Returning to the Father’s house

…continued from the previous post

The great tragedy of our times lies in the fact that we live, speak, think, and even pray to God, outside our heart, outside our Father’s house. And truly our Father’s house is our heart, the place where ‘the spirit of glory and of God’ would find repose, that Christ may ’be formed in us’. Indeed, only then can we be made whole, and become hypostases in the image of the true and perfect Hypostasis, the Son and Word of God, Who created and redeemed us by the precious Blood of His ineffable sacrifice.

Yet as long as we are held captive by our passions, which distract our mind from our heart and lure it into the ever-changing and vain world of natural and created things, thus depriving us of all spiritual strength, we will not know the new birth from on High that makes us children of God and gods by grace. In fact, in one way or another, we are all ‘prodigal sons’ of our Father in heaven, because as the Scriptures testify, ‘All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.’ Sin has separated our mind from the life-giving contemplation of God and led it into a ‘far country’. In this ‘far country’ we have been deprived of the honour of our Father’s embrace and, in feeding swine, we have been made subject to demons. We gave ourselves over to dishonourable passions and the dreadful famine of sin, which then established itself by force, becoming the law of our members. But now we must come out of this godless hell and return to our Father’s house, so as to uproot the law of sin that is within us and allow the law of Christ’s commandments to dwell in our heart. For the only path leading out of the torment of hell to the everlasting joy of the Kingdom is that of the divine commandments: with our whole being we are to love God and our neighbours with a heart that is free of all sin.

The return journey from this remote and inhospitable land is not an easy one, and there is no hunger more fearful than that of a heart laid waste by sin. Those in whom the heart is full of the consolation of incorruptable grace can endure all external deprivations and afflictions, transforming them into a feast of spiritual joy; but the famine in a hardened heart lacking divine consolation is a comfortless torment. There is no greater misfortune than that of an insensible and petrified heart that is unable to distinguish between the luminous Way of God’s Providence and the gloomy confusion of the ways of this world. On the other hand, throughout history there have been men whose hearts were filled with grace. These chosen vessels were enlightened by the spirit of prophecy, and were therefore able to distinguish between Divine Light and the darkness of this world.

No matter how daunting and difficult the struggle of purifying the heart may be, nothing should deter us from this undertaking. We have on our side the ineffable goodness of a God Who has made man’s heart His personal concern and goal. In the Book of Job, we read the following astonishing words: ‘What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? And that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him? And that thou shouldest visit him every morning, and try him every moment… Why has thou set me as a mark against thee, so that I am a burden to myself?’ We sense God Who is incomprehensible, pursuing man’s heart: ‘Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.’ He knocks at the door of our heart, but He also encourages us to knock at the door of His mercy: ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ When the two doors that are God’s goodness and man’s heart open, then the greatest miracle of our existence occurs: man’s heart is united with the Spirit of the Lord, God feasting with the sons of men.

Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), The Hidden Man of the Heart  (Essex, Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2007) 12-15.

 

Archimandrite Zacharias on the heart

All of the ordinances of the undefiled Church are offered to the world for the sole purpose of discovering the ‘deep heart’, the centre of man’s hypostasis. According to the Holy Scriptures, God has fashioned every heart in a special way, and each heart is His goal, a place wherein He desires to abide that He may manifest Himself.

Since the kingdom of God is within us, the heart is the battlefield of our salvation, and all ascetic effort is aimed at cleansing it of all filthiness, and preserving it pure before the Lord. ‘Keep thy heart with diligence; for out of it are the issues of life’, exhorts Solomon, the wise king of Israel. These paths of life pass through man’s heart, and therefore the unquenchable desire of all who ceaselessly seek the Face of the living God is that their heart, once deadened by sin, may be reconciled by His grace.

