St. John of Karpathos, “Ascetic and Consolatory Discourse.”1

A Guest Who Comes in Secret

“I visit you secretly.” If St. John of Karpathos's words are true, then my failure to be aware of God is not an obstacle to His presence. It is the very form His presence takes.

God does not come to me as an idea I can master or an experience I can possess. He comes as a Guest who enters while I am looking elsewhere. His grace is real and at work in me, but this work is hidden.

So, you may ask, why should God visit us this way? And what does it require of us to receive Him?

Not Understanding God

Only God understands God. I do not understand Him, and not simply because He is, as we hear in the Church’s hymnography, He is “supraessentia.l” He is, but this is not why I cannot understand Him.

To say that I do not understand God because I am finite, though I am, is also not true. No, the reason I do not understand God is that understanding God is not a possibility for me. Comprehending God is not what a creature is for.

Put more positively, not understanding God is part of my perfection as a creature. Not understanding God is fundamentally different from misunderstanding Him. Misunderstanding separates me from God. Not understanding is always an invitation to enter more deeply into communion with the Most Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The Church gives this a precise form. God is unknowable in His essence, yet truly present in His energies. He gives Himself wholly and without reservation to us, but without ever being comprehended. That is what it means to be visited secretly.

St. Gregory of Nyssa is helpful here:

The perfection of everything which can be measured by the senses is marked off by certain definite boundaries... But in the case of virtue, we have learned from the Apostle that its limit of perfection is the fact that it has no limit... It is undoubtedly impossible to attain perfection since, as I have said, perfection is not marked off by limits: the one limit of virtue is the absence of a limit... for the perfection of human nature consists perhaps in its very growth in goodness.

For the saint, the more constant “and unchanging in the good,” the more I grow in virtue, that is, in the life of God. Paradoxically, stability becomes “a sort of wing” for the upward journey.2 Because God is always more than what I have received (though never less than what I am given), every gift He gives is also the hiding place of a greater gift still to come.

Standing Upright

G. K. Chesterton, writing of orthodoxy in the broad sense of the Christian creed, complained that we speak of it as something “heavy, humdrum, and safe.” In truth, he said, nothing was ever “so perilous or so exciting.” Orthodoxy is sanity, and sanity is a balance kept by effort, like a driver holding “madly rushing horses.” It is always easy to fall, since “there are an infinity of angles at which one falls,” and “only one at which one stands.”3 Drifting with the spirit of the age, takes no effort at all. As for pushing against it, it too requires no effort. Why? Because what I imagine to be my pushing is, on closer examination, only possible when I allow the age to hold me up.

For the Orthodox Christian, our stance is one of patience as we await the revelation of the hidden Guest (Matthew 25:37-40): steady enough not to run after every passing sign of God, yet not so rigid as to miss Him when He comes.

This is the posture God demands of Job:

Now prepare yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me: Would you indeed annul My judgment? Would you condemn Me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God? Or can you thunder with a voice like His? (Job 40:7–9, NKJV)

Once I accept that to be human means not to understand God, then I must also accept that I cannot fully comprehend His work in creation. How, then, can I hope to discern His activity in the depths of my own heart, much less my neighbor’s? This is precisely why St. John of Karpathos insists that God’s work in us is hidden.

Why God Visits Secretly

Why should God hide His visits? Because, like Narcissus, I am prone to fall in love with my own reflection.

Ironically, the danger grows as I grow in holiness. As I am cleansed of sin and my true beauty begins to shine through, I become more, not less, tempted to gaze at myself. It is far easier to turn away from a disfigured reflection than from the shining image of God in a soul being deified. We are, after all, naturally drawn to beauty.

Were God’s visits always felt and seen, I would soon mistake the gift for the Giver and His work in me for my own achievement. The fathers saw this clearly. St. Diadochos of Photiki teaches that the grace of Baptism dwells hidden in the depths of the heart, and that God at times lets the soul feel as though grace has withdrawn, so that it does not grow proud.4

God’s secrecy is not a withholding. It is a mercy that protects me from idolizing my own healing.

Where God Visits

The Apostle Paul tells the Romans to wake up! Why? Because “now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed” (Romans 13:11, NKJV). Awakening to God’s hidden presence in our hearts is the goal of the spiritual life. In this, the Church’s dogmas and doctrines, the Mysteries and our ascetical struggles, and the works of charity are not rivals to this awareness. They are the places where the hidden God has promised to be found. Found, yes, but not possessed, for He always exceeds my grasp.

Instead, and again and again, God makes His secret entrance.

In Baptism, He enters the heart unseen. In the Eucharist, He comes to us so again easily missed under bread and wine. In the hungry, the sick, and the stranger, He comes unrecognized by the saint as much as to the unrepentant sinner: “Lord, when saw we thee?” (Matt. 25:37). And He is present with us in our trials.

Most of all, He is present in those moments of my deepest shame, in those times when I would turn my back on myself. He is there in these moments, waiting to embrace me.

The secret visit is not a private experience or something only reserved for mystics. It is for all. The universality of secret grace is why Holy Tradition and the Church’s ascetical and liturgical traditions are essential. We need these because secrecy is the way God meets every Christian, and He does so in the ordinary life of the Church.

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The Silence That Receives

Hesychasm, the Orthodox tradition of inner and outer stillness in prayer, aims at union with God. Part of its discipline is refusing to mistake my own thoughts and mental images of God for God Himself. As much as Holy Tradition, this guards against my tendencies toward intellectual and spiritual idolatry.

But the hesychast’s silence is not emptiness. It is hospitality. Through the practice of the Jesus Prayer, I make my heart a room ready for the Guest who will not announce Himself, and who will not visit on my terms.

Grace operates in secret, then, not because God is reluctant to be known. He hides so that He may be loved rather than possessed, and so that I may be healed without falling in love with my own healing. “I visit you secretly.” The task of the Christian life is to become the kind of person who can receive such a visit.

We see this in the opening moments of Augustine’s reflection on his sorrow. “Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only death.” This is the source of his estrangement from all he loves. “My native land was a torment to me and my father’s house unbelievable misery. Everything I had shared with my friend turned into hideous anguish without him.” Longing for his decease friend cause him to not just withdraw from his community, but actively oppose it. “My eyes sought him everywhere, but he was missing; I hated all things because they held him not, and could no more say to me, ‘Look, here he comes!’ as they had been wont to do in his lifetime when he had been away.” Ultimately, he reaches a stage when Augustine no longer recognize himself, and he comes to see rebellion against God as just.

I had become a great enigma to myself, and I questioned my soul, demanding why it was sorrowful and why it so disquieted me, but it had no answer. If I bade it, “Trust in God,” it rightly disobeyed me, for the man it had held so dear and lost was more real and more lovable than the fantasy in which it was bidden to trust. Weeping alone brought me solace, and took my friend’s place as the only comfort of my soul (Confessions, IV: 4.9).

His misery is the misery of all those “whose mind is chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss.” But then he says something both interesting and disturbing. The sorrow he feels in response to his friend’s death reveals to him “the misery” we are all in “even before” our loss (IV.6.11). He speaks for all of us when he says of himself that his misery is rooted in his estrangement form God. “For what I thought of was not you at all; an empty fantasy and my own error were my god” (IV.7.12).

This fantasy is not only a theological error, it robs him of the consolation of friendship, trapping him as it does in a fantasy world of his own creation. “If I tried to lodge my soul in that, hoping that it might rest there, it would slip through that insubstantial thing” compounding his suffering. In his disappointment he “falls back again” on himself, remaining stuck in “an unhappy place where I could not live, but from which I could not escape.” His grief makes clear to Augustine that what he seeks to avoid is not emotional pain, real though it is, but for his own life with its disordered loves that make restoration impossible and further pain unavoidable. “Whither could my heart flee to escape itself? Where could I go and leave myself behind? Was there any place of refuge where I would not be followed by my own self?” (IV.7.12)

There is no where he can go to escape himself. And “Yet flee I did from my native land, for my eyes were less inclined to look for him where they had not been wont to see him before. So I left Thagaste and came to Carthage” (IV.7.12) Though his motives for the journey are mixed it is in Carthage, or rather in the company of friends there that embrace him, that Augustine overcomes his grief.

At first, this “company” is for Augustine just another “substitute” for God and so “a gross fable and a long-sustained lie.” But his willingness to accept the acceptance of the company of friends “who loved and knew their love returned, signs to be read in smiles, words, glances and a thousand gracious gestures,” becomes for him a source of renewal. It is here, in this communion where “sparks kindled and our minds were fused inseparably, out of many becoming one” (IV.8.13), that he overcomes the grief’s paralysis.

For all the effort that Augustine exerts to know himself, it is ultimately his acceptance of the gift of friendship that proves healing. Thanks to his friends, Augustine, slowly comes to learn to love God and so his friends in God and even his enemies “for your sake” (IV.9.14). In response to our grief, Augustine offers us a stern but kind word. We cannot loosen the grip of grief by ourselves, we need help. Indeed, we need the one thing that grief makes distasteful and even painful; the company of friends.

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References

Augustine of Hippo. (1997). The Confessions (M. Boulding O.S.B., Trans.). New City Press.

Ascetical struggle centers on four foundational disciplines

• Prayer (connecting with God and gaining orientation)

• Fasting (mastering appetites and strengthening willpower)

• Almsgiving (practicing radical generosity and breaking self-absorption), and

Manual Labor (fostering humility and fighting idleness)

These disciplines are not ends in themselves but are designed to cultivate four specific virtues or “fruits”:

• Poverty (inner freedom from possessions)

• Chastity (the proper ordering of all desires)

• Obedience (humble alignment with a higher purpose), and

• Stability (endurance and perseverance).

Finally, we see that a growing in peace and joy is lifelong challenge where the greatest potential for growth lies precisely in the discipline that is hardest to maintain.

If You Have Brokenness Of Spirit; if you have such humility, then your fault is better than the virtue of the worldly. And your stains are preferable to the great purity of the worldly.

Saint John of Karpathos, “Ascetic and Consolatory Discourse Supplementary to the One Hundred Chapters,” Philokalia, vol I, 159.1

Trivial Moralizing

One of the most challenging aspects for Orthodox Christians to comprehend is the often shocking, non-moralizing nature of many monastic authors from late antiquity. The problem is not simply intellectual. The struggle is compounded by the frequent, and at times with gleeful polemical edge, with which we present monasticism as “nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct” that “is increasingly alienated” from a life of communion between God and humanity. Instead, again often with a certain triumphalism, the monastic witness is presented as “a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity.” Having exchanged the pursuit of shared holiness, many of us have instead “adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.”2

Obscured in our catechesis, our apologetics, and above all by our actions, is my more fundamental confusion about the catholic nature of the spiritual life. I misunderstand the monk, because I see my own spiritual life as little more than a concatenation of “conventional form[s] under which individuals are grouped together into an institution.” To do this is to confess (if only unintentionally) that I have forgotten the Church’s true “ontological identity--what she really, essentially is.” Like Esau, I have traded a living sense of the Church “as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion” for something that exists “to serve the ‘religious needs’ of the people, the individualistic emotional and psychological needs of fallen man.”3

The Church Offers a Key, Not a Plan

St. John of Karpathos challenges me to at least consider a change of heart.

