Joshua and Caleb are given as models of obedience (Numbers 13), while all the others, disobedient, perished in the desert. So the cenobite who wishes to go and live in a cell (symbolized by the “promised land”) must first prove himself perfectly obedient in community.
On the other hand, stubborn disobedience is the root of all vices. This is described in relation to Exodus 32. Fixing one’s eyes on the “serpent” of the obedient Christ (Numbers 14) saves one from the serpent of calumny and unjust reproach, so often met in the desert. So, too, for all other trials: “By His crucifixion Jesus is nearer to you than the brazen serpent was to the Jews for He dwells in your heart, and in the secret recesses of your soul there shines the radiance of His glorious visage.”
Vocation to the Desert (Homily 9)
Christ going out into the desert is the model of monastic renunciation. The monk, like Christ, goes into the desert to engage in combat with the spiritual enemy. He must not take anything of the world with him. He leaves the world in the “ Jordan” or the “Red Sea” on his way into the desert. The Holy Spirit accompanies those who go out into the desert, but only if they rely on no other source of strength. “The disciples who abandon the company of the world are at once aided by the Spirit, and when they have despised human help they win celestial assistance; as soon as they reject bodily strength, spiritual strength is given to them at once.” (Here the world is considered as an end in itself, a closed system in which individual survival is cared for.)
Jesus before and after baptism: Before baptism Jesus is subject to the Law. After it, He has no law but the Spirit and the will of His Father. “Man is born from one world into another when he passes from the rule of the world to the rule of Christ, and from being the master of possessions to the renunciation that God asks of him. When a man is in the world he is subject to a rule that demands that he do all those things of the world; when he is gone out after Jesus it is demanded of him that he fulfill the spiritual law, according to the order of the place into which he is come.” This last phrase refers not to a written or traditional set of rules, but to the mode of life dictated by the very nature of the desert. Really going out of the world means giving away all one’s goods to the poor and “coming forth naked as one came forth from the womb.”
He insists that going out into the desert is really a new birth. This throws much light on the traditional doctrine of religious profession as a second baptism.3 It is in so far as it is a death and a resurrection to a new life. A mere change of worldly habits into other worldly habits will not suffice. (Note the ambiguity of Philoxenos’ concept: Christian life “in the world” for him is insufficient. Is this the Biblical concept?) The new life entails “renouncing one’s own thoughts, errors and ignorance.” What is this ignorance?
The child in the womb of the world: Though baptized and “saved” the Christian in the world lives only in the same way that a child in the womb lives. He is alive, but he cannot make use of his senses. Hence he is blind and helpless, spiritually:
The man who is shut up in the rule of the world like a child in the womb, has his discernment buried in the obscurity of cares . . . and human preoccupations; he cannot taste the riches of the rule of Christ and he does not see spiritual things . . .
The spiritual foetus, having accomplished all the justice of the law in the world, as though in the womb, goes forth from the world as by a new birth . . . he begins a new growth and becomes perfect . . . not in the body of justice which is in the world but in the spiritual person who will reach the fullness of Christ.
Note the well-developed concept of spiritual maturity here. Good works in the world by no means constitute perfection. They are only the life and growth of the foetus in the womb of ignorance. “The foetus cannot become a man in the womb and man cannot become perfect in the world. No matter how the foetus in the womb develops, he cannot develop beyond the limits of the womb that encloses him: the justice of the Christian is confined to the limits of the womb of the world in which he is enclosed.”
The trauma of spiritual birth: We are born to spiritual life in the world by the sacrament and by faith—that is to say by “hearing” only, by being told of the mystery of Christ and of our participation in Christ. But now we must actually experience in our lives the sufferings and death of Christ. “Now the time has come to will to leave the old man and to experience the fact that we leave him, by our labors and our weariness, and not just by the hearing of faith, by experience, by sufferings and tears, by love for God and pure prayers, by continual petitions, by wonder and contemplation of God’s majesty, and by the rapid progress of the hidden man toward the Lord.” The true maturity of the Christian is in that knowledge of God that is granted only in the desert. The justification of the Christian by faith and baptism is real but it is not a matter of experience, only of hearsay. He must experience the new life that comes from liberation from the passions and desires. Error and ignorance are closely associated with desire. They are born in the “service of desire” and “when the heart is hardened in delights.” In order to live serving one’s desires one must maintain a false concept of the meaning of life, centered on the self.
What balance is to be maintained? Man is made up of body and soul. But according to Philoxenos, it would be an error to say that we must therefore treat the body and the soul on an equal basis. Hence the “measure” or “golden mean” of natural virtue is not enough. One must first bring the body into complete submission to the soul, and this means giving it less than it might reasonably require. He will treat this in a later Homily, “Against Gluttony.” To live even reasonably in the world, while amassing riches (even though one does so without injustice) is a life of weariness, frustration (cf. Ecclesiastes):
What fatigue is more painful than to be wearied when one seeks to rest? The way of human riches is a way without end in the world. The further one advances, the further one must go. It has no end but death. If you accumulate riches in order to rest, even your rest becomes weariness, and if even the delights of the world are heavy labors and burdens, what shall we call its labor? . . . Those who seek the good things of the world bear heavy burdens. They wear themselves out seeking loss.
