Transcript

Welcome to the Barrcast. I’m your host, Nick Barr, coming to you on a sunny and cold winter morning here in New York.

We are going to start reading the Praktikos today. So this is 100 chapters. It’s not long, but I expect this to take two episodes.

Why are we reading the Praktikos? This is a work by Evagrius Ponticus. If you’ve followed previous videos, you know, we’ve been doing a lot of work on the Enneagram and reading through Claudio Naranjo’s contributions. If Naranjo is sort of the father of the Enneagram of personality, then Evagrius is the grandfather. He’s a desert father, a Christian mystic from the three hundreds who lived in Egypt and led a nomadic life.

And so we’re going to dive into the Praktikos. And I think the only piece of context that I want to lay out now is I’m just getting started on Evagrius’s work. But what I know about the Praktikos is it’s sort of considered groundwork on his end. So what we’re going to be reading here could be thought of as sort of foundational or training material or groundwork. If you practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, you maybe have heard of the word ngondro. This is kind of like training material. And so it’s written for someone still very much working on the foundations of practice. That doesn’t mean exactly that it’s like junior varsity material. But there’s a kind of a tone and approach to groundwork spiritual training that pervades here. And I think basically we’re going to be talking a lot about fighting demons and resisting demons. And it’s written for a spiritual practitioner who’s at a stage of practice where that’s really central in their practice is this kind of combat with temptation. And let’s get started.

I love the way he starts it. So it’s a letter to Anatolius. And he begins, since you recently wrote to me in Scetis from the holy mountain, dear Brother Anatolius, demanding that I explain to you the symbolic habit of the Egyptian monks, for you believe it to be neither accidental nor superfluous that the habit is so different from what other people wear. I will therefore tell you what we have learned concerning this from the Holy Fathers. So he’s going to describe his habit, the clothes he wears.

The hood is a symbol of the grace of our Savior and God. It shelters their mind and nurses their childlike relationship with Christ in the face of those who are always attempting to beat and wound it. Anyone who bears this hood on his head is truly chanting the inner meaning of the psalm quote, “Unless the Lord builds the house and guards the city, in vain did the builder and watchman labor.” Recitations like these produce humility and uproot the primordial vice of pride that cast down to the earth Lucifer the dawn rising star.

The nakedness of their hands manifests the absence of hypocrisy in their way of life. Vainglory is terribly clever at covering and darkening virtues, always hunting for the esteem that comes from men and chasing faith away. “For how is it possible for you to believe,” it says, “when you receive glory from one another and the glory that comes only from God, you do not seek?” For the good ought to be chosen for no other reason than itself. Apart from this, anything that moves us to do good will appear far more precious than the good itself. And nothing could be more absurd than to consider and assert that something is better than God.

And again, the scapular that wraps around the shoulders in the form of a cross is a symbol of the faith in Christ that supports the gentle and always, despite obstacles, permits them to work unimpeded.

The belt tied around their loins repels all impurity and declares it is good for a man not to touch a woman. They wear the sheepskin, those always carrying around in their bodies the death of Jesus and muzzling all the body’s irrational passions, cutting back the wickedness of the soul by their communion in the good and loving poverty, but fleeing from avarice as the mother of idolatry.

The staff is a tree of life to all who hold it reliable, for those who lean on it, just as they lean on the Lord.

The habit, then, is like a symbol that summarizes these things. And these are the words the fathers always say to them. “Faith, oh, my child, is steadied by the fear of God. And this fear in turn is strengthened by continence. The latter virtue is made unshakable by patient endurance and hope. From these is born apatheia, or dispassion, which brings into being love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature, which leads to theology and the supreme blessedness.”

