Spyridon Bailey: The Shape of Fire: Orthodox Monastic Encounters. Chapters 4-12. London: FeedARead.com Publishing, 2026.
Upon first landing at the foot of Mount Athos in Greece, the Mother of God prayed to her son, who consecrated the beautiful location to her. Although Orthodox churches were established there, the mountain did not become a place for an organized set of monasteries until the tenth century. Father Bailey undertook his first pilgrimage to Mt. Athos in 2013; his conversations with four monks there include the central chapters of his book. Appropriately, the first of these conversations concerns Mary herself, whom Orthodox Christians call the Panaghia or All-Holy (pan = all, hagios = holy) and the Theotokos or God-bearer, Mother of God (Theo = God, tokos = offspring).
Father George, an Englishman residing at the Osian Gregoriou monastery, relates that “When we look at an icon of the Panaghia, we see the whole purpose of life,” for just as the Son of God formed in body of Mary, so “Christ may be formed in us.” The icon “is a reminder of the incarnation,” and as such, “we venerate her as one of us,” as “the prototype of all Christians.” Just as Mary obeyed the summons of God—through “her faith God was already alive in her heart”—so should we. The Israelite temple in Jerusalem contained the Holy of Holies; Mary “became the new holy of holies,” a “sign of what it means for us to become temples of God’s presence.” And it is to be understood that Christ grows in us as a child—gentle, returning the love of his parents. “Christ offers Himself this way, and where there is love, He will rest.” In the icons, depicting Mother and Child, “it is as though she is giving us her child, inviting us to take Him and hold Him, and even more, that we allow Him to be born in us, born in our soul, that He may truly live in us.” To live in us, to begin to flourish in us, Christians must live the way of life of the Church, with its ascetic “taming of our sinful will,” its “denial of anger and ego,” making room for God’s love. This is why the Apostle Paul “says that he no longer lives, but it is Christ Who lives in him.” “In our Panaghia we recognize humanity in whom Christ lives.”
Christianity, then, is no mere system of morality. “The call of Christ is not to follow a set of moral rules, it is to have His life within us.” Insofar as we achieve “union with him…good deeds will inevitably flow” from us, from our way of life. We will be “new creatures,” not only as individuals but as members of the Body of Christ, the Church. “Just as we are baptized into His Body, so our union with Him grows as part of that Body.” To undertake any other way of life—in Montaignian modernity, typically one charted by ourselves—we “are trusting in ourselves and rejecting Christ.” Mary was no prominent person but “a humble and chaste woman unknown to the world,” not ‘full of herself’ but full of divine grace. “The wisdom of Solomon, the courage of David, the faith of Abraham and Moses, all of the great gifts God has given to the prophets are as nothing beside the sanctity of the Panaghia’s heart.” But, the pilgrim asks, given the sinfulness of all human beings, “how are we to understand how the perfect God could unite Himself to her flesh?” True, while the Panaghia did live “in obedience and love,” she “was still subject to the effects of Adam’s sin.” The Roman Catholic teaching, laid down in the ninth century and made a dogma in the nineteenth, that the Panaghia had no sin, is a Franciscan heresy which spread “despite Thomas Aquinas opposing it.” However, do not misconceive the doctrine of original sin. A new-born baby will suffer the illnesses and eventual death that flesh is heir to, but he is not yet guilty. And “immediately before Christ’s conception,” the Holy Spirit “so filled her that her flesh was sanctified by His presence,” making her “a fit vessel for the Son of God.” And in her prior and continued obedience to God, “humanity reclaimed [the] paradise which was lost through Eve’s disobedience.” God’s grace “has abounded all the more, so that the Panaghia has been raised above the angels.” Eve attempted to elevate herself “through vanity and pride and disobedience.” Through humility and obedience, Mary found herself elevated by God, “as we shall be raised on the final day.”. As such, she is to be venerated, not worshipped.
