And a lot of these titles are rather uninteresting or perhaps sound negative, but when you open up what he's talking about, you find that there's a whole lot inside, and that it leads you into the centre, as always, of everything. And really it leads us into the centre of the monastic heart, that's what it's all about, it's finding out what is the quality of the heart, which a monk really has, and this is one of the names for it, humility is another name, and so on. And notice the continuity with the other discourses we've been reading. The first one on renunciation, which lays out the whole path and all the elements, then humility, conscience and the fear of God, now these are all in the same area, they're all in continuity, and that humility is a sort of general name for the attitude for the heart of the monk, the disposition of the monk, according to Dorotheus. According to the way of Dorotheus, which is laid down in the first discourse, it's not

[01:09]

the same as every way of spirituality, but there's a certain emphasis, the same elements are always there in Christian spirituality, in monastic spirituality, but the emphasis can be vastly different. Sometimes there can be an emphasis, for instance, most strongly on prayer, sometimes the emphasis is more strongly on obedience, sometimes it's on asceticism, sometimes it's on solitude, but Dorotheus, it's right down this line, of humility and the fear of God, and the fear of God means to be awake to your conscience, really. Humility and the fear of God are the dispositions which mean that a person is in touch with his conscience, in touch with that centre that we were talking about. But every time the title comes from one side and doesn't express the fullness and balance of what he's talking about, the expression of fear of God, the expression of humility, is an approach from one side, the traditionally monastic side, but what we're coming to is really the centre and not just one side of the whole thing. What we're trying to get to is the core, is this heart, this experience of God, or this

[02:11]

being centred, whatever you want to call it. So there's a continuity with the first three discourses. There's another one later on he's got on a similar title. It's number 12, on fear of punishments to come and so on, where he starts out with the business of the last things, and his titles are so heavy that they can turn a person off on, on the, what would you call it, the more contemporary, or in a sense more distended or relaxed way of grasping, of understanding the same thing. This remembrance of God, this remembrance also of the total picture, and hence the remembrance of the last things. Remember how important the memory of death is in the monastic tradition, and that's where he's coming from. A few references. First of all, there's a biblical basis for this expression of fear of God, and that's

[03:15]

one reason why he picks it up. It's so consecrated by the monastic tradition because it's already very much in the scriptures, especially in the Old Testament, but it also gets picked up in the New Testament. In fact, in the New Testament you find especially this paradox of fear and love, which Dorotheus brings out immediately when he starts his discourse there. Because you'll find Saint John saying, perfect love casts out fear because fear has punishment, and love doesn't know fear. And then you find the expressions in the Old Testament that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of God is the perfection of wisdom, and so on. And then you see Saint Paul saying something like this, work out your salvation of fear and trauma. So it appears that there is a fear which continues. There's something that can be called by that name which remains with us right to the end of our spiritual life, no matter how far we go. And on the other hand, there's something which just is incompatible with the perfection of the love of God. So on the biblical basis of all of this, there's the Dictionary of Biblical Theology, that's

[04:23]

where the name of fear of God also is, the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. Cassian, you know, has a conference on perfection, and this conference is very parallel to the treatment of Dorotheus, it's number 10, I think, it's in Western Citizen, it's the conference about Cheremon, in which he talks about the movement from, it starts out this way, three things enable men to control their sins, maybe that heavy language. Fear of hell or the law of the land, fear of the law. Hope for the kingdom of heaven and the love of goodness for his own sake. You see the kind of progression that Cassian is making there? From fear to hope to love, and then you can put fear on the same level as faith, and then you make a progression from faith to hope to love, and faith and hope turn out to be

[05:26]

the two inferior motives for the spiritual life, for seeking God, and the love of God is the ultimate motive that stays with you to the end. And that's, the way that he interprets it, it's got a meaning, but you know that's kind of spiritual poetry or theological poetry rather than being precisely and accurately theology in biblical terms. Remember how St. Paul says that there are three things which remain, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love. So faith and hope remain too, in some form, in some way. And we know that faith sure remains to the end of this life. We're constantly being confronted with this thing in the monastic literature that they tend to make a pattern in which you, it's a ladder, you know, in which you're continually leaving something behind and getting on to something else, exclusively, in an exclusive sort of way, so that you leave the first thing perfectly, completely behind, like you leave faith behind, and you leave hope behind, and you have nothing but love. But that's an idealized picture, and Cassian frequently does that, he has this ladder,

[06:28]

and then he's got those two ladders at the end of his institute, at the end of the fourth book of the Institutes of Cassian, you'll find this. First of all, you've got the Discourse of Abbot Benufius, remember, in which he says, The fear of the Lord is our cross. Crook's nostril of timor dominates. The fear of the Lord is our cross. As then one who is crucified no longer has the power of moving or turning his limbs in any direction as he pleases, so we also ought to affix our wishes and desires, not in accordance with what is pleasant and delightful to us now, but in accordance with the law of the Lord where it constrains us. Freud puts it in simple terms of moving from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. But Freud is not talking about theology, he's not talking about God, he doesn't believe in that. He's just talking about a kind of law of human nature, moving from the pleasure principle to the reality principle.

[07:30]

It's kind of a very small reflection of what Cassian is talking about here. And somehow the fear of the Lord comes in there. In changing our direction, somehow the fear of God is necessary. It's like in conversion, you've got two parts, you've got a turning towards and you've got a turning away from. And if you're turned towards something, how do you turn away from it? Do you turn away from it by being attracted by something that's more attractive? I don't know, to a certain extent we can, but usually, often at least, it's not a stepping over in which you just step over from something good to something better. Somehow there's a step in the middle where you have to pull back from the something good to a point of nothing maybe, or to a point of something not so good, or a point of something less, so that you can be open and free for the something better. It's usually not a smooth transition right up from something good to something better, but it's something good to something less to something better, isn't it?

