Introduction
Sometime in the mid-sixth century, a monk from Antioch named Dorotheos became hegoumen of a monastery near Thawatha, in the hinterlands of Gaza.Footnote 1 He was in some ways an obvious choice to lead a monastery. Educated in rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine, he had personally assisted his own hegoumen, Seridos, at the Monastery of St. Hilarion.Footnote 2 More impressively, he had been disciple and amanuensis for the charismatic but reclusive monks Barsanuphios and John, the “Great Old Men of Gaza.”Footnote 3 When Dorotheos joined the monastery, Barsanuphios advised him to keep his books and use his medical training, while commanding Seridos to appoint Dorotheos first to run the guesthouse and later the infirmary.Footnote 4 During this time, Dorotheos may have confessed to Seridos,Footnote 5 but Barsanuphios and John oversaw his formation.Footnote 6 Yet Dorotheos did not succeed Seridos as abbot. On John’s recommendation, a wealthy parvenu named Aelianos did,Footnote 7 and at some point after the Old Men’s deaths (ca. 543), Dorotheos left that monastery and took over the running of a monastery nearby. He was an enthusiastic teacher, with seventeen Instructions, several Letters, and various Sayings surviving from his abbacy. It is also likely (faute de mieux) that he edited the roughly 850 letters of Barsanuphios and John. Educated between Chalcedonian and Miaphysite monks in Gaza, formed during the decades of the Second Origenist Controversy, and standing as the last known representative of the thriving monastic and educational centers of late antique Gaza, Dorotheos provides an invaluable view into theological and intellectual dynamics among late antique Christians in the crucible of sixth-century contests for orthodoxy.
In his twelfth Instruction, on which this essay will center, Dorotheos discusses the character of postmortem suffering. He turns to the topic by invoking two hortatory sayings “from the Gerontikon,” an early collection of what are now called the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.Footnote 8 After quoting “the elders,” Dorotheos says, “And Evagrios too said . . . ,” before launching into two quotations from the Kephalaia Gnostica of Evagrios of Pontos (345–399) concerning the importance of persisting in ascetic discipline and the distractions offered by one’s body. Dorotheos then pivots from these to claim that the fire which burns in Hades is not an external fire but a psychic sensation born of the passions with which the soul, denuded of its body, is left alone in death. He says, “Such is the impassioned soul—it is forever punished by the wretchedness of its own evil disposition, possessing forever the bitter memory and agonizing chatter of the passions burning and consuming it.”Footnote 9 Dorotheos’s vision of the postmortem is striking, and in the context of sixth-century theological politics, the presence of Evagrios even more so.
To explain, let’s leave Dorotheos to one side for now to look briefly at what was going on in the region during the years of his formation under the Old Men and his own abbacy. There are two controversies between which Gazan monasticism took shape, and against which it is generally studied: first, over the authority of the Council of Chalcedon (451), and second, over the legacy of Origen of Alexandria’s theology. While the first of these had divided Christian communities across the Levant, the latter, though more limited in scope and intensity, would influence the dynamics of speculative theology, especially in matters of eschatology, for centuries to come. The Second Origenist Controversy began among monks in Chalcedonian monasteries in Judea during the 520s but soon drew the attention of Emperor Justinian, who convoked councils in Constantinople and Jerusalem (536) and, several years later (543), promulgated nine anathemas against positions drawn (primarily) from Origen’s On First Principles.Footnote 10 A decade later (553), probably during meetings preliminary to the Second Council of Constantinople, Justinian’s anathemas were expanded to fifteen, focused on christology, and ratified by bishops present there. While the place of Origen in the Council’s proceedings is a matter of scholarly contention, by the mid-sixth century the fate of Origen as “heretic” was sealed.Footnote 11 Alongside adoptionist christology, universalism—the idea that postmortem punishment and its accompanying hellfire would terminate and eventually all souls would return to God—was condemned.Footnote 12 This position had been attacked centuries before by Methodios of Olympos and, more acerbically, by Jerome, during the First Origenist Controversy, which took place in Egypt at the turn of the fifth century.Footnote 13 The so-called Chapters of the Disciples of Evagrios were written and edited sometime in the intervening period, and Gabriel Bunge has argued that these tractates display the teachings, especially the christological ones, that drew the ire of the Council.Footnote 14 However, the charge of “Origenism” was leveled at quite a broad range of theologians, including Evagrios, Didymos the Blind (ca. 313–ca. 398), and Leontios of Byzantium (ca. 485–ca. 543), and the differences between these make it impossible to demarcate a body of doctrine shared between them that could be called “Origenist”; yet, for centuries this term would be hurled at those who strayed (or seemed to stray) too far in their speculation, especially in directions of universal salvation.
The epithet and associations stuck, and so over the course of the controversy the name and teachings of Evagrios came especially under fire. During this period key works ceased circulating in Greek (though Syriac versions survived), most especially the controversial Kephalaia Gnostica. This period saw also the wholesale, and almost certainly deliberate, transfer of the authorship of most other works from Evagrios to Neilos of Ankyra (5th cent.). Thus, Evagrios’s name became a watchword for all manner of heresy, and his Kephalaia Gnostica the supposed repository of evil teachings. These facts make it all the more striking, not to say perplexing, that sometime in the 550s or thereafter—in an era when, as Dirk Krausmüller has argued, “Origenists” resorted to strategies of concealment to preserve teachings without drawing notice—Dorotheos openly invokes the name of Evagrios and sets him on a level with “the elders” of the Gerontikon!Footnote 15 That he then quotes the Kephalaia Gnostica in an Instruction concerned with eschatology, to then reconceive hellfire as a condition within the soul, only sharpens the question of what Dorotheos’s own theological commitments might have been, and what effects the Second Origenist Controversy had in Gaza.
