Jan-Eric Steppa, John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian Culture. Piscataway, NY: Gorgias Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvii + 199. Paperback, $ 45.00. ISBN 1-931956-09-X.
Cornelia B.
Horn
University of St. Thomas
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
TEI XML encoding by
html2TEI.xsl
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
January 2003
Vol. 6, No. 1
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv6n1prhorn
Cornelia B. HORN
Jan-Eric Steppa, John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian Culture. Piscataway, NY: Gorgias Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvii + 199. Paperback, $ 45.00. ISBN 1-931956-09-X.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol6/HV6N1PRHorn.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2003
vol 6
issue 1
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Chalcedon
John Rufus
Jan-Eric Steppa
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
[1] As the
first volume in its new dissertation series “Gorgias
Dissertations: Early Christian Studies,” advertised on
the book cover as “Ancient Christian Studies,”
Gorgias Press published this past summer a recent dissertation,
defended in Sweden in April 2001. In the study, entitled
John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian
Culture, the author, Jan-Eric Steppa, refines the work he
began as a master’s thesis on anti-Chalcedonian
hagiography in a Syro-Palestinian setting. While the second
half of both works show the same structure, the Ph.D.
dissertation as a whole is a more comprehensive study,
involving the cultural aspects of this literature. Given such a
first in a new series, the present review will comment on both
Steppa’s immediate work and on the achievements and
shortcomings of Gorgias Press’s new series.
[2] Steppa
introduces his study with a brief review of models, constructed
by Bacht, Frend, and more recently by Roldanus, that intend to
explain the resistance of the ascetic community in Palestine to
the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451). While Steppa sees kernels
of truth in the claim that the motives of loyalty to the
Alexandrian Patriarch, ascetic authority, and monastic
involvement in ecclesiastical affairs were driving forces for
the monks, he otherwise dismisses those earlier attempts as
insufficient and intends to provide an improved model with the
present study. Briefly discussing his methodological background
in more general terms and along the lines of Averil Cameron and
Patricia Cox, he understands the nature of biography and
hagiographical writing as an interplay between fiction and
history. Consequently, he isolates the three
“hagiographic themes” of “the idea of the
holy man, the rhetorical power of miracles and visions, and the
representation of heresy” as “the characteristic
features” of the works of John Rufus, insofar as those
are extant. It is Steppa’s proposition that a discussion
of those themes allows one to find the motivating force for
anti-Chalcedonian monks in Palestine. Steppa also claims that
it was the unique characteristic of anti-Chalcedonians to have
“conce[ived] of the world as the arena of a cosmological
war between God and the evil powers of the material
world” (p. xxxv). However, the mere reference to the Book
of Daniel or Revelation suffices to caution such claims.
[3] The main
body of the book consists of five chapters, entitled “The
Stage of Resistance,” “The Texts,” “The
Images of Authority,” “Signs and
Revelations,” and “The Image of the Enemies.”
The first two chapters, filling roughly the first half of the
book, provide background information regarding the
chronological development of the stages of the controversy as
well as a presentation of aspects of John Rufus’s life
and works. The second half of the study is a discussion of
specific motives in Rufus’s works, which according to
Steppa constitute key features of anti-Chalcedonian cultural
identity. The reader would welcome a definition in the early
part of the book of what exactly constitutes that concept of
“culture” which Steppa assumes and references (p.
166). Without a definition of terms, claims can be taken into
any direction without control. His main interest appears to be
the “world vision” of anti-Chalcedonians. Yet the
attainment and proper understanding of such a “world
vision” is not feasible without a consideration of the
concrete material manifestations and social conditions and
relations that shaped people’s lives. Occasionally, the
book touches on socio-historical aspects, e.g., in the attempt
to identify an anti-Chalcedonian, ascetic attitude towards work
(pp. 104-105). Yet such adventures remain fragmentary and
unrepresentative, since they are neither comprehensive nor
balanced. For example, in his discussion of this ascetic
attitude towards work Steppa neither mentions nor considers
Rufus’s choice of the ascetic models of Melania and
Pinianus and their embrace and appreciation of work as
essential to the life of a [future] anti-Chalcedonian ascetic,
namely Peter the Iberian himself (Life of Peter the
Iberian 28-29).
