Sacred Heart Major Seminary

The Christology of Evagrius of Pontus in the Epistula Fidei and the Epistula ad Melaniam ST 910: Early, Medieval, and Renaissance Christology

Stephen C. Petrica December 2011 (Submitted March 2012)

A Personal Prolegomenon
Evagrius may not be a household name today, but in the 4th century, he was on Christianitys cutting-edge and rubbed shoulders with some of the most prominent figures in the early Church.1

Until just a few years ago, mine was among the households where Evagrius was unknown. But as one whose spiritual discipline has long been shaped by the Benedictine Rule, my interest was drawn to the publication in 2002 of Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer According to the Patristic Tradition, by Gabriel Bunge, O.S.B.2 In his monastic Rule [73:2,5], St. Benedict commends the Conferences of the Fathers [and] their Institutes to those hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, and I had indeed acquired some familiarity with St. John Cassian. But it was Bunges discussion that introduced me to Cassians dependence upon the obscure Evagrius. A few years after that I bought Bambergers edition3 of The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer by the same Evagrius. I discovered in him a profound and provocative, if sometimes cryptic, spiritual guide. I was not alone in that discovery. Kline wrote in 1985 that
[e]ver since the discovery that Cassians Institutes and Conferences describe a spiritual system that could be traced back directly to Evagrius and then to Origen, monks and nuns have rightly busied themselves with 1) a study of his works and 2) a search for traces of his influences in later monastic writers. 4

In a 2004 status question, Casiday noted [t]wenty years of fruitful research that were forcing

W illiam Harmless, S.J., and Raymond R. Fitzgerald, S.J. The Sapphire Light of the Mind: The Skemmata of Evagrius Ponticus, Theological Studies 62 (2001): 498.
2

San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, translated, with an introduction and notes, by John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981). Abbreviated hereafter as PCP. Francis Kline, The Christology of Evagrius and the Parent System of Origen, in Cistercian Studies 20 (1985), p. 155.
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revisions to the traditional accounts of Evagrianism.5 Evagrius has been undergoing a revival. But how had such a fecund writer fallen into obscurity in the first place? His name, I learned, had been tainted by centuries-old anathemas and charges of heresy. I was primed, then, to do some exploring on my own. Evagrius: A Prcis of His Life Our principal sources of information about the life of Evagrius are a fragmentary Coptic Life of Evagrius and chapter 38 of the Greek Lausiac History, both by Palladius, the late fourth-, early fifth-century Galatian monk in Egypt. The Coptic Life is substantially longer than the corresponding chapter of the Lausiac History, leading Vivian to infer almost certain censorship regarding Evagrius and other Origenists6 arising from what has been called the First Origenist Controversy. Anti-Origenism and its effects on the transmission of texts by and about Evagrius is an issue we will meet again later in this paper. Evagrius was the son of a chorepiskopos, or suffragan bishop serving a rural diocese, born circa 345 in Pontus, a town on the Black Sea. He was ordained a lector by Basil, bishop of Csarea, who was later revered as St. Basil the Great, one of the Cappadocian fathers. In his twenties he relocated to Constantinople, where he became something of a disciple to another of the Cappadocian fathers, St. Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory ordained him to the diaconate, and recognizing his intellectual abilities advanced him to the position of archdeacon. With Gregory, Evagrius attended the Council of Constantinople in 381. There he acquired a reputation as an
5

Augustine Casiday, Gabriel Bunge and the Study of Evagrius Ponticus, St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly 48 (2004), pp 249251. Casiday cites the publication in English of Earthen Vessels as something of a turning point in this revisionism. Tim Vivian, Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt and Macarius of Alexandria (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2004), p 52.
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effective defender of orthodox Trinitarian theology. Palladius notes that:

[T]ruly Evagrius was very protective of the Scriptures and was well equipped to refute every heresy with his wisdom. He was therefore well known throughout Constantinople for having combated the heretics with forceful and eloquent language. The whole city praised him greatly.7

Despite his learning and rhetorical skills, however, Evagrius remained subject to the temptations of young men. Palladius continues:
[H]e fell into the hands of the demon who brings about lustful thoughts for women, as he told us later after he had been freed from this passion. Indeed, the woman loved him very much in return. But Evagrius was fearful before God and did not sin with her because, in fact, the woman was married and Evagrius also followed his conscience because her husband was member of the nobility and greatly honored and, furthermore, Evagrius thought deeply about the magnitude of shame and sin and judgment and realized that all the heretics whom he had humiliated would rejoice.8

Palladius notes that Evagrius sought Gods help to free him from this passion, yet the woman persisted in her madness for him to the point that she made a public spectacle of herself.9 Warned in a dream, Evagrius fled Constantinople for Jerusalem, where he was joyfully welcomed10 by Melania the Elder, a patrician Roman who took the veil after her husband and two sons all died in the same year. She and Rufinus of Aquileia11 ruled over a double monastery of men and women on the Mount of Olives. Still susceptible, however, to vanity and bodily pleasure, Evagrius developed a mysteri-

Ibid., p. 75.

