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In the struggle without respite against evil, the evil one, and hell, the remarkable effort of the Fathers of the desert and later of monasticism has played a decisive role in the destiny of Christianity. Following them, today's believer takes up the same task that has been enormously lightened, and lives on the heritage of this glorious and highly instructive past.
The eschatological texts of Scripture place history between the incarnation and the parousia. Time appears entirely relative to the return of Christ who will surprise us “as a thief in the night”. Qualitatively, since the day of Pentecost, we live in the latter days, and the parousia that has begun despoils the centuries of their apparent stability. For “those who love his coming”,13.1 the Christian city that the Empire of Constantine undertook to build is profoundly ambiguous, and this is why the monastic ascesis of virginity would like to hasten the end of the world by the extinction of the human species. If a couple began history, it is abstinence that win end it, Dositheus affirmed in the 3rd century. A little later, Basil of Ancyra wrote: “Now that the earth has been inseminated... virginity... will cause incorruption to flourish, beginning with the body.”13.2 The vow of celibacy, the collective refusal of procreation, expresses an extreme position in regard to history and the future of life on earth. The Gospel image of a sudden death accentuates the moribund state of the world, which bearing its own agony, advances from one survival to another, toward its inevitable disappearance. Consequently the radical break of monasticism with society was required.
A very paradoxical reversal of the situation appears here. It is no longer the pagan world that fights and eliminates the martyr; it is the hermit who takes up the attack and eliminates the world from his being. The Fathers brought back the atmosphere of fighting of the first centuries, finding the equivalent of the aggressive forms of persecution. The arenas where wild beasts had torn the martyrs apart were replaced by the immense desert where more fearful beasts rise up, and where the demoniacal powers cast their shadows. The “temptation of St. Anthony” or that of John of Egypt offers the striking image of temptation by the evil one so faithfully reproduced in the art of Jerome Bosch.
In burying themselves in vast solitudes, the anchorites sought to penetrate the territory of the demons in order to fight them more efficaciously at close range. They made a desert for themselves, a desert of themselves, more agonizing than merely an uninhabited place, a simple retreat. It was this solitude willed by the human spirit that was visited by the noonday devil and the one of nocturnal despair. Only an ascetic charged with extreme vigor could take the exact measure of the adversary and confront him “in a very singular combat”, according to the words of St. Benedict.
The rupture with the world went further than a mere flight from the approach of man. Those seeking unusual perfection placed themselves at the edge of the world, not to find a refuge, but to build a new world, and to anticipate the heavenly city. The ascetics considered desert places as an intermediary zone between the profane world and the kingdom. Exile became the pilgrimage of homo viator seeking his heavenly origins. The hermits were not exiles but “athletes of exile”, fighters at the most advanced outposts; above all, they were, in the magnificent words of St. Macarius, “men intoxicated with God”.13.3 When in groups, they foreshadowed the future societies or republics of monks (Mount Athos) which were built not on the edge but on the site of this world, and which by their very nature are the radical negations of profane society. For the one who turns completely toward the Orient, conformity is unacceptable.
According to the firm belief of his disciples, St. Pachomius estab- lished his monastic community, which counted eight thousand members, on “the rule of the angel” who dictated it to him. The two letters that he left to his successors are written in an unknown language, called “the language of the angels”. This symbolism is indicative of the transcendent origin of monastic society which contrasts sharply with bases of the city of man. An anchorite is God's rebel, and “the monastery is an earthly heaven”, St. John Climacus declares.13.4 He proclaims the abolition of profane history and announces the coming of the new city inhabited by new men. If every man is made “similar” to the image of God, the office of the holy monks calls them “very similar”, and venerates them as “earthly angels and heavenly men”.
Leaving a world entails entering another and implies a consistent strategy. A preliminary ascesis undoes the tainted heritage in order to remake a purified human being. It experiments On the “anti-natural”, anti-conformity conditions of life, as if the world of the living no longer existed or as if it presented only a deceptive and unreal aspect of being. In order to apply the axe of repentance to the roots of guilty conformity and behavior, the “dying to the world” practiced in the extreme forms of the ascesis of the desert strikes us by its deliberate asymmetry, which at times reaches an apparent ugliness, the exact opposite of the profane ideal of ethics and aesthetics.
