Evagrius Ponticus: Ad Monachos (review)

Few figures in the history of Christian spirituality have been as influential as Evagrius Ponticus (345–399). Yet he is hardly a household name. Most readers, even if they don't know the name, know one of his conceptual inventions: the Seven Deadly Sins (though he has eight, not seven, and calls them "thoughts," not sins). Evagrius was an astute psychologist of the spirit, and his analyses of what ails the soul form but one thread within a wider and more intricate theology of the spiritual life. He was a pioneer of Christian mysticism, advocating unceasing wordless and imageless prayer, and was among the first to plot milestones in the soul's journey to God.

The son of a Christian bishop, Evagrius grew up in Pontus, what is now northern Turkey, near the Black Sea. He moved among a "who's who" of fourth-century Christianity. He knew the Cappadocian Fathers well. Gregory of Nazianzus ordained him a deacon, and he ended up following Gregory to Constantinople where, during the great debates on the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Spirit, he earned a reputation for his eloquent defense of the emerging orthodox consensus. He was on site when the Council of Constantinople of 381 put together the version of the Nicene Creed recited today. Soon after, he fell in love with a married woman, but broke off the affair after a vision and fled the imperial capital for Jerusalem. There he came under the sway of one of the extraordinary women in early Christianity, Melania the Elder, a Latin-speaking aristocrat who founded a monastery on the Mount of Olives. Melania convinced Evagrius to adopt the monastic life and sent him on to her friends in Egypt. In 383, he settled at Nitria, a large coenobitic monastery southeast of Alexandria. Two years later he moved to the remote (and recently excavated) anchoritic settlement of Kellia. He apprenticed in the monastic life under two prominent desert fathers, Macarius the Egyptian and Macarius the Alexandrian. Evagrius soon emerged as a leader and won local fame for his skilled discernment of spirits. He died after a brief illness in 399.

Later that same year, the bishop of Alexandria turned against Evagrius' friends, denouncing them as heretical Origenists and chasing them out of Egypt. They were accused of promoting Origen's boldest speculations on the pre-existence of souls and on a final universal redemption (apokatastasis). Evagrius was posthumously condemned, together with Origen and Didymus the Blind, by the Council of Constantinople in 553. His ideas lived on through other voices. His spirituality was passed to the Latin West via John Cassian and there entered the mainstream of medieval monasticism. Similar survivals took place in the Greek East via Maximus Confessor and in the Syriac Middle East via Babai the Great and Isaac of Nineveh.

The modern rediscovery and publication of Evagrius' long-lost works—as well as the reassessment of his significance—has been led since 1950 by French-speaking scholars who have produced an array of critical editions, theological analyses, and translations into French. Antoine and Claire Guillaumont have been at the forefront of this, presenting Evagrius to audiences, both learned and popular. The English-speaking world has been slow to pick up on these developments. There have been exceptions. In 1972, Thomas Merton's disciple, John Eudes Bamberger, published a helpful, but flawed translation of Evagrius' Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer. In the last decade, key studies have appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies and other scholarly venues, but only in 2003, with the publication of two major books, have Evagrius' works at last become available to the wider public. The first of these, Robert Sinkewicz's Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, was published by Oxford in its Early Christian Studies series. It includes translations of key texts, but is geared to advanced students and offers little by way of commentary.

More helpful to newcomers is the second...