Building on the saint’s words above, maybe it is better to be an impious whore in the Church than a pious virgin in the agora.4 To be sure, my language here is more colorful than the saint’s. Differences aside, however, we are both making the same point as Fr. Georges Florovsky. Father writes that

The Church gives us not a system but a key; not a plan of God’s City, but the means of entering it. Perhaps someone will lose his way because he has no plan. But all that he will see, he will see without a mediator, he will see it directly, it will be real for him; while he who has studies only the plan, risks remaining outside and not really finding anything.5

The fathers of the Philokalia ground their soteriology in our participation in the divine nature (see 2 Peter 1:4). This shifts the conversation away not only from morality but also from the sterile post-Reformation polemics about salvation by faith alone that obscure from most Christians the ascetical riches of the Christian tradition. At its heart, asceticism is nothing more or less than our acceptance of grace, of God’s invitation to us to share in His life.6

Participation in the Divine Nature

St. Irenaeus likens our condition to that of iron in the fire. Just as the iron acquires the quality of fire while remaining iron. Similarly, the Christian by grace comes to possess the qualities of God while remaining human. Beautiful though the image is, it might leave us with a misunderstanding that this process is mechanical or somehow deterministic. In fact, the invitation to share is personal. Not only am I called by name (see, Isaiah 43:1-4), but I am invited to enter into the community of the Most Holy Trinity (see, Matthew 5:45, Romans 8:14-17, and Galatians 4:6-7). To share in the divine life, therefore, is not simply to become like heated iron.

Immigrant and Sojourner

I am, we are, rather like immigrants to a new nation (Philippians 3:20).

We may or may not master the language and customs of our new home, but it is still our (new) home. To be sure, we may be only more or less comfortable in this our new land. Indeed, we may even at times long for our former home (see Exodus 16:3). But no matter how well, or poorly I adapt, this new nation is now home and even if I never feel myself being anything more other than a “stranger in a foreign land” (Exodus 2:22).

To St. John’s words above, we must add our Lord’s word in the Fourth Gospel. One of the greatest temptations Christians face is this: to forget that while we are “in the world,” we are not to be “of the world” (see John 14:16-17). This world, this nation, is not our true and lasting homeland. We are citizens not just of the Kingdom of God, true though this is, but by grace also members of the Holy Trinity by adopt.

Given the distance between the Uncreated and the created, our participation by grace in the life of the Holy Trinity, we always feel a bit strange. What this will be like in the life to come, I cannot say, having never been dead.

But in this life, my being a son by adopt leaves me, in a certain sense, homeless. Belong partially to two communities, one eternal and the other passing away, I am necessarily always a sojourner. I find myself traveling between the Church and the Agora, going back and forth, from one to another. I am, at one and the same time, an impious whore and a pious virgin, feeling in both roles out of place.

As time goes on, however, the initial familiarity of the Agora and the strangeness of the Church begin to shift; hopefully an exchange takes place. I become more at home in the Church and less so in the Agora. While welcome, this change is never complete. In this life at least, I will always feel only partial at home in the Church and so always tempted to try and make my true homeland that other city that is passing away the Agora.

This brings us back to the non-moralizing character of monastic spirituality.

Negligible Differences Before God

The distance between the unrepentant sinner and the saint is so great that it can drive the former to despair. When, however, the standard is not the sinner relative to the saint but both relative to God, then the distance between them becomes negligible. The differences are real, of course, and they remain.

But over time, as we glimpse more fully the life to come, our differences come to mean much less. Realizing this is central to our life in Christ. After all, if the saint’s holiness can drive the sinner to despair, the sinner’s lack of virtue can move the saint to pride. After all, when life in Christ is “nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct,” we praise the virgin and condemn the whore. To do so, however, is to obscure God’s grace and mercy for both.

But just as my thumb cannot block the sun but only my vision of it, so too moralizing only blocks my vision of God. For all that my good conduct is good, if it becomes the standard of life in Christ, of the life of the Church, all it does is blind me to “the Light of Christ which illumines all!” (Paschal Service)

My moralizing is more than a self-inflicted wound; it is also an offense against justice. Gouging out my eyes (compare, Matthew 18:9), cutting out my tongue (compare Proverbs 10:31, Psalm 12:3) in a parody of ascetical life I fail to acknowledge the divine beauty of the whore or the virgin, the sinner or the saint.

Conclusion: The Priority of Place Over Status

To say better an impious whore in the Church than a pious virgin in the Agora, is not to prefer one to another, but one place to another. Like fish in the fisherman’s net, the Church and the Agora contain all sorts of men and women. Measured objectively--and there is a limited value to this--some are more virtuous or vicious than others. But all are residents, fellow citizens, of the same place; they are fish caught in the same net.

We who are in Christ are sons by adoption, citizens, and yet strangers of the Kingdom of God, iron in the fire. Relative to each other, some are closer, others further, from God. Relative to God, however, we are so alike one to another as to make the differences among us of almost no importance.

So what matters is not whether we are sinner or saint, whore or virgin. What matters is that we are members of the community of the Holy Trinity, citizens of the Kingdom of God, members of the Body of Christ.

If we are? Then we know that it is better for us to be impious whores in the Church than pious virgins in the Agora.

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Bibliography

Burge, Ryan. “Did The Election of Donald Trump Drive People from the Pews?” Religion Unplugged, May 5, 2023. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/5/3/did-the-election-of-donald-trump-drive-people-from-the-pews.

Christina, Nun. Philokalia Volumes 1 - 5 The Full Text. Jerusalem: Virgin Mary of Australia and Oceania, 2024.

Florovsky, Georges. “The Church: Her Nature and Task.” In Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (Volume One in the Collected Works of Georges Florovsky), 57–72. Vaduz, Europa: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987.

----. “The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament: Reflections on the Critique of the Theology of the Reformation.” In The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol X, 17–59. Vaduz, Europa: Buchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/florov_nt.aspx.

Nikodemos Of the Holy Mountain,and Markarios Of Corinth, trans., Nun Christina. Philokalia Volume 5 the Full Text, 2024.

Yannaras, Christos. The Freedom of Morality. St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.

The often overlooked irony here, is that this is largely the approach taken by the college or university’s office of student services. Free food and friendships of utility.

Neither of these, let me hasten to add, are in and of themselves, immoral or manipulative. A shared meal, or in the case of free pizza, what passes for a meal, is often the first step in what can become a life-long friendship. Consider this:

According to the biblical account, it is with a meal at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18:1–8), that the Most Holy Trinity is revealed and enters into what will be a lifelong friendship with humanity beginning with Abraham.

Nor should we dismiss friendships based in utility anymore than we should dismiss the first stirring of physical attract that will one day grow into a mature, conjugal love. After all, to borrow from T.S. Eliot, in our ends we find our beginnings.

But an academic community, or so it seems to me, must offer more than free pizza and easy fellowship. A college or university worthy of its own, deep history in the Gospel and Eucharistic life of the Church (East and West, Greek and Latin), must offer ideas that challenge, inspire, and transform. They must offer truth.

A Christian ministry especially must take seriously this challenge to not only offer truth (and the Truth, Who is Christ) but do so in a manner that takes the consumers of ideas and reforms and transforms them into witnesses for truth and the Truth.

On this point, we have the Greek word μάρτυς (martus), from which we derive the word “martyr.” Few things mitigate against martyrdom more than “free pizza,” easy fellowship, and the glib self-assured answers that are the conversational currency on most campuses.

In saying this, let me once again hasten to add, I am not criticizing the students. Rather, I am looking at the adults, those of us who have taken on the obligation to guide them. It is with more than a note of irony that for all that they disagree, conservative campus voices (religious and secular) and progressive offices of student affairs, share a common, rhetorical approach rooted not in metaphysical, ontology, and ethics but sociology and psychology. The arguments between these two groups are so intense, if I may wax cliché, because the stakes are so low.

No one has ever died for a disagreement rooted in the social sciences. Though, as recent events demonstrate, there are those on both sides willing to kill or at least bless the killing.

And so, “No Free Pizza.” A series of six, short lectures on the spirituality of the Orthodox Church. The first of these asks the listener to reflect on the only two questions that matter:

1. Why is there something, rather than nothing?

2. What are you going to do about it?

The spirituality of the Orthodox Church are built on the answers to these questions. To find answers to these questions, we turn to the 7th century monk, St. Maximus the Confessor. What I especially like about St. Maximus is his argument that Christ’s incarnation was not a reaction to sin, but God’s original plan to unite all creation. And us? St. Maximus says that humanity, is a “microcosm,” and called by God to unite five fundamental dimensions of reality. Thankfully, while we failed, Christ succeeded in unifying the cosmos in his person. The life of the Church is nothing more or less, than our experiencing in our own life, Christ’s communion with the cosmos or deification (theosis).

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A monk should engage in a secret war against three things above all: gluttony, glory, and avarice, which is idolatry (Col. 3:5).

St. John of Karpathos, “100 Consolatory Chapters to the Monks of India,” 86.

The Monastic Witness

When I first made the acquaintance of the desert fathers I could not have been more than 20 years old. Randomly, I was in a bookstore and picked up a copy of Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the Desert.1 Although it has been more than 40 years, my affection for the Desert Father hasn’t waned. Over the years, I have come to appreciate the great paradox of the desert. Like the later Neptic Fathers of the Philokalia, the strength of the monastic witness lies in this: They lead from the margins of the Church. This is not merely a sociological quirk.

Together with the sacraments, monastic life embodies the nature of the Church's life. Fr Georges Florovsky asks us to consider “If the monastic ideal is union with God through prayer, through humility, through obedience, through constant recognition of one’s sins, voluntary or involuntary, through a renunciation of the values of this world, through poverty, through chastity, through love for mankind and love for God, then is such an ideal Christian?” He goes on to say that

For some, the very raising of such a question may appear strange and foreign. But the history of Christianity, especially the new theological attitude that obtained as a result of the Reformation, forces such a question and demands a serious answer. If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non-existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical--New Testamental? Or is this monastic ideal, as its opponents have claimed, a distortion of authentic Christianity, a slavery to mechanical "monkish" "works righteousness"?2

After 500 years of increasingly abstract Reformation and Counter-Reformation theological polemics, it sometimes seems that even Orthodox Christians have lost sight of the ascetical transformation of human life by divine grace. We have become indifferent to the fact that Christ is not a philosopher who gives not a doctrine but a way of life.

This doesn’t mean that dogma doesn’t matter; it does. Borrowing from St. Seraphim of Sarov we might frame the matter this way. Like “prayer, fasting, vigil, and all the other Christian practices,” doctrine does

…not constitute the aim of our Christian life. Although it is true that they serve as the indispensable means of reaching this end, the true aim of our Christian life consists of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God. As for fasts, and vigils, and prayer, and almsgiving, and every good deed done for Christ's sake, are the only means of acquiring the Holy Spirit of God.3

Following along with St. Seraphim, the task of the spiritual father is to train the person in dogmatic theology or the perfection of ascetical discipline. Rather, his task is to help the individual acquire the Holy Spirit. To do this, he must first have acquired, or perhaps better, become aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit in his own life. Only then can the spiritual father lead others into an ever-deeper relationship with the Most Holy Trinity. The Desert and Neptic Fathers that concern us here are dependable guides in this work.

