In the first column of Material Mysticism we looked at the way the contemplative wisdom of Evagrius of Pontus was visualized by his followers. However much Evagrius emphasized imageless prayer, his teaching still took the form of images. Evagrius counsels that we should “be deaf and dumb at the time of prayer,” but not blind. “Keep an eye out for the grievous assaults of the devil,” he advises. “Give thought to a way of putting an end to your servitude to him.” Such life-giving thoughts resulted in wall paintings that enhanced spartan monastic dwellings, paintings that assisted monks in overcoming the eight deadly thoughts.

But to see Evagrius’s mystical method visualized, we need not limit ourselves to the sands of Egypt, where faded images of monastic combat with demons barely survive. We who are tantalized by ever-present screens whose customized seductions slip past our defences require more than poorly preserved wall paintings to capture our attention. The same internet that has unfurled an unprecedented barrage of distractions also gives us access to marvellously detailed reproductions of Christianity’s greatest monuments. With our digital illnesses also come digital cures. Thanks to this access, there is nothing to keep us from seeing Evagrius’s method materialized in the sumptuous monuments of Florence, that central city in the history of art.

Renaissance Florence was once seen as the harbinger of godless modernity. “The dike of faith was going down as the sea of rationalism burst through,” historians confidently argued. But Renaissance art history in more recent decades discerned in this period not just secular vision but miraculous icons and indefatigably devotional art. It was an ancient Christian hermit like Evagrius, after all, who inaugurated Christian Florence in the first place. Legend relates that the hermit San Miniato prayed on a hill above the city until he was marked for death by Emperor Decius. When the beasts refused to devour him in the amphitheatre, San Miniato was beheaded. He promptly picked up his head and returned to his hermitage, where his bones remain to this day. Such headless saints, including St. Denis in Paris or St. Catherine of Alexandria, are a visceral reminder that Christianity cannot be rationally contained.

When visitors to Florence make their way up the hill to the basilica of San Miniato al Monte for its unrivalled view, they are—whether they realize it or not—ascending contemplative heights. And when they descend back into the city to enter its central monument, the Baptistery of San Giovanni, there they encounter ancient Christian wisdom again. The baptistery is Florence’s visual hub, from which its other monuments extend as splendid, but still dependent, spokes. If the Evagrian wall paintings of Egypt could assist us in our spiritual quest, then the baptistery’s magnificent mosaics, recently restored and more resplendent than ever, can help us even more.

The Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence

The mosaic ceiling of San Giovanni, into whose glow baptized Florentine infants have long been welcomed, was created by a series of mostly anonymous artisans from the 1220s to the 1270s, with the final touches complete by the year 1300. Looking up—just as Dante, who was present at the dedication that year, would have—we see the face of the resurrected Christ displaying his wounds. To the risen Christ’s left is a deliberately chaotic, appropriately marginalized image of hell, with a variety of demons feasting on human prey.

Jacob Needleman—channelling the wisdom of Evagrius as represented by the elusive modern desert mystic Father Sylvan—explains the demonic this way:

As stated previously, we need not choose between understanding demons as fallen angels or as destructive thought patterns. Both registers are required. If the wall paintings in Egypt innocently visualized these thoughts as bears or snakes, the Florentine mosaicists by contrast, no doubt inspiring Dante, were not content with zoological metaphors.

Ironically enough, the mosaics of the baptistery are truer to the visceral reality of what Evagrius actually says than are the paintings made by his Egyptian monastic confrères. In Florence, the battle with thoughts grows much more intense. Evagrius writes “concerning the serpents that appear flying in the air and also make themselves come out of the walls”; here in the walls and ceiling of the baptistery, this happens quite literally. In the main scene of hell, the demon that Evagrius says “lands on the shoulders and neck” is conveniently depicted, along with the one who “scratches the ears,” “punches the nose,” and worse.

Hell has become an unfashionable topic, but we do well to meditate on it still. It is Evagrius himself, not to mention Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, who expressly advises that we “think of what awaits sinners: the shame before God and Christ himself . . . and all the places of punishment: the fire in the next world, the worm that does not die.” Even if these thinkers don’t consider either the worms or the fire to be eternal, they still advise we ponder them. This is not so that we will fret about the future or weigh ourselves down with anxiety, but so that we will make better use of the present, skillfully identifying that which prevents us from inhabiting it.

These directives are anything but morbid. In his book Dante and Byzantium, E.D. Karampetsos makes a very Evagrian point about the San Giovanni mosaics: “Hell is totally insignificant in comparison to the rest of God’s universe!” Later generations, by comparison, appear to have lost such restraint. In Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century dome paintings just across the Paradiso at Florence’s main cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, all hell breaks loose. What was limited to one small area in the baptistery encircles the entire dome.

It is fitting that San Giovanni’s contained depiction of hell takes place in a baptistery, for Evagrius’s prayers against the deadly thoughts draw on the ancient Christian rites of baptism, which came complete with exorcisms. But not all angels, of course, are fallen. The assistance of angels is clear in Evagrius’s texts, and in the Florence mosaics as well. Evagrius calls his way of prayer “the angelic way.” He writes, “Through the insights of admonition the holy angels purify us from vice and make us dispassionate.” The baptistery mosaics dramatically depict such assistance. The forces of evil that beset us are beyond our control and therefore require forces beyond our control to master. Angels may sadly bar the gates of Eden, but they are also eager to assist us now. The fact that the particular rank of angels depicted below (drawing on Dionysius the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy) is called Virtues nicely illustrates the process of virtues casting out corresponding vice.

