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Welcome to Life Sentences, an exploration into the wisdom of the ancient Church Fathers, presented by me, Thomas Small.
In this episode, Evagrius acquaints us further with the demons who attack our tripartite soul, and teaches us how best to combat those demons who target our sensual desire: gluttony, fornication, avarice, and sorrow.
In the last episode, we continued exploring Evagrius Ponticus’s seminal work, the Praktikos. He introduced us to the eight primary logismoi, the strategic chains of thought that demons use to trick us into setting the eight basic passions in motion.
In this episode, we’ll journey even further into the Praktikos to hear Evagrius’ teachings on how to combat these logismoi.
But first, as always, let us continue our account of Evagrius’ life and times.
It’s still the year 379 A.D. It is early autumn. Evagrius is in Constantinople, assisting St. Gregory the Theologian in his battle against Arianism.
The Roman Empire, especially its eastern half, is in political and theological turmoil.
The trouble began just over a year earlier. In August 378, the Emperor Valens, Augustus of the East, fell in the disastrous battle of Adrianople, fighting the Goths who’d settled inside the Empire, but then revolted. Alongside the fallen Emperor, two-thirds of the Roman army was wiped out.
Valens had been a committed Arian. During his fourteen-year reign, he had installed Arian bishops across the East. With his death, those bishops who adhered to the orthodox Nicene faith saw an opportunity to reclaim influence.
In the West, the young Emperor Gratian, Valens’ nephew, became senior emperor. Gratian was a close ally of the Pope of Rome, Damasus I, a stalwart defender of orthodoxy. They were in open conflict with the see of Constantinople, whose archbishops had for decades been Arians or semi-Arians.
To stabilize the East, Gratian appointed a new Augustus, a seasoned Spanish military commander named Theodosius.
Theodosius had proved his worth fighting Saxons, Picts, and Franks in Britain and Gaul, and so in the Emperor Gratian’s eyes, Theodosius was just the man to resume the fight against the Goths in the East. Even better, Theodosius was committed to Nicene orthodoxy, which won him the endorsement of the Pope and the other Nicene bishops.
So, on the 19th of January, 379, Theodosius was acclaimed Augustus of the East, setting the stage for a decisive turn in the battle for the soul of the empire. The eastern capital, Constantinople, braced itself for another round of theological conflict.
Saint Gregory the Theologian had been called there to lead the Nicene party. His first cousin just happened to be the wife of a prominent Roman senator, who owned a large villa in the city. Gregory moved in, and also took over one of the villa’s halls, turning it into a chapel which he called the Anastasia, the place of resurrection. From there he led the city’s orthodox Christians. Though many regarded him as their bishop, he was already technically the bishop of his hometown of Nazianzus, and officially, Constantinople already had an archbishop, Demophilus, an Arian. So, St. Gregory’s status was non-canonical.
But what about Evagrius? He’d come to Constantinople, as we’ve seen, to study Christian philosophy with St. Gregory. In a letter which Evagrius wrote back to friends or perhaps superiors in Cappadocia, he begs them to let him stay a little longer in St. Gregory’s philosophical circle. He wrote:
A longing arose within me for the divine doctrines, and the philosophy concerning them. For otherwise, how could I, I ask myself, endure the evil that dwells among us? Having found a chosen vessel and a deep well—by this I mean Gregory, the mouthpiece of Christ—grant us, I pray, a little more time. Not because we long for a life spent in the cities, for we know that the evil one uses such places to devise deceit for humanity, but because we consider encounters with the saints to be especially beneficial. For in speaking about the divine doctrines, and in listening to them more frequently, we acquire a steadfast habit of theoria, contemplation.
Listening to St. Gregory expound on the divine doctrines, hearing him speak about the higher philosophy, being trained in theoria—this is what attracted Evagrius. Not just the doctrines, but their philosophy, the way to put them into practice.
And it’s no wonder Evagrius was captivated. St. Gregory’s words about transcending the material world by becoming a reflection of divine light were as profound as they were poetic. Listen to this, from Gregory’s Oration 20, delivered in Constantinople shortly after Evagrius arrived there:
Nothing appeals to me more than to live the life that transcends visible nature. By blocking out my senses, severing all ties with the flesh and the world, placing myself beyond the reach of human concerns except for the unavoidable, and communing with myself and with God, ever containing within myself the reflections of the divine, their purity unclouded by the false images here below, and to be, and ever come to be, a spotless mirror of God, as it were, and of the Divine, capturing light with light, and the brighter through the more dim, until we reach the fount of those rays that penetrate human existence, and we finally attain the blessed goal, our mirrors shattered by the reality of truth.
Wow! What a sermon!
But Constantinople was not only a place of calm contemplation of things divine. Evagrius was indeed well aware that the devil was using the city to devise deceit for humanity, and he would soon learn how life in Constantinople could corrupt even the most well-intentioned soul. From that central position so close to the famed champion of Nicaea, Evagrius would become intimately involved in the dirty politics going on behind the scenes.
On 27th February 380, Emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, declaring Nicene Christianity to be the one true faith and the official religion of the Roman Empire. While other religions were allowed to continue, all Christian heresies were outlawed, all heretics threatened with banishment. But this world-historic move, far from settling matters, stirred the pot even more.
Constantinople was a whirlwind of political scheming. There was open factionalism, and theological debates were turning violent. At Easter that year, monks stormed Gregory’s Anastasia Chapel, hurling stones at the congregation. The streets buzzed with arguments and outright clashes between rival Christian factions, and backroom deals were being brokered.
