Fr Gregory
Summary
Evil and Good: Evil does not exist by nature; it is created through actions. Good, which exists by nature, is more powerful.
Self-Acceptance: True self-acceptance involves acknowledging one’s past, present, and future, and standing naked before God.
Hope and Responsibility: Hope is not mere optimism but a deep belief in redemption. Accepting grace means taking responsibility for one’s life.
Human Desire: Human desire is rooted in the need for love and acceptance from both God and others. This desire drives self-acceptance and responsibility.
3. Evil does not exist by nature, nor is any man naturally evil, for God made nothing that was not good. When in the desire of his heart someone conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence, then what he desires begins to exist. We should therefore turn our attention away from the inclination to evil and concentrate it on the remembrance of God; for good, which exists by nature, is more powerful than our inclination to evil. The one has existence while the other has not, except when we give it existence through our actions.
St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” The Philokalia (Vol. 1), 310.
Profitably reading the desert fathers (and their heirs in the Philokalia) requires from us an act of radical self-knowledge. More controversially, I would argue, they also require from me an equally radical act of self-acceptance. While self-knowledge has a long and venerable role to play in Orthodox spirituality, self-acceptance is of a more recent vintage (seemingly) emerging from within the broad context of humanistic, and even pop, psychology.
The recent, secular origin of the term is not a reason for us to dismiss self-acceptance as an element of our life in Christ. Understood rightly, self-acceptance is a difficult and frightening act. It means to stand at the threshold between being and non-being. To accept myself as I am, means to stand at the confluence of who I am (my present), who I am no longer (my past), and who I may yet be (my future). The Church’s hymnography illustrates this for us:
I, the wretched one, have cast off the robe woven by God, and by the counsel of the enemy have disobeyed Thy divine command, O Lord, I am clothed now in fig leaves and in garments of skin, condemned to eat the bread of toil, The earth hath been cursed, bearing thorns and thistles for me. But do Thou Who in the last times wast made flesh of the Virgin, call me back again and bring me into Paradise (Sticheron, Vespers on Forgiveness Sunday).
In the hymn, we see the temporal elements of self-acceptance and so the interplay between being and non-being:
Past: I, ..., have cast off the robe woven by God, and by the counsel of the enemy have disobeyed Thy divine command, O Lord;
Present; I am clothed now in fig leaves and in garments of skin, condemned to eat the bread of toil, the earth hath been cursed, bearing thorns and thistles for me;
Future: But do Thou ... call me back again and bring me into Paradise.
To accept myself as I am—as one who stands between being and non-being—is what it means to stand naked and without defense before God. What this does not mean, however, is that I am without hope of a Redeemer.
Hope is not optimism as Marcel points out. It is to say with Job “I know that my Redeemer lives.” But to say this requires that I go on to say (again with Job)
And He shall stand at last on the earth;
And after my skin is destroyed, this I know,
That in my flesh I shall see God,
Whom I shall see for myself,
And my eyes shall behold, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me! (Job 19:25-27)
To hope for forgiveness is also to foresee and to will the destruction of my body and all those aspects of character and personality dependent upon not only the body but also the material and social worlds.
Which means death and forgiveness travel together.
The neptic fathers allow me no room for sentimentality about my condition or the cost I will pay to enter the Kingdom of God—free gift though it is. Accepting salvation means accepting the heavy burden of responsibility for my life.
Here we see the attraction of not only humanistic and pop psychologies but also religious fundamentalism and political ideology. Each in its way, allows me to sidestep the uncomfortable reality that grace does not exempt me from responsibility. To accept the grace means to accept a life of active participation in the work of salvation:
For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, you are God’s building. According to the grace of God which was given to me, as a wise master builder I have laid the foundation, and another builds on it. But let each one take heed how he builds on it. For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:9-15)
To read profitably the desert fathers and the Philokalia is not just a matter of preparing to be “saved ... as through fire” but actively seeking out that fire in the here and now.
To do this requires that I stop hiding from God. I must freely sit outside the Gates, lamenting my nakedness, weeping with Adam for both my sin and his:
“Woe is me! By evil persuasion I have been deceived and led astray and am now exiled from glory. Woe is me! lacking noetic insight, I am now naked, and in need. O Paradise, no more shall I take pleasure in thy joys; no more shall I look upon the Lord my God and Maker, for I shall return to the earth from whence I was taken. O merciful and compassionate Lord, I cry unto Thee: Have mercy on me who have fallen.” (Doxastikon, Vespers on Forgiveness Sunday)
The monastic tradition’s emphasis on self-knowledge and co-working with God for the salvation of my neighbor demands a type of self-acceptance that is neither sentimental nor static.
It is not sentimental since neither the pleasant nor unpleasant facts of my life have the final say in who I am. It is not static because who I am, is a being who holds together in myself both being and non-being. To borrow once again from Marcel, we are homo viator1—a being who does not simply move toward the future but does so in the hope of a final, costly, restoration to a life of integrity. Surprisingly, the 18th-century economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith has something to add.
