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Evagrius of Pontus' Letter to Melania
Abstract
Summary The so-called “Letter to Melania” by the fourth century author Evagrius of Pontus, is an important though perhaps rather hasty summary of his Origenist thought system. In the first article, a general introduction to the author's life, his writings and his doctrine, is given. In this, it is important to see Evagrius' place in desert spirituality as well as the role which his writings played in the 6th century condemnation of Origen. Then follows an English translation of the Letter's text, which has been preserved in a Syriac translation only of the original Greek, and which has been edited in two parts by different editors. In the second article, the present writer attempts to summarize and comment upon the contents of the Letter in some detail.
Separation, loss, confinement, and change have been imposed on entire populations during the Covid-19 pandemic in the form of lockdowns aimed at limiting the spread of the virus. They are also central to Evagrian asceticism, where they establish the conditions for the change at which the monastic life aims, namely to begin to reverse the effects of the fall by restoring the soul to health. This paper examines how they do so in order to gain an understanding of their ascetic function. Following the Introduction, it outlines Evagrius’ anthropology in order to lay the groundwork for its main theme, the healing of pathos through the practical life. Separation, loss, and confinement are each considered in turn by referencing Evagrius’ descriptions of their ascetic function and his own experience of them. Next, the change at which they aim is described, again drawing upon a range of Evagrian material. The final section of the paper considers how Evagrius can speak to the experience of lockdown by endowing separation, loss, confinement with meaning and purpose in relation to spiritual awakening and growth, highlighting our freedom to choose our attitude to them, and acting as both our guide and our companion.
В Священном Писании ангелы изображаются неизмеримо более совершенными существами, чем человек, но при этом в Послании к Евреям человек ставится гораздо выше служебных духов, посылаемых в помощь имеющим наследовать спасение (Евр. 1, 14). Очень немногие Отцы предпринимали попытку систематического обсуждения онтологического статуса и роли небесных сил. Даже в самом известном трактате об ангелах, «О небесной иерархии», Дионисий Ареопагит рассуждает об ангелах в рамках неоплатонической иерархической парадигмы, используемой в качестве концептуальной основы для учения об ангелах как посредниках в передаче божественного откровения, по большей части игнорируя радикальный и парадоксальный «слом» онтологических иерархий в Воплощении и возвышенную роль человеческой природы, телесно пребывающую одесную Отца на престоле славы в ипостаси Сына. Альтернативное Дионисию учение об ангелах содержится в краткой главе об ангелах в «Точном изложении православной веры» Иоанна Дамаскина, где подчёркивается равный людям онтологический статус ангелов как части тварного мира. В других произведениях Иоанн Дамаскин даёт убедительное христологическое решение дихотомии между ангельским возвышенным состоянием и человеческим ограниченным состоянием в духе Послания к Евреям, предлагая два ярких примера в качестве разрешения: Богородицу, неизмеримо превосходящую все ангельские силы, возвышенную более херувимов и превознесённую превыше серафимов, а также участие в Евхаристии, дарованное людям, но не ангелам.
Summary:
Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity examines the various ways in which Christian intellectuals engaged with Platonism both as a pagan competitor and as a source of philosophical material useful to the Christian faith. The chapters are united in their goal to explore transformations that took place in the reception and interaction process between Platonism and Christianity in this period.
The contributions in this volume explore the reception of Platonic material in Christian thought, showing that the transmission of cultural content is always mediated, and ought to be studied as a transformative process by way of selection and interpretation. Some chapters also deal with various aspects of the wider discussion on how Platonic, and Hellenic, philosophy and early Christian thought related to each other, examining the differences and common ground between these traditions.
Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity offers an insightful and broad ranging study on the subject, which will be of interest to students of both philosophy and theology in the Late Antique period, as well as anyone working on the reception and history of Platonic thought, and the development of Christian thought.