Even worse, there were traitors in the Nicene ranks. That spring a man arrived in Constantinople by ship from Alexandria: Maximus the Cynic. The Cynics were the hippies of the ancient world, if that’s not too anachronistic a word to use. They openly flouted polite conventions and Maximus was no different. He wore a wig of bright, bleach-blonde curls; painted his face; and adopted a markedly effeminate manner. And yet he was also a dedicated ascetic, a die-hard partisan of the Council of Nicaea—and came bearing a letter from Peter, the Archbishop of Alexandria.
And so St. Gregory welcomed him into his inner circle. Indeed, during one of his orations in the Anastasia, St. Gregory invited Maximus to join him up on the dais. Was Evagrius looking on, perhaps enviously, wondering how this unusual stranger had beguiled his master?
If so, Evagrius’s skepticism was well founded. Maximus was a Trojan horse. He’d been sent by Peter of Alexandria to do whatever it took to ensure that the see of Constantinople fell under Alexandria’s control.
Late one night, while all the clergy were asleep, Maximus and a gang of Alexandrian bishops sneaked into the glorious Church of the Holy Apostles.
In its crypt, the Emperor Constantine the Great lay entombed, just as he’d commanded, his gilded mausoleum surrounded by twelve cenotaphs symbolizing the twelve apostles, with his own at the centre, the Thirteenth Apostle—or so he styled himself. In the ornate nave above, Maximus and his fellow Alexandrian conspirators tried quickly to effect a clandestine consecration, hoping to elevate Maximus to the bishop’s throne, thereby seizing the see for Alexandria.
However, as dawn broke, their plot was uncovered, and armed men burst in. One of them managed to slice off a lock from Maximus’s blonde wig, but Maximus himself escaped, seeking refuge, so it was said, in a house of ill repute. He soon fled to Rome, where he continued to press his claim of being Archbishop of Constantinople, leaving his erstwhile supporter St. Gregory humiliated over his lack of judgment—though, in another fine oration, Gregory blamed his gullibility on his naive philosophical temperament.
Later that autumn, on 24th November 380, having defeated the rebellious Goths, the Emperor Theodosius entered Constantinople in triumph.
The city was on edge. He gave the Arian archbishop Demophilus a choice: reject Arianism or suffer banishment. Demophilus chose the latter. And so, Theodosius invited St. Gregory to join him in a solemn procession to the Church of the Holy Apostles.
It’s almost certain Evagrius was there. He would have seen his master Gregory looking thin, his body wasted from fasting. The Emperor, however, was strong, flush with worldly glory. To him the crowd roared their acclaim. To Gregory they showed only skepticism. Most were still Arians. So, when the imperial procession reached the church, and Theodosius tried to make Gregory archbishop there on the spot, Gregory refused. Best to wait for things to calm down, he thought.
His caution would prove well-founded. He clearly had enemies. When he took over the running of the Church in Constantinople, he discovered that all its financial records had been destroyed, its coffers emptied. Corruption!
Worse, not long after, while he lay sick in bed, a young man rushed into his private quarters and pushed his way through the crowd of attendants. When he set eyes on the saintly monk, the young man stopped short, fell to his knees, and burst into tears. Gregory knelt beside him, and gently asked him what was the matter. He had been sent to kill him, he confessed. He had been bribed by one of Gregory’s enemies.
The assassin’s confession moved Gregory deeply. ‘God save you,’ he told the young man. ‘For me who has been delivered, to be kind to my attacker is but a little thing. Your courage has made you mine. See to it that you become a credit both to me and to God.’
Things in the capital were clearly reaching crisis-point. Evagrius could see it, and so could his master. It didn’t help that Theodosius was seen granting audiences to Arian bishops. Would the eastern empire once again formally embrace heresy?
The political turmoil in Constantinople would soon climax in a Church Council riven by factional infighting. And in the midst of it all, Evagrius would find himself dangerously close to utterly losing his virtue.
But that exciting story will have to wait. For it is now time to return to Evagrius’s writings, penned long after he’d escaped the evil allurements of the city and settled in the Egyptian desert, where he learned how to combat the eight demonic logismoi which trouble every soul that seeks the kingdom of heaven.
As we’ll learn right after this short break.
In fact, before we resume the Praktikos, I thought it might be helpful to turn to a different text by Evagrius, one entitled On the Logismoi, specifically its first chapter, which explains a bit better the subject which Evagrius covered last time, the eight basic logismoi—but gives them a slightly different spin.
Scholars think that On the Logismoi was written after the Praktikos. Perhaps in the meantime Evagrius fine-tuned his presentation of spirituality. And I do think it helps to clarify even better those eight basic demonic temptations, those eight basic mental stratagems which the demons use to lure us, to trick us, into activating our passions.
So, this is chapter one of On the Logismoi by Evagrius Ponticus:
Of the demons who fight against praktikē, the first to confront us in battle are: those entrusted with the pleasures, or rather the desires, of gluttony; those who whisper avarice to us; and those who summon us to seek the glory of men. All the other demons follow behind and attack those who have already been wounded by these first.
Okay, that’s not the whole chapter, but I want to stop there and point out a few things.
First, he says, ‘Of the demons who fight against praktikē.’ It’s a really illuminating way to put it. These demons, the ones in charge of the eight basic logismoi, and all the other subordinate ranks of demons, all these demons are fighting against praktikē. Of course, yes, they’re fighting us. But specifically they are trying to prevent us from engaging in praktikē, from laying that foundation of the spiritual life and maintaining that foundation throughout our lives as the Holy Spirit builds on top of it the spiritual life’s two higher levels, theoria and theologia, contemplation and theology, intellectual illumination and divine union.
