This essay tracks the dynamics of the demonic in the work of Evagrius of Pontus, a desert Christian monk of the 4th century. To recapitulate the practice of the Evagrian monk in writing, and therefore in ourselves, it will be helpful to review the cosmological theory of Origen, a theologian, philosopher, and biblical exegete of the early church. This recapitulation is not meant to reinforce a crude division between theoria and praktikē. Theory is a subset of practice. The world offers resistance, sometimes it even overwhelms us, and we are compelled to theorize in order to regain balance, to find relief. Truth, as we’ve been told, lies in correspondence, but a fitting correspondence is signaled only when the painful obstinacy of the world dips below a tolerable threshold. This is sense-making.

Theory makes possible a configuration of flows. It opens some avenues and closes others. It invites some energies and banishes others. It actively reconstitutes the life-world. Discursive theorizing is the search for an incantation, a configuration of words and annotations that appease the world for us, that satisfies a demand inherent in the gift that we have received in the world (and in this sense it is an offering), and that gives us the power to act in new capacities, genres, and styles. Theory brings new possibilities into view, it brings new avenues of energetic expenditure within range. As such, the cosmological theory of an Evagrian monk forms the boundaries of what is allowed to occur, of how phenomena are allowed to give themselves, and of how the monk is empowered to act.

Constituting the Boundaries: Origenist Cosmology

Evagrius was influenced by the Cappadocians, a name given to Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus (and, I would argue, their teacher, Macrina the Younger). In their theological work, the Cappadocians gave rigorous philosophical attention to early Trinitarian doctrine in conversation with Greek philosophy. The theoretical expression of Trinitarian doctrine in the Cappadocians drew also on the cosmology of an even earlier Church Father: Origen. Evagrius inherited from the Cappadocians “a commitment to Origen’s narrative of rational creatures falling away from, and eventually returning to, an original unity with God.”[1] The first creation was an intellectual one. In the beginning, there was only the contemplative unity of nous, created minds in communion with God. Then, as the Origenist myth goes, these minds began to turn away. They began their plunge away from God. Ergo the Fall.

The second creation, a term used by Origen (but, importantly, not by Evagrius) is a result of this primordial catastrophe. The irascible and concupiscible aspects of the soul emerge after this precipitation of the intellect, and these soulish lower qualities are united to a material body.[2] God is merciful, catching and preserving the intellect, providing a material path back to that blessed originary state. So, for Evagrius and the Origenist tradition writ large, the fact that the intellect is burdened by a body and an irrational soul is the direct result of a primeval calamity. The Fall precedes material creation. Evagrius saw the joining of nous to a lower soul and a body as, at the very least, a suboptimal state of affairs. The art of monasticism, then, is one of reorientation, of ascetical work aimed at right ordering of body, soul, and mind.

For Evagrius, the demon is no respecter of the epidermis, nor is he a respecter of the even more tenuous “interior.” The demon is an irascible spirit of the air (Eph. 2:2), fallen further from God than both the angel and the human.[3] Full of malice, the demon hurls flaming darts (Eph. 6:16) of logizmoi (afflicting thoughts) into the range of the monk’s interior perception. The demon incites battle by means of these thoughts. Evagrius writes,

If there is any monk who wishes to take the measure of some of the more fierce demons so as to gain experience in his monastic art, then let him keep careful watch over his thoughts. Let him observe their intensity, their periods of decline and follow them as they rise and fall. Let him note well the complexity of his thoughts, their periodicity, the demons which cause them, with the order of their succession and the nature of their associations. Then let him ask from Christ the explanations of these data he has observed. For the demons become thoroughly infuriated with those who practice active virtue in a manner that is increasingly contemplative. They are even of a mind to “pierce the upright of heart through, under cover of darkness.”[4]

To understand the demonic, the monk must understand and observe his own thoughts.[5] The demonic does not give itself as such. Rather, the demonic announces itself by virtue of the thought. Knowledge of the demonic, then, becomes correlated with knowledge of interior states. The demonic is present not only in the content of a thought, but also (and primarily) in the affliction that the thought brings. Interior affliction is the manifest intention of the demonic.