What has this to do with the Orthodox Church? “The Theotokos has vanquished the laws of nature,” having conceived a child “without a husband.” “Motherhood is given to the natural world, but she bore the very creator of all nature, and she alone received the fullness of Him Who fills all things.” Genuine Christians will be divinized, as the Bible teaches, but “she alone is the first, fully divinized person,” personifying “the whole mystery of divine economy” as a foreshadowing or “type” of the Church,” which is also “immaculate but wedded,” the Bride of Christ. “She is mother to all who become members of Christ’s Body.” Her virginity “signifies the Church’s fidelity to Christ,” the fidelity of Bride to Bridegroom.
On his walk between the Gregoriou Monastery and Simonos Petras Monastery, the Father Spyridon encountered a young Romanian monk. This conversation centered on things of this world—specifically, the end times. “You must prepare your people for what is to come,” as “Christians must take a stand against the spirit of the times,” despite the fact that “there is only one path ahead for the Church, that of suffering.” Many Christians have succumbed to historicism, the notion that the course of events is progressing toward “victory in the world.” On the contrary: before the return of Christ there will be the coming of the Antichrist, and “few will recognize antichrist for who he is”: “the counterfeit of Christ.” That is because historicist progressivism habituates men “to trust in everything that will abandon us.” “When our lives are good, when we enjoy peace, we must not relax or become comfortable with what the world is giving us.” The saints of the fourth century prudently “fled to the deserts when the empire became Christian” because “they understood the danger of the appearance of the world’s acceptance of Christ,” something that will never happen. The regime of Antichrist initially will resemble the democratic dystopia Tocqueville predicts: the abandonment of civil and political liberty for the comforts of the administrative state animated by administrative ‘science.’ “But the truth for us is clear, there can be no salvation without the cross”—without “struggle” and “suffering.” Persecution of the Church will follow. “Friendship with the world makes us enemies of God,” leading not only to “worldly sensuality” but “spiritual sensuality,” whereby Christians make “calls to relax the rules and teachings of the Church to accommodate modern ideas, to become more acceptable to the weaknesses of our time.” This was called New Age spirituality in the 1970s, but more often, since the nineteenth century, ‘the religion of humanity.’ [1] The world has “rejected Christ and the remaining faithful must recognize themselves as the last Christians, however many generations may be left.” As a Romanian, he has seen a sort of dress rehearsal for the regime of the Antichrist in communism: “Before they remove freedom, they remove the truth. Grubby men always plot to spread lies, not knowing that the truth can never be hidden, because the truth is alive; Christ is the Truth.”
Modern Israel is nationalist, not Biblical, a product of “false messianic reasoning.” Indeed, “every major political and geopolitical change is the building of all that is necessary for antichrist.” Decades before that, the murder of the Russian Czar Nicholas and his family inaugurated a time in which “Satan’s deception…moved from beyond the realm of individual men’s hearts to the capturing of whole nations,” to “universal apostasy.” With Communism’s collapse, “Satan is devising more subtle ways to pollute men’s hearts”: “amusements, luxury, entertainments—everything that distracts us from the nearness of death and judgment,” beckoning us to “the pursuit of pleasure” in “the fantasy of a man-made paradise here on earth.” And “every tyrant or social movement that seeks a worldly utopia, always demands that the worship of God be abolished.” Christians cannot successfully fight these things, only prepare themselves.
A Christian’s main preparation should not be for the rule of the Antichrist but for the Day of Judgment, for Christ’s return. It isn’t sufficient merely to recognize His enemy but to ally yourself with Christ. Without that, the rule of Antichrist will be insufferable; “we can only endure these things if we look beyond them to Christ’s Second Coming.” Do not build a bomb shelter and store it with cans of beans. Rather store up “grace through repentance and prayer in the storehouses of our souls,” so that when Judgment comes, “our soul will not be attached to the devil” and “there will be at least a little virtue weighing in our favor.” Christians can and should have courage because “the Church is a powerful fortress”, and they are “armed with every spiritual shield and weapon to fight off the assaults of the demons.” Satan will be unbound; he will “attack us directly once more,” unleashing “the full fury of hell on Orthodoxy” with “every earthly means.” Spiritually, “a spirit of revolt against everything good and reasonable will be unmistakable,” as “basic truths, not just of religious faith, but the foundations of understanding and reasoning will be rejected” and “men will be free to deny even what they see with their own eyes in the service of the new ‘good,'” their conscience “silenced for the sake of fitting in.” “Nothing will be accepted as objective or true, and men’s impulses and feelings will be elevated to the status of the unquestionable standard for truth.” The “taste of the truth will only be recognized by those who persist and struggle.”
