Somebody suggested, Victor said, why don't you do a class on Thomas Merton, and it became interesting. But maybe what we should do is take a look at monastic theology in our time. It's good to move from one thing to something that's quite different, so that you get kind of, you get a wide perspective on each. And so what we could do is take a look at those different traditions that we were talking about in the Hausher's article, those different currents of Eastern spirituality, for instance. Take a couple of, this would be a quick thing, but take a couple of sample texts from each one, and then move into our contemporary monastic spirituality and theology, and try to get our bearings there. See what the change has been, and what has been constant in those two. Merton could be a kind of focus. But also to take a look at somebody like Marmy, for a contrast with Merton, or Vanzella, or some of the other monastic people, to give you a sense of the field, and then center

[01:05]

on him, in a principle sense. So this discourse of Dorotheus is on the fear of God. But as we saw, Dorotheus is always, he's always talking about everything, and he's always talking about the same thing. If you read through this discourse, you'll find out that he changes his subject after a while. Remember? He moves from, in the first part he's talking about the fear of God and its function in spiritual life, and then he gets into this other subject, which is sort of the law of our being, and the fact that you have to, what you sow you are going to reap, and the kind of work that the monk is about. Which, according to these Eastern fathers, is always concerned with the passions, with eradicating the passions, with rooting up the vices, and sowing the virtues. And that can be very, I don't know, very heavy for us after a while, to keep hearing that

[02:07]

language. What we need to do is get a sense of the mechanics of it. I shouldn't even use the word mechanics. But a sense of the laws that are involved here. In other words, it's like learning the law of your own being, the law of your own nature. The same thing that the Eastern disciplines are doing. For instance, if Cornfield talks to you about meditation, about getting beyond a certain level of your own psyche, he's talking about the same thing in another language. This is the way that our monastic fathers talk about it. It should be verified in experience that our insides react in this way. That we are bound or free, for instance. That we are weak or strong, depending on what we do. Depending on how we relate to our feelings and our reactions and the things that elicit those feelings. And that's what they're talking about when they're talking about the passions. So we have to get a feel of this for ourselves instead of having it sort of fall on us like a never-ending stream which we can't assimilate.

[03:11]

Because the language itself is very monotonous. This continual language of our passions. We need to get a sense for it. What it means to us. And in a sense it may be simpler for us. And in some ways it is simpler because it all boils down to really one thing. When we get to Maximus Confessor we'll see how he boils down all of the passions to one passion which is self-love. And which for him has been a moderate love for the body. So it's a kind of wrong connection between the spirit and the body. So it's as if the whole of the spiritual life consists in untangling that wrong connection and making a proper connection. In other words, to the rectification, I call it deification of our human nature. Not just in such a way that the spirit gets on top of the body, gets in charge, masters the passions, but in the sense of integration. And so that the whole thing is lifted up and the passions themselves are liberated,

[04:12]

are transformed so that they act according to nature. Now, we need to get some kind of an experiential grip of this so that we begin to see it working in our own lives. Unless we do that it's just words. And it's not easy because the language is so monotonous, but we have to work with it until that language means something to us. Just to review a little bit what he was talking about last time. He was talking about the role of fear in our lives and that that role can be positive. And this is something, it's very hard for us to hear that, but I think it's true. Sometimes the only thing that can break through our shell and our sleepiness, just the shell that we keep around ourselves to keep comfortable is either suffering or fear. Not always, but very often. Because you know how if we have a joyful experience we tend to cling it to ourselves and then build a fence around it. In other words, we bring it right inside our fence if we have a positive experience.

[05:13]

Sometimes it's only the negative experience that actually breaks the fence. And so we have to find a way of changing the negative experience into a positive, which it really is if we go through it. So many things in the world are negatives on the outside and positives on the inside. Just like the things that we grab at are positive on the outside and negative on the inside. The Australia, the tree in the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He's talking about the fear of God, and then he's talking about compunction, remember, and how the fear of God sort of turns into compunction. He doesn't say so much about that. Some of the other fathers do, like Gregory the Great. He's just great in that kind of psychology of compunction. How the negative turns into the positive. How pain turns into joy. Talking about it just under that aspect of feeling. The feeling of regret or fear. We talked about those things.

[06:14]

How compunction breaks in at a time when we'd like to remember. And then there's this principle that he expresses, getting to the second part of the thing now, this law of our nature. The first part was on fear, the second part is the law of our nature. It's as if from the fear comes a kind of motivation. And then we say, well, gosh, I've got to get to work. It's like we've got a clock ticking. Ticking away our life. I've got to get to work, because this thing has to get done before I go away into the other kingdom. As Merton says, they've got their ways. He makes it sound very forbidden. Merton's version of purgatory is like a dentist's fear. Whatever way we think of it, we've got a certain work to do. And the fear is the sense of urgency about it. The word fear he calls this, because it's not good to be afraid. We don't want to even think of ourselves as being afraid. Call it whatever you want. It's something that we need here. Because what else will really pull us forward? We can't always be pulled forward by the positive motivation,

[07:16]

because we don't have that positive motivation yet about what is true and real. We're on the road to that. But that takes over gradually, as we work through the negativity that's in ourselves. Because really, the negativity that's in ourselves is not in reality. He says... Whatever is in a man here is going to leave the earth with him, going to be with him forever. And that's the principle. You see, there's a kind of a personal way of relating to God in which you figure that grace is going to do everything, okay? And so all that you need to do is be completely humble or receptive. And then there's a natural way, sort of, of thinking about the spiritual life, so that you are something. You are like... He's going to adopt this image of a field that has to be colored here.