[4] The five
chapters of the study can conveniently be divided into three
parts. The first part, ch. 1, is a discussion of the setting of
the events in time, space, and ideological framework, treating
“the events in Palestine immediately after the Council of
Chalcedon in 451,” anti-Chalcedonian asceticism in Gaza,
Egypt as haven of orthodoxy and the “birthplace of
monasticism,” and two fields of tension, one being that
between ascetic retreat versus active community involvement,
the other being that between the radical choice for orthodoxy
and the willingness to compromise if necessary. While creating
a new synthesis and presentation from earlier studies of the
same source material, Steppa points to significant elements in
the overall picture that have not yet received sufficient
attention, e.g., the concern for the preservation of
Trinitarian orthodoxy as a driving motive for
anti-Chalcedonians in their opposition to Chalcedon. The
discussion is strong in presenting the influence of Egyptian
monasticism on anti-Chalcedonian ascetics in Palestine.
Throughout, the book successfully details parallels between
John Rufus’s works and the Life of Antony. It is
regrettable that the study leaves out a consideration of the
relevance and impact of Basilian ascetic ideas, which are
clearly reflected in the primary texts, even in the ones quoted
in the study itself (e.g., p. 94).
[5] With a
wealth of detail, in the second part of the study Steppa
assembles in ch. 2 a picture of John Rufus as author. He also
provides basic information concerning Rufus’s extant
works. Since Rufus’s authorship of the three works
discussed, i.e., the Life of Peter the Iberian, the
Commemoration of the Death of Theodosius, and the
Plerophories, is not unanimously held in modern-day
scholarship (e.g., Orlandi), at least an acknowledgement of
those dissenting views would have been in place. The somewhat
negligent treatment of facts, e.g., Peter the Iberian dying in
489 AD on p. 58 and in 491 AD on p. 61, raise doubt as to the
ultimate reliability of the overall picture of Rufus’s
life and work presented in this chapter.
[6] In the
third part of the study, chs. 3, 4, and 5, roughly the second
half of the book, Steppa turns to a detailed discussion of the
above mentioned “hagiographical themes.” The first
theme, with which he deals in ch. 3, is that of the
anti-Chalcedonian holy man. Steppa sees him (or her) as a mere
instrument in the hand of God, who in turn works with
“absolute initiative” (p. 100). Consequently, the
claim is formulated that this feature of non-negotiable
instrumentality is the distinctive moment, characterizing the
anti-Chalcedonian holy man as virtuous model for respective
ascetics in Palestine. In the course of his discussion, Steppa
suggests the matrix of the four images of the holy man as
model, intercessor, prophetic witness, and extraordinary sign
as typical of Eastern monastic hagiography and usefully applies
the first three to the evidence found in Rufus’s texts.
His own discussion of extreme forms of asceticism in the case
of Heliodorus should also be counted as in incident of
“extraordinary sign,” thus widening the relevance
of this category beyond the scope he assigns to it (p. 85). The
wider audience will benefit from Steppa’s valuable
attempt at contrasting the program of correlating orthodoxy
with asceticism found in John Rufus with that of Cyril of
Scythopolis. While Rufus’s ascetics in renouncing the
civilized world are drawn to the disorder of the wilderness,
Cyril’s holy desert dwellers in fact are portrayed as
preferring the order of the civilized world. Moreover, while
Rufus appears to locate much of ascetic authority in personal
charisma and “individual progress” made “on
the path of asceticism,” for Cyril attainment of truth
turns out to be a result of “obedience to the
ecclesiastical hierarchy” (p. 111).