The heart is the true ‘temple’ of man’s meeting with the Lord. Man’s search ’seeketh knowledge’ both intellectual and divine, and knows no rest until the Lord of glory comes and abides therein. On His part God, Who is ‘jealous God’, will not settle for a mere portion of the heart. In the Old Testament we hear His voice crying out, ‘My son, give Me thy heart’, and in the New Testament He commands: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.’ He is the one who has fashioned the heart of every man in a unique and unrepeatable way, though no heart can contain Him fully because ‘God is greater than our heart’. Nevertheless, when man succeeds in turning his whole heart to God, then God begets it by the incorruptible seed of His word, seals it with His wondrous Name and makes it shine with His perpetual and charismatic presence. He makes it a temple of His Divinity, a temple not made by hands, able to reflect His ’shape’ and to hearken unto His ‘voice’ and ‘bear’ His Name. In a word, man then fulfils the purpose of his life, the reason for his coming into the transient existence of this world.

Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), The Hidden Man of the Heart  (Essex, Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 2007) 11-12.

 

The prayers of the merciful

A heart full of sorrow on account of its feebleness and impotence regarding outward physical deeds takes the place of all physical works. Deeds of the body performed without sorrow of mind are like a body without a soul. The man who is sorely grieved in his heart but gives rein to his senses, is like a sick man who suffers physically but who opens his mouth to every kind of harmful food. The man who is sorely grieved in his heart but gives rein to his senses is like a man with an only son, whom he slaughters with his own hands, little by little. Sorrow of mind is a precious gift before God; and the man who bears this gift as he ought is like a man who bears holiness in his members. A man who unleashes his tongue against other men for good or evil is unworthy of this grace. …

Mercy and justice in one soul is like a man who worships God and the idols in one house. Mercy is opposed to justice. Justice is the equality of the even scale, for it gives to each as he deserves; and when it makes recompense, it does not incline to one side or show respect of persons. Mercy, on the other hand, is a sorrow and pity stirred up by goodness, and it compassionately inclines a man in the direction of all; it does not requite a man who is deserving of evil, and to him who is deserving of good it gives a double portion. If, therefore, it is evident that mercy belongs to the portion of righteousness, then justice belongs to the portion of wickedness. As grass and fire cannot coexist in one place, so justice and mercy cannot abide in one soul. As a grain of sand cannot counterbalance a great quantity of gold, so in comparison God’s use of justice cannot counterbalance His mercy.

As a handful of sand thrown into the great sea, so are the sins of all flesh in comparison with the mind of God. And just as a strongly flowing spring is not obstructed by a handful of dust, so the mercy of the Creator is not stemmed by the vices of His creatures. As a man who sows in the sea and expects to reap a harvest, so is he who remembers wrongs and prays. As the flame of fire cannot be checked from rising upward, so the prayers of the merciful are not hindered from ascending to Heaven. The current of a stream runs swiftly in a narrow place, and likewise the force of anger whenever it finds a place in our mind. The man who has acquired humility in his heart is dead to this world. He who is dead to the world has died to the passions. For to the man who has died in his heart to his kinsmen, the devil is dead. He who has found malice, with it has found him who originally found it.

The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, I, 51, translated by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1984. 243-244.

 

Andrew Louth on the Fathers and Asceticism

What can we learn from the Fathers, seen this time as fellow participants in times of radical change? Norman Baines, the renowned Byzantinist from earlier on in the last century, once remarked that what struck him as a historian about the early Christian movement was a stark asceticism and a staggering confidence, a stark asceticism and a staggering confidence. It seems to me that these two go together and that together they explained how the Fathers lived through periods of dramatic change without being discouraged or dispirited, indeed rather the contrary, for the Fathers became spokesmen for what was being created and refined in the crucible of the times through which they lived.

The confidence was founded on God. But not just on a confidence in His guiding providence in general terms. The Fathers believed that God, who had created and governs the world through His Word, had made Himself part of that world by assuming humanity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Incarnation, God had lived and died as a human being and by death had conquered death and in the Resurrection given life to humankind. This was the core of their faith as it is the core of our faith, as we sing constantly during the period of Easter, “Christ is risen from the dead, by death He has trampled on death and to those in the graves given life.”