At the end of his prophetic message, the Romanian veered into anti-Semitism, saying that “the Jews will be the first” to declare Antichrist Christ, Messiah, “and all the tribes of the earth will quickly follow.” “One day we will hear that Israel has bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, and we will know that this is a sign that things are happening.” Israel indeed did just that in 2025, the year prior to the publication of this book, so we will see.
If no Christian can do anything to stop the coming rule of Antichrist, what can he do? Back on Mt. Athos in 2013, Father Spyridon met an unnamed monk who invited him to his hermitage, where they discussed confession and repentance, “the heart of Orthodox life,” the path of “reconciliation with God.” Human beings do not have the natural power “to change ourselves”; we need God’s power “to perfect us,” to “obliterate our sins.” “Repentance is transformation,” the “transforming mercy of God.” In the first four hundred years of the church, Christians made their confessions publicly, before their fellow parishioners: “Can you imagine such humility?” Satan intends to “use shame against us” in order to “keep us distant from God”; in this, we imitate Adam, who hid from God after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Had he instead confessed his sins, Adam “would have found God’s forgiveness.” But “when we have faith in God’s love, shame cannot kill hope” because our shame is “a godly grief” that “flows from love of God,” a genuine desire “to unite our will with God’s will.” “Tears for our sins are a form of baptism,” of “rebirth in God.” Because we sin frequently, we must repent continually. In sin, human beings turn from God; in repentance, they turn back toward Him. “In both cases, it is our act of will, our free choice that determines whether we are able to receive God’s forgiveness.” Since our will is far from infallible, we should confess both to God, with the Jesus Prayer, and to our human confessor, a teacher who has some of the prudence Jesus commends to His Apostles. “To follow the guidance of our spiritual father is an act of obedience,” an “act of submission” that enables us to “overcome pride and self-reliance.” The confessor of today takes the place of the congregations in early Church history. Knowing that Father Bailey now serves as the confessor for his congregation, the monk advises him, “Whatever is confessed, your calling is to forgive in your heart with every ounce of love you can muster,” “standing beside them before God” as “their witness.”
Against such humility in those who confess and in those who hear confessions leans the cultivation of pride, from which “so many” of our passions follow. “Weak parents desperate for their child’s approval” and schools that cultivate “self-worth and self-esteem” collaborate to make children “little gods in their family homes.” But “every type of pride is demonic.” Pride works to conceal sins, and “deliberate concealment of sins in confession is a worse sin than the sin we are too ashamed to confess,” inasmuch as “concealment of sins cuts us off from God’s mercy” and therefore “a route to damnation.” Christians should rather “become the prosecutor” of themselves, “accusing themselves without pity, naming every sin of which we are guilty.” Christ suffered torture on the Cross for our sins, sins of the past, present, and future: we cannot undo sins, but at least we can regret them, grieve over them, repent of them. Confession “is an act of humility” that “shows God how truly we hate our sins.” “Better that our sins should be exposed now to the healing mercy of God by our choice, than at Judgment when we can make no plea.” We might gratefully consider the fact that confession need not go into the details of specific acts or thoughts. One names only the kind of sin, which is humiliating enough. And even that isn’t easy. “We agree with the Protestants” in teaching that “it is God’s grace that saves us, but by giving us the strength to repent.” Although we lack the strength to repent, we “do have to show God our genuine longing to repent.”
