Evagrius correlates the emotional realm of human beings to the three logismoi of sadness, of anger, and of acedia.
“Sadness can sometimes arise when a person’s wishes go unfulfilled. Sometimes it also appears in the company of anger. If it arises as a consequence of needs and wishes that have not been met, it usually occurs in this way: such persons think first of all of their homes, of their parents, or of the life they led before. If they put up no resistance to this thought, or willingly go along with it or give into pleasures, even if only in their imagination, they are completely overcome.
But in the end the thoughts they delighted in fade away, and they sink into melancholy. Their present circumstances prevent their thoughts from becoming reality. And so these unhappy persons are troubled insofar as they have abandoned themselves to such thoughts.”
Evagrius distinguishes sadness (lype) from sorrow (penthos). While sorrow is an essential part of human maturation, as grief-work, as a processing of experiences of loss, sadness as self-pity is unfruitful. People take refuge in self-pity when their wishes are not fulfilled. Sadness often conceals exaggerated wishes of life. Because I am not the greatest, I don’t even enter the struggle and take flight into sadness.
Sorrow can weep. Its tears can soften the hardened soul and make it fruitful. The tears of sorrow can be transformed into tears of joy. Sadness cannot weep; it is whiny; it bathes in its own self-pity.
For Evagrius sadness consists above all in fruitless clinging to the past. One continually imagines the feelings one had before, back home with one’s parents, the security, the freedom from cares, etc. Though it sometimes can be good to busy oneself with one’s past, to assimilate it and sense in it the roots of the present, it doesn’t get us very far when we are constantly looking into the past and longing for what it held.
For Evagrius it’s especially dangerous to flee from present reality into the past, which is gone once and for all and will never again be real. We can, certainly, learn a great deal for the present from the past. But when it turns into flight from the present, the past prevents us from facing today’s tasks and coming to maturity by working on them.
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
