To Train His Soul in Books: Syriac Asceticism in Early Christianity

8. The Influence of Evagrius of Pontus

157 Robin Darling Young 8. The Influence of Evagrius of Pontus In about 460, a young Persian Christian named Aksenâyâ traveled north from his home province of Beth Garmai to become a student at the school of Edessa. Already committed to the monastic life, he undertook there a study of the works of Cyril of Alexandria. That study convinced him of the errors of the East Syrian theology with which he had probably been raised, and eventually led him to go further west, allying himself with the anti-Chalcedonian monasteries and hierarchies of northern and western Syria. An eloquent symbol of his relocation was the new name that Aksenâyâ was given by his bishop, Peter the Fuller of Antioch: he became Philoxenos, now taking on a Greek name that incorporated and changed the meaning of his Syriac name. He was no longer “the stranger” but “the hospitable one,” that is, “the lover of strangers,” a kind of guestmaster. Coincidentally or not, his change of name reflects Philoxenos’s entire program for the reform of Syriac-speaking Christianity: to make the language and its theology more suitable for reflecting the more exact and technical theology of the Greek-speaking church to its west. Previously, the Syriac-speaking world had been more receptive to the theology associated with the region of Antioch— exemplified by the works of Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Nestorius. Philoxenos wanted to introduce to the Syriac-speaking tradition the theology associated with the city of Alexandria. 158   R o b i n D a r l i n g Y o u n g In the matter of Christology, then, he was loyal to the works and vocabulary of Cyril of Alexandria, the standard of orthodoxy for those dissenting from the Chalcedonian formula. In the matter of the monastic life, Philoxenos was an admirer of the works of Evagrius of Pontus, a student of the Cappadocians who had become a student of the learned monks of Nitria and Scetis and had revived the ascetic thought of Clement and Origen to combine it with the practical instruction he had learned in Egypt. Philoxenos seemed to think that the more ancient form of Syriac-language thought, associated with Ephrem and Philoxenos’s own contemporary Jacob of Sarug, was inadequate to preserve the terminology needed to guard the orthodox faith against the distortions of a two-nature Christology. Equally, however , he appeared to think the monastic heritage of Syria required an infusion of Evagrian expertise in order to safeguard against some of the dangers of the ascetic life. Thus Philoxenos became a medium for the introduction of Evagrian thought into Syria and the Syriac language. Yet he was not the only monk to have been impressed by Evagrius and some of the directions implied in Evagrius’s thought but not taken by him. That these latter presented some dangers to themselves and their readers we can learn from reading Philoxenos’s own works. But the chief interest of the present essay is to show what the similarities are between Philoxenos and Evagrius in the matter of one aspect of the monastic life, the imitation of Christ. The essential connection between the thought of Philoxenos and that of Evagrius has, of course, been discussed for some sixty years, in a variety of monographs and articles. It took, however, that great scholar of oriental spirituality , Irenée Hausherr, to set the two authors together and to demonstrate Philoxenos’s manifest dependence on the ascetical works of Evagrius for his own description of the spiritual life of the Christian—primarily that of the monk, with whose guidance Philoxenos was always and foremost concerned, even though he was a bishop who had responsibility for all kinds of Christians in his rural region. Further work on the subject of the connection between these two has been done by Harb and Watt, as well as by Vööbus, but the dominant interpretations have been provided by De Halleux, in his Philoxène, and a subsequent article on Philoxenos’s spirituality, and by Guillaumont’s well-known discussion of the T h e I n f l u e n c e o f E va g r i u s o f P o n t u s 159 progress of Evagrius’s thought among Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians.1 Guillaumont’s reconstruction of the absorption of Evagrian ideas by...