Evagrius Ponticus and the Psychology of 'Natural Contemplation'

DAVID T. BRADFORD

EVAGRIUS PONTICUS AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ‘NATURAL CONTEMPLATION’

SUMMARY — Evagrius was the first ascetical theologian of the Chris- tian tradition and one of its most influential. His mystical theology has been widely discussed with the exception of his writings on ‘natural contemplation’ (theoria physike). Traditional spiritual writings regularly mention natural contemplation but provide relatively few details and little practical exposition. This study has nine sections. The first is concerned with textual sources. The second situates natural contemplation in Evagrius’s outline of the stages of the ascetic life. The third shows that the two forms of natural contemplation are aspects of a single cognitive process. The fourth is focused on psychological insights mediated through natural contemplation. The types of contemplative objects are reviewed in the fifth section, and the mystic’s identification with the objects is discussed in the sixth. The seventh section highlights contemplation’s effect of inhibiting sensory perception. The eighth is concerned with extraordinary spatial perceptions intrinsic to contemplation. The temporal duration of the two forms of natural contemplation is considered in the final section. This is the first psychological analysis of natural contemplation.

INTRODUCTION

Evagrius (345-399) was the first ascetical theologian of the Christian tradition and possibly its most influential. Born in the area of present-day Turkey, he was ordained as a lector by Basil of Caesarea and as a deacon by Gregory Nazi- anzus. His vocational ascent led to Byzantium’s highest ecclesiastical circles.1 In 383, he joined monks living in Nitria, a site of desert asceticism forty miles from Alexandria. He moved two years later to the relatively remote community of Kellia, where he remained until his death fourteen years later. His writings were condemned in 553 because of his reliance on the heretical work of Origen.2

1 F.T. Meyer (Trans.), Palladius: The Lausiac History, New York: Newman Press, 1964. 2 R.E. Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek ascetic corpus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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This did little to blunt the impact of his ascetical theology, which entered the West through John Cassian and was readily embraced in Eastern monasticism.3 Evagrius’s mystical theology has been widely discussed with the exception of his writings on ‘natural contemplation’ (theoria physike).4 Similarly, traditional spiritual writings regularly mention natural contemplation but provide relatively few details and little practical exposition. Natural contemplation encom- passes two forms of experience. One demands considerable familiarity with scripture and some degree of philosophical training. The other is a radically altered state in which the mystic is transformed into the powers and principles of the spiritual world. The sparseness of information about natural contemplation in traditional writings is probably the result of a combination of factors, including the secrecy compelled by esoteric religious experience, the rarity of natural contemplation, the degree of literacy required for the one form of contemplation, and the limited circulation of the related Evagrian texts. The first section of the study is concerned with textual sources. The second situates natural contemplation in Evagrius’s outline of the stages of the ascetic life. The third shows that the two forms of natural contemplation are aspects of a single cognitive process. Psychological insights mediated through natural contemplation are considered in the fourth section. Contemplative objects are reviewed in the fifth section, and the mystic’s identification with the objects is discussed in the sixth. The inhibition of sensory perception during contemplation in addressed in the seventh section. The eighth is concerned with an extraordinary spatial perception intrinsic to contemplation. The final section considers the temporal duration of natural contemplation.

SOURCES

The analysis focuses on two of the most important sources for natural contemplation: Gnostikos and Kephalaia Gnostika.5 Each is composed of ‘chapters’

3 C. Stewart, Cassian the Monk, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 4 J.E. Bamberger (ed. & trans.), Evagrius Ponticus: The Praktikos and Chapters on prayer, Kala- mazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1978; A. Louth, The origins of the Christian mystical tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; W. Harmless & R.R. Fitzgerald, ‘The sapphire light of the mind: The Skemmata of Evagrius Ponticus’, in: Theological Studies 62 (2001), 498-529; C. Stewart, ‘Imageless prayer and the theological vision of Evagrius Ponticus’, in: Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001), 173-204; Sinke- wicz, Evagrius of Pontus. 5 St. Evagrius Ponticus (345-399): Gnostikos (GPG 2431) and Kephalaia Gnostika. Translated by Luke Dysinger (1990) and available at: http://www.ldysinger.com/Evagrius/02_Gno- Keph/00a_start.htm Gnostikos and Kephalaia Gnostika will be indicated G and KG, respec-

