Evagrius Ponticus: Ascetical Theory (2024)

William, S.J. Harmless

In the 360s and 370s, intellectuals from around the empire began to take notice of Egypt. Athanasius's Life of Antony had sparked their attention, but word of mouth also played a part. Pilgrims to the Holy Land made side trips to the desert, as Rufinus and Melania the Elder had, and broadcast what they saw. A steady stream of works—the letters of Jerome, the translations of Rufinus, travelogues such as the History of the Monks of Egypt and Egeria's Pilgrimage—would help spread the word among the educated across the empire.

Some intellectuals came and stayed. Gruff, cantankerous Abba Arsenius was one of those. He had once moved in the most cultured circles in the empire and had even served for a time as tutor of the emperor's sons. Yet he placed himself at the feet of Coptic peasants. Someone once asked him, “Abba Arsenius, how is it that you with such a good Latin and Greek education, ask this peasant about your thoughts?” He answered, “I have indeed been taught Latin and Greek, but I do not even know the alphabet of this peasant.”1 Intellectuals like Arsenius realized that these often illiterate Egyptian peasants had discovered a new alphabet, the subtle inner lettering of the human heart. In the desert, the monks had made the human heart their text. Intellectuals among the monks would begin to take things a step further. They would devote their skills in Greek and Latin letters and begin recording, distilling, systematizing, and popularizing these new discoveries of the human heart.

One day, another brother came to Arsenius. He, like Arsenius, was a foreigner and, like Arsenius, had come to question the worth of his fine learning: “How is it that we, with all our education and our wide knowledge get nowhere, while these Egyptian peasants acquire so many virtues?” It was a question that the elite around the empire found themselves asking. Augustine, moments before his dramatic conversion in the garden in Milan, had asked himself the exact same question. Arsenius's answer was telling: “We indeed get nothing from our secular education, but these Egyptian peasants acquire the virtues by hard work.” In the Alphabetical Collection, Arsenius's interrogator is unnamed. But in the Systematic Collection, his name is given: Evagrius Ponticus.2

Until the 1950s, Evagrius was a name little known, even in scholarly circles. Those familiar with the condemnation of Origen by the Council of Constantinople II in 553 would have recognized Evagrius's name as one of those it condemned as an Origenist. Early in the twentieth century, a quiet but remarkable reclamation of his writings began to occur. Some were rediscovered, buried in little-known Syriac and Armenian manuscripts. Other texts were discovered to have been disguised and passed on under the name of such venerable figures as Nilus of Ancyra. Meanwhile, scholars realized that John Cassian, whose writings profoundly shaped medieval Benedictine spirituality, had drawn heavily from Evagrius. Cassian never acknowledged his borrowings or even mentioned Evagrius's name, but the ideas are everywhere. Even church fathers who condemned Evagrius, such as Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century, were discovered to be deeply in his debt. Scholars began to realize that Evagrius was “one of the most important names in the history of spirituality, one of those that not only marked a decisive turning-point, but called forth a real spiritual mutation”3 “he is the almost absolute ruler of the entire Syriac and Byzantine mystical theology, andhas influenced in a decisive manner Western ascetical and mystical teaching as well.”4

Even ordinary Christians unfamiliar with Evagrius's name are familiar with his famous catalogue of human vices: the so-called seven deadly sins—though he calls them “thoughts,” not sins, and has eight, not seven. Evagrius had learned from the great Egyptian masters how to read this new alphabet of the human heart. With his Greek literary and philosophical training, he was able to translate and transform Coptic spirituality for the Greek-speaking world, systematizing its insights into a gemlike brilliance. He would become the first great theoretician of the spiritual life.

The Desert Calligrapher

Much of what we know about the life of Evagrius comes from Palladius's Lausiac History. Palladius was a devoted disciple and extolled Evagrius as fearlessly as he did his other persecuted friend, John Chrysostom. While Palladius's account provides the basic framework, it can be confirmed and filled out from details in Evagrius's own writings as well from notices in the ancient historians Socrates, Sozomen, and Gennadius.5

Evagrius was born in Ibora in the province of Pontus, near the Black Sea, in what is today northern Turkey (for a map, see figure 10.1; for a chronological outline, see table 10.1). His father was a country bishop (chorepiscopos). In his teens, Evagrius was ordained lector by one of the pioneers of the monastic movement, Basil of Caesarea. In the 370s, he followed Basil's friend, Gregory of Nazianzus, to Constantinople.6 Evagrius always felt great affection for Gregory and in later years spoke of him as “Gregory the Just, the one who planted me,” and as “a deep wellspringthe mouthpiece of Christ.”7 In Constantinople, Evagrius served as Gregory's archdeacon and helped man the front lines of the debate on the Trinity before and at the Council of Constantinople in 381. He was an important voice in the Nicene cause, “one most skillful in confuting all the heresies,” as Palladius puts it.8 The accuracy of this assessment has become clear with the discovery that a famous letter probing subtle aspects of Trinitarian doctrine, a letter long attributed to Basil, was in fact composed by Evagrius.9

