Will Morrisey Reviews

John Climacus: The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore translation. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.

 

At Genesis 28: 10-19, we learn of Jacob’s dream at Haran, northeast of Beersheba, from which he was fleeing from his malicious brother, Esau. He sees angels ascending and descending on a ladder between Heaven and earth, and finds the LORD Himself beside him, assuring him that his people someday will prosper, throughout the world. The Christian Fathers Gregory of Nyssa and John Chrysostem interpreted this passage as a figure of the ascetic’s struggle toward God. In the seventh century, John Climacus, abbot of the Monastery at Mount Sinai, followed this line of thought, writing The Ladder of Divine Ascent (titled simply, Climax Paradisi in Latin), in response to a request from John, Abbot of Raitha. Although Jacob’s Ladder has more than seventy rungs, this version has thirty, which commentators have associated with the age of Jesus when baptized by John the Baptist.

Writing to “the servants of God,” and invoking the supreme goodness of God at the outset, Climacus immediately presents a classification of human beings in Christian terms. All angels and human beings are “rational beings created by Him and honored with the dignity of free-will.” But there the resemblances end. The angels and saints in Heaven are the “intellectual and incorporeal beings which surround God.” The “true servants of God” are “those who tirelessly and unremittingly do and have done His will.” But there are also “worthless servants” who “think of themselves as having been granted baptism but have not faithfully kept the vows they made to God.” There are those “estranged from God and alienated from Him—the unbelievers or heretics.” And there are outright “enemies of God,” who “have not only evaded and rejected the Lord’s commandment themselves, but who also wage bitter war on those who are fulfilling it.” Preeminent among them are the fallen angels, the demons. “God belongs to all free beings”; among humans, “the monk is he who within his earthly and soiled body toils towards the rank and state of incorporeal beings.” He is the true servant of God, “a mourning soul”—recall that Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, weeps but never laughs—who, “both asleep and awake is unceasingly occupied with the remembrance of death.” He has withdrawn from the world in “voluntary hatred of vaunted material things,” denying “nature for the attainment of what is above nature.” Renunciation of the world is the first step on the Ladder. Taking that step is reasonable if done “either for the sake of the future Kingdom, or because of the multitude of [one’s] sins, or for love of God”—God, Who out of respect for human free-will, “sets our contests” and “waits to see what the end of our course will be.” 

If motivated by a desire to overcome sin, the monk “should not discontinue his hot and fiery streams of tears and voiceless heartfelt groaning until he, too, sees that Jesus has come to him an rolled away the stone of hardness from his heart,” freeing “Lazarus, that is to say, our mind, from the bands of sin,” commanding the angels to free the penitent’s mind from his passion and “let[ting] him go to blessed dispassion.” Those motivated by the desire to enter the Kingdom of God, “to go out of Egypt and to fly from Pharaoh,” will need “some Moses as a mediator with God and from God,” a man standing “between action and contemplation,” praying “for us to God” to allow us to “cross the sea of sin and rout the Amalek of the passions.” This person may be what Orthodox Christians call a spiritual father. And those animated simply by the love of God will need to battle (“violence indeed and constant suffering”) “until our pleasure-loving dispositions,” our erotic longings, our natural and worldly loves, “attain the love of God and chastity” by means of “visible sorrow” in imitation of Christ. Eventually, this spiritual warfare, undertaken with “great toil” and “much unseen suffering” by means of “simplicity, deep angerlessness and diligence,” will make our mind, that “greedy kitchen dog addicted to barking,” into “a lover of chastity and watchfulness.” We can achieve this, “if only we unceasingly go right down to the depth of humility.” “He who withdraws from the world out of love for God has obtained fire at the very outset; and, like fire set to fuel, it soon kindles a larger fire.” The right foundation or first step of renunciation consists of innocence, fasting (because physical food feeds the passions), and temperance. “A firm beginning will certainly be useful for us when we later grow slack. A soul that is strong at first but then relaxes”—few indeed will not experience backsliding—is “spurred on by the memory of its former zeal,” often growing “new wings” as a result.

This first step comes with “labor and grief.” But as we progress, “we no longer feel sorrow, or we feel little sorrow,” as “our mortal mind is consumed” and we practice the Christian virtues “with all joy and eagerness, with love and with divine fire.” But what of those who cannot undertake a life in solitude, or life in a monastery, Christians who have families and are “beset with social cares”? “Do all the good you can,” Climacus replies. “Do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not lie to anyone; do not be arrogant towards anyone; do not hate anyone; be sure you go to church; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man’s domestic happiness; and be content with what your own wives can give you. If you behave in this way you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.” (He leaves it open, as to whether you will get there.) But “those who have really [emphasis added] determined to serve Christ, with the help of spiritual fathers and their own self-knowledge will strive before all else to choose a place, and a way of life, and a habitation, and exercises suitable for them,” inasmuch as “community life is not for all, on account of greed; and not for all are places of solitude, on account of anger,” which festers when a man is alone with his bitter memories of past injuries. The “monastic state” comes in three forms: “the retirement and solitude of a spiritual athlete”; “living in silene with one or two others”; or “settling patiently in a community.” Climacus prefers the social settings for most monks, as they will have other men to lift them up if they fall into despondency, despair, lethargy or laziness. He quotes Jesus: “For where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” [Matthew 18: 20). 

After renouncing the world, the second step is full “detachment” from it, not longing for its pleasures while in a monk’s cell. “The man who really loves the Lord…will not love, care or worry about money, or possessions, or parents or worldly glory, or friends, or brothers, or anything at all on earth,” hating “even his own flesh” and “follow[ing] Christ without anxiety or hesitation, always looking heavenward and expecting help from there”—depending upon God, not man. “Water-loving plants are not such as to produce fruit in hard and arid training fields,” and “the man who has come to hate the world has escaped sorrow.” Climacus is utterly frank in describing what this entails. The “narrow way,” the regime of the Christian monk, consists of “mortification of the stomach, all-night standing, water in moderation, short rations of bread, the purifying draught of dishonor, sneers, derision, insult, the cutting out of one’s own will, patience in annoyances, unmurmuring endurance of scorn, disregard of insults, and the habit, when wronged, of bearing it sturdily; when slandered, of not being indignant,; when humiliated, not to be angry; when condemned, to be humble.” Be ready for the demons to “inflame our hearts by reminding us of our parents and brethren,” a fire that can only be fought with fire, namely “the remembrance of the eternal fire.” Your sanctuary is no invulnerable fortress; your battle continues there.

“Exile or pilgrimage” constitutes the third step. “Exile means that we leave forever everything in our own country that prevents us from reaching the goal of the religious life,” namely, the Kingdom of God, a pilgrimage “undertaken by the lovers of perfection so that they may live a life of hardship and simplicity.” It is crucial not to undertake this pilgrimage out of vainglory, succumbing to a sense of one’s own superiority to those he has left behind. The Christian regime, the Christian way of life, is indeed superior to the way of ‘the world,’ but the Christian himself remains a sinner in the hands of a vigilant if not angry God. “I do not know whether we must teach all others but teach yourselves at all costs.” Your pilgrimage is not an odyssey: “In going into exile, beware of the demon of wandering and of sensual desire, because exile gives him his opportunity,” as it did to not-so-chaste Ulysses. And you must find a new family, not return to Penelope. “Let him be your father who is able and willing to labor with you in bearing the burden of your sins; and your mother—contrition, which can cleanse you from impurity; and your brother—your comrade, who toils and fights side by side with you in your striving toward the heights.” As for a wife, let her be “separable”—the “remembrance of death,” your children “the sighs of your heart,” your body “your slave,” your friends the angels “who can help you at the hour of your death, if they become your friends.” “This is the family of those who seek the Lord,” since “love of God extinguishes our love for our parents,” bringing a spiritual sword to sever the natural ties. With regard to our home, “choose places where there are fewer opportunities for comfort and ambition, but more for humility,” lest we flee the world “in company with our passions.” All the work we do to develop “a good and firm disposition” can “be lost in an instant” if we do not take care, as “our mind, which is the organ of knowledge, is extremely imperfect and full of all kinds of ignorance,” prey to fantasy, with which we fill its void, whether awake or asleep. “The devils try to disturb us with dreams,” but “he who believes in dreams is like a person running after his own shadow and trying to catch it.” By all means, believe in some of your dreams—those “that foretell torments and judgment for you,” unless they cause despair, in which case they “are also from the devils.”