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grouped in ‘centuries’. Chapters in English translations are usually 1-3 sen- tences in length, and those collected in a particular century may have little obvious connection. Some chapters are like ‘sayings’; most are expository and highly abstract.6 A century contains fewer than the expected 100 chapters. Kephalaia Gnostika includes six centuries of ninety chapters each. Gnostikos sur- vives only in fragments. These texts are relatively obscure compared with other Evagrian writings. The obscurity results in part from their literary format (which Evagrius invented) and his elliptical style. Another cause is the esoteric nature of their subject matter: ‘The mystery is the spiritual contemplation that is not accessible to everyone’.7 Evagrius’s worldview tests the modern imagination because of its ancient provenance and also because the gnosis conveyed in natural contemplation is very different from ordinary experience. Secondary historical and theological sources are not discussed in the course of the analysis. For the most part, such material is unrelated to psychological interests. Interpretations based on mystical literature or psychological and neu- ropsychological concepts are given priority. Evagrian texts have been quoted generously in order to convey his manner of thinking and the aesthetic quality of his literary style. Some interpretive material has been placed in footnotes in order to sharpen the focus on psychological analysis.

FIVE CONTEMPLATIONS8

Natural contemplation is preceded by two preliminary contemplations grouped as ascetic ‘practice’ (praktike).9 The first brings behavior into conformity with moral commandments. The second closes when the ascetic attains the quiescent

tively, with the century noted in Roman numerals and the chapter in cardinal numbers. For example, ‘KG: VI.65’ refers to the 65th chapter of the 6th century of Kephalaia Gnostika. Where Dysinger uses nous, ‘intellect’ has been substituted. See Luke Dysinger for his textual sources: St. Evagrius Ponticus: Gnosticus and Kephalaia Gnostika and Letter 56 (To Melania), 1990 (online article, available at http://www.ldysinger.com/Evagrius/11_Letters/00a_start. htm) 6 For the ‘saying’ and other forms of mystical literature, see C.A. Keller, ‘Mystical literature’, in S.T. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and philosophical analysis, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, 75-100. 7 KG: VI.65; cf. The Praktikos and Chapters on prayer, 14f. 8 The Praktikos and Chapters on prayer; Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus; and Gnosticus and Kepha- laia Gnostika (ed. Dysinger) are the major sources for this section. 9 For Evagrius’s ascetical theology, see D.T. Bradford, ‘Brain and psyche in early Christian asceticism’, in: Psychological Reports 109 (2011), 461-520.

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condition of ‘dispassion’ (apatheia). Practice is a way of life rather than a single mental state. Evagrius distinguished two types of natural contemplation. ‘Second natural contemplation’ is preliminary to ‘first natural contemplation’ and establishes its cognitive basis. ‘First’ indicates heightened mental purity and increased proxim- ity to God; the contemplation is first in value. Its objects are immaterial; those of second contemplation are composed of matter and spirit. A contemplation is ‘natural’ when probing the nature or spiritual essence of its objects. Natural contemplation is preliminary to ‘theology’ (theologia), which is the superlative contemplation and the outcome of ‘true prayer’. One of Evagrius’s most striking chapters is concerned with the relation between theology and prayer: ‘If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian’.10 This is not petitionary prayer, nor does it engage linguistic forms or imaginal images. It arises in the one who seeks it; prayer occurs spontaneous- ly.11 Evagrius is unclear on whether its emotional and cognitive aspects coincide or occur independently. The emotional consequence of prayer is realization of ‘the primordial love, namely God, for it is through our love that we behold God’s love for us’.12 Such love ‘snatches to the height of intelligible reality the spirit which loves wisdom and which is truly spiritualized by the most intense love’.13 The cognitive aspect of prayer is a simple grasp of the divine presence mediated through the purified intellect. The mystic receives knowledge of God ‘co-extensive with the capacity of the intelligence and giving it surpassing incorruptibility’.14 The intellect must be purified of ‘thoughts’ (logismoi) in preparation for prayer. Thoughts are the mental representations employed by demons to inspire the impassioned ideas, impulses, and feelings that inform ordinary mental process.15 Prayer inhibits the form-generating capacities responsible for mental representations, allowing the mystic to surpass the created order: ‘He whose mind has outstripped the very being of created things has become a true theologian’.16 He then ‘beholds the state of mind’ that Evagrius (following Greek scripture) called the ‘place of God’ and likened to the ‘shelter’

10 Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 130. 11 E.g., Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 55. 12 Evagrius Ponticus, Letter 56 (To Melania). 13 The Praktikos and Chapters on prayer, 63. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 For ‘thoughts’, see D. Brakke, Demons and the making of the monk: Spiritual combat in early Christianity, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006; and Bradford, ‘Brain and psyche in early Christian asceticism’. 16 Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 131.