Praktikē is the foundation. It’s like the basement of our spiritual lives. And so really, those three stages, as they’re presented, of the spiritual life—praktikē, physikē, theologikē—they’re not consecutive, appearing one after the other. They’re not temporal in that way, really. It’s not like you first focus on praktikē… okay, you perfect that, you’re done with that, you leave it behind… and then you focus on physikē, on theoria, contemplation… and then, right, okay, finish that stage, on to theologia, union with God, done and dusted. It’s not like that. It’s not horizontal. It’s vertical, like building a house. Praktikē is the foundation. It remains. It never ends. And as the foundation is being laid, the upper two stories are being constructed simultaneously in degrees.
In fact, throwing that metaphor out the window, it regularly happens that someone—perhaps at the very outset of the spiritual life, perhaps before they’ve ever even considered the idea of taking up the spiritual life—it can happen that, through divine grace, an experience of illumination, of that second stage of physikē, of contemplation—or even, I dare say, an experience of theologia, of union—can be granted to them. It could be that some young man, some young woman, minding his or her business, taking a walk through the countryside, will suddenly be struck with a powerful experience of illumination. It might be that that experience wakes them up to divine reality and encourages them to seek out the way to God. Once they’ve found it, they lay the foundation, praktikē, in all its many dimensions: practicing asceticism, incorporating regular daily disciplined prayer, attending the divine services, participating in the sacraments, etc. They lay that foundation, and all the while contemplation and even union is there, at least in outline. And as praktikē is established more firmly, so does that second, and then that third and highest, degree of the spiritual life emerge more clearly.
The point is, the demons are fighting against praktikē. It’s like they’re trying to literally undermine us. Like soldiers digging tunnels underneath their enemies’ headquarters, laying explosive charges, igniting them, undermining the foundations of the building, and it collapses. That’s what they’re doing. The demons are fighting against praktikē.
It’s important to remember that. Their goal is to upset our praktikē, our spiritual practice. That is their goal. Which suggests, at least, that when one feels the influence of demonic attack in whatever way—temptations, sadness, depression, sloth, all of the demonic attacks—our first thought must be, where have I neglected my spiritual practice? Or how is this trying to get in the way of my spiritual practice? That’s what they’re targeting. That’s what the demons are trying to destroy: praktikē.
And then, Evagrius said, ‘Of all the demons who fight against praktikē, the first,’ he says, ‘the first to confront us in battle are…’, and then he lists three: first gluttony, then avarice, then vainglory. But he puts it this way. He calls these three ‘those entrusted with the pleasures’ and then, like, in parentheses he says ‘or rather the desires.’ That is really interesting. He first says these demons are entrusted with pleasures and then he corrects himself and says, no no, the desires. It’s a reminder that when we are indulging in any given pleasure, the pleasure in itself is not the sin. The pleasure in itself is not, as it were, implicated with the demon. The demon is implicated in the desire which, when activated, resulted in some pleasure. It’s the desire itself that we must be on the lookout for.
These three primary demons are stimulating our desire in an irrational way, in a way against nature. If you remember from last time, the tripartite soul had three fundamental powers: the logistikon, or reason, the rational power; thymikon, or anger, the incensive power; and epithymētikon, desire, the desiring power. Our souls are an amalgam of these three powers and we fall into sin or spiritual darkness when the highest power of the soul, the logistikon, the rational power, is subverted. And that subversion, according to Evagrius, happens first when our power of desire is allowed to move not in accordance with nature. So it is desire that we’re first and foremost on the lookout for, the desire indeed for some pleasure, of course, but it’s the desire, the unnatural, irrational desire that we’re trying to diagnose.
And so, Evagrius says, there are three primary demons who first confront us in battle: first gluttony, then avarice, then vainglory. Three modes, three ways in which the power of desire moves unnaturally: towards an unnatural desire for food, an unnatural desire for possessions, and an unnatural desire for glory or reputation or honour. All the other demons, Evagrius says, follow behind these three and attack those who have already been wounded by them.
This is a very powerful diagnostic tool. If you have fallen victim to the demon of sorrow; if you have fallen victim to the demon of wrath; if you have fallen victim to the demon of pride, you can know for certain that you had already fallen victim to the demons of gluttony or avarice or vainglory or all three. So during prayer, when you turn inside and scrutinize your conscience—when you cast your memory back to earlier in that day, earlier in that week, earlier in that year, or perhaps your whole life—you can ask yourself, where am I regularly succumbing to gluttony? In what way am I habitually avaricious? Am I motivated by inordinate vainglory? These are the questions we can ask ourselves first.
Because, Evagrius goes on:
For it is impossible to fall into the hands of the spirit of fornication, unless one has first fallen under the influence of gluttony. And it is impossible for wrath to be aroused unless one is fighting over food or money or glory. Nor can one escape the demon of sadness without remaining untroubled by the lack of these things or by the failure to attain them. Neither will anyone avoid pride, the first offspring of the devil, unless one has uprooted avarice, the root of all evils, for as the wise Solomon says, ‘poverty humbles a man.’
(That’s a quote from Proverbs chapter 10.)
So you see here very clearly what Evagrius is saying. Gluttony, avarice, and vainglory are the demonic infantry, the advance guard, the skirmishers who are sent out first to harass us, to weaken us, to wrap up the battle then and there.
Are you struggling with lust? Look to gluttony.
Are you quick to anger? What are you really fighting over—food, money, or glory?
Are you depressed? Are you sad? Which of those three things do you lack? Which of them do you desperately want but have failed to attain?
Are you proud? Do you think you are the source of goodness, are the source of your virtues, praising yourself for them, forgetting that God is the source of all good? Then, Evagrius says, you have already fallen victim to avarice, to greed, the root of all evils.