[08:16]

You've got a nature which actually has its own laws, and that nature has to be dealt with. So really, we've got those two principles. The one you can call the personal way of looking at the spiritual life, in which what matters is your relationship with God, and if you're related to God, if you have faith, and if you have love, and if you pray, everything is going to work out. And that's true. In fact, that's the, as they like to say, the bottom line. That's the last word about it. But no matter what condition you're in, if you're open to that relationship with God, if you trust and ask and want Him, you'll be heard, and you'll be okay. But what's the other side of it? The other side of the thing is sort of this walk, which has its own laws. Our nature which has its laws. The way that Rahner talks about this is beautiful, because he talks about... That whole thing he lumps under the notion of concupiscence. He says there are two elements of the spiritual life. One is just the freedom of God and our own freedom. There's this relationship that Keating talked about.

[09:17]

Father Keating talked about the play of love in the middle between God and the human being. And that's what's really important. And that's what the mystics talk about. But there's also something else. There's this thing in us, whatever it is, this weight that keeps us from being free for that relationship of love. And so we have to deal with that. And that's what Rahner calls concupiscence, in a very broad sense. Everything that pulls us down from the freedom really to relate to God the way we want to. We want to, but we don't want to. And what is it that keeps us from falling in love? What we want to. That's that concupiscence he's talking about. That's a word of St. Augustine. It's Paul. Yeah. It's Paul in Augustine. It's Paul in Romans 7, where he says, I have a law in my members. He's talking about the law of God, but we could just as well talk about the law of God. I want to love God with my heart, but there's something in me that doesn't let me. Because every time I try to move towards God, there's something that pulls me back and says, no, you're going to have to let go of this or that, or it's going to be painful, or it's going to be scary, or whatever, so we don't do it. And when he gives us an opportunity,

[10:20]

we turn it down sometimes because it costs too much, or it's too difficult, or we're not ready for it, or this isn't the proper moment, or we choose not to recognize it. But that's what does it. It's that thing that holds us back. So that's what we're concerned with. And the Greeks have their way of looking at it in terms of pathos, in terms of passion. Just like there are things in our nature that, what would you call them? Are they weights, or are they shackles, or are they defects, are they diseases? You can talk about them as being weeds in your garden. See, they've got all these different images for them. But the central word is pathos, passion. And a passion is something which is involuntary, but which affects your will, okay? Because pathos, passivity, passion, all of those words come from the same root, and they all mean something that you're not in control of. So it's precisely that which keeps your will from being your will. Precisely that which binds your freedom so that it's not really freedom, and which keeps you from being yourself, okay? So then he picks up this image of the field,

[11:28]

which has to be cultivated, and he carries that throughout the rest of the discourse. But note these two ways. They're kind of important. These two aspects of the spiritual life, of grace and nature, and the two ways of looking at the spiritual life. Personally, when you talk about grace and love and faith, and you and God, okay, or Jesus and you, now that's the personal way of speaking of the spiritual life. And you'll find that some people don't speak of it in any other way, especially in the West. In modern Western spirituality, say from the 15th century, you'll find a lot of people who never talk about that natural aspect, or hardly ever. It's as if nature were totally out the window in some way, or totally hopeless, and all you can do is seek God personally, and then he will do it with his grace. Now there's something about this, which is actually the conquest, okay? Because the other way is treating yourself as a certain nature, like as a mechanism which has its laws, or like a land which has certain qualities to it,

[12:30]

so you have to cultivate it, you have to fertilize it, you have to water it, all that, okay? But those are natural laws. And these are typical of the Eastern ways, right? I mean, the non-Christian Eastern ways, a lot of them, like yoga, is dealing with your nature, isn't it? It's not personal, because you're not related to a personal God. You don't think of God as being personal. But you're dealing with your own nature. Now that's something that we don't have much of in the West. Even in Eastern Christianity, they have more of it than we do, because they talk about the passions in this way. They have kind of a science of your own nature. Now, this lasted into the Western history, up to the scholastic theologian, like Thomas Aquinas, who has a beautiful kind of doctrine of the whole thing, or synthesis of the whole thing, but it becomes less and less a practical matter, especially in monasticism. Okay? I mean, regardless of the practices that we do in the Bible, I really feel that all the practices, Buddhist practices that are used,

[13:33]

should be used at all times. And, you know, to the guidance of the Spirit. Because, like, we say, okay, we do such-and-such practice, and it's going to give us such-and-such results. Or we're going to call such-and-such a doctrine, and it's certainly something that's going to give us the knowledge that we want. I don't think we're ever going to find what we're looking for. I think the idea, or the ideal, is that this practice, whatever it is, is going to build a relationship between the people, and this practical thing, and to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so that each individual is taught in an individual way, in preparation for their future. And that's the value,