As a spiritual father, I turn again and again not only to their teaching but, above all, to the example of their life. Unlike the fathers, my life is not characterized by quiet. I am a married parish priest, a college campus ministry, and a seminary professor. Externally, my life is much different from theirs. Even with these differences, I realize that, like monastic fathers I love, to be a spiritual father requires that I actively cultivate a life on the margins not only of society but of the Church. Here, the significance of St. John of Karpathos’s words becomes clear.

The Spiritual Father’s Secret War

Like the monk, the priest who aspires to be a spiritual father not simply in name but in fact, will necessarily, willingly, and even eagerly, “engage in a secret war against three things above all: gluttony, glory, and avarice, which is idolatry.” Let’s look briefly at each.

Glutton, Coward, & Bully

For St. John Cassian, gluttony is not simply a matter of eating or drinking. It is rather the pursuit of bodily pleasure. To pursue pleasure also means striving to avoid pain. Over time, the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain makes the glutton a coward. He will do the right thing, but only if he can do so without personal cost. And when he does what is good, he does so not for the sake of goodness but to win the acclaim of others.

In either case, the glutton becomes, in turn, first a coward and then devoid of charity.

He is a coward because comfort sets a hard limit on his commitment to pursuing what is good, true, beautiful, and just. To want the praise of others is simply the opening movement of lust. The glutton sees others only in terms of how they can serve his desires. As lust grows and as chastity wanes, he becomes even more incapable of forgiveness. Instead, he will punish those who displease him by failing to meet his expectations.

His love of pleasure, his fear, and lack of forgiveness all stem from a desire for glory. St. Maximus the Confessor is helpful here.

Killing What I Desire

Just as the eye is naturally ordered to light, and the ear to sound, so (the saint teaches), the human will is ordered toward God, Who is perfect and does not change. When I affix my will to created being, I am inevitably frustrated not because creation isn’t good but because it isn’t sufficient.

What is the inadequacy of creation that frustrates the will? Here we borrow from St. Gregory of Nyssa. The saint observes that the perfection of God is that He never changes. The perfection of created being, however, is that it changes and changes frequently. To seek the praise of others means to love that which is always passing away. Because my neighbor is always changing, there is always necessarily a gap between who I desire and who I meet.

To put the matter directly, because it is the nature of creation to change, what I love is not the person but my image of the person. I do not love who you are but who I imagine (or more accurately, want) you to be. Given the dynamic nature of life, the picture I have of you is always out of date, always inaccurate. My neighbor disappointments me because I am attached to my idea of who he was. Through no necessary fault of his own, my neighbor is always changing. This ability to change and change frequently is the God given source of his perfection.

St. Augustine tells me that my frustration is the fruit of a disordered love. Reflecting on the unexpected death of a friend in the Confessions he writes

I was astonished that other mortals lived, since he whom I loved, as if he would never die, was dead; and I wondered still more that I, who was to him a second self, could live when he was dead. Well did one say of his friend, Thou half of my soul, for I felt that my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies; and, consequently, my life was a horror to me, because I would not live in half. And therefore, perchance, was I afraid to die, lest he should die wholly whom I had so greatly loved.4

So strong is the will’s natural desire for the God Who never changes it will overwhelm my reason, compelling it to see my neighbor one who “would never die,” never change. The will demands I make an idol of my neighbor. Having done this, however, he is no longer my neighbor but perversion of my own creation. Having made an idol of my neighbor, I have killed him

The Avaricious Spiritual Father is Merciless

And so the spiritual father’s last secret battle, this is against “avarice, which is idolatry,” which, as the Apostle Paul says is the root of all evil (see 1 Timothy 6:10). The avaricious soul is consumed by a "longing for control – control over others, control over one's circumstances (present and future), control over one's image." Looking deeper, we see that this sin

represents a failure to trust the providence of God. Avarice arises from various sorts of fear: the fear of being at the mercy of other people's perceptions and other people's freedom, the fear of an unknown future that urges me to make sure I have resources for all crises and eventualities – a fear that can lead to unlimited avarice because I can never know what lies ahead.

In the final analysis, it is "a longing to keep others in my debt. Mercy scores a line through the whole language of debt."5

This fatal turn to the self, is only the final stage of spiritual self-degradation but the flowering of a merciless heart. Worshiping myself, seeing all creation--including my spiritual children--as merely the moon to my sun, means I leave no room for human finitude, weakness and failure, much less, freedom, strength and creativity.

Trapped by “avarice, which is idolatry,” I am incapable of the self-emptying service to which all Christians are called (see Philippians 2). And so in the words of Psalm 135, not only “those who make” idols but “everyone who trust in them” becomes “like them” that is dumb, deaf, and dead. Caught by avaricious idolatry, the so-called spiritual father is corrupt and corrupting.

The responsible spiritual father must always be aware of how quickly and easily the soul can move from the love of pleasure to spiritual death to spiritual homicide. This is why the spiritual father must continually fight his own “secret war.” This is why, he will always lead from the margin.

Go to the Margin

The margin is the place of freedom and creativity. It is at the margin that I hear the invitation to transcend the limits of my life as it is, and enter into a life that is more expansive and fuller. Think of the physical world. We move from our house to the world by exiting a door, by crossing the boundary created by the walls.

Or, if you prefer, the spiritual father is a scout who goes ahead of us searching for a safe path for us to walk. This is the secret war to which St. John refers. Once he finds the path, he returns and stands at the edge of our awareness. From here, he calls to us, inviting us to travel with him along a new and untrodden path.

This path is not only new to us. Our presence makes it new to him as well. By our presence, the spiritual father sees anew the once familiar path. Our presence, our needs, and missteps along the way are all an invitation to him to repent, to reconsider his own life and relationship to Christ and the Church.

As a spiritual father, self-examination evoked by the presence of my spiritual children is essential to them and to me. I am always tempted to usurp the place of God. Harmful as this is in my personal life, it is deadly in the life of the spiritual father. In doing so, I not only harm my spiritual children, but myself.

As a husband, priest, teacher and spiritual father, fidelity to my vocation requires me to serve the deification of those whom God brings to me. As my wife reminds me, “Care for the people God brings you.” And, once again, I must turn my face to the margin since these people always enter my life from outside, from the margins, if you will.

Like the father of the prodigal son, a spiritual father's vocation is to go and stand at the threshold, on the margins of life, scanning the horizon so that when his spiritual children need him, him can see them while they are “still a great way off” (Luke 15:20).

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Bibliography

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions, Book IV. New Advent. Accessed September 15, 2025. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/110104.htm.

Florovsky, Georges. “The Ascetic Ideal And The New Testament.” https://www.romanity.org/index.htm. Accessed September 15, 2025. https://www.romanity.org/htm/flo.01.en.the_ascetic_ideal_and_the_new_testament.01.htm.

Merton, Thomas. The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century. New Directions Publishing, 1970.

Seraphim of Sarov. “Saint Seraphim of Sarov: On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit. Conversation with Motovilov.” OrthoChristian.Com. Accessed September 15, 2025. https://orthochristian.com/47866.html.

Williams, Rowan. Passions of the Soul. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

…observe the spider and consider how much man differs from the spider, which is the most weak and fragile creature.

St. John of Karpathos, “100 Consolatory Chapters to the Monks of India,” #47

St. John of Karpathos asks us to consider that, owing to the spider’s fragile nature,e it “has neither properties nor sea voyage, nor does it go to courts, nor does it get angry, nor does it have storerooms.” Rather, and presumably unlike the monks to whom he addresses his chapters, “it lives its life in perfect meekness and moderation and utmost quietness.” The spider is neither “curious about the matters of others, but only attends to its own work with calmness and inactivity.”

Just when I think I’ve drawn the proper lesson from my guided meditation on a spider’s life and character, the saint changes direction and quotes the Apostle Paul. It is “as if” the spider is “saying to those who live idly that anyone who does not want work should not want to eat (2 Thessalonians 3:10); and it keeps such silence that it surpasses even Pythagoras, whom the Greeks admire above all philosophers for his restraint in speech.”

Whatever might be the zoological insight the saint offers us about the spider, we need to be careful lest we risk making an anthropological error. The human person is physically stronger than a spider. As creatures, however, both have frail natures. The shared fragility consists in this: neither is the source and guarantor of its existence. Both the spider and I are contingent, which means our being comes to us from outside, that from God.

For the saint, the spider’s ontological fragility is embodied in what it does not do. It does not own property, explore the world, trade, or make laws to govern arachnid society. Their absence reflects the perfection of its nature.

Likewise, that the spider does not get angry. How could it? It has no pride to offend living as it does “in perfect meekness and moderation and utmost quietness” minding its own business in obedience to its nature. But this also means that, unlike the human person, the spider does—indeed, cannot—take offense when others transgress the demands of justice.

The good things the saint lists are alien to the spider’s nature. A spider that owned property or made laws would be extraordinary. He would also no longer be a spider. Pursuing these good things could only come at the expense of its very nature as a spider, while at the same time, he would still fall short of being human.

For the human, the good things inaccessible to the spider reflect the poverty unique to our nature. The spider, like other insects and the whole of non-human flora and fauna, is guided by instinct, not by reason. The former is the great protector of the non-human, while the latter is the great protector of the human. All those things denied to the spider are the cost he pays for living by instinct, not reason.

None of this is to say that our acquisition of property, our voyages over sea, land, space, and imagination, are always compatible with our nature. The same with our laws and emotions. All of these can—and often are—contra natura. This is a tragedy because it is an act of self-betrayal. It is also the bitter fruit of our fallen state imposed on us by the envy of the devil.

In response, the Church offers humanity her ascetical and liturgical life. Togther, these as the start of a cure for our spiritual illness. Good as the cure, it will not be efficacious apart from the right use of reason. In the tradition of the Orthodox Church, reason is the crowning glory of humanity created in the image of the Logos, Who is Reason Itself.

The Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity is the touchstone of human reason. For the neptic fathers, reason is more than abstract or utilitarian logic based on empirical data. As the saint suggests, the exercise of reason means that we can see not simply what is but what should be.

And we see this not simply by examining ourselves but by examining all of creation, including the humble and meek spider. To exercise reason in a full sense is to grasp the analogical structure of creation itself. It also means seeing how creation, both as a whole and in all its parts, is related—again, analogically—with the Creature Himself.

This means I cannot only see myself in the spider but the spider in myself. More amazing still, I see God in both and both in God.

G. K. Chesterton summarizes the matter for us when he says, “The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. … He has always had one foot on earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them.” Most importantly,

He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.

And so, the true mysticism to which we are all called and which the neptic fathers defend, that there is “such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will. … [T]hat children were indeed the kingdom of heaven but nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth.” The true, ordinary mystic admires “youth because it [is] young and age because it [is] not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”1

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Love & Human Identity.

