grammar of Hebrews 1.4. If the author had said that the Son was more than the angels “by so much,” or that he “was so much greater than they,” then it would be proper to assume that the Son and angels share the same nature and can be compared. However, since the author says the Son is “better” and that the Son differs from the angels “as a son differs from servants,” it is clear that the Son has a different nature than the angels.32 A second line of argumentation depends upon reading other parts of Scripture. Athanasius twice turns to the statement immediately following Hebrews 1.4, “To which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you’?”33 From this, he argues,

31

Athanasius, Or. 1.55 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 58). Athanasius, Or. 1.57 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 60). This is a slightly specious argument, in that μᾶλλον and μείζων are comparative in much the same way that κρείττων is. 33 Athanasius, Or. 1.57, 62 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 60, 65).

32

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it is clear that the Son is of a different nature than angels. As a bolster to these arguments, Athanasius invokes the specter of more ancient heresies. If they do such violence to say that [the word “better”] suggests comparison, and that comparison implies oneness [ὁμογενῆ], so that the Son is of the nature of the angels, they should be ashamed to bring up again the things of the Valentinians and the Carpocratians and other heretics….Maybe it is through them that they learned to liken the Word of God to the angels.34 Athanasius lays out his hermeneutical rules—which first use the grammar of Hebrews 1.4, then invoke other passages of Scripture—to arrive at his interpretation of the Son. Those who do not follow his method of reading Scripture are likened to the archheretics of centuries past: the Valentinians, among others. There is a point that is obvious in Athanasius’s exegesis, but it is one worth stating explicitly. The notion of the Son having a nature superior to that of the angels by implication creates a classification for angels that is lower than the Son. That is, Athanasius’s logic requires that the angels are part of the created order, something that is not at all apparent from Scripture. Athanasius finds confirmation of the angels’ created status in other scriptural passages that position the Son with respect to the Father. No angel, he notes, was ever raised to “sit at the right hand of the Father.”35 Additionally, Athanasius appeals to a common belief that angels worship the Son in order to prove the Son’s higher status. By drawing attention to Hebrews 1.6 (“Let all God’s angels worship him”) and reading it as a reference to the Son, Athanasius 34

Athanasius, Or. 1.56 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 59). Athanasius, Or. 1.61 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 64). The issue of the positioning of divine actors near God appears in rabbinic thinking about angels; see, for example, the story of Metatron being mistaken for a second God because he sits while God stands (b. Hagiga 15a, discussed by Alan F. Segal in Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 25 [Leiden: Brill, 1977], esp. 60-73; see now as well Daniel Boyarin’s reconsideration of the situation in Border Lines: The Partition of JudaeoChristianity, Divinations [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004], esp. 134-44).

35

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echoes a number of other Christian writers who speak of angels joining in the worship of the Son.36 His interpretation may have been doubly motivated. Rowan Williams has argued that the Sanctus was likely understood in parts of Alexandria as a prayer from the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father, and that Arius may have known this tradition.37 To instead place the Son as an object of worship, rather than as a worshipper, as Athanasius does, had the effect of elevating his status toward that of the Father. Of course, the concomitant result for angels is the opposite: as worshippers of the Son, they show themselves to be less than him. In these ways, this section of the first Oration against the Arians works to reinforce the divinity and value of the Son by clarifying the status of angels as something different than the Son.38 It is not clear why Athanasius chose to put such emphasis on the rebuttal of the “Arian” reading of Hebrews 1.4, yet it seems as if he were aiming at correcting the interpretation of this particular piece of Scripture from the opening of his first Oration. The word “superior” and his enemies’ reading of it are what trouble him, but because the comparative objects of this superiority are “the angels,” Athanasius ends up focusing on angels more than a simple investigation of the Son might warrant. It is likely the combined impact of these reading strategies, voiced by Athanasius, which

36

Athanasius, Or. 1.61 (ed. Bright, Orations of St. Athanasius, 64); cf. Or. 2.23. Others who note that the angels worship the Son and/or God and wish human beings to do so as well are Origen (Cels. 5.45) and Augustine (Civ. 10.7, 26). 37 Williams, “Angels Unawares: Heavenly Liturgy and Earthly Theology in Alexandria,” Studia Patristica 30 (1997): 350-63. 38 See the general discussion of Athanasius’s strategies in this passage in Kannengiesser, Athanase d’Alexandrie évêque et écrivain, 238-46. I have wondered whether Athanasius’s emphasis on humanity as that which Christ assumed so as to work salvation for human beings may have eliminated human beings as the exemplars of the created order; that is, angels may have been the necessary example of created things because, as Athanasius holds, Christ did not take on the nature of angels (Or. 2.8).

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motivated Kretschmar to see in Nicaea the division between God and “the world of angels.” After the writing of these two Orations, Athanasius continued to develop his methods for drawing information about the Son from Scripture. In his third Oration against the Arians, Athanasius exhibits a sensitivity to language, particularly to the way that the names of those divine actors Christians read as the Son do—or more frequently, do not—give information about the Son’s nature.39 Athanasius can read the Son in the passages of the Septuagint which refer to an “angel” or an “angel of the Lord,” yet maintains that the Son is nothing like an angel. Next, we will consider two thinkers—Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa—who further theorize about the relationship between the titles of the Son and his nature and in so doing, also lend precision to the position of angels.

NAMES AND NATURES Athanasius may have been the earliest formulator of a pro-Nicene position, but as recent scholarship reminds us, there were “many architects of pro-Nicene theology.”40 In fourth-century Christian intellectual circles, there were multiple overlapping conversations—or, more accurately, arguments—about the nature of the Trinity. One of these conversations, which began about a decade after Athanasius’s first two Orations, is preserved for us in a trio of works: Eunomius of Cyzicus’s Apology,

39

Athanasius, Or. 3.12 (when Jacob prays in Gen 38 for the “angel” to bless his grandsons, it must be read as a plea to the Son, yet this does not mean that the Son has the nature of an angel) and 3.14 (the one who says he has seen the Son knows that he has not seen an angel or a creature, but God). 40 Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 187.

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Basil of Casearea’s Contra Eunomius, and Gregory of Nyssa’s Against Eunomius (which also records fragments of a Second Apology by Eunomius).41 As chance would have it, we have access in these works to an extended dialogue; they contain Eunomius’s original statement, Basil’s response, (parts of) Eunomius’s rebuttal, and Gregory’s eventual defense. The primary issue at stake in the conversation they record is epistemological. These authors are concerned with the use of biblical language to learn information about the Son. By tracing the ways that each treats the relationship between scriptural language and the Son’s nature, I hope to show that while Basil and Gregory were both disquieted by Eunomius’s equation of the Son with angels, Gregory’s response is much harsher than Basil’s, suggesting that over the time of the conversation between these two Cappadocians and Eunomius, the sharp divide between the Son and angels grew ever wider. Eunomius’s position regarding the reading of Scripture depended on his belief in a strict correspondence between language and knowledge. For him, the names of divine beings in Scripture indicate to us their substance. As he holds We say that the Son is a product [γέννημα] of the Father, according to the teaching of the Scriptures. We do not think that substance [οὐσίαν] is one thing, while that which indicates it is another. But, the entity [ὑπόστασιν] itself is that which indicates the name

41

Stephen Hildebrand, “A Reconsideration of the Development of Basil’s Trintarian Theology: The Dating of Ep. 9 and Contra Eunomium,” Vigiliae Christianae 58 (2004): 393-406; Hildebrand opts for 362 as the date, but discusses the other scholarly opinions which range from 360 to 365 (397-403). See Hildebrand’s dissertation, “The Trinitarian Theology of Basil of Caesarea: A Synthesis of Greek Thought and Biblical Truth” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 2007). For a longer discussion of Basil in his own right, see Philip Rousseau’s always useful Basil of Caesarea, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 20 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). For the best narrative of Eunomius’s life, see Richard Vaggione’s Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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[τοὒνομα], for the designation [προσηγορίας] speaks truthfully about the substance [οὐσίᾳ].42 Names are determined by entities, and substances can be correctly discovered by the investigation of designations. According to this way of treating names, the Son is indicated to be below the Father in two ways. First, if the Father is described as “unbegotten” (ἀγέννητον), then this has significance for the Son, namely, that he and all others must be “begotten” (γέννηματα). Second, by the fact of his being “Son,” a name that indicates a hierarchical relationship between himself and the Father, we can discover that the Son is less than the Father. Furthermore, Eunomius extends his ability to draw information from Scripture by relying on the grammar of subject and object: any verb of action designates an object of that action. So, because Psalm 2 links God speaking to a Son and God saying “today I have begotten you,” Eunomius reasons that this Son must be a begotten thing, a γέννημα.43 Such an extrapolation also applies to the text of the New Testament, as Eunomius takes Peter’s statement in Acts that “God has made [ἐποίησε] him both Lord and Christ” to mean that the Son is a made thing (ποίημα). For Eunomius, knowledge about the Son is available through the process of reading him as the object of the Father’s actions; adjectives which teach us about the Son’s nature can be generated from verbs designating his creation by the Father.

42

Eunomius of Cyzyicus, Apol. 12 (cited by Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.6 [Bernard Sesboüé, ed., Basile de Césarée Contra Eunome, suivi de Eunome Apologie, Sources chrétiennes 305 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1983), 26], who omits the following sentence, “The one who was produced when he was not, before his own proper construction, having been produced, he was before all things by the will of God and Father,” which mitigates some of Basil’s concerns about the Son being thought of as part of the regular creation). 43 Basil of Caesarea, Contra Eunomius 2.8 (SC 305:30-32).

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Basil rejects Eunomius for his ease with language, instead advocating a more conservative hermeneutic be applied to Scripture. Basil acknowledges that there are many titles that Christian readers have found in Scripture for the Son. These titles, however, do not refer to the Son’s nature. Instead, they are indicative of the Son’s properties, from which human beings may draw abstract concepts, but which do not grant the depth of knowledge about the Son which Eunomius claims. As Basil explains: As our Lord Jesus Christ intimates in Scripture about himself both the philanthrophy of divinity and the grace which comes from [divine] economy, he indicates these things by some properties [ἰδιώμασι τισι] that may be contemplated with respect to him: he calls himself “door” and “way” and “bread” and “vine” and “shepherd” and “light”…but all these names do not mean different things about him…. He is one in substrate, a single and simple, not composite, substance; he speaks differently about himself in different places, harmonizing the designations that lead to certain concepts with each part. According to the variance of works and the scheme of his different activities, he provides names for himself.44 Even though Basil allows for the human capacity to create concepts about the Son from biblical language, the limits of his method of interpretation are clear. Names and designations refer to properties (ἰδιώματα), but do not reveal the Son’s substance; no human language could. As Ayres summarizes, the variety of names for the Son which exist in Scripture “enables us to conceptualize an aspect of [the Son’s] work and grow in knowledge of him,” while his nature remains unknowable.45 Basil is even more concerned by titles applied to the Son which are derived from, but not extant in, Scripture. Eunomius’s reliance on the relations of subject and

44 45

Basil, Contra Eunomius 1.7 (SC 299:188-90). Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 192.

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object to investigate the son, seeing “ποίημα” implied in the verb “ἐποίησε,” constitutes for Basil a dangerous move toward innovation. He warns, “do not let Eunomius”—or any reader, for that matter say that he has the authority in discourses about such great matters to invent certain variations and transformations of names. For if we indeed are called to account for “careless” words on the day of judgement (Matt 12.36), then how could the hewing of new things regarding these great matters be set aside from us without account?46 His point is this: only words that are predicated of the Son in Scripture are legitimate for deriving knowledge about the Son. As for the word “ποίημα,” Basil points out that Scripture does indeed use it, but not in reference to the Son.47 For Basil, the silence is telling: if Scripture can call the Son “glory” and “axe,” “cornerstone” and “stumbling block,” but scrupulously avoids calling him “creature,” then “creature” must be discarded as a name that even applies to the Son, let alone one that conveys information about his nature. Basil then turns to address one of the passages made significant by Eunomius’s theory of deriving object from subject, namely Isaiah 9.5, “a child has been begotten for us, a son has been given to us, the beginning rests on his shoulder, and his name is called ‘angel of great counsel’” (LXX).48 Following Eunomius’s method of interpretation, the fact that Scripture says that this child “has been begotten” (ἐγεννήθη) necessitates that the Son is himself a begotten thing (γέννημα); if there is a passage in Scripture that produces such a meaning, it is

46

Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.2 (SC 305:14). Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.2 (SC 305:14-16). 48 Is 9.5 (LXX): ὅτι παιδίον ἐγεννήθη ἡμῖν, υἱὸς καὶ ἐδόθη ἡμῖν, οὗ ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐγενήθη ἐπὶ τοῦ ὤμου αὐτοῦ, καὶ καλεῖται τὸ ὂνομα αὐτοῦ Μεγάλης βουλῆς ἄγγελος.

47

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certainly this one. But Basil finds it significant that the title given this son is not γέννημα, but something else: That the Father has begotten, we have learned everywhere; that the Son is a begotten thing, we have never heard up until today. “For unto us a child is begotten, and unto us a Son is given, and his name was called” not “begotten thing” [γέννημα] but “angel of great counsel.” If “begotten thing” did signify substance, we would not have received another name from the Holy Spirit, different than one which would clearly provide his substance.49 The title, “angel of great counsel,” given by a christological reading of Isaiah 9.5, makes Eunomius’s derivative logic unnecessary. If Scripture had intended Christ to be understood as γέννημα, it would have called him just that, instead of naming him to be the “angel of great counsel.” Furthermore, it reiterates Basil’s contention that names do not indicate substance; “angel of great counsel” cannot inform us of the Son’s nature any more than the invented “γέννημα” would. In Basil’s view, “angel of great counsel” may indicate one of the Son’s properties, as other names and designations from Scripture do, but not his substance. Basil’s willingness to entertain “angel of great counsel” as a title of the Son becomes helpful in his response to another plank in Eunomius’s platform: namely, the claim that the Son was recently created from nothing.50 By assuming continuity of character as he reads Scripture, Basil demonstrates that there is a divine actor who is called both “angel and “God.” In Genesis 31, for example, Jacob is approached by

49

Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.7 (SC 305:28-30). I am grateful to Andy Radde-Gallwitz and Mark DelCogliano for discussing this passage with me and offering their advice about its translation and its implications. I look forward to the publication of their translation of Contra Eunomius. 50 By “recently” I mean not from eternity. Either Basil did not understand all of Eunomius’s position, did not see a text that included it, or purposefully omitted the fact that Eunomius specifies that while the Son is indeed created, “not existing before his own contstitution,” he is nevertheless “made to exist before all, through the will of God and Father” (Apol. 12 [SC 305:258]).

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“the angel of God,” who announces to him, “I am the God of Bethel.” In Exodus 3, “the angel of the Lord” appears to Moses in the burning bush, then announces “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Later in the chapter, the entity speaking with Moses announces, “I am who I am.” Unless one is willing to read “God,” “the Lord,” and “the angel of the Lord” as different characters—and narrative logic strongly counters this desire—then one must assume that all these names refer to the same being. Once Basil establishes that the same entity should be read for all divine speakers throughout the passages, he asks “Who is he who is both angel and God? Is it not the one whose name, we learned, is called ‘angel of great counsel’?” In this way, Basil disputes Eunomius’s claim that the son is created from nothing. Instead, the Son exists from the same time as “the Existent,” the God whose title he shares. Even with an awareness of narrative time—seeing, for example, that the angel of great counsel in Isaiah may be a title given to the entity born in the incarnate Son—Basil maintains that “angel” has indicated a property of the Son since before time. As he explains, “Even if he became the angel of great counsel recently, he did not reject earlier the name of ‘angel’.”51 Thus the Son has borne the titles of God and angel for all existence, and his co-eternity with the Father cannot be questioned. While this may have been a viable response to Eunomius’s idea of a recentlybegotten Son, one less than the Father, Basil’s association of the Son with these two titles backfired, because they formed for Eunomius the basis for a more precise claim

51

Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.18 (SC 305:72).

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about the Son’s status: that he occupies a mediate position between the angels and God the Father. In what remains of his Second Apology Eunomius confirms Basil’s reading of the Son in passages like Genesis 31 and Exodus 3, then applies his own theory of language to these passages. Because Eunomius correlates names and substances, the Son’s title of “angel” reveals information about his relationship to God, while his title of “God” reveals information about his relationship to angels. The Son is the one Who, by being named “angel,” on the one hand, clearly showed the one [i.e., God] through whom he announces his words and [clearly showed] who is the Existent; and, on the other hand, by being addressed as “God,” demonstrated his own authority over all things. For he [the Son] is the god of all things coming about through him, angel of the God above all things.52 The Son, being indicated by the words “angel” and “God” alike, occupies a middle position: less than God, the Father, but more than the things created, a role that allows for both names to be indications of his nature. No response survives from Basil to this second round of Eunomius’s thought. However, Gregory of Nyssa became Basil’s later defender, writing a rebuttal to Eunomius’s Second Apology in three books, composed between 380 and 383. In Gregory’s work, titled Against Eunomius, we see evidence of a much starker divide between the Son’s nature and any use of the name “angel.” Basil’s calm, careful

52

Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.27 (W. Jaeger, ed., Gregorii Nysseni Opera: Liber III (Vulgo III-XII, Refutatio Confessionis Eunomii (Vulgo Lib. II) [Leiden: Brill, 1960], 273-74). This is a case where the Greek may be easier to understand than the English, and Eunomius’s styling of the God/angel binary represented in the Son is rhetorically savvy: ὃς τῷ μὲν ἄγγελος ὠνομάσθαι σαφῶς ἐδίδαξε δι’ ὃτου διήγγειλε τοὺς λόγους καὶ τίς ὁ ὤν, τῷ δὲ καὶ θεὸς προσειρῆσθαι τὴν ἰδίαν ἒδειξε κατὰ πάντων ὑπεροχήν. ὁ γὰρ τῶν δι’ αὐτοῦ γενομένων θεὸς ἄγγελος τοῦ ἐπὶ πάντων θεοῦ. Cf. Origen, Comm. in Jo. 1.34.

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explications of language and scriptural hermeneutics are gone, replaced by Gregory’s escalated range of argument and accusation. Gregory’s first response is marked by emotion, strikingly different from the measured tone of his predecssor, Basil. He is outraged by the way Eunomius reads Scripture, seeing substance in the name “angel,” and he fairly explodes: Immediately anger falls on my heart and cuts short my logic, falling into my heart and my reason is confused by passion with the anger brought up by the things [he says]. Maybe I will not be pardoned for such passion—but who would anger not seize [when he heard] such things, when the Apostle says that every angelic nature is subject to the Lord? [Heb 1.6]. . .What should I feel, hearing from [this] fighter of Christ that the Lord of the angels is an angel—when he does not let this fall by chance, but indeed struggles to maintain this totally inappropriate position!?53 This kind of passionate response—while it may or may not represent Gregory’s true reaction—indicates for the reader the urgency of the problem and models an intensity of rejection, perhaps for her to follow. It also portrays Eunomius as a willing heretic—his calling the Son an angel is not just a mistake, but a purposeful revision of the truth. The intensity of this anger is a departure from Basil’s more nuanced, if not neutral, position. Gregory’s second response to Eunomius appears in form to be similar to Basil’s methods at first glance; he returns to the reading strategy which assumes continuity of character from one biblical passage to another. However, Gregory employs this strategy to create a reading almost opposite Basil’s. Remember Eunomius has located the son halfway between angels and God, and a corollary of the Son’s middle position, Eunomius argues, is that the Son does not participate in all the

53

Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.28 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 274).

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qualities of the Father. The problem, Gregory complains, is that Eunomius errs by suggesting that “the Son does not appropriate the worthiness of the Existent,” naming as “worthiness” being itself. How properly he knows to adapt words to things! And since he [the Son] [exists] through the Father, [Eunomius] says that [the Son] alienates himself from [the Father], so that “the substance which has authority over him draws toward itself the conception of the Existent.”54 Thus, as Gregory understands Eunomius’s position, the substance of the Son cannot be part of the Existent—God the Father—given that the Son has come into being through the Existent; the Son’s substance must have been separate in order for the Son to have existence in a form that does not participate in every last quality of the Father. By using continuity of character, Gregory finds the characterization, plot, and narrative of a particular section of Scripture must lead to the conclusion that the Son remains one with the Existent, despite having the name of “angel.” He develops this counterargument to Eunomius on the basis of a reading of Exodus 22 and 23. The total inappropriateness of our author is condemned by Scripture itself, in which Moses supplicated the Lord not to place an angel in charge of leading the nation, but for he himself to guide its journey. Thus we have from God himself: “Walk, go down and lead this people into the place which I tell you. And behold, my angel will travel before you on the day when I oversee” [Ex 32.34, LXX]. And again, a little later on, “I will send my angel to your presence” [Ex 33.2, LXX, slightly adapted]. Next, a little after the following, comes the supplication from the servant [Moses] toward God, “If I have found favor in your eyes, send my Lord with us” [Ex 34.9]. And again, “unless he travels with us, do not send me up” [Ex 33.15]. Then, the answer of God toward Moses: “that which you have said I will do. You have found favor in my eyes and I know you past all [others]” [Ex

54

Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.21-22 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 27172). See also Eunomius’s reference to Jesus calling the Father “the one alone who is good” in Mark 10, Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.22-23 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 272).

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33.17]. Thus, if Moses asks that not the angel, but the one discoursing with him, be the attendant and leader of the army, clearly [Scripture] demonstrated through this that the one who made himself known by the name of “Existent,” the only-begotten, is God.55 And, we should understand, not simply an angel. That is, God tells Moses several times that an angel will accompany him. Moses appears dissatisfied, asking instead for his “Lord” to join him; he even refuses to budge without the Lord’s accompaniment. Gregory, working here through an extended conversation between Moses and God, uses the assumption that the actors have remained constant throughout the conversation in order to make the point that “the Lord” is not the angel of God, but rather God.56 Thus the Son, whom Gregory locates in all these theophanies, is part of the Existent and not merely something sent out from it. An observant reader may come to the conclusion that this extended conversation signifies something else entirely: namely, that the angel is one being, “the Lord” another, God another, and that given that the passage makes no mention of the Son, there is no referent to the Son in the passage. That possibility is out of the question for Gregory, who adopts yet a third approach to reject Eunomius’s position. He marks the bounds of what he considers acceptable by declaring other positions to be “Jewish,” casting out the idea that there could be more than one divine actor in the biblical narrative. If someone says anything against this, he is an advocate of the Jewish persuasion, not taking the Son as the savior of the people. If the angel is not the one that went forth with the Israelites, and the one indicated

55

Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.34-35 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 27677). 56 For a similar exegetical trend in Judaism, see Judah Goldin, “ ‘Not by means of an angel and not by means of a messenger’,” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of E. R. Goodenough, ed. Jacob Neusner, Supplements to Numen 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 412-24.

