A Marked Absence: Pneumatic Abandonment as Desert Hermeneutic

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which the Letters of Ammonas, John Cassian’s Conference IV, and the corpus of Macarius-Symeon appropriate and develop the motif of divine abandonment found in St. Antony and shifts it into a distinctly pneumatological key through Scriptural exegesis. Correcting a misconception popularized by Vladimir Lossky, this paper argues for a normative experience of divine abandonment in the Eastern Christian tradition via sustained engagement with the experience of those practitioners of desert spirituality. Engaging with the hermeneutics of Hans Georg Gadamer and following the previously established trajectories of Douglas Burton-Christie, I argue that the desert fathers, despite initial hesitation and eventual qualification, accepted the reality of pneumatic abandonment due to the interlocking pressures of Scripture and monastic experience. The paper concludes with some implications for contemporary pneumatological discussions by drawing critical parallels between the pneumatological tradition of the desert and the contemporary pneumatic doctrine of Ephraim Radner. Radner is affirmed in his insistence on individual pneumatic abandonment but is critically questioned regarding his articulation of the pneumatic abandonment of the Church through the vantage of Macarius-Symeon’s stabilized pneumatology.

1. Introduction

And when the roofs darken, when the stars drift

until they shatter on the sea’s finish,

you will know what I told you is true

when I said abandonment is beautiful.

(Reece 2004, p. 1, “Portifino”)

“For many, though, the idea of pneumatic abandonment, at least as a characterization of what God does in an almost expected way, is anathema” (Radner 2022). This assessment by Ephraim Radner on the current reception of the idea of pneumatic abandonment seems a true enough summary of the concept’s status in modern theology. Even the great Vladimir Lossky, certainly no slave to public opinion, more or less rejected the idea as untraditional in the East:

Just because it is light grace, the source of revelation, cannot remain within us unperceived. We are incapable of not being aware of God, if our nature is in proper spiritual health … Dryness is a state of illness which must not last; it is never thought of by the mystical and ascetical writers of the Eastern tradition as a necessary and normal stage in union. It is but an accident on the way, frequent indeed, but always a peril.

(Lossky 1957, pp. 225–26)

For Lossky, remaining unaware of God’s presence is neither necessary nor normal. Lossky ties this necessity of the felt experience of grace in the mature soul not merely to an optimistic Eastern “mood,” but to a particular pneumatology, such that “the two traditions [East and West] have separated on a mysterious doctrinal point, relating to the Holy Spirit, who is the source of holiness” (Lossky 1957, pp. 226–27). For Lossky, Eastern pneumatology is the reason why the Eastern Church has resisted St. John of the Cross and the Western tradition of abandonment and dryness.

Since the publication of these remarks in The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, there have been a number of learned rejoinders to Lossky’s historical claims, showing evidence for a tradition of normative divine abandonment in Eastern Christianity (See, for instance, Hausherr 1946; Hart 2003; Anderson 2020). What is less frequently addressed, however, is the pneumatological motivation for Lossky’s claim. In this paper, I hope to contribute toward addressing this aspect of Lossky’s concern by tracing the theme of the Holy Spirit’s absence through three of the most pneumatically reflective and articulate voices of the desert tradition—Ammonas, John Cassian, and Macarius-Symeon. Continuing in the lines established by Douglas Burton-Christie (Burton-Christie 1993), I will argue that this tradition is ultimately born out of an engagement with Scripture itself, read against the experience of the spiritual life of the desert. First, this paper will survey the Antonine witness to divine abandonment through the lens of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of experience, followed by the pneumatological and Scriptural developments of Ammonas, John Cassian, and Macarius-Symeon. While I date Macarius-Symeon slightly earlier than John Cassian (as I will discuss below), I have structured the paper as placing Cassian before Macarius-Symeon in order to highlight both the continuity of Cassian with Ammonas and to emphasize the quite different voice and perspective Macarius-Symeon brings to the tradition. The paper will conclude with a last return to Ephraim Radner, whose words opened this essay, and a note on the contributions of desert pneumatology to contemporary pneumatological discourse.