[08:33]

There's a turning away as well as a turning to. It's not just, it's not always, it's not simply a turning to. And that's what this fear of God business is about, and that's what the renunciation business is about, is the turning away in order to turn to. Or the turning away that accompanies the turning to. Because there's a phase, like a blind spot or a desert or a dead phase, in between the turning away and the turning to. Rather, in between having the good and having the better. Now, how does this come out in the scriptures? Well, it comes out in the desert experience, first of all. It comes out also in the passion and death and resurrection of Jesus, doesn't it? He doesn't just turn from something good, which is this life, to something better, does it? He has to go down. He has to go down into the passion, empty himself of falsehoods, he goes down into the passion and death, and then he comes up through the power of God. Okay? And that's the monastic trajectory, that's the monastic trip. It's not just from something good to something better. Now, the tendency today, okay, the tendency right now in our contemporary world is not

[09:37]

to accept that, but to say, no, you simply go from something good to something better, and there's always something better. You don't have to go from something good to something less. Never. Simply go to something better. Okay, we'll try it. Yeah, he told Peter that Peter was going to, when he was young, he went where he wanted to, right? But when you're old, you'll put forth your hands and somebody else will lead you where you don't want to go. And John says that he was telling him what manner of death he was to die. And when he says Peter, he means the whole church still, okay? And he also means each of us. Now, this whole thing about not going directly from something good to something better, it involves a change in level in ourselves in some way, okay? There's this fellow, Ronald, he's a fascinating theologian, I can't understand him, but he's

[10:41]

fascinating. These are the same parentage of Ronald, they're both theologians, they both have this transcendental philosophy. He talks about horizons, okay? Now, this is a business of horizons, of having to move to a larger horizon. That doesn't mean you have to move into a larger world, which means that you have to break through the crust of your own world in some way. Now, we think about it typically as going deeper, as going deeper. But you can think about it also as going up or whatever, or going out. But to change your horizon, to go deeper, you have to let go of something, in a sense. You have to let go of something, and you have to be a bit empty. And this is the Sabbath thing, and it's the death thing, and it's the desert thing, and it's the night thing, this thing down on the cross. It's those purifications, whatever expression you use for it. It's the monastic emptiness. It's the emptiness of Buddhism, too. You have to make yourself empty in order to become ready to receive that which is to be

[11:43]

given. So there's a period of what? A period of faith, a period of faith and hope before the infilling. Even though the seed may have been given to you, this law of the journey, and the law of time, and the law of life, and growth, and as if the seed went to the ground, and you wait, and sit, and believe, and hope, and thereby grow down and descend to a deeper level before the fullness is going to happen, before the fruit and the harvest will be there. It's the same law, and it's manifested in a hundred ways. And we know it in our bones, but we are continually inclined to go back to the law of this world, as it were, and to expect things to work in a mechanical way, always to go immediately from good to better. Another way of putting it is that you have to give in order to get, that nothing is without a price. But the thing is that the price is not proportionate to the yield, that the price is not proportionate to what's being bought. Saint Paul says that the sufferings of this life are a little thing in comparison with the glory which is to be manifested in us, because glory has no limit.

[12:45]

Glory just blazes out, and looms out, and spills out, and is abundant in itself. The kind of being which is abundance in itself, it's hard for us to conceive of it until we think of love, or until we think of beauty, or until we think of joy, is a being which is always more than itself. A being which is simply more. But to break through into that new horizon, to get to that center, that depth, we have to move away, we have to turn away. And that's what this whole business of the fear of God is about. There's something like a word which comes and says, you've got to turn away. The word which calls people out into the desert, the word that comes to Moses, the word that comes to John the Baptist, that calls the people out to see John the Baptist, what do they go out there for? There's nothing out there. That's the question Jesus asks. Why do you go out in the desert if there's nothing out there? They go out because there's a word calling them out there, and the word says you have to move out into emptiness. You have to move out and listen to this word, this thing that speaks to the center of you instead of to the surface. See, the word calls you out into a place where there's nothing on the surface anymore. The desert is just bare earth, it's emptiness, okay?

[13:45]

On the surface level, on the level where you've been expecting your fruits and your feedback and all the good things, the level of the good, there's nothing there. The word calls you into a place where there's nothing there on the visible level. And then what? The word has spoken to the core of yourself, the center of yourself, you know that seed that Jesus compares it to, the sower sows his seed. And then you wait there in the emptiness until from the place where that word has struck in the center of yourself, which you don't even know, you don't even know that place, but you can hear from it. Somehow we can hear from it. You wait until the fruit comes from there, until the desert bursts in again. But that word can come across, like John the Baptist, as a word of fear. See, John comes, and what does he say? He says, like John, this place is going to be destroyed, and the day of the Lord is coming, and there's going to be a day of thunder, you know, and the one who comes is going to come with a threshing stick, you know, he's going to whack out the grain and so on, and he's going to cleanse his threshing floor with fire. So that fear thing, somehow, is needed to turn us away and to pull us out into that

[14:50]

empty place, to pull us out into the desert, and then in the desert we can await the coming, we can await what we don't know yet. So somehow the turning away and the turning from requires that dimension, that aspect of fear, which we don't like at all. And it's like a winter period in between the fall, you know, in between the summer that we know and the spring that we don't know yet. The spring which is a breakthrough to another horizon, another depth, another fullness, another world, another kingdom. Okay, just to justify that whole thing. And then he's got these ladders, which you've heard before, at the end of the Institute. This is still Abbot Pinocchio's. Remember the long one and the short one. The long one is in Chapter 39. It's in here if you have this one, 232. The beginning of our salvation and the safeguard of it is, as I said, the fear of the Lord. And then he goes on, he says, and for through this those who are trained in the way of perfection can gain a start in conversion as well as purification from vices, insecurity and virtues.