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by the name “the Existent” is not the only-begotten—just as Eunomius would have it—then nothing other than the doctrines of the synagogue has he brought into the church of God. 57 Anyone who says that the Son is not God himself, that being who speaks in Exodus 33.17, has turned aside to the “Jewish persuasion.” Additionally, those who advocate that the Son is not also the Lord in Gregory’s mind are “clearly Judaizing, taking away from doctrine the presence of the only-begotten.”58 Gregory’s charge that considering the Son to be less than the Existent and thus an angel is a particularly “Jewish” error is charged with added meaning because of the long-standing Christian discourse that associated Judaism with the worship of angels. As Daniel Boyarin has explained, most Christians accused of heresy by patristic writers are also accused of Judaism, this trope being so prevalent in early Christian authors that it is at times difficult for scholars to remember that it is a trope.59 There is an especial connection between heresy, Judaism, and angels. This theme occurs in several places in the New Testament. For example, in the speech Stephen gives in Acts, when Stephen charges that Israelites (and the Jews before whom Stephen is speaking) have been left to worship the angels of the “host of heaven,” having misunderstood the message of the God of the Christians (Acts 7.42). The author of the pseudo-Pauline letter to the Colossians advises his readers to persist only in the practices they had learned from him:

57

Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.34-35 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 27677). 58 Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomius 3.9.31 (ed. Jaeger, Gregory Nysseni Opera: Liber III, 275). 59 Boyarin, Border Lines, 14, discusses “the orthodox topos that Christian heretics are Jews or Judaizers,” noting that the “‘Jews’ (for this context, heretics so named), the Judaizers, and the Jewish Christians—whether they existed or to what extent is irrelevant in this context—thus mark a space of threatening hybridity, which it is the task of religion police to do away with.”

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Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, and sabbaths. These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions.60 Many scholars have attempted to identify what is meant by the “self-abasement and worship of angels,” or what groups may have recommended these practices. To some, the reference to “festivals, new moons, and sabbaths,” suggests the outsiders influencing the Colossians were Jews.61 Even those scholars who acknowledge the influence of non-Jewish traditions on the Colossians have concluded that the author of the letter was writing against Jews.62 These later interpreters saw in the text of Colossians evidence of Jewish angel worship. Ancient Christians writing after the time of the New Testament texts shared the conviction that Jews were worshippers of angels. The Preaching of Peter, a second-century work that—as the title makes clear—had apostolic aspirations,

60

Col 2.16-18: Μὴ οὖν τις ὑμᾶς κρινέτω ἐν βρώσει καὶ ἐν πόσει ἢ ἐν μέρει ἑορτῆς ἢ νεομηνίας ἢ σαββάτων ·ἅ ἐστιν σκιὰ τῶν μελλόντων, τὸ δὲ σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ. μηδεὶς ὑμᾶς καταβραβευέτω θέλων ἐν ταπεινοφροσύνῃ καὶ θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγέλων, ἅ ἑόρακεν ἐμβατεύων. 61 See A. L. Williams, “The Cult of Angels at Colossae,” Journal of Theological Studies o.s. 10 (1909): 413-38; Harold A. Attridge, “On Becoming an Angel: Rival Baptismal Theologies at Colossae,” in Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays Honoring Dieter Gorgi, ed. L. Bormann, K. Terdici, and A Standhartinger (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 481-98; Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Citizens of Heaven and Earth: Asceticism and Social Integration in Colossians and Ephesians,” in Asceticism and the New Testament, ed. Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush (New York: Routledge, 1999), 269-98. For a discussion of the linguistic problems of the passage, and the possiblity that θρησκείᾳ τῶν ἀγγελῶν may mean the worship accomplished by the angels, rather than the worship directed to angels, see Hannah, Michael and Christ, 106-7 and the notes listed there for sources. 62 C. E. Arnold, The Colossian Syncretism: The Interface between Christianity and Folk Belief at Colossae, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 77 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995). This author, despite the title, ends up identifying the problem at Colossae with Jewish magical practices.

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exhorts its readers “not to worship as the Greeks do” nor to “worship as the Jews do.”63 For they, thinking that they alone know God, do not believe, serving angels and archangels, month and moon, and if the moon does not appear, they do not make the sabbath called “the first,” nor do they do the new month, nor do they celebrate “the Unleavened” nor “the Spring” nor “the Great Day.”64 While the juxtaposition of “month,” “moon,” and “angels” call to mind the “festivals and new moons” and “worship of angels” of Colossians, there is no lexical evidence that the two passages share a common textual history.65 Still, the similarity in themes between the two passages is striking and unlikely to be a coincidence. The fact that they are not literal reproductions of one another but yet are so alike in their details suggests that they both draw from a wider early Christian tradition that paired Jews with the worship of angels. While it remained connected to the interpretation of such early texts, that tradition took on an even more vitriolic character in the era of Gregory’s Against

63

Its career as a testimony of Peter the apostle was brief: even later patristic writers, such as Origen and Eusebius, note their reservations about its authenticity (Origen, Comm. in Jo. 13.17, Eusebius h. e. 2.3.2; see the entry on “Literature about Peter” in Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Siegmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerlings, trans. Matthew O’Connell [New York: Herder and Herder, 2000], 476-77). Most scholars place the work in the early part of the second century; indeed, in its original form, the text may be contemporary to Colossians. At the very least we know that the work existed for Clement to preserve fragments of it in his Stromateis; thus, the most conservative of estimates places the work in the latter half of the second century (Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, 476. See also P. Nautin, “Les citations de la Predication de Pierre,” Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 25 [1974]: 98-105; and H. Paulsen, “Das Kerygma Petr. und die urchristicliche Apologetik,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 88 [1977]: 1-37). 64 Clem Strom. 6.5.41; Fragment IV in in Dobschütz’s classification (Das Kerygma Petri, vol. 11 of Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichet der altchristlichen Literatur, ed. Oscar von Gebhardt and Adolf Harnack [Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1894], 1-162, here cited at 21). Cf. Origen Comm. in Jo. 13.17: “Neither worship God as they Jews do, when also they, thinking themselves alone to believe in God, are ignorant of him, serving angels and month and moon” (Dobschütz, Das Kerygma Petri, 21). 65 Compare the Greek of the Preaching to the text of Colossians in n. 60: μηδὲ κατὰ ἰουδαίους σέβεσθε · καὶ γὰρ ἐκεῖνοι, μόνοι οἰόμενοι τὸν θεὸν γινώσκειν, οὐκ ἐπίστανται λαρεύοντες ἀγγέλοις καὶ ἀρχαγγέλοις, μηνὶ καὶ σελήνῃ.

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Eunomius. Take, for example, Jerome’s letter to the widow Algasia, a text roughly contemporary with Gregory’s impassioned defense of Basil and of his particular orthodoxy. In it, Jerome interprets Colossians for the widow and reveals to us the associations between Jews and angel worship he has at his disposal. We ask what did he [Paul] wish to say when he said, “in humility and the religion of the angels”? What does that mean? The Lord spoke to the disciples about this, [saying], “Get up, let us go from here,” and “your house is left to you, desolate,” and “the place in which the Lord was crucified is called Egypt and Sodom in a spiritual sense.” That is, the entire cult of the observations of the Jews is destroyed, and whatever sacrifices they offer, they do not offer them to God, but to fugitive angels and to unclean spirits.66 Jerome’s reading of Colossians explains the phrase “religion of the angels” as the temple sacrifices that took place after the arrival of Christ, or in a wider sense, any Jewish “observation.” The same practices that once were directed to God have been redirected to “fugitive angels.”67 Understanding the voices in Christian literature that drew associations between Judaism and the worship of angels—both more ancient than Gregory and those contemporary to him—helps us to see the impact that Gregory’s accusation that Eunomius was verging on “Jewish” territory delivered. It is certainly an example of

66

Letter to Algasia 121.10.10-11 (Isidor Hilberg, ed., Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 56 [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996], 44-45). 67 Damasus, Jerome’s contemporary and bishop of Rome is another example of the ways that the Christian discourse of Jewish angel worship could serve to bolster particular practices by discounting Judaism and with it, other traditions. In a letter to Paulinus, recognized now as a record of a Roman synod held in 377 or 378, Damasus lists the practices of groups that he anathematizes. He first notes the Christian practice of reading “gods” in Scripture as angels, but cautions against extrapolating that title to a particular practice. “The name of ‘gods’ is given and imposed by God to angels and all the saints; for the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, by one equal divinity, they are not given the name of ‘gods’ but of ‘God.’ Let us only be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and not in the names of archangels, or angels, in the way the heretics, Jews, and the senseless Gentiles do” (ep. to Paulinus [PL 13:364]).

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what Boyarin described, theological variance billed as “heresy,” thus “Jewish,” but it is also more specific, participating in the tradition of accusing Jews of worshipping angels. Gregory’s contention is with those who would not read the Son in the appearances of the Existent, the being that conversed with Moses in Exodus 33 and 32. In his eyes, Eunomius’s scheme to place the Son on the middle level, where he appears to be an angel for God, but a god to the angels below him, makes such an identification impossible. The application of “angel” to Christ’s nature—making him something less than the Existent—is what draws Gregory’s ire. Eunomius makes a “Jewish” mistake, taking the Son to be an angel; a regrettable error, given that, in Gregory’s estimation, even Moses himself knew enough to ask for the “Lord” to lead the nation, rather than an angel. In response to Eunomius’s developing hermeneutics, then, Gregory first registered moral outrage, then suggested different readings of the Old Testament, and most effectively, charged Eunomius with “Judaism” tinged with angel worship. The combination of these strategies created a strong case against Eunomius’s theology, one more black and white than Basil’s. It also created an impasse. After Gregory’s arguments against Eunomius, it was questionable to consider the title “angel” applicable to the Son, even as just a title. This simplified the description of the Son, but affected Christian angelology in two ways. First, it made the practice of reading the Son in the theophanies of the Old Testament, particularly those that identified the Son as the “angel of the Lord,” difficult to maintain; this was a reading practice that had seen currency as recently as Basil. Second, it clarified the residence of angels at a status lower than other divine actors; not only did the divine being, the Son, not share

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in their name, he had nothing to do with them. They existed in their own, separate classification. In the next section, we will see this new classification extended and developed in Augustine’s work On the Trinity.

SENDING AND SENSING While the Latin-speaking areas of Christianity were not nearly as engaged with the philosophical and linguistic intricacies of the Greek debate about the relationships among the persons of the Trinity in the fourth century, these issues were still matters for thought. Augustine, the great synthesizer of Latin Christianity, took them up in the first few decades of the fifth century, completing his treatise On the Trinity before 420. Throughout the work, Augustine remains mindful that he is a latecomer to the issues at hand: The fact, surely, is that sufficient works on this subject have not been published in Latin, or at least they are not at all easy to find; and as for Greek, though I do not doubt, from the few works that have been translated for us, that everything we might properly wish to know could be found there, most of us are hardly well enough acquainted with that language to be able to read Greek books on the subject with any real understanding.68 Because he is only beginning to understand—Augustine admits that “by writing I have myself learned much that I did not know”—he cautions his readers not to accept what he says without subjecting it to reason.69 Despite his overtures to conservation, though, Augustine does introduce a new way of understanding the Trinity, and in particular, a new way of considering those

68

Augustine, de trin. 3.1 (Edmund Hill, ed. and trans., The Trinity, vol. 1.5 of The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century [Brooklyn: New City Press, 1990], 127). 69 Augustine, de trin. 3.1.

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appearances of divinities in the Old Testament, the theophanies used by other writers to evidence the eternity of the Son. Through the construction of this new style of reading, Augustine confirms the status of angels as created beings, yet goes beyond that to make necessary the notion that angels are material beings as well. Thus, Augustine’s scriptural hermeneutic further clarifies the status of angels, such that they come to rest as beings created, sent under the will of others, and fully material in their nature. Augustine begins with a look at previous traditions of reading. There is a practice of scriptural epistemology already in place that Augustine acknowledges as common knowledge. As he explains, this rule is itself derived from Scripture: We find scattered through the scriptures, and marked out by learned Catholic expositors of them, a kind of canonical rule, which we hold onto most firmly, about how our Lord Jesus Christ is to be understood to be God’s Son, both equal to the Father by the form of God in which he is, and less than the Father by the form of a servant which he took.70 That is, Christ is the Son, but this Son is understood in two ways: first, he is divine, equal to God the Father, whose “form” he represents; second, he is less than the Father at the moment when he becomes incarnate. For Augustine, this event of taking on the flesh marks a decrease in the Son’s status, but one that is undertaken willingly, a reading based on Philippians 2. Thus a reader can interpret a passage as speaking of the Son “in the form of God” or “in the form of a servant”; these two options allow interpreters a great deal of latitude to understand statements about the Son. Even though this two-fold hermeneutic had proven to be successful, there are signs that it is not accepted by all Augustine’s contemporaries. There is a limit to the

70

Augustine, de trin. 2.2 (trans. Hill, Works of Saint Augustine, 98).

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appropriate application of the Son-in-the-form-of-a-servant interpretation, which some readers do not understand. Augustine observes some Christians read about the Son being “from the Father” and become confused, trying “to measure these texts by the form-of-a-servant rule,” and finding “it very upsetting when they fail to make proper sense of them.”71 Others still seem to purposefully mistake the rule, taking words like “the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing” (John 5.19) to mean that the Son in his form of a servant must be lower than the Father. This, too, Augustine rejects. The purpose of the “form-of-God” rule is to make such readings impossible: it is “intended to show not that one person is less than the other, but only that one is from the other. Yet some people have extracted from it the sense that the Son is less than the Father,” Augustine complains.72 These problems of hierarchy between the Son and the Father are also in play in Augustine’s reading of the Old Testament. In particular, two aspects of the theophanies usually read as appearances of the Son troubled Augustine. First, he is bothered by the issue of mission. Augustine’s opponents claim that “sending” is an action which implies a dominion of one person over another. “They turn to another axiom: ‘The one who sends is greater than the one sent,’” Augustine explains. As the Son is one sent, so these interpreters conclude that “the Father is greater than the Son, who is constantly presenting himself as sent by the Father.”73 The remainder of Book 2 is taken up by Augustine’s discussion of the question of mission and whether the Son being sent implies a hierarchical relationship between the Son and the Father.

71

Augustine, de trin. 2.2 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 99). Augustine, de trin. 2.2 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 99). 73 Augustine, de trin. 2.7 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 101). 72

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While Augustine does discuss some cases of the Son referring to himself as “sent” in the New Testament, the majority of the passages he discusses are those in which other Christians have seen the Son appearing to the patriarchs, such as Abraham. Augustine recognizes the standing interpretation, based on references in the New Testament to Jesus as “the Lord,” that mention of the Lord indicates the Son in passages like Genesis 12.7 (“the Lord appeared to Abraham”) or Genesis 18.1 (“the Lord appeared to him…”). However, the primary trouble is that if the Son were the entity that was sent to biblical ancestors, it would make no sense for a New Testament writer like Paul to say of him “when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman” (Gal 4.4), as if he had not been “sent” until the time of his incarnation.74 Thus Augustine calls into question the identity of the pre-New Testament theophanies. In the case of Abraham and the three angelic visitors of Genesis 18, Augustine would question those who read the Son as one of the visitors, asking them, How they would account for his being found in the condition of a man (Phil 2.7)—having his feet washed, sitting down to human victuals— before he took flesh. How could all this happen while he was still in the form of God, not thinking it robbery to be equal to God (Phil 2.6)? Surely he had not already emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, made in the likeness of men and found in the condition of man (Phil 2.7)? We know, after all, that he did this by being born of the virgin. So how could he appear to Abraham as one man before he had done this?75 Reconciling Old and New Testaments is an arduous task. Because Augustine’s understanding of being “sent” depends on his reading of Galatians, this term only

74

Augustine, de trin. 2.12 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 106). The verses in John regarding the Holy Spirit use variations on πέμπω, yet Augustine takes these to be related to the statement about Jesus in Galatians, which uses a variation of ἀποστέλλω. 75 Augustine, de trin. 2.20 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 111-12).

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applies to the Son after his incarnation. Such a position makes it difficult for Augustine to read the Son in the theophanies of the Old Testament. This is not Augustine’s only headache. His insistence on the incarnation of the Son as the pivotal moment of mission hints toward a second difficulty he finds in reading the Son in these theophanies. Because being “sent,” when applied to the Son and the Holy Spirit, means “coming forth from the hidden world of the spiritual into the public gaze of mortal men in some bodily shape,” then Augustine wonders whether the Father should not also be described as one “sent,” “if he was signified by those bodily manifestations which were shown to the eyes of men in the Old Testament.”76 That is, traditional readings of the theophanies require the manifestation of whatever divine actor one sees in them. Because Augustine ties visibility to mutability, it is impossible for him to read any member of the Trinity in these theophanies. If the Father is immutable, it is out of the question for him to appear to the sight of humans; the same applies to the Son and the Holy Spirit.77 The solution itself is simple: Augustine concludes that any appearance of a divine actor in the Old Testament is materially manifested by angels. Though a particular theophany may be driven by the will of any member of the Trinity, what is actually sensed by the human beings involved is a created, sent, being: an angel. Surprisingly, Augustine legitimizes this position through the technique of continuity of character, the same technique that Christians like Basil and Gregory had used to locate the Son in such theophanies. For example, an angel speaks in the person of God in Exodus 3, where first it says “an angel of the Lord” appears and then this

76 77

Augustine, de trin. 3.3 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 129). Augustine, de trin. 3.21 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 140).

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entity announces “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” 78 Instead of seeing this speaker as a divine being who has the title of both “God” and “angel,” as others had done, Augustine explains that angels act as mouthpieces for God, who cannot be part of the physical reality of human beings. The very person of God, however, is not always represented in the things told us by the Lord God. When his person is represented, it is sometimes manifested in an angel, sometimes in an appearance or likeness which is not identical with an angel, though engineered by an angel; in this latter case it is sometimes a pre-existing body that is used and adapted for the manifestation, sometimes it is just produced ad hoc, and dissolved again when the business is complete.79 While it might make sense, then, for Scripture to always specify that an “angel” is appearing to human beings in all theophanies, Scripture nevertheless uses “Lord” in places where it does not mean what others had seen identified with the title of “Lord,” that is, the Son. This, Augustine reasons, is like the workings of a courtroom: angels are the recorder of God, who speak for him as a clerk speaks for a judge.80 Indeed, those same passages of Scripture that others have used to justify reading the Son in theophanies, Augustine uses to bolster his claim that all theophanies are appearances of angels. Previous readers, such as Basil, had seen Christ in the “angel of great counsel” of Isaiah, yet Augustine prefers to rely on the evidence he discovers in the New Testament. There are people who want to take the angel as meaning the Son of God speaking directly in his own person, because the prophet calls him angel (Is 9.6), to signify that he is the messenger of the Father’s—and his own—will. It was to counter this opinion that I preferred to use the

78

Augustine, de trin. 3.20 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 139). Augustine, de trin. 3.19 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 138). 80 Augustine, de trin. 3.23 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 141).

79

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evidence of Hebrews where it does not say “through an angel” but “through angels” (Heb 2.1).81 In this way, Augustine overrides several centuries’ worth of interpretative tradition and rejects the claim that this “angel of great counsel” is the Son. The plurality of angels in the phrase from Hebrews shows that all appearances thought to be the Son are actually accomplished by angels. His method of reading eliminates several problems, perhaps best typified by a look at Genesis 22. Augustine interprets the story of the binding of Isaac in a way that makes it impossible for the divine actor (or actors) involved to be anything but angels. In this passage, it is “God” who “tests” Abraham by ordering the sacrifice of his son, but at the crucial moment, it is “an angel of the Lord” who tells Abraham to lay off and not to harm the boy. Augustine laughs at the possible misinterpretations: What will they answer to this? That God ordered the death of Isaac, and an angel forbade it? That his father obeyed the angels’ command to spare him in the teeth of God’s command to kill him? A ridiculous and untenable opinion. Anyway, scripture expressly excludes it by adding “Now I know that you fear God, and for my sake have not spared your beloved son.”82 Rather than suggest that an angel override God’s own command, Augustine comes to see that all the divine speakers in Gen 22 are angels, acting as mouthpieces for God. This explains why the speaker in verse 12 would say “I know you fear God” instead of “I know you fear me”; it is an angel who acknowledges Abraham’s fear of God, the one who sent him. Additionally, a reader might interpret the second clause of the angel’s announcement, “you have not spared your son for my sake,” as meaning this:

81

Augustine, de trin. 3.23 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 141-42); while Augustine does not point this out, his argument is parallel to Paul’s argument regarding offspring in Gal 3. 82 Augustine, de trin. 3.25 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 142-43).

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“you have not spared Isaac simply because I, the angel, had ordered you to do so; rather, it was because it was an order from God that came to you through me.” Here and elsewhere, Augustine solves the issue of multiple titles for the divine in biblical theophanies by eliminating the members of the Trinity as possible actors and making all divine appearances of one class: those worked by angels on behalf of God. In a certain sense, Augustine expands the status of angels by making them the main actors in the dramas of the Old Testament. Those appearances which were previously thought to be manifestations of the Son—pivotal moments such as the staying of Abraham’s hand during the near-sacrifice of Isaac or the giving of the law to Moses—were now seen by Augustine to have been manifestations of angels. Angels were present at the most significant events in pre-Christian history, accomplishing divine interactions with humanity. Augustine’s approach also reveals something about angelic natures; angels are indeed created beings, different from the Son, but they are also different from the Son in their substance. Able to be sensed by human beings, angels can enact the theophanies of the Old Testament because they are material, their physicality allowing them to interact with humanity in ways the Son—as conceived by the scriptural practices honed by thinkers in the Trinitarian era—could not. While Augustine’s reading may appear to perform a subtle maneuver to take agency away from angels, it may also lend angels a freedom not available to human beings.83 Because they appear at the behest of the divine, the only work that angels can accomplish is to use their voices to express the will of others, or use their

83

Augustine, de trin. 3.26 (trans. Hill, Works of St. Augustine, 144).

