Stuart Parsons: The Coherence of Evagrius’ Scholia on Proverbs

Scholarship has not yet discovered the structure of Evagrius’ Scholia on Proverbs at a detailed level. Indeed, Paul Géhin, one of the foremost Evagrius scholars of the twentieth century and editor of our standard Greek text of the Scholia, finds Evagrius’ selection of proverbs upon which to comment to be curious. But this curiosity is explained by an ascetic-salvific, conceptual structure that underlies the Scholia, determining not only the commentary but even Evagrius’ very selection of individual proverbs, a structure owing not as much to a unique philosophical system encoded in his mystical writings, but rather to more widely held views and to his exegetical convictions recorded in his Gnostikos.