The reason we need not despair at the experience of grim dreams will be seen at the fourth step on the ladder: obedience, “blessed and ever-remembered,” a virtue that is “entirely foreign to hypocrisy and one’s own will.” Obedience aims at substituting God’s will for our own, as in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” This is a much more daunting command than it might seem at first. “Our treatise now appropriately touches upon prizefighters and athletes of Christ,” those who have succeeded in climbing the ladder, proving that, and how, this arduous battle against the demons can be won. We obey God by renouncing “our own life,” by mortifying “the limbs while the mind remains alive,” entombing our will and resurrecting our humility. “A corpse does not argue or reason as to what is good or what seems to be bad.” He who obeys God distrusts himself “in everything, however good it may be, right up to the end of [his] life.” Climacus has seen this way of life in monasteries, has known this among “these holy fathers,” men “gathered and united in the Lord, with a wonderful active and contemplative life, men “so occupied with divine thoughts,” so “exercised…in good deeds that there was scarcely any need of the superior to remind them of anything.” “Of their own good will they aroused one another to divine vigilance,” conversing of “death and the thought of eternal judgment.” They prayed together, each in his own mind, a practice of which “they reminded one another…by secret signs and gestures,” preempting mental wandering. Nor is this a life lived in vain; on the contrary, “it bears and shows abundant fruit,” proficiency “both in active life and spiritual insight,” both lives “in discernment and humility.” Some had attained “deepest innocence” and “wise simplicity, spontaneous and God-guided,” souls never duplicitous but all of one piece. “Among them there are none who are fatuous and foolish, like old men in the world who are commonly called ‘in their dotage.'” Gentle, kindly, radiant, sincere, “they make God Himself and their superior their very breath, and the eye of their mind keeps a bold and strict watch for demons and passions.”

He offers three examples, each exemplifying a Christian virtue. Isidore had been a cruel and arrogant magistrate before he entered the monastery. He learned humility by being assigned to prostrate himself before everyone who went in or out of the monastery. He obeyed this harsh but loving, agapic, command for the seven years before his death. Laurence exemplified prudence—indeed, “divine prudence.” Climacus tested him, asking him “what he was thinking of when standing by the table.” Laurence told him he was thinking of “the shepherd as the image of Christ,” praying “not as before a table of men, but as before the altar of God.” This elderly monk, who had been tested many times before, advised Climacus “that if anyone surrenders himself to simplicity and voluntary innocence, then he no longer gives the devil either time or place to attack him.” And final, Abbacyrus exemplified patient, “exemplary fortitude.” For fifteen years, he had endured maltreatment by his brother monks. He told Climacus that “my fathers are testing me to see whether I am really a monk,” but “they are not doing this in real earnest.” Some of the brothers have been tested for thirty years; he was only in his fifteenth year at the monastery. “And rightly, Father John, for without trial gold is not purified.” Abbacyrus died two years later, blessing those who tempted him, then “buried with the local saints.” 

Another of “those ever-memorable fathers” advised Climacus, “Fix your mind to your soul as to the wood of the cross to be struck like an anvil with blow upon blow of the hammers, to be mocked, abused, ridiculed and wrong, without being in the least crushed or broken, but continuing to be quite calm and immovable. Shed your own will as a garment of shame, and thus stripped of it enter the practice ground.” By such determinations “will all men know, dearest father, that we are disciples of Christ, if while living together, we have love for one another,” avoiding “the devil’s disease,” which is the “will and desire in conversation…to establish his own opinion, even though what he says is true.” If we cannot achieve “such patience and obedience, then it is best for us, having at least discovered our weakness, to live far apart from the athletic lists, and bless the combatants and pray they may be granted patience.” Too many aspirants make their decision to join a holy order too easily. Climacus writes, “To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.” 

To take the fourth step, obey your spiritual father. “Base-born children regard the absence of their teacher as a joy, but legitimate ones think it a loss.” A spiritual father will help to guide you away from the devil’s two principal snares, or sets of snares. The first set aims at reducing the monks’ zeal, “mak[ing] them hard-hearted” by “defil[ing] them with bodily pollution, or making them “sluggish in prayer, drowsy and confused by spiritual darkness,” in order to deceive them into “think[ing] they have gained nothing by their obedience.” But when Providence withdraws “our imagined goods or blessings,” God is really “lead[ing] us to the deepest humility.” The second set of snares is the opposite extreme—spiritual overconfidence or pride, “the thought that they now had the qualifications for the solitary life, and that in solitude they could attain to freedom from passion as the final prize.” Do not be deceived “by the spirit of conceit.” We will sin, even as we ascend the Ladder. Above all, do not conceal those sins or “do so as if we were confessing another’s sin,” or “lay the blame for our sin on others.” On the contrary, tell God, and tell your spiritual father, “No one is to blame for this, no man, no spirit no body, nothing but my own carelessness.” “Be like a condemned criminal in disposition and in outward appearance and thought.” Bear in mind that “everything depends on habit, and follows upon it,” as Aristotle says of the virtues, but as Christians we “have God as their great collaborator.” When “in the presence of a [spiritual] superior,” “practice extreme silence and ignorance,” “for a silent man is a son of wisdom, always acquiring much knowledge.” Pay attention to them, not your fellow novitiates. The saintly Father Acacius recalled, “I have seen innocent and most beautiful children come to school for the sake of wisdom, education, and profit, but through contact with the other pupils they learn there nothing but cunning and vice. The intelligent will understand this.” 

Novitiates choose their spiritual fathers, and must do so in self-knowledge, especially in knowledge of their own passions. Those “prone to lust” should choose “an ascetic who will hear of no consolation in food.” Prideful novitiates should choose a “stern and unyielding” spiritual father, not a “meek and kindly” one. Always assume that “that the Superior is trying you, and you will certainly never go wide of the mark.” If we anger God, the father can intercede for us in prayer, but when the father “is incensed against us, there is no one to propitiate him for us. “When the day comes when you “obtain great faith and love” for your spiritual father, “then know that the Holy Spirit has invisibly made His abode in your soul and the power of the Highest has overshadowed you.” Climacus observes that the number four is the number of the four Apostles. “Athlete, keep running fearlessly.”

The fifth step is “painstaking and true repentance.” The Apostle John exemplifies obedience, in imitation of Christ at Gethsemane. The Apostle Peter exemplifies repentance, which Christ, of course, never needed to undertake. Peter is the more ‘human’ Apostle, of the two. “Obedience precedes repentance, which is “the renewal of baptism,” a “contract with God for a second life,” a “self-condemning reflection, and carefree self-care.” It is the opposite of despair, being rather its renunciation, “the daughter of hope.” Repentance reconciles us with God and purifies our conscience. Crucially, “a penitent is the inflictor of his own punishments.” He does not wait for God or his superiors at the monastery to punish him. At an establishment set aside for penitents, called “The Prison,” “men endured hardship and bowed down to the end of their life, going about with a sad countenance all day long, the wounds in their body stinking of rottenness, and they took no notice of them, and they forgot to eat their bread, and they mingled their drink of water with seeping; they ate dust and ashes with their bread, and their bones cleaved to their flesh, and were withered like grass.” With supreme understatement, Climacus asks, “Where could you see anything like laughter, or idle talking, or irritation, or anger?” These men “were quite indistinguishable from corpses.” In seeing them, “I nearly despaired of myself, seeing my own indifference and comparing it with their suffering.” Nevertheless, “what is hard and intolerable for others becomes easy and acceptable for those who have fallen away from virtue and spiritual riches.” And “he who really keeps account of his actions considers as lost every day in which he does not mourn, whatever good he may have done on it.” Those who despair may commit suicide, but those who despair have already committed spiritual suicide, since “nothing equals or excels God’s mercies.” At the same time, do not entangle yourself in the opposite trap; do not “sicken in heart from the disease of the godless Origen,” the Neo-Platonist and pretended Christian who espoused universalism, the doctrine that all human beings will be saved, eventually. Climacus offers this prayer, in the stead of such errors: “May the holy convicts mentioned above provide you with a rule, and a pattern, and a model, and a living picture of repentance; and throughout your life you will need no book at all until Christ, the Son of God and God, enlightens you in the resurrection of true repentance.” Repentance purifies the physical senses; “by voluntarily accepting retribution and punishment, you have escaped the punishment that is everlasting.”

