Evagrius on Coping with Nihilism

I’ve been spending time reading Evagrius’ On Thoughts. This text is aimed at more advanced monks who have achieved higher levels of Evagrius’ spiritual progression. In this meditation, I want to spend some time on a chapter in that work that provides very specific guidance on how to overcome ressentiment. In this chapter (19), he takes a break from the purely theoretical discussion of how thoughts work. He presents very specific guidance on how to deal with our thoughts through a technique of neutralization and externalization.

Before delving into those chapters, I want to take stock of where I am with respect to ressentiment. I hesitate to give it a specific definition. For Nietzsche, ressentiment operates at the level of experience. It is fundamentally a flow of energy that is invested with emotional meaning. But it is more than that. It has a crucial temporal quality that must be understood. For the “man of ressentiment” to come into being, the emotions driving meaning must linger: they must become internalized as a nearly permanent state of the self. Ressentiment must “give birth to values” as a way of seeing the world and oneself. Paradoxically, this permanent state feels good because it is based on giving meaning to oneself. Thus the man of ressentiment holds grudges and finds validation in holding grudges. Those grudges are indicators that this man of ressentiment has realized something bad about the world, and therefore something good about himself: “he has conceived ‘the evil enemy',’ ‘the Evil One,’ and this is in fact his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and a pendant, a ‘good one’ — himself!” (GM 1.10).

To make this more clear, let’s look briefly at basic ressentiment before it becomes the more permanent “man of ressentiment”:

Ressentiment itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction and therefore does not poison: on the other hand, it fails to appear at all on countless occasions on which it inevitably appears in the weak and impotent.

To be incapable of taking one’s enemies, one’s accidents, even one’s misdeeds seriously for very long — that is the sign of strong, full natures in whom there is an excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate and to forget (a good example of this in modern times is Mirabeau, who had no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was able to forgive simply because he — forgot). Such a man shakes off with a single shrug many vermin that eat deep into others. (GM 1.10)

We can find no stronger statement of what Nietzsche thinks about how one overcomes nihilism and ressentiment. There can be no clearer statement of alliance with the Stoic ideal of letting things go and not dwelling on harms done. Contrary to how we might think today, this ability to forget and to “shake off with a single shrug” any lingering sense of anger and hatred is the sign of “strong, full natures.”

Thus the initial energies of ressentiment burst forth (if they do at all) but quickly dissipate as they find either an outlet in immediate but temporary action, or they simply don’t occur at all because the Stoic sage hasn’t even noticed the offense. For Nietzsche this is a crucial part of his moral vision. It is a sign of strength, not weakness to be able to let things go. We don’t deny the emotions we feel (if we feel them at all), but we do not let them control us. There is a balance between the Dionysian and the Apollonian that he wants to restore.

The crucial point here is that the initial feelings of ressentiment are natural and healthy, but the problems happen when we cultivate these feelings to become stable and permanent aspects of our selves — when we rely on ressentiment to become part of our identities and how we find our meaning in the world — when “ressentiment gives birth to values” (GM 1.10). For simple ressentiment to become the “man of ressentiment” is not a natural and necessary evolution: the “man of ressentiment” is cultivated by forces external to himself. He is a product of what Nietzsche called the “ascetic priest.”

It would be easy to read Evagrius as Nietzsche’s ascetic priest. He is not. He is the undoing of the ascetic priest. A close reading of Evagrius finds much more of a Mirabeau than a man of ressentiment. Nothing makes this more clear than looking specifically at Evagrius’ spiritual practices aimed at restoring the ability to prevent “passions” from “lingering” and thus becoming a permanent state of the soul. He passes onto us in these spiritual practices specific techniques for “cutting off” (a technical and practical term for Evagrius) this lingering disposition so that one can become like Nietzsche’s Mirabeau — a man who “has no memory for insults and vile actions done him and was able to forgive simply because he — forgot.”

Forgetting is an active “cutting off” of passionate thoughts and memories, which are the substances on which Evagrian spiritual practices work. We don’t find in Evagrius a complete renunciation of the affective part of ourselves (as we find in other Christainties). Rather, we find a due respect for them that allows self-control and channeling without becoming a complete ascetic annihilation of what he called our thymos or thymikon (typically translated as the “irascible part of our soul”) and epithymia or epithymetikon (typically translate awkwardly as the “concupiscible part of the soul” or “the source of desire, especially bodily desires”). (See William Harmless’ glossary of Evagrius’ terms in Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism, 369.)