2. The Horizon of the Desert: Anthony’s Abandonment

“Hermeneutic work is based on a polarity of familiarity and strangeness … It is in the play between the traditionary text’s strangeness and familiarity to us, between being a historically intended, distanced object and belonging to a tradition. The true locus of hermeneutics is this in-between” (Gadamer 2004, p. 295; italics original). No reading happens from nowhere. According to Gadamer, hermeneutics presupposes a tradition, a common experience with the text, such that “the most basic of all hermeneutic preconditions remains one’s own fore-understanding, which comes from being concerned with the same subject” (Gadamer 2004, p. 294). When we turn to the desert, we encounter a community shaped by common experiences articulated by Scripture, but also by founding, paradigmatic figures; the discoverers of “a new alphabet of the heart” (Brown 1988, p. 229). As Burton-Christie notes, by becoming themselves an embodiment of the text, “the holy person became a new text and a new object of interpretation” (Burton-Christie 1993, p. 20). Thus, in the desert, the experience of particular holy people becomes both extensions of the interpreted text and patterns for non-identical repetition in the lives of those who follow them—their fellow monks (see Pickstock 2013). In the person of the Abba or Amma, the horizons of experience, tradition, and text all converge. And the greatest of these figures for the early desert, of course, was Antony, Antony the Great.

Antony, as we now know, was not the first ascetic, but he quickly took on a mythic, paradigmatic quality. It was around him, St. Athanasius famously said, that “the desert was made a city by monks” (Athanasius, Life of Antony, §14; Migne 1857–1866a; Gregg 1980, pp. 42–43). Aside from a handful of scattered references, early Antonine material roughly falls into three categories: the material in the Apophthegmata Patrum, the Vita of Athanasius, and the Letters (See Rubenson 1995, pp. 12–13). Though there is a long history of scholarly disagreement about the trustworthiness of Athanasius’s Vita, Samuel Rubenson has convincingly drawn out the broad compatibility between the Antony of the Letters and the Antony of the Vita (Rubenson 1995, pp. 126–44). Both sources constitute part of the one Antonine legacy remembered by history.

Particularly significant for our purposes is Antony’s divine abandonment, recorded in the Vita. After enduring substantial physical assault from demons while living among the tombs of the desert, eventually the Lord comes to Antony’s aid in a vision of light and dispels the demons. Antony then proceeds to have a conversation with the vision:

Antony entreated the vision that appeared, saying, ‘Where were you? Why didn’t you appear in the beginning, so that you could stop my distresses?’ And a voice came to him: ‘I was here (ὧδε ἤμην), Antony, but I waited to watch your struggle. And now, since you persevered and were not defeated, I will be your helper forever, and I will make you famous everywhere.’

(Athanasius, Life of Antony, §10; Gregg 1980, p. 39)

Antony’s experience here is strikingly paradoxical. While Antony’s experience is very much one of divine abandonment, it is revealed that Antony’s abandonment is offset and located within the greater reality of God’s presence. Yet in the divine patience God’s presence, the vision of light, is hidden from Antony for a time for the sake of testing: “I waited to see what you will do”. Antony’s reward is that the testing of divine abandonment will not occur again.

As E. Bartzis notes in his close reading of the passage, Antony surprisingly does not cite Scripture in the episode of his abandonment, and God’s reply “I was here” (Ἀντώνιε, ὧδε ἤμην) does not have any obvious Scripture parallels (Bartzis 2021, pp. 140–41). While Bartzis points to possible parallels in Origen’s theology of martyrdom, the fact remains that Antony’s experience seems to stand somewhat alone as a tradition-defining experience (Bartzis 2021, pp. 140–44). In many ways, Antony’s experience would become normative for the later desert tradition. But, as Gadamer again reminds us, “If we thus regard experience in terms of result, we have ignored the fact that experience is a process” (Gadamer 2004, p. 347). Rather than giving the last word on divine abandonment, Antony opens up this particular process of experience for the desert readers of the Scriptures. Some, such as Evagrius, will follow in Antony’s footsteps in charting five causes for abandonment without reference to the Spirit (see, e.g., his Gnostikos 28). And where we might most expect to find the integration of pneumatology with divine abandonment, Ps. 50/1:11, we find an Evagrian silence in his extant scholia on the Psalms (see Rondeau 2021). But his immediate disciple, Ammonas, will develop this experience in other, pneumatological, ways.

3. Merging Horizons: Ammonas, the Spirit, and the Scriptures

Now we turn to Ammonas, Antony’s disciple (See McNary-Zak 2010, pp. 18–22). The extant writings of Ammonas consist of eight Letters, the four Instructions, the sayings “To Novices,” the Exhortations, and two additional fragments, in addition to the fairly sizable body of teachings recorded in the Lives and Sayings (Kmosko 1915; Nau 1915; McNary-Zak 2010, p. 9). While the Letters were at one time attributed to Antony, the attribution of the Exhortations and Instructions were never in question (McNary-Zak 2010, pp. 18, 22). Except for the Letters, the rough chronology of the writings is uncertain, but we can, perhaps, discern a strong thematic development throughout the Ammonean corpus.

