The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius Scholasticus - Coptic ...

ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY: BOOK I 7
afraid to assault the faith like an enemy, since it was forti¢ed by so many
holy Fathers and he had been deprived of much of his force while besieging
it, still like a thief he pursued the deed, devising anew certain questions
and answers and in a novel fashion bringing the errant towards
Judaism, 11 not comprehending ^ the wretch ^ the reverse that would
come from there as well: for what he previously held as his only adversary
he now cherished and embraced, and not so that in his arrogance he
might dislodge the entirety but that he might manage to counterfeit
even one word. 12 While frequently grovelling in his own wickedness he
the Church when the good are £ourishing, creates Manichaeism as the enemy of the Church;
Gregory of Antioch, On the Baptism of Christ ii.10 (PG 88, col. 1881): the Devil stitches
together pretexts to destroy the peace of the Church.
Arius’ heresy was servile since he argued that Christ was merely an instrument of God.
11 It was common to castigate Christological opponents of Nicene orthodoxy as Judaizers,
on the grounds that, as Subordinationists, they recognized God the Father but failed to
pay proper honour to God the Son: e.g. Socrates ii.19; Theodoret, EH i.4.5. For Nestorius as
a Jew, see Evagrius i.2; Koptische Akten 52^4; Severus, Letters 25, pp. 233, 236^7; 31, p. 264;
Life of Sabas 38, p. 128.6^8; further references in Allen,Evagrius 75 n. 9. For Chalcedonians
as the new Jews: Athanasius, Life of Severus, p. 680; Severus, Letter i.60, p. 184. Nestorians
used the same accusation against their opponents: Barhadbeshabba 21, p. 533; 22, p. 535;
27, p. 564.
12 This has been described by Festugie' re as an extraordinarily di⁄cult passage. Two
main issues have to be resolved, the identity of Satan’s former adversary whom he now embraces,
and the word which is counterfeited. One possibility is to identify the word as homoousios
(‘consubstantial’) which by the addition of a single letter became the rival formula
homoiousios (‘of similar substance’): this is the view of BEL 256 n. 2, and by implication
Allen, Evagrius 75^6. In this case the former adversary would be the Arians, or neo-
Arians, but the last sentence of the chapter explicitly envisages that the Devil’s initiative
will be covered in Evagrius’ narrative, which does not apply to the homoiousian dispute.
Festugie' re adopts a more complex solution (201 n. 5): the former adversary is the word
homoousios, and he translates ‘The word which previously he regarded as pre-eminently his
enemy’. The Devil embraced this term because of its ambivalence, since, if Christ was completely
consubstantial with God, He could not also be consubstantial with mankind: this
dilemma led either to the position of Nestorius, where the consubstantiality of Christ and
God was compromised, or to that of Eutyches where that of Christ and mankind was
denied. For Festugie' re, the counterfeited word refers forward to the Chalcedonian^
Monophysite dispute which was produced by the Devil’s acceptance of the principle of consubstantiality.
This solution is certainly preferable, since the chapter has a clear chronological
progression: the Nicene disputes with Arians and neo-Arians have already been resolved
by the Council of Constantinople, after which the Devil has to look around for a new device
to undermine the Church; he picks on Nestorius, whose heresy inspired the disputes which
culminated in Chalcedon.