Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 4 November 2011

Fourth Century Syria

Jack Tannous at monachos.net, to whom we are here indebted for the idea for this page, discusses important early Christian collections, the Syriac Liber Graduum or the Book of Steps, and those of the Persian sage, Aphrahat. To anchor in time the discussion of these fairly obscure works and their authors to a recognizable person, here also is mentioned Ephraim, by far the best known contemporary Syriac writer. Ephraim (Ephrem), the Syrian, and Aphrahat (Aphraates), the Persian Sage, are the earliest Syriac authors of whose works any appreciable remains survive. Both flourished about the middle of the fourth century, and both illuminate the nature of the primitive Syrian Church. Syriac literature began with these two but hardly developed beyond them, and few early Syriac authors mention the anonymous Liber Graduum, though manuscripts of it were as available as those of more famous works of the same era.

Ephraim’s history is extensively mytholicized and adorned with miracles, but in very brief outline it is as follows. Young Ephraim disagreed with his father, who was alleged to have been a pagan priest, and left his house. The saintly Bishop, Jacob of Nisibis, heard his story and admitted him to Christianity as a “Hearer”, at that time, a novice catechumen. Allegedly, he spent eight years with the anchorites and monks of Egypt, but in practical terms they cannot be fitted into the known dates of his life. In any event, he became a “solitary”, or “anchorite”, living in the caves of the Mount of Edessa, now Nimrud Dagh, where he spent his time praying, fasting, and studying scripture.

During his life, he wrote massively, being particulatly noted for hymns. When he died, he blessed his five faithful disciples by name, left an anathema on two who had erred from the faith, Paulinus and Urit, and directed his final abhorrence also towards various heresies, the Arians and Anomoeans, the Cathari and those of the Serpent, the Marcionites and Manichcoeans, the Bardesanites and Kukites, Paulites and Vitalianites, the Sabbatarians and Borborites, and other unseemly superstitions.

The rest of this page discusses the almost unknown works of his neglected contemporaries.

The Demonstrations of Aphrahat (Aphraates)

Though Zoroastrianism was still the religion of Persia, Aphrahat wrote in Syriac as a Christian. He followed the Peshitto rather than the Greek, but departed from both, and was familiar with Aramaic literary habits. Jewish scholars[†]See the article by Ginzberg in the Jewish Encyclopedia. consider Aphrahat’s homilies are valuable to the Jewish historian, for no church father was as strongly influenced by rabbinical Judaism as he was. Funk and Ginzberg show many parallel passages from Rabbinical literature with which the scriptural explanations of Aphrahat coincides.

In questions concerning the soul, God, retribution, and so on, he is a student of the Jews. His doctrine in Demonstration 6 (Demonstration 6) of the two attributes of God, justice and mercy, they claim is unequivocally Jewish, being found in Philo, and often in Rabbinical literature as “Middat ha Din” and “Middat ha Rahamim”. In citing the Old Testament, he shows acquaintanceship with most of the Jewish Canon, and with some of the deuterocanonical books—the Apocrypha—Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, Maccabees, perhaps Wisdom, but not Judith, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, or Baruch. According to W Wright, citing Georgios, bishop of the Arabs (c 780 AD), Aphrahat’ was dependent on Jewish doctrine, and Wellhausen noted “how completely the Syriac Church was bound to Jewish tradition, even in the fourth century” quoting in evidence the Homilies of Aphraates.

This book, Demonstrations or Homilies, by Aphrahat, of whom little is known, is earlier than the Book of Steps. The first ten “Demonstrations” he composed in 337 AD, and the rest in 344 AD. So the entire work was completed within nine years, five years before the middle of the fourth century, and probably before the composition of the earliest work of Ephraim, whose dates are known with fair accuracy. What is interesting is that much of both of these works sounds remarkably Essenic. Aphrahat’s Demonstration 6, for example is called “On the Sons of the Covenant” (bnay or bar qyama), though the exhortations it comprises seem to draw heavily on biblical imagery, especially the gospel parables, but also Paul:

• Let us be the true salt (Mt 5:13)) so that we do not become food for the serpent
• Let us keep our seedlings clear of thorns so that they may give fruit a hundredfold (Mt 17:7-8; Lk 8:7-8)
• Let us be aliens from the world just as Christ was not of it (Jn 17:14)
• Let us be poor in the world so that we may enrich many with the teaching of our Lord (Jas 2:5)
• Let us leave behind us the world which does not belong to us, so that he may cause us to arrive at the place to which we have been invited
• He who is trained in the athletic art (1 Cor 9:24-5) let him keep himself from the world
• He who takes upon himself the likeness of angels (Mt 22:30) let him become a stranger to human beings
• He who takes upon himself the yoke of the continent (holy) let him keep money affairs far from himself
• Whoever is expectantly awaiting the marriage feast of the bridegroom should not love the marriage feast that belongs to time
• Whoever has let himself be invited to the banquet should not (then) excuse himself and become a merchant (Lk 14:18-19)
• the “heavenly” soul reverts to its heavenly nature at death.

Aphrahat is primarily concerned with celibacy as the starting point of Christian vocation. It is the mark not only of betrothal to Christ, a joyful gift freely given and freely received, but also of the call to participate in the holy cosmic war against the Adversary. Baptism was interpreted in some groups as betrothal to Christ, the Heavenly Bridegroom, effectively reducing earthly marriage to adultery against Christ. In his Demonstration 6, Aphrahat interweaves the concepts of betrothal to Christ, renunciation, service, holy war, and eschatology in a rich tapestry of biblical imagery and models representing a tradition he has inherited, the roots of which may well stem from Qumran and early sectarian Judaism. He does not speak of the body as something to be subjugated to the soul, language pervading the roughly contemporary Life of Antony. Rather, body and soul are God’s, as one, both are for His use and His work.

Aphrahat takes up the issue of the cosmic war, speaking of ’our Adversary’ who is ’skilful and cunning in his fight against us’. Aphrahat’s eschatology—that of the Nestorians still—takes the human soul as dual, on the Persian model:

• the “natural” soul is immortal, but is buried with the body after death, remaining without consciousness until the resurrection
• the “heavenly” soul reverts to its heavenly nature (Homily 6) at death.
• On the Day of Judgement, “all the Just shall rise again” ready to enter paradise, when the two elements of the soul reunite.

Satan tries to subvert believers by assuming various guises by which he may intervene in their lives, but the children of light are more clever and can outwit him. ’If he should incite them through lust for Eve, they live by themselves and not in the company of the daughters of Eve’, a comment which is followed by a string of biblical examples starting with Adam and ending with Zimri ’chief of the tribe of Simeon’, whom Satan tempted and caused to sin by means of women.

Sons of the Covenant

The bnay and bnath qyama were important in Aphrahat’s Demonstrations. Well established as a part of Syriac Christianity by the third century, these Covenanters, or “Sons and Daughters of the Covenant”, were organized as especially pious elite Christians, and were still a feature of the Syriac churches into the Islamic period. Their main characteristic was their abstinence from sexual intercourse, even when married. Like the Essenes, they had assumed the likeness of angels—who as Jesus said, do not marry, nor are given in marriage—for they are eternal beings with no more need of reproduction than God Himself—and had become aloof from other human beings to keep their angelic purity. Their existence was a sort of bridge to heaven and an example of the sort of life Christians should lead to enter God’s kingdom. So, they lived a celibate and regulated life—by the fifth century, subject to orders—and obeyed Christ's commandments while living in the Christian community. Emphasis on celibacy and service to the church, then, was widely found in Syriac Christianity before the growth of ascetic orders. S P Brock observes:

From Aphrahat we learn that the members of the qyama lived in small associations, sometimes of men and women together …, forming house communities or informal religious communes. They were essentially a feature of town and village life, a far remove from the Egyptian monastic model of anachoresis or withdrawal from town and village to the desert …

Well, these communes do not sound too informal, but they are apparently quite different from the Egyptian model of solitary hermits, if that is itself true. They are however, very close in concept to the Essenes who lived both as small mixed communities called village Essenes and as strictly separated “camps” of men whose life sounded very monastic.