Ibid., pp. 7576. Note that distracting thoughts deployed by demons to distract monks from their ascetic struggle is a typical Evagrian analysis, developed in his essay On Thoughts (in Casiday [2006], pp. 89116). A cynic, reading that the womans husband was an influential nobleman and that the heretics would revel in implicating Evagrius in a scandal, might suspect that the operations of his conscience were augmented by thoughts planted by a demon of calculation.
9

Ibid. Ibid., p. 78.

10

Like St. Jerome, his contemporary in Jerusalem, Rufinus was a translator of theological works into Latin; he it was who translated Origens De principiis from the Greek. Rufinus had also spent several years in Egypt himself, for six years as a disciple in Alexandria of Didymus the Blind.

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ous wasting illness that resisted all the efforts of physicians. Melania perceived that the illness was Gods visitation, and bade Evagrius to disclose to her all this thoughts. Exacting his promise to become a monk, she entreated God for him and he was restored to health. True to his word, Evagrius took the habit and went to Nitria, a center of Egyptian monasticism in the Nile delta. After two years there (receiving monastic formation?) he moved deeper into the desert, 12 miles south to Kellia. There he spent the remaining years of his life, dying in 399. Evagrius as a Theologian His monastic context and the structures of prayer and ascetical discipline that characterize it are utterly essential to understanding Evagrius as a theologian. Indeed, the very term theologian has a particular meaning in the Evagrian thought-world, as is suggested by what may be his best known words: If you are a theologian, you truly pray. If you truly pray, you are a theologian.12 Harmless and Fitzgerald explain:
According to Evagrius, theology is a knowledge of God gained from first-hand experience It comes not from books, but from prayer. Evagrius did not doubt the value of reading, of study, of reason; nor did he doubt the profound value of dogma, of liturgy, or of ecclesiastical authority. Far from it. But for him, theology in the strict sense is the encounter of the praying mind with God.13

The human person, in Evagrius understanding, was a pure mind created by God to enjoy the knowledge of him, but by the exercise of their free wills, these pure minds fell from their contemplation of God:
Falling at some point from its former rank through its free will, it was called a soul. And it descended again and was named a body. Since their differences of will and movement will at some point pass away, it will rise to its former creation: its nature and person and name will be one, which God

12

Chapter 60 on Prayer, PCP 65. Harmless and Fitzgerald, pp. 498499.

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knows.14

As Driscoll summarizes, [God] provides the rational soul as the direct extension of the fallen mind, and he arranges lower parts of the soul whereby he joins it (and the mind of which it is an extension) to a body.15 The mind of which the soul is an extension is the highest part of man. The soul is further subdivided into two parts: the concupiscible part and the irascible part (or as Louth calls them, the desiring and incensive parts of the soul, respectively).16 These two are the passionate part of the soul, while the mind is the faculty of reason by which one knows God. Prayer is the activity of the mind by which we know God, but that intellectual activity can be hindered by desire (the concupiscible part of the soul) distracting the intellect (or mind) and the incensive or irascible part darkening it.17 This leads Evagrius directly to the whole point of monastic life: Since [t]he passions are accustomed to be stirred up by the senses,18 for the soul to return to God its passions must be purified and brought into order, and [t]he ascetic life is the spiritual method for cleansing the affective part of the soul.19
The goal of the ascetic life is charity; the goal of contemplative knowledge is theology. The beginnings of each are faith and contemplation of nature respectively. Such of the demons as fall upon the

A.M. Casiday, Evagrius Ponticus, The Early Church Fathers, (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 69. The text cited is from The Great Letter, often referred to as the Letter to Melania, 26 (by Casidays paragraph numbering). Evagrius Ponticus, Ad Monachos, Ancient Christian W riters, Translation and Commentary by Jeremy Dricoll, O.S.B. (New York: Newman, 2003), p. 7. Emphasis in the original. Andrew Louth, And If You Pray Truly, You Are A Theologian: Some Reflections on Early Christian Spirituality, in Wisdom of the Byzantine Church: Evagrios of Pontus and Maximos the Confessor, edited by Jill Raitt, (Columbia, Mo.: Department of Religious Studies [University of Missouri], 1997), p. 2. Note that Evagrios is Louths preferred spelling.
17 16 15

14

Ibid. Praktikos 38, PCP 26. Praktikos 78, PCP 36.