The first lesson I take from Bernard is the foundational role of love in our identity. I am shaped by who and what I love, yes. More fundamentally, however, my life is formed by who loves me. Being loved is critical for all human beings. “When we look inside ourselves,” we must be careful to retain “the inward recollection of who we are.” If we do not do this or are indifferent to the God Who first loved us, “we run the risk of acting contrary to our nature or letting the evil one slip into that central place of heart and there exert an influence” (McCabe, 2012, p. 23).

Forgetfulness of my identity as one loved by God is a great, self-inflicted wound on my soul. There is certainly value in the externals of their spiritual life—prayer, fasting, almsgiving, manual labor, and the sacramental life of the Church—and a regular examination of conscience can bear the good fruit of accurate self-knowledge and spur me on to cultivate the life of virtue. But essential as this all is, it is not enough.

Bernard reminds us that what is necessary is not simply moral improvement, much less a snappy life hack, but an “inward contemplative gaze in the light of the truth.” The “careful guarding of the heart and unflinching honesty about what we see there” is needed since this alone “clears a space … where it becomes increasingly easy to see, to hear, and to breathe the things of God” (McCabe, p. 23).

To be fully and truly human is to live a life in response in love to the God Who first loved us. Failure to realize this means that even a life of robust ascetical and liturgical practice will be fruitless, a house built on sand. As a spiritual father, if I do not understand that my ministry is also a free response to the God Who loves me and my spiritual children, then I am a “blind guide” (Matthew 15:14).

Unity of Creation & Redemption.

The second lesson is the intimate and enduring relationship between creation and redemption. While Bernard contrasts the ease of creation with the hardship of redemption, even after the Fall, the former retains its goodness and its fundamentally positive role in the latter.

This unity between creation and redemption is ontological. All that exists does so because God calls it out of nonexistence into being. “You have brought all things out of nothing into being.” Even in a fallen world, together with all of creation, we share in God’s life. “You have created man and woman in Your image and likeness and adorned them with all the gifts of Your grace.” Sin might obscure creation’s goodness and participation in the divine life, but for Bernard, it never obliterates the sacramental quality of created being. No matter how wicked we are, we never cease to participate in the being of God. “You give wisdom and understanding to the supplicant and do not overlook the sinner but have established repentance as the way of salvation” (Prayer of the Trisagion Hymn).

The Human Heart as a Microcosm

Third, the ontological goodness of creation, its fundamental unity and balance, are only grasped by a grateful heart. It is through our personal thanksgiving for the work of God in creation, redemption, and our own life, that we come to see that in Christ “all things work to the good” (compare Romans 8:28).

The grateful heart understands itself as a microcosm of creation (Meyendorff, 1974, pp. 134-1). As 4th century Egyptian St. Macarius the Great (1999-2018) says

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there (Homilies, 43.7).

And, in another place, he says,

Within the heart is an unfathomable depth. There are reception rooms and bedchambers in it, doors and porches, and many offices and passages. In it is the workshop of righteousness and of wickedness. In it is death, in it is life…. The heart is Christ’s palace…There Christ the King comes to take His rest, with the angels and the spirits of the saints, and He dwells there, walking within it and placing His kingdom there (Homilies 15:32-33).

Seen in this light, it is any wonder that (like Narcissus), we fall in love with our reflection? Our beauty also explains why those closest to God are the most susceptible to the sin of pride. After all, what is more beautiful, more delightful to behold, after God than the work of God that is the human person?

All Things Must Give Way to Love

Finally, Bernard’s defense of human reason and his concern for the self can serve as a corrective to an approach to the Christian life that reduces it to mere morality, the sacramental life, or arid doctrinal speculation. All of these are subject to being corrupted by pride and serving as an “objective” standard that frees me from the burden of love.

The abbot of Clairvaux is no “practical atheist” who would have us live our lives “as if” God did not exist. The twin vessels of creation and redemption, of the self-given and restored, point beyond themselves to love even if it is a love deeply wounded by sin:

...the heart, tempted by many deceitful charms, wearies itself to no purpose, is always craving, and counts for nothing what it has enjoyed, compared to what it fain would have; and is tormented, by desire of what it has not, …. All one cannot have; for the little it is possible to get, the price of labour must be paid; and it must be enjoyed with trembling; nay, with the miserable certainty that one day it must be lost, though the date of that day be not known (Bernard, p. 28).

Here, purely secular thought as well as a Christian life fixated on externals must hear a harsh word spoken against them. For all the good to be found in both, any form of life separated ideologically or methodologically from an awareness of creation redeemed or of the self as given and restored is, in the final analysis, a cause of misery. Even if unintentionally, this rupture encourages us to labor for bread that does not—and cannot—satisfy. The tragedy is that often with the best of intentions, both secularism and a superficial Christian life perpetuate the misery of sin by offering a false self and not the self as it is known and loved by God.

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References

Bernard of Clairvaux. (2016). On Loving God. Gideon House Books.

Macarius of Egypt. (1999-2018). “Fifty Spiritual Homilies.” e-Catholic 2000. Retrieved 14 September 2021, from https://www.ecatholic2000.com/macarius/untitled-02.shtml

McCabe, M. (2012). I Am the Way: Stages of Prayer in Saint Bernard. Cistercian Publications.

Meyendorff, J. (1974). Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. Fordham University Press.

Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). “Positive psychology: An introduction.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14.

van Kaam, Adrian L. (1983). Fundamental Formation. Crossroads Publishing Company.

Coming to the end of his teaching on love, St. Bernard takes a surprising turn.

In his view, there comes a point when we love ourselves not narcissistically but in obedience to God. At this stage, love is still self-referential, but we realize that our self-love was merely a pale imitation of God’s love for us. The saint assures us, that it is not merely our own nature that is the foundation and telos of self-love. God Himself is the Source and Goal of our love.

This realization changes the moral problem of self-love. It is not the mere fact that I love myself that is of concern. After all, God loves me. No, the failure of self-love is (as we have seen) that it is cramped and fickle love. I am to myself an unfaithful lover.

While surprising, this makes sense. What else does it mean to be a sinner except that I am unfaithful to God? Given my infidelity to the Most High God, why do I imagine that I would be faithful to myself?

To love myself, I must be obedient to the God Who first loves me. After all, what is obedience except to join my will to the will of God? If God loves me and I make His will my own, then how can I not love myself as well? But, again, Bernard offers us a sober warning.

The Eschatological Fulfillment of My Frail Self-Love

Given the struggles of living in a fallen world, "We may not hope to possess the fourth degree of love, or rather to be possessed by it, until we have put on a body spiritual and immortal, pure and calm, obedient and subject in all to the spirit.” Love’s highest degree, in other words, is an eschatological reality. And while this does not happen without our participation, it is not “our doing, but only the work of the power of God in favour of such as please Him.” In this life, we may have glimpses of this “perfect love.” But we will only experience it fully in the life to come because it is only then “when neither the burden nor the temptations of this body oppress” us (Bernard, p. 36).

This does not contradict Bernard’s view of the fundamental goodness of creation and so of the body. Nor does it mean he denies the intimate connection of creation and redemption. “The body,” he writes, “is for the soul a faithful companion; if it be a burden [because of sin], it is also a help.” This is why our lives are “laborious,” because that which is given to us for our help is often a hindrance. This changes at death when the body “ceases to aid” but also “ceases to hinder.” It changes again definitively at the resurrection when the body is once again a help and “no more a burden” but “glorious.” It is this last, glorious state that we glimpse in this life when we come to love ourselves with the love God has for us (Bernard, p. 38).

God’s Work in Creation and Redemption

Though he does not quote from the text, I think we can fairly summarize Bernard’s teaching in On Loving God, with Job’s words:

Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. And he said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

And naked shall I return there.

The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:20-21, NKJV)

And a little later, “Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” (2:10).

Like Job, Bernard is no sentimentalist; neither is he a proponent of anything remotely like positive thinking, the prosperity gospel, or Christian life hacks. He is a sober spiritual father who grounds his counsel to his spiritual sons (and so to us) in the sacramental and ascetical vision of the Christian life of the Church fathers and monastic authors.

This vision is rooted in the analogia entis, the analogy of being that highlights for us that creation and redemption are both the work of God. Though with their own unique character, their differences do not obscure their fundamental similarity and unity. To understand creation is to understand redemption. Likewise, our understanding of redemption helps us understand God’s creative act. God creates to redeem. Creation yearns for redemption, even as redemption fulfills the yearning of creation, as St. Paul tells us (see Romans 1 and 8). And so, creation and redemption are related not only analogically but teleologically. Creation ends not by ceasing to be but by becoming what God from all intends it to be in Jesus Christ.

Understanding our desires, we must understand the great drama of creation and redemption. To say grace perfects nature is to say that nature aspires toward that which is above it. Likewise, grace not only perfects nature but, in so doing, reveals nature to us.

In Bernard’s theology, salvation is not simply a forensic declaration or moral improvement. To be a Christian in his view means to “partake of the divine nature,” as the Apostle Peter tells us (see 2 Peter 1:4). In other words, his is a soteriology of deification, of our becoming by grace what Jesus is by nature. We find in St. Benard not merely an echo of Orthodox theology but a robust statement. “For if anything merely human remained in man, how then should God be all in all?” Bernard asks before continuing, “It is not that human nature will be destroyed, but that it will attain another beauty, a higher power and glory” (p. 36).

Desire Unfilled

Underlying Bernard’s anthropology is the eschatological fulfillment of all human desire. He to returns this theme again and again in his sermons on the Song of Songs. In Sermon 50, he gives his brothers an overview of what he means by love (Bernard, 1895). Here he tells the monks that, yes, love is an emotion or feeling it is however, something beyond my ability to fulfill as I would like, much less in the measure needed. This is why, in this life, love stays an unfulfilled desire.

There is charity in action, and there is charity in feeling. As concerning the first, I think that it is a law and explicit commandment given to men; but, as relates to the other, who can have it in such perfection as is contemplated by the precept? The one, therefore, is ordered as a command, the other given as a reward. We do not deny, however, that with the grace of God it is possible, even in this life, to attain the commencement, and even some degree of progress in the latter; but we maintain that the consummation of it is reserved for the happiness to come (Sermon 50:2).

Ironically, nothing so kills love as my attempt to consummate my desire. It is one thing to be in the presence of the Other (whether divine or human); it is quite another to possess the Other. Here, Emmanuel Levinas’s (2015) discussion of alterity is helpful. I can only possess the Other by an act of literal or metaphorical violence that strips the other of his or her uniqueness (otherness or alterity). To do so means I have exchanged an image (ikon, see Hebrews 8) for an idol.

There remains even in the life to come, an unfulfilled quality to love. At least this is the argument made by St. Gregory of Nyssa, who sees heaven as a process of our unending growth in love for God that begins in this life. God being infinite means that there is always more to discover, more to know, and love. To be in the divine presence is to experience the possibility of desire that is never fulfilled. In heaven, however, love unfulfilled is not a source of frustration; it is but an invitation to enjoy evermore fully the superabundance of God’s beauty.

A Rational Desire and a Gift to Be Received

Bernard tells us that love is our natural and proper response to the other whether human or divine. At the same time, while natural [i.e., created] divorced from right reason, love is quickly degraded. To say love must be reasonable is to say it must conform to the divine will (i.e., act obediently). “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone” (Matthew 23:23, NKJV).