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physical bodies to manifest others. Angels are important for the material services they perform as they act out God’s person and will, rather than their own. This places them in a special category as creatures unable to depart from the will of God, and for Augustine, this is a positive attribute: the guarantee of never being able to counter God’s will grants happiness. Because Augustine believes that true human freedom is complete devotion to and delight in God and the Good, angels are supremely happy: free, wholeheartedly devoted to God, so delighting in him that they do his will without any reservation, and unable to sin. The process by which Christian writers came to create these angels, so well-designed for mediation, coincided with increasing Christian expectations that angels could and would interact with humanity. We will see some of the results of these expectations in the following chapter.

ANGELS AS MEDIATORS Trinitarian readings of Scripture clarified the position of the Son with respect to the Father. As they did so, they also clarified the position of angels with respect to the Son. For an early thinker like Athanasius, it was important to demonstrate that angels, and not the Son, were among the created order. Later, while Basil could suggest that both of the Son’s titles “angel” and “God” relayed information about his properties, his later champion Gregory rejected this, denying the title “angel” to the Son. Augustine, at the start of the fifth century, created a style of reading that saw angels as the actors of the theophanies of the Old Testament. By positioning them as created, fleshly beings, sent by God to accomplish these manifestations, Augustine avoided

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some of the logical, and theological, difficulties produced by seeing the Son in these appearances. The overall trajectory of these readings reveals a more precise status for angels, as defined with respect to the Son, over the course of the fourth century, and this new attention to angels generated their aptitude for mediation. In many ways, such a refiguration of angels was necessary to the clarification of the Son’s nature so important to these writers. Christian notions of angels, as developed by thinkers like Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, and Augustine, stood to clarify the ways that the Son was linked with and was one with God the Father. As angels were more carefully defined as created physical beings without their own wills, the Son rose ever higher toward the status of the one God, eventually coming to be understood as one with the Father. Creating more precise knowledge about angels was an integral step in creating more precise knowledge of the Son.

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Chapter Five AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THE ANGELIC LIFE: THE PROMISE AND PERILS OF AN EARLY CHRISTIAN DISCOURSE OF ASCETICISM There will not be display of rhetorical speech to set you now among the angels and put the world beneath your feet through the beauty of virginity. —Jerome, writing to Eustochium1

Near the end of the fourth century, a small group of monks from Palestine traveled to Egypt, there to observe the way of life of the ascetics living in the desert. One of the travelers gave an account of the journey and the wonders he beheld, which begins: I saw many fathers living the angelic life as they went forward in the imitation of our divine savior, and I saw other new prophets who have attained a divine state by their inspired and wonderful and virtuous way of life. As true servants of God, they do not worry about any earthly matter or consider anything temporal, but while dwelling on earth in this manner they have their citizenship in heaven.2 This opening to the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto is only one of a large number of texts from Christian antiquity that utilize the special lens of the “angelic life” for viewing the feats of those ascetics who renounced sex, family, and food to adopt a new lifestyle. The equation of the ascetic life with the angelic one is a theme that permeates ancient writing about the renunciatory efforts of Christians.

1

ep. 22.2. (ed. Jérôme Labourt, Saint Jérôme: Lettres, vol 1 [Paris: Les belles lettres, 1982], 112; trans. C. C. Mierow, The Letters of St. Jerome, Ancient Christian Writers 33 [New York: Newman Press, 1963], 135). 2 HM Prologue 5 (A.-J. Festugière, ed. and trans., Historia Monachorum in Aegypto: Édition critique du texte grec, Subsidia Hagiographica 34 [Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961], 7; Norman Russell, trans., The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, Cistercian Studies 34 [Oxford: Mowbray; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981], 49-50).

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It also permeates twentieth-century scholarly treatments of asceticism in late antique Christianity. Between the 1930s and the 1960s, at least four monographs and twice as many articles on this topic appeared in French and German, the majority of which attempted to account for the novelty of the ascetic movement by asserting that the imitation of angels was the driving force of this new development three hundred years after the life of Jesus.3 Perhaps the most well-known of these studies is Karl Suso Frank’s 1964 work ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΟΣ ΒΙΟΣ.4 It argues that early Christian ascetics understood themselves, even in the smallest facets of their practice, to be imitating angels. Peter Nagel in his 1966 book, Die Motivierung der Askese in der alten Kirche und der Ursprung des Mönchtums, came to a complementary conclusion, having searched for an origin of the Christian ascetic movement and finding it in the idea of enacting the angelic life.5 While the heyday of studies of this “angelic life” was over in the late 1960s, the trope did not drop out of circulation entirely. More recent scholarly work, particularly in English, also references early Christian ascetics as those who live the “angelic life.” Robin Lane Fox’s popular book, Pagans and Christians, dedicates an entire chapter to asceticism with the title “Living like Angels.”6 A scholar no less impressive than Peter Brown discusses Syriac ascetics

3

These more specific volumes were in large part inspired by Karl Heussi’s Der Ursprung des Mönchtums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1936), which laid out several different explanations for the origin of the monastic project. 4 ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΟΣ ΒΙΟΣ: Begriffsanalytische und Begriffsgeschictliche Untersuchung zum “engelgleichen Leben” im frühen Mönchtum (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1964). 5 Die Motivierung der Askese in der alten Kirche und der Ursprung des Mönchtums (Berlin: Academie-Verlag, 1966). See also Uta Ranke-Heinemann, “Zum ideal der vita angelica im frühen Mönchtum,” Geist und Leben 29 (1956): 347-57; E. V. Severus, “ΒΙΟΣ ΑΓΓΕΛΙΚΟΣ: Zum Verständis des Mönchslebens als ‘Engelleben’ in der christlichen Überlieferung,” Liturgie und Mönchtum 21 (1960): 73-88. Other, more overtly confessional sources also link ascetic and monastic lives with angels; as examples, see P. Klemens Nachtlberger, “Engel und Mönch,” Seckauer Hefte 7 (1938): 11-13; and Agnès Lamy, “Bios Angelikos,” Dieu vivant 7 (1946): 59-77. 6 Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (New York: Knopf, 1986), 336-74.

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under the rubric “These are our angels” in his book about late antique asceticicm, The Body and Society.7 The concept of the vita angelica served as a heuristic tool for medievalist Dyan Elliott to study Tertullian’s configuration of female virgins as equal to angels in stature, but separate from them in their flesh.8 In accounts both academic and religious, it is easy to find ascetics—whether those in the deserts of antiquity or those in the monasteries of modernity—described as living the angelic life. What does it mean when those in antiquity—or even modern scholars—talk about early Christians “living the angelic life”? That is, if ancient Christian ascetics are mainly recognizable to us by the feats they are said to have achieved with their bodies, what did it accomplish to asscociate them and their practices with beings primarily identified with incorporeality? In this chapter, I will first trace the development of the discourse that links ascetic practices with “the angelic life,” then will examine how this discourse functioned in the Christian ascetic communities of the fourth and fifth centuries. While the analogy between renunciation and angels began as an inventive exegetical extension of a gospel story, it found traction among the fourth-century bishops who were pressed to make sense of the new ascetic movements in their territories and to explain this new style of Christian living to their urban congregations. As for the ascetics, it is clear that most of them knew their fellow Christians thought of them as living like angels. Those in renunciatory communities

7

Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 323-38. 8 Dyan Elliott, “Tertullian, the Angelic Life, and the Bride of Christ,” in Professing Gender, Professing Christianity: Essays on Medieval Women, ed. Lisa Bitel and Felice Lifshitz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

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even put the trope of “living the angelic life” to use among themselves: by envisioning angels as a constant audience for their practices, ascetics created and sustained the boundaries between their communities and the world. Taking the angelic designation to heart and imagining ascetic communities to be places where angels could appear at any moment also created constructive solutions for the sometimes difficult navigation between the strict ideals of perfection in virtue and the flexibility demanded by life in community. However, angelic appearances generated their own difficulties on occasion—both conflicts of authority and crises of identity. Monks who were thought of as living “the angelic life” received that assessment with ambivalence, and at times disdain, rather than seeing it as an entirely positive identification.

ANGELS “IN THE FORM OF HUMANS” The first widespread use of the angelic epithet among Christians to describe a particular practice lies in the late third and early fourth century with the develoment of a discrete lifestyle of sexual renunciation within Christianity.9 Even though sexual renunciation was a common component of the culture of later monastic communities that constructed themselves as an alternative to an urban lifestyle, historians have demonstrated that it was first a practice adopted by men and women who otherwise 9

Some earlier Christian writers had used the language of being “equal to the angels” as a reference for virginity; see Elliott, “Tertullian, the Angelic Life, and the Bride of Christ.” Others had used it for an advanced state of Christian living. Clement of Alexandria refers to Christians who are advanced in their development as “equal to angels” in Paed. 1.36.6 and Strom. 6.105.1 and 7.57.5; I thank Judith Kovacs for drawing these references to my attention. My interest here lies with the application of this discourse, associated with the phrases “equal to the angels” or “living the angelic life,” to particular ascetic practices in the fourth and fifth centuries.

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maintained normal social relationships and remained in their towns and villages. Dedicated to being virgins, these Christians enacted different models of sexual renunciation; two of the most significant were men and women who lived together, but remained chaste, and women who declared themselves virgins, declining to marry and continuing to live with their families. 10 The adoption of a life of sexual renunciation by so many Christians inspired a profusion of texts that reflected on virginity and the young people who decided to dedicate themselves as virgins.11 Some gave practical advice to the fathers whose daughters lived as virgins in the family home, as forms the anonymous text Peri Parthenias, while others, such as Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on Virginity, were more philosophical, visualizing the character of virginal purity.12 Though approaches to the topic could be abstract or concrete, almost all treatises on virginity commented on the superiority of the lifestyle and the unsurpassed purity of the virgins themselves. There were many ways to translate the admirable and transcendent nature of sexual renunciants, but one particularly compelling way was to adopt the language, inspired by the gospels, that compared virgins to angels.

10

Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), viii, ix, 29-39. See Elm’s discussion of the shift from several different species of female virginity toward monastic structures, facilitated by the rhetorical redefinition of models of piety by bishops and other Christian writers, in Virgins, 373-85. See also Andrea Sterk’s review of the earliest developments in Christian asceticism and note the recent turn in scholarship toward finding diversity rather than unity in the origins of asceticism: Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 13-34. 11 For one reading of the genre of virginity sermons, see Thomas Camelot, “Les traités ‘de virginitate’ au IVe siècle,” Études carmélitaines 31 (1952): 273-92. 12 Peri Parthenias (D. Amand de Mendieta and M. Ch. Moons, “Une curieuse homélie grecque inédite sur la virginité adressée au pères de famille,” Revue Bénédictine 63 [1953]: 18-69, 211-38); Gregory of Nyssa, de virginitate (M. Aubineau, ed., Grégoire de Nysse: Traité de la virginité, Sources chrétiennes 119 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1966]).

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Authors writing about virginity most often turned to the Synoptic story of the Sadducees’ challenge to Jesus regarding the resurrection to make this comparison (Mark 12.18-27; Matt 22.23-33; Luke 20.27-40). The Sadducees were known to reject both the idea that a soul endures after the death of the body and thus the possibility of resurrection.13 In this story, they pose a question to Jesus: if a woman is married seven times in this life, who is her husband in the resurrection? For early readers of the story, the reality of the resurrection was the most salient lesson to be drawn from Jesus’ response to the question. At the point when ascetic practice became more popular among Christians, a new lesson emerged.14 Christians saw in Luke’s particular version of the story an affirmation that the life of the resurrection was also available before death to those on Earth who declined to marry. Luke depends on Mark for this story, sharing the narrative details of the conflict between Jesus and the Sadducees almost verbatim; however, the specific words that Luke chooses for Jesus’ answer to the question about the resurrection differ greatly from those in Mark. In Luke, Jesus responds: The sons of this world marry and are given in marriage, but those who happen to be judged worthy of that world and of the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore, since they are equal to the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection. (Luke 20.34-36) Two features of this version of Jesus’ answer produce a particular emphasis on the unmarried state. First is the way Luke distinguishes between those who marry and those who do not. Jesus’ words make a distinction between “the sons of this world”

13

Compare Josephus J.W. 2.165 as well as Ant. 18.16, two passages where Josephus reports on the Sadducees’ ideas about the mortality of the soul. 14 Elizabeth Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 199-200.

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(οἱ υἱοί τοῦ αἰῶνος τούτου) who participate in marriage and those, on the other hand, “who happen to be judged worthy of that world and of the resurrection from the dead” (οἱ δὲ καταξιωθέντες τοῦ αἰῶνος ἐκείνου τυχεῖν τῆς ἀναστάσεως τῆς ἐκ νεκρῶν), who do not participate in marriage rituals. It appears that those who do not marry have not yet died: these people are simply those “judged worthy” of the next world, not those who have already passed on to it. In fact, these people “cannot die anymore,” another detail that suggests Luke is addressing two groups of people among the living: those who have married and those who have not. Luke’s version of the answer also differs from Mark’s in the way Jesus expresses the similarity between these unmarried people and angels. For Mark, those who are resurrected are “like angels” (ὡς ἄγγελοι) and thus do not marry. In Luke, these unmarried people, the ones who are “considered worthy of…the resurrection,” are “equal to angels” (ἰσάγγελοι γὰρ εἰσιν) while they are yet alive and yet in this world. The change from “ὡς ἄγγελοι” to “ἰσάγγελοι” may seem insignificant, but it is quite provocative: constructive readers understood Luke’s version of this story to mean that those who decline marriage in this life achieve a status equal to angels while they are yet very much alive—and still human. The idea that renunciation of sexuality might, in some way, make human beings “equal to angels” was a powerfully attractive metaphor for the writers who sought to articulate the place of virginity in early Christian practice. A classic text in praise of sexual renunciation, Gregory of Nyssa’s Treatise on Virginity (371 C.E.), alludes to Luke’s version of Jesus’ exchange with the Sadducees in an explanation of

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the status of the virgin.15 In Gregory’s reasoning, a virgin may claim the benefits of the resurrected life as a result of his renunciation of sexuality: For if the life after the resurrection promised to the righteous by the Lord is equal to the angels, and if being set free from marriage is indeed part of the angelic nature, he [the virgin] has already received the benefits of the promise, mingling “with the brilliance of the holy ones” (Ps 110.3) and imitating the purity of the incorporeal ones by the undefiled nature of his life.16 Here, Gregory makes explicit what is implicit in Luke 20: not only will humans refrain from marriage in the resurrection, but those who remain unmarried now are already considered righteous, having “already received the benefits” of the resurrection.17 By being pure in this way, virgins imitate angelic purity and may even “mingle” with angels, the “holy ones” of Psalm 110. As Gregory links virginity in its “undefiled nature” to a life equal to angels, he also elaborates on the activities of angels. For Gregory, virginity is more than the absence of marriage; it primarily involves the cultivation of the soul through the contemplation of the beautiful. Consequently, one of his main interests is to describe how one might protect the soul from disturbance; by releasing attachments and distancing the soul from things liable to change, one can maintain a pure state of contemplation. That means, in essence, being distant from the things of this impassioned and fleshly life; rather, to make any sympathy for one’s own body an alien thing, so as to avoid coming to depend on the things borne of the flesh by [living] the life of the flesh. It means living the solitary life and imitating, as much as is 15

See Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse, 25, for the date. de virg. 14.4 (ed. Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse, 440-43). This passage, Aubineau notes, has an almost direct parallel in the Sermo Asceticus attributed to Basil of Caesarea (443 n. 3). For a discussion of those sources that may have influenced Gregory, including Methodius and Basil of Ankyra, see Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse, 97-142. 17 Basil of Ankyra, who may have influenced Gregory’s writing, goes further by saying that virgins are “already angels on Earth” (virg. 37 [PG 30:744], cf. 51 [772]).

16

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possible, the community of the incorporeal powers, who “neither marry nor are given in marriage,” but whose work, attention, and perfection comprise contemplating the father of incorruptibility and making their own form nearer to the beauty of the archetype through the imitation that is allowed them.18 Equally influenced by Platonic advice regarding the contemplation of the beautiful and the belief that angels do not participate in marriage, Gregory constructs a twopart model for virgins to imitate “the incorporeal powers”: the person who attempts virginity should adopt the ways of angels, both their unmarried state and their contemplation of that which is above them. Virgins can only imitate angels in their actions but cannot identify as angels: they remain below, relegated—as angels are— to the “imitation that is allowed them.” A more optimistic view of the status of virgins underlies a treatise on virginity that survives in Syriac, once attributed to Athanasius but now recognized as pseudepigraphical.19 The author addresses female virgins, who, instead of living in their homes with their families, have adopted separate communities; he encourages them, speaking to each individually: [t]oward the heavenly light you too have been summoned, illustrious bride, and to the lifestyle of the angels, as also their companion on account of the brilliance of the lofty beauty of virginity and the perpetuity of the unending glory. Therefore, even the angels honor the excellence of her (virginity’s) splendor as their equal.20 The equation of the unmarried state and angels in Luke’s passage informs this author’s concept of virginity, to be sure, but these women do more than simply avoid marriage. Rather, they adopt the “lifestyle of the angels,” both beautiful and glorious.

18

de virg. 4.8 (Aubineau, Grégoire de Nysse, 328-31). David Brakke, ed., Pseudo-Athanasius On Virginity, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 592 (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), x-xii. 20 On Virginity 42 (CSCO 592:17; trans. CSCO 593:16). 19

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In this, they are more than just “equal to the angels,” because the virginity they practice is actively honored by the angels as their equal. Angels are not the object of their imitation, as in Gregory’s Treatise on Virginity, but rather act as the voice that approves these virgins’ new and separate community of chastity. If this text presents a wider and more complex view of virginity, it is also more complex in its view of what angels are. Even if virgins can attain a state equal to angels by enacting a certain set of practices, angels are still more sublime than people….because angels are not given in marriage nor are married, still they are not entangled in flesh and blood, nor do they have a dwelling place on earth, nor are they occupied with the multitude of desires, nor do they need food and drink, nor is a sweet tone able to wound them, nor too an illustrious sight to make them bend down. Rather, just as with the sun at midday one sees evenly the extent of its transparency with nothing to mar it, so too with the nature of the angels: there is not a single desire to mar it.21 Angels, it is true, do not participate in marriage. However, they have several other defining characteristics: they do not have flesh, nor desire, do not need food or drink, and, apparently, are entirely transparent. In all of these things, angels are certainly “more sublime than people,” but the very words used by this text to describe angels are based on assumptions about virgins. Virgins are indeed “entangled in flesh and blood,” they do “have a dwelling place on earth,” they are “occupied by the multitude of desires,” they do need food and drink. The effect of listing the attributes of angels in this way—as the photographic negative of the human condition—is, ultimately, to praise human virgins. To the extent that a virgin is successful in her pursuit of purity, she is more than equal to angels, for to accomplish her goals while burdened with the

21

On Virginity 45 (CSCO 592:18; trans. CSCO 593:17).

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desires and flaws of the flesh, she must surpass the effort of angels, who have no such burdens. Ultimately, writers began to describe other ascetic lifestyles, ones encompassing more than the renunciation of sex, with a discourse that emphasized the “angelic” nature of these lifestyles. As more ascetic practices came to be associated with the angelic life, angels as imagined by Christians came to resemble those who took up such practices. For example, John Chrysostom appears to conceive of angels in ways influenced by his knowledge of monastic communities. On the one hand, he is clearly aware of the references in the New Testament to multiple levels of angels. In one of his baptismal homilies, Chrysostom reminds his catechumens that the martyrs of the past overcame their physical pain by thinking on heavenly things. “That is why,” he says, that blessed apostle, who knew the strength of such counsel, told us to mind the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God [Col 3.1]. See the sagacity of our teacher and to what a height all at once he raises those who heed him. He cut a path through the midst of all the angels, archangels, thrones, dominations, pricipalities, virtues, all those invisible powers, the cherubim and seraphim, and set the thoughts of the faithful right before the very throne of the King.22 In order to reassure Christians who suffer that they have direct access to the power of God through Christ’s intervention, Chrysostom pieces together the different orders of angels that are mentioned in Scripture and then depicts Christ traveling up through these successive orders. As he portrays it, angels are at the lowest level, followed by archangels, thrones, and others on up to the seraphim and cherubim who surround

22

Chrysostom, Baptismal Homilies 7.20 (Paul W. Harkins, ed., St. John Chrysostom: Baptismal Instructions, Ancient Christian Writers 31 [New York: Newman Press, 1963], 112). In addition, see Baptismal Homilies 1.2 (Harkins, Baptismal Instructions, 23).

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God. The rhetorical effect of mentioning all of these levels of angels is to emphasize Christ’s mediating power, now made available to new Christians; their prayers bypass the heavenly middlemen and go straight to the top. Even before the appearance of the famous sixth-century text detailing the Celestial Hierarchy, Chrysostom was cognizant of multiple orders of angels and could use that idea to make a point to his catechumens about Christ’s mediation. It is striking, then, that in another context, Chrysostom defines angels precisely by their lack of hierarchy. In his treatise, Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life, Chrysostom attempts to reassure frightened parents of those thinking of entering the monastery. These worried parents think that if their child were to disengage from marriage and family—as the monastic lifestyle requires—it would reflect negatively on the care they, as parents, have provided. Chrysostom agrees with them about the gravity of their situation: neglecting the welfare of one’s children, he acknowledges, is among the highest of sins and will be punished by God.23 However, he points out, parents who consider entry into the monastery the equivalent of neglect are mistaken: their children are actually better protected in the monastery than in society, because it is a place that allows them to avoid confusion and injustice. Only those in monasteries live in tranquility, in the harbor, in great security, observing the shipwrecks of others, as if from heaven. For they have chosen a way of life which befits heaven, and they have attained a state inferior in no way to that of angels. Just as among the angels there is no inequality, nor do some enjoy prosperity while others experience misery, but all

23

Adv. Oppugnatores 3.4 (trans. David G. Hunter, A Comparison between a King and a Monk / Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life: Two Treatises by John Chrysostom, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 13 [Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1989], 132). Cf. Sterk’s mention of a similar viewpoint of monasticism, Renouncing Yet Leading, 22-23.