18

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affective part of the soul are said to be the opponents of the ascetic life. Those again who disturb the rational part are the enemies of all truth and the adversaries of contemplation.20

The ascetical disciplines of monastic life have as their object the mastery of passion, leading to the condition Evagrius calls apatheia or passionlessness. Freed from the darkness and distractions of the soul, the mind is able to enter into the contemplative knowledge of the Trinity. He expresses this paradigmatically in Skemmata 2:
If one wishes to see the state of the mind, let him deprive himself of all representations and then he will see the mind appear similar to sapphire or to the color of the sky. But to do that without being passionless (a-patheia) is impossible, for one must have the assistance of God who breathes into him the kindred light.21

This brief passage is freighted with terms (state, mind, representations, and passionlessness) that in Evagrian use have specific content; but for the purposes of this paper, mind and passionlessness are the more directly relevant.
[I]n the Greek tradition, the mind (nous) is our intuitive side. It enables us to know and recognize the truth of things instantly, whether a friends face or a mathematical proof. Evagrius believed that the way the mind knows God is not a matter of logic, of thinking; it is a direct intuition. For Evagrius, as for the whole Eastern theological tradition, the mind is the highest dimension of the human person. It is the image of God within us, that which is most like its creator. Since the mind is the most Godlike part of us, it is the faculty most capable of knowing God. Thus Evagrius claims that there is nothing more natural to us as human beings than praying 22

In a comment on Psalm 141:2 (Let my prayer be set forth in thy sight as the incense), Evagrius says that if prayer is like incense, then the mind as the vessel of prayer is a sort of

20

Praktikos 84, PCP 37.

Harmless and Fitzgerald, p. 521. The sapphire allusion is to the theophany narrated in Exodus 24:9-10: Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a pavement of sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness (ibid., p. 518). Ibid., p. 513. They note as well on p. 514: Evagrius says that prayer is not just an activity of mind; it is a state of mind, a katastasis. That means that prayer is not so much something one does as something one is. For Evagrius, prayer is not ekstasis, not leaving oneself; it is a katastasis, a coming to ones true state.
22

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censer.23 True prayer is knowledge of God, that is, contemplation of the Trinity. Strictly speaking, theology is not ratiocination about the qualities or nature of God, but it is knowledge of God in prayer. (Knowledge gained through discursive reasoning Evagrius would call philosophy.24) As Louth puts it, [i]nstead of referring to what we know of God, however highly qualified, [theology] refers to our actual knowing of God.25 Only the one who prays truly can be a theologos or theologian, and to pray truly requires an intellect that is attentive to God; but the passions of the soul distract from that attentiveness.
But if the intellect can rise above distractions to the state that Evagrios called apatheia, then it attains to its natural state which is the state of prayer. [I]n this state the philosophical and spiritual mind is snatched up on high in the most intense love. 26

The English word apathy is a false cognate for apatheia as Evagrius uses the word. Harmless and Fitzgerald state that:
Evagriuss term here, apatheia, has nothing to do with apathy. Nor does it mean a lack of passion in the sense of a lack of emotion. In fact, Evagrius defines his understanding quite precisely in the Skemmata: Passionlessness is a quiet state of the rational soul. It results from gentleness and selfcontrol {Skemmata 3).27

Evagrius's concern is prayer, and in his understanding the passions interfere with true prayer: A man in chains cannot run. Nor can the mind that is enslaved to passion see the place of spiritual

23

Cited in Harmless and Fitzgerald, p. 514. Driscoll, p. 338. Louth (1997), p. 8. Louth (1997), p. 7. He is quoting at the end number 52 of the Chapters on Prayer; cf. PCP 63.

24

25

26

Harmless and Fitzgerald, p. 516. They note: The term apatheia had been originally used by the Stoics, but Christian theologians soon adopted it. Athanasius, for instance, speaks of Christ as passionless; and in the Life of Anthony, Athanasius describes his hero arriving at a state of dispassionate tranquility.

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prayer. It is dragged along and tossed by these passion-filled thoughts and cannot stand firm and tranquil.28 Apatheia is not some Stoic ideal of imperturbability. It is a relative calm on the far side of the stormand a realistic calm that still must face the daily upsets of life.29 Evagrius understands the apatheia sought in monastic life as the return of a fallen soul to its healthy state. Through assiduous practice of the ascetical disciplines, the monk learns to control the distractions of the sensible world on the operation of the intellect, and thus he is able to rise to the former state of his soul: the intellectual contemplation of God in prayer. Louth points out that this is consistent with Plato, for whom theology
was more than the ascertaining of facts about the divine; it entailed a whole moral reformation the long and painful passage from the shadows of the Cave to the daylight reality of the world outside. Moral virtue was the indispensable basis for intellectual virtue, and neither could be achieved without struggle and perseverance. Philosophy described this whole process. It was a preparation for passing beyond this world to the world of intelligible reality 30

In this sense, then, monks are philosophers whose lives are ordered to control the passions. With the intellect clear, the monk is able to pray truly and become a theologian. Evagrian Christology From the foregoing, it will be apparent that Evagrius is neither a speculative nor a systematic theologian in the sense that those terms are used today. Rather, he is a monk writing

28

Number 71 of the Chapters on Prayer, PCP 66.