Evagrius stayed on in Constantinople after Gregory's abrupt resignation and served his successor, Nectarius. Not long after this, Evagrius fell in love with an upper-class woman, the wife of a high imperial official. Apparently the risk of scandal was great, and, as Palladius notes, a sexual scandal would have risked the fragile hegemony of the Nicene cause in the capital city. Evagrius decided to break off the affair, but the woman was “by now eager and frantic.”10 One night he had an ominous dream. He imagined himself under military arrest, standing in chains and an iron collar. Suddenly an angel appeared and compelled him to swear on the book of the Gospels that he would leave town. When he awoke, he decided to fulfill the oath he swore in the dream vision and caught the first available ship to Jerusalem.

There in Jerusalem, he met Melania the Elder and Rufinus and their circle. As we saw, their monastic community at the Mount of Olives was a remarkable intellectual center, one that introduced the Latin-speaking world to Eastern currents in both monasticism (e.g., Pachomius) and theology (e.g., Origen). There Evagrius's health took a bad turn. He reportedly suffered a six-month-long fever that left him emaciated. Various doctors were unable to diagnose his problem. So Melania took him in and challenged him: “Son, I am not pleased with your long sickness. Tell me what is in your mind, for your sickness is not beyond God's aid.” Evagrius apparently confessed what had happened to him in Constantinople. She got him to promise to adopt the monastic life, and she promised to pray for his healing. He recovered quickly. According to Palladius, he “received a change of clothing at her hands.”11 This sounds like Melania formally invested Evagrius in monastic garb in the manner of a monastic superior.12 She then sent him on to her contacts in Egypt.

Around 383, Evagrius arrived at Nitria. There he joined that remarkable circle of intellectual monks led by Ammonius the Earless and the Tall Brothers. They had been disciples of Abba Pambo and, in the later controversy, became the leaders of the Origenists. It did not take long for Evagrius's learning to attract attention and for his leadership skills to emerge. The group soon became known as the “entourage of Ammonius and Evagrius,” or even as “the community of Evagrius.”13

After a two-year stay at Nitria, Evagrius moved on to the more solitary lifestyle of Kellia. He would spend the remaining fourteen years of his life there.14 Evagrius worked hard to learn and absorb the new alphabet of the Coptic monks he lived with. He apprenticed under two of the greatest of the desert fathers, Macarius the Egyptian and Macarius the Alexandrian. Socrates remarks that “Evagrius became a disciple of these men and acquired from them the philosophy of deeds, whereas before he knew only a philosophy of words.”15 In the Praktikos, Evagrius speaks of Macarius the Egyptian in glowing terms as “our holy and most ascetic master” and as “the vessel of election.”16 He also quotes Macarius on the need for a balanced asceticism: “the monk should always live as if he were to die on the morrow but at the same time he should treat his body as if he were to live on with it for many years to come.”17 Macarius, it seems, contributed to Evagrius's teaching on a whole variety of issues: combating anger, discernment and prayer, the naturalness of virtue, “remembering” God. To seek out Macarius's advice, Evagrius had to make the dangerous desert trek from Kellia to Scetis.

Evagrius's links to the other Macarius are less surprising, since the Alexandrian served as priest of Kellia until his death in 393. Evagrius records an interesting anecdote that highlights both Macarius's sense of quiet joy and his fierce asceticism. Once Evagrius went over to visit him at the hottest part of the day. Evagrius was thirsty and asked Macarius for some water. But Macarius advised him to count his blessings: “Be content with the shade, for many there are who are making a journey on land or on sea who are deprived of this.” Evagrius found himself unable to bask in gratitude and struggled with his thoughts. So Macarius told him about his own ascetic regimen: “Take courage, my son. For twenty full years I have not taken my fill of bread or water or sleep. I have eaten my bread by scant weight, and drunk my water by measure, and snatched a few winks of sleep while leaning against a wall.”18

Unlike most Egyptian monks, who earned their living by weaving rope, Evagrius worked as a calligrapher. Palladius mentions that Evagrius had graceful penmanship and wrote in the Oxyrhynchus style.19 In the Middle Ages, copying manuscripts would become a routine monastic labor, but at this early date it was the exception. The contrast between the literate Evagrius and illiterate Coptic monks should not be overdrawn. It is ironic, for instance, that the learned Evagrius passes on two of the apophthegms most critical of book learning and book collecting. In the Praktikos, Evagrius tells of an encounter Antony had with some philosophers. One asked Antony, “How do you ever manage to carry on, Father, deprived as you are of the consolation of books?” Antony's reply: “My book, sir philosopher, is the nature of created things, and it is always at hand when I wish to read the words of God.”20 This seems to fit nicely with Athanasius's portrait of the unlearned Antony lecturing learned philosophers on the proper pursuit of wisdom. But it also exemplifies one of Evagrius's favorite ideas: creation as the handwriting of God.21 Evagrius also passes on a quaint apophthegm about a monk who once owned a copy of the Gospels. Books were very valuable commodities. So the monk decided to sell his Bible and give the proceeds to the poor. When asked about it, he said he was simply fulfilling the Gospel's own command: “I have sold the very word that speaks to me saying, `Sell your possessions and give to the poor.'”22

