The Second Origenist Controversy

The most source-critically delicate episode of Sabbas’s later years was the Second Origenist Controversy, a conflict over speculative theology — pre-existence of souls, universal restoration, and certain Christological speculations associated with the legacy of Origen and Evagrius — that spread among some learned monks of the Palestinian lauras, above all the New Lavra, in the early and mid sixth century. Sabbas opposed the Origenist monks and raised the danger before Justinian on his embassy of 531; after his death in 532 the controversy escalated into imperial condemnations and the anti-Origenist anathemas associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553), and ended with the expulsion of the Origenist monks from the New Lavra in 555. Because the precise content of this “Origenism” and the canonical standing of the anathemas are genuinely contested, this file flags those disputes rather than resolving them.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; founder of the Great Lavra)

A Controversy That Must Be Handled With Care

Of all the topics in this collection, the Second Origenist Controversy demands the most caution, and for a reason that goes beyond the ordinary fog of distant events. Our central narrative source — Cyril of Scythopolis — is not a neutral observer but a committed opponent of the Origenist monks, writing to vindicate Sabbas and the anti-Origenist party; and the very label “Origenist,” as applied to sixth-century monks, has been the subject of sustained modern debate over what these men actually believed and how it related to Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 – c. 254) and to Evagrius of Pontus (345–399), whose names became attached to the movement. The methodology’s directive for disputed and sensitive matters governs this whole file: positions are named without anachronistic polemic, the partisanship of the sources is stated openly, and the contested points are marked as disputes (METHODOLOGY §4). The reader should hold the entire reconstruction below at the confidence level the evidence allows — which, on several key questions, is low.

What “Origenism” May Have Meant in the Sixth-Century Lauras

The teachings condemned under the name of Origenism in the sixth century centred on a cluster of speculative doctrines: the pre-existence of souls (that rational beings, or logikoi, existed before the material world and fell into bodies); the apokatastasis or universal restoration (that all rational creatures, perhaps even the demons, would finally be restored to God); and certain Christological and cosmological speculations about the original unity of rational beings, the nature of the risen body, and the relation of Christ’s mind to the other logikoi (Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy, Rome 2001; Chitty, The Desert a City, Oxford 1966). These ideas were transmitted in the monastic world above all through the writings of Evagrius of Pontus, whose more esoteric works (the Kephalaia Gnostica in particular) gave systematic form to an Origenist cosmology; the sixth-century controversy is in large part a controversy over Evagrian as much as Origenian theology (Hombergen 2001; Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ, Oxford 1994).

But precisely how much of this the Palestinian monks held, and in what form, is contested. [Disputed: the actual content of sixth-century "Origenism" is debated. Cyril of Scythopolis presents the New Lavra Origenists as holding pre-existence, apokatastasis, and related speculations as a coherent system (Cyril of Scythopolis, *Life of Sabas* 36, 83–90; trans. Price 1991); Daniël Hombergen argues that Cyril's account is a polemical and partly schematic construction written a generation later, and that the precise doctrines of the monks — and the degree to which "Origenism" was a unified party rather than a label imposed by opponents — cannot be straightforwardly read off Cyril's narrative (Hombergen, *The Second Origenist Controversy*, Rome 2001). The relation of the sixth-century monks' views to Origen's own writings, and to Evagrius, is itself part of the dispute, since Origen was condemned for positions later readers systematized far beyond anything he himself asserted.] The prudent course, and the one taken here, is to describe the doctrines as the condemnations described them while noting that the fit between those descriptions and the monks’ actual beliefs is uncertain.

The New Lavra and the Spread of the Teaching

The institutional centre of the controversy was the New Lavra. It had been founded around 507 by a group of monks who had seceded from Sabbas’s Great Lavra after a dispute, settling in a separate establishment to the south; Sabbas, characteristically, did not abandon the breakaway community but helped to regularize it, providing it with a church and a superior (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 36; trans. Price 1991; Patrich, Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism, Washington 1995). Over the following decades the New Lavra became, in Cyril’s telling, the chief nursery of Origenist theology in the Palestinian desert, drawing learned and speculatively inclined monks (Cyril, Life of Sabas 36; Binns 1994). Other houses were touched as well, but the New Lavra is the recurring name in the sources.

