Gregory Collins - The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism

University of Notre Dame Press
Chapter Title: The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism

Chapter Author(s): Gregory Collins
Book Title: Evagrius and His Legacy

Book Editor(s): JOEL KALVESMAKI, ROBIN DARLING YOUNG
Published by: University of Notre Dame Press. (2016)
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CHAPTER 12
The Evagrian Heritage in

Late Byzantine Monasticism
Gre gory Collins, OSB
Nearly a full millennium separates the work of Gregory Palamas

(1296–1359) from Evagrius’s in the late fourth century. Yet the later
monastic teacher and bishop could still use the thought of his predeces-
sor for purposes quite different from its original context and aims. Like
the revival of Augustinian thought in late-medieval and Reformation
Europe, or the continuous consultation of Gregory the Great, the puz-
zling works of Evagrius— preserved in Greek monastic libraries—
allowed and perhaps even compelled Byzantine thinkers to rethink
their own views against the background of the topics he was the first to
articulate for the then-new monastic form of life.
After a brief review of Evagrius’s theories as received in Byzan-
tine thought, this essay will focus on the specific issue of his influence
on St. Gregory Palamas, fourteenth-century Athonite monk, Metro-
politan of Thessalonica, and foremost defender of Athonite Neo-
Hesychasm.
317
318 Gre go ry Co l l i ns , O S B
The Evagrian Legacy
Evagrius’s systematic exposition of the dynamics between God and the

soul in monastic life and prayer marked forever the entire heritage of
Christian monasticism. The Byzantine and Syrian forms of monastic
spirituality everywhere reveal the impact of his thought, while on ac-
count of the transmission of his work to the West accomplished by St.
John Cassian (for the Byzantines, “the Roman”), he exercised a deep
and abiding influence on medieval Latin monasticism as well, an in-
fluence extending far beyond the Benedictine and Cistercian worlds.
Evagrius effectively shaped an entire language of inner experience to
describe the anthropological and theological dynamics of the spiritual
life in the monastic context.
He did not, of course, invent the language, since his achievement con-
sisted for the most part in using the work of Origen, itself a synthesis of
Middle-Platonic thought and scriptural exegesis, to categorize the experi-
ences undergone by the monks of the Egyptian desert. His peculiar ge-
nius and distinctive contribution was to have systematized that language
so as to attain clarity in matters of monastic experience, making it thereby
the lingua franca of all later monks and nuns in Byzantium. Thanks to
him Eastern Christian monastics speak a language that one may legiti-
mately call “Evagrian,” or to be more precise “Evagro-Macarian.”
Despite Evagrius’s formal condemnation by the Fifth Ecumenical
Council and the subsequent blackening of his reputation, “Evagrian-
ism” as a system of ascetical and mystical concepts entered Orthodox
monastic tradition so successfully that its presence is diffused through-
out it at every point. His conceptualization of monastic life and prayer
became so omnipresent in Byzantine monasticism that it is impossible
to understand that tradition without knowledge of his work and its re-
appropriation by Byzantine monks throughout the long history of the
Eastern Roman Empire.
Everywhere in Byzantine monastic literature one encounters the
Evagrian grammar and vocabulary of the spiritual life, including such
typical elements as the following:
• the fundamental division of the spiritual life between praktikē

and theōria;
The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 319
• the rigorous analysis of the dynamics of demonic temptation