[15:50]

So he starts with this because it's canonized by the scripture. This fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, as he said. And when this has gained an entrance into a man's heart, it produces contempt of all things. Now what does he mean? The fear of the Lord is some kind of a sense of the Lord. It's some kind of a taste of the Lord, which means that nothing else really counts. So the fear of the Lord is a lot more than the fear of the Lord. When we talk about this, we really have to translate it into another language. We have to, in order to understand it. Instead of saying fear of the Lord, see, people in other generations can stand that language, but we can't stand it very well because our ears have been changed in some way. So it's better for us to say the sense of the Lord, the taste of the Lord, the remembrance of the Lord, the consciousness of the Lord, the presence of the Lord, one of those things, to get across. What is this question supposed to convey? It must be pretty powerful if it produces the contempt of all things. Notice the negativity of that language. Whether in the word fear or the word contempt, that continual negativity of the language of monastic literature, which turns us off today, but inside that negativity is the whole

[16:53]

thing, you see? You break through that shell of the negativity and you find the whole thing is right there because he's talking about the sense of God. And he's talking about, instead of the contempt of all things as if they were dirt, they're as if dirt in comparison to that thing which you have tasted in your heart, you know, the pearl in the Gospel. Well, that thing that Paul is talking about when he says, for his sake I consider all things as if they were garbage, for the surpassing knowledge of my Lord Jesus Christ. What Gasham's talking about, what he's talking about in a negative language, so it's a translation that has to happen. Notice how the gold in the monastic literature is hidden beneath his crest, sometimes also in the scriptures. And then he goes on. He goes on through the other stages, humility and so on. Ten signs of humility. And then he gives a final summary. Hear then in a few words how you come out up to the heights of perfection without any effort or difficulty. The beginning of our salvation and of wisdom, quotation marks, is according to Scripture

[17:55]

the fear of the Lord. From the fear of the Lord arises salutary confunction. Okay, the connection between fear and confunction. What's the difference? Fear is kind of a naked, first of all, fear sounds like a naked shiver or something. A trembling of the first shock of something which we don't know. And something which is outside of us. Fear comes from something outside of us. And God, we don't feel God inside of us. And what's confunction? Confunction is simply being pierced by that fear. But in both the fear, as we've seen, there's the sense of God, and then confunction is a kind of flowering of the sense of God into something like tears. So that it's a softening of the heart, a softening of the heart, a penetration of the heart by grace. Which hasn't yet turned to joy, but somehow inside it there's this silver lining of joy. From confunction of heart springs renunciation. That is, nakedness and contempt of all possessions. See, before he telescoped that and put them right together. From nakedness is begotten humility. From humility, the mortification of desires.

[18:57]

From mortification of desires, all faults are extirpated and decayed. By driving out faults, virtues free up, and see how the latter, and each step seems to exclude the step before and on. And it's so clear, and it's so untrue, also, in the sense of that exclusion. And yet it's more like a spectrum than like Aladdin. You move it, and there are always gradations. But the precision of the language is very helpful, because it's no problem to telescope the language afterwards, but to have somebody lay it out like that, even if it's over-sharp, is the helpful thing for us. To be over-clear and then to synthesize afterwards is better than not being clear at all. From mortification of desires, all fault now. By driving out faults, virtues shoot up and increase. By the budding of virtues, purity of heart is gained. By purity of heart, the perfection of epistolic love is acquired. So there's the ladder from the fear of the Lord to perfect love. That's in chapter 43 of the Fourth Institute, first book on page 235.

[19:57]

So Cashin is different there, because he theorizes. Notice how he makes things much sharper and much more structured than Dorotheus does. Dorotheus will take the structure, and then what does he do? He gives a homily on it, a practical homily on how to live your life and your own experience and his own experience in the community, based on sort of playing around that structure and using it. So Dorotheus is a lot more useful, actually, for practical life, because he's very realistic. Whereas Cashin can stretch you on that idealistic ladder and give you trouble. There's also, for the Western tradition, there's this book of Gilson about St. Bernard, the mystical theology of St. Bernard, in which, as I mentioned before, he traces the path of the spiritual life from fear to love through humility. And he says that that's the way of St. Benedict, and that's the way of St. Bernard. It's also the way of Dorotheus. There's an analysis there of the spiritual theology of St. Bernard in the other medieval

[21:05]

Cistercians, which is parallel to what we're talking about, but much more speculative, much more contemplative in a sense. From fear to love through humility. He says humility is the way. Now, he's taking fear there as kind of naked fear, that is, as fear of punishment or the negative fear of God, because you move through that positive fear of God to love, and it's already that level. Then there's been a lot of psychological work done on the question of fear and of anxiety, and also with respect to Christianity and with respect to the monastic tradition. And you get this whole thing coming across that, well, there are two ways to be. One way is to live in anxiety and to live in it with a kind of contracted heart, a contracted

[22:06]

spirit, and that's bad. And the other way to live is confidently and creatively in an expansive movement. For instance, Maslow writes in his book, in a beautiful way, he sets this out. He talks about two kinds of motivation. There's defense motivation and survival motivation, which is basically negative and constrictive and shrinks you and makes you incapable, really, of anything creative, anything positive or anything abundant. And then there's growth motivation, in which you really expand and thrive, and he sets the two against one another. And, of course, that seems to throw out our whole notion of the value or any kind of meaning for the motivation of fear, so we have to take that into consideration. You think the over-abundance of fear is a kind of common field? Yeah, that's what they claim. In other words... I can't say over-field, because you can be sure...