Arriving at the Simonos-Petras Monastery, Father Spyridon learned more about grace from another unnamed monk. The monk asked his impressions of Mt. Athos but Father Spyridon hesitated to answer, saying “that I didn’t think I would know until I had been home for a while.” The monk considered that to be the right response. “Too often we rush to judge what God is doing with us,” impatiently imposing our own interpretations on “what God is doing to us.” “But this is how we ignore God,” who has His own plan, enacted on His own timing. To be sure, God is always present, and “He promises that if we struggle to be obedient to Him, He will reveal more of Himself to us.” The crucial point is that human beings, endowed with speech and reason, naturally attempt to understand God in terms of speech and reason. But “our words only scratch the surface of the reality,” which is “why we lose so much when we reduce it to something we can express to other people, or even to ourselves.” In prayer we reach out, as “finite creatures,” to “the infinite Creator.” “If we busy ourselves with trying to comprehend what is happening”—comprehension meaning ‘encompassing’—then “we are turning our attention back to our own mind, our own understanding.” Our understanding does not suffice to understand God’s creativity. “The same breath that brought life to the body of Adam that was formed from dust of the earth, now creates life in us beyond life on earth.” The “desire for God” seen in the “impulse to pray” is “not anything human; it is the love of God calling us to Him.” Prayer opens the soul further to the Holy Spirit, to Jesus Christ, to the Father. It asks not for natural knowledge, which we can achieve by natural (if God-endowed) powers, but for divine wisdom, for guidance by God, by the Logos, and not for guidance by our own minds’ logos. We are longing for a source of wisdom ‘above’ ourselves, and “when we do this, we begin to understand ourselves with greater clarity.” Socrates wants self-knowledge; insofar as he seeks it by the aid of his own natural powers of observation and reasoning, he judges himself. Is not God the better judge, the better informant? The point, then, is to “see our words and our actions as either drawing us towards God or pushing us away from Him,” and “this is why the saints can be filled with joy when they hunger and suffer for Christ”: martyrs “see all things in terms of union with God.” This union is a matter of the mind but much more a matter of the heart.
“We must not imagine such spiritual progress is the reward of our efforts: it is the fruit of god’s grace.” Our awareness of God increases as our “attachment to the things of this world” weakens. Hence the asceticism of the saints. As for the vast majority of Orthodox Christians who do not live in the desert, they can still “struggle against temptation,” overcome the body without pity, since “every animal instinct fights to stay alive, and the Christian must willingly oppose this basic impulse,” an effort that would be impossible without God’s grace. Modern man’s “light-heartedness,” his dogged quest for fun, distracts him from the need to follow Christ in the willingness to be crucified in the flesh. “To cling to Him, to find His help, we must look to Him, constantly, [and] this is why we say the Jesus Prayer”—not as a habit but as part of our struggle to obey Him. “In faith, to call on Christ’s name is to seek communion with Him. The Jews will not speak God’s name out of respect and fear. But Christ calls us to a new intimacy, where we speak in love in a direct and personal way to our Lord.” It might be noticed that David, too, spoke “in a direct and personal way” to God, albeit without calling Him by His name. Either way, “prayer penetrates to a level of truth that the wisest philosophers cannot equal.” They remain on the level of the humanly rational, never ascending by the ladder of divine ascent to the divine Reason. “The name of Jesus Christ is God’s own revelation of Himself to us and so builds the spiritual connection between heaven and earth.” This does not result in any sort of mystical vision. When God grants that a man knows himself, when he “sees the terrible truth of himself, of his sins,” he “doesn’t consider himself worthy of any kind of mystical experience.” So seeing, men instead humble themselves “as they draw closer to God.” Seeing “how far they have betrayed Him,” their “only desire is to be reconciled, healed and forgiven.”
