Talking Back (Antirrhetikos): A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons (Cistercian Studies)
Language: English
Published by Cistercian Publications September 2009, 2009
- Softcover
- New

Seller: Eighth Day Books, LLC, Wichita, KS, U.S.A.Eighth Day Books, LLC
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Condition: New
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Intense conflict with demons, especially in the form of thoughts, lay at the heart of early Egyptian monasticism. 'Opposition from demons,' writes professor of Religious Studies David Brakke, 'provided the resistance that the monk needed to form himself into a person of integrity.' In Talking Back Evagrius couples the thoughts, circumstances, and anxieties the demons use to assail the monk with relevant passages from the Bible that contradict demonic suggestion. Arranged in eight books according to the eight primary demons-gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride-Antirrhetikos is modeled on the monastic tradition of antirrhesis, the practice of talking back. Evagrius cites King David and Jesus as the biblical founders of the tradition-David directed many of his Psalms against his persecutors and enemies (whom Evagrius equates with the demons) and Jesus used Scripture to respond to the temptations of Satan in the desert. Though Talking Back may strike the modern reader as an odd sort of book, the anxieties that troubled these monastic pioneers are altogether human. They worried about the effect of asceticism on their bodies, about the condition of their cells, about the health of their families. They missed relatives, feared going mad and growing old. Their struggle to attend to the power of thoughts is a necessary corrective to the modern affliction of the undisciplined mind. 190 pp.…
Seller Inventory # 57214
- Title
- Talking Back (Antirrhetikos): A Monastic Handbook for Combating Demons (Cistercian Studies)
- Author
- EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS, EVAGRIOS PONTICUS, DAVID BRAKKE (TRANS)
- Publisher
- Cistercian Publications September 2009
- Publication year
- 2009
- Condition
- New
- Binding
- Paper Back
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0879073292
- ISBN 13
- 9780879073299
- Seller catalogs
- Desert Tradition/Secondary Sources
How did the monks of the Egyptian desert fight against the demons that attacked them with tempting thoughts? How could Christians resist the thoughts of gluttony, fornication, or pride that assailed them and obstructed their contemplation of God? According to Evagrius of Pontus (345 '399), one of the greatest spiritual directors of ancient monasticism, the monk should talk back to demons with relevant passages from the Bible. His book Talking Back (Antirrhêtikos) lists over 500 thoughts or circumstances in which the demon-fighting monk might find himself, along with the biblical passages with which the monk should respond. It became one of the most popular books among the ascetics of Late Antiquity and the Byzantine East, but until now the entire text had not been translated into English. From Talking Back we gain a better understanding of Evagrius's eight primary demons: gluttony, fornication, love of money, sadness, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. We can explore a central aspect of early monastic spirituality, and we get a glimpse of the temptations and anxieties that the first desert monks faced.
David Brakke is professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences of Indiana University. He studied ancient Christianity at Harvard Divinity School and Yale University. Brakke is the author of Athanasius and Asceticism and Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity, and he edits the Journal of Early Christian Studies.
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