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of them share one peace, one joy, one glory, so it is likewise in the monasteries. No one reproaches poverty, no one exults over wealth. That “yours” and “mine” which overturns and upsets everything is utterly banished. All things are held in common—food, housing, clothing.24 Chrysostom has perceptively identified the source of the parents’ fear: if marriage and family are primary guarantors of social standing and financial security, aren’t parents who allow their children to opt out of marriage and its benefits irresponsibly endangering their children’s future security? Chrysostom’s answer is no. Entering the monastery actually ensures that security. Even if there is no prosperity among its members, there is no poverty, either. All monks are of equal status, and that status happens to be “in no way inferior to that of the angels.” Chrysostom identifies life in the monastery with life in heaven and singles out one thing as the most prominent feature of this life: the total equality among members. It may not be remarkable to say that angels are not distinguished by wealth or poverty; even the earliest gospel telling of the story of Jesus being questioned by the Saduccees acknowledges that angels live free from the mundane and the material. But, to say that among angels there is “no inequality,” that they “share one glory,” is indeed remarkable, particularly for a writer who has in other contexts made reference to the hierarchical nature of the heavenly orders. Chrysostom’s idea of an equal community of angels is clearly influenced by his view of monastic life. As much as monks are like angels, angels are—in this text—a lot like monks. We should not be surprised, then, that Chrysostom speaks of the ascetics living outside of Antioch, those who have abandoned society and even the bounds of

24

Adv. Oppugnatores 3.11 (Hunter, Two Treatises by John Chrysostom, 146-47). Hunter notes that there is a very similar passage in Chrysostom’s Hom. in Matt. 72.3 (PG 58:671-73).

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the monastery, as “angels in human form” waiting to be seen. He does so at the beginning of a series of homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, a set of pieces notable for the way they urge listeners to go and visit these “angels,” even if they must travel to do so.25 When some ascetics happen to visit his congregation, Chrysostom tells the members of his church not to miss the opportunity to observe their holiness: “Lest we neglect their virtue as we consider their simple appearance and the language they speak, let us observe well and accurately their angelic life, the philosophy they enact.” 26 A number of Christians followed the advice of orators like Chrysostom: when the population of ascetics living in the Egyptian desert rose, so did the number of pilgrims who traveled to see them. As the angelic and otherworldly character of the communities in the desert was presented to congregations of urban Christians, “some men and women became so deeply attracted to this world that they set out to see the living saints for themselves.”27 The numbers of pilgrims were so great, Georgia Frank points out, that even those writers who recorded the journeys of a single group to see ascetics could not help but notice that their protagonists were hardly alone. Theodoret, in his compilation of stories collected by pilgrims like himself, says that there were so many visitors to these ascetic practicioners that every road looked like a river, with pilgrims streaming along. 28

25

Hom. in Matt 8.5 (PG 57:87-88); this is also not the only place where Chrysostom refers to monks as “angels” or living the “angelic life.” See also In Epist. 1 ad Tim. 14 (PG 62:575): “they, being holy, are indeed angels in the form of humans.” 26 Hom. in Matt 8.4-5 (249-50), quotation at 8.4 (249). 27 The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 2. 28 Historia religiosa 26.11 (Pierre Canivet and Alice Leroy-Molinghen, ed. and trans., Théodoret de Cyr: Histoire des moines de Syrie, Sources chrétiennes 234, 257 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977, 1979],

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The accounts of these pilgrims suggest that they were influenced by the discourse that equated ascetics with angels. The narrator of the Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, cited at the start of this essay, describes the ascetics his group visited as “angels.” He boasts of having seen something otherworldly—humans who are “new prophets” and living in a “Godlike state.” The ascetics locate their bodies in the desert, but their lives are lived in heaven. Having prepared its readers in this way, the text does not disappoint expectations that ascetics will resemble angels. The Historia Monachorum takes the angelic metaphor as a physical reality, its preferred way of depicting the appearance of monks being to attribute to them angelic qualities such as lustrous and shining faces.29 For example, the author visits Abba Or and reports that he “looked just like an angel. He was about ninety years old and had a snowy white beard down to his chest. And his face was so radiant that the sight of him alone filled one with awe.”30 For others it is their carriage that earns them the epithet “angelic”: Abba Bes, who “surpassed everyone in meekness,” “lived a life of utmost stillness, and his manner was serene, since he had attained the angelic state.”31 Theon’s ability to heal prompts the author of Historia Monachorum to label his appearance that of an angel: “A crowd of sick people went out to see him every day, and laying his hand on them through the window, he would send them away cured. One could see him with the face of an angel giving joy to his visitors by his gaze and abounding with much

at 257:182), cited by Frank, Memory of the Eyes, 2. For more evidence that the numbers of pilgrims bound for ascetic viewing were high, see Frank’s list of references here, n. 4. 29 Patricia Cox Miller treats this style of depiction in HM as well as other works in her well-known article, “Desert Asceticism and the Body from Nowhere,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 137-53. 30 HM Abba Or 1 (ed. Festugière, Historia Monachorum, 35; trans. Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 63). 31 HM Abba Bes 1 (ed. Festugière, Historia Monachorum, 40; trans. Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 66).

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grace.”32 In some cases, the epithet extends to an entire community, as was the case with those who were living with the ascetic Apollo: they looked like “a real army of angels.”33 By the time of the writing of the account of Historia Monachorum, its author could use the metaphor of “ascetic as angel” as a vessel for many different impressive features he perceived among the desert dwellers. While writers who had focused on virginity alone, such as Gregory of Nyssa, drew a link between the rejection of marriage and a status equal to angels in their reading of Luke 20, other writers applied the angelic discourse to these more complex systems of renunciation. For bishops looking to promote and sanctify the growing movement toward ascetic practice, the designation of ascetic lifestyles as “angelic” was a powerful rhetorical tool—so powerful that in some cases, its use redefined the nature of angels as it linked their glory to the glory of human ascetics. These ascetics also seemed to understand that others conceived of them this way.

SUSTAINING COMMUNITY: THE ROLE OF ANGELS Even in antiquity, Egypt was widely recognized as the birthplace of Christian ascetic practice.34 Two kinds of literature survive from the ascetic and monastic movements

32

HM Theon 1(ed. Festugière, Historia Monachorum, 44; trans. Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 68). 33 HM Apollo 18-19 (ed. Festugière, Historia Monachorum, 54; ed. Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, 73): “A community of brothers formed itself around him [Apollo] on the mountain, as many as five hundred of them, all sharing a common life and eating at the same table. [19] One could see them looking like a real army of angels, drawn up in perfect order, robed in white, and realising in their own lives the text of Scripture which says, ‘Be glad ye thirsty desert; break forth into singing thou that didst not travail with child; for more are the children of the desert than the children of the married life’ (Is. 31.1; 54.1).”

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in Egypt. There are texts written by and about monastic leaders, such as those which we have from Shenoute’s White Monastery or the materials related to the Pachomian federation. On the other hand, there are several collections of sayings and traditions of Egyptian monks, none of which were actually compiled in Egypt: the Historia Monachorum, again, is the report of a group of Palestinian monks who visited Egypt; Palladius’s Lausiac History is based in part on his experiences during an eight-year stint in the Egyptian desert, but was written long after his departure; and the Apophthegmata texts appear to have been redacted in Palestine in the wake of the Origenist controversy, the result of a preservationist tendency that arose when it became clear that the Egyptian model of monastic life was quickly changing.35 From a careful analysis of both types of texts, we find that ascetics understood the idea of living “the angelic life” as more than just the praise heaped on them by non-ascetic Christians; it was also adopted as one way for them to frame their own experiences. The literature from and about the ascetic movement in Egypt suggests that the angelic discourse operated in the lives of ascetics, shaping the bounds of community and determining acceptable behavior, often through the assumption that ascetics were somehow like and could expect to see angels. In some cases, the angelic appearances in these texts provided tools for navigating the conflicting demands of different virtues idealized in ascetic communities. However, such appearances also created problems of authority and status for the ascetics portrayed in this literature. 34

Even if there is no one single point of origin for the Christian ascetic movement of late antiquity, it is clear that the diverse traditions that represent the start of ascetic practice mostly began in Egypt, with others in Syria. See James Goehring, “The Origins of Monasticism,” in Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 1999), 13-35. 35 David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 127-28.

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There were many ways that the idea of an “angelic life” lived in the desert served ascetic communities constructively. Most ascetic literature made a sharp distinction between the community of ascetics and the rest of the world, and an analogy between a life of renunciation and the life of the angels made this distinction even sharper. Two Apophthegmata Patrum collections report a story about a pair of ascetics who are forced to make a choice: Two brothers who were attacked by fornication went away and took wives. Afterwards, they said to one another, “How have we benefitted by deserting the angelic order and coming to this impurity? And after that won’t we come into the fire and into torment? Let us therefore go back to the desert and repent about what we have done.”36 For these brothers, there are but two options: either life with women (and by extension, with society), or the “angelic order” of life in the desert.37 By the lights of this rhetoric, these men must decide between a present and possible heaven and a delayed but inevitable hell. The constrast between these choices could not be sharper. However, the physical distance between the “desert” communities of Egypt and the towns and villages they renounced was, as James Goehring has pointed out, not that large.38 To suggest, as this story does, that ascetics are part of an angelic order is to create a gulf of supernatural proportions between their society and that of lay Christians. In this way, the understanding that ascetics in the desert were living the

36

Verba sen. 5.5.34 (PL 73:882D). A longer version of this anecdote occurs in the Greek anonymous collection, N186 (F. Nau, ed., “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 13 [1908]: 272). 37 One anonymous reviewer for this chapter from the Journal of Early Christian Studies pointed out that “the shorthand reference of ‘taking wives’” in this story may be an allusion to the gospel distinction between humans who marry and angels who do not marry; that is to say, Jesus’ answer to the Sadducees may underlie the logic of the story. 38 Goehring, “The World Engaged: The Social and Economic World of Early Egyptian Monasticism,” in Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 39-52.

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life of the angels—a notion which, in the case of orators like Chrysostom, spurred an injunction to observe such ascetics and adopt some of their practices—actually created a distance between those in the desert and the rest of the world, rather than making ascetics more accessible to lay Christians. Built into statements about the angelic life among ascetics is the assumption that to live in the desert meant to forsake utterly one’s former mundane relationships as a requirement of membership, even relationships with Christian family members.39 But these acts of renunciation garnered the ascetic a new family. As Evagrius promises, “whoever keeps the commandment of God and rejects the world will not be put out of the community of angels.”40 Remaining within the ascetic community had benefits beyond the vague promise of being part of an “angelic order.” The equation of renunciation with the angelic life created expectations about angels appearing to and living among members of ascetic communities, expectations which were primarily operative within the literature that represented these communities to others. For example, Palladius assumed that because ascetics lived in community with angels, they could expect some degree of angelic help in their labors. In the Lausiac History, angels appear and help ascetics do the physically impossible—or at least those tasks that may seem physically impossible to the reader. For instance, angels appear in order to help ascetics manage the difficulty of sexual renunciation and its requirements. In one

39

Bentley Layton, “Rules, Patterns, and the Exercise of Power in Shenoute’s Monastery: The Problem of World Replacement and Identity Maintenance,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007): 4573. 40 Cent. 4.74 (W. Frankenburg, ed., Evagrius Ponticus [Berlin: Weidmannsche buchhandlung, 1912], 307).

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case, an angel appears to Amoun of Nitria and transports him across a river he is trying to ford, thus preventing him from having to take off his clothes and appear nude in front of others.41 Another ascetic, Elias, was overwhelmed at his task of taking care of 3,000 female virgins; apparently, this large number of nubile young women was almost too much for Elias’s temperament. Three angels come to him in a vision and helpfully castrate him, allowing him to keep up his work.42 Even if sexual temptation overwhelms the ascetic, angels can lessen the negative consequences. According to the Lausiac History, as Evagrius considered his love for a woman he could not have, he envisioned himself being thrown in prison for his impropriety. Though only a daydream, being left alone in prison was so difficult for Evagrius that an angel came to him to keep him company.43 These angelic appearances are spectacular, and in their wonder they call attention to the amazing—and in some cases heartbreaking—deeds of sexual renunciation that Palladius witnessed or heard. At the same time, the presence of angels as assistants paradoxically makes these deeds more believable to contemporary readers, for the help of a supernatural entity makes these feats of renunciation seem possible. The assumption that ascetics live the angelic life also helped members of the ascetic community adopt appropriate behaviors. The imagined presence of angels, for example, inspired repentance: one saying in the Greek anonymous collection of the Apophthegmata reports that there lived “an anchorite who had settled in the desert in

41

Lausiac History 8 (Cuthbert Butler, ed., The Lausiac History of Palladius, Texts and Studies [Cambridge, 1904], 28-29); cf. Life of Antony 60 (G. J. M. Bartelink, ed., Vie d’Antoine, Sources chrétiennes 400 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994], 294-96). 42 Lausiac History 29 (ed. Butler, Lausiac History, 84-86). 43 Lausiac History 38 (ed. Butler, Lausiac History, 117-18).

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the district of Antinoë and was progressing in virtue.” However, he is persuaded by a demon that he needed to be serving others, and thus he left the community to go work in society, unaware he had fallen into a trap: After a long time, he happened across a woman and having been weakened by his lack of attention and arriving at a deserted place, with the enemy following after, he sinned beside the river. When he took to heart how the enemy rejoiced at his fall, he wished to give up on himself for having so greatly grieved the Spirit of God, the angels, and the holy fathers….44 As he repents, the public to whom he imagines himself responsible includes God, those he lives with in the desert, and angels, who observe his action.45 To be part of a community of angels meant that angels watch one’s behavior and can hold one accountable, even after one has left the community. If the monk who left to work in the world is held accountable by angels, how much more were so those who stayed? According to the literature that recounts stories of the Egyptian ascetics, angels can, by their very appearance, influence the behaviors—and even the speech—of those who remain with their communities. Consider the story told about the discerning monk who has visions of angels: One of the fathers said that when the elders used to sit around and speak about beneficial matters, there was one among them who could discern things, and he saw angels fanning them with palm branches and praising them. When another matter came up [one that was not beneficial], the angels went away and pigs full of foul odors would wallow in their midst and obliterate them. As soon as they spoke about beneficial matters again, the angels would come and praise them.46

44

N175 (ed. Nau, “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 13 [1908]: 266-68, cited at 266). 45 Jerome D. Folkman, “The Unseen World in the Minor Midrashim,” (Rabbinical thesis, Hebrew Union College, 1931) makes a similar argument about unseen heavenly angels enforcing group behavior. 46 N359 (ed. Nau, “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 18 [1913]:137).

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There are two ways these visions help create and reinforce the community expectation about good discourse. First, as angels appear and disappear, they provide immediate feedback on the conversation of the group. Second, the presence and absence of the angels allow the discerning brother to avoid direct judgment of the group. Instead, he simply reports what he sees; the angels “speak” for him. This is an important distinction, because according to the virtues idealized in Christian ascetic communities, a monk should at all costs avoid judging another monk. In his work detailing the values that governed the relationships among desert monks, Graham Gould observes that the sheer “number of stories illustrating the necessity of not judging others, and the urgency with which abstaining from judgement was commended, confirms the importance of the problem of judgement” in ascetic literature.47 The act of judging represented a lack of humility or the ignorance of one’s own sins, and the “possibility of being subject to demonic deceit,” not to mention the undue shame it could inflict on the one being judged.48 The mechanism by which the manifesting angels save the brother from erring in the vice of judgement is rather simple—either he sees angels or he sees pigs—but the assumption that angels could manifest themselves in monastic communities allowed for elegant solutions to more complex problems, particularly those which arose when the demands of multiple ascetic virtues seemed to clash. Specifically, the imagined presence of angels helped monks and their superiors negotiate the difficult path between avoiding one behavior—slander—and allowing another—heresy. The

47

Graham Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 123, but see also the discussion that ranges over 123-32. 48 Gould, Desert Fathers, 129.

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stories of two Pachomian leaders, Pachomius himself and Theodore, illustrate the deft arbitration made possible by the presence of angels; these stories require some contextualization regarding the gravity of both slander and heresy as vices condemned by ascetic communities. First, let us consider the fact that while judgement was indeed considered an act of vice, worse still than judgement was slander—perhaps logically so, because slander involved a third person, a listener, in the act of judging.49 As one ascetic describes it, slander is both “[f]ailure to recognize the glory of God and jealousy toward one’s neighbor.”50 In a community that depended on humility and comraderie, the human urge to talk about one’s neighbors could be an insidious force. It was also a necessary one. In her study of the desert ascetics and their style of communication, Maud Gleason notes that as “we examine the social behavior of these indomitable individuals, the corpus of their sayings and stories yields evidence of two processes characteristic of social groups: status negotiation and behavioral regulation. Gossip played a critical role in both.”51 If ascetics rejected the usual demonstrations of status as a part of their renunciatory project—eschewing wealth and family connections—social prestige as defined by their own community was the last marker of status remaining to them. The stories repeated about a particular ascetic and his deeds of renunciation were the building blocks of his reputation

49

At least one saying in the Apophthegmata collections directly contradicts me, saying that to judge another is indeed worse than slander. See N417, cited by Gould, Desert Fathers, 123. 50 AP Isaias 10; I was directed to this reference by its mention and translation in Robert E. Sinkewicz’s Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18. For other references to the monastic injunction against gossip, see Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 18 n. 18, 19, and 21. 51 “Visiting and News: Gossip and Reputation-Management in the Desert,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 501-21, at 503.

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among his peers and even his spiritual progeny. In Gleason’s words, “status recognition required gossip.”52 This view of the necessity of gossip, however, assumes that “gossip” is always positive; negative reports could, of course, be damaging to an ascetic’s reputation. Perhaps this is why the literature representing ascetic communities treats the avoidance of slander as if it were an ascetic practice itself, one more important than the more familiar rejections of food, drink, sleep, and sex. A saying of Hyperchios asserts that “it is better to eat meat and drink wine, than to eat the flesh of brothers in slander [καταλαλιαῖς].”53 This pronouncement is immediately followed by another that explains the special nature of slander as more than just a sin of the self: “The serpent drove Eve out of paradise through whispering. He who slanders his neighbor is like the serpent, for he both loses the soul of the one who listens, and does not preserve his own.”54 Slander, unlike culinary indulgence, involves more than one member of a community and can be damaging to the whole. While we may think of sexaul renunciation as the most salient of the ascetic practices treasured by early Christian monks, in sayings attributed to Poemen and Matoes, slander is unfavorably compared with fornication.55 In these texts, avoiding slander is considered equal to the basic ascetic practices that renounce physical pleasures. The damaging nature of slander made its avoidance even more important than telling the truth. For some monastic leaders, there was no difference between

52

“Visiting and News,” 503, emphasis in original. Hyperechius 4 (Gould, Desert Fathers, 121). 54 Hyperechius 5 (Gould, Desert Fathers, 121). 55 Gould, Desert Fathers, 121. In Poemen 154, slander and fornication are spoken of in once piece, while in Matoes 8, Matoes discusses with another brother whether slander is worse than fornication. Matoes argues that it is not, with the brother holding the other view.

53

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statements made that were false and those that were true: any negative report about another would count as slander and thus be a vice.56 Weigh the message of the following story from the alphabetic collection of the Apophthegmata: Suppose two men have committed murder before you, and one of them has fled to your cell. Then the magistrate comes to look for him, and asks you whether you have seen a murder[er?]. If you do not lie, you are handing the man over to death. You should leave him before God without censure, for God knows everything.57 When one is given the choice between telling the truth and “handing the man over to death” on the one hand or lying and allowing the murderer to go free, this anecdote recommends that one should lie rather than report a brother’s transgression, even if that transgression is murder.58 With the consideration of the general injunction against slander, this story may be easier to understand: it teaches that the report of another’s sin is a breach of community values. Slander is worse than lying, even worse than murder. Is slander, then, the worst imaginable transgression? According to the Apophthegmata Patrum, one sin topped all others, including slander—heresy. Consider how Agathon, described as a “monk of great discernment,” reacts when some brothers come to test him: he admits to a litany of sins, including fornication, pride, and slander, but bristles at the idea that he is a heretic. He explains: “The first things I ascribe to myself, for it is good for my soul, but heresy is separation from

56

Basil of Caesarea reports that “he who makes a statement against someone in order to slander or disparage him is a detractor, even though the statement be true”; ep. 22.3.8, cited and translated by Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 18 n. 18. 57 Alonius 4 (cited in Gould, Desert Fathers, 125). 58 There is, of course, a message about the difference between the community of ascetics and the world of the magistrate in this story; perhaps the meaning of the story lies in keeping the ascetic community a different society by refusing to participate in the juridical system of the world. Even so, it is surprising to see lying portrayed as preferable here.

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God, and I do not wish to be separated from God.”59 Agathon may be a fornicator, he may even be a slanderer, but he claims that these activities and their consequences ultimately are good for him and his spiritual development. Heresy alone threatens to remove him from community with God.