In what follows, I will argue that Dorotheos’s interiorized eschatology, with its quotations of Evagrios, show that “Origenist” theology was alive and well in Gazan monasteries, but that this could be reconciled with doctrinal orthodoxy as well as an irenic approach to theological controversy. We will see Dorotheos drawing heavily on Origen and Evagrios, although using not monastic traditions but his secular education to correct and obviate any apparent heterodoxy. By reflecting Dorotheos’s Instruction against what we learn from Barsanuphios and John’s Correspondence and from scholarly assessments of Gazan intellectual culture I conclude that Dorotheos was an Origenist by sixth-century standards. Furthermore, I show that the formative culture in Gazan monasteries was less touched by the Origenist Controversy and more open to speculative theology within the intimate relationships that defined spiritual direction there than has previously been allowed.
The Last of the Gazans
Dorotheos’s writings are instructions, originally delivered orally to monks in his cenobium. They are traditional and practical, full of homely illustrations and monastic quotations, which have often enough led to Dorotheos himself being depicted as a Melvillian “sub-sub librarian” of what has sometimes (and for a variety of reasons) been called the “Gaza school.”Footnote 16 Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Aryeh Kofsky refer to Dorotheos’s writings’ “lack of originality and their eclectic nature” that express his “predilection for preserving and systemizing monastic tradition.”Footnote 17 Dorotheos can easily give the impression of a man engaged in organizing and elaborating an inheritance. He displays wide learning, confesses bookish tendencies,Footnote 18 and, in addition to Scripture, frequently quotes from his Gazan forerunners, Basil of Caesarea, and the Gerontikon. Footnote 19 Lorenzo Perrone has thus argued that Dorotheos’s talent lay in harmonizing (rather than systematizing) not just Gazan but Basilian and Pachomian traditions,Footnote 20 while Rosa Maria Parrinello speaks of his “unique monastic imaginary.”Footnote 21 Daniël Hombergen, by contrast, argues that “with regard to striving for spiritual knowledge Dorotheus shows himself much less reluctant than Barsanuphios and John, nevertheless without dissociating himself from his former teachers.”Footnote 22 He suggests that Dorotheos’s speculative proclivities are perhaps masked by his invocation of authorities like the Old Men. Dorotheos displays a persistent fidelity to his monastic heritage but allows a varied assessment of his creativity in relation to it.
Michael Champion and Jan Stenger have set Dorotheos’s Instructions in the context of late antique rhetorical education and philosophy in the Neoplatonic school of Gaza,Footnote 23 as well as late antique philosophical culture generally.Footnote 24 Champion, especially, has shown that Dorotheos puts rhetorical, philosophical, and even medical secular learning to a distinctly Christian end.Footnote 25 He also notes Evagrios’s influence and Dorotheos’s mobilization of both practical and speculative works, in service of forming monks.Footnote 26 The key, though, is humility as the mode of becoming like God.Footnote 27 In similar fashion, Perrone identifies “l’altro,” the other, whom Dorotheos identifies at once as one’s fellow monks in the cenobium and as Christ himself whom the monk imitates and serves, as the key to his spiritual vision.Footnote 28 Read thus, Dorotheos does not merely synthesize monastic regimes; rather, he unites a range of intellectual traditions to form his monks in ethical and cognitive habits aimed at drawing them closer to God and to each other. Putting these readings together, a richly colored portrait emerges, but it remains incomplete until we can incorporate Dorotheos’s reliance on Evagrios in the context of the controversies. If we reject—as I think we must—the explanation that Gazan monasticism tended away from philosophical learning, if not into anti-intellectualism, then we have to grapple not just with Dorotheos’s own forays into speculative theology and unabashed debts to Origen, but also with what those suggest about the culture that formed him. So, to better understand both Dorotheos and Gazan monasticism in the context of the Origenist Controversy, we turn now to the twelfth Instruction and its striking eschatology.Footnote 29
The Fevered Memory: Dorotheos on Death and Judgment
Despite its influence on later Byzantine theologians like Michael Glykas (1125–1204) and Meletios Confessor (ca. 1209–1286),Footnote 30 and even its place in Mark Eugenikos’s (1392–1444) diatribes against the doctrine of purgatory,Footnote 31 Dorotheos’s twelfth Instruction has received only passing comment among modern scholars.Footnote 32 The Instruction teaches effort and endurance in pursuit of salvation, but it begins by reflecting on how present suffering and diminishment ought to be borne. While everything should be ascribed to God or, at least, understood as permitted by divine providence, some cannot see this through the veil of their pains. But they are gravely mistaken, because, in the words of an anonymous elder of the Gerontikon, they do not realize “that future suffering is much worse than present suffering.”Footnote 33 Dorotheos then turns to Evagrios. The first quote continues the hortatory line of the Gerontikon: “And Evagrios too said that ‘Someone who, still in the grip of passion, prays that death come for him sooner, is like someone begging a carpenter swiftly to smash a sick person’s bed.’ ”Footnote 34 Dorotheos uses the second to frame his own eschatology: “Through this body the soul is distracted from its passions and comforted [Διὰ γὰρ τοῦ σώματος τούτου περισπᾶται ἡ ψυχὴ ἀπὸ τῶν παθῶν αὐτῆς καὶ παρακαλεῖται].”Footnote 35 Now, in both surviving Syriac versions of the Kephalaia Gnostica, Evagrios calls the body a refuge for the soul from the demons (ܣܐܕܵܐ) that surround it (ܕܚܕܝܪܝܝܢ ܠܗ). Substituting “passions” for “demons,” Dorotheos pivots from external to internal, while developing an implicit but commonly held distinction between πάθη pertaining primarily to the soul and those to the body. Bodily passions like hunger and thirst may be unpleasant, but by fulfilling such needs the soul can ignore its own passions, like anger and sadness. Thus, Dorotheos explains that what Evagrios must have meant was that, through its attendant body, the soul
