Dreams in Evagrius Ponticus' Life and teaching

Abstract

There are few late antiquity authors who pay more attention than Evagrius todreams. For him, visions and dreams are not a way to prophesy the future or tokeep in contact with the dead. They are basically a way to know oneself and thestate of ones own spiritual life. After contextualizing the theories on dreams in themost significant authors of that period, I discuss the place that visions and dreamsoccupied in the Evagrian corpus, describing their mechanisms as a complex operationbetween passions, memory and the influence of demons.