Thus “the grazers”, descending to the level of the soil, nourished themselves on herbs and roots. They took the attitude of Adam hiding in the bushes; they fled from men and made themselves akin to the animal world. St. Ephrem the Syrian, called “the zither of the Holy Spirit”, wrote in his Praise of the Solitaries: “They went wandering in the deserts with the wild beasts as if they themselves were wild beasts.” They lived as if they had cast Off the burden of the flesh, and in their emaciation they retained no accumulated poisons. In appearance they imitated animal life, putting on a second nature just as those accomplished actors, “the fools of Christ”, in order to create an atmosphere of contempt and abjection, and to become “the least” of this world in reaching the utmost limit of humility.
“The recluses” also led a strange life; giving up light and language, they buried themselves in ancient tombs or in holes in the ground. We can see in this form the trials of abandonment, solitude and silence, this experience anticipating the conditions of death. “Pray often in the tombs and paint an indelible picture of them in your heart,”13.5 St. John Climacus counseled everyone, in order to make death familiar, to live and meditate on its mystery before it comes. The recluses opposed the silence of the lips to the tumult of a soul on fire with passion. “Do not judge anyone and learn to be silent,” said St. Macarius, for in the words of St. Isaac: “Silence will be the language of the future world.”13.6
There were also “the dendrites” chained to a branch of a tree so that they would no longer touch the earth sullied by man. Like Noah in the ark, they relived the experience of humanity withdrawn by the grace of God from a contaminated world. By this withdrawal they measured the depth of man's fall and their penitent tears mingled the waters of the deluge with the waters of baptism. In tree branches, exposed to the winds, they led the life of birds intoxicated with the heavens and with God.
“The stationaries” remained motionless and petrified, with their arms in the form of a cross in a state of perpetual prayer, a living symbol of the vertical vocation of man, of his spirit that tends to the most high. “The stylites” continued this attitude. Perched on high columns, far above all agitation or tumult, they placed themselves between heaven and earth, though nearer heaven on the last rung of the “Ladder of Paradise”.
All these forms of withdrawal represent a very puzzling phenomenon. The ascetics' refusal of the human city and of historical development brought about a return to the conditions of prehistoric life. The words, “become as little children”, were taken literally, but this “spiritual childhood” hides an astonishing depth. We read in St. Isaac's works: “When you prostrate yourself before God in prayer, become in your own judgment like an ant, a worm, or a beetle. Do not speak before God as a man who knows anything, but stammer and approach him with a childlike spirit.”13.7
Exteriorly this ascesis strikes us as an extravagance bordering on the inhuman, but interiorly we discover a great sobriety and perfect moderation. Some of the words of the ascetics, such as those of Hesychius on the silence of the heart, a state of perfect recollection, reveal a profound knowledge of the human soul.
The extraordinary and the miraculous do not surprise us in the atmosphere of the desert. They become normal for a nature that is inwardly on fire. Thus “the old man Joseph arose and lifted his hands toward heaven. His hands became as lighted candles. And he said to Abbot Lot: `If you wish to be perfect, become all on fire.”13.8 The ascesis of the desert entailed the baptism of fire.
It is a great temptation for an historian to regard this ascesis as an aberration and to give “a comical description”90 of it. A university professor of the 20th century would automatically reduce its secret depths to its surface appearance, and he would do this less by what he says than by what he does not say and by what he does not even suspect. When the desert Fathers recognized the powerlessness of words, they counseled veneration of the mystery by silence. This is just what the icon does. An icon of a saint tells us nothing of his physical appearance and gives no biographical, historical, or sociological detail. It shows the radiating influence of the man beyond history. A saint bears history within himself, but he shows it in a different manner; he reveals a new dimension of it, in which its meaning is made clear by its last end. He constitutes a meta-historical synthesis. We must read the lives of the desert Fathers iconographically, just as we contemplate an icon.