eats, drinks, sleeps, meets people, and is diverted with loved ones. But when it has departed from the body, it is all alone with its own passions, and thereafter it is forever punished by them, as it dwells on them, is burned by their irritation, and torn apart by them [μονοῦται αὕτη καὶ τὰ πάθη αὐτῆς, καὶ λοιπὸν κολάζεται πάντοτε ὑπ’ αὐτῶν, εἰς αὐτὰ ἀδολεσχοῦσα καὶ φλεγομένη ὑπὸ τῆς ὀχλήσεως αὐτῶν καὶ διασπαραττομένη ὑπ’ αὐτῶν], so much that it cannot remember God. For the very memory of God consoles the soul.Footnote 36
Absent a body, the soul is turned in on itself, and this introversion provides the basis of Dorotheos’s eschatology. Notably, he does not mention either external agents or some kind of “soul-sleep,” which two options are the most likely in this era.Footnote 37 If souls are not depicted as temporarily defunct, we generally see them received by either angels or demons and rewarded or punished by them appropriately. Souls may be anxious and downcast in Hades, but because they await the terrible final judgment, not because of their own passions.Footnote 38 It is possible Dorotheos is here inspired by Abba Isaiah, who, in a description of demonic assault at death, claimed that angels accompany the soul and “the powers of darkness go out to meet it.” Those powers “search whether the soul has something of them in it,” and in that struggle, “the angels do not fight them; rather, the soul’s deeds which it did wall it about and guard it from the powers of darkness, lest they touch it.”Footnote 39 Isaiah then opposes a number of virtues to vices and concludes that “all these things grip the soul when it departs the body, and the virtues which it procured help it then.”Footnote 40 Nevertheless, while “virtues” may take the place of angels, the evil spirits are external agents that attack the soul in accordance with the vices that rendered it liable to them. Another possible parallel or source is a homily attributed to Symeon of Mesopotamia (4th–5th cent.), in which virtues “become” angels and passions “become” demons (γίνονται δαίμονες πονηροὶ). However, in Symeon’s account these passions-turned-demons simply join the “opposing powers and rulers of darkness” in dragging the soul off to be punished with the Devil.Footnote 41 Dorotheos’s interiority stands apart from both Isaiah and Symeon, as well as other visionary and didactic accounts.
Admittedly, Dorotheos does eventually rattle off the expected furnishings of hell.Footnote 42 But then he suggests something worse than all such things. Returning to the soul’s solitary and decidedly inward experience, Dorotheos explains that “The conviction itself of conscience and the very memory of things done [αὐτὸς ὁ ἔλεγχος τῆς συνειδήσεως καὶ αὐτὴ ἡ μνήμη τῶν πεπραγμένων], just as we said before, is worse than myriads of unspeakable punishments.”Footnote 43 While Symeon and Isaiah ultimately incorporate passions into the normal setpieces of postmortem punishments, Dorotheos foregrounds interiority and with it a total dislocation from body and place.
Having stripped away all else, Dorotheos must explain the mechanics of a totally interiorized punishment. To that end he asks:
When someone has a fever [πυρέσσῃ], what is it that burns him [τὸ καῖον αὐτόν]? What sort of fire [πῦρ], or what sort of fuel generates that combustion? If, indeed, someone is found to have a body marked by melancholic imbalance [σῶμα μελαγχολικὸν δύσκρατον], is it not his imbalance that burns him, that always troubles him, and that afflicts his life [οὐκ αὐτὴ ἡ δυσκρασία αὐτοῦ καίει αὐτὸν καὶ ταράσσει πάντοτε καὶ θλίβει τὴν ζωὴν αὐτοῦ]? So too the impassioned soul is forever punished by the wretchedness of its own evil disposition [ὑπὸ τῆς ἰδίας κακοεξίας], possessing forever the bitter memory [πικρὰν μνήμην] and agonizing chatter of the passions forever burning and consuming it [καιόντων ἀεὶ καὶ καταφλεγόντων αὐτήν].Footnote 44
This description of interiorized torment hinges on a biological analogy. The initial reference to “melancholic imbalance” (σῶμα μελαγχολικὸν δύσκρατον) signals a decisive medical element in Dorotheos’s thought. Dorotheos had some medical education and experience running the monastery’s clinic (νοσοκομεῖον),Footnote 45 and he frequently draws on medicine either to explain how physical activities impact cognitive and affective statesFootnote 46 or to draw analogies with education.Footnote 47 Here, he employs Hippocratic nosology, according to which black bile (μελαγχόλη) causes quaternary fevers.Footnote 48 However, Dorotheos’ language of an underlying humoral imbalance (δυσκρασία) points to a tenet not of Hippocratic but of Galenic medicine, which came to predominance by the late fourth century. Galen read human bodies through a more consistently humoral hermeneutic than one could find in Hippocratic texts.Footnote 49 Crucially, for Galen, the mixture of humors (κρᾶσις) defines not only physical states but also affective and cognitive ones,Footnote 50 a logic which Dorotheos takes up with regard to virtues like humility.Footnote 51 Moreover, while humoral mixtures are variable and susceptible to external alteration, they tend toward lasting configurations, which may be healthy or unhealthy, which Galen terms “dispositions” (διαθέσεις, κατασκεύαι). These lasting configurations constrain the operations of both body and soul. Dorotheos, who is much concerned with bodily and psychical dispositions and their interdependence, employs the same logic when he refers to the soul’s “evil disposition” (κακοεξία).Footnote 52 In Aristotelian terms, ἕξις is a more lasting state, or “fixed disposition,” than διάθεσιςFootnote 53 and, though Dorotheos sometimes uses the terms interchangeably,Footnote 54 it may be significant that to describe the condition of the dead he employs a derivation of the stronger term.Footnote 55
This “evil disposition” is composed of “bitter memory” and the “agonizing chatter of the passions.” The body is neither present nor considered. This too marks a departure from other vivid descriptions of punishment in which tormented and mutilated bodies express their owners’ deviant ways of life. The body’s absence is not merely unusual but conceptually important. In Dorotheos’s opposition of the present life to the state of death, the body makes the difference: the soul on its own is stuck, unable either to escape its passions or to alter its disposition. Thus, in place of bodily humors, memory and chatter provide all the fuel needed for its conflagration. Crucially, neither memory nor passions as such feed the soul’s fever, but rather the stable disposition defined by them. The soul burns because it has come to a state of burning; no need then for demons or fiery pits. The soul’s disposition, like a melancholic body, is the agent of punishment. Dorotheos, substituting fever (πυρέσσειν) for fire (πῦρ), not only interiorizes hellfire but makes it the inevitable and permanent consequence of the psychical configuration of the dead.