Source: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429440465
The delay of the Parousia-the second coming of Christ-has vexed Christians since the final decades of the first century. This volume offers a critical, constructive, and interdisciplinary solution to that dilemma. The argument is grounded in Christian tradition while remaining fully engaged with the critical insights and methodological approaches of twenty-first-century scholars. The authors argue that the deferral of Christ's prophesied return follows logically from the conditional nature of ancient predictive prophecy: Jesus has not come again because God's people have not yet responded sufficiently to Christ's call for holy and godly action. God, in patient mercy, remains committed to cooperating with humans to bring about the consummation of history with Jesus' return. Collaboratively written by an interdisciplinary and ecumenical team of scholars, the argument draws on expertise in biblical studies, systematics, and historical theology to fuse critical biblical exegesis with a powerful theological paradigm that generates an apophatic and constructive Christian eschatology. The authors, however, have done more than tackle a daunting theological problem: as the group traverses issues from higher criticism through doctrine and into liturgy and ethics, they present an innovative approach for how to do Christian theology in the twenty-first-century academy.
Can we really learn anything new from the past? Is it possible to find something original and even useful in an old, forgotten, dusty text? One common assumption of our own times is that novelty and usefulness are the preserve of ‘science’, to be judged finally by the standard of a technological progress that supersedes everything older than yesterday evening. Yet this is plainly false; for first, there is no such entity as ‘science’, but many different sciences with different methods, some of them reductive and pragmatic in order to get results, but others more descriptive, non-exclusionary and open-ended, in principle; and, second, ‘science’ has a habit of discovering its future in the past: Darwin discovered that the new could startlingly be found in a different way of looking at the past. Astrophysics and astronomy help us to see what is really happening in the present by taking us billions of years into the past. Moreover, in order to discover that 96% of the matter and energy in the universe remains a total mystery to us we have had to devise the means of looking intelligently into the pre-human history of our universe. So the past is a part of the present, in some ways, and a reservoir of possibilities for the future; and even if we cannot remember much about the day before yesterday, our fragile ability to record, and then to retrieve in a new way, something of our own history remembered or written thousands of years ago may be crucial to help us overcome uncritical, exclusionary models of science and thought that may even come to threaten our survival.
If Theophilus of Alexandria seems a minor figure today, it is because we persist in seeing him through the eyes of hostile contemporary witnesses, each of whom had his own reasons for diminishing Theophilus' stature. In fact, he was one of the greatest bishops of the Theodosian era, who played an important role in a crucial phase of the Roman Empire's transformation into a Christian society. Norman Russell's new assessment of Theophilus shows him as an able theologian, an expert ecclesiastical lawyer, a highly skilled orator and, surprisingly, a spiritual teacher. The introductory section examines his efforts to Christianize an Egypt still denominated by its great temples and his battles to maintain the pre-eminence of the Alexandrian Church in an age of rapid change. The texts, most of them translated into a modern language for the first time, reveal the full power and range of his thinking. Thoephilus of Alexandria brings back into focus a figure who has long been neglected in the study of early Christianity and will provide students and lecturers with a fresh perspective, not least through the translation of texts, for the first time, into English.
Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have either been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times, or overshadowed by their prominent friend and brother (respectively), Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great. Yet they are major figures in the development of Christian thought in late antiquity and their works express a unique combination of desert and urban spiritualities in the lived and somewhat turbulent experience of an entire age. They also provide a significant link between the great ancient thinkers of the past Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Clement and others and the birth and transmission of the early Medieval period associated with Boethius, Cassian and Augustine. This book makes accessible, to a wide audience, the thought of Evagrius and Gregory on the mind, soul and body, in the context of ancient philosophy/theology and the Cappadocians generally. Corrigan argues that in these two figures we witness the birth of new forms of thought and science. Evagrius and Gregory are no mere receivers of a monolithic pagan and Christian tradition, but innovative, critical interpreters of the range and limits of cognitive psychology, the soulbody relation, reflexive self-knowledge, personal and human identity and the soul's practical relation to goodness in the context of human experience and divine self-disclosure. This book provides a critical evaluation of their thought on these major issues and argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, philosophy, and theology.
This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice.
