Praktike — the Greek term designating the active, ascetic life of moral struggle and purification — occupies a foundational position in Evagrian psychology and, through its transmission, in the broader depth-psychological tradition. In Evagrius Ponticus, Praktike constitutes the first of three stages in the spiritual itinerary, concerned with the disciplining of the passions, the combat against the eight principal thoughts (logismoi), and the cultivation of apatheia as its telos. It is neither mere behavioural morality nor external observance but a rigorous inner psychology: the monk attends to the origins of passionate thoughts, discerns the operations of demons and psychic images, and progressively heals the irrational part of the soul. Crucially, Praktike is not self-sufficient; Evagrius insists that its effects must be complemented by contemplative activity for the soul's powers to be fully restored. The tension structuring the corpus is precisely this: Praktike prepares the ground for theoria and prayer, yet the boundary between active purification and contemplative illumination is permeable and mutually conditioning. What depth psychology inherits from this framework — mediated through John Cassian, Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Philokalia — is a model of psychic transformation in which action, image-work, and contemplation form an integrated economy, anticipating later accounts of individuation, shadow-work, and the relationship between ethical practice and noetic transparency.
In the library
12 substantive passages
"The effects of keeping the commandments (i.e. apatheia) do not suffice to heal the powers of the soul completely. They must be complemented by a contemplative activity appropriate to these faculties and this activity must penetrate the spirit." Praktikos, 79.
This passage establishes the essential structural argument of the Praktike: ascetic practice culminating in apatheia is a necessary but insufficient condition for psychic wholeness, which requires the additional work of contemplation.
We shall make a concise distribution of the material into one hundred chapters on the ascetic life and fifty plus another six hundred on contemplative matters.
Evagrius announces the architectural division of his system, placing Praktike as the first, ascetic stage in a tripartite structure that leads through natural contemplation to theology.
Man cannot be perfected merely from action that proceeds from the exterior to the interior. He must be altered even in the depths of his spirit, where there lie hidden in the furthest recesses of his being unknown images, inaccessible to the external world.
The introduction articulates the depth-psychological dimension of Praktike: external ascetic action alone cannot reach the hidden images that govern the soul's attitudes, pointing toward a psychology of unconscious formation.
We must take care to recognize the different types of demons and note the special times of their activity ... so that when these various evil thoughts set their own proper forces to work we are in a position to address effective words against them.
Praktike requires systematic discernment of the logismoi — a proto-psychological taxonomy of passionate thought-forms — anticipating, as the editor notes, Freud's own statements by a millennium.
Certain thoughts first drive the soul to the memory of home and parents, or else to that of one's former life. Now when these thoughts find that the soul offers no resistance but rather follows after them and pours itself out in pleasures that are still only mental in nature, they then seize her.
This passage from the Praktikos proper illustrates the mechanism of acedia and sadness as analysed within Praktike: the soul's capitulation to mental fantasy produces a distinctive affective collapse.
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 refines the goal of Praktike: apatheia is not the suppression of sensation but the transformation of memory-affect, signalling a depth-structural rather than merely behavioural achievement.
To separate the body from the soul is the privilege only of the One who has joined them together. But to separate the soul from the body lies as well in the power of the man who pursues virtue.
Praktike's anachoresis is clarified as an inner psychic movement — a progressive dis-identification from bodily compulsion — not mere physical withdrawal, situating the ascetic life within a psychology of the will.
A monk of the most proved virtue lives there, a member of the colony of contemplatives. He states that all the actions of monks are performed through five causes: through God, through nature, through habit, through necessity, or through manual effort.
This apophthegm embedded in the Praktikos identifies a phenomenological typology of motivated action, revealing the ethical-psychological analysis of volition that structures the whole work.
The Praktikos & Chapters on Prayer By Evagrius Ponticus Translation and Introduction by John Bamberger OCSO
The volume's title page establishes the canonical pairing of Praktikos with the Chapters on Prayer, indicating that the two texts are conceived as a single pedagogical and psychological whole.
These gifts were recognized to be the fruit of his asceticism and purity of heart more than the result of study. Discretion in particular had been considered the essential sign of the true spiritual master since the times of Anthony the Great.
The biographical introduction grounds Praktike in lived experience: the spiritual authority Evagrius exercised derived not from intellectual formation but from the psychic purification his ascetic practice had achieved.
Madame Claire Guillaumont has established the critical text of the Praktikos for Sources Chrétiennes. She has very generously placed at my disposal all the variants of any significance.
This passage documents the textual transmission and critical editing of the Praktikos, relevant to understanding the reliability of the text through which Evagrius' psychology has been transmitted.
"Pray always," she seems to tell us through him, "for in prayer you become fully a man, and learn your own dignity."
The introduction to the Chapters on Prayer frames the Praktike's terminal goal — prayer — as the locus of full human self-realisation, linking ascetic practice to anthropological completion.