introduction - university of notre dameundpress/excerpts/p03217-ex.pdfin armenia completed a large...

IntroductionThe Ornament and Intellect of the Desert

Robin Darling Young & Joel Kalvesmaki

In the early thirteenth century, the learned monk Kirakos of Erzinjanin Armenia completed a large commentary on the Kephalaia gnostikaof the fourth-century teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Kirakos was a var-dapet, or religious teacher, and he knew Evagrius’s works in those Ar-menian translations available in his native language for nearly eight hun-dred years. Learned Armenian Christians, like their Syriac-speakingcomrades to the south, had for all that time called Evagrius a holy manand had revered and learned from his works. Kirakos elaborately praisedhim as “Saint Evagrius, the bodiless man-in-a-body, who is called theornament and the intellect of the desert.”

Kirakos’s brief encomium touches on three aspects of Evagrius’spresence in that Armenian library—his teaching, his intellectual accom-plishments, and his Egyptian asceticism. First, Evagrius was knownboth in his own day and in later eras as a teacher of monks and a bril-liant pedagogue of the soul. He had assembled that pedagogy fromthe oral traditions of his own monastic teachers and philosophical

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techniques common to both pagans and Christians in late antiquity,writing a guidebook for an endeavor that Pierre Hadot has memorablycalled “philosophy as a way of life.” By Kirakos’s time, Evagrius’s peda -gogy had proven a reliable form of training for nearly a millennium,and had spread far beyond the Greek culture in whose language it wasexpressed. In this pedagogy, it was believed, the body’s troubles yieldedto the direction of a healthy soul.

Second, Kirakos celebrates the noetic goal of that same pedagogy.Its more advanced training aimed to restore a human’s natural intel-lectual powers to allow knowledge and contemplation to grow and,through prayer and the deep understanding of scripture, to guide themind to union with God.

Finally, Kirakos’s encomium praises the Egyptian desert itself,which all medieval monks, from the Atlantic to the eastern stretches ofthe Silk Road, believed to be the origin of the monastic life. The desertwas the source, they thought, of their ascetic traditions and the dwellingplace of the fathers of monasticism—Anthony, Ammon, Macarius, andother abbas from whom Evagrius himself had learned during his resi-dence in Nitria and Kellia from 383 to 399. In the monks’ own histori-ography, the complex origins of Christian monastic life had been sim-plified: the “angelic life” of the monks had begun with one founder,Anthony; the first abbot and the first rule had come from there; andpilgrims who wanted to learn how to live that life visited first the earlymonastic houses of Egypt.

From Kirakos’s vantage point, Evagrius was an exemplary monk ofthe first generations of monasticism; that he was a reliable teacher wentwithout saying. But in the west, over the border and beyond Armenia—in the eastern Roman Empire of the sixth century—Evagrius’s workhad been condemned, and his more advanced writings had been oblit-erated. For most Latin and Greek speakers, Evagrius was not “theornament and intellect of the desert,” but a dissident who spread theheresy of Origenism; even during his lifetime, some thought him a badinfluence on monks.

For this reason there are two problems that continue to afflict thestudy of Evagrius and his legacy. The first is that he was not only amonk, even measured by the conventions of his own time; thus his

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work has been interpreted too narrowly. As a cosmopolitan intellectualand former habitué at the imperial court, his was a thorough and so-phisticated education. The second problem is that after the SecondCouncil of Constantinople (553) condemned Origen and his teachings,his supposed follower Evagrius began to be considered a heretic, too,and his works were destroyed, or no longer copied, in their originalGreek—or in any place where the edicts of the council had force. Onlyin churches beyond the borders of the empire could Evagrius’s worksbe copied; but they were usually copied in translation, and those trans-lations were often imperfect. Elementary works survived in Greek, andothers, esoteric and advanced, that were still considered too useful tolose, survived under pseudonyms or in fragments.

