The Problem Is, I'm Shallow

... grace dwells in the depths of his intellect, while the wicked spirits cluster round only the outside of the heart. This is just what the demons do not want us to know, for fear that our intellect, once definitely aware of it, will arm itself against them with the remembrance of God. 

St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” # 33 in Philokalia, vol I, p. 320. 

Be Responsible and Answer God 

Unlike the brief anecdotes that make up most of what we read in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers from the ascetic fathers, the often more technical, theological style of the neptic fathers The Philokalia is often hard for modern readers to understand. The neptic fathers’ emphasis on the believer’s responsibility for the character in the presence of divine grace can be off-putting for those of us raised on a steady cultural diet of post-Reformation polemics and apologetics. Their message of radical responsibility falls on ears deafened by a steady diet of a gospel of cheap grace that seeks to lift from the believers’ shoulders the heavy weight of “bracing” ourselves while God not only questions us but “you shall answer Me” (see Job 38:3, NIV). 

The irony hidden within our preference for the modern and resistant to the ancient is that men like St. Diadochos (c. 400 - c. 486) are culturally and theologically closer to the New Testament era than any classical or contemporary proponent of sola Scriptura. Without scant foundation and a poverty of intellectual justification, contemporary Christians dismiss monastic authors as estranged from—and even, polluters of—the apostolic witness.¹

Meeting the Stranger 

Whatever we make of it theologically, the fathers we’ve been looking at here lived and wrote in a time different from our own. Because of this, it is not surprising that their concerns and ways of thinking are often alien to mine. In a word, they are strangers to me. But what do the Scriptures tell us? “Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels” (Hebrews 13:2, NKJV). As is so often the case, Chesterton is helpful here,  

He reminds us that we  

...always talk about the most important things to total strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself; the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of the wisdom of a moustache (The Club of Queer Trades). 

The great advantage of the spiritual fathers of the desert and the Philokalia is that they are unfamiliar to us. Like the sympathetic stranger I met while going about my day, they are uniquely situated to help me reclaim “the one thing necessary” which, while it will “never be taken away” can be lost through my own concern “over many things” (see, Luke 10:41-42). 

Once again, Chesterton (The Everlasting Man) is helpful. 

...when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.  

The sacramental and liturgical life which is both “the source and summit” (see, Lumen Gentium, 11) of life in Christ was common to both East and West for 15 centuries.  

But what once had all the romance and excitement of falling in love, became in time dependable and even comfortable. And once the ascetical character of the Gospel became familiar, it was easily forgotten.  

Clinging to the Form, Contemptous of the Substance 

But what was forgotten was not the externals of the sacramental and ascetical life. If anything, we have clung to these with the tenacity of with which a now gone to seed, high school quarterback remembers his glory days. What we lost is not their form but their substance and intrinsic and necessary connection to the following Christ. 

It is precisely because the forms remained familiar, that it became possible to treat them with contempt. What was once the common response of the unbelieving pagan has become increasingly taken up by those who lay claim to that Name above every other name (see Philippians 2:9-11). 

Florovksy illustrates the nature of our loss when he asks  

If the monastic ideal is union with God through prayer, through humility, through obedience, through constant recognition of one’s sins, voluntary or involuntary, through a renunciation of the values of this world, through poverty, through chastity, through love for mankind and love for God, then is such an ideal Christian?” 

He goes on to say that  

For some the very raising of such a question may appear strange and foreign. But the history of Christianity, especially the new theological attitude that obtained as a result of the Reformation, forces such a question and demands a serious answer. If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non-existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical—New Testamental? Or is this monastic ideal, as its opponents have claimed, a distortion of authentic Christianity, a slavery to mechanical "monkish" "works righteousness"? 

Now thanks to both the polemics and course correct that emerge with Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Christians hold liturgy, sacraments, and asceticism as unnecessary. Some, like the heirs of the Reformation, do so de fide. To put it charitably the five sola—sola scriptura (“Scripture alone”), sola fide (“faith alone”), sola gratia (“grace alone”), solus Christus (“Christ alone”), soli Deo Gloria (“to the glory of God alone”) —can all be held apart from any organic connection to the life of the first 1500 years. 

And the children of the Counter-Reformation? Sadly, their embrace of abstraction in defense of catholic and orthodox faith and practice has the unhappy consequence of severing—or at least deeply wounding—the organic link between themselves and their own, earliest history. 

The tragic reality is that not only Protestants who hold this life in contempt. Orthodox and Catholic Christian in large number treat the celebration of the sacraments of baptism and marriage as mere rites of passage. As for confession, Holy Communion, and the ascetical disciplines of prayer, fasting, almsgiving and manual labor, their behavior makes clear they see these as merely optional but hardly life-giving. 

And so, when, as Chesterton goes on to say, that “familiarity breeds contempt” it is essential that we—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—welcome the stranger and embrace the teaching and example of the now sadly, unfamiliar neptic fathers. “For in connection with things so great as are here considered,” as Chesterton says “whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what is there.” 

Providentially, if unintentionally, Chesterton brings us back to St. Diadochos of Photiki whose central argument is simple enough. The central struggle of my spiritual life is this: I am shallow.  

Preferring Grape Juice to Wine 

I prefer the superficial, the familiar, and the understood to the grace that “works its mysteries with[in] the soul for the most part without its knowledge” (#69, p. 338). In place of grace, I am “unreservedly proud” of my “own experience of spiritual perception.” Consequentially, I am enslaved by the myriad ways in which the enemy of souls “entices” me “by means of certain plausible illusions of grace.” Symptomatic of this state is my preference for “dank and debilitating sweetness” rather than the “taste of divine goodness.”  In my moral life, I forgo the cultivation of virtue in favor of emotivism; in my spiritual life rather than pursuing inner silence, I tend toward the sentimental.  

As for the cure, the saint says this requires realizing that “grace dwells in the depths of [the] intellect.”  And here lies the root of my distaste for the neptic fathers; I prefer grape juice to wine.  

It is easy enough for me to embrace the idea that God dwells in the depths of my heart. I may even be willing to acknowledge this grace in other Christians (or at least the “right” kind of Christian—let the reader beware!).  

But to see this hidden grace as the common gift to all humanity? This is too much for me to bear. Once I accept it, it quickly undoes the plans and projects with which I have come to identify with my life in Christ. 

The Most Unbearable Thing 

But what is most unbearable is this. If grace is found at the foundation of each human life, then I am no longer the guardian of grace. What is worse, my preaching, teaching, and sacramental ministry are no longer “sources” of grace under my control. 

Because grace is at the foundation of your life, I can no longer presume—even in the privacy of my own heart—to know where you stand in the great moral hierarchy that I have built and use to sort the world of persons, events, and things. To see grace hidden within the depths of each human life leaves me as naked as Adam on the day of his creation. It also leaves me as ashamed as Adam in the first moment after the Fall. 

To read the neptic fathers is to invite the loss of the “fig leaves” with which I cover my shame. To take seriously their words and example is to stand before God like Adam and say, “I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10).  

But fallen as I am, all this self-afflicted suffering is necessary if I am to be clothed, once again in divine glory. Or, rather, this stripping is needed if I am to realize that sin has only obscured—but not destroyed—my divine beauty. 

1. This is Fr. Georges Florovsky’s argument in “The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament: Reflections on the Critique of the Theology of the Reformation,” in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. X, The Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers (Vaduz, Europa: Buchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), pp. 17-59. This same chapter is duplicated in Vol. XIII on pp. 102-133. Available online https://www.romanity.org/htm/flo.01.en.the_ascetic_ideal_and_the_new_testament.01.htm.