Harmless and Fitzgerald, p. 516f. Imperturbability, however, is precisely how St. Jerome describes apatheia as Evagrius uses the word. In Epistle 133 he lampoons the teaching: Evagrius has published a book of maxims on apathy, or, as we should say, impassivity or imperturbability; a state in which the mind ceases to be agitated and to speak simply becomes either a stone or a God. In the same passage he also maligns Melania as her whose name bears witness to the blackness of her perfidy. At http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001133.htm. Accessed December 13, 2011. Louth (1997), p. 9. Of the Platonic influence on Evagrius and his contemporaries, Louth notes (p. 5f.) that this influence should not be construed as the impact of one collection of ideas on another collection of ideas (of Platonism on the Bible), but rather as the way Christians who spoke and thought in Greek, who were Greek, drew upon ideas familiar to them to answer problems [sic] that were problems for them.
30

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primarily for other monks out of his experience of ascetic discipline and prayer. Understanding his theological method, one also sees that one cannot separate Evagrius doctrinal and ascetical writings. That is a distinction he would neither make nor understand. Nevertheless, Evagrius does discuss theological doctrine in his writings. He touches on questions of the nature and work of Christ primarily in four documents. The Scholia on the Psalms touch incidentally on types of Christ in the Psalms, while the Kephalaia Gnostica engages Christological questions more substantively. However, neither is readily available in complete English translation. We shall focus principally, therefore, on two significant documents in the Evagrian corpus, the Epistula Fidei and the Epistula ad Melaniam. The epistle on the faith is the earliest datable writing of Evagrius, being written from Constantinople circa 379380,31 i.e., in the period immediately before the First Council of Constantinople. Given that time and place, it is unsurprising that matters of Christology are discussed in the context of Trinitarian theology. Evagrius begins with a clear affirmation of the divinity of the Son: One must confess God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit To those who insult us on grounds of believing in three gods, it must be said that we confess that God is one, not in number, but in nature.32 He notes that everything holy that has a circumscribed nature has holiness added to it; and since it has holiness added to it, it admits of evil. But the font of holiness, from which every reasoning creature is made holy in proportion to its virtue, is the Son and the Holy Spirit.33 He continues,
31

Casiday [2006], p. 45f. Epistula Fidei [hereafter abbreviated EF] nos. 45 (according to Bunges numbering as used in Casiday

32

[2006]).
33

EF 8.

And yet we, in keeping with right reason, do not say the Son is either like or unlike the Father; each term is equally inapplicable. For the terms like and unlike are used only with respect to qualities, whereas the divine is free from quality. But as we confess the identity of their nature, we also accept the identity of their essence and disavow the idea of a composite naturefor the Father, who is God by his essence, has begotten the Son, who is God by his essence. Thus, the identity of their essence is shown: for one who is God by essence has the same essence as another who is God by essence.34

All three Persons of the Trinity share the same essence, that of the one God. Then he considers each of six passages of Scripture that our adversaries seize and distort to their own purpose before presenting them to us to debase the glory of the Only-Begotten,35 namely, by suggesting the inferiority of the Son to the Father. 1. I live because of the Father (John 6:57)36 Evagrius first proposes that this expression does not describe [Christs] life in eternity, as I thinkbut rather that life in the flesh that came to be in time which he lived through the Father. Then he suggests that [h]e can also mean by life that life which Christ lives in that he has God the Word within himself. Noting that the same verse continues, so he who eats me will live because of me, he says we eat his flesh and drink of his blood, becoming communicants of the Word and Wisdom through his Incarnation and physical life. It is this flesh and blood existence that Christ lives through the power of God that is the means by which the soul is nourished and prepared for the contemplation of ultimate realities. 2,. The Father is greater than I (John 14:28)37 Even from this phrase, Evagrius claims, it can be shown that the Son is of one essence

34

EF 9. EF 14. EF 1415. Scripture quotations throughout are from the Revised Standard Version. EF 1618.

