In a very general way, you find an astonishing correspondence there, you find that the trip of the Jews out of Egypt and through the desert and into the Promised Land is exactly what we go through, what we're going through all the time. And you find that when St. John of the Cross talks about the night of ascension, you know, the night of the Spirit, he's talking about the same thing. In other words, what's night for him is desert for Harlequin, for the Scripture. And so you find that that thing happens in every one of us, and that's the story of the Christian life. Now this is not just in a way in which you'd say it, and there it is, but a way in which you can meditate on that time and time again, you know, through your whole life, and you keep finding new lights and new reassurance in it. So, that's the level of symbolism, and it's extremely rich. Daniel Lew is one who's written a lot about this. He's got one, in a lot of his books, he writes about it. The one in Origen, for instance, he goes through this thing of desert and spiritual life in the last chapter in his book on Origen, the chapter on the spiritual life. And he's got another one called Shadows and Reality, in which he talks about the types

[01:01]

of Jesus in the Old Testament, the images of Christ in the Old Testament, and how they're fulfilled in the New. When you begin to see how so many things reflect the coming Messiah, reflect Jesus, in the Old Testament, then the whole of Scripture begins to take on a mysterious sort of growth or materialism. You expect to find something under every stone, actually. Very often you do, but it's only when the Holy Spirit fights it off. But anyway, so there's a kind of a unitary thing beyond all the games of allegories. The allegories are sort of the play, the game. It keeps you entertained a bit while you remain in contact with the deeper symbolism, the totalistic thing, the total picture. And the reason why this, one reason why this is important is because it shows us that all of reality is one, in some way, and everything in reality, on one level, reflects something on another level. So the Old Testament reflects the New Testament already, and our spiritual life is reflected in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. And so, and even in nature, you know, that's the other end of the speculation.

[02:03]

Okay, we'll go into that some other time. So many of the Fathers seem to go on and on about nothing at all. I find the envies are very pleased. I don't know who asked these questions that made this difficult. We've already talked about that. Sometimes, if it's too dull, you just have to change to something else. And it may be that they're just talking about a matter that doesn't interest you, and they had to talk about it for a good reason. But something, you know, the bishop was preaching and something had happened in his church, and he talked about that. And sometimes it's just because we're not where they are. And it's possible for every speaker, every writer, to be dull sometimes. I find it very difficult to get worked up about things that are past and finished. Now, this may be a shallow notion of history, you see. Because the fact is that the things that the Fathers are talking about are very often the same things that exist in our time. And we don't recognize it because we don't know history. Consider Gnosticism, for instance. You know, Irenaeus wrote these vast tracts against the Gnostics.

[03:08]

Fire folks against the Heretics. And if we look around, we can say, well, that's archaeology. We don't have any Valentinians or anything like that. But if you look around, you'll find that there's a whole jungle full of Gnosticism in the world today, as running rampant around the borders of Christianity and also in Solomon's. If you don't know history, and if you don't have some acquaintance with the Fathers, we repeat the errors. We go around in the same circle, you see. We keep making the same mistakes that have been made in the centuries. We keep falling into the same pits. It's been said that everything has been tried, you know. That it can all be found in history. You can argue with that statement, but at least to some extent it's true. That every false path has already been explored. And so sometimes we're going to find that the Fathers, when they're out beating some narrative or talking exactly to some mistake of our time, to which I myself may be inclined. And what they're doing is trying to steer the Church back into the middle road.

[04:10]

Back into the right path. Some of those things, of course, can be pretty complex. You get into that question of grace and free will between Passion and St. Augustine, and you get into a complicated thing, which is not easy even nowadays to straighten out completely. But the problem is very alive with us still. In the way that I operate in my own spiritual life, whether I sort of live as if I were doing it all under my own steam, or whether I have a substantial opening for grace and for faith, whether my life is simply a sort of a hopeful ageism, whether my life is a self-centered ascetical striving, or whether it is an openness to God's activity and a following of His activity. I shouldn't go on so long. So a lot of these things are very contemporary. Other ones are not contemporary, and so we can pass them by. But ordinarily, the first time we read about these things,

[05:12]

we don't understand their significance for us today, you see. The first time we read, we don't understand the significance. But we have to maybe study it anyway. Now here I'm talking more about the study of Church history than about reading the Fathers. We have to go through it anyway, and then later on we find the significance. But if we don't have that acquaintance with it, in the history, or in the Fathers, we won't get the significance when it comes up. I've never read that. I don't know if we have it. We'll have to find out about that. Martin, in some of his writings, is like the new man. He points out a lot of those. Some of those are the revelations, because of Promethean spirituality and so on.

[06:14]

He doesn't have them. Difficulty 10. The writings of the Fathers are riddled with Platonism. I find it difficult to profit from writings permeated with a philosophy that I cannot accept. Okay, now this is a very thorny question. It's true that there's not only Platonism, but Stoicism, plenty of it in the Fathers. But what do the Fathers do? What do they represent? What distinguishes the Fathers from Scripture? Largely the fact that they represent a world of thought, which is not the world of thought of the Bible, and they're reading the Bible, and they're trying to arrive at a synthesis between those two world of thought. Now the world that they come from is the Greek, Roman, Eastern world of thought, which is not Jewish. So you've got the collision, the confrontation of those two worlds of thought. One the biblical, the other usually the Greek, the Hellenic.