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or ‘temple of the Holy Trinity’.17 The purified mental state is a personal epiphany. Evagrius’s five-part sequence spanning practice and theology is his most complex analysis of contemplation. In simpler outlines he merged the forms of practice or the two natural contemplations. Most of his distinctions were retained in the later tradition.18 Individual contemplations could be described as ‘steps’ of ascetic life, but this conveys an incremental and possibly irreversible development in which each advance departs entirely from the one before. The accurate model of spiritual change in the Evagrian system is a process in which a preliminary transition evolves naturally into the one or more that follow. As becomes clear later in the analysis, certain contemplations interpenetrate, or the mystic’s mental status may devolve to an earlier contemplation if he is unable to sustain one that is relatively refined.19

CONTEMPLATIVE PROCESS

The natural contemplations are not undifferentiated states, but structured in accord with the subject-object relationship. In Evagrius’s words: ‘All contemplation appears with an underlying object’.20 Evagrius was a spiritual realist who believed that contemplative objects are entirely real. He also recognized that human cognition (in the form of the intellect) shapes the appearance of contemplative objects: ‘Objects are outside the intellect and the contemplation concerning them is constituted within it’.21 Evagrius said that the contemplations are more ‘numerous’ than those he identified explicitly.22 Immaterial creatures also contemplate.23 The diversity of

17 Ibid., 211, 80, 214. 18 E.g., G.E.H. Palmer, P. Sherrard, & K. Ware (Trans.), The Philokalia: The complete text com- piled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth. Vol. 2, London: Faber & Faber, 1981, 186; M. Hansbury, On ascetical life: St. Isaac of Ninevah, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, 52. 19 The conception of spiritual change as a process of mental transformations rather than a sequence of fixed or irreversible steps was elaborated with great subtlety in a psychology devel- oped in the monastic tradition of Eastern Christianity. The psychology is rooted in Evagrian teachings and is little evident after the eighth century. See D.T. Bradford, ‘Comparable process psychologies in eastern Christianity and early Buddhism’, in: Chromatikon 7 (2012), 87-102. 20 KG: IV.87. 21 KG: IV.77. 22 KG: II.4, VI.2. 23 KG: I.13, III.4.

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contemplative states is based on the purity of their respective objects. In Eva- grius’s words: ‘Knowing natures examine objects, and the knowledge of objects purifies the Knowers’.24 Pure objects purify the intellect, which is degraded and ‘cloud[ed]’ by impure objects.25 The intellect is disposed toward contemplation, only the passions block its occurrence.26 Despite the struggle of the ascetic life, Evagrius was optimistic in saying, ‘Every reasoning nature is in its essence knowledge-seeking; and our God is Himself knowable’.27 Similarly: ‘All beings exist for the knowledge of God’ that one might see their spiritual meaning and so understand their Crea- tor.28 Evagrius said that the ‘naked vision’ of the ‘naked intellect’ is ‘easily able to receive essential knowledge’.29 ‘Nakedness’ implies that the contemplative intellect is free of sensory constraints; its objects are not modeled in sensory-percep- tual terms. Centuries later, Isaac the Syrian applied Evagrius’s metaphor: ‘The senses are the last garment of the intellect. Its nakedness consists in its being moved by non-material contemplations’.30 The intellect is disposed toward ‘receptivity’:31 The sense [sensory organ], naturally by itself, senses sensory things, but the mind [the intellect] always stands and waits [to ascertain] which spiritual contemplation gives it vision.32 The intellect stands, waits, and is given vision. Its operations involve passively inclined attention and a diminished sense of agency.33 Contemplation is unlike the common experience of manipulating mental objects that are felt to be one’s