It’s so interesting. We wouldn’t necessarily think that a proud man was an avaricious man. Evagrius says he is. Evagrius says a proud man will have failed to be charitable, failed to give generously, will have prioritized material wealth and well-being.
So you see, an additional helpful scheme for understanding those eight primary demonic logismoi. Evagrius is saying these are the passions that are primarily the result of unnatural or subverted or irrational desire. The desiring faculty in the tripartite soul goes wrong and gluttony, avarice, and vainglory result.
But then the question is what distinguishes gluttony from avarice from vainglory? Are all three only or equally subverted desire?
I would like to suggest that that’s not the case. I would like to suggest that gluttony is wholly subverted desire. Gluttony is the passion of the flesh par excellence. The flesh, the substance from which our bodies are made, and which is, according to St. Paul, something like an enemy of our soul, particularly susceptible to demonic intervention, and which needs food to sustain it in existence; gluttony is when that natural need is exaggerated, felt irrationally. So gluttony is like desire gone wrong.
Avarice, however, is both desire—you want to acquire things—and meanness of spirit, lack of charity, stinginess: a mode of anger. So avarice is like perverted desire plus perverted anger, or perverted desire with just a bit of anger mixed in.
As for vainglory, certainly desire is involved—you want people’s esteem, you desire attention—but there’s a bit of anger involved. Vainglory has an edge of competitiveness. You want the glory. You also don’t want him to have the glory. So there’s a kind of angry, uncharitable dimension. And finally, irrationality. The corruption of the rational faculty. To desire glory in that unnatural way is already to have conceived in your reason an image of yourself that is false, that is perverse. Your rational power is not functioning properly if you unnaturally crave other people’s attention or glory or honor. So you see, maybe progressively, all three powers of the soul become more involved in these first three logismoi, these first three demons.
But that’s not to say that the other demons, the ones that follow behind those three, don’t also manipulate or participate in all three powers of the soul in that unnatural way as well.
So for example, gluttony, as we’ve said: a form of perverse desire. But then what about fornication, which Evagrius says follows upon gluttony? Of course, fornication involves desire. But in a deeper way, fornication really involves wrath, the desire to dominate another person, to subject them to your will. The spirit of fornication, understood here as sex when it’s not natural, vicious sex, clearly involves both desire and wrath. But equally involves a perversion of the rational faculty. If you are indulging in fornication, you have not seen reality properly. You have not seen properly the humanity of your sexual partner. You have not seen properly how human beings are images of God and that the way we relate to other human beings is a reflection of and indeed participates in how we are relating to God.
So this is true of all the demons. They’re each in their own way playing on these three powers of our soul—desire, anger, and reason—to different degrees and in different ways. Like a chord, like the three notes of a chord, and each demon plays each note to a slightly different pitch, to a slightly different volume, and the end result is the passion, the specific mixing of desire, anger, and irrationality.
Evagrius finishes:
In short, no one can fall under a demon’s power unless he has first been wounded by these front-line attackers. And this is why, at that time of temptation, the devil proposed to the Saviour these three logismoi. First, he exhorted him to turn stones into bread. Then he promised him the whole world if he would fall down and worship him. And third, he told him if he cast himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, he would be glorified without suffering any harm. But our Lord, having shown himself superior to these temptations, commanded the devil to depart, teaching us by this example that it is not possible to drive away the devil unless we scornfully reject these three logismoi.
So you see how Evagrius’ scheme here of the three primary demons that are the frontline attackers, as he calls them, behind which the other demons wait to attack—that scheme comes from a meditation on Scripture. The devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness Evagrius uses to help him understand how the demons are attacking him in his spiritual life. And our spiritual lives can benefit from his contemplations.
And so, returning now to the Praktikos, we go straight to Chapter 15, where we left off last time. And right away in Chapter 15, Evagrius returns to the theme of the tripartite soul and frames all of the anti-demon strategies that will follow around the idea of rehabilitating the tripartite soul.
So here is the Praktikos by Evagrius Ponticus, chapter 15:
Whereas a wandering nous is steadied by reading, vigil, and prayer; burning desire is extinguished by hunger, labour, and withdrawal; and anger that’s been stirred up is calmed by psalmody, patience, and mercy. And these things are to be done at the proper times and in the appropriate measures. For what is excessive and untimely is short-lived, and what is short-lived is more harmful than beneficial.
Okay, as always, a brief chapter. Two sentences there full of interest.
As I say, he’s talking about the tripartite soul. In this chapter, he equates the logistikon, the rational faculty, with the nous itself. That is very interesting—but I don’t want to take any time talking about it now. Maybe in another episode we can talk about the nous and its relationship to the soul as a whole. But he characterizes a logistikon, or a rational faculty, that has gone awry as a ‘wandering nous’. The nous, the spiritual intellect, the mind properly so called, is not meant to wander. It is meant to be focused, fixed, stable, quiet. And as we all know, it is hardly ever those things. It is almost always wandering.
This is unnatural. The nous is supposed to be strong. The nous is supposed to be subject to our free will. It is not meant to be subjected to constant distraction, constant movement, constant wandering. That is a sign that your tripartite soul is broken.
And the Way of the Cross, especially praktikē, is primarily focused on fixing your nous, and Evagrius here says that you can steady the nous, you practice—praktikē—you practice fixing the nous by three things: reading, vigil, and prayer.
Reading. Spiritual reading. The Scriptures most of all. When we read the Holy Scriptures with concentration and discipline, we are communing with the Word of God. Jesus Christ is healing us. He is healing our nous.
So we must read the Scriptures. We must read other spiritual writings, works that bring us into contact with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ who heals our minds.
