Evagrius Ponticus was a late 4th century figure, trained in the theology and politics of big city ecclesial life under the Cappadocians, who ended up as a monk in the remote Egyptian desert. He was often criticized for being too intellectual, and indeed his theology did have very systematic theory behind it, unusual in the midst of often uneducated Coptic monks who focused more exclusively on the practical monastic experience, and often held anthropomorphic beliefs of God. Yet his theology also had a very practical side, for he gives a keen psychological analysis and develops battle tactics against the eight logismoi, or tempting thoughts, that attack a monk learning to pray.
From him come the very well known words, "the one who prays is a theologian, the theologian is one who prays."
And yet, this phrase is not so simple to unravel as it might appear. To understand them, you need to have a specific understanding of anthropology, epistemology, and the ascetic life, and how these all link together. Evagrius had a very particular idea about what a knowledge of God is, and the way it can be reached based on the kind of minds we have, and the way that body relates to that. Because of his Origenist creation account, he believed that we are all created originally to be minds contemplating God. But then we got distracted and fell away, cooling our fiery spirits into bodies. Those that fell the least were given angelic bodies, those that fell the most were given demonic bodies, and we are somewhere in between. Although bodies are not evil, exactly, they are not a full reflection of what we were meant to be - we were meant to contemplate God in undistracted unity. This is exactly the goal of monastic life, to return as far as possible to this contemplation.
This is prayer. But this itself is also theology.
How do we know something? Well, we can kind of get knowledge encountering things in this world of multiplicity, but we can't really know a thing until we grasp its nature. This is very much like Plotinus (who was a contemporary of Origen, Evagrius' biggest theological influence) - there is the knowledge you get through discursive reasoning, but a higher knowledge comes through immediate intuition of truth (like angelic knowledge). But this is still not the greatest kind of knowledge, because it is still in the world of multiplicity - this is not yet the unity of God himself. So there are three stages - discursive reasoning, intuitive knowledge of natures, and intuitive knowledge of God himself. But God does not come to just anyone, and it's not something we can do on our own. We have to first clear our minds of distractions (again, what caused us to fall away from our original bliss) by battling the logismoi until we reach the state of apatheia, a sort of unshakable peace. THEN we are in a place that God can show himself to us. This is theology.
The way Evagrius sees it, theology does not involve active thinking. Theology is conceptless prayer in which God reveals himself to us.
Again, note the connection this has to Plotinus. The highest form of philosophy was conceptless union with the One - to approach its utter simplicity required one to "close the eye of the intellect". Of course, Plotinus saw this mainly as a human activity, rather than a gift of God - his One remained unremoved from everything, as opposed to the Christian God who became incarnate. God is a goal rather than a means. However, interestingly enough, Plotinus himself was considered to be a fairly severe ascetic by his Greek peers (though nothing compared to Christian ascetics).
So there seems to be a relationship between different kinds of knowledge and access to truth, and how the body affects this.
For Greeks, knowledge WAS the access to truth - askesis was to prepare for this, and even the philosophers did this to some extent, although most of them fairly moderately.
For today's culture, if there is truth, it is an scientific, academic pursuit, with lots of computers and data, and no askesis is necessary to attain it. If there is truth, it doesn't really pertain to what we do. The skepticism about truth is combined with a strange dualism, in which we see no need to act in particular ways because our body is whatever our minds want it to be (since there's no objective truth) - asceticism is pointless. (Again, recall the lack of asceticism for those who theoretically need their minds most.)
What should we say as Christians? Well, there is certainly access to truth through scientific knowledge, but this is not everything. There is also through the infused wisdom of the Holy Spirit, able to be received only by those who have purified themselves from disordered attachments - ascesis is to prepare for the second kind of knowledge, unless these stages are not at all distinct. If they are not distinct, then you need to practice asceticism and virtue to be a good physicist, and I am very skeptical of such claims.
This leads into a further question: what kinds of truth really requires ascesis or holiness to understand? I think probably the deeper the knowledge penetrates to the natures of things, the closer to God it comes, the more purity of heart is necessary to understand it.
So is the theologian the one who prays? Supposing we don't espouse an Origenist anthropology, and supposing we think that knowledge comes both through science and infused wisdom, instead of the more singular divine illumination epistemology of Neo-Platonism... does Evagrius' statement about theology become meaningless? It seems you can do theology without prayer, at least to some extent. But if you take the scholastic route which allows for scientific knowledge, is there a place for contemplative prayer? If it is not to gain knowledge in the way Evagrius has it, then what is it for?
I think in order to really answer this question, we would need to first examine more carefully these two different kinds of epistemology - divinely infused knowledge, and then natural knowledge... but really, I think "natural knowing" is a broader concept than a single identical kind. It seems that way. An artist knows truth in a different way than a philosopher, even if they are knowing the same truth. There are different facets to be had with different approaches.
Second, we would need to find out how knowledge is related to union. Likeness is a principle for knowing - "like knows like," and so the more we are like God the more we know him. We become like God through union with him. We are in union with him the more we love. So Evagrius says to pray is to be a theologian... where does love enter this equation as well?
Nope, I'm not going to answer those questions. I don't know enough yet. They are familiar points in a trajectory that reaches many years into the future, at which point I may have answers more clearly laid out.
No comments:
Post a Comment