In the writings of Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 AD), one finds a man and inner world beset by demons, ones that he carefully observed, categorized, and struggled against over many nights in his monastic cell. The rigorous self-scrutiny and self-revelation that characterize his work would ultimately give birth to a new form of literature: the searching of the soul.1 His intense conflict with demons - including the demon he called Love of Money - was a major part of this fourth century monks’ struggle for salvation and purity of soul, and Evagrius is credited with crafting the most sophisticated demonology of early Christian monasticism, if not in ancient Christianity as a whole.2
Among Evagrius’ multiple works is the short treatise and practical spiritual manual Talking Back on the tactics needed to defeat the eight demons that undermine monastic life: gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. In this post, I will rely heavily on a translation of Talking Back and an essay on Evagrius Ponticus in Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity by historian David Brakke. In the prologue to his translation, Brakke notes, “In Talking Back we find the thoughts, circumstances, and anxieties with which the demons assailed the monk, and we observe a primary strategy in the struggle to overcome such assaults: antirrhe¯sis, the speaking of relevant passages from the Bible that would contradict or, as Evagrius puts it, cut off the demonic suggestions.”3
The “cutting off” of demonic suggestions and rigor of Evagrius’ ascetic regimen are particularly pointed when it comes to the demon Love of Money. In addition to addressing issues of corruption and lack of generosity to the poor, Evagrius believed that monks should avoid confusing the monastic ideal of sufficiency with economic security. He counseled a bare-bones existence. Evagrius advised that monks should strive for minimal self-sufficiency and give all surplus to the poor, and held that the ideal monk cultivated economic vulnerability as a means of developing spiritual dependence on God and openness to other people.4 Evagrius saw the demon Love of Money at work in the stockpiling of goods for the metaphorical rainy day and even in the accumulation of wealth to survive old age. Monks were to exhibit near-complete dependence on God and others in their monastic community.5
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In order to understand the occasionally extreme asceticism found in Talking Back, it is helpful to bear in mind how Evagrius arrived at the monastery as well as the slow, self-inflicted death that occurred not long after completing this treatise.
Evagrius was born to a “country bishop” in the region of Pontus in Asia Minor and appears to have been destined for prominent ecclesiastical positions from an early life. His early career intersected with and impacted many of “the greats” that are still known and studied today. Evagrius was ordained a lector by Basil the Great in Pontus as a young man. He traveled to Constantinople and was ordained a deacon by Gregory of Nazianzus around 380. His later writings and teachings as a monk in Nitria and Kellia in Egypt would go on to have significant influence on the development of western monasticism through translations of his works from Greek into Latin and by drawing followers like John Cassian who, in turn, would greatly influence Benedict of Nursia. Many of Evagrius’ works became very popular even in his own lifetime, and Talking Back was eventually translated from the original Greek into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, and Sogdian.6
Yet despite this seeming ecclesiastical promise and prominence, it is also clear (to me, anyway) that Evagrius was a tortured and even self-destructive soul. The first glimpse of this aspect of his personality appears during his time in Constantinople. It was not long after he became the protege to Gregory of Nazianzus that he became embroiled in a scandal that would force him to flee the city.
In Constantinople, the handsome Evagrius had a romantic entanglement with a married woman and had to flee quickly when he was warned in a vision of her husband’s plans for revenge. A confession: I’ve enjoyed reading accounts that insist that this was an unconsummated romantic affair even as these very same accounts acknowledge that Evagrius is very vague on this entire episode. How could we possibly know? What is known is that after fleeing to Jerusalem, Evagrius sauntered the streets of the Holy City until he had a mental and physical breakdown. He found refuge and restoration of health in 383 at the monastery of Melania the Elder (c. 342-410), one of the few wealthy women who had been able to use her wealth and ascetical identity to become a leading Christian intellectual. Situated on the Mount of Olives, Melania’s monastery was known as one of the Christian world’s great centers for the study and dissemination of the works of Origen of Alexandria. 7 This would ultimately have a profound influence on Evagrius for much of his writings and spirituality bear the imprint of Origen. It is only after, around the age of 38, that Evagrius left Jerusalem to become a monk in Nitria and later Kellia in Egypt.