As David Brakke has noted, in Ammonas’s writings, we have a window into the historical process of “an ascetic master adapting his teaching to changing circumstances” (Brakke 2001, p. 32). Ammonas is consciously writing from the tradition of the Christian Scriptures and more narrowly the Antonine tradition of the desert, to the lived experience of a particular community. Thus, as Burton-Christie notes, readers such as Ammonas were not consciously innovating. Instead,

What was new and distinct in the desert hermeneutic was the peculiar combination of the locus of the desert and the questions that arose within the ascetical life there. The questions were shaped by the particular demands of the life; in turn these questions affected the hermeneutic, both in its substance and its form.

(Burton-Christie 1993, p. 61)

In Ammonas, like in other desert readers, ascetical application takes on a central role in interpretation—an application forged from what Gadamer describes as the “fusion” of horizons of past and future which occurs in understanding, that fusion which we call application (Gadamer 2004, pp. 304–6). For Ammonas, Scripture is always and already involved in living dialectic with the spiritual experience of the practicing, ascetic community.

As we approach Ammonas as Scriptural reader, we note first his natural disposition toward pneumatic optimism. While the Spirit is not mentioned in either Ammonas’s Exhortations or Instructions, the Exhortations in particular are marked by the recurring theme of divine presence. Each of the nineteen exhortations (except for Ex. XVIII) begin “keep yourself scrupulously”. Following the introduction of the theme of presence in Ex. VII, Ex. VIII, X, and XIV-XVI, all immediately follow this initial refrain with some affirmation of the perpetual divine presence.1

Ammonas uses these exhortations to ground his ethics of “fear and trembling” (Ex. VII), giving his monks a theological justification for obedience and readiness (Ex. VIII-XV) as well as a sure and certain ground for hope in God supplying their daily needs (Ex. XVI). For Ammonas, the motivation for the monastic life is tied up with the theological conviction of God’s constant presence. To in any way undermine the immediacy of divine presence, from the perspective of this text, is to undermine the monastic vocation as a whole.

This makes our turn to Ammonas’s letters all the more striking, where he does wrestle with just such an overturning. Like the rest of Ammonas’s corpus, the Letters begin with speaking generically of “God,” rather than specifically of the Spirit, although, by Letter II, we have the introduction of the “Guardian” which expels the enemy from the soul (Chitty 1979, p. 2). It is not until Letter VIII that we find explicit references to the “Holy Spirit,” who will come to the upright who ask (Chitty 1979, p. 9). Here Ammonas’s theology of presence is grounded specifically in the Spirit, which will become very important in the next letter for opening up otherwise unforeseen Scriptural avenues when trouble arises.

In Letter VIII, Ammonas had prayed that the community would “grow up in emulation of me” and so receive the Spirit such that “heavenly joy will overtake you” (Chitty 1979, pp. 8–9). But Letter IX jarringly begins in crisis: “I know that you are in travail of heart” (Chitty 1979, p. 10). It is in Letter IX that we find the surprising development of Ammonas’s theology of presence. Ammonas’s community, it seems, has encountered a state of trial and demonic warfare, hithertofore unaccountable in Ammonas’s theology. Faced with the lived reality of his community, Ammonas nuances his account of divine presence to accommodate the community’s experience of divine absence:

You must know how, in the beginning of the spiritual life, the Holy Spirit gives people joy when He sees their hearts becoming pure. But after the Spirit has given them joy and sweetness, He then departs and leaves them. This is a sign of His activity and happens with every soul that seeks and fears God: He departs and keeps at a distance until He knows whether they will go on seeking him or not.

(Chitty 1979, pp. 11–12)2

The Spirit’s departure, surprisingly, is not a sign of the community’s sin or wrongdoing; it is in fact a “sign of His activity” and “happens with every soul that seeks and fears God”, all for the purpose of testing. Just as God’s presence inspires “fear”, so now His absence tests that fear. According to Ammonas, the soul being thus tried has two options. One can either “sit in their heaviness without moving” or they can beseech God “with tears and fasting” for the joy they had at first (Chitty 1979, p. 12). If those being tested persevere in their prayer for renewed joy, “God in His grace will give them a greater joy than the first, and establish them more firmly” (Chitty 1979, p. 12). This central insight of pneumatic abandonment as testing introduced in Letter IX is only heightened and expanded in the following letters, never contradicted.