That’s reading.
Vigil. Waking up early. Spending time in the middle of the night reading and praying. It strikes us as utterly bizarre, I know it. It’s just not something that our culture today ever talks about. But for two thousand years, the Christian tradition—and indeed, you know, all the spiritual traditions of mankind—has been advocating vigil. Monks, millions of monks, and lay people and priests and bishops: Christians for two thousand years have been getting up early in the morning, long before dawn, and dedicating themselves to some period of time at least of reading and prayer.
It’s important. In the Scriptures, when Christ takes his disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells them, ‘Stay awake. Stay up with me. Watch with me and pray.’ We are to do that. It heals our wandering nous.
And finally, prayer. It also heals the nous, you won’t be surprised to find out.
Reading, vigil, and prayer, they heal the nous. They are the three dimensions of praktikē that focus on fixing the broken rational part of the soul.
Next, burning desire, as he calls it. Desire that is irrational, he says, is extinguished by three things: hunger, labour, and withdrawal.
I’ll start with the last one first this time: withdrawal. That means seclusion. Solitude. That means removing yourself physically from the hubbub of social life. From too much exposure to other people. Obviously not in a spirit of anger or contempt. Not in an uncharitable spirit. It’s not the other people that are the problem. It’s you. Your desire is broken. It’s burning. And too much exposure to other people is preventing the spirit from healing your broken desire. Maybe because those other people are very attractive and so proximity to them keeps the pilot light of your lust alit. But maybe because they’re pleasant company. They’re good company. They make you laugh. They stimulate good conversation. All of this, indulgence in desire resulting in pleasure. Evagrius is saying we mustn’t overdo it. We must build into our spiritual lives regular periods of withdrawal.
And then also hunger. By which he means fasting. Never eating to satiety. Basically for us, following the Church’s fasting rules.
And labour. In his time in the desert, that meant working with your hands. Usually weaving baskets, although Evagrius did not weave baskets. He was a scribe. He copied manuscripts, which were sold at market to earn money for the brotherhood.
Now, these days we don’t often work with our hands—although, of course, many, many, many people do. And if you do, if you are tempted to resent the fact that you do, be comforted at least to know that you can use that manual labour to your spiritual benefit. Manual labour, working with your hands, frees up your mind for prayer. But disciplined labour of any kind curbs burning desire, Evagrius says.
And it’s easy to see how that might be. Your alarm clock goes off, you’ve got to wake up and go to work. You don’t want to. You would rather stay in bed, indulging that desire, indulging that pleasure. You would rather be free to do whatever you want, indulging those desires. Going to work, being forced to go to work, is to your spiritual benefit. It is a basic way that you submit your will to the will of someone else and help to extinguish burning desire.
So: hunger, labour, and withdrawal. These are the three dimensions of praktikē that target a broken desire, a broken epithymētikon.
And finally, anger.
Evagrius says, anger that’s been stirred up, it’s calmed, he says, by three things: psalmody, patience, and mercy.
Psalmody.
So, this is different from prayer or reading. This is a different practice that involves the mind. Psalmody. It is literally chanting or reciting the Psalms. This was, back then—and it remains the case today—a fundamental pillar of Christian spiritual life. Reading, reciting, chanting the Psalms. The Church Fathers taught, and I promise you it is true, that the Psalms were especially powerful means of calming your anger, of healing a thymikon that has gone awry in your soul.
So if you struggle with anger—whether expressed or repressed—regular, disciplined reading of the Psalms can really help. In addition to all the other ways in which the Psalms help us spiritually, which are infinite. They are oceans of profundity.
Patience.
Patience is a virtue. It is also a spiritual practice. It is when you exercise your will to resist a tendency to impatience or crankiness or grumbling or criticism or outright wrath. It’s a spiritual practice. It is an activity. Patience. And it helps to calm anger when it’s stirred up.
Finally, mercy.
Acts of mercy. Giving. Charity. Compassion. If you are an angry person or if you are in the grip of anger, you must practice conscious, willed mercy towards the object of your anger. You must love them. You must attend to their needs. You must put them first. This is, again, a spiritual practice, which targets anger that’s been stirred up.
So those three—psalmody, patience and mercy—are the three dimensions of praktikē that target anger.
And Evagrius makes clear—and my God, this is important—that these nine things, these nine dimensions of praktikē, are to be done at the proper times and in the appropriate measures. This takes discernment, this takes humility—to know what the proper measure is and when the proper time is for all of these things. This is why membership in the Church, participation in the sacraments, regular attendance to confession with your priest, and following the Church’s rules without exceeding them is extremely important. Because Evagrius says anything that is excessive and untimely (done at the wrong time) is short-lived. And what is short-lived, he says, is more harmful than beneficial.
Isn’t that interesting? It’s harmful because it’s short-lived. This means that in Evagrius’s mind, discipline is absolutely vital. Establishing a disciplined practice is vital. Undisciplined, sporadic, and therefore irrational spiritual practice, he says, is more harmful than beneficial.
This doesn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card! You must have a spiritual life. It is to say: that spiritual life must be disciplined.
Again, the Church’s rules will help you. The Church has very reasonable, very practicable rules for the spiritual life. We should follow those rules.
And if we do, over time, if we persevere, our tripartite soul will be rehabilitated and we will be on the road to dispassion, contemplation, and—God-willing!—union with the Lord.
Okay, we’ll take another short break here and when we get back, having established all the basic principles of the eight logismoi, Evagrius will begin teaching us how best to combat them. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back.