Evagrius emerged as a respected spiritual director. When the author of the Historia monachorum visited Kellia, he met Evagrius and described him as “a wise and learned man who was skilled in the discernment of thoughts, an ability he had acquired by experience.”23 This was also how his disciple Palladius remembered him. In the Coptic version of the Lausiac History, Palladius says that Evagrius “taught me the way of life in Christ and helped me understand Holy Scripture spiritually.” Palladius goes on to describe the pedagogical routine practiced in Evagrius's circle at Kellia:

One striking anecdote about Evagrius appears in the Apophthegmata. At an assembly at Kellia, Evagrius put forth his views on some issue. But one of the priests chided him: “Abba, we know that if you were living in your own country, you would probably be a bishop and a great leader; but at present you sit here as a stranger.” It was a stern rebuke. Evagrius accepted it, quoting Job 40:5: “I have spoken once. But I will not do so a second time.”25 One can read this tense episode several ways. At one level, it lays bare what Evagrius's choice of the desert had cost him: home, ecclesiastical honors, even the right to the public voice normally accorded the educated. In this sense, it is a telling demonstration of Evagrius's humility—likely the reason it appears in the Apophthegmata.

But it can also be read as a foreshadowing of what was to come: while Evagrius accepted Egypt, Egypt did not accept Evagrius. In 399, on the feast of Epiphany, Evagrius was near death. He had to be carried to church to receive the Eucharist and died soon after. He was fifty-five—comparatively young, given the long lives that desert literature normally accords its leaders. That year, the patriarch of Alexandria, Theophilus, embarked on a ruthless persecution against Evagrius's friends and disciples. They were accused of the heresy of Origenism and forced to flee Egypt. Death spared Evagrius the bitter experience of exile and condemnation.

The Art of the Chapter

Evagrius deeply admired his old teacher, Gregory of Nazianzus, who, as patriarch of Constantinople, had eloquently defended the Nicene cause. No one embodied the rhetorical fashion of his day better than Gregory. He favored a mannered style, with intricate, flowing sentences, peppered with archaic vocabulary, daring wordplay, and subtle literary allusions. This style, known as Second Sophistic, was all the rage. Think in musical terms: what Bach is to classical music, Gregory is to Greek rhetoric. In lesser hands, this ornamented style could be all fluff and artifice—like bad baroque music—but with Gregory, it flowed forth with an effortless, natural spontaneity.

Evagrius shared his teacher's Nicene theology, but in style the two could not have been more different. Where Gregory is prolix, Evagrius is gnomic. Evagrius cultivated an artful brevity. All his best-known and most influential writings are collections of terse, proverblike sentences, clustered in brief, seemingly disconnected paragraphs called kephalaia (“chapters”) One of the best descriptions of reading Evagrius is also one of the earliest. It comes from the seventh-century Nestorian Babai the Great:

What struck Babai strikes the modern reader: Evagrius's writings are an elegant polyphony, a fuguelike weave of motifs, built from self-contained morsels.

He carefully numbered his chapters, and numbers shape the larger architecture of many of his treatises. His Praktikos has 100 chapters and is the first known example of the literary genre called the century. It would set off a fashion in Greek spiritual writing and find great imitators, such as Diodochus of Photice and Maximus the Confessor.

Many of Evagrius's chapters have the ring of a proverb. For example, in his Chapters on Prayer, he writes:

Others read like dictionary definitions. The opening chapter of the Praktikos sounds like something lifted from an old-fashioned catechism:

The density of these sayings can make translation difficult. Partly this is because Evagrius developed his own systematic vocabulary. What I have translated here (rather crudely) as “physics” refers not to science. In Evagrius's vocabulary, “physics” (physikē) means “contemplating the natural world,” or, more precisely, “contemplating the natural world so that one sees through it to its divine order.” The two other terms in the same sentence, “practice” and “theology,” have their own rich and somewhat idiosyncratic meanings in Evagrius's system.

Evagrius was quite a prolific author.29 He grouped three of his most important treatises into a sort of theological trilogy.

Praktikos (The Practical Treatise)

The 100-chapter Practical Treatise focuses on the first phase of monastic life, which he calls “practice” (praktikē), the practical acquisition of virtue. It contains an account of the eight evil “thoughts” (logismoi) and offers suggestions for combating them. The last ten chapters are a mini-collection of Apophthegmata. The Praktikos was his most popular work and has been preserved in numerous Greek manuscripts, as well as in Syriac and Armenian translations (for an outline, see table 10.2).

