The Origenist Crisis and Constantinople

The controversy that broke St. John Cassian’s Egyptian apprenticeship and set him on the road to the West. In the winter of 399/400 Theophilus of Alexandria, who had earlier favored the learned Origenist monks of the Nitrian and Scetiote desert, turned against them under pressure from “anthropomorphite” ascetics, and a wave of monks — among them the “Tall Brothers” — fled toward Palestine and Constantinople. Cassian, who preserves a first-hand witness to the dispute in his Conferences, left Egypt with his companion Germanus for Constantinople, where John Chrysostom ordained him deacon; and after Chrysostom’s deposition the two friends are connected with the embassy that carried his cause to Pope Innocent I at Rome.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)

The Anthropomorphite Quarrel

The Egyptian desert in which Cassian and Germanus had been formed was, by the 390s, divided over a question that touched the most intimate act of the monk’s life — prayer. At issue was how the human mind ought to conceive God in the moment of contemplation: whether the words of Genesis 1:26, that man was made “in the image of God,” meant that God Himself possessed a human form that the praying monk might hold before the eyes of the heart, or whether, as the more learned and Origenist-minded monks insisted, God is incorporeal and formless and must be approached by a mind purged of every image. The first party — the so-called anthropomorphites — were numerous and unlettered, especially among the older monks of Scetis; the second drew on the spiritual theology of Origen as mediated through Evagrius Ponticus, whose teaching had shaped the contemplative milieu in which Cassian himself was trained (on that milieu, see Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt; Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998; Clark, The Origenist Controversy, 1992).

Cassian is not a distant reporter of this quarrel but a witness to it, and his witness is the most valuable single anchor for what the controversy felt like from inside a Scetiote cell. In the tenth Conference, on prayer, he places in the mouth of Abba Isaac an account of the aged and otherwise irreproachable Egyptian monk Serapion, who had clung all his life to the anthropomorphite manner of prayer. When at last he was persuaded by the reasoning of a visitor — in Cassian’s telling, a deacon named Photinus — that God has no human shape, the old man rose to pray and found that he could no longer picture the One he had always addressed; and breaking into tears he cried out, “Woe is me! They have taken my God away from me, and I have no one to lay hold of, nor do I know whom I should adore or address” (Cassian, Conferences 10.3; trans. Ramsey, ACW 57). The episode is told by Cassian with evident sympathy for the bereft old man even as he affirms the incorporeal doctrine — a sign of how the dispute cut across the desert’s own pieties rather than along any simple line of orthodoxy and error.

This was, then, not a remote dogmatic squabble but a crisis in the practice of prayer itself, and it is in that register — as a problem of the purification of the contemplating mind — that Cassian preserves it. He is careful never to name Origen or Evagrius as his masters, but the doctrine he defends through Abba Isaac is theirs (Stewart 1998; on Cassian’s habitual silence about Evagrius, see The Conlationes).

Theophilus and the Reversal of 399/400

Into this monastic disagreement came the policy of a patriarch. Theophilus of Alexandria had at first stood with the educated party; his festal letter for the year 399 is reported to have asserted the incorporeality of God against the anthropomorphite reading, provoking an uproar among the simpler monks, a body of whom are said to have come down to Alexandria in anger (Socrates, Ecclesiastical History 6.7; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 8.11). According to the narrative sources, Theophilus then reversed himself with startling speed: confronted by the crowd of anthropomorphite monks, he placated them — Socrates gives him the famous, double-edged words that in seeing them he saw “the face of God” — and turned the force of his office against the Origenists he had lately defended (Socrates, HE 6.7; Sozomen, HE 8.11–12). The motives behind the reversal are presented by the ancient writers as personal and political as much as doctrinal, bound up with Theophilus’s quarrel with the Nitrian monk-priest Isidore and with the “Tall Brothers” who had sheltered him.

[Disputed: the ancient narrators assign Theophilus's reversal to differing motives — Socrates, *HE* 6.7, and Sozomen, *HE* 8.11–13, foreground his personal feud with Isidore and the Tall Brothers and present the doctrinal turn as opportunistic; Palladius, *Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom* 6–7, written from the Origenist and Johannite side, treats Theophilus as the persecutor throughout; modern reconstructions (Clark, *The Origenist Controversy*, 1992; Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968) weigh these against the genuine doctrinal stakes and caution that the sequence of festal letter, riot, and reversal is recoverable only in outline].

In 400 Theophilus moved openly against the Origenist monasteries. He obtained synodical and imperial backing for the condemnation of Origenist teaching, marched against the settlements of Nitria, and drove out the monks who would not submit — an action the sympathetic sources describe as violent (Sozomen, HE 8.12–13; Palladius, Dialogue 7). The defeated party scattered. Many went first to Palestine; a substantial group, with the Tall Brothers at their head, made their way to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor and to the bishop of the capital.

The Tall Brothers and the Flight from Egypt

The “Tall Brothers” (so called for their stature) were four Nitrian monks of high reputation — Dioscorus, Ammonius, Eusebius, and Euthymius — learned in the Scriptures and in the spiritual tradition of Origen, and it was around them and their protégé Isidore that the storm had gathered (Socrates, HE 6.7; Sozomen, HE 8.12–13; Palladius, Dialogue 7). Their flight to Constantinople, where they sought the protection of Bishop John Chrysostom and lodged their complaint against Theophilus, set in motion the chain of events that would entangle Chrysostom himself in the Origenist affair and contribute to his ruin — for Theophilus would come to the capital ostensibly to answer the monks’ charges and would instead preside over the synod that deposed Chrysostom (Palladius, Dialogue 7–8; Socrates, HE 6.7–15).

