Evagrius and His Legacy

Description

Evagrius of Pontus (ca. 345-399) was a Greek-speaking monastic thinker and Christian theologian whose works formed the basis for much later reflection on monastic practice and thought in the Christian Near East, in Byzantium, and in the Latin West. His innovative collections of short chapters meant for meditation, scriptural commentaries in the form of scholia, extended discourses, and letters were widely translated and copied. Condemned posthumously by two ecumenical councils as a heretic along with Origen and Didymus of Alexandria, he was revered among Christians to the east of the Byzantine Empire, in Syria and Armenia, while only some of his writings endured in the Latin and Greek churches.

A student of the famed bishop-theologians Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, Evagrius left the service of the urban church and settled in an Egyptian monastic compound. His teachers were veteran monks schooled in the tradition of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Anthony, and he enriched their legacy with the experience of the desert and with insight drawn from the entire Greek philosophical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through Iamblichus.

Evagrius and His Legacy brings together essays by eminent scholars who explore selected aspects of Evagrius's life and times and address his far-flung and controversial but long-lasting influence on Latin, Byzantine, and Syriac cultures in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Touching on points relevant to theology, philosophy, history, patristics, literary studies, and manuscript studies, Evagrius and His Legacy is also intended to catalyze further study of Evagrius within as large a context as possible.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Evagrius Ponticus
• Basil of Caesarea
• Didymus the Blind
• Spirituality
• Origen
• Monasticism
• Gregory of Nazianzus
• Byzantium
• Greek
• Christian
• History
• Byzance

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268084745
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Evagrius and His Legacy
With special thanks to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, DC .
EVAGRIUS and HIS LEGACY

