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Studia Patristica 57, (“Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held at Oxford, 2011,” ed. M. Vincent, Vol. 5: Evagrius Ponticus on Contemplation, ed. M. Tobon), Peeters, 2013, pp. 31-50.
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For Evagrius, both physical and psychological transformation are integral to spiritual transformation. A human being is essentially a nous that, as image of the Triune God, is itself triune, the anthropological triad of spirit, soul and body and the psychological triad of logistikon, thumos and epithumêtikon being its fragmented, post-lapsarian forms. All three parts of the human soul are, accordingly, in some sense nous, and the soul is the form of the body. The predominance of epithumia characteristic of the human soul is reflected in a predominantly earthy, 'thick' and contracted bodily 'mixture' which by means of diet can be transmuted to a lighter, more expansive constitution. This 'passage of the body from the bad to the superior quality' is reflected in that of the soul from passibility to impassibility and of the nous from ignorance to knowledge. Thus diet establishes the physical ground for the restoration of unity to the 'trinity of ours' that is the imago Dei, as body and soul are 'raised to the order of the nous' and the spiritual body emerges from the 'triple resurrection' of body, soul and spirit. The increasing expansiveness of the body's mixture is the correlate of the 'expansion of the heart' and is reflected phenomenologically in the passage of the nous into ever greater spaciousness and inclusivity as it 'approaches the unconcealed Divinity in itself.' Introducing his edition of Evagrius' letters, Fr Gabriel Bunge observes that 'a mystic writes not about something but from something, namely that unity that he himself has encountered and that informs his own life.' 1 Nowhere can this be seen more clearly in Evagrius than in his holistic understanding of the ascent to God as fully involving all three parts of the human person: spirit, soul and body, or in Evagrius' terms, nous, soul and body. All three rise together in a tripartite resurrection in which each finds renewal according to its particular nature, meaning that for Evagrius contemplation is rooted as much in the transformation of the body as in that of the soul. The first three sections of this paper develop an interpretation of Evagrius' anthropology, focusing respectively on the anthropological triad of nous, soul and body; the psychological triad of logistikon, thumos and epithumētikon, and the genesis of the physical body. From the latter it emerges that for Evagrius physical constitution is a function of spiritual condition and therefore mutable, and following on from this I argue in Section Four that the transformation of the body's elemental mixture forms the basis for the restoration of spiritual health to body and soul in the process that Evagrius identifies with their respective 'resurrections'. In Section Five I explain how this process continues in the contemplative ascent as the 'raising of the body and soul to the order of the nous', that is to say, the 'resurrection of the nous', and how it finds reflection in the experience of the contemplative. Finally, in Section Six I argue that Evagrius tacitly invites us to equate his 'intelligible body', as the composite of perceptible body and (fallen) soul, with Paul's 'animal body' and therefore to understand the process of 'raising of body and soul to the order of the nous' as the genesis of the spiritual body.
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