Why does Ammonas provide the seemingly uncharacteristic answer that he does? Perhaps one reason has to do with the new Scriptural associations opened up to interpretation through the lens of the Spirit. In articulating a theological rationale for the experience of his community, Ammonas cites Scripture side by side with St. Antony, thus reading the two together: “For Abba Antony used to say to us: ‘No man will be able to enter into the kingdom of God without troubles’” (Ep. XIII; Chitty 1979, p. 11). In Letter IX, Ammonas seems to form his theology of divine abandonment by fitting the Antonine paradigm into the interpretive mold of Ps. 50(/1; hereafter, Ps. 50). Speaking of the presence of the Holy Spirit along with subsequent dryness naturally calls to mind Ps. 50:11—“Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me”. Reference to the restoration of “joy” further resonates with Ps. 50:8 and Ps. 50:12- “Let me hear of joy and gladness” and “Restore to me the joy of your salvation”. And the appropriate response of “tears and fasting” of course echoes the tone of the whole Psalm: “the sacrifice of a broken spirit/a broken and contrite heart O God you will not despise” (Ps. 50:17). These connections are only strengthened by the prominent role of the psalms in desert spirituality, providing the “background against which all other work was undertaken” (Dysinger 2005, p. 49).

If we are right to see echoes of Psalm 50 here in Ammonas, the implications are quite striking. Ammonas is turning to the Scriptures not to find prooftexts, but to find normative patterns against which to read monastic experience, even if the horizon of the text and the horizon of the monk merge in surprising ways. The horizon of Ammonas’ community is very different from the initial setting of Ps. 50, a psalm of David written in the aftermath of his affair with Bathsheba and subsequent murder of Uriah. Yet the pneumatic deprivation the psalm envisions is being used here by Ammonas to ground the pneumatic abandonment of his community, a pneumatic abandonment not directly caused by a particular sin. That Ammonas uses this psalm here to speak to the situation at hand shows his willingness and creativity in merging the horizon of the text with the horizon of his community.

But Ps. 50 is not the only Scriptural justification Ammonas uses to ground pneumatic abandonment. As Ammonas continues to deepen his initial pneumatic doctrine, he increasingly relies on the temptation narratives in the Gospels: “So when our Lord was incarnate and made in all things an example for us, when for our instruction in righteousness He was baptized and the Spirit came upon Him in the form of a dove, then the Spirit led Him up into the wilderness to delivered Him to Satan to be tempted, and Satan had no strength against Him” (Ep. XIII; Chitty 1979, p. 19). Just as Christ had to be led into the wilderness by the Spirit to endure temptation, so also the soul must be led by the Spirit into their own wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

For Ammonas, the soul’s being led into the wilderness by the Spirit for temptation necessarily entails a corresponding abandonment by the Spirit. Beginning with Antony, it becomes an axiom of the desert that sin/Satan and the Spirit cannot occupy the same psychic space. “For the Spirit” says Antony, “enters not the soul of one whose heart is defiled, nor the body that sins; a holy power it is, free from all deceit” (Antony, Letter IV; Garitte 1995; Migne 1857–1866b; Chitty 1975, p. 12). Ammonas fully adopts this principle: “For that Spirit comes not to any soul but only to those which are perfectly cleansed of the passions; for it is holy and cannot enter into an unclean soul” (Ammonas, Ep. XIII; Chitty 1979, p. 18). Ammonas takes this principle so far, in fact, as to postulate a third, intermediate pneumatic principle, “the spirit of penitence,” which prepares the way for the Holy Spirit: “The spirit of penitence has overshadowed them, it calls them and washes them from all their uncleanness and cleans them perfectly, and then it offers them to the Holy Spirit, and He ceases not to pour upon them fragrance and sweetness” (Ep. XIII; Chitty 1979, p. 18).

For Ammonas, then, to be handed over to Satan, to enter into the horizon of Christ’s temptation, entails a doctrine of pneumatic abandonment. But this pneumatic abandonment never occurs chaotically or without reason, but always under the direction of the Spirit: “You know that trial does not come upon a man unless he has received the Spirit; and once he has received the Spirit he is handed over to Satan to be tried. But who hands him over? The Spirit of God. For it is impossible for Satan to try a faithful man unless God delivers him to be tried” (Ep. XIII; Chitty 1979, p. 19). For Ammonas, pneumatic abandonment paradoxically becomes the very sign of having received the Spirit. But why? What exactly is the Spirit up to in leaving the soul? These are the questions that would occupy John Cassian.

