If you have confidence in the power of the mind do not be alarmed by the movement of desire in your members; it is the occasion of much good for you, if you have knowledge and can draw profit from this trial instead of loss.
He admits this will not work as long as “the thought is seized by the sweetness of the desire.” It must be entirely untouched. The condition of “drawing profit” is that one should struggle manfully to make one’s desire of God greater and more fervent than is the ardor of lust in the body.
Later, Philoxenos admits that if the mind is not sure of remaining free from desire, it should take flight from the combat and not try to gain knowledge by calmly observing the rise of passion. The practice requires a cool, objective power to observe without being affected by what one sees. This is not to be recommended as a tactic, especially for beginners. One can easily be misled by false confidence, and if it works one may still be confirmed in pride. Philoxenos recognizes this himself. A victory based on vainglory is of no value. Victory must come from God. The real remedy is trust in grace, not in “the power of the mind.” However, there is no harm in remaining calm and objective and not giving in to useless fears. Fasting remains supremely important, because an abundance of food is like oil on the flames (of lust).
Conclusions:
1) To understand this treatment of fornication in which the ascetic combats it not only by flight but by direct attack, the usual outlook of Philoxenos must be remembered. “All teaching that comes from outside us accumulates in us through the medium of words. But the doctrine that we acquire by overcoming passion establishes wisdom in us by the experience of the fact itself. Such knowledge is worthy of confidence and is truly certain. And when the soul finds this wisdom, this is more pleasing to it than that which comes from outside because it is of our own household, and by it the soul rests in itself, its joy coming from within itself and not from the outside.” “Therefore observe [your passions] with the discernment of knowledge, understand and distinguish between your person and your passion, so that you may make haste to seek the purity of your person.”
2) Overcoming passion by passion is only a beginning. It is not real victory but only “containment” of passion. Here the desire of self-knowledge is regarded merely as a passion and its victories are not secure. The other passion may come back and win. True victory comes from the love of the Holy Spirit overcoming the lust of the body. This is the “divine triumph,” the only true victory. The great thing is then not to gain knowledge by experiment with passion but to surrender completely to the Holy Spirit, to be led by Him, so that all our actions are spiritualized.
__________
1 Merton has used the honorific “Mar” a few times already by this point in these lectures. “Mar” or “Mor” is a title of respect in Syriac which means, “my lord.” “Mart” or “Mort” is the feminine.
2 “See Merton’s translation of the ‘Ox Mountain Parable’ of Meng Tzu (Mencius) at the end of his essay ‘Classic Chinese Thought,’ in Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 65–68. See also his comments on the text in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 123, where he concludes, ‘Without the night spirit, the dawn breath, silence, passivity, rest, man’s nature cannot be itself. In its barrenness it is no longer natura: nothing grows from it, nothing is born of it any more.’ ” –Patrick O’Connell
3 Was mentioned in the context of St. Jerome in Lecture 8.
Group Discussion Topics, Questions, and Additional Readings
Lecture 1
In her book, The New Asceticism, British theologian Sarah Coakley recently said: “[We are] titillated intellectually by antique ascetic rigour, but for the most part quite unthinkingly accommodated to post-modern self-indulgence. Asceticism [has] become voyeuristic, something to study but not actually do” (18). Does this strike you as accurate of many today who read a book such as this? How might this contrast with Merton’s original audience of young men studying to become Trappist monks?
Note the “mystique of martyrdom” and the quotes from Tertullian and St. Cyprian praising the actions of a martyr. These are sobering, particularly in a time when it is often presumed that these ideas are only owned by fundamentalists of other religious traditions.
Lecture 2
Among the many “Aberrations” in this Lecture is Montanism; Merton only briefly mentions one of the aspects of that error: ecstasy. Montanus, for whom Montanism is named, was known for ecstatic prophecy and trance. His was the essence of the mystic’s myth that there are secrets to be known and that one must be initiated by particular experiences in order to come to know those mysteries. A century ago, the Quaker scholar, Rufus Jones, explained it this way in his book, Studies in Mystical Tradition (1909):
Montanism did not introduce new doctrines; it was not a new conception of God, nor of the world, nor of salvation. It was rather an attempt to realise in the Church the promise of Christ that the Paraclete should come to lead men into all truth and to enable them to do greater things than He did. (39)
Lecture 3
In his Stromata, Clement of Alexandria begins the Christian tradition of understanding prayer as much more than simply talking with God. This is part of what’s essential in the desert tradition—and perhaps a corrective needed for Christians today, for whom prayer is learned most often as conversation not unlike what takes places between friends.
