Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation

Sorabji’s Emotion and Peace of Mind is the philological standard for the transmission of the Stoic theory of the passions into the Christian patristic and monastic traditions. Its central technical contribution is the close reading of prōta kinēmata — the Stoic doctrine of “first movements” — as the involuntary somatic shocks that precede emotion proper, and the demonstration that this doctrine becomes, in Origen, Evagrius Ponticus, Cassian, and the broader desert tradition, the apparatus of the logismoi.

For the Seba graph, the work is load-bearing. It traces the genealogy of nepsis from Stoic prosoche through Evagrius’s Practical Treatise into the broader monastic discipline of watching the heart. It documents the Cappadocian negotiation of apatheia and metriopatheia — the rival ideals of eradication and moderation — and identifies Cassian as the figure who carries Evagrian apatheia into Latin monasticism over the objections of Augustine and Jerome.

Sorabji’s method is exact. He cites the Greek terms in their original form, distinguishes the senses in which they are deployed by different authors, and refuses the simplifications that would make the patristic reception either a mere borrowing from or a mere rejection of pagan philosophy. The desert tradition, on his reading, builds something genuinely new from Stoic materials — neither Stoic nor not-Stoic, but a third thing whose proper name is the discipline of nepsis.

Concepts introduced or developed

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evagrius-ponticus