To pose the alternative of culture or holiness13.9 is like breaking down an open door. A well-balanced tradition would affirm culture and holiness. However, to make this balance and to establish it definitely, it was necessary first to pass dialectically through the extreme polarization of the terms. In effecting this passage, the ascesis of the desert reveals its Gospel origin. The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the desert to encounter the devil. The mysterious time of forty days of silence inaugurated the mission of the Word. “He who truly possesses the Word of Jesus can hear even his silence,” declared St. Ignatius of Antioch.13.10 The tradition of the Church is precisely this prayerful silence which surrounds the Word and from which the liturgy and the icon come forth. Silence and the Word, holiness and culture, compenetrate and complement one another.
It would be a flagrant error to see in the desert only the outcasts of monasticism, illiterate men living in a degrading atmosphere. If we do not penetrate into the deep motives of their souls, we pass by a unique fact that had incalculable consequences for the destiny of Christianity. The ascesis of the desert forms an inevitable moment in Christian spirituality. Certainly it belongs to a past age, and any return to the desert now would be an unacceptable rupture with tradition. Nevertheless, this ascesis keeps its unfailing significance for all ages and all times; it is the keystone of later monastic tradition.
It was not with the instruments of culture but with their bare hands that the ascetics maintained the Christian ideal at its transcendent height, and this is the miracle. They understood well the spirit of the Gospel; it is not the road that is impossible, it is the impossible that is the road, and they have traversed it.
Above all, every ascesis exercises a pedagogical influence. A man of the world, even the one most laden with cares, knew that somewhere, in his place, there were true men, who in the silence of their hearts were speaking with angels and who were encroaching on the life of the future world. Crowds used to come to contemplate the stylites, and they had engraved on their hearts this image of “intoxication with God”. Some of them, in order to have it always before their eyes, made a summary sketch of it and thus traced the prototype of the icon.
“By the virtue of the Spirit and spiritual regeneration, man is raised to the dignity of the first Adam,”13.11 said St. Macarius. The ascesis lessens the effects of the first sin and manifests the power of the spirit. The “bestiaries” of the desert recount an astonishing friendship, for the wild beasts recognized “the odor of paradise” in the saints and ended by becoming more human, reflecting the human face with its gentle and intelligent eyes. The anchorites revived rnan's lost privilege, given to him by God, to rule the animals and to be king of the universe.13.12
The world finds its norm, its scale of comparison, in the extreme efforts of the ascetics; it perceives also the dreadful dullness and insipidity of the spirit of self-sufficiency. In the face of the declaration of common sense, “God does not ask so much of us”, the ascesis of the desert proclaims the terrible jealousy of God, who after giving all of himself, asks all from men. The desert Fathers have left us a picture of this total gift. Its excessive features strike our attention and ask us what is the utmost each one of us can do. The Christian type would not be what it is were it not for this ascesis, which from remote times has unconsciously made its purifying influence felt.
We can go deeper still. The ascetics renounced culture in their seeking for the one thing necessary. This desire had to become a passion for perfection: “Sell all that you have.” Even more, “Sell all that you are.” In the perfection of this attitude, all became a single act--the carrying of the cross. “Let him renounce himself and take up his cross.” This is not the liturgy, but is a preliminary to it, a compact and startling epitome of immolation.
“Ground between the two millstones of humility”, the ascetics sacrificed themselves in order that others would later profit from their “virginity of spirit”, by inaugurating Christian culture. The ascesis in itself is not the ideal; it represents only the culminating point of the catharsis or purification. Tertullian, as an already prejudiced polemist, asked:13.13 “What does Athens have in common with Jerusalem, and the Academy with the Church?” He added: “All curiosity ceases after the Gospel.” Now all curiosity really begins after the Gospel, but in a different manner than before.
There is a risk that peace will allow this curiosity to slacken. The ascesis of the desert, after having interiorized the persecutions, will later interiorize true peace in hesychasm, but this time with the contemplative knowledge of God and of the world in the light of Thabor.
