Evagrius and Gregory

Mind, Soul and Body in the 4th Century

Kevin Corrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754616856
• eBook ISBN: 9781317138846
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have either been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times, or overshadowed by their prominent friend and brother (respectively), Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great. Yet they are major figures in the development of Christian thought in late antiquity and their works express a unique combination of desert and urban spiritualities in the lived and somewhat turbulent experience of an entire age. They also provide a significant link between the great ancient thinkers of the past - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Clement and others - and the birth and transmission of the early Medieval period - associated with Boethius, Cassian and Augustine. This book makes accessible, to a wide audience, the thought of Evagrius and Gregory on the mind, soul and body, in the context of ancient philosophy/theology and the Cappadocians generally. Corrigan argues that in these two figures we witness the birth of new forms of thought and science. Evagrius and Gregory are no mere receivers of a monolithic pagan and Christian tradition, but innovative, critical interpreters of the range and limits of cognitive psychology, the soul-body relation, reflexive self-knowledge, personal and human identity and the soul's practical relation to goodness in the context of human experience and divine self-disclosure. This book provides a critical evaluation of their thought on these major issues and argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, philosophy, and theology.

Chapter 1
Evagrius and Gregory: Ascetic Master, Pastoral Father

1.1 Why Evagrius and Gregory?

Evagrius and Gregory are unlikely companions. When one reads their works, there seems almost no correlation, but their thought is deeply connected. Something similar is true about their lives. They knew each other, shared significant theological opinions, but the connection appears not as significant as those between Evagrius and Basil or Evagrius and Gregory of Nazianzus, whom Evagrius claimed as his teacher. Yet Evagrius and Gregory are strangely related: each represents major strands of the legacy of the 4th century in the birth and development of cognitive psychology and ascetic practice, in the development of Christian anthropology, as well as of sacramental and mystical theology. Both were exceptional diagnosticians of the human soul, heart and mind (along with Augustine, their younger contemporary). They were, like Origen, great biblical exegetes. They opened and mapped out the range of scientific insights from psychology and ethics through biology and physics to theology, prayer, and the mystical life; and they charted the pathways of mystical experience for future ages. At the same time, they were apparently heretical in their adherence to views generally labeled today as “Origenist.” They were saved from themselves by clever women; and so unwittingly, they summed up in their own lives the forceful but hidden presence of women in the making of history. One, Evagrius, was a town boy with a flair for people who ended up in the desert and the other, Gregory, was perhaps stay-at-home material with little taste for administrative or political life who nonetheless ended up in the public limelight. Although Gregory of Nyssa was born into one of the most committed Christian families of Cappadocia, a family tested by persecutions, he showed no real commitment until, at about the age of 40, he reluctantly accepted appointment as bishop of the insignificant see of Nyssa from his brother Basil. Later, after Basil’s death in 379, when Gregory became one of the foremost champions of Christian orthodoxy against Arianism, he remained a not particularly distinguished administrator, who could grumble about his lot in life to his older sister, Macrina, on her deathbed.¹ Yet this somewhat unprepossessing figure distilled the thought and spirit of both Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus into the creative philosophic-theological transmission of a Cappadocian legacy for the future of Christianity. Let us take Evagrius first.

1.2 Evagrius

Evagrius’ achievement was similar to that of Gregory, though nobody would have predicted it in the early 380s and few knew anything of it in the West until the 1950s. Condemned with Origen by the Council of Constantinople II in 553 as a heretic, Evagrius virtually disappeared: his practical works were retained in Greek, but the metaphysical works disappeared into Syriac and Armenian copies or assumed canonized form under the names like St. Nilus of Ancyra. Only in modern times did scholars begin to realize that John Cassian, whose writings helped to shape Benedictine spirituality, was deeply indebted to Evagrius. Cassian never mentions Evagrius, but Evagrius pervades his thought.