In the modern study of Evagrius, the first and second problemstend to overlap. Interpreting Evagrius first as a practitioner of monasti-cism has tended to deprive him of the rich and complex world he in-habited, and restrict his study primarily to a kind of monastic history.This often means that he and his work are compared to an author andmonastic founder like Pachomius or to the complex collections calledSayings of the Desert Fathers. But the second, interpreting Evagrius asa heretic—or trying to rebut that charge—both reinforces his appar-ent status as a monastic teacher (misguided or not) and diverts atten-tion from the intention and scope of his entire work. Of course, bothconcerns reflect the customarily ecclesiastical orientation of Evagrianscholars—but just because they predominate in the scholarly literature,categories like “monk” and “heresy” have been just as frequent amongthose students of Evagrius who have little interest in justifying and pre-serving church tradition or condemnations.

The present volume cannot avoid having to deal with these two as-pects of Evagrius’s legacy both because they have formed the body ofworks that survives to the present and because they have dominatedprior scholarly discussion. But the editors and authors hope to con-tribute to shifting the focus—away from the conventional lines of dis-cussion, and toward a richer appreciation of the influence, despite hiscondemnation and misinterpretation, of Evagrius the Christian thinker.

To introduce these essays, then, it is useful to understand moredeeply the two problems mentioned above. Was Evagrius a monastic

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founder? Was he a heretic? In both these areas, it is essential to try toinvestigate how Evagrius’s work looked in its contemporary setting,without the benefit, or the drawback, of historiographical retrojection.

The Problem of Retrojection

Because Evagrius used the term monachos, or “solitary,” to describehimself and others for whom he wrote, it is natural enough to depicthim as the member of a community of single men like the monasteriesof Pachomius to the south, where monks lived in a large communitywith an abbot and a rule. But in his own day, Evagrius was not what wehave come to think of as a monk of the fourth century. He was unlikethose of his contemporaries who were shaping and occupying modelsof monasticism familiar through their survival in the various cultures ofthe Christian world. Compared to such communities, the settlementsof Kellia and Nitria, where Evagrius lived after donning the monasticschema, allowed for relative autonomy within a weekly cycle. Duringweekdays, monks lived in freestanding dwellings with one or twocompanions; they joined other residents on Sundays for the Eucharis-tic synaxis and for study and discussion. Evagrius composed instruc-tions for both experienced and inexperienced monks—but no rule hassurvived and he did not mention one.

No doubt the literary elegance of Evagrius’s writings, and theirusefulness for building a foundation for later forms of the ascetic life,guaranteed their wide reproduction and diffusion in later settings, inthe languages of the ancient and medieval Christian monastic world.Presumably at the direction of monastic leaders and teachers, variousworks were copied and remained available in Latin, Greek, Coptic,Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Georgian, and even Soghdian trans-lations. Monks from all these cultures evidently considered Evagrius’sworks important aids in monastic training and therefore ensured theyremained in monastic libraries. Among some monks, portions of Evag -rius’s writings are used to the present day, and since the appearance ofmodern translations, even nonmonastic readers have both studied andfound guidance in them. Just as later readers could, and do, read the




Bible for instruction and inspiration, they may do so without beinglimited by the context of those ancient works or the forms of life thatinspired and shaped them.

Evagrius’s own style has contributed to the situation, too. For themost part, he composed collections of short statements that either gavemoral instruction to readers—presumably duplicating oral instructionthat he gave to his own students—or provoked contemplative medi-tation upon scriptural verses or images. His statements—technically,kephalaia, or “sentences”—imitate biblical proverbs, and they aremeant to linger in the memory as a guide to conduct and thought.Evagrius combined philosophical terminology and biblical language inhis kephalaia, as he did in his similarly lapidary glosses on scripturalbooks—Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Psalms. Evagrius also wrote morediscursive works, and his letters are elaborate depictions of mutual spiri -tual guidance among friends. But in all this work, Evagrius reflects nota later monastic setting but the setting of an ascetic Christian philo-sophical circle—attached to prayer, liturgy, and the spiritual interpre-tation of scripture, of course—but not enclosed in a monastic setting.