4. Horizontal Understanding: John Cassian and Pneumatic Pedagogy

If Ammonas provided a pneumatological grammar for articulating divine abandonment, Cassian provided a rationale. In Conference IV, Abba Daniel presents a sophisticated doctrine of pneumological abandonment which neatly ties together several threads of Ammonas’s account. After a brief introductory narrative establishing Abba Daniel’s ascetic credentials, the conference begins with the experience of pneumatic abandonment: Cassian and Germanus ask why prayer can go from being full of “unspeakable joy” to being filled with “anguish and a certain irrational sadness” and all this “with no apparent cause” (nullis existentibus causis) (IV.II; Pichery 1955; Ramsey 1997, pp. 155–56).

Abba Daniel provides three possible explanations which have been “handed down”: personal negligence, the attack of the devil, or “as the Lord’s design and trial” (IV. III. Ramsey 1997, p. 156). The first two causes Abba Daniel evidently treats as self-evident, but the third prompts a more in-depth treatment. “The Lord’s design and trial,” Abba Daniel begins, has two purposes:

First, so that by being forsaken by the Lord for a short while and humbly seeing the frailty of our spirit, we may not become proud because of any previous purity of heart which has been granted by his visitation; … The second reason for this trial is to put to the proof our perseverance and steadfastness of mind and our desire, and also to manifest in us with what yearning of heart and earnestness of prayer we must look for the visitation of the Holy Spirit when he has left us.

(IV.IV.1–2; Ramsey 1997, p. 156)

The Lord’s design and trial, then, has the double aspect of increasing humility and manifesting resolve in the ascetic. Here, we note, Abba Daniel has seamlessly transitioned from speaking about being forsaken and visited by “the Lord” (Domino) in the first purpose of trial to being forsaken and visited by the “Holy Spirit” (Sancti Spiritus) in the second.

The motivation for this shift from “Lord” to “Holy Spirit” appears to have a dogmatic rather than directly Scriptural motivation. On Cassian’s interpretation, none of the subsequent Scripture citations in the conference directly refer to the Spirit. As Thomas Humphries has recently shown however, Cassian possesses a very developed pneumatology which unites his Christology and ascetic theology under the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as index of God’s presence (Humphries 2013; see Cassian, De Incan. 2.6.4-5.). Thus, while references to Christ do not appear as an explicit hermeneutical key to the experience of pneumatic abandonment as they do for Ammonas and (as we will see) for Macarius-Symeon, Christology is nonetheless in the background, influencing Cassian’s pneumatology.

Having sketched the theological basis of his answer, Abba Daniel turns to Scripture to defend it, citing David (Psalm 118/9), Job, the Book of Judges, and St. Paul (1 Cor. 10:13; Gal. 5:17), all deployed in order to show God’s good purpose in pneumatic abandonment in order to lead the soul into deeper dependence. In deploying these texts, Cassian coordinates the first and second reasons of the Lord’s testing, humility, and manifestation around the theme of divine pedagogy. In particular, Cassian draws special attention to Psalm 118/9:8: “do not forsake me utterly”. Appealing to the Greek of the LXX, Cassian glosses this verse: do not forsake me to “an excessive degree” (IV.VI.2; Ramsey 1997, p. 58). Cassian stresses the measured, pedagogical character of pneumatic abandonment. Just as the pagan nations were left within the borders of Israel in order to “instruct” (erudiret) them, so the Pauline battle between flesh and spirit functions as “provoking and compelling us to a better condition” (IV.VI.1-VII.2; Ramsey 1997, pp. 157–59). The rest of the conference is then spent further defining and clarifying this central conflict between flesh and spirit, now allowed to play itself out in the absence of direct pneumatological intervention. If the Lord left Antony in order to “see what [he] would do,” the Spirit leaves Cassian in order to instruct him. For Cassian, testing fits within the wider framework of instruction.

In Cassian’s concern with “too much” abandonment, we find a sort of pneumatic stabilization anchored in the goodness and pedagogy of God toward the health of the soul. Here, rather than playing an experientially descriptive role, Scripture bounds monastic experience. By the time we reach Cassian, we obtain a sense of Gadamer’s insight that “all experience is experience of human finitude” (Gadamer 2004, p. 351). What Gadamer describes in hermeneutics as the quality of experience to continually open us to further experience, to our own lack of control over the perpetually receding horizon of reality, Cassian makes central in his articulation of pneumatological abandonment. Pneumatic abandonment is that experience which crowns all experience, which, in a special way, opens us pedagogically to the ways of God to men, and in some sense, it is the experience which allows for the merging of our horizon with the horizon of Scripture in a newfound humility. It is in the experience of pneumatic abandonment that we are able to read the Pauline dichotomy of spirit and flesh, which perpetually drives our spirit to the Holy Spirit in utter dependance.