35

36

37

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withe the Father because just as with apples and oranges, comparisons are only meaningful between things that are of the same nature.
[W ]e say that this angel is greater than that, or this man more righteous than that, or this bird faster than that. If, then, comparisons are made of things in the same species; and the Father is called greater in comparison with the Son; then the Son is of the same essence as the Father.

A second consideration about how he who is the Logos and became flesh could confess that the Father is greater than himself, is precisely that he became a dead man for your sake, so as to deliver you from death and give you a share of heavenly life. That is to say, the subordination of Christ to the Father is an element of the divine condescension for the sake of fallen humanity. 3. Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only (Matthew 24:36)38 Evagrius adduces two separate arguments to explain the apparent subordination of the Son to the Father in this passage. In the first he asserts that nothing is unknown to the true Wisdom, through whom all things were made [i.e., to Christ; cf. John 1:3]; and no one at all is ever ignorant of what he has made. Nevertheless, Christ numbered himself among the ignorant for the sakeof the weakness of the multitudes; that is:
[H]e makes this dispensation for your weakness, so that those who are sinning would not fall into despair owing to the appointed time, as if insufficient time remained for repentance; and again so that those who have been long fighting against the opposing power would not abandon their posts owing to the length of time.

In other words, in the Incarnation Christ assumes human ignorance so as to assure the lax that there is still time to repent and to encourage the strong to persevere. Alternatively, Evagrius explains that the disciples of Christ having come to contemplation

38

EF 1925.

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and being purified by the Word yearn to know ultimate blessedness. By day Jesus meant the complete and precise comprehension of Gods purposes, and in saying hour, the contemplation of the One and Only.39 But understanding these things is possible to the Father only, since the Father himself is the end and ultimate blessedness.40
If, then, God is said to know about himself what is, and not to know what is not; and our Lord is not the final object of desire, in keeping with the purpose of the Incarnation and rudimentary doctrine; then our Saviour does not know the goal and ultimate blessedness.41

Knowledge of that goal and ultimate blessedness, which Evagrius identifies as the meaning of the day and hour, is specifically knowledge of the Father rather than of Christ. Therefore Christ quite properly does not know it, since it is not knowledge of himself; that, however, is not to deny that he is God the Son, one in essence with the Father. 4. The LORD created me (Proverbs 8:22)42 Evagrius distinguishes between creation in essence and creation in function:
He who leads us to the kingdom of heaven is also called the beginning of the evangelical ways not as one who became a creature in nature, but as one who became the way according to the dispensation. And in the same way he became the way, so, too, he became the door, the shepherd, the angel, the sheep, and again the high priest and apostle, with the particular names being applied to particular considerations.

The word considerations in this passage is Casidays translation for Evagrius term epinoia.43 The epinoias of Christ are different aspects of his identity, vocation, and providential action. Thus he is the way, the door, the shepherd, and so on. The epinoias of Christ are what is created,

39

EF 21. EF 22. Ibid. EF 27. Casiday [2006], p. 211 n. 9.

40

41

42

43

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says Evagrius, not his essence. 5. For our sake he made him to be sin (II Corinthians 5:21)44 Rather than meaning that Christ in his essence somehow became sin, and therefore by definition distinct from, inferior to, and unworthy of the holy God, Evagrius asserts that he became sin when he made mankinds subjectionand persecution, nakedness, and weaknesshis own: [T]he Lord made his own those difficulties that surround us by taking to himself our passions through communion with us. 6. The Son can do nothing of his own accord (John 5:19)45 Evagrius avers that even this passage attests chiefly that the Son is of the same nature as the Father, and he adduces three arguments to prove it. First is a sort of syllogism:
[I]f every rational creature with free will can do of itself what it wills and has equal inclination toward the good and the bad, whereas the Son can do nothing of himself, then the Son is no creature; and if no creature, then he is of one essence with the Father.

Second is another syllogism predicated on a Christological reading of an Old Testament text: [N]one of the creatures can do all that it wishes. But the Son has done whatever he desired in heaven and on earth [Psalm 134.6]. So, then, the Son is no creature. Third, and most obscurely, he argues that all creatures consist of opposites or admit of opposites. But the Son is righteousness itself and is immaterial. So, then, the Son is no creature; and, if not, he is of one essence with the Father. The third argument, in other words, reasons from the eternal Son, the second Person of the immaterial Trinity in whom there are no opposites, in apparent distinction from the Incarnatei.e., materialJesus. It would be anachronistic to call this argument Nestorian,

44

EF 28. EF 29.