[23:07]

You sure can. You sure can. That's what they're getting at. You see, we've had a kind of Christianity taught sometimes, and a kind of monastic spirituality taught, which is nothing but fear, in a sense. There's a danger in Dorothy, it's that we don't look out, because the emphasis in the language is always on that side, look out, and magnifying this motivation of fear. And so, the psychologists bust out on the other side. Somebody like Luther is sort of at the outside of that movement of the human spirit, and says, wait a minute, we've had enough of that now, forget it. And then all the way over on the other side, there's nothing but love and fear. There's a problem, because there has to be a synthesis, there has to be some kind of knowledge for this factory element. There's this Paul Tournier, for instance, who's a Swiss doctor, who's also a psychologist, and he writes about the negative effects of hearing the wrong word of scripture on certain people. When they hear the fear-inspiring, seemingly condemnatory, and threatening words of scripture,

[24:13]

time after time, they're just completely paralyzed, they give to nothing. Whereas for other people, they don't even touch them, they just bounce off. That book was strong in the week. He's got another book, Guilt and Grace, in which he talks about this thing. And what he's coming from is the experience of a whole bunch of Christians who have been intimidated into a kind of state of uselessness. By that kind of spirituality, we can emphasize this fear so much, instead of love. Because the only thing that makes us grow is love. It would seem like they would only respond to other fears, and not others. Yeah, that's the trouble, they get caught in that and can't move over. So today, you practically have to start from the other side. We have to translate Dorothy's language into something else. And yet what he's saying, on the level of practical life, is right. It's the language, the thought that is real. And also some of the suggested motivations, the pure punishment of it. What he's trying to do is wake somebody up, you know.

[25:14]

You ever have a creature come in a parish church, and come and do the fire and brimstone thing, and just shout and rant and rave? And just with the effect of shock, try to wake people out of their lethargy. Try to wake people out of their indifference. There's a lot of that in monastic preaching. It's as if the abbot was coming, and all the monks were dozing. You know, he'll say anything to wake them up. And then once he's got them awake, he can talk to them. One more thing before I let go of that. In fact, there's this fellow, this Frenchman, Pierre Salignac, who wrote the book The Christian Heralds, The Christian Heralds, which he considers as being precisely his preaching of fear, which makes people incapable of a positive, courageous, confident, abundant, and loving life. He's coming, Freudian perspective. Anybody can find plenty of evidence for that. And then remember Berger in the thing about salvation and of fear Christianity versus

[26:18]

creativity and an expansive Christianity. Now, there's another thing that comes in here later on, which is Kierkegaard and that whole, the existentialists and the discovery of another level of anxiety, because you've got neurotic anxiety, okay, which is a sickness and has to be done away with. But then they bore through and they come to another level, the level of what they call existential anxiety, which is precisely the thing that wakes people up to a deeper level of reality. The notion of the fear of death, which is not a negative fear. It's a healthy fear. It's like, I don't know, it's like a chill breeze in the morning or something like that, which wakes you up to the reality of which you are on the way. So the whole of this thing is concerned with breaking through from one narrow horizon to a broader horizon, from one small world to a bigger world, from a superficial level of life to a deeper level of life. And the fear thing can always only be the first step, can only be the first shot. And if it goes, endures all the way, that kind of fear, and does not give place to love

[27:21]

and to courage and confidence, then it's a whole big mistake and it's just never too late. I thought you were asking me the language, because I was studying Syriac, so fear of the Lord is gladness and one from joy. And I mean, you know, let's say fear of that kind of thing. That's right. And my father, this man who's here, was saying they have another word for the loose confinement, a couple of words for fear of the Son of God. And fear of the Lord, as he says, it's a humble, it's a causative fear of offending God, of losing Him somehow. Yes. Almost like a fear of the reverence you have towards someone you love, but you're trying to get them along after that. You could translate it into tenderness of heart, though. Tenderness of heart. And the Russians have this word, humileni, which is like that, you know, which we can't translate. We don't have any word for it. Exactly.

[28:27]

That's connected with Kierkegaard's dread, okay, and with that Edsie Stenshul thing I was talking about. And that, Merton says it, this is in that book on the contemplative prayer, the reference is, contemplative prayer, chapters 16 through 18, where he talks about dread. And what he's saying is that this dread is the only thing that keeps people from closing themselves at a certain point in their spiritual life. It's the only thing that keeps people from getting complacent and from going on their own trip of sort of perfection, you know, their own contemplative trip, or their perfection trip, or their asceticism trip, their prayer trip, whatever it is. The only thing that keeps them from closing up that way is dread. And the real meditation, which is getting somewhere, is the meditation in which there

[29:33]

is this element of dread, this confrontation with the unlimited reality, with transcendence. And here there's always a connection of death, because death is the concrete expression of this thing we're talking about. I know that book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death, where he says that our whole psychology, the construction of our character, is a shell that we build around ourselves in order to escape from that fear of death, from the fear of that which is greater than us and which we have no power to control. So we build this control thing around us. He says that's the basis of our character structure. There's a lot of truth in that, a lot of other people say that same thing. And Merton says it when he talks about the false self. The false self is taken apart by dread, the false self is taken apart by fear, which is the knowledge of the reality of the falseness of that shell, in the light of the reality which is still dark that comes from beyond. When it turns from dark to light, then it's not fear anymore, it's not dread anymore, it's love. It's contemplation. But as long as it's dark out there, it's fear.

