Messalianism

The Euchites or Messalians were a sect first mentioned in the 370s by Ephrem the Syrian, and Epiphanius, and Jerome., and first condemned as heretical in a synod of 383 AD (Side, Pamphylia), whose was referred by Photius. From Mesopotamia they spread to Asia Minor and Thrace. The name 'Messalian' comes from the Syriac ܡܨܠܝܢܐ, mṣallyānā, meaning 'one who prays'. The Greek translation is εὐχίτης, euchitēs, meaning the same.

Modern scholarship has questioned, though, whether a coherent heretical movement existed behind these condemnations, and has emphasised instead the friction in the Eastern Church caused by Messalianism's 'ascetical practices and imagistic language far more characteristic of Syriac Christianity than of the imperial Church centred on Constantinople'.

The condemnation of the sect by St John Damascene and Timothy, priest of Constantinople, expressed the view that the sect espoused a sort of mystical materialism. The sect's teaching asserted that:

Messalians taught that once a person experienced the essence of God they were freed from moral obligations or ecclesiastical discipline. They had male and female teachers whom they honored more than the clergy, the "perfecti".

They are mentioned in the works of Photius, Patriarch Atticus (406–425), Theodotus of Antioch and Sisinnius. Their critics accused them of incest, cannibalism and "debauchery" (in Armenia their name came to mean "filthy") but scholars reject these claims.

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