Okay, we’re now embarking on a subsection of the Praktikos known as Against the Eight Logismoi where Evagrius, drawing on his deep experience of prayer and contemplation, goes through the eight primary demonic temptations one by one, advising us on how best to defend ourselves against them.
The remainder of this episode of Life Sentences will cover the first four demonic logismoi, the ones that particularly target our soul’s power of desire: gluttony, fornication, avarice, and sorrow. The next episode will cover the remaining four, the ones that are more engaged with our soul’s other powers, anger and reason—especially that demon which Evagrius says we must fight more than any other: wrath.
But that’s next time. For now, Evagrius begins by laying the foundation, telling us how best to combat the first of those front-line demonic attackers: gluttony.
Chapter 16:
Whenever our soul yearns for various foods, then let it restrict itself to bread and water, so that it may become grateful for plain bread. For fullness from many kinds of food generates epithymia, but hunger considers fullness from bread to be blessedness.
Okay, right away we see, again, that Evagrius is writing not only for monks, but for solitaries in the desert. So, we must not take him literally here. Not for us. That would be disastrous.
In fact, it would place my soul in greatest jeopardy if I thought that any of you listeners listening to that chapter would go and institute it literally. We are not solitaries in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century under obedience to an enlightened elder. We are ordinary Christians working out our salvation in the world. And so we mustn’t take Evagrius’ advice here literally.
We must instead attend to it and abstract from it principles that we can safely harness to our own obedient practice of the Church’s teachings about fasting. We are never to go beyond the fasting rules that the Church lays out for us men and women in the world.
In short, those fasting rules are, again: on Wednesdays and Fridays, oil-free, alcohol-free veganism, with the sole exception of shellfish; and then during fasting periods—Great Lent, the Apostles’ Fast, the Dormition Fast, and the Nativity Fast—it’s oil-free, alcohol-free veganism, with the exception of shellfish, Mondays to Fridays; and, in addition on the weekends you are permitted oil and alcohol, but are expected to remain a vegan with, again, the exception of shellfish. (There are other little mini-rules here and there throughout the Church’s year. You should be referring daily to an official Church calendar or lectionary. They will almost always tell you what the fasting rules are for that day.)
These rules are not only our baseline, they are our target, and we must not go beyond them, not without the explicit sanction of an experienced spiritual father that we are under obedience to. I cannot stress this enough. If you go beyond the Church’s rules without that explicit sanction from an experienced spiritual father, you are acting from pride and will come to spiritual grief. Stick to the rules.
Okay, having laid down that very important proviso, we can go back to chapter 16 here, and see what Evagrius is saying, as it were, behind the scenes of the literal text.
‘Whenever our soul yearns for various foods,’ he begins—and therefore, what we’re trying to identify in ourselves is that movement of desire towards various foods. We are meant to recognize that desire. To be conscious, at the very least, of that desire, a desire for various foods. An unwillingness to be gratefully satiated by what is in front of us, but a desire for more, a desire for variety. Not focused thankfully on what you have in front of you, but instead imaginatively fixated on what is not there. What might be there. This is what we’re trying to locate in our souls and to zero in on repentantly. This is something that we do not wish to be acting unconsciously from, an unconscious desire for various foods.
And so, when Evagrius advises the solitaries in the Egyptian desert to restrict themselves to bread and water as a way of attacking that passion of soul, a desire for various foods, we can attend to the reason he gives for that. He says, ‘so that it may become grateful for plain bread.’ Let us interpret it in this way: we will accept the food set in front of us and we will do so gratefully in order to cultivate gratitude for it. This is Evagrius’ point: gratitude for the food that God has given us.
If, while you’re eating, you are consciously or even half consciously thinking about the next course, or thinking about how this particular dish could be more delicious, or how you actually prefer to eat X or Y and not this that has been put in front of you—this is not to be grateful. This is quite literally to be resentful. Whereas we must cultivate gratitude for the food that is placed in front of us.
And he finishes off this chapter by stating that fullness from many kinds of food generates epithymia—epithymia, remembering, being the energy that powers the epithymētikon, one of the three dimensions of the tripartite soul, the dimension that is felt as desire. It is natural to the soul. We naturally desire. Indeed, as we’ve said before, the epithymētikon, first and foremost, naturally desires God.
And yet, if we indulge sensual pleasure, as Evagrius states here; if we indulge sensual pleasure, and especially at the level of the food that we eat; if we eat indulgently, if we imagine food indulgently, we will generate, he says, an excess of epithymia, too much epithymia, which causes the epithymētikon to break free from the logistikon, from the rational power of the soul, which is meant to keep everything in harmony and balance; and this irrational, unbalanced amount of epithymia inclines us away from God and towards created objects in a way that is harmful to us.
The Church emphasizes what you eat in terms of periods of fasting and feasting in order that you learn to cultivate a keen inner awareness of the way in which desire for food can become disordered and distract you or incline you away from your soul’s natural desire for God. This is why Evagrius states that the point of all this is to increase your gratitude for food—for ‘plain bread’ as he puts it; let us say for the simple food that is placed in front of you. Gratitude. Gratitude to whom? To God. It increases your awareness of God through gratitude, and with an increase in awareness of God there will be a concomitant increase in a natural desire for God, which will fuel your ongoing pursuit of virtue.
The pursuit of virtue is the pursuit of God. Because virtue is God in the soul, expressing himself in that mode, the mode of virtue, in your soul; expressing himself in your soul in his energies, as they’re called, in his operations, in his works, in his activities, in that mode, the mode of virtue. And the foundation is: restraining epithymia so that it is rational, so that it is in accordance with the logistikon, the rational part of the soul.
