Evagrius and His Legacy - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Joel Kalvesmaki is editor in Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

Robin Darling Young is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Catholic University of America.

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In the early thirteenth century, the learned monk Kirakos of Erzinjan in Armenia completed a large commentary on the Kephalaia gnostika of the fourth-century teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Kirakos was a vardapet, or religious teacher, and he knew Evagrius’s works in those Armenian translations available in his native language for nearly eight hundred years. Learned Armenian Christians, like their Syriac-speaking comrades to the south, had for all that time called Evagrius a holy man and had revered and learned from his works. Kirakos elaborately praised him as “Saint Evagrius, the bodiless man-in-a-body, who is called the ornament and the intellect of the desert.”

Kirakos’s brief encomium touches on three aspects of Evagrius’s presence in that Armenian library―his teaching, his intellectual accomplishments, and his Egyptian asceticism. First, Evagrius was known both in his own day and in later eras as a teacher of monks and a brilliant pedagogue of the soul. He had assembled that pedagogy from the oral traditions of his own monastic teachers and philosophical techniques common to both pagans and Christians in late antiquity, writing a guidebook for an endeavor that Pierre Hadot has memorably called “philosophy as a way of life.” By Kirakos’s time, Evagrius’s pedagogy had proven a reliable form of training for nearly a millennium, and had spread far beyond the Greek culture in whose language it was expressed. In this pedagogy, it was believed, the body’s troubles yielded to 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 intellectual powers to allow knowledge and contemplation to grow and, through prayer and the deep understanding of scripture, to guide the mind to union with God.

Finally, Kirakos’s encomium praises the Egyptian desert itself, which all medieval monks, from the Atlantic to the eastern stretches of the Silk Road, believed to be the origin of the monastic life. The desert was the source, they thought, of their ascetic traditions and the dwelling place of the fathers of monasticism―Anthony, Ammon, Macarius, and other abbas from whom Evagrius himself had learned during his residence in Nitria and Kellia from 383 to 399. In the monks’ own historiography, the complex origins of Christian monastic life had been simplified: the “angelic life” of the monks had begun with one founder, Anthony; the first abbot and the first rule had come from there; and pilgrims who wanted to learn how to live that life visited first the early monastic houses of Egypt

From Kirakos’s vantage point, Evagrius was an exemplary monk of the first generations of monasticism; that he was a reliable teacher went without saying. But in the west, over the border and beyond Armenia―in the eastern Roman Empire of the sixth century―Evagrius’s work had been condemned, and his more advanced writings had been obliterated. For most Latin and Greek speakers, Evagrius was not “the ornament and intellect of the desert,” but a dissident who spread the heresy of Origenism; even during his lifetime, some thought him a bad influence on monks.

For this reason there are two problems that continue to afflict the study of Evagrius and his legacy. The first is that he was not only a monk, even measured by the conventions of his own time; thus his work has been interpreted too narrowly. As a cosmopolitan intellectual and former habitué at the imperial court, his was a thorough and sophisticated education. The second problem is that after the Second Council 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 original Greek―or in any place where the edicts of the council had force. Only in churches beyond the borders of the empire could Evagrius’s works be copied; but they were usually copied in translation, and those translations were often imperfect. Elementary works survived in Greek, and others, esoteric and advanced, that were still considered too useful to lose, survived under pseudonyms or in fragments.

In the modern study of Evagrius, the first and second problems tend to overlap. Interpreting Evagrius first as a practitioner of monasticism has tended to deprive him of the rich and complex world he inhabited, and restrict his study primarily to a kind of monastic history. This often means that he and his work are compared to an author and monastic founder like Pachomius or to the complex collections called Sayings of the Desert Fathers. But the second, interpreting Evagrius as a heretic―or trying to rebut that charge―both reinforces his apparent status as a monastic teacher (misguided or not) and diverts atten- tion from the intention and scope of his entire work. Of course, both concerns reflect the customarily ecclesiastical orientation of Evagrian scholars―but just because they predominate in the scholarly literature, categories like “monk” and “heresy” have been just as frequent among those students of Evagrius who have little interest in justifying and preserving church tradition or condemnations.

(Excerpted from Introduction)