[30:38]

But we know that it's truth, in its light, somehow. We know the falseness of our shell, the things that we're doing in the shell. It always has been, but there's been a wave. See, for a long while things were pretty much together, I think. So the people knew that. If they talked about the fear of God, the expansiveness was already there, because the whole thing pulsed like a heart. It was all together, it was one thing. Then at a certain point it fragments. And at a certain point in history, you get a dark phase where there's really a spirituality and theology being preached, like Gansanism for instance, which is so much on that side of fear that people actually are pushed into neurosis and droves by it, you see.

[31:40]

And there's a dark shadow even that falls over a lot of Christianity at a certain point in history, during the past few centuries. Which means that the thing has become unbalanced. And because there's been that unbalanced wave on one side, there's a corresponding reaction on the other side of fear that we're experiencing now. And people can't hear about these things anymore. And in either case, the center has been lost touch with. The center, and therefore the wholeness and the balance of the thing, is out of touch. We've lost it. And that's why we get this vibration, this fluctuation from one side to the other. So now we're experiencing the wave of, what was it called, resurrection or whatever, or positivity, which is unable to look at the other side of things. Because you can't look at negativity without positivity. But you can't escape from negativity and that side of life into positivity, into mere positivity. So, in the beginning, it was the center, but it's not something that has evolved. Oh, no. It's lost, I think.

[32:42]

Yeah, I think the emphasis was incorrect. We've lost the center. But rather, in the past five or six centuries, there's been just a lot of fluctuation. There's been poor contact with the center, and therefore with the balance of the whole. And a lot of fluctuation back and forth, for a long time. Now, even in the beginning, you had these fluctuations in some... Read that chapter of Gormakus on the penitents, that place of the flagellants and all those people. There were imbalances there, too. But in general, in the theology of the Church, in the spiritual theology of the Church, I think there was a pretty good contact with that center and a pretty good balance. Things were still in a more compact state. But with a big expansion, both mentally and geographically, as we have in megatimes, it's easier to get in touch with that center. And there were always weird little groups, you know, that would get off on one side or another. It would look like that psychology is some sort of a modern development, which, on a

[33:51]

certain point, you look at it, and myself and I, you know, it's like that history of the Church, you know, and I'm trying to just look at it in a sense of a vacation, so maybe psychology has led this positive view of the Church. No, it's not so at all. I think what psychology is, is the attempt of the West to make up for its loss of contact with its religious root. In other words, I think the West has a massive neurosis because it has become so secularized and lost its real center, lost its real human core, which can only be in religion, which can only be in God. And for us, for our Western tradition, it's in Christianity. Now, having pulled away from this and having sort of shifted its whole ground, its whole foundation over onto the secular, from the religious, there's a massive neurosis. There's a massive emptiness and a massive anxiety and a massive, you know, disorientation, and that's where psychology grows.

[34:52]

What it's trying to do is to compensate, make up for, substitute, actually, for what faith and more organic and religiously oriented doctrines should be doing, or pastoral therapy and so on. Psychology is a substitute for something that would be in the religious sphere, in an integrated culture, or at least would be connected with it. It seems like for Christian scientists, psychologists, they have also found losses in Christian traditions. Because you can say that the physical science should be independent, but you can't say that about the human sciences. The human sciences, in the end, have to be connected with the spiritual depths and with the center, otherwise... Because if the center is wrong, you lose contact with religion, and people are sick. So it's a secular substitute, I think, for the power of spirituality, by and large. Which is not to say that everything it does is invalid, not at all.

[35:54]

But for me, it's good, and it's helpful, in our present precarious state. And elucidating that area of knowledge does lend a better balance, finally, when you get the whole thing together. It's good to be lost, in a sense, sometimes, because you explore some territory that wasn't known before. Any other questions on that before we turn to dark places? Or on emptiness? This time, we did some of our general survey before, instead of after, but that's okay. It's a conference. It's a conference next Friday. It's the one on perfection. It's number ten, and it's chapters six through thirteen. No, it's eleven. It's both in the post-Nicene Fathers, and it's also in Western philosophy.

[36:59]

So we've got some ideas, then, to keep in mind as we go through this. First of all, Dorotheus talks about the two kinds of fear. You always get that, because that paradox just leaps to your eye when you read the scripture. Saint John says, perfect love drives out fear. And yet, the psalmist says, fear the Lord, O you who love him. And we find thousands of similar sayings in Holy Scriptures. If, therefore, the saints who so loved him feared him, how can he say love casts out fear? Saint John wants to show us that there are two kinds of fear. One preliminary, the other perfect. The one found in beginners, the other in those perfected in holiness, those having arrived at true love. One forms a desire of God through fear of condemnation. This is, as we have said, the starting point. Another forms a desire for God because he loves God himself, loves him and knows what is acceptable to him.

[38:03]

This is, you know, it's a reality which grows in us, and it's hard to put it into words. And every statement of it, like this, is somewhat inexact and incomplete. And he talks about the perfect fear. But it's impossible to come to perfect fear except through that preliminary fear. Now that, of course, is disputable. I think some people are given a gratuitous experience of God which dispels all fear for a while, and they have fear afterwards. I mean, you know, they may go back to the beginner's fear afterwards, but they can be given an experience like that which dispels the, which gives them perfect fear, the perfect experience of love of God and the fullness and abundance and positivity of God and goodness of God, which makes it pretty hard for them afterwards to get back into the position of sure God fear. Saint Basil talks about three states.