And that gift of life, they, the Fathers, took very seriously. This gift of life was the gift of the life of the Triune Godhead, the life that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit share in their consubstantial communion with each other. So, as God had become human in Christ, so in Christ we humans are called to become God, to be deified. And that confidence demanded asceticism, a stark asceticism answering to a staggering confidence. For the life that we live in this fallen world is far from the divine life promised in Christ. It’s even far from the truly human life that Adam and Eve were to have lived in paradise. It is, as the women of Canterbury constantly bewail and lament in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, “living and partly living.”

If we are to grasp and experience the divine life of the godhead, then we have to destroy death in our own lives, the death that makes our own living no more than partly living. And that demands a lifetime of ascesis, training, or perhaps better what the root of that Greek word suggests, to work in raw materials as an artist does, to create and fashion something beautiful out of the raw materials of human living and human loving, of hoping and fearing, of longing and experiencing. Asceticism is often understood in a negative way, as a matter of denial. But that denial is only demanded by the presence of the negative in our fallen human life, a negative that needs to be excised, cut out, so as to make evident the beauty of God’s original creation and beyond that the beauty of the divine life that is offered us through the Incarnation. To be able to distance ourselves from the negativity of the corruption and death that cast their shadow over human lives lived apart from God is to find freedom, that freedom that is the fruit of the Fathers’ stark asceticism and manifest in their staggering confidence, a freedom that enabled them to keep their eyes on the vision of God’s transfiguring glory while living in a society bewildered and often defeatist, with its ancient certainties eroded and crumbling. It is that freedom that we need to grasp and experience and the Fathers offer themselves as our guides to the confidence in God and this corresponding practice of asceticism that is its basis.

Father Andrew Louth, lecture on “The relevance of the Church Fathers Today”

For those who haven’t seen it yet (here or here), a commenter on The Way of the Fathers has kindly tracked down some lost lectures by Father Andrew Louth and made them available in MP3 format.

• The Relevance of the Church Fathers Today.
• Maximus the Confessor and Modern Science.

As anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a couple of months knows, Father Louth is eminently worth reading. Now it turns out that he is also worth listening to!

 

Saint Benedict: a new note

Thus grace and divine love intervene as we advance in the monastic life, and lessen the initial impression of severity. The observance still remains objectively what it is, but the heart within is changed. In other words, Benedict relativized the concept of ‘narrow way’, drawing attention to the subjectivity of the man who follows it. The opposition between the ‘narrow way’ and the ’sweet yoke’ is not suppressed for all that, but this way of interiorizing the problem makes it lose its sharpness. ‘Narrowness’ and ‘breadth’, difficulty and ease are measured less by the objective tenor of the ascesis imposed than by the inmost dispositions of the ascetic. These latter improve with time and by virtue of the ascesis itself, until one experiences something more than the ‘easiness’ and the ‘lightness’ announced by Jesus, namely a ’sweetness’ that cannot be expressed because it proceeds from ‘love’.

Adalbert de Vogüé. The Rule of Saint Benedict. A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary. Kalamazoo, Michigan; Cistercian Publications, 1983. 32.

Having considered the background that the Rule of the Master provides to our understanding of Saint Benedict, and especially his understanding of the monastery as “school of the Lord’s service” Father de Vogüé now turns to Saint Benedict himself. He points out that the Master’s understanding of a school, both in the sense of learning and in the sense of service and suffering, are present in the Rule of Saint Benedict, and especially in his understanding of obedience. However, he also introduces a new note.

But it is especially in his final addition that he seems to have been preoccupied with this painful aspect of the ’school of the Lord’s service’. He was invited to it by the Master’s austere conclusion: ‘to persevere until death … to share in the passion of Christ by patience’. This perspective of endless suffering here below visibly disturbed Benedict. By his addition he introduced into it a series of comforting touches, the chief of which is the promise of the expansion of the heart through love, and a sweet running in the way of God’s commandments once the initial tightness of the narrow way has been passed. The monk’s earthly life therefore is not a continual agony. Before the heavenly kingdom, it knows a certain happiness which Benedict even qualifies as ‘ineffable’.

