For neither the angels nor the intellect rivaling them in purity will ever be sated with praising the Creator. And just as the angels, being immaterial, do not concern themselves with food, so neither do material beings when once they have entered the heaven of the intellect's stillness and have themselves become angelic.
St. Hesychios the Priest, “On Watchfulness and Holiness: Written for Theodoulos,” The Philokalia, Vol. I, pp. 239-240.
Orthodox Fathers or Gnostic Pretenders?
Dip into the Desert Fathers or the neptic fathers[1] of the Philokalia and you could be forgiven for thinking of them as eccentric and borderline Gnostic. This certainly has been the response I’ve gotten when I’ve presented their teaching to my Evangelical Christian colleagues at professional conferences in psychology or in ecumenical gatherings on the spiritual life.
To be fair, when St. Hesychios the Priest tells us that those who “have entered the heaven of the intellect’s stillness...have themselves become angelic” and are no longer concerned “with food” preferring instead “praising the Creator,” such criticisms have the ring of truth about them.
At the same time, how different is what the saint tells us from what Jesus tells us in the Gospel?
Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
....
Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble (Matthew 6: 25-27, 31-34, NKJV).
Asceticism Is Not an Afterthought
While we shouldn’t dismiss the tendency in some quarters to over-emphasize the ascetical character of the Christian life, asceticism is not only NOT contrary to the Gospel but is, as Fr. Georges Florovsky argues, central to our life in Christ. After all, he writes,
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 continues by asking “Is [not] 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’”?[2] before going on to answer his own questions in the affirmative and explaining that the ascetical ideal reflects,
The balanced synergistic doctrine of the early and Eastern Church, a doctrine misunderstood and undermined by Latin Christianity in general from St. Augustine on—although there was always opposition to this in the Latin Church—always understood that God initiates, accompanies, and completes everything in the process of salvation. What it always rejected—both spontaneously and intellectually—is the idea of irresistible grace, the idea that man has no participating role in his salvation.
The Orthodox East never embraced the Lutheran notion that “identifies any participation of man in his salvation, any movement of human will and soul toward God, as a pagan distortion of Agape, as ‘Eros.’ And this attitude, this theological perspective will be the determining point for the rejection of monasticism and other forms of asceticism and spirituality so familiar to the Christian Church from its inception.”
For All Have Fallen Short
Here I would pause and ask you to consider—or really, reconsider—how we typically [mis-]understand St. Paul’s observation that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, KJV).
For the sinner, to know he has fallen “short of the glory of God,” should elicit sorrow and hopefully repentance. Of course, it can just as easily lead him to despair. The difference between these two responses hinges on his ability to put aside a merely moral reading of the text in favor of understanding it ontologically.
Yes, I am a sinner. And, yes, because of this I fall short of the glory of God. What is sin, after all, but a falling short of the mark? And what is that mark, the standard of a life that is created “in the image of God” (see Genesis 1:27) but God Himself?
But when I say this, I need to be careful that I do not succumb to what—after 500 years of Protestant rhetoric—is the tendency to “ontologize” morality.[3] I must guard against the thought that being a sinner is something more than my existential condition and instead imagine that being a sinner is something like my nature.
To be sure, sin is my “second nature.” As such, it is like a stained and dirty cloth that hides a beautiful painting. But sin only hides the image of God it doesn’t, it can’t, destroy the image. What sin can and does do, is distort our likeness to God. But even the most horrible of sins can only obscure the imago dei. No sin can obliterate the imago dei.
To say otherwise, to say I am a sinner by nature turns salvation into merely a legal fiction (imputed grace or manure covered by snow to borrow from Luther). Or, if I am a sinner by nature, then salvation represents an ontological rupture akin to a dog becoming human. We can’t overlook the anthropological fact that sin is not the sole—much less the primary—reason we fall short of the glory of God.
The Joy of Not Measuring Up
We also fall short of the divine glory for the wholly good, praiseworthy, and salvific reason that we are creatures called by God to become like Him Who in Jesus Christ became like us. It is only to the human person that God has commanded “Become more than you are.”
Once we grasp that it is God’s gift to us is that we fall short of His glory. everything changes in our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with God. Rather than being a cause of sorrow, to realize I fall short of the divine glory, is now seen as an invitation to become more like Him. To realize my failure—moral or practical—is to stand at the threshold of transcendence.
To repent, then, becomes not simply regret for the past—real though this often is—but to leap ahead, to strive by God’s grace and my effort, to become more than I have been and more than I am.
And when ontologize sin? Well, life becomes just one damn thing after another.
But when we realize that it is in our God-given nature to fall short of the glory of God then, like “the angels ... [we] will [n]ever be sated with praising the Creator,” as St. Hesychios. To praise the Creator is only possible when I accept with gratitude my limited nature and the limits inherent in my biography.
After all, how can I praise God without also thanking Him for the gift of my own life, the people in my life, and the (limited and limiting) circumstances of that life?
And how can I thank Him for my life without also thanking Him for yours?
And what are our lives singularly and together, but symphonies composed of finitude and transcendence?
This leads us to see that just as the angels, being immaterial, do not concern themselves with food, so neither do material beings when once they have entered the heaven of the intellect's stillness and have themselves become angelic. But, again, we need to be cautious here.
It was said of Abba John the Dwarf, that one day he said to his elder brother, ‘I should like to be free of all care, like the angels, who do not work, but ceaselessly offer worship to God.’ So he took off his cloak and went away into the desert. After a week he came back to his brother. When he knocked on the door, he heard his brother say, before he opened it ‘Who are you?’ He said, ‘I am John, your brother.’ But he replied, ‘John has become an angel, and henceforth he is no longer among men.’ Then the other begged him saying, ‘It is I.’ However, his brother did not let him in, but left him there in distress until morning. Then, opening the door, he said to him, ‘You are a man and you must once again work in order to eat.’ Then John made a prostration before him, saying, ‘Forgive me.’”[4]
What the sobriety of the desert fathers and Philokalia teach is simply what our Lord says in the Gospel: “Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25).
[1] “Neptic fathers” is another name for the ascetic fathers we meet in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and the Philokalia. In Orthodox theology, nepsis simply means “watchfulness” or “wakefulness.” St. Hesychios the Priest defines nepsis as “a continual fixing and halting of thought at the entrance to the heart.”
[2] Georges Florovsky, “The Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament: Reflections on the Critique of the Theology of the Reformation,” in Georges Florovsky, The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky, Vol. X: The Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers (Vaduz, Europa: Buchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 17–59, http://www.romanity.org/htm/flo.01.en.the_ascetic_ideal_and_the_new_testament.01.htm.
[3] This is an argument made in greater detail by Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984).
[4] Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian, Edinburgh, 2004), 86.