And yet, while love governed by reason is enduring, divorced from feeling, it is arid. As for love without obedience, what is it but mere pretense? Love then is an emotion and an action guided and guarded by reason but transcending all three and in the aggregate. Love finds its fulfillment only in the Beloved.

Since the ultimate object of our love is the God Who first loved us, love is ultimately a gift to be received by the “full maturity,” which means that love in the full sense, “is reserved to future bliss” in the Kingdom of God.

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References

Bernard of Clairvaux. Cantica Canticorum: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon. By Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, A.D. 1115-1153. Translated and Edited, with Notes, by Samuel J. Eales, M.A., D.C.L., Vicar of Stalisfield, Kent, Chaplain to the Most Honourable the Marquess of Bath. Edited & translated by Samuel J Eales, E. Stock, 1895.

------. On Loving God. Gideon House Books, 2016

Lévinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other and Additional Essays. Pittsburgh, Pa: Duquesne University Press, 2015.

St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” #96 in Philokalia. Vol I, p. 360.

A Blessing and a Curse

Reading about yesterday’s election of Pope Leo XIV, I was struck by how quickly joy, gratitude, and delight in a new pope—and his being an American of all things! —degenerated into all manner of carping and baseless criticisms and fears about a papal ministry only hours old. Having been online for the whole of my almost 30 years as a priest, I see how social media can serve the Gospel. I am also keenly aware that it is one of the greatest threats to the spiritual life.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt makes a similar argument in The Anxious Generation (2024) and his earlier The Happiness Hypothesis (2006). In the former, he identifies what he calls “spiritual practices” (2024, pp. 201-215) that historically and cross-culturally have helped “elevate” us above our tendencies to “behaving in petty, nasty ways, or doing physically disguising things” that “close us off” or “turn [us] away” from “our elevated nature” (p. 200). While all the practices are valuable and are found in the spirituality of the Church, I want to focus here on one in particular: “Stillness, Silence, and Focus” (pp. 205-207). Living as we do in a consumer society that fetishizes youth and novelty, stillness, silence, and focus are not just foreign to our experience but can seem frightening and even repulsive.

Our Distaste for Silence

Whenever I have spoken on the Jesus Prayer to audiences from different Christian traditions, I am struck by two responses. One is simply resistance to investing the time and effort needed to foster inner silence. This is not surprising since my audiences are typically successful academics and graduate students from prestigious research universities (both secular and Christian).

Time practicing the Jesus Prayer would come at the expense of academic work or intrude upon their already over-scheduled personal time. Coupled with this was the sincere, if tragic, fear that inner silence would rob them of the edge they needed to succeed in a competitive environment. As they saw it, success demanded not “inner silence” but a state of “inner anxiety” and (socially sanctioned) aggression.

The other, more disturbing, response is a frank utilitarian attitude toward the life of prayer in general and the Jesus Prayer in particular. Here, too, there was a marked indifference to a life of inner silence. What my listeners wanted was a technique, a “spiritual technology,” as it were, to help them succeed in life. They embraced the Jesus Prayer but only as just another “life hack.”

Silence Not Quietism

Given all this, it is no wonder that for many of us, the primacy of silence in monastic life is often misunderstood as a form of quietism.1 If it has any value at all, it is in the service of our desires. In either case, I would argue, this is to fundamentally misunderstand and misapply the teaching we find in the Philokalia. For the neptic fathers, inner quiet does not mean moral or spiritual passivity. Nor is it meant to focus our attention so we can get what we want. Inner silence neither abrogates nor validates human will. Silence is meant to deepen and broaden our cooperation with a divine grace that respects our created nature and the weaknesses inherent in our fallen condition.

The great Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the early Church testify that it is not simply in our contemporary, secular age that Christians are tempted to succumb to the will’s unchaste relationship with novelty. In the dogmatic tradition “innovation” is simply another word of “heresy.”

To be sure, not all innovation is heretical. Some is desirable and can serve human flourishing and the life of Christian holiness. We see this in Deirdre McCloskey’s "Bourgeois Era" trilogy2 where she argues that changes in rhetoric and attitudes towards the bourgeoisie and innovation (which were, in their time, social heresies) were foundational to the “Great Enrichment” of the modern era. Billions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty because humanity has embraced the values and virtues that promote the creation of wealth, not only for a few but for the many.

Silence and Sacrifice, Guard Human Freedom, and Creativity

In a dogmatic context, however, innovation leads to—or rather, contributes to—what I would call a “Great Impoverishment.” Christological and Trinitarian heresies deny that it is precisely God Who saves us and that He does so not by judicial fiat or a mere act of will. Rather, in the Incarnation He makes our humanity His Own. God saves us by an act of personal sacrifice.

.... though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:6-11, RSV)

In the dogmatic tradition of the Church “that which He has not assumed He has not healed,” as St. Gregory of Nazianzus writes.

...but that which is united to His Godhead is also saved. If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole...Keep then the whole man, and mingle Godhead therewith, that you may benefit me in my completeness.3

By their cultivation of inner and outer silence, the neptic fathers sought to safeguard and foster human freedom and creativity rather than suppress or (what is far worse) extinguish it. Well before Heidegger would take up the theme, they understood that to be human is, in a certain way, to be always ahead of myself (Dasein, the “being there”).4 While sometimes this is an act of transcendence by which I “grow in divine life,”5 this is not the only possibility.

A Life of Noisy Dissipation

St. Diadochos of Photiki’s observation about talking is equally applicable more broadly to the unwise exercise of our freedom and creativity, to which social media bears a sad witness.

Too much talk radically dissipates the intellect, not only making it lazy in spiritual works, but also handing it over to the demon of listlessness, who first enervates it completely and then passes it on to the demons of dejection and anger.

For the neptic fathers, outer and inner silence serve as both a prophylactic and therapeutic role to play. Silence guards the dissipation of the intellect (nous), which in our fallen state is forever at risk of being distracted by novelties of one kind or another. This reflects the misuse of “personal freedom” after the example of “Adam and Eve... after the Fall, in separation from God, from true knowledge, from all the assurance secured by "natural" existence. It implies hesitation, wandering, and suffering; this is the gnomic will (gnome, opinion), a function of the hypostatic, or personal, life, not of nature.”6 To pursue novelty (the sin of curiosity, inquisitiveness, or more bluntly, pride; see Psalm 131;1 and Job 42:3), is to invite the dissipation the saint warns against. Think here of the dissipation we associate with alcoholics or drug addicts.

Over time, their addiction makes the exercise of freedom and creativity increasingly less likely. Like any addict, the more I give myself over to my own desires, the more enslaved I become not to them and, through them, to things external to myself. This includes not only drugs or alcohol but the whole constellation of actions and prevarications upon which the addict comes more and more to depend.7

Lose the Novel to Find the Lasting

Silence, that is the intention discipline of the nous and the refusal to chase the various novelties presented to us. To cultivate silence is to liberate ourselves first from the world of persons, events, and things, then from our own desires. Delightfully, rather than finding ourselves alone or failing, this liberation turns out to be the very means by which we see not only lasting success in this world, but communion with the very world of persons, events, and things, we but only recently left behind.

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Bibliography

“CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Quietism.” n.d. Www.newadvent.org. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm.

“CHURCH FATHERS: Letters, Division I (Gregory Nazianzen).” n.d. Www.newadvent.org. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3103a.htm.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York, Penguin Press, 2024.

———. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. London, Arrow, 2006.

Mccloskey, Deirdre N. 2006. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

———. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago, Ill.: University Of Chicago Press.

———. 2016. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.

Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. Fordham University Press, 1987.

For You formed my inward parts;
You covered me in my mother’s womb.
I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Marvelous are Your works,
And that my soul knows very well.
My frame was not hidden from You,
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.
Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
The days fashioned for me,
When as yet there were none of them (Psalm 139: 13-16, NKJV).

In this post, I will be looking with you at Bernard’s first degree of love: to love myself for the sake of myself. Before I do so, let me make one brief observation about the difference between spiritual formation and developmental psychology.

Developmental Psychology & Spiritual Formation

Ideally, we should see spiritual formation and development psychology as complimentary. From the former, we get the broad outline and goal of human life while from the latter, we get the day-to-day details. Put slightly differently, spiritual formation is teleological while development psychology as descriptive. We live our lives in the tension between the “what is” of psychology and the “what should be” of spirituality.

As a positive science, developmental psychology (and the other social and natural sciences) is deterministic. For the developmental psychologist, the stages of human growth and development will unfold spontaneously, assuming no outside interference. Spiritual formation, however, is not deterministic but assumes the relative freedom of the person in response to both divine grace and circumstances. This means that, unlike psychology, there are no laws about the spiritual life. What we have instead are general patterns that play out uniquely in the life of each person.

We will come back to psychology and the spiritual life in a later post in this series. For now though, let us look at the four degrees of love.

I Love Myself, for the Sake of Myself

As we mentioned in our first post, human nature is frail. This is not simply a matter of moral failing because of sin or the body’s vulnerability to deprivation, injury, or illness. All of these are certainly true, even as they are also secondary. For Bernard, we are first ontologically weak and then only subsequently morally and physically so.

Moreover, ontological weakness is inherent in being a creature. I am, in an absolute sense, dependent on God for my existence even as, in a relative sense, I am dependent upon my neighbor—first my parents and then everyone else—and the whole material world.¹ Far from being a negative reality, for Bernard, our ontological weakness is the source of love and so paradoxically our greatest strength.

The web of ontological, material and social dependence that characterizes my life as a creature is why, as Bernard says, I “love first by nature, not precept—’No man ever hated his own flesh’” (Bernard, p. 30) The problem is that I tend to narrow my understanding of my flesh to my own body or (worse) bodily desire. Doing so means I reduce my existence to only a few things at the expense of a life and personality characterized by a catholic fullness or wholeness of being.

The specific way in which I limit myself does not matter overly much. What does, is that this reductionistic view of myself allows me to ignore, deny, or forget that I am dependent on both God and my neighbor.

Built on this constricted view of my own identity, my self-love “increase(s) too much.” It becomes “like a river” that “overflow(s) and flood(s) the lands about it.” It is only the command to love my neighbor as myself Bernard says that can serve as the “dyke” that keeps the love of self from causing great harm to self and others; he calls this harmful desire “voluptuousness” (Bernard, p. 31)

While this sounds quite stern, he is not moralizing. We should think of ourselves, he says, “as much as ever [we] will, if only [we] take care to think equally of [our] neighbor.” This is no mere life hack or a utilitarian scheme that offers the “form of godliness” while “denying its power” (see, 2 Timothy 3:5). Indulgent self-love is not necessarily sinful. It is rather a call to consider “the just limit imposed upon [us] by … [our] own being and by … conscience” so that we are “not carried away by … selfishness to … destruction” and left “at the mercy of the enemies of [our] soul(s)” the powers of sin and death (Bernard, p. 31).