Prayer is . . . converse with God. Though whispering . . . and not opening the lips, we speak in silence, yet we cry inwardly. For God hears continually all the inward converse. So also we raise the head and lift the hands to heaven and set the feet in motion . . . following the eagerness of the spirit directed towards the intellectual essence; and endeavoring to abstract the body from the earth along with the discourse, raising the soul aloft, winged with longing for better things, we compel it to advance to the region of holiness, magnanimously despising the chain of the flesh.
[This is the English translation of Stromateis, from book seven, available at http://newadvent.org/fathers/02107.htm.]
This is prayer of the heart, with an intensity of intention and devotion that does not resemble, for instance, how the Lord’s Prayer is often taught to Christians, as simple conversation with one’s Abba. Clement’s way of prayer (like that of Evagrius, later) is about salvation: made possible through redemption in Christ, seeking relationship to God and holiness and salvation through (not at all simple) conversation.
1) How do you understand prayer?
2) Do Clement’s words, and the desert tradition, add something important to your practice of prayer?
Lecture 4
Recently in Cistercian Studies Quarterly, Tim Vivian wrote about St. Anthony and the document we know as the “Sayings” of the Desert Fathers. He asks the simple question, “Why read this stuff?” Then, Vivian answers the question. In his translation, the third saying begins: “Someone asked Abba Antony, saying, ‘What sort of practices do I need to maintain in order to please God?’ ” Vivian summarizes the practical answers that come throughout the Sayings, attaching the Saying number for each. These include:
Keep God right before your eyes, with you always. (3, 28)
Hold on to the testimony of the Scriptures. (3)
Stay put. (3, 31)
Own up to your own errors. (4)
Expect temptation to your last breath. (4)
Don’t be self-righteous. (6)
Let go of the past. (6)
There are twenty-two more on Vivian’s list. Make your own list.
[Tim Vivian, “Each Breath Both Prayer and Practice: The Sayings of Antony the Great in the Alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum, A New Translation and Commentary,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly, Vol. 53.3, 2018.]
Lecture 5
The second paragraph is telling of where Merton was at, personally, when these lectures were first delivered:
With Pachomius, we find organized community life. And here begins
an old debate: between cenobites and hermits. It was to last a long time, and the thread of argument runs all through the Desert Fathers’ literature. Some are for the free, unorganized life of the hermit living alone with God. Others are for the safer, more consistent, organized life of communities. The argument sometimes gets quite heated, and in the end the cenobites, for all practical purposes, won out. The eremitical ideal remains still the highest ideal of monasticism . . .
How does the “debate” between community life and hermit life in monasticism relate to the “debate” between parish life and individual spirituality for the average Christian? For you?
Lecture 6
Renouncing the world, leaving the world, forsaking the world—are constant themes throughout these Lectures. Merton famously changed his view of the monk as one who “leaves” the world when he realized one day at the corner of 4th and Walnut, in downtown Louisville, a connection to everyone around him, that everyone was “walking around shining like the sun.” Consider these sentences Merton wrote in a late essay, published after his death in Love and Living, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart:
What, then, is the world? Simply the human and non-human environment in which man finds himself, to which he is called to establish a certain definite relationship. It is true that most men are content to accept a ready-made relationship which the world itself offers them, but in theory we are all free to stand back from the world, to judge it, and even to come to certain decisions about remaking it. (107–8)
Do you think this differs from the way of life and teachings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers?
Lecture 7
Merton describes Gregory of Nyssa’s commentary on the Song of Songs, describing “the steps by which the Word makes Himself known to the soul—as a faint ‘perfume,’ as a voice, and finally as food for the soul that is ‘tasted’ and sweet.” These are such beautiful metaphors.
Are they simply metaphors? Do you ever experience the Beloved in this way? Do you ever hope to experience the Beloved in this way?
Lecture 8
Merton says this about St. Jerome and his legendary short temper: “[W]e have to be careful of taking Jerome as a typical Desert Father. On the whole he is not the best of models for contemplatives. He inspires rather those whose spiritual life is aggressive, ascetical, active, and controversial: but these are often people who stir up monastic orders and cause dissension—though when they are really saints they may accomplish much good.”
We all know people like this, don’t we? Is there a genuine, completely faithful form of Christian life that is “aggressive” and “controversial”? What do you think?
Lecture 9
Another of the famous Desert Mothers, St. Mary of Egypt, is not mentioned by Merton in this Lecture. She lived in either the early fifth or early sixth century: the sources are indefinite. A prostitute who was so brazen as to join a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to offer herself to genuine pilgrims along the way, Mary was barred from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by what she described as a force she couldn’t see. Then she saw an icon of the Theotokos (“Mother of God”) and was suddenly pierced with remorse and repented her sins, deciding to become an ascetic and leave for the desert. She’s a character in Goethe’s Faust and in Mahler’s 8th Symphony.
Each year during Lent, Orthodox Churches read portions of the Life of St. Mary of Egypt, written in the seventh century by St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem. It includes the story of Elder Zosima, from a monastery in Palestine, who spends time in the desert, encountering St. Mary there.