By tying pneumatic abandonment to the Pauline struggle of flesh and spirit, Cassian has regularized pneumatic abandonment, and in some sense has even made it the form of the Christian life. But such a trajectory calls into question the Spirit’s seal (Eph. 1:13), not to mention the relevance or dependability of the sacraments of the Church. Even as Cassian seeks to maintain pneumatic stability through divine pedagogy, his very normalization of the process calls this very stabilization into question. This is the concern driving Macarius-Symeon’s anti-Messalian, ecclesial pneumatology, and it is to this that we now turn.

5. The Horizon of the Church: Macarius-Symeon on Pneumatic Stability

Like Cassian, Macarius-Symeon (hereafter simply “Macarius”) recreates and builds upon Ammonas’s concerns, albeit in a different context. As previously noted, Macarius slightly predates Cassian, being at the latest a contemporary of Gregory of Nyssa (Plested 2004, pp. 51–54). It is now generally agreed that Macarius hails from Syria, rather than the Egyptian desert, and it is not at all apparent that the author himself intended the pseudonymous connection to the Antonine tradition, given the lack of internal allusion to Egypt or the key figures of the desert (Plested 2004, p. 14). Yet the traditional Macarian attribution invites the reader into this sort of cross-reading, and comparisons with Evagrius in particular are quite common (Plested 2004, pp. 59–72).

Whether from the Egyptian desert or the Syrian milieu, Macarius is exposed to pneumatic abandonment. Aphrahat, for instance, in Demonstration 6.17, speaks at length about the regular departure of the Spirit to facilitate temptation by Satan, suggesting that this theme was at least present at one point in the Syriac world (Wright 1869). Initially, however, we might be skeptical about the possibility of finding pneumatic abandonment in Macarius himself. Like Ammonas, his natural disposition is to stress the Spirit’s presence, rather than absence: “the soul that believes in God and has been freed of the sordidness of sin is lifted through death out of the life of darkness once the soul has accepted the light of the Holy Spirit as its life. By that means it has come to life and spends its life in the Spirit forever after, because it is now held captive by the divine light” (Macarius II.1.7; Dörries et al. 1964; Maloney 1992, p. 41). For Macarius, the presence of the Holy Spirit is necessary, since Christ, the Charioteer, guides the soul “with the reigns of the Spirit” (II.1.3; Maloney 1992, p. 38), and the end of the Christian life is to “participate in the light of the Holy Spirit by becoming his throne and habitation” (II.1.2; Maloney 1992, p. 37). In the absence of the Spirit, it would seem, the soul would be deprived of both the means and the end of the Christian life.

Yet, like Ammonas, Macarius does end up affirming a normative experience of something resembling pneumatic abandonment. In Homily 27.20 of Collection II, Macarius, arguing for the necessity of effort in the Christian life, notes the following:

What we say is this, that the man who hears the word comes to compunction, and after that, grace (χάριτος) purposely withdraws, for the man’s good, and he enters into training and the discipline of battle, and engages in a struggle and contest with Satan, and only after a long race and contest carries off the prizes of victory, and becomes a Christian.

(II.27.20; Mason 1921, p. 211)

We can tell that Macarius is here referring to the same Antonine experience of abandonment which we have been examining, and it is clear from the immediately preceding context of 27.19 that Macarius is using Holy Spirit and grace somewhat interchangeably: “Is [the heart] the temple of Satan or the temple of the Holy Spirit … with what treasure is your heart filled: grace (χάριτος) or Satan?” (II.27.19; Maloney 1992, p. 182). According to the monastic logic previously encountered, the soul can be indwelt either by Satan or the Spirit, but not both. Like Ammonas before him, Macarius seems to view the withdrawal of grace as the pneumatic abandonment of the temptation narrative following Jesus’s baptism, where the Spirit leads the soul into a time of temptation.

