Evagrius the Cappadocian: Redating the Kephalaia gnostika

Abstract:

The three works Praktikos, Gnostikos, and Kephalaia gnostika (KG) are traditionally dated to the late 380s, when Evagrius Ponticus was a monk in Egypt. The trilogy is commonly seen as a unified, gradated curriculum for monks. In this article, I argue that this paradigm is deficient. Evagrius wrote the KG largely in the 370s, before he ever became a monk, and well before he even started the Praktikos and Gnostikos, which were written later, as a pair of companion pieces, to attempt to repackage the KG as part of a monastic trilogy.

Redating the KG to the middle years of Evagrius's life significantly changes our interpretation of his entire corpus. It reveals a layer of his writings that originally had nothing to do with monks and monasticism, but were turned to that purpose late in life. An early KG opens up an important and poorly documented part of Evagrius's writing career, when, in company with the Cappadocians, he had already developed a sophisticated exegesis and metaphysics, long before he became a monk.