Heresy is a problem with one’s

relationship to the divine, but it can also threaten an ascetic’s bond with the human community. In the Apophthegmata collections, Theodore of Pherme offers the following counsel: If you are friendly with someone, and it comes about that he falls into the temptation of fornication, give him your hand and draw him out. But if he falls into heresy, and you cannot persuade him to return, then quickly cut yourself off from him, lest by delaying you are dragged down with him into the pit.60 Fornication, while perilous to the person involved, does not threaten to endanger others around him. Heresy is entirely another story. If slander is to be avoided at all costs, but heresy was such a danger to the community, what should happen if one brother hears that another is entertaining heretical ideas? As Maud Gleason indicates, inevitably “word gets out” about deviance in ascetic communities, but how?61 How could information about possible heresy pass among the community, or perhaps more importantly, from the community to its leader, without violating the injunction against offering negative reports of others—against slander? No antique source phrases the problem in quite this way. There are, however, stories in the literature about ascetic communities that demonstrate awareness of the

59

Agathon 5 (cited in Gould, Desert Fathers, 65). Theodore of Pherme 4 (cited in Gould, Desert Fathers, 93). 61 Gleason, “Visiting and News,” 504. 60

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dilemma, and these stories suggest that angelic appearances could resolve it. In two texts from the Pachomian community superiors learn about the heretical dispositions of others through having visions of angels or receiving messages from angels, thus avoiding the more mundane transfer of information from one human being to another and, with it, the prospect of slander. The first text describes how Pachomius himself—here called “the Great Man” or “the Old Man”—is able to sniff out heresy among a group of visitors: As [the visitors] sat in a secluded cell, the Old Man perceived a strong stench from them. He did not know the cause of such a stench, because he was conversing with them face to face and could not learn the cause by a supplication to God. Seeing their eloquence and their familiarity with the Scriptures, he could not understand their sickening stench. After the Great Man had conversed long with them about the holy Scriptures, and the ninth hour was come, they rose up to go away to their own place….The Great Man, in order to know the cause of their stench, went into his cell and prayed God to make it known to him. An angel of the Lord came and told him, “It was some doctrines of impiety from Origen that, in their souls, produced such a stench.”62 In the remainder of the passage, Pachomius calls the visitors back and counsels the brothers not to be acquainted with Origen’s books, indeed to “cast them in the river, and never want to read them again, and especially the blasphemous ones.”63 The benefit of angelic visions also applies to Theodore, a later leader of the Pachomian federation.64 According to two passages in the Letter of Ammon, Theodore

62

Paralipomena 7 (Armand Veilleux, trans., Pachomian Koinonia, vol. 2: Pachomian Chronicles and Rules [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981], 28-29.) 63 Paralipomena 7 (trans. Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, vol. 2, 29). 64 Theodore’s appointment as head of the federation was a compromise solution to a dispute about the proper successor to Pachomius. Apparently, the ep. Amm. is aware of the slight taint surrounding Theodore and in the text, Theodore’s leadership is confirmed by angelic appearances: the letter recounts a story in which Pachomius claims that Theodore’s appropriateness as sucessor was clear to him because when Theodore joined the community, an angel appeared to Pachomius to tell him that Theodore was “full of the Holy Spirit,” citing Acts 7.55 (James E. Goehring, ed., The Letter of Ammon and Pachomian Monasticism, Patristische Texte und Studien 27 [New York: de Gruyter, 1986], text:

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is aware of the heretical deeds of monks hidden away in private cells because angels act as his informants.65 In the first instance, a monk accused of improper deeds tries to avoid talking with Theodore about his actions, but Theodore has been given specific information about these hidden deeds and uses that information to persuade the monk to admit his wrongdoing: Theodore appeared at the monastery and called the brothers together….And seizing a certain young monk who was coming out of the house, he hauled him into a vaulted room and compelled him to relate what he had done. He explained that he was the one who had been pointed out by the angel and ordered expelled from the monastery. As he did not want to speak, Theodore began to relate his first act and asked whether he had another monk as a sympathizer. Falling at Theodore’s feet, he requested him to remain silent with respect to his other acts and to expel [him] from the monastery.66 While the passage does not tell us the exact nature of the deed, the act is embarrassing enough for the young monk to decide to leave the monastery once he hears the particulars of his supposedly private actions recounted to him. Theodore used this same tactic more than once; after Theodore had expelled the first monk, “he went to each of the other monks that had been accused by the angel in private at night.” As the Letter of Ammon would have it, Theodore apparently received regular, detailed, and frank reports on the activities of monks from an angel.

130, trans.: 163-64). In addition to this, while Pachomius is still alive, Theodore has a night vision in which he sees angels enacting a sort of Eucharist at the altar of the church, one in which Theodore himself is fed “an alien food” (ξένην τροφήν) that helps him see more such visions (Goehring, Letter of Ammon, text: 134, trans.: 166-67). As James Goehring has pointed out, the ep. Amm., like most of the extant Pachomian texts, should be dated to the time of Theodore and Horsiesius (ca. 346-400), and thus any story about Pachomius in texts like the ep. Amm. must be read as representing this later time period’s interpretation of Pachomius. That is to say, these appearances have more to do with authenticating Theodore as a leader than they do with reporting Pachomius’s experience. See Goehring, “New Frontiers in Pachomian Studies,” in Ascetics, Society, and the Desert, 162-86, particularly 163-64. 65 To be fair, I should point out that in two other instances, the text indicates that Theodore receives word of heresy via the Holy Spirit (ep. Amm. 22, 23 [Goehring, Letter of Ammon, text: 143-46, trans.: 172-74]). 66 ep. Amm. 20 (Goehring, Letter of Ammon, text: 141, trans.: 171).

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The deeds of the monks in this particular case are implied to be sexual, but a second story about Theodore intimates that he receives reports about heretical teachings promulgated in secret as well: And once, when Theodore had all the brothers together, he said to Psarphius… “Send to Palchelphius’ cell and have him come here together with the youth that is with him in his cell. And summon also his elder son.” And when they arrived, Theodore said to Palchelphius: “Tell [me] what you were teaching this youth during the night.” And he said: “What was I teaching him? The fear of God.” Theodore said: “God himself, through an angel, has informed against you. Therefore, tell the truth whether indeed your teaching is a light.” But since he refused, Theodore said to all: “He was teaching him that there is no resurrection of the flesh, reproaching the nature of his flesh.” Then, as he said to Patchelphius, “Say whether it is so or not,” Patchelphius’ son cried out and said: “He also persuaded me to think about these things last evening.”67 Even though Patchelphius refuses to confess when confronted, Theodore leverages the information he has, playing one witness against another: the son finally confesses that the father, indeed, had been teaching him to “reproach the flesh.” The pattern in this story is much like that in the story of the young monk with the embarrassing deed: Theodore learns about covert deviance from an angel and uses this knowledge to his advantage. In both stories about Theodore and also in the earlier story about Pachomius and the foul-smelling visitors, angelic appearances allowed the leader of the community to challenge the doctrinal or practical errors of others without having had to have learned of these errors through other monks.68 These appearances remove the

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ep. Amm. 26 (Goehring, Letter of Ammon, text: 148, trans.: 175-76). Angels sometimes take matters into their own hands. In the alphabetical collection, there is the story of a brother whose errors in thinking about the Eucharist are corrected by the appearance of an angel during the rite: AP Daniel 7 (PG 65:156C-160A). Cf. the anecdote in the Lausiac History about 68

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limit that avoidance of slander might impose: if Pachomius and Theodore are reporting what angels tell them, not only is that information likely true—indeed, in all the stories related here, the information turns out to be reliable—but it also is free from the stain of having been passed from one monk to another. The pattern of such stories, in which angels offer negative reports so monks do not have to, likely served a second purpose, demonstrating to later readers how to handle the discovery of heresy. They provided a cover story of sorts to would-be monastic informants by eliding the source of the damaging reports into a generic message from an “angel.” Later leaders of monastic communities might learn from such stories how to protect the anonymity of their sources, whether by citing angelic visions as the source of their information or by playing on the ambiguity of the word “ἄγγελος,” “angel,” which in Greek and Coptic also can mean simply “messenger.” In turn, having read these stories, monks with information to report might hope their superiors would have learned to follow this pattern and would be likely to cover their informants. The prospect that stories like these can telegraph a model for dealing with heresy is further bolstered by the fact that two of them are marked by their involvement with the archetypical heresy that occupied Egyptian ascetic communities: the Origenist heresy.69 The story of Pachomius and the foul-smelling visitors is explicit about the cause of their odor: it is because these monks “read the works of Origen” that they reek. The second story of Theodore’s angelic visions has

Marcus the ascetic, who receives his communion from the hand of an angel (Lausiac History 18 [ed. Butler, Lausiac History, 56, 3-10]); it is possible that this story affirms obliquely Marcus’s orthodoxy regarding the Eucharist. 69 See Elizabeth Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

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him correct a brother who teaches “there is no resurrection of the flesh,” one of the doctrines that characterized the position of those branded as “Origenists.” It is also interesting that these stories deal with exposing “Origenists,” because the main tenet of the position characterized in that way was that the divine cannot have a human form; there is no “likeness” of the divine that can be seen. Evagrius, most likely at the center of the movement to avoid picturing the divine, warned his readers against more than just imagining God. Rather, he urged them, “Hold no desire to see angels or powers or Christ with the senses, lest you go completely insane, taking a wolf to be the shepherd and worshipping your enemies, the demons.”70 In what must be seen as an ironic twist, angels appear to Pachomius and Theodore in order to accuse exactly those people who would suggest that angels should have no appearance, namely probable “Origenists.” These stories are doubly anti-heretical, their protagonists revealing heretics by means of the very thing the heresy denies. To extend the irony, we should consider the fact that the Origenist controversy appears to have started with the vision of an angel, according to one of the two ancient sources describing its beginnings. The Coptic Life of Aphou details the reception of a festal letter distributed by Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, in which he denies that the divine has an image.71 Aphou, a monk who had been living alone in

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Evagrius, On Prayer 115 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 205-6). One might think this advice is a bit difficult to take, since the rewards of good behavior can include visions of angels. Consider the contrast Evagrius makes between the angry person and the patient person in Eight Thoughts. Evagrius finishes the section on anger this way: “The irascible person sees disturbing nightmares, and an angry person imagines attacks of wild beasts. A patient person has visions of encounters with holy angels, and one free from resentment discourses on spiritual matters and receives in the night answers to mysteries”; Eight Thoughts 20-21 (ed. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 81). 71 John Cassian, Conference 10.2 is the other source for this encounter.

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the desert, comes to gather with the other members of his community for the reading of Theophilus’s festal letter. The Life of Aphou relates that while [Aphou] was still living with the wild beasts he left for the proclamation of holy Easter. He heard a statement that did not accord with his understanding of the Holy Spirit. As a result, he was very upset at what he heard. Indeed, everyone who heard it was saddened and and upset over it. But the angel of the Lord commanded blessed Aphou not to be indifferent to what was read, saying to him, “You have been appointed by the Lord to go to Alexandria to take issue with what was said.” The wording of that proclamation went like this: in exalting the glory of God in the proclamation, it emphasized human weakness, and the person who had dictated it said that “this weakness is not the image of God,” understanding “this weakness” to be we who bear the image, that is, we human beings. (5-6)72 As Aphou and his fellow ascetics listen to the letter of Theophilus, they have a disturbing experience: Theophilus asserts that humanity does not share in the image of God, a view that discomfits those who hear it.73 While the entire group is upset, only Aphou moves to take action, being emboldened by an angel. After his encounter with the angel, Aphou stands ready to challenge the text of the letter and prepared with the exact words to do so. The initiative the angel gives Aphou to challenge the bishop must have been strong, for the gap between a monk from the wilds and the bishop of the largest city in Egypt was a power differential to be respected. Once Aphou has an audience with Theophilus, however, none of his weaknesses, be they social or spiritual, hinder the conversation.74 Instead, because of Aphou’s confident speech, Theophilus agrees to

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Tim Vivian, trans., Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt and Macarius of Alexandria (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004), 183. 73 Cassian describes Theophilus’s letter as a “long refutation of the absurd heresy of the anthropomorphites” (Conference 10.2; Owen Chadwick, ed. and trans., Western Asceticism, Library of Christian Classics [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958], 234). 74 The text of the Life of Aphou marks this difference in the ways it chooses to depict the monk. When Aphou joins the celebration of Easter, he leaves behind the wild beasts he lives with (5). As he

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change the wording of his letter and issues a correction at once, saying “I see that your appearance is that of a peasant, but on the other hand I can hear that your words are more elevated than the words of those who are wise” (16-17).75 When Theophilus asks why he alone, of all those bothered by the phrase, was the only one to speak up, Aphou answers, “[for my part], I am confident that you will agree with me and will no longer oppose me.”76 Let us remember that at the start of this narrative, Aphou is upset by the phrase in Theophilus’s festal letter, but he appears unprepared to do anything about it. In fact, his lowly status militates against him challenging the bishop of the most important city in Egypt. Thus, the angel of the Lord instructs him specifically “not to be indifferent to what was read.” However, in his response to Theophilus, Aphou does not tell the bishop about the visit from the angel. If we are to avoid charging Aphou with pride when he meets with Theophilus, why would the text omit the reason for his challenge? It is possible to contextualize the omission by looking at Theophilus’s own role in the Origenist controversy. This episode between Aphou and Theophilus was only the beginning of the controversy, and Theophilus changed his allegiance several times, his support wavering between monks who held the idea that the divine may be partially represented in human form and other monks who did not.77 Even though the

prepares to go to Alexandira, Aphou puts on a “raggedy garment” (7). His appearance is so meager that he is ignored for three days after he arrives and the bishop’s servants are afraid to present him at court (7). As if these clues weren’t enough, Aphou identifies himself as a “poor man.” 75 Vivian, Four Desert Fathers, 187. 76 I reproduce Vivian’s translation above, but add “[for my part]” in order to point out the specific valence of the construction here. By using a pronoun unnecessary to the Coptic, Aphou may be emphasizing that it is he, and noone else, that is confident. See the discussion of “personal independents” in Bentley Layton, A Coptic Grammar with Chrestomathy and Glossary: Sahidic Dialect, Porta Linguarum Orientalium 20 (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000), 65 (§77). 77 See Clark, The Origenist Controversy.

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Life of Aphou champions a monk who convinced Theophilus to allow that the divine may have a likeness among human beings, it still exhibits caution about having Aphou be inspired by the vision of an angel. Aphou’s reluctance to report the source of his boldness suggests that even this text, extremely sympathetic to one who had such a vision, manifests a wariness about monks seeing angels. Such ambivalence about angelic appearances among ascetics is not limited to the Life of Aphou. The idea that ascetics were “living the angelic life” led many to imagine that angels might be present in ascetic communities. We have seen that appearances of angels in these communities could accomplish constructive things: angels inspire good behavior and, when good behavior is lacking, repentance; angels by their presence steer ascetics to edifying topics of conversation; angelic appearances even resolve situations that seem to demand that monks engage in one vice—slander—to prevent another—heresy. However, other works of ascetic literature share the concern demonstrated by the Life of Aphou about visions of angels. In the next section, as we explore this concern, we will see the less-thanhelpful effects of the equation of the ascetic life with the angelic one.

TROUBLE IN THE CITY IN THE DESERT: ANGELIC EXPECTATIONS In the alphabetic collection of the Apophthegmata Patrum, Megethios laments the golden days of his community: “In the beginning, when we came together, we spoke of beneficial things, encouraging one another, and we became choirs upon choirs [of angels]; we ascended up to the heavens. But now when we come together, we gossip,

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one against the other, and thus go down [to hell].”78 The complaint is not a new one.79 However, the specificity of Megethios’s complaint can illumine: he contrasts the heady early moments in his community, a time when he was one of many angels, with the more recent, and all too human, behavior of his group. The difference between the ideal of the ascetic life and its realities was likely harsh enough, but it may have been exacerbated by the portrayal of ascetic communities as “choirs upon choirs” of angels. There is evidence that, particularly for those who had heard tell of ascetic endeavors and were led to join these “angels” in the desert, the expectations created by these lofty descriptions of the ascetic life needed to be tempered by the wisdom of more experienced community members. As I explained in the last section, the analogy of the ascetic project with the “angelic life” allowed those in ascetic communities to imagine that angels might appear to them. The stories collected in the Apophthegmata Patrum treat most of these appearances as problematic, if not outright dangerous. In the Greek anonymous collection, one saying tells the story of a young monk who is apparently piqued that other ascetics have seen angels while he himself has not: “An old man was asked, ‘How do some say, “We see visions of angels”?’—and he replied, ‘Happy is he who always sees his sins.’”80 This more experienced monk reassures the one who asked by noting that the visions of angels claimed by others are unreal, or, at the very least, inconsequential. There is an emphasis on humility in the “old man’s” response;

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Megethios 4 (PG 65:300). See the litany of religious laments for the splendor of the past in Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Knopf, 1999), 60-62. 80 N332 (F. Nau, ed., “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 17 [1912]: 210).

79

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having angelic visions and talking about them is a distraction from the primary purpose, the struggle with one’s own sin. Rejecting distraction is a message that underlies a longer narrative, this one focusing on an ascetic who has had an angelic vision himself. A brother lived in silence. Wishing to deceive him, the demons appeared to him looking like angels and roused him for the synaxis and showed him a light. So he went an old man and said to him, “Abba, angels come with a light and rouse me for the synaxis.” The old man said to him, “Do not listen to them, my child, for they are demons, but when they come to waken you say, ‘I wake myself when I wish but I do not listen to you.’”81 The more experienced monk responds very quickly, discerning the presence of demons, rather than angels, in an instant. This may be simply the skill of a wizened ascetic who knows the temptations that come in one’s practice, but notice that the troubled brother “lives in silence,” a phrase suggesting he himself may be welladvanced in his ascetic career. Perhaps both monks, and by extension, those who read the story for edification, can safely assume that any visitation is a demonic visitation. No monk, however well-advanced, should be so proud to expect, or accept, angelic visions. Two other vignettes which propose a method for responding to such visions reveal that the pervasiveness of pride and the exercise of humility are at stake for ascetics when they see angels. The Greek anonymous collection of the Apophthegmata Patrum recounts that the “old men used to say, ‘Even if an angel should indeed appear to you, do not receive him but humiliate yourself, saying, ‘I am

81

N224 (ed. Nau, “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 17 [1912]: 206).

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not worthy to see an angel, living in sin.’”82 Psychologically astute, this piece of advice does not on the surface deny that an ascetic may see an angel, but simply instructs the ascetic to humble himself regardless. The counsel, however, suggests by its wording that the elders should recognize that a misguided ascetic affected by the grandiosity that inspires—or is inspired by—a vision of an angel may not be capable in the moment of realizing that the vision is false. Thus it grants “even if an angel should indeed appear to you….” Consequently, an ascetic convinced of his special status because of his experience of an angelic vision does not need to confront his pride until after the vision ends and the demon has been revealed. Consider this story from the anonymous collection: “The devil appeared to a brother disguised as an angel of light and said to him, ‘I am Gabriel and I have been sent to you.’ The brother said to him, ‘See if it is not someone else to whom you have been sent; as for me, I am not worthy of it’—and immediately the devil vanished.” Here the approach advocated by “the old man” works in practice: even when the vision is of an important angel like Gabriel, affecting humility allows the brother who experiences the vision to dispel it with its temptations. The underlying problem, pride, is taken care of with an affirmation of humility. Admonitory stories like these highlight the ascetic emphasis on humility, but they tell us that more than just personal virtue is in play when monks have angelic visions. We have seen many cases where the presence of angels lends an otherwise unavailable authority to an ascetic: the old man who discerns appropriate behavior

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N311 (ed. Nau, “Histoires des solitaires égyptiens,” Revue de l’Orient chrétien 17 [1912]: 356).

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from the presence of angels or pigs, Pachomius and Theodore finding heretics through angelic reconnaissance, and Aphou speaking up to his bishop once prompted by an angel. Because angels supervise the activities of monks and help determine community standards, it could be destabilizing to the community order for an inappropriate monk to receive angelic visions. It is perhaps for this reason that the ascetic literature collected as the Apophthegmata Patrum goes to such lengths to contain, rebut, and eventually reject visions of angels as detrimental both to individual ascetics and to the community as a whole.83 This is all the more true when, rather than being convinced they are seeing angels, ascetics are convinced of being angels. Even though the trope that the ascetic life is a life “equal to the angels” pervades the texts I have examined in this essay, the idea that one may actually live as an angel finds little purchase in them. Indeed, the literature raises the prospect only to reject it. One example, the story of John the Dwarf and his unruly expectations about the ascetic life, has drawn comment from many interpreters.84 Perhaps it is a favorite because it strikes the sardonic tone that so satisfies readers of the Apophthegmata Patrum. One day, John realizes that he is like an angel. He said to his older brother: “I want to be free from care, as the angels are free from care, since they do not work, but are ceaselessly serving God.” And, taking off his garment, he went out into the desert. Having spent a week thus, he returned to his brother. He knocked at the door, and [the brother] recognized him before he opened the door, saying “Who are you?” He responded “It is I, John, your brother.” And he answered, saying to him “John became an angel, and he is no

83

I thank Mark Graham for raising this point with me. Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 33 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 43, for example. 84

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longer among humans.” And he called for his help, saying, “It’s me!” And he did not open the door to him, but left him to afflict himself until the next morning. Later, having opened the door to him, he said “You are human, it is necessary to work again so you can eat.” And he was repentant, saying “Forgive me.”85 John has overestimated his abilities, and his thoughts of living “like an angel” have, literally, left him shut out of the community. Even after he returns from his “angelic” retreat, John the Dwarf is no less proud, considering that he wishes to be immediately recognized as a brother by the monk who remained in his cell. It takes time—not to mention some physical affliction—to instill in John the proper understanding of his status as an ascetic. To sympathize with John the Dwarf for a moment, were these ideas about seeing angels and being angels so extraordinary, given how ascetics were represented by their admirers? That is to say, if the ascetic project was being experienced by lay Christians through literature and oration, media that often described the ascetic life as an angelic one, it cannot be beyond plausibility that lay Christians formed their expectations of ascetic practice and its rewards accordingly. Thus, when a Christian decided to join an ascetic community, part of the challenge may have been rooting out the unrealistic and even detrimental images created by having been a spectator to ascetic lifestyles.86 In the Apophthegmata Patrum stories examined here, those who see angels or think themselves angels are less experienced; those who correct them

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John the Dwarf 2 (PG 65:204-5); cf. Ethiopic collection 14.52, about Silvanos. See also Caner’s discussion of “free from care” (Wandering, Begging Monks, 33 n. 68). This word—ἀμέριμνος—has a long history in the monastic movment; consider that it is the contemplation of Matt 6.34 (“Do not worry about tomorrow”) that moves Antony to leave society (Athanasius, Life of Antony 3.1; SC 400:134). 86 See Bentley Layton’s discussion of the formation of monastic expectations in “Rules, Patterns, and the Exercise of Power,” esp. 58-65.

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are more experienced. It is in a new monk’s negotiations of status and identity that conflict appears between the expectations of an observer and the realities of ascetic practice. This same gap between expectation and reality prompts Shenoute, the leader of the White Monastery, to remind his monks that even though they are called “angels” by their admirers, this does not ensure a stable identity for them. He makes a distinction between righteous angels and sinning angels: Are you not called, [my] congregation, by those who glorify you “heavenly Jerusalem” and the ones who dwell among [you] “angel”? You are always the same—“heavenly Jerusalem”—and the angels are those among you who fear God and observe his words…. If those among you who resemble angels or are similar to them in their righteous deeds, then they also will be with the angels in the kingdom of God, in the way that the Scripture tells us. If, however, those who are defiled or who will defile themselves at some point among you resemble or are similar to the ancient sinning angels in their unclean deeds, then they will be with them in hell.87 Shenoute recalls for his monks those Christians, presumably outsiders, who think of their community as one which surpasses the world; they are a “heavenly Jerusalem,” glorified as “angels.” Angels, he threatens, come in two species—heavenly and sinning—and his monks can align themselves with either group by their behavior.