Introducing the sixth step, the remembrance of death, Climacus distinguishes between fear of death, “a natural instinct that comes from disobedience,” the penalty human beings paid for Adam’s failure to obey God, and terror of death, which is “evidence of unrepented sin.” Christ Himself feared death, in the sense that he prayed to His Father in Gethsemane, asking if He must go to the Cross while determining to do as He was told; He did not “show terror,” having committed no sin for which He would be bound to repent. Remembrance of death is especially needed if you live in society, where the insistent frivolity of almost everyone will distress and depress you. “But amongst those who are free from noise it produces the putting aside of cares and constant prayer and guarding of the mind,” detachment from the noisemakers. Let no one imagine that renunciation of frivolity, even renunciation of one’s own will, must lead to torpor. On the contrary, “there are many activities for an active mind,” namely, “meditation on the love of God, on the remembrance of God, on the remembrance of the Kingdom, on the remembrance of the zeal of the holy martyrs, on the remembrance of God Himself present,” as well as “remembrance of the holy and spiritual powers, on remembrance of one’s departure, judgment, punishment, and sentence.” After all, “the day is not sufficient to repay in full its own debt to the Lord.” We should think and act as if this day is “the last of our whole life.” “Even the pagans have said something of the sort, since they define philosophy as meditation on death.” Those who remember death will “never sin”—well, perhaps at the same time they are remembering. 

With the remembrance of death comes the inclination to mourn, and mourning causes us to pray. Prayerful mourning is the seventh step. It is “a golden spur in which a soul which is stripped of all attachment and of all ties, fixed by holy sorrow to watch over the heart.” At this step, “temperance and silence of the lips” will be yours; “humility, thirst for dishonors, voluntary craving for involuntary afflictions, no condemnation of sinners, compassion even beyond one’s strength”—these are the fruits grasped at the sixth step. Climacus emphasizes that these are the opposite of feelings. Christian compassion is no passion. Christian tears do not betoken an outburst of emotion. “Tears without thought are proper only to an irrational nature and not to a rational one”; that is, they are less than human. Rightly, “tears are the product of thought, and the father of thought is a rational mind.” It is for this reason that “the demons fear concentration as thieves fear dogs.” “My friends,” Climacus tells his brothers in Christ, “God does not ask or desire that man should mourn from sorrow of heart, but rather that out of love for Him he should rejoice with spiritual laughter. Remove sin, and the tear of sorrow is superfluous for your eyes of sense. What is the use of a bandage when there is no wound?” Once again, virtue entails habituation. “Practice produces habit, and perseverance grows into a feeling of the heart; and what is done with an ingrained feeling of the heart is not easily eradicated.” At our judgment, God will not blame us for failing to work miracles, a power He alone can grant, or “for not having been theologians or contemplatives,” men whose gifts He grants to only a few, but “we shall certainly have to give an account to God of why we have not unceasingly mourned.”

To quench a fire completely, pour water on it gradually. “The tears of mourning will quench every flame of anger and irritability,” and it is the consequent attitude of meekness that results from the eighth step. “Anger is a reminder of hidden hatred, that is to say, remembrance of wrongs,” and it must be said that truer words have never been written. (The old joke has it, ‘He has Irish Alzheimer’s disease; he only remembers his grudges.’ But not only the Irish.) Anger is against humility. “If you want, or rather intend, to take a splinter out of another person, then do not hack at it with a stick instead of a lancet, for you will only drive it deeper.” The stick is “rude speech and rough gestures,” while the lancet in “tempered instruction and patient reprimand.” Do the latter rarely, “and not with your own hand” but by “the agency of another,” to soften the blow. For yourself and for the one you instruct or reprimand, you want to cultivate the conviction that dishonor “is praise.”

Accordingly, take the ninth step, which is to expunge “remembrance of wrongs,” which is “the consummation of anger, the keeper of sins, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind shame of prayer, stopping of supplication, estrangement of love, a nail stuck in the soul, pleasureless feeling beloved in the sweetness of bitterness, continuous sin, unsleeping transgression, hourly malice”—altogether, a “dark and hateful passion.” It can only be replaced fully by the agape, which abandons revenge. “He who nurses enmities stores up for himself endless sufferings” in this life and the next. “Let it be put to shame by the Prayer of Jesus, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That prayer recalls our minds to remembrance of our sins against others, not their sins against us.

Such resentment pushes us to slander, a sin “born of hatred and malice.” If someone disparages his neighbor, ask him to stop, since “I fall into graver sins every day, so how can I criticize him?” How can I join you in your condemnation of him? With this reply, “you will heal yourself and your neighbor with one plaster,” following Christ’s injunction to avoid “judgment,” lest I be judged. This is the tenth step. Avoiding judgment of others does not mean to overlook their sins. Rather, “hasty and severe judges of the sins of their neighbor” have “not yet attained to a thorough and constant remembrance and concern for their own sins.” They leave no sufficient time to mourn for themselves.

The eleventh step is in one sense not a step ‘up’ but a step ‘down.’ Do not mount “the throne of vainglory” by becoming talkative. It is “the friend of silence” who “draws near to God, and by secretly conversing with Him is enlightened by God.” But “garrulity comes especially from vainglory.” People who love to talk too-highly esteem their own opinions and brains.

Lying is an especially pernicious sort of talk, “the offspring of chatter and joking” and “the destruction of love” because it ruins trust. Worse still, joking “destroy[s] in their hearers the habit of mourning,” which isn’t easy to develop or to recover, once lost. In describing this twelfth step, Climacus shows that he has understood the teaching of Plato’s Socrates, however: “When we are completely cleansed of lying, then we can resort to it, but only with fear and as occasion demands.” Socrates’ example is lying to someone who wants to know where a weapon is, so he can kill an enemy. Climacus gives no example, perhaps because he regards the teaching as true but dangerous, particularly in light of the commandment against it. Retreating to safer ground, he observes that “he who has become merry with wine involuntarily speaks the truth on all subjects, and he who is drunk with compunction cannot lie.”

Warring against the sin of acedia or despondency, spiritual sloth, is the thirteenth step. This sin leads to slackness—the “neglect of asceticism, hatred of the vow made,” a “blessing of worldlings” but a curse for Christians, since it amounts to an implied accusation that God is “merciless and without love for men” by thinking, in effect, ‘What’s the use?’ “Community life oppose[s] despondency,” being more the “constant companion of the hermit.” Climacus calls it the “gravest” of the “capital vices,” which may be why he lists it under the number 13, symbol of atheism. For the Christian sliding into it, the antidotes are to remember his sins and to perform manual labor. Both community life and manual labor take the mind off itself, while remembering one’s sins directs the Christian mind toward the soul-labor of repentance, away from listlessness.

The fourteenth step aims at crushing that “clamorous yet wicked master, the stomach.” If wonder is the first step toward philosophy, here Climacus takes it: “I wonder if anyone has got free of this master before settling in the grave.” In addition to being a vice in itself, gluttony is “the father of fornication,” an illicit attempt to work off all those extra calories without going to the trouble of more rigorous exercise. (If Adam “had not been overcome by his stomach he would not have known what a wife is.”) A disciple of the dubious Origen, Evagrius, “afflicted by an evil spirit,” supposing himself “to be the wisest of the wise,” told his readers to combat gluttony by consuming only bread and water. “This is like saying to a child: ‘Go up the whole ladder in one stride.'” Be more “cunning” than that, first “only deny[ing] ourselves fattening foods, then heating foods, and only then what makes our food pleasant. Just “give your stomach satisfying and digestible food, so as to satisfy its insatiable hunger by sufficiency.” While despondency is the gravest of sins, the stomach is “the prince of the passions.” It “alone…is the cause of all human shipwreck,” he avers, with some exaggeration. Fasting, on the other hand, “is the coercion of nature and the cutting out of everything that delights the palate, the prevention of lust, the uprooting of bad thoughts, deliverance from dreams, purity of prayer, the light of the soul, the guarding of the mind, deliverance from blindness, the door of compunction, humble sighing, glad contrition, a lull in chatter, a means to silence, a guard of obedience, lightening of sleep, health of body, agent of dispassion, remission of sins, the gate of Paradise and its delight.”

