Apatheia and Anthropology in Evagrius of Pontus

Evagrius of Pontus (c.345-399 CE) has been renowned for his spiritual insight and psychological acumen ever since his lifetime, and despite his condemnation for heresy in the sixth century exercised a defining influence on the development of both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian traditions. Rooting himself in scripture and patristic thought but also drawing widely upon pagan sources and making use of empirical observation, Evagrius constructed a comprehensive and unified theory of human origins, nature, destiny, and our place in a material cosmos understood as the sacramental self-revelation of a loving God who seeks by means of its beauty to awaken our desire for him. The state that Evagrius calls apatheia harmonises and stabilises the soul, establishing love as its disposition, and is rooted in the disciplines of the monastic life and a purified physical constitution.

This book is the first full-length study of Evagrian apatheia and the most detailed examination to date of Evagrian anthropology. It situates them in their overall context of cosmology, salvation history, and the spiritual life. It describes a system which, while profoundly christocentric and deriving its structure from Paul, is a masterpiece of late antique philosophical synthesis incorporating elements of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and medical thought. It will be of interest to specialists in classical and late antique philosophy, to historians of philosophy, theology, spirituality, psychology, psychiatry, and medicine, to scholars of monasticism, and to theologians and philosophers interested in the human person.

Monica Tobon holds a BA in Philosophy, and an MA and PhD in Classics, all focusing on Ancient and Late Antique Philosophy, from University College London. She lectured for six years in the history of philosophy and Christian spirituality at the Franciscan International Study Centre in Canterbury while continuing to work on Evagrius. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at UCL’s Department of Greek and Latin. This is her first book, but she has previously contributed to and co-edited with Markus Vinzent Evagrius on Contemplation, Supplement to Studia Patristica 57 (Peeters, 2013), contributed to and co-edited with Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Kevin Corrigan, and Markus Vinzent Evagrius Between Origen, the Cappadocians and Neoplatonism, Supplement to Studia Patristica 83 (Peeters, 2017), and also published several other peer-reviewed papers on Evagrius.