And yet, as Macarius seems to realize, engaging the temptation narrative for discussions of pneumatic abandonment poses its own challenges. In John’s Gospel, the Spirit not only descends on Jesus at baptism but “remained on him” (Jn. 1:32), and if John is read together with the Synoptics, it would seem to imply that the Spirit who leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted does so precisely by his abiding presence. Also, then, for Macarius, grace both withdraws for the sake of temptation, yet seems to nonetheless abide: “Christians possess a glory and beauty and an indescribable heavenly richness that come to them with hard work and sweat, acquired in times of temptations and in many trials. All of this must be ascribed to divine grace” (II.5.5; Maloney 1992, p. 65). How are we to make sense of this tension between the presence and absence of grace?

In tracing this tension, it is essential to note that while Macarius reads the experience of the withdrawal of grace through the lens of the tradition of pneumatic abandonment, the fact remains that Macarius speaks of “grace” rather than “Spirit” withdrawing from the soul, suggesting that Macarius may want to distance himself from some of the theological implications of pneumatic abandonment, all the while affirming its experiential reality. This, very likely, has to do with Macarius’ relationship with the Messalians.

We know of the Messalians only through their adversaries, and it is difficult if not impossible to define a Messalian schema of doctrine (Plested 2004, p. 23). Relevant to our purposes, among a long list of propositions, the orthodox party condemns the Messalians for denying the efficacy of the sacraments (Plested 2004, p. 24). It is clear that Pseudo-Macarius shares certain features and imagery with the condemned Messalian propositions recorded by Timothy of Constantinople and John of Damascus, but he also opposes supposedly Messalian doctrine on a number of points, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in his baptismal theology (Plested 2004, p. 17).

According to Macarius, through baptism believers “attain to the measure of the first Adam and become master of demons and passions” (III.1.2.12; Desprez 1980, pp. 76–77); they receive the betrothal pledge (ἀρραβῶνα) of their future inheritance (III.28.3.7; Desprez 1980, pp. 336–37). The one who has been baptized has the perfect talent (τάλαντον τέλειον) (III.28.3.15-16; Desprez 1980, pp. 338–39). Yet, Macarius adds, the one who does not work is imperfect (ἀτελὴς) and will be deprived of their talent (III.28.3.16-17; Desprez 1980, pp. 338–39). Desprez is correct in noting that for Macarius, “Le baptême est ressenti essentiellement comme le début d’un progress vers la perfection,” rather than its completion (Desprez 1988, p. 155). To play with Macarius’ metaphor, the betrothal gift is fully given in baptism, but the marriage can still be called off if the soul fails to make the appropriate preparations.

While Desprez argued that Macarius’ understanding of baptism is purely spiritual (Desprez 1988, p. 153), as opposed to sacramental and ecclesial, such a reading appears unjustified in the light of Collection I (see the contrary reading in Plested 2004, pp. 38–42). Logos 52, for instance, claims that “God gave his Holy Spirit to the holy and catholic Church even to be joined to the holy altar and the holy waters of baptism” and that “from baptism and the altar and the eucharistic bread and all the mysteries of the worship of the Church faithful hearts may be energized by the Holy Spirit”.(I.52.1.4; Desprez and Dunaev 2015, p. 628). For Macarius, then, baptism by water unites the soul in a betrothal to Christ and grants the soul the ἀρραβῶνα of the Holy Spirit (Cf. Eph. 1:13-14). Against the Messalians, Macarius strongly affirms the efficacy of the baptismal gift through reception of the “perfect talent,” while also emphasizing the necessity of ascetic struggle.

Given Macarius’s baptismal theology, we see how the tradition of testing and pedagogical pneumatic abandonment might undercut the anti-Messalian thrust of his argument. While Macarius does reference this tradition, he significantly underplays the phenomena and locates it within a wider, ecclesial, and sacramental narrative of pneumatic stability. In one particularly telling passage, Macarius explains pneumatic abandonment through the deeper reality of the abiding presence of grace, and it is thus worth quoting in full:

Grace, indeed, is unceasingly present and is rooted in us and mingled with our nature from our earliest years. It is as something natural and real which adheres to a person as though it formed one substance. Still, it operates in a person in various ways, depending on one’s cooperation as far as this is given.

At times the fire flares out and burns with more vehement flames. At other times it burns more gently and slowly. The light that it gives off flames up at times and shines more brightly. At other times it goes down and barely gives off any light. So it is also with the lamp of grace. It is always burning and giving off light, but when it is especially trimmed, it burns more brilliantly as though intoxicated by the love of God. But again, by a certain dispensation of God, the light is still there but it barely shines.