45

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but it does seem to reflect what could be described as at least an incipient Nestorianism. The second principal source for Evagrius Christology is the Epistula ad Melaniam, which is his longest and perhaps latest letter. Whatever its precise date, it may be said to reflect Evagrius mature thought. He begins with a discussion of the nature of epistolary communication, and analogizes creation to a letter from God. He says that creation exists like a letter: through his power and his wisdom (that is, by his Son and Spirit), he made known abroad his love for [those who are far from him] so that they might be aware of it and draw near.46 As in reading a letter one becomes aware of the skill of him who wrote it and the intention of the writer, so one who contemplates creation with understanding becomes aware of the Creators hand and finger, as well as his intentionthat is, his love.47 Hand and finger are figures for the Son and Spirit of God:
You may ask me, How can the hand and finger stand for the wisdom and power or rather, the Son and the Spirit? Listen to the Spirit of God, who says, The Lords right hand has shown strength, and the Lords right hand exalted me [Ps 118.15]; and, Your right hand, Lord, is glorified in strength, etc. [Ex 15.6]. The right hand and the power are the Son. As for the Spirit, the Son says in his gospel, If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons [Mt 12.28]; but according to another Evangelist, he says, by the finger of God [Lk 11.20]; so the finger and wisdom are the Spirit of God. It is thus evident that the hand and finger of God are the Son and Spirit of God.48

Thus the ministry of God through creation for those who are far from him, but others who are receptive because of their purity and good deeds are so near to God that they do not need letters (that is, creation) to become aware of their Creators intention, wisdom and power.49 Gods

Epistula ad Melaniam [hereafter abbreviated EM] no. 5 (according to Bunges numbering as used in Casiday [2006]).
47

46

EM 6.

EM 7. This use also prefigures the ninth century hymn, Veni Creator Spiritus, which includes the line, The sevenfold gifts of grace are thine, O Finger of the Hand Divine
49

48

EM 8.

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ministry to them is still by the Word and the Spirit, but is no longer mediated by created things. There is a hierarchy discernible here:
The Son and the Spirit are signs of the Father by which he is known, and rational creation is a sign by which the Son and the Spirit are known (in keeping with the verse, in our image [Gen 1.26]). The sign of intelligible and immaterial creation is visible and material creation, just as visible things are the types of invisible things. 50

Contemplation of the sensible world leads those whose perceptions have been purified by the ascetical life to the intelligible world, the world of mind where the soul may contemplate God, and therein lies their salvation:
W hen like torrents to the sea the minds return to [God the Father], he completely changes them to his own nature, colour and taste: in his endless and inseparable unity, they will be one and no longer many, since they will be united and joined to him.51

Thus the minds that through the exercise of their free will fell from their former rank and became souls, and then descended again and became bodies, may rise again to their former creation.52 This unification of rational beings with God the Father,53 or theosis, is possible only because of the incarnation of God the Son:
It is unnatural that God should be born from a woman [Gal 4.4]. Yet, because of his love for us and since his nature is not bound by or subjected to any law, God was born from a woman in keeping with his will (so that his being was not destroyed), to free us from the conception and birth of the curse and transgression and to bear us anew in a birth of blessing and righteousness. [H]e not only did not dwell among [this conception and birth that is enclosed by the curse], but even raised us up because (as we have said) in his love he descended into them without transgression.54

EM 12. It would be a mistaken inference to conclude from the parallelism of the last sentence that Evagrius considers the Son and Spirit to be created. He makes the point explicit in EM 18: [T]he W ord and Spirit are signs of the Father: they know everything and make everything known, since they are not creatures but rather are the exact image and true radiance of the Fathers essence.
51

50

EM 27. EM 26. EM 27. EM 5758.

52

53

54

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Toward the end of the Epistula ad Melaniam Evagrius anticipates the question of incipient Nestorianism that we adumbrated above:
In this world, they were not two (God and man), but one (God for himself and simultaneously man for us); likewise, in his world, they were not two (God and man), but one God (God for himself who is God and man, since God became human) for just as the former is man because of the latter, likewise the latter is God because of the former.55

Conclusion: Anathema and Revision During the hundred and fifty years which followed his death in 399, Dysinger notes that Evagrius writings inspired both criticism and admiration.56 In 553, however, the Second Council of Constantinople (i.e., the fifth ecumenical council) anathematized Origen and his followers (among whom was accounted Evagrius), who were found to hold a heretical metaphysic. Nearly 100 years later the Lateran Council of 649 enacted its Canon 18, which reads:
If anyone according to the holy Fathers, harmoniously with us and likewise with the Faith, does not with mind and lips reject and anathematize all the most abominable heretics together with their impious writings even to one least portion, whom the holy Catholic and apostolic Church of God, that is, the holy and universal five Synods and likewise all the approved Fathers of the Church in harmony, rejects and anathematizes, we mean Origen, Didymus, Evagrius, and briefly all the remaining heretics, who have been condemned and cast out by the Catholic Church 57

Consequently, the works of Evagrius were systematically expunged by the orthodox churches of the east and west. The original texts were lost, although translations survived in the Syrian and Armenian churches. Some, most notably the Epistula Fidei, survived by virtue of misattribution to writers of undoubted orthodoxy. The irony is that the contemporaries of Evagrius do not seem to have understood him to
55

EM 61.