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This is an unpublished portion of a florilegium of Shenoutean texts; Stephen Emmel has identified this particular fragment as a part of So Listen, from Canon 8 (XL297=FR-BN 1304 f.149): mh eumoute an ero tsunagwgh ebol xitNnet+eoou ne je cILHM Ntpe auw netouhx N[x]hte je aggelos; Nto Nto on pe cILHM Ntpe auw xenaggelos ne netRxote xhtf Mpnoute xrai" Nxhte etxarex enef¥aje: alla Nce Ntaxenaggelos kw Nswou Nteu[ar]yh aueire [ ] xbhue em […] xNxenakacartos auw eutako nneu2uyh xNxenxbhue eme¥¥e xrai" nxhte Nouoei¥ nim . e¥je netouaab etNxhte eueine Naggelos h eutNtwn eroou xNneuxbhue Ndikaiosunh ei"e euna¥wpe on mNNaggelos xNtmNtero Mpnoute Nce eteretegravh jw Mmos: e¥je netjaxM de on h netnajaxmou xrai" Nxhte Nouoei¥ nim . eueine h eutNtwn xNneuxbhue Nloimos enaggelos Ntaurnobe Naryaios ei"e euna¥wpe on mNnetMmau xrai" xNamnte. I thank Stephen Emmel for allowing me the use of this fragment.

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Even the vigor behind such threats, though, did not blunt the disappointments created by the identification of the ascetic life with the angelic one. Consider the situation described in the text Why, O Lord, a part of Canon 4.88 Some monks had recently left the monastery at Shenoute’s request, and Shenoute wonders who, exactly, is responsible for the fact that the monks have, by leaving, broken their vows. Is it he, who enforced his will and forced the monks out of the community, or is it they, whose behavior was unacceptable and led to their expulsion? As Shenoute reconsiders his decision from several perspectives, he may sound like a hesitant young leader, but Why, O Lord was written after Shenoute had been at the head of the monastery for some time and thus reveals the regret of a seasoned leader after a traumatic event in his community.89 As he reviews the details of his decision to eject the offending monks, Shenoute repines against the distance between the perceptions of outsiders and the reality of the constant work he has to do to keep the monastery going: Many times…we spend the entire day speaking and convicting, petitioning, comforting, blessing, cursing, struggling, saying words of enmity, reciting words of peace, being holy and being civilized, being gentle in patience, loving anger, being small of heart in disturbance and more anger, weeping with tears, laughing with the comfort and fear of the Lord, knowing that we are condemned by [our] laughing because the thing that allows us to laugh “turns to grief,” as it is written [alluding to James 4.9], because our sins grow “we are restless,” as it is written [2 Cor 6.10?], and yet “we rejoice in the Lord,” according to the Scriptures. We endure and we dwell and we gather together, saying the words “Where are our friends on the 88

What remains of Canon 4 is, as much of Shenoute’s work, a composite of many different manuscript pieces. For a complete details about the Canon and its representation in the manuscripts, see Stephen Emmel’s discussion in Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, 2 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 1:155–63 and 2:573–75, along with the table on 2:719–26. 89 Shenoute’s Literary Corpus, 2:573–74. Emmel here is refuting the assertion of the editor of this part of Canon 4 for the CSCO series, Johannes Leipoldt, who had suggested that it may have been written shortly after Shenoute’s taking of power.

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outside who call us ‘angel’?” They see all of our bad deeds with our falsehood and our evil thoughts and they see us acting indecently in enmity with one another on account of our pride and our ignorance.90 Given the machinations that Shenoute found necessary to lead his monastery—the constant management of emotions and reactions by cajoling, pleading, comforting, scolding—the fact that those outside the monastery could refer to him and his monks as “angels” must have seemed ironic to him, even bitterly so.91 For all his efforts, the “bad deeds” and “evil thoughts” of the community were exhibited publicly; “pride” and “ignorance” were in evidence among his monks. While being called an angel may have been meant in admiration, to Shenoute, such a term could only point out his failings as a leader. Even in antiquity, those Christians who rejected sexuality and family to live in the monasteries and deserts of Egypt were viewed as superstars, their way of life being so perfect as to be “equal to the angels.” It is clear that Egyptian ascetics knew others praised them by making a connection between their practices and the “angelic life.” This connection entered into the ways that ascetics thought both of themselves and of their project. Such a discourse worked constructively—establishing boundaries between the community and the world, affirming certain behaviors while allowing for others to be avoided—but it also created problems of authority and

90

Canon 4, Why, O Lord (Johannes Leipoldt, ed., Sinuthii archimandritae vita et opera omnia 3, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 42 [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1908], 116-51). Leipoldt titles this work De eis qui e monasterio discesserunt, cited at 148-49; the operative part of the citation reads in Coptic: enxupomeine enxmoos ensooux exoun enjw nxen¥aje nteimine jeeutwn nen¥beer etxibol etnhu nan etmoute eron jeaggelos; 91 Shenoute’s litany serves another purpose, namely to project Shenoute as a “suffering servant,” one who must work constantly to overcome the difficulties created by those in his community who err. See Rebecca Krawiec’s discussion of this trope in Shenoute’s writing (Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity [New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 69-71).

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arrogance among ascetics. When we read texts, be they ancient or modern, that compare ascetics to angels, we must remember Shenoute’s warning. The idea that Christian ascetics were living “the angelic life” carries varied and even opposite effects, some worthy and helpful, like the righteous angels in the kingdom of God, and others difficult and troubling, like the defiled angels who reside in hell.

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Chapter Six THE BEGINNING—AND END—OF ANTIQUE ANGELOLOGY I wrote my Aeropagitica, in order to deliver the press from the restraints with which it was encumbered. —John Milton, Second Defense of the English People1

The most comprehensive and important treatment of angels by a Christian writer in antiquity is the Celestial Hierarchy. Although it and other works by its author, Dionysius, were long taken to be written by Dionysius the Aeropagite, the New Testament character whom Paul converted in Acts 17, scholars now place the Dionysian corpus in the context of late fifth-century or early sixth-century Syria. The reasons for the change in attribution are numerous. First, two scholars at the end of the nineteenth century successfully argued that a work of Proclus, the fifth-century neoplatonist philosopher, on the essence of evil was not inspired by, but was the inspiration for, this Dionysius’s treatise on the Divine Names.2 Next, with the Dionysian corpus located in the fifth century, other scholars noted multiple pieces of evidence to tie Dionysius to the late antique east: the first author to cite the Divine Names was Severus of Antioch (fl. 512-18); Dionysius’s treatise on Christian ritual, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, appears to reflect the practice of reciting the Nicene Creed aloud during the mass, a practice likely introduced by Timothy I, patriarch of

1

John Milton, Second Defense of the English People (Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose [New York: Macmillan, 1957], 817-38, at 831). 2 Josef Stiglmayer, “Der Neuplatoniker Proclus als Vorlage des sogennante Dionysius Aeropagita in der Lehre vom Übel,” Historisches Jahrbuch 16 (1895): 253-73, 721-48; H. Koch, “Proclus als Quelle des Pseudo-Dionysius Ar. in der Lehre vom Bösen,” Philologus 54 (1895): 438-54.

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Constantinople (d. 523); and Dionysius’s writings as a whole reflect knowledge of the Henotikon, which circulated in 482.3 Given this late date for Dionysius’s corpus, the extensive angelology described in his Celestial Hierarchy allows us a unique perspective on the history of ancient Christian thinking about angels. It appears—well-developed and fully formed—after several centuries in which angels, as an explicit topic of inquiry, had little currency. And, Celestial Hierarchy can help us look forward in time to Christian ideas about angels after the ancient period, for its influence on later thinkers was substantial. From east to west, medieval times to early modernity, the questions posed by Dionysius’s mystical and theological aims occupied religious and secular scholars alike.4 This is particularly true of his view of the angelic world: the basic order that Dionysius described—nine ranks of angels in the heavens, organized into three sections or “dispositions” that stand in sequence between the one God and the material world—was the foundation for later Christian speculation about angels. In the west, the order and ranks of angels described by this work were followed by Aquinas in his angelology, which led to the adoption of Dionysius’s scheme by the

3

Paul Rorem and John C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus: Annotating the Aeropagite, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), specifically “The Earliest Reception of the Dionysian Corpus,” 9-18. Even though there have been many attempts to identify the author with previously known Christian authors, none have yet proven convincing to a majority of scholars. Stiglmayer himself suggested that the author actually was Severus of Antioch, while others identified him as Peter the Iberian (E. Honigmann, “Pierre l’Ibérian et les écrits du Pseudo-Denys l’Aréopagite,” Mémoires d l’Académie Royal de Belgique 48 [1952]: 6-7). 4 See the variety of essays collected in Denys l’Aéropagite et sa postérité en orient et in occident, ed. Ysabel de Andia, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Antiquité 151 (Paris: Institut d’ Études Augustiniennes, 1997), which include studies of the influence of Dionysius on Maximus the Confessor, Simeon the New Theologian, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Gregory Palamas, among others.

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large majority of western Christian theologians.5 In the east, scholars have also noted the influence of Dionysius’s angelology, describing the instrumentality of his Celestial Hierarchies in the iconoclastic controversies and its weight in the speculations of individual writers of the Byzantine period.6 If our goal is to understand the place of the Celestial Hierarchy in relation to its own era, we can discern much of the character and purpose of the work in its first lines. It opens with a citation from the New Testament: “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the father of lights” [Jas 1.17]. But there is something more. Inspired by the Father, each procession of the Light spreads itself generously toward us, and in its power to unify, it stirs us by lifting us up. It returns us back to the oneness and deifying simplicity of the Father who gathers us in. For, as the sacred Word says, “from him and to him are all things” [Rom 11.36].7 Here Dionysius has artfully woven together two threads that form ancient Christian cosmology: indigenous scriptural knowledge and contemporary, often pagan, philosophical theories about the relationship between the material world and the divine. As one editor of the Celestial Hierarchy has observed, this opening “bracketed the Neoplatonic theme of procession and return with two supporting

5

Compare J. D. Collins, “The Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1947) and David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), introduction, esp. 7, which emphasizes the importance of Thomistic angelology on later thinkers. 6 Glenn Peers, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium, Transformation of the Classical Heritage 32 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 5 (general influence), 102 (use in iconoclastic debates), 115-16 (influence on John of Damascus), 118 (Nicephorus), and 125 (Michael of Studios and summary). 7 Celestial Hierarchy 1.1 (René Roques, ed., Denys L’Aréopagite: La hiérarchie céleste, Sources chrétiennes 58 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958], 70; Colm Luibheid, trans., Paul Rorem, ed., PseudoDionysius: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality [New York: Paulist Press, 1987], 145). For ease of reading, I will use Luibheid’s translation throughout, but with some concern; his translation renders Dionysius’s prose legible, but removes some of the dizzying range of vocabulary and syntax.

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biblical quotations.”8 The treatise (and the rest of the Dionysian corpus) advertises its adherence to and subjection to “Scripture,” broadly defined, yet it reveals that “there is something more.”9 That “something more”—the combination of Christian and neoplatonic theologies—is what draws many scholars to study Dionysius, to ruminate on the mutual influence of scriptural and philosophical perspectives which is manifest in the opening paragraph to Celestial Hierarchy. Yet there may be more to be found in what is not immediately apparent in this short introduction to the work. For it is intriguing, and perhaps instructive, that while Dionyius opens his work by evoking a particular section of James, he avoids quoting the phrases from that book which immediately follow what he has reproduced. After it describes how every good thing comes from above, from the “father of lights,” the book of James continues to identify this father of lights as the one “with whom there is no shadow or variation due to change.” For the father of lights to communicate with those below, there must be, according to ancient philosophies of transmission, some change, variation, or malleability on the part of this one divine entity. By leaving this small clause from Scripture out of his introduction, Dionysius obscures the shadow-like corollary to his scheme of transmission of light. As a text, Celestial Hierarchy negotiates the difficult territory that lies between Christian and neoplatonist assumptions of divine unity and the desire, on the part of both traditions, to account for communication between this divine unity and the multiplicity of the material world and by extension humanity. Dionysius’s text

8

Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionsysius: The Complete Works, 145 n. 4. See Paul Rorem’s discussion of what “Scripture” might mean to the author in Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis, Studies and Texts 71 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), 22-26.

9

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approaches this territory in three complementary vehicles: in its cosmology, it provides an explicit account of how angels communicate light from the divine to the rest of the cosmos; in its conceptualization and utilization of “Scripture,” it authoritatively reinscribes this new order of angels into the Christian canon; and in its very perspective on the utility of language, Celestial Hierarchy establishes a new equilibrium in Christian speculation about the divine world. Through these vehicles, Celestial Hierarchy buffers the kind of creative innovation about angels that the early chapters of this project recorded. The first full Christian angelology, it also marks the end of angelology as a speculative, rather than categorizing, endeavor.

THE ONE AND THE MANY The question of how unity of the divine might interact with the diversity of the apparent world occupied the best thinkers of many late antique philosophical and religious traditions. In the case of Christianity, this question is what lies beneath the intense fourth- and fifth-century preoccupation with defining first the Son as a mediator of the Father, then all the persons of the Trinity as part of a unified whole. As I discussed in chapter 4, Christian questions about the Son, impelled by the dilemma of unity within the Godhead, brought theologians to consider the Son as one with the Father, not just in essence, but in being itself. That is, Christians resolved the issue of divine unity and multiplicity in part by characterizing the Son, for practical purposes, as one with the Father, thus preserving the unity within the Godhead.

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Of course, Christians were not alone in this pursuit of logical coherence in theology. Third- and fourth-century neoplatonist writers were also moved to address questions of divine unity. The tension that is apparent between, for example, the position of Plotinus and that of Porphyry, his student, is generated by contemplation of the unity of the One. While Plotinus appeared to introduce new intermediaries between the One and the multiple forms of the material, Porphyry was known by his philosophical successors as a reformer of Plotinus’s thought, who argued for a reversion to a single unitary divine principle.10 Yet diversity remained latent within neoplatonic understandings of the divine. Proclus’s Platonic Theology, a later, fourthcentury text, was focused on explaining how the One might be manifest in the material world despite its unity.11 Over the course of several centuries the issue of divine unity vexed pagans as it did Christians, with no resolution entirely forthcoming.12 The Dionysian corpus represents an attempt to manage the dichotomy between unity and multiplicity by an author who is variously identified as too neoplatonist to be a true Christian or too Christian to be a true neoplatonist. Historically speaking, Celestial Hierarchy is the one Dionysian treatise scholars have

10

See John M. Dillon, “Porphyry’s Doctrine of the One,” in The Great Tradition: Further Studies in the Development of Platonism and Early Christianity (Ashgate: Variorum, 1997), essay XVI (no comprehensive page numbers), esp. internal page 357. Damascius, the successor of Porphyry who understood Porphyry to be trimming Plotinus’s multiple divine hypostases back to one, is only one epitomator of the great thinker. Indeed, it is possible to find evidence that Porphyry both sought a simpler system of divine hypostases than the one he inherited and felt no discomfort explaining the distinctions between hypostases. Dillon points out that Porphyry’s successors had their own reasons for presenting his theology in ways that took after their own. 11 Proclus, Platonic Theology (H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink, eds., Théologie Platonicienne [Paris: Les belles lettres, 1968]). Being materially manifest requires specialization or ramification and thus, in more conservative platonic thinking, would signal a state less than truly unified. 12 See also Dillon, “Porphyry and Iamblichus in Proclus: Commentary on the Parmenides,” “Iamblichus and Henads Again,” and “Damascius on the Ineffable,” all in the same volume, The Great Tradition.

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avoided as they seek to understand the relationship between neoplatonist and Christian theologies. Instead, the treatise on the Divine Names has been singled out for study.13 This is likely because most of the earliest evidence we have for Dionysius’s literary production consists of quotations from the Divine Names, such as those citations by Severus of Antioch. It is also because it is the Divine Names that reproduces in part the writing of Proclus, so it is a natural point of investigation for the influence of pagan neoplatonists on Christian ones. The Divine Names itself joins an already very well-populated group of texts that comment on the Parmenides.14 Of course, other features of the Divine Names draw scholars to consider its relationship to neoplatonic thought, in particular, its three-fold system of advancement— purification, illumination, and perfection—which so closely mirrors the expectations of neoplatonist philosophical advancement. Thus, while considering all of Dionysius’s works in order to understand how Christian and neoplatonic tradition reflect one another, scholars have most often chosen to direct their attention toward the Divine Names. This is a limited perspective, for even though the Divine Names does treat the issue of divine unity in explicit terms, it is the Celestial Hierarchy that instantiates

13

Others have considered the Dionysian corpus as a unit and turn their attention to the kind of comprehensive religious system that the writings may represent. Taking all four treatises in the corpus together, Paul Rorem has argued that they work as a symbolic whole. The type of biblical interpretation required by the theology of the Dionysian works points to a mystical procession, an experience that goes beyond exegesis to the practical and ritual aspects of Christian life (Biblical and Liturgical Symbols within the Pseudo-Dionysian Synthesis, 3-11, 132-48). Additionally, Alexander Golitzen followed Rorem to consider the actual situation of the corpus; he concluded that its description of a mystical upward procession mediated through ritual was meant as a training for monks in particular. Golitzen, “Dionysius Aeropagitica: A Christian Mysticism?” Pro Ecclesia 12 (2003): 161-212, publication of a lecture given to the Lumen Christi Society, University of Chicago, February 1999. 14 Eugenio Corsini, Il trattato De divinis nominibus dello Pseudo-Dionigi e i commenti neoplatonici al Parmenide, Pubblicazioni della Facolta` di lettere e filosofia / Universita` di Torino (Turin: Giappichelli, 1962).

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Dionysius’s cosmological solution to the issue that so plagues him and other late ancient thinkers. Even though it is named for its depiction of the multiple orders of angels in the heavens, Celestial Hierarchy has the ineffability of the one God at its center. Following the same principle that undergirds neoplatonic theology, Dionysius observes that the one God “is in no way like the things that have being.” God stands at a remove from materiality, variance, and creation, in its “incomprehensible and ineffable transcendence and invisibility.”15 The mediator that Christianity introduces for this God, Jesus, is for Dionysius as ineffable as God. The Celestial Hierarchy describes Jesus as “the Light of the Father,” a “simple ray” that illuminates those below him. Despite Jesus’ communicative function, this light of the Father remains unchanged in its nature: Of course, this ray never abandons its own proper nature, or its own interior unity. Even though it works itself outward to multiplicity and proceeds outside of itself as befits its generosity, doing so to lift upward and to unify those beings for which it has a providential responsibility, nevertheless it remains inherently stable and it is forever one with its own unchanging identity.16 Just as the father is unchanged by his illumination of those below, so too is Jesus, the erstwhile mediator, unchanged. This is because Jesus’s act of illumination depends upon the mediation of yet other beings; as Dionysius warns, “this divine ray can enlighten us only by being upliftingly concealed in a variety of sacred veils which the Providence of the Father adapts to our nature as human beings.”17 Or, as a scholar of the Divine Names declares, “the gap between ourselves and God is never closed.”18

15

CH 2.3 (SC 58:78-79; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 150). CH 1.2 (SC 58:71; trans. Luibheid, Psuedo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 146). 17 CH 1.2 (SC 58:72; trans. Luibheid, Psuedo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 146). This translation is awkward, to be sure, but it reflects the complexity of the Greek: καὶ γὰρ οὐδὲ δυνατὸν ἑτέρως 16

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While never closed, that gap is populated. Interpreters of the Dionysian system have seen in Scripture itself one of the “veils” that shrouds Jesus, the “ray of light,” and in the institutional liturgy, another; both serve as material vehicles for the communication of divine illumination.19 However, it is clear from the passage in the Celestial Hierarchy which follows the description of these “veils” that Scripture and rite are material forms which direct human beings to think of the celestial hierarchy, the orders of angels. Dionysius may have meant either those forms or the hierarchy itself as the “veils” which shroud Jesus. To opt for the particular intepretation of the orders of the celestial hierarchy as the “veils” seems defensible, for it is difficult to imagine the author of the Celestial Hierarchy refusing to include the angelic orders he details among those things that “lead up” to the one divine and communicate its light. Cosmically speaking, the levels of angels that Dionysius lays out stand between human beings and God, whether God is known as Father or Son. The transmission of light by these angels to human beings is an eternal act, but it is not static. This transmission is perpetually in motion yet remains ever balanced. The angelic hierarchy has a purpose that requires such transmission: The goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him. A hierarchy has God as its leader of all understanding and action. It is forever looking directly at the comeliness of God. A hierarchy bears in itself the mark of God. Hierarchy causes its members to be images of God in all respects, to

ἡμῖν ἐπιλάμψαι τὴν θεαρχικὴν ἀκτῖνα μὴ τῇ ποικιλίᾳ τῶν ἱερῶν παραπετασμάτων ἀναγωγικῶς περικεκαλυμμένην καὶ τοῖς καθ’ ἡμᾶς προνοίᾳ πατρικῇ συμφυῶς καὶ οἰκείως διεσκευασμένην. 18 Jeffrey Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius,” Journal of Religion 81 (2001): 529-48, at 545. 19 Paul Rorem, ed., Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 146 n. 7.

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be clear and spotless mirrors [Wisdom 7.26] reflecting the glow of primordial light and indeed of God himself.20 Each member of a hierarchy is to be “at one” with God. However, this does not mean that the hierarchy unites with God. Rather, its unity with God comes about in a visual way: members reflect God’s light without refracting—they are “clear” and “spotless,” with no defects to mar their reproduction of the divine image. Dionysius acknowledges, however, that the ideal and perfect transmission of light is not assured. When the members of a hierarchy “have received this full and divine splendor they can then pass on this light generously and in accordance with God’s will to beings further down the scale.”21 In these phrases I have emphasized, there is a hint of what is made explicit later in the Celestial Hierarchy: while each level attempts to communicate the perfection of the divine to the next level below, that communication is not itself perfect. Each “order in the hierarchical rank is uplifted as best it can toward cooperation with God.”22 Thus in its cosmology, the Celestial Hierarchy addresses the increasing empty space between the one divine god and the material and lesser forms of humanity. The nine orders of angels that it specifies exist to take up the task of communicating light from the one God to other beings. They do this in a way that is less than perfect, yet still functional. The presence of so many different intermediary orders can explain why the perfectly communicated divine light does not appear to reach humanity in a perfect way; as light is transmitted from one order to another, it undergoes an

20

CH 3.2 (SC 58:87-89; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 154). CH 3.2 (SC 58:88-89; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 154), emphasis mine. 22 CH 3.3 (SC 58:92; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 155), emphasis mine.

21

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unforeseen but inevitable decay. Celestial Hierarchy introduces a way to understand the necessary distance between the changeless one and the variant many. It does so with a cosmic system that solves the issue of unity and multiplicity without ever resolving it, for the point seems to be perpetual integration, rather than completed perfection.

