Evagrius Ponticus

Evagrius Ponticus left a brilliant career in the cities of the East to become a monk in the Egyptian desert, where he became the great psychologist of the spiritual life — naming the “thoughts” that beset the soul and charting the path to inner freedom.

He taught that prayer begins low and tender: “Pray first for the gift of tears,” a holy sorrow that softens the hard heart and opens it to mercy.

From there it rises to what he called pure prayer — “the laying aside of thoughts” — a bare, imageless communion with God. “If you truly pray,” he wrote, “you are a theologian.”