and spiritual struggle;
• the listing of eight logismoi (or variants that derive from his list);
• the delicate art of diakrisis: discriminating spiritually between
thoughts (noēmata) coming from God, the angelic sphere, or the
earthly order and how to distinguish them from the logismoi;
• the differentiation of various dimensions of contemplation, with
theōria physikē as enlightened insight into Holy Scripture, provi-
dence, and judgment and God’s underlying presence in the logoi
of creation;
• the notion of a direct contemplation of the Holy Trinity (theōria
theologikē) whose light begins to shine in and through a mind
(nous) purified not only of sinful thoughts but of discursive
thinking and indeed of conceptuality itself;
• the insistence that prayer entails “the shedding (or laying aside)
of thoughts” (noēmata);
• the assertion that theology (i.e., the contemplative vision of the
Trinity) is the summit of prayer and the fruit of personal purifi-
cation and contemplative illumination, and that the true theolo-
gian is one who prays.
All this became, and remains to this day, the common doctrine of
Byzantine monastic theology: without Evagrius’s concepts that the-
ology would be literally unthinkable. The Greek monastic tradition
quickly joined those ideas and practices to the work of other monastic
authors: the Spiritual Homilies ascribed to Macarius, the works of Dia-
dochos of Photikē, John Climacus, and Maximus the Confessor, in ad-
dition to the Greek translation of the work of Isaac the Syrian. In
eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium, Peter of Damascus, Symeon
the New Theologian, and Theoleptus of Philadelphia also engaged
Evagrius’s teachings.
Gregory’s Evagrian Advice to the Nun Xenia
One treatise in particular serves to show how Gregory adapted Evag-

rius’s teachings. An examination of the treatise on monastic life written
320 Grego ry Co l l i ns , O S B
by Palamas for the nun Xenia demonstrates an interesting application of

Evagrius’s theories to a situation very different from their original con-
text. In the years between 1342 and 1346, Xenia was acting as matron and
schoolmistress to the children of the recently deceased Emperor An-
dronikos III. It is possible to see the work as an encouragement ad-
dressed to one who may have been distracted by the demands of her
work. This text was included in the eighteenth-century Greek Philokalia
of Sts. Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth because it is
one of Palamas’s most instructive writings.1 It is a useful source for chart-
ing the influence of Evagrius on him.
Written at the beginning of the hesychastic controversy, the treatise
shows that Palamas was under fire. He begins his advice to Xenia by
lamenting the need to write at all, a conventional enough topos but, in
this context at least, surely more than a mere literary device.2 Contrast-
ing spiritual death with the spiritual life that comes from obedience to
Christ’s commandments, he presents a strongly Christocentric vision of
the Christian path based on the incarnation of the Word, his resurrec-
tion, and ascension.3 Human beings, he teaches, are called to participate
in these Christ-realities, and time is given us precisely so that through
repentance we may begin to do so: but their perfection will come only
in heaven.4
As is usual with Palamas, this eschatological note is strongly
sounded. The Christian life is about becoming one spirit with Christ so
as to be united with him forever in heaven. The one who issues the invi-
tation is God the Father, who raises the mind through the power of the
Holy Spirit.5 This Trinitarian account of the path of theōsis, grounded in
the mysteries of Christ, is what inspires the first stage of spiritual refor-
mation of life, the way of praktikē.
Palamas describes it in conventional monastic terms as the pruning
away of wealth, soft living, worldly honors, and the passions of body
and soul.6 Virginity is understood as a nuptial relationship with God,
though he is careful only to relativize marriage rather than denigrate it.7
He then launches into an extended encomium on poverty, discusses
purification of the tripartite soul, and explains the practical life as a
process of interior healing.8 The passions are seen, in accordance with
the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor, not merely as inherently
negative tendencies but as natural propensities of the soul, which ac-

