23–36

23. Let this also not be hidden from you, that the enemies of truth work unceasingly to blot out the truth. But God always, from the very creation of the world, appeared to His creation and taught how God should be fittingly glorified. But when, through the weakness of the body and through the enemies who war against it, the good strivings of the human soul lost their strength, and for this reason a person could no longer attain even what belongs to him by nature and by his purpose, and still less could free himself from sins and rise to his first state — then God in His greatest mercy looked upon him and by the giving of the law taught man the true glorifying of God. But since this too did not help man, who is inclined to sin, then God, seeing that the sore was growing ever sharper and demanded decisive treatment, resolved to send His Only-begotten Son into this world for our healing and salvation — Jesus Christ, who is indeed our only Physician.

24. Wounded with love for Jesus Christ, when I survey our times with the eye of the mind, I am now filled with joy, now grieve and weep. Many people have clothed themselves in the garment of reverence (that is, have become monks), but only a few have done so with all their heart, and few have become worthy of the salvation of the soul which is gained for us by the Lord’s coming. And these are the monks over whom I so rejoice. But the others, who have disregarded the vow they gave the Lord when setting out on this path, have submitted to the will of their body and act following foul desires; and for this reason the Lord’s coming will be for them a reproof and a judgement. And these are the monks who now think, vainly exalting themselves: how long we have been labouring! — and because of this have fallen in spirit, have stripped off the garment of reverence and become like mutes. And these are the monks over whom I mourn and lament, because the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ will be for their condemnation too.

25. With all my strength I pray for you before God, that He may kindle in your hearts the holy fire, that fire which the Lord came into this world to kindle, as He Himself says in the holy Gospel: “I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” (Luke 12:49).

26. When the wind blows moderately and there is no great swell at sea, every sailor may have a high opinion of himself and even boast of his skill; but it is only in the sudden shifting of the winds and in the great swell they raise that the skill of truly experienced helmsmen is shown.

27. He who truly has the fear of the Lord and keeps the commandments given by Him — he is the true servant of God. But this servitude, in which we too stand, is not bondage but the doing of righteousness and reverence, which leads us to adoption by God. Our Lord Himself chose the apostles and entrusted to them the preaching of the Gospel. The commandments given through the apostles established for us a beautiful service, so that we might gain the mastery over all our passions and evil desires and might perform the equally beautiful service of virtue. And when we too are clothed in virtue and draw near to God’s grace, then our Lord Jesus Christ will address us as He said in His time to the apostles: “Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you” (John 15:15). Those who have come to the grace of virtue know by experience the movement of the Holy Spirit and understand their own spiritual state; and when they know and understand all this, they will cry out to the Lord thus: “…ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.”

28. God is the leader of all and governs all by the working of His grace. Therefore do not be slothful and do not despair; call upon God for help day and night in your prayers, and the good God will send you help from on high in knowing what to do and how to act. Give not “sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids, nor rest to your flesh, until ye find a place for the Lord and God of Jacob” (Psalm 131:4–5); but be filled with divine zeal and strive to offer yourselves to God as a cleansed sacrifice, so as to become worthy of seeing Him, for, as the Apostle Paul says, without holiness no one will see God (Heb. 12:14).

29. All the saints of the Lord, when they see our deeds — that we are slothful and are not diligent as we should be in our labour — are sad, grieve and weep. But when they see that we keep the law as we ought and grow in spiritual perfection, then they rejoice, and in this joy they offer unceasing prayers to the Creator for us, that we may not lose what we have and may gain still more. And the Lord is pleased with our virtue and good deeds, as with the witness and the prayerful labour of His saints, and therefore fills us with grace still more generously.