But the ever-practical Evagrius does much more than summon angelic assistance. If Christ resisted Satan in the desert three times using Scripture, Evagrius turns Christ’s method into a full-scale manual, offering hundreds and hundreds of scriptural antidotes for every imaginable spinoff of the eight deadly thoughts. Evagrius does this, in step with the ancient Christian tradition, by allegorizing the Bible. The text becomes not just a historical record but a practical psychological guide.

For example, in his first entry for countering acedia (listlessness, despair), Evagrius urges endurance in everyday labour by citing Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, until you return to the earth from which you were taken. For you are earth, and to earth you shall return.” In the same way, the Baptistery of San Giovanni typologically lays out the Old Testament, sandwiching the life of Christ between scenes from Genesis and the life of John the Baptist. Within this complex interplay, we find Evagrius’s cure for acedia beautifully visualized in the upper left. “Perseverance is the cure for acedia, along with the execution of all tasks with great attention,” he writes. “Set a measure for yourself in every work and do not let up until you have completed it.”

The Florentine mosaics also give us a picture of what Evagrian dispassion looks like. “Passion” may be uncritically celebrated in our culture, but “just as often we fail with—no, because of—passion,” claims Ryan Holiday, bringing Evagrian sensibilities into the present. The baptistery visualizes Evagrian apatheia in the form of the three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, a Christian equivalent to the Three Pure Ones in Taoist iconography. These three figures are more than just biblical illustration. They are pictures of those who have attained apatheia, and their children, seated on their lap, are not just the patriarch’s descendants. From an Evagrian perspective, they are the children of apatheia, agape. In addition, their gripping toes remind us that it is Christ accomplishing agape through them, as they resemble the same gripping toes in the risen Christ nearby.

As with the demons, we need not view these images only as future states; we can view them as a potential present state as well. The doorway in the mosaic, accordingly, becomes the doorway to one’s prayer closet, or to the present moment itself. Yes, it is true, the angel’s banner (cited by Dante) reads, “Come, blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the earth” (Matthew 25:34). But that kingdom, though then, is also now. “The intelligible wall is the impassivity (apatheia) of the soul, that which demons cannot reach,” says Evagrius in the Kephalaia Gnostika.

In addition, the phantasmagoric plants around the patriarchs, each of them unique, are a reminder that Evagrius’s is anything but a purely “inward” spirituality. As C.S. Lewis reminds us in The Great Divorce (cited by my colleague Richard Gibson in a recent lecture):

Or, as Joseph Ratzinger put it, “One is in heaven to the degree that one is in Christ.”

The baptistery therefore summons us to transformation by grace, while proclaiming that the one who transforms us has a face himself. Indeed, the image of the logos incarnandus (the word to be incarnated) above the risen Jesus reminds us that there was never a time when his face was not anticipated. Evagrius, we must remember, is a Nicene thinker through and through. For him, there is no such thing as time without Christ. In the same way, the upper Christ holds an open book that says CREAVI DEU[S] ANGELOS—that is, “God created angels.” This eternal face, not an ethereal stupor or blissful haze, is the aim of Christian contemplation. A disciple of Evagrius, John Cassian, insists that solitude’s purpose is pursuit of “the glory of the face of Christ . . . the image of his splendor.”

But to stop with the possibility of depiction would insufficiently honour the Evagrian heritage; still less would it do justice to the necessary range of Christian image theory. We must go higher still, or deeper, as it were. The only way such sumptuous Florentine mosaics can be authorized, if we are to be informed by Christian desert mysticism, is to also insist on their limitation. Dante certainly knew as much:

The most important moment in the mosaic cycle is therefore not in the mosaics themselves, nor even in its luminous background gold, but in the lantern above the program that is apophatic black by night, and by day permits light to flood the cycle. Evagrius insisted that the soul illuminated in prayer “resembles a sapphire; it is as clear and bright as the very sky.” He left the matter open as to whether this light is from God or the soul. Either way, it is a gift of God’s grace that makes the nous (mind) shine like a lamp that “absorbs the holy Light (i.e., God).” Seven times in his writings Evagrius references this mysterious light. After progress in prayer, “imperturbability of heart will arise for you and in prayer you will see your mind like a star.” The octagonal ceiling of the baptistery even resembles a modern stop sign, reminding us of Evagrius’s demand that we give the cerebral engines a rest. Ultimately, the elimination of thought is necessary so that “at the time of prayer [we] see the light of the Holy Trinity.”

In sum, should we allow it to, the Baptistery of San Giovanni uses images to cast out images, enabling the identification of our own deadly thoughts. Hell must be seen to be transcended. The result is the apatheia that leads to agape, an agape emanating from the gracious face of Christ. Evagrius permits us to see the city of Florence, and maybe even the entire history of art that it generated, as a weapon in our arsenal against the demons, an aid toward mystical encounter, a tool for transcendence that is never an end in itself. Those who made the baptistery likely had some of this mystical counsel in mind. There is therefore nothing to prevent us from using the monument, more accessible on our screens than in person, in the same way today.

But to end there might be too exalted. Yes, it is true that the monuments of Florence have been so beautifully re-created that we can not only look at them but even walk through them digitally. Interest in digital re-creations of art-historical monuments has been enormous, sometimes accompanied by the hope that such technology can rescue the humanities from irrelevance. But we do well to be cautious. In the re-creations of Renaissance Florence in Assassin’s Creed II, one can go on a quattrocento killing spree (sprees chillingly enacted with more efficient weaponry in actual American life); but one cannot repent and be baptized, for in this admittedly impressive video game—I’m sorry to report—the Baptistery of San Giovanni, still less the wisdom of Evagrius of Pontus, is nowhere to be found.