Edited by
JOEL KALVESMAKI and ROBIN DARLING YOUNG
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright 2016 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kalvesmaki, Joel, editor.
Title: Evagrius and his legacy / edited by Joel Kalvesmaki and Robin Darling Young.
Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037517 | ISBN 9780268033293 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268033293 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Evagrius, Ponticus, 345?-399.
Classification: LCC BR65.E926 E93 2015 | DDC 270.2092-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037517
ISBN 9780268084745
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Ornament and Intellect of the Desert
ROBIN DARLING YOUNG JOEL KALVESMAKI
1 Evagrius and Cappadocian Orthodoxy
BRIAN E. DALEY, SJ
2 Thoughts that Cut: Cutting, Imprinting, and Lingering in Evagrius of Pontus
KEVIN CORRIGAN
3 Evagrius Ponticus, Exegete of the Soul
LUKE DYSINGER, OSB
4 Evagrius and Authority
BLOSSOM STEFANIW
5 Evagrius Ponticus and Maximus the Confessor: The Building of the Self in Praxis and Contemplation
JULIA KONSTANTINOVSKY
6 The Role of Letters in the Works of Evagrius
ROBIN DARLING YOUNG
7 Philoxenos of Mabbug and the Simplicity of Evagrian Gnosis: Competing Uses of Evagrius in the Early Sixth Century
DAVID A. MICHELSON
8 Evagrius beyond Byzantium: The Latin and Syriac Receptions
COLUMBA STEWART, OSB
9 Evagrius: East of the Euphrates
ANTHONY J. WATSON
10 Evagrius in the Byzantine Genre of Chapters
JOEL KALVESMAKI
11 Origenism and Anti-Origenism in the Late Sixth and Seventh Centuries
DIRK KRAUSM LLER
12 The Evagrian Heritage in Late Byzantine Monasticism
GREGORY COLLINS, OSB
Bibliography
Select Works of Evagrius
Select Editions and Translations of Ancient and Medieval Works
Other Primary and Secondary Studies
Contributors
Index
ABBREVIATIONS
BHL
Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquitae et mediae aetatis , SubsHag 6 (Brussels, 1898-1911; new suppl. 1986)
BL
British Library
CCSG
Corpus christianorum, Series graeca
CCSL
Corpus christianorum, Series latina
CD
Corpus Dionysiacum
CFMM
Church of the Forty Martyrs (manuscript collection in Mardin, Turkey)
CH
Church History
CPG
Clavis patrum graecorum , ed. M. Geerard and F. Glorie (Turnhout, 1974-87) [2nd edition under way, with vol. 3 released in 2003]
CPL
Clavis patrum latinorum , 3rd ed. (Steenbrug, 1995)
CSCO
Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium
DACL
Dictionnaire d arch ologie chr tienne et de liturgie
DSp
Dictionnaire de spiritualit asc tique et mystique
ET
English translation
FT
French translation
GCS
Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten [drei] Jahrhunderte
GNO
Hermann Langerbeck, ed., Gregorii Nysseni opera (Leiden, 1960)
KG
Kephalaia gnostika (Evagrius)
LSJ
H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. S. Jones, et al., A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1968)
LXX
Septuagint
MGMT
Mor Garbiel Monastery (manuscript collection)
NPNF
Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series
ODB
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium , ed. A. Kazhdan et al. (New York, 1991)
PG
Patrologiae cursus completus, Series graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1857-66)
PL
Patrologiae cursus completus, Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1844-80)
PO
Patrologia orientalis
RB
Reallexikon der Byzantinistik , ed. P. Wirth (Amsterdam, 1968-)
SC
Sources chr tiennes
SubsHag
Subsidia hagiographica
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The editors of this volume wish to thank the institutions and scholars who kindly made possible the meetings in which these essays were first discussed-the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the University of Notre Dame. At Dumbarton Oaks, Director Jan Ziolkowski and then-Director of Byzantine Studies Alice-Mary Talbot generously agreed to cosponsor a two-year, cooperative workshop on Evagrius and his legacy; when Margaret Mullett arrived as Byzantine director, she graciously and enthusiastically accepted the project.
At the University of Notre Dame, Charles Barbour offered funding from the fledgling Byzantine Studies program, Kenneth Garcia of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts helped secure additional support, and the staff of the Department of Theology generously assisted with the workshop. Dumbarton Oaks has long had an interest in the religious literature and monastic institutions of Byzantium, as its publications attest-for instance, the five-volume Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents , its translations of Byzantine Saints Lives, or its Hagiography Database . Notre Dame s Anastos Collection-now housed in the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Reading Room-and growing program in Byzantine studies prompted a cooperative effort, and this volume is one result. Yet an examination of the work and the legacy of Evagrius was a new project for both institutions. Thus the editors and authors offer this volume as an invitation to further explorations into the fascinating thought of Evagrius and his intellectual heirs.
We wish also to thank the participants in the 2012 Roundtable held at Dumbarton Oaks, who helped think through the presentations, along with the respondents to the various sessions there: Elizabeth A. Clark of Duke University, Philip Rousseau and Sidney Griffith of the Catholic University of America, Susan Ashbrook Harvey of Brown University, and Margaret Mullett. We appreciate the observations of the volume s anonymous reviewers and are grateful to the staff of the University of Notre Dame Press for their work in editing and publishing the book. Finally, we wish especially to recall the kind assistance of the late Remie Constable, former director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. Dumbarton Oaks had been a home in her youth, and she was happy to aid the cooperation between the two institutions. Her memory is dear to her friends and colleagues.
Introduction
The Ornament and Intellect of the Desert
R OBIN D ARLING Y OUNG J OEL K ALVESMAKI
In the early thirteenth century, the learned monk Kirakos of Erzinjan in Armenia completed a large commentary on the Kephalaia gnostika of the fourth-century teacher Evagrius of Pontus. Kirakos was a vardapet , or religious teacher, and he knew Evagrius s works in those Armenian translations available in his native language for nearly eight hundred years. Learned Armenian Christians, like their Syriac-speaking comrades to the south, had for all that time called Evagrius a holy man and had revered and learned from his works. Kirakos elaborately praised him as Saint Evagrius, the bodiless man-in-a-body, who is called the ornament and the intellect of the desert.
Kirakos s brief encomium touches on three aspects of Evagrius s presence in that Armenian library-his teaching, his intellectual accomplishments, and his Egyptian asceticism. First, Evagrius was known both in his own day and in later eras as a teacher of monks and a brilliant pedagogue of the soul. He had assembled that pedagogy from the oral traditions of his own monastic teachers and philosophical techniques common to both pagans and Christians in late antiquity, writing a guidebook for an endeavor that Pierre Hadot has memorably called philosophy as a way of life. By Kirakos s time, Evagrius s pedagogy had proven a reliable form of training for nearly a millennium, and had spread far beyond the Greek culture in whose language it was expressed. In this pedagogy, it was believed, the body s troubles yielded to the direction of a healthy soul.
Second, Kirakos celebrates the noetic goal of that same pedagogy. Its more advanced training aimed to restore a human s natural intellectual powers to allow knowledge and contemplation to grow and, through prayer and the deep understanding of scripture, to guide the mind to union with God.
Finally, Kirakos s encomium praises the Egyptian desert itself, which all medieval monks, from the Atlantic to the eastern stretches of the Silk Road, believed to be the origin of the monastic life. The desert was the source, they thought, of their ascetic traditions and the dwelling place of the fathers of monasticism-Anthony, Ammon, Macarius, and other abbas from whom Evagrius himself had learned during his residence in Nitria and Kellia from 383 to 399. In the monks own historiography, the complex origins of Christian monastic life had been simplified: the angelic life of the monks had begun with one founder, Anthony; the first abbot and the first rule had come from there; and pilgrims who wanted to learn how to live that life visited first the early monastic houses of Egypt.
From Kirakos s vantage point, Evagrius was an exemplary monk of the first generations of monasticism; that he was a reliable teacher went without saying. But in the west, over the border and beyond Armenia-in the eastern Roman Empire of the sixth century-Evagrius s work had been condemned, and his more advanced writings had been obliterated. For most Latin and Greek speakers, Evagrius was not the ornament and intellect of the desert, but a dissident who spread the heresy of Origenism; even during his lifetime, some thought him a bad influence on monks.
For this reason there are two problems that continue to afflict the study of Evagr