To the Caesareans...: Introduction

Let us now look at the content of Passage A. First of all, Passage A advances the argument that the Kingdom of Christ is natural contemplation, and that it is therefore ontologically inferior to the Kingdom of the Father, which is the immaterial contemplation of God. But this raises an issue of the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Passage A.

Next, the passage contains a succinct description of first natural contemplation, the contemplation of the angels themselves and of their reasons (logoi): ‘“But neither the angels know,” [Jesus] said—that is, neither the contemplation which is in them nor the reasons (logoi) of their ministries are the final object of desire.’

First natural contemplation is a very advanced stage of contemplation, just prior to the mystic’s entry into the contemplation of the Divinity.[1] The two parts of first natural contemplation are the intuitive sight of the actual angels themselves[2] and the intuitive apprehension of the reasons (logoi) of the angels’ ministry,[3] what the angels are all about.

This brief reference in Passage A to first natural contemplation is far more than an immature foreshadowing of a later mystical system; it is a very sophisticated, concise description of a major part of that system. Hence, the assertion that Evagrius wrote the whole text of the letter in Constantinople at the age of 34 before he went to Egypt is problematical.

Next is this part of Passage A:

…But because our mind (nous), having being made gross, has been joined to the dust and is mixed up with the clay and is unable to gaze in bare contemplation, therefore being guided by means of the adornments which are related to the body[4] it understands the operations (energeies) of the Creator, and in the beginning it understands these from the results (apotelesmata), so that, thus having increased little by little, it might have the strength at some time to advance even to the naked Divinity itself. (¶7 [23].)

Consider the first part of this sentence: ‘our mind (nous), having been made gross’. The text has the aorist participle pachyntheis. The author of the text is introducing a temporal sequence of events in a very concise way. Given this temporal sequence, we can see this passage as an allusion to the doctrine of the pre-existence of the minds (noes) and their descent into bodies. This doctrine was condemned in Anathema 1 of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod.[5]

In other respects, this excerpt from Passage A is a very concise presentation of the Evagrian doctrine of the mystical ascent to God through second natural contemplation, apart from our reservations about terminology that we discussed earlier.

The preceding discussion of passages of To the Caesareans… raises the issue of the status of the Kephalaia Gnostica in the interpretation of To the Caesareans…, or more generally put, the issue of what works are most representative of Evagrius the thinker. Some scholars emphasize both the orthodoxy of To the Caesareans…, as written under the watchful eye of St Gregory the Theologian in Constantinople, and its normative value for the orthodox interpretation of Evagrius’ later works, especially the Kephalaia Gnostica. However, once we view To the Caesareans… as a more heterogeneous work which may contain much later elements of Evagrius’ thought than what he would have espoused at the age of 34 in Constantinople, then we can raise the question of whether we should not be using the Kephalaia Gnostica to interpret To the Caesareans….

For it is from a familiarity with Evagrius’ later works that the reader can spot elements in Layer 3 of the letter that might reflect Evagrius’ later heterodox views on cosmology—or indeed his later orthodox views on contemplation.

Let us give another example:

…For it is necessary that that prayer of our Master be brought to its end. For Jesus is he who prays: ‘Give them that they may be one in us just as you and I are one, Father.’ For being one, God, coming to be in each, makes all one and number is destroyed in the sojourn in the Monad.[6] (¶7 [25].)

The last sentence of this excerpt is a clear allusion to the doctrine of the Restoration (apokatastasis), when all the minds (noes) will become one in such a way that there will a loss of number—i.e. a loss of individual characteristics—among the individual minds. Now one might suppose that the sentence should be taken as a statement that when a person has a mystical experience, then he subjectively feels the unity of all Creation and all men. However, such a subjectivism would be completely foreign to the philosophical and spiritual tradition of which Evagrius was a part, from Plato through Aristotle through the Cappadocians. Admittedly, the author’s construction ‘epidemia tes monados’, which we have rendered ‘sojourn in the Monad’, is grammatically difficult to render properly, but a familiarity with the Kephalaia Gnostica immediately raises the question whether the author is not alluding to the Restoration (apokatastasis).

Moreover, just as we find in the Kephalaia Gnostica, the author of Passage A uses the terms ‘Monad’ and ‘Unity’ in reference to the Father and in reference to the Word. ‘Monad’ and ‘Unity’ are in any event terms of neo-Platonic philosophy, used by Proclus. We therefore are faced with a rich interpretative issue in translating and interpreting To the Caesareans….

This is also true of the use of ‘Right Hand’ in the letter: some of the chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica provide interpretations of ‘Right Hand’.[7]

The issue here is this: Should we assume, on the basis of his association with St Gregory and St Basil, that Evagrius is orthodox and give him the benefit of the doubt in interpreting such passages as these of To the Caesareans…, and then continue with that orthodox interpretation into the Kephalaia Gnostica, denying the a posteriori template that the Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod supposedly put on the Kephalaia Gnostica?