Gnostikos (The Gnostic)

The Gnostikos, a brief fifty-chapter work, offers advice for advanced monks, whom he calls “knowers” (gnōstikoi), and who now serve as teachers and have a circle of disciples around them. The treatise offers perspectives on spiritual pedagogy and principles of biblical exegesis. Toward the end, Evagrius quotes excerpts from five theologians he admires: Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil of Caesarea, Athanasius, Serapion of Thmuis, and Didymus the Blind.30 Only fragments of it remain in Greek, but the complete work is preserved in Syriac (for an outline, see table 10.3).

Kephalaia gnostica (The Gnostic Chapters)

The Kephalia gnostica has 540 chapters, grouped in six centuries of 90. It is a complex, often esoteric work and contains Evagrius's bold cosmological vision. The original Greek text (except for a few fragments) has been lost. A Syriac version had been published early in the twentieth century. But this was found to have been a carefully sanitized text when, in 1952, Antoine Guillaumont discovered an unexpurgated version in a Syriac manuscript in the British Museum. Before Guillaumont's discovery, scholars had wondered whether Evagrius had been unjustly accused of Origenism; after the discovery, they realized that the Kephalaia gnostica contains all the bold Origenist theories for which Evagrius had been anathematized by the Council of Constantinople in 553. It describes, for instance, the preexistence of minds as well as a cosmic restoration and reintegration of all things into God (apokatastasis). A supplement of 60 chapters was later attached to the original 540, making it an even 600 and thereby completing the incomplete centuries. This supplement—which is not part of the original Kephalaia gnostica—contains genuine sayings of Evagrius, drawn especially from a short treatise called Reflections (Skemmata).

Evagrius composed other important works. These include the following.

De Oratione (Chapters on Prayer)

The Chapters on Prayer, like Evagrius's great trilogy, is written in the style of terse gnomic sayings.31 This treatise contains 153 chapters—a play on the number of fish netted in the miraculous catch described in the resurrection narrative of John 21 (for the text and an analysis, see appendix 10.1). It was preserved in Greek, disguised under the name of Nilus of Ancyra. Only in the 1930s did Irénée Hausherr finally demonstrate that Evagrius was its true author. It spells out Evagrius's vision of the mind's mystical ascent to the Trinity and describes his theory of “pure prayer,” a mode of prayer that is both wordless and imageless.

Antirrhetikos (Counter-Arguments)

One might call the Antirrhetikos a scriptural battle manual. It is a listing of 487 temptations, grouped together under the eight evil “thoughts.” After describing each temptation, Evagrius lists an apt text from scripture with which the monk can counter the temptation. The model here, as Evagrius notes in the preface, is Jesus's own behavior when he faced demonic temptation in the desert. The book was written at the request of Abba Loukios, who was one of the leaders of the famous Enaton monastery, located nine miles outside of Alexandria. This is the only work Palladius mentions in his account of the life of Evagrius—an indication of its high regard among Evagrius's disciples. The work survives only in Syriac and Armenian.

Scholia

A little-known side of Evagrius is his biblical commentaries. Two have been edited thus far, one on the book of Proverbs, a second on Ecclesiastes; a third, on the book of Psalms, is forthcoming. Evagrius did not compose verse-by-verse commentaries, nor are they detailed. They are scholia, brief comments on selected verses.

Letters

Evagrius authored some sixty-four letters. The most famous is his Letter to Melania, which offers a bold and straightforward account of his theological vision (including ideas on preexistence, the primordial fall into bodies, and the final bodiless reunion in God). Another, mentioned earlier, is a letter about aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity, attributed for centuries to Basil but now recognized as the work of Evagrius. The others are preserved only in Syriac. These show his wide-ranging friendships with notables around the empire, including Melania, Rufinus, and Gregory of Nazianzus. They also show his personal warmth and sensitivity and his devotion to the person of Christ. These counterbalance the impression sometimes given by his works in the chapter style that he was an intellectual overly prone to abstraction and system.

Other Works

Evagrius wrote other treatises as well. Two works, On the Eight Spirits of Evil and On Thoughts, explore further dimensions of his theory of the eight evil “thoughts.” His Foundations of Monastic Life offers advice for beginners on basic issues: celibacy, renunciation, poverty, solitude, and manual labor. Two other works on monastic spirituality use metric sentences and are modeled on the biblical book of Proverbs: To the Monks and To a Virgin (for excerpts, see appendix 10.2).