And so, Evagrius’ final note here—‘hunger considers fullness from bread to be blessedness’—he’s expressed very neatly what it would be for the epithymētikon to be properly subject to the logistikon. It would mean a baseline degree of hunger, never eating to absolute fullness, so that in gratitude for the food placed before us by the providence of God, we might recognize our blessedness; we might recognize our communion with the divine nature through cooperating with God’s grace of temperance in the soul.
So gluttony is, remember, the first demon to attack us, and therefore combatting gluttony in a rational, measured way is the first step, is the foundation of the spiritual life.
And with that foundation laid, we can move on to the next demon among the eight primary demons that attack the soul, fornication. Chapter 17.
Being deprived of water contributes greatly to sophrosyne. Of this let the three hundred of those Israelites with Gideon persuade you who conquered Midian.
Okay, a couple of things that might need to be explained to make sure you’ve understood that chapter.
First, that Greek word sophrosyne. It’s hard to translate that word directly. It basically means moderation in sensual desires. In Plato, sophrosyne is the word that he uses to describe the state of the soul when its power of desire is dominated by reason. And so everything I just said about gluttony and about the fight against gluttony is aimed at encouraging sophrosyne in the soul: moderation in sensual desires.
And the other thing in this chapter that might be unclear: he mentions three hundred Israelites who conquered Midian alongside Gideon. Gideon was one of the ancient Israelite judges. And in the Book of Judges, in chapter 7, the story of Gideon’s war against the Midianites is told. And in that story, God tells Gideon to separate out from amongst a large number of Israelites the men who, while drinking from a river, were lifting the water with their hands up to their mouth, cupping the water and sipping it from their hands, and to take them into battle with him, but not to take the vast majority of the Israelites who were leaning all the way down to drink directly from the river. God promises Gideon that with those three hundred men—the men who were bringing the water to their mouths in their hands—that with those three hundred men he would conquer the Midianites.
Evagrius is using this Old Testament story to illustrate how we are meant to cultivate sophrosyne in the soul, cultivate moderation in sensual desires.
Now, he never states it explicitly, but based on the structure of the Prakitkos, it is clear that this chapter, chapter 17, is directed against the demon or the passion of fornication. He never states it openly. As I said in a previous episode, fornication is often tiptoed around in the writings of the Desert Fathers. The Desert Fathers don’t want their writings about fornication to stimulate lust in the imagination, so they tiptoe around the subject.
On the literal level, Evagrius is saying—and perhaps he’s addressing this specifically to men—that if you drink too much water, perhaps too much liquid, certainly too much alcohol, you will experience sensual desire to an immoderate degree, which will invariably incline you in the direction of fornication, open to attack from the demon of fornication.
I think this is, in fact, something that we can more or less literally apply to our lives: to remain conscious of the amount of liquids that we’re drinking, especially alcohol for obvious reasons, but all liquids: water, whatever. And maybe especially before we go to sleep. Male listeners, I think, will understand what I mean, that if you go to sleep having drunk too much liquid and therefore in the middle of the night struggle with needing to pee, you might not get up to pee, it might have some effect on your physiology which might lead in your fantasies to an increase in those sorts of desires, in fornication.
But in general, in chapter 17, Evagrius is adding a dimension to what he laid down in chapter 16. In chapter 16, being content with a moderate amount of food and accepting the food that is placed before you with gratitude is a way of attacking gluttony. In chapter 17, ensuring moderation in drink of any kind is the primary way that we combat fornication—fornication being, really, a further dimension of the general desire of the flesh.
Food and sex are, in general, the two primary ways in which the soul’s power of epithymia manifests on the level of the flesh. And restraining the flesh, restraining sensual desire on the level of the flesh is the foundation, as I’ve said many times before, of the spiritual life. The two passions of gluttony and fornication are the two passions we must be most vigilant against. This is the foundation. This is a constant, never-ending struggle. A constant, never-ending dimension of the spiritual life. And to struggle against these two passions, we ensure moderation in food and drink, both in accordance with the Church’s fasting rules and, in general, day by day, combatting sensual indulgence in food and drink, as a means of ensuring that we keep the passion of fornication in check.
And it goes without saying that just as we are to obediently follow the Church’s fasting rules, so we are absolutely and completely and never-endingly to obediently follow the Church’s rules against fornication. It is a bedrock teaching of the Christian faith that any form of sexual relation outside of marriage is fornication. Whether that be explicit in fleshly practice or implicit in the imagination, it’s all fornication and it must be fought against. This is absolutely non-negotiable. The earliest documents of the Christian Church make this perfectly plain.
It is, of course, entirely not in keeping with modern mores. But it’s the truth. If you wish to unite yourself in spirit with Christ the Lord, you must avoid fornication.
Okay, so having covered those two foundational passions of sensual indulgence, we move on to avarice, a subtler, less wholly sensual form of desire. Chapter 18:
Just as it is impossible for life and death to coexist in the same person, so too is it impossible for agape to coexist with wealth. For agape is destructive not only of wealth, but also of our very own transitory life.
That’s a really fascinating chapter. I’m going to read it again.
Just as it is impossible for life and death to coexist in the same person, so too is it impossible for agape to coexist with wealth. For agape is destructive not only of wealth, but also of our very own transitory life.
What to say about that? You know, I think we all know what that means. We know that the pursuit of wealth is vice. The love of money, as the Bible makes plain, is the root of all evil. Christ says clearly, you cannot serve both God and mammon.
And so if, on the one hand, your soul’s power of desire is perverted by a desire for inordinate wealth, and on the other hand, your soul’s power of anger is perverted by your mean-spirited and even violent unwillingness to part with your material possessions, you are in a state of death, disconnected from life, from agape, from love, from God—God who is agape.
