A monk should consider the purpose of each text of Scripture, to whom it speaks and on what occasions. He should persevere continually in the ascetic struggle and be on his guard against the provocations of the enemy. Like a pilot steering a boat through the waves, he should hold his course, guided by grace. Keeping his attention fixed within himself, he should commune with God in stillness, guarding his thought from distraction and his intellect from curiosity.
St. Isaiah the Solitary, "On Guarding the Intellect: Twenty-Seven Texts," Philokalia, pp. 24-25
Read the Philokalia or the Desert Fathers with any attention and you'll see that studying Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers, and human psychology are all central to Orthodox monasticism. And as St. Isaiah makes, the monk must also be familiar with the natural world and its practical demands.
Oddly, to contemporary ears at least, the saint concludes his brief praise of study with a warning to his monastic readers about the dangers of "curiosity" equating it with one of the great temptations of his time and ours, "distraction." Here we need to pause a moment to recall the meaning of a word is not fixed. This is especially true when we consider its connotations. But even definitions change. For example, "nice" once meant "foolish," "silly" meant "blessed," and being "awful" was a good thing.
Curiosity has undergone a similar change. Understanding this change is important for how we understand the role of the intellect for how we who aren't monastics live our life in Christ.
Along with "concupiscence of the flesh, which lures us to indulge in the pleasures of the senses, and brings disaster on its slaves," St. Augustine in The Confessions also identifies "concupiscence of the mind." The bishop of Hippo describes it as "a frivolous, avid curiosity." Where the first captures the senses, the second captures the intellect. Masquerading "as a zeal for knowledge and learning," it is
a thirst for firsthand information about everything, and since the eyes are paramount among the senses in acquiring information, this inquisitive tendency is called in holy Scripture concupiscence of the eyes (see, 1 Jn 2:16; emphasis in the original).
In the ancient world, and still today, sight is not simply "the eyes' business" but a metaphor for all human knowing.
Yet we do say not only, “See how it shines,” which the eyes alone can report; we also say, “Let’s see how this sounds … See how fragrant … See what this tastes like … Just look how hard that is!” So, as I have pointed out, general sense experience is called lust of the eyes, because when the other senses explore an object in an effort to collect knowledge, they claim for themselves, by a certain analogy, the office of seeing, in which the eyes unquestionably hold the primacy" (Confessions, Book X:35)
What St. Isaiah warns the monk against then is not studying, not the pursuit of knowledge as such but doing so apart from the proper end of knowledge. We must understand the purpose of our intellect. Only in this way can we avoid the temptation to reduce human knowledge to only information about Christ. We also must guard against reducing the role of the intellect to only being concerned with the things of God.
But religious fundamentalism wounds the intellect and so our knowledge of the world of persons, events, and things as deeply as banishing God, metaphysics, ontology, and morality to the realm of mere opinion because they cannot be validated empirically. Life in Christ excludes the assault on reason from both religious and secular fundamentalists. Ironically, though they see the other as their foe, religious and secular fundamentalists share a similar, defective anthropology.
Both begin with the human as it is and so fail to understand the human as it was meant to be. Digging a bit deeper we discover, as the Catholic bishop and monastic author Erik Varden points out, that they hold in common "an inverted hermeneutic, projecting an image of 'God' that issues from our [fallen] sense of what man is. The result is caricatural. The divine reduced to our measure" (Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, p. 107).
In place of this, the Church reminds us that, in the words of Nicholas Kabasilas,
It was for the New Man [Christ] that human nature was originally created; it was for him that intellect and desire were prepared. We received rationality that we might know Christ, desire that we might run towards him. For the old Adam is not a model for the new, but the new a model for the old (quoted in Varden, Chastity, p. 108).
Flowing as they do from the Old Man it is necessary to our everyday expectations and the actions that flow from them. This is why St. Isaiah says the monk must cultivate first the "virtue of detachment, that is, death in relation to every person or thing" if he is to find in himself "the desire for God" (#25). The saint is not counseling that I be indifferent--much less, hostile--to my neighbor. Rather it reflects the damage I do to you through "concupiscence of the mind." Under the influence of sin (i.e., "attachment") I see you not for who you are--that is to say, how God sees you--but only insofar as you serve (even if unwittingly or unwillingly) my transitory agenda.
Against this and other assaults against obedience to divine charity, the appropriate response is that anger "in accordance with nature, ... that flares up against all the tricks of the enemy." Only then will "the fear of God establish itself within us, and through fear love will be made manifest" (#25).
But how can I fear (that is, be in awe) of a god of my creation? While I may "love" this god, in the end, it is my own desires that I love since this god is merely, to borrow from Carl Jung, a symbol of the self.
If this is the god we worship, then while "speaking of God with our lips" we are actually "pondering wicked thoughts." Again, though, these thoughts are not simply thinking about "bad thoughts" but thinking of the world of persons, events, and things as if it were not God's gift to us given to draw us to Himself. At its core, “wicked thoughts” are those thoughts that strip creation of its sacramental nature.
It is here that we begin to see the role of study in our spiritual life.
Or maybe to speak more precisely, how we are to understand rightly our ability to understand creation. "Whatever you are doing," St. Isaiah says, "remember that God sees all your thoughts, and then you will never sin" (#27). To the Old Man, this can't but sound like an intrusion and even a threat. To the New Man, however, this is simply part of intimacy with the Father.
Bishop Varden is helpful here when he writes that "Christ does not flee from our contradictions. He does not shun in disgust the world of lusts and instant hopes that Siddhartha in Hesse's novel, calls the world of 'people-who-are-like-children.'" Rather, "He enters that world and calls out to us, 'Adam, where are you?'" (Chastity, p. 109).
Here we see the value of study--of human knowing in its proper, Christological key.
The Old Man sees not simply different perspective but the violence that inevitably comes with a zero-sum understanding of contradiction. And the New Man? He sees reality as a series of divine invitations.
First God invites him to self-reflection and self-knowledge:"Adam, where are you?" Having accepted this turn to the self, he discovers next that he is mostly fully himself when he accepts a life of personal communion with the Father, in the Son, through the Holy Spirit, and in God with all creation. It is this relationship, in turn, that bears fruit in a life of evangelical and prophetic service: "I heard the voice of the Lord, saying: 'Whom shall I send, And who will go for Us?' Then I said, 'Here am I! Send me'"(Isaiah 6:8, NKJV).
Far from necessarily leading the soul astray, the intellectual life rightly lived draws us closer to the Most Holy Trinity. The hesitancy that many have with the life of the mind and even to the point of disparaging human reason itself, is a consequence of their having "reject[ed] this counterfeit 'God,'" this god which is nothing else than the elevation of human desire.
While it is not without its dangers, this rejection is not necessarily a sin but in fact "is in many ways an indication of their good sense" (Varden, Chastity, p. 107). Precisely because they are sensible, those who reject counterfeit forms of reason and human knowledge that serve a counterfeit god, are those to whom the Church--and especially spiritual fathers and mothers--must seek out. These seeming unbelievers are closer to the Gospel than the fundamentalist or the ideologue.
At the same time, even when undertaken with "good sense" the spiritual life is not without its dangers. This is even more the case when, as is the case today, it is good sense estranged from Holy Tradition and a sound, wholesome understanding of human reason.
All of this is to say that fidelity to the Desert fathers and the neptic fathers of the Philakolia requires from Orthodox Christians a renewed appreciation of a catholic understanding of the life of the mind and the ascetical disciplines proper to the cultivation of the right use of reason.