Humanly rational life requires the natural effort of the mind, which can make progress in recognizing logical contradictions in human speech, resolving them, and acting in accordance with such resolutions. Godly or spiritual rational life requires attention, a focus “on God, on our sins, on His forgiveness.” Otherwise, we will “gaze into the hypnotic spirals of the world,” fragmenting our attention and “los[ing] our souls.” By struggling against this mesmerism, by invoking Jesus’ name, we gradually become more attentive, thus more aware of “the presence of God.” “The humble, divine love fills the humble heart,” and “we are created anew” in His presence. Human reason is perceptive, but it is not genuinely creative, no matter how much we laud the ‘creativity’ of artists and children. When the Jesus Prayer is “alive within us, how could our choices and actions not be transformed?” “The heart becomes aflame with His glory, which is God’s self-revelation, the infinitely personal, living God.” Human reason can arrive at impersonal abstractions, ideas. These are not worthless, as we live our lives in this world. But they cannot capture the person. It may be that Plato wrote dialogues, portraying the person of Socrates, the way of life of the philosopher, in recognition of this. What he did not perceive was the presence of the Person of all persons, the Person who created all other persons. God “is beyond every fantasy and thought.” “So long as we are content with our own creations, we will not know the divine Creator.” The Jesus Prayer teaches humility, turns us from the pride of our own ratiocination and our own imagining, thereby “reform[ing] and remold[ing] our nature.” The fire of God referenced in the title of Father Bailey’s book, is God’s love within us, searing us painfully with the acknowledgment of our sins while curing that pain with His forgiveness, as we repent of those sins. God’s love burns our sins and illuminates our minds and hearts. It puts human reason, human imagination, human desire on a new path, into a new way of life, the right regime, which is the Kingdom of God. And so, take the occasion of prayer to think, before praying, of who you have loved and who you are angry with. This will not only guide your prayers toward right gratitude and right forgiveness, but it will strengthen your self-knowledge, all by the grace of God.
Those unfamiliar with Orthodox Christian teaching may find the claim that the true saints pray the Jesus Prayer continually especially mysterious. Prayer is a conscious act of the mind. How can anyone pray continually, even while sleeping? Such a phenomenon seems implausible because it is outside ordinary human experience. The monk therefore turns to the matter of hesychia, “the pursuit of inner silence.” The silence we in the world think of is the absence of sound, “a kind of emptiness.” Not so, the silence sought by the Orthodox. Silence for the Orthodox Christian means “listening” to “the prayer within ourselves.” “When we have spent many years saying the Jesus Prayer, we may begin to detect God praying within us.” That is, the Jesus Prayer, which guards “the inner quiet” of the Christian, “helping to keep watch over the gateways of the senses,” keeps those gateways, if not shut entirely, narrow to the things of the material world, less distracted by them. We cannot pray consciously at all times, but God can. And he can do so within us, having taken up residence, so to speak, in our souls. “With the Jesus Prayer, we can walk down a city street and still experience true silence,” although human beings should fortify that silence by finding “a place of retreat where they can listen to God.” Modern men distract themselves with noise because they “can’t face what they see in themselves when they are forced to be silent.” Silence and attention to God “are inseparable,” but it is so much easier, for the moment, not to pay attention to what God tells us about ourselves. “Enslaved by our ego,” we prevent ourselves “from loving as we must,” setting up “our needs, our opinions,” which serve as “barriers to love.” “Only when we crucify the old man”—the vetus homo, the man of sin—and “accept his death are we free to love God and neighbor.”
The monk warns that there are times, even for the greatest saints, when God “withdraws from us.” This is what Christians have called times of ‘spiritual dryness.’ God may be doing this “not out of anger or condemnation, but out of love,” as a way of inducing us to long for Him more intensely. At such times, “we remember God’s presence from a particular time in our lives”—perhaps the time of our conversion, when the Holy Spirit was so ‘present’ to us—and “assume that this will be the way it will always be.” But the Holy Spirit goeth where he listeth, as the Elizabethan English translation puts it. The assumption that He ‘stays put’ “shut[s] out what God is actually doing” with us. “The love of the infinite God cannot be bound into familiar packages. To learn more of God, we must be willing to be continually surprised by Him,” as “there is no end to the knowledge of God.” “Everything that God permits in our lives is for our salvation,” including His occasional silences. Christians ought to obey not only God’s commands, “but also His providence.”