Thanks to the superabundance of grace, “which always heals that which is infirm and completes that which is lacking” (Eastern Orthodox Prayer of Ordination), “selfishness becomes benevolence by taking a wider range” (Bernard, p. 31). Though we are, Bernard concludes, “by nature animal and carnal, with no love but for [ourselves],” grace brings us “through self-love to love of God.” It is this first degree of love that sets the stage for the next two as we slowly come to recognize that “all [our] abilit[ies], ... for good, [we have] from God, and without Him [we are] able to do nothing” (Bernard, p. 32). In our next post, we will see this happens.

References

Bernard of Clairvaux. (2016). On Loving God. Gideon House Books.

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Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God

Let me take a slight detour from the Neptic Fathers and turn to the great Medieval monastic reformer St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153).1 To some, my interest in Bernard might seem eccentric. I am, after all, an Orthodox priest. But this man Pope Pius XII called “the last of the fathers” and the “Doctor Mellifluus” (“Doctor Mellifluus (May 24, 1953) | PIUS XII”) has much to teach us about the inner life and can serve as a welcome counterpoint to the desert fathers and the Philokalia.

So, who is Bernard of Clairvaux, and why do we care about what he has to say?

I care because of the Cistercian fathers of the Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and New Melleray Abbey. These contemporary monastic brothers of Bernard were my professors in college and graduate school. These men are sterling examples of intellectual excellence, fidelity to Christ, holiness, and above all charity. Their witness led me to Bernard.

My fondness for Bernard and the Cisterians aside, let me suggest that we should care about his work because it is true and because he practiced what he preached; he loved sacrificially.

Building on our Lord’s teaching of the two greatest commandments (Matthew 22:37-40; Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27), St. Bernard teaches that the interconnected nature of love of God, neighbor, and self. He touches on this in sermons and letters and at length in his treatise On Loving God (2016). For Bernard, love is not transactional; it is “not a contract” but “an affection of the soul.” It is not rooted in “mere agreement” but arises spontaneously in response to the beloved. Love’s true reward is not any external benefit but the beloved (Bernard, p. 26).

A keen psychologist of the spiritual life, Bernard identifies four stages or “degrees” in our formation in love:

1. I love myself for the sake of myself.

2. I love God out of a recognition of my need for Him.

3. I love God in gratitude for His many gifts to me.

4. Finally, I come to love myself because God first loved me.

As we will see, there is a self-referential aspect to all four degrees of love. The frank narcissism of the first stage gives way in time to the humility of the second, the eucharistic character of the third, and culminates in an act of obedience that is a foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The self-interested character of all four stages of love need not disturb us or compel us to doubt the sincerity of, especially the opening movement, as the soul comes to understand the eschatological nature of love. To transcend the constraints of a “nature… soft and weak,” the soul “has to love itself first” (p. 30). Only then can one gradually ascend to the love of God and eventually come to love “oneself only for God’s sake” (p. 34). Seen in the light of the last stage, the narcissism of the first is revealed as the seminal presence in the soul of the Kingdom of God. Across all stages, self-love within the limits of the moral law is not an act of mere formal or external obedience but rather a gradual process of the believer becoming a co-worker with Christ (1 Corinthians 3:9) in his or her salvation, of conforming the self to Christ (Romans 8:29), and of taking every thought captive (2 Corinthians 10:5).

Given the limits of human nature—and the wounds inflicted on us by sin—love’s last stage is only glimpsed in this life; it is “something [we] may [only] hope to possess… or rather to be possessed by” in heaven (p. 36). Rather than seeing this as negative, Bernard sees it as the source of compassion for self and others. This side of heaven, we have only a superficial view of our worth and the depth of God’s love for us.

In addition, this unfulfilled longing is a reminder of the joy that awaits us in the Kingdom of God. This, in turn, is the source of both fidelity and patience. Finally, we can conclude that desire is a source of hope.

Sacrificial Love.

“God Himself,” writes Bernard, “is the motive of our love for Him.” As for “the measure of love,” we owe God the answer is “clear enough” to those who have studied the Scriptures; we are to love Him “without measure.” To say this is to say that needs to be said. But because he is the abbot of a monastery made up of both the “learned and the unlearned,” he realizes he must remember the latter even if he has already “said enough for the former.” And so, the love of neighbor requires that he “unfold [his] meaning and perhaps add somewhat to it” for the benefit of all (p. 9).

This is not merely a moral or institutional obligation for Bernard. Faithful to the example of Christ Who “gave Himself to us in spite of our unworthiness, and, being God, what could He give us of greater worth than Himself,” his catechesis on love is also his own, personal act of self-offering. His treatise is a sacrifice of his interiority for the sake of his spiritual sons and, as it happens, for us too.

Sacrificial service for others is a central theme of Bernard’s life. Though a nobleman, he renounces his privilege to pursue intimacy with Christ in a life of prayer, fasting, obedience, and manual labor in the new, obscure, and poor monastery at Cîteaux. Soon, though, he would leave the peace and fellowship he found here to be the founding abbot of the monastery at Clairvaux.

Bernard’s life at Clairvaux would frequently be interrupted—sacrificed, really—as he was drawn into the various ecclesiastic and geo-political controversies of the Middle Ages. Papal schisms, theological arguments, the crusades, and the petty jealousy of his brother monastics would all at one time or another intrude upon his solitude. Each time he is called to do so, the abbot of Clairvaux sacrifices the quiet of monastic life and the fellowship of his brother monks. He does so because love requires that we sacrifice ourselves first to God and then for our neighbor’s good. We “are bound to love God,” Bernard writes, because “He first loved us” (p. 9).

This obligation is not simply bound up with God’s love for us and ours for Him. Created as we are in the image of God Who is Himself love, our love for Him and our neighbor is intrinsic to who we are as Christians and human beings. Failure, or worse, the refusal, to love God or my neighbor is not only a moral failing. It also inflicts a deep wound on my identity.

In our next conversation, we will turn to St. Bernard's On Loving God and see what we might see.

References

Bernard of Clairvaux. (2016). On Loving God. Gideon House Books.

Pius XII, “Doctor Mellifluus (May 24, 1953), Vatican.va, 23 May 1953, www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_24051953_doctor-mellifluus.html. Accessed 29 Apr. 2025.

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Today...since by the Lord’s grace peace prevails in the Church, the bodies of those contending for holiness have to be tested by frequent illnesses, and their souls by evil thoughts.

St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” #94 in Philokalia. Vol I, p. 358.

Spiritual masochism and its dangers

Today, we face the challenge posed by a pathological and frankly sinful acceptance of suffering as a moral good. We need to shake off our embrace of spiritual masochism.

By spiritual masochism, I mean the pathological belief that suffering, in and of itself, possesses inherent moral or spiritual value, leading to the active pursuit or acceptance of pain and humiliation. Let me explain why this is a problem.

Together with his brother monks, my college confessor saw his country invaded by Hitler and then the Soviet Union, together with his brother monks, he immigrated to the US in the 1950s. Father was my moral theology professor. Faithful to his monastic vocation, he taught not simply from books but from his own experience.

One day in class he told us “Suffering isn’t suffering unless it hurts.” Father was skeptical about those who “suffer nobly.” Suffering, he reasoned, inflicts upon us the unavoidable experience of human weakness—both our own and others. In this, it is the opposite of the popular view of nobility. We may bear suffering with patience and humility. But nobility? No, there is nothing noble about suffering.

This brings us to the heart of a misunderstanding of suffering common among many Orthodox Christians.

Misunderstand Suffering

I can all too easily imagine that my suffering has some kind of positive moral or spiritual value. Saying this robs the person of agency. Suffering makes clear the limits within which I can exercise my freedom. But limits are not limiting if they are mine to decide.

What matters is my response to these situations. Suffering is a challenge to my illusory sense of freedom AND an invitation to exercise that rightly.

Valuing suffering and not my response to it, makes me prone to think that if a little suffering is good, more must be better. Once this takes hold, I become able—and eventually even eager—to justify all manners of abuse as “spiritually efficacious.”

The soul that embraces suffering as a moral good rather than an invitation to the right exercise of freedom will seek out opportunities for failure and humiliation. More extreme, and eccentric, ascetical practices. A controlling and even abusive spiritual father. Sadly, there is no shortage of this kind of authoritarian spiritual fathers and pastors.

Suffering, Asceticism, and the Life of Virtue

The 'right exercise' involves cultivating virtues like patience, humility, and compassion in the face of suffering, while also actively seeking healing and growth. It means recognizing our limitations and sinfulness without succumbing to despair or self-pity.

Orthodox asceticism is in the service of exercising our freedom rightly. While it can be a valuable tool for spiritual growth, this requires discernment and guidance by a mature spiritual father or mother.

Risks of Extreme Ascetical Practices

Especially without a mature guide, asceticism can easily become an end in itself. When this happens, I am prone to spiritual delusion (or prelast). Instead of becoming more like Christ through health, and moderate acts of self-denial, I look to ratify my fractured self-image and my commitment to leading a life of self-sufficiency. We see this played out with dreary regularity in social media.

Participants in internet Orthodoxy regularly glorify (their own) victimhood. To gain attention (and so confirmation of their victim status) they engage in increasingly extreme interpretations of Orthodox doctrine. Disagreement about ecclesiastical, social, and political issues, are all seen as evidence of persecution. In turn, this justifies their refusal to engage in constructive dialogue with those both outside and inside the Church.

Developmentally, such a splintered view of the self is understandable. It takes time to bring the disparate elements of my personality into something that resembles a whole, balanced view of the self. Spiritual masochism undoes this by calling into question even the desirability of the journey toward wholeness of being. Instead, it “blesses” the fragmentation of the person as the norm of the spiritual life.

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Impact of Spiritual masochism on Personality and Relationships

Acceptance of suffering and so the fragmentation of the personality as morally good tends to excuse and, what is worse, justify abuse at the hands of an ill-prepared spiritual father, an abusive spouse or parent, or a toxic workplace or parish.

It also goes a long way in accounting for sectarian tendencies and feelings of persecution we see in many Orthodox Christians both in the West and in the “Old Country.” While we should not minimize the differences and competition between the City of God and the City of Man, neither should we so emphasize them to make friendship impossible with those outside the Church.1 As Fr. Alexander Schmemann never tired of reminding us, it is for the latter that the Son of God suffers and dies.2

Looking at my own life, I realize that situations in which I feel “persecuted” are more charitably—and truthfully—described as the natural consequence of my failings. How easy it is for me to look away from my disjointed personality, my immaturity and sinfulness. Blaming others is a balm for my ego, my personal and pastoral failures, and my lackadaisical approach to the spiritual life.

Unlike in St. Diadochos of Photiki’s day Christians in the West are not “tested by frequent illnesses” we are still tested “by evil thoughts.” Especially for those of us who are wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of the avaricious in Late Antiquity, physical illness is less with us (though as COVID reminds us not absent either), but evil thoughts are still with us. Today bodily illnesses have given way to those of a more psychological nature. These include not only mental illness but the lack of psychological maturity I have described here.

And evil thoughts?

Those cataloged by the fathers (especially St. John Cassian) are still with us of course. But today we are tempted to excuse—and as I said above, even bless or reward—mental illness or emotional immaturity by appealing to a piety that embraces suffering—rather than our response to it—as desirable.