Mystics are path-breaking religious practitioners who claim to have experience of the infinite, word-defying mystery that is God. Many have been gifted writers with an uncanny ability to communicate the great realities of life with both a theologian's precision and a poet's lyricism. They use words to jolt us into recognizing ineffable mysteries surging beneath the surface of our lives and within the depths of our hearts and, by their artistry, can awaken us to see and savor fugitive glimpses of a God-drenched world. This book introduces readers to the scholarly study of mysticism. The author explores both mystics' lives and writings using a case-study method centered on detailed examinations of six major Christian mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus. Rather than presenting mysticism as a subtle web of psychological or theological abstractions, the author's case-study approach brings things down to earth, restoring mystics to their historical context. He highlights the pungent diversity of mystical experiences and mystical theologies. Stepping beyond Christianity, he also explores mystical elements within Islam and Buddhism, offering a chapter on the popular Sufi poet Rumi and one on the famous Japanese Zen master Dogen. The author concludes with an overview of the century-long scholarly conversation on mysticism and offers an optic for understanding mystics, their communities, and their writings.
This book examines the life, work, and thought of Palladius of Helenopolis (ca. 362-420), an important witness of late antique Christianity and author of the Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom and the Lausiac History . These compositions provide rich information concerning the downfall of John Chrysostom, the Origenist controversy, and many notable personalities such as John Chrysostom, Theophilus of Alexandria, Jerome, Evagrius of Pontus, and Melania the Elder. The book examines Palladius' role as an advocate on behalf of John Chrysostom, and it employs late antique theories of judicial rhetoric and argumentation (issue or stasis theory), the significance of which is only now becoming apparent to late antique scholars, and elicits new insights from the Dialogue regarding the controversy that resulted in the death of John Chrysostom. The book also demonstrates that the Lausiac History promoted to the imperial court of Pulcheria the ascetic practices of his ascetic colleagues, whom Jerome had recently decried as Origenists. The book delineates Palladius' understanding of asceticism, Scripture, contemplation, prayer, human freedom, and theodicy to demonstrate a dependence upon the spirituality of his mentor Evagrius of Pontus, and upon the broader theological legacy of Origen. What emerges from these pages is the self-portrait, rather than a polemicist's caricature, of an Origenist at the turn of the fifth-century, who has profoundly influenced Christian history, hagiography, and piety for nearly 1,600 years.
Evagrius of Pontus (c.345-99) was one of the most prominent figures among the monks of the desert settlements of Nitria, Sketis, and Kellia in Lower Egypt. Through the course of his ascetic writings he formulated a systematic presentation of the teaching of the semi-eremitic monks of these settlements. The works of Evagrius had a profound influence on Eastern Orthodox monastic teaching and passed to the West through the writings of John Cassian (c.365-435). This book provides an English translation of Evagrius' Greek ascetic writings, based on modern critical editions, where available, and, where they are not, on collations of the principal manuscripts. Two appendices provide variant readings for the Greek texts and the complete text of the long recension of Eulogios. The translations are accompanied by a commentary to guide the reader through the intricacies of Evagrian thought by offering explanatory comments and references to other Evagrian texts and relevant scholarly literature. Finally, detailed indexes are provided to allow the reader to identify and study the numerous themes of Evagrian teaching.
With increasing interest in early Egyptian (Coptic) Christianity, this volume offers an important collection of essays about Coptic language, literature, and social history by the very finest authors in the field. The essays explore a wide range of topics and offer much to the advancement of Coptic studies. © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.
This book explores the writings of Evagrius Ponticus. It seeks a connection between the seemingly disparate aspects of Evagrius' mystical theology by approaching the relationship between psalmody and prayer from three perspectives. First, Evagrius' life, works, and spiritual doctrine are presented, followed by a description of the monastic discipline of psalmody as practised by Evagrius and his contemporaries; Evagrius texts on the interrelationship between psalmody and prayer are then considered. Second, Evagrius' recommendations on the usefulness of psalmody in healing of the passions are discussed. Finally, the biblical scholia are studied, which facilitate what Evagrius called 'undistracted psalmody', that is, contemplation by means of the words used in psalmody of the person of Christ and of Christ's salvific work within creation.