Optimism, care to encourage the weak, interest in spiritual progress here below, an augustinian sense of the role of love in this progress, – many aspects deserve being picked out of this remarkable passage. But especially should be measure its impact on the notion of ‘the school of the Lord’s service’. Indeed, the only purpose of these lines is to brighten the sombre atmosphere in which the Master wrapped his scola. (30)

By declaring his intention to establish nothing harsh or burdensome, Saint Benedict alludes to the Gospel logion of Matthew 11:28-30 which the Master had used in his parable of the spring, but gives it a different interpretation by identifying heaviness not with sin but rather with the weight of observances. However, this does not mean that the Rule should not be demanding and so he introduces the image of the narrow way (Mt 7). Father de Vogüé suggests that Saint Benedict is playing with images here and that his purpose is to show that the way of salvation is only narrow at the beginning and becomes lighter as the heart enlarges and love takes over. Thus Benedict shifts the focus from the difficulty of the way to the transformation of the one who follows it.

This whole note therefore is an amendment to the sombre project of the scola laid down by the Master. The ‘Lord’s service’ will not be uniformly hard and painful. It will include restrictions, to be sure, but love will transform them into sweetness. And Christ does not reserve consolations for us only in his kingdom; even now he is for us both a lovable master and a companion in suffering.  (33)

 

Costly simplicity

We are told that he was whipped with such force that he became “speechless from the tortures.” Now he lay alone on the bare earth, unmoving, “as if dead.” This is the image of the desert ascetic that we encounter in the opening chapters of Athanasius’ fourth-century Life of Antony. It is a strange, bewildering image of utter helplessness and vulnerability. Elsewhere in the Life, Antony is portrayed as anything but helpless; he is a heroic fighter, capable of overcoming every temptation, every obstacle placed in his way by the demons who inhabit the desert. He is an alter Christus who routs the demons and makes of the desert a city for a generation of monastic fighters who will follow him into those wild places. But here in this moment he overcomes no one. Instead, he himself has been overcome. He has been reduced, radically, to a condition of pure need, of abandonment and desolation.

This scene occupies a relatively brief space in Athanasius’s narrative. Indeed, with the help of friends, Antony soon recovers and continues his assault on the demons, eventually realizing his heroic destiny. Still, I would suggest that the image of the monk lying alone and half-naked on the bare earth, a mute victim of frenzied assault by nameless demonic forces, has a significance that far transcends its brevity. This is because it expresses, so eloquently and disturbingly, the feeling of psychological unravelling that was such a prevalent part of the early monastic life. And because it helps us to grasp, in spite of the simple triumphalism of Athanasius’s narrative, the immense complexity and cost of setting out on the ascetic path. Part of this complexity is revealed in the very character of the experience it expresses. The ascetic has entered a place of profound need. In a sense, he is in this moment nothing but need. He is struggling to survive, and everything else, every extraneous consideration, has been swept aside. In his weakness and vulnerability, he has been reduced to an elemental simplicity. And yet, what is unfolding within him in this moment is anything but simple. His identity, his very sense of self has begun to be eroded. A bewildering array of competing claims tears at him. He longs for a resolution, for a safe haven that – for the moment anyway – eludes him. In his simple need, he is vulnerable, exposed to an entire universe of anxiety and concerns that tests him, that threatens to destroy or remake him.