If gluttony encourages fornication, that makes purity, successful resistance to lust, the logical fifteenth step. “Purity means that we put on the angelic nature”—a very big step, indeed. It is “the supernatural denial of nature,” which is why Climacus warns his readers not to “expect to confute the demon of fornication by arguing with him; for with nature on his side, he has the best of the argument.” The way to proceed is to expel erotic love with agapic love, “extinguish[ing] the material fire by the immaterial fire.” Chastity is “common to all the virtues” because it means that you have achieved “perfect insensibility to difference in bodies,” i.e., the sexual difference between them, but more: “the rule and limit of absolute and perfect purity is to be equally disposed towards animate and inanimate bodies, rational and irrational.” Obviously, this achievement is humanly impossible, due rather “to the presence of Him who is above nature,” stronger than nature. “He is great who remains free from passion when touched. But greater is he who remains unwounded by sight, and who has conquered the fire caused by the beauties of earth by meditation on the beauties of heaven.” By contrast, the sensual person loves bodies so much that “a kind of shameless and inhuman spirit openly asserts itself in the very feeling of the heart,” producing “a feeling of physical pain in the heart, fierce as from a blazing stove,” abandoning the fear of God and thereby the beginning of wisdom, “disdain[ing] prayer” and being “perpetually drunk with desire for creatures, rational and irrational.” In warring against ascetics, especially, those who, with God’s grace, have conquered their nature, the devil sets them to desiring “what is unnatural.” While ascetics are no longer tempted by women, they do not know, “poor things, that where a worse downfall has been prepared for them, there was no need for the lesser one.” He does not specify what the worse downfall is, and the story about St. Anthony, who lamented of a young monk that he had sinned after helping some elderly monks by miraculously bringing wild asses for them to ride, isn’t explicit, either, although Climacus hints first at bestiality, then at masturbation (“bodily intercourse is possible without intercourse with another body”). And finally, there is the sin that consists of “a flick of the mind”—a “simple remembrance with which the soul has no time to dally, since it is independent of time, unconnected with any image, impervious to analysis, and in some cases even unknown to the person himself”—the effect of “a mere glance, or touch of the hand, or hearing of a song, without any notion or thought.” In this circumstance, physical “violence in bodily prayer”—that is, “stretching out the hands, beating the breast, sincere raising of the eyes to heaven, deep sighing, frequent prostration”—will help you if you are alone. If you are with others, and such gestures are out of place, silently pray the Jesus Prayer, and “with invisible help you will invisibly drive away the invisible ones,” the demons who have taken aim at you.

Love of bodies is one kind of materialism, love of money another, amounting to an instance of the more general love of external things, which we may ‘idolize.’ “The worship of idols, a daughter of unbelief, an excuse for infirmities, a foreboder of old age, a harbinger of drought, a herald of hunger,” must be resisted as the sixteenth step. Money is indeed the proverbial root of all evils inasmuch as it “produces hatred, thefts, envy, separations, enmities, storms, remembrance of wrong, hard-heartedness, murders.” Following it, the seventeenth step is poverty, which minimizes the number of material things to which we have become attached. To become impoverished is to resign one’s cares, one’s anxieties, becoming “an unencumbered traveler” alienated from sorrow and faithful to God’s commandments. Truly, “a poor monk is lord of the world,” having “entrusted his cares to God and by faith…[having] obtained all men as his slaves” as “a son of detachment,” “pilgrims for the Lord.” The only danger in poverty comes to the one who “impoverishes himself for no reason,” unintentionally. Such a person merely “abstains from present goods and is deprived of future ones.” This is the poverty ‘moderns’ lament, as they declare ‘war on poverty.’ 

Love of money can bring “insensibility,” the “deadening of the soul and the death of the mind before the death of the body.” Such a man “is a brainless philosopher, a self-condemned commentator, a self-contradictory windbag, a blind man who teaches others to see,” a hypocrite whose “mouth prays against his passion, and his body struggles for it,” “philosophiz[ing] about death” wile “behav[ing] as if he were immortal,” “prais[ing] prayer, but run[ng] away from it as from the plague.” Climacus admits “my own powerlessness, since I am sorely afflicted with this sickness,” fighting with “with the scourge of the feat of the Lord and with unceasing prayer.” It is a “tyrant” who tells him, to “be constant in vigil, meditating on the eternal judgment; then perhaps I shall to some extent relax my hold on you.” If so, he will have taken the eighteenth step.

The prayer of “the really obedient man, his nineteenth step, can make him become “suddenly radiant and exultant,” having been “prepared and fired beforehand by his sincere service” to God and neighbor. Prayer and singing psalms in chapel is best for most, “solitary prayer [being] for the very few.” The closely related twentieth step, which encompasses first bodily and then spiritual vigil, begins with literal standing at prayer “during day and night.” We also stand while singing songs and while reading Scripture. Such pious sleeplessness in the all-night vigil can be mitigated by working with one’s hands or thinking of death, but “God accepts and values the offerings of each according to their intention and power.” And once sleep comes, “the soul which has spent all day unceasingly engaged with the word of the Lord will love to be occupied with it in sleep, too.” 

Solitaries are especially vulnerable to “unmanly and puerile cowardice,” strength being found in numbers. “Cowardice is a falling away from faith that comes from expecting the unexpected,” a “loss of conviction.” It readily comes to the man who is alone, who leaves himself open to groundless imaginings. To counter it, “do not hesitate to go late at night to those places where you usually feel afraid,” rather as someone who has a natural fear of the dark can overcome it by long walks at night. “Arm yourself with prayer,” since “it is not darkness and loneliness of place that gives the demons power against us, but barrenness of soul.” Take this twenty-first step, for the very good reason that “he who has conquered cowardice has clearly dedicated his life and soul to God.”

Traditionally, pride takes pride, if that is the right word, in being the worst of sins. Vainglory is the beginning of pride, “unholy self-esteem” a “perversion of character” that squanders the virtues won in previous struggles. It delights “at the sight of increasing virtue,” but just as “the sun shines on all alike,” so does “vainglory beam on all activities,” making them evaporate. Vainglory is idolatry aimed not outward at visible objects but at other men. “A vainglorious person is a believing idolator; he apparently honors God, but he wants to please not God but men.” His asceticism “exhausts his body” without earning him any reward from God—cheating the ascetic twice. He mouths self-depreciation, but so what? It is “he who maintains the same love for the very man who reproaches him” who exhibits genuine humility. A vainglorious man may live with the monks, “but in mind and thought he is in the world.” As his vainglory increases, “it gives birth to pride.” Stopping vainglory before it reaches that culmination is the twenty-second step.

A treatment of “mad pride” and its worst consequence, “unclean blasphemous thoughts,” accordingly follows. Pride and blasphemy are related because “pride is denial of God” and “flight from divine assistance.” To understand that one needs divine assistance requires humility. Pride affords “a foothold for satanic possession,” which is madness, the sure way to Hell. Climacus finds the beginning of mad pride in false gratitude. “I have seen people who thank God with their mouth but mentally magnify themselves.” But it is “utter madness to fancy one deserves God’s gifts.” We monks should rather “constantly be examining and comparing ourselves with the holy Fathers and the lights who lived before us,” finding “that we have not yet entered upon the path of the ascetic life, and have not kept our vow in holy fashion, and in disposition are still living in the world.” A true monk “experiences rapture of mind and sorrow of life.” He has taken the twenty-third step of overcoming pride. Blasphemous thoughts, “born from foul pride,” can be remedied by prayer. There will be times, nonetheless, when demons will push blasphemous thoughts into our minds; God forgives us for those.

The countermeasure to pride is humility, whose “precursor” is “weakness,” that is, a circumstance irremediable by the exercise of our own powers. Meekness, simplicity, and guilelessness” constitute the twenty-fourth step. They originate not in nature but from habit—for example, “praying calmly and sincerely for a troublesome neighbor.” The soul “finds rest” in a meek heart, while “a turbulent soul is a seat of the devil.” Meedness may be gained only to be lost, however. “I have seen honest sous who learnt to be evil from evil people.” Another snare is knowledge, which “puffs up many people,” although ignorance can be another: “There are here and there people who pride themselves on their ignorance.” Climacus offers a paradoxical but telling definition of “a simple-hearted monk”: he “is like a rational dumb animal, who lays his burden on his director.” “Dumb animal” in the original sense of not talking, or at least not much. “Rational” in that he understands that his director, his spiritual father, knows better than he. As for those knowledge-clever men, “a fall has often corrected” them, “giving them salvation and innocence in spite of themselves.” With divine intervention, a Saul can become a Paul.