According to his disciple, Palladius, in the Lausiac History, and from indications in other ancient historians (such as Socrates, Sozomen, and Gennadius), Evagrius was born (perhaps in 334, but possibly earlier by five years) in Ibora in the province of Pontus, above Cappadocia and near the Black Sea, in contemporary Northern Turkey.² He was the son of a country bishop (chorepiskopos) whom Basil ordained lector and then priest. About the time of Basil’s death (377 or 379) and after, Evagrius served as Gregory Nazianzus’ archdeacon in Constantinople and became an important spokesperson for the Nicene cause in the Trinitarian debate at the Council of Constantinople in 381, where Gregory “left him to the blessed bishop, Nectarius, as one most skillful in confuting all the heresies. He flourished in the great city, confuting every heresy with youthful exuberance” (Palladius, LH, section 2). Palladius was Evagrius’ friend, but we are able to judge for ourselves since Letter 8 in the collection attributed to Basil, expounding a Nicene view of the Trinity, was written by Evagrius.³ After Basil’s death and Gregory Nazianzus left the Council, Evagrius and Gregory of Nyssa must have spent time together, but no details have been preserved.

Evagrius’ talent, however, was in danger of being destroyed: he fell in love with a married woman “of the highest social class.” The possibility of scandal was great – and the political consequences to the Nicene cause would have been even greater. Evagrius wanted to break off the affair but could not do so; neither could she. Dream, trauma, and sickness came to play an archetypal role in Evagrius’ life. One night he dreamed that he had been arrested by the governor’s soldiers, chained without knowing why: yet he knew why in his conscience and thought the woman’s husband had arranged it. Suddenly an angel, in the guise of a friend, appeared and asked him to swear on the Gospel to leave town and take care of his soul on condition of freedom. In the dream, Evagrius swore the oath and when he awoke, he decided immediately “even if this oath was made in my vision, nevertheless I did swear it” (LH 4–7). He packed his goods and clothes of which he had plenty and took the first ship to Jerusalem.

Evagrius’ experience of dividedness was not easily discarded. In Jerusalem, he entered the remarkable monastic community of Melania the Elder and Rufinus at the Mount of Olives, a community that in its experience and bilingualism (Rufinus) was able to link the Latin-speaking to the Eastern world’s experiences in monasticism and theology, from Pachomius to Origen.⁴ Here, he slipped back into his old ways: cleverness, clothes, and pleasure. As the Coptic Life puts it:

… his heart doubted and became divided; and on account of his boiling youthfulness and his very learned speech, and because of his large and splendid wardrobe (he would change clothes twice a day), he fell into vain habits and bodily pleasure. But God, who always keeps destruction from his people, sent a tempest of fever and chills upon him until he contracted a grave illness that persisted until his flesh became as thin as thread (Coptic Life, section 8).⁵

Nobody could diagnose the problem until Evagrius confessed his affair in Constantinople to Melania. He promised to adopt the monastic life, rapidly recovered, “got up [and] received a change of clothing at her hands” (LH, section 9). This sounds as though Melania acted as monastic superior formally investing him with monastic garments. As Gregory of Nyssa acknowledges his older sister, Macrina, to be his superior and teacher, so Evagrius’ admission to the monastic life has the powerful, symbolic quality of occurring through a woman of superior station and intelligence. He left immediately for Egypt under the auspices of Melania who had several years before visited an experimental monastic colony at Nitria, just south of Alexandria, where a remarkable city was established on the edge of the Libyan Desert.

For two years, he lived in Nitria, forty miles southeast of Alexandria on the edge of the Nile delta, a settlement that, according to Palladius, had about 5,000 inhabitants, some in cells, others in pairs, and others in larger groups. Most of the monks earned their living by weaving rope, the manufacture of linen, winemaking, and gardening. There were seven bakeries to supply Nitria and the 600 monks who lived in solitary conditions at its remote settlement of Kellia.⁶ Discipline was hard,⁷ yet the colony’s hospitality was great. Rufinus paints a vivid picture of a rather unique community to welcome the weary traveler:

So as we drew near to that place and they realized that foreign brethren were arriving, they poured out of their cells like a swarm of bees and ran to meet us with delight …, many of them carrying containers of water and of bread …. When they had welcomed us, first of all they led us with psalms into the church and washed our feet and one by one dried them with the linen cloth with which they were girded, as if to wash away the fatigue of the journey, but in fact to purge away the hardships of worldly life with this traditional mystery. What can I say that would do justice to their humanity, their courtesy, and their love; each of them wanted to take us to his own cell, not only to fulfill the duties of hospitality but even more out of humility, in which they are indeed masters, and out of gentleness and similar qualities which are learned among them according to the graces that differ but with the one and the same teaching, as if they had left the world for this one end.⁸

For two years, Evagrius disappeared into this community whose daily order we do not know except for the “divine psalmody issuing forth from each cell” around the ninth hour (three o’clock in the afternoon) (LH 7.5) and liturgies on Saturdays and Sundays presided over by eight priests. The most senior alone presided at the Eucharist and preached. The diversity of monastic experience is worth noting: Nitria was an experimental form of monasticism very different from the common-life or cenobitic model of Pachomius with its written rules and non-clerical hierarchy, different again from the community of Melania and Rufinus on the Mt. of Olives or from the household community of family and freed slaves initiated by Macrina, the older sister of Gregory of Nyssa,⁹ and different again from the extreme anchoritic life of Antony, and even more so from the life of Syncletica who lived in a tomb outside of Alexandria for over forty years and whose Life, preserved in the portfolio of Athanasius, reveals a woman of very good sense whom crowds of people must have come to visit.¹⁰ In Athanasius’ famous dictum, the desert was turned into a city in very different experimental ways.¹¹

After two years, Evagrius moved to the more solitary location of Kellia, twelve miles south of Nitria – to “the Cells” that lay, according to Rufinus, in the “interior desert,” a “vast wasteland” in which “cells are divided from one another by so great a distance that no one can catch sight of another nor can a voice be heard,” situated partially underground in small walled compounds, according to archaeological evidence after Antoine Gillaumont discovered their buried ruins in 1964.¹² A priest-monk, aided by a council of elders, presided over this community. Its “huge silence and great stillness” (silentium ingens et quies magna)¹³ was broken only when the monks gathered in Church on Saturdays and Sundays. Here Evagrius worked as a calligrapher for the next fourteen years, learning the Coptic of the monks and apprenticing under two of the greatest desert fathers, Macarius the Egyptian and Macarius the Alexandrian.¹⁴ The historian Socrates tells us: “Evagrius became a disciple of these men and acquired from them the philosophy of deeds whereas before he only knew a philosophy of words.”¹⁵ The ideal of experiential philosophy as a form of lived spiritual experience sounds strange to modern ears, but it goes to the heart of Christian monastic life catching the etymological meaning of the term “philosophy,” that is, love of wisdom, as evinced in Socrates’ characterization of philosophy as the “practice of dying” in Plato’s Phaedo, or again in Iamblichus’ later insistence upon theurgy, that is, “god-work” or “god-deed,” as opposed to theology: that is, god-talk or speaking about god.¹⁶ Gregory of Nyssa places a similar insistence upon philosophy as a way of life that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Evagrius and Gregory: Ascetic Master, Pastoral Father
• 2 Christian Upheavals
• 3 Mind, Soul, Body: an Overview of Evagrius’ and Gregory’s Thought
• 4 The Meaning and Scope of Impassibility or Purity of Heart in Evagrius and Gregory
• 5 Uncovering the Origins and Structure of the Seven Deadly Sins Tradition: Evagrius and the Eight “Reasonings”
• 6 Gregory and the Fall of Intellect
• 7 Body into Mind: the Scientific Eye in Evagrius
• 8 Gregory’s Anthropology: Trinity, Humanity and Body-Soul Formation
• 9 The Human in the Divine: the Dialogical Expansion of Mind and Heart in Evagrius
• 10 Pathways into Infinity: Gregory of Nyssa and the Mystical Life
• 11 General Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index