It is not easy to reconcile this notion of simplicity – at once complex and ambiguous and demanding – with the often clearer, more straightforward sense of simplicity that we so often encounter in the early Christian monastic tradition. Statements about the aims and purposes of early monastic life often give the impression of simple clarity. Cassian, for example, summed up the end of monastic life in essentially simple terms: the skopos or proximate goal is purity of heart, and the telos or ultimate goal is the kingdom of God. Such simplicity is also evident in the way monastic beginnings were understood: Antony’s “call” to the monastic life involved nothing more or less than a complete and open-hearted response to the Gospel injunction to “sell what you possess and give it to the poor” (Mt 19:21), to renounce everything for the sake of God. … And there is a simplicity also in the way the monastic practice is understood: at its root, it means, as it surely did for Antony, lying alone on the bare earth, in utter abandonment to God.

Still, in an irony that was probably not lost on the early monks, but which often has been lost on modern commentators, the monastic ideal of simplicity is anything but simple. It is rather full of complexity, ambiguity, and depth. … I want to suggest that the simplicity admired and practiced by the early Christian monks, so often construed (wrongly, I believe) as a first order naiveté or credulity devoid of depth or subtlety, in fact contained and expressed a complex range of thought and feeling. More than this, it was, at least in its most mature expressions, a hard won achievement, realized only through a costly and demanding process of relinquishment.

Douglas Burton-Christie, “Simplicity, or the Terror of Belief: The Making and Unmaking of the Self in Early Christian Monasticism” in Cistercian Studies Quarterly, 40.4 (2005), 353-355.

 

A school of the Lord’s service: I

As a synonym of monasterium, which figures in the following phrase, the word scola makes the monastery the chief place where Christ teaches. The use of this term scola is laden with meaning. First of all, by means of it the monastery is connected to a word of the Gospel. Although neither the word monasterium nor even the idea of a monastery is found anywhere in the New Testament, indeed in the whole of Scripture, recourse to the word scola amounts to basing this new type of society on the word of God by making it seem like a response to the words of Christ, ‘Learn of me’.

Adalbert de Vogüé. The Rule of Saint Benedict. A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary.Kalamazoo, Michigan; Cistercian Publications, 1983. 17.

In a previous post we saw Father de Vogüé’s argument that Saint Benedict took over the Master’s commentary on the Psalms precisely because it ended with the intention to establish “a school of the Lord’s service.” For the Master, this imagery of a school is rooted in Christ’s appeal that he invokes in the parable of the Spring and which Benedict leaves out:

Take up my yoke upon you, and put yourself in my school, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light. (Mt 11: 28-30)

The Master sees this call as addressed to all human beings and thus monastic life appears as a prolongation of baptism. Moreover, he sees this call as containing two elements. In the first place, we are to turn away from sin – “Come to me … and I will refresh you” – which is identified with baptism. And in the second place, we are called to leave the world – “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me” – which is identified with the monastery.

The Master understands the burden of sin to which the Lord refers not as the weight of the law, but rather as “the torments and servitudes of sin.” (15) For those crushed by the consciousness of sin, the law of Christ represents a liberation. Thus he sees the contrast not so much as a contrast between Law and Gospel (as modern and even some patristic commentators do) but between sin and the renunciation of sin brought by baptism. This is in keeping with the logion of the two ways (Mt 7: 13-14) which the Master invokes in his Prologue.

This superficial antinomy between the ‘narrowness’ of the way and the ‘lightness’ of the burden resolves itself, if we with our author understand the second, not as the easiness of a rule that does not demand much, but of the interior liberation and relief procured by purity. Objectively the way is narrow, certainly, and Christ’s demands are formidable, but the deliverance from sin which is bought at this price gains the soul quiet, ease, and relief. The perspective opened by the Master is not very different from the views that Benedict was to expound in the final addition to his Prologue, when he spoke of the way of salvation, whose beginning seems narrow but whose sequel is only enthusiasm, love, and inexpressible sweetness. (15-16)

 

De Vogüé on taming the Rule

As necessary as the investigation of the Fathers’ writings is to see the premises from which Benedict starts, to see what he means and where he is leading us, this investigation is still more necessary inasmuch as our times and culture are remote from theirs. For lack of knowing this context of patristic thought and primitive monasticism, we are liable to inject our familiar notions into his text and to reduce his discourse to our present-day mental categories.