The ascesis undoes the act by which Adam ceased to be fully himself, in wishing to belong only to himself and in refusing to go beyond himself in God. It takes up again the vocation of Adam and continues the conformation to Christ obeying. The martyrs imitated Christ crucified; the ascetics “imitated”, took literally the counsels of the Gospel: “If thy hand... thy foot... are an occasion of sin for thee, cut them off. If thy eye is an occasion of sin to thee, pluck it out... it is better for thee to enter the kingdom of God lame and with one eye than to be cast into the hell of fire... for everyone shall be salted with fire.” In the heroic atmosphere of the desert this salt and this fire were not simple metaphors. The moral chaining of the instincts by the will was realized here by means of actual and heavy chains. Their spiritual elevation caused the stylites to mount pillars. St. Anthony attained at the same time the summit of meditation and the peak of Kolzum. The arid and burning desert flourished as “a spiritual meadow”. Through the ascetics' thirst for the kingdom, monasteries and deserts were transformed into microcosmic particles of the heavenly city of the future.
The soul that has been drawn from nothingness desires to find its origins and asks to be recreated, to allow itself to be unmade and remade by having its elements purified one after another. The goal aimed at by the ascetics was a state anterior to fallen nature in its preconceptual, preaffective, prevoluntary center; they sought to reach the unsullied structure of the “self” made to the image of God. In the extreme forms of ascesis, we perceive the attempt to change the human condition by the mutation of its psychosomatic elements. St. Macarius says this in his Homilies: “When the apostle urges the putting off of the old man, he means the entire man. He means: have other eyes than those the man has, another head than his, hands and feet that are no longer his.” St. Symeon the New Theologian speaks as a mystic in his Hymns: “My hands are those of an unfortunate and my feet are those of Christ. I, unworthy, am the hand and the foot of Christ. I move my hand and my hand is all Christ, for the divinity of God is invisibly united to me.”
“The apostolic man” of the spiritual writers is not subject to the laws of this world; he anticipates the man of eternity. The radical character of the change is emphasized by the fact that, though it is interior, it modifies, in certain cases, even outward appearance. This was the case of St. Alexis, the “man of God”, who after his life in the desert was received as a beggar in his own home without being recognized. A woman named Athanasia joined her husband in the desert with the features of a man and was not recognized until the moment of her death. All ties, as well as sexual differentiation, became foreign to them and they to the world.
The ascetic technique “renders the earthly qualities of the body pure”. An athlete exercises his body; an ascetic, his flesh. The icons show us men whose flesh has neither weight nor earthly heaviness, beings living in a new dimension. They have lost their material qualities that made them like things, but not their reality; more real than anyone else, they have gone beyond themselves.
The ascesis of solitude dims even the light and colors of the outer world in order to direct the glance inward. The ascetics manifested a supreme indifference to social conventions. “Clothed with space”, they often went naked, having found again a lost innocence. They did not wish to harm even the smallest insect, and they acted not from without and on, but from within with a boundless cosmic charity.
Their refusal of a contaminated world led to the abolition of all social traditions. The extreme forms of their ascesis effected a deliberate regression to the prenatal, mineral, animal stage, and a behavior that was opposed to the normal human condition. It led to an Adam-like nakedness, to a physical and psychic indifference, in despoiling men of their human attributes--upright posture, discursive reasoning, speech, rest. The ascetics ceased reacting normally to the needs of the flesh in order to purify at the roots all the essential elements of a human being, and to reconstitute a new man, spiritually and also biologically. The Orient conceives salvation from a therapeutic point of view; it sees in it, before all else, a cure of death by eternal life. It avoids juridical wording, and expresses redemption itself in biological terms: it is not so much the fault that is repaired as the nature that is repaired in Christ.
Ascesis means that the encounter with God cannot be effected by starting from fallen nature. God remains exterior in the proportion that the passions are interior and the “ego” is identified with “the dark spirits that nestle somewhere near the heart”.13.14 The ascent toward God begins with a descent into oneself--“Know thyself” --in order to force the deifugal passions to alienate and exteriorize themselves. This first stage is called praxis, the practice of purifying and exteriorizing virtues. To be despised and struck by all serves as a purging against concupiscence, explained St. John Climacus13.15in speaking of humility. Though the avoidance of all speculative thought may give the impression of “stultification”, it is only a preliminary method in the search of “the place of the heart”, of “the place of God”. However, every seeking of the natural “buries the heart under the fog of passions”, arouses an immediate reaction from the dark “underground”, from the obscure world of the subconscious.
