Apostleship of Prayer Spirituality
 
 

    Evagrius Ponticus

The first stage of spiritual growth is PRACTIKE ending in APATHEIA.
The second stage is PHYSIKE, ie. knowledge of divine reason.
The third stage is THEOLOGIA, the knowledge of the Trinity.

In the East these three stages became
a) Prayer of the lips,
b) Prayer of the mind,
c) Prayer of the heart.

In the West they became
a) Purgative Way,
b) Illuminative Way,
c) Unitive Way.

PRACTIKE:
Evagrius has very definite ideas on the virtues and the vices, their connection, their hierarchy. The active life begins with repentance (metanoia), understood not merely as sorrow for sin but as a radical conversion, the re-centring of our whole life on God. He was the first to distinguish the eight basic sins (the ancestors of our seven deadly sins: pride, envy, jealousy, lust, anger, gluttony, and sloth). The spiritual aspirant strives, with the help of God's grace, to overcome the deep-seated passions that distort his or her human nature.  For Evagrius and most Greek writers, the term "passions" (pathos) signified a disordered impulse which has the tendency to dominate violently the soul of a person.   Further, the Christian is called to struggle not only against the passions but also against thoughts as soon as they first emerge into consciousness and long before they have emerged into actions.
Faith is the starting point.  On it is built the fundamental virtue, depending on the fear of God, of enkrateia: one particular form of this virtue is continence which consists in resistance to all the impulses of the passions.  To this is added patience which helps us to bear pain peacefully.  The apex of all these virtues is hope: the expectation of all true goods, towards which faith directs us.

The aspirant is called upon to develop virtues such as keeping watch over his heart, growing in self-awareness, sobriety, discernment (diakris) or the power to distinguish between good and evil.  Evagrius placed wrath as the greatest obstacle to the development of the Spiritual Life: thoughts of anger, hatred and vengeance will flood into the monk's prayer and these can only be overcome by gentleness and charity, if the monk is to make progress. With all these virtues the aspirant needs to have penthos - the gift of inward tears - and compunction to soften the heart of the monk: these should be followed by the gift of actual tears, firstly of penitence but later of gratitude and love.  This gift of tears must not be thought of as sadness for Evagrius maintains that sadness also is an enemy of prayer. This gift of tears is the real beginning of the prayer life.

 Evagrius is not so much anxious about the virtues for their own sake: eg. he is not concerned with love and the avoidance of anger because this is better for those with whom we have to live; but, for him, love and avoidance of anger are important because they calm the soul, bring it to a state of Apatheia and so make prayer possible.

(To be continued)

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