The Teaching on the Thoughts

More than any other theme, the Apophthegmata put into Poemen’s mouth a teaching on the logismoi — the “thoughts,” the suggestions and impulses that rise in the mind — and on the watchfulness (nepsis) and custody of the heart by which the monk meets them. This file gathers his sayings on how a thought becomes a passion, on the difference between the first suggestion and consent, on cutting the thought off at once, and on the humility and fear of God that must be “as the breath which comes out of the nostrils.” It sets Poemen’s practical, unsystematic counsel beside the schematic eight-logismoi analysis of Evagrius of Pontus, and carries the systematic treatment forward to Section 06.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; master of discernment)

The Desert Science of the Thoughts

The desert fathers developed, out of long experience in the cell, a remarkably precise psychology of the inner life. Its central category is the logismos — the “thought,” but more exactly the suggestion, image, or impulse that arises unbidden in the mind and presses toward the soul’s consent (Harmless 2004, 322–343; Ward 1984). The monk’s warfare is not primarily against external acts but against these inner movements, caught and dealt with at their source. The discipline of attending to them is nepsis, watchfulness or sobriety, and its aim is the custody of the heart — the guarding of the inmost self from which, in the desert’s biblical reading, the passions and the actions both proceed (cf. Proverbs 4:23; Matthew 15:19; Ward 1984; Gould 1993).

Poemen’s dossier is saturated with this teaching, and it is the matter for which he is most often quoted in the later ascetic tradition. His counsel is not a theory but a method: how to recognize a thought, how not to let it take root, when to resist and when to disregard, and what disposition of soul makes the whole struggle possible. The sayings are occasional and concrete; they do not build a system, and that is itself characteristic — Poemen teaches the practice of watchfulness rather than its anatomy (Regnault 1999; Harmless 2004).

From Suggestion to Passion

The fathers distinguished stages by which a thought, if not resisted, grows into a passion and finally into an act. The progression — roughly from the first suggestion (prosbolē), through coupling or entertaining the thought, to consent, and on to passion and habit — was analyzed with increasing precision in the desert and was given its classic later schematization by writers like John Climacus (Ward 1984; on the later systematization, see St. John Climacus). The crucial moral hinge is the difference between the first involuntary suggestion, for which the monk is not culpable, and the consent of the will, by which the thought is made his own. The first cannot always be prevented; the second can and must be refused (Gould 1993; Harmless 2004, 322–343).

Poemen’s teaching turns on exactly this hinge. He counsels that the thought must be met at its arising, before it can be entertained and before consent is given — that the decisive moment is the first one. The whole point of watchfulness is to be present at that moment rather than to wake up only when the thought has already become a passion. His famous practical images all serve this single insight: deal with the thought now, at once, while it is still only a thought.

Cut the Thought Off at Once

The most consistent counsel in Poemen’s teaching on the logismoi is immediacy: the thought is to be cut off at its first appearance, not negotiated with. He likens the thoughts to a snake or scorpion shut up in a jar: in time they will surely weaken and die — but the man who is patient and does not give them entry will be rid of them, whereas to take the lid off, to handle and entertain them, is to be stung (Poemen, on the thoughts; trans. Ward 1984; Regnault 1999). The image teaches both resistance and patience: one neither consents to the thought nor despairs at its presence, but contains it and waits.

A second image is water. Poemen uses the figure of water to teach that the nature of the soul, like water, is soft and yielding and takes the shape of what acts on it, so that a hard and persistent thing — a constant drop, the discipline of the word of God, the steady refusal of the thought — will in time wear down even what seems hardest in the heart (Poemen; trans. Ward 1984; Regnault 1999). The thoughts, like water, are not overcome by a single violent effort but by steady, patient guarding.

To this Poemen joins the indispensable disposition without which the whole struggle collapses into self-reliance. Humility and the fear of God, he says, must be “as the breath which comes out of his nostrils” — that is, as constant, as involuntary, and as necessary to the life of the soul as breathing is to the body (Poemen; trans. Ward 1984; Regnault 1999). The watchfulness over the thoughts is not a technique of self-mastery but the labor of a humble and God-fearing heart, kept up as ceaselessly as the breath. Where humility lapses, the guarding of the heart becomes pride, and the demons, the fathers say, are only too glad to supply “spiritual” thoughts to a proud watchman.

The Word and the Deed

Poemen guards his teaching on the thoughts against a particular danger: that it should become mere talk about the inner life rather than the doing of it. His most quoted saying makes the point with a homely image: “A man who teaches without doing what he teaches is like a spring which gives drink and refreshes everyone and is not able to purify itself” (Poemen 25; trans. Ward 1984). The teaching on watchfulness is only as good as the watchfulness practiced; the word that does not pass into the deed cleanses others but leaves the speaker unclean. This is why Poemen’s logismoi teaching is delivered as counsel for practice and never as a doctrine to be admired — its whole value is in being done.