[39:06]

The first, this is a classic thing that comes out in the whole of tradition. For instance, in St. Bernard in the U.S., in different versions, here's St. Basil's version. There are three states in which we can be pleasing to God. The first is that of fearing punishment, the state of slaves. We're already acceptable to God, and it's a state of grace. The second is the state of servants working for wages, fulfilling orders for our own advantage to see that we're self-centered still. The third is the state of sons where we strive for the highest good. You'll find some people talking about the state of friends, and I'll tell you about the state of servants, the state of friends, the state of sons, and the state of friends might even be the highest good. Forget how it is for St. Bernard. Because Jesus says, you know, I don't call you servants anymore, I call you friends. So it depends on which sequence you take. This is parallel to Cassian's theme, that we're moving from fear or faith through love

[40:08]

and through hope. You see, hope is the hope for your own reward. So both the fear and the hope are still self-centered to love, which is God's reward. Anthony said, I no longer fear God. Thank you. He repeats himself. Perfect fear cannot come about if the man has not that beginning of wisdom. The scripture says the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. So we talked about that enough, that fear is more than fear. So much of this is a semantic problem, it's a problem of words, that we're continually mistaking a word for reality, we're continually being unhappy because the whole of reality doesn't travel with the word. And because somebody uses a word, it really means something else, from the obvious, circumscribed definition. By the fear of the Lord, every man turns away from evil.

[41:08]

And for me, that seems to be the key, at least to fear as fear. That we need, in order to turn away from something, we need a voice, a word, something stronger that tells us you cannot, you know, like the commandments, those negative commandments, the Decalogue in the Old Testament, thou shalt not. In order to turn away from something under which we're stuck, we have to have something that, we have to have a word that pulls us away from it. And the effect of that word can be called fear, in a sense, even if on the other end of it is a promise. It is if you want to have God, you cannot have this. But there's something of fear in there, in that appreciation of the difference. That knowledge that the two are incompatible, okay? That you cannot have God and you cannot have this too. That you cannot be saved and do this. You cannot serve God and man, that kind of thing. We need that. We need that unless we're already completely pure. Why?

[42:11]

Because the other good, at that moment, if we're stuck on something, the other good is not that evident to us. It's not that powerful to us. The most powerful thing for us, on the level of our sensitivity or sensibility or whatever, senses, is what's right in front of us, it would be a meal or whatever. And how is something else going to turn us away from that? Not by overpowering it on the level of good, really, but only through that reasoning thing that says you can't have both of these. You can't have this and also have God. So that's kind of fear in a broad sense. It's the business of turning away, not of returning to. The turning away which is part of returning to. Okay, then he quotes this psalm, which I remember Saint Benedict also quotes in comments, I think, in his prologue. Come, my children, listen to me, and I will teach you the fear of the Lord. I'll talk about this in a second.

[43:15]

Then over in the middle of page 113, he sums himself up and prepares for his second part. Now we've heard what the perfect fear of the saint is and what is the preliminary fear which belongs to our local state. How we escape from it, where we come to it, through the fear of God. So he's described the journey. Now he's going to talk about the how. Lastly, we desire to learn how the fear of God comes about, and to do this we must say what it is that banishes us from the fear of God. Then he quotes a very rich expression of one of the fathers here. The fathers tell us that if man gains possession of the fear of God, who is this father? It's not identified here. Nestoros. But these are in those obscure sources, and we don't have them in English. This reverend number 15 to now, now was a Benedictine. He collected all these scattered saints of the fathers that hadn't been in their regular collections and published them in some articles. And afterwards they were all gathered together by the monks of Salem into a three-vibing

[44:22]

French collection, which we don't have in English. Some of them will probably be in Benedict Award, you know, the second of the vibing. It's called the Wistermunde. First, by keeping the thought of death before his mind and becoming eternal punishment. Secondly, by examining himself each evening by how he's passed the day. Thirdly, by never giving rain to his tongue, and by keeping a close and continual touch with a man possessed to the fear of God as his spiritual record, that's the fourth one. Notice how all of these are kinds of remembering. What he's really talking about is remembering God. And remember also, the first to be of your heart is Saint Benedict in chapter 7, which is really the sense of the presence of God, that the eyes of God are upon you all the time, and from that everything else comes. And Saint Benedict talks about it also in those terrible terms, in terms of fear. And yet, we need something to translate it into, in terms of a continual remembrance

[45:23]

of the presence of God, of the reality of God, the remembrance of what we're doing here, the seriousness, mindfulness, in the language of the East. And here we get to just a difference in personality, a difference in psychology between us and the men of the third or fourth or fifth or sixth century. But that was the language for them, and they didn't flinch under that language. But we simply have to understand, partly because of that whole, what do you call it, zone of civilization which has buffered us off from the area where fear is a significant concourse. There's a neutral zone that's come in there in some way, a buffer zone, so that we don't relate to life well anymore in that way, so immediate reactions of fear. You've got to remember that some of these people are probably barbarians, though.

[46:47]

For instance, Saint Benedict, Brother Dorotheus, these people haven't all been to school. I don't know if they had schools in those days. And so it's like an elementary civilizing pedagogy at the same time, you know, it's as if they had to be taught the very rudiments of civilization sometimes. It seems to be true in some of these cases. Like where Saint Benedict puts the Ten Commandments in his book. So it's no wonder. Well, we can grab it at another level, with the sense of the presence of God. If one can grasp the presence of God, then that's what it means. There should be something else there, too, though. Not only the sense of the presence of God, but the sense of what that means in terms of the seriousness of God, because people can sort of glide and float on the sense of the presence of God if we're not careful. If we don't remember the word of God, if we don't have the Gospels, can you have Jesus without John the Baptist? Well, Jesus himself is John the Baptist, in a sense, because he keeps speaking that same word when he predicts the end of the world, when he predicts the fall of Jerusalem. A lot of things like that, in a sense.

