Herald of Hope

Striving to live virtuous lives is essential for Christians. Practicing virtues cultivates habits of the mind that support moral behavior and that help individuals to avoid sin. While virtues are not an end in themselves, they aid us in in being receptive to the salvation that God offers us.

An important element for growth in a life of virtue is the examination of conscience. The examination of conscience is a way of measuring moral shortcomings in one’s life with the goal of finding ways to improve.

Typically, this examination is used when an individual prepares for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. More broadly, it is used by some as a daily practice to help with continued development in virtuous living. Tools used for reflection in the examination of conscience include the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the list of the “Seven Deadly Sins.”

Most people who engage in the examination of conscience would be familiar with the Seven Deadly Sins (pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth), but may not be familiar with the origins of these categories. One of the main sources is the “Eight Kinds of Evil Thoughts” found in the writings of Evagrius Ponticus. The Seven Deadly Sins are a list of destructive vices that damage a person’s moral character. By contrast, the Eight Kinds of Evil Thoughts are negative mental states that can impede progress in prayer and lead to problematic behavior.

Evagrius Ponticus was born in 345 A.D. in Iborra in Pontus (in present-day Turkey). He was an intelligent, learned young man, serious about growth in holiness. Under St. Basil the Great, he served as a lector. Under St. Gregory of Nazianzus, he became a deacon, and then an archdeacon under St. Nectarius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Before long, he became the Imperial Councilor to the Emperor.

In Constantinople, in the Imperial Court, Evagrius became more worldly, and his penchant for meditation and prayer began to wane. At a certain point, he found himself near despair, struggling with his own passions, and he decided to leave Constantinople to care for his soul. He headed first to Jerusalem, and later to Nitria, Egypt, to meet with a monastic community known for their dedication to asceticism and learning.

Fourth-century Egypt saw the flowering of desert monasticism. St. Anthony ventured out in the desert to live as a hermit, and numerous disciples gathered around him. Around the same time, St. Pachomius founded a monastery in the desert for monks to live in community. By the second decade of the fourth century, there were thousands of monks and nuns populating in the Egyptian wasteland, living simply with few possessions, seeking God in a rough environment, and testing the limits of their capacity for growth in holiness. They sustained themselves by physical labor, and they tended to live in small huts or cells in which they focused their minds on prayer and meditation. They would often seek the counsel of wiser and more experienced monastics.

Evagrius remained with the monks and learned from them. He dedicated his life to prayer and to writing about what he learned about the monastic way of life. He lived an austere life, and faced great trials with temptations, which he met with heroic resistance. He grew in the ways of humility, learned the discernment of spirits, and became known as a great director of souls.

One of his best-known works is his “Praktikos,” which is a guide to ascetical life. While written for eremitical monks, it has much to offer Christians in all walks of life. It is within this work that Evagrius writes about the Eight Kinds of Evil Thoughts. The eight evil thoughts are gluttony, impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride. Evagrius refers to these as thoughts, passions, or even demons.

The order in which Evagrius lists these thoughts is not accidental. The first three, gluttony, impurity and avarice, tend to be the temptations that affect those who are beginners in a life of prayer and meditation. Beginners contend with the more base and materialistic temptations in the early part of their journey. Those in the middle of their journey of prayer and asceticism tend to be confronted with inward temptations, such as sadness or dejection, anger or wrath, and acedia or listlessness. Those who are at a more advanced stage of their souls’ development find themselves needing to guard against vainglory and pride.

Gluttony is the evil thought that haunts a person beginning to practice a life of abstinence. It focuses the mind on the stomach and causes it to obsess over imagined illnesses brought on by a scarcity of commodities, and other maladies that could possibly be experienced due to a strict ascetical life.

Impurity is the temptation that causes a person practicing prayer and asceticism to engage in lustful thoughts. One becomes preoccupied with the idea that there may possibly be nothing to be gained by a life of chastity.

Avarice plants the idea in the mind that a person living a life of voluntary simplicity will eventually reach an age in which work will no longer be a possibility, and the pinch of a lack of material things will make itself felt. Fear of privation leads to a desire to accumulate things. The mind obsesses that illnesses are sure to come, as well as famine and other catastrophes. Along with this is a feeling of shame that one may need to rely on others for the necessities of life.

The evil thought of sadness comes up when a person feels a deprivation of the things of the past. Thoughts turn to memories of home, parents and one’s former way of life. If a person offers no resistance to these memories, the mind seeks pleasure and consolation in them, and then sadness hits with the realization that these things no longer are a part of one’s life.

Evagrius describes anger as a fierce passion. It is a boiling up of wrath against one who has given injury or is perceived to have done so. This thought irritates the soul and tends to do so especially at times of prayer. If left unchecked, it is soon transformed into indignation.

The evil thought of acedia is the one that causes the most trouble for a person living an ascetical life. Evagrius calls acedia or listlessness “the noonday demon.” It causes a person trying to engage in prayer to feel that time passes very slowly, provoking the urge to constantly interrupt meditation to look out the window to see if the sun has made any progress on its path in the sky. It brings distraction, and causes one to be dissatisfied with one’s life, living arrangements and manual labor. This demon of listlessness causes one to feel that there is no one to give encouragement in the struggle to make progress in the spiritual life.

Vainglory is the most subtle of the evil thoughts. It strikes those who are making progress in the practice of virtues. This temptation leads people to make their spiritual struggles known in order to gain the praise of others.

The temptation of pride leads to the greatest downfall of all for those who pursue a life of holiness. It is the temptation that leads an individual to refuse to believe that God is providing divine aid in the pursuit of virtue. A person begins to imagine that progress in virtue is by one’s own striving alone.

Among the remedies that Evagrius prescribes for those struggling with evil thoughts is the practice of virtues; for example, practicing almsgiving as a remedy for avarice and fasting as a remedy for gluttony. He stresses that actions to remedy evil thoughts must be appropriate to the particular struggles that one is experiencing, and that persistence, vigilance and guidance are essential.

What can we learn from this fourth-century monastic author? Evagrius teaches us that our thoughts affect our attitudes and actions. If we want to change our behavior, we must change our way of thinking. Evagrius also shows us that self-knowledge is the key to progress in the spiritual life. To know and understand our personal struggles in our striving for holiness is crucial. Our willingness to admit to imperfections and to commit ourselves to cooperate with God’s grace in our efforts to move beyond them is essential for our growth in holiness.