In Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche, he finds three forms of nihilism. First is “negative nihilism,” which involves the active devaluation and depreciation of life in the name of higher values. This form of nihilism makes of life on earth a mere appearance or shadow of an essence that exists in “the Beyond.” It takes active work on oneself to transform oneself into a kind of subject that can reconnect with the Beyond. Crucially, this form of nihilism is not the denial of the will but, in fact, its invigoration and intensification. This life becomes something that we need to overcome in the name of higher values. More specifically, the attainment of higher values requires that the life of the body — the embodied life lived in the world with all its human passions — be overcome, which requires active practices of self-denial. These active practices of self-denial are, according to Deleuze, the “triumph of reactive forces.” What does he mean by “reactive forces?” This is a key concept to understand. Reactive forces work like this: they take active measures to cut off externally directed action. For example, I desperately want to eat an entire pie even though I know it will be bad for me. In the name of higher values — health and wellness — I deny myself the pleasure of eating the pie. I am using reactive forces to cut off the desired action. In other words, the objective of reactive forces is to cut off my desire for the pie itself.

In negative nihilism, this reactive denial is activated by ressentiment. I seek to despise the pie itself and the person who is tempting me with it. My anger and hatred are projected outward as accusations against a hostile other who is keeping me from living my higher values of health and wellness. Over time, ressentiment wins out by continually activating and normalizing my self-denial as a badge of honor. I learn, through the outward projection of ressentiment, to de-activate my desires for pie. I am transformed by ressentiment into a subject in control of my will.

The second stage of nihilism occurs when my sense of triumph becomes my own. This is “reactive nihilism,” and it occurs when I come to appreciate my ability to deny my desires as my very own accomplishment. This ability to self-deny becomes, in and of itself, valuable. I deny my desire for the pie not because I believe in health and wellness, but because I believe in self-denial as the primary value. If health and wellness follow, it is not because I was pursuing them directly as higher values. This is negative nihilism — the activation of self-denial through the pursuit of God, truth, et cetera. Reactive nihilism “finds its principle in the reactive life completely solitary and naked, in reactive forces reduced to themselves” (148). Man’s pursuit of God has given way to Man as God. We’ve replaced him with an emptiness of values, with an atheism that still thinks that it has found the Truth. It’s just that this Truth is Nothingness. This is still nihilism as the active devaluation of life.

Ressentiment does not go away in this brand of nihilism. It is reinvigorated as a hatred of the false values of the past. It seeks the Death of God as the laughing mockery of the atheists directed toward the madman in the marketplace (The Gay Science 125): “Ressentiment becomes atheistic, but this atheism is still ressentiment” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 150). Reactive nihilism is still the depreciation of life, but this depreciation is elevated to its own force that “secretes its own values”:

adaptation, evolution, progress, happiness for all and the good of the community; the God-man, the moral man, the truthful man and the social man. These are the new values that are recommended in the place of higher values, these are the new characters that are proposed in the place of God. (151)

In this way, reactive nihilism finds its strength, but that strength is conceived of as limitless and the creator (“secretor”) of its own values. I marvel in my self-denying accomplishment of overcoming my desire for pie. I may have done this to start with from negative nihilism — God wants me to treat my body as a temple, therefore I will pursue health and wellness as a higher value. But as I accomplish this undertaking such that it becomes a permanent state of being, I become justifiably proud of this accomplishment. I begin to see self-denial as itself a value — as something that I should pursue for its own sake. Suddenly (or gradually) I no longer need to see my body as a temple to God. I can see it as my own accomplishment — as the temple that I have built by myself relying only on my own volition. I am making up my own values and have effectively taken the place of God. This is still nihilism. It is the brand of nihilism that empties the universe of values. What was once a universe of essence (God, Truth, the Good) and appearance (this life here on earth) is now only appearance: “Now essence is denied but appearance is retained: everything is merely appearance, life which is left to us remains for itself an appearance” (148). To see everything as appearance does not result from an unveiling of an illusion, though reactive nihilism believes that is has discovered the true nothingness at the heart of life. Rather, reactive nihilism actively empties out higher values to leave a hole in the heart of Being that must be filled up.