A Balanced and Compassionate Understanding of Suffering

Physical and emotional suffering, whether caused by illness, misfortune, or social isolation, are human constants. The same is true of mistreatment at the hands of others. We should neither glorify nor deny the reality of suffering. If we are not to engage in spiritual masochism, we should not be Pollyannish in the face of sorrow.

Learning to navigate these waters is one of the chief benefits of asceticism. Given that human sin is a constant, finding a balanced response to suffering has been and will always be a struggle. I suspect that ours is not the first age to put a pious gloss on abuse.

Additionally, other sins—some great, some petty—are still with us. Whether the sins of one era are greater in greater number than another is an empirical question for which, alas, we do not always have sufficient data.

But the saint suggests that our age, like every age, faces its unique ascetical challenges. In the early Church, martyrdom was common. Later, indifference and capitulation to the State followed. And today?

Today, we must reject the seductive allure of spiritual masochism and embrace a more balanced and compassionate understanding of suffering. By doing so, we can cultivate true spiritual growth and build a more just and loving community. We cannot do this by minimizing or flat-out denying the wealth and freedom we have. Rather, we must learn to put both at the service of human flourishing and Christian holiness.

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St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” in The Philokalia, vol 1, p. 357.

Neither Hedonists nor Masochists

The Need for Caution. To hear some Orthodox Christians talk, one would assume that any affective response to divine grace is not just suspect is the fruit of spiritual deception (prelest) and might even be sinful.

In defense of this position, one of the signs that I am approaching the spiritual life on my own terms is that it seems easy. Jesus warns us this, telling us to “’Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it’” (Matthew 7:13-14, NKJV).

At the same time, if positive emotions and blithe certainty are suspect, so too is any approach to the spiritual life that takes hardship and suffering as evidence of fidelity to Christ and the Gospel. Orthodox Christians are no more spiritual masochists than we are spiritual hedonists. Both these extremes betray an underlying narcissism and pride that need to be rooted out of the soul.

None of this is to say that consolations as such are wrong. Especially when we begin the life of prayer, there is often a surprising—and consoling—sweetness. What I need to be on guard against is expecting this to be the norm as I progress in the life of faith.

To expect sweetness is to open myself up to the uncritical—and frankly, annoying—enthusiasm we typically identify with the new convert. If I don’t free myself from the pursuit of spiritual pleasure, I will fall into cynicism as I become increasingly disappointed with life in Christ.

Two Spiritual Pathologies

Let’s take a moment and look a bit more closely at these two spiritual pathologies.

Romanticism. The expectation that life in Christ is all sweetness reflects a certain understandable naivety. Because I lack experience in the inner life, I image the spiritual life as an almost effortless passage from “glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3: 18). In this I am more likely an adolescent in the throes of a crush; it is less a sign of moral wickedness and more of spiritual immaturity.

The cure is simple enough. The soul must say yes to Jesus’ command to “pick up your cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24. A temptation here is that I pick up the cross I want rather than the cross Christ wants for me. If I do this, I defeat myself before I’ve even begun. Instead, let me simply abstain from what I know to be wrong and do the good things I can.

Cynicism. When I fail to pick up my cross, I will experience the gradual erosion of hope and the willingness to do good. The soul flips St. Paul’s injunction on its head—”let us not grow weary while doing good”—when for one reason or another (and there are always “reasons”), it loses sight of the promise that “in due season we shall reap” a harvest of goodness but only “if we do not lose heart” (Galatians 6:9).

Learning Not to Stand in My Own Way

What should happen though is this. As we grow in self-knowledge, we begin to see the obstacles that stand between us and the Kingdom of God. The temptation here is to imagine these obstacles are, primarily, external. Friends, family members, my job, all of these seem to conspire against my pursuit of “holiness.” None of these stand in my way, however; only I do.

The Lure of Pleasure. It is my love of pleasure—physical, social, and above all psychological—that is the only obstacle. Again, though, I need to be careful. The ability to experience pleasure is natural and a sign of physical health. Likewise, the ability to see the goodness and desirability of pleasure is indicative of psychological and moral health.

At the same time, as St. Diadochos of Photiki reminds us, “the path of virtue seems very rough and forbidding... not because it really is difficult, but because our human nature from the womb is accustomed to the wide roads of sensual pleasure.”

In a fallen world, the saint’s warning is important. I too easily confuse the gift with the Giver. We read in the book of Wisdom that

For all men who were ignorant of God were foolish by nature; and they were unable from the good things that are seen to know him who exists, nor did they recognize the craftsman while paying heed to his works; but they supposed that either fire or wind or swift air, or the circle of the stars, or turbulent water, or the luminaries of heaven were the gods that rule the world.

And yet, the problem here is not human malice but ignorance.

If through delight in the beauty of these [created] things men assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them.

Instead of being “amazed” at the “power and working” of created things, I should rather

...perceive from them how much more powerful is he who formed them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator.

Nevertheless, even if human beings misunderstands the revelation of God inscribed as it is in creation and human hearts they

...are little to be blamed, for perhaps they go astray while seeking God and desiring to find him. For as they live among his works they keep searching, and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.

Confusion Invites Reflection. Human misunderstanding, however, is not “to be excused.” It is rather a divine invitation to exercise our reason—our “power to know so much that they could investigate the world” so that we overcome our failure and “find sooner the Lord of these things” (Wisdom 13:1-9).

The pursuit of consolations, of spiritual pleasures, at the beginning of the spiritual life, becomes joy; the “zeal without knowledge” (Proverbs 19:2) that necessarily characterizes the neophyte, becomes that “faith” which “is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

And so, to return to St. Diadochos, it is only “when a bad habit has been subjected to a good one through the energy of grace” that “it is destroyed along with the remembrance of mindless pleasures; and thereafter the soul gladly journeys on all the ways of virtue.”

Healthy human development depends upon and deepens the infant’s trust for the parents. The mature love of adulthood is in no way a diminishment—much less a rejection—of infantile love. The latter perfects the former, but the former is never left behind much less discarded; I am never not my parent’s child. Progress in the spiritual life is like this.

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Isaiah 40:1-2

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... grace dwells in the depths of his intellect, while the wicked spirits cluster round only the outside of the heart. This is just what the demons do not want us to know, for fear that our intellect, once definitely aware of it, will arm itself against them with the remembrance of God. 

St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” # 33 in Philokalia, vol I, p. 320. 

Be Responsible and Answer God 

Unlike the brief anecdotes that make up most of what we read in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers from the ascetic fathers, the often more technical, theological style of the neptic fathers The Philokalia is often hard for modern readers to understand. The neptic fathers’ emphasis on the believer’s responsibility for the character in the presence of divine grace can be off-putting for those of us raised on a steady cultural diet of post-Reformation polemics and apologetics. Their message of radical responsibility falls on ears deafened by a steady diet of a gospel of cheap grace that seeks to lift from the believers’ shoulders the heavy weight of “bracing” ourselves while God not only questions us but “you shall answer Me” (see Job 38:3, NIV). 

The irony hidden within our preference for the modern and resistant to the ancient is that men like St. Diadochos (c. 400 - c. 486) are culturally and theologically closer to the New Testament era than any classical or contemporary proponent of sola Scriptura. Without scant foundation and a poverty of intellectual justification, contemporary Christians dismiss monastic authors as estranged from—and even, polluters of—the apostolic witness.1

Meeting the Stranger 

Whatever we make of it theologically, the fathers we’ve been looking at here lived and wrote in a time different from our own. Because of this, it is not surprising that their concerns and ways of thinking are often alien to mine. In a word, they are strangers to me. But what do the Scriptures tell us? “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels” (Hebrews 13:2, NKJV). As is so often the case, Chesterton is helpful here,  

He reminds us that we  

...always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache (The Club of Queer Trades). 

The great advantage of the spiritual fathers of the desert and the Philokalia is that they are unfamiliar to us. Like the sympathetic stranger I met while going about my day, they are uniquely situated to help me reclaim “the one thing necessary” which, while it will “never be taken away” can be lost through my own concern “over many things” (see, Luke 10:41-42). 

Once again, Chesterton (The Everlasting Man) is helpful. 

...when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.  

The sacramental and liturgical life which is both “the source and summit” (see, Lumen Gentium, 11) of life in Christ was common to both East and West for 15 centuries.  

But what once had all the romance and excitement of falling in love, became in time dependable and even comfortable. And once the ascetical character of the Gospel became familiar, it was easily forgotten.  

Clinging to the Form, Contemptous of the Substance 

But what was forgotten was not the externals of the sacramental and ascetical life. If anything, we have clung to these with the tenacity of with which a now gone to seed, high school quarterback remembers his glory days. What we lost is not their form but their substance and intrinsic and necessary connection to the following Christ. 

It is precisely because the forms remained familiar, that it became possible to treat them with contempt. What was once the common response of the unbelieving pagan has become increasingly taken up by those who lay claim to that Name above every other name (see Philippians 2:9-11). 

Florovksy illustrates the nature of our loss when he asks  

If the monastic ideal is union with God through prayer, through humility, through obedience, through constant recognition of one’s sins, voluntary or involuntary, through a renunciation of the values of this world, through poverty, through chastity, through love for mankind and love for God, then is such an ideal Christian?” 

He goes on to say that  

For some the very raising of such a question may appear strange and foreign. But the history of Christianity, especially the new theological attitude that obtained as a result of the Reformation, forces such a question and demands a serious answer. If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non-existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical—New Testamental? Or is this monastic ideal, as its opponents have claimed, a distortion of authentic Christianity, a slavery to mechanical "monkish" "works righteousness"? 

Now thanks to both the polemics and course correct that emerge with Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Christians hold liturgy, sacraments, and asceticism as unnecessary. Some, like the heirs of the Reformation, do so de fide. To put it charitably the five sola—sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”), sola fide (“faith alone”), sola gratia (“grace alone”), solus Christus (“Christ alone”), soli Deo Gloria (“to the glory of God alone”) —can all be held apart from any organic connection to the life of the first 1500 years. 

And the children of the Counter-Reformation? Sadly, their embrace of abstraction in defense of catholic and orthodox faith and practice has the unhappy consequence of severing—or at least deeply wounding—the organic link between themselves and their own, earliest history. 

The tragic reality is that not only Protestants who hold this life in contempt. Orthodox and Catholic Christian in large number treat the celebration of the sacraments of baptism and marriage as mere rites of passage. As for confession, Holy Communion, and the ascetical disciplines of prayer, fasting, almsgiving and manual labor, their behavior makes clear they see these as merely optional but hardly life-giving. 

And so, when, as Chesterton goes on to say, that “familiarity breeds contempt” it is essential that we—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—welcome the stranger and embrace the teaching and example of the now sadly, unfamiliar neptic fathers. “For in connection with things so great as are here considered,” as Chesterton says “whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.” 

Providentially, if unintentionally, Chesterton brings us back to St. Diadochos of Photiki whose central argument is simple enough. The central struggle of my spiritual life is this: I am shallow.  