He guards it also against the opposite danger of restless self-scrutiny. Poemen counsels the monk to attend to his own thoughts and not to busy himself with the failings of others; vigilance over the heart is inward, and “vigilance, self-knowledge and discernment are the guides of the soul” (Poemen 35; trans. Ward 1984; Gould 1993). The watchman watches himself.

Poemen and Evagrius: Practice and System

Behind the desert teaching on the logismoi stands the figure who gave it its most influential systematic form: Evagrius of Pontus (c. 345–399). Evagrius, a learned monk of the Egyptian desert, organized the inner warfare into a scheme of eight kinds of evil thought — gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness (lypē), anger, acedia (listlessness or “the noonday demon”), vainglory, and pride — each analyzed as to its mechanism and its remedy (Harmless 2004, 322–343, on Evagrius and the eight logismoi; this scheme is the ancestor of the later Western “seven deadly sins”). Evagrius’s treatment is analytic, ordered, and intellectual: a map of the passions and a method for each.

Poemen’s teaching stands in a deliberate and instructive contrast. It is practical, occasional, and unsystematic: he gives no list of eight, no taxonomy, no theory of the soul’s parts. Where Evagrius anatomizes, Poemen prescribes — the snake in the jar, the wearing water, the breath of humility. The two are not opposed; they are complementary registers of the same desert wisdom, and the later tradition (Climacus, the Philokalia) wove them together (Harmless 2004; Ward 1984; on the later synthesis, St. John Climacus). But the difference is real and worth marking: the Apophthegmata preserve Poemen as the master of the lived discipline of the thoughts, the elder who tells a particular monk what to do with the particular thought in front of him, rather than the theorist who maps the field. This is part of why his sayings travelled so far and were so loved: they are usable.

A concrete instance shows the difference in operation. The Apophthegmata record that a brother came to Poemen troubled by the thoughts that warfare stirred in him, and Poemen, rather than diagnosing which of the passions was at work, simply directed him back to the patient guarding of the heart and to the company of those who would help him bear the struggle — counsel addressed to this monk’s situation rather than to the abstract anatomy of the logismos (Ward 1984; Gould 1993). Where the brother brought him a question that invited speculation, Poemen characteristically deflected it toward practice: he is reported to have said that the thoughts are not to be debated but watched, and that the monk’s business is to attend to his own work and let the thoughts pass without entertaining them (Ward 1984; Regnault 1999). The contrast with Evagrius is not one of disagreement about the reality of the inner warfare — on that they are at one — but of register: the analyst maps, the elder steers.

It should be noted, finally, that the desert’s own attitude toward Evagrian intellectualism was not uniformly warm — the Apophthegmata themselves record a certain suspicion of “much speaking” and of learning that outruns humility (Ward 1984; Harmless 2004) — and Poemen’s plain, practical counsel belongs to that more reticent strain of the tradition. The systematic teaching on nepsis and the passions of which these sayings are the raw material is developed in its own place (see The Thoughts and Watchfulness).

The Heart Guarded

What holds the whole of Poemen’s teaching on the thoughts together is the biblical theme of the heart. The desert read the heart (kardia) as the center of the person, the source from which both the passions and the prayer of the soul arise, and therefore the place to be guarded above all (cf. Proverbs 4:23, “keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life”; Matthew 12:34–35; Ward 1984; Gould 1993). To guard the thoughts is to guard the heart; to guard the heart is to keep the place where God is sought. In this Poemen’s teaching looks forward to the whole later tradition of the prayer of the heart and of watchful, unceasing prayer (see The Jesus Prayer). The desert science of the thoughts is, at bottom, the negative side of a single positive aim: to keep the heart clear for God.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The Poemen series on the thoughts: the snake/scorpion in the jar; the image of water; humility and the fear of God “as the breath which comes out of his nostrils”; Poemen 25, the spring that cannot purify itself; Poemen 35, vigilance, self-knowledge, and discernment.)
Harmless, William, S.J. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Chapter on Evagrius of Pontus and the eight logismoi, pp. 322–343; the desert psychology of the thoughts; the contrast of practice and system.)
Regnault, Lucien, O.S.B. The Day-to-Day Life of the Desert Fathers in Fourth-Century Egypt. Trans. Étienne Poirier, Jr. Petersham: St. Bede’s Publications, 1999. (Synthesis of the Poemen material on the thoughts and watchfulness.)
Gould, Graham. The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (The logismoi, custody of the heart, and self-knowledge in the Apophthegmata.)
Holy Scripture: Proverbs 4:23; Matthew 12:34–35; 15:19 (the heart as the source from which the passions proceed).