… by irascibility, he [the monk] may put to flight the concepts that are wolves and, by concupiscence, he may show his love for the sheep, even though he is often battered by the wind and the rain. (On Thoughts 17)

Evagrius is clear throughout his writings that these parts of the soul are sources of motivation — good and bad. Our job is to control and channel them, not to eradicate, repress, or annihilate them. As creations of God, these are not in and of themselves evil or bad. They are neutral and without any inherent value. It is what we do with them that makes the difference. If/when we allow irascibility and/or desire to linger such that they become out of control emotions as our prime motivators — this is when sin occurs. “Cutting off” becomes, not annihilation, but channeling, which is what Nietzsche advocated as the cure for nihilism.

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With that preliminary in place, I will now return to the topic of this meditation — a spiritual practice designed specifically to short-circuit lingering passions (anger, hatred, sexual desire, gluttony, et cetera) so that they do not become permanent ressentiment deep-seated in the soul. This spiritual practice maintains a strong distinction between what is outside oneself and what is inside. This is critical for the spiritual practice. It also shows us how, as Nietzsche pointed out, the man of ressentiment is the creation of an external force that cultivates anger into long-term hatred. The man of ressentiment, in other words, results from internalizing external forces such that ressentiment becomes part of one’s sense of self and how one creates meaning and finds value.

For Evagrius, seeing these forces as external “demons” allows us to delay our knee-jerk willingness to adopt demonic thoughts as our own. To be sure, given his time and place, Evagrius quite likely thought these demons were real. We, of course, are under no obligation to believe in real demons. However, maintaining this useful fiction is well within reason. No less a figure than Rene Descartes showed us this in the seventeenth century when he imagined “some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me”:

This is why I shall take great care not to accept into my belief anything false, and shall so well prepare my mind against all the tricks of this great deceiver that, however powerful and cunning he may be, he will never be able to impose on me. (First Meditation)

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Now to get on with the spiritual practice itself, which is detailed in On Thoughts Chapters 8 and 19. In Chapter 8, Evagrius discusses the differences among angelic, human, and demonic thoughts. Let’s start in the center with human thoughts. To have a thought or a memory for Evagrius is for the mind to conjure up an image of something concrete — a “mental representation” (phantasia, to use the Aristotelian and Stoic term). This is one of the mind’s fundamental capacities, but here is the important part: these phantasia are completely neutral and utterly without meaning. They are magnets for meaning, but not meaningful in and of themselves. To have meaning – and thus to be motivators of action – these mental representations must be taken over by external entities – angels or demons.

Angels create meaning in the direction of God and opens us up to see a world, including ourselves, that is deeply interwoven. We are part of it, and it is part of us:

Firstly, the angelic thoughts thoroughly investigate the natures of things and trace out their spiritual reasons; thus: Why was gold created and strewn like gravel in the lower parts of the earth, and why is it found only with much effort and difficulty? And [they investigate] how, once it has been discovered, it is washed in water and committed to the fire and thus put into the hands of the craftsmen who made the lampstand, the censer, the thurible and the vessels of the Tabernacle.

This is a mystical practice that sees connections beyond essences. Contrast this with someone like Aristotle (or at least how Aristotle has been handed down to us). For him, each thing has an essential function – a hammer to pound nails, a lyre to make beautiful music, a ship to carry troops, human beings to seek happiness (eudaimonia). We judge the excellence (arete in Greek) of these things by how well they conform to their essences. Evagrius’ angelic thoughts, to the contrary, see only connections. To “thoroughly investigate the natures of things and trace out their spiritual reasons” is not to seek Aristotle’s functional essences that give things meaning. It is to trace out connections, to see things interwoven with other things. Gold has no essence as wealth that must be identified and exploited. It is not lying there in the ground waiting to be turned into individual wealth. It simply flows through the world undergoing multiple transformations. Yet it remains gold. Transformation is, in other words, its essence.

Demonic thoughts don’t see these connections; in fact, they actively cut them off. They turn the mental representation of gold into something that benefits only oneself:

Now the demonic thought neither knows nor understands these things, but shamelessly suggests only the possession of perceptible gold and foretells the delight and glory that will come from it.

Demonic thought turns gold into an object and me into the subject that can only see it as a source of wealth for me. Thus I see it only as an actual or potential possession. This is demonic thought operating as sin – the propensity to see everything as objects in reference to how they either help or benefit me as an individual entity. Evagrius is clear on this point: seeing the gold as an object that gets its meaning from how it impacts ourselves is an example of how sin works. Once we invest things with personal meaning like this, the demons are at work, and their work is to make us see ourselves and the objects around us as atomized entities. In other words, to see oneself as a self-sufficient subject with acquisitive passions is itself sinful and inspired by demons.

