Vice and Self-examination in the Christian Desert: An Intellectual Historical Reading of Evagrius Ponticus

This thesis offers an analysis of the vice tradition of the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus. While Evagrius, like others before him, understands that virtue and vice have an affective component, and that these affections are reactions to mental images, for Evagrius these images are veridically thinner than what we find in earlier discussions of passion in ancient philosophy. As a result, vice is less a matter of false reasoning and false perception than it is a matter of the excessive dwelling on representations connected with events of one’s personal history, to the point that the passions aroused at the time of those events become globalized dispositions. Evagrius’s concern with how memories lead us to dwell on these “bad thoughts” proves to be point of contact with psychoanaly which many modern authors, including Michel Foucault, have detected; yet a close analysis of what Evagrius takes to be involved in self-examination reveals that Foucault’s account of the “technologies of the self” fails to take into account Evagrius’s interest in the distinction between the endowed self, that self which is examined, and the ideal self, the goal of the ascetic activity.Ph