With great psychotherapeutic shrewdness, these spiritual men discovered the obscure energies lying below the threshold of consciousness.
The ascesis of the desert is a vast psychoanalysis followed by a psychosynthesis of the universal human soul. Origen, the brilliant commentator, compares the desert to Plato's cave. The desert with all its arsenal of phantasmagoria was ;a theater of shadows, a spectacle for men and angels; only the shadows did not reflect the reality outside the cave. They were the projection of the world inside man.
For the authors of the New Testament, as for the Fathers of the desert, the world before the time of Christ was a world bewitched. The Gospel speaks of the possessed, of disturbing elements and of the perversity of the human heart. The abysses we discover are haunted,there are secret places where evil powers are crouching and they rule us if we are ignorant or heedless. Ascesis cultivates our attention and begins by an experimental phenomenology of our human interior. It was necessary to materialize and personalize the perverted elements of a being, the hateful ego with its self-love, the doubter and the demoniacal counterpart. Above all, it was necessary to extirpate them, to “vomit” them, and to objectify them, in order to look them in the face as detached and exteriorized. This “objectivation” creates a distance, permits the projection of all interior elements as on a screen (Plato's cave of shadows) under the form of monsters, wild beasts and demons. This operation requires a very precise conviction of the reality of the enemy, in order to cut every bond and communion with him. Jerome Bosch gives an artistic interpretation in his striking iconography.
The Fathers of the desert have carried out this operation once for all and in the place of all. “He who has seen himself such as he is and has seen his sin is greater than he who raises the dead.”13.16 They have shown man naked, and they have put a face and name on every obscure element of evil. The hidden play, both human and demoniacal, is demonstrated and brought to light. After this demonstration, the man going to confession knows what he has to do and what is going to happen. Each time he reproduces the experience of the desert Fathers. He can look within himself, but now without being troubled by the unknown. In order not to remain in a stifling tete-a-tate with his sins and with himself, he can discern their elements and exteriorize them by confession. Here only Christ, the absolute innocent and the absolute victim, can bring about the unique living transference, “by canceling the decree against us”.13.17
When the ascesis left the caves of the desert and spread through the world, the screen and the shadows disappeared. All entered again into the interior of man but in a different manner. The hierarchy of purified values, having been reestablished, permitted man to see the evil before being tempted to commit it.
The metaphysical unity of mankind, the collective subconsciousness lying at the roots of consciousness, condition and explain the mystical fact that humanity was different before the incarnation from what it is now. One can say also that human consciousness was different before the ascesis of the desert from what it was after. Just like the event of Pentecost, this ascesis has modified the dominant energies of the psyche and has renewed the human spirit.
The therapeutic effect formed by “the desert” in the profoundest depths of the human spirit is universal. It represents the collective vomit, the objectivation and the projection on the outside of the original and the accumulated impurity. This is perhaps the meaning of the words of St. Paul, “to add to the suffering of Christ”, something that the innocent Christ could not do in the place of man; only the sinner, the man of the desert, could do it in the place of all and with a universal significance. From a positive point of view, it was the formation of the ascetic archetype of man. It pre-formed “the violent” in order to fight evil and the evil one inside and outside of man.
Human guilt does not do away with the reality of demons. That authorities of the stature of St. Athanasius, St. Cassian and St. Benedict speak of demons should give greater prudence to every critical spirit who sees in them only obscurantism. The reality is more complex. The Gospel speaks of them, and the rite of exorcism bears testimony to them.
The Gospel13.18 speaks of the unclean spirit who, finding a human soul “swept and decorated”, installs himself there again with seven other spirits. The ascesis has purified the soul; it also keeps its role of vigilant sentinel.
Certainly now there can be no possible return to the desert. We are in different times and above all in different spiritual ages.* Delays on one side and advances on the other do not allow exact dating, but it is clear that on the margin of chronology men, for example, Evagrius, the Macarius of the Homilies, and Diadochus, belong to another age than did the ascetics of the desert. The collective projection is over, and every attempt to revive it would become a dangerous illusion. Excessive analysis and obsession with scruples are frowned upon as a morbid state. In placing themselves in antisocial conditions, the ascetics had prepared the return of the new man to history. The complete cycle had been achieved. In its origins placed outside history, monasticism was to become a religious force that would most strongly influence history.
