Nielsen’s Nook

The Letter to Menas and the anathematisms of the fifth council do not always resonate with what we know to be true of Origen. Their objections focus on the περί ἀρχῶν mainly. Origen was inclined to remain quiet on some of his more dubious positions in his other works (viz., Commentaries). Further, some of the doctrines condemned have no parallel in the known writings of Origen.

Origen or Evagrius?
Anathematisms 6-9, 12 and 13 of the fifth council were concerned with a dualistic conception of Christ which distinguished Christ from the Logos. This distinction was not to be supported by the basic doctrine of the περί ἀρχῶν. The assembly’s target then was not a straw-man of Origen; rather, it focused on the genuine doctrines of “one of the spiritual masters of Eastern monasticism, Evagrius.

For Evagrius, Christ was an immaterial intellect (νους - nous) who did not Fall (in the Platonic sense) and consequently did not materialize. Therefore, writes Meyendorff:

There was … no incarnation of the Word. There was an abasement of the νους-Christ for the salvation of all creatures, in the various degrees of their fallen existence, in order to restore them to their primitive unity (p 55).

Christ then can be called Logos only because of his - Christ’s - union to the Logos (a separate entity in Evagrius’ thought) from before all world. This thinking obfuscated the doctrine of the Trinity that the Cappadocian fathers had given to the Church as well as presented a Christ that was something other than the Christ of Scripture.

Whoever says that it is not the God-Logos…, one of the holy Trinity, who is properly Christ, but that he is so by catachresis, because, they say, of the mind which stooped (διά τόν κενώσαντα εαθτόν νουν), being attached to the God-Logos himself (συνημμένον αὐτῷ τῷ θεῷ Λόγῳ), and which is properly called Christ, but whoever says that the Logos is called Christ because of the mind and that the mind is called God because of the Logos, be he anathema (Anathema 8).

Compare the above anathematism with this excerpt from Evagrius:

Christ is not the Word at the beginning, so that he who has been anointed is not God at the beginning, but that one, because of this one, is Christ, and this one, because of that one, is God….(p 55-6).

“After reading the fifteen anathematisms, one cannot help wondering how the notion, spread by Harnack, that Byzantine Christianity was Hellenized Christianity can have been so popular” (p 57). O. Cullmann has articulated that biblical time is an [eschatologically oriented] ascending line, while for Hellenism, it is the circle. Consequently, Greeks could not conceive of a deliverance that resulted from divine action within temporal history.

Justinian argued that on account of Origen’s education in the mythology of the Greeks, he merely posed as exegete of the Scriptures, while he expounded the doctrines of Plato (p 57). Consequently, the circular notion of time and its succession of falls necessary to return to the primitive natural state implied a determinism that made redemption unnecessary.

Evagrius’ condemnation was also monumental because he was one of the most widely read authors in Eastern monasteries. Even the most fierce of anti-Origenists like St. Barsanuphius, while officially condemning Evagrian doctrines as “Hellenistic myths” admitted that the soul could find useful teaching in the ‘purely spiritual’ and ‘non-dogmatic’ aspects of his work. Evagrius’ work On Prayer continued under the borrowed name of St. Nilus.

The Evagrian conception of perfection as gnosis and of prayer as an activity “proper to the mind” was linked to his platonic anthropology. Thus, the Incarnation has no place in Evagrius whose spiritual goal was to hold oneself as immaterial before the Immaterial. Evagrius was the originator of the monologic prayer and consequently it became the center of Byzantine monastic life. St. John Climacus and St. Maximus the Confessor would take over his teachings at this point. The “intellectual prayer” in the different context of union with God [i.e., per Incarnation] became in the Byzantine tradition the “Jesus Prayer” (p 60).

Interestingly, it is Evagrius’ master, St. Macarius who provides the corrective for Evagrian anthropology. St. Macarius presents the human being as a psychosomatic composite (psyche = soul, soma = body, hence human being = soul + body where the Greek formula might look like this: human being = soul - body). The result of this corrective is 1) the Incarnation is no longer excluded 2) spiritual life is not reduced to dematerialization of the intellect and 3) the center of spiritual life is union with Christ.

Leontius of Byzantium
A transitional figure between Evagrius and St. Maximus was the Origenist Leontius of Byzantium (not to be confused with Leontius of Jerusalem). Leontius sought to offer his solution to the contemporary Christological problem that divided Monophysites and Chalcedonians. His two major contributions to Christology are reflected in the essential christological definition:

1. A comparison between the two natures in Christ and the union of the body and soul in a human being.
2. The definition of the union of the divinity and humanity in Christ as an ‘essential union’ (ἕνωσις κατ’ οὐσίαν).

As with many writers of substance, what is not written is as important as what is written. Leontius never designates the Logos as the subject of the union, which is always Christ. This distinction, carried over from Origen and Evagrius, is apparent in the way that Leontius deals with Christ’s death, in which Christ suffered in the flesh by the will of the Logos (p 64).

Such an ontology (Evagrian) required that Leontius create a new system of metaphysical thought. Such an endeavor ended up conflating and/or confusing nature (φύσις) and substance (οὐσία). His articulation seemed to lead to the conclusion that there were different species of Christs and that the Christ only possessed one nature.

In light of these problems, Leontius gives us the term enhypostaton as a major contribution to christology. It is this new notion of the existence “within something” that allows Leontius to deal with the notion of “no nature without hypostasis” that the Nestorians and Eutychians both admitted. However, Leontius makes clear that enhypostaton is not identical with hypostasis and in this way Leontius’ vocabulary strays from the Trinitarian vocabulary given by the Cappadocians.

It was when Leontius’ notion was taken into a context that viewed Christ as identical with the Logos, being pre-existent and having assumed a human nature (enhypostaton), and when it was seen that the duality of natures does not obfuscate the unity of the subject in Christ, then Leontius “true contribution” took its place in the history of Christology (p 68).