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The three monastic vows constitute a great charter of human liberty. Poverty frees from the ascendancy of the material; it is the baptismal transmutation into the new creature. Chastity frees from the ascendancy of the carnal; it is the nuptial mystery of the agape. Obedience frees from the idolatry of the ego; it indicates the son ship to the Father. All, whether monks or not, ask God for these things in the tripartite structure of the Lord's prayer: obedience to the will of the Father; poverty of one who is hungry only for the substantial and eucharistic bread; chastity, the purification from evil.
In Old Testament days, each time that the Israelites, as nomadic pilgrims, encountered the material civilization of “the settled countries”, they discovered there three temptations: idols, contrary to obedience; prostitution, contrary to chastity; wealth, contrary to poverty. The prophets did not cease from denouncing and fighting the primacy of efficiency over truth, material success and its power as the standard of value, and justification of everything by force. Today's world has adopted these principles more than ever before. Formerly all the efforts of the prophets were directed against them; they preached adoration of the one God, the purification of the people, the exercise of charity toward the poor.
The New Testament, in the account of the Lord's three temptations, takes up the same subject, but now under the form of a supreme and definitive revelation. The text stresses this: “When the devil had tried every temptation, he departed from him.”14.14 The Servant of Yahweh, the obedient man, the poor man, who had “no place to lay his head”, the pure man--“Behold, Satan has nothing in me”--went to the heart of the desert as the prototype of the monk, and proclaimed urbi et orbi the triple synthesis of human existence.
Patristic thought attributes to this account a central place among the first events of the Gospel. Christ had come to fight against the evil powers that were enslaving men, and it is this liberating quality of his work that is in question here. St. Justin14.15compared the temptations of the first and second Adam and showed in Christ the universal attitude of every son of God. Likewise, Origen saw here a decisive event that enlightens the final combat of all the faithful, for what is at stake is, neither more nor less, “to make every man a martyr or an idolator”.14.16 He underlines the fact that the temptations sought to make of Christ a new source of sin, since its scope would put it on the level of original sin. For St. Irenaeus,14.17 the temptation failed to make man definitely captive, and consequently the brilliant victory of Jesus orients the combat of the Church and frees the true follower from all satanic ascendancy. “I have given you power to tread... over all the might of your enemies.”14.18
Thus the thought of the Fathers from the beginning saw in the account of the temptations in the desert, the ultima verba of the Gospel message. Indeed to the archetype of man in the divine wisdom, the tempter opposed his counter-plan, the man of demoniacal wisdom. St. Paul even mentions a demoniacal Pentecost (2 Corinthians 11, 4). All human history unfolds in a striking summary where everything is unsettled in one way or another. Satan advances three infallible solutions of human destiny: the alchemist miracle of the philosopher's stone; the mystery of occult sciences and their boundless powers; and finally, one unifying authority.
To transform stones into bread14.19is to solve the economic problem, to suppress “the sweat of man's brow”, all ascetic efforts, and creation itself. To cast oneself down from the temple is to suppress the temple and even the need of prayer; it is to substitute magic power for God, to triumph over the principle of necessity, and to solve the problem of knowledge. Now knowledge without limits causes the submission of cosmic and carnal elements, the immediate satisfaction of all covetousness, a duration made up of “little eternities of enjoyment”, the destruction of chastity. Finally, to unite all nations by the power of a single weapon is to solve the political problem, suppress war and inaugurate the era of the peace of this world.
The first act took place between the God-Man and Satan. If Christ had prostrated himself before Satan, Satan would have retired from the world, because there would be nothing for him to do there.
Definitely captive, humanity would live without knowing the freedom of choice, for it would never attain to good or evil.
Temptation would weigh once again and weigh heavily in the prayer of our Lord: “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass away from me.”14.20 What the Father did not do, Satan could do, and he offered the very real possibility of definitively withdrawing the cup and escaping the cross. The tragedy of God and of man would then have been resolved in a demoniacal “happy ending”.
We must take an exact measure of the adversary and grasp the scope of the evil that obliges God to leave “the summit of silence”, and to utter the cry: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” It makes temptation very real, without adding anything fictitious or any stage setting. In leaving Lucifer's will free to pervert himself into the evil one, God has asked himself the question of being or of not being the unique, at the risk of finding himself a being by himself, suffering and abandoned. To the God entered in time, Satan proposed an infallible messiahship that would have no risk of suffering, and that would be founded on a triple suppression of freedom, on a triple slavery of man: the violation of his freedom by miracle, mystery and power.14.21
The divine refusal changed nothing in the disposition of the tempter. His project is now being offered to man, and it is this second act that conditions history.