Dorotheos merges philosophical and medical streams of thought into a striking account of postmortem punishment. Demons and the body are both absent, while a Galenic nosology of fevers explains biblical language of punishment and suffering. However, the unspoken inspiration of these features lies in Origen’s On First Principles.
The Hidden Spring: Dorotheos and Origen
If Evagrios provides Dorotheos a logic of embodiment, Origen provides one of interiorized hellfire. I quote at some length from a section of On First Principles that survives only in Rufinus’s Latin translation:Footnote 56
If, then, such be the quality of the body which will arise from the dead, let us now see what the threat of eternal fire (Matt 25:41) signifies [uideamus nunc quid sibi uelit ignis aeterni comminatio]. . . . [E]very sinner kindles for himself the flame of his own fire [flammam sibi ipse proprii ignis accendat], and is not plunged into some fire which has already been kindled by another or existed before himself. The food and material of this fire are our sins [cuius ignis esca atque materia sunt nostra peccata], which are called, by the Apostle Paul, “wood and hay and straw” (1 Cor 3:12). And I think that just as in the body an excess of nourishment and a detrimental kind and quantity of foods gives rise to fevers, and the fevers are also diverse either in kind or duration [sicut in corpore escae abundantia et qualitas uel quantitas cibi contraria febres generat, et febres diuersi uel modi uel temporis], according to the degree in which accumulated intemperateness supplies material and fuel for the fevers [intemperies collecta materiam suggesserit ac fomitem] (the quality of this material, gathered together from different kinds of intemperance, is the cause either of a more acute or more lingering disease [uel acerbioris morbi uel prolixioris]), so also, when the soul has gathered together a multitude of evil works and an excess [abundantiam] of sins in itself, at a suitable time all that assembly of evils boils up to punishment and is set aflame to chastisements; at which time, the intellect itself, or the conscience [mens ipsa uel conscientia], bringing to memory [in memoriam recipiens] by divine power all those things the impressions and forms [signa quaedam ac formas] of which it had stamped in itself when sinning, will see exposed before its eyes a history, as it were, of its evil deeds, of every single act it had done [et singulorum], whether foul or shameful, and had even impiously committed.Footnote 57
The similarities with Dorotheos’s account are numerous. Origen first denies an external agent (ab alio), fire (aliquem ignem), or a fiery place, since none existed beforehand. Instead, he claims that sins and evil deeds done (omnis illa malorum) become fodder and fuel (esca atque materia) through the medium of memory, when the mind recalls everything that has left an impression (signa ac formas) on it and sees its life displayed before its eyes. Most telling, though, is the physical analogy and medical logic of these punishments: they correspond to bodily fevers (febres) caused by overeating or malnutrition. In the next paragraph, Origen suggests that this fire is a continuation of burning experienced by souls caught in the passionum vitiis: “burnt up by the flame of love, or tormented by contention or envy, or agitated by the madness of anger, or consumed by the immensity of sorrow [uel flammis amoris exuritur anima uel zeli aut liuoris ignibus maceratur, aut cum irae agitator insania uel tristitiae inmensitate consumitur].”Footnote 58 He then asks if these might not be the punishment described as “eternal fire.” Origen suggests, as would Dorotheos, that the burning feeling may in fact be the lingering effect of indulgence in destructive emotional attachments and habits.Footnote 59 Punishment amounts to a necessary consequence of human psychophysiology: πῦρ is really πυρετός, ignis actually febris.
Origen’s account tallies point for point with Dorotheos’s on exactly those issues where the latter seems most idiosyncratic. Moreover, it is entirely plausible that Dorotheos was reading Origen. Seridos’s monastery had books of Origen, Evagrios, and Didymos in its library.Footnote 60 Dorotheos, a clever and well-educated individual, would have gravitated to the more challenging books in the monastery library, including On First Principles, which, it seems, inspired his otherwise unique account of postmortem punishment.
A Remembered Conversation: Dorotheos and Disposition
However, Dorotheos’s insistence on habituated dispositions breaks with Origen and tells us much about how Dorotheos received, utilized, and ultimately modified Origenian theology. At stake is the burning issue of postmortem punishment’s duration: how “eternal” is “eternal fire,” really? The turn to fever (febris) offers an answer. In the passage quoted above, Origen argues that the soul’s febris arises from excess or harmful foods and that febres vary in type and duration (febres diuersi uel modi uel temporis) according to the amount (secundum eam mensuram) of food taken in. The food is the fever’s fuel (materiam ac fomitem febrium); when burned off, the fever ceases. This is perfectly consonant with Hippocratic theories of fevers, and allows Origen to suggest that postmortem punishment is finite. Once the fuel of passions or wicked deeds have been burned through, punishment can end. In the following paragraph, Origen suggests exactly that, as he presents a different “species of punishment” on analogy with the dislocation of joints. He says:
[The soul] must be supposed to bear the chastisement and torment of its own dissension and to feel the punishments of its own instability and disorder [inconstantiae suae atque inordinationis]. But when the soul, thus dissolved and rent asunder, has been tried by the application of rational fire, it is undoubtedly reinforced in the consolidation and re-establishment of its structure [Quaeque animae dissolutio atque diuulsio cum adhibiti ignis ratione fuerit explorata, sine dubio ad firmiorem sui conpagem instaurationemque solidatur].Footnote 61
For Origen, what is called “punishment” is really the pain consequent on one’s own disorder and failure. But this pain is divinely ordained and is, therefore, educational and therapeutic, comparable to bone-setting by the medicus animarum. However painful they may be, the fires of torment serve to burn away the soul’s illness.Footnote 62 Though it may take a long while, and only God’s patience can account for it, the aim, at least, of every punishment is salvation.Footnote 63
These passages tend toward the positions condemned by Justinian in 543 and anathematized at the Second Council of Constantinople (553), a decade which saw the deaths of the Old Men and probably the beginning of Dorotheos’s abbacy. More than a century earlier, Jerome had written to one Avitus (and would repeat in his attack on Rufinus’s books) that Origen’s interiorized punishment implied both a transmigration of souls and the ultimate shedding of body and soul.Footnote 64 In the same letter Jerome criticized Origen’s medicalizing claim that suffering should lead to healing.Footnote 65 He takes issue with its implication of numerous successive worlds, which would be required to allow for the lengthy process of healing and the likely relapses souls would suffer on the way, as well as its air of universalism.Footnote 66 What, then, does Dorotheos make of the possibility that the memories may be “consumed” or that punishment leads to healing?
We have already seen that Dorotheos, deploying a Galenic medical logic, focuses on the evil disposition (κακοεξία) that afflicts the dead soul, rather than on the inventory of its evil deeds. This logic of psychic disposition opposes Origen’s specificity, which Dorotheos ventriloquizes in a conversation remembered between him and a certain “great old man.” Dorotheos says:
One time we were discussing this with a certain great old man [μετά τινος μεγάλου γέροντος], and that old man said that the soul after its departure from the body remembers the passion which it performed, the sin itself, and the face of him with whom it committed the sin. I said to him, “Probably not quite thus, but likely the soul will have the disposition it developed thanks to the activity of sin [τὴν ἕξιν τὴν γενομένην αὐτῇ ἐκ τῆς ἐργασίας τῆς ἁμαρτίας], and this is what it remembers.” We remained for some time contending over this word, wishing to understand it [φιλονεικοῦντες περὶ τοῦ λόγου τούτου θέλοντες μαθεῖν]. The old man would not be persuaded, saying that the soul remembers the form, the place, and the face of its partners in sin [λέγων ὅτι καὶ αὐτοῦ τοῦ εἴδους τῆς ἁμαρτίας μέμνηται, καὶ τοῦ τόπου καὶ αὐτοῦ τοῦ προσώπου τοῦ συναμαρτήσαντος]. And, truly, if it is this way, then we shall have an even more evil end, unless we pay attention to ourselves.Footnote 67
To begin with, the “certain great old man” is Barsanuphios. In Dorotheos’s works, as in the edited Correspondence of Barsanuphios and John, this epithet (μέγας γέρων) is effectively shorthand for Barsanuphios.Footnote 68 Dorotheos’s audience would surely have known exactly whom he meant.
And yet Barsanuphios’s words are Origen’s. He argues that memories are at once synoptic and granular. The soul remembers every passion (πάθος) but also each individual sin (ἁμαρτία) and, not only that, but its details: form, place, and faces of those involved (εἶδος, τόπος, πρόσωπα). This mnemonic specificity reiterates Origen’s description of “all those things the impressions and forms of which it had stamped in itself when sinning [omnia . . . quorum in semet signa quaedam ac formae, cum peccaret],” and of “a history of evil deeds [historiam quondam scelerum suorum] of “every single act [singulorum].”Footnote 69 Rufinus’s formae likely translates εἴδη, the same term used by the old man, and refers to a species of sin, as opposed to a genus (γένος) of passion (πάθος) which can be expressed in numerous different acts.Footnote 70 By referring to εἴδη, Origen—and Barsanuphios—argue that the acts themselves are remembered and cause the feverish pain of punishment.
Dorotheos claims that things work differently, in fact denying that souls remember such details at all. Instead, the “disposition” (ἕξις), which has been formed through practice of passions, defines a soul’s “bitter memory.” At first glance, this seems a strange way to speak of memory and something of a redundancy, since souls’ evil disposition burns them.Footnote 71 However, Dorotheos is now talking about how a psychic disposition is formed during life, before becoming the mechanism of postmortem punishment.
To explain, we need to think a bit about the role of habit (ἔθος, συνήθεια) in Dorotheos’s ethics.Footnote 72 Dorotheos’s language of dispositions draws out Aristotelian ethics, according to which ἕξις is a fixed disposition developed through habit and stamped on the soul through embodied action. The formation of ἕξεις through habit is central also to Aristotelian mnemonics, in relation to which Aristotle says that “habit is already nature [φύσις ἤδη τὸ ἔθος].”Footnote 73 While the memory (μνήμη) may contain numerous impressions, recollection (ἀνάνμησις)—the process of calling up memories as well as other pieces of knowledge—proceeds through chains of inference defined either by art or habituation.Footnote 74 Training emotions was especially important to schools that asserted an irreducible irrationality in the soul, whether in the ἐπιθυμητικόν of a Platonic, or the παθητικόν of a Peripatetic, account. By Dorotheos’s time, many philosophers had amalgamated these psychologies in service of training emotions through habituation, as well as teaching them by correcting judgments.Footnote 75 Galen, for example, had followed this line in his ethical-philosophical treatises,Footnote 76 while in his clinical ones he says that habit is a more important consideration (σκοπός) in learning a patient’s capacity and condition even than age.Footnote 77 For writers in these traditions, habit and habituation are decisive factors in the formation of lasting somatic, affective, and ethical dispositions.