[14:36]

the adventure of the spiritual life. If we have to just reduce it to the practice, and the effect, the cause and effect, we draw on that. If we did that, it's on the same level as science on the outside. I mean, as physics, or chemistry, or things like that. Because you're dealing with nature, and it's below you in some way, you know. And when we do that, we're dealing with ourselves insofar as we are below ourselves, and not yet ourselves. When we deal with the Spirit in terms of freedom, and obedience directly to the Spirit that way, and with a person, then we're dealing with ourselves on the level of ourselves. That's what we are, you know. The other thing is there too, it's part of us. But I mean, if we deal with the spiritual life in terms of nature, and natures, and laws, and practices, those things, we haven't got there yet. You're right. And yet we have to do it in a way, because otherwise it will catch us up. You see, if you get into a completely personal approach to God,

[15:40]

there are traps in that. There are ways in which we trap ourselves, and ways in which we deceive ourselves, unless we know our own nature. Even Jesus talks about the training of the disciple. Yeah. He talks about it. See, there are people that are led very simply and personally. Take Francis of Assisi, for example. You can't conceive of him having a spiritual theory, about the nature of the passions and so on. Can you imagine him talking about that stuff? Hardly. I don't know if he ever does. But he's so simple and so personally led, he's kind of the genius of Western spirituality. I use the word genius, I mean the saint. He's got the spirit of this personal thing in Western spirituality so thoroughly, that he wouldn't theorize and talk about those things at all. But he can do that because he's a saint. But everybody else has to set up a kind of defensive system in order to deal with those things, in order to get around their own selfishness, weakness,

[16:43]

self-deception and self-love. We've got to have names for the things we deal with. If you can deal just straight with God, that's great. But only the saints can do that. The rest is a kind of pedagogy. Remember the law in the Old Testament? Remember what St. Paul says about the law in the Old Testament? It's a pedagogue that leads you to Christ. It's somebody that leads you to school, leads you to the teacher, in a way. And it doesn't really teach you perfection. It doesn't really teach you Christianity or love. It only leads you up to the door. Now, these things we're talking about are simply another kind of law, aren't they? They're a law of your nature, rather than a law of the Covenant, rather than a law of Sinai. See, the Jews have their law, and the Greeks have their law, and the Hindus have their law. But those laws, outside of Judaism, are kind of the laws of nature which have been discovered by experience. The laws of the human psyche and of the human body and so on. Sometimes we try to get by without any of that,

[17:44]

but I think we fall into a lot of pits when we try to get by without any of it. Because what we do is we don't recognize the things that are in ourselves. See, we don't recognize our own motivations and so on. And then psychology comes along and catches us out, because we find that there's a whole lot of ignorance about ourselves, and that we have fallen into a lot of illusion, and that we're calling things spiritual, which are really psychological, that may be physical, may be psychosomatic. In other words, a lot of phoniness develops when we don't call a spade a spade as far as our own nature is concerned. A lot of sentimentality... See, the risk of the strictly personal approach is a kind of sentimentality, where everything is spiritual, everything is the love of God, everything... And there's a lot of that language, of course. But nothing is really what it is. And nothing is really... There are no brass tacks and no nuts and bolts, but everything is just love, and everything is just sentiment and emotion. And there's an awful lot of deception that creeps into that,

[18:46]

and an awful lot of neurosis too. That's right. But what they do is they catch you out, you see, in the right way. A lot of the phoniness is there, but they haven't got the essential, they haven't got the other thing. And they don't have the personal thing. So they haven't got the really personal, spiritual-personal relation with God, which is the core of the whole thing. But we have lost our grip on our particular psychology, our Christian psychology, which Dorotheus had, for instance, in a very practical way. Okay, we'll get back to that later. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this discourse, because I presume that you've read it, if at certain points. So he keeps on with this image of the field that has to be cultivated right to the end. And agriculture has its laws, of course, and that's what he's talking about. He's talking about the laws of cultivation of the soul. It's impossible for a man not to reap what he sows.

[19:48]

You see, the insistence on that law, a law of nature, that you are made in a certain way, and what you do now is going to determine what you are later on. What you put into yourself is what you're going to get out of yourself. That's not morality in the sense of guilt against offending God, is it? That's nature. You see, you're made that way. So the Greeks have a very strong notion of that. It's almost as if their key word... On one level, the key word of the Greeks is intellect, is mind. On the other level, it's nature. They tend to treat things in terms of nature. Even when they talk about person, they tend to talk about person in terms of nature. Whereas when a Westerner talks about person, he thinks of a face, he thinks of a living human being, and an interpersonal relationship. Not so much for the Westerner. They're complementary to each other. Then he talks about the roots of these things, the roots of these passions, over on 187.