While Evagrius's preference for proverbs and terse sentences had precedents in Greek literature, his choice seems to have flowed out of his experience in the desert. At the heart of desert spirituality were those momentous encounters when a monk begged an abba for a “word of salvation.” Those encounters became enshrined in the literary form of the apophthegm and were brought together in the great collections of the Apophthegmata Patrum. The collections record stories from Evagrius's generation—about the two Macarii, John the Little, Moses, and Poemen. But these were only written down and assembled much later, in the late fifth or early sixth century. In fact, the earliest collection of written apophthegms are those that close Evagrius's Praktikos. There he tells anecdotes about Antony, Macarius the Egyptian, Macarius the Alexandrian, and others. Evagrius saw himself articulating an ancient and venerable tradition: “It is a very necessary thing also to examine carefully the ways of the monks who have traveled, in an earlier age, straight along the road and to direct oneself along the same paths.”32 And he thought of his monastic predecessors as heroes and healers: “Our old men are to be honored like the angels for it is they who have anointed us for the battles and who treat the wounds we suffer from the bites of wild beasts.”33

Unlike most literature of the desert, Evagrius's works are not easy reading. His sentences are dense wisdom-sayings that need to be mulled over and, sometimes, deciphered. We know that he consciously cultivated a certain obscurity, at least on some matters. In the preface to the Praktikos, he quotes Jesus's saying that one should not “give what is holy to the dogs or cast our pearls before swine” (Matt. 7:6) and then adds: “Some of these matters will be kept in concealment and others alluded to only obscurely, but yet so as to keep them quite clear to those who walk along in the same path.”34 This studied obscurity poses a real challenge for contemporary commentators. One has to decode Evagrius. The approach pioneered by Irénée Hausherr and Antoine Guillaumont has been to use Evagrius to interpret Evagrius, to find parallels and doublets to decode key ideas. That resolves many but not all problems.

There is a great paradox in Evagrius's art of the chapter. One would imagine that his style would reflect his thought. In other words, one would presume that a writing style that broke thoughts into small, disconnected snippets would leave the thought itself piecemeal. In fact, the opposite is the case. The snippets, like the bright-colored tesserae used in ancient mosaics, come together and create a vast coherent landscape. His thinking about the spiritual life is startlingly consistent and complete.

The Eight Evil Thoughts

Evagrius is best known for his catalog of the human propensity for evil, what he called the eight evil thoughts (logismoi). He lists and explains them in the opening half of the Praktikos:

This list should look familiar. It would become, with slight modification, the seven deadly sins and enjoy a venerable place in the spirituality of the Middle Ages. And, eventually, in Dante's hands, it would come to define the very geography of the afterlife, both the Inferno and the Purgatorio. The one who brought Evagrius's scheme to the Latin West was his disciple, John Cassian, who discussed them at length in two works, The Institutes and The Conferences (for more on this, see chapter 12).36

Ancient commentators recognized the originality of Evagrius's scheme. Gennadius of Marseilles, in his fifth-century compendium of “illustrious” Christians, remarked, “Evagrius the monk, the intimate disciple of Macarius,wrote Suggestions against the Eight Principal Vices. He was the first to mention them, or at least, among the first to teach about these.”37 Evagrius's originality comes not from the list itself. One finds similar ones in Origen, and behind him in the New Testament. Rather, it stems from the classic descriptions he provides and from his insights into the psychology of their interplay.

Note that Evagrius calls them “thoughts,” not sins. Sin implies consent and responsibility, as Evagrius notes: “It is not in our power to determine whether we are disturbed by these thoughts, but it is up to us to decide if they are to linger within us or not and whether or not they are to stir up our passions.”38 To see something of his insight, let us examine how he discusses three of them.

Vainglory

Vainglory is that all-too-human thirst for fame. The form Evagrius describes in the Praktikos is the vainglory not of a politician or athlete or actor, but of a monk:

Evagrius here ruthlessly unmasks the secret hypocrisies of the holy men of his day: the desire to be acclaimed for one's healing touch, to send demons squealing, to have clients knocking at the door seeking tidbits of wisdom, to be forcibly enlisted into the ranks of the clergy. The image of a monk tied up and forcibly taken to town for ordination is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Forced ordination was a fairly common practice in the early church. Some of the leading church fathers—Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine—were ordained against their will.40 The monk in Evagrius's description feigns humility so that the crowd has to tie him up. But as Evagrius's description makes clear, all this humility is false pretense. The monk loves nothing better than playing the act of refusing the honor. It is interesting to note that, according to the historian Socrates, Evagrius himself fled when Theophilus of Alexandria tried to ordain him bishop of Thmuis.41

Note how Evagrius shifts from the language of “thoughts” to the language of “demons.” If one surveys his works, one finds that he refers almost indifferently to the “thought of vainglory” and the “demon of vainglory.” The same flip-flopping between “thoughts” and “demons” appears when he speaks of the other vices. Note also that when the demon of vainglory runs its course, others take its place. Evagrius's demons are all specialists, each specializing in a given vice. In this case, pride, sadness, or fornication picks up where vainglory leaves off. Evagrius especially links vainglory with pride. As he says in The Eight Spirits of Evil: “The flash of lightning comes before the rumble of thunder; the presence of vainglory announces the arrival of pride.”42