Christian thinkers like Basil of Caesarea absorb and repurpose these ideas. I dwell for a moment on Basil, because Dorotheos is particularly fond of him and discussed Basil’s Asceticon with Barsanuphios and John.Footnote 78 Basil not only links habit and nature, but, in one passage, he makes “fixed disposition” (ἕξις) an intermediary stage between “habit” and “nature,” since ἕξις is “hard to change” (δυσκίνητον) and, therefore, “hard to cure” (δυσίατος) and, eventually, “utterly incurable” (παντέλως ἀνίατος), by which point “habit has been transformed into nature” (εἰς φύσιν, ὡς τὰ πολλὰ, τοῦ ἔθους μεθισταμένου).Footnote 79 This fluidity between nature and habit is key to ethical development (or degeneration). However, when it comes to dispositions, Basil tends to treat διαθέσεις as something akin to “attitudes.”Footnote 80 He rarely discusses ἕξεις, though he does draw attention to them as considerations when disciplining monks: “Let the following be considered in superiors’ estimation [of penances]: the time and manner of sin, the age of the body, and the disposition of soul, as well as the category of sin [ὁ καιρὸς καὶ ὁ τρόπος κατά τε τὴν ἡλικίαν τοῦ σώματος καὶ ἕξιν ψυχῆς, καὶ ἁμαρτήματος διαφοράν].”Footnote 81 In the Asceticon, then, language of disposition is largely lacking, but habit matters, since patterns of behavior become so ingrained that they are no longer chosen but compulsory. Dorotheos, however, presses Basil into alliance with his own project, saying: “Nothing is worse than bad habit. And the holy Basil says, ‘The struggle to overcome one’s habit is no small one, for habit is strengthened by prolongation and acquits, very often, the power of nature [οὐδὲν γὰρ χεῖρον κακῆς συνηθείας. Καὶ ὁ ἅγιος Βασίλειος λέγει· Οὐ μικρὸς δὲ οὗτος ἀγών, τῆς συνηθείας ἑαυτοῦ περιγενέσθαι. Ἔθος γὰρ διὰ μακροῦ χρόνου βεβαιωθέν, φύσεως ἰσχύν, ὡς τὰ πολλά, λαμβάνει].”Footnote 82 Basilian anxiety over the power of habit fits neatly with Dorotheos’s emphasis on the “evil disposition” that punishes the dead. He concludes, then, that this disposition is formed through habits indulged while living.
Dorotheos explores such lived habits at greater length in his eleventh Instruction, “On striving to cut off the passions swiftly before they become an evil disposition in the soul [Περὶ τοῦ σπουδάζειν ταχέως ἐκκόπτειν τὰ πάθη πρὸ τοῦ ἐν ἕξει κακὴ γενέσθαι τὴν ψυχήν].”Footnote 83 That Instruction mirrors the twelfth: the dead suffer a punishment they unwittingly contrived while alive. In the eleventh, Dorotheos describes how evil habits begin from chance events or even for good reasons. His example is of a monk who steals food because he is hungry, but over time, the action itself becomes the reason. Eventually, that monk, despite being reprimanded and even given extra rations, not only continues to steal but admits that he throws it in the rubbish or gives it to a donkey. Concluding that thievery has become this monk’s nature compelling him to it, Dorotheos summarizes the power of bad habits thus: “We receive through evil activity a certain strange and contra-natural fixed disposition [ἀλλὰ ξένην τινὰ καὶ παρὰ φύσιν λαμβάνομεν ἕξιν διὰ τῆς ἐνεργείας τοῦ κακοῦ].”Footnote 84 This is true, however, only for bad habits. Virtue, Dorotheos explains, is already natural.Footnote 85 Engaging in virtuous habits perfects, rather than alters, human nature. Thus, “I have said, therefore, that as much as we engage in good activities, we come to be in a fixed disposition of virtue, which is to say, we take up again our own proper disposition [Εἶπον οὖν ὅτι ὅσον ἐνεργοῦμεν τὰ καλά, ἐν ἕξει τῆς ἀρετῆς γινόμεθα, τοῦτ’ ἔστι τὴν ἰδίαν ἕξιν ἀναλαμβάνομεν].”Footnote 86 Medical thinking enters here as well, as Dorotheos calls this state of natural function “proper health” (ἴδια ὑγεία) and the contra-natural disposition a “pestilential disease” (λοιμῶδης ἀρρωστία), both harmful and painful.Footnote 87 Its pain may be called “punishment,” just as health may be “refreshment”: “But from their continuous operation both virtue and vice fashion a certain disposition in the soul, and thereafter this very disposition either punishes or refreshes [ἀλλὰ καὶ ἡ ἀρετὴ καὶ ἡ κακία ἐκ τοῦ συνεχῶς ἐνεργεῖσθαι ἕξιν τινὰ ἐμποιεῖ τῇ ψυχῇ, καὶ λοιπὸν αὐτὴ ἡ ἕξις ἢ κολάζει ἢ ἀναπαύει αὐτήν].”Footnote 88 The mechanism of punishment and refreshment is the same for the living and the dead. It is the soul’s disposition in both instances.
This same logic of habituated dispositions leads to a key distinction between the living and the dead. Whereas God may deliver people from an “evil fixed disposition” in life,Footnote 89 Dorotheos offers no such consolation in death. Why not? Dispositions, as we have seen, are only formed through activities (ἐνέργειαι) and, for Dorotheos, that means especially bodily activities: fasting, vigil, prayer, mercy, psalmody, labor, and obedience. The absence of a body in Dorotheos’s postmortem is decisive. Without it, repentance and the development of new habits are impossible. In a chilling illustration, Dorotheos explains eschatological fever:
Would you like to learn what I’m saying in an example? Let one of you go and close himself in a dark cell, and neither eat nor drink for three days, nor sleep, nor meet anyone, nor chant psalms nor pray, nor even remember God at all. Then he will teach me what the passions do to him. And if this is what happens even now, just think how much worse it will be after his soul departs his body, is handed over to the passions, and left alone with them [πόσῳ γε μᾶλλον μετὰ τὸ ἐξελθεῖν τὴν ψυχὴν ἀπὸ τοῦ σώματος καὶ προδοθῆναι αὐτοῖς καὶ μονωθῆναι μετ’ αὐτῶν]!Footnote 90
Death means the soul lacks the body through which it could perceive, act, sense, feel—in short, do anything. The body does not merely distract the soul from its passions. Rather, turning the soul toward “l’altro,” as Perrone put it, the body provides the means of repentance, progress, and salvation. Death is a sensory-deprivation chamber in which the soul, unable either to act or to receive new stimuli, is frozen in place, doomed to feel only the pain and misery of its own passion. By referring the soul’s memory to its disposition, Dorotheos has removed the possibility of remediation, let alone salvation for souls in suffering. Why do souls suffer in death? They are not burning off the memories of past deeds. Instead, lifelong habituation in passions has congealed into a self-tormenting nature.
