“The soul which has apatheia is not simply the one which is not disturbed by changing events but the one which remains unmoved at the memory of them as well.” - Evagrius Ponticus[1]
Evagrius writes in the latter half of the 4th century. He is one of the great theoreticians of the spiritual life and through his influence on John Cassian, transmitted the wisdom of Origin of Alexandria and the early monastics of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in a lineage that continues through St. Benedict of Nursia to our own day. His influence on ascetical theology is enormous, albeit underappreciated.
Like many of the desert fathers and mothers, Evagrius was an astute psychologist whose teaching was rooted in experience and observation. He understood the prominent role that memory plays in our inner lives and its capacity to disturb and even paralyze us. This is why he insists that being unmoved by the memory of past events is an essential element of apatheia.
By apatheia, Evagrius and the tradition that he represents does not mean “apathy” in the modern sense of the word. It is not a state of indifference to events, but rather “a habitual state of imperturbable calm.”[2] It is a state of awareness in which our emotional energy is integrated with the rational faculties of consciousness, so that we have the capacity to be fully present to our experience and perceive reality clearly. It is a state of freedom in which we can respond to events rather than simply react to them. It is the prerequisite for what Beatrice Bruteau describes as creative freedom, in which genuine agency or initiative becomes possible rather than simply responding to stimuli.[3]
Evagrius recognized that spiritual growth requires the healing of memory, the resolution of emotional disturbances the prevent the past from becoming the past. Contemporary trauma theory provides a neuroscientific basis for understanding what Evagrius intuited.[4] We can be and often are disturbed by the memory of past events; or rather, by the inability to integrate past experience as memory. Victims of trauma experiences their suffering as a continuing present reality, unable to consign it to the past. Their emotional responses are frozen in the mode of fight, flight, or dissociation, interfering with their ability to perceive and respond to reality in the present.
The healing of trauma involves creating conditions in which the victims can feel safe enough in their bodies to relax the autonomic responses that keep them in emotional upheaval. Then they can begin to articulate for themselves a narrative of the past and reintegrate their emotions with the cognitive centers of the brain that allow for the development of memory. The healing of trauma is very much connected to what the Christian contemplative tradition has described as the purification (or healing) of memory.
Ancient monastics like Evagrius created the conditions that allowed for the healing of the past through spiritual practices that cultivated moral self-discipline, introspection, and meditation. These practices integrated body, emotions, and intellect. Through ascesis, assiduous commitment to these practices, one eventually obtained apatheia and, as Evagrius noted, “agape is the progeny of apatheia.” The sign of healing, of mature spiritual development, is the capacity to love freely unconstrained by self-centered preoccupations. Conversely, it is the experience of being held in love, of intuiting directly the divine agape in the present moment, that allows the past to become the past. The healing of memory is the freedom to love.
This process of healing involves both forgiving and re-membering. Forgiveness means no longer being defined by the harms one has suffered or caused; this is genuine freedom from the disturbance of past events. As forgiveness ripens in the soul, it leads to re-membering. The past becomes the past and no longer has any power to disturb (though it continues to inform) our perception of the present and hope for the future.
At the deepest level of our being, we begin to understand that our identity is not what has happened to us. We are part of a larger wholeness in which everything belongs. We are free to make different choices, unhindered by the past, that can advance personal and collective flourishing. One can even achieve a kind of forgetting that is not minimization or denial of the past, but a complete transfiguration of one’s inner life that simply no longer identifies with it. It drops away because its purpose is fulfilled and transcended.[5]
This is a degree of interior freedom that is perhaps rarely achieved, but it does point to evolutionary possibilities in human consciousness that are essential to our collective healing and hope for the future. Apatheia creates a capacity for intuitive knowing through sympathetic resonance; knowing another from the inside out, as it were. It leads to a profound realization of our interconnection with all of reality and evokes compassion and wisdom. We begin to embody agape, acting for the well-being of others. This is the freedom of the prophets who can imagine a future no longer constrained by the past. This is the consciousness of the saints and the bodhisattvas: those who forgive and forget.
[1] Evagrius Ponticus, The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer, translated by John Eudes Bamberger, OCSO (Trappist, KY: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1972), p. 34.
[2] See Bamberger’s translation, Ibid., p. 63.
[3] Beatrice Bruteau, “Prayer and Identity” in Contemplative Review, 1981.
[4] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).
[5] Constance FitzGerald, “From Impasse to Prophetic Hope: Crisis of Memory” in CTSA PROCEEDINGS 64 (2009): 21-42. FitgzGerald carefully notes the caveats to “forgetting” when considering the requirements of social justice in response to collective traumas, but nevertheless offers a provocative argument for the importance of the purification of memory in the development of genuine prophetic hope.
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