[7] In the
discussion of the second theme, i.e., of frequent visions and
miracles employed in the presumably cosmological struggle,
which constitutes ch. 4, Steppa plays off against one another
the two functions which are fulfilled by visions and miracles
in Rufus’s works, significantly more prominent in the
Plerophories than in the Life of Peter the
Iberian, namely that they work as “express
confirmations of God’s verdict against the Chalcedonian
bishops rather than as rhetorical markers of the virtuous
qualities of the saintly protagonists.” Given the
centrality of the Plerophories in this regard, a
discussion of the concept “plerophoriae” and its
use either as noun or in derived forms in verbs, adverbs, and
the like, would have been helpful. A glance into Lampe’s
Patristic Lexicon provides sufficient references that
allow for a comparative study between Rufus’s and other
early Christian authors’ use of the term, thus allowing
the researcher to sharpen or relativize any distinctly
anti-Chalcedonian connotations of its usage. Particularly in
this chapter, Steppa recounts chains of events, taken from the
stories in Rufus’s works, a feature of the study which is
helpful for those researchers who are not be able to consult
the Syriac text or the French translation of the
Plerophories directly. Not infrequently these stories
are left to speak for themselves, without clear guidance for
the reader as to what exactly the connecting moments or
important aspects of a given piece are, other than being
incidents of a “vision” predicting the horrors of
Chalcedon. Again, a distortion of details in the summaries of
individual scenes (e.g., p. 128, the church referred to in
Plerophories 11 is the Church of the Ascension; pp. 131
and 138, Syriac dukto [Plerophories 41 and 38] means
“place,” not “road”) calls into
question the soundness of the conclusions drawn on the basis of
such abbreviated presentations. Rufus’s construction of a
connection between Peter the Iberian and Peter of Alexandria
also intends to join the leader of ascetics in Palestine with
the famous leader of the Church in Egypt, as Steppa points out.
For Rufus, there is evidence of a connection between the Monk
Romanus and Peter the Iberian and more prominently between
Theodosius of Jerusalem and the Apostle James (p. 136, fn. 58).
Yet beyond Steppa’s reading, one should notice that
ultimately this evidence points to Rufus’s overall
preference for connecting significant leaders with one another
and ideally with apostolic authorities in order to be able to
lay claim to that apostolic foundation of the faith of
anti-Chalcedonians. In that case, retrospectively, the
important connecting moment between Peter the Iberian and Peter
of Alexandria (beyond the latter’s prominent role as
martyr, which opens up yet another field of reference and
influence) is their common apostolic namesake. In the end, one
may disagree with Steppa’s evaluation of Rufus’s
application of the label “holy man.” Instead of
seeing that character of the anti-Chalcedonian “holy
man” “fade into the background and join a diverse
group of protagonists that includes venerable ascetics, simple
priests and deacons, intellectuals, and women” (p. 141),
one may be inclined to reason in the other direction and
acknowledge that in Rufus’s assessment, everyone who
holds on to the true faith becomes a “holy man or
woman,” and therefore is appropriately labelled as such
throughout the text (e.g., Plerophories 35: “the
holy woman Eliana”; Plerophories 44: “the
holy bishop Epiphanius”; Plerophories 45:
“holy ones, old Cilician monks”; or also in clear
contrast, Plerophories 56: “the unholy
Juvenal”).
[8] The
third theme, the image of the enemy as heretic, forms the
subject matter of the final chapter. Having established and
documented that the rules of hagiography require the heretic as
a counter-figure to the holy man, Steppa goes into greater
depth when discussing the perception of Chalcedon as an
anti-Trinitarian heresy in the eyes of anti-Chalcedonians, as
well as their refusal to participate in common eucharistic
services as the accepted means of separation from heresy. Both
of these are important moments in the development of
anti-Chalcedonian self-understanding, which Steppa rightly
acknowledges. Yet he does not take the time to discuss the
significance of such convictions and actions in their impact on
ecclesiastical identity. What is needed is more detailed
investigation and reflection concerning those earliest stages
in the process of establishing a separate anti-Chalcedonian
Church. To describe the notion of heresy through recourse to
the image of disease is certainly a possibilty; but the only
concrete example from Rufus’s works cited in the text
(Plerophoriae 80 discussed at p. 158) does not bear out
any such claim. The woman’s illness is not described or
suggested as in any way linked to her prior forced attendance
at the Chalcedonian liturgy. Rather the accompanying
circumstances of her illness, presumably delirium, seem to be
used to link her backwards with previous events, but are not
caused by them.
