Most of us think of psychology as a uniquely modern invention, introduced by a pipe-smoking German psychoanalyst named Sigmund Freud. Today\u2019s most popular form of psychological counseling\u2014Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT\u2014owes much to Freud\u2019s discoveries.<\/p>\n
Used to treat addictions, uncontrollable anger, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other intractable mental health issues, CBT focuses on uncovering the automatic thought patterns that cause emotional upheaval and replacing them with more helpful ones.<\/p>\n
But Freud and CBT did not come out of nowhere. Seventeen hundred years ago, a desert father named Evagrius of Pontus taught young monks a version of the same approach.<\/p>\n
Born in Ibora, Pontus, in 345, Evagrius grew up near the family estate of St. Basil, one of Christianity\u2019s great theologians. Early on, Basil took notice of the brilliant young Evagrius, ordaining him a lector and inviting him into his inner circle. One of Basil\u2019s primary interests was monasticism, and he strongly encouraged his followers, including Evagrius, to become monks.<\/p>\n
Though he gave Basil\u2019s suggestion serious consideration, Evagrius was more drawn to the intellectual dynamism of Constantinople, where he had already achieved some status. City life proved too seductive, however. He became \u201ccareless, worldly, and delicate,\u201d spending hours on his physical appearance and being pampered by slaves. Whatever religious discipline he\u2019d developed under the tutelage of Basil soon faded, even as he continued to preach and teach the Gospel.<\/p>\n
Then the bottom dropped out. He fell in love with a married woman. His struggle to contain this secret passion felt doomed, and he nearly caved into despair. But a powerful, numinous dream, during which he vowed to leave Constantinople to \u201cwatch after his soul,\u201d sent him fleeing to Jerusalem. There, he found lodging on the Mount of Olives in a hospice for pilgrims established by a wealthy Roman widow called Melania.<\/p>\n
Melania had visited the hermits and monks of the Egyptian desert and had even lived there for six months with the colony at Nitria. She was liked and respected by many of the elders, who saw her as a gifted spiritual teacher in her own right.<\/p>\n
When Evagrius fell gravely ill and was sick for months, it was Melania who discovered the underlying cause. When he was drifting back to his big city ways and feeling guilty about once again failing to \u201cwatch after his soul,\u201d it was Monica who urged him to finally become a monk.<\/p>\n
Evagrius went first to Nitria, where he became a disciple to several of the holiest elders, and then moved on to the Cells, an even more austere community of desert hermits, where he stayed for the next fourteen years.<\/p>\n
To curb his passionate nature, Evagrius adopted severe ascetical practices, living on a little bread and oil, sleeping only a few hours a night, standing outside in the winter cold, and reciting a hundred prayers each day. The strict regimen calmed him, and as he became humbler and more loving his reputation for wisdom and holiness grew. According to the many who flocked to him for spiritual direction, Evagrius was able to \u201cdiscern the spirits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palladius, historian of the Desert Father era, writes, \u201cThe brothers would gather around him on Saturday and Sunday, discussing their thoughts with him throughout the night, listening to his words of encouragement until sunrise. And thus they would leave rejoicing and glorifying God, for Evagrius’ teaching was very sweet.\u201d<\/p>\n
But if he sensed a monk needed individual counseling, Evagrius would say, \u201cMy brothers, if one of you has either a profound or a troubled thought, let him be silent until the brothers depart and let him reflect on it alone with me. Let us not make him speak in front of the brothers lest a little one perish on account of his thoughts and grief swallow him at a gulp.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evagrius\u2019 gift of discernment was rooted in his view of the soul as \u201ctri-partite\u201d (having three distinct faculties). This was Plato\u2019s theory, but Evagrius thoroughly Christianized what Plato first proposed.<\/p>\n
Evagrius believed our souls have a calm reasoning part, a desiring or longing part, and an indignant or angrily reactive part, and we must learn to control these passions so that they don\u2019t control us. Our goal is to achieve apatheia,<\/em> or a state of deep interior peace, so that we are not constantly being blind-sided by our emotional dramas.<\/p>\n Though modern psychologists since the time of Freud have warned against the dangers of repressing our emotions, Evagrius\u2019 apatheia<\/em> is not a cold-hearted, robotic denial of our feelings but a steady calm that frees us to gaze upon the world with a pure form of love he called agape.<\/em><\/p>\n When we are \u201cbeside ourselves\u201d with anger or \u201cswept away\u201d by desire, then apatheia<\/em> is disrupted and agape <\/em>cannot function. They are two sides of the same coin.