quire an evil orientation only later through the “passion-charged nous.”9
Self-control gained through the usual means of fasting, humility, rejec-
tion of evil thoughts, and above all poverty of spirit enables the whole
person to achieve integration under the guidance of the purified mind.10
Thus far this is common doctrine: the influence of both Evagrius and
St. Maximus is evident.
Interestingly, Palamas also speaks of a kind of negative eschatologi-
cal experience in which grief, fear, and self-accusation generate a fore-
taste of hell in this life. Yet they are also a blessing in that they draw
Christ down to us in compassion and invoke the consolation of the
Paraclete. Thus penthos and compunction lead to joy.11 Throughout
this section of the work he draws largely on the common doctrine of
Byzantine asceticism—the Evagro-Macarian patrimony and St. John
Climacus, from whom he also quotes.12
However, another current appears to be flowing in the river. It is
hard to say if Palamas is directly echoing Symeon the New Theologian
(whom he had read), but he does lay considerable emphasis here and
elsewhere on the activity of the Holy Spirit, both in the economy of sal-
vation and in the inner life of the nous.13 Vladimir Lossky perceptively
identified an intensified pneumatological tendency as a characteristic
trait of middle and late Byzantine theology, something that is certainly
true of Symeon the New Theologian and of Gregory Palamas.14 The lat-
ter also recalls Symeon in the distinctly experiential way in which he de-
scribes the sudden transition from sadness to joy.15 This may perhaps re-
veal something of his personal spiritual experience in addition to the
more emotionally charged orientation of later Byzantine spirituality.
Palamas also employs bridal imagery in his exposition, thus em-
phasizing even more the affective and experiential dimensions of the
spiritual life.16 Although it would be an exaggeration to deny this ele-
ment in Evagrius’s thought, it would not seem to have been central to
his understanding. While therefore typically Evagrian themes and ter-
minology drawn from the tradition certainly provide the underlying
structure for Palamas’s exposition of the monastic path, they are by no
means exclusive and are used within the context of other strands of tra-
dition and experience.
Having sketched the fundamental ascetic ground rules at the start,

Palamas indicates that the thrust of his exhortation is about to acceler-
ate: “Listen attentively so as to learn!”17 Joy, light, and consolation, he
asserts, will begin to break through in the darkness of self-abasement
as, “Prayer changes from entreaty to thanksgiving and meditation on
the divine truths of faith fills the heart with a sense of jubilation and
unimpeachable hope.”18
Yet this is by no means all—much more is to come. The Bride-
groom (Christ) desires to manifest himself more clearly in the souls of
those who have been purified and “arrayed for the bridal chamber.”19
Shameful passions having been expelled and the nous having returned on
itself—a characteristic emphasis in Palamas and Athonite hesychasm—
the mind, purified of evil thoughts, then goes further still, purging away
all imprints and accretions of whatever kind, good as well as bad.20 The
requisite purification is not simply a moral one, however, but a cleansing
from fragmentation and multiplicity as such: Evagrius (and perhaps The-
oleptos) is very much in evidence at this point.
Having become deaf and dumb in God’s presence and having tran-
scended all intelligible images and ideas, the process of ascent continues
under the transporting guidance of illuminating grace. It is not accom-
plished by human power alone, however, for the soul is borne aloft on
the wings of the Holy Spirit. Transported into an angelic mode of exis-
tence, it becomes a participant in the liturgy of heaven. Yet this is no
mere abandonment of the earth, no simple matter of a solitary flight to-
wards the Absolute. Palamas insists on the mediating, transforming
character of the soul’s ascent, for as it goes ahead it does not relinquish
the earth but rather brings the lower orders of creation along with it.21
Palamas was well grounded in the traditional doctrine of man as medi-
ator: “Through itself it brings every created thing closer to God, for it
itself also participates in all things and even in Him who transcends all,
inasmuch as it has faithfully conformed itself to the divine image.”22
It is at this point that Evagrius (disguised of course as “St. Nilus of
Sinai”) emerges from the background and takes up a guiding role at the
heart of Palamas’s exposition. Describing what occurs on the mountain
top of theōria, he quotes directly from Evagrius’s work Reflections
(Skemmata):
“The nous’s proper state (katastasis) is a noetic height (hupsos noē-

ton), somewhat resembling the sky’s hue, which is filled with the
light ( phōs) of the Holy Trinity during the time of prayer (kairon
tēs proseuchēs).” If you wish to see the proper state of the nous, rid
yourself of all concepts ( pantōn tōn nōematōn), and then you will
see it like sapphire or the sky’s hue. But you cannot do this unless
you have obtained a state of dispassion (apatheias), for God has to
cooperate with you and to imbue you with his co-natural light.23
Recent scholarship has alerted us to the centrality of these highly