Brock, Early Syrian Asceticism, noted the Syrians themselves lost sight of the origins of their asceticism under the belief that the first monks were Egyptians, and eventually claimed that the ascetic roots in Syria and Mesopotamia came from disciples of Pachomius. Perhaps this relates to the myth of Ephraims sojourn among the Egyptian monks. Aphrahat’s reason for discussing the dangers of women, and possibly his reason for writing Demonstration 6 itself, is related to the institution of the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant as a pecursor of monasticism. It is that the sons and daughters of the covenant had been cohabiting:

Therefore, my brethren, any man who is a bar qyama (or bnay qyama, a son of the covenant) or a qaddisha (holy person) who loves ihidayuta (singleness) and wants a woman, who is a bat qyama (or bnat qyana, daughter of the covenant) like him, to live with him, in such a case it is better that he should take a wife openly and not be unrestrained in lust. Likewise, in the case of a woman, it is appropriate for her, if she is not going to separate from a man who is an ihidaya, to be openly with a husband. It is fitting that a woman should live with (another) woman, and a man ought to live with (another) man. Even in the case of a man who wants to live in qaddishuta (holiness, abstinence from marital intercourse), his spouse should not live with him, lest he revert to his former natural state (1 Cor 7:8), and he be accounted an adulterer.

The emphasised words, which appear in other early Syriac writings, have technical meanings which S P Brock discusses in his book, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of S Ephrem. The state in which a qaddisha or holy person lives is qaddishuta, which is literally holiness but has the special meaning of “abstinence from marital intercourse” whether temporary or permanent. The intensity of this identity of sexual chastity with holiness is close to the feelings of the leading Essenes—those who apparently lived separated from women. The meaning of qyama, Brock tells us, is the most debated word in Syriac scholarship. Its most likely English equivalent is “covenant” but it can mean “stance” and “standing”, and even “resurrection”. So these people were “sons and daughters of the covenant”, sounding much like the Essenes, except that there is an acknowledged order of women as well as men. Indeed they are just what might be expected of a transitional species between the Essenes as we know them from the Scrolls and classical writers, and Christian communities as the emerged.

Sidney H Griffith argues that, given the polyvalence of Semitic languages—the quality that leads to the Jewish fondness of puns, and, in part, the Essenic method of scriptural interpretation called “Pesher”) more than one meaning could be suggested by the word qyama. ’While “Resurrection” is not an apt translation of the word qyama in the contexts we have been discussing, it is nevertheless unlikely that the concept was far from Aphrahat’s mind in his discussion of the bnay qyama.

The Importance of Celibacy

A notion rooted in Judeo-Christianity’s emphasis on singleminded devotion to God, “singleness” gave particular meaning to the ideal of celibacy. Brock calls ihidaya “single” the “key term of the Syrian protomonastic tradition”, and so ihidayuta “singleness” is equally important:

The ihidaya is a follower and imitator of Christ the ihidaya par excellence. He is single minded for Christ. His heart is single and not divided. He is single as Adam was single when he was created. He is single in the sense of celibate.

S P Brock

So, the term ihidaya has three senses:

1. singular, individual, unique
2. single minded, not divided in heart
3. single, unmarried, celibate

The believer was to be singlemindedly focused on the divine, the believer living a single, unmarried life to avoid distraction from the singlar purpose. Christ himself had lived such a “single” life of devotion to God’s purpose. In Syriac, the word meaning “single one”, ihidaya, was also used to connote Christ as the “only begotten” one of God. It became interchangeable with other technical terms for the ascetic or the monk. Just as in earliest Syrian Christian terminology the word meaning “virgin”, bthula, could also mean “Christian”, so too the word for “single one”, and, indeed, for “only begotten”, could also mean an ascetic, and later a monk. Thus, from various sources, Syriac spirituality nourished the conviction that to be a Christian was to be single minded, and to be celibate, and to live a life of renunciation. In a passage in Demonstration 6, Aphrahat says:

Those who do not take wives are ministered to by the Watchers of Heaven. Those who preserve qaddishuta (holiness, abstinence) will find rest in the Sanctuary of the Most High. The ihidaya who is from his Father’s womb (Jn 1:18) gives joy to all the ihidaye. There is no male or female there, no servant or freeborn (Lk 6.35; Gal 3.28), rather all are children of the Most High, and the pure virgins who are betrothed to Christ will have their lamps shine brightly there as they enter, with the Bridegroom, to his Bridal Chamber (Mt 25:7-10). All those who are betrothed to Christ are far removed from the curse of the Law, and they are delivered from the punishment of Eve’s daughters. For they do not have husbands, or receive the curse and be in pains. They do not reckon death because they do not hand over children to him. Instead of a husband who dies, they are betrothed to Christ.

