Freedom from Thoughts 5
The Shadow Side of Sadness: Nostalgia and Self-Pity
This is the fifth in a series of posts exploring Evagrius Ponticus’ teaching on the eight kinds of evil thoughts. The previous posts were an introduction, on gluttony, on lust, and on avarice.
Our examination of Evagrius’ teaching on the eight evil thoughts now shifts into a different key. Previously, his focus was on mental obsessions that have an element of physical compulsion: gluttony, lust, avarice. Now, Evagrius turns to mental obsessions that give rise to particular feeling-tones that distort our perception of reality. He begins with lype, sadness.
Sadness tends to come up at times because of the deprivation of one’s desires. On other occasions it accompanies anger. When it arises from the deprivation of desires it takes place in the following manner. 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, then can seize her and drench her in sadness, with the result that these ideas she was indulging in no longer remain. In fact, they cannot be had in reality, either, because of her present way of life. So the miserable soul is now shriveled up in her humiliation to the degree that she poured herself out upon these thoughts of hers.1
This is a subtle teaching. Evagrius is attuned to the relationship between sadness and anger. He anticipates the idea that sadness can take the form of anger turned inward against one’s self. Today, we understand such sadness as a way of grounding anger when one’s circumstances are such that expressing anger would be too dangerous, or simply overwhelming. Such sadness exacts a very high cost, and may be related to clinical depression.
This is not the kind of sadness that Evagrius is addressing. He seems to understand the difference between depression and sadness, and he will address the issue of anger separately. Evagrius also distinguishes between sadness and sorrow or penthos. In his Chapters on Prayer, he displays a sophisticated understanding of the necessary and healing role of genuine compunction for our sins and the sins of the world; grief over the harms we have caused and the harms we have suffered. It is especially important at the beginning of our efforts to grow spiritually.
Pray first for the gift of tears so that by means of sorrow you may soften your native rudeness. Then having confessed your sins to the Lord you will obtain pardon for them.2
Such tears aid us in developing humility and self-understanding, as well as coming to terms with the past so that it does not undermine our progress in prayer later. Tears soften our “native rudeness,” our mindlessness and indifference to suffering. These tears are not only an expression of sorrow for our own condition, but also accompany our supplications for the needs of others.
Pray with tears and your request will find a hearing. Nothing so gratifies the Lord as supplication offered in the midst of tears.3
Evagrius cautions that even here we can overdo it, becoming maudlin in our sorrow and so fixated upon it that we make no further progress in the spiritual life. Genuine sorrow is reduced to an obsession with feeling sadness. He warns that “though fountains of tears flow during your prayer do not begin to consider yourself better than others,” for then one turns “the very antidote of passion into passion . . . this madness has led any number of persons astray. They have lost sight of the purpose of their tears even while weeping for their sins.”4
Sadness can become a source of identity and even pride. We are our suffering, and we wave it like a banner! This is the shadow side of identity politics, which can become stuck in sadness as well as anger. Sadness shades into a mental obsession and a related feeling state that leads to evil because it becomes disconnected from present reality. It distorts our perception of reality and our capacity to respond to it appropriately. We might do better to translate lype as self-pity rather than sadness.
Evagrius describes this form of sadness in terms akin to nostalgia. The past never becomes the past. We continually replay the harms we’ve suffered or the “good old days” that we miss. Our ability to live in the present moment and move toward the horizon of the future is undermined by our preoccupation with the repetition of the past. Fr. Enzo Bianchi, commenting on Evagrius teaching, perceptively notes that
Lype indicates sadness or despair, but also the frustration we experience when our relationship with time is out of balance and when we are not able to live in a unified way in the time granted to us.5
Lype is a mental obsession with the past or future that cuts us off from the sacrament of the present moment, in which grace always is available. What do we do when we find ourselves stuck in this kind of self-pity?
Evagrius counsels detachment.
The man who flees from all worldy pleasures is an impregnable tower before the assaults of the demon of sadness. For sadness is a deprivation of sensible pleasure, whether actually present or only hoped for. And so if we continue to cherish some affection for anything in this world it is impossible to repel this enemy, for he lays his snares and produces sadness precisely where he sees we are particularly inclined.6
The soul which has apathia 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.7
Evagrius invites us to let go of our attachment to particular circumstances and outcomes as the source of our identity and serenity. We often do not have control over our circumstances, and life in the world is inherently transient. What is constant is our conscious contact with God in each moment. We always can lean back into God’s love and renew our interior peace.
This is the secret that St. Paul describes,
I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. – Philippians 4:12-13
Here, we can take refuge in Christ, in our spiritual practice, and in our spiritual community. We remain faithful to our commitment to them and to our self. We keep showing up. Our relationships to God and others carry us across the sea of sadness to the far shore of consolation. The great temptation of sadness is isolation and descent into the abyss of self-pity.
And, we continue to pray for the gift of tears. Here, I depart from Evagrius, who seems to see sorrow as an initial, temporary stage in the spiritual life. But as Evagrius himself teaches, “Agape is the progeny of apatheia.”8 Obsessive sadness or self-pity closes us in on our selves. Love always opens the heart to the joy and pain of the world. Apatheia (interior peace) and sorrow, the piercing of the heart called penthos, are perfectly compatible.
As Douglas Christie observes,
The early Christian monks knew that tears could help break open the soul, kindling a deeper awareness of one’s vulnerability and fragility, and one’s capacity for intimacy with God and all living beings. But opening oneself in this way required courage, a willingness to face one’s own fragility as well as the fragility and brokenness of the world. It meant refusing the temptation to evade the reality of those bonds that connect all beings to each other, and embracing the reality of a shared world. Weeping, when understood as part of a conscious spiritual practice, had the capacity to flood the soul with an awareness of the intricacy, beauty, and spiritual value of all existence.9
Penthos, the gift of tears, is both the doorway into life, and the sign that we are not only alive, but awake. Tears metabolize and integrate our experience of sorrow so that we can respond with compassion. Oddly, the cultivation of both detachment and genuine sorrow is the antidote to self-centered sadness. By fostering agape they brings us into the flow of divine mercy and makes us usable for God in the healing of the world. Our culture is drowning in self-pity. Penthos, the gift of tears, waters the seeds of love that yield new life.
What supports your capacity to realize the secret of being content in all circumstances? Are you in touch with sorrow? How can you tell the difference between sorrow and self-pity?
Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 10.
Evagrius Ponticus, Chapters on Prayer 5.
Chapters on Prayer 6.
Chapters on Prayer 7-8.
Enzo Bianchi, Words of Spirituality: Exploring the Inner Life (London: SPCK, 2002), p. 15.
Praktikos 19.
Praktikos 67.
Praktikos 81.
Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 77.