A TESTAMENT OLD, AND YET NEW We have seen in earlier chapters that early Christians frequently thought about and thought with angels. However, for the first four centuries of this era, Christian exploration of the organization of angelic orders—how many kinds of angels there might be, how they might differ from one another in status, how they might relate among themselves—was almost non-existent. When a moment of explicit speculation about angelic orders arose, Christian authors were content to list those names of divine beings which could be culled from Scripture and were thought to represent different ranks of angels. While not comprehensive, the following list of Christian writers who produced some (usually shorter) version of Dionysius’s nine ranks can demonstrate the pervasive nature of the listing impulse: Irenaeus, Antony, Cyril of Jerusalem, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; a variation of the list even appears in the Apostolic Constitutions.23 Such lists culled

23

Paul Rorem lists these authors (Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 75). Some sources list extra names: the Apostolic Constitutions, a liturgical record from the late fourth century (ca. 380), excludes dominions,

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references to angels in Romans 8.38, Dan 10.13 (LXX), Jud 9, 1 Th 4.16, Col 1.16, Eph 1.21, and Rev 4.5. In none of these cases did the authors of the lists go about explaining the relationships between the differently-named groups of angels. According to one scholar, liturgical texts from late antiquity also tend to parrot scriptural references, much like these authors, without adding or subtracting: “The church….did not speculate on the number of the angelic orders, nor did it ask whether there were more orders than the scriptures presented, or if there were less. It placed these texts in juxtaposition without trying to comprehend them.”24 Augustine proves the truth of this statement in his own explanation of the angelic orders. In the introduction, we saw that he fairly boasts of his ignorance when he writes, “I firmly believe that there are thrones, dominations, principalites and powers in the heavenly array and that they differ from one another in some way…[but] I do not know what they are or how they differ from one another.”25 “What angels are” and “how they differ from one another” are precisely the matters that the Celestial Hierarchy seeks to explain. The text creates an ordered schema, an organizational chart, of these heavenly creatures. From the barest bones of scriptural reference, Dionysius builds a rank and a nature for each angelic name, nine in total, positioning them with respect to God and to one another. While Dionysius acknowledges that the nine names of his ranks are taken from Scripture, he admits

but includes aeons and armies while other authors, such as Eusebius and Hilary include aeons as well. I was directed to these latter references by J. Turmel, “Histoire de l’angélologie des temps apostoliques a la fin du Ve siècle,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 3 (1898): 433. 24 Turmel, “Histoire de l’angélologie,” 433. 25 This translation is mine from the French in Turmel’s article; Augusutine, Ad Orosius contra Prisc., 14 (see introduction, 3 n. 4).

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that his “own sacred-initiator has divided these into three tripartite groups.”26 According to this person,27 Dionysius has learned that the first group, consisting of seraphim, cherubim, and thrones, is “forever around God and is said to be permanently united with him ahead of any of the others, with no intermediary.”28 The middle group consists of authorities, dominions, and powers, while the lowest group comprises angels, archangels, and principalities. These lower two groups do not enjoy the same access to the divine that the first triad does. Regardless of their status, though, each group receives a chapter of description in the text of the Celestial Hierarchy. These descriptions, as we will see, combine scriptural knowledge with traditions Dionysius had learned in his own “initiation.” Dionysius’s scheme, then, is much more complex than the lists compiled by his predecessors; it is an angelology. Simply put, his is the first angelology attempted by Christians. Despite the text’s novel approach, and its use of a new source of information, Dionysius claims to be nothing more than a biblical interpreter. Here is how he describes his project: It is necessary, then, I know, to lay out first what we think is the purpose of the entire hierarchy and what is the profit to each of the members of its company, next to ode the heavenly hierarchies according to the revelation of them in the Scriptures, and following these to say by which holy forms the holy writings of the Scriptures depict the heavenly orders.29 As Rorem emphasizes, Dionysius understands the key part of his work in angelology to be elaboration, not invention. Dionysius echoes the approach, if not the actual

26

CH 6.2 (SC 58:104; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 160). Some have identified the initiator with the “Hierotheus” named in the Divine Names. 28 CH 6.2 (SC 58:104-105; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 160). 29 CH 2.1 (SC 58:73-74). 27

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product, of those earlier compilers of angelic names, warning his readers that “I have therefore nothing of my own to say about all this and I am content merely to set down, as well as I can, what it was that the sacred [theologies envisioned] of the angelic sights and what they shared with us about it.”30 He, too, is a reporter. Yet the inventive cosmology laid out by the Celestial Hierarchy allows for a more deft interpretation of Scripture than Scripture alone would facilitate. Consider the way that Dionysius treats the problem of divine appearances in the Old Testament. Dionysius follows other thinkers of his era in granting the theophanies of the Old Testament to angels. While some may say that early figures of Scripture were able to see God, Dionysius argues that any appearance of God was made possible by the celestial hierarchy itself; that is, by angels. Of course, God has appeared to certain pious men in ways which were in keeping with his divinity. He has come in certain sacred visions fashioned to suit the beholders. This kind of vision, that is to say, where the formless God is represented in forms, is rightly described by theological discourse as a theophany. The recipients of such visions are lifted up to the divine. They are granted divine enlightenment and are somehow initiated in the divine things themselves. Yet it was the heavenly powers which initiated our venerable ancestors to these divine visions.31 Thus, while other theologians, such as Augustine, envisioned angels replacing the Son or God as the active agents of biblical theophanies, Dionysius creates a far more complex mechanism for understanding these appearances. Those Old Testament characters who have seen God have not truly seen him, at least not in a simple sense;

30

Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols, 23, citing CH 6.1 (SC 58:103; trans. Rorem, Biblical and Liturgical Symbols, with one modification: what Rorem translates as “sacred theologians contemplate,” I instead translate as “sacred theologies”—that is, Scripture—and thus change “contemplate” to “envision.” 31 CH 4.3 (SC 58:96-97; trans. Luibheid, Psuedo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 157).

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at the same time, they have not “seen” angels standing in for God, either. They have participated in an initiation with the angels—akin to Dionysius’s own initiation with his “sacred initiator”—that allows them access to the divine and yet avoids having the divine participate in the material world. Dionysius’s inventive method of reading Scripture through the structure of the angelic hierarchy also applies to texts from the New Testament, allowing for Scripture to support the existence of this hierarchy and be transformed through it at the same time. For example, the Celestial Hierarchy underscores the tradition, extant in the New Testament, that Moses received the Law from God through angels (Acts 7, Gal 3, Heb 2). Dionysius explains that the Law was mediated through angels, in part “so that God’s order might show us how it is that secondary beings are uplifted through the primary beings.”32 Thus Moses, a secondary being, was brought to understand God’s law through the mediation of the angels, the primary beings; there was no appearance of God directly to Moses. The order that Dionysius establishes for angels from the scant titles available in Scripture he reinscribes into Scripture by finding that “before the days of the Law and after it had come, it was the angels who uplifted our illustrious ancestors toward the divine.”33 By injecting angels into scriptural discourse, the Celestial Hierarchy increases the viability of Scripture, balancing it as both a source of knowledge and a location for innovation. While the cycle of spiritual authority and interpretation in the Celestial Hierarchy is structural—the orders of angels lending order to divine

32 33

CH 4.3 (SC 58:97-98; trans. Luibheid, Psuedo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 157-58). CH 4.2 (SC 58:95-96; trans. Luibheid, Psuedo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 157).

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appearances— Dionysius also accomplishes the goal of combining knowledge and invention about angels through the creative use of language.

DIONYSIAN LANGUAGE: A “perennial circling around the divine things” As is immediately obviously to any reader of Greek, the idiom of the Dionysian corpus is wildly innovative, even unruly. It combines and recombines stems and words to make new meanings for use in its new system of interpretation. The neologisms in the Dionysian corpus are numerous, bewildering in their complexity: the “thearch,” “thearchy,” “the perfect beginning,” all refer to the divine; “theology” and “holy writings,” refer to Scripture. Even the word “hierarchy” is an invention of Dionysius.34 A taste of the originality and eccentricity of the Dionysian language is available in the way that the Celestial Hierarchy mines the names of the nine angelic ranks to understand the nature of those ranks. Speaking of the order of seraphim, Dionysius notes immediately that their name is taken from the Hebrew word for fire, making them “warmers.”35 This identification leads him to an entire cascade of designations for the seraphim: For the designation seraphim really teaches this—a perennial circling around the divine things, penetrating warmth, the overflowing heat of a movement which never falters and never fails, a capacity to stamp

34

Josef Stiglmayr, “Über die Termini Hierarch und Hierarchie,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 22 (1898): 180-87. 35 CH 7.1 (SC 58:105): θερµαίνοντας.

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their own image on subordinates by arousing and uplifting in them too a like flame, the same warmth. It means also the power to purify by means of the lightning flash and the flame. It means the ability to hold unveiled and undiminished both the light they have and the illumination they give out. It means the capacity to push aside and to do away with every obscuring shadow.36 The imagery of fire, warmth, and light is extravagant. Dionysius describes the action of the seraphim, their “perennial circling around the divine things”; the way they transfer their imprint to others through heat; their purification and their perfect, unshadowed transmission of light. Of course, to interpret is to elaborate, but Dionysius’s elaborations are literally ecstatic, going outside themselves, extending in multiple directions to generate knowledge about how seraphim act in the cosmological drama of transmission. A similar calculus is at work in Dionysius’s description of the authorities. These are the first rank in the middle triad of angels, and Dionysius extracts knowledge about their method of dealing with other ranks of angels from their name. They are so placed that they can receive God in a harmonious and unconfused way and indicate the ordered nature of their celestial and intellectual authority. Far from employing their authoritative powers to do tyrannous harm to the inferiors, they are harmoniously and unfailingly uplifted toward the things of God and, in their goodness, they lift up with them the ranks of those inferior to them. They are likened, insofar as they can be, to the authority which is the source of all authority and creates all authority; and they make that authority evident, to the extent that angels can, in their harmonious orders of authoritative power.37 The authorities have “authoritative power,” which they use for the good of others.

36 37

CH 7.1 (SC 58:106-7; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 162). CH 8.1 (SC 58:121-22; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 167).

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In their name, “authority,” Dionysius locates a welter of reassurances about this rank’s use of power and its relations with other ranks. Perhaps the best indication of how improvisational the language in the Celestial Hierarchy can be is Dionysius’s description of the principalities, a relatively low rank of angels, those at the very bottom of the third order. The term “heavenly principalities” refers to those who possess a godlike and princely hegemony, with a sacred order most suited to princely powers, the ablity to be returned completely toward that principle which is above all principles and to lead others to him like a prince, the power to receive to the full the mark of the Principle of principles and, by their harmonious exercise of princely powers, to make manifest this transcendent principle of all.38 By playing with “prince” and “principle,” Dionysius comments on the communicative faculties of this rank of angels, the principalities, those closest to humanity. His style, so gleefully repetitive, can strain the communicative faculties of readers, even to the point of exhaustion. And, indeed, “exhaustion” may be the goal. Recently, in her article on Origen’s Commentary on John, Catherine M. Chin notes Origen’s exuberance about the variety of divine names. His expansive style, she argues, is actually a grammatical strategy that is analogous to the mathematical principle of exhaustion. Like Stoic grammarians, Origen “inclines toward a theory of natural correspondence between words and their meanings, and uses etymology and allegory to uncover that

38

CH 9.1 (SC 58:128-29; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 170).

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correspondence.”39 Origen’s method of interpretation is not without limit, as some detractors might argue, but the limits that are apparent in his work can show us “Origen’s preoccupations as a professional grammarian and his approach to the apparent conflict between the principle of direct connection between words and meanings and the impossibility of realizing that connection through conventional interpretative strategies.”40 Instead of hoping that a reader might work her way from words about the figure of Christ to the true meaning of Christ, Origen instead offers an exceedingly long and variable list of names that one could apply to and ultimately substitute for Christ. This method Chin labels “textual exhaustion,” creating a novel application of an ancient mathematical principle which explains how one might bridge a gap. Exhaustion is a geometrical method by which “a smaller magnitude can be approximated to a larger through the repeated division of the difference between the larger and smaller magnitudes.”41 Applied by Origen as a prescription for grammatical explication, it functions to approximate knowledge of Christ to Christ himself: as one proliferates the number of names for Christ, the essence those names indicate becomes clearer and clearer—never quite transparently the same as the actual essence of Christ, but approaching that essence asymptotically.

39

Catherine M. Chin, “Origen and Christian Naming: Textual Exhaustion and the Boundaries of Gentility in Commentary on John 1,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 14 (2006): 407-36, at 413. 40 Chin, “Origen and Christian Naming,” 421. 41 Chin, “Origen and Christian Naming,” 421.

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It is clear that a similar principle is at work in the Celestial Hierarchy, particularly in Dionysius’s generation of a host of derivative adjectives from the name of one rank of angels. This plenitude is necessary for the full understanding of any one rank, because Dionysius does not trust in the ability of language to represent reality. Adjectives and nouns that are positive—those that describe the essence of something—do not convey the complete nature of any divinity. Indeed, Dionysius expects any linguistic description to fail; even lofty descriptions fall short of revealing the divine. Sometimes the mysterious tradition of the scriptures represents the sacred blessedness of the transcendent Deity under the form of “Word,” “Mind,” and “Being.” It shows thereby that rationality and wisdom are, necessarily, attributes of God, that he is also to be deemed a true subsistence and the true cause of the subsistence of every being, and that he may also be represented as light and hailed as life. Now these sacred shapes certainly show more reverence and seem vastly superior to the making of images drawn from the world. Yet they are actually no less defective than the latter, for the Deity is far beyond every manifestation of being and life; no reference to light can characterize it; every reason or intelligence falls short of similarity to it.42 Thus, even the most impressive and worthy words do not actually convey the essence of the Deity.43 They, like words about the material world, remain unreliable. The doubtful capacity of language fully to register meaning leads Dionysius toward a novel reading strategy. In the Celestial Hierarchy, he describes an interpretative principle that is foundational, not just for the Dionysian angelology, but

42

CH 2.3 (SC 58:77-78; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 149). Compare Divine Names 5.2 and 7.3, in which Dionysius attempts to describe the one Father with multiple positive names and appears to be quite optimistic about the functionality of language; discussed and cited by Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity,” 531-32.

43

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for the whole of the Dionysian corpus. It transcends the use of positive language, which is inadequate, and even negative language, which by definition does not express the essence of the deity. As Dionysius attempts to explain the range of oftencrude language in Scripture about angels, he reasons, Since the way of negation appears to be more suitable to the realm of the divine and since positive affirmations are always unfitting to the hiddenness of the inexpressible, a manifestation through dissimilar shapes is more correctly to be applied to the invisible. So it is that scriptural writings, far from demeaning the ranks of heaven, actually pay them honor by describing them with dissimilar shapes so completely at variance with what they really are that we come to discover how those ranks, so far removed from us, transcend all materiality.44 In this way, scriptural descriptions of angels as “gleaming men” or “horses” or “wings” or “eyes” are acceptable, even in Dionysius’s system, which devalues the material. Readers should acknowledge that these material forms lead one to think past materiality to the essence of angels. Such a hermeneutical perspective has a distinct advantage over others: it is boundless in its ability to buffer variance, problematic readings, and even crass depictions. As the Celestial Hierarchy explains, “even those [forms] drawn from the lowliest matter can be used, not unfittingly, with regard to heavenly beings.”45 Dionysius’s preferred term for this type of representation is “dissimilar similarity,” indicating by “dissimilar” the unlikeness between the nature of the representation and that which is represented, and by “similarity” the possibility that such words might lead one to contemplate successfully the higher natures of angels.

44 45

CH 2.3 (SC 58:79; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 150). CH 2.4 (SC 58:83; trans. Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, 151).

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Given this playful and inventive perspective on language and this particular attention to the capacity of language for representation, the works of Dionysius have been read, perhaps predictably, as having an affinity with poststructuralist theories of representation. Also, as modern theologians have attempted to revive a tradition of negative theology, they have turned to the Dionysian corpus for inspiration; the interpretative move involved in recognizing “dissimilar similarities” they claim as their own. Indeed, these two trends can be combined; Jeffery Fisher has argued that “what theology has found useful in deconstruction is operative in the tradition of Dionysian negative theology.”46 In Fisher’s view, we ought to claim Dionysius’s hermeneutic as “dis/similarity,” a neologism that points toward the affinities that Dionysius’s reading style has with that more famous jou(iss)eur of language, Jacques Derrida. Dionysius’s rich and subtle method of reading is but one way that the text of the Celestial Hierarchy attempts a stabilization of meaning while it enacts a crossing of the gap between meaning and representation. The prospect that any language can refer a reader to higher and more accurate forms of contemplation, without delivering the full representation of being, undergirds the purpose of the work as a whole, and the negotiation of this gap in language reflects back upon the negotiation that the Celestial Hierarchy accomplishes between the one divine God and human beings by multiplying the number of intermediaries. Indeed, both these approaches echo the kind of work that Celestial Hierarchy does by calling upon the fixed body of Scripture as an authority even as it introduces new information and new formations 46

Fisher, “The Theology of Dis/similarity,” 529.

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under that banner, freeing Scripture from its first- and second-century restraints. The text of Dionysius’s angelology effects a three-fold management of the breach between unity and multiplicity.

AN END TO ANGELOLOGY? If the Celestial Hierarchy and the other Dionysian works were composed outside the main stream of Christian thought, they did not remain there for long. By its quick and almost complete reception as New Testament-era literature, the Dionysian corpus demonstrates that its concern with the resolution of a connection between unity and multiplicity reverberated throughout late antique Christianity. In 532, bishop Hypatius of Ephesus led a group of Chalcedonians during a meeting with Monophysites in Constantinople, called by Justinian. The purpose of the Colloquy was to create a reconciliation, of a sort, between the groups, but Hypatius complained about the shady list of authors the Monophysite delegation had brought to witness their position. Most troubling, he argued, was their use of a certain author whom the Monophysites claimed to be Dionysius the Aeropagite, Paul’s convert mentioned in Acts 17. As Hypatius scolds, The testimonies which you say are of the blessed Dionysius, how can you prove that they are authentic, as you claim? For if they are in fact by him, they would not have escaped the notice of the blessed Cyril.... But if none of the ancients made mention of them, I simply do not know how you can prove that they were written by Dionysius.47 47

Acts of the Colloquy of Constantinople in Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum 4/2:173.12-18, cited and translated by Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus, 18.

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It seemed suspicious to Hypatius that the works of this Dionysius, whose name was not known to any previous Christian writer, would appear almost 500 years after their alleged writing; even more suspicious was their potential complementarity to the Monophysite position.48 Despite Hypatius’s concerns, which remained part of the records of the Colloquy, Dionysius’s works were quickly accepted as belonging to the first century, that apostolic age, the nativity of Christianity which brought with it a weighty authority. As René Roques observes, the Chalcedonian leader Hypatius’s accusation about the doubtful nature of Dionysius’s works was followed by a long period in which any “critical reservations [about the authenticity of the corpus] were expressed in discreet conversations and half-whispers, without striking the collective consciousness of the churches.”49 The four treatises by Dionysius (in addition to Celestial Hierarchy, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, and Divine Names, Dionysius also penned a treatise titled Mystical Theology) and ten letters were taken by most later Christians as an open window on the thought of one of the earliest Greek converts to Christianity, a corpus that relayed his native wisdom about matters mystical and cosmological. This eager reception of the Dionysian corpus as apostolic was helped in no small way by the notes and prologue written by John of Scythopolis, its first dedicated reader and commentator. Even though he acknowledges the absence of the

48

René Roques, introduction to SC 58, vii. Rorem and Lamoreaux call this complementarity into question (John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus, 11). 49 Roques, introduction to Denys L’Aréopagite, vii-viii.

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Dionysian writings from any previous Christian literature, John argues explicitly in his prologue for the identification of the author with Dionysius the Aeropagite. John answers his critics who, like Hypatius, note that previous Christian writers do not mention this Dionysius: Against them, one must say that Eusebius omitted mention of many things which had not come into his hands, nor indeed did he say that he had collected everything once for all….I do not know whether Origen made mention of all of them, or four at most. But a certain Roman deacon, by name of Peter, has told me that all the works ascribed to the divine Dionysius are preserved in the library of the sacred [books] in Rome. 50 John relies on the depository of Rome as the sign of the authenticity of Dionysius’s works and seems untroubled by the lack of prior knowledge among Christians about Dionysius as an author. John’s argument for the acceptance of the Dionysian corpus was a success. His redaction of the works into a single body, complete with prologue, appears to have been the catalyst for their dissemination in Christian late antiquity, for the prologue is included in all the extant Greek manuscripts of the works. That is to say, Dionysius’s writing did not circulate, as far as current evidence shows, without John’s prologue and John’s argument for its antiquity.51 Not only did the care of a redactor help establish Dionsyius as a reputable author, the content of the prologue and John’s notes vouched for his authenticity.

50

John of Scythopolis, prologue (PG 4:16A-21C, at 20C-D; trans. Rorem and Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus, 147). 51 Beate Regina Schula, “Eine Redaktion des griechischen Corpus Dionysiacum Areopagiticum im Umkreis des Johannes von Skythopolis, des Verfassers von Prolog und Scholien,” Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttigen: I. Philologisch-historische Klasse 4 (1984): 176-88.

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John’s packaging of the corpus had a profound effect on the reception of the Dionysian writings, creating the illusion of the Aeropagite as an apostolic author—a conceit which lasted until the modern period. The acceptance of the Dionysian corpus as a part of the age of the New Testament did not depend on John of Scythopolis alone, however. It also suggests a receptivity among late antique Christians for a new yet authoritative source of information about angels. Dionysius’s writings, judged by their almost immediate acceptance, served to answer the questions of many Christians and staunched their curiousity. It is interesting, too, that while the Celestial Hierarchy was the first Christian text directed at the explication of the angelic world, it was also the last one to demonstrate such confident and creative innovation. That is, the Celestial Hierarchy, with its profound influence on later thinkers, certainly stimulated a great deal of Christian speculative theology, but these later theologies treated angels in ways that did not divert from Dionysius’s original plan of nine sequentially ordered ranks. Dionysius’s angelology drew an unprecendented amount of commentary from medieval and Renaissance theologians, but did not inspire new inventions of angelic knowledge.52 This, I suggest, is a sign of the text’s facility: it mediates—through cosmology, scriptural authority, and language— between unity and diversity, between stability and variation. The Celestial Hierarchy was the first Christian attempt at a categorization of angels, but the tools it created made it difficult for any later

52

Beate Regina Suchla, “Dionysius the Aeropagite,” in Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, ed. Siegmar Döpp and Wilhelm Geerlings, trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 180; Suchla lists “Maximus the Confessor, Theodore Bar Zarudi, Iwannis of Dara, John Scotus Eriugena, Hugh of St. Victor, John Sarracenus, Bar Salibi, Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Gallus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hibernicus, George Pachymeres, John Gerson, Denis the Carthusian, and Marsilius Ficinus” among those who wrote commentaries on the corpus—an impressive list indeed.