This conversation served as the apex of Father Bailey’s first pilgrimage to Mt. Athos. He undertook his second pilgrimage in 2016, accompanied by one of his sons. Near there, they met Macarius, a Ukrainian headed for the Sait Panteleimon Monastery to request permission to join the monastery as a monk. Macarius claims that “they” are killing Christians in Donbass in order, somehow, to induce NATO to offer membership to Ukraine. Donbass is clear enough: the Donetsk Basin, a region rich in coal to which many Russians emigrated in the nineteenth century looking for work as miners, and where Stalin transferred many more as part of his geopolitical calculations. In 2016, civil war between Ukrainians and Russian in Donbass was ongoing; it is likely that when Macarius says “they” he means the Ukrainians. Since the Ukrainians are also Orthodox Christians, his claim that Ukrainians are killing Christians is decidedly one-sided, since Christians were dying on both sides. “One day evil men will be driven from my homeland”—meaning the Ukrainians—and “perhaps it will be God’s will that I return.” In the meantime, “I must accept exile here.”
Moving to spiritual matters, Macarius echoed the teachings of the unnamed monk Father Bailey encountered during his first visit. “If we desire resurrection, we must always look through the cross,” “crucify[ing] the passions within us.” God’s grace cleanses us of our sins, but never completely, so “when we receive forgiveness, we do so knowing that we will sin again.” With patience, our sinfulness will decline. “Use the awareness of your sinfulness to lead you to humility,” especially in light of the way in which Jesus, “who is sinless,” nonetheless “humbled Himself for us.” We have a lot more to be humble about. Turning again to the Russo-Ukrainian War, he deplores the sight of “Orthodox nations being divided and corrupted.” He points to “Holy Russia,” where the Church was nearly crushed by the Communists, but “now the Church is flourishing once more.” “I hope we will see new life in Ukraine, but resurrection only follows crucifixion.” That Russians are the ones crucifying Ukrainians does not come out very clearly in his analysis, but his yearning for “Christians of all nations” to “learn the language of Christ”—the language of “prayer, forgiveness, and above all, love,” now seemingly “a rod of affliction” but in reality “a rod of consolation” because it is “for the sake of our salvation”—is clear and forthright.
Four years later, Father Spyridon journeyed to Russia to see for himself. At the Saint Savva Monastery in Zvenigorod, he met an elderly monk, who responded to his observation that in Britain “atheism has dominated” the culture “for a long time, but there are signs that it is losing its grip,” that “young people are recognizing that the promises of politics and social movements cannot satisfy their needs.” As a Russian, the monk understands: “When men recognize that the life of God is freedom from slavery, they see that the new ways of society are empty.” He gives the example of the Orthodox liturgy, laden as it is with meaning. The priest who conducts the service physically is God’s servant, only; it is God Himself who “enacts the reality of His saving love, to prepare us for death and judgment.” Communion is an act not only of remembrance but also of looking forward “to the end of all time”—a “taste” of the Kingdom of God. Christ descended to earth in His ministry, “but in the Divine Liturgy we ascend, we are lifted to heaven,” where Christ returned and where we may someday come. The monk delights in “witnessing God’s eternal life entering the mortal flesh of those struggling in this fallen world,” laments Christians outside the Orthodox Church, who “remain like catechumens who receive the teaching of the word, but do not yet enter into the fullness of the mysteries,” do not “enter the union of Christ’s Body, the Church.” It is “the whole human person [who] is united with Christ, our will is united in order to conform to His will, and through a life of struggle and receiving Holy Communion, we are changed, transformed, the soul is dressed in its wedding garments once more,” as it progresses spiritually toward God. The ceremonies in other churches are often little more than “musical parties they call worship,” “provid[ing] a little fun,” making the congregants feel better “for an hour, but there is no spiritual value.” On the contrary, “at the center of the Christian life is pain. Without pain we accomplish nothing.” For the most part, we do accomplish nothing, spiritually, because “we have constructed a world of entertainments and pleasures.” Even “ideas are not enough,” because they do not reach “the truth of the living God” that Holy Communion grants. “There is nothing a man can think, read, or believe that can substitute for this reality.” In receiving Christ in Holy Communion “we are like Moses who glimpsed the promised land.”