[07:16]

So, what's the answer? Do you just filter out the Greek element and throw it away? Do you filter out, siphon off the Platonism and throw it down the drain? Or maybe, does it have something to offer also to us? That's a big question, because there are certain people who said, no, you've got to get all of the Hellenism, all of the Platonism, everything, out of Christianity, any other factor of Christianity. And yet, Platonism may have been providentially designed as a vehicle for Christian thought. And a lot of the fathers thought that too. St. Augustine thought that. Thought that Plato, for instance, was like a prophet. Not a prophet, but like a prophet. Predestined by God to offer a form in which the thought of the Gospel could be conveyed to all people, not just to the Jews anymore. But what happens when Judaism, the Jewish form of thought and the Gospel in, say,

[08:18]

a world of all different kinds of thought, that we have to be translating some of it into another thought language, not just into another word. So, that's a controversy. But we don't want to discard the Platonism, nor the Stoicism, nor the Neoplatonism, nor the Gospel. St. Augustine is one of the Neoplatonists. But often those ways were the only ways in which the new reality of Christianity could be expressed so that people could understand it in that way. It's very hard to express, really, the heart of Christian theology simply in the words of the Gospel. Especially for people who are not familiar with that problem. And Platonism often is a very suitable way. It emphasizes a certain aspect. Then in the 13th century you get Aristotle coming along, being accepted by scholastic theologians and Thomists, and a different point of view. So you've got a tension between those two.

[09:19]

Now, we've pretty well moved away from the Platonist point of view today, but we're still pretty much saddled with the Aristotelian point of view, which is down-to-earth, which is practical, which is empirical, which is rational, and so on. But Plato is more ethereal, more contemplative, you see. And some people blame our moving away from the contemplative point of view upon this switch from medieval Platonism and patristic Platonism over to Aristotle's down-to-earth, contemplative, secular type of thought. So we don't want to be too rash about throwing out Platonism as a product. You'll find a lot of proof in that view. You've got to be careful of it, though. We've found plenty of it in Natasha, haven't we? Plenty of it in Natasha. With this sort of contempt for the flesh and so on. And the exaggerated, sometimes, division between spirit and body. This exaltation of contemplation

[10:21]

sometimes over excessively putting other things in the shade. The whole movement away from earth towards heaven. Which nowadays would be very much criticized and rejected, you know. It's very difficult to find a balance. You can see the exaggeration here. But if we throw out entirely that point of view, we're just as wrong. There you are. There's another example of a new thought form coming in as a vehicle for a Christian thought. But it itself has to bear the contemplation of criticism. How well can it convey the whole Christian message? Teilhardian thought. Now what have you got here? You've got another input coming from contemporary science. Plus a certain Eastern input, I think, which is pretty subtle in Teilhard's thought. A certain metaphysic which seems more or less...

[11:23]

There are difficulties there in trying to convey the whole Christian message in the work of Teilhard. I don't think it's there, not at this point. But certain aspects are just put in too much. You know, the sexual aspects of Christianity. You get a false impression that you get your Christianity clearly through Teilhard. But every form is imperfect. In any case, the gospel, the word of God, extends beyond all of the confines of human thought. So that no one thinker or one school can design a language for a vehicle, a motive for how to put together it exposes the limits of human thought. Whether the patristic kind or the other. We can't contend ourselves to be thought-loving fathers and simply want to learn. And yet it has something very important to offer us. Father Robert Fernandes wrote a book,

[12:29]

as a matter of fact, the scope of which was to synthesize or show the grounding and conformity of the thought of Teilhard with that of a Greek philosopher. And their view of cosmic Christianity. Christ as being the world, the universe, as being the body of Christ. That's kind of the bodacious thought of Teilhard. Eleven. The world has changed since the days of the fathers. We have to do what they did and find solutions to our problems and these are specific to our own times. As usual, there's a little truth in that. Anybody who sticks, as we said, to the thought world of the fathers is going to be very ill-equipped to confront his own problems of today. This happens sometimes, right? Because monks have been occasionally formed too much in the patristic tradition or formed too much, say, on the rule of St. Benedict.

[13:29]

So they study the rule and they swallow the rule whole and they meditate on the rule and they read all the commentators on the rule, the old commentators on the rule. And then they're completely helpless when they have to confront a problem like that of authority and obedience today. Because they haven't kept one eye open on the evolution of man. The evolution of thought. The needs of today, the signs of the times and all the things that came out of Vatican II. So you can get unbalanced in that way too. Nevertheless, as I said, many of the problems of today are problems which have existed in other times. We've got to remember that man is fundamentally the same. Human nature is the same. We're still on the same Earth. We're still confronted with very much the same existential situation between person and person. How much has that changed? The relations between two men since the days of St. Augustine or since the days of Jesus. Well, they've changed, yeah, but that much?

[14:31]

How much? Fundamentally the reality is going to be the same. Yeah, people are the same. And yet they're different. If they're the same, if man has a nature which is stable, yet there's a change, there's a difference, there's an evolution. So we can't settle for either one of those statements. The statements are dialectical. Man is the same. Man has a given nature. Man has developed. Man is no longer the same. Man is an evolutionary creature. His mind, his consciousness, even his body and so on. You have to hold it to intention. See, those are the kind of statements that appeal to our simple mind because we feel, now I've got it. Now here's a point I'm going to hold it down. But the truth is never that way. The truth is somehow a synthesis of the truth. So a lot of their problems are also our problems. And yet we have to translate their way of thinking into our way of thinking. If you read Cassian, for instance, and then you try to apply his principles of asceticism to your own life, you can easily run into problems, right? Where are these ideal thoughts in my own life? That's not my problem.