The form of monasticism that Evagrius found and joined in Egypt has been called “semi-eremetic”, referring to the fact that ‘the monastery’ appears to have been a loose cluster – a desert constellation - of individual hermits. ‘Semi-eremetic monasticism’ describes an arrangement in which monks lived in individual residences ("Kellia" eventually gave its name to “cells”), were under the supervision of an abba, yet came together regularly for teaching, meetings, and fellowship.8 “Nitria was the site where intending monks were inducted into desert, living in small communities designed to supervise them and test their vocations” and Kellia was “a loose association of monastic settlements covering many square miles of the desert” and became a place where more advanced monks could escape irritating monastic newcomers.9
Over the next sixteen years at Nitria and Kellia, Evagrius would become a renowned spiritual teacher to this loose constellation of monks. The historian John Anthony McGuckin writes how Evagrius “drew his disciples around him closely in a conscious modeling of an ancient philosophical schola, where intellectual labor, study, deep meditative reflection, and the development of the states of inner peace and wordless prayer were given a higher priority over the traditional forms of ascetical labor and vocal prayer services (psalms and exclamations) favored by the earlier, less intellectual monks.”10 A centerpiece of his practical teaching was the sophisticated demonology that he had developed, one borne out of his personal experience of a fraught and seemingly unceasing battle with the demons plaguing his monastic existence.
There is, in fact, something profoundly tragic about his unceasing, pitched battle, and this sadness looms over his many writings. Soon the elders of the monastery were repeatedly warning him about his extreme asceticism, and even as Evagrius became Kellia’s most renowned inhabitant, his brethren appear to have found many of Evagrius’ viewpoints unsettling.11 His protracted struggles against the demons catalogued in Talking Back and the severe bodily mortifications he engaged in took their toll and he died just sixteen years after departing from Jerusalem for Egypt.
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When Evagrius left Jerusalem for Egypt, he was setting out to join a monastic movement that had developed as a form of ‘silent protest’ against the worldliness of the Church and societal instability of the second and third century. Diarmaid McCullough’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years describes monasticism’s development in Syria and Egypt as an “implied criticism of Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.”12 Monastic communities were a refuge and pointed alternative to an increasingly monarchical and worldly church, but it was an alternative that remained within the church's bounds and discipline. Monasticism also provided Christians an opportunity to engage in a martyrdom of the self at a time when the Roman persecutions of Christians were in decline, a tradition of self-crucifixion that Evagrius would enthusiastically embrace.
By stepping out of society -- literally walking out into the desert in many cases -- first ascetic hermits and then these early semi-hermetic communities in the third century developed a way of life that fused two things held in uneasy tension. By separating from wider society and a church increasingly at ease with wealth, monks were able to follow Jesus’ advice to abandon worldly wealth even as their communities remained under authority of the bishop and therefore part of the orbit of the wider Church.13 This ability for monasticism to remain part of the wider Church but not of it, a seemingly nonthreatening alternative to the path of increasing wealth and power of the rest of the Church, is why it has been occasionally referred to as a form of silent protest.
As Evagrius would find, however, even in the desert, it was impossible to separate one’s self from the spiritual dangers of wealth. Indeed, the semi-eremetical model of monasticism that he found in Nitrea and Kellia was one in which monks ended up being directly engaged and responsible for their own financial survival. David Brakke notes “Still, unlike his cenobitic brother, who took his place in a well-structured collective, the semi-eremetical monk had to manage his own financial affairs, and thus monastic renunciation complicated his relationship to money and possessions, rather than ending it completely.”14 You can sense this close involvement with finances in Evagrius’ instructions to a monastic beginner: “Give thought to working with your hands, if possible both night and day, so that you will not be a burden to anyone, and further that you may be able to offer donations, as the holy apostle Paul advised.”15 The challenging financial ideals of both self-sufficiency – so as to not be a burden on anyone else – and having enough to be generous, may be why the demon Love of Money appears more often in the literature from semi-eremetical monastic settings than in monastic models wherein most of the monks were far less engaged in the day-to-day finances of the monastery.