30. Whoever does not hate with his whole soul and heart, with all his being, everything that belongs to the material and earthly body, whoever does not loathe every bodily movement and action, and whoever does not lift up his mind to the Father of all in heaven — such a person will not gain the salvation of the soul. But whoever does all this and hates everything earthly, his toil and labour our Lord will mercifully accept, and He will grant his soul an invisible and immaterial fire. With this fire He will burn up in him all the passions and foul desires and in this way will wholly cleanse his mind. And then the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ will take up His dwelling in such a person and will abide with him always, teaching him the due worship of the Father. But so long as we, together with our material body, delight in earthly pleasures, we are enemies of God, of His angels and of the saints. So I beseech you all, brethren in Christ, I implore you: never cease from labour and do not slacken your struggle in your earthly life! In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ I ask you: always care for the salvation of your soul and do not let this passing world snatch from you the eternal life, which has no end; and do not let this fleshly body snatch from you the kingdom of light, boundless and unutterable. Truly my soul is shaken and my spirit turns to stone when I think that God granted us freedom of choice, so that we might choose for ourselves the deeds of the saints and do only good works; and yet we, drunk with passions and evil desires as men drunk with wine, do not want to kindle our mind with a striving upward toward heaven and to gain the highest glory; and we do not want to imitate the deeds of the saints, that is, to walk in their footsteps, so as to become the heirs of their works and together with them to gain the eternal inheritance.

31. You, brethren, have become worthy of the greatest good, since you have received that grace which is now in you — the desire for the monastic labour. But with this it befits you to labour without sloth in the name of Him “whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us” (Luke 1:79), so as to become with Him a pure and undefiled sacrifice. We know how our nature fell from its first height and how it found itself in the abyss of humiliation and poverty; but we know too how the all-merciful God appeared to it, to our fallen nature, through His law written by the hand of Moses, and also through His will uttered by the mouths of the other prophets; and we know, finally, how God did this in the last times through His Only-begotten Son, who is the highest leader of our hierarchs and our true Physician, and who alone can heal our deadly sickness. We know that He took our nature, clothed Himself in human flesh and of His own will gave Himself for us and for our sins, and in this way by His death delivered us from death. So look deeply into the ordinances of our Creator and consider His commands diligently; understand His coming to us, to the inward and the outward man — that coming which took place after we, formerly intelligent, became senseless and were enslaved to the will of the enemy, the worker of evil, the father of lies.

32. How endlessly great is the number of the evil spirits, and how countless the wiles and devices that come from them! For they do not leave us in peace even after they see that we have come to know our passions and our shame and are striving to keep away from the evil deeds into which the devils lead us; even when they know that we no longer lend an ear to their evil counsels and suggestions. And not only do they not leave us in peace, but with still greater fury they set about their evil work — our deception — since they know their own lot and inheritance, hell, which God has finally appointed for them because they hated God utterly and departed from Him. Would that the Lord might open the eyes of your hearts, so that you too might see how very great are the wiles of the demons and how much evil they bring upon us every day! And would that the all-merciful God might grant you a brave, watchful heart and a spirit of understanding, so that you may be able to offer God yourselves as a living and sinless sacrifice — the greatest of offerings — and so that you may always guard yourselves from the envy of the demons and from their evil counsels, from their hidden craft and their disguised malice, from their alluring falsehood and blasphemous thoughts, from their sharp suggestions and counsels that look like the truth, which they put into our hearts every day! Beware of anger and slander, to which the evil spirits push us; beware of justifying yourselves and judging another, your neighbour, and speaking evil of one another; beware of speaking to one another with a sweet tongue while at that very moment you are embittered in your heart — lest you condemn the outward in your neighbour while keeping a ravening beast within yourselves; do not dispute with one another and do not rise up against your neighbour in order to set yourselves up on high and to appear righteous before others. Every person who takes pleasure in his own evil thoughts falls by his own will, like a wicked servant who meets the enemy’s suggestion with sympathy and, deceiving himself, thinks to justify himself by deeds done only for others to see — outwardly, while within he is the dwelling of an evil spirit, who teaches him everything unseemly. The body of such a person is full of shameful deformity, since he is enslaved to demonic passions instead of driving them away from himself. The demons have no visible body of their own, but we become bodies for them when in soul we partake of their dark thoughts; for in receiving the evil thoughts of the demons, by this we receive the demons themselves into our soul and body and make them visible.