The leaders of the movement, as Cyril names them, were a circle of educated monks, among them one Nonnus (the figure most often named as a principal of the Origenist party) and, in the next phase of the conflict, monks such as Theodore Askidas and Domitian, who rose to influence at the imperial court (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 83, 86–90; trans. Price 1991; Hombergen 2001). Cyril portrays them as concealing their speculations under a show of asceticism and learning, and as gradually gaining ground among the younger monks (Cyril, Life of Sabas 36, 83; Patrich 1995). Here again the partisan shaping of the source is plain: the men Cyril describes as deceivers were, in their own self-understanding, serious students of a contemplative theology with deep roots in the monastic tradition, and the “concealment” Cyril alleges may be as much a polemical trope as a fact (Hombergen 2001).

Sabbas’s Opposition

Sabbas himself stood against the Origenist monks. Cyril presents him as detecting and resisting the teaching within his own lauras, refusing communion to those who held it and labouring to keep his communities free of it (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 36, 83–84; trans. Price 1991). Sabbas was not a speculative theologian and the sources do not credit him with refuting Origenism by argument; his opposition was that of a monastic father guarding the simplicity and tradition of his houses against what he regarded as dangerous novelty (Binns 1994; Chitty 1966). The conflict was as much about the character of the monastic life — ascetic obedience versus learned speculation — as about doctrine in the abstract.

Crucially, Sabbas carried the matter beyond the desert. On his embassy to Constantinople in 531 — undertaken chiefly to seek relief for Palestine after the Samaritan revolt — Cyril reports that Sabbas also warned the emperor Justinian of the Origenist danger, urging action against the teaching (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 72–73; trans. Price 1991; see The Christological Struggles). Whether or not the warning was as formal as Cyril makes it, it places the desert controversy on the agenda of imperial church policy in the very years before the great condemnations. Sabbas died on 5 December 532, with the conflict still smouldering; its escalation belongs to the years after him.

Escalation After Sabbas’s Death (532)

With Sabbas gone, the restraining authority of his person was removed, and the controversy intensified through the 530s and 540s. The Origenist monks of the New Lavra, and their allies, gained ground; Cyril describes open disturbances in the lauras, the expulsion and counter-expulsion of monks, and the rise of Origenist sympathizers — notably Theodore Askidas — to high favour at Justinian’s court (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 83–90; trans. Price 1991; Hombergen 2001). The anti-Origenist monks, led now by Sabbas’s successors and by Gelasius and others at the Great Lavra, appealed repeatedly to the patriarch of Jerusalem and to Constantinople for a condemnation of the teaching (Cyril, Life of Sabas 84–87; Binns 1994). The dispute had become a struggle of monastic parties with court patrons on each side.

The imperial response came in stages. Around 543 the emperor Justinian issued an edict against Origenism — a letter or treatise addressed to the patriarch Menas of Constantinople — condemning a list of Origenist propositions, and a synod at Constantinople endorsed it; from this came a set of anti-Origenist anathemas directed at the doctrines of pre-existence, apokatastasis, and the rest (Hombergen 2001; Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, Liverpool 2009; Meyendorff, Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions, Crestwood 1989). This was a decisive intervention: for the first time the speculative theology of the lauras was formally condemned by imperial and synodal authority.

The Anathemas and the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553)

The condemnation of Origenism is traditionally associated with the Fifth Ecumenical Council, Constantinople II, of 553 (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The exact relationship between that council and the anti-Origenist anathemas is, however, one of the genuinely vexed questions of the field, and must be flagged rather than smoothed over. [Disputed: the canonical status and origin of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas are contested. They are absent from the official acts of the Council of Constantinople II (553) as those acts survive; Richard Price argues that the fifteen anathemas were issued at a preliminary gathering of bishops at Constantinople before the council formally opened in 553, while a distinct, earlier set of anti-Origenist anathemas belongs to Justinian's edict and the local synod of around 543 (Price, *The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553*, Liverpool 2009). On this reconstruction the condemnation of Origenism was not, strictly, an act of the Fifth Ecumenical Council's formal sessions. Orthodox tradition has nonetheless received the condemnation of Origenism as conciliar and binding, and the council is remembered as having anathematized Origen along with the Three Chapters (cf. [The Seven Ecumenical Councils](../../orthodoxy/02-sources-of-theology/ecumenical-councils.md)).] The doctrines anathematized — pre-existence of souls, the eventual restoration and dissolution of bodies, the apokatastasis, and the associated Christological speculations — are clear enough; it is their precise conciliar vehicle that scholarship disputes.