He could not have been so enclosed, for Evagrius lived in a busyexurb of Alexandria. In a period when there were many experimentswith the single, ascetic life, the settlements in which he lived were insome ways like the cities whence their inhabitants had largely comeand from which their numerous visitors traveled to see the monks. Ni-tria, his first stop after concluding his visit to the ascetic couple Rufinusand Melania in Jerusalem, had been a tourist or pilgrim site for decades.Its inhabitants lived in pairs or threesomes, in single houses, support-ing themselves as tradesmen or merchants. Even the archaeologicalremains of both Nitria and Kellia, explored in the second half of thetwentieth century, are sufficient to indicate that there was no uniform,self-sufficient, and abbatially ruled community in those locations.

In the slightly more remote Kellia, to which Evagrius moved shortlythereafter, there were only hundreds of monks living in this style, in-stead of the thousands living in Nitria. Here too, it was necessary towork, earn money, and buy the necessities for a life disconnected fromthat of the nearby agricultural villages. Doubtless, though, pilgrims andwould-be students brought contributions, both in money and in kind,

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and Evagrius’s frequent worry about the monks’ easy travel and inter-course with wealthy families testifies to Kellia’s lack of enclosure. WhenAthanasius wrote earlier in the century that the monks had made “thedesert a city,” he may have expressed a lifestyle in addition to an esti-mated population.

If Evagrius was not a monk in the conventional sense, what washe? Most probably, a Christian philosopher of a more ancient type—aman who aspired to live as a Christian intellectual in a society meant tocompete with, and imitate, pagan societies, real and ideal, of the thirdcentury. As a student of Gregory of Nazianzus and, before him, ofBasil of Caesarea, Evagrius may have heard first about this kind of so-ciety from those very men who had, in their youth, tried to live thatway. Basil famously appealed to Gregory to live in such a style at theirretreat in Pontus. Short-lived as it was, that attempt to live as an asceticcouple devoted to prayer and study is just one example of an experi-ment in the philosophical life that flourished in the fourth century, andthat sometimes survived into the sixth century—for example, in thelifestyle of the monks Barsanuphius and John of Gaza.

But in the fourth century, Evagrius aspired to live as a Christian in-tellectual in a small society of philosophers, not unlike those of Ploti-nus in Rome, Iamblichus in Syria, Augustine’s group of philosophicalfriends in Cassiciacum, or Hypatia and her circle (including Christianstudents) in Alexandria. Even his own guides, Rufinus and Melania inJerusalem, lived more like members of a devout study-circle than asthe leaders of a double monastery, as they are often described; and thesame might be said of Jerome and his associates in Bethlehem.

Evagrius was unlike all of them except Basil, though, in hisdecision—following Melania’s advice—to live away from the city.The city had been the customary setting of late ancient philosophers,but Evagrius moved to an exurban retreat, and there he provided theservices of an authoritative teacher, a kind of philosophical catechistlike his Christian predecessors Clement and Origen, or his pagan ana-logues Porphyry and Iamblichus or, later, Proclus. He was at once as-cetic, didaskalos, and gnostikos—a sage—in the mold of numerousthird- and fourth-century writers. Even though he lived as a monachos,he understood that title in the light of contemplation of the metaphysi-




cal One (monas) and guided like-minded monks who were building anew form of Christian institution. But when, in the fifth century, thosemonastic institutions settled into now-familiar forms, he began to lookout of place—because he was.

Less than a year after he died, Evagrius’s community suffereddestruction—visited upon it by a leader whose intentions remain puz-zling. Theophilus, bishop of Alexandria, marked the beginning of thelate-fourth-century Origenist controversy by arranging for the expul-sion of those monks who allegedly followed the teaching of Origen.The so-called “Anthropomorphite” monks of Egypt had vociferouslyobjected, in an audience with Theophilus, to the study of Origen, andthe bishop temporarily obliged them. Thereafter, Jerome—who had al-ready rejected Origen as an ecclesiastical authority—also named Eva-grius and his friends Melania and Rufinus as dissidents.