But “the true rich man is not he who has many things but he who has need of nothing . . . ” “The more the rich man enriches himself the more he is poor. . . . The rich man is charmed by the love of what does not exist.” This theme of the weariness of the good things of life, seen to be burdensome, is familiar (cf. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on Ecclesiastes). Thus, though a man may be rich and still be a “just man,” he cannot attain to the perfection and the knowledge of God that are possible only in renunciation.
The Jordan: “Christ at the Jordan ended the road of the law and began the road of perfection which he showed by His passion to those who love Him. . . . The Jordan was for Him the passage from one world to the other, from the world of the body to the world of the Spirit.” After the Jordan:
a) Jesus fulfills the will of no one but the Father;
b) He takes with Him nothing of the world, no law of the world, no human rule or measure. “He went out alone with no one to help Him and without company, without friends to care for Him, without precious things, without riches, without possessions, without clothes, without ornaments; nothing of the world went forth with him but only Himself in the company of the Holy Spirit. Model thyself thus on the going out of thy master; go out also having with thee nothing of the world and the Holy Spirit will go with thee.”
c) One of the chief reasons for going forth without burdens is that the world pursues us into the desert and seeks to win us back. If we have anything in us belonging to the world, the world has a claim on us. “Cast off the burdens of the world in order to fight the world.” What this means especially is not only the physical renunciation implicit in our going forth, but especially the renunciation of worldly thoughts and desires, the renunciation of the fundamental error which is in the service of desires, and which centers on
care of the self and its protection. Our cares will be left in the “Red Sea” like the Egyptians if we are generous and knowing in our renunciation. “Wash thyself in the waters of knowledge rather than in the Jordan and having washed, go forth in the Rule of the Spirit.” There are then two baptisms: the second leads into the desert.
Conditions of perseverance in the desert: This is a life of pure praise, the life of the Kingdom of God, not of man. Here is nothing but tranquillity and spiritual repose, all the inhabitants sing out the Trisagion in praise of the Holy Essence. All you know is that you have joy, but you know not how to explain whence that joy comes. Instead of conversation with men you have conversation with Jesus Christ, and you sustain your labors without weariness because the awareness of Christ does not allow you to feel them and the ravishment of your mind in God makes you unable to feel bodily things. In your spiritual understanding are deposited the spiritual signs of divine knowledge, not in symbol but in truth because knowledge comes to meet knowledge without intermediary. “Here is no altar of gold on which incense is offered but the altar of the Spirit where all good and reasonable thoughts go up.”
Important: all the signs, symbols, rites etc. that were used collectively by the People of God are here realized in the spiritual person. The worship of the spiritual person in solitude is then the fulfillment of all these signs in collective worship. The sacrifice offered to God here is more pleasing than that of outward liturgy: “Here is the living table which is Christ Himself. . . . Here the high priest Himself, Christ, consecrates before His Father living and reasonable substances.” The condition of remaining in this kingdom is then “to work legitimately in this place according to the justice of the place,” that is to say in the spirit, in contemplation, and not according to the rule of the world, in outward works and signs. One must get rid both of “bodily rules” and of “dead thoughts.” One must live by the spiritual rule, conversatio nostra in coelis (“our citizenship is in heaven”).
One must not only fulfill the external actions of the desert life (solitude, silence, etc.), but one must think the thoughts of the spiritual world in which one now dwells. This calls for unequivocal renunciation of the world in all thoughts. One must not remain linked to the world even by the smallest thoughts and desires (here he uses the famous image of the bird held by a thread). Note—like St. John of the Cross [in Ascent of Mount Carmel], Philoxenos also mistrusts visions and other extraordinary psychological experiences. “St. Paul says that all that the tongue can represent of contemplation in the region of bodily beings is nothing but a phantom of the thoughts of the mind and not an effect of grace. Consequently you must remember this and be on your guard against the phantasies of deep thoughts [unconscious images]” (from the Letter to Patricius). The inordinate desire of contemplative experiences is therefore reproved.
The Kingdom of Heaven: true science comes when one is no longer “bound” by the ignorance which imagines that the things of the world are definitively real. This means freedom from cares and anxieties about the things of the world. The knowledge that comes to one who is free from care is twofold:
1) He perceives “the spiritual rule” as a beginner;
2) As a progressive and perfect man he sees and dwells in the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of Heaven (enjoyed even on earth by the wise) is freedom from all care, because free of illusion. Philoxenos says: “The Kingdom of Heaven is a soul without passions, having knowledge of that which is.” The passions bring care because they bring fear of loss—hence also mistrust, anxiety. When one has forsaken care about worldly things and about one’s own life on earth, then there is no room for anxiety. All is joy and hope. This joy is a foretaste of the joy of heaven itself. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth then consists in a beginning of the future life by the foretaste which is given us in: perfect trust; Eucharistic union with Christ, foreshadowing perfect union with His Person in Heaven; union with the Holy Spirit in faith, presaging the perfectly known union with Him in Heaven.
