Born c. 345 in the Roman province of Helenopontus on the southern coast of the Black Sea, Evagrius was a gifted Christian intellectual who, following a personal crisis, exchanged a high-flying career at the imperial court for the rigours of monastic life in the Egyptian desert. A protégé of some of the greatest Christian luminaries of his age, including Basil of Caesarea and Gregory Nazianzus in his homeland, Melania the Elder and Rufinus of Aquileia in Jerusalem, and the two Macarii in Egypt, he became in the desert a sought-after teacher, renowned for his insight into the soul's interior dynamics as it seeks to become established in health and ascend and expand into union with God. As well as receiving visitors every day, who came from far and wide to learn from him, he committed his teachings to writing, and as a result they became foundational to the theory and practice of Christian monastic asceticism, psychology and spirituality both in and beyond both the Latin and the Byzantine worlds.

The Gnostic Trilogy (GT) occupies a privileged place in Evagrius’ writings in that it expounds a complete curriculum of Christian life, epitomised by the monastic life and comprising the embodied pursuit of wisdom in its ethical, contemplative and unitive dimensions. Underpinning that curriculum is his unpacking, informed by a deep knowledge of both patristic tradition and pagan philosophy, of the psychology, anthropology, and perhaps also cosmology, depending on how we read him, that he took to be implicit in the Christian scriptures. But Evagrius presents his readers with an array of challenges, of which the most obvious is his preferred literary form, that of the kephalaion. As Young et al. explain, while the word is standardly rendered either as ‘chapter’ or as ‘sentence’, in the case of Evagrius neither is accurate or adequate (p. 1). Rather than sequential divisions of the text, his kephalaia consist almost entirely of ‘short, interconnected, multi-referential, and often deliberately puzzling statements’ (p. 1). They are arranged in patterns that differ from one volume to the next and are to be read ‘slowly and repeatedly’, ‘not[ing] relationships’ and ‘draw[ing] cross comparisons, including with other writings’ (p. 3). Readers are advised – rightly, in my experience – that ‘it is not unusual to need several minutes – or even years – before beginning to understand a single kephalaion’ (p. 20). All three volumes of the GT, Praktikos, Gnostikos and Kephalaia Gnostika, are composed in kephalaia, the Praktikos having 100, the Gnostikos 50, and the Kephalaia Gnostika 600 but with a twist. Reflecting Evagrius’ statement in the prologue that he has ‘concealed some things and obscured others’, so as not to ‘cast pearls before swine’, although these things will be clear to those who follow the same path (p. 29), the kephalaia tend to become briefer and more opaque as the trilogy progresses.

Another challenge involved in reading Evagrius is the impact upon his corpus of his condemnation for heresy in the sixth century, along with Origen and Didymus the Blind. While some of his works survived in the original Greek, a few under his own name, others attributed to more respectable writers (chiefly Nilus of Ancyra), some survived only in translation into the languages of churches that did not recognise the condemnation. The fate of the GT epitomises the resulting complexities of transmission. While the Praktikos survived in Greek under Evagrius’ own name and is widely and securely attested, only 60% of the Gnostikos survives in Greek, and only 25% of the Kephalaia Gnostika. All three volumes have been preserved complete in more than one Syriac and Armenian translation, but not without further complications; for example, they rarely appear in the same manuscript and never adjacent, and the translations show significant variation.

The present volume, the fruit of more than a decade's work by a team of leading Evagrius scholars headed by Young, provides a scholarly English translation, sensitive to Evagrius’ technical vocabulary (another challenge facing his readers) of the GT, using the Syriac versions to supplement the surviving Greek. A concise but thorough introduction begins by outlining the trilogy's structure, aim, intended audience and pedagogical principles. While it is clear that Evagrius intended the three volumes to comprise a trilogy, there is no evidence of his having given it a title, and so the decision to name it the Gnostic Trilogy was taken by Young et al. in recognition of the fact that its aim is ‘to prepare the reader's mind for gnōsis’ (p. 2), understood in its biblical sense and echoing Clement of Alexandria's use of the term gnōstikos for ‘Christian teachers of the non-dualist philosophy that he thought could lead to union with the divine’ (p. 3). A description of Evagrius’ education and approach to biblical exegesis is followed by an overview of his writings and of the manuscript tradition, text and ancient translations of the trilogy, then a more detailed consideration of each volume. A section on the different Syriac translations summarises the results of comparing each to the surviving Greek witnesses and each other, with one table showing the authors’ reasons for concluding the Syriac translations to be the work of at least four, but no more than six, different translators, and another table showing the manuscript witnesses to the Syriac versions. The introduction concludes by explaining how references are cited and how the authors approached translating and commenting on the text, and offering guidance on how readers might approach the trilogy. A list of general abbreviations follows.

Both the Praktikos and the Gnostikos survive in three Syriac versions, known as S1, S2 and S3, while the Kephalaia Gnostika survives only in S1 and S2; but because the Praktikos and its prologue are securely attested in Greek, the authors have translated only the Greek text and one Syriac version: in the case of the prologue, S2, and of the main text, S1. In the case of the Gnostikos, they translate the surviving Greek and all three Syriac versions, and with the Kephalaia Gnostika, the surviving Greek and both S1 and S2. The translation is accompanied by a concise commentary that, rather than propose interpretations, is aimed at helping readers to study the GT for themselves and developing their understanding of it (p. 16); similarly, references to pertinent biblical, patristic or pagan sources are suggestive rather than exhaustive.

The volume concludes with a concise bibliography of secondary sources (a more comprehensive bibliography of Evagrius, regularly updated, is available at https://evagriusponticus.net/bibliography.htm), a bibliography of select writings of Evagrius, a table of the GT's quotations and direct allusions (apart from three references to Aristotle, all are scriptural), and tables of cross-references to scripture, other patristic and pagan authors and Evagrius’ own writings. There is a comprehensive index.

The book is well produced and edited, with no typos or other errors that I could see. The translation and commentary are clearly laid out, with each kephalaion shown first in translation from the Greek where applicable and then from the accompanying Syriac version or versions, followed by the commentary where provided. While in order to limit the length and price of the book, the corresponding Greek and Syriac texts are not included, they have been made available by the authors at J. Kalvesmaki's Guide to Evagrius Ponticus website (http://evagriusponticus.net).

This is a work of monumental scholarship that for the first time since late antiquity makes the GT available as Evagrius intended, together with the supporting material needed to start navigating the various challenges it presents. It is an invaluable resource both for experienced scholars of Evagrius and for those encountering him for the first time; and given the ever-increasing scholarly interest in Evagrius and the importance of the GT, it is extremely welcome and timely.