It was during Evagrius’ time in Nitria and Kellia, at some point in the last decade of the fourth century, that a monk named Loukios wrote to Evagrius requesting a practical treatise for dealing with the demons that undermined monastic life, including the demon Love of Money. Talking Back was Evagrius’ response to this request, one borne out of the rigorous pattern of observation and control he had subjected himself to. For “[Evagrius] slept no more than a third of the night, devoting the rest of his time to prayer, contemplation and study of Scripture. To keep himself awake, he was in the habit of walking in the courtyard of his cell. He scrupulously attended to his thoughts and, based on these observations, prepared a dossier of verses from Scripture to be cast in the face of attacking demons.”16
Talking Back belongs to the genre of practical instruction written for “small groups of immediate and intimate disciples who are constantly under the eye of a master who has considerable authority over his charges.”17 These practical instructions sought to manage monastics’ physical drives toward sexuality, increase of wealth, and comfort through fasting, hard labor, and redirection of thought. In order to dethrone the primary place of the body, “the body was given the tasks of weaving with the hands, plowing the earth, while all the time the mind repeated a simple phrase in sotto voce. If conflicting thoughts and distractions became unmanageable, the phrase was repeated aloud for some minutes until the order of things had been reestablished.”18
Evagrius sees the monks’ over-involvement in financial affairs as a spiritually dangerous concession to the demon Love of Money. A keen observer of his own thoughts, he notes the way that financial hardship caused anxiety and a distortion of priorities. To struggle against the demon Love of Money is to forever struggle “Against the thought that anxiously serves in business affairs on the pretext that the money has run out, and now there is nothing left of it, and it cannot be regained,” and “Against the inner thoughts that want to acquire riches and to consume the intellect with anxiety about them.”19
This anxiety about money threatened to undermine the monastic life. Evagrius observed a tendency in monks to end up laboring so much that they neglected prayer and study: “Against the thought of love of money that, on account of the desire for wealth, drove us to perform manual labor night and day, and so deprived us of reading the Holy Scriptures and prevented us from visiting and ministering to the sick: Wealth does not profit on the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death (Prov 11:4).”20 Worse still, he also observed monks exploiting other monks in the name of creating wealth and economic security. He warned monks “against the thought that demanded more manual labor from a brother than he is capable of…” and “against the thought that, on account of love of money, leads us to afflict with the burden of many labors a brother who has recently become a disciple.”21
In lieu of anxiety about finances, Evagrius counsels a dis-possession of the desire for financial security and instead urges an openness to economic vulnerability and a greater reliance on God. This included arguing against the accumulation of wealth to offset destitution in the monk’s old age. Old age was to be a time of utter dependency. “Against the soul that seeks more than food and clothing and does not remember that it entered the world bare and it will leave it naked. For we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these (1 Tim 6:7-8).”22 Such warnings against making provisions for old age are perhaps why Benedict of Nursia’s Rule of the sixth century, which stipulates compassion and basic medical care for elderly monks who could no longer engage in manual labor, was considered a remarkably humane contrast to prior monastic models.
Along with radical economic vulnerability, the giving of any surplus to the (often aged) monks who were poor was foundational to a monk’s economic life. And yet like self-sufficiency, Evagrius also sees this aspect of a monk’s economic life as fraught with spiritual dangers. First, it is important to emphasize that Evagrius encouraged generosity - “Against the thought of love of money that withheld compassion from a brother who asked out of his need and that advised us to store up for ourselves alone…”23 - and skewered the tendency in monks to give and then regret such generosity, as well as the tendency to lend only to the monks who could repay. And yet, Evagrius also observed how giving to the poor could become a point of pride and self-delusion, and that the demon Love of Money could transform even generosity into an excuse to accumulate wealth. As David Brakke notes, “Already in Foundations of the Monastic Life, a work aimed at beginners, Evagrius must command, ‘Do not desire to possess riches in order to make donations to the poor, for this is a deception of the evil one that often leads to vainglory and casts the mind into occasions for idle preoccupations.”24
At every turn, Evagrius is insisting that “the monk must create in himself or herself a spiritual condition of reliance on God and openness to others, summed up in the virtues of apatheia and agape. It is this spiritual vulnerability and generosity that economic vulnerability and generosity are meant to cultivate.”25
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One of the most fascinating aspects of Evagrius’ writings on Love of Money is in his discussions of possessions and what happens when people, and even institutions, lust after ownership. A true ascetic, Evagrius’ unease with possessions was tied to his sense that it was rooted in the sexual desire “to possess”, and that there is a lusting involved with seeking to own more and more. He also observes the closely related animalistic anger that then occurs when we feel our possessions are threatened. For “if we have property, then we become like a dog that barks at and attacks people because it wants to protect its things,”26 and he sees the epitome of this behavior in monks who engage in lawsuits over property, as well as in those who misuse funds intended for the whole community.27