The Church’s rules on almsgiving, on generous giving, both to the Church itself in the form of tithing and beyond that in the form of giving to the poor, of joyfully giving to your loved ones, of in general cultivating an omnipresent desire to divest yourself of personal possessions—this is how we combat avarice.
But that final sentence in this chapter: ‘For agape,’ Evagrius says, ‘is destructive not only of wealth but also of our very own transitory life.’ In the first sentence, he equates life and death with agape and wealth; and in the second sentence, he equates our transitory life with death. The true life which is agape is the eternal life. Whereas our mere transitory, biological existence is false life. It is in fact death. And therefore death, which we understand to be the end of our transitory life, is actually life, is agape—is, in a way, God.
The next time you contemplate the mystery of the Cross, keep this in mind. The Cross, an instrument of corporal punishment, is, according to the Christian tradition, the Tree of Life. And so almsgiving, generosity, combatting avarice is pre-eminently a way of walking the Way of the Cross. It is how we lay down our own lives in imitation of the Saviour. It is, therefore, how we unite with his saving Passion and enter into communion with his gracious, eternal life.
Combatting avarice is, as you can see, not a sideshow attraction in our spiritual lives. Not at all. It is, in a way, central—indeed, literally crucial to our salvation.
In the parable of the Last Judgment, where the Son comes again in glory to separate the sheep from the goats, the sole criterion for inheriting eternal life is the degree to which you have been generous in this life: showing charity, love, to the poor, to strangers, to prisoners. Fighting avarice in this way is key.
And after avarice, in the list of eight primary logismoi, eight primary demons, comes sorrow. Chapter 19:
The one who flees all worldly pleasures is a fortress inaccessible to the demon of sorrow. For sorrow is the deprivation of pleasure, either present or expected. It is impossible to drive away this enemy while we remain attached to anything earthly. For when he sees us especially inclining toward something, there he sets his trap and produces sorrow.
Depression these days is so widespread that it’s almost an epidemic. And I don’t want to say that in every case depression isn’t biological or neurological in nature. Surely in many cases it is. However, I think it is worth pondering, at least, whether in our era of historically unprecedented abundance—indeed indulgence, indulgence in all manner of worldly pleasures—whether that abundance itself may underlie the epidemic of depression, at least to some degree. And, as a further thing to ponder, whether those neurological or biological signs of depression in the corporeal body may manifest spiritual realities at the level of the soul. The soul and the body, after all, are one.
Certainly here, Evagrius very intelligently states that sorrow attends to some thwarted pleasure or another. Anyone who has toddlers in their lives knows this particularly well. Toddlers can turn on a dime from contentedness to utter anguish at the deprivation of any expected or present pleasure. It’s quite remarkable the degree to which, lacking reason, they can be overwhelmed by excruciating sorrow. We’re no different, though perhaps as we grow up we get better at hiding it. But inside ourselves, we can experience great anguish at the deprivation of pleasure. And also, as we get older, those pleasures can become subtler, the deprivation of which can cause us to feel sorrow.
If you suffer from depression, reckon with yourself. What pleasure is being thwarted in you? What is it that you want, that you desire, that you’re not getting—and which is causing you to feel sorrow? And be brutally honest.
In my case, I can tell you, my depression, when I feel it, and I often do, comes when my vainglory is thwarted. Which is a form of pleasure, the pleasure we derive from contemplating, imagining a kind of grandiose self-image. Certainly today, in general, the world holds out to each one of us the promise of greatness, of glory, of celebrity, of uniqueness, of praise. It’s one of the ways in which the devil, frankly, dominates our world today. In all but a tiny handful of cases, this expectation we have of greatness, and the pleasure we derive from imagining ourselves receiving it—that pleasure is almost always thwarted, the pleasure that follows upon this exaggerated self-image, this vainglorious inner self-image—and therefore I believe often underlies that depression that just bubbles away just on the other side of consciousness.
And so, Evagrius says we must flee all worldly pleasures. You can see, this is taking it a further step from food and drink, from sensual pleasures, from pleasures of the flesh alone, to material possessions, to the pleasure of owning material objects, to now all worldly pleasures including those merely psychological pleasures that are rooted in the imagination, in the fantasy, in our exaggerated false and egotistical self image.
If we flee all such pleasures then we become, he says, a fortress inaccessible to the demon of sorrow.
That brings us to the end of this episode of Life Sentences. We covered a lot.
We learned about the deepening crisis inside the Church of Constantinople—and left Evagrius on the verge of falling into serious sin. To be continued.
Evagrius then told us about the three demonic front-line attackers: gluttony, avarice, and vainglory. If any of the other demons has managed to wrestle your soul to the ground, then you can be sure that, knowingly or unknowingly, you’ve already succumbed to one of these three—and so, it is against these three that we must remain especially vigilant.
Then we began the subsection of the Praktikos known as Against the Eight Logismoi. We learned to combat gluttony and fornication by strictly avoiding overindulgence in both food and drink. This keeps our soul’s level of desire, or epithymia, in rational balance, a state of the soul known as sophrosyne, moderation in sensual desires. And we learned to avoid avarice like the plague, training ourselves not just to detach from material possessions, but much more importantly to divest ourselves of them as much as we can by cultivating a spirit of joyful, eager generosity. Only then can we progress toward freeing ourselves of all worldly desires, which is the only way not to fall under the influence of the insidious and malignant demon of sorrow.
In the next episode, Evagrius will tell us how to fight the remaining eight primary demons: acedia, vainglory, pride, and the demon which he focuses on more than any other, the one most destructive of our spiritual well-being: wrath. So you can look forward to that!
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Right, that’s it for now. Stay well.
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