The details of this controversy have been explored thoroughlyelsewhere; for the legacy of Evagrius and his teaching, it is importantonly to note that this episode was the beginning of the end, both of hisstyle of life and of the development of Origenian theology. It is alsoimportant to note that this theology found its opponent in the rise ofthe great urban bishop in the late fourth century—a development madepossible with the decisions of the emperor Theodosius. Bishops oftencame to regard ascetics as both rivals and resources, and they acted tocontrol them. In the course of this development, the more independentstyle of teacher that had begun with Clement and Origen came to anend, replaced by episcopal teachers and more isolated monastic schools.Thus, even though Evagrius was by no means merely a duplicate ofOrigen, the latter’s freer style of thinking and teaching in the churchwas transmitted among Evagrius and his friends.

Origen and his Alexandrian predecessor Clement had crafted, intheir own pre-Constantinian era, similar approaches to the Christianlife that drew from the training of philosophers developed among Sto-ics and Platonists—in order to foster a deep appropriation of the Bibleas interpreted through grammar and metaphor. Philosophy had beenadapted to the Christian life—but without any contemporary provi-sion for monasticism. Perhaps more fatefully, the lifestyle of Clementand Origen made no provision for episcopal supervision, and because

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its setting was the small group of Christian philosophers-in-training, itwas prized among later solitaries and ascetics, but not prized amongbishops, who needed different tools for the establishment of Christianityin their sees.

Certainly Evagrius’s appreciation of Origen and Clement, and hisadaptation of their ideas to his new setting, did not win him friendsamong their latter-day opponents. But it was not primarily his style oflife that made Evagrius problematic, either in his own day or in latercenturies. Rather, it was the similarity of some of his teachings to thoseof Origen that guaranteed his later reputation as a heretic.

The Making of a Heretical Monk

Initially, Evagrius’s literary works were not the target of the aggressorsin the Origenist controversy of the late fourth century, in which Epi -phanius of Salamis and Jerome began to turn against the theology andbiblical interpretation of Origen and of those alleged followers Epi -phanius had labeled “Origenists” in his compendious heresiologicalwork, the Panarion. Their writings led to no official ecclesiastical con-demnation. Yet their written attacks found contemporary targets—John, bishop of Jerusalem, Rufinus and Melania, and Evagrius were allknown to have studied Origen. Rufinus and Melania continued to readOrigen after Jerome rejected him—Rufinus, in particular, to translateand introduce his work for the West.

Ironically, Evagrius was not, primarily, an Origenist—either in thesense that Jerome or Epiphanius meant or in the later sense associatedwith the sixth-century monks of Palestine. He was an eclectic thinker,like many Christian intellectuals of the fourth century—like Gregoryof Nyssa, his contemporary and countryman, for example. He thoughtin the terms of contemporary philosophy, pagan and Christian, like hiscountrymen the Cappadocians—and if he is represented accurately inThe Disciples of Evagrius, purportedly a kind of table-talk assembledposthumously by his students, he knew that pagans drew from hiswork, too:




If one of the outsiders speaks a true word, do not be astounded—because this is the result of natural seeds [of wisdom], or fromhearing [something said by] one of the saints, or he has heard itfrom a demon, because often they overhear [the saints] when theyteach meditations about practice to their students. (Disciples ofEvagrius 5 [Géhin, 106– 7])

Here Evagrius’s approach to pagan philosophy resembles Clem -ent of Alexandria’s, and indeed he absorbed Clement’s thought andterminology, liberally borrowing Clement’s esoteric approach toChristian teaching. Like Clement, he taught that the attainment ofgno sis, knowledge, came through diligent study and self-reform; heimitated Clement’s use of an eclectic, pagan, and Christian moral andmetaphysical philosophy interwoven with “barbarian” wisdom asClement called it, in other words, the scriptures. Ironically, in the latefourth century, Clement’s influence was uncontroversial; his work,eclipsed by the more prominent work of Origen, reflected an esoteri-cism so profound and statements so ambiguous that it avoided thekind of doctrinal daring that would trouble later church authorities.It was Origen who tried to clarify Christian teaching, beginning withhis On First Principles; and though he, too, presented a simplifiedform of his views in sermons to larger audiences, Origen was less in-terested in pagan philosophy, and also less interested in preserving eso -teric meaning.