[15:32]

My problem is I can't sleep. Or something like that. My problem is that nothing makes any sense to me. I'm disoriented. I don't have a sense of identity. So what good is Cassian's ideal thoughts going to do to me? Well, they're the truth. Merton could, you see. Merton could build a bridge between the two, you see. But it's not sufficient, therefore, just to think in their terms. But at a certain point we're going to find that they're talking exactly about us personally. There are matters of depth here, too, because we've got our psychological hang-ups where we come from. Those are peculiar to the 20th century because they've been created by our own society, our own conditioning. Now, that's one level. Once you get those things healed up, I mean very largely healed, you get to another level in which you're closer to the Father, you see. Because then you're confronting basic human problems the same as they were. And you get to a deeper level. You get to the intimate spiritual level, and then you're right where they were. You're right where St. Bernard was, for instance. You're right where Cassian was.

[16:35]

And so on. So, it's a matter of level. And as a person progresses in his spiritual life and gets his more superficial problems maybe clarified and worked through a bit, he finds himself closer and closer to the Father as it goes on. Closer and closer to the Scripture, too. So that both of them tend to light up and have much more meaning for him than they did at first. And you see, he's made a trip. It isn't just a matter of translating him into his language or bringing him to us. It's a matter of really travelling to get where they are. ... Is there anything that you can say about your problems with, say, reading Cassian? Or the taste that you have? Maybe you'll have better difficulties than most of the characters. My problem for a long while was that they just didn't relate to my own experience.

[17:37]

And sometimes it was just a blur. Sometimes just a blur and just teetering. Sometimes I find them coming on much too strong. Depending on where you are, you see, if you're in a place where week-to-week fasting is not exactly the indicated medicine for you, and you start reading St. John Chrysostom, somebody who's very harsh at that particular moment, they start to turn you off completely. They say, well, this is a paper. It says nothing to do with it. It's not for me. The same thing can be true of St. John, of course. I didn't want to generalize on St. John Chrysostom by saying I might have picked somebody up for it. But sometimes you find a particular work of the Father was very unbalanced because he wrote it for a particular need at a particular time.

[18:37]

Just like the saying to the fathers of the world was, go and sit in your cell and listen to each other. Well, that was great for that monk. It probably was for him, but for me, it might kill me. It might drive me crazy. Something that might seem clear to you, especially when it speaks about the demons. What can it be? I mean, what's it say? Well, for one thing, I think it's important because it makes you question your own thinking. It makes you question modern day thinking. Well, the Fathers believe in demons 100%. We tend to believe in them 0%. Where's the truth? It's important that that happens. If you read the New Testament, you find demons all over the place. And you ask yourself, well, who's right? Is it true when some of the exegetes

[19:38]

say that this is just a figure of speech for some psychological infirmity? This possession that Jesus is continually dealing with is simply a metaphor of St. Matthew or of Jesus himself for psychosis or something like that. Is that true or not? The question is, it's important that it be raised because, you see, if we remain where we start, our world is incomplete. If we don't include those spiritual realities in our world, then our world is incomplete. It's not really the Christian world. It's not really the biblical world. So it happens with the Fathers and that involves the Holy Scripture. Or the matter of angels. We don't see many of them. If you didn't read anything but contemporary literature and even spiritual writing, you might never really come across the notion of the existence of other spiritual beings. Well, it's important. If it's true, it's more important. It's a whole section of reality which is somewhere between us and God which we may be completely

[20:40]

unconscious of. Now, it may not have enormous practical consequences in your life, but for one thing, if you don't... This is kind of a cycle, a vicious cycle. If you don't believe that, then you're going to have a big skepticism about a lot of the things in the Scriptures. If you explain that away, explain away the angels, explain away the demons, you've arrived at a level of skepticism about the Scriptures which is very dangerous. Because then you're going to start explaining everything away which is supernatural. Sometimes you need to explain away all miracles. No matter what miracle it is, we've got a natural explanation for that. There's a thing that happens in the Red Sea every 11 years that causes it to open up at this point. You arrive at that level of skepticism and you can't get the thing out of the Scriptures anymore. You kill the Scriptures and you arrive at that point.

[21:42]

Because the power of God can't break through anything. Because by that time you've reduced it completely to the limits of human thinking, of human reason. Well, God can't get away from this place anymore. That's another aspect. The Fathers sometimes make those things more meaningful to us. In other words, if Cashin tells me about the experience of the demons which he and the other monks had, that can make it more real for me than merely reading about it in the Scriptures. If I'm following it, I'm going to like the least part of it. For example, there was a very, very recent prophecy about the truth and I'm very, very, very disbelieving in the healing of the mind. Yes, I do. And it's all very convinced. That's the question I should ask. I've been doing psychology and all this thing. Just couldn't accept it.

[22:43]

And now I saw the healing of myself. This healing is incredible. You get to a point where you realize there are two different minds there. There are two different spiritual universes. The one of faith and the other of human reason. Or human reason also is just a dash of deception. Sometimes. Let's call it human reason. What does St. Paul say? He says, the things of the spirit are impermeable to the mind of the flesh. And the mind of the flesh, what does it mean? It doesn't mean a carnal, sinful, ugly, black man. It means merely the natural mind without the spirit of God. The natural mind can't understand the things of the spirit. It can't and won't at the same moment. It can't understand because it doesn't want to understand. And the fact that the spirit isn't inside there, illuminating the spirit. Because there are things that we can't know without God knowing

[23:46]

in us those things. The spirit of God in us knows those things that he teaches us. And if that spirit isn't there or isn't active there, what we see at the surface, what we see below. Oh, there's another, talking about psychology. When we're talking about Lectio, there's more than one way of reading too, you know. We can work with our rational mind, we can analyze and so on. There's another kind of consciousness, even on the purely natural level, setting aside the action of the spirit, intuitive consciousness. Intuitive more than understanding. We've got the rational and we've got the intuitive. And they're quite different. One is more active, analytical, the other is more receptive and synthetic in the sense that it tends to see things as totality. And more unitive in the sense that the person's experience tends to be united with what he's