charged images in the thought of Evagrius. Alexander Golitzin rightly
insists that the references to the theopanies accorded to Moses in the
book of Exodus should encourage us to acknowledge the solidly scrip-
tural substrate of Evagrian “mysticism” (for want of a better word) and
alerts us to the prevailing influence of themes and motifs derived from
Second Temple “mysticism,” such as the holy mountain and mystical
ascent to the place of divine revelation—themes not exactly unheard of
in the Cappadocian and Syrian traditions either!24 By citing these Eva-
grian texts, Palamas not only confirms the significance accorded them
in contemporary scholarship: he also reveals his own finesse in articu-
lating what transpired at the summit of Byzantine mystical experience
and in putting his finger on the pulse of the tradition’s heartbeat. These
are the very texts that express with such clarity the center of Evagrian
mystical theology.
But what is most interesting about Palamas’s citation of these par-
ticular Evagrian texts is the context in which he places them. He imme-
diately invokes two other leading authorities, first citing Diadochos in
a passage emphasizing the essential place of baptism in the spiritual life
and the activity of the Holy Spirit whom the purified nous begins to
perceive in full consciousness, an experience without which it cannot
be fulfilled in perfect love.25 This is about as “Macarian” a theme as one
could find anywhere in the tradition and a mainstay of Symeon the
New Theologian’s teaching.
The second authority Palamas cites is Isaac of Syria, who in this
context reads like Evagrius redivivus. Palamas quotes him (quoting
Evagrius): “And likewise St. Isaac writes that during the time of prayer
the nous that has received grace sees its own purity (tēn eautou katha-
roteta) to be ‘like heaven’s hue,’ which was also called ‘the place of
God’ (topos theou) by the council of the elders of Israel, when it was
seen by them in the mountain [cf. Ex. 24.9–10]. Again, he says that
‘prayer is purity of the nous, and it is consummated when we are illu-
mined in utter amazement by the light of the Holy Trinity.’ He also
speaks of ‘the purity of the nous upon and through which the light of
the Holy Trinity ( phōs tēs Hagias Triados) shines at the time of prayer’
(en tō kairō tēs proseuchēs).”26
Commenting on these Evagrian texts in their original context, Wil-
liam Harmless has unpacked the implicit resonances and connections
they contain: “Here Evagrius reads the biblical text allegorically. First
he transposes outer realities into inner ones. Mount Sinai, the ‘place of
God,’ is not only a place on the map of the Holy Land; it is an inner
landmark, a centre on the geography of the soul. The encounter with
God is not limited to some past theophany. . . . [S]econd he uses the
Bible to interpret the Bible. He notes that the phrase, ‘place of God’
appears in both Exodus 24 and Psalm 75. He reads Psalm 75 as a cipher
for Exodus 24. This leads him to insist that the Mount Sinai of the mind
is also a Mount Zion, that the inner mountain is an inner temple. The
human person is thus a sacred precinct, a holy of holies.”27
Likewise, Columba Stewart has commented on Evagrius’s spiri-
tualizing of biblical images in providing an interior topography for
prayer: “Evagrius universalizes the place of God by shifting it from
geographical Sinai to the human mind (nous). The relocation of biblical
topography to an inner landscape, the reinscription of the biblical text
on the heart, is a move typical of Alexandrian exegesis.”28
Even more significantly, Stewart underlines the importance of this
spiritualizing topography in the whole of Evagrius’s work: “The inter-
nalization of the place of God presents one of the central paradoxes of
Evagrius’s theology. The place of God is to be found within the human
person, more specifically within the human mind, but ‘seeing’ it re-
quires that one transcend all ordinary mental operation. Although po-
tentially accessible to all, the place of God is hard to reach. Its sudden
and ephemeral discovery is the culmination of monastic prayer.”29
Palamas had already used his citations from Evagrius and Isaac in
the first of his treatises against Barlaam of Calabria in defense of hesy-
chastic monastic experience (Triads 1.1). In that work, defending the
hesychastic method of prayer, he had upheld the doctrine that the nous
can be “returned” to the body, which has the capacity to “contain” it,
since scripture speaks of the body as a temple in which the divine pres-
ence can dwell. Palamas had asked rhetorically, “that which becomes a
dwelling place for God—for a person granted intelligence—how could
it not be held worthy of accomodating one’s own nous? And even God,
how would he have been able, in the beginning to make the nous be in
the body?”30
The hesychasts waged war against Barlaam specifically on this
point, insisting that it is indeed possible for the nous, in bringing itself
back from dispersion in external activities and focusing on its proper
place (the heart whose “eye” it is meant to be), to return into itself and
remain within the body.
Palamas’s rereading of Evagrius allows us to see that a significant de-
velopment had occurred in Byzantine monastic theology during the
hesychastic controversy. Palamas showed, regarding Evagrius’s doctrine
of the experience of divine light in the inner sanctum of the purified
nous—the culmination of all that Israel had experienced as it encoun-
tered God in the luminous darkness of Sinai and the resplendent glory of
Zion—that as in the teaching of Evagrius/Nilus, this culminating expe-
rience occurs in the nous when it has recovered its proper state through
apatheia and the abandonment of concepts. By invoking Diadochos,
however, he took pains to establish that it is also due to the illuminat-
ing work of the Holy Spirit. In traditional Evagrian terms, Palamas saw
the nous purified from logismoi and from multiplicity as identical with
the “place of God” (topos theou). The purified interiority of the self
is the privileged disclosure zone for the manifestation of the divine light.
But by insisting that the nous is located not only at the center of the
heart (kardia) but that its proper place is actually “within” the body—
“into” which it can be made to return through prayer—Palamas in-
sisted on the body’s significance as a constituent aspect of human ex-
istence that can in no way be excluded from salvation or deification.
Far from being merely some external container temporarily housing a