It is against this exodus that Cassian’s own departure from Egypt is to be understood. He and Germanus had lived in Scetis and Kellia within precisely the Evagrian, Origenist-leaning world that Theophilus now proscribed, and they left the country in this period and did not return. Cassian nowhere narrates his own flight as such — his reticence about his life is nearly total — and so the connection rests on the convergence of his datable disappearance from Egypt with the dispersal of 399/400 and on the doctrinal company he kept (Stewart 1998; Chadwick 1968; on the limits of this reconstruction, see What We Know and Don’t). What is certain is that the desert phase of his life ended here, and that the next time the record shows him he is in the capital of the East.

Constantinople and the Ordination by Chrysostom

At Constantinople Cassian and Germanus entered the orbit of John Chrysostom, who had become bishop of the city in 398. The bond was close enough to leave permanent marks on Cassian’s career and on his memory. Chrysostom ordained Cassian deacon and Germanus presbyter, drawing the two desert monks into the clergy of the capital and into Chrysostom’s service (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). Cassian never forgot it. Decades later, writing in Latin in the West, he would name Chrysostom as his teacher: in the seventh book of his treatise On the Incarnation Against Nestorius he appeals to “John, bishop of Constantinople,” recalling his own debt to the man under whom he had served at the altar (Cassian, On the Incarnation 7.31; Chadwick 1968). The reverence with which the later, Latin Cassian speaks of the Greek bishop is one of the firmer threads tying his eastern and western lives together (on Chrysostom, see St. John Chrysostom).

[Disputed: the exact dating and detail of Cassian's Constantinople years are thinly attested and reconstructed largely from his own later remarks (notably *On the Incarnation* 7.31, naming Chrysostom his teacher) and from Palladius, *Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom*; the sources securely attest the ordinations of Cassian as deacon and Germanus as presbyter under Chrysostom (Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed., 1968; Stewart, *Cassian the Monk*, 1998), but the length of the friends' stay and the offices they held are inferred rather than documented].

These years placed Cassian at the center of a great ecclesiastical crisis. The arrival of the Tall Brothers, the coming of Theophilus, the “Synod of the Oak” that condemned Chrysostom in 403, his brief recall and his second and final deposition and exile in 404 — Cassian lived through the whole of it as a deacon of the church Chrysostom led (Palladius, Dialogue 8–11; Socrates, HE 6.15–18). When the bishop fell, his clergy and supporters did not accept the verdict, and they looked westward, to Rome, for vindication.

The Embassy to Pope Innocent I

After Chrysostom’s second deposition in 404, his supporters in Constantinople — the “Johannites” — sent a delegation to the West to lay his cause before Pope Innocent I of Rome and the Western bishops, carrying letters from Chrysostom himself, from the faithful clergy of the capital, and (in Palladius’s account) the documents and even the treasures of the church meant to authenticate the appeal (Palladius, Dialogue 1–4; Sozomen, HE 8.26–28). Innocent received the appeal, refused to recognize Chrysostom’s deposition, and pressed for a council to reopen the case — an early and significant instance of Rome’s intervention on behalf of an Eastern see against its accusers (Palladius, Dialogue 3–4; Chadwick 1968).

Cassian is generally identified as a member or bearer of this embassy. The deacon Cassian appears among the envoys associated with carrying the Johannite documents to Rome, and his subsequent presence and standing in the West are most economically explained by his having come there in Chrysostom’s cause (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). This crossing is the literal passage from East to West that gives this section its name: the man formed in the Egyptian desert and ordained in the Greek capital now appears on the soil of the Latin Church, where the remainder of his life and all of his writing would unfold.

[Disputed: Cassian's precise role in the Roman embassy is inferred — Palladius, *Dialogue on the Life of Chrysostom* 1–4, describes the Johannite delegation to Innocent I and names a deacon Cassian among those connected with it, and Chadwick, *John Cassian*, 2nd ed. (1968), and Stewart, *Cassian the Monk* (1998), treat him as a bearer of the appeal; the sources, however, supply the envoys' commission and outcome far more clearly than they fix Cassian's individual part, which is reconstructed from his later western emergence].

From the Embassy to the West

Between the Roman embassy and Cassian’s reappearance at Marseilles lies a gap of perhaps a decade about which the record is all but silent. He may have remained for a time at Rome, where, on the showing of his own later work, he formed the connection with the Roman clergy — and in particular with the future Pope Leo I — that would bear fruit at the very end of his life in the treatise On the Incarnation (Chadwick 1968; Stewart 1998). What the sources establish is the trajectory: Egypt lost to the Origenist crisis, Constantinople gained and then lost with Chrysostom, Rome enlisted in his defense, and finally Gaul, where Cassian would become the great Latin transmitter of the desert he had been forced to leave. That settlement, and the books it produced, are the subject of the companion file (see Founding St Victor at Marseilles).

References

Cassian, John. The Conferences (Conlationes). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (The Serapion episode and the anthropomorphite controversy at Conferences 10.3.)
Cassian, John. On the Incarnation of the Lord, Against Nestorius (De incarnatione Domini contra Nestorium). In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. (Cassian names Chrysostom his teacher at 7.31.)
Palladius. Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 45. New York: Newman Press, 1985. (The Johannite embassy to Innocent I; the Tall Brothers; Theophilus’s campaign.)
Socrates Scholasticus. Ecclesiastical History, Book 6. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. (Theophilus’s festal letter, the anthropomorphite riot, and the reversal of 399/400; the Tall Brothers; the Synod of the Oak.)
Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History, Book 8. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 2. (The expulsion of the Nitrian monks and the flight to Constantinople.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (Cassian’s Constantinople years, the ordinations, and his role in the Roman embassy.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Cassian within the Evagrian milieu and the Origenist crisis; the reticence of his autobiographical record.)
Clark, Elizabeth A. The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. (The doctrinal and social anatomy of the controversy of 399/400.)