Preferring Grape Juice to Wine 

I prefer the superficial, the familiar, and the understood to the grace that “works its mysteries with[in] the soul for the most part without its knowledge” (#69, p. 338). In place of grace, I am “unreservedly proud” of my “own experience of spiritual perception.” Consequentially, I am enslaved by the myriad ways in which the enemy of souls “entices” me “by means of certain plausible illusions of grace.” Symptomatic of this state is my preference for “dank and debilitating sweetness” rather than the “taste of divine goodness.”  In my moral life, I forgo the cultivation of virtue in favor of emotivism; in my spiritual life rather than pursuing inner silence, I tend toward the sentimental.  

As for the cure, the saint says this requires realizing that “grace dwells in the depths of [the] intellect.”  And here lies the root of my distaste for the neptic fathers; I prefer grape juice to wine.  

It is easy enough for me to embrace the idea that God dwells in the depths of my heart. I may even be willing to acknowledge this grace in other Christians (or at least the “right” kind of Christian—let the reader beware!).  

But to see this hidden grace as the common gift to all humanity? This is too much for me to bear. Once I accept it, it quickly undoes the plans and projects with which I have come to identify with my life in Christ. 

The Most Unbearable Thing 

But what is most unbearable is this. If grace is found at the foundation of each human life, then I am no longer the guardian of grace. What is worse, my preaching, teaching, and sacramental ministry are no longer “sources” of grace under my control. 

Because grace is at the foundation of your life, I can no longer presume—even in the privacy of my own heart—to know where you stand in the great moral hierarchy that I have built and use to sort the world of persons, events, and things. To see grace hidden within the depths of each human life leaves me as naked as Adam on the day of his creation. It also leaves me as ashamed as Adam in the first moment after the Fall. 

To read the neptic fathers is to invite the loss of the “fig leaves” with which I cover my shame. To take seriously their words and example is to stand before God like Adam and say, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).  

But fallen as I am, all this self-afflicted suffering is necessary if I am to be clothed, once again in divine glory. Or, rather, this stripping is needed if I am to realize that sin has only obscured—but not destroyed—my divine beauty. 

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Summary

• Evil and Good: Evil does not exist by nature; it is created through actions. Good, which exists by nature, is more powerful.

• Self-Acceptance: True self-acceptance involves acknowledging one’s past, present, and future, and standing naked before God.

• Hope and Responsibility: Hope is not mere optimism but a deep belief in redemption. Accepting grace means taking responsibility for one’s life.

• Human Desire: Human desire is rooted in the need for love and acceptance from both God and others. This desire drives self-acceptance and responsibility.

3.     Evil does not exist by nature, nor is any man naturally evil, for God made nothing that was not good. When in the desire of his heart someone conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence, then what he desires begins to exist. We should therefore turn our attention away from the inclination to evil and concentrate it on the remembrance of God; for good, which exists by nature, is more powerful than our inclination to evil. The one has existence while the other has not, except when we give it existence through our actions. 

St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” The Philokalia (Vol. 1), 310. 

Profitably reading the desert fathers (and their heirs in the Philokalia) requires from us an act of radical self-knowledge. More controversially, I would argue, they also require from me an equally radical act of self-acceptance. While self-knowledge has a long and venerable role to play in Orthodox spirituality, self-acceptance is of a more recent vintage (seemingly) emerging from within the broad context of humanistic, and even pop, psychology. 

The recent, secular origin of the term is not a reason for us to dismiss self-acceptance as an element of our life in Christ. Understood rightly, self-acceptance is a difficult and frightening act. It means to stand at the threshold between being and non-being. To accept myself as I am, means to stand at the confluence of who I am (my present), who I am no longer (my past), and who I may yet be (my future). The Church’s hymnography illustrates this for us: 

I, the wretched one, have cast off the robe woven by God, and by the counsel of the enemy have disobeyed Thy divine command, O Lord, I am clothed now in fig leaves and in garments of skin,  condemned to eat the bread of toil,  The earth hath been cursed, bearing thorns and thistles for me.  But do Thou Who in the last times  wast made flesh of the Virgin, call me back again and bring me into Paradise (Sticheron, Vespers on Forgiveness Sunday). 

In the hymn, we see the temporal elements of self-acceptance and so the interplay between being and non-being: 

1. Past: I, ..., have cast off the robe woven by God, and by the counsel of the enemy have disobeyed Thy divine command, O Lord; 

2. Present; I am clothed now in fig leaves and in garments of skin, condemned to eat the bread of toil, the earth hath been cursed, bearing thorns and thistles for me; 

3. Future: But do Thou ... call me back again and bring me into Paradise. 

To accept myself as I am—as one who stands between being and non-being—is what it means to stand naked and without defense before God. What this does not mean, however, is that I am without hope of a Redeemer. 

Hope is not optimism as Marcel points out. It is to say with Job “I know that my Redeemer lives.” But to say this requires that I go on to say (again with Job) 

And He shall stand at last on the earth; 
And after my skin is destroyed, this I know, 
That in my flesh I shall see God, 
Whom I shall see for myself, 
And my eyes shall behold, and not another. 
How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27) 

To hope for forgiveness is also to foresee and to will the destruction of my body and all those aspects of character and personality dependent upon not only the body but also the material and social worlds.  

Which means death and forgiveness travel together. 

The neptic fathers allow me no room for sentimentality about my condition or the cost I will pay to enter the Kingdom of God—free gift though it is. Accepting salvation means accepting the heavy burden of responsibility for my life.  

Here we see the attraction of not only humanistic and pop psychologies but also religious fundamentalism and political ideology. Each in its way, allows me to sidestep the uncomfortable reality that grace does not exempt me from responsibility. To accept the grace means to accept a life of active participation in the work of salvation: 

For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, you are God’s building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let each one take heed how he builds on it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:9-15) 

To read profitably the desert fathers and the Philokalia is not just a matter of preparing to be “saved ... as through fire” but actively seeking out that fire in the here and now.  

To do this requires that I stop hiding from God. I must freely sit outside the Gates, lamenting my nakedness, weeping with Adam for both my sin and his: 

“Woe is me! By evil persuasion I have been deceived and led astray and am now exiled from glory. Woe is me!  lacking noetic insight, I am now naked, and in need.  O Paradise, no more shall I take pleasure in thy joys; no more shall I look upon the Lord my God and Maker, for I shall return to the earth from whence I was taken.  O merciful and compassionate Lord, I cry unto Thee:  Have mercy on me who have fallen.” (Doxastikon, Vespers on Forgiveness Sunday) 

The monastic tradition’s emphasis on self-knowledge and co-working with God for the salvation of my neighbor demands a type of self-acceptance that is neither sentimental nor static.  

It is not sentimental since neither the pleasant nor unpleasant facts of my life have the final say in who I am. It is not static because who I am, is a being who holds together in myself both being and non-being. To borrow once again from Marcel, we are homo viator¹—a being who does not simply move toward the future but does so in the hope of a final, costly, restoration to a life of integrity. Surprisingly, the 18^th-century economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith has something to add.  

The human, he writes, “naturally desires, not only to be loved but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” Wishing to be lovely, the person also (and again) “naturally dreads, not only to be hated but to be hateful.” He says we shy away from being thought of as “the natural and proper object of hatred.” To conceive in myself the desire to be loved and to be lovely means also accepting how I am hated because I am hateful; accepting love requires that I look at how I tend to non-being (that is, sin). 

The Scottish philosopher introduces us to a distinction that fits quite easily in the thought and practice of the neptic fathers of the desert and the  Philokalia. We do not simply desire “praise” — what the fathers call vainglory—but to be seen as lovely and so praiseworthy, Smith says, means becoming what we admire in others.² Here I realize that, as we read in the desert fathers, my neighbor is my life. 

Unlike Freud’s Seducer, who shatters our infantile integrity by having us look outward³ Smith has us look inward. Here we discover that our “emulation” of what is admirable in others is not sufficient. We are not “satisfied with being merely admired for what other people are admired,” that is having only the outward appearance of beauty. Instead, 

We must at least believe ourselves to be admirable for what they are admirable. But, in order to attain this satisfaction, we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct. We must endeavour to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. When seen in this light, if they appear to us as we wish, we are happy and contented. But it greatly confirms this happiness and contentment when we find that other people, viewing them with those very eyes with which we, in imagination only, were endeavouring to view them, see them precisely in the same light in which we ourselves had seen them.⁴ 

Compare this to St. Diadochos.  

At first, our heart “conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence.” But, having done so, that which did not exist “begins to exist.” He goes on to say that 

We should therefore turn our attention away from the inclination to evil and concentrate on the remembrance of God; for good, which exists by nature, is more powerful than our inclination to evil. The one has existence while the other has not, except when we give it existence through our actions (#3, emphasis added). 

St. Diadochos tells me (to use Smith’s language) that I should not act on those aspects of my character that make me blameworthy. I can instead resist the lure of my past misdeeds secure in the reality that “good ... is more powerful” than my inclination toward evil.  

The saint’s understanding of evil—and so its grip on us—is based on the teaching common to the fathers of the fundamental, ontological goodness of creation. No one (and nothing) that exists is “evil, for God made nothing that was not good.”  To be is to be good. Or, if you prefer, I am, you are, we are good because we exist. 

At the same time, to desire something is to perceive a lack in myself. While, yes, this lacuna is part of what it means to be a sinner—I lack a good that should be present—the experience of absent goodness is not inherently the result of sin. Returning for a moment to Adam in the Garden, it is only after naming the animals he realizes both their ontological goodness AND that none are a fit helpmate for him (see Genesis 2:18-20). 

It is the perception of his lack and the lack in the animals, that gives birth to desire in the Man for a helpmate. Genesis highlights for us that human desire does not find its fulfillment in possessing the good.⁵ Likewise, and even when exercised virtuously neither authority⁶ nor knowledge,⁷ are sufficient for us.  

This allows us to see how Freud’s Seducer imposes on the child a state of polymorphous perversion; he enslaves the child to the world of mere appearances. Beyond the pleasure of the merely physical, it is a world that can be categorized and manipulated. 

But here is the rub.  

This world of appearance is an abstract of our own devising. As such it falls short of the sacramental goodness of creation. No matter how satisfyingly they are arranged (that is, no matter how beautiful), there is no communion to be found in our ideas about objects or others.  

This is not because our ideas are bad—they are not—but because they cannot reciprocate; my ideas are mine and I am alone in them.  But it is reciprocity (as both Smith and the saint tell us) that we seek and without which integrity of being is impossible.  

We see the radical orientation of the human toward the Other from humanity’s beginning: 

And Adam said: 

“This is now bone of my bones 

And flesh of my flesh; 

She shall be called Woman, 

Because she was taken out of Man.” 

Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. 

 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:23-25). 

Here though we should pause.  

And recall, that as presented by Genesis, desire for the desire of the Other (to borrow again from Lacan) embraces both God and the human. The Man’s desire for the Woman grows out of his communion with God and his deep understanding of the nature of the created being, above all himself. 

To desire the other and to desire the desire of the other (both human and divine) is an act of radical self-acceptance and so responsibility for one’s own life. Let me put this another way. 

I can't be responsible unless I first accept my desire for the desire of the other. It is not my love for the Other that makes me whole but the Other’s (human and divine) love for me. The necessity of being loved by God and neighbor is why Christ as the Theanthropos (God-Man)