[24:48]

understanding and talking about. It's not just a matter of that thing out there and me over here. I have to have some relationship with the thing if I'm going to understand it. Now, this is very largely the mode of understanding by which we understand God and divine things, including the earth, including the scriptures. We need both ways, both kinds of consciousness and understanding. But that's the way in which we really get into context. You talk about understanding of the brain, understanding of the mind, you talk about understanding of the heart. The understanding of the heart is that the object is no longer really separate from the subject. Well, you understand by being one with the thing. And you're one by understanding. Nowadays they talk about the two sides of the brain. They say that your rational understanding and your verbal understanding and what they call linear understanding is rooted in one side of the brain, the left side. The left hemisphere. And it refers to the right side of your body. The right side is the dominant, masculine,

[25:50]

active side. And they say that the intuitive mode of consciousness is related to the left side, which is the more plumbly side. They call that the feminine side. The more receptive side. Whether or not that's true, there are these two modes of consciousness. And there's a whole double column that you can make of qualities of consciousness which line up in this way. Now we have to realize that we may have to switch when we begin to do Lectio from one way of thinking to another. Although not exclusively. Not exclusively. We don't completely stop being critical or reason when we listen to the Scripture. Indeed, if you read some of the Fathers, they ask you to do a lot of reasoning, don't they? Because you've got to reason out their parables, reason out their allegories, reason out their arguments. But then there's a certain moment at which they put something before you and they just leave it there and you can reason all you want and you won't get any closer to it. You have to use the other mode, the intuitive mode of understanding. Which also is the aesthetic mode.

[26:50]

It's the artistic mode of understanding. They call it the spatial understanding. Rather than words and the sculptures. Let's probably oversimplify now, but there is that distinction. Even on a natural level. In this book by Ornstein called The Psychology of Consciousness you've got two columns and I'm not sure that all of these elements certainly are not of equal value. Some of them could be very controversial. But this is how the two columns line up. He equates the analytical consciousness with the rational consciousness with day and the other one with night. Which is already giving a certain twist to it which may affect it, I don't know. Because the intuitive consciousness may be extremely brilliant. And the rational consciousness may be

[27:50]

wavering all the time over a cloud. So that metaphor is a little bit dangerous and may mislead us as we go on. Day and night that is the rational and the intuitive. Intellectual and sensuous. Well there again, that's debatable. Because if you look at the intellect in medieval theologian terms, the intellect is the intuitive mind. Intellectus intelligentsia is the intuitive mind as St. Thomas said. And ratia is the reasoning mind. When we think about the intellect, when we refer to the intellect, we mean the reasoning mind. But what the ancients meant was the intuitive intellect. The contemplative intellect. That's an extremely important distinction. Intellectual and sensuous. Intellectual and sensuous. So when he puts the intuitive on the side of sensuous it's debatable. And actually what he's doing, these are not his own thoughts. These he's getting from a bunch of different people. So you don't necessarily have to put your own.

[28:51]

Time and history. Eternity and timelessness. Active and receptive. I think that one goes for a while. The active mode of consciousness and the receptive. That paper that he recommended from the Bosch meditation on it, that was something that he took up, the bi-mode of consciousness. And relating that to the two ways of meditation. To the, what we were talking about is the meditation of the word really. The dimension of the word. Which is concentrated. And the other one which is I think he simply calls it we call it receptive. Receptive. Receptive. Concentrated, where you focus on an object. Receptive. Explicit and passive or implicit. Analytic. Breaking down. Gestalt. The right side of the body, the left side of the body. Left hemisphere, right hemisphere. Lineal and non-linear. It goes with logical or analytical non-logical, non-analytical.

[29:55]

Sequential. Simultaneous. Focal. Focusing on an object. Diffused. Masculine, feminine. Light, dark. Time, space. Divided. Verbal, spatial. I think this is where the brain comes in. I'm not sure. Intellectual, intuitive. Intellectual, intuitive. Better to say rational, intuitive. Causal, occasional. Argument, logic. Experience. So, we're moving over to the right hand column when we move into lexical domains. So we may have to change our Anyone who is used to reading literature will be used to this already. If you read poetry, for instance, usually you've got to do it with that intuitive moment. We have to use both kinds of consciousness and alternate them, but really when we penetrate

[30:58]

we're going to be using the intuitive moment. That tends to be where we get. Now, we talked about meditation the other day, we talked about lecture today. It's largely a parallel process though, you see. When we talk about concentrating we're focusing all the meditation even analytical kind of meditation breaking things down, chewing them up and ruminating on them, thinking about them. And then we talk about a purely receptive simple, quiet, empty type of meditation. We talk about a rational kind of working with the word lexical, and then we talk about the receptive. First off, there's something different from reading that we ordinarily do. So, I recommend listening to some of the articles from the periodical Chirunga. I'd like to consider several of them in order this morning, rather briefly. The first one is that one by Casey,

[32:00]