The cruel times of the persecutions force one to salute the Christian empire. The paradoxical canonization of Constantine, declared “a saint”, bears witness to the positive element of his gesture, justified dialectically by the principle of “economy”. The Church was imposed on the pagan world; it obtained a wide hearing; is it going to succeed? This is another question. In this confrontation, one party is going “to soil its hands”, another will keep them clean from the compromise; both are necessary and both complement each other. Moreover, it was not the official and functionalized Church that spoke the words of life; it confided this task to the fathers of the Councils, and above all to those great spiritual men, the monks. The importance of the coming of monasticism is in the liberty of spirit that the irregular formation of charismatics will enjoy on the margin of the world and the established Church.
We must admit that the empire proclaimed Christian was built on the three solutions of Satan, certainly not entirely nor consciously, but in mingling light with darkness, God and Caesar, the suggestions of Satan and the refutations of Christ. The empire was ambiguous, for it twisted the cross; no “Christian State” as a State has ever been a crucified State. It is on the subject of the Church that John of Saroug asks the question: “What bride has ever chosen a crucified as spouse?” On the contrary, misunderstanding about the protective power of the cross delivers princes and politicians without defense to the three temptations. Constantine founded an empire whose greatness and prosperity were more dangerous than the cruelties of Nero.
It was at this moment that monasticism entered upon the stage of history. It is the most categorical no to all compromise, to all conformity, to all cooperation with the tempter, disguised now by the imperial crown, now by the episcopal miter. It is the resounding yes to the Christ of the desert. One can never insist enough on the salvific character of monasticism. “Our Lord has left us as a heritage what he himself has done when he was tempted by Satan,” said Evagrius.14.22 From its origin, Egyptian monasticism understood its spirituality as the continuation of the fight begun by the Lord in the desert.
If the empire made its secret temptation out of Satan's three invitations, monasticism was openly built on Christ's three immortal answers. It is astonishing that no exegesis has ever recognized the triple word placed as a cornerstone in the very being of monasticism. The three monastic vows reproduce exactly the three answers of Jesus. Christ as monk fulfilled them in accepting the cup and in mounting the cross “that he might destroy the works of the devil”.14.23“Canceling the decree against us which was hostile to us.
Indeed, he has taken it completely away, nailing it to the cross.”14.24 Christ destroyed the satanic plan of triple slavery, and from the summit of the cross he announced the divine charter of triple freedom. St. Paul emphasizes this by his energetic warning in the passage that begins with “see that no one deceives you”,14.25or takes away that freedom of which the cross is the dazzling pledge. Every monk is a staurophore (a cross-bearer). He is also a pneumatophore (Spirit-bearer), for the cross is the triumphant power of the Holy Spirit manifesting Christ crucified. “Give your blood and receive the Spirit”, is an ancient monastic saying which reveals that in every monk freedom takes flesh by the action of the Holy Spirit. Such were the first charismatics before democratization was made necessary by the crowds of monks, and before the need of organizing them led to the imposition of harsh monastic law. Those who knew how to make this law a source of grace corresponded to the authentic grandeur of monasticism. Above every organized institution, this remained essentially an event.
Christ's three answers resounded in the silence of the desert; it was therefore here that the monks came in order to hear them again and to receive them as the rule of their monastic life, under the form of the three vows.
St. Gregory Palamas describes the type of holy monks thus: “They have given up the enjoyment of material goods (poverty), human glory (obedience), and the evil pleasures of the body (chastity), and they have preferred an evangelical life; thus the perfect have arrived at the adult age according to Christ.”14.26 In a letter to Paul Asen on the subject of clothes and exterior signs of the monastic degrees, St. Gregory counseled “to perfect the manner of life and not the changing of clothes”. In the great figures of monasticism we see how they went beyond every formal principle and every form; they passed from symbols to reality.
“I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.”14.27, This advance of one alone toward the only one”, shows the primacy of the anchorhold and hermitage over the cenobitic form; it indicates an aristocracy of the spirit that frees itself from everything, even from a community and its rules. However, if one leaves society to find freedom, it is in order to find the world of men again and in a better way.
This level of freedom transcends the limits of institutions, and in it can be seen its universal significance as a solution of human destiny. The interiorized monasticism of the royal priesthood finds its own spirituality in taking to itself the equivalent of the monastic vows.
Formerly fidelity implied the blood of martyrs or the exploits of the desert, striking spectacles in their visible grandeur. At the moment when the Constantinian epoch definitely ended, the combat of the Christian king gave way to the martyrdom14.28 and the heroism of the faithful in their daily life, which is not necessarily spectacular.