Part 1

“From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force” (Mt 11:12). Two invisible forces constantly act upon man: a good force and an evil one, the power of God, the power of grace, and the power of the Devil, the power of cunning and completely destructive. Man is placed in this world as it were between two fires, one of which is life-giving, about which the Lord says: “I have come to bring fire on the earth” (Lk 12:49), and the other is a consuming and devouring fire. Man must exert effort over himself to kindle in himself the divine fire, the fire of faith and love toward God and neighbor. Man has lost his first divine dignity, his righteousness, holiness, goodness, meekness, and has filled his soul with every kind of sin. See—you lack purity of heart—this is a great loss; you must acquire it. You lack constant compassion for your neighbor in his sorrow, need, poverty, and illness—transform yourself, become compassionate… You lack zeal in prayer to God, you lack a spiritual taste for prayer, you lack a spiritual ear for hearing the Word of God—transform yourself, awaken your spirit, your taste, and your spiritual ear, so that you might with love hear the Word of God, so that you might feel the sweetness of prayer and the sweetness of good deeds. Evil fights against man powerfully and compels him toward evil, while good attracts him to itself by its moral beauty, by peace of soul, by spiritual freedom. Good attracