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12 Making Public the Monastic Life: Reading the Self in Evagrius Ponticus’ Talking Back David Brakke In his unfinished genealogy of the subject, Michel Foucault identified exomologe ̄sis, the public acknowledgment of oneself as a sinner, and exagoreusis, the verbalization of one’s thoughts and desires to a spiritual master, as two distinctively early Christian contributions to the development of the self. ‘‘Throughout Christianity,’’ he wrote, ‘‘there is a correlation between disclosure of the self, dramatic or verbalized, and the renunciation of the self.’’∞ He considered the second form of self-disclosure, verbalization of one’s thoughts, to be the more important of the two since it developed into the institution of penance and, although this is usually left implicit, into the practice of psychoanalytic therapy. Foucault located exagoreusis primarily in the monastic life: the monk was expected to disclose all of his thoughts to a more advanced monk for the elder’s scrutiny. Thus, the monastic subject represents an ancient ancestor of the modern subject, who discloses his or her self by speaking to the therapist or the talk show host. This model appears to assume that the self is interior or hidden and so requires or permits ‘‘disclosure,’’ and here Foucault’s work may dovetail with Charles Taylor’s claim that Augustine, an ancient Christian monk, bequeathed to the modern self a ‘‘radical reflexivity’’ predicated on the notion of the self as being an inner space (presumably disclosed in Foucault’s exagoreusis).≤ For his understanding of monastic confession, Foucault relied primarily on the Conferences of John Cassian, who composed his work in Gaul in the 420s but presented his teachings as those of monks whom he had known during a sojourn in Egypt in the 380s and 390s. If we are to look for the origins of the verbalized and renounced self that Foucault attributed to monastic Christianity Making Public the Monastic Life 223 and perhaps also for the interior self that it appears to require, we must turn to the Egyptian desert of the late fourth century. There Cassian’s principal teacher in the monastic life was Evagrius of Pontus, who settled in the Egyptian desert in 383 after a brief but tumultuous career in ecclesiastical politics in Constantinople. Although Evagrius’ teachings profoundly influenced his work, Cassian never mentions him because, shortly after Evagrius’ death in 399, a controversy broke out over the orthodoxy of monastic teachings like his. Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria ordered the forced eviction of ‘‘Origenist’’ monks from the monastic settlements of Nitria and Scetis in Lower Egypt, and most likely John Cassian was among the ascetics who departed Egypt at this time.≥ Despite these unfortunate events, Evagrius’ writings remained highly influential, especially in eastern Christian monasticism , and they provide precious evidence for the spirituality of the monks of Lower Egypt during the fourth century. Unlike the much better known Apophthegmata patrum, the earliest surviving collections of which originated in Palestine during the latter half of the fifth century, Evagrius’ works were actually composed in fourth-century Egypt and directly reflect the guide-disciple relationship that formed Cassian’s spirituality and that so interested Foucault. Among the several writings of Evagrius that survive, Antirrheticus, or Talking Back, provides some of the most intriguing material for the historian investigating the ancient religious self. Extant today completely only in Syriac and not at all in the original Greek, Talking Back lists some 498 thoughts, situations, or conditions that may trouble or characterize the monk, along with verses from the Bible. Most of the items are thoughts suggested by demons, and thus the monk should use the biblical verse to ‘‘talk back’’ to the demon or thought, just as Jesus responded to the temptations of Satan with biblical quotations (Matt 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). For example: ‘‘Against the thought of love of money that calls blessed our corporeal brothers and our kinfolk in the world because they possess visible wealth: ‘For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal’ (2 Cor 4:18).’’∂ Other biblical verses are to be addressed to a monk su√ering from a certain condition (e.g., ‘‘For the soul that is stingy with money . . . ’’) or to God in a situation of distress or thanksgiving. Evagrius organized the 498 chapters by the eight primary demons that he believed a∆ict the practicing monk: gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness , anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. The book, then, is a...

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