The encounter with oneself that the monks sought in silence and that they saw as a prerequisite for the encounter with God is for Evagrius Ponticus primarily a meeting with the thoughts and feelings in one’s own heart. Among the desert fathers Evagrius is considered a specialist in dealing with thoughts and passions. He experienced them himself and wrote about them again and again in his books, to share his experience with others.
It was said of him: “If you wish to learn all the temptations that he experienced at the hands of the demons, then read the book that he wrote against the objections of the demons. There you will see all his power and his temptations. That is why he put them down in writing, so that those who read them may be strengthened and see that they aren’t the only ones to be tempted in this way. He is the one who taught us which thoughts may be overcome in which way.”
Evagrius comes to terms with the fact that a large part of our spiritual life consists in paying attention to our passions, in getting acquainted with them and dealing properly with them. The goal of this dealing is apatheia, a condition of inner quiet and serenity. In apatheia the passions are no longer in conflict with one another, but in accord. Evagrius also calls apatheia the health of the soul. The goal of the spiritual path is thus not a moral ideal of freedom from error, but the health of the soul. The soul is healthy, Evagrius says, when it is in harmony with itself and capable of love. Only those who achieve apatheia can really love. Indeed, apatheia actually is love.
Evagrius was a Greek, and hence he constructs the spiritual path in accordance with the Greek image of humanity. Greek philosophy was acquainted with three realms in the human person: the desirous part (epithymia), the emotional part (thymos), and the intellectual part (nous). These are also, by the way, the realms known to the enneagram, a system of self-knowledge that derives from Sufism and has close similarities with the nine logismoi (Greek for “reasonings” or “arguments”) of Evagrius. The enneagram speaks of the gut type, the heart type, and the head type.
Evagrius then coordinates each of the three realms with three logismoi, which are emotionally accented thoughts that can rule a person; they are the passions of the soul, the drives that one must confront. In the negative sense Evagrius also calls the logismoi vices and relates them to demons that infect humans. Hence dealing with these thoughts and passions is at the same time a struggle with the demons. In this process the demons have more than just a negative meaning. They are also forces that humans can bend to their will. In Plato the “daimons” were thoroughly good energies, which Persian dualism later turned into negative powers. For Evagrius they are forces of this world, personified psychological mechanisms at work in humans. The meaning of Evagrius for our time undoubtedly lies in his sharp-eyed account of “demonology” as a way of dealing with the passions and the laws of the human soul.
Evagrius challenges us to observe precisely our feelings and our thoughts, the demons and their laws: “If any should wish to know the evil demons from their own experience and become familiar with their art, I would advise them to carefully observe their thoughts. They should pay heed to the intensity and to the ebbing of their thoughts, when they arise and when they pass away. They should observe the variety of their thoughts, the regularity with which they recur, the demons responsible for them, which give way to succeeding ones, and which do not. Then they should beg Christ to explain to them everything that they have observed. For the demons are especially infuriated by those who are armed with such knowledge in their practice of virtue.”
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