Evagrius’s debt to Origen is nonetheless clear, and certain views ofEvagrius were increasingly unusual in his own day, if not unorthodox.Most well-known among these is apokatastasis, the teaching that all ra-tional beings could be saved eventually, even demons—a teaching thatmade the increasingly popular teaching of a literal and permanent Helltemporary or less important, at least by implication. Jerome objects tothe teaching of apatheia (calm, literally passionlessness) as shared byEvagrius with others—he came to identify it with Pelagius’s views. YetEvagrius’s teachings were not problematic generally until they becameassociated with a monastic dispute in sixth-century Palestine that led tothe condemnation of Origen in the same century.

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Evagrius’s opponents took aim less at his program of training inthe ascetic life and more frequently and intensely at his ideas about themeaning of certain teachings and scriptural interpretations increasinglyelaborated at the end of the fourth century. In particular, these were hisconception of Christ and the Christian’s relation to him, the nature ofprovidence and judgment, and the relationship of the contemplative’smind to God in the final stages of approach to the divine.

But the most damaging criticisms of Evagrius came in the sixthcentury—from the Great Lavra in Palestine, under the leadership ofSt. Saba. The monastic biographer Cyril of Scythopolis gave a detailedaccount of Origenist monks in the New Lavra, called “isochrists” bytheir enemies for their aspirations to be Christ’s equals in the resur-rection. A decades-long struggle between the Origenists and their op-ponents culminated in a decision requested from, and granted by, theemperor Justinian. His letter to Menas, patriarch of Constantinople,counts Origen as one of the worst of the heretics; a subsequent councilin 543, in Constantinople, condemned Origen and received the agree-ment of the bishop of Rome. But it was in the wake of the Fifth Ecu-menical Council, in 553, that Evagrius became linked to Origen on thelist of the condemned.

Yet among the monks who lived outside the Roman Empire, par-ticularly in the churches of Syria and Armenia, Evagrius was for themost part not controversial. Numerous Syriac and Armenian manu-scripts contain his writings and were, or still are, housed in monastic li-braries in the Near East and the Caucasus, and they are the only surviv-ing witnesses to some of his works—those that were destroyed and lostto the Greek tradition. This situation means two things: first, it requiresscholars interested in studying Evagrius—either in context or in hisreception-history—to master the languages in which much of his mostcomplicated and controversial work survives. Second, it requires explo-ration and explanation for its own sake. Both of these tasks are daunt-ing, and in different ways. Mastering the languages in which Evagriantexts are extant requires a knowledge not only of the language itself,but of the differing cultural and religious contexts in which each devel-oped, and into which Evagrius’s works were received and absorbed.




Such a limitation, imposed by circumstance, has also kept Evagrius’swork somewhat isolated from the wider discussion of early Christianthought and made it the province of specialists.

A wider question is why these two cultures, very similar in theirtheological beliefs to their Greek neighbors, preserved and used thetexts of Evagrius with little concern for their alleged heresy. The twobranches of Syriac Christianity differed primarily in their descriptionof the union of the divine and human natures in Christ; one of them,the West Syrian, held virtually the same views on the matter as theArmenian. And all three of them were, in the fifth century, adherentsof virtually the same traditions as the Greeks’ apart from their de-scription of Christ. In fact, there were more differences of customand expression between Greeks and their Latin-speaking Christianbrothers to the west than between Greeks and the easterners. Under-standing how Evagrius became a heretic on one side of Asia Minorand a saint on the other requires knowing a considerable amountabout the fracturing Eastern Roman Empire of the sixth and latercenturies. This, too, acts as a limit on the degree to which Evagriushas been discussed among scholars of late antiquity or of early Chris-tian theology.

Finally, apart from the question of divided judgments about Eva-grius’s work in the various Christian churches, there is the far largermatter of the unacknowledged reception of those works as the foun-dational and shaping influence on the very traditions that rejectedhim overtly—the Latin and Greek (and, by extension, Slavic) monasticthought of late antiquity and the medieval and Byzantine periods. Evenafter imperial or ecclesiastical authorities condemned Evagrius or pro-scribed the copying (and therefore the reading) of his works, the mainlines of his thought were replicated in other authors. Among Greekspeakers, in particular, Evagrius’s patterns of thought echo through Di-adochos of Photikē, Maximus the Confessor, John Climacus (who si-multaneously condemns Evagrius), and other, later authors like GregoryPalamas. It still remains to be explored how this obvious replication ofideas took place, even when it did not necessarily depend upon thecopying of manuscripts.