<\/p>\n But what triggers these angry or desiring passions in us? Evagrius\u2019 great realization was that emotions are preceded by thoughts. What if he could categorize the most disruptive of these thoughts and devise antidotes for them?<\/p>\n At the beginning of his famous treatise known as the Praktikos,<\/em> Evagius says, \u201cThere are eight general and basic categories of thoughts. . .. First is that of gluttony, then impurity [lust], avarice [greed], sadness [self-pity], anger, acedia [the sense that nothing means anything, and all action is futile], vainglory [addiction to public acclaim], and last of all, pride. It is not in our power to determine whether we are disturbed by these thoughts, but it is up to us to decide if they are to linger within us or not and whether or not they are to stir up our passions.\u201d<\/p>\n The best way to disarm these thoughts is first to reveal them to a wise elder and then to counter them with an opposing thought or action. For example, \u201cwhen the soul desires to seek after a variety of foods then it is time to afflict it with bread and water that it may learn to be grateful for a mere morsel of bread.\u201d Or, \u201canger is calmed by the singing of Psalms, by patience and almsgiving.\u201d Or, if acedia is the problem, \u201cthe monk should. . . live as if he were to die on the morrow but at the same time he should treat his body as if he were to live on with it for many years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n Evagrius learned the hard way how painful and destructive unrestrained passion can be. Elizabeth Seton learned the same lesson as a child, while grieving the loss of her mother, longing for her absent father, and trying to navigate life with an unstable, unloving stepmother.<\/p>\n Later, while in Italy as a new widow still in mourning, Elizabeth struggled with a powerful emotional fixation on the married Antonio Filicchi. Her way of coping with these overwhelming feelings was to invent her own form of stoicism. She simply wouldn\u2019t allow herself to care so deeply.<\/p>\n Evagrius\u2019 quest for apatheia<\/em> can sound somewhat like Elizabeth\u2019s quest to drift calmly above life with all its trials. But the difference lies in the motivating impulse.<\/p>\n In her early years, Elizabeth was desperate for some measure of peace, even if it meant ignoring, repressing, or denying her deepest feelings. Evagrius took the opposite approach: powerful emotions and the thoughts that precipitate them must be thoroughly examined and dealt with, preferably with the help of a wise elder, to free up the soul for genuine love. Apatheia<\/em> was another name for the simplicity of spirit Jesus was referring to in Matthew 5: \u201cBlessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.\u201d<\/p>\n Though Elizabeth was not formed in Evagrius\u2019 desert tradition, she gravitated naturally to the great truths found there. But first she had to give up her self-protective stoicism and begin identifying the thoughts that triggered emotional turmoil.<\/p>\n One thing she noticed was her habit of passing harsh judgments on others. As the disillusioning difficulties of starting her new community of Sisters in the remote countryside of Maryland began to mount, she realized her judgmental thoughts were rooted in pride. She saw herself as wiser, more virtuous, and more spiritually adept than most, yet the fact was she was \u201cmore willful than she\u2019d believed, less able to \u2018look up\u2019 than she\u2019d imagined, and more often deprived of a sense of God\u2019s presence than she\u2019d hoped.\u201d<\/p>\n How to counter such judgmentalism? \u201cNo more would she allow herself to close the door against those she found uncongenial.\u201d In the process of opening her heart to people who irritated her, she became more sympathetic and affectionate. As she wrote, \u201cI am not enabled as Jesus Christ to do miracles for others, but I may constantly find occasions of rendering them good offices and exercising kindness and good will toward them.\u201d Like Evagrius, she came to believe that \u201cconstant attentiveness to God and others would remake a person from the inside out.\u201d<\/p>\n The Evagrian scholar Richard Bamberger says, \u201cThe method of observation employed by Evagrius is as close to a scientific psychology as clinicians are now able to establish.\u201d But unlike contemporary Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which strives to help its clients function better and feel happier about themselves, \u201cfor Evagrius such observation was a form of searching for God.\u201d<\/p>\n As it surely was for Elizabeth also.<\/p>\n PAULA HUSTON<\/strong>is a National Endowment of the Arts Fellow and the author of two novels and eight books of spiritual nonfiction. Her short stories have honored by Best American Short Stories and her essays have appeared in the annual Best Spiritual Writing anthology. Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, Huston is a convert to Catholicism. In 1999, she became a Camaldolese Benedictine Oblate and is a lay member of New Camaldoli Hermitage\u2019s community of monks in Big Sur, Calif. She\u2019s also a former president of the\u00a0<\/em>Chrysostom Society<\/em><\/a>, a national organization of literary Christian writers.<\/em><\/p>\n