Luke Dysinger, Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), in adapted form at http://www.ldysinger.com/evagrius/00_introd/02_biog.htm. Accessed December 13, 2011. These three occur at the end of a list of 21 putative heretics, among them Sabellius, Arius, Eunomius, Apollinaris, Paul of Samosata, and Nestorius.
57

56

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be an Origenist. To be sure, he knew and was influenced by the writings of Origen, but as Dysinger pertinently observes:
[I]n the first decades following his death neither his critics nor his admirers bestowed on him the title (or epithet) Origenist. Jerome disliked Evagrius use of the term apatheia and was suspicious of Evagrius friendship with Rufinus; but he seems to have regarded Evagrius as a crypto-Pelagian, rather than a disciple of Origen. Neither Palladius, Socrates, nor Sozomen associate Evagrius with the first Origenist crisis, which they otherwise recount in detail. Palladius failure to associate Evagrius with Origen is particularly surprising, since Palladius considered expertise in Origen a high attainment, almost a sign of sanctity; and he extols other desert fathers and mothers precisely because they pored over the famous Alexandrians works. That Palladius does not praise his own teacher, Evagrius, in these terms suggests that Evagrius Origenism was either less apparent or less a source of concern to his contemporaries than it was to those who later came to know his writings.58

The question isnt whether what the Councils condemned was heretical, but whether the heretical teachings could legitimately be ascribed to Evagrius. Of this Dysinger says,
These anathemas were occasioned in large measure by the exaggerated (and by then clearly heretical) christology and eschatology of certain sixth-century Palestinian monks who were fascinated with the writings of Origen and apparently also with Evagrius more obscure treatises, especially the Kephalaia Gnostica. 59

For centuries, orthodox theologians east and west have taken the findings of the ecumenical council at face value, with the consequence that Evagrius was largely ignored where he wasnt completely forgotten. But the last several decades have seen a renewal of interest in the work of Evagrius and a reassessment of his place in theological history. Augustine Casiday describes two divergent approaches in the contemporary study of Evagrius: the traditional Heresiologist school and a revisionist view that he calls the Benedictine School.60 An Origenist who surpassed Origen himself is the Heresiologist view, but Casiday argues cogently that:

58

Ibid. Ibid.

59

Casiday [2004], p. 251. He calls the revisionists the Benedictine School because its two principal protagonists are Benedictines, as are the principal institutions and publications involved.

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Later controversies have exercised an undue influence on how people have read Evagrius: lapidary slogans, excerpts stripped from their original context, and hostile accusations the most important of which were made over a century and a half after his death have provided the framework that most theologians and historians have used to assess Evagrius writings.61

These slogans and excerpts arise from the Second Origenist Controversy (c. 532-553), the most thorough account of which was written by one Cyril of Scythopolis. Scholars for centuries have tended to accept Cyrils presentation as essentially accurate, but Casiday cites the work of the Dutch Cistercian scholar Danil Hombergen which he says offers a compelling case for systematic skepticism about Cyrils claims.62 And by calling into question the historical reliability of Cyrils depiction of Origenism, Casiday says, Hombergen has kicked a major prop from beneath the habit of reading Evagrius as a speculative theologian who was, in the eyes of orthodox bogeys, dangerously liberal.
To be clear on this all-important point, the expectation that in Evagrius we find a free-thinking philosophical theologian derives primarily from the condemnations of Origenism advanced chiefly by Cyril of Scythopolis. And since Hombergen has shown that Cyril tends to make unverifiable assertions about what Origenism meant in the sixth century, there is really no reason for theologians 63 and scholars at the dawn of the twenty-first century to perpetuate Cyrils claims.

It seems to me to be the case rather that what McGuckin says about Origens Christology could just as readily be said about that of Evagrius, changing only the date:
One must only keep in mind that, when he first conceived his Christology, in the first half of the third century, Origen ventured into a conceptual no-mans-land. The time was hardly ripe for a systematic treatise on Christ. However, in his whole written legacy the Alexandrian pioneer exhibits a consistent Gospel-based Christology, whose richness still amazes many historians of Christian thought.64

Indeed, when Evagrius was active the Church had yet to pronounce on questions of Christologi-

61

Casiday [2004], p. 269. Casiday [2004], p. 270. Ibid. John McGuckin, ed., The Westminster Handbook to Origen (Louisville: W estminster, 2004), p. 74