The human, he writes, “naturally desires, not only to be loved but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” Wishing to be lovely, the person also (and again) “naturally dreads, not only to be hated but to be hateful.” He says we shy away from being thought of as “the natural and proper object of hatred.” To conceive in myself the desire to be loved and to be lovely means also accepting how I am hated because I am hateful; accepting love requires that I look at how I tend to non-being (that is, sin).
The Scottish philosopher introduces us to a distinction that fits quite easily in the thought and practice of the neptic fathers of the desert and the Philokalia. We do not simply desire “praise” — what the fathers call vainglory—but to be seen as lovely and so praiseworthy, Smith says, means becoming what we admire in others.2 Here I realize that, as we read in the desert fathers, my neighbor is my life.
Unlike Freud’s Seducer, who shatters our infantile integrity by having us look outward3 Smith has us look inward. Here we discover that our “emulation” of what is admirable in others is not sufficient. We are not “satisfied with being merely admired for what other people are admired,” that is having only the outward appearance of beauty. Instead,
We must at least believe ourselves to be admirable for what they are admirable. But, in order to attain this satisfaction, we must become the impartial spectators of our own character and conduct. We must endeavour to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. When seen in this light, if they appear to us as we wish, we are happy and contented. But it greatly confirms this happiness and contentment when we find that other people, viewing them with those very eyes with which we, in imagination only, were endeavouring to view them, see them precisely in the same light in which we ourselves had seen them.4
Compare this to St. Diadochos.
At first, our heart “conceives and gives form to what in reality has no existence.” But, having done so, that which did not exist “begins to exist.” He goes on to say that
We should therefore turn our attention away from the inclination to evil and concentrate on the remembrance of God; for good, which exists by nature, is more powerful than our inclination to evil. The one has existence while the other has not, except when we give it existence through our actions (#3, emphasis added).
St. Diadochos tells me (to use Smith’s language) that I should not act on those aspects of my character that make me blameworthy. I can instead resist the lure of my past misdeeds secure in the reality that “good ... is more powerful” than my inclination toward evil.
The saint’s understanding of evil—and so its grip on us—is based on the teaching common to the fathers of the fundamental, ontological goodness of creation. No one (and nothing) that exists is “evil, for God made nothing that was not good.” To be is to be good. Or, if you prefer, I am, you are, we are good because we exist.
At the same time, to desire something is to perceive a lack in myself. While, yes, this lacuna is part of what it means to be a sinner—I lack a good that should be present—the experience of absent goodness is not inherently the result of sin. Returning for a moment to Adam in the Garden, it is only after naming the animals he realizes both their ontological goodness AND that none are a fit helpmate for him (see Genesis 2:18-20).
It is the perception of his lack and the lack in the animals, that gives birth to desire in the Man for a helpmate. Genesis highlights for us that human desire does not find its fulfillment in possessing the good.5 Likewise, and even when exercised virtuously neither authority6 nor knowledge,7 are sufficient for us.
This allows us to see how Freud’s Seducer imposes on the child a state of polymorphous perversion; he enslaves the child to the world of mere appearances. Beyond the pleasure of the merely physical, it is a world that can be categorized and manipulated.
But here is the rub.
This world of appearance is an abstract of our own devising. As such it falls short of the sacramental goodness of creation. No matter how satisfyingly they are arranged (that is, no matter how beautiful), there is no communion to be found in our ideas about objects or others.
This is not because our ideas are bad—they are not—but because they cannot reciprocate; my ideas are mine and I am alone in them. But it is reciprocity (as both Smith and the saint tell us) that we seek and without which integrity of being is impossible.
We see the radical orientation of the human toward the Other from humanity’s beginning:
And Adam said:
“This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:23-25).
Here though we should pause.
And recall, that as presented by Genesis, desire for the desire of the Other (to borrow again from Lacan) embraces both God and the human. The Man’s desire for the Woman grows out of his communion with God and his deep understanding of the nature of the created being, above all himself.
To desire the other and to desire the desire of the other (both human and divine) is an act of radical self-acceptance and so responsibility for one’s own life. Let me put this another way.
I can't be responsible unless I first accept my desire for the desire of the other. It is not my love for the Other that makes me whole but the Other’s (human and divine) love for me. The necessity of being loved by God and neighbor is why Christ as the Theanthropos (God-Man)
1 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2010).
2 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III: Chapter 2 in Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations & The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Copenhagen: Titan Read, nd.), 1690.
3 Fr Gregory, “The Syntax of Asceticism,” Substack.com (Father, Speak a Word, August 14, 2024), https://frgregoryj.substack.com/p/the-syntax-of-asceticism.
4 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1691.
5 “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat,” Genesis 2:16.
6 “...have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28).
7 “Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper comparable to him” (Genesis 2:20).