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Side Note: This is why Nietzsche is not an Existentialist or an atheist. Existentialism starts from atheism as its discovery: the nothingness at the heart of Being. As a starting point, it is a springboard for Being as Becoming. This reactive nihilism that sees life as empty of higher values is a positive action to place the value of nil on life itself. Nietzsche is confronting nihilism in all its forms as active decisions that we make about the value of life. There is no discovery; there is no unveiling of higher values or no values. The move from negative nihilism (higher values, essence vs appearance) to reactive nihilism (no inherent values, it’s all appearance) still involves the active devaluation of life through the positive assertion of “nothingness” at the heart of Being. In other words, there is still an essence behind appearance — an essential nothingness that the Existential atheist claims to have discovered. The Existentialist atheist thus holds onto this nothingness as his motor. He seeks to fill it up with an “art of living” and the manufacturing of new values that are energized by the imagination of nothingness as a fundamental human condition to be overcome.

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Eventually, this imagined “discovery” of nothingness at the heart of Being exhausts itself. It runs out of values to create and dies of its own fatigue. This is the third form of nihilism — passive nihilism. The will to nothingness that is the heart of reactive nihilism becomes its reverse — the nothingness of the will. No longer do I deny myself the pie because I think denial is good or because I believe God wants me to be healthy. I deny my denial. What does it matter what I eat? It’s all nothingness and meaninglessness anyhow. My will to nothingness exhausts itself to become an inert nothingness of the will. This can take the form of apathy and not caring about anything. I turn away from learning how to cook healthy meals and start binge-watching Netflix while sitting on the couch eating the whole pie. Or I devote my emotional energy to a passionate engagement with sports franchise over which I have zero control. I just live and die by its ups and downs. This brand of passive nihilism comes from actively giving up on values — the higher ones and the self-selected ones — and thus on action itself.

On its face, this is way too easy of an evolutionary tale to tell. It’s too neat. But Deleuze doesn’t see it so neatly. There is a moment that occurs before negative nihilism turns into reactive nihilism where passive nihilism can be positive and productive as it undoes ressentiment. We must avoid conflating two different senses of “passivity” here. There is a kind of passivity that is “giving up.” Today we might call this apathy or inertia. It can take the form of the exhaustion of values. The other kind of passivity is more spiritual in nature and often goes by the name of “grace” especially within spiritual practices of mysticism. Plotinus, Origen, Evagrius, Augustine and other early neoplatonic Christians are the beginnings. Their lineage is passed down through later Christian mystics like Simone Weil. This passivity is better understood as a cultivated openness to experiences that can only occur when we defuse our will to power and will to truth. When we “let go,” we make ourselves receptive to these experiences.

For Nietzsche, this other passivity is found in Buddhism not as a doctrine but as a practice. It is a passivity that lets go of ressentiment and thereby prevents it from becoming a mode of subjectivity. As an experience, it feels like surrendering the search for something because you’re working too hard: the hard effort is actually preventing the results you seek. We’ve all had these experiences. We’ve all had the moment where we abandon the search for our lost keys only to suddenly realize later, passively, where we left them. Or we’ve forgotten a name and admit that it will come to us in the middle of the night. In some legends, the holy grail can be found only when one stops actively searching for it. This is the paradox of active passivity. It desires and it seeks what it desires, but it also relaxes and empties the self in order to receive experiential truths. It is, to use Simon Kotva’s title, Effort and Grace at one and the same time. As such, it is a spiritual practice that doesn’t reduce religion to systems of doctrinal beliefs as the mechanism of salvation. This reduction to definition doesn’t happen: these are experiential (i.e., mystical) truths. They are not open to the “what is _______?” definitions of Plato’s Socrates. The “Our Father” as a rote statement of what a Catholic Christian believes has, at best, tangential spiritual value.