A further complication deserves mention. The reception of the condemnation has shaped how Origen himself is remembered: Origen the third-century theologian was anathematized for a systematized “Origenism” that owed at least as much to his later interpreters — and to Evagrius — as to his own writings, so that the name attached to the condemnation does not map neatly onto the historical Origen (Hombergen 2001; Chitty 1966). This is why the modern study of the controversy insists on distinguishing the doctrines as condemned from the theology as actually held by either Origen or the sixth-century monks.

The Expulsion from the New Lavra (555)

The institutional end of the controversy in Palestine came after the condemnations. With imperial and ecclesiastical authority now firmly against them, the Origenist monks of the New Lavra were driven out; Cyril dates the final expulsion to 555, when the recalcitrant monks were removed from the New Lavra and the house was repopulated with orthodox brethren — among them Cyril himself, who entered the New Lavra after the purge and is thus, on this very episode, both witness and interested party (Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Sabas 90; trans. Price 1991; Hombergen 2001; Patrich 1995). The Origenist movement in the Judean desert was broken, and the lauras returned to the tradition Sabbas had defended.

Cyril’s Partisanship and the Limits of Reconstruction

It bears repeating, as a conclusion, that the narrative frame of this whole controversy comes from a single hostile source. Cyril of Scythopolis was an anti-Origenist who entered the New Lavra in the wake of the Origenists’ expulsion and wrote his Lives in the 550s in part to celebrate the victory of Sabbas’s party (Hombergen 2001; Binns 1994). His account is detailed, chronologically careful, and indispensable — but it is the prosecution’s case, and Daniël Hombergen’s monograph in particular has argued that much of what Cyril presents as the doctrine and conduct of the Origenists is polemical construction that cannot be taken at face value as a description of what the monks believed (Hombergen, The Second Origenist Controversy, Rome 2001). The Orthodox tradition rightly receives the condemnation of the speculative doctrines — pre-existence and apokatastasis are not the faith of the Church — and rightly honours Sabbas’s defence of the monastic tradition. But the historian’s reconstruction of the men he opposed, and of exactly what they taught, remains genuinely uncertain, and is presented here as such (METHODOLOGY §§3.5, 4).

References

Cyril of Scythopolis. Life of Sabas, in The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Trans. R. M. Price, intro. and notes John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (The founding of the New Lavra c. 507 at ch. 36; the Origenist monks, Nonnus, and the disturbances at chs. 36, 83–90; the warning to Justinian in 531 at chs. 72–73; the expulsion of 555 at ch. 90. Cyril’s anti-Origenist standpoint is to be weighed throughout.)
Hombergen, Daniël. The Second Origenist Controversy: A New Perspective on Cyril of Scythopolis’ Monastic Biographies as Historical Sources for Sixth-Century Origenism. Studia Anselmiana 132. Rome: Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, 2001. (The principal modern study; argues for caution about reading the monks’ doctrines off Cyril’s polemic, and on the Evagrian dimension.)
Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. (On the relation of the fifteen anti-Origenist anathemas to the council of 553 and to Justinian’s edict of c. 543.)
Patrich, Joseph. Sabas, Leader of Palestinian Monasticism. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 32. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1995.
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (On Origenism, Evagrius, and the Palestinian lauras.)
Binns, John. Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine 314–631. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
Meyendorff, John. Imperial Unity and Christian Divisions: The Church 450–680 AD. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.
Council of Constantinople II (553), Fifth Ecumenical Council. In Tanner, Norman P., ed. Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. 2 vols. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1990.