The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Evagrius Ponticus
died c. 399Patristic
A brilliant deacon who fled both Constantinople and his own desire, and mapped the eight thoughts that became the seven deadly sins.
Summary
- Lived died c. 399.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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).
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
In their own words
“I have seen, he says, the material world that preoccupies human minds, that which God gave to the human race prior to its cleansing so that they would occupy themselves. He means here that the beauty of the material world is temporal, not eternal. For, …”
SCHOLIA ON ECCLESIASTES 15:3.10-13 · on Ecclesiastes 3:11
“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom the work that God has done from beginning to end.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Evagrius Ponticus at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Mapped the eight thoughts that trip up the soul, the list the West later turned into the seven deadly sins.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.