24 KG: V.76. 25 KG: III.90. 26 KG: III.22. Evagrius: ‘By its very nature the spirit is made to pray’ (The Praktikos and Chap- ters on prayer, 29). 27 KG: I.3. 28 G: I.87; cf. KG: I.88. 29 KG: III.12, 19, 70. 30 Hansbury, On ascetical life, 52. 31 E.g., KG: I.49, VI.73. ‘Receive’ and its variants occur more than 40 times in G and KG, usually in connection with the intellect. 32 KG: I.34. 33 Evagrius highlighted the role of attention in entering and stabilizing the state of prayer (Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 209). In this way he anticipated the importance of ‘vigilance’ (nipsis) in later Hesychastic strategies for prayer. See D.T. Bradford, ‘Microgenesis of mystical awareness’, in: M. Pachalska & M. Weber (Eds.), Neuropsychology and philosophy of mind in process: Essays in honor of Jason W. Brown, Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, 2008, 53-113; and T. Spidlik, Prayer: The spirituality of the Christian East. Vol. 2. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2005.

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own creation. Intellectual operations are a way of ‘seeing’ aided by the ‘light’ of God: Virtues [acquired through ascetic practice] cause the intellect to see second natural contemplation; and the latter cause it to see first [natural contemplation]; and the first in its turn [allows it to see] the Blessed Unity.34 The passage is significant for showing that the mental process that informs contemplation is a cascade of intellectual ‘transformations’ directed toward higher states of knowledge.35 Spontaneity and momentum are two of its general features. The continuity of contemplative states is supported by another text: Sometimes the mind moves from one mental representation to another, sometimes from one contemplative consideration to another, and in turn from a contemplative consideration to a mental representation. And there are also times when the mind moves from the imageless state to mental representations or contemplative considerations, and from these it returns again to the imageless state. This happens to the mind during prayer.36 Evagrius has portrayed a smoothly changing and reversible process of mental change. Natural contemplation is a single cognitive process whose divisions are somewhat arbitrary. Entering or exiting particular contemplations is unlike climbing a ladder and more akin to riding a boat through differently eddying currents. Con- tinuity among neighboring contemplations can be assumed, also their interpenetration during transitions from one to the next. Theology is unlike the preliminary contemplations in that it is incomparable and more nearly encapsulated.

PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHT

Psychological insight is enhanced in second contemplation. The ascetic who battled demons in order to attain this state of awareness is rewarded with understanding of their tactics.37 Penitence, asceticism, and scrutiny of con- science free the ascetic from the passions and the demonic factors in normal psychology that prevent or spoil contemplation. Dispassion creates additional freedom. Second contemplation provides yet another degree of detachment such that the demons are further depleted of power.

34 KG: I.35; KG: III.6. 35 KG: II.83. ‘Transformation’ is Evagrius’s word. 36 Sinkewicz, Evagrius of Pontus, 213. 37 KG: III.90, cf. VI.2; Louth, The origins of the Christian mystical tradition.

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First contemplation gives the mystic special insight into his own cognitive process. He is able to step back and observe his mind in operation: ‘We first see objects, and when we are further purified, we will also see the contemplation concerning them’.38 The mystic observes his ways of knowing.39 Evagrius distinguished the natural contemplations and their respective objects in broad terms: ‘Twofold is the contemplation of this world: the one is obvious and dense, the other spiritual and intelligible’.40 The material order is ‘obvious and dense’; it is opaque, weighty, and visible to the eye. Second contemplation probes the inner structure of the material order. ‘Spiritual and intelligible’ refers to a different order whose principles and creatures are detected through first contemplation. Second contemplation discloses a subtle order that subtends the obvious and dense. The mystic sees that the Creator ‘dwells in his creation in the same way as a builder in his house’.41 This is not the Romantic exultation in the sublim- ity of the natural world. God’s ‘majesty is above earth and heaven’ rather than