There is humility, and then there is “sublime” or “holy” humility, “rooted in spiritual feeling.” This is the twenty-fifth step. Climacus does not attempt to describe the experience of it, which attempt would be “like a man who by words and comparisons wants to give an idea of the sweetness of honey to people who have never tasted it.” The monk who has taken this step accepts indignity “with the greatest pleasure” because it “relieves and cauterizes diseases of the soul and great sins” Such a man has jettisoned “all bad temper” and lives in “true distrust of [his] own qualities and [in] a constant desire to learn.” That is, he does not resemble a philosopher in one way—he does not rely on the unassisted power of human reason—while very much resembling a philosopher in his eros for wisdom. He desires wisdom but seeks it from God and from Godly men. Such men are now immune to “the poison of hypocrisy,” having no reason to attempt to conceal their faults. “Having in mind Christ’s passion, [they] regard themselves always as debtors.” Whatever intellectual or other natural powers they possess, they understand as “gifts of God,” and “so live as to account themselves unworthy of such wealth and each day add it to their debt.” The Socratic philosopher seeks self-knowledge; the man of holy humility understands it as “a true ideal of one’s spiritual growth and an unbroken remembrance of one’s slightest sins,” knowing that “it is better to offend men than God.” At the same time, they do not seek contention with others: “Birds fear the sight of a hawk, and those who practice humility fear the sound of argument,” which betokens prideful striving to assert the superiority of one’s own convictions over those of others.

Rationality grows beyond the step of obeying one’s spiritual father—an elder who one day will pass on—when one achieves “discernment of thoughts, passions, and virtues,” the twenty-sixth step. Discernment begins with self-knowledge, moves to “a spiritual sense that faultlessly distinguishes what is truly good from what is of nature and opposed to,” then becomes perfect in knowledge from “divine illumination,” which “can enlighten with its lamp what is dark in others.” With this step, the passions of gluttony, cupidity, and vainglory, along with those of lust, anger, despair, despondency, and pride have been “piously destroyed,” although Climacus cautions that “he who has been negligent” about the first three “will not conquer even one passion.” You can’t jump over any step on the Ladder. Conflicts with Satan come from “three generic causes”: negligence, which is “pitiable”; pride, which is “disastrous”; or “the envy of demons,” which is actually “blessed.” He explains the last, surprising, claim by first identifying the “three pits” that the demons dig for us. They try “to prevent any good at all from being done,” to frustrate us; monks should counter this “by zeal and fear of death.” They try to ensure good results will “not be done according to the will of God” but by means unacceptable to Him; monks should counter this by “obedience and humiliation.” Finally, “when these rogues fail in this too, they stand “quietly before our soul,” praising us “for living a thoroughly godly life”; counter this appeal to vanity with “unceasing self-condemnation.” (A holy man might respond to a person who praises his virtues by saying, ‘No, I am the greatest of sinners.’) “Perilous, truly perilous is the sea that we humble monks are crossing.” Our very efforts provoke the demons to redouble their efforts to ruin us. Therefore, “let us try to learn divine truth more by toil and sweat than by mere word, for at the time of our departure it is not words but deeds that will have to be shown.” Although the later Protestants will accuse such Christians as Climacus as trying to earn their way to salvation by works, not by faith, what he means is works animated by faith, and by the Word if not by words. He regards learning as a matter of such doing, not only as an act of reading or of listening. He retains profound esteem for reading and listening to the Gospel. The main virtues of which “the active life” of a Christian consists are fasting and obedience; “the first destroys sensuality, and the other reinforces this destruction with humility.” 

How is this possible, given human sin? Human beings still ‘stand a chance’ because “vice or passion is not originally planted in nature, for God is not the Creator of passions.” What is more, “there are in us many natural virtues from Him, among which are certainly the following: mercy, for even the pagans are compassionate; love, for even dumb animals often weep at the loss of one another; faith, for we all give birth to it of ourselves; hope, for we lend, and sail, and sow, hoping for the best.” And “love is a natural virtue in us,” as “the bond and fulfillment of the law,” as seen in Romans 13:10: “Love worketh not ill to his neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” In all things, “ask yourself: Am I really doing this in accordance with God’s will?” To learn what God’s will is, first mortify your own, pray, and ask advice from the fathers “or even the brothers with humility of heart and no thought of doubt”; “God is not unjust, and will not la astray souls who with faith and innocence humbly submit to the advice and judgment of their neighbor.” As to consulting the Bible, at least “at the beginning of the monastic life some of the unclean demons instruct us in the interpretation of the Divine Scriptures,” which the Devil himself has been known to quote. “Vainglorious people and…those who have been educated in secular studies” are particularly vulnerable to their scheme of gradual deception, “lead[ing] them into heresy and blasphemy,” perhaps because vainglorious souls will find what they want to find and former secularists will likely bring un-Christian philosophic notions to their study of the Bible. “We can recognize this diabolic divinity, or rather, devilry, by the disturbances and the confused and unholy joy which are felt in the soul during the instruction.” And while it is true that “an energetic soul rouses the demons against itself,” as our “conflicts increase, so do our crowns.

Writing about the twenty-seventh step us risky. It is “the holy solitude of body and soul.” “We, who are weak and infirm, hesitate to philosophize in our discourse about the haven of solitude,” for the demons lurk around “the table of good brotherhood,” waiting to snatch a soul, “run[ning] off with it in its mouth and devour[ing] it on the quiet.” He therefore refuses to talk about peace of soul to those who have yet to attain it. He is willing, however, to “speak briefly about solitude, if only to explain what it is.” Disengagement from all worldly affairs and “earnest prayer” are the first actions to take, followed by a deliberate attempt to concentrate mind and heart on God, channeling them away from considerations of the lower things. This is difficult. “Those who are thoroughly versed in secular philosophy are indeed rare; but I affirm that those who have a divine knowledge of the philosophy of true solitude are still more rare.” Read, but “let what you read lead you to action,” for as a Christian “you are a doer,” and putting the right words “into practice makes further reading superfluous.” “Seek to be enlightened by the words of health through your labors, and not merely from books,” especially allegorical books, “because they are dark words, and they darken the weak.”

At this point on the Ladder, “holy and blessed prayer” becomes even more important as the twenty-eighth step. Prayer, “the converse and union of man with God,” which “upholds the world and brings about reconciliation with God,” yields “invisible progress” towards Him. “For him who truly prays, prayer is the court, the judgment hall and the tribunal of the Lord before the judgment to come.” Prayer should be “completely simple.” The publican and the prodigal son “were reconciled to God by a single phrase.” God knows, and so needs no elaboration. The right order of prayer is thanksgiving followed by confession, “heartfelt contrition of soul,” and then only then petition. Because “instability is natural to the mind,” you should “shut off your thought within the words of your prayer.” When distracted, return. Always remember, faithfully, that “Spirit cannot be bound, but where the Creator of the spirit is, everything obeys.”

The penultimate, twenty-ninth step is “heaven on earth,” by which Climacus means “godlike dispassion and perfection.” This is “the resurrection of the soul before the general Resurrection.” That “soul has dispassion who is immersed in the virtues as the passionate are in pleasures.” Dispassion means “to hold all persons in the same regard as inanimate things” in the sense that God is no respecter of ‘persons,’ those of high earthly rank and reputation. The humble man knows that all men are created equal, and at this step you will “have humble thoughts” even “in the midst of high undertakings and achievements.” To unite with God means disuniting with men insofar as men concern themselves with less-than-godly things, animated by less-than-godly passions.

The thirtieth and final step brings together faith, hope, and agapic love, “the supreme trinity among the virtues.” Like the Holy Trinity, these three are three-in-one, the first a ray, the second a light, the third a circle, but “in all, one radiance and one splendor.” “The first can make and create all things; the divine merc surrounds the second and makes it immune to disappointment; the third does not fall, does not stop in its course and allows no respite to him who is wounded by its blessed rapture.” Of these three, love is the greatest because it is “the progress of eternity,” ruling “over all.” 