This harm is felt especially in monastic circles. The monk is dedicated to hearing the Rule frequently, to venerating it and drawing from it a spiritual nourishment for his own life, and so he is particularly exposed to making Benedict his contemporary rather than making himself Benedict’s contemporary. The loss that results is not confined to the realm of knowledge. The monastic vocation itself suffers, for what we hear thus is less the provocative and fertilizing message of the Fathers than the echo of our own discourse as modern men.

Also, the discrepancy between present-day monasticism and the Rule will be strongly emphasized in this commentary. By so doing we wish to act not only as a historian but as a monk. While leaving to novice-masters and abbots the care of bringing the two terms together, we shall often place them in contrast. Our aim is not at all to invite the monks of today to estrange themselves from what remains of their Rule, but to suggest to them – and to ourselves as well – the effort that must be furnished if we will be faithful to it.

Adalbert de Vogüé. The Rule of Saint Benedict. A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary.Kalamazoo, Michigan; Cistercian Publications, 1983. 4.

As I said before, this book looks challenging! In his introduction Father de Vogüé distances himself from the widespread view that because of the historical and cultural distance between Saint Benedict and us, and the impossibility of literally observing the Rule today, we should focus on the spirit rather than the letter of the Rule and ask instead: “What would Benedict do today?” He sees such a response as nonsensical, for

The only reality we possess is the Rule such as we know it, together with the related documents which allow us to grasp it. This text is a given, which we can take or leave according to whether or not we feel ourselves concerned about its message. If we choose to expose ourselves to its influence, this influence will operate in the exact measure that we can conform ourselves to what it prescribes. Since it is a matter of a rule of life, fidelity to the spirit does not go without a certain observance of the letter. The way of true renewal can only be, we think, that of a literalism that is intelligent, prudent and enlightened by spiritual discernment. Our hope in offering this modest work to our brothers is to serve such a renewal. (6)

I find myself with rather mixed reactions, the various aspects of which may become clearer in the course of the book. I don’t know of any communities who follow the Rule of Saint Benedict literally, in fact I rather doubt that it is possible or perhaps even desirable to do so today, and I am not sure that this is what de Vogüé is arguing for. However, it is clear to me that it is all-too-easy to delude ourselves on such matters, hence the importance of discernment and in this the concreteness of the Rule is a valuable challenge.

As a not-entirely-unrelated aside: I once read a little book by Fr de Vogüé entitled To Love Fasting. Unlike his other books it was a very personal account of his own experience of fasting in which he basically argued for both the possibility and the desirability of keeping the traditional fasts, something that is virtually unheard of – and often even impossible – in contemporary monasteries following the Rule of Saint Benedict. This would seem to be one area in which I suspect that a certain level of contemporary cultural delusion is operative, and in which we perhaps do need to be challenged. (Please note that this does not mean that I am particularly good at any of this myself! But I am interested in the extent to which we are capable of deceiving ourselves.)

 

Lent

If you have no works, do not speak on virtues. Afflictions suffered for the Lord’s sake are more precious to Him than every vow and sacrifice; and the odour of their sweat surpasses every fragrance and choice incense. Regard every virtue performed without bodily toil as premature, stillborn fruit of the womb.

The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, I, 6, translated by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1984. 60.

 

Saint Isaac on temptations

Whenever in your path you find unchanging peace, beware: you are very far from the divine paths trodden by the weary feet of the saints. For as long as you are journeying in the way to the city of the Kingdom and are drawing nigh to the city of God, this will be a sign for you: the strength of the temptations that you encounter. And the nearer you draw nigh and progress, the more temptations will multiply against you. Whenever, therefore, you perceive in your soul diverse and stronger temptations in your path, know that at that time your soul has in fact secretly entered a new and higher level, and that grace has been added to her in the state wherein she was found; for God leads the soul into the afflictions of trials in exact proportion to the magnitude of the grace He bestows.

The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, translated by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, 1984. 208.