Two categories of celibacy were recognized—the bthule, “virgins”, and people who though married, nevertheless practiced continence and so remained the qaddishe, “holy ones”. Spiritual marriage, the way of the qaddishe, combined the social functions of marriage with the life of pious devotion. When the mainstream church tried to curb spiritual marriage in Christian communities in the late third century, the Syrian Orient proved most resistant to it. Celibacy was fundamental for Syrian Christians. Hence, in earliest Syrian Christianity, the word “virgin”, was a synonymous with Christian.

In section seven of Demonstration 6, Aphrahat advises, “Virgins who have betrothed your souls to Christ” to reply to any of the bnay qyama who want to live with them, “I am betrothed to a man who is king, and it is him to whom I am ministering. If I leave the ministry to him and I minister to you, then my betrothed will become angry with me, write a letter of divorce, and dismiss me from his house”.

Liber Graduum

The Liber Graduum is an anonymous collection of 30 memre (homilies), written as an instruction manual once thought to have been for a community of Syrian monks. The fount of Christian monasticism is always said to have been Egypt, the Church seeing the founder of monasticism as Anthony the Great, the first of the Egyptian, often solitary, monks. So a work more characteristic of Syriac speaking Mesopotamia is a novelty compared with the Egyptian species. But Robert Kitchen writes in The Development of the Status of Perfection in Early Syriac Asceticism with special reference to the Liber Graduum and Philoxenus of Mabbug (Dissertation, Oxford 1997) about the Liber Graduum’s author and community:

This is not a monastery and the author is not an abbot, and there is none of the language characteristic of later Syriac monasticism.

An enthusiast for Syriac Christianity writes on the web (Wikipedia, sv, “Sons of the Covenant” or qyama):

The first Christian impulses in the lands of the Euphrates and Tigris did not come from Hellenistic Christianity via Antioch but from Palestinian Jewish Christianity… these archaic conditions, which understood the qyama as the whole congregation of celibates who alone were admitted to baptism and sacramental life, were tenacious and were able to last for generations.

When they are being described, Syrian monks based their purpose and practice on the life and teachings of Christ, his apostles and his disciples, not on an intermediary. They lived among the people, Christians and non-Christians, keeping ascetic while interacting with the world about them. Although the author of Liber Graduum is aware of the bnay qyama, they hardly bear on the work. The word qyama appears only twice in it, both on the same page:

1. At first one forgets that he is a bar qyama and after a while one will forget that he should serve God, just as the Israelites forgot the mighty one who had saved them
2. The mature Christian (gemire) will eventually be able to teach various groups who were previously superior to him, parents, priests, and the qyama.

The Liber Graduum is an early work. Based on internal evidence, has been dated to the mid to late fourth century and was perhaps written in what is today northern Iraq. The internal evidence is:

1. reference to the ’Lesser Zab’, a tributary to the Tigris in a way that suggests familiarity with this small river by both the author and his audience
2. references to Christian persecution with which the author seemed to be contemporary, suggesting either the reign of Diocletian, or, if the reference to the Zab is in fact an indicator of location, the persecutions of Christians which happened in the Persian Empire under Shapur
3. comparison of the author of the Liber Graduum with Gregory Nazianzen, Basil of Caesarea, and Evagrius Ponticus by the Syriac editor. The editor could not have mentioned them before the late fourth century, when they flourished, so the author must have lived earlier.

