Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Praying Is Joying: Musings on Love in Evagrius Ponticus

 Praying Is Joying: Musings on Love in Evagrius Ponticus V I R G I N I A B U R R U S ‘‘Happy the spirit [nous] which attains to total insensibility at prayer,’’ exults Evagrius of Pontus in his Chapters on Prayer (120).1 The Chapters, like so many ancient texts, comes wrapped in the envelope of a personal letter (though we no longer know the name of Evagrius’s addressee). A response to another letter, it begins suspensefully in medias res—in the midst of an epistolary exchange between friends and also in the midst of a charged moment for Evagrius himself. ‘‘It was so characteristic of you to get a letter to me just at a time when I was aflame with the hot urgings of my own impure passions and my spirit was afflicted with all kinds of vile thoughts,’’ he exclaims with apparent abandon. A timely letter from a cherished friend has thus cut across the barriers of his selfenclosed misery, opening him to new possibilities, hailing another self. That friend, like Jacob, knows how to work hard in pursuit of ‘‘his heart’s desire.’’ His ‘‘command’’ has rekindled the flame of Evagrius’s own desire . Left to himself, he had found nothing to say about prayer: ‘‘I have worked the night through and caught nothing.’’2 But now, at his friend’s renewed urging, he has cast his net again ‘‘and come up with a whole netful of fish.’’ They are, he acknowledges, small in size but nonetheless great in number (153, to be precise),3 and he sends them, ‘‘in the basket of charity [agapē],’’ to his friend. ‘‘So then, this is my way of carrying out your orders to me.’’ Evagrius’s adoption of the role of a joyfully submissive lover is not an unusual rhetorical stance within late antique literature, and especially v i rg i nia b u rr u s 兩 195 within the literary correspondences of ascetic men, who frequently represent themselves both as filled with erotic longing for their absent addressees and as able to write only under command. It is also not, however, incidental to the chapters that follow—a collection of aphoristic sayings on prayer. Indeed, the introductory letter goes on to perform a brief, but nearly ecstatic, numero-theological meditation that conveys Evagrius’s newfound joy and fecundity of spirit, the marks of a truly prayerful monk. (‘‘Prayer is a continual intercourse of the spirit with God [3], he notes later; it is also ‘‘the fruit of joy and thanksgiving’’ [15].) In addition, and still more significantly, the letter itself turns out to be a prayer, as well as a request for prayer.4 Evagrius concludes his address to his friend: ‘‘Since you have the gift of preserving the fruit of kindness and charity for your true brothers, pray for a sick man that he may recover his health, pick up his mat and henceforth walk about freely by the grace of Christ. Amen.’’ Freedom is, then, to be discovered in the exchange of ‘‘charitable ’’ prayers, in the transfiguring acts of mutual interpellation invoked in a spirit of love. Of course, we hear only one half of this particular exchange . But is that not always the case with prayer? This is why desire is not love. —jean-luc nancy, ‘‘Shattered Love’’ Evagrius, as we have seen, assumes a distinction between ‘‘impure passions ’’ and the state of spiritual love (agapē, but also erōs) that is both the precondition and the goal of prayer—that is, indeed, virtually identical with prayer. He is famous for his advocacy of passionlessness (apatheia) as the necessary first stage on the ascent toward prayerful contemplation .5 ‘‘The state of the spirit can be aptly described as a habitual state of apatheia. It snatches to the heights of intelligible reality the spirit which loves wisdom and which is truly spiritualized by the most intense love [erōs]’’ (52). The notion of an apathetic eros is not of course unprecedented within ancient thought (whether non-Christian or Christian); nonetheless , the ambitious stretch of the paradoxical concept invites interpretative engagement, now as then. For Evagrius, passion is, most generally, that which produces psychic disturbance and distraction, scattering creative energies and dissipating 196 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y o f e ro s joy. In another work, he conveniently catalogues...