A Homily on the Various States of Human Nature in Relation to Good and Evil (Part 5)

Here a question naturally arises: what relation does the renewed man have to evil? He cannot avoid accurate knowledge of evil. But we have seen that the innocent human nature, in the condition it had at its creation, barely acquired such knowledge when it perished from it. So it is even more necessary to understand the relation of renewed nature to the knowledge of evil. We answer: purity of heart—the spiritual state of renewed nature, called in the Gospel a blessedness, which grants man the vision of God (Mt. 5:8), appears in the soul after the blessedness of mercy, flows from this blessedness. It is known that Gospel blessings are spiritual states revealed in the Christian from the fulfillment of Gospel commandments, that the blessings are revealed one after another, each born from the other.[1] After rejecting one’s own righteousness, as defiled by evil, out of the midst of weeping over one’s state of falling, out of the midst of gentleness—this reconciliation to all sorrows, visible and invisible—begins to be felt in the soul a hunger and thirst for God’s Righteousness. God’s Righteousness is found in mercy, where the Gospel commands us to seek it. “Love your enemies,” it says, “bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you: that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the pagans do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Mt. 5:44–48). Perfection of Christian, and therefore human virtue in renewed nature is a gracious, God-imitating mercy produced in the Christian by the development of Divine grace given to him in Baptism and cultivated by commandments. From such mercy appears spiritual purity: it is nourished by it, it lives by it. The Venerable Isaac the Syrian, when asked what is purity, answered: “Purity is a heart full of mercy for all creation.” When asked what is a merciful heart, this great teacher of monasticism said: “This is a burning of the heart for every creature, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons—in short, for every creation. From remembrance of them and sight of them the eyes of the merciful flow with tears because of abundant and mighty mercy that has seized the heart. From constant patience his heart has become the heart of a child, and he cannot be indifferent when he hears or sees any harm or even a small sorrow to which any creature is subjected. And therefore he offers prayers accompanied by tears hourly, both for the dumb animals and for enemies of the truth and for those who attack him, that they may be saved and cleansed; he even does this for the nature of creeping things, from great mercy that moves excessively in his heart in likeness to God.” From the great mercy which he felt in himself, the great Isaac exclaims: “On that day, when you suffer with anyone in any way at all who is suffering, bodily or mentally, good or evil—consider yourself a martyr and look upon yourself as one who has suffered for Christ, as one deemed worthy of confession. Remember that Christ died for sinners, not for the righteous. See how great it is to suffer with the evil and to do good to sinners! It is more than doing one or the other toward the righteous. The Apostle mentions this as worthy of wonder.”[2] Holy Isaac, comparing the righteousness of fallen human nature with Divine righteousness, consisting of gracious, spiritual mercy, calls the second service to God and the first service to idols. The Apostle speaks of the acquisition of this mercy when he enjoins those who have believed in Christ: “Put on therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, heartfelt mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other, if anyone has a complaint against another; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.”[3][4] (Col. 3:12–13). Saint Macarius the Great says: “Grace works and calms all the powers and the heart so that the soul, from great joy (mercy), becomes like a harmless child, and the man no longer judges either a Greek or a Jew, neither a sinner nor a layman, but the inner man looks upon all with a pure eye and rejoices over the whole world, and desires in every way to honour and love both Greeks and Jews.” “Purity of heart,” said the aforementioned Saint Isaac, “sees God; it shines and blooms in the soul not because of human teaching, but from not seeing human malice.” Then man does not see evil in his neighbors when all his relations with his neighbors are absorbed in mercy toward them.[5] Is not such not-seeing of defects in neighbors a blindness of the mind, a recognition of evil as good? On the contrary:[6] blindness of the mind, not-seeing of sin and evil, recognition of evil as good belong to unrepentant sinners, who justify their own sin. God’s Holy ones, enlightened by the Spirit of God, understand evil in all its detail, know its wiles and its poison; they, with the aid of this knowledge granted by the Spirit, guard themselves with special care against experiential knowledge of sins, acquired by committing sin in fact. “He who is born of God” says the holy John the Theologian, “does not sin: he who is born of God keeps himself, and the evil one does not touch him” (1 Jn. 5:18). Through the gracious mercy with which true Christians breathe toward their neighbors, they remain alien from the sinfulness of their neighbors, communicated through the condemnation which condemns the one who condemns, violating his own peaceful, joyful, holy state. “The peace of Christ, which surpasses all understanding,” dwelling in God’s holy ones, immediately convicts every approaching thought that is opposed, whatever mask of righteousness may cover such a thought (Phil. 4:7). Saint John of the Ladder in his discourse on spiritual discernment and on thoughts, passions and virtues, says that it comes from an unblemished conscience and purity of heart; that in beginners it is a knowledge of their own falling and sinfulness; that in the intermediate (in advancement) it separates true good from the natural and from evil, both open and covered with a mask of good; finally, that in the perfect it is spiritual understanding radiating from the Holy Spirit, and seeing the manner of action of evil in other men.[7] Thus the holy Apostle Peter said to Simon the sorcerer: “for I see you in the gall of bitterness and the bondage of unrighteousness.” (Acts 8:23). In the preface to the Discourse on Sacred Silence, Saint John says that God’s Holy ones have precise and detailed knowledge of sin by revelation of the Holy Spirit. The beginning of the illumination of the soul and a sign of its health consists in this: when the mind begins to see its own transgressions as numerous as the sands of the sea, said Saint Peter Damascene. This Father calls the sight of one’s own fall and the sight of one’s own sins a spiritual vision revealed by the action of grace in one who labours in Christ’s commandments.[8] Holy Church has ordained her children to ask of God with fervent prayer the great gift—the vision of their own sins.[9] Fallen nature is struck with blindness of mind.[10] It does not see its fall, does not see its sins, does not see its pilgrimage on earth and manages itself as if immortal, as if existing solely for the earth.[11] Not only does it judge and condemn the sins of its neighbor with cruelty, but out of its own miserable condition it invents for its neighbor sins which he does not have; it is scandalized by the most exalted Christian virtues, distorting their significance according to its false understanding and its heart’s malice. On the contrary, renewed nature has a gracious knowledge and vision of evil granted by God, a knowledge and vision of evil, which not only does not violate the integrity of good in man, but also serves the strictest protection of man from experiential knowledge of evil, which is destructive to man. Renewed nature sees and knows evil in itself, in men, and in demons, but remains undefiled by evil, because this sight and knowledge of renewed nature do not belong to man himself, are not acquired by man’s own effort, but are granted him by God. One can compare the knowledge of evil acquired by man through the fall to a sick man’s knowledge of the diseases from which he suffers, while the knowledge of evil by men renewed by Baptism is like a physician’s knowledge of diseases. The sick know a disease experientially, but know neither its causes nor the means of curing it; physicians, not knowing a disease experientially, know it incomparably more precisely than the sick, know its causes and means of healing from it.

