Sometimes you just come across these great little gems in the desert. I've been reading, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism of late, perhaps just to counterbalance the slow dread I feel when yet another example of Rome's fall in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy mirrors the current decay of my own nation. It is a mixed bag. I'm not Christian but I'm well-practiced in mentally "translating" works to view them in the best light I can... but it can be tough. You want to, say, appreciate some of Augustine's good points yet trying to cut through his preoccupation with sexual purity, bizarre-bad arguments that assume their conclusion, and outdated cosmology to get at those gems can be a grueling task. But then I came across Evagrius.
I'd never heard of this guy before. He's an early Church member from the latter half of the 4th century who produced a fair number of writings but is apparently more popular in eastern Christianity than in the west (several of his original works in Greek are lost but preserved in Syriac and Armenian). The selection in the book was from his Praktikos and it fully lived up to its name.
"Love [agape] is the offspring of apatheia; apatheia the flower of ascetical life."
Apatheia, or "without passions", is Evagrius' goal. It sounds like the sort of idea he may have developed from the Epicureans or Stoics, but in his writings comes across more positive than negative. That is, he isn't seeking an absence of all passions in order to simply live a peaceful life, but that one must first clear the mind of distracting passions before one can move onto the task of contemplating God and doing good to man. It has a remarkably Buddhist ring to it, especially when he describes how to go about it:
If any monk wishes experience of the savage demons and to become acquainted with their art, he should observe his tempting thoughts and note down:
their intensification
and diminution,
and their interconnectedness,
and their timing,
and which demons produce what,
and which demon comes after another,
and which does not follow after which;and he should seek from Christ the inner meanings [logoi] of these things. They dislike those who approach the ascetic life with greater knowledge, for they wish to shoot in darkness at the upright of heart (Ps 10:2).
It's like an early treatise on being mindful of one's mental processes, and that gaining insight into them is part of the key to reaching a more enlightened state.
Now of course, the talk of demons jumps out. Evagrius believes in them; they are his mode of explanation as to why we suffer from strange impulses that would lead us away from our goals. But the thing about them is, he never relies on them for anything else. For instance, Augustine believed that astrology was the work of demons. Why? Because it was actually "real" magic in his mind, but since it wasn't from the Church it couldn't be from God; therefore he had to explain how there must be demons who alter the appearances of the heavens, or bestow favors, in order that astrology sometimes works. It has the flavor of explaining away a phenomenon, while Evagrius' demons are merely a stand-in mechanism behind genuine observations; it is trivial to mentally update them to mental phenomena. I mean, just check this description out:
The demon of acedia, which is also called the noonday demon (Ps 90:6), is the most burdensome of all the demons. It besets the monk at about the fourth hour (10am) of the morning, encircling his soul until about the eight hour (2pm).
[1] First it makes the sun appear to slow down or stop, so the day seems to be fifty hours long.
[2] Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the ninth hour, and to look about in every direction in case of any of the brothers are there.
[3] Then it assails him with hatred of his place, his way of life and the work of his hands; that love has departed from the brethren and there is no one to console him.
[4] If anyone has recently caused the monk grief the demon adds this as well to amplify his hatred [of his condition]
[5] It makes him desire other places where he can easily find all that he needs and practice an easier, more convenient craft. After all, pleasing the lord is not dependent on geography, the demon adds; God is to be worshipped everywhere.
[6] It combines this with remembrance of his relatives and his former way of life, and depicts to him a long life, placing before his eyes a vision of the burdens of the ascetic life.So, it employs, as they say, every [possible] means to move the monk to heave his cell and flee the racecourse.
No other demon comes immediately after this one; rather, after the struggle the soul receives in turn a peaceful state and unspeakable joy.
This is a remarkably clear-eyed description of those midday doldrums we all experience, when the morning's enthusiasm has worn off and all we can do is tick off the hours, distracting ourselves while knowing we aren't really getting anything done. Add in the little bits of self-pity at one's frustrations and ruminations, as well as that rather clever observation of how rationalizations work in worshiping God anywhere, and he's nailed it.
You can also see how direct he is in his writing, not carried away by anything other than his goal. I haven't read his other works to see if this is his style or a byproduct of the focus of this particular treatise, but it gives the writing a real genuineness. He's here to give us practical tips. It's like the long-time reader of r/desertascetics has compiled a useful guide for beginners to pin at the top of the subreddit. "Having trouble with the demon of anger? People have found that chanting hymns seems to be especially effective. Self-pity and gloominess? The word on the street is that serving the sick best dispels those." Like other hobbyists, the main source of knowledge is not theory but experience, and that makes it incredibly practical:
Do not immediately pray when you are tempted [by other people]; first speak some words with anger to the one pressuring you for when your soul is acted upon by tempting-thoughts prayer cannot be pure. But if you speak to them with anger you will confuse and utterly destroy the ideas that come from your enemies. This is also the natural result of anger in the case of good ideas.
"Look, it's all fine that when you feel upset you want to immediately regain your footing via petitionary prayer, but if you're still arguing with that person in your mind it's not going to be very effective. Sometimes you need to express yourself first in order to help clear your own head." While not explicitly focused on self-knowledge, it is clear that this all arises from a lot of introspective experience. Which really brings me to the last part:
We should not be disturbed by the demon that seizes and carries off the nous [mind] towards blasphemy against God and towards unspeakable fantasies that I have not even attempted to record in writing; nor should such things hinder our eagerness. The Lord is knower of the heart and he knows that even when we were in the world we were not guilty of such insanity.
Where did this sentiment get lost?!? Seriously. How much of Christian soul-searching is useless hand-wringing over stray thoughts that we have no control over? How much mental anguish could have been saved if people just said, "Oh, yeah, that thought randomly wandered in again. It's a weird one but the Lord knows it means nothing." Luther at the very least wouldn't have been such a screwball who ultimately needed to claim humans were unsalvageably broken just because he couldn't control every little day dream. Or this:
A man who has established the virtues in himself and is entirely permeated with them no longer remembers the law or the commandments or punishment. Rather, he says and does what [this] excellent condition suggests.
It's Augustine's, "Love God and do as you will" except less of the horrible capacity for misinterpretation. In fact, I find in it a rather compelling positive version of Tao Te Ching 38:
When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality,
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.
Which to bring this to an end, he at times touches on points I find both practical and moving:
To love all the brothers equally is not possible, but it is possible to meet them all with apatheia by being free from memory of evil and hatred...
Toss out your idea of the saint as somebody who floats above it all and has no preferences or feelings. Instead see the one who acts out of principle even toward those they dislike, for:
The proof of apatheia is that the nous begins to behold its [own] proper gentle radiance... and that it looks at matters calmly.
