The Syntax of Asceticism
29. The loving and Holy Spirit of God teaches us, as we have said, that the perceptive faculty natural to our soul is single; indeed, even the five bodily senses differ from each other only because of the body's varying needs. But this single faculty of perception is split because of the dislocation which, as a result of Adam's disobedience, takes place in the intellect through the modes in which the soul now operates.
St. Diadochos of Photiki, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination: One Hundred Texts,” The Philokalia (Vol. 1), 319.
Summary:
Fragmented Perception: The text discusses how human perception is fragmented due to Adam’s disobedience, leading to a disjointed understanding of reality.
Passions and Fear: It explores how passions like desire, anger, and fear pull individuals away from God, causing anxiety and a loss of the ability to love.
Spiritual Knowledge: The importance of spiritual knowledge and self-restraint is emphasized, suggesting that divine grace and effort are needed to rise above earthly desires.
The Passions
The “passions” are central to how the fathers in the Philokalia understand the spiritual life. Affectively, the passionate life is characterized by desire, anger, and above all fear. Acting with centrifugal force our thoughts, desires, and actions pull me away from God and “tear [me] to pieces.”1 Once they take hold, my intellect loses its ability to think deeply about the nature of reality. Consequently, my ability to engage in metaphysical2 and ontological3 reflection slips away. I increasingly lose the ability—and even the desire—to grasp the nature of created being, to give “names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field” (Genesis 2:20). With this loss, comes a new, more deadly loss: to know myself “as I am known” by God (compare, 1 Corinthians 13:12). Which is to say, I increasingly lose the ability to love.
In place of reason in this proper sense, as a passionate individual I “live according to the senses” in a manner that slowly “change[s] the whole [self] into ‘body.’” Instead of love, I now live directed “by the senses penetrated by desire and anger.”4 As my desires become more focused on the visible, resentment overwhelms me as I become increasingly concerned with what I do not have. As gratitude ebbs, I lose sight of the sacramentality of the present moment5 and live “always ahead of [my]self” in some imagined future characterized not by hope but a “fear (Angst) ... [that feeds on my] belonging to the world.”6
A Life of Anger and Fear
My constant fear of some imagined future cripples me. And how can it be otherwise? Having lost through disuse the ability to see the harmony of the good, the true, and the beautiful, I am left with nothing but an arbitrary slate of mutually exclusive possibilities; money spent for this means I cannot have that. My commitment to one way of life comes at the expense of some other.
The cruel vanity of my passions does not end here.
The disappointment at what I do not have quickly becomes a dread of a life in which whatever good I do acquire comes at the cost of losing some other, equally desirable good. My life is life now a zero-sum game in which every yes conceals a more fundamental, and global, no. I am left with anxiety “nourished by the feeling that [I am] at the mercy of [my] responsibilities.” My only relief (for there is no escape) is “to forever launch out toward [some] future possibilities, in other words, towards [some] more appropriate opportunity.”7
Having come now to “the brink of despair,” let us take to heart the advice of St. Sophrony of Essex and “draw back a little and have a cup of tea.”
A Fragmented Life
We cannot ignore the consequences of the passions. Left unchecked, they are (if you will forgive the phrase) a sacrament (or, anti-sacrament) of Hell. Presented here in a naked fashion, we might find ourselves overwhelmed by the very thought of them. To balance this—to “draw back a little and have a cup of tea” —let us shift our focus from the results of the passions to their proximate source in human development.
St. Diadochos of Photiki teaches that sin factures our ability to know the truth as a balanced and integrated whole.
The loving and Holy Spirit of God teaches us, as we have said, that the perceptive faculty natural to our soul is single; indeed, even the five bodily senses differ from each other only because of the body's varying needs. But this single faculty of perception is split because of the dislocation which, as a result of Adam's disobedience, takes place in the intellect through the modes in which the soul now operates.
We know many true things, but our knowledge is disjointed. It is only with divine grace and effort, he says, that we can rise above our knowledge of “the good things of this life” and “pursue heavenly beauty.”