Fornication

Evagrius does not offer a generic portrait of the “demon of fornication.” He limits his description to the form a monk might face: “The demon of fornication forces one to desire various bodies; it attacks violently those who live in abstinence, in order to get them to stop, persuading them that they achieve nothing by it; and it gets [the monk] to lower himself to shameful acts, dirtying the soul; it makes him say certain words and to listen, all as if the object [of his desire] were visible and present.”43 This description from the Praktikos is unusually terse. In the Antirrhetikos, Evagrius details more clearly each of the points he makes here. He notes, for example, the visual quality of this “desire for bodies”: the “demon of fornication” appears as a sultry temptress (much as it does in the Life of Antony), “taking on the likeness of a naked woman, with languishing walk, her whole body indicating sensual delight.”44 Evagrius also notes the discouragement with and disgust for celibacy: this is “the demon who puts into my mind that I should marry a wife and become a father of sons, and not spend my time here starving and battling with foul thoughts.”45 Finally, Evagrius explains the rather vague reference about words spoken and heard. This refers to the monk imagining himself offering spiritual direction to women, using these occasions as a ruse for a hidden sexual agenda. Here the demon prompts “thoughts of spending long periods of time with a married woman, with frequent visits at close quarters, as if she were deriving great spiritual benefit from us”; or again, it suggests “the thought which takes the form of a beautiful woman engaging us in serious conversation, while we wish to do evil and shameful things with her.”46

Acēdia

The Apophthegmata, in the very first of its 1000 stories, says that “the holy Abba Antony, when he lived in the desert, fell prey to acēdia and a great gloom of thoughts.”47 The Greek word acēdia has no easy equivalent in English. The medievals often translated it as “sloth,” but that is not what the desert tradition means. For Evagrius, acēdia is a sort of restless boredom, a listlessness, and beneath that, discouragement. For centuries, Evagrius's translators have groped to find a single term that captures the rich meaning he gives the word acēdia. Early Syrian scholars, for instance, translated it as “despondency of spirit” or “ennui,” while John Cassian translated it into Latin as taedium cordis, “weariness of heart.”48 But the solution taken by most translators, ancient and modern, has been simply to leave the Greek term untranslated and to let Evagrius's evocative descriptions suffice.

In the Praktikos, Evagrius gives a famous description of this most deadly of “thoughts”:

Here Evagrius masterfully sketches the face of boredom. We all know the feeling: when time moves at a crawl, when “the day is fifty hours long.” Notice how he describes the monk repeatedly looking out the window to see how far it was from the “ninth hour” (three o'clock in the afternoon). That, of course, was when the monk ate his one meal of the day. Evagrius describes acēdia as the “noonday demon,” a phrase he lifts from Psalm 60:6. This demon attacks not under the cover of darkness, but in broad daylight, from the “fourth” to the “eighth” hour (ten in the morning to two in the afternoon), when the sun is at its peak and the midday heat saps one's energy and robs one's concentration. Other demons—vainglory, fornication—work at night and conjure up dreams and fantasies. But this one induces the monk to stare at the hard, drab sameness of his life. Evagrius captures here the ebb and flow of feeling. On the one hand, the monk feels hatred: hatred for the narrow confines of his cell, hatred for the tedium of manual labor, hatred for monastic life itself. On the other hand, there are wistful desires: desire for family, for his old life, for a life elsewhere. Evagrius has an eye for the way religious people can invoke platitudes to mask the real issue. Here the monk complains about how community life is going downhill, how it has lost its Christian charity; the monk also invokes the truism that God can be worshipped anywhere to justify his plans to go somewhere else, anywhere else. Evagrius's portrait here illustrates a dynamic he describes in one of his letters: acēdia wages a two-pronged attack, “an entangled struggle of hate and desire. For the listless one hates whatever is in front of him and desires what is not there. And the more desire drags the monk down, the more hate chases him out of his cell.”50

The monk plagued by acēdia yearns for escape, for distraction of some sort, of any sort. That is why he keeps looking out the window, hoping for a visitor to drop by. Note the incomplete sentence in the middle of Evagrius's description, where he says that acēdia “constrains the monk to looknow this way, that way, to see if one of the brothers mightmight.”51 Evagrius uses this literary device, known as an ellipsis, to evoke the monk's desperate pining for companionship. In the treatise On the Eight Spirits of Evil, he describes this behavior more specifically:

Here Evagrius teases out other features of this restless boredom: the yawning, the wandering eyes, the petty faultfinding, the inability to concentrate on anything—even sleep.

The heart of the temptation is, as Evagrius notes, “to induce the monk to forsake his cell and drop out of the fight.” To leave the cell is to abandon his solitude. Acēdia is such a great temptation for the solitary precisely because it is an attack on his very identity as a solitary.53 The only solution is to stay put, for “endurance cures acēdia.”54 In his poetic work To the Monks, Evagrius puts it this way: “If the spirit of acēdia grabs you, do not leave your house; and do not turn aside in that hour of profitable wrestling.”55 The language Evagrius uses here and elsewhere is the language of sports, of boxing and wrestling. To leave one's cell is to climb out of the boxing ring or get up from the wrestling mat in the middle of a bout. Thus, in the Praktikos, Evagrius counsels:

Note Evagrius's terminology: acēdia is the “heaviest” of the monk's wrestling opponents. He notes that where the other “thoughts” latch “on only one part of the soul,” this “noonday demon is in the habit of enveloping the whole soul and suffocating the mind.”57 That is why when one defeats it, the monk does not have to turn and face new opponents. No other demons follow in its wake, and the monk enjoys “deep peace and inexpressible joy.” In conquering acēdia, he recovers his very identity as a solitary.