Placing Rufinus of Aquileia's translation projects into the larger theological context of the Origenist controversy suggests a correspondence between Rufinus's methods of textual alteration and restoration and Origen's notion of the fall of souls and their ultimate return to God. This correspondence also parallels an emphasis in Rufinus's work on the idea of a Christian literary aggregate, or the idea of a Christian library, which contrasts with the idea of the Christian author as found in Rufinus's contemporaries, notably Jerome; for Rufinus, the library overshadows individual authors in the same way that God overshadows souls in the final reunification. Thus Rufinus's translations of Christian texts should be read both as contributions to the idea of a body of Christian literature, as this idea became established in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and as material practices that participate in an Origenist cosmology of fall and return.
Evagrius Ponticus (ca. 345-399), practitioner and theologian
of monastic prayer, brought his deep knowledge of both Hellenistic
philosophy and Christian thought (especially the work of Origen) to
bear on his tracing of the human journey back to perfect union with
God. His several writings on prayer, and particularly his teaching
about "imageless prayer," must be situated within that philosophical
and theological framework. The emphasis on imageless prayer creates a
tension with the Christian and monastic focus on biblical texts. Examining
Evagrius' theories of mental operation and biblical exegesis helps in
understanding both the imperative of imageless prayer for Evagrius and
its problematic aspects.
The controversy over Origenism that erupted in the last years of the fourth century and the opening years of the fifth has puzzled many students of the period: no single identifiable theological issue seemed at stake. At the center of the Arian controversy lay a debate over the subordination (or nonsubordination) of the Son to the Father; in the fifth-century christological disputes Jesus' “nature” or “natures” prompted disagreement. But what was the focus of the Origenist controversy: the subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father? the “fall” of the rational creatures into bodies? the restoration of the Devil? the interpretation of resurrection from the dead?
Written by experts in the field, the essays in this volume examine the early Christian book from a wide range of disciplines: religion, art history, history, Near Eastern studies, and classics. © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.
A revered instructor of the eremitic monks of Nitria, Sketis and Kellia, Evagrius Ponticus is a fascinating yet enigmatic figure in the history of fourth-century mystical thought. This historical and theological re-evaluation of the teaching of Evagrius brings to bear evidence from the Greek and Syriac Evagriana. Focusing on Evagrius' concept of perfection as the acquisition of spiritual knowledge, this book revisits current perceptions of Evagrius's thought and character by comparing and contrasting him with his contemporaries and predecessors, both Christian and pagan. Ideas of the three Cappadocians and the author of the Macariana, as well as Stoic, Neo-Platonic and earlier Christian writers such as Alcinoos, Plotinus, Clement and Origen, are all explored. Konstantinovsky draws attention to a lack of uniformity in the fourth-century views on the origin of the soul, the body-soul relation, and the eschatological destiny of humankind.
Presenting many texts available for the very first time, this new volume in the successful Early Church Fathers series showcases full translations of Evagrius' letters, notes on various books of the bible, his treatises and his 'chapters'. Augustine Casiday's material is both accurate and refreshingly approachable, and the work is prefaced by a solid introductory essay that presents Evagrius, his work and influences, and modern scholarship in an easy-to-understand way for beginners. For students dealing with Evagrius for the first time, they could not find a better book to begin their exploration of this figure in late-ancient history and theology.
The same comparison comes in On Prayer 101Bread is food for the body and virtue is food for the soul; spiritual prayer is food for the mind". This quotation confirms our impression, that Evagrius only wants to speak of the soul and the body in these sections
- Food
Food and virtues: The same comparison comes in On Prayer 101: "Bread is food for the body and virtue is food for the soul; spiritual prayer is food for the mind". This quotation confirms our impression, that Evagrius only wants to speak of the soul and the body in these sections.
Philokalia An ET of all the Evagrian material in the has appeared in G
- E H Palmer
- Philip Sherrard
- Kallistos Ware
IV,26, 11, PL 2/427 A = CChr I
- Adv
- Marc
108 note 124; cp. below section 6
- K G Les
On the subject of the suppression of number, cp. also Guillaumont, p.157 note 110
- K G Les