Zosima asked her: “How many years have gone by since you began to live in this desert?” She replied: “Forty-seven years have gone by since I left the holy city.” Zosima asked: “But what food do you find?” She said: “I had two-and-a-half loaves when I crossed the Jordan. Soon they dried up and became hard as rock. Eating a little I gradually finished them after a few years.” Zosima asked: “Can it be that you have lived so many years this way, without suffering?” The woman answered: “You remind me of what I dare not speak of. For when I recall all the dangers which I overcame, and all the violent thoughts which confused me, I am again afraid that they will take possession of me.” Zosima said: “Do not hide anything from me; speak to me without concealing anything.”
She went on: “Abba, seventeen years I passed in this desert fighting wild beasts: mad desires and passions. When I was about to partake of food, I used to begin to regret the meat and fish of which I had so much in Egypt. I regretted also not having wine which I loved so much, for I drank a lot of wine when I lived in the world, while here I had not even water. I used to burn and succumb with thirst. The mad desire for profligate songs also entered me and confused me greatly. But when these desires entered me I struck myself on the breast and reminded myself of the vow I’d made when going into the desert. In my thoughts, I returned to the icon of the Mother of God that had received me and to her I cried in prayer. I implored her to chase away the thoughts. And after weeping for long and beating my breast I used to see light at last which seemed to shine on me from everywhere. And after the violent storm, lasting calm descended.”
[Adapted from the version found on the website of St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox Church, Roswell, Georgia: https://www.stmaryofegypt.org/files/library/life.htm.]
Lecture 10
Consider for a moment the Christian saintly tradition of “holy foolishness.” Merton writes this, after describing the way of life and spirituality of the stylites:
What attitude should we take toward this kind of sanctity? The fashion has been to disparage it, to treat it as something absurd and grotesque. This is not the full truth. It was a witness to the divine transcendency, and to the superiority of the spirit. Precisely its uselessness was what made this witness powerful.
Do you agree? Do you see any practical application for today?
Lecture 11
When Merton discusses Pseudo-Macarius, he passes over something quickly that merits a pause. He notes that Pseudo-Macarius was not so much Platonist as he was biblical, adding: “This distinction is based on two different views of man. In the former it is the mind, nous, that is the seat of spirituality and of prayer.”
Consider this quotation from Plato himself, from his Timaeus:
If a man has seriously devoted himself to love of learning and to true wisdom . . . then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine. . . . And to the extent that human nature can partake of immortality, he can in no way fail to achieve this.
[From Timaeus, 90 b-c, Donald J. Zehl, trans., Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997).]
1. For Plato, the nous of intelligence is the part of the soul most apt to reach the Divine. To Merton’s point, what is the biblical view?
2. How do you think your intelligence and your heart/soul work together to reach to, or respond to, God?
Lecture 12
Describing Evagrius’s teaching from On Prayer, Merton writes: “Apatheia is the victory of the soul over all the devils (i.e., all the passions). Note that apatheia is not mere insensibility. It is compounded of humility, compunction, zeal, and intense love for God.”
At the end of the long paragraph in which this clarification from Merton occurs, he adds: “Note that prayer is inseparably connected with virtue. Without virtue, one cannot resist passion, and if one is dominated by passion, he has no control of thoughts and cannot pray.”
1. How might these two, apatheia and virtue, come together in the ideal Christian life?
2. Do they interact in your own spiritual life and practice?
Lecture 13
In his book The Wisdom of the Desert (1960), Merton wrote:
The flight to the desert was neither purely negative nor purely individualistic. They were not rebels against society. . . . They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a
decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values. . . . They did not reject society with proud contempt. . . . The society they sought was one where all men were truly equal, where the only authority under God was the charismatic authority of wisdom, experience and love. . . . What the Fathers sought most of all was their own true self, in Christ. (5)
Do you see the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and the way and practice of faith as found in desert spirituality, relevant for your life in the twenty-first century?
Lecture 14
When discussing Conference 9, in which Abbot Isaac turns to different types of prayer, Merton summarizes:
The first difficulty in explaining the “kinds of prayer” is that there is in reality an almost infinite variety. Prayer is always varying. It is a living reality and there are as many kinds of prayer as there are variations of spiritual states. . . . Abbot Isaac reminds us that we pray differently under different circumstances, and in “classifying” prayer we must not forget these differences and these potential variations. In other words, we must not bind ourselves to pray always in the same way, or expect our prayer to fall always into the same pattern. We must not impose a rigid plan on our prayer life and try to make life conform to an abstract theory of our own, but we must on the contrary let our prayer be living, and let it grow out of our life in union with God.
A Course in Desert Spirituality Page 17
