Evagrius Ponticus

Evagrius was born in 345 at Ibora, in Pontus, on the southern shore of the Black Sea. He was ordained a reader by Basil the Great and a deacon by Gregory of Nazianzus, and went with Gregory to Constantinople, where he became a celebrated preacher during the council of 381.

A love affair with a married woman of high rank, and a warning dream, drove him from the capital to Jerusalem, where Melania the Elder persuaded him to become a monk. In 383 he went to Egypt, first to Nitria and then to Kellia, where he lived as a monk until his death in 399, learning from the disciples of Macarius and earning his living as a copyist.

In short, carefully ordered chapters, he set down the experience of the desert as a science of the soul: the Praktikos, on the struggle with the passions; the Chapters on Prayer; and the Gnostic Chapters, on contemplation. His speculative theology, drawn from Origen, was condemned in 553, and his works survived in part under other names, such as that of Nilus. Through Cassian in the West and the Philokalia in the East, his teaching on thoughts, apatheia and prayer shaped all later Christian contemplative practice.