Tradition reestablished the balance in a masterly fashion. After the purification of the desert, the spiritual leaders taught a new and definitive interiorization. “Enter within thy soul and there find God, the angels and the kingdom.”13.19 “The purified heart becomes an interior heaven.”13.20 It is no longer by extraordinary conditions of life, but by true prayer that a monk becomes isangelos, equal to the angels.13.21 The rule of St. Benedict stresses this: “All that one formerly observed through terror and fear of hell, one now keeps through love of Christ.”13.22
Prayer participates in universal existence, and “the heart is inflamed with love for every creature” (St. Macarius, St. Isaac).13.23
* The reader should note that the name of this book in French is The Ages of the Spiritual Life (ed.) The new consciousness expanded in the cosmic charity of the saints.
One can take at random some of the vigorous measures used to arrive at a more balanced ascesis. They tempered the excessive and advised against following it, sometimes by the voice of the Councils. The Council of Ancyra threatened to condemn the intransigence of the ascetics who refused to eat vegetables cooked with meat. Cassian declared: “Excessive fasts do as much harm as gluttony.”13.24 The encratic and gnostic tendencies which despised the flesh and conjugal life were vigorously opposed.
When St. Simon the Stylite put a chain around his foot in order to reduce his movements to what was strictly necessary, Meletius, the Patriarch of Antioch, told him that one could attain immobility just by the will.
A text of the 6th century speaks of Theodulus the Stylite who lived forty-eight years on a pillar. To his naive question about the recompense due him, an angel told him it would be the same as that of the actor of Damas who had given all his fortune to a woman in dire poverty. The Historia Monachorum recounts an episode in the life of Paphnutius, the great ascetic. He asked God to show him the perfect men whose equal he had proved himself to be. There followed a vision in which be saw three persons: a brigand who had saved a woman lost in the desert, a village chief who was just and generous to all, a pearl merchant who distributed all his goods to the poor. The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschus describes a young monk who did not hesitate to frequent taverns but who kept his heart pure; he was the envy of an old monk who, after passing fifty years at Scete, had not acquired a like purity of heart.
Under the pedagogical guidance of the Church, the teaching of the Gospel was recognized; henceforth acts of charity surpass ascetic exploits and are placed at the very center. The Apophthegms tell of a hermit who after forty years in the desert, said to the abbot of a large monastery: “The sun has never seen me eat.” The abbot replied: “As for me, it has never seen me in anger.” St. Basil made a long sojourn with the monks of Egypt and Syria, and later, with St. Gregory of Nazianzen, drew up his two Monastic Rules which later inspired St. Benedict. Profoundly impressed by the desert, he was nevertheless aware of his own times and wrote as a Father of the Church. In his vision of the future, he deliberately accorded less importance to renunciation of the world and much more to love of neighbor and the service of mankind. Thus, if monasticism left the world, it was only to bless it from its retreat and to be mindful of it in its incessant prayer. “The perfect man becomes the equal of the apostles... He can return to men and tell them what he has seen in God. He can and he ought, in fact, he cannot do otherwise.”13.25 St. Maximus the Confessor reacted violently against all pessimism of neo-Platonic origin, and the ascesis of St. Isaac the Syrian strikes us with its extreme appreciation of man and of God's creation.
The hesychastic tradition stresses the body's participation in the exercise of the spirit. Its ascesis does not seek suffering and affliction but endurance through abstention, resistance to distractions, and attention of the heart to essentials. The great truth of the Gospel is clearly affirmed: the spiritual man is such entirely, soul and body. For St. Gregory Palamas, this is man's privilege and his superiority over the angels.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, the great Laura of Athos began a very special experiment. Its eschatological atmosphere is expressed in the tradition of the prayer of Jesus and of the light of Thabor. The Gospel narrative telling of the transfiguration shows it as an anticipation of the parousia and of the kingdom, but after Pentecost, the light became interior. In rare cases it can manifest itself and be perceived by means of transfigured senses. The man who inwardly or outwardly contemplates it is transmuted; this is because the light is not only the object but the means of his vision. Iconographically, as the nimbus of the saints shows, the corporal luminosity of the saints is ontologically normal.