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Christian to think outside the bounds it had surveyed. Its success marks the end of a particularly fruitful period of Christian speculation about angels.

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Epilogue Almost instinctively, we want to know more about them, not only because they can do so much for or against us but because they are all so very close to us and our living….We are not nearly so alone as we imagine, whatever the hour or place. —My Way of Life Pocket Edition of St. Thomas: The Summa Simplified for Everyone1

Walter Farrell, a Dominican brother from Brooklyn who died in 1951, spent almost two decades writing a companion volume to Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a comprehensive work the four volumes of which take up ten inches of bookshelf space.2 Farrell’s attention to the Summa was primarily that of an expert, but he worked to make the Summa available to others who shared, if not his dedication, at least his interest in studying Aquinas’s thought as a system. As the foreword to the third volume states, "This whole work is not ... about the Summa, but the Summa itself reduced to popular language." For those who did not have the stamina for the Summa, the Companion to the Summa gave helpful access to Aquinas’s work in language that was more in keeping with common usage. Even so, the bulk of Farrell’s Companion itself was daunting. During the end of the 1940s and in 1950, Farrell worked to create a “pocket edition” of his Companion, intended for a reader perhaps just beginning to appreciate the complexity of the Thomistic system. He finished the first part of the book before his death: My Way of Life, subtitled The Summa Simplified for Everyone, was completed by Martin

1

Walter Farrell and Martin J. Healy, My Way of Life Pocket Edition of St. Thomas: The Summa Simplified for Everyone (Brooklyn, NY: Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 1952), 70-71. 2 A Companion to the Summa, 4 vols. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1938), foreword to volume 3.

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Healy and published in 1952.3 With some 600 pages of leather-bound onionskin and an attached ribbon bookmark, My Way of Life has the look of a book meant to be consulted daily for spiritual inspiration and guidance; its tone reassures the 1950’s Catholic that Aquinas is neither out of reach nor out of touch. Like any commentary, My Way of Life reveals as much to us about its authors as it does about the text they venture to interpret. To look at one small part of this pocket edition and its way of presenting the Summa is also to look obliquely at Walter Farrell’s concerns and hopes. Given both Farrell’s interest in the exhaustive system of Thomistic knowledge and the amount of time he struggled to condense its complexity for others, Farrell’s construal of the question of angelic knowledge—an important topic of the Summa—is especially poignant. One can sense a scholar’s frustration as Farrell explains the way that angels know: The angel has all his knowledge in the first instant of his life; when ever, through all his ageless career, an angel uses any one of those infused ideas there is no laborious thinking involved. The thought of an angel, swifter than light, deeper than a sword thrust to the heart, an intuitive plunging to the very depths of truth, leaves no room for doubts, for error, for indecision.4 As one who likely dealt with indecision and doubt in his intellectual projects, Farrell senses the perfection of angelic knowledge and seems to understand with some resignation that his abilities were limited in comparison. Unlike the angel, granted all knowledge at its first instant of existence, Farrell was unable to gain full understanding of his subject: his own death, just before the completion of My Way of Life, marks the limitations of human knowledge. Angels have an “ageless career” in

3

Farrell, My Way of Life; the history of the creation of the book is recounted in the foreword, v-vi. Farrell, My Way of Life, 70.

4

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which to contemplate their perfect understanding of all subjects; human beings do not. I came across the story of Walter Farrell very early in my research for this project, and as I wrote about angels in the early Christian imagination, the same limitations that seem to have haunted him also followed me. My project is a summa of sorts, a summary of previously unrelated materials that crosses linguistic and geographical boundaries, spanning five centuries. Farrell’s impulse, to provide a guidebook to the complex world of Aquinas, is familiar to me: the temptation to condense and simplify what I was learning was always present. However, early Christian ideas about angels were anything but simple, even in the slightest way. From the earliest Christian writings, the letters of Paul, we learn that the nature of angels is difficult for humans to discern. Paul warns that angels may be demons in disguise, but he also suggests that human beings with gifts for religiosity— himself included—can be “angels.” The idea that angels do not have one stable nature extends far beyond Paul, however, throughout early Christian literature. Both Evagrius and Augustine were grappling with this basic instability, and they both relied upon approaches to the problem that were also evident in the works of contemporary pagan philosophers. In both Christianity and in its surroundings, notions of angelic natures were tightly interwoven with the interiority of humans. As Farrell wrote, angels are “all so very close to us and our living.” Because of this proximity, early Christian expectations about angels were also intertwined with Christian hopes—and fears—about humanity. Christians like Synesius asked for and expected a “companion,” an angel who might nudge its charge

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toward his better nature and help him avoid the more dangerous and unwise decisions human beings are prone to take. In the context of the growing ascetic movement, the acquisition of this companion became proof of the moral accomplishment of the practiced Christian athlete. Those practiced athletes, Christians whose dedication was evident in the difficult techniques of the self they enacted, seemed to be so far beyond the range of potential human lifestyles that other Christians began to speak of them as being angels themselves. The literature from the communities of ascetics suggests, through stories and warnings, that being thought of as “angels on earth” had both constructive and destabilizing consequences for these renunciant Christians and the social order they were attempting to create. The instability of thought about angels is useful to historians of Christianity, for early Christian speculation about angels can obliquely illumine other theological developments. For example, Christian catechists asked new Christians to generate mental images to supplement their experience of the liturgy, and frequently, those mental images included angels. Just how these angels were to be imagined changed over the course of several centuries: once heavenly ritual specialists to be imitated, angels later became spectators who departed heaven to observe Christian ritual on earth. In this change, Christian catechists signaled—in some cases, explicitly—their increasing confidence in the authority of the priest. As another example, consider the way that angels came to be precisely defined by the reading practices of theologians worrying the Son’s nature. While the earliest Christian theologians, such as Justin, were likely to describe the Son as an angel (among other things), the writers of the Trinitarian era worked out reading practices that made it difficult to consider the Son

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to be anything like an angel. As these ways of drawing knowledge about the Son’s nature from Scripture developed, they necessitated a more precise definition of angelic nature as well. Thinkers like Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine created an understanding of angels that made them well-suited to be mediators to humanity, at a moment when the Son’s mediating capacity was overshadowed by emphasis on his unity with God the Father. The first five centuries of Christianity, then, were a time of intense speculation about angels, as beings both divine and almost human. However, the fervent interest in angels and the irreconcilable diversity of opinions expressed by Christians about their roles and their natures was short-lived. It ended with what appeared to have been a beginning: written at the end of the fifth century, Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy was the first Christian work to catalogue and classify the angels mentioned in Scripture and their orders. Ironically, the chararacteristics of the text itself—its structure, its approach to language, and its almost immediate acceptance as an apostolic work—had the effect of discouraging further speculation about the angelic world and its relationship to human beings. Although Christian writers after Dionysius lent their attention to angels, they most often did so by commenting on Dionysius’s text, and thus they remained within the parameters laid out by Dionysius. While medieval theologians were not as fatuous as the well-known question about angels and heads of pins might make them seem, 5 even Aquinas, for all his intellectual vigor, adopted Dionysius’s scheme and worked within it. The time of

5

George MacDonald Ross exposes the question “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as an early modern parody of Scholastic thought in “Angels,” Philosophy 60 (1985): 495-511, esp. 49597.

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inventive exposition among Christians about angels, based upon their unstable natures and their complicated relationship with humanity, had passed.

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Appendix ANCIENT VERSIONS OF LIFE OF ANTONY 10 The version of Antony’s vision recorded in Athanasius’s Life is as follows: After many attempts, [the demons] gnashed their teeth against him, because they were belittling themselves instead of him. [10] In this, the Lord did not forget Antony’s struggle, but came to his aid. And so looking up, he saw the roof as if it were being opened and a certain ray of light were coming down upon him. And the demons immediately disappeared, the bodily pain immediately ceased, and his house was again set right. Antony, sensing the support and breathing again now that his pains were lessened, questioned the vision that had manifested, saying, “Where were you? Why didn’t you appear at the beginning, so to put a stop to my grief?” And a voice came to him: “Antony, I was here, but I waited to watch your struggle. Since you held out and were not bested, I will be to you always a helper and I will make your name known everywhere.” Having heard this, he got up to pray. Πολλὰ τοίνυν ἐπιχειρήσαντες ἒτριζον κατ’ αὐτοῦ τοὺς ὀδοντας, ὃτι μᾶλλον ἒπαιζον ἑαυτούς, καὶ οὐκ ἐκεῖνον. [10] Ὁ δὲ Κύριος οὐδὲ ἐν τούτῳ ἐπελάθετο τῆς ἀθλήσεως Ἀντωνίου, ἀλλ’ εἰς ἀντίληψιν αὐτῷ γέγονεν. Ἀναβλέψας γοῦν, εἶδε τὴν στέγην ὣσπερ διανοιγομένην καὶ ἀκτῖνα τινα φωτὸς κατερχομένην πρὸς αὐτόν. Καὶ οἱ μὲν δαίμονες ἐξαίφνης ἄφαντοι γεγόνασιν, ὁ πόνος δὲ τοῦ σώματος εὐθὺς ἐπέπαυτο, καὶ ὁ οἶκος πάλιν ἦν ὁλόκληρος. Ὁ δὲ Ἀντώνιος, αἰσθόμενος τῆς ἀντιλήψεως, καὶ πλέον ἀναπνεσας κουφισθείς τε τῶν πόνων, ἐδέετο τῆς φανείσης ὀπτασίας λέγων · Ποῦ ἦς; Διὰ τί μὴ ἐξ ἀρχῆς ἐφάνης, ἳνα μου τὰς ὀδύνας παύῃς; Καὶ φωνὴ γέγονε πρὸς αὐτόν · Ἀντώνιε, ὧδε ἤμην, ἀλλὰ περιέμενον ἰδεῖν τὸν σὸν ἀγωνισμόν. Ἐπεὶ οὖν ὑπέμεινας καὶ οὐχ ἡττήθης, ἔσομαί σοι ἀεὶ βοηθὸς καὶ ποιήσω σε ὀνομαστὸν πανταχοῦ γενέσθαι. Ταῦτα ἀκούσας, ἀναστὰς ηὔχετο.1 The Coptic version of the Life of Antony indicates the Lord’s involvement in a slightly different way: They tried to do many things to him and they ground their teeth at him [Acts 7.54]. [10] He looked up and he saw the roof, as if it were opening, and he saw something like a ray of light coming down toward him. And immediately the demons ceased 1

Life of Antony 9.11-10.4 (G. J. M. Bartelink, ed., Vie d’Antoine, Sources chrétiennes 400 [Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1994], 162-64).

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living, the pain of his body stopped in an instant, and the place where he was living was restored to its fashion. Antony sensed that the Lord saved him, and when he started breathing again, he sensed that he lightened his pain. He asked the one that appeared to him, “where are you from? and why did you not appear to me at the first so that you could heal me?” A voice came to him, saying, “I was in this place, but I remained to see your struggle. And since you perservered and were not conquered, I will be to you a helper in every time, and I will will make you famous everywhere.” When he heard these things, he got up and he prayed.

ntoou de auxitootou exax eaau naf auw auxrojrj nneuofxe exoun exraf. [10] afqw¥t exrai afnau etmelwt xws esnaouwn auw afnau Nce nnouaktin nouoein efnhu epesht ¥arof . auw xnou¥pn¥wp andaimwnion lo euonX ebol auw atmokxS mpefswma lo nteunou auw enerepma enefnxhtF ouoj ntefxe. antwnios de afaiscane jeapjoeis naxmef auw nterefanaxthu afaiscane jeafasai ebol xntmokxs afsopS mpentafouwnX naf ebol efjw mmos jeektwn auw etbeou mpekouonX eroi jine¥orP jekas eketalqoi. aoucmhqe ¥wpe ¥arof esjw mmos jeneimpeimape alla ntaiqw enau epekagwn. epei oun akxupomine auw mpoujro erok, +na¥wpe nak nbohcos nouoei¥ nim auw +naaak nsoeit xmma nim. nai de Nterefsotmou aftwoun af¥LL ayw afqmqom nxouo xwste nfaiscane etqom ntas¥wpe naf xmpefswma. nefxhn de exoun emabth Nrompe Mpeuoei¥ etmmau. nai de Nterefsotmou aftwoun af¥LL.2 The Coptic version proceeds directly from the demons gnashing their teeth at Antony to the moment when he sees the roof opening. That is to say, the line which in the Greek version identifies this help as coming from the Lord—emphasized above, “the Lord did not forget Antony’s struggle, but came to his aid”—is entirely missing in the Coptic version. This is not to say that the Coptic version does not attribute the vision to the Lord; it simply does so in another location in the text. In the Greek version, Anthony “[senses] the support, and [breathes] again [when] his pains were lessened,” then asks

2

Life of Antony 9.11-10.4, Sahidic (G. Garitte, ed., S. Antonii vitae versio sahidica, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 117 [Paris: Imprimerie National, 1949], 15-16).

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his question of the vision. Notice that the Coptic text offers more detail at this point of the narrative: “Antony sensed that the Lord saved him, and when he started breathing again, he sensed that he lightened his pain.” The Coptic text makes the same assumption that the Greek text makes, namely that it is the Lord who is the agent of this vision of Antony’s. However, its particular way of expressing that assumption is different than the way it is expressed in the Greek text. With no sentence to match the opening line of section 10 the Greek, the Coptic instead has Antony sense that the Lord, specifically, has saved him. The third version, that preserved in Syriac, survives in both long and short recensions. However, all the manuscripts agree regarding the way Antony’s experience is portrayed. Notice that it is missing the line about the gnashing of the teeth. Instead, it simply begins, Now our Lord did not neglect to help his athlete, but appeared to him before his victory. The blessed one [Antony] lifted his eyes and he saw the roof uncovered and a ray of light descending from there toward him. And at that moment, the demons dispersed quickly and the pains of his body eased. Then blessed Antony perceived and recognized the help of our Lord. And when he went on a bit and he was saved from his tribulations and he had help from the comforting of the vision of our Lord, he raised his voice and said, “I love your deeds, but where were you before these pains and tribulations came to me?” And then a voice came to him, “I was here beside you, Antony, and I did not abandon you, but I waited to see your struggle. So now that you have been perfectly illumined and you were not grieved [by your torments], I will be for you a director and paraclete and I will make you a faithful servant and one famous in all the Earth….and he got up, knelt, and prayed to God, who had visited him.3 & $" %  '( .)*+ ( ! , ) -!  !) (%  , -!   

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Life of Antony 9.11-10.4, Syriac (R. Draguet, ed., La Vie primitive de S. Antoine conservée in syriaque, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 417 [Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1980]:2627).

250

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This version follows the Greek version in its opening, its first sentence being an approximation of the Greek, but then the passage specifically states of the source Antony’s assistance, twice naming “our Lord” as the source of the help and then having Antony pray to “God who had visited him.” It accomplishes the same identification of the Lord with Antony’s vision, but in a way that supplements what the Greek version does.

251

Ellen Muehlberger Ph.D., Religious Studies April 2008 Indiana University-Bloomington Dissertation: “Angels in the Religious Imagination of Late Antiquity” Director: David Brakke Readers: J. Albert Harrill, Steven Weitzman, Constance Furey M.A., Religious Studies 2001 Indiana University-Bloomington Thesis: “Cogitis Me: A Medieval Sermon on the Assumption” Director: David Brakke; Readers: Constance Furey, Mary Jo Weaver B.A., Comparative Religion, Biomedical Science Western Michigan University

1995

Teaching Areas Early Christianity, Judaism in Antiquity (Second Temple, Rabbinic) Method and Theory in the Study of Religion Publications "Ambivalence about the Angelic Life: The Promise and Perils of an Early Christian Discourse of Asceticism." Journal of Early Christian Studies 16.4 (Winter 2008). “The Representation of Theatricality in Philo’s Embassy to Gaius.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods 39.1 (February 2008). Papers and Presentations “The Influence of Numenius: The ‘Self-Originate’ in Sethian Literature and the Gospel of Judas.” Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism Section, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. Boston, MA. November 2008. “Seeing the Light: A Re-Evaluation of the Context of Life of Antony 10.” North American Patristics Society. Chicago, IL. May 2008. “Negotiations with Death: Death as a Subject in Rabbinic and Eastern Christian Literature.” Bates College Faculty Colloquium. Lewiston, ME. January 2008.

"Timothy I's Letter 39: Nestorius the 'Angel of Light' and the Condemnation of Cyril." Readers’ Circle, Medieval Studies Symposium. Bloomington, IN. March 2007. “Multiple Voices in Iamblichus’s de mysteriis.” Indiana University Religious Studies Graduate Conference. Bloomington, IN. March 2007. “The Limits of Critique: Augustine’s Concepts of Angelic Nature.” Jews, Christians, and Pagans in Antiquity—Critique and Apologetics, Ph.D. Seminar. Sponsored by Aarhus University. Aarhus, Denmark. January 2007. “Origen and Jerome on Accusations of Jewish Angel Worship.” Early JewishChristian Relations Program Unit, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. Washington, DC. November 2006. “Imagining Angels at Ritual: John Chrysostom and Narsai of Edessa on the Power of the Priest.” North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. June 2006. “Narsai of Edessa’s Homilies on the Epiphany: A Syriac Selection.” Readers’ Circle, Medieval Studies Symposium. Bloomington, IN. April 2006. “How to Avoid Gossip: Angelic Appearances and Heresy in the Ascetic Literature of Egypt.” Religion in Roman Egypt Consultation, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. Philadelphia, PA. November 2005. “A New Source of Scripture in John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Matthew.” History of Interpretation Section, Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting. Philadelphia, PA. November 2005. “The Angelic Life Revisited.” Ancient Studies Colloquium. Bloomington, IN. November 2005. Panelist for "The Children of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Pre-and-Post 9/11," Congregation Beth Shalom. Bloomington, IN. September 11, 2005. “Ambiguity about ‘The Angelic Life’: Evidence from Shenoute’s Fourth Canon.” North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. June 2005. “A Coptic Homily on Michael the Archangel Attributed to Basil of Caesarea from the Pierpont Morgan Library.” Readers’ Circle, Medieval Studies Symposium. Bloomington, IN. March 2005. “How Do Angels Speak? Diadochus of Photice on the Voice of the Angels.” North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. May 2004.

“Bar Hebraeus’s Candelabra of the Sanctuary and the Rationality of Angels: A Short Reading in Syriac.” Readers’ Circle, Medieval Studies Symposium. Bloomington, IN. March 2004. “The Representation of Theatricality in Philo’s Embassy.” Borns Jewish Studies Program Colloquium. Bloomington, IN. February 2004. “Angels and the Religious Imagination of Late Antiquity.” Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity Colloquium. Bloomington, IN. November 2003. “Basil’s Use of Biblical Exempla: Models for Lay and Monastic Fasting.” North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL. May 2002.

Teaching Experience Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington Introduction to the New Testament Instructor Introduction to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Instructor Images of Jesus in Western Culture Assistant Instructor Introduction to Judaism Assistant Instructor Zen, Mysticism, and Irrationality Assistant Instructor Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University-Bloomington Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Instructor Intermediate Biblical Hebrew Instructor School of Continuing Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington Religions of the West Instructor, Course Developer Introduction to Christianity Instructor Introduction to the New Testament Instructor, Course Developer Mary Magdalene: Saint, Sinner, Sensual Instructor Biblical Heroes or Biblical Villains? Instructor

Employment Editorial Assistant, Journal of Early Christian Studies

July 2005-May 2008

Instructor, Biblical Hebrew August 2003-May 2008 Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University-Bloomington

Instructor, School of Continuing Studies August 2003-November 2005 Independent Studies Program, Indiana University-Bloomington Associate Instructor August 2000-May 2003 Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University-Bloomington Regional Director—Development and Special Events American Heart Association, Traverse City, Michigan

July 1996-May 1999

Service Moderator, “Special Topics in the Humanities and Social Sciences." Hutton Honors College Undergraduate Research Symposium. Indiana University-Bloomington

2007

Mentor to Undergraduate Thesis Writer, "Pedagogy, Polemic, Propaganda: The Evolution of Martin Luther's Art and Rhetoric," by Christine Foust Religious Studies Department Indiana University-Bloomington

2007

Indiana University Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Alumni Association Board of Directors

2006-present

Steering Committee Member Art and Religions of Antiquity Program Unit Society of Biblical Literature

2006-present

Chair, “Neo-Pagan and Tantric Negotiations of Sexuality.” March 2006 GraduateStudent Symposium in Religious Studies, “Embodying Volatile Borderlands: Religion, Gender and Sex(uality).” Indiana University-Bloomington On-campus Student Representative Society of Biblical Literature Student Advisory Group

2005-2008

Chair, Session on “Judaism and Christianity.” North American Patristics Society Annual Meeting. Chicago, IL.

June 2005

Member, Religious Studies Doctoral Program Restructuring Committee Indiana University-Bloomington

2004

Chair, Graduate Student Symposium in Religious Studies, “Images and Asceticism” Indiana University-Bloomington

2004

Academic Honors Borns Jewish Studies Program Conference Funding Indiana University-Bloomington

2006

College of Arts and Sciences Travel Grant Indiana University-Bloomington

2005, 2002

Doctoral exams passed with honors

2003

Best Graduate Essay, Department of Religious Studies “The Representation of Theatricality in Philo’s Embassy.” Indiana University-Bloomington

2003

Chancellor’s Fellow Indiana University-Bloomington Presidential Scholar in Comparative Religion Western Michigan University Medallion Scholar Western Michigan University

1999-2004 1995

1991-1995

Book Reviews and Notes John Cassian and the Reading of Egyptian Monastic Culture by Steven D. Driver, booknote for Religious Studies Review 32 (April 2006): 126. Tobit and Judith by Benedict Otzen, for Journal of Semitic Studies 50 (2005): 386-88. The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions by Jed Wyrick, for Bryn Mawr Classical Review Online (2005.05.54), May 2005. Playing a Jewish Game: Gentile Christian Judaizing in the First and Second Centuries C.E. by Michele Murray, for Journal of Early Christian Studies 13 (2005): 123-24. Research Languages Ancient: Modern:

Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Syriac French, German, Italian

Professional Associations Association for Jewish Studies International Association for Coptic Studies North American Patristics Society Society of Biblical Literature