Negligence as the Cause of the Fall of Souls in Origen and its Reinterpretation by Evagrius Ponticus

RUBÉN PERETÓ RIVAS

Platonic Inquiries. Selected Papers from the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies

The Prometheus Trust

Lugar: Westbury; Año: 2017; p. 233 - 242

Studies by leading Origenists like Henry Crouzel and Marguerite Harl, show that, for the Alexandrian author, satiety would be the cause of the fall of the souls from the original unit, a subject that Origins receives from the Neoplatonic tradition. Evagrius of Pontus, the Egyptian desert monk who writes extensively during the second half of the fourth century, is formed in the school of Origen but reinterprets some of the key points of his teaching according to their own philosophy. In his Kephalaia Gnostica introduces the concept of negligence to refer to the cause that originated the movement, not the fall, from the Unit. The purpose of this paper is discuss the concept of negligence in Evagrius of Pontus and its ability or effectiveness to cause the movement that ended with the fall of souls. My hypothesis holds that this negligence may be understood as acedia, a concept that Evagrius use to indicate a disorder of spiritual kind. In this way, the acedia is located in a new horizon of understanding and acquires a new weight and importance.