Although a former professor of mine, John Anthony McGuckin, always warned against the temptation to lift Evagrius’ writings out of the context of the fourth century desert and apply them, willy nilly, to today – pretending that our cities and suburban lifestyle are in any way like the monastic clusters and topography these manuals were written to and within - I’ve decided to succumb to that temptation because Evagrius' insights about possessions still seem like such sound advice today.28
The truth is, possessions are strange things. Even though we might acquire possessions to fulfill a perceived need, as many have pointed out before, it turns out that possessions themselves have considerable needs of their own. Possessions need to be cleaned, maintained, and stored. Clothes need to be selected and washed; a car needs gas and regular maintenance; even the smallest of homes must be attended to. A larger house needs to be filled with furniture, will almost always require constant repairs, and many rooms may require the hiring of additional people to help clean it regularly. The finer the furniture – beautiful rugs, for instance – the more special care needed. Second homes need to be visited and then checked in on, opened up, closed down, and driveways cleared after a storm. If you’re Joel Osteen, private helicopters must be piloted and staffed. That so many of us go into debt (credit card, mortgages) for possessions adds yet an additional layer that would likely have fascinated Evagrius, for debt has been described as the evil doppelganger of insurance in that it’s “there when you least need it.” Debt has a way of compounding a terrible situation – a sudden loss of income, for instance – by showing up relentlessly. Possessions acquired through debt are especially insistent in having their needs met.
At some point, people with many possessions may experience a reversal between “the owner” and “the owned.” I’ll never forget having lunch with a wealthy individual, a man who makes almost half a million dollars per year, but who was carrying two mortgages for homes he could not sell. Despite his wealth, he was trapped in a miserable existence because staying with an abusive employer was the only way he could continue to make the payments. To be clear, this wasn’t poverty, yet the psychic stress he carried from this state was very real. Who is the owner here? The bank and the homes themselves were, and it was the “owner” who was profoundly “owned” in that it was the needs of his possessions he was forever answering to.
This relationship also occurs within the Church, of course, a fact which is made all the more awkward when you consider not only the writings of desert fathers like Evagrius, but also the fact that Jesus instructed his disciples to go two-by-two, taking nothing for the journey – with “no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic.”29 Perhaps this is an unreasonable command given that the apostles themselves eventually transitioned from itinerant preaching to settled ministries, but the centrality of this teaching suggests Christians should be more circumspect when it comes to property ownership.
Yet what Evagrius observed as the ‘lust to possess’ is alive and well. An ecclesiastical equivalent to the lunch I describe above might be the time, several years ago, when I visited a vast Episcopal Church building with just a few people in it. Sitting in the back pew, I was struck by the fact that the sermon only briefly mentioned the Gospel before getting to the heart of the matter, which was that the roof needed to be repaired and that it was up to the twenty or so souls there to find enough money to fund those repairs. Where? How? It was a stunningly beautiful building – a historic landmark, as I’d learn later - but it did not appear to me that those twenty souls had vast sums of wealth at their disposal. Did the congregation, then, really “own the building” or was it the building itself who “owned the ministry” of that community, drove its focus, even to the point of occupying the central point of the sermon? The relationship between the “owners” and the “owned” had become reversed and Jesus’ teaching to travel lightly was but a distant echo. Would it not be better for the Church to model owning less?
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| Fr. Peter Hinde welcoming us to Casa Tabor in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico |
The second point that Evagrius makes regarding property is even more interesting and, frankly, awkward for the church. He observes that possessions have an additional need of being protected from others and that in carrying out this duty we can be transformed, becoming “like a dog that barks at and attacks people because it wants to protect its things.”30 The vaster our acquisitions, the more vigilant we must be in protecting them from others. Limiting our possessions has the beneficial effect of limiting the range and realm of that which we must bring our aggression to in order to protect. Evagrius observed monks suing one another over possessions, and thereby saw ecclesiastical legal battles as the especially tragic outcomes of a demonic insistence on possession of property. Even when we have the legal right, we risk becoming “like a dog that barks at and attacks people” in order to protect our property and a real question must therefore be whether such a legal battle – and the transformation it brings - is truly worth it. The answer may be yes, but we should be clear about the personal costs that come with defending our hold on possessions.