38 KG: V.57. Gregory Palamus addressed the Evagrian distinction between ‘see[ing] objects’ and ‘see[ing] the contemplation concerning them’. ‘The intellect’, wrote Palamus, ‘functions, first, by observing things other than itself (…) and this is what St. Dionysios the Great calls the intellect’s “direct movement”. Secondly, it returns to itself and operates within itself, and so beholds itself [in its spiritual forms and nature]; and this is called (…) the intellect’s “circular movement”’ (Palmer, Sherrard & Ware, The Philokalia. Vol. 4 [1995], 336). In Evagrius, second contemplation is like intellect’s direct movement, and first contemplation like its circular movement. The distinction recalls the Neoplatonist concept of exitus-reditus (exit and return): the emanation of Intellect from the One and its turning back to contemplate its source (J. Katz, The philosophy of Plotinus, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950). The psychology of these concepts concerns patterns of dissolution and reintegration during mystical states of awareness. 39 The operation of stepping back to observe mental process is mediated by certain prefrontal areas of the brain, which are instrumental in forming abstract judgments and moral apprais- als, and in posing counterfactual possibilities and projecting oneself forward in time. See: J.D. Greene, L.E. Nystrom, A.B. Engell, J.M. Darley & J.D. Cohen, ‘The neural basis of cognitive conflict and control in moral judgment’, in: Neuron 14 (2004), 389-400; R.T. Knight & M. Grabowecky, ‘Escape from linear time: Prefrontal cortex and conscious experience’, in: M.S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The cognitive neurosciences, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, 1357-1372; J. Moll, R. de Oliveira-Souza, P.J. Eslinger, I.E. Bramati, J. Mourao- Miranda, P.A. Andreinolo & P.A. Pessoa, ‘The neural correlates of moral sensitivity: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation of basic and moral emotions’, in: Journal of Neuroscience 22 (2002), 2730-2736; L.M. Shin, D.D. Dougherty, S.P. Orr, R.K. Pitman, M. Lasko, M.A. Macklin, N.M. Alpert, A.J. Fischman & S.L. Rauch, ‘Activation of anterior paralimbic structures during guilt-related script-driven imagery’, in: Biological Psychiatry 48 (2000), 43-50. 40 KG: VI.2. 41 KG: VI.82.

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mingled and dispersed in creation.42 The material order is a display of His handiwork. In passing from second to first contemplation, the mystic enters the invisible world where he discerns the creatures and principles that ‘order the worlds of men’.43 Among these creatures are the guiding powers or ‘guardians’ whose number includes angels and animate stars: ‘celestial powers’, ‘incorporeal beings’, ‘reasoning and holy natures’.44 The most exalted objects of first contemplation are the ‘principles’ (logoi) which exfoliate from Christ-the-Logos.45 The principles inform the guiding powers and transmit knowledge of ‘provi- dence and judgment’.46 A hierarchy of creative power spans the principles and ‘the worlds of men’.47 The material order is seen as spiritually animate and suffused with transcendent sense. It seems to the mystic in first contemplation that ‘another world is created’ which ‘rejects far from it the sensitive [sensory] world’.48 This newly appearing world is home to the spiritual powers which animate the material order. A new way of experience has opened which changes the character of the material world. It is no longer dumb, obvious, and dense, but an orderly web of spiritual symbols whose diversity is subsumed into the broad categories of meaning the mystic has learned from scripture. This high reach of the intellect occurs when the mystic settles into deep imaginal structures whose expressions are the principles and creatures that ‘order the worlds of men’.49

42 Psalms 148:13. 43 KG: II.30. 44 G: I.42; KG: I.42, V.7, VI.2, VI.88. The Evagrian angel is like the daemon: a transcendent intelligence that ferries information between the gods and humans and is active in shaping one’s fate (E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the irrational, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1951; W. Burkert, Greek religion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). Spiritual guides (comparable to angels) are discussed as autoscopic experiences in S. Arzy, M. Idel, T. Landis & O. Blanke, ‘Speaking with oneself: Autoscopic phenomena in writings from the ecstatic Kabbalah’, in: Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005), 4-30. 45 For the relationship between the principles and Christ, see KG: I.4, II.45. 46 KG: I.27. 47 KG: II.30. Evagrius’s conception of contemplative advance (as an ascent from the material world to the angels and the principles of a demiurge-like Christ) recalls contemporaneous Gnostic movements. Cf. D. Brakke, The gnostics: Myth, ritual, and diversity in early Christian- ity, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2001; J.S. Konstantinovsky, Evagrius Ponticus: The making of a Gnostic, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. 48 KG: V.12. 49 KG: II.30. Lévi-Bruhl coined the term participation mystique for a way of experiencing the world that results in its supernatural animation: L. Lévi-Bruhl, Primitive mentality (Trans. L.A. Clare), Boston: Beacon, 1966 (orig. publ. 1922); and The notebooks on primitive mentality (Trans. P. Rivière), New York: Harper & Row, 1978 (orig. publ. 1949) Its dominant mediums are imagination and what James called the ‘aboriginal flow of feeling’ (W. James,