In Holy Communion, Christians do not merely think about God; they “participate in the life of God.” All of the events of the Church calendar immerse believers in that life, keep them on that way of life, “and it all has one purpose, our salvation in Christ,” a communion “with God in spirit and in truth,” allowing “His love to penetrate our whole being.” This love, agapic love, “is not sentiment or emotion, it is the desire for our enemies to be saved, it is knowing that if God left their punishment or reward to us, we would rejoice at their entry into His Kingdom.” It has nothing to do with romantic love, which is erotic, not agapic. Christian love enhances marriage. The monk recalls the example of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, who, when asked for a blessing on a prospective marriage, asked only one question: Does the future bridegroom keep the fasts? “In other words, does he struggle to be a Christian?”
In Moscow, Father Spyridon was invited to tea by Photini, an elderly nun. Picking up on the theme of struggle, she speaks of spiritual warfare. “We must remain spiritually aware” of demonic assault, as “the devil uses our ignorance against us.” He is powerless against faith and obedience to God, but Christians must be “watchful as to avoid his traps.” Diavallo means slander—false words directed at person—and division, especially the division of man from God. Satan used both of these techniques against Eve in Eden. “The first temptation for anyone who struggles in the spiritual life is belief in his own merit”; the shield against it is humility, particularly “a deep awareness of our sins.” The demons know what those sins are, and if, struggling and with God’s grace, we are fortified in one area they will attack in another, “lead[ing] men away from self-control and moderation.” Having seen Christ “restore freedom to man,” they “now work to convince us to choose slavery once more.” We should be careful not to judge the spiritual condition of others; this is itself a demonic temptation. “Only God knows who is struggling, who is repenting.” Even the saints remain weak, in need of God. And “only when the heart is aflame with the Holy Spirit can a person live as a monk.” Far from being a ‘religion of works,’ as some charge, Orthodox Christianity teaches the Christians are “completely dependent on God’s grace” in the spiritual war, even if our freedom “cannot happen without our choice.” By choosing to resist the temptations offered from outside us, temptations offered by the world, we become ready to fight the inner war. “God sees how far we are willing to deny ourselves the vanities of this world and accordingly grants us strength to fight inwardly.”
Human being are offered this opportunity because “man’s fall came about through deception.” The Serpent lied to Eve, convincing her that eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil would make her godlike; Adam evidently believed that, too. “The goodness that God placed within him was not completely lost.” The demons, when angels, rebelled against God knowing what they were doing, “freely and with deliberate intention.” As a result, “the evil in them consumes their nature”; “no trace of goodness” remains. True, human beings will “look at an action and think it is good” without perceiving “the pride, the elf-serving, the self-satisfaction that is mixed in with our motives and remain concealed within us,” but at least we do want the good. The demons do not; “their pleasure is entirely in evil,” having “no desire for goodness of any kind.” “Evil be thou my Good,” Milton’s Satan intones, meaning that his ‘good’ or purpose, his telos, is evil.
Demons continue the Satanic effort at deception, “suggest[ing] evil to us in such a way as to give us the sense that their thoughts are our thoughts,” “dress[ing] up their own words as our inclinations and choices.” This gives us an illusion of freedom, but “evil thoughts are sent to trouble us, to provoke us, and if we refuse to be troubled by them, they become like arrows bouncing off our armor.” That is why the defense against such uninvited thought is immediate rejection of them, so that they do not have “a chance to stir up images or desires within us,” thus protecting “the peace of Christ within us.” “Above all, we must pray,” the action which it is “the chief activity of the demons” to prevent. Prayer bespeaks a seed of goodness—precisely what the demons do not, cannot, have. “The memory of lost heavenly glory remains within them, and it is aroused when they see a man repent and pray.” They want man to despair of God; despair of God is the “demonic weapon.” And the demons quite understandably reserve their most powerful attacks against Christians, and especially the most saintly men among them. “The devil is a thief” and, like all thieves, he would “break into the largest house to find the greatest treasure.”
