So many publications in the study of Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) from the last seven decades could be called landmarks that it may sound trite to bestow that status on yet another, but The Gnostic Trilogy undoubtedly deserves it. Evagrius, late ancient Christianity’s greatest theorist of the monastic life, wanted his works Praktikos, Gnostikos, and Kephalaia Gnostica to form a set (in that order) that would guide the reader from resisting evil thoughts and passions as a practitioner to contemplating the visible and invisible worlds and guiding others as a knower. Since antiquity, however, few readers have had the opportunity to fulfill that intention, primarily thanks to Evagrius’s condemnation at the Second Council of Constantinople (553). Scribes within the Roman empire stopped copying his works or gave them the names of other authors or revised them to make them more “orthodox”; those living to the east of the empire and copying in Syriac, Armenian, or Sogdian had more freedom but often depended on problematic Greek texts. As a result, only the Praktikos survives completely in Greek, and serious translation and study of all three works require navigating several late ancient Syriac translations of varying accuracy.

Robin Darling Young, Joel Kalvesmaki, Columba Stewart, Charles Stang, and Luke Dysinger have given Anglophone readers the best opportunity to study the trilogy as Evagrius intended, even those who do not know Greek or Syriac. Because they have translated both the surviving Greek and one or more Syriac versions of each work, readers can examine variations and consider what Evagrius may have written (which may not always be in the Greek) and what scribes and translators made of it. Moreover, the Syriac translations are valuable in themselves, for it is their Evagrius who shaped the spirituality of Syrian monasticism. In addition to a clear introduction, the translating team has annotated the texts with references primarily to other Evagrian works, but also to significant Christian and philosophical literature and to some essential scholarship. Useful indexes complete the book. Readers have been given the tools to craft their own intellectual journeys through these remarkable and enigmatic pieces of Christian asceticism spirituality, and theology. The translators deserve gratitude and congratulations for a landmark achievement in the study of Evagrius, monasticism, and late ancient Christian philosophy.