In Chapter 19 of On Thoughts, Evagrius turns this theoretical discussion of angelic, human, and demonic throughts into a spiritual practice, which is worth quoting at length. When faced with a thought about possessing something like gold because it brings wealth, he says the following (I’ve added numbers to emphasize the process):

Analyze within yourself the thought that has been sent by him against you: which is it; of how many things is it composed; and which among them chiefly afflicts the mind? What I mean is this. Let us suppose the thought of avarice is sent by him. Analyze this into [1] the mind that received it, [2] the concept of gold, [3] the gold as such, and [4] the avaricious passion; finally ask which of these is the sin. Is it [1] the mind and, if so, how? For the mind is the icon of God. Is it [2] the concept of gold, then? Who in his right mind would say that? So is [3] the gold as such a sin? Then why was it created? It follows, then, that the cause of the sin is the fourth, which is neither a thing that subsists in essence, nor a concept of a thing, nor yet a bodiless mind; instead it is a certain misanthropic pleasure born from self-determination which forces the mind to use God’s creations badly and which the law of God has been entrusted to excise. Now as you scrutinize these things, the thought will be dissolved in this contemplation and thus destroyed; the demonic [thought] will flee from you as your thinking is raised on high by this knowledge.

The moral psychology that is articulated here places the mind and its operation of representing images to itself in a completely neutral position. To remember or to see gold does not, by itself, have meaning one way or the other. Gold does not inherently invoke greed, nor does it automatically drive us to see it as part of an interwoven universe. Something else must happen for us to swing one way or the other, and this something else must come to us from outside ourselves.

All of this is fairly straightforward, and it is not particularly novel. Buddhism and Stoicism both taught the same disposition to attachments. Training oneself to separate the object from how we invest it with meaning had been going on at least since Heraclitus in the fifth century BCE in what we now call the West (though he lived in modern-day Turkey) and in Buddhist practices well before that (in modern-day India). What is important in Evagrius (though I’m sure not exclusive to him) is how the angelic and the demonic invest this neutrality with meaning from the outside in. He emphasizes more than others before him that meaning comes from outside ourselves. He uses demons and angels to emphasize this externality, which of course he thought were real entities. In doing so, he is able to get us to more clearly see the effects of leaning toward the angelic and away from the demonic. His fundamental spiritual practice is teaching us how to recognize when one is leaning in the wrong direction. Ultimately, his question becomes how does one correct oneself to start leaning in the right direction?

The practice depends on a two-step movement. First we must neutralize our mental representations, which means divesting them of any inherent meaning. Second, we have to see any meaning that is on offer as arriving from outside ourselves and outside the image itself. These two moves allow for us to see ourselves as nodes within networks of meaning creation. Our selves are spread across these networks as the recipients of often competing messages that are trying to invest particular images with meaning. By imagining ourselves this way — as nodes in meaning-creating networks — outside and inside become fluid boundaries. Self-control becomes, in part, our ability to recognize the networks we are in and the way that those networks want us to see things, and thus, how those networks activate our thymos and epitymia.

Here's a practical example. A few years ago, Colin Kapernick decided that he was going to use his national stage as the starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. During the national anthem he simply “took a knee” which was in obvious contrast to the accepted behavior of standing in reverence with helmets removed and (preferably) hands over hearts. Kapernick intended the gesture as a protest over police brutality, particularly toward African Americans. For many others, his gesture showed a profound disrespect for the country, particularly the sacrifices of military families. I’m not interested in the right and wrong interpretations of this act. I’m interested in how oppositional meanings were created in this act and how, using Evagrius’ spiritual practices, this episode of ressentiment could have had a much more productive conclusion.

What if we start from the practice of neutralizing the image of Kapernick taking a knee during the Star Spangled Banner? Then what if instead of trying to determine what it really means we pay attention to how this meaning is being interpreted for us and imposed on us? Everyone interested in the scene (which played out for several Sundays) seemed to be interested in telling us what we should think about it. Simply neutralizing the image and asking, “Why do you want me to think in a particular way about this?” is a good way to neutralize passions and start a more deliberate discussion about what Kapernick was trying to communicate.

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End Note: I am not a Buddhist, and have not diligently studied Buddhism. I do realize, however, that the fundamental ideas that I am articulating here can readily be found in its spiritual practices and supporting metaphysics and cosmology. The fact that similar ideas can be found in different traditions does not compel me to seek the origins. It is quite compelling and powerful to understand that these practices have found purchase in different times and places, perhaps because the practitioners directly knew of each other or because these practices were in wide circulation in a world that had yet to have a hard division between East and West. Further, for the audience that is likely to come across this little book, becoming a Buddhist is not, as William James put it, a “live option.” Modifying one’s Christian beliefs, however, can very much be a live option for those of us living in the West and trying to overcome ressentiment, which is often fueled by the Christianity of the post-modern mega-churches.