[9] In his
conclusion, Steppa locates the doctrinal dimension of
Rufus’s theological worldview within the parameters of
anti-Chalcedonianism as it was defined by the thought of
Severus of Antioch and studied by Lebon. His final comments
that future researchers could fruitfully pursue the
intellectual, social, liturgical, and ecclesiological
dimensions of the controversies can only be seconded.
[10] One
finds contradictions in the study, e.g., seemingly at-random
choices between a translation derived from Raabe’s German
translation and attempts at a closer reading of the Syriac
text, the language in which Rufus’s works are exclusively
preserved, (e.g., p. 2, citation of Life of Peter the
Iberian 52, where one should read “circumcised”
instead of “excommunicated,” versus an attempt
later on [p. 100] to draw out more fully and in sharper
contours the portrait of the “enemy,” and thus
employing the actual meaning of the Syriac word). Such
inconsistencies between the translation and the understanding
of the original text reveal the lack of a coherently developed
picture of events and characterizations attempted in this
study.
[11] A
major point of critique with Steppa’s overall approach to
the subject matter rests with his lack of accounting for the
literary chronology of Rufus’s opera and its
implications. He mixes quotes from those three works that can
reasonably be attributed to Rufus into a largely
undifferentiated amalgamate (except for an afterthought briefly
on pp. 121-122). Thus he fails to take into account with
sufficient clarity and rigor the discernible historical
development of the literary production of Rufus’s work.
Clearly, the Life of Peter the Iberian as arguably the
first one of his works does not feature holy men, i.e.,
most obviously Peter the Iberian, as “having no
importance of their own as human beings in the world” (p.
xxxvi). Steppa himself provides the counterexample from the
Life of Peter the Iberian 19 (pp. 119-120, with
misleading cross-references in the footnotes), identifying
Peter’s vision of Christ as a monk as an illustration of
“the theological idea of the constant interplay between
God’s will and the holy man’s own initiative”
(p. 120). Thus an awareness of, and a more nuanced approach to,
the different stages of Rufus’s writing career would have
helped to better elucidate the impact of the role of the author
in the construction of what is potentially an anti-Chalcedonian
Weltanschauung.
[12]
Steppa’s discussion presupposes a relationship between
hagiography, history, and truth. Following Cameron and Cox, he
suggests that the truth claim in this relationship was
expressed by the construction of a historical narrative which
was primarily and almost exclusively intended to construct
communal identity. With an emphasis on deconstructionist
analysis, the question to what extent the “play”
between history and fiction ever emphasized the side of
“history” is not discussed. While a lot can be
gained from studying Rufus as a hagiographer, such an approach
is far from sufficient. Although any historian, no matter how
hard she or he tries, ultimately will admit that the
historiographical product is and cannot be free from
ideological concerns, in order to be fully understood,
Rufus’s work does need to be appreciated as
historiography, a perspective not pursued by Steppa.
