The Messalian Boundary

The doctrinal work the corpus’s experiential spirituality demands: a careful demonstration of how the Macarian teaching, which sounds so close to the condemned Messalian heresy, is in fact distinguished from it. The distinction turns on three points — the coexistence of grace and sin in the baptized soul, the meaning of ceaseless prayer, and the affirmation of baptism, the sacraments, and ascetic labor — on each of which the corpus stands against the propositions condemned at Ephesus.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Why There Is a Boundary to Draw

The Macarian corpus prizes the conscious experience of grace (see Grace and Experience) and continual prayer — and these are exactly the emphases that the Church condemned in the Messalians. The very name of the heresy (“Messalian” from the Syriac, “Euchite” from the Greek, both meaning “those who pray”) marks the overlap: the Messalians, too, made felt grace and ceaseless prayer the center of the spiritual life. Since 1920, when Louis Villecourt first matched passages of the Homilies against the condemned Messalian propositions, the corpus has lived under the shadow of that resemblance (see The Symeon Authorship Question). The task of this file is to show where the resemblance ends — to draw, point by point, the boundary between the Macarian spirituality the Church received and the Messalianism the Church condemned at the Council of Ephesus (431). The dominant scholarship (Stewart 1991; Plested 2004; Meyendorff) holds that on every doctrinally decisive point the corpus falls on the orthodox side of that line; this file follows that demonstration.

The Condemned Propositions

The Messalian errors are catalogued in the heresiological lists, chiefly the eighteen anathematized chapters in John of Damascus, De haeresibus 80, with a parallel enumeration in Timothy of Constantinople, De receptione haereticorum (PG 86). The core of the condemned system was:

That a demon dwells substantially in the soul from Adam’s fall, co-existing with the Holy Spirit, and that baptism does not expel it — only persistent prayer can drive it out.
That after the demon’s expulsion the soul receives the Spirit in a perceptible, sensible way, attains apatheia (passionlessness) and sinlessness, and may even enjoy a bodily vision of the Trinity.
That, consequently, the sacraments are of no real profit, the churches are to be despised, and manual labor is unworthy of the spiritual person, who should devote himself to prayer alone.

The Macarian corpus is tested against each of these.

Point One: The Coexistence of Grace and Sin

This is the decisive distinction, and it is subtle. The Macarian corpus agrees with the Messalians that sin is not simply abolished at baptism — that evil remains in the heart of the baptized, warring against grace. Against a too-easy view that baptism instantly roots out all sin, the Homilies insist on the persistence of the passions and the reality of continued spiritual warfare: grace and sin co-exist in the same heart, and the Christian life is the long struggle of the one against the other (a recurring theme of the Homilies; cf. the heart as the contested “workshop” of Homily 15). Kallistos Ware notes that the corpus does retain real “Messalian affinities” in teaching that the Adamic “veil of the passions” persists after baptism (Ware, in Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, 1992).

But the corpus does not draw the Messalian conclusion. For the Messalians, the persistence of evil meant that baptism is ineffectual and the indwelling demon must be expelled by prayer alone. For “Macarius-Symeon,” baptism is real and effective; grace is truly given and truly present in the baptized; the remaining evil is not a substantial demon that baptism failed to dislodge but the disordered movement of the passions, to be overcome by the synergy of grace and ascetic effort. The truly heretical Messalian move was the equation of grace with the experience of grace — the claim that grace is present only when sensibly felt. The Macarian author resists this by his schema of hidden grace: grace is given at baptism but at first concealed, even from the soul’s own perception, and is revealed and consciously experienced only progressively as the soul advances. This is precisely the point that Mark the Monk and then Diadochus of Photike would sharpen into an explicit anti-Messalian corrective — that “the fullness of grace exists in the baptized whether they ever come to a full experience of it or not” (Plested, The Macarian Legacy, 2004; see Eastern Reception).

Point Two: Ceaseless Prayer

Both the Macarian corpus and the Messalians prize continual prayer — the literal pursuit of the apostolic command to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Here, too, the overlap is real and the divergence is in the framework. For the Messalians, ceaseless prayer was set against the sacraments and against work: prayer was the one thing necessary, and the sacramental and laboring life was so much distraction from it. For “Macarius-Symeon,” ceaseless prayer is embedded within a sacramental and laboring life, not opposed to it; the continual turning of the heart to God is the soul of an ascetic discipline that also includes the Eucharist, obedience, and the work of the hands. The Macarian emphasis on continual prayer of the heart is, in fact, one of the deep sources of the later hesychast tradition of the Jesus Prayer — a tradition that holds ceaseless prayer in perfect harmony with the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

Point Three: Baptism, Sacraments, and Labor

On the third cluster of condemned propositions the corpus stands plainly opposed to Messalianism. Where the Messalians despised the sacraments, the Macarian Homilies affirm baptism and the Eucharist as real bearers of grace. Where the Messalians scorned manual labor, the corpus assumes the laboring monastic life — the very life of the cell-and-synaxis Scetis it borrowed its patron’s name from (see Founding of Scetis). The scholarly verdict is that “the thought of Macarius and the Messalians is in open contrast regarding the sacraments and baptism,” and that the Macarian writings in effect supplied the monastic movement with an orthodox alternative to Messalianism — retaining the Syrian emphasis on conscious spiritual experience while replacing the Messalian framework with a sacramental and biblical one (the Meyendorff–Plested line; cf. Plested 2004). This is why John Meyendorff could pose the question of the corpus as “Messalianism or anti-Messalianism?” and answer, in effect, the latter.

The Boundary in Sum

The Macarian corpus and Messalianism grew from the same soil — the ascetic, experiential, prayer-centered Christianity of the Syrian Orient — and they share a vocabulary that an outside observer can easily confuse. Columba Stewart’s great contribution was to show that much of the apparent “Messalianism” of the Homilies is exactly this shared idiom, misread as shared doctrine by Greek-speaking bishops unfamiliar with the Semitic spiritual world (Stewart, Working the Earth of the Heart, 1991; see Wider Reception). On the points that the councils actually condemned — the impotence of baptism, the substantial indwelling demon, the equation of grace with its experience, the contempt for sacraments and labor — the corpus stands on the orthodox side of the line. [Disputed: how cleanly the corpus clears the Messalian boundary remains contested at the edges. The dominant view (Stewart, Plested, Meyendorff) holds that the author is not a Messalian; a minority continues to see genuine Messalian elements (the legacy of Villecourt and the early Dörries), and Ware notes that real “Messalian affinities” persist in the teaching on the post-baptismal passions. The settled conclusion is that the corpus cannot be classed as Messalian heresy; the unsettled question is exactly how near to the edge it stands.] That the Church received it, redacted it, and canonized its spirituality through Diadochus, the Metaphrasis, and the hesychasts is itself the strongest historical testimony to where it falls.

References

Stewart, Columba. “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (The controversy as misperceived shared idiom.)
Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The coexistence of grace and sin; “Macarius cannot be regarded as a Messalian”; the Meyendorff line.)
Maloney, George A., trans. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. (Ware’s preface on the “Messalian affinities”; the Homilies on grace and sin.)
John of Damascus. De haeresibus 80. (The eighteen condemned Messalian propositions.)
Timothy of Constantinople. De receptione haereticorum. PG 86. (The Messalian errors.)
Council of Ephesus (431). (The condemnation of the Messalians and their Asketikon.)