Eleven Difficulties in Reading the Thoughts. Now, there's a problem when you talk about the difficulties in reading, because a person who's a person at the beginning doesn't know what his difficulties are, right? All he gets is a fog, he gets a blur. And he says, well, this isn't going for me, I'm not getting anything out of it. But he can't explain to you why. He can't tell you whether the translation is wrong, you know, or is imperfect, or what. It's only from insight that you can tell what's wrong in the communication process. So, it turns out that the difficulties, the questions that he raises here, seem rather trivial. But we can go from there. However, his other article is very good, I think, the one on the principle of... We use this, sort of, as a stringboard in order to deal with our own questions. He makes a big point about the fact that flexio divina is something different from ordinary reading. Now, since it's so closely connected with faith, our ordinary reading, we sort of assimilate

[33:05]

things to ourselves, actually. The flexio divina, in a certain sense, is assimilating us to the Word of God. In other words, we have to move. We have to move a distance. A learning into a kind of motion. And it's likely to challenge the ideas that we have. Now, it would be oversimplifying to say that that's the only thing that happens, but it works in both ways. We take the Word to ourselves, but at the same time, the Word sort of comes into us. We find our con-naturality there, and so on. At the same time, however, the Word changes us. The Word confronts us and demands that we move so that we're not where we were in the beginning, but we move to where the Word is. So there's both an absorption, a con-naturality, and a confrontation and a demand that we move and go where the Word is. You see, the Word comes to us, but it demands that we go to the Word as well. Now, the same sort of thing is true in any kind of learning. Because you add what you're learning onto what you know, and yet, to some extent, you have to abandon your

[34:06]

previous knowledge and move towards something new. It's especially true when you take up a new sphere. But if you're studying a science, if you're studying physics or something like that, well, normally, as you go along, what you learn is going to add pretty well onto what you know already. It may not add well onto your other prejudices and so on, but it will add onto the physical knowledge that you're conducting now. However, this sort of thing, especially when you're entering a new sphere, it's something different. And it's always that way with the Word of God. It always demands that we move. And so, we have to make more than one kind of effort of understanding. It's not just an effort of trying to break down this Word and translate it into my language and say, what does this Word really mean, this particular concept in Scripture? It's a question also of my getting to the place where I can hear it. Because maybe the Word can't be heard by where I am and who I am, so I have to go where it is so I can hear it. So, we'll talk about that in a moment. So, the fact is then that we have to be prepared to make

[35:07]

a big change of mentality, to make some big steps to make a journey when we start reading the Word. Now, this is true of the Word of Scripture, but it's also true of the Word of the Father, you see. In the Scriptures, we're ready to accept that because we say, here's the Gospel, that's the basis of our faith. Of course, I have to be converted to hear the Gospel. But is the same thing true of the Fathers? And is it true only on the – if it is true of the Fathers – is it true only on the level of the things that they say that are defeated, that are of the faith that we have to believe because it's part of the Christian mystery? No, not necessarily. There's a double effort. One is the effort of a kind of conversion to the Christian truth, and the other is the effort of conversion to another world of thought. Why? Because I want to live in the fourth century? No. But because that's part of me already, and yet I don't recognize it. And because somehow, getting into another world that way is one of the ways of getting out of my own little world,

[36:09]

my own mental confinement. How can you get out of your own mental confinement unless you move into another world? So there's a conversion which is – what did he say? A spiritual conversion, but also an intellectual conversion. I think it's Lonergan, the theologian, I suppose, all different kinds of conversions. He talks about a moral conversion, and to be able to hear the Gospel there, we have to make a moral conversion. Right? Because a sinner can't hear the Gospel. Somebody who's really sunk, who's really in a mess of sin, the Gospel runs off and is like water off a stone. He can't hear it because he doesn't want to hear it, because it's harder Scripture than something else. So there's that moral conversion. And Jesus is talking all the time about the people who are at the age that they don't do the right things. And then you have an intellectual conversion, which is something different. Now, we're pretty stuck on our ideas, but we don't even know it, because we don't know those ideas as distinct things, usually. In other words, we've got all sorts of mental predispositions and presuppositions and prejudices

[37:10]

that we don't know about. And we don't realize we have them until somebody challenges us. And then we think, well, no, this is the truth. I've always believed this. It must be true. It's like standing on a stone and suddenly you're lifted away from the ground and you find out it's not the ground. It's just something you're standing on. And the ground is somewhere else. That happens to us when we get challenged. Now, in reading the Proverbs we're going to find ourselves challenged continually. And we're going to have to ask ourselves, well, who has to give way here? Is this just an antiquated mode of thinking, or really is it my mental constriction that makes it impossible for me to understand what he's saying? And it works both ways, because it's a dialogue. And then there's another kind of conversion that seems to happen, which you might call more a transformation. And that's finally the conversion of feeling, where not only do you begin to understand what the person is saying, but also your heart resonates with what he's saying. So that you like to read it now. You prefer it to anything else.

[38:12]

It's like people... The scriptures are just examples. People who wouldn't touch the Bible with a ten-foot pole, and then they get converted. And not only do they have a moral conversion, so that they can bear to listen to the Word, because it doesn't condemn them. The intellectual conversion is something else, and it's a slower process. Of course, the Holy Spirit can make breakthroughs, but still it's a long, broad process that has to take place. But there's this conversion of feeling, which can be instantaneous and reckless for the scripture. Because the scripture has this special dynamism, this special power. The same thing is true of the Fathers, but in a somewhat more subdued sense, so that it's the long term process really. In the scriptures it can be over now. A person's feeling can be completely illumined by the scriptures. So they just love the Bible and the Gospel. Maybe the Russian Pilgrims. But with the Fathers, generally, it's a slower process, because you've got these other obstacles to get through too. But that conversion of feeling is very important really to develop an affinity so that the Fathers become your friends.

