The Christian’s Relation to His Passions (Part 2)
Purity of heart and body is greatly to be desired! By it God is seen (Mt. 5:8). This purity is acquired through constant and laborious struggle against impurity. For the entry into the struggle against impurity, it is necessary that impurity first be revealed before the eyes of the mind. It is revealed through thoughts, fantasies, and carnal sensations. One who has never fought against impurity, who does not know it, who counts himself pure, is in the most dangerous self-delusion and is capable of unexpectedly and suddenly plunging headlong into the abyss of mortal sins: impurity is an inalienable property of fallen nature, while purity is a gift of God’s grace drawn out by the person’s right effort at cleansing himself.
There is the greatest difference between sinning deliberately and from a disposition toward sin, and sinning through being swept away and through weakness, while being disposed to please God. There is the greatest difference between living a sinful life—a life of satisfying all one’s desires and all one’s passions—and stumbling through weakness and limitedness and sinful infection while walking the path of God.
Premature dispassion is dangerous! Prematurely receiving the delight of Divine grace is dangerous. Supernatural gifts can destroy an ascetic who has not been taught his own weakness through falls, who is inexperienced in life, who is unskilled in the battle against sinful thoughts, who is unfamiliar in detail with the cunning and malice of demons, and with the changeableness of human nature. A person is free to choose good or evil; even if that person is a vessel of Divine grace, he can abuse the very grace of God. Because of it he may exalt himself above his neighbors; because of it he may fall into self-reliance—the consequence of self-reliance is usually negligence, a slackening in the struggle, and the abandonment of it. On the heels of negligence, carnal desires rise up suddenly and violently in the soul and body of those who have been sanctified, sweep them away like a rushing torrent, and plunge them into the abyss of fornication, often into the very death of the soul.
God, the lover of mankind, “who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4), has permitted his servants, permitted his beloved, throughout the whole time of their earthly sojourn, a struggle with outward and inward afflictions. The struggle with the passions and the sufferings that spring from this struggle are incomparably more burdensome than all temptations from without. The anguish and the struggle into which a Christian is brought by the invisible, interior battle rises in its significance to the struggle of the martyrs. “Give blood and receive the Spirit”—we repeat the saying of the Fathers who knew this battle through experience. The yoke of such struggle is borne only by those who carefully fulfill the commandments of the Gospel, only by the true servants of Christ.[1] “The fulfillment of the commandments teaches a person his own weakness”—so said the Venerable Symeon. Upon the knowledge and acknowledgment of weakness the entire edifice of salvation is built.
A strange course of things to a superficial eye! “The fulfillment of the commandments teaches a person his own weakness.” But these are the words of experience. Only through the careful fulfillment of Christ’s commandments can a person see the multitude of his passions; only through the careful fulfillment of Christ’s commandments can a person become convinced of the complete powerlessness of the old Adam for the activity of the new—convinced of the justice of the verdict pronounced by the spiritual law, a verdict that this law can be fulfilled only through the mercies of Christ.[2]
In the almighty hand of Providence, even sin itself—dwelling within a person, having encompassed his whole being, having encompassed all the members of soul and body—contributes to his progress, if that person is a true Christian.
Spiritual poverty, the acknowledgment of one’s fall, the acknowledgment of the necessity of a Redeemer, the striving with one’s whole being to confess the Son of God and God who redeemed us—our Lord Jesus Christ—these are the fruits of the battle with the passions. These fruits are a pledge of eternal blessedness.
Spiritual poverty, the fall of humanity, and living confession of the Redeemer are unknown to the son of this age. He serves the passions, perceives in himself an abundance of worthiness, sees virtues—and either expects nothing in heaven, never thinking of heaven at all, or expects rewards there as something owed him, expecting them because of his deep ignorance concerning the one virtue rewarded in heaven. That virtue is Christianity.
The servant of God, fulfilling the Gospel commandments, discloses more and more of his passions within himself; and at the very time when the grace of the Holy Spirit is forming within him blessed spiritual states—poverty of spirit, weeping, meekness, mercy, chastity, spiritual understanding—he counts himself the sinner of sinners, as one who has done no good, guilty of countless transgressions, worthy of eternal torment in the fire of Gehenna for his constant violation of God’s commandments.
The holy Fathers, seeing the spiritual fruit sprouting within them from the struggle with the passions, did not wish for this struggle to cease; they wished to endure in it valorously and with magnanimity.[3] Blessed men! They did not seek any other perfection than perfection in humility; they did not seek to find the hope of salvation in anything of their own, but sought to find it in Christ. Where there is no humility, there are no Christian virtues; but where there is true humility, there are all virtues in their fullness; there is Christ; there the passions and the “enemy” the devil who wields them “shall prevail nothing” against the servant of Christ, “and the son of lawlessness”, sin, “shall not harm him” (Ps. 88:23).
Let us follow in the footsteps of the Fathers—and we shall reach the harbor of eternal blessedness. Amen.