soul destined to pass on to higher things, the body for Palamas was a
shrine prepared through baptism, communion in the mysteries, and the
transforming light of grace, for the eschatological goal of resurrection
and deification. His defense of hesychastic prayer and its corporeal con-
comitants was part and parcel of an anthropological vision that refused
to exalt the soul over the body, because both are created, but insisted on
its ministerial and mediating capacity in relation to the flesh. Soul, and
its deepest (or highest) intensity (the nous) as the place of the divine, lu-
minous self-manifestation, is also the link to what lies beneath.
Diadochos had already written: “Sometimes the soul is kindled into
love for God and, free from all fantasy and image, moves untroubled by
doubt towards him; and it draws, as it were, the body with it into the
depths of that ineffable love.”31 In his instruction for Xenia, just as in his
polemic against the hyper-intellectualism of Barlaam in the Triads, Pala-
mas also insisted on this positive evaluation of the body and on the nous
as agent, mediating the transforming grace of the Holy Spirit. Just as
mystical ascension through deification entails a cosmic drawing up of all
things to God, so spiritual consummation does not mean that the body
is simply to be abandoned. Through the deified nous God confers his
gifts also on the flesh. As Palamas wrote: “The nous that has been ac-
counted worthy of this light also transmits to the body that is united
with it many clear tokens of the divine beauty, acting as an intermediary
between divine grace and the grossness of the flesh and conferring on
the flesh the power to do what lies beyond its power.”32
By defending the importance of the body, Palamas completed the
long process through which it had been granted full acceptance within
Byzantine theology. But he also gave fuller significance to the temple
symbolism deriving from St. Paul and the third- and fourth-century
matrix that had produced Evagrius, inserting the latter’s insights about
the reception of the divine presence as light into a more somatically af-
firmative anthropological vision in which the divine light is received—
pace Evagrius within the purified nous and pace Diadochos within
the heart—but with the fullest assent to biblical revelation, within the
body of flesh itself. The flesh is the forecourt of the temple-shrine that
houses the inner man but also the medium through which the divine
light, manifesting itself in that “place,” is filtered so as to appear in