According to Plutarch, the ancient biographer's task was “to capture the gesture which laid bare the soul.”58 Evagrius had an eye for such gestures and knew which ones could lay bare the soul. He also had a knack for word painting and invested his painterly gifts especially in these descriptions of the eight evil “thoughts.” Some, like those in the Praktikos and in On the Eight Spirits, are finely wrought miniatures; others, like those in the Antirrhetikos, are thumbnail sketches that, in a few quick lines, capture a scene or a face and give the monk a window into the soul. Nor is it an accident that Evagrius focused his word painting on the pathologies of the soul. He speaks of the monastic teacher as a physician and describes the pedagogical task in medicinal metaphors.59 Evagrius's word paintings are like plates in a medical textbook: they illustrate the symptomology of disease. Evagrius the word painter was at the same time Evagrius the doctor of souls who sought to cure the cataract on the soul's eye and make it ready to glimpse the light of the Trinity.

Combat with Demons

Demons figure prominently in the works of Evagrius, as they do in all desert literature. More than two-thirds of the Praktikos (67 out of 100 chapters) discusses demons, and his theory of the eight “thoughts” is simultaneously a demonology. There are two sides to Evagrius's reflections. One is more experiential, an analysis of the psychology of temptation. His approach here is entirely consistent with the desert tradition, but he brings to it both an astute eye for the vagaries of the human heart and a talent for synthesizing insights into a coherent whole. The other side is speculative, with daring hypotheses on the cosmological origins, nature, and destiny of demons. I will take up this second side in the next chapter.

Evagrius, as we saw, speaks of “thoughts” and “demons” as though they were synonyms. That does not mean he thought of demons as merely metaphorical, as a symbol for psychological dynamics. He believed that there really were demons. “Thoughts” were simply the most common mechanism by which desert solitaries encountered demons. Evagrius suggests that demons attack different people in different ways: they attack “men of the world chiefly through their deeds”; they attack cenobitic monks through the irritating habits of their brothers in community; but they attack the desert solitaries “by means of thoughts.”60 Combat at the level of “thoughts” is unusually fearsome: “Just as it is easier to sin by thought than by deed, so also is the war fought on the field of thought more severe than that which is conducted in the area of things and events. For the mind is easily moved indeed, and hard to control in the presence of sinful fantasies.”61 Evagrius would even say that the combat solitaries face is so fearsome because it is hand-to-hand combat.62

Evagrius's disciple Palladius says his teacher had repeated personal experiences with demons.63 Likewise, the author of the History of the Monks—who apparently had met Evagrius—remarks that Evagrius's skill in the discernment of spirits was “acquired by experience.”64 Evagrius encouraged his disciples to reflect on their personal experience with demons.

Evagrius's recommendation is somewhere between a military commander's and a psychologist's: one needs to study the enemy to defeat him. But insight comes from what Christ himself tells the monk. Christ provides the gnosis, the knowledge.

Evagrius rejects a long-standing strain in ancient Christian demonology: that each person had a demon assigned to tempt him, a sort of demonic counterpart to one's guardian angel.66 Demons, according to Evagrius, were specialists, and the monk had to face a gauntlet of them. Evagrius denied that demons can force us to do anything. Nor can they read our mind or hearts; “It is God alone, who has created us, who knows our spirits” and who can “discover the secrets in our hearts.” Demons are more like animals with very acute senses: by observing our speech or even the slightest bodily gestures, they see signs “whether we have conceived their thought within us and bring it forth.”67

Evagrius distinguishes between three parts or dimensions within the human soul: the rational (logistikon), the concupiscible (epithymētikon), and the irascible (thymikon). This threefold division derives ultimately from Plato, but Evagrius says that he learned this from “our wise teacher,” Gregory of Nazianzus.68 Evagrius uses this division to discuss the acquisition of virtue, but he also applies it to the workings of the demons. The concupiscible is the realm of the bodily and of desire. According to Evagrius, when demons attack this part of us, they produce fantasies of desire: “They employ for this combat phantasms (and we run to see them) which show conversations with our friends, banquets with our relatives, whole choruses and all kinds of other things calculated to produce delight.” The irascible is the realm of psychic energy, which, when disordered, comes out as violence, anger, and fear. When the demons attack this part of the soul, they produce nightmarish hallucinations: “They constrain us to walk along precipitous paths where they have us encounter armed men, poisonous snakes and man-eating beasts.”69