Praying to Love, he receives an answer: “Unless you renounce your gross flesh, you cannot know my beauty May this ladder teach you the spiritual combination of the virtues.” And so Climacus calls his brothers to the ascent.

The spiritual, spirit-centered, body-sacrificing ascent John Climacus describes and defends has a ‘worldly’ or ‘secular’ dimension. It concerns the question of aristocracy. The aristocrats of antiquity and the later aristocrats of the Middle Ages were warriors. They too sacrificed their bodies—in their case, for the sake of their families, political regimes, countries, and for the sake of honor, even glory. These were men of thumos, of spiritedness, as distinguished from spirituality, holiness. Their thumos caused them to despise the dishonorable, merely mortal body. Classical philosophers attempted to steer such aspiring Homeric heroes into willing rule by philosophers, by reason (Plato, albeit with irony) or to a life of virtue (Aristotle, who understood the aristocratic regime of genuine virtue to be the rarest of all regimes). Such modern philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu attempted to steer the Christian aristocrats away from chivalric conflicts and towards the peaceful competition of commerce and industry. The strict ascetic hierarchy of the monastery that Climacus is still another attempt to re-channel honor-loving aristocrats, here a spiritual aristocracy. Tocqueville’s claim, that Christian began the long-term trend toward ‘democracy,’ i.e. social equality, became true, but not without this profoundly undemocratic claim, which goes so far as to suggest not only that many are called but few are chosen by God, but that God chooses very few, indeed, and only those who undertake a way of life that amounts to a new kind of heroism, a heroism of the spirit.

 

 

 

John Cassian: The Institutes of the Cenobites and the Remedies for the Eight Principal Vices. Boniface Ramsey translation. New York: The Newman Press, 2000.

 

Born in Dacia around 360 AD, not long before its conquest by the Huns, John Cassian traveled widely—to Bethlehem, Alexandria, Constantinople (where the Patriarch, John Chrysostom, made him a deacon of the Church), Rome (where he was ordained to the priesthood by Pope Innocent I), and eventually to Marseille, where he founded two monasteries, writing the Institutes as a guide for the monks, recalling the practices he had seen in the monasteries of Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. “Institutes” are the principles that guide the practices.

In his preface, he thanks the local bishop, Castor, for summoning him, a foreigner, to “collaborate in your great work”: building a “true and spiritual temple for God,” a “community of holy men” in whose souls dwells “Christ the king.” “You are concerned that the simple life of holy men be explained in simple language to the brothers in your new monastery.” To this task, Cassian brings “experience and practice alone,” since “such things could never be handed on or understood or conjured up by men of leisurely meditation or verbal teaching”—the stuff of philosophizing—but by a person “who has striven to learn” the “reasoning of what was done” in the monasteries with the same “zeal and effort” as displayed in those Christian temples. Saints Basil and Jerome reported on these practices but did not experience them; in all humility, I have.

The book moves from the “outward appearance” of the monks, their garb, to their “inner worship,” including their spiritual warfare against sin and the demons who tempt them to sin. With respect to clothing, “it is proper for a monk always to dress like a soldier of Christ, ever ready for battle, his loins girded.” The Old Testament prophets Elijah and Elisha “were responsible for the beginnings of this profession.” Elijah wore a leather belt, “a kind of trademark of his”—girt loins indicating his chastity—and only sufficient clothing as to serve as a covering for “the shame of nakedness” and for protection from the cold, “not such as nurtures seeds of vanity or pride.” On the contrary, a monk’s clothing “should be grimy with filth accumulated by neglect,” and nothing should differentiate him from the other monks while everything should differentiate him from the world. The small hoods they wear remind them “to hold constantly to the innocence and simplicity of small children,” very much in contrast with the laurels sported by imperial dignitaries. The cords that extend from the neck to the armpits free their arms and hands for work, as he who does not wish to work shall not eat. For the rest of the body, the monk dresses in goatskin, which “signifies that, once all the turbulence of their carnal passions has been put to death”—the goat being the traditional symbol of lust. In all, he “must abide in the most elevated virtue,” with none of “the willfulness or wantonness” of youth. His belt, made with “dead skin,” indicates Elijah-like chastity. He carries a staff, as did Elisha—another outward sign of spiritual warfare, warning him that he “must never go out unarmed in the midst of the numerous barking dogs of the vices and the invisible beasts of the evil spirits.” Whereas the monks of southern regions he had observed wore only sandals, “we ourselves,” here in the north, should adapt our footwear and other clothing to the climate, so long as we dress “in keeping with the humility of our profession” as well as “the character of the climate.” 

In this appropriate clothing, monks have prepared themselves for their most spiritually important activities: praying and singing, both night and day. These practices must be ruled aright. “Many persons in different places—following their own ideas and possessing, as Aristotle says, ‘a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge’—have stablished different models and rules for themselves in this matter.” But the Egyptian monastics adhere to traditions upheld by “a succession of elders.” For example, “no one is allowed to rule over a community of brothers, or even over himself, unless he not only gets rid of all his possessions but also recognizes that he is in fact not his own master and has no power over himself,” ready to obey as a child would do, “because he is beginning afresh.” As for his superiors, “no one is chosen to rule over a community of brothers unless, before he himself exercises authority, he has learned by obedience how he should command those who will be subject to him and has understood from the institutes of the elders what he should pass on to the young.” The person willing to undergo the strictest of obedient discipline possesses “a most lofty gift and a grace of the Holy Spirit.” 

Night prayers and psalms follow a regular order: twelve psalms followed by two readings, one from the Old and the other from the New Testament. “This number, which was set in the distant past and which is inviolate in the monasteries of those regions even until now, has been kept for so many centuries because the elders declare that it was not established by human whim but was given to the fathers from heaven by the teaching of an angel.” Nor should this surprise anyone today, in the fourth century, as it was the Apostle Mark himself who first ruled as Alexandria’s bishop over a “multitude of believers.” The Apostle “had one heart and one soul” in pursuing not only the way of prayer but the way of “rigorous abstinence,” worshipping with “such fervor that the very appetite and memory of food only disturbed them every second or third day.” The monks amounted to a spiritual aristocracy, mirroring the civil-social aristocracy that characterized the ancient world around them. “When the faith of the few had not yet been spread among the multitude and grown lukewarm, the venerable fathers, reflecting with unceasing concern on those who would follow them, came together to discuss what form daily worship would take throughout the whole body of the brotherhood,” establishing the practices that prevail to this day. In their prudence, they limited the number of psalms so as not to cause the monks to become distracted by bodily discomfort; “it is not a multitude of verses but rather the understanding of the mind that pleases them.” As to the prayers, they were kept brief but frequent, again to avoid distraction—a “pointed brevity” enabling the monks “to be able to dodge the lurking devil’s darts.”  

When they are not praying and singing, the monks work with their hands throughout their waking hours at night, “offering a sacrifice to God” in so doing. This also ensures “that the hateful enemy, jealous of our purity and always lying in wait for it and continually attacking it, might not by some phantasm of sleep sully the cleanness that we have acquired by nightly psalms and prayers.” And even when no such assault occurs, sleep induces grogginess upon awakening, often “produc[ing] heaviness and torpor in the mind for the whole day, dulling its vigor and clouding that clarity of intellect and impoverishing that richness of heart which would make it possible for us to remain wary and strong throughout the day in the face of all the enemy’s snares.” In all, the monks “practice equally the virtues of body and soul, balancing the profit of the outer man with the gain of the inner.” This is what has preserved the monastic regime in its unity for so long, with none of the schisms that distraction from God’s teachings and traditions might flourish in a condition of idleness. Even while working with his hands on whatever task he has been assigned, the monk will review a psalm or scriptural text in his mind, “giv[ing] none of his talents or his time to harmful schemes or to wicked plots, nor even to idle gossip, since both his mouth and his heart are constantly busied with spiritual meditation.” If a lapse does occur, the monk suffers internal exile, with no one permitted to “pray with him until he has done penance on the ground and his reconciliation and pardon for the thing committed have been granted publicly by the abba, in the presence of all the brothers.” He must be humbled, lest by “a destructive consolation he hardens his heart more and more.”