the world.
Hence the ferocity of Palamas’s response to the hyper-intellectualism
of Barlaam is understandable. It had threatened man’s unifying voca-
tion as mediator and risked losing the essential somatic dimension of
Jewish-Christian revelation. Yet at the same time Palamas both pre-
served Evagrius’s fundamental insight into contact with God in the
soul’s proper place and integrated it more effectively with revelation’s
emphasis on the dignity of the deified body.
I would like to return tentatively to one of the most difficult as-
pects of the teaching of Evagrius/Nilus and Isaac re-presented by Pala-
mas: that in the process of prayer the highest experience is that of see-
ing the light of one’s own nous, a “state” (katastasis) identical with the
“place” (topos) where God reveals his presence and is experienced as
light. The evocative imagery employed, the sapphire blue pavement
bright like the sky, is biblical (Ex. 24.10 and Ez. 10.1) and beautiful, but
also arcane and impenetrable.
Columba Stewart has perhaps given the clearest explanation of
what it means in Evagrius: “To see the place of God, to speak to God in
the place of prayer, means climbing above all impassioned thoughts
and all depictions, including nonsensory ones. . . . The place of God is,
by definition, ‘unimaged’ (aneideos, Reflections 20, cf. 22), meaning
that the mind itself, when it becomes the place of God, is free of self-
created imagery.”33
Obscure as it is, this imagery is central to Evagrian spirituality and
therefore, as we see clearly in Palamas, to later Byzantine monastic
doctrine. Under the influence of Macarius and Diadochos, however,
hesychasm and the development of the Jesus Prayer provide us with
pointers as to how Byzantine monks aimed to attain this experience of
the purified nous as the place where, filtered in and through one’s own
light, the divine light appears.
In his fifty-eighth and fifty-ninth chapters Diadochos had spoken
of confining the nous within very narrow limits so that one may devote
oneself solely to remembering God. He went on to say: “When we
have blocked all its outlets by means of the remembrance of God, the
nous requires of us imperatively some task which will satisfy its need
for activity. For the complete fulfillment of its purpose we should give
it nothing but the prayer ‘Lord Jesus.’ ‘No one,’ it is written, ‘can say
“Lord Jesus” except in the Holy Spirit’ [1 Cor. 12.3].”34
It must surely have been the experience of those who practiced
prayer according to Evagrius’s instructions that it is extraordinarily
difficult and demanding to keep the mind free of thoughts and particu-
lar forms and focused on what appears to be in effect (at least at the
outset but perhaps for a considerable period of time) attention to a
void, a kind of interiorized expanse of sky. As Stewart observed, the
place of God is hard to reach! Yet, gradually, through the practice of
monologistic prayer, Byzantine monks discovered that the in-drawing
of the soul’s powers and the return of the nous on itself are greatly fa-
cilitated by focusing on the name of Jesus, which according to Diado-
chos has the nature of a quasi-sacramental divine self-disclosure: “Let
the nous continually concentrate on these words within its inner shrine
with such intensity that it is not turned aside to any mental images.”35
We should note here the deliberate use of temple imagery and the
claim that in repelling the logismoi the invocation of the name is of vital
significance, thanks to the intensity of the divine presence mediated
through focusing intensely on it. But what Diadochos went on to say
was even more illuminating: “Those who meditate unceasingly upon
this glorious and holy name in the depths of their heart can sometimes
see the light of their own nous.”36
This is because, as he explains, the concentration of the nous on this
name purifies the soul like a divine fire, awakens fervent love for God’s
glory in the heart, and implants therein a love for God’s goodness. By
perfecting the inner purgation of the nous, the invocation of the name
allows it to see its own clarity and luminosity, thus opening it up to the
manifestation of the uncreated Trinitarian light, the vision of which
Evagrius had postulated as the culminating moment of interior prayer.
Evagrius’s vision of divine light in and through the light of the
purified nous (compare to Ps 35[36].9: “In your light we see light”), fa-
cilitated by Diadochos’s invocation of the name in the heart as the in-
strumental cause of purification, achieved in Palamas their fullest inte-
gration into Byzantine theology through his strong articulation of
hesychastic theory with its insistence on psychosomatic methods of
prayer and the experience of the light of Thabor, the foretaste of the
world to come. It was the last great theological synthesis achieved in
Byzantium, and Evagrius supplied one of its most fundamental con-
stituent elements.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have stressed that the Byzantine reception of Evagrius

