Evagrius analysed the interior life the way a naturalist analyses a habitat. What he studies are logismoi, thoughts, and his crucial move is to distinguish the thought that arrives from the consent that follows it. A thought is not a sin. It presents itself, and the question is whether the monk engages with it, and it is the engaging that can be worked on.
He identified eight of them and described each with a clinician's eye: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory and pride. The account of acedia is the one that has never been bettered. It arrives around the fourth hour, he says, makes the sun seem barely to move, makes the monk stare out of the window, count how long until the next meal, remember his family, decide that this cell and this work and these brothers are the problem, and that somewhere else he could really live properly.
The goal of the work is apatheia, which is badly translated as passionlessness and does not mean feeling nothing. It is the settled condition in which the passions no longer govern, and Evagrius says explicitly that its offspring is love. Beyond it lies contemplative knowledge, and his description of pure prayer, in which the mind holds no image or concept at all, is the source of a very long tradition of imageless prayer in both East and West.