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Who Was Evagrius Ponticus?

Who Was Evagrius Ponticus?

Starting explanation, not independently reviewed

The current answer

The desert's sharpest psychologist: the monk whose map of temptation became the seven deadly sins, and whose cosmology was anathematized a century and a half after his death.

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Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345 to 399) was a Greek-educated deacon who left a rising church career in Constantinople for the Egyptian desert and became early monasticism's most systematic mind.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Palladius, Lausiac History 38

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In the Praktikos he identifies eight generic logismoi, "thoughts": gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Evagrius, Praktikos

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Cassian never names Evagrius; the usual reading is prudence about a suspect source, though that is an inference, not a documented motive (Stewart, Cassian the Monk, 1998).

Imported citation, not independently checked: Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (1998)

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In the Syriac East, outside the reach of the Byzantine anathemas, nearly the whole corpus survived in translation; Isaac of Nineveh cites him with reverence.

Imported citation, not independently checked: Isaac of Nineveh; Syriac Evagrian corpus

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