The daytime hours go similarly—prayer, psalms, work. The pacing of these activities differs, however, with prayers and psalms at the third, sixth, and ninth hours of the day, three psalms each time. Each hour commemorates an event seen in the Gospel: The Holy Spirit first visited the apostles in the third hour of the day; Jesus mounted the cross at the sixth hour, and Peter received his commission to preach to the Gentiles at that hour, too; at the ninth hour, Jesus harrowed Hell, Cornelius the centurion “learned from an angel who spoke to him that the offering of his prayers and alms had been received by the Lord, and Peter received “the sacraments of the call of the Gentiles” that had been revealed to him at the sixth hour. That is, the timing of daytime prayer and song reminds the monks of their calling, of Christian sacrifice, of the guarantees God makes to the faithful, and of their obligation to preach the Gospel. As with the brevity of nighttime prayer, the division of these periods of devotion allows for “the body’s frailty” and the mind’s need for refreshment.

Cassian describes the conditions of admission to communities formed according to such a strict regime, along with the training undergone once the renunciates are admitted. The seeker must lie outside the monastery for at least ten days, giving “an indication of his perseverance and desire, as well as of his humility and patience” by embracing the knees of each brother who goes by, enduring their rebukes and insults, bearing inspection for any money that may be secreted on their person. The monastery accepts no money from him, lest “he might be puffed up with self-confidence from having mad this offering,” holding himself above “his poor brothers.” Not only would such a person “never stoop to the lowliness of Christ,” but if he could not endure the regime he might demand his money back. 

Once admitted, each renunciate is assigned a supervisor, a spiritual father. The renunciate must never “hide any of the wanton thoughts in their hearts but to reveal them to their elder as soon as they surface,” accepting his judgment of them without question, so that “it never happens that the clever foe is able to get the better of a young man as if he were inexperienced and ignorant, or to deceive him by some trick.” All of their actions, including “attend[ing] to their common and natural necessities” and “leav[ing] their cells” for any reason, must be done only with “the knowledge and permission of their superior.” He shall obey the superior’s orders without question, whether or not the task assigned is physically possible; he must still attempt it and accept failure. If “he prefers reading to obedience” he must repent publicly. At meals, he must remain silent, with his hood “drawn lower than [his] eyebrows,” preventing a “free view” that might “facilitate a roving curiosity.” Cassian tells the story of one renunciate who was commanded to roll a huge rock over to his superior. “He little weighed the impossibility of the command or of the deed in his reverence for the old man and in his sincere and simple dutifulness, which led him to believe with absolute confidence that the old man could give no order that was purposeless and unreasonable.” Nor was it, having been issued to test his obedience. A much more extreme and unsettling case was that of the renunciate who was admitted along with his eight-year-old son. They were separated, perhaps in accord with Jesus’ prediction that obedience to Him would sunder families. But worse, the child was “purposely neglected, clothed in rags rather than garments, and so covered over and marred with filth as to shock rather than delight his father whenever he could see him.” The boy was also subjected “to the blows and slaps of different persons.” Cassian invites us to admire the father’s heart, “unmoved out of love of Christ and the virtue of obedience.” Finally, in imitation of God’s command to Abraham for the sacrifice of his son, the father was told to throw his son into the river. While the monks rescued the child from the water and “the man’s faith and devotion were so acceptable to God that they were immediately confirmed by divine testimony,” one does wonder what effect all of this had on the boy. As a reward, the abba of the monastery designated the man as his successor. We hear nothing more of the son.

Cassian ends his account of the monastic practices with an exhortation delivered from one monk to another. “Renunciation is nothing else than a manifestation of the cross and of a dying” to the world; “he lives in you who was crucified for you,” and you crucify yourself out of the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom, of that discernment that recognizes the traps set for you by Satan. You thus “prepare your soul not for peace or security or pleasure” but to experience the “trials and difficulties” you will encounter on your way to the highest regime, the Kingdom of God. Scripture teaches that “the gate is narrow and the path is strait which leads to life, and few there are who find it,” but you are “one of the chosen few”; “do not grow cold through the example and the lukewarmness of the multitude, but live as do the few, so that with the few may deserve to be found in the kingdom.” This path of humility and obedience, walked steadily and long, will bring the humility and obedience of action into your soul, ingrain it there, so that “the things that you used to do out of a certain dread of punishment you will begin to do without any difficulty, as it were naturally, and no longer with a view of punishment or fear of any kind, but out of love for the good itself and out of pleasure in virtue.” Foolish in the eyes of the world, you will attain “purity of heart”; “with purity of heart the perfection of apostolic love is possessed.” 

Let the spiritual warfare begin, then. Cassian turns to the eight sins that must be overcome, listing them in the order of difficulty in combating them. They are: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. Sins are “harmful passions” that “claim dominion for themselves,” exercising “a most cruel tyranny over our mortal body.” It is God’s Word that can, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, break “the iron bolts of the vices that shut us out from true knowledge” and “lead us to our concealed secrets”—concealed from others and very often from ourselves. “Thus, penetrating the dark shadows of our vices with the most pure eyes of our soul, we shall be able to expose them and bring them to light,” discern their “causes and natures,” and “bedewed with spiritual remedies,” be “led to a place of refreshment and perfection.” Even then, no one monk will have all the virtues; Christ is present “when all are assembled.” That is the spiritual advantage of the regime of the holy community.

Gluttony, “the desire to gourmandize,” must be counteracted by fasting. No “uniform rule concerning the manner of fasting” can “easily be kept because not all bodies have the same strength.” But while metabolisms vary, there is nonetheless “one rule of discipline for everyone with regard to an abstinent and virtuous mind.” Do not eat until sated, either with respect to the quantity or the quality of your food. “The mind that is suffocated and weighed down by food cannot be guided by the governance of discretion,” the rule of reason both natural and spiritual. “Too much food of any kind makes it stagger and sway and robs it of every possibility of integrity and purity.” Gluttony wasn’t Sodom’s only sin, but it was its first. “The surfeit of bread…set ablaze” the Sodomites’ lust. Therefore, “eat only as much as an unyielding discretion with respect to temperance judges sufficient to maintain [your] life, and not as much as [your] appetite demands.” Set times for eating; set portions proper to your condition; “more than anything else,” respect the judgment of your conscience. “Integrity of mind is closely connected with an empty stomach.” Abstinence is necessary if not sufficient to achieve such integrity, but “the desire to gourmandize…is the first thing that we must trample upon.” Like Olympians, spiritual athletes must attend first to their diet in order “to compete in the higher contests.” No less a saint than the Apostle Paul “wrestl[ed] strenuously with his flesh.” Such a man strives “to make himself pure for God so that he may deserve to welcome Christ in himself as his guest” in his heart. While doing so, do not concentrate on your ‘self’ alone, as so many ‘dieters’ do. “It [is] better to practice the virtue of hospitality and love than to display the strictness of our abstinence and daily rigor of our chosen orientation” to our visitors.

Our “second struggle” is the “savage war” against fornication, a war “longer than the others and of greater duration,” “completely won by only a few.” This passion “gains in strength by the weakness of both body and soul,” since fasting alone cannot cure it but must be “preceded by a contrite spirit and by persevering prayer against this most unclean spirit,” along with “toilsome manual labor,” which “restrains and recalls the feckless wanderings of the heart.” As with the cure for any vice, the contrite spirit must first be animated by “true humility” within the heart, which commands the flesh. And abstinence alone will not do; chastity, “a disposition of integrity and incorruption,” a virginity not only of the flesh but of the mind, must prevail. Humility is indispensable because “the soul cannot escape being attacked by this vice until it realizes that waging this war is beyond its own powers,” that it needs “the assistance and protection of the Lord” if it will win the victory. We will know that we have achieved this “if either no unlawful image occurs to us as we lie at rest and relaxed in slumber or at least, when one does surface, it does not arouse any movements of desire,” since “the character of our thoughts…is made trial of in the calm of night,” when relaxation of the mind brings to the surface “the hidden depths of the soul,” the “hidden fevers of seething emotion.” 