This active passivity works at the level of experience not at the level of belief. As a spiritual practice, it understands ressentiment as an outward projection of anger toward a hostile world. At the moment of that experience, active passivity diffuses ressentiment by letting go of the will that is driving the outward projection. This is a tricky move because it is the activation of reactive forces, which is the beginning of ressentiment as a type of subjectivity. This active passivity cuts off the desire to act on anger and is therefore reactive force. The key to understanding this is to get a handle on what Deleuze meant by ressentiment as topology and ressentiment as type. As topology, ressentiment arises from the unavoidable psychological and physiological forces that project and accuse outward toward an other. This is the first movement of ressentiment. The second movement is the result of time: Deleuze’s use of type signals the long-term effects of repeatedly embracing the first movement of ressentiment. One holds a grudge and gets used to holding grudges. The grudge becomes a badge of honor and an affirmation of one’s subjectivity. The man of ressentiment “cannot have done with anything.” When this occurs, ressentiment becomes a type of subjectivity — a relation of onself to oneself — that holds grudges, that continually accuses, and either hates life or comes to love it perversely as a perpetual victim. Ressentiment thus becomes self-affirmation.

The work of active passivity (of the Buddhist and Christian mystical practices) is the work of defusing the first movement of ressentiment (topology) before it becomes the second movement (a type of subjectivity). The time that occurs between the first and second movement is the time for letting go of the self by letting go of the experience of ressentiment. If this is successful, bad conscience and guilt never take hold in the interior of the subject. Ressentiment never turns inward to become bad conscience and perpetual guilt of a sinful nature. This is the practice that Nietzsche believed Jesus demonstrated in his life, and it is what made him closer to a Buddhist than a Pauline Christian.

It is also important to call out the sequence of this narrative. Instead of happening at the end, passive nihilism occurs between ressentiment as topology and ressentiment as type of subjectivity. This makes all the difference. Instead of being the fruit of exhaustion, this active passivity takes a great deal of effort to recognize the topological experience and then to let it go. Yes, it is nihilism, but it is a nihilism in the service of “the suppression of the idea of sin, the absence of all ressentiment and of all spirit of revenge, the consequent refusal of all war, the revelation of a kingdom of God on Earth as state of the heart…”

It is easy to see what Nietzsche is getting at: Christ was the opposite of what St Paul made of him, the true Christ was a kind of Buddha, … He gave passive nihilism a certain nobility where men were still at the stage of negative nihilism, when reactive nihilism had hardly begun…. For here we have the difference between Buddhism and the official Christianity of St Paul. Buddhism is the religion of passive nihilism. (155)

I’ll put this in terms of the vertical and horizontal soul that I’ve been ruminating on in the last several meditations: passive nihilism, when it comes at the end of the sequence as exhaustion, is still vertically oriented. The exhaustion is a vertical exhaustion of higher values that has played out all the way from negative nihilism to reactive nihilism. With nothing higher left to believe in (including one’s own self-created higher values), the passive nihilist binges Netflix.

When passive nihilism is activated within negative nihilism and before reactive nihilism, it is horizontally oriented. As the cutting off of ressentiment, passive nihilism operates within the horizontal projection of accusation, anger and hatred. It cuts them off it their tracks and, in the process, maintains focus and effort on the horizontal relationship between oneself and others.

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To turn now to what I really wanted to get at in this mediation — a continued engagement with the ascetic practices of Evagrius Ponticus. My fascination with Evagrius started when I decided to read The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer looking for an example of Nietzche’s ascetic priest as the impresario of the ascetic ideal. Closely reading these works, however, leads me to a very different understanding of what Evagrius was doing with Christian asceticism in the fourth century than what a reading of the Third Essay of the Genealogy was leading me to look for in Evagrius. By focusing on Christianity as a set of practices rather than as a doctrine of belief, Evagrius provided a model of how to live passive nihilism with the “certain nobility” that Deleuze found in Nietzche’s appreciation of Jesus as a Buddhist. When I read these works by Evagrius, I find practical techniques for undoing ressentiment by undoing subjectivity. Prayer and contemplation for Evagrius are acts of de-subjectification that collapse the distinction between doer and deed and refuse the final establishment of a stable interiority where the truth of our sinful nature is discoverable. At every turn, Evagrius seems to be undoing interiority at the moment he affirms it. It is a remarkable spiritual practice of subjectification and de-subjectification.

This may sound strange and wrong. So much of Evagrius’ ascetic writings emphasize interiority. Clearly demons act upon “thoughts” and the struggle for true prayer is a “war fought on the field of thought” (Chapters on Prayer 48). Evagrius was masterful at articulating the psychological and physiological forces at work on the monk. The relentless self-awareness that is demanded of the ascetic life requires the creation of an interiority for the monk that is the battle ground of salvation. But this battle is not a battle for creating subjectivity as a stable interiority. Instead the battle is over de-subjectification — the undoing of the ego and the stable self that seeks its own truth. This can be seen through the role that demons play in his ascetic practices.