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IDENTIFICATION WITH SPIRITUAL OBJECTS

In first contemplation the mystic identifies with the spiritual objects to which his attention has been directed. On this basis he becomes what he knows. The cognitive outcome of this transition is dramatic, since coincidentally the mystic knows in the same way as his object. Evagrius conveyed the point as follows: ‘Those who have attained to immaterial contemplation, are also in the [same] state’.50 A ‘state’ is a way of knowing that creates a manner of being. Immaterial creatures have this freedom; their respective ways of knowing establish their forms of being. Humans are constrained by their corporeal nature, which limits their ways of knowing. In first contemplation the mystic is released from such constraint. Evagrius addressed in another way the mystic’s identification with the objects discerned in first contemplation: The intellect, when it considers the intelligibles, sometimes receives their vision separately, and sometimes also becomes a seer of objects.51 The ‘intelligibles’ are the principles and spiritual creatures whose rarified domain is the world of first contemplation. ‘Separately’ and ‘seer’ represent two ways of knowing whose difference turns on the mystic’s retention or loss of his sense of personal identity. He retains this sense in second contemplation, which enables his preserving a measure of objectivity. On this basis the intelligibles remain ‘separate’ from the mystic. This differs from first contemplation in which a lapse of personal identity promotes the mystic’s merging with an intelligible. He thus ‘becomes a seer’ who sees in a way natural to the intelligible.52 He ‘becomes an angel’, or a power, or a principle, and is conveyed in an emotional flow that lifts him to levels

Some problems of philosophy: A beginning of an introduction to philosophy, New York: Long- mans, Green, and Co., 1911, 96). Participation mystique contributes to an animistic outlook. The concept of participation was adopted in Analytical Psychology; Jung emphasized its psychological relevance (C.G. Jung, Psychological types [The collected works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 6; transl. R.F.C. Hull], Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). The angels and ‘celestial powers’ of Evagrian cosmology have god-like qualities (KG: I.42, VI.88). Evagrius added layers of philosophical reflection to a mental disposition whose consequence in indigenous traditions is animism. 50 KG:: III.17. 51 KG: II.27. This chapter recalls Plotinus on union with the divine Intellect. Persons who attain union, wrote Plotinus, ‘are not simply spectators. For there is no longer one thing outside and another outside which is looking at it, but the keen sighted has what is seen within. (…) One must transport what one sees into oneself and look at it as oneself, as if someone possessed by a god’ (I. Hadot, ‘Neoplatonist spirituality. I: Plotinus and Porphyry’, in: A.H. Armstrong [Ed.], Classical Mediterranean spirituality, New York: Crossroad, 1986, 230-249: 239f.). 52 KG: II.27.

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of abstraction from which the material world feels like a dream.53 He enters ‘another world’ and passes within and across imaginal structures whose conceptual and imaginary expressions he has learned from scripture and philosophy.54 The seer passage implies that the mystic may oscillate between contemplations during a single experience, exchanging one way of knowing for the other.55 The term ‘intelligibles’ is usually reserved for the spiritual objects of first contemplation; yet Evagrius has said that the mystic may ‘receive their vision separately’, in which case he has entered, or reentered, second contemplation. Seership is an unstable and subtle condition which is subject to collapse. The related feats of abstraction and imagination are limited in duration. The seer passage supports the conclusion that natural contemplation is a single cognitive process whose divisions are somewhat arbitrary. Flickering changes yield one or the other natural contemplation, or promote their interpenetration during transitions from one to the next.

INHIBITION OF SENSORY PERCEPTION

Two chapters imply that first contemplation inhibits sensory perception while deepening imaginal experience. Here is the first: The intellect that is divested of the passions and sees the logoi [principles] of beings does not henceforth truly receive the eidola [images] that [arrive] through the senses; but it is as if another world is created by its knowledge, attracting to it its thought and rejecting far from it the sensitive [sensory] world.56

53 The Praktikos and Chapters on prayer, 74; cf. KG: V.7. 54 KG: V.12. The Evagrian distinction represented by ‘seer’ and ‘separately’ is analogous to Wil- liam James’s distinction between ‘knowledge of acquaintance’ and ‘knowledge-about’ (W. James, Psychology, New York: Holt, 1892). The first is mediated by feeling, yields an indescribable joining with the object, and is the more immediate and intimate of the two ways of knowing. Knowledge-about depends on past learning and conceptual systems, of which scripture and theology are examples. Knowledge-about promotes symbolic mentation in second contemplation. First contemplation provides direct acquaintance with the spiritual principles and creatures whose activities were glimpsed previously in symbolic form. For other religious applications of the Jamesian distinction, see G.W. Barnard, ‘William James and the origins of mystical experience’, in: R.K.C. Forman (Ed.), The innate capacity: Mysticism, psychology, and philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 161-210; and R. Niebuhr, ‘William James on religious experience’, in: R.A. Putnam (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 214-236. 55 This, too, is consistent with James, who spoke of the reciprocity of the two ways of knowing. Knowledge-about provides progressively refined descriptions based on new information mediated through repeated (recursive) instances of knowledge-by-acquaintance. See: James, Psychology. 56 KG: V.12.

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Here is an interpretive rewording of this difficult chapter: When the intellect is free of passionate influences and sees the hidden forms inherent in created things, and passes beyond mental images based on sensory contact, then another world appears which gathers its content exclusively from present awareness. This world exerts a strong attraction and excludes images based on sensory perception. In other words, abstract intuitions with supernatural content sub- stitute for worldly images. The mystic has exited the ordinary world; a marked degree of psychological dissociation may be assumed. The second chapter is specific to first contemplation, or possibly to both first contemplation and theology: When the intellect will have received essential knowledge, then it will also be called ‘God’, because it will also be able to found varied worlds.57 That one might ‘found varied worlds’ implies the unchecked autonomy of imagination. That the ascetic might ‘be called ‘God’’ implies his exultation and sense of deification.58 At this point, the world evident to the senses has faded from awareness. The matter of dissociation is clarified by what Evagrius said of persons who ‘receive the contemplation that concerns them’: …then also the entire nature of the body will be withdrawn; and thus the contemplation that concerns it will become immaterial.59 The mystic’s sense of self-embodiment has been altered. Somatic awareness has been inhibited.60

SPATIAL PERCEPTION

Spatial perception is changed by contemplation: The sensible eye, when it looks at some visible thing, does not see the totality: but the intelligible eye either has not seen, or else[,] when it sees immediately[,] surrounds all the sides of what it sees.61

57 KG: V.81. 58 For the history of deification in Eastern Christianity, see N. Russell, The doctrine of deification in the Greek patristic tradition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. For theological aspects, see V. Lossky, The mystical theology of the Eastern Church, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976; and J. Meyendorff, Byzantine theology: Historical trends and doctrinal themes, New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. 59 KG: II.62. 60 Somatic changes of this kind are reported in certain autoscopic experiences; the ‘out-of-body experience’ is an example. See D.T. Bradford, ‘Autoscopic hallucinations and disordered self- embodiment’, in: Acta Neuropsychologica 3 (2005), 129-189. 61 KG: II.28.

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The ‘sensible eye’ detects material objects from the one perspective determined by the body’s location. In contrast, the ‘intelligible eye’ of the contemplative intellect is detached from the spatial reference frame whose center and locus of evaluation is the embodied ego.62 Under such conditions, conceptual analysis is disengaged as impassive awareness simply envelops its object. Some sculptors and painters can visualize in this manner. Another analogy, related to the audi- tory modality, is a composer’s instant grasp of a chord progression. Evagrius said that the intellect is ‘composed of neither form nor matter’, which implies that the body’s location does not bear on its manner of seeing.63 The intellect’s freedom from corporeal constraints reaches its apogee in theology: Knowledge is said to be in a place, when it frequents the intellection of creatures, but in no place when it admires the Holy Trinity.64 Evagrius conveyed the same point in saying: ‘Bodiless is our intellect, when it renders itself similar to God’.65 The naked intellect is without a corporeal form, which ordinarily imposes and defines its physical place. Its ‘where’ is instantly present based on the meaning and the imaginal location of its contemplative object. First contemplation yields an extraordinary spatial perception. Evagrius employed the metaphor of the open sky to convey its properties: In pure thoughts [there] is imprinted a splendid sky to see and a spacious region.66 The kind of spatial perception inherent in first contemplation entails circumambient awareness of vast unbroken space.67