While all this is true, “we should worry less about the demons and more about our carelessness,” which makes us vulnerable to their assaults. As a Russian, she recalls the Communist regime. Communists told themselves that they were serving the good of the people, defined materially: food, work for everyone. “But [they] sent millions to their deaths,” beginning “with the martyrdom of our saintly Czar.” They put their faith in ‘History,’ but “Man must not put his faith in anything that contradicts Christ’s commandments,” as Marxist-Leninism very noticeably did—resulting in some 20 to 30 million murdered in Russia alone. “Such disobedience is always a sign of demonic activity and always points to inevitable suffering in this world and in the next.” Humanly, then, human beings should “hate the devil and everything he does, everything he gives, everything he suggest,” namely, “the sin he entices us to commit.”
Father Spyridon’s final lesson came not during a pilgrimage but during one of his monthly trips to Belfast, where he performed the liturgy during the COVID epidemic. There, he met an Orthodox monk who was traveling to New York City. Another Romanian, Father Seraphim wanted to talk about death, spiritual death. Spiritual death occurs when we “unite ourselves to sin” to the extent that we become its slaves. Adam’s spiritual death long preceded his physical death. So long as sin “remains in us because we refuse to repent, death exists in us.” Death is the ultimate ‘humbling.’ But when “God became man, and through His incarnation enter[ed] and destroy[ed] death” in His resurrection, “His incorrupt body rose to lift all human nature, that the whole man God created should be redeemed.” Hamlet is right: the readiness is all. “We must live in a state of readiness” for death, and the right preparation for death is living a Christian life. By contrast, “modern western culture has hidden death from sight.” Wrongly so, since “the remembrance of death is a shield against the world’s deception,” so long as we understand that “the memory of death must always be accompanied by the memory of judgement, and the mercy of God.” And indeed, “Who would curse their loved one with unending life on earth in this fallen world?”
What of the unjust deaths? Since “we are sinners,” an unjust death “is something small.” What, then, of the unjust deaths of Christian martyrs, men and women who, thanks to God’s grace, have overcome their sins to the degree possible for human beings? The more blessed, they, Father Seraphim answers. “Blessed are they who suffer for Christ and His Gospel,” and for this reason “our hearts should be more burdened over the death of a great sinner than the unjust death of a saint.”
After death, each soul “sees with absolute clarity its spiritual condition”—an “anticipation of the final judgment,” which will occur “outside time.” There is no Purgatory, which is “the development of ideas found in Origen,” a Neo-Platonist who posed as a Christian. The doctrine is pernicious because “Purgatory bypasses [the] revealed truth [of the Bible], it tells the unwary that there can be salvation without spiritual warfare, that there will be a second chance.” “Woe to those false teachers who assure Christians they have no need of virtues,” especially those exhibited by ascetics, who deny the body, subordinate it to the soul, precisely in recognition that resurrection means the resurrection of the body as well as the soul, and that body and soul should be put in right order before death. In effect, Father Bailey adds, the doctrine of Purgatory denies “Christ’s perfect work in being obedient to the cross”—the supreme act of asceticism. The Christian’s reward is not on this earth, in this world, but eternity with God, “an endless growing in the presence and knowledge of God Who has no limits.”
In thinking about his pilgrimages and the conversations they enabled him to engage in, Father Bailey concludes that “monasticism is misunderstood by the world,” “often falsely portrayed as a running away from life, a denial of life.” But a monk who enters a monastery begins “a life where he gives himself more completely to humanity by offering himself to God on behalf of all people,” living a life of prayer on behalf of the Church “but also for every poor soul separated from the divine life of Christ.” And in submitting to the regime of Orthodox Christianity, those who are not monks or priests still submit to “that unearthly life that is Orthodoxy,” “not because these things will save us, but that they will help us to turn to the One Who does save.”
Note
- See “Manent on ‘The Religion of Humanity,'” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
Recent Comments