Hence it becomes important to study the “rule of perfection” which is the way to the “Kingdom of Heaven.” He mentions living examples of the rule of perfection: John the Baptist is the model of solitaries. He never sinned. He possessed the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb. “He received the Spirit even in the womb and grew up out of the world so that by these means he might possess the purity of the first man before he transgressed the commandment, and by this purity of soul he received the knowledge of the divine mysteries.” The rule of perfection is then the solitary life, in freedom, and far from men, avoiding all human conversation. This is the complete renunciation demanded by Christ in Luke 14:26 and Luke 9:60. Commenting on this latter passage (“Let the dead bury the dead”), Philoxenos paraphrases it:
It is not necessary for you to observe the law because I have observed it and have loosed it. It is not necessary to serve your natural parents because I have served them for all. Hence the yoke of the law of nature is lifted off you and you are left free to yourself in such manner that the world cannot oblige you to serve it, since it is dead to you and you are dead to it. One does not serve corpses. . . . Let the corpses bury each other.
On not looking back (Luke 9:61), he has Christ say: “I have come to divide a man against his father. . . . I brought the sword and you want to go and salute your relatives? . . . You run to sew up with your foolishness the rent that I have torn in the world. . . . I have torn this mantle of agreement because it was entirely woven in errors, and in its place I have woven the mantle of heavenly salvation.” Hence the need of perfect interior detachment in thought, to accord with the exterior signs of detachment, the monastic habit, tonsure, etc.
On Fornication (Homily 12)
Why does the natural desire (of marriage) persist in the ascetic? For his advantage, to teach him the power of spiritual love. The disciple needs to experience the force and heat of the desire of the Spirit by experiencing the heat of natural desire.
When the fire of lawlessness is kindled in their members, they can also experience the burning fire that Jesus has placed in them. Then, instead of unnatural pleasure they experience the joys of our true nature. Instead of the movements [of lust] which end as soon as they have begun, the disciple tastes the joy of living movement which begins with a desire to see the beauty of Christ and remains without end in the soul purified to be its worthy habitation.
Hence, the thing to do is to make good use of temptation in order to grow spiritually by it, and not be ruined by it. At the same time, one who has experienced the joys and light of the spirit has greater cause for sorrow and shame if he allows himself to compromise with impure thoughts. But this can teach them the need for vigilance in thoughts, and make them realize that the avoidance of lustful actions is not enough. If one finds himself thinking of bodily beauty, he must realize this is because he does not see the beauty of God. “It is for lack of beauty that you desire beauty.” Desire would not have real force against us unless we allowed it to grow strong and blind us (at least unconsciously). We must “teach the soul to live solitary in the house of the body,” that is to say, to become aware of itself as not identified completely with the body and its desires.
Though dwelling in the body the pure soul does not participate in its passions. It does not unite the mystery of its love with that which does not deserve love, but living apart and solitary, in admiration at the greatness of God’s glory, it dwells in a house of silence.
A solitary mind is that which, living in the body, is a stranger and remote from all its desires and pleasures, and is with itself.
When the soul is “solitary” in the body it can summon to itself all the natural energies and use them against the passions (or withdraw their use from the passions, rather).
The allies of desire: The body alone has not strength to overcome the soul. But it entices to itself the energies of the soul by pleasures of eating and drinking; all pleasure and recreation—“play”; fine clothes; conversation turning u
pon pleasures, desires, lusts; contemplating faces, bodies; daydreams; memories. To fight desire, “take away fuel and the flames will go out.” He advises “fury” against even small inclinations to the above. (Note: exaggerated effort and agitation do more harm than good. Peaceful, positive, turning away is more effective.) He admits anger is an evil, but use passion to fight passion in the beginning, he says. He points out the special danger of supposedly “spiritual friendships.”
Importance of awareness of God’s presence: In order to yield to sinful desires, the soul seeks darkness and oblivion of God. If one is aware of God, he cannot surrender to sin. Hence, keep the light of awareness burning, and you will not yield to temptation.
Only the light of God’s presence can restrain the soul from sins of the flesh; thus it must always preserve this light in itself, that it may continually shine there. The soul must not let the memory of God depart, but must be held by the pleasure of converse with Him. As long as the soul converses with Him it will not abase itself to converse with its desire. As long as the light of God shines in the soul, the darkness does not enter, as into its own house, into this place of light. As long as the desire of the soul is mingled with the desire of the Holy Spirit, it does not mingle its thoughts with the desire of the flesh.
However, it is clear that the body may independently have desires which the soul does not accept. Union of the soul with God in charity does not exclude all bodily feelings. On the contrary, the combat of the monk consists in keeping the soul detached, untouched, even though desires may rage. Philoxenos recommends that we try to draw spiritual profit from inevitable desires, studying them objectively, without panic, trying to learn the causes. According to Philoxenos, the monk even permits the heat of desire to grow, in order to observe how it works. But this, we may add, is dangerous. For instance he suggests that the ascetic ought to be able to arouse impure desires and quiet them again by an act of will. Philoxenos supposes that the intelligence will remain cool, objective and detached and not be blinded by desire itself. But the danger is that while the mind imagines itself cool and detached, it has perhaps already been blinded and deceived:
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