Evagrius Ponticus

Evagrius analysed the interior life the way a naturalist analyses a habitat. What he studies are logismoi, thoughts, and his crucial move is to distinguish the thought that arrives from the consent that follows it. A thought is not a sin. It presents itself, and the question is whether the monk engages with it, and it is the engaging that can be worked on.

He identified eight of them and described each with a clinician's eye: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride. The account of acedia is the one that has never been bettered. It arrives around the fourth hour, he says, makes the sun seem barely to move, makes the monk stare out of the window, count how long until the next meal, remember his family, decide that this cell and this work and these brothers are the problem, and that somewhere else he could really live properly.

The goal of the work is apatheia, which is badly translated as passionlessness and does not mean feeling nothing. It is the settled condition in which the passions no longer govern, and Evagrius says explicitly that its offspring is love. Beyond it lies contemplative knowledge, and his description of pure prayer, in which the mind holds no image or concept at all, is the source of a very long tradition of imageless prayer in both East and West.

Evagrius was a brilliant young deacon at Constantinople, preaching under Gregory of Nazianzus, when he fell in love with a married noblewoman and fled the city rather than face the consequences. He went to Jerusalem, was taken in by Melania the Elder, and from there to the Egyptian desert, where he spent the rest of his life among the monks of Nitria and Kellia, weaving baskets, eating very little, and writing in short numbered sentences.

The writing has two halves. One is the practical psychology, which everyone found useful. The other is a speculative theology, in the tradition of Origen, involving a pre-existent unity of minds, a fall into diversity, and an eventual restoration in which bodies and distinctions fall away. That second half was condemned. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 anathematised Origenist propositions and named Evagrius among their sources, and his works stopped being copied under his name in Greek.

They did not stop being read. The practical works survived in Greek attributed to other authors, notably Nilus, and were read for centuries by people who did not know whose they were. The speculative works survived in Syriac and Armenian translations made before the condemnation, and were recovered by scholars in the twentieth century. His psychology reached the Latin West through Cassian, who transmits it faithfully and never names him, and it is in the Philokalia, so that a condemned author sits near the foundation of both Eastern and Western contemplative practice.