When facing demonic temptation, Evagrius advised “praying to Christ in our nightly vigils” and making use of “short and intense prayer.”70 So when the monk hears “crashing sounds and roars and voices and beatings—all of these coming from the devilshe does not lose courage nor his presence of mind. He calls out to God: `I shall fear no evils for you are with me' (Ps.22:4).”71 His remarkable handbook, the Antirrhetikos (Counter-Arguments), catalogs some 487 temptations, listed under the headings of the eight “thoughts.” After describing each temptation, he suggests a scriptural phrase. For instance, he cites the nightmarish fear of “human thoughts that are terrified by the sight of demons in the form of entwining snakes at one's back and to one's side in the confusion of the night.” Against this he recommends that the monk recite Deuteronomy 20:3: “Let not the heart be faint; do not fear, or tremble, or shrink from facing them, for the Lord your God is he that goes with you, to fight for you against your evil enemies.”72 Evagrius's model here is Jesus, who recited words from scripture in his combat with Satan in the desert. As he says in the preface to the Antirrhetikos:

Early in one's monastic life, one fights as though “in the darkness of night”; one is so immersed in the fight itself that one does not see “the basic meaning of the war.”74 And in this battle, one does not always win: “Wrestlers are not the only ones whose occupation it is to throw others down and to be thrown in turn; the demons too wrestle—with us. Sometimes they throw us and at other times it is we who throw them.”75 That is why he advises hard work: “Train yourself like a skilled athlete.”76 In time, one becomes a battle-hardened veteran. For Evagrius, there are no shortcuts to sanctity: “Wisdom is not won except by a battle, nor is the battle well fought except with prudence.”77 With wisdom and purity of heart, one learns to “make out the designs of the enemy.”78

Evagrius's intricate ascetical theory is only one side of his thought. The other side is a mystical theology that tries to chart the soul's journey to God. To that, we can now turn.

Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Appendix 10.1 Evagrius's Number Symbolism

Evagrius was fascinated with numbers. One sees this in the design of his works. The Praktikos is consciously composed of 100 chapters, a so-called century. His treatise Chapters on Prayer (De oratione) is composed of 153 chapters and plays upon an elaborate symbolism. In the prologue, he first notes the biblical basis for the number and then teases out an elaborate combination of symbolic numbers. Charts are given to explain Evagrius's rather complicated description. Here is the text:

To understand why the ancient Greek mathematicians referred to certain numbers as triangular, or square, or hexagonal, see the figures in the next section.

Triangular Numbers

A triangular number is the sum total of a continuous series of integers, starting with the number 1. The following are triangular numbers: 3 (= 1 + 2), 6 (= 1 + 2 + 3), 10 (= 1 + 2 + 3 + 4), etc.

Square Numbers

A square number is the sum of odd numbers, starting with the number 1. The following are square numbers: 4 (= 1 + 3), 9 (= 1 + 3 + 5), 16 (= 1 + 3 + 5 + 7), etc. See figures.

Hexagonal Numbers

A hexagonal number is the sum of every other odd number, starting with the number 1. The following are hexagonal numbers: 6 (= 1 + 5), 15 (= 1 + 5 + 9), 28 (= 1 + 5 + 9 + 13), etc. See the figures.

Spherical Numbers

A spherical number is one that, when multiplied by itself, appears as the last digit or digits of the new number. For example: 1 × 1 = 1; 5 × 5 = 25; 6 × 6 = 36; 25 × 25 = 625.

Therefore, in this passage, Evagrius is saying:

Note that Evagrius seems confused about why 25 is a spherical number. It is spherical not because 5 × 5 = 25, but because 25 × 25 = 625.

Appendix 10.2 Evagrius Ponticus, Sententiae ad Virginem

A remarkable and little-known work by Evagrius is the work excerpted here, Sententiae ad virginem (“Sentences to a Virgin”). Like so many of his works, it is a collection of brief proverblike sentences. In this case, there are fifty-five, which he addresses to a “woman of noble birth.” This woman may have been Melania the Elder, or perhaps one of the members of her community, such as a deaconess named Severa, with whom Evagrius was known to have corresponded. This treatise, like his Sententiae ad monachos (“Sentences to a Monk”), uses balanced parallelisms, similar to the biblical Book of Proverbs. Here one finds stock Evagrian themes: advice on virtues (generosity, gentleness) and vices (anger, lust), and the need for unceasing prayer. It closes echoing the rich poetry of the Song of Songs.

Incessant Prayer

Anger and Grudges

Almsgiving

Psalm Singing and the Heart

Thoughts and Pure Prayer

Language of the Song of Songs

For the Greek text, see Hugo Gressmann, Nonnenspiegel und Mönchsspiegel des Euagrios Pontikos, TU 39.4 (Leipzig, 1913), 152–165. Special thanks to Susanna Elm for use of excerpts from her unpublished translation. For a valuable study, see especially her essay “Evagrius Ponticus' Sententiae ad virginem,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 97–120.

Metrics

View Metrics

More from Oxford Academic