With his natural but transfigured eyes, the saint contemplates an immaterial light but his visions and his knowledge are granted to him. They are never a “possession” of the divine. God, in manifesting himself, safeguards his mystery and his total transcendence. If he accords us a participation in his life and his presence, he hides himself in his very manifestation. He hides his inaccessible Being. The hesychastic tradition is very firm on this point: the transcendence of God is not due to man's weakness but to the nature of God. Unknowable by nature, God is more than God. Even in uniting himself to man, God remains transcendent to him. Participation in God is participation only in his energies, in his grace; this is the burning intimacy of his presence. According to St. Symeon: “God is the more invisible the more he radiates in man's spirit.” This superessential principle of the divine essence conditions human love, its eternal epektasis, its tension toward God, of which St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks.
Tradition rapidly eliminated all imagination, all mystic intoxication with suffering, and imposed the greatest sobriety. Even ecstasy was held suspect. “When it seems to you that your spirit is drawn toward the heights by an invisible force, do not put any faith in it, but oblige yourself to work. By work a monk avoids all romantic abstraction and exercises charity. Very often one thinks that it is a spiritual joy, and it is only sensuality aroused by the enemy; those who have had this experience can distinguish it,” teaches Gregory the Sinaite.13.26 Evagrius said, “Do not desire to see either evil powers or angels under pain of sinking into madness.”13.27
The liturgy offers an efficacious means of filtering out every disordered emotion. That is why the life of a monk is centered more and more on psalmody, prayer and prayerful meditation on the Scriptures. The soul listens to the Word and allows itself to be penetrated and filled with it. Biblical ontology forms the categories of emptiness and fullness, absence and communion. Every spiritual person aspires to the communion that fills him with God, as the Blessed Virgin or St. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit. From this biblical source comes the patristic definition of theology: the experimental [i.e., “experiential”--ed.] way of union with God. “If you are a theologian, you will truly pray, and if you truly pray, you are a theologian.”13.28 This experience of “the sense of God” permits one to transpose into eucharistic terms the nuptial dwelling of God in man. Man does not speculate but he changes. This clear-sighted realism of the ascesis affirms for all times in its essential principle: No ascesis deprived of love approaches God. “We shall be judged for the evil we have done but especially for the good we have neglected and for the fact that we have not loved our neighbor.”13.29 The Shepherd of Hermas is likewise explicit in declaring that anyone who has omitted to help a man in spiritual distress will be held responsible for his loss.13.30 At Mount Athos today the old maxims have lost nothing of their value: “The true monk is the one who in the present life possesses nothing but Christ.” “The one who has in his heart even a trace of wickedness is unworthy of the charity of Christ.”
Having arrived at the height of the greatest freedom, the hermit can find the world again since for him it is no longer bewitched. He can find men and their city again since he has attained to the charity that urges him to leave his solitude. On this summit “man no longer condemns the Jews nor the Greeks nor sinners... the interior man looks at all men with a pure eye, and he rejoices then on account of the entire universe; he desires with his whole heart only to love and venerate each and every one,” says St. Macarius.13.31 As a messenger and a witness, he mixes with the crowd; as a charismatic, he opens the door of his cell and receives the world.
Contrary to the purely physical ascesis of mortification, the therapeutic art of tradition rehabilitated matter, and in letters of joy inscribed the paschal message, the destiny of man to eternal life on all the tombs throughout the world. The eschatological tone of the ascesis of all times remains.
The soul recognizes God in its avowal of its total powerlessness; it renounces itself and no longer belongs to itself. This oblation, this unconditional giving up of oneself, structures contemplative re- ceptivity; it is humility that has become act. “Naked man follows the naked Christ.” He keeps himself in expectation and in his soul he awaits the parousia, the coming of Christ. But this soul bears the world of all men. Purified by ascesis, a spiritual man, according to the fine words of St. Gregory Nazianzen, is “the depositary of the divine love of men”.13.32