Evagrius the Iconographer: Monastic Pedagogy in the Gnostikos

Although it is one of the keys to his thought, the Gnostikos of Evagrius of Pontus has not yet been thoroughly explored in an essay devoted to it alone; furthermore, it has received almost no attention in English.¹ The present article is a preliminary study of two aspects of the book: first, its character as a monastic pedagogy employing "un certain ésotérisme," and, second, its portrayal of a biblical interpretation proper to that practice of concealment.

When the practiced monk, the of the title, had begun to receive knowledge appropriate to that status, he was able, in Evagrius' view, to use the book's fifty as counsels. Those sentences were arranged to teach him how to use a particular monastic system of education adapted from ancient philosophy and freshly assimilated to Christian teaching. They presuppose that the Bible symbolizes knowledge of all created reality, and hints at the highest knowledge available, the of the Trinity. With this pedagogy he could adapt certain biblical passages to communicate appropriate knowledge but, far more importantly, to rewrite his students as images of Christ.

Although Evagrius was the first monastic author to compose apophthegms for the use of other monks, and although his work achieved a level of complexity unmatched by his contemporaries in the literature of the fourth-century monastic movement, his work was not novel. The Gnostikos, in fact, far from being an invention of a literary genius, continued a more ancient discussion about the character and acquisition of knowledge. It will be considered here as the written version of his oral teaching.

The Setting of the Gnostikos

The Gnostikos is, like its preceding volume, the Praktikos, a book that claims to represent the opinions of well-known monks of the second half of the fourth century. However, like all his works, it reflects the mind of a highly educated, late ancient Christian, and is therefore an artful adaptation of the teaching of an entire group of monks in Egypt.

When Evagrius first came to the monastic settlements of Nitria in 383, he arrived already trained as a scholar. There and in Kellia, where he subsequently moved, he was taught by the priest Macarius of Alexandria, as well as the monk of Scetis, Macarius the Egyptian.² Of this period in Evagrius' life, the historian Socrates wrote that, when he became their disciple, he acquired a "philosophy in deeds, whereas he had previously known that which consisted in words only."³ Although the later Apophthegmata Patrum contrast the profane learning of Evagrius with the untutored wisdom of the fathers of the desert, in actuality Evagrius found numerous scholarly monks there and formed an alliance with them; their meetings are reflected in many of Evagrius' works.

It has recently been demonstrated that among many of the fourth-century monastic establishments of Lower Egypt, a sophisticated curriculum, itself dependent upon a long-established Hellenistic paideia still in place in Egyptian schools of the Nile valley, formed the accepted basis for the monastic life. Furthermore, an earlier generation of monks, particularly the followers of Anthony, had been trained in a curriculum adapted from the third-century works of Clement of Alexandria and of Origen, and their successors among Egyptian Christian teachers. It presupposed a kind of Platonic philosophy and a spiritual interpretation of Scripture.⁴ There was, then, a continuous transmission of training and of theological ideas from Origen, through Anthony and his disciples, to the late-fourth-century leaders of the monastic foundations of Kellia, where Evagrius learned his craft.

This revised portrait of monastic education has great bearing upon the interpretation of the works of Evagrius of Pontus, a deacon and former student of Gregory of Nazianzus who also learned from Melania and Rufinus in Jerusalem. Once in Egypt he joined the younger followers of Anthony, particularly Macarius the Great and Macarius the Egyptian, and quickly became a monastic teacher himself. Like Antony, he adapted the paideia of Clement and Origen to the ascetic circles of Nitria and Scetis.⁵ And he too used both Stoic and Platonic philosophical vocabulary to describe the...