Evagrius Ponticus

Life events

1. Born — 345

   Evagrius was born into a Christian family in Ibora, a small town in the late Roman province of Helenopontus, modern-day İverönü near Erbaa in Pontus.

2. Educated — 362

   Evagrius received his education in Neocaesarea, where Basil of Caesarea ordained him as a lector — his first formal ecclesiastical office.

3. Ordained — 380

   Around 380, Evagrius joined Gregory of Nazianzus in Constantinople, where Gregory had been installed as bishop and promoted him to deacon; after Gregory departed in July 381, Evagrius remained and rose to archdeacon under the new episcopal administration.

4. Tonsured — 383

   Having fled Constantinople after an infatuation with a married woman and a vision warning him to leave, Evagrius was received by Melania the Elder and Rufinus of Aquileia near Jerusalem; falling gravely ill, he confessed his troubles to Melania and was made a monk at Jerusalem in 383.

5. Pilgrimage — 385

   Around 385, Evagrius joined a cenobitic community in Nitria in Lower Egypt; after some years he moved to the more remote settlement of Kellia, where he spent the last fourteen years of his life studying under Macarius of Alexandria and Macarius the Great.

6. Wrote

   During his years at Nitria and Kellia, Evagrius composed his major ascetic and speculative works: the Praktikos, the Gnostikos, the Kephalaia Gnostica, De oratione (153 chapters on prayer), and the Antirrhetikos, which catalogued 487 temptations under the eight categories of evil thought.

7. Died — 399

   Evagrius died in 399 at Kellia in the Egyptian desert, having spent roughly fourteen years in ascetic life, writing, and teaching in the monastic settlements of Lower Egypt.

8. Council — 553

   At the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, Evagrius's speculative teachings on the pre-existence of souls and apocatastasis were condemned alongside those of Origen; this condemnation caused most of his speculative Greek writings to be lost, surviving only in sixth-century Syriac and Armenian translations.

Relationships

Documented claims

• Evagrius codified eight evil thoughts (logismoi) — gluttony, lust, greed, sadness, acedia, anger, vainglory, and pride — stating 'The first thought of all is that of love of self; after this, the eight.' Pope Gregory I condensed these into the Seven Deadly Sins in 590. (likely)
• According to Palladius's Lausiac History, Evagrius ate only once a day and consumed no fruit, meat, vegetables, or cooked food; he refrained from bathing and slept only a few hours each night, devoting the remainder to contemplation and prayer. (likely)
• After the 553 condemnation, most of Evagrius's speculative Greek writings were lost; they survived in Syriac and Armenian translations made before the council, and his ascetic works circulated in Greek under pseudonyms — chiefly Nilus of Ancyra — until twentieth-century scholarship restored correct attribution. (likely)
• John Cassian, Evagrius's disciple, transmitted the eight-thought schema to the Latin West through his Institutes and Conferences without naming Evagrius — whose reputation was already tainted — enabling the framework to reach Gregory the Great and become the Seven Deadly Sins. (likely)
• Because most Egyptian monks of his era were illiterate, Evagrius — a classically trained scholar — is regarded as among the first to record and systematize the oral teachings of the Desert Fathers; he himself was eventually counted among them, and his sayings appear in the Vitae Patrum. (likely)