Tactical Desert Empiricism: Indications of Ways

Evagrius’s knowledge of the demonic was not primarily bookish (though he was extremely well read). Rather, it emerged from a sort of spiritual athleticism, a corpus of bodily and affective familiarity, practical knowledge. It was probably Macarius the Alexandrian, a man who possessed a practical familiarity with the demons of the desert and their patterns of attack, who initially introduced Evagrius to a monastic form of spiritual combat.[6] Evagrius then took this to the group context of the monastery, allowing accounts from his monks to inform his own views. It was an empirical process, above all else. Though the monks practiced their ascetic regimes in their cells during the week, on Sundays they gathered for worship, and on Saturdays they shared their experiences of demonic combat and sought advice from Evagrius.[7] The theories of Stoicism and Gnosticism are possible precursors, but the empirical data of the Saturday evening discussion group, combined with scriptural sources, generated novel and unprecedented insights into the workings of the demonic.[8]

The purpose of demonological knowledge in Evagrian monasticism is combat: to build a repertoire of gestures and maneuvers, which is just as important to the monastic art as knowledge of the hierarchy of demons. Evagrian knowledge is tactical. To that end, Evagrius gives indications not only of things, but also and primarily of ways, modes of encounter, learned maneuvers, tactics of opposition. He gives ascetic choreographic indications. The demon is never theorized apart from its oppressive activities and the corresponding affective gestures necessary for the monk’s resistance.[9]

The Happening of Cathexis: Body, Soul, Mind

As I mentioned above, Evagrius held a tripartite anthropology. The human being is essentially a mind (nous) joined to a soul (shorthand for irrational desiring and irascible tendencies in the interior), joined to a material body. The irascible and desiring aspects of the soul, fueled by the body, give rise to irrational desires that seem, at times, to come from without. Addiction, for example, demonstrates the blurred lines between acting and being acted upon. Evagrius understood that cathexes form on their own, as it were (in the irrational part of the soul), contrary to Freud’s crude notion of “object choice.”[10]

A cathexis (that is, the attachment or fixation of the libido on a particular object, i.e., attraction in some capacity) happens to us; it is not a volitional act, though volition may be involved in the construction of a situation in which a cathexis happens or is likely to happen. The body, too, is part of the situation that gives energy to desire and irascibility. I feed myself well, I feast on meat and wine, and I thereby dispose myself to the thought of fornication.[11] The well-fed body tends toward fornication because it creates the energetic condition for cathexes to form in the soul. Cathexis and anti-cathexis (that is, the opposite of cathexis: psychic repulsion at an object, i.e., hatred or disgust) are tendencies of the irascible and concupiscible capacities of the irrational soul (the id?), to mix Freudian and Evagrian terminology.

However, there is the possibility of interrupting the interior flow of a cathexis, to be familiar enough with the process of cathecting that one can redirect it. Cultivating a mindful familiarity with the process of cathexis is a key aspect of the training of the monk. One must be skillful, fluent in the cathectic flow, in order to redirect it with ease. The thought that the demon sends into range is the “protopassion” (propatheia),[12] or, we might say, the proto-cathexis. When the monk has developed his observational art (part of the “monastic art”)[13] well enough to take cognizance not just of the thought leveled against him, but also of the identity of the demonic entity sending such a thought, the monk is able to name the character and dynamic of a particular subset of cathectic flow. The monk estimates the flow, and draws on strategies for taming it.

Take the scene of the monk in prayer, for example, perhaps during an extended fast. The thought enters into range: “Do not torment your soul with a lot of fasting that gains you nothing and does not purify your intellect.”[14] Already a cathexis (or an anti-cathexis) is forming: “This fasting is no good,” or perhaps, “I am resentful against myself and against my superiors for the imposition of useless fasting.” Affects begin to surge in the body, perhaps a burning anger or shortness of breath. They may begin subtlely or grossly, but left to their own, they intensify. Salivation as the thought of meat enters into range: a visualization, perhaps even a gustatory imagination verging on the hallucinatory.

With all this in view, can see clearly what Evagrius meant by his statement in Ad Monachos 70:

A Flaming arrow ignites the soul,
but the man of praktikē will extinguish it.[15]

The demon’s flaming arrow, the thought, runs its course, surges through its familiar pathways, but the monk, the person of praktikē, knows how to intervene, how to extinguish it. He can counter this thought and the ensuing havoc it is wreaking and will wreak if he leaves it unchecked. He can observe the thought, its gluttonous character (gluttonous in its implication in the flow of gluttony: from the will of the demon, to the thought which it sends, to the follow-through in the vicious act). “The demon of gluttony is at hand,” the monk reckons. Gluttony is working to derail the fast, and, perhaps, through encouraging the monk to fill his body with meat and wine, gluttony is working to set the conditions for a successful attack from the demon of fornication.[16]

Against this particular thought that gluttony sends, Evagrius recommends reciting Exodus 38:26: “He made the bronze basin and its bronze stand from the mirrors of the women who fasted, who fasted by the doors of the tabernacle of witness, in the day in which he set it up.”[17] A new cathectic possibility enters range, a counter-magnetism, a mutually exclusive affective pathway. If the monk can adequately set up his interior situation, rearranging the flows through setting up verbal banks and levies of scriptural content and bringing to mind the attracting love of God and the promise contained in his commitment to the fast, then all the demonic potential in the afflicting thought is rendered null. Even the very act of reciting scripture moves the monk interiorly, bringing him to a posture incompatible with gluttony.

Though we have treated means of cathexis interruption and prevention, it is important to note that not every cathexis (or anti-cathexis) is undesirable.[18] Take, for example, anger, “the most fierce passion.”[19] The author of James understood, as did early monastics, that anger is rarely godly since it is more often than not directed against the neighbor (Jas. 1:19-20). The proper channeling of anger, though, is beneficial. The monastic war machine requires that anger be steered to its proper target: demons.[20]

In other words, the monk need not extricate himself from every cathectic or anti-cathectic flow, per se. Rather, the monk must perfect the art of rearranging his affective topography, channeling passions in the proper mode. Indeed, anger is a gift “given” to the monk, provided he can wield it properly. The irascible and concupiscible parts of the soul are sources of much needed energy, pushes and pulls, repulsions and attractions, that the monk needs in order to engage in his combat.

De-Severance and Interior “Space”

The question of inner “space,” a metaphor I have employed at length, has been put off long enough. What is the spatiality of the demonic? Evagrius clearly taught that demons have corporeal form, though it is too thin and airy for us to see. Further, the demon can send afflicting thoughts “into” the monk. Yet what is the spatiality of a thought? What is the spatiality of the “interior” of the monk? Even further still, there are strategies of blockade within the monk: “Remember your former life and your past sins and how, though you were subject to the passions, you have been brought into apatheia by the mercy of Christ . . . such thoughts instill humility in us and afford no entrance to the demon of pride.”[21] Humble thoughts, self-deprecating thoughts, casting oneself onto the mercy of a savior, these are not so much spatial realities as affective ones. And, as explicated in Heidegger’s Being and Time, space itself is a fundamentally affective reality.[22] De-distancing, de-severance, the desire to hold other beings close, to overcome separation, the drive toward the other, the showing of a phenomenon exerting an affective magnetism—Space is a derivative reality from this more primordial phenomenon.

Distance can be a synonym for dereliction. Perhaps, then, interior “space” is precisely a battle of competing energies, drives, flows, magnetisms, and resonances. The holy reconfiguration of these energies is the activity of purification, or its unholy opposite, defilement. Interior space is a set of tendencies, directly available to the mind (nous) for modification. But the untamed passions exert their own force. The perceptual availability of an interior object or tendency does not mean that it is neutral or inert. Humility, for example, exerts a particular force upon the interior configuration of affect management in the monk, a force that irrigates energies in a way that is mutually incompatible with Vainglory’s influence (in-flowing). Again, we slip into spatial metaphors. Spatial metaphors will have to do as useful shorthand, as long as we remember that space requires the affects of attraction (concupiscence) and repulsion (irascibility).[23]

Ordinarily there is not direct contact between the demon and the monk. The demon is encountered via the thought (demon-thought-contact). The thought is the intermediary phenomena, the rustling leaves that prove the wind. The thought is a proto-passion (propatheia), and belongs to the realm of affect. It beckons the monk, flags the monk’s attention, and, depending on the maneuver of the monk (whether the monk allows the cathexis to form on its own, or to reach his viscera) it may inflame the concupiscible or irascible passions of the soul, or even, in the case of fornication especially, register as a burning in the body. Thus we can track specific moments in a demonic flow: the will of a demonic entity, the sending of a thought into range, possibly the assent of a monk in a maneuver that submits itself to the thought, and a subsequent cathexis so strong that it overpowers the intentions of nous, or possibly the defensive gesture of the monk that invokes a configuration of energy-irrigation incompatible with such submission (one cannot serve two masters).

To submit is to yield, to cease to resist a current. The afflicting thought presents itself as a crosscurrent, a juncture, where a decisive submission or resistance must occur. The thought comes, a visualization of a meal, an afternoon of leisure, a fantasy of betrayal. Already the thought pulls forth the first inkling of concupiscence or irascibility. The body reacts. Will the monk yield to the thought? Give in to the current? Will he allow the body and soul to feed back on one another until a torrent of agitation leaves him scattered? To consent to this affect is to consent to disintegration. Fragmentation. A microcosmic repetition of the primordial Fall. To resist, which requires intellectual (nous) effort, is to prefigure the apokatastasis in some small way, to be on one’s way toward more subtle irrigations in gnosis and theologia, and, ultimately, in reconciliation to the Trinity.