62

63

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cal orthodoxy; the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon took place in the fifth century. Evagrius came to maturity, rather, during the Trinitarian controversies of the fourth century, and as Palladius records (in the passage cited on p. 3, above), his contemporaries regarded him as a champion of orthodoxy. The observation Derwas Chitty made about Evagrius in 1966 remains true today: His very great importance is only now beginning to be appreciated,65 and thus theologians (in the modern sense of the word) have begun to revisit the received wisdom about him. Dysinger reports (a bit optimistically, as it turns out) that:
Evagrius memory has also been recently vindicated in the Roman Catholic Church. He is included in the most recent edition of Butlers Lives of the Saints (Collegeville, 1997 [sic]), with directions that his feast day of February 11 may be celebrated as an optional memorial.66

That new edition of Butlers67 features a distinctly ambivalent eulogy of Evagrius (e.g., there is still debate about whether his influence was altogether beneficial and [he opened a current of abstract thought that was to] influence the Middle Ages in ways that can be seen as being at least as dangerous to Christian spirituality as beneficial to it68). Still, it acknowledges that [h]e is now recognized as a major spiritual writer, above all on the monastic life, and that he marked a real turning-point in the development of spirituality. However, the celebration of Evagrius rehabilitation seems to be premature, as he is not, in fact, in the newest edition of the Martyrolo-

65

Derwas J. Chitty, The Desert a City (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995), p.50. Dysinger, loc. cit.

66

Butlers Lives of the Saints, New Full Edition, Vol.2: February, Revised by Paul Burns (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998). Pp. 112 and 113, respectively. The entry in Butlers is based largely (p. 114) on Louis Bouyers History of Christian Spirituality, a work very much of what Casiday calls the heresiological school in its approach to Evagrius.
68

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gium Romanum.69 A later entry in Butlers may offer a clue, though, in its mention of a new draft Roman Martyrology,70 which might suggest that Evagrius inclusion was considered (and considered up until a very late stage) but ultimately rejected. The vindication of Evagrius is not yet complete, but it is past due. Casiday comments that
the dramatic afterlife of Evagrian theology serves as a valuable lesson in how the people who lived during the generations that come between us and what we study are sometimes able to divert our attention away from earlier history onto their own concerns.71

For Evagrius sakeand our ownwe need to reclaim him from those intervening generations.

69

Catholic Church, Martyrologium Romanum, Editio Altera, (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004). Butlers, p. 208. Emphasis added. Casiday [2006], p. 38.

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Bibliography Butlers Lives of the Saints, New Full Edition. Vol.2 February. Revised by Paul Burns. College ville: Liturgical Press, 1998. Casiday, Augustine. Gabriel Bunge and the Study of Evagrius Ponticus. St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly 48 (2004): 249297. Casiday, A.M. Evagrius Ponticus. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2006. Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995. Dysinger, Luke. Psalmody and Prayer in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. . The Significance of Psalmody in the Mystical Theology of Evagrius of Pontus. In Studia Patristica, Vol. XXX: Biblica et Apocrypha, Ascetica, Liturgica, edited by Elizabeth Livingstone, pp. 176182. Leuven: Peeters, 1997. Evagrius Ponticus. Ad Monachos. Ancient Christian Writers. Translation and Commentary by Jeremy Dricoll, O.S.B. New York: Newman, 2003. . The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer. Translated, with an introduction and notes, by John-Eudes Bamberger, OCSO. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1981. Harmless, William, S.J., and Fitzgerald, Raymond R., S.J. The Sapphire Light of the Mind: The Skemmata of Evagrius Ponticus. Theological Studies 62 (2001): 498529. Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Doctrines, Revised Edition. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978. Kline, Francis. The Christology of Evagrius and the Parent System of Origen. Cistercian Studies 20 (1985): 155-83. Louth, Andrew. And If You Pray Truly, You Are A Theologian: Some Reflections on Early 21

Christian Spirituality. In Wisdom of the Byzantine Church: Evagrios of Pontus and Maximos the Confessor, edited by Jill Raitt, pp. 111. Columbia, Mo.: Department of Religious Studies [University of Missouri], 1997. . The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Parmentier, Martien Evagrius of Pontus Letter to Melania. In Forms of Devotion: Conversion, Worship, Spirituality, and Asceticism Recent Studies in Early Christianity. Edited by Everett Ferguson, pp. 272309. New York: Garland Pub, 1999. (I am grateful to Professor Parmentier for sending me a photocopy of his difficult-to-find article, originally published in the Dutch journal Bijdragen in 1985.) Vivian, Tim. Four Desert Fathers: Pambo, Evagrius, Macarius of Egypt and Macarius of Alexandria. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2004.

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