For the monks of the Egyptian desert, demons work at the level of thought. Evagrius codified eight of them: “First is that of gluttony, then impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and last of all pride” (Praktikos, Chapter 6). These demons are explicitly thoughts. So in this sense we have the demons coming from the outside to the inside of the self such that the battle becomes personal. This is critical in Evagrius’ ascetic works. While representing universal vices, these demons personalize their attacks on the thoughts of the monk based on his/her dispostion. They are not the same for everyone. The work of the monk is to understand which ones he/she is susceptible to and to keep a constant watch on one’s thoughts for the appearance of the demons. (See Praktikos, Chapter 43.)

Asceticism and anachoresis (withdrawal) intensify this movement from the outside in. The monk withdraws from society in order to intensify the interior struggle: “The demons strive against men of the world chiefly through their deeds, but in the case of the monks for the most part by means of thoughts, since the desert deprives them of such affairs” (Praktikos, Chapter 48). In this move to the desert, the struggle with demons is invited to be an interior struggle. These entities, in the context of the social life of the village, are external forces controllable through rituals, festivals, and other communal practices. But anachoresis jetisons the communal context to seek an individual struggle solely and completely within the interiority of the monk. Anachoresis is thus the occasion for the cultivation of an interiority that draws the external demons into oneself in order to do battle with them at the level of thought. Temptation is thus a two-way street. On the one hand, the monk initiates the first temptation — he tempts the demons through his move to the desert. On the other hand, the demons in turn tempt the monk by taking over his thoughts. “Temptation is the lot of the monk” (Praktikos 74) thus has a double meaning: the monk is both the tempter and tempted.

For Evagrius, however, interiority is not an end state for the monk. It is something to be undone through contemplation and prayer. One finds as much pushing out as there is pulling in of the demons in Evagrius’ ascetic works. The pushing out is passive nihilism as the undoing of ressentiment. In fact, dealing with anger plays a major role in the lot of the monk. Much of what Evagrius has to tell us involves dealing with our anger, particularly the lingering memories of perceived injustices done to us.

To better understand this, I want to look at Chapter 58 of The Praktikos. This chapter is structured by a rhythm of inviting demons in and pushing them out. In the process, we have a difficult time finding a stable interiority of the monk. Rather, we have an interiority that constitutes itself in order to dissolve itself as it strives for apatheia, which is the “state of mind” necessary to prepare oneself for perfect gnosis — the experience of God as immaterial Being and the complete dissolving of the self:

58. The demon of vainglory lives in a state of opposition to the demon of impurity, so that it is not possible for both of them to assault the soul at the same time. For the one promises honors while the other becomes the agent of dishonor. And so whichever of these draws near to harass you, feign that the thoughts of the other antagonist is present within you. Should you then be able, as the saying has it, to drive out a nail with a nail, you can know for certain that you stand near the confines of apatheia, for your mind is strong enough to abolish thoughts inspired by the demons with human thoughts. Beyond any doubt, the ability to drive away the thought of vainglory through humility, or the power to repel the demon of impurity through temperance is a most profound proof of apatheia. Make every attempt to deal in this same way with all the demons that are mutually opposed to one another. At the same time learn to recognize by which emotion you are more inclined to be led astray, and employ your whole strength in pleading with God to ward off your enemies in this second manner also. (Praktikos, Chapter 58, emphasis added)

So much of what Evagrius had to teach us about his spiritual practices is contained in this chapter. I’ve chosen to emphasize the pulling in and pushing out metaphors to show how his practices are as much about de-subjectification as they are about subjectification. Demons move from the outside in because they are provoked by the anchorite monk. As I said above, this drawing in is an effect of choosing the ascetic life where the monk is tempting the demons to take over his thoughts. Most importantly, this drawing in becomes the occasion for pushing out and re-externalizing these demons. These thoughts that we don’t want become compartmentalized and externalized so that they can be exorcised from the self. To push out requires the active formation and adoption of mental states that actively opposed the demons — vainglory is pushed out by humility, and impurity is pushed out by temperance. This direct confrontation of demons by their opposing virtues is the central practice of Evagrius’ asceticism. Both virtues and vices are thoughts and all the action is within the interiority of the monk. But the battle is won by de-subjectifying oneself, not deeper modes of subjectification. In fact, the virtues of humility and temperance are designed specifically to defuse the demons. They are reactive forces in Nietzsche’s sense (via Deleuze) designed to negate the power of the demons by draining them of their energy. In this sense, they are the virtues of passive nihilism.