We ourselves think that when one has a familiarity with the Kephalaia Gnostica, even in the French of Guillaumont, then when he is reading To the Caesareans…, he easily can spot allusions to the system of the Kephalaia Gnostica. It does not seem to us methodologically sound to impose on Evagrius the a priori template of orthodoxy. We must confront the issue that the Kephalaia Gnostica, taken on its own terms, can tell us something about what Evagrius thought, even in To the Caesareans….

Let us illustrate what we are saying with another passage from To the Caesareans…, this time not from Passage A but from another part of the letter:

He bore with these things on account of his great love for mankind concerning his creature, so that he recover the lost sheep, and so that he combine that which was saved; and so that he lead healthy again to his familiar homeland him who descended from Jerusalem to Jericho and for that reason fell into the hands of robbers. … (¶5 [18].)

The author of this passage uses an unusual word in context, katamixei (καταμίξῃ), for what he expects Jesus to do with the lost sheep that Jesus has recovered. We have rendered that word ‘combine’. A person familiar with the Kephalaia Gnostica can immediately detect an allusion here to the Restoration (apokatastasis), when all the minds will enter without individual characteristics into the henad of naked minds, just as we have discussed above.

Moreover, the author immediately goes on to use another Gospel image, that of the traveller who descended from Jerusalem to Jericho. In the Kephalaia Gnostica we find this:

Egypt signifies vice; the desert, praktiki; the land of Judah, the contemplation of bodies; Jerusalem, [the contemplation] of incorporeals; and Zion is the symbol of the Trinity[8]. (KG VI, 49.)

Zion is the sign of the first gnosis[9], and Egypt is the indication of all vice; but the symbol of the [first] natural contemplation is Jerusalem, where is the Mount of Zion, the summit of the city. (KG V, 88.)

The contemplation of angels is named the celestial Jerusalem and the Mount of Zion, for if those who have believed in Christ draw near to the Mount of Zion and to the City of the Living God, then it is in the contemplation of angels that those who have believed in Christ have been and will be, that contemplation from which their fathers have gone out and descended into Egypt. (KG V, 6.)

As can be seen, the image of the descent from Jerusalem to Jericho is pregnant with meaning in Evagrius’ mature system.

Jerusalem is taken to be symbolic of the Restoration (apokatastasis), or, more precisely put, of the contemplation of the angels which is just prior to the sojourn in the Monad, which itself is identified by Evagrius with the Mount of Zion. Moreover, the expression ‘familiar homeland’, which is a literal translation of the text of the letter, then alludes to the doctrine that the Restoration (apokatastasis) is a return to the original state that the minds had before their fall from the Monad—as is clearly indicated by KG V, 6, above. The verb ‘descended’ in the passage under consideration of the letter would then refer to the descent of the fallen minds into bodies. Finally, the thieves that fall upon the traveller who has descended from Jerusalem to Jericho[10] are the demons. Elsewhere in the letter, as we have already pointed out, the author has spoken thus: ‘But because our mind (nous), having being made gross, has been joined to the dust and is mixed up with the clay and is unable to gaze in bare contemplation…’.

[1] For a discussion of the cognitive psychology of these stages of contemplation, see Peri Logismon 41. Discussions of this stage of contemplation can be found in the Kephalaia Gnostica. For a discussion of specific chapters of the Kephalaia Gnostica which pertain to the stages of contemplation, see our ‘Digression’ in the Evagrian Ascetical System (Constantine Vol. II).

[2] This is the intelligible intuitive apprehension of a created intelligible being with mind. Intuitive is meant in the philosophical sense, precisely in the way the conclusion of the letter discusses the fact that the mind (nous) has been created by God to grasp its own materials without being taught. This is not a matter of discursive meditation on the angels or of seeing them in fantasy.

[3] The intuitive apprehension of the reasons (logoi) of the ministry of the angels is by analogy with the intuitive apprehension of the reason (logos) of a material object in second natural contemplation. For a full discussion, see Peri Logismon 41.

[4] Evidently, these ‘adornments which are related to the body’ are the beauties of the material world which manifest the operations of the Creator.

[5] See Constantine Vol. I, Chap. 3, Section 11, ‘Anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Synod’, p. 243 ff.

[6] Literally, ‘of the Monad’.

[7] For a selection of passages see fn. 55 below. Note that the Greek in the text of the letter is dexia, ‘right’, where ‘hand’ is understood. Not much should be made in the passages in the fn. cited of references to ‘right’ without ‘hand’. This would merely be a matter of the original translation into the Syriac of dexia.

[8] I.e. the contemplation of the Trinity.

[9] I.e. Theology, mystical union with God.

[10] Here taken by the author to be praktiki, although Jericho is treated in Peri Logismon 20 as a symbol of second natural contemplation.