8. Conclusion

Having set forth, to the extent of my meager ability, the state of human nature in relation to good and evil after its creation, after its fall, and after its redemption, to whom shall I turn with the conclusion of this humble Homily? The Homily serves as an exposure of my own shortcomings, and therefore I turn with an exhortation, which ordinarily concludes every Homily, to myself. I borrow the exhortation from a Father of the Church. If any of my neighbors recognize it as fitting for themselves as well, then let them receive it with love. “You have remembered,—says the Father I have mentioned,—that nobility which you received in Baptism from grace, and yet willfully cast it off through the passions in the world; you have desired to restore (this nobility) through good intention; you have proven such desire by deed, coming to the sacred school, having clothed yourself in the honorable garments of repentance and having taken the vow to remain with equanimity in the monastery to death itself. You made with God a second covenant. The first was made upon entering the present life; the second was made when you began to incline toward the end of the present life. Then you were received by Christ for your piety; now you have joined yourself to Christ through repentance. Then you received grace; now you have confessed your debt. Then, being an infant, you did not perceive the dignity given to you, although afterward, upon reaching maturity, you came to know the greatness of the gift, and your mouth is closed (to self-justification); now with sufficient development of knowledge, you understand the meaning of the vow. Take heed lest you neglect this promise (of repentance) as well;[12] take heed lest you be rejected and cast down, like some vessel utterly shattered, into outer darkness, where ‘there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (Mt. 22:13). Apart from the path of repentance there is no other way that returns to salvation”454. “The Holy Spirit speaks: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts, as in the provocation, in the days of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test, tested me, and saw my works for forty years. Therefore I was angry with that generation and said: They always go astray in their hearts, and they have not known my ways, as I swore in my anger, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’ Be careful, brothers, that there not be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, so as to turn away from the living God. But encourage yourselves every day, while it is still called ‘today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin; for we have become partakers of Christ, if indeed we hold the beginning of our confidence”[13]455 (Lk. 11:23),—said the Lord,—“even to the end secure, we hold fast” (Heb. 3:7–14). “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:14–16). Amen.