Behind Dorotheos’s account of death, we can see (even if filtered through Basil) Aristotle’s ideas of habit and Galen’s concept of disposition. But now with a twist: neither Aristotle nor Galen imagined the soul to outlast the body. They have no account of postmortem memory, because, for them, there is no such thing. Dorotheos, however, applies their logic of habituated dispositions to an immortal soul and in consequence overcomes any question of the duration of postmortem punishment. Origen, in keeping with Hippocratic logic, had imagined that individual deeds were stacked in the memory, ready to be burned off. For Dorotheos’s Galenic logic, not the number of actions but the disposition developed in the soul matters. Absent a body, the disposition has become an irreversible state. Dorotheos’s eschatology is clearly inspired by Origen, informed by Aristotle, and filled out by Galen and Basil, but what he makes of those sources is at once wholly his own and thoroughly orthodox by the standards of the Chalcedonian churches in the sixth century. Dorotheos can quote Evagrios and draw on Origen without committing to their conclusions—even arguing the merits of the latter with Barsanuphios.
Dorotheos the Origenist
In the twelfth Instruction, Dorotheos weaves together Christian theology with non-Christian philosophy, using Aristotelian categories of disposition and its development in Galenic medicine to interpret Evagrios and correct Origen. He advanced these categories in debate with Barsanuphios, who seems to have maintained a more strictly Origenist position. Dorotheos’s interweaving of philosophy, medicine, and theological speculation shows him participating in a tradition not of inflexible dogmatism or crushing obedience but of conversation and intimacy.
Let’s return now to the Second Origenist Controversy. What, exactly, the Controversy concerned remains contentious. Cyril of Scythopolis and the Emperor Justinian paint a picture of universalist heresy and tainted hellene philosophy,Footnote 91 but there is little scholarly consensus on the doctrinal content of “Origenism.”Footnote 92 That is, the connection between the fifteen anathemas and the surviving texts is frequently tenuous, both as regards Origen’s own ideas and those of thinkers labeled “Origenist.”Footnote 93 Absent a clear doctrinal basis, Daniël Hombergen has argued that the controversy in Judean monasteries originally centred on issues of authority and ascetic practice, to which doctrinal—specifically eschatological—speculation was important, but secondary. He writes: “Instead of being a mere difference of opinion over doctrine, the Second Origenist Controversy was also a clash of different concepts of the spiritual life.”Footnote 94 The intellectual and moral formation that underlay philosophical pedagogy and the tight-knit relationship between teacher and student were pitted against centralized political and theological authority invested in the persons of emperor, bishops, and abbots. At stake, then, were the location and construction of authority, the rigorism of ascetic practice, and especially “the integration of the Hellenistic philosophical legacy within the monastic tradition.”Footnote 95 Those issues certainly inflect Gazan monasticism. Authority appears in Dorotheos’s twelfth Instruction in the form of both Scripture, which he interprets creatively, and monastic elders, with whom he argues imaginatively. Ascetic practice is implicated in the pain of postmortem punishment and leads Dorotheos to his favorite topics of habit and the formation of disposition through bodily action. Philosophical categories and concepts inform him as well; though, as we have seen, Dorotheos uses them judiciously. In the twelfth Instruction, we see him freely considering with his monks the same questions, both doctrinal and social, that sparked such vitriolic polemic in Judean monasteries and stern response from Constantinople.
Brian Daley has argued that the label “Origenist,” in this era at least, picked out “a style of religious thinking, and perhaps a set of priorities in living the monastic life” rather than “adherence to a body of doctrine which could find its inspiration in the works of Origen.”Footnote 96 To be an “Origenist” did not necessarily mean adopting Origen’s—or Evagrios’s—doctrines. It meant resistance to centralized theological authority (represented at the monastic level by heavy-handed leaders like Sabas and at the imperial level by Justinian’s enforcement of Chalcedonian orthodoxy) and a commitment to faithful intellectual inquiry. By 543, and certainly after 553, the anathemas surely pushed theologians toward more calcified rejection of the tenets of Origen and Evagrios. In this era, John of Gaza’s bifurcated reading strategy—read what’s good, reject what isn’t—merely oscillates between adherence and rejection,Footnote 97 while Origenist thinkers frequently concealed his presence in their teachings like a secret code. Dorotheos, however, like his near contemporary Boethius or Maximos Confessor a century later, cuts his own path, neither concealing nor vacillating. He acts like an “Origenist,” not by agreeing to everything Origen said but by his creative and careful working of Origen’s ideas into a thoroughly orthodox form. This work exceeds repetition and comment; it opens horizons of eschatological thinking not otherwise seen in late antiquity.
Reassessing Gazan Monastic Culture
Having shown Dorotheos to be an Origenist and speculative theologian, I would suggest that this picture requires two broader reassessments of the intellectual and theological climate of Gaza, which call for, and will inform, further research. First, the Origenist Controversy’s effects were felt much less in Gaza than Judea. Hombergen has said that “Evagrius’s unconcealed presence in Dorotheus, against the background of what was going on in the sixth-century Palestinian monastic world, remains an enigma.”Footnote 98 But it is only puzzling if we accept that conciliar condemnations of Origen and Evagrios in Jerusalem and Constantinople led immediately to rejection everywhere. There are two good reasons not to accept that claim.