The memre treat ascetical and theological subjects in various genres, though Kitchen sees perfection as the fundamental motif of the Liber Graduum—the recapturing of the pure state status of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The range of the memre are indicated by their titles, which are:

1. Author’s introduction
2. About those who want to become Perfect
3. The physical and spiritual ministry
4. On the vegetables for the sick
5. On the milk of the children
6. On those who are made Perfect and continue to grow
7. On the commandments of the Upright
8. On one who gives all he has to feed the poor
9. On Uprightness and the love of the Upright and the prophets
10. On fasting and the humility of body and soul
11. On the hearing of scripture when the law is read before us
12. On the hidden and public ministry of the church
13. By the same author on the ways of the Upright
14. On the Upright and the Perfect
15. On Adam’s marital desire
16. On how a person may surpass the major commandments
17. On the sufferings of our Lord who became through them an example for us
18. On the tears of prayer
19. On the discernment of the way of Perfection
20. On the difficult steps which are on the road of the City of our Lord
21. On the tree of Adam
22. On the judgments which do not save those who observe them
23. On Satan and Pharaoh and the Israelites
24. On repentance
25. On the voice of God and of Satan
26. On the second law which the Lord established for Adam
27. About the history of the thief who is saved
28. On the fact that the human soul is not identical with the blood
29. On the discipline of the body
30. On the commandments of faith and the love of the solitaries.

Writing in the midst of a pre-monastic religious community, it seems the author of the Liber Graduum saw his community as collapsing morally and spiritually. He tried to counter a decline in the standards and fervor among the Perfect. It is the reason and purpose of the book. As the community lost focus on the idea of the step by step journey the Book of Steps was written to remind them they were sliding deeper into decline. The first half of the collection presents a rule for both levels as the ideal to which they aspire. The second half contains a variety of materials, with the last six memre advocating the legitimacy of the Upright. He admonishes them for their slack behavior and spiritual laziness. They are talking the talk but not walking the walk:

We teach these others, but we do not teach ourselves… we talk about these (the apostles and earlier devout Christians), but do not act like them.

A source of puzzlement and confusion in the New Testament for Christians has been Jesus’s demands of discipleship that he put on them. He seemed to require some simply to believe in him to be saved, but to others, he seemed more demanding, speaking of renunciation of property and family. The Liber Graduum suggests that these differences occured because Christianity, in fact, had different degrees or levels of participation. These degrees came from the precursors of the Christians, the Essenes, and were largely lost in the transmission of belief west into the Roman empire. In Syria, though, there were plenty who were Palestinian and Babylonian Jews who knew much more of the beliefs of the Essenes which Jesus and John the Baptist had been trying to propagate in their anticipation of the End. The Qaraites, a Jewish Essenic sect lived in these parts, including Mesopotamiam for a thousand years before they died out.

The Six Degrees of Christianity

So, the original hierarchy of the Essenes seems to have been preserved in the early Christianity practiced in Syria. The people could aspire to one or other of the levels available depending on their commitment and devotion. They could still be an acceptable Christian, though at the lowest level, as long as they undertook to practice the principles which applied there, and could progress up the hierarchy, by proceeding stepwise as the book prescribes, or perhaps could remain content at the level comfortable for them.

The Liber Graduum points to the six levels of Christian commitment noted by Kitchen:

1. the “Sick”
2. the “Children”
3. the “Disciples of Faith”
4. the “Disciples of Love”.
5. the “Upright”, the “Righteous”, or the “Just” (kene)
6. the “Perfect” (gemire)

The distinction between the “Upright” and the “Perfect”, however, seem the most significant. The boundary between uprightness and perfection is the renunciation of the world and the adoption of celibacy. The two main divisions are identical to the two divisions in the later, supposed heresy of Bogomilism and Catharism, where they are called “Hearers”, a title once given to novices, and “Perfects”, and it seems a reflection of the division of the Essenes into the villagers and the devout.

The “Sick” are not physically sick, any more than they are in the gospels, properly understood. Indeed, the title reflects the parables of Jesus where sickness is used as a code for different levels of backsliding, and not, as professional Christians maintain, actual physical sicknesses. The Sick have issues to be dealt with—they need a cure, persuasion, tuition, convincing. They may have become skeptical of their adopted religion, may have been over critical of their brothers and sisters, judging them, condemning them, they may hsve been arguing heretically, causing moral or spiritual harm in their neighbors, instead of forgiving and patiently correcting them, as they would as an Upright or a Perfect.