62 For spatial reference frames, see V. Jagaroo, ‘Towards an analytical framework for the visuospatial domain: Spatial reference frames, cognitive operations, and neural systems’, in: Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 21 (1999), 134-146. 63 KG: III.31. 64 KG: I.62. 65 G: I.45. 66 KG: V.39. 67 Circumambient awareness in mystical experience is discussed in J.H. Austin, Zen and the brain: Toward an understanding of meditation and consciousness, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998; D.T. Bradford, ‘Archetypal hallucinations in brain damage’, in: Quadrant 28 (1998), 63-82; and Idem, ‘Autoscopic hallucinations and disordered self-embodiment’. Such awareness is extracampine in the sense that the space detected extends outside the visual field. The luminous presence of Christ, as envisioned by Symeon the New Theologian and reported in some hesychastic mystical accounts, appears to have circumambient properties, e.g., A.F. Dob- bie-Bateman, ‘St. Seraphim of Sarov’, in: G.P. Fedotov (Ed.), The way of the pilgrim and other classics of Russian spirituality, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003, 242-279 (orig. publ. 1936); and C.J. DeCatanzaro, Symeon the New Theologian: The discourses, New York: Paulist Press, 1980, 245. Circumambient spatial awareness is also suggested and described in non-Christian

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Evagrius said that the perception of unimpeded space is dulled or terminated by anger or irritability: And this vision that is imprinted – irritation causes it to be seen obscurely, and anger[,] when it flames up[,] destroys it completely.68 ‘Irritation’ and ‘anger’ result from the aggravation of what Evagrius (following Plato) identified as the ‘incensive power’ of the tripartite soul.69 The dispassion attained through ascetic practice subdues the incensive power and ensures the intellect’s capacity to enter advanced contemplations. Anger ‘destroys’ circumambient awareness, which implies the delicacy of first contemplation and hints of the possibility of a precipitous fall in which the ascetic’s elevated perspective collapses to less refined contemplations.

DURATION OF CONTEMPLATION

The duration of individual contemplations is a matter of interest. Those concerned with practice may last for years or decades. Their outcome is dispassion, a difficult attainment and the foundation of subsequent contemplations. Second contemplation is aided by meditation on scripture and may coincide with ordinary activities. Darts of intuitive certainties punctuate the quiescent course of the dispassionate life, or the mystical reverie of second contemplation can extend for longer periods. This is to live simultaneously in two intercalated worlds. The one evident to the senses is infused with images, ideas, and narra- tive patterns that provide its deeper spiritual meanings. In first contemplation the mystic is removed from ordinary experience to the extent that managing the concrete demands of everyday life would be impossi- ble. First contemplation is relatively brief, otherwise the mystic could not attend to work, liturgy, and vital bodily needs.70

traditions. In Buddhist prajna literature, enlightening awareness of the emptiness of phenomena is likened to unimpeded space and the open sky: see E. Conze, The perfection of wisdom in eight thousand lines and its verse summary, Berkeley, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973. In an arupa jhana (‘formless meditation’) described in Pali scriptures and later Abhidhamma commentary, mental forms are relinquished and unimpeded space becomes the ‘object’ of awareness, see B. Bodhi, In the Buddha’s words: An anthology of discourses from the Pali Canon, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005, 297. 68 KG: V.39. 69 J.M. Cooper, ‘Plato’s theory of human motivation’, in: F. Wagner (Ed.), Essays on Plato’s psychology, New York: Lexington Books, 2001, 91-114. 70 A comparison of mystical states described by Evagrius and Isaac the Syrian, respectively, may help in estimating the duration of first contemplation. In Evagrius, second contemplation is preliminary to first contemplation; in Isaac, the state of ‘limpidity’ is preliminary to the

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Theology is the superlative contemplation and is ‘destructive of every earthly mental representation’.71 In the absence of representations, the experience of time collapses, since consciousness is without the images and ideas that enable its movement and substantiate its existence in passing time.72 The more pure the contemplation, the greater its brevity, with instantaneity a mark of theology. God appears in a momentary awareness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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