Avarice or the love of money differs from gluttony and fornication because it is not natural, not “inborn.” The other passions at least have their root in God-given necessity: gluttony is a deranged desire for food, fornication a deranged desire for replenishing the earth, and so on with the rest of the sins. But “this disease arrives later and comes upon the soul from without”; in this, its only simulacrum is envy.  And once it enters the soul it is “much more dangerous than all the others and is that much more difficult to get rid of,” becoming the proverbial root of all evils. Avarice sneaks up on us, beginning with making a brother “concerned about a very small sum,” providing him with “certain justifiable and, so to speak, reasonable grounds for holding money back and keeping it for himself”: Does he not need more than what the monastery supplies in order to maintain his health? Does he not need to travel in order to relieve himself of his restlessness behind the narrow confines of the monastery? Does not the prospect of infirm old age ruin his sense of security? “And so the unhappy soul is agitated and tied up in serpentine entanglements.” Hoarding, then desiring material goods, then an attenuation of zeal for holy goods will put him into retreat from the spiritual war. In the end, he will “not shudder to commit a crime of lying or perjury or theft, nor to break faith, nor to be filled with the guilty fury of wrath.” Instead of conforming his way of life and their way of thinking to “the meaning of Scripture,” he will “adapt the power of Scripture to their own wanton desires by looking to harmonize it with their own opinions.” After all, if it is more blessed to give than to receive, must I not have something to give, the more the better? In my now lukewarm faith, I then “refuse to be satisfied with either manual labor or the frugality of the monastery.” Instead, “not only the possession of money” but “even the desire itself should be utterly cast out of one’s mind.” Do not be a Judas, ready to “sell the world’s redeemer and the author of human salvation for thirty pieces of silver.”

Anger is a “deadly poison” that “must be totally uprooted from the depths of our soul” because it “blinds our mind’s eye with its harmful darkness”—the mind being the nous, reason. Wise Solomon’s Book of Proverbs admits that “anger destroys even the prudent.” Biblical references to God’s anger are not to be taken literally. “The disturbance of anger (not to mention wrath) cannot be attributed to that immutable nature without monstrous blasphemy,” any more than the ascription of physical attributes—God’s “mouth,” His “eyes,” His “hands,” His “arm,”—can be literally applied to a purely spiritual Being. God’s “mouth” denotes “that conversation of his which he is wont to carry on softly in the inmost recesses of our souls, or what he spoke to our fathers and to the prophets.” His “eyes” refer to his capacity to see all things, “the fact that nothing that is done or will be done or that is thought by us is hidden from him.” His “hands” is a metaphor by which “we should understand that providence and activity by which he is the creator and author of all things,” while His “arm” refers “to that power and governance by which he sustains, directs, and rules all things.” God’s anger and wrath have nothing to do with “lowly human disturbances,” denoting instead his role as “judge and avenger of every wicked deed in this world,” one we should fear “as the terrible repayer of our acts,” anything we do “against his will.” This is the import of Jesus’ command to remove the “beam of wrath” from your own eye instead of complaining about the speck in the eye of another. Be indignant at your own sins, “the wanton movements of our heart,” at “things that we are ashamed to do or to say in the sight of human beings but that have found their way into the recesses of our heart.” Consider the bad example of irascible souls, who “turn the poison of their wrath back to their own destruction, brooding over it in their hearts and in glum silence digesting it within themselves.” Their anger blocks them from prayer, and especially from prayer for their enemies, which God commands us to do. And further, “as long as we attribute our own wrongdoing to other people,” as long as we resent, “we shall never be able to get near to patience and perfection.” On the contrary, our anger is under “our own power,” quite apart from what others do or say. And “lastly,” never abuse prayer, never pray to God “when we are anger,” when we are likely to petition Him for our enemy’s ruin. “Keep before our eyes the uncertain state of our human condition,” which dictates that we will die, abandoning all the earthly goods we are so indignant to lose.

“A consuming sadness” is also a sin, inasmuch as Christians eventually will see God in eternity and, in the meantime, “it cuts us off totally from the vision of the divine contemplation” while “weaken[ing] and oppress[ing] the mind itself,” discouraging it from “carry[ing] out its prayers with its customary eagerness of heart” and blocking it from “dwell[ing] upon the remedies of sacred scripture.” Sadness can follow sustained, frustrated anger or the failure to achieve “some gain.” “Occasionally we are even provoked to fall into this misfortune for no apparent reason.” Patience remedies sadness, in particular when we seek to win over someone we have offended or injured. So does rightly directed hope, as the natural benefit of sadness comes “when we conceive it out of repentance for our sins and are inflamed by a desire for perfection, and by the contemplation of future blessedness.” 

Acedia is the term for “a wearied or anxious heart.” Similar to sadness, “it makes a person horrified at where he is, disgusted with his cell, and also disdainful and contemptuous of the brothers who live with him or at a slight distance,” rendering him “slothful and immobile in the face of all the work to be done within the walls of his dwelling.” Acedia causes the mind to fill “with a kind of irrational confusion.” David suffered from it, as seen in Psalm 119:28: “My soul slept from weariness” or “heaviness.” It cannot “be avoided by flight but overcome through resistance.” To do so, don’t compare yourself with your brother monks, pay no attention to gossip, work with your hands, “walk honorably for the sake of outsiders,” and “desire nothing of anyone.” Take your stand on the Word of God, on His promises of salvation, on your coming entry into His regime, the Kingdom of God.

Vainglory is a spiritual rather than a fleshly sin. Indeed, “persons who could not be deceived by carnal vices are all the more brutally hurt as a result of their spiritual successes”; their lack of sin tempts them to sin. Vainglory is accordingly more complex than many of the other sins. “Multifarious, multiform, and varied,” it conceals itself under virtues. It pursues souls even into solitude. “One [man] is tried because of his great knowledge, another because he reads much, still another because of his frequent vigils.” For these things, he is likely to be praised, even flattered. For this reason, “a monk must by all means flee from women and bishops.” Or, if an academic, from women and deans. Do not boast, and “avoid those things that could set us apart from others and that would gain us praise from human beings, as if we were the only ones who could do them.” Do not “do for the sake of human beings what we should have done” for the sake of God.

In many ways, Cassian has commended humility as the cure for the sins. The eighth and final sin is pride, “the final one in the combat with the vices” but “first in terms of origin and time.” Unlike most of the other vices, it cannot rest satisfied, however temporarily, when it achieves its telos. Nor does it confine itself to the corruption of one virtue, as gluttony corrupts moderation, lust charity, anger patience. “Like a most savage tyrant it lays waste and overturns the whole city from its foundations.” Rebellious Lucifer would have destroyed the Kingdom of God. His pride made him rely “on the power of his free will”; he no longer believed that he needed God. He tempted Adam into sharing it with him, bringing the first man to believe “he could attain to the glory of the Godhead by his own free will and effort.” But genuine theosis depends entirely upon understanding that our virtues are gifts bestowed upon us by the grace of God. This is why monks are so vulnerable to pride; they can easily suppose that their spiritual victories are their own. On the contrary, we must remind ourselves of our dependence upon Him.

“How great the evil of pride is, that it deserves to have as its adversary not an angel or other virtues contrary to it but rather God himself!” The cure for it may be seen in the words of the Apostle Paul in First Corinthians: “Not I, but the grace of God in me.” “A person cannot be cleansed of his carnal vices if he does not realize that all his efforts and attempts are insufficient in view of the great end of perfection, and if he does not recognize that this cannot be grasped apart from the compassion and help of God.” “Never will a person’s own effort and human diligence be equal to the divine gift, if it has not been granted by the divine compassion to the one who desires it.” To say this does not “nullify human effort” or redirect men from “diligence and intense toil.” Indeed, “God’s mercy and grace are bestowed only on those who toil and labor,” “given to those who will and those who run,” to those who ask for God’s blessing, knock at God’s door, search for God. But one must hope for “the rewards of the life to come not by reason of [one’s] own works but on account of the Lord’s mercy,” giving themselves “no credit for the great circumspection of heart that they [have] in comparison with others.” Do not flatter yourself. God was the one who “created us rational, gave us the power of free will, bestowed on us the grace of baptism, and granted us the knowledge and help of the law,” protecting us from evil by His providence. 

“This is the true humility with respect to God, this is the unspoiled faith of the most ancient fathers, which remains pure in their successors up to the present day.” Not by philosophy, with its “dialectical syllogisms,” or rhetoric, “Ciceronian eloquence,” but by the “experience of an unspoiled life and by the most upright behavior, as well as by the correction of their vices and, to speak more truly, by visible indications,” the fathers of the faith “learned that the nature of perfection is contained” in “simplicity of heart.”