It is this fractured knowledge that is the source of our suffering in this life. We see the pieces of the puzzle, but we can never quite put them together. Truth as an integrated whole always seems to elude us. This does not mean simply mean that we “know in part” (see 1 Corinthians 13:12, NKJV). This, as the saint says, is our natural condition— “the five bodily senses differ from each other only because of the body's varying needs” — but something else more tragic.
I am “captivated” by what I know. I am “carried away” by the beauty of my own, partial knowledge because I do not “practice self-restraint.”
The Tutorial of Desire
Freud, like the psychoanalysts who come after him, always knows better than he knew. There is a surplus to his words that, however shocking, are often helpful in ways he never intended and would disavow.
In his chapter on infantile sexuality, he offers us a particularly disturbing but nevertheless, helpful insight.
It is an instructive fact that under the influence of seduction children can become polymorphously perverse and can be led into all possible kinds of sexual irregularities.8
The sexual irregularities to which Freud refers reflect not a moral failure on the part of the children but the malevolent influence of the adult who seduces them. The seduction consists precisely in this: by an act of power, the seducer obscures aspects what von Balthasar calls “the transcendental attributes of Being” that are “are coextensive with Being” itself.9 From childhood on, our natural desire for the truth becomes increasingly unbalanced and misshapen. Initially, at least, this happens not by our actions but by those of others. Whether malevolent or well-meaning, whether because of the exploitation of a seducer or the sincere caring of a loving parent who is likewise a victim of fragmentation, the child’s knowledge of the truth is increasingly splintered.
We are all of us cracked mirrors that distort the light of God’s love.
As the saint reminds us “perception is split because of the dislocation which, as a result of Adam's disobedience, takes place in the intellect through the modes in which the soul now operates.” I am, in other words, predisposed by Adam’s sin to attend to some aspects of the world of persons, events, and things, at the expense of others.
Since I lack a holistic or catholic view of being, what I know, and what I desire, are a concatenation of abstractions.
“This,” returning to Freud, “shows that an aptitude” to fixate on the beauty of the partial truth “is innately present” in the child. And why is there “consequently little resistance towards” the “irregularities” to which he refers? Simply because the child is naive and lacks for this reason “the mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust, and morality’ These “have either not yet been constructed at all or are only in the course of construction, according to the age of the child.”10
The Syntax of the Spiritual Life
To put away “childish things” as the Apostle counsels (see 1 Corinthians 13:11), means precisely to undertake the ascetical life and grow in “self-restraint.” But the “self” that is restrained, is the self that knows the world of persons, events, and things (and so itself), only as fragments rather than as epiphanies—sacraments if you will—of “heavenly beauty.”
Rooted in the grace of the Church’s sacrament life and guided by the rhythm of liturgical and personal prayer, asceticism is a kind of syntax for the spiritual life. The spiritual disciplines St. Diadochos writes, are how
...we learn persistently to be detached from the good things of this world, we shall be able to unite the earthly appetite of the soul to its spiritual and intellectual aspiration, through the communion of the Holy Spirit who brings this about within us. For unless His divinity actively illumines the inner shrine of our heart, we shall not be able to taste God's goodness with the perceptive faculty undivided, that is, with unified aspiration (#29).
Whatever their differences, both Freud and the saint agree that while innate, human desire (what the saint calls “the power to discriminate accurately between the tastes of different realities”) must be shaped or tutored.
But this will be the subject of our next essay.
Dumitru Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality: A Practical Guide for the Faithful and a Definitive Manual for the Scholar, trans. Archimandrite Jerome (Newville) and Otilia Kloos (Wilkes Barre, PA: St. Tikhon Seminary Press, 2003), 93.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
What does it mean to be rather than not be?
Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality ,106; emphasis added.
For more, see Jean-Pierre De Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence (Image, 2012).
Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, 106; emphasis added.
Ibid., 116.
Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality,” in The Freud Reader. United Kingdom, WW Norton, 1995, 268.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, My Work (Ignatius Press, 2012), 115.
Freud, “Three Essays on Sexuality,” 268.