(II.8.2; Maloney 1992, p. 81)

Pneumatic abandonment, it seems, occurs within the wider reality of the unceasing presence of grace so intimate that it forms one substance with nature. The experience of pneumatic abandonment can be explained in terms of a failure to feel or consciously experience the Spirit’s presence, but it decidedly is not an indication of the Spirit’s absence in any metaphysical or ontological sense, for the flame of grace is sometimes vehement, other times gentle and slow. Elsewhere, in fact, Macarius will provide a theological grounding for this vision of grace in Christology. Grace has this double aspect of hiddenness and revelation because the Lord himself has two aspects, two faces (δυσὶ προσώποις): “in his stigmata and in the glory of his light,” in cross and transfiguration (III.3.3.2; Desprez 1980, p. 90). And, just so, the soul is “transformed from glory to glory even as by the Spirit of the Lord” as it contemplates and progresses according to each “face” or aspect (III.3.3.2; Desprez 1980, p. 90). While, like Ammonas, Macarius does ground pneumatic abandonment in the temptation narrative as we have seen, he, in turn, grounds the temptation narrative in the whole horizon of Jesus’s life, both the cross and the transfiguration, all guided by the Spirit. For Macarius, pneumatological abandonment is just one step along the road to union with Christ, and thus to theosis.

Thus, while Ammonas uses Scripture to define the experience of pneumatic abandonment, and Cassian uses Scripture to bound this experience, Macarius, in some sense, sets Scripture over and against the experience of pneumatic abandonment through the horizon of the whole gospel narrative. While Macarius affirms the experience of the temptation narrative and pneumatic abandonment (albeit in his qualified way), he sets against it the sacramental efficacy of baptism and the wider horizon of the whole sweep of Jesus’s life and the divinized end of the Christian. For Macarius, we might say, the ever-increasing experience of finitude through pneumatic abandonment must be seen only in light of its paradoxical corollary of ever-increasing pneumatic proximity. It is precisely in encountering its finitude as the cross of Christ that the soul is prepared to receive anew the Spirit’s transfiguring light.

6. Conclusions

Thus far, we have charted the ways in which the desert tradition has developed the Antonine paradigm of divine abandonment in a pneumatological direction, at least partially, in response to the pressure of the Scriptural horizon. We have also seen how Macarius simultaneously resonates with the key themes and motifs of this tradition, while also quietly anchoring the experience in baptism and reorienting its hermeneutic force toward transfiguration and the cross, rather than the temptation narrative. It is precisely because the Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, the light of the world who died in darkness, that, contra Lossky, the Spirit’s very presence and work in the Christian can, at times, be absent to the point of complete hiddenness. And this, too, is grace.

But if we are to be faithful to the desert hermeneutic of Scripture and the prior tradition, part of our task of reading and understanding these pneumatologies is the task of application, of the meeting of the desert horizon with our own horizons in a post-schism Church. According to Ephraim Radner, one of the few contemporary theologians continuing this line of reasoning, the post-schism Church must countenance the reality of both individual and corporate pneumatic abandonment. If the Church continues to pray “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me,” surely this must be a reality. And if it is an individual reality, could it not also apply to a wider context, to the Church herself? If the Spirit at one time abandoned Israel (Cf. Is. 63:10), Radner reasons, we ought to countenance that this pneumatic abandonment “is figurally prophetic of Christian Israel too, just because of its participation in the larger christic form that allows for the initial figural transposition of the two Testaments” (Radner 1999, p. 382). In pneumatic abandonment, both Israel and the Church point to and participate in the form of the wounded body of Christ on the cross.

Radner, in advocating the reality of individual pneumatic abandonment, stands in strong continuity with the tradition of the desert we have examined. However, as Radner turns to countenance the pneumatic abandonment of the Church, he may fall afoul of the concerns of Macarius. If the objective presence of the Holy Spirit in the sacramental life of the Church grounds and renders intelligible the subjective experience of individual pneumatological abandonment, what greater objective reality could ground the pneumatic abandonment of the Church herself? Where is the Spirit if not in the Church? Although Radner is too wise and subtle a theologian not to have considered these questions, the fact remains that the desert in general and Macarius in particular exerts its pressure against the main lineaments of his ecclesial thesis, calling for further dialogue and reflection. As the desert tradition reveals, the absence of the Spirit can only be understood as itself the manifestation of the Spirit’s faithful presence in the Church, leading Christians into becoming “one spirit with Him” (1 Cor. 6:17). Perhaps Radner himself summarizes this tradition best: “Although abandonment by the Holy Spirit is real; it is also, or can be also, a mark of the deepest place of God’s self-giving to us” (Radner 2022).