[47:50]

So somehow we've got to have it all there. And even the sense of the presence of God, if it becomes, what would you call it, the sensuality of the presence of God, then it's not authentic anymore. And that's possible. It's possible for somebody with a sense of the presence of God to fall into a kind of spiritual sensuality, because that's not the whole thing. It can be. A sense of the presence of God can contain everything, and it's certainly a better start than fear. But it doesn't necessarily contain everything. It doesn't necessarily make us true to God. Like some of those people that cried, Lord, Lord, and didn't hear the word of the Father, they might, they could have had a sense of the presence of God. But if we do consider that, I think, that we're talking about an experience of perfect devotion to God, and trying to put that experience of God into practice, then we're going to have a great change in the world as we go through this.

[48:52]

Right. Because you get people that do that. Like the Levite and the priest walking along the road by keeping the presence of God. So they didn't see it, but they got it. And they put it on the street. That's right. On the street. Nobody can know it. It's the presence of God. It's the presence of God. That's right. It's sensual. It's sensual. Okay, but also the word of the Gospel tells us that they should have seen what the Samaritans said. The word of the Gospel tells us that our sense of the presence of God has to be extended to the presence of God and our brother. Things like that, okay? So that we know. If we didn't have the word, I don't know if we'd know that. It can be. Yeah, because there's a physical thing there too, you know. When I say sensuality, I mean that. There's a physical resonance somehow of our experience of God, which in the end can separate

[50:00]

itself from God himself and be a self-centered cycle, as in TM. Yes, so it doesn't relate to God, but you might find some of them. We'll call that sense the presence of God. We'll call that experience the presence of God. Yes? How do we keep in touch with the language of the scriptures now? And yet, you know, to see through the words and the material, and develop new vocabulary and understand them, and yet to keep in touch with them. Okay, I don't think we can develop a new vocabulary.

[51:01]

A new vocabulary which replaces the language of scripture, okay? Excuse me, I don't think you can do that. The scriptural words are what they are and have to remain the word of God. And yet, for our own sake, it's like, here's a scriptural word, and then I make another column of maybe five words, which for some, for me, fill out the meaning of that word in scripture, okay? Something like that. A whole range. And then to check them out, we have to go back to the original word. And there are things in that scriptural word that we're not ready to hear yet, but they're still there. And if we simply translate it into a word in our own language, you know, in our own vocabulary, we're going to lose that. We're never going to hear it. It's something that we haven't heard yet. But at the same time, we have to get out the whole spectrum of meaning in that word. And some are part of it, we just can't hear. I mean, part of it we don't want to hear, and part of it we haven't heard yet. There is not only the words, it's the actions. It's the actual history.

[52:02]

You say, well, how could that be God's word? How could God say that? How could he tell him to do that? It's a whole theological problem. Okay, then he talks about how, he started out, how a man gains possession. It's a matter of remembering one way or another. And how do we chase away from us the fear of the world? When we do the opposite. We don't keep before us the thought of death, of punishment, but we tend to our own condition, or examine ourselves. We live differently and are occupied with different things, pandering to our liberty, giving way to ourselves. Okay, what's all this? Self-forgetfulness, or forgetfulness, anyway. So it's a question of remembering or forgetting. And then he gets to a word which is kind of key here, and he's going to talk about it a long while. That word is parasia. P-A-R-R-E-S-I-A It's a word which has an interesting history in the scripture, and then afterwards in monastic tradition. Because in the scripture it tends to be a positive, in the New Testament.

[53:05]

And in monastic literature, it's a negative. For a Dorotheus here, it's a negative. The word is translated self-indulgence by the translator here. It would be good if you write in that parasia, because self-indulgence doesn't express it. Self-indulgence means something else to us. Parasia is a confidence, but it's the wrong kind of confidence. And St. Paul uses the same word for Christian confidence, or for the freedom of the sons of God. I didn't get time to find it in the occurrences in St. Paul, but I will in this talk. So there's a right confidence of the sons of God, and then there's a wrong confidence, which is, especially in the monastic life, which is a kind of contempt, or a kind of self-confidence, or a kind of bold complacency, which doesn't listen in a sense, which is closed. And it's very hard to find the words to translate that exactly what he's talking about. There are a bunch of words.

[54:06]

It's interesting too, because we see it. If you read St. Bernard's The Steps of Pride and Humility, if you read those Steps of Pride, you get an idea of exactly what this is, because he writes it out, draws it out in descriptive terms, even ludicrous terms. There's confidence. And this, once again, touches the nerve of that problem that we have of monastic spirituality and the monastic tradition, and then what we know of our own experience, and what we know of what Christianity is supposed to be. That Christianity is supposed to be confidence and freedom. So how can confidence and freedom be wrong? It's like you have three sides. You have monastic tradition, represented by Dorotheus, and putting it on your guard against this confidence and this freedom. He says it's wrong. Then you have the word of the New Testament, which says that Christians are born into a new confidence and freedom. And then you have the word of modern psychology, which tells you that you've got to be confident and free in order to be healthy, in order to be a full human person.

[55:07]

You've got those three voices speaking. Now, how do we get that all together? Then you've got, of course, the Old Testament, which I didn't speak about. Maybe it's more on the side of monastic tradition. I think we need to try to understand what St. Paul was talking about first, and then how that corresponds with the psychological world, and then what Dorotheus is talking about in the light of that. And then you would find texts, even in St. Paul, where he's talking against that false confidence, in the works of the flesh, for instance, and a lot of that. St. Paul is exactly the right example to put alongside Dorotheus, because he is the preacher of Christian liberty and Christian confidence. He's the one who boasts in the Lord. And Dorotheus, it seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction, and asking us to go back under the yoke of the old law. The law of fear, the law of contraction, the shrinking of the heart, in a sense.

