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"Working the Earth of the Heart": The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to AD 431. By COLUMBA STEWART, O.S.B. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. x + 340 pp. $79.00.
Messalianism, so called from a Syriac term for "those who pray," was, like Priscillianism on the opposite end of the Mediterranean, a spiritual movement that threatened the mainstream of the fourth-century church. Messalians seem to have believed that the divine must be felt and that intense spiritual experience can issue in Christian perfection. This emphasis on experience threatened constituted church authority, especially by its indifference toward the sacraments. Messalians also seem to have referred to themselves as "Christians" with the implication that the term applied only to them. We know about the Messalians through a series of condemnations of their alleged teachings and through a remarkable corpus of works apparently composed by one of their number and surviving under the name of Macarius of Egypt,...