Contemplation and prayer are, for Evagrius, the end game of salvation, which is not eternal life. Salvation for Evagrius happens here on earth through the ascetic practices of the monk. Salvation is, therefore, a matter of passive nihilism — the total loss of the self in gnosis. Interiority is dissolved as purity of contemplation is achieved. His programmatic use of apatheia is key to understanding this practice. Apatheia is a state of mind that enacts a profound openness to gnosis as something that comes down from God when one completely empties oneself of thoughts, feelings, stable concepts, memories, and “phantasms”:

62. The Holy Spirit takes compassion on our weakness, and though we are impure he often comes to visit us. If he should find our spirit praying to him out of love for the truth he then descends upon it and dispels the whole army of thoughts and reasonings that beset it. And too he urges it on to the works of spiritual prayer. (Praktikos, Chapter 62)

Again we see the movement of outside to inside and back out again with a new twist: the Holy Spirit is a descent from above to affect the dissolution of the self. In other words, apatheia is the adoption of a spiritual state that is open to the descent of the de-subjectifying power of the Holy Spirt as an experience of thoughtlessness: “Happy is the spirit that attains to perfect formlessness at the time of prayer” (Chapters on Prayer, 117).

This “perfect formlessness” is the objective of the monk. Its chief demonic enemy is not impurity, gluttony or other bodily passions (logismoi). Its enemy is “resentment and anger.” This is where I find Evagrius to be the positive figure of passive nihilism that Nietzsche saw in Jesus. Many passages could be cited (especially the sequence of Chapters 24-27 in Chapters on Prayer), but Chapters 11 and 12 will suffice:

11. Strive to render your mind deaf and dumb at the time of prayer and you will be able to pray.

12. When you find yourself tempted or contradicted; or when you get irritated or grow angry through encountering some opposition or feel the urge to utter some kind of invective — then is the time to put yourself in mind of prayer and of the judgment to be passed on such doings. You will find that the disordered movement will immediately be stilled. (Chapters on Prayer, 11 and 12)

Anger and resentment are defused by passive nihilism adopted at just the moment when that demon of anger shows up. To be clear, for the monk this demon operates largely through memory, which is a key battleground for Evagrius. Because the monk has withdrawn from society, anger is less about what happens here and now and more about remembering something from one’s past that disturbs prayer. Nietzsche was clear on the role of memory in ressentiment. The man of ressentiment has a prodigious memory. He can’t let go of anything: “One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything — everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experience strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound” (Ecce Homo 1.6 quoted in Deleuze, 116). This is how ressentiment goes from topology to type — from psychological and physical forces to subjectivity. The memory of harms done becomes a permanent state of ressentiment and the formation of a stable identity anchored in these memories of perceived injustice.

It would be easy to read Evagrius as embracing ressentiment as type. Memory plays a key role in the internal struggles of the monk. Memories are always there, particular bad ones such as anger and resentment. But what Evagrius teaches us is how to release them when they occur. If the man of ressentiment “cannot have done with anything” (GM 1.10), Evagrius shows us how to. He takes memory as given and unavoidable, but he does so in order to undo ressentiment, not to embrace it.

There is a danger, of course, with this type of passive nihilism. It can easily become inertia and a complete lack of enthusiasm for anything involving pleasures, passions and other benefits of being a human being. The verticalized and atomized soul, as long as it is conceived as vertically open but horizontally cut off, can end up seeking anachoresis as an end state. The Stoics warned against this. By making salvation an internal battle, even if it ends in the de-subjectification of the self, the soul is cut off from other souls. Its relationships with other souls that are not on the same journey suffers from an arrested development:

41. When we are constrained to pass some time in the city or town then above all is the time to be abstemious. We find ourselves in the presence of secular persons and this measure will prevent the edge of our spirit from being dulled. We shall be able to avoid perpetrating some ill-considered action which being deprived of our customary practices we might be led to commit. Under the demons’ assaults such action might cause us to take flight from our monastic practices altogether. (Praktikos 41)

To move into a world perceived as hostile — a perception shaped by ressentiment — the anachoretic soul struggles to make connections with people on any terms other than its own. It tries to stay self-contained (“abstemious”), sharp-edged, and inactive. These protective measures are directly related to the way in which the vertical soul has been cultivated through the practices Evagrius details. The vertical soul is extremely fragile when moving among others who are not monks. This is not just a consequence of being a monk. This is a consequence of spiritual practices driven by a purely internal focus with the aim of creating an individualized salvation — whether or not that salvation is here on earth or in an afterlife.

Let’s look at a sequence from Chapters on Prayer noting how the verticalized soul looks out on others and sees only itself:

122. Happy is the monk who views the welfare and progress of all men with as much joy as if it were his own.

123. Happy is the monk who considers all men as god — after God.

124. A monk is a man who is separated from all and who is in harmony with all.

125. A monk is a man who considers himself one with all men because he seems constantly to see himself in every man.

To be sure, apologists of the verticalized soul easily see this sequence as tempering the atomizing effects of anachoresis. In fact, Evagrius’ English translator (John Eudes Bamberger) says as much in his footnote to these chapters: “This deep respect for one’s fellow man goes very far to combating one of the chief accusations made against Desert spirituality, namely that it is egocentric.” This just seems to be admitting that this verticalized soul has a hard time reconnecting to life on earth. We shouldn’t take these moments of “harmony” as solutions; rather they are the admission that there are shortcomings to conceiving of salvation as a personal matter between one’s soul and God. All that is really happening here is that other souls are conceived of as individualized, atomized and on their own personal journey, if at all. Chapter 124 explicitly frames the issues as first one of separation that only then can become harmony.

But what is the status of this harmony? It is difficult to clearly articulate because it remains under-theorized. This under-theorization, however, is a consequence of the vision of salvation and the soul. To be clear, anachoresis and its passive nihilism are perfectly fine for someone who wishes to seek salvation as a monk. To be a monk is to choose how one wants to settle down with him/herself to concentrate on their own thoughts and interiority. I have absolutely no quarrel with this. I find this quite personally compelling. However, as a template for Christian salvation regardless of whether or not one chooses the life of an anchorite, we have to recognize the problems that it creates from its vertical bias. For the majority of self-professed Christians, being a monk is not a realistic option. Yet to embrace this atomization as a template for one’s relationship to God and personal salvation cuts off our ability to genuinely think about other ways to shape our souls.

Nietzsche captures this beautifully and succinctly is Chapter 43 of Anti-Christ:

When one places life’s center of gravity not in life but in the “beyond” — in nothingness — one deprives life of its center of gravity altogether. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, everything natural in the instincts — whatever in the instincts is beneficent and life-promoting or guarantees a future arouses a mistrust. To live so, that there is no longer any sense in living, that now becomes the “sense” of life. Why communal sense, why any further gratitude for descent and ancestors, why cooperate, trust, promote, and envisage any common welfare? Just as many “temptations,” just as many distractions from the “right path” — “one thing is needful.”

Indeed, if salvation is up to you and your personal relationship with God — if it is the “one thing needful” — why give a damn about our horizontal relationships with others? Passive nihilism, insofar as it is vertically oriented, gets stuck in a mode that devalues the world and reduces one’s relationships with others to one dimension. This may be tempered by vertical de-subjectification, but insofar as it remains vertical it remains in a state of arrested development with respect to others.

At issue is, I think, seeing the soul as fundamentally the possession of an individual and the thing that is to be saved. While Evagrius can see the soul as a means to reconnecting with God as the formless, immaterial Being that gives everything meaning, the soul remains the possession of the individual. The soul is from its inception an individualized entity. Once we start from that perspective, we are stuck with individualized salvation. So, while the soul can dissolve into The One, this dissolution still belongs only to the individual undertaking the exercise. It is a loss of self that ends up reconstituting the self as a stable entity that stands separate from others while seeking harmony with them — but harmony on the newly reconstituted terms of salvation. “I’ve achieved salvation, let me help you undertake the same journey.”