[39:13]

That's a preferred occupation. And the understanding of tradition is very important too. Where we start from, we really have no conception at all of the meaning of tradition. Because modern man tends to think that he was born yesterday, in the sense that he thinks that tradition starts with him, in a certain sense. Everything that went before was sort of a mistake, but now finally we have the tools to get to the truth and we're going to work things out in our century. And modern man is, modern Americans especially, really cut off from this tradition. And that's one of the reasons we have such a flourishing of all kinds of factors in different religions. He doesn't have a sense of his own, of where he stands, of his own soul. Now, the Fathers are our tradition. They are our tradition. It takes us

[40:15]

a long while to learn what that means. And one of the difficulties in seeing it is because it's hard to see what you are. How can you see what you are unless you get outside yourself? Some of the Fathers were so habituated to their thought, like St. Augustine. St. Augustine has been so ploughed into the soil of Christian tradition. It's very hard for us to separate him off and see actually the originality of it, the specific character of what he's saying, to distinguish his insights. Because his insights have become our commonplaces, you see. And yet he's so much part of us that we find it hard to listen to him because he's too dull, really. This is true of St. Augustine and St. Gerda and so on. But something happens, though. There's a kind of freshening of interest after a while. And you begin to rediscover the elements of your own tradition and what's really inside of you in some way, as if you were meeting it for the first time. So no longer is it something like, I don't know, a lot of the things that we're too familiar with that way we've never really seen in themselves. They're just part of the big bird, which is

[41:15]

our ordinary bird. So, that's another process that has to take place. So the tradition becomes real for us in some way. And that's not easy. A lot of things that we've just... that have been built unreflectively into our pattern of thinking have to be removed and looked at again and then allowed to move back to where they are. So it has to be taken apart and put back together again. Okay, some of the difficulties that people bring up here. We'll go through these quickly and then maybe talk a little more in general. Difficulty one. The fathers wrote in Latin, Greek and Syriac. And when the translations are available they're often nearly as unintelligible as the original. One thing is the language difficulty, okay? Just knowing what the words mean. That's not such a bad difficulty because we have a lot of good translations now.

[42:16]

That one that we were using for Cassian is a hundred years old. Some people have a lot of trouble with it. And yet, you can really find out what he's talking about. There are a few ambiguous places, a few mistakes, but generally you can get the meaning pretty well. The meaning on one level. But the real difficulty lies deeper because when you're getting something translated from Greek into English you can't translate the way a Greek thought in the 4th or 5th century into the English of the 20th century and then understand it that way. Unless you've spent years and years probably trying to assimilate that manner of thinking. So the real difficulty is not on the level of the individual words but just getting the meaning. The surface meaning for it. But the real difficulty is getting into the mind that wrote the words. The same thing is true in Scripture. Being able to think like he thought. And until you do that you can't really feel a sort of friendship for what he's saying. You can't really have that resonate

[43:18]

in you until in some way you can reproduce the same thinking process or the same insight in yourself. Which involves a lot more than just knowing what that word means. So when we talk about these terms a lot of them. Well purity of heart or hesychia or compunction or any of those things. That's something else because those are distinctly spiritual and monastic things. But any of those words, those archaic words, we have a big journey to make. Fortunately it's helped very much by the Holy Spirit. So it's not just a matter of becoming an archaeologist, a specialist in 4th century Greek thought. That's a horrible thing. Because if you did that then you couldn't be a monk anymore really. Only on the side. But the Holy Spirit somehow helps us to get a unitary understanding in which we begin to see the place of all of those terms and all of those ideas and the total mystery, the total conflict. But it's good for us to understand how far they are from us. Now that's the first thing you see because, I don't know, when I started to read this stuff I sort of felt well

[44:20]

they were men who thought just as I did. It was just a matter of translating it into our language. More or less like a scientific treatise. You translate a German chemical paper into English. And there's no problem with the world of thought. Because a modern student of chemistry in America thinks just the way a modern student of chemistry does in Germany I suppose. Because you're in such a technical framework you see that it constricts your thought to that extent that it's perfectly reproducible. But this isn't true with these people you see. Because there you're talking about the heart. And you're talking about the totality of a man who's involved in what he's saying. Not just his brain. And not just with physical experiments and so on. The totality of a man. And so you've got somehow to try to penetrate into the way a man thought and felt in those days. Which isn't easy. And the only way that you do it really is by acquiring this sort of love for that thought. Which is partly a literary thing.

[45:20]

In other words, some people enjoy reading Greek dramas, you know, Greek poetry of 2500 years ago. They acquire a love for it. And because they have a love for it they begin really to understand what it means. And vice versa. As they understand it the love develops and develops. The same thing is true here. There's a literary level. But through the literary level comes the Holy Spirit. He even has different categories. He puts it all into one. We don't want to despise the literary level. It's important. It's a very human thing to learn. As well as being spiritual. Okay. Difficulty two. There aren't any good introductions. Well, he says yes there are. So that one's a simple. Question. Difficulty three. I tried to read The Father but I didn't like it. There's a brilliant challenge. So he says, well, not every father will appear to everybody.

[46:21]

And that's true. Just as if you start reading modern poetry you're going to find that you like a particular poet and you can't stand another one. It just doesn't make any sense to you. So it'll be with the father. You'll find your own favorite one. Except for Isaac of Nineveh because everybody likes him. And a couple of others like him. But you'll probably find somebody that has a certain harmony with your own, just with your own mental structure. Or with your own experience. Some people like Evagrius. A lot of people can't stand him. To come further up today, some people like St. Therese and some people like St. John the Cross. Just like Jack Spadding his wife. One of them writes in a much more cold, intellectual seeming way with a kind of a depth of fire that St. John the Cross. And the other one writes in common sense, down-to-earth terms, but a very vivid kind of experience of the heart. And it's as if you divide people into two groups when you talk about these two writers. Not that the same person can appreciate both. It's the same over the course.