The “Children” were infants in the faith, new to the experience of Christianity, enthusiastic converts perhaps but in need of instruction—catechumens or “Hearers”. Though “Children” was a junior status, it nevertheless implies acceptance into the community as “children of the Most High”, “children of the Father”, and so brothers and sisters—bnay or bar abba and bnat or bat abba, cf bnay qyama and bnat qyama, “Sons and Daughters of the Covenant”. Children were to resist any temptation to apostatize by remaining away from their previous friends, haunts and habits, lest they be drawn back to their pagan ways.

We hear of no sisterhood among the Essene monks, but their equivalents elsewhere, the Therapeutae, had orders of both sexes, and Essenes, if Jesus is one, explicitly called God their Father—He is the Father of all Jews, indeed all humans, once the Jewish God is universalized—so those in the community were all His “Children”, brothers and sisters, and evidently this had been formalized into a junior rank.

While the author of the Liber Graduum distinguished the Disciples of Faith and the Disciples of Love respectively from the Upright and the Perfect, the references to them are brief. Nominally, they sound almost like two factions, followers of Paul and followers of James and Peter, respectively Disciples of Faith and the Disciples of Love. Conceivably, it represents two tendencies in the Essenes which led to a split between Paul who was freed to teach faith ahead of love in the West, and James and Peter who remained orthodox, but in the East the two factions remained in uneasy partnership until Constantine settled the matter as far as Catholicism was concerned.

If Kitchen is correct in that there were just six ranks, it suggests also the Cathar belief that each of us has a maximum of six incarnations on earth before entering God’s kingdom. People were expected to progress through the ranks, if not in the present lifetime, then in a future one! The Persian magic number is seven, so the seventh level of perfection (heaven) is reached in the sixth incarnation.

The Upright and the Perfect

Each Christian worked within their community to decide their degree of understanding and how they should progress towards perfection, given that they can, and wish to improve. Particular attention is paid to the two main degrees, the “Upright” and the “Perfect”. The first nine memre focus on the Perfect and how the other degrees of commitment compare unfavorably with it. The community of the Liber Graduum had two sets of commandments, major and minor.

The Upright must fully obey Christ’s minor commandments, while the Perfect must obey his main ones. The author of Liber Graduum called the major commandments those “through which a man is made perfect”—those commandments which were given by our Lord and his apostles to the perfect and distinguishes them from the “vegetables and milk” of the Upright. So, in memre 14, the Upright distinguish good people from evil ones, and are compassionate to those who are evil, not vengeful. But the Perfect go further, they are humble, considering themselves as the least among their community. Whereas the Upright strived to be followers of Jesus, the Perfect, having given up their possessions, family, and even their wives, went as far as seeking to be angels on Earth. It is precisely what the Essenes of the Qumran Scrolls were trying to be.

To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also—pray for him and be perfect. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. If anyone takes your coat by force, let him have your cloak as well. Love him who hates you, bless him who curses you, pray for the man who harms you and persecutes you.

In memre 19, “on the explanation of the way of perfection”, a series of biblical commandments, “The perfect road is this” “…” “but the path that leads you away from it is this” “…”. Examples are:

The perfect road is this: “men do not marry wives, and women who are not married to husbands will be like the angels and will not be able to die” (cf Mt 22:30). “And he who has not left his wife and sons and his family and everything which he has on earth is not worthy of me” (cf Mt 10:37). But the path that leads away from it is this: “What God has joined together you are not to put asunder” (cf Mt 19:6).

The perfect road is this: “A virgin who is not married to a husband and a man who does not marry a wife please the Lord in body and spirit; but those who enter into marriage please him in their turn”. But the path that leads you away from that is this: “Marriage, he says, is honorable and their marriage bed is pure” (Heb 13:4).

While the “Upright” (“Righteous” or “Just”) are lay people, married, work, earn money, may own property and have possessions, and engage in business and trade, but must use their wealth charitably in the town or village where they live, the Perfect have renounced all such attachments and spend their lives as “itinerant preachers” to instruct by example less perfect Christians than themselves. So, the Upright feed the hungry, clothe the naked and ransom the oppressed, provide for the physical needs of the Perfect, because they can afford to. Perfects take up their cross and follow their Lord to serve him, surrender all their possessions once and for all to the needy and oppressed, do not labor, wander, remain chaste and celibate, and mediate conflicts, loving all men, and perpetually praying for them. “The righteous will have an inheritance on this side of the City of the Perfect—the Perfect will be with Our Lord in Eden and Jerusalem above, because they have imitated him. (Liber Graduum, memre 14:2)”

Again, this sounds closely parallel to the division of the Essenes into the Separated Ones, the Essene “monks” living mainly in isolated “camps” like Qumran, and the ordinary village Essenes who interacted in everyday life with the ordinary Jews, and had carefully compiled methods of doing so without pollution. The title “the Just”, as in James the Just, the so-called Brother of the Lord who was the leader of the Jerusalem Church, after the crucifixion, seems to have been an Essene title, as we have noted elsewhere on these pages. Here, three centuries later, it is a title among primitive Syrian Christians, but a title which applies to the equivalent of village Essenes. Perhaps it always denoted an execeptionally worthy villager in the sect.

The critical duties of the Perfect is celibacy and renunciation of the world, but as this is not a monastic community isolated from the town, the Perfect have to renounce the world whilst in public view. The Upright, though committed to gospel principles, do not wish to be celibate and renounce their marriages. It seems, the decision to be Upright is made by those unwilling or unable to live a Perfect life, but the decision to progress is possible, though apparently rare. In the case of the later Cathars who had a similar system of “Perfects” and “Hearers”, the Hearer could undertake the consolamentum and become a Perfect.

The Perfect and the bnay qyama of Aphrahat have notable similarities. Kitchen writes:

In the pre-monastic period, the bnay/bnat qyama are the elite ascetic group, living within the community. The characteristics and duties attached to them are closely analogous to the profile of the Perfect in the Liber Graduum. Both groups require celibacy, embrace poverty, and transcend the limits of traditional spiritual discipline. Teaching and prayer are their primary vocations.

Both are a celibate, spiritual elite within their communities whose celibacy is at least partially inspired by idea that angels neither marry nor are given in marriage. But, though the author of Liber Graduum is aware of the bnay qyama, he does not identify them with the Perfect. One important difference between the sons of the covenant and the “Perfects” is their attitude toward and participation in the world. The latter seem to be much more other worldly than Aphrahat’s group of spiritual elites, who, while they may be celibate, are still more actively involved in the affairs of everyday life.

Philoxenos, Later Development

A century and a half later, in the sixth century, Philoxenos used the same terms for a much changed ecclesiastical and social situation. The Upright and Perfect ones are described in similar terms to the Liber Graduum, though Philoxenos makes no mention of the earlier work. But the setting now is not the village of the Liber Graduum, but a monastery, in which everyon has withdrawn from the world, and are celibate. Notionally, at least, sex is not a choice any more. Eating is!

Philoxenos emends the Upright/Perfect dichotomy into a continuum applicable to his audience. For a young monk to enter the monastery, he is already of the Upright, the practical community of believing Christians. So, he enters as an Upright one, and now has the duty to progress towards the state of Perfection. Philoxenos begins his instruction on the ascetical life with the Evagrian fundamentals of faith, simplicity, and the fear of God, which had been given as a solid basis for anyone in the Christian faith.

In the context of monastic life, the monk had to renounce the world. Philoxenos has no need to instruct the novices to “depart from the world”. They had done it, but many may not have spiritually renounced it, lingering over memories of family and marriage, rather than dwelling spiritually in the kingdom of heaven or the Garden of Eden.

It seemed then that the degrees of Christianity traceable to the Essenes transmuted into monastics and laypeople, and so they remained. But the Bogomils surprisingly emerged in the tenth century with many of the characteristics described here, degrees of ‘Perfects’ and “Hearers”, but with an even stronger dualist background. The influence of Persian religion, the Qaraite sect of Judaism in Persia, and the Christian remnants of Essenism seemed to have allowed a form of primitive Christianity to survive in some remote region of Turkey or Armenia to emerge again as a Protestant sect with immense appeal to disappointed Christians across Europe, before the Catholic Church bloodily destroyed them. More about the Bogomils, Cathari and Paulinians can be had at Christian Heresy.

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