[20:50]

A man must combat, as I was saying, not only the bad habits, but the unruly passions which cause them, so a habit would be a ritual way of acting, presumably, or reacting. But deeper than that is something in you. Nowadays, what would they call it? They'd call it a complex or something, I suppose. It's an emotional complex which makes you react in a certain way. It's deeper than the habit. The Scholastics make a distinction between habits and passions, but it's not quite the same thing that he's doing here. I think for them a habit is something that's with you for a long time, and a passion is something transitory. But that's not what he's saying quite, because the passions here are with you for a long time. Certain passions, and this is descending to another level, don't go strong if one cuts out their causes. So the passions themselves have roots. An example of these is jealousy, which in itself is nothing but one of its causes is vainglory. A more proper word here might be envy rather than jealousy. Someone who is eager for praise is jealous or envious

[21:56]

of someone who is being praised or given a special honor. We find that in ourselves when we're gleed when somebody else is praised. We may slide over that without noticing it, but that really tells us something about ourselves. If we thought too much about it, we could get depressed. But how jealous we are of glory, of praise, as if, my goodness, nobody else in the world should be praised except me. That belongs to me. If there's praise, if there's glory, that particular goody belongs to me. But that thing can be very deep in us. We don't want to be too upset by it, because we've got to remember that our deepest hunger, in a sense, is for glory, is for the glory of truth, the glory of the truth of our being. And that somehow it is infinite, but we have to get to it in another mode in which we don't have to compete for it, in which the more you have, the less I have. So it's not as if that passion is ever just going to get quenched.

[22:56]

It's going to come up in another form, like it is with sinful. Anger has diverse causes, but the principal one is love of pleasure. So if you just deal with the anger, and if you don't get to the love of pleasure, it's going to keep coming up, because the root is there, and the plant is going to keep popping up through the surface. He says, Every one of the vices comes from one of three things, love of glory, love of money, and love of pleasure. Where does that come from? One place is from the letter of John, where he says, There is nothing in the world except three things, that are the pride of life, the pride of the flesh, and still, the pride of the eyes, the pride of...

[23:58]

It's funny, because I always knew that, and I just forgot. Anyway, that's one of them. I think that's it. So the pride of life has been glory. The concupiscence of the eyes would be greed, in a large form, which comes down to the love of money for him. The concupiscence of the flesh is lust, in its basic form. So those are the three. The Fathers very often keep that trilogy. Evagrius is pretty good at this, but the Grand Master, I think, is Maximus the Confessor. In his centuries on love, especially, he goes into this. He's a whole different kind from Dorotheus, but he sort of incorporates Dorotheus, and then he has this whole intellectual point of view, which Dorotheus just leaves out. And he synthesizes it, too. This is in the third century on love. It starts at number 56 and goes to 64. It's in that second volume of a new translation of the Philokalia.

[25:03]

Now, for him, he's a real synthesizer, so he boils it all down, as I said before, to self-love. He boils it all down to one vice, which he says is the mother of all the passions, and that's this kind of sensual self-love, which is really... I'll let you... Psychologists could make a good commentary on that today. If you get it down to a kind of infantile self-love, which is not evil, really. It's only evil when it dominates our life. But it's there for the whole of our life. From the time when you're a baby, I think, you get masters of it. Self-love has often been said is the cause of all impassioned thoughts. For him, that's Philokalia. Hausser wrote a beautiful book on this, a maximist and a professor of this, Philokalia, which is self-love. Self-love in the negative way, because it's a positive self-love, too. But the positive self-love can't dominate until this is overcome from it. For from it are produced the three principal thoughts of desire,

[26:09]

those of gluttony, avarice, and self-esteem. So here we are again. How does that compare with what he's got? From one to three. Love of glory, love of money, and love of pleasure. See, he's got gluttony for love of pleasure. Otherwise, they're the same. From gluttony is born the thought of unchastity. So he says the food thing moves into the sexual area. From avarice, the thought of greed. From self-esteem, the thought of pride. All the rest, the thoughts of anger, resentment, rancor, listlessness, envy, backbiting, and so on, are consequent upon one or the other of these three. These passions, then, tie the intellect to material things. See, for him, the intellect is the center, the noose. Remember the difference between the intellect, the way they talk, and the way we mean. Tie the intellect, tie your center. Others would say your heart. Hunter Hezekiahs would say tie your heart down. Tie your intellect down to material things

[27:12]

and drag it down to earth, pressing on it like a massive stone. Although by nature it is lighter and swifter than fire. So he goes deeper than Dorotheus, you see, with this notion of the noose. He's really talking about your center. Dorotheus doesn't usually do that. He's on the level of experience, relationship, the sort of bread and butter of life, the interactions of life. He's not on this deeply contemplative level of maxims. The origin of all the passions is self-love. Their consummation is pride. Self-love is a mindless love for the body. He who cuts this off, cuts off at the same time all the passions that come from it. And that's kind of the basis of the way the Fathers treat the body. And why they put so much emphasis on Fatherhood and Justice is because they feel that that loop of self-love is there. And until that thing is cut in some way, we're never free. Never free for the contemplation that he's talking about. The same thing is in St. John the Cross.

[28:13]

Where he talks about sense and spirit. There's a certain kind of experience which is always related to the body, always related to sensuality. And there's another kind of experience which is spiritual. And he speaks as if one had nothing to do with the other. He speaks that way. It's very mysterious. But there we are. Now, we can have a lot of trouble with that language and that theory, but the theory makes a lot of sense, because we have to do it. Then it takes me to say, we have to love the body, and protect the body. Exactly.

[29:15]

Because we're protecting the body all the time. It fits in with this thing about the fear of death that we were talking about. Because the fear of death is a bodily thing. And you can say that all of our self-centered defenses are like the fear of death, which in its base is bodily. Even the self-image thing is very related to that. That's why we can think about that a little bit, too. Good. I think it's possible that there's a real danger... I don't know if it will be true, but there's a real danger that as the meditation takes place in the body, unless you have an attitude or a mindset already that what you're going to see is harmful to you, there's a danger that you're just going to get more attracted to it. How do you mean when it takes you into the body? Well, you can sweep the experience. You have to at one time be sweeping, focusing on the breath or sweeping through the body sensations. And you can do that all inside the body.

[30:18]

And you can identify with it, which is like... Some of you said it's like a neurosis, to identify with the unconscious, like the inflated ego. Because you start identifying with these sensations. And then in the meditation, you constantly remind yourself, don't put any names to these sensations. Don't put any characters. Because you can really know that what your body is doing is what your mind is doing. It's really paradox. And you can start seeing different characteristics of your sensations and how that relates to your body. And they say, don't put a good amount of pain here, a happy feeling here. And that's why I think we orientate ourselves unnaturally. I mean, we have a tendency to do that. I think often they put names,

[31:20]

but they don't put judgments. So you identify a sensation as being... You can even say pain, pain. That's not saying bad, bad. And then you begin to relate to it, or to identify it, and then, without judging, to just relate to it. Which in a way can get you outside of it. It gets you inside and outside at the same time, but it gets you beyond the judgment that's in the middle, the idea thing that's in the middle. That's the problem. It's to free our nature from those mental things that stand in its way. It's a curious thing. You see, all this language about the split between the body and the spirit, and the fact that you almost have to leave the body, it's a real problem. However, it's like there's a kind of pivot where one has to get a certain distance from the body in order to reintegrate with it. Get a certain distance, and then around that distance, that kind of independence from the body, swings a new reintegration of the body, so that the body and the spirit are once again one,

[32:21]

the way they're supposed to be. At the same time, they can have a very sort of fierce asceticism with the body, okay? So, the heart is the place where you can relate to the body in a positive way. It's almost as if all the other ways of relating to the body, with all these passions and everything, were negative. But if you get into the heart, there is the pivot where your relation with the body, the relation between spirit and body, turns around and becomes positive in the light of God, sort of, you know, or in the light of the name of Jesus. The heart is the place where it happens. And then the rest of the body can be brought into a very gradual process. Is this a lot of volume? I'll read a little more of Maxwell's work.

[33:25]

It says a lot about self-esteem. Self-esteem... He who has been granted knowledge of God and fully enjoys the pleasure that comes from it. What pleasure is he? That's just true. Despises all the pleasures produced by the soul's desiring power. Now, this one is typical of Maxwell's. It's John of the Cross in another language. He who desires earthly things, desires either food or things which satisfy the sexual appetite, number one, or human fame, number two, or wealth, number three. Okay, there you have your three passions. Or some other thing consequent upon these. See, these are the roots in all the other desires and passions and things stem from it. Unless the intellect finds something more noble to which it may transfer its desire. Now, the intellect, what he's talking about is desire. Now, what kind of an intellect is that that has a desire?

[34:37]

You see, he means more than the intellect in our sense. He means the center where knowledge and desire are one in some way, okay? Now, the Hesychast would call it the heart. Other people would call it the center of the soul. Martin would have his own name for it. It will not be persuaded to scorn these things completely. The knowledge of God and of divine things is incomparably more noble than these earthly things. Now, that's Maximus' first principle. You find it right at the outset of his centuries on earth. And he's so stern about it that it's like you have to get out of the body in order to have this knowledge of God. But that's the dynamic. And the noose, the center, that intellect, that contemplative intellect he's talking about is the place where it happens and it happens through prayer, largely. It happens through prayer. In prayer, you're able to know God and also the word of God as this comes through. You're able to know God in a way which changes your motivation fundamentally and frees you from being tied down to those other things, those things which are basically outside of ourselves.

[35:38]

And then we live through our center and from our center rather than from outside of ourselves. Here's his first chapter in the first century on love. These are masterpieces, four centuries on love. They're very severe sometimes. Love is a holy state of the soul disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. See, the knowledge of God, there's the thing. There's more to that knowledge than knowledge. That's not knowledge in our sense. It's something else. It's being filled with the reality of God in some way. And it's expanding in the light of God. It's not just knowledge any more than the intellect. It's just intellect in our terms. We cannot attain lasting possession of such love while we are still attached to anything more of it. So that's sort of his first principle. What we've just read just translates it into other terms. Breaks it down, makes it more specific. It can be scary because we feel that it's asking more than human nature can bear.

