Evagrius Ponticus

Evagrius was born in 345 at Ibora in Pontus, on the Black Sea coast, the son of a country bishop. Basil of Caesarea ordained him a reader. Gregory of Nazianzus ordained him a deacon and took him to Constantinople for the council of 381, and left him behind as archdeacon under the new bishop. He was brilliant, quick in argument, effective against the Arians, and thoroughly at home in the capital. Then he fell in love with the wife of a high official. He knew what he was doing and could not stop. He records that a dream and an oath finally broke it: he swore he would leave the city, woke, and booked passage the next day. He went to Jerusalem, to the monastery of Melania the Elder on the Mount of Olives, collapsed into a six-month fever, and confessed everything to her. She told him to become a monk. In 383 he went to Egypt — first to Nitria for two years, then to the Cells, where he stayed for sixteen years until his death. He supported himself copying manuscripts. He ate a pound of bread a day and a little oil, and drank no wine. He was taught by Macarius the Great and Macarius of Alexandria. Palladius and John Cassian were his students. He was the first man to write down the desert's teaching in an ordered way. The Praktikos, the Chapters on Prayer, the Antirrhetikos, the Gnostikos and the Kephalaia Gnostika are short, numbered, memorizable paragraphs — a psychology of temptation built from what the elders had learned by trial. His most famous contribution is the list of eight logismoi, the tempting thoughts that assault a soul in order: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride. He described how each one works, what it disguises itself as, and what defeats it. John Cassian carried the list to southern Gaul; Gregory the Great reworked it; the West knows it as the seven deadly sins. He also followed Origen into speculation about the pre-existence of souls and the final restoration of all things, and for that the Second Council of Constantinople condemned him by name in 553. His Greek works were largely destroyed. They survived in Syriac and Armenian translation, or in Greek under other men's names — a good deal of him circulated for centuries as "Nilus." He died in 399, at fifty-four, months before the anti-Origenist purge drove his brethren out of Egypt. Sources: Palladius, Lausiac History, 38; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, IV.23; Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, translated by John Eudes Bamberger; Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City (1966).