First, the social networks of Gazan monasteries differ from Judean ones. Both the Correspondence and the Instructions are full of positive interactions with sophists, dignitaries, and other laypeople.Footnote 99 Both Thawatha and Maiouma were sought out by intellectuals in Gaza, much as the Enaton Monastery was by Christian students in Alexandria.Footnote 100 Schools run by the philosopher Aeneas and the rhetorician and exegete Prokopios (465–528) were turning out thinkers like Zacharias of Mytilene and Chorikios during Barsanuphios and John’s tenure at Thawatha, and during Dorotheos’s formative years there. None of these shied from controversy and speculative thought, and Chorikios defended a mixture of secular and religious education in public intellectuals even as he praised his teacher, Prokopios.Footnote 101 Prokopios, it might be added, peppered his biblical commentaries with quotations from Origen, Didymos, and Evagrios.Footnote 102 While people sought the intercession and power of holy men,Footnote 103 it would be strange indeed for sophists and philosophers to visit or correspond with doctrinaire monks afraid or dismissive of rigorous intellectual inquiry. Second, Gaza, as opposed to Jerusalem, was largely non-Chalcedonian, and, whatever the epithets hurled, the Origenist Controversy was a spat within the Chalcedonian fold. We should keep asking how much effect Justinian’s decrees and Constantinopolitan—or even Jerusalemite—councils actually had in Gaza, even among Chalcedonian circles. It may well be that Seridos’s monastery, and later Dorotheos, were committed to elements of Justinianic orthodoxy, or at least orthopraxy, without feeling bound by every point.
This leads to the second point of reassessment: the formative culture of Gazan monasticism. We need to understand how much it has been portrayed as nonspeculative, noncontroversial, and even anti-intellectual. These monasteries appear in the literary record as refuges from the bitter, sometimes violent prosecution of theological controversy in the sixth century. While Peter the Iberian placed Gazan monasticism in the field of theological polemics, Isaiah and the Old Men were keen to remove it as much as possible. Peter and Zacharias of Mytilene were fiery anti-Chalcedonians but Isaiah an irenic one.Footnote 104 For example, in his Discourses (or, Logoi), Isaiah recommends abstaining from debates or even reading books containing “heretical things.”Footnote 105 His attitude led to ambiguous reputations for him and some of his disciples. On the one side, Chalcedonians would eagerly read Isaiah’s works alongside those of “orthodox” writers. On the other, Barsanuphios, John, and Dorotheos had their Chalcedonian bona fides questioned even in late antiquity.Footnote 106 In fact, it is quite likely—despite the protestations of Dorotheos’s editor and their icons in Hagia SophiaFootnote 107—that Sophronios of Jerusalem condemned not some doppelganger, but this Isaiah and this Barsanuphios with Peter the Iberian as “headless” (i.e., belonging to the party of Severos of Antioch).Footnote 108 Whether or not Sophronios was correct and there was, as Bitton-Ashkelony and Kofsky suggest, “transformation into a kind of crypto-Monophysitism,”Footnote 109 it is clear that Isaiah’s legacy included such reticence on christology that Gazans could be read as members of either church. The question is whether reticence on that topic expressed a more general rejection of dogmatic as well as speculative theology and discussion.
Of course, while monasteries to the north, in Judea, were being convulsed by the Second Origenist Controversy, and Cyril of Scythopolis was tarnishing the names of Evagrios and Didymos, monks at Seridos’s monastery in Gaza had access to their books. An unnamed monk wrote to the Old Men about his adventures with Origen, Evagrios, and Didymos, claiming to have stumbled on them in the monastery library (quite by accident, he claims). The fact that the monastery possessed such books and that monks could read them without permission certainly suggests a degree of curiosity and openness. However, Barsanuphios advised him vehemently to avoid such authors entirely, while John said to sift out and ignore the more problematic positions and focus instead on what was practically beneficial. This advice echoes Isaiah’s refusal of polemics and has been read as part of a wider strategy of avoiding controversy, also including the Chalcedonian one,Footnote 110 or even as a sign of an anti-intellectual trend among Gazan (and other) monastics.Footnote 111 Monastic formation in Gaza would seem to have shunned not just ecclesial conflicts but also the speculative reading that might embroil monks in theological controversies.
And yet, Dorotheos presents the same Barsanuphios who authored such condemnatory letters, as arguing over the finer points of Origenist eschatology. If we take Dorotheos’ presentation of that conversation, or at least his monks’ likely perception of it, seriously, then it would be ridiculous to imagine that speculative theology was out of bounds in Seridos’s monastery. But it would make sense that such conversations occurred within the context of the intimate relationships of spiritual direction. The conversation Dorotheos recounts is unusual only in that it took place in person. Time and again in the Correspondence asymmetries of power and the Old Men’s sometimes vociferous insistence on obedience are balanced by their correspondents’ frequent boldness, even stubbornness.Footnote 112 Further, the infrequency of more mystical or speculative teaching (excepting the famous Resp. 137b) in the Correspondence, an absence on which so much has been built, is comprehensible for two reasons. First, the Old Men set no universal curriculum. Rather, the dynamics of spiritual direction required that the character and capacity of the disciple determine in large part what the master would say, as not everyone is ready for more intellectually challenging or mystical teachings. Focus on mitigating, even extirpating, one’s own passions is as much a cognitive propaedeutic as it is an ethical imperative, and so when Barsanuphios counsels the monk reading Evagrios to focus his attention on his passions, he is not telling him that “intellectual speculation is a distraction from ascetical struggle and prayer.”Footnote 113 Rather, he is reminding his interlocutor that he is going about things in the wrong order—a warning that Evagrios, committed as he was to a pedagogical program that moved from emotional and ethical transformation into contemplation, would have agreed with wholeheartedly. Second, ancient epistolography was public business, and we should not expect the Old Men to have committed to writing everything they said in private or communicated through Seridos and Dorotheos. We have no reason, after all, to expect that the letters to the Old Men are faithfully reproduced, and the collection’s composition has yet to be seriously studied. Rather, tempting though it is to read the Correspondence as direct witness to the topics touched on in various letters, we must remember that it is more limited in its scope. It is a literary and layered text, which invites scholars to read against the grain and to explore its silences. The same awareness calls for greater weight to be given to Dorotheos’s Instructions—though they are, of course, just as literary and complex—in assessing the intellectual and theological climate of Seridos’s monastery, as well as Dorotheos’s position in Gaza and contribution to late antique theology.
So then: how to characterize Dorotheos’s formation under the Old Men of Gaza? how to explain Seridos’s well-stocked library? how to make sense of Evagrios’s explicit and Origen’s implicit place in Dorotheos’s own theology? All things considered, it seems to me simplest to describe Dorotheos and those who formed him as, in the sense it held in their time, “Origenists.”
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