[36:38]

But that's where grace comes in. It's a slow, slow thing. And we get glimpses. God will touch us now and then and show us that he does want us to find that freedom. And then we'll fall back. And then we'll get another glimpse. So we need to revive that sort of science of our own nature. We need to find it in our own language. There's very little being done about that nowadays. And it's a tragedy. The bridge has to be built between that language and that knowledge that's there, that experience that's there and, say, the knowledge of contemporary psychology. Which squares with our experience more. So that we can get that together. Then he's got another principle here, that the soul can't be empty. If you take out something,

[37:43]

you've got to put something else in. Similarly, it can't be still if it's not moving in one direction it has to move in another direction. If it's not going forward, it's going to go back. Do you see the similarity between these two things? And the paradox that's involved here, because in contemplative prayer, what are you taught? In hesychasm, what are you taught? You should be still and you should be empty, right? And here he's saying, you can't be still and you can't be empty. So he's talking on another level. And to be still, on one level, is to be filled, on another level. To be empty, on one level, is to be moving forward at a greater speed, on another level. To be empty of these desires he's talking about, is to be moving towards God and to be full of God in some way, because God and his grace have to be there in order to enable you to be empty in that way. To be empty and to be still and not grabbing at the same time. And to be still is to be moving towards God. Because the only thing

[38:44]

that will keep you still and from reaching and grabbing and striving and wiggling is to have God in you unless you're asleep. He quotes Luke 11, 24 to 27. When the unclean spirit goes out of a man he goes about through parts of places he can rest and so on. And then he comes back to the house from which he came out. And coming he finds it empty and swept and garnished. And then he goes and gets seven other devils and brings them back and installs them somewhere. You can interpret that in different ways. The way he interprets it is, if you drive out the vices you have to plant the virtues. Otherwise more vices will come back. And the other image that he uses is the image of the land. If you pull up the weeds you've got to plant good seed. Otherwise more weeds will just come in. We can still wonder exactly what Jesus means by the image. It really means that you have to

[39:46]

purify. Your purification has to fit with God. It seems to me. It's like talking to the scribes and pharisees. Men who purify themselves. Remember what he said to them? You're white in sepulchres. You're graves with rotting bones inside you. You're rotting with garbage inside of you. You're beautiful on the outside but you're rotten on the inside because you've purified yourselves on the outside. You've another cup and a dish and a plate. And meanwhile you've run wild inside. You're full of, what did he say, hypocrisy and sin and lust and murder and whatever. It's possible for us to do an external purification and still in our hearts to be hanging on to sin hanging on to that self-love and producing a great falsity so that we get worse and worse in a way on the inside but we polish ourselves more and more on the outside. It's possible for that to happen. So it's an emptiness on the inside which is also got to be full of God on the inside. The heart has to be transformed.

[40:47]

You have to make space for him, not just for self. So either we're full of him or we're full of self, as Augustine would say, I guess. One is growing and the other is diminishing at the same time. As we cast away vice, virtue, and brought in vices in the past, we must now work at throwing out our vices and replacing them with contrary virtues. That language, it's very hard to hear that language of virtue and vice in traditional moralism nowadays. It needs to be translated for us. By God's gift the virtues belong to the nature we possess. For truly when God made man he sowed the virtues in him. This image of the field comes back to me. Let us make man to our own image and likeness. To his image, since God made the soul incorruptible and self-determining, made it eternal imperishable and also free and self-determined. To his likeness

[41:49]

which means having similar virtues. The virtues are like something that comes from the outside in a sense, but they belong to the nature. He's going to get down to it later on when he talks about the opposite. Just above there, he says every vice has its opposite virtue. Pride has humility, avarice has almsgiving, licentiousness has self-discipline, neglect has perseverance, anger has viciousness, and so on. So those, I take it, would be the kind of virtues he's talking about. You can say they're habits but really they're acts, because what he's been talking about is the dynamism of the spiritual life. That you're never still. You have to be doing something. There has to be an act to this. So the virtue for him, it seems, is an act. It's a doing. Rather than thinking of it as a kind of thing that inheres in you, often he seems to be thinking of it as something that you do. Emphasizes the dynamic aspect.

[42:50]

He's kind of a philosopher but he's a moral philosopher and so he immediately jumps into behavior and act. Now that theology of the image of God is going to be conceived by different people differently. Some of the fathers would talk about man as being the image of God because of his intellect, because he's got something in him that's able to see God. Now, Atheist is not saying that. He's much more interested in the will than he is in the intellect. And so he talks about man's besides his imperishability, his freedom, and then the virtues that he has. So these are moral qualities that make him like God. And that's very much like the New Testament, it seems to me. But it's not all, there's more. God gave us the virtues as an endowment of our nature. So they may or may not be there. They're not part of the essential image, but... And this is like a lot of the fathers talk about, that likeness is something you can lose, but you don't lose the image. And we've lost the