An affective calculus is likely impossible, but heuristically, it will suffice to say that if the lower nature (the body, the concupsicible and irascible soul) exerts an interior current with greater intensity (repellent or attractive force) than that of the intellect, then the thought must be met with active struggle, perhaps tiring resistance. The point of praktikē is precisely to alter the interior through a repeated maneuvering that erodes old patterns of the body and soul and forces new enactive pathways to emerge.

This set of maneuvers is the techne at the monk’s disposal, the irrigating technology of practice, the method of “talking back” (antirhettorikos). Detachment. Apatheia is not the absence of bodily, irascible, and conscupiscible energies. Rather, it is an optimal configuration of the flows of those energies such that the nous is not met with the foreign resistance of the afflictive thought. When the thought is disarmed, the flow of affect in which the thought situates itself stops at the level of mere perception. The experienced monk can observe and dismiss the afflictive thought. Liberation is on the horizon. We begin to approach the summit of apatheia.

Conclusion: The Evagrian Demonic

The conclusion of this investigation is, hopefully, an opening out. I have indicated the demonic in terms of flows and energies, and to some extent, I have recreated the encounter of the Evagrian monk with the demonic. I hope also to have signified the affective and hydraulic functions of such an encounter. Some may call this a “thick description,” with particular attention given to interior states.[24] That is right, I think, so long as we realize that the thick description is also the submersion, the baptism, the initiation of the reader into a thought-world, which has a transformative effect on the reader’s life-world.

We have seen how, for Evagrius and his monks, the theorization of the demonic becomes necessary in the context of praktikē. An explanation and subsequent comportment is called for in the context of prayer, when the mind wanders off and is suddenly afflicted with what seems to be a flaming dart of vicious thought. This is the empirical data that demands an account. But the Evagrian theorization of the demonic is also based in scriptural and late antique cosmology. It always occurs as a result of the struggle for virtue within a late antique setting.

It is tempting to read the demon as merely the afflicting thought. Indeed, this would be much more agreeable to modern sensibilities. But, as I hope I have shown, this would be a mistake. The angelic and demonic powers and principalities that inhabited the thought-world of Evagrius and his contemporaries were not merely refractions of the “dark side” and “light side” of the self.[25] To cast them in these terms is to preclude the phenomenon from showing itself. The interior struggle against the demonic has its fractal correspondence to the cosmological struggle toward universal redemption, which we experience now as groaning (Rom. 8:22) toward its final reconciliation in the apokatastasis.

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[1] David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 49.

[2] Ibid., 6–7.

[3] Brakke, Demons, 75.

[4] TP, 50. Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO (Trappist: Cistercian Publications, 1972). References to Evagrius’s work in this paper will include the abbreviation and the section number, followed by English translation information in the first citation of the text.

[5] I will be gendering the monk male in this essay for the sake of brevity, and because Evagrius’s monks were specifically male.

[6] Brakke, Demons, 50.

[7] Ibid., 50–51.

[8] Ibid., 57.

[9] Of the Praktikos and the Chapters on Prayer, Jean Leclerq writes, “These . . . works are oriented much more toward experience than speculation” (Jean Leclerq, OSB, “Preface” in Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO [Trappist: Cistercian Publications, 1972], lxxx).

[10] Cf. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

[11] Cf. AM, 102: “Weigh your bread on a balance and drink your water by measure; and the spirit of fornication will flee from you” (Evagrius Ponticus, Ad Monachos, trans. Jeremy Driscoll [New York: The Newman Press, 2003).

[12] Brakke, Demons, 54.

[13] TP, 50.

[14] TB, 1. (Evagrius of Pontus, Talking Back: Antirrhetikos: A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons, trans. David Brakke [Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2009])

[15] AM, 70.

[16] Brakke, Demons, 58.

[17] TB, 1.

[18] Brakke, Demons, 53.

[19] TP, 11.

[20] Ibid., 24.

[21] TP, 33.

[22] Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. and ed. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1962), especially I.3.24 (145–148).

[23] On the basis of this observation, we may be able to question whether, in Evagrian cosmology, the spatio-temporal order depends on the irascible and concupiscible soul.

[24] I use this term loosely here, but for the more precise development of the term, see Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

[25] Brakke, Demons, 76–77.