[56:09]

But even the old law didn't mean that. That was only a wrong interpretation of it. So how do we get together, really, these two notions of the freedom of the sons of God, the confidence of the sons of God, their boldness, and remember where St. Paul says that when the Jews read the Old Testament, they've still got a veil over their hearts, and a veil over their faces in some way, because they don't see Christ inside. But we would unveil faces, behold the glory of the Lord, as we go from glory to glory. Unveil faces, and that confidence that he's talking about is parousia. Now, how do we get that together with this monastic thing? We'll talk about that more next time. If you want, you can look up that word. I don't know where it would be, for instance, in the dictionary of biblical theology. It might be under confidence, or something like that. There's a subtlety in that true confidence. It's the same thing as another manifestation of what's so prevalent

[57:11]

when we're carrying the love together with the fear. There's a subtlety and a tenderness hidden within that true confidence, and kind of a balance. There's another pull, there's a counterweight that keeps it from being ego-centered. And in that tenderness, in that sensitivity, and I think it's the secret of this other thing, which is what Veracruz is talking about, within the boldness and the confidence of the sense of God, there should be the refinement, which is one with this putting off of the world, the purification of confidence, this purification of freedom, let's put it that way. So that gradually one moves from a superficial level of freedom to a deeper level of freedom. In which he doesn't hurt anybody else. In which others can be free as well. Which is no longer self-centered, but God-centered, and therefore, this goes to the other, or Veracruz to the other person.

[58:13]

Anyway, let me talk about that next time. But there are other monastic writers who write in the same terms about this parousia, and make it the first of all evils. And what is it? Let's try to get a look at it before we leave this. It's the contrary of the spirit of the fear of God, which is a kind of forgetfulness of God, and a forgetfulness of oneself, and therefore, which responds on the surface. And therefore, which reacts just according to one's own pleasure. And that's why the translator calls it self-intelligence. It responds just in terms of what I want, of what is pleasing to me, of what seems right to me. It's the forgetfulness of God, therefore, in this self-centered attitude. And it's manifested largely, you notice he's talking about the fear of God, and it's contrary.

[59:15]

But he's talking about the behavior of your brothers, mostly you. Immediately this thing is manifested in a lack of respect for others. Another way it's translated by some of the prophets is familiarity. And remember that old proverb, familiarity breeds contempt. There's a kinship between the wrong kind of familiarity and contempt. If there's, what would you say, friendship, the right kind of relationship underneath this, then one doesn't have to be that afraid of familiarity, even though one can still overstep. It depends on the quality of the relationship. But notice that here, Dorotheus is not talking about relationship with your brothers. It's almost as if that's not in the picture, in this form, in the sense of individual relationships. You're relating to God, and the relationship to God and its quality is manifested in the way that you behave towards your brothers. But he doesn't seem to conceive, actually, of relationships or friendship between the brothers.

[60:16]

That's a peculiar thing. And in a lot of the monastic traditions, you don't find that. So, as the contrary to this false confidence, he's talking about respect for our brothers, instead of just reverence for God. Okay, let's leave it there for today and come back to this next one. This is an important thing for us, because in the quality of our own life together, what we've been trying to encourage is a kind of warmth and spirit of fraternity, right? And a typical thing here now, a typical thing is not using the term brother when we talk to everybody. I mean, one can do it or not do it, but it was insisted on before, and we don't insist on it anymore. We don't insist on calling one another brother, Brother Francis and so on, but we refer to each other by simply our first name very often.

[61:20]

And why is that? It's in order to develop a sense of relationship and of friendship without having a kind of formal obstacle in the middle, okay? A formal obstacle of the term brother. Now, that would seem to be moving in the direction of this kind of familiarity, of this kind of parrhesia, this kind of confidence. And yet we find just empirically that we need it. We need it. So how do you get the one without having the other? How do you get the right kind of confidence without that forgetfulness and eventually that kind of contempt for our brothers that's supposed to go in? I think we're in a much different context today in our community than Dorotheus was when he wrote this. And this is one of the places where we sort of have to measure the difference. We have to understand what he's saying, and then we can apply to it. Our needs are different. And somehow the texture, the atmosphere, the likeness of the community is different. Even though the essential communion has to be the same at the bottom. Right.

[62:26]

And usually an exception is usually made there even when we just use our names. It doesn't have to get in our way. And there may be a time when we'll want to go back to it, okay? But during a certain phase in the growth of our community it seemed essential to let that go and to permit that greater familiarity, that greater closeness. I won't say greater, but easier closeness without it. In other words, to lean on that side. There may come a time when we need to lean on the other side and to use it once again and when we can do it continually without any problem. But even if we did, I think there should always be room for the exception. Because a way of speaking like that should be a kind of law, like in music, where there's always a moment where you depart from that in order for an emphasis, because there's a need. In other words, to absolutize a language would be a mistake. As a kind of law. Any other questions?

[63:30]

Notice how the fear of God has its repercussions immediately here, though on the level of community and not just on the level of relating to God himself. The thing that this reminded me of, this Eli Siegel, you know, my friend there, he's got this expression that contempt causes insanity. And contempt is the beginning of all the problems of the human psyche, of all of man's psychological problems and of all social disorders too. And contempt for him is a preference for self which is heedless of the other, or which somehow grows by putting down the other. Or thinking that my good, somehow, is related to the non-good of the other, or at least to the ignoring of the other. And ignoring, very often, is a not quite conscious deriving of my good from somebody else's evil. There's no such thing as neutrality. So ignoring is rejecting in a certain sense.

[64:33]

And this kind of thing, considering oneself and what one likes and heedlessness of the other, this contempt that he's talking about, is a two-sided thing. We're always doing something to our brother.

[64:45]

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