[43:52]

likeness through sin, we have to get it back through virtue. But to look at it this way is not quite satisfying from another point of view. To say that the virtues make us like God. We want a more unified view in which we can really see the one light of God upon us. Something like that, I think. In which we can have a kind of vision of ourselves as containing, bearing and reflecting God within us. And not just by some kind of moral qualities that are unified. The whole of our nature on fire with God, or alight with God, like the burning bush or the transfiguration. So the moral viewpoint doesn't carry us quite as far as we want to go, but it's essential though, because we don't get there except that way. Faith working through love, he says in 1 Corinthians. That's the thing between Paul and James, where James emphasizes the works and Paul emphasizes

[44:54]

the faith. And of course, they're both important. Depends on who he's writing to, for one thing. He might say to some people, work, and other people he says, just believe. See, that's what he writes to the Galatians, where this Jewish thing, this Judaizing thing, that works, works, works, blah, blah, blah. So he describes it. So he's a philosopher. He says, the vices have no essence or existence of their own. They're like darkness. And he talks about state of vice. Down at the bottom of 189, I wonder if this puzzles you the way it puzzled me. God leaves a man to himself when he does something foreign to his spiritual state. The word there for state is catastasis, which is widely used by the Proverbs.

[45:55]

And I think that he's got the same word there that Wheeler translates natural temperament below. Catastasis, I think is the same word in both places. I didn't check the first one. I checked the second one. So we have to be careful. It's not just a natural thing. It's not simply a spiritual thing. But it's more like a spiritual thing. As for example, when a man who is cautious indulges in foolhardiness, or a mild man breaks into violence, God does not abandon a foolish man who acts foolishly or a courageous man who is over-courageous as he does a discreet man who is foolhardy or a meek man who acts violently. This is to sin against his own, he says natural temperament, but to sin against his own state. I don't know, okay? And from this comes his abandonment by God. Now why would that be? Why should God turn against somebody who sins against, say, his own natural temperament or sins against his own state? What does that mean? What's so bad about that? That's it. I think that's it, okay?

[47:04]

You're rejecting the grace you've been given. If God gives you something to be saved with, he gives you a central virtue, okay? If he gives you a charism like, and you throw it away, that's your salvation, isn't it? And so you rejected his grace, and that's the only way you're going to get it, unless he has another special mercy on you. So that seems to be the key, okay? It's like each of us has a core given to us on which to mold a personality with which to find God. And it's given to us naturally but supernaturally. One fits into the other. And if we throw that away, we don't have anything anymore. Because that's the way that we have to find God. So it's a matter of rejecting grace, I think. If we think it's just a matter of going against our personality, you know, or something like that, it doesn't catch you. David? ... [...]

[48:05]

... You know, Thomas told me something. He was very impressed with that. Go ahead. ... [...] Thomas said, you see, he said she was transformed into this globe, that's her gift, you know.

[49:12]

But that thing about your gift and having to do it, now, that's important, isn't it? That if we throw away the particular way that God has given us – you can talk about vocation also, can't you, in a sense, but I don't want to talk about vocation exactly in terms of a community or a congregation or a religious order or a way of life, but the inherent gift, the gift that's inside you, that that's given to us, that way is given to us to be saved with and to help others with at the same time. She had a healing gift, but that was her own salvation, you know, that's her simplicity. You throw that away, that's it. It's like Jonah, remember? Jonah throws away his gift and he goes round and round in the belly of the whale until he, until he changes his mind. It's the Jonah thing, but it can be worse. Also, on a larger level, you can look at the Jewish people and the whole of history on a larger level, because their gift is the salvation of mankind. It's focused and consummated in Jesus, the Word of God, and when it comes, if you throw

[50:14]

that away, they don't have anything. They do it in a way, you know, but in another way. It's the Jonah thing, round and round. So, it's the same thing that happens with the Hebrews, that we met at the Pestilence, which are the people who had what's that experience, grace, and they throw it away from them, and they throw it away, and it's the salvation. Yeah. Now, that can be in a general way. Here he's talking about a particular quality, okay, a particular kind of gift. The two are connected. We often think of gifts that just are stuck onto us. I mean, you're anybody. And if God gives you a gift of hearing, he gives you this gift to let go, as if it didn't have anything to do with you. But look how much it has to do with you. Look how much it has to do with your personality and your salvation, okay? So, it's not like that. The gifts that we're given are very important to us. This has all kinds of consequences. Yeah. Now, we're lumping a whole bunch of things together here, so we've got to be careful about it. You see the importance of the connection between our salvation and the gifts that are given

[51:16]

to us. If we had a whole bunch of lives to live, one after another, it might be different. But we have this one life, and certain things are going to do us a lot of stuff. In a sense, we've listed that it's somehow connected against our nature. Yeah. We say, you know, the tendency to be, you know, organized, but maybe we should be strict with something. That's right. That we have to resist in a way that... You may even have to resist a gift, okay? If you... I mean, a natural talent, like... Or even the gift of a... Like the carry of oars in the skull of the Carthusian, something like that, you know, seems to be a gift. But he didn't go, and evidently he wasn't supposed to go. And so it goes. But even more on the natural level, there may be natural gifts that we have that because of our chief gift, the chief grace and vocation we've been given, we may never be able to realize, okay? Talents, you know, abilities to study art, whatever, can happen. Not necessarily. We shouldn't make it a principle, but it can happen. Because you can't fulfill... You can't realize yourself in all directions.