Evagrius is relentless, of course, in his commitment to living right on the edge of not just simplicity, but the vulnerability that comes with chosen poverty. He is urging monks to not just dispossess themselves of their possessions, but also of the desire to possess, and to instead give as much as possible to the poor. It is a perspective that deserves the overused word of “radical” and I think that it can only be understood within the broader framework of seeking to imitate what he describes as the death of Jesus.
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Evagrius alluded to his self-denying regimen and his own complete economic divestment in Talking Back when he warned, “Against the soul that wants to attain the death of Jesus while retaining some wealth and forgets how Elisha the prophet, when he renounced the world, divested himself of all that he had.”31 This pursuit of the death of Jesus resulted in not only divestment but a dangerous physical regimen. Augustine Casiday notes, “[Evagrius] ate only once per day. When he did eat, his diet was extremely limited. He assiduously abstained from lettuce, green vegetables, fruit, grapes and meat; he refrained from bathing and took no cooked food; eventually, he ruined his digestive tract and probably suffered from urinary tract stones. He slept no more than a third of the night, devoting the rest of his time to prayer, contemplation and study of Scripture.”32
When reading Evagrius in Talking Back, I occasionally had the sense of being trapped in an inescapable net. There is, quite frankly, no space in either thought or action that isn’t beset by the imperiling whisper of demonic forces and his life is a pitched battle against the forces that are constantly crowding in. As uniquely perceptive and sophisticated as his denomology is, I’m struck by the way that his writings betray the inner workings of what feels, at times, to be a self-destructive mind. Tragically, this included the refusal to heed the moderating wisdom of his elders.
Evagrius' ascetic regimen proved to be so harsh that his elders in Kellia warned him to moderate his practices, warnings that Evagrius appears to have – ironically - willfully ignored. This strikes me as a profoundly tragic decision for someone who so carefully observed the ways we delude ourselves, whether in regard to Love of Money or many of the other demonic forces that circumscribe our lives, and speaks to the way that self-martyrdom in the name of “attaining the death of Jesus” is replete with its own spiritual and physical dangers. Evagrius died of a ruined digestive tract on the feast of Epiphany in 399, a relatively early death widely thought to have been the result of his extreme asceticism.
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1 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years
2 Talking back : a monastic handbook for combating demons / Evagrius of Pontus ; translated with an Introduction by David Brakke, Trappist, Ky. : Cistercian Publications ; Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, c2009. Page 2
3 Talking back : a monastic handbook for combating demons / Evagrius of Pontus ; translated with an Introduction by David Brakke, Trappist, Ky. : Cistercian Publications ; Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, c2009. Page 2
4 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87 / Pages 77-78
5 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 77-78
6 Talking back : a monastic handbook for combating demons / Evagrius of Pontus ; translated with an Introduction by David Brakke, Trappist, Ky. : Cistercian Publications ; Collegeville, Minn. : Liturgical Press, c2009. Page 1
7 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Page 908
8 Casiday, Augustine. EVAGRIUS PONTICUS (Early Church Fathers S.) 1st Edition. Page 10
9 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. 396
10 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. 398
11 McGuckin, John Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. 398
12 McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 200-206
13 McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 201-202
14 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 77
15 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 82-83
16 Casiday, Augustine. EVAGRIUS PONTICUS (Early Church Fathers S.) 1st Edition. Page 13
17 McGuckin, Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Page 870
18 McGuckin, Anthony. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. Page 872
19 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.) Pages 97-98
20 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.) Pages 91-92
21 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.)
22 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.) Page 97
23 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.)
24 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 84
25 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 87
26 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 79
27 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 80
28 With apologies to John Anthony McGuckin, The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years, Page 870
29 Luke 9 :3
30 Care for the Poor, Fear of Poverty, and Love of Money: Evagrius Ponticus on the Monk’s Economic Vulnerability by David Brakke, Wealth and Poverty in Early Church and Society. Pages 76-87, 79
31 Third Book - Concerning the Love of Money (Pontus, Evagrius Of. Talking Back: Volume 229 (Cistercian Studies) (p. 85). Liturgical Press. Kindle Edition.) 88
32 Augustine Casiday.Evagrius Ponticus, Page 13
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