entailed a long and complex process of interpretation within a tradi-
tion in which he was certainly a major player but by no means the only
one. There was the direct but veiled influence of his surviving ascetic
works. There was his creative reappropriation by other significant
figures in the course of the empire’s life. There was also his reentry on
to the Byzantine scene via the works of Issac of Nineveh. Evagrian
ideas and images—though always in a creative synthesis with those of
Macarius—effectively provided the standard terminology in Byzan-
tium for describing and categorizing monastic experience.
Recognizing—as the Byzantines did—the harmony between these
two great monastic traditions, the Evagrian and the Macarian, is not just
a matter of smoothing out differences in the interests of orthodoxy but
of accepting that later categories imposed by scholars do not always do
justice to the evidence. Hence, just as von Balthasar’s negative judg-
ment on Evagrius’s thought needs to be revised in the light of recent re-
search, so does his sweeping generalization about the extent of his
influence.
Balthasar claimed that Evagrius was “the almost absolute ruler of
the entire Syriac and Byzantine mystical theology.”37 That judgment
requires qualification at least regarding the Byzantine tradition. It is al-
most correct yet it says too much. Instead of visualizing him as an al-
most absolute ruler it might be more helpful to imagine his voice as
providing a kind of cantus firmus in the rich polyphony of Byzantine
ascetical and mystical theology. Other voices were (almost) equally im-
portant, as St. Gregory Palamas showed when in the same place he
cited “Nilus”/Evagrius, the thoroughly “Macarian” Diadachos of
Photikē, and Isaac of Nineveh, an out-and-out “Evagrian.” This mixing
330 Gre go ry Co l l i ns , O S B
of authorities is a good indication of the place of the synthetic nature of

tradition and the role of the Evagrian heritage in forming Byzantine
monastic theory.
Notes
1. Gregory Palamas, To the Most Reverend Nun Xenia, in Nicodemus

the Hagiorite and Makarios, Philokalia, 4:293– 322. This text will hereafter be
cited as Gregory, Xenia, followed by section numbers.
2. Gregory, Xenia, 1– 6.
3. Gregory, Xenia, 8–15.
4. Gregory, Xenia, 16.
12. For John Climacus, see Gregory, Xenia, 50.
13. For example, Gregory, Xenia, 54.
14. Lossky, Mystical Theology.
16. For example, Gregory, Xenia, 57.
19. Gregory, Xenia, 57, modified by author.
24. See Golitzin, “Earthly Angels,” esp. 148– 49, “Hierarchy versus Anar-
chy,” esp. 152– 57, and “Vision of God.”
27. Harmless, Mystics, 153.
28. Stewart, “Imageless Prayer,” 196.
29. Ibid., 196– 97, emphasis added.

30. Gregory Palamas, Triads 1.2.1
31. Diadochos of Photikē, Gnostic Centuries on Spiritual Knowledge and
Discoveries 33.
33. Stewart, “Imageless Prayer,” 197.
34. Diadochos, Kephalaia praktika 59.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Balthasar, “Metaphysics,” 183, cited in Harmless, Mystics, 141.

Gregory Collins - The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism

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University of Notre Dame Press

Chapter Title: The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism

Book Title: Evagrius and His Legacy

The Evagrian Heritage in

Gre gory Collins, OSB

Nearly a full millennium separates the work of Gregory Palamas

The Evagrian Legacy

Evagrius’s systematic exposition of the dynamics between God and the

• the fundamental division of the spiritual life between praktikē

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 319

• the rigorous analysis of the dynamics of demonic temptation

Gregory’s Evagrian Advice to the Nun Xenia

One treatise in particular serves to show how Gregory adapted Evag-

by Palamas for the nun Xenia demonstrates an interesting application of

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 321

negative tendencies but as natural propensities of the soul, which ac-

Having sketched the fundamental ascetic ground rules at the start,

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 323

“The nous’s proper state (katastasis) is a noetic height (hupsos noē-

Recent scholarship has alerted us to the centrality of these highly

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 325

Far from being merely some external container temporarily housing a

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 327

light, manifesting itself in that “place,” is filtered so as to appear in

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 329

In this chapter, I have stressed that the Byzantine reception of Evagrius

of authorities is a good indication of the place of the synthetic nature of

1. Gregory Palamas, To the Most Reverend Nun Xenia, in Nicodemus

The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism 331

29. Ibid., 196– 97, emphasis added.

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