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The Present Volume

Thus scholars are left with the question of how and by what means didByzantine, Near Eastern, and medieval Christian societies receive thecomplex and challenging work of Evagrius of Pontus even when hewas considered dangerous? Evagrius wrote exclusively for male andfemale solitaries advancing in their life of reading and contemplation,and parts of his work have remained in the monastic curriculum to thepresent day. What did those later monastics accept of Evagrius’s, andhow did they use it? That question is among those addressed by DavidMichelson, who tantalizingly suggests that in the sixth century Eva-grius was used to combat Origenism in the Syriac world. This, of course,is the inverse of the Latin world, where Origen’s writings survive intranslation and Evagrius’s do not. The explanations for such divergenceare explored by Columba Stewart, who charts the fate of Evagrius’scorpus in Latin and Syriac through the medieval period. That later pe-riod, marked by Crusades and conflict, would seem to herald culturesequally divergent. But there was interchange, as noted by Anthony Wat-son, who explores the role of Evagrius’s eight temptations in thirteenth-century Syriac writers who traveled extensively in the West.

Between Latin West and Syriac East lies Byzantium, which cannotbe dismissed, even after the Fifth Ecumenical Council, for disregardingEvagrius’s legacy. Dirk Krausmüller and Julia Konstantinovsky bothargue that the circles of Evagrius’s thought were alive and well in thesixth and seventh centuries, either in the enactment of praxis plus con-templation or in the theories about the fate of the soul after death. Thenotion of Evagrius’s troubled Byzantine reception is further developedby Gregory Collins and Joel Kalvesmaki, both of whom focus on themiddle through late Byzantine reception, either through explicit theo-logical appeals or implicit adoption of literary modes.

Although later associated with solitaries or monks in monasteries,the greater part of Evagrius’s life was spent in the company of scholars,theologians, and urbanites, and so his work can be seen as part of a webof conversations among contemporaries in the regions of Asia Minor,Syria, and Egypt, and likewise part of a chain of philosophical com-mentary from ancient Athens and Alexandria to the fourth century.




The essays that consider Evagrius in his own day bring his thought to-gether with contemporary theologians, as does Brian Daley’s essay onthe continuities and discontinuities between Evagrius and his Cappa -docian teachers. Kevin Corrigan shows how Evagrius uses the conceptof “cutting” in his consideration of moral agency, extending a philo-sophical discussion rooted in the Phaedo and the Posterior Analytics,with reference to Stoic ideas—showing how deeply Evagrius’s thoughtis rooted in the philosophical tradition he loved, while at the same timeis mingled with biblical expressions. Luke Dysinger, writing of Eva-grius as a spiritual guide, shows how he understands biblical exegesis asan aid in “reading the heart” and rendering guidance in the “drama ofeach soul’s struggle.” In a similar vein, Robin Darling Young discussesthe aims of Evagrius’s letters, now extant only in Syriac. Guillaumontcalled them “the workshop of his thought”; possibly meant for widecirculation, they convey his friendship, his guidance (sometimes stern),and his own struggles. And Blossom Stefaniw urges that considerationsof Evagrius’s condemnation move beyond the discussion of “Ori-genism” to consider his own high sense of his authority, a sense thatmade conflict with developing conciliar authority—particularly by thetime of Justinian—virtually inevitable.

The essays in this volume can only begin to address the question ofhow later authors received Evagrius’s work. After the sixth century, thechurch of the later Roman Empire reorganized itself, dividing intosmaller groups with differing languages and theological traditions. Insome, Evagrius was received as a saintly teacher; in others, he was re-jected outright or preserved in truncated or concealed forms. We offerthese studies as initial explorations into their reception of Evagrius’sworks, and his thought.

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