So that’s the conclusion of this first part, which is the description of the habit. And I find it very beautiful. I don’t know yet enough about sort of this system that we’re approaching, but you can hear certainly the hood as a symbol of protection from pride. The naked hands as a protection from vanity or vainglory. I think I need to make sure I understand what vainglory exactly means to Evagrius. And check if vainglory is another word for pride or is for vanity. And then other adornments there. And so he mentions apatheia. So, you know, you maybe hear apathy, but it’s dispassion or non attachment. Or you could maybe try equanimity out. This is freedom from the passions. And this is the purpose of the groundwork of the Praktikos is to birth dispassion, birth apatheia. And so these qualities here—continence, endurance, hope, humility—these are the qualities that will birth dispassion, which brings into being, he says, love. Love is the door to knowledge of nature which leads to theology. And so that’s his progression: the Praktikos to the knowledge of nature to theology. And so we’re just focused on the Praktikos for now.

He concludes the prologue by saying, and so, concerning the holy habit and the teaching of the elders, these things we have said should suffice for now. But concerning the life of the ascetic and the knower, I now propose to describe in detail not only what we have seen or heard, but also what I’ve been taught by the elders to say to others. I have compactly divided ascetical matters into a hundred chapters and matters of knowledge into 50 plus 600.

So we’re going to be reading the hundred chapters on ascetical matters here. And some things I’ve concealed and shadowed over so that we do not throw holy things to the dogs, nor cast pearls before swine. But this will be clear to those who have embarked on the same quest. So I think he’s hinting here that there’s going to be some twilight language, some secret language here, that we can keep our eyes out for as we go without totally rabbit holing on it. So here we are. The treatise on the Praktikos. 100 chapters.

And these first chapters are incredibly dense, sort of deceivingly so. So let’s see how we go. Christianity is the teaching of our Savior Christ, consisting of ascetical practice, the contemplation of nature and theology. This is this trifold progression. The kingdom of heaven is apatheia, dispassion of the soul together with true knowledge of beings. The kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the capacity of the nous, mind or intellect, but surpassing it in incorruptibility.

So he’s just sort of outlined the whole project here and hinted that the kingdom of heaven is what we can hope to achieve, or become through this practice of dispassion, the ascetic practice. If you want to make a Buddhist connection, you could call this renunciation, that plus true knowledge of beings that will come later in his contemplation of nature. But even then, if you have this sort of practice of equanimity, that is dispassion combined with some sort of seeing into the true nature of things, that is exceeded still by the kingdom of God, which he says is direct knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the structure of the nous, structure of the mind, but surpassing it in incorruptibility. We can just leave that aside for now. Just knowing that that’s there. For whatever person ardently loves, he uses eros here. Loves he will want completely and what he wants, he will struggle to acquire.

Now, every pleasure is preceded by desire, epithumia. And desire is born of sensation. Thus, that which is not subject to sensation is also free from passion.

Against the hermits, the demons engage in naked combat. Against those laboring at virtue in monasteries or communities, they armed the more careless of the brethren. For the second battle is much lighter than the first. Since there cannot be found on earth men more bitter than the demons, or able to undertake all their evil doings at once.

So where are we here? He’s making a general statement about what it’s like to be a being. You know, a person on Earth, a human being. For humans, we love things. And what we love we want. And what we want, we struggle to acquire. Again, you know, you could map this into a Buddhist framework pretty easily.

So every pleasure that we experience is preceded by desire born of sensation. And so, you know, putting two and two together, I think part of what he’s trying to say here is that pleasure seeking is incompatible with dispassion. Because when we seek and experience pleasure, it’s because we’ve given into desire born of sensation to some extent. And what we’re looking for in dispassion is something that’s not born from sensation. It’s not contingent on sensation.

So he continues. There are eight principal kinds of tempting thoughts. So here I think, and I don’t have the Greek available, but it’s on this website. All you have to do is just search Ev Ponticus, Praktikos. So, if you’re a scholar here, you can do more tracing than I can. But I think for the first time he’s introducing this word, logismoi, the singular being, logismos. These are like tempting thoughts.

I think they’re tempting thoughts that are born of sensation. So these eight...