[13]
Steppa’s bibliography reflects a selectively adequate
approach to literature on asceticism and hagiography in the
context of Chalcedonian / anti-Chalcedonian struggles in the
larger Syro-Palestinian milieu. Yet his choices are
unnecessarily restrictive and fail to allow him to engage in
discussion with current scholarship on asceticism in the Gaza
area (e.g., Jennifer Hevelone-Harper, “Letters to the
Great Old Man: Monks, laity, and spiritual authority in
sixth-century Gaza [Palestine],” Ph.D. thesis, Princeton
University, 2000), contemporary monastic violence in Palestine
(e.g., the final chapter in John Michael Gaddis, “There
is no crime for those who have Christ: Religious violence in
the Christian Roman Empire,” Ph.D. thesis, Princeton
University, 1999), or even, more pertinently, studies of
key-figures of the Palestinian anti-Chalcedonian milieu (e.g.,
Kathleen M. Hay, “Evolution of resistance: Peter the
Iberian, itinerant bishop,” in: Prayer and
Spirituality in the Early Church , pp. 159-168; or Cornelia
B. Horn, “Beyond theology: The career of Peter the
Iberian in the Christological controversies of fifth-century
Palestine,” Ph.D. thesis, The Catholic University of
America, 2001). Given that so much rests on the discussion of
the correlation between charismatic authority of the ascetic
versus ecclesiastical or institutional authority, one wonders
why none of these respective studies is consulted in order to
set the anti-Chalcedonian version à la Rufus into its
proper context. Insofar as an object of research is to be
defined appropriately both by reference to the quality of its
inner core and by the extension of its outer borders, one also
would expect some discussion of those ascetics who switched
their allegiance in the course of the historical development of
the controversy. Michael Kohlbacher’s on-going work on
Markianos of Bethlehem (e.g., in Studia Patristica 29)
would be an excellent starting point for such investigations.
Overall, the book reflects the background and influence of
selected voices of the “holy man” discussion. It
lacks a more detailed study of the primary texts, e.g.,
tracking down Scriptural allusions, which would have helped in
coming to a fuller understanding of the meaning of rhetorical
and literary choices in the inner-textual context.
[14] At
first glance, the overall text layout on the page and the
design on the front cover of the series are pleasing. The
expensive price for a paperback is to be explained by the
limited circulation that is to be expected for such specialized
studies. At second glance, however, glaring errors in the text
distort the picture. Omissions of complete citations of works
at their first occurrence in the text (e.g., xxxv), reversal of
date and place of publication in bibliographic entries (p.
176), misspellings of the names of ancient authors
(“Isodore” on p. 176), misspelled foreign names (p.
178), and other such mistakes and oversights fall within the
proper framework of proofreading a Ph.D. thesis for
publication. The admittedly demanding task of proofreading and
editing such works includes avoiding, e.g., inconsistencies in
choice of italics or styles of punctuation, typographical
errors (e.g., for the last three items pp. xiii-xiv and 139),
mixing of lower case and upper case layout in headlines (p.
xv), repetitions of complete sentences within the text (p. 76),
wrong word choices (throughout, e.g., p. 140), sentence
fragments (e.g., pp. 140 and 150), or completely misleading
cross-references (e.g., p. 120, fn. 18; p. 126, fn. 33). To
have available a dissertation series in the field of Eastern
Christian or Syriac studies, which has a quick turn-over is
certainly useful in the short run. Yet the desirability of such
a series will only be proven in the long run if the overall
quality of the manuscript preparation and book production
increases significantly.
[15]
Overall Steppa’s study is useful, not least because it
raises issues that need to be pursued in future, in-depth
research. It accomplishes valuable work by sifting monastic
literature for examples that illuminate the concepts of
“holy man,” “ascetic attitudes towards
visions and dreams,” and “conceptions of the
heretic.” Steppa has beneficially applied those concepts
with their attributes and specifications in ascetic literature
to Rufus’s works and it is to be hoped that his research
in this direction will continue and deepen. The book
contributes to the study of Palestinian asceticism by
highlighting the significance of ideological constructions of
communal identity. Yet while the author has “brought into
some light” what he perceives to be “specific
characteristics of anti-Chalcedonian culture,” how
“characteristic” they ultimately are remains to be
seen. If his claim that “John Rufus’ works
uncover[.] a world vision that is focused on the notion of the
absolute initiative of God, whereas the holy men are reduced to
[being] merely instruments for God’s announcement of his
judgement upon Chalcedon” (p. xxxv) needed no
modification, then anti-Chalcedonian identity, as created on
paper by Rufus, would have quite a bit in common with both Old
Testament prophecy and Radical Reformers, and thus would not be
so “specific[ally] characteristic[.]” afterall.