Syriac Liber Graduum

[DL82]

Is anyone here familiar with the Liber Graduum, or Book of Steps? It’s a 4th century Syriac Christian guidebook, which is richly grounded in gospel texts as well as other apocryphal early Christian writing on the life of Christ our Lord.

The counsels it gives seem largely good ones, though the strict division between the ‘Upright’ and the ‘Perfect’ seems excessive. It’s not quite a division between laity and clergy, though there are clearly echoes of that. The problem is not that the Liber counts the perfect better, but that it seems to say that the Upright will not really inherit the same kind of paradise as the Perfect.

I know the Eastern Church doesn’t accept the conception of Purgatory advanced by the West, but the Liber has opened my mind to another possibility in Eastern Christianity, that of multiple heavens and hells. The Liber seems to suggest that even those in eternal torment will be more or less tormented depending on how they have lived, which is different to the conception of hell in the West, where the absence of any light from God’s presence is the ultimate torment, to which it is hard to imagine anything other than God making it better, nor anything really making it worse.

Does the Eastern Church teach that there are different heavens and different hells? Are these different levels fixed at death, or do some climb from lower to higher heavens? Will the joy of those in the lower heavens be less than perfect? Am I missing something here?

 

[jimmy]

Is anyone here familiar with the Liber Graduum, or Book of Steps? It’s a 4th century Syriac Christian guidebook, which is richly grounded in gospel texts as well as other apocryphal early Christian writing on the life of Christ our Lord.

The counsels it gives seem largely good ones, though the strict division between the ‘Upright’ and the ‘Perfect’ seems excessive. It’s not quite a division between laity and clergy, though there are clearly echoes of that. The problem is not that the Liber counts the perfect better, but that it seems to say that the Upright will not really inherit the same kind of paradise as the Perfect.

I know the Eastern Church doesn’t accept the conception of Purgatory advanced by the West, but the Liber has opened my mind to another possibility in Eastern Christianity, that of multiple heavens and hells. The Liber seems to suggest that even those in eternal torment will be more or less tormented depending on how they have lived, which is different to the conception of hell in the West, where the absence of any light from God’s presence is the ultimate torment, to which it is hard to imagine anything other than God making it better, nor anything really making it worse.

Does the Eastern Church teach that there are different heavens and different hells? Are these different levels fixed at death, or do some climb from lower to higher heavens? Will the joy of those in the lower heavens be less than perfect? Am I missing something here?

I don’t know much about the Liber Graduum. I only know what I have read of it from other books. The ancient Syriac’s had their own form of asceticism called the bnay qyama, the Sons of the Covenant. Rather than monastics like the Egyptian desert produced they had a form which was more integrated with the Church. They were generally laymen. They would take vows of virginity and poverty but they tended to be much more associated with the church. The liber graduum also speaks of ascetics who would basically live in the open air and beg for food and were pretty much naked. This is probably what you mean by ‘the perfect’. There are many distinctions that the Syriacs had which might not be acceptable from a modern perspective. For example, I think some may have limited the Sacraments to those who had taken the vows of the bnay qyama. Now that I think of it I might recall them being refered to as the perfect.

I don’t know about the idea of seperate heavens. I haven’t heard of it. Regarding progression I know that the Byzantines view it from the perspective of Theosis. From their perspective there is continual progression. We will never be completely united with the divine nature. I am not sure what the Syriac perspective on this is. Syriac theology is rather tough to study since there are so few Syriac theologians.

 

[Formosus]

To my knowledge, both the western and eastern churches have always understood that there are different levels of reward or punishment within heaven or hell.

The Liber (IMO) isn’t really differientiating between clergy and laity because a cleric might still be only upright since most clerics still have property, and in the east are married and most of their charitable acts would follow those of the upright that the author lists. This is really talking more about proto-monasticism of some kind(monasticism didn’t reach the area till after the work was written) where the perfect is the one who abandons all he has to Christ in a litteraly and metaphorical sense. Thats my impression but I am only on Memra 11. This book definetely hits my favorites list as far as books go.