33. The intelligent and immortal nature is hidden in our corruptible bodies so that in it and through it it may show forth its working. So we must turn this body into an altar of incense, offer up on it as a sacrifice all our thoughts and reasonings, all our evil desires, set them before the Lord, rise up to Him in soul and heart and with our whole being entreat Him to send down on us from above His immaterial fire, which will burn up everything that lies upon this altar and will cleanse us. And if this happens, great fear will fall upon our adversaries, and they will perish by your hand as those who did evil to the prophet Elijah perished by his hand (3 Kings 18:25 and following). And then we shall see with the spiritual eye the man coming up from the divine waters — He who does us great mercy: He pours upon us the spiritual rain, that is, He waters us with His Comforter, the Spirit.

34. The devil, who by reason of pride lost his heavenly rank and fell, unceasingly increases his efforts to destroy those people who have desired with all their being to draw near to the Lord, and he does this by the very same means by which he himself fell — that is, by pride and the love of vain glory. With the same means the demons too war against us, who, kindling pride in our souls and resorting to other wiles, strive to remove us from God. Besides this, they resort to another device against us: knowing that a person who loves his brother and his neighbour loves God above all, the evil spirits put hatred of one another into our hearts and often go so far in this craft of theirs, and achieve so much, that some of us find it loathsome even to see our neighbour and spiritual brother, or do not even want to say two words to help him. Many truly worthy and great fathers have laboured for virtue, and many just as worthy have wearied themselves for good works, but in the end, by their own want of understanding, have destroyed themselves. And it will be no wonder at all if the same happens to one of us when, say, we rest from our toils and think: how many good deeds we have done, being full of virtue! And if such a thing happens to us, let us know that we have fallen into this sickness of the devil: we vainly exalt ourselves, and, enslaved to pride, we think we have drawn near to the Lord and abide in His light, while in fact, it turns out, we are wrapped in darkness. And what else moved our Lord Jesus Christ at the end of the supper with His disciples to rise, “to lay aside His garments… to gird Himself with a towel… to pour water into a basin and to begin to wash the feet of His disciples” (John 13:4), but the intention to give us an example of humility? Yes, humility and obedience the Lord depicted for us by this act of His at the mystical supper, and He told us that whoever wishes to reach the divine heights and to be counted by God among the first will not attain what he desires in any other way than by humility. For at the very beginning too the angels fell from heaven because of pride — heavenly beings turned from spirits of light into dark, evil spirits! So if there is not in a person full humility and obedience, humility with the whole heart, the whole mind, the whole spirit, the whole soul and the whole body, then such a person will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

35. If we truly and sincerely want to follow our Creator, we must labour also to free our soul from passions and desires according to the spiritual law, since because of our evil deeds, because of our delight in the passions and because of the many other temptations of the devil, our intelligent power has grown very weak and the good strivings of our souls have been stifled. Because of the desires and passions that take hold of us, we can no longer know true beauty or see the needs of our spiritual nature. And there is no salvation for us anywhere save through our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Apostle Paul says: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). Our Lord Jesus Christ is the salvation and the life of every intelligent creature, created by Him in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:27).

36. We bear the names of the Lord’s saints from the day of our birth and are clothed in their very garment from the day we entered upon the monastic labour, and in this we boast before unbelieving and weak people; but we do not care at all to imitate the saints in virtue and in the doing of good works. And I fear lest we become like those people who, in the words of the Apostle Paul, will live in this world in the last days and from whom he bids his disciple Timothy to turn away, since they, along with much other evil, “have a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof” (2 Tim. 3:5). So may the Lord grant you to understand what in its essence is the gift of life you have received, so that by the spiritual working of this life you may become worthy to receive the invisible inheritance! And that we may do every work of ours, as far as possible, in accord with the work of the Lord! This is our duty, since such action belongs to our first nature — for God created us for Himself. So to live in accord with the will of the Lord is our chief duty in this world, and nothing else besides this should be required of our virtue. Whoever serves God with his whole soul and heart and seeks Him with all his being acts according to his first nature and in accord with the will of the Lord; but whoever commits some sin is worthy of blame and punishment, since this is foreign to his first nature and is contrary to the will of the Lord.