[47:23]

That article of Hausser on the great currents of Eastern spirituality is very useful in that way. Because you begin to see where your own affinities lie. He talks about the intellectualist current of origin, Evagrius and so on. The spirituality of the heart. And a couple of other terms. The spirituality of obedience and so on. Without much mystical emphasis. And so on and so on. A bunch of different terms. And a person finds that one is congenial to him of a certain kind. He can follow that. But he should never exclusively follow that because then he's going to stunt his growth. He's going to confine his own his own horizon. And one of the points in reading the Fathers is to broaden your horizon, to get out of your own limitation. Okay. The task of reading the Fathers seems so vast that I don't know where to begin. Doesn't it? It is a big thing. Did you ever see did you ever see Minya? Minya's pathology of Latina

[48:25]

and Greco. In the Latin there are two hundred and some big volumes. Big ones. They're this tall and they're that thick. So it's a whole library of writing. And then the Greek has another hundred and probably a hundred and eighty volumes. These are writings of the Fathers in the original languages. The Latin Fathers and the Greek Fathers. Many of them are in Syrian. They're translated into Latin. But that's an enormous thing to look at, you see. Now it might not be so enormous if those were 19th century novels. You know, you could zip through one in a few days. But it's different with the Fathers because it's almost archaeology to get into what they're thinking. Some of them are extremely difficult. There's technical words and so on. So it is a big thing. It is a big thing. So one would be foolish just to throw himself into that ocean of literature and try to swallow it all. What you have to do is start very modestly in one corner

[49:27]

and something that's good for you, that works for you at this moment will slip away and gradually move around. But nobody has to read it all. It's incredible. There's editions of them later, like that one of me. I don't know how he did that. How he edited it all. Not all the editions are very good on him. They're just the same. It's almost a room full of books. That's just what he's up to. The initial guidance. So you need a little guidance on something to start on and then experiment. You follow one thing for a little while and say, well, this helped me or this didn't help me. It's not that big a problem. It's only that people, they tend to get lost when they launch out on their own. They want to read everything. Wandering too much from one place to another.

[50:28]

Just being hypnotized there by the diversity. The same thing you would do in any kind of study. Next difficulty. This article is worth reading. Especially because of the references he gives you. Difficulty five. It seems that I have to... Also, if you read a book about one of the fathers, say that book on Origen by Daniel, that's excellent. Because it really gives you a taste of Origen. It brings out the beauty in his writing. Chadwick, his book on Cassium, or Johnny Brandberg's Introduction to Reliability or something like that. There are things like that. If you read his introduction to the saying of the father there, and then you read the saying of the father, and then you get into something like that, you begin to like it, you get a taste for it, and then you follow with that. And then pretty soon you try a neighboring sector. You try something that's close to it. Spokonius, something like that.

[51:30]

You go on this way for years and years. And sometimes you don't seem to be getting anything. And sometimes, after a while, you may really break through and seem extremely rich to it. So that everything seems to be there. Everything seems to be conscripted in some form. It's a matter of integrating it with your life, too. Because it's not much good if it doesn't somehow connect with your life, with what you're doing. And integrating it also with your prayer. It's trying to understand by keeping some relation between prayer and meditation and this reading. The two are kind of parallel tracks. It seems that I have to keep working at the Father's a long time before I begin to reap any spiritual value from reading him. He's got spiritual underlines, so I suppose he's distinguishing that from just cultural or intellectual value. He says this is true. There may be long times where it seems just a desert. Or you might be reading the wrong thing, but you might be reading the right thing, and it just isn't

[52:31]

lighting up for you at all. It's okay, though. It's okay. You can keep on with it if it's the same. But you need other reading to bring you more savor and excitement at the time. You don't want to just get yourself into something so dull that it kills you. And not have anything else. But you have to keep working on it. And make sure you're working in the right area. If it's something that is going to have meaning for you, then just keep at it. It's that way with a lot of things that we study. At first, they attract us because they're new and exciting. But then we get into them and we find, oh my gosh, this is dead. We're not interested at all. But if you stay with it, you build a kind of mentality on that pattern, and then it makes sense to you. It's a matter of building something inside of us. Of constructing something inside. The structure of thought, the different terms of reference. You build a kind of a world in there and then it seems to make sense to you when you speak to that world. Getting spiritual nourishment

[53:32]

from the writings of the fathers takes more time and demands more application than reading modern books. This may be true. If you read a little essay by Merton, you may get a lot more of a charge out of it than spending five hours with Cassius. That could be. And yet, as you go on, you're going to find somehow that in order to get really deep, you have to go back into those earlier works. If you really want things to fit together, you have to begin to penetrate into that mentality of tradition, into that mind of tradition. Just as you may find Merton, or who's another good example of a spiritual writer who really is incisive. You may find it a lot more exciting than the scriptures. But if you just read, for instance, somebody who's in love with mysticism, when he reads St. Teresa, she really sets him on fire and really gets drunk on St. Teresa. And he sets aside the scriptures.

[54:33]

What about that? If he keeps doing that, after a while he's going to find himself living on a pretty superficial plane. He's going to find that he's just sort of entertaining himself with reading about this stuff, but it's nowhere near his life. Not really near his prayer, because he may be trying for this kind of experience, but he's not getting it. He's not getting it. You really have to get back to the centers. And the circles that are closest to the center are the scriptures and the fathers. I use the example of the scriptures because that's an obvious one. If somebody doesn't read the scriptures and just reads other things, he's going to have malnutrition. On the other hand, if he just reads the scriptures and doesn't read anything else, he may find that his life turns very grim, and nothing fits together for him, because sometimes the scriptures are too remote from his own way of understanding. Because he's not contemplating. The same thing is true of the fathers.

[55:35]

The person doesn't have to start reading the fathers right away, immediately. But when somebody comes into the monastic life, it's important that he try to enter into that world quite soon. We'll see more about that when we look at that article. But the monastic life is really grounded in the fathers. For instance, if you just read the scriptures and then you live your monastic life, you're going to have a lot of problems about justifying your monastic life simply in the light of the scriptures. Unless you justify it, unless you explain it, rationalize it or whatever, also in the light of the lives of the saints, in the light of what has been written by the fathers, what's in tradition. There are some things that don't come out clearly, merely in the scriptures, but come out only in subsequent tradition, clearly. Because tradition, too, is a word of God. Okay. Seven.

[56:35]

I'm sure that the content of patristic writings is very good. What puts me off is their flowery style, play on words and endless allegories. There are a couple of things to be said about this. There is a stylistic difficulty. We have to remember that being a different age, they didn't have a lot of books in those days. There wasn't any printing in those days. And so you had a whole different manner of communication. No printed page. Not a lot of literature. And so sometimes, oratory, speaking had to be entertainment as well as information. So they had a lot of different things to do with what they were speaking. Most of these things tended to be oral. Well, the same thing is not true for us when we read now. We've got different functionings, different purposes and use for things like that. And also, the literary style of that time was bound to turn slow. A lot of it. It just doesn't seem suited to us. It seems like a waste of time sometimes. But there's something

[57:37]

else that balances that a little. There does seem to be a lot of wasted words and wasted time. On the other side, we find a density and a kind of a centrality of understanding very often which makes it all worthwhile. In other words, there's one level on which a lot of games are played and a lot of time is wasted and a lot of useless words. On another level, they're right on. They're completely on target in what they're saying. Because their understanding is centered. And one balances the other off. Which doesn't mean that you should read every patristic work no matter how dull it seems to you. It just means that because of the rightness of the underlying mentality, a lot of what seems to be a waste of time may be very worthwhile. And often you can be absorbing on a deeper level even when you seem to be wasting your time on the surface level. But part of it is a matter of spending time in contact with the Word. It's not just what you think you're getting, what you think you're understanding at the moment, but it's spending time in contact with the Word.

[58:39]

The Word of God which is latent in that which the Father just said. Now by that I don't want to excuse all the excess of the Father. Another thing about this allegory we're turned off by. When St. Augustine explains the 152 free fish, remember that the disciples caught in some completely out-of-the-world manner. He does, I mean, he says that well, the 100 represents this and the 50 is this and the 3 is this and there we are. Remember the shore when Jesus appeared in the resurrection. Those numerical games and everything. They always seem to be using the same poker chips. Faith, hope and charity. If it's three and if it's two then there's a body and a soul. They always seem to use them. They're putting it in the Scriptures. They're not taking it out, they're putting it in. It's called exegesis instead of exegesis. Exegesis is to lead out. And exegesis is to lead in. The detail,

[59:41]

they're playing games, that's what they're doing. So consider it like music. And in music you've got one, you've got a violin up here doing all sorts of variations and down here you've got the steady bass throb. This is a string quartet. So while that violin is playing its games up there, it may not interest you too much. Something very significant is going on at each level. As this thing moves along. It's working on several levels. One of them may seem very trivial to you but meanwhile something else is going on. With the allegory for instance. If you look at the detailed allegories which they're using they can very often disgust you and turn you off because they seem trivial, just again. Is he kidding anybody with what he's saying? St. Augustine's first work. But if you look at the symbolism which they're seeing in a more simple and totalistic way, often you see it as a very great depth of truth. The way that they see reality

[60:43]

as being symbolic. The way that they see Christ as represented for instance in the figures of the Old Testament. In David or in Solomon or in Moses or whatever. And if you look at all the Father's divinity you see that there's a great convergence in the symbolism. And so it's rash to say that they're just wasting time. Even though you can be turned off time and time again by the seeming games of allegory they are games. But it's alright to have entertainment on one level while something else very serious is going on on the other level. And once again it's a matter of spending time in contact with the world. So we have to try to keep our ear open, not only to the level of allegory but also to the people. And one of them is the level of symbolism. There's a big difference between symbolism and allegory. Allegory is where you take a story for instance and you relate every element in that story to some truth. Jesus uses allegory

[61:47]

in a couple of places. The parable of the sower is an allegory. The parable of the sower is an allegory because he says he goes on and explains it. He gives the parable and then he explains it actually. He says the seed is the word of God. I don't know if he says the sower is the son of man but then the ground he tells you what that is, he tells you what the stone is, he tells you what the path is what the thorns are it's an allegory. But that allegory is very solid. It comes from a place for instance and therefore everything has its depth of meaning. And in the fathers you don't always have that depth of meaning for every one of the elements of the allegory. But the difference between that and symbolism, allegory you have a bunch of details and each detail has a deeper meaning. But the meaning may not be that deep and the whole thing may be very artificial. But in symbolism you look at something in a general way and find its deeper significance. Like the connection between the spiritual life and the exodus. Okay? The moving of the Israelites

[62:50]

to the desert. That can either be allegory or symbolism. Origen makes allegory out of it because he says that each of those thirty some stops of the Israelites in the desert represent a particular point in the spiritual life. So he makes a whole long story.

[63:05]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