[52:17]

Amen? Particularly at the time of conversion, the one gift sort of eclipses everything else, you know? Everything else becomes unimportant at that time. But then later on, you find that those other things are part of your salvation too. They have to be brought back. Maybe you were supposed to be helping people, you know? It can happen that a craftsman or somebody is so tied up with his art that he forgets

[53:22]

the people that are sent to him for him to help something, or his family, or the spiritual art itself. Because there's a hierarchy of values. And you may have another gift. This idea of abandonment by God is a scary idea. The word for that is encatalypsis. And there's a lot of history of that, I think. Encatalypsis, there's a sizable article on it in the Dictionary of Spirituality. And it's got several different forms. One thing is abandonment by God, which is kind of medicinal, you know? The grace of God disappears. It's a desert experience, basically, when you don't feel God's presence in the desert. But then there's another kind of abandonment of God, which is our fall. And that's what Dorotheus is talking about. And which is much more fearful, much more scared. Because really, we're not out of God's hands, but we're on a wrong road.

[54:27]

You can have abandonment by God when you're on the right road. In fact, that's one of the signs of being on the right road, is enduring that kind of thing, is being able to endure it. You don't know how. But we can also have a kind of abandonment by God when we're on the wrong road. And that's the one. Here we get back to the idea of the fear of God. That's what he ends up with in the Discourse. We've got to be able to get down on our knees and prefer him to anything else at that point, because we don't know where we've come off. Can you tell the difference between these two attitudes? Yeah, I think you can, to a certain extent. And the mark of one, I think, is anger. When you're on a wrong road, you're not going to have any patience. There's a fundamental negativity from that cut-off from God, which makes you furious at everything that comes against you. So you won't have any patience and affliction. You won't be able to take anything. You won't be able to suffer. Whereas the other kind, the person has a kind of strength that's given to him inside,

[55:34]

so he can go through it, even though it's very hard. And he's like the man you read about in the psalm, who's crying out to God. But the guy who is really abandoned by God isn't crying out to God. He's angry. He doesn't react that way. He doesn't move towards God. He moves away from God when something comes, something negative comes up to him. We can experience some of that, at any time, some of that anger. But it's really deep and turns into bitterness, I think, when a person has gotten on a wrong track, and it can turn into despair. Whereas there's something that keeps the other person always from really despairing. He can think that he's despairing, but still there's a strength in him that keeps him from that. Okay, maybe that's enough about that. We'll be quitting in a minute, so I'll just sum up a few thoughts about this topic. First of all, that notion of the place of anxiety, anxiety in our life.

[56:41]

And there are two kinds of anxiety. There's neurotic anxiety, and there's a real existential anxiety, and this connects with the fear of death, the fear of bodily death, which there's always a physical connection to it. Then, we talked about that thing, that sort of Christian neurosis or Catholic neurosis. What happens when the way that we understand our faith itself, or the way that we understand the monastic life, the religious life, turns negative in some way? And we get unhealthy kinds of fear and scrupulosity. Now, these are things that we absolutely have to cut through, because they spoil Christianity in a sense. They spoil Catholicism, they spoil the religious life. And that's where things like psychology help us. We're able to identify those unhealthy spots, get rid of them, and then restore the monastic life, or restore the Christian life to its power and its freedom. Then, there's this fact that a breakthrough very often comes after a period of fear, after a period of real anguish.

[57:43]

That's the time when somehow we can be disposed for a special grace from God, and you take another step forward in your life. Remember the notion of compunction in the monastic tradition, and how that kind of fear of God is the road on which the monks would travel. Although, gradually, it must have become more and more free, and more and more tender. But nevertheless, that's the road which they kept themselves. And they moved freely from fear to love, cashing the rule of St. Benedict in St. Barnabas. Very much in the Western tradition, especially the movement of fear to love. But it's universal, because it's already in the system. The two kinds of fear along that road. Survival of fear, which is fear of punishment, and the fear of which remains, and the fear of which is, somehow, wisdom. And that loving fear of offending, the sensitivity of love, which is the fear of a son, who doesn't want to injure that love which he has been given. And that's a very delicate and beautiful gift, which you see, also, between people.

[58:47]

They would rather be hurt themselves, than hurt the other person. And then fear is within faith and love. If it's outside of faith and love, then it's bad. But it's within. It can be a kind of purification of a memory, a memory of a past life. The idea of purifying your hope by being surrounded, or pursued in some way, by fear. Fear which is able to cut off our attachments to various things. So our one hope is the only one. That's probably enough for that. Next time we can go on to the next one, on trials. Isn't there something to savor that Dorotheus has for these subjects? Subjects like trials and afflictions and so on. He's at that point of a really good doctor who knows what's good for you.

[59:52]

And he's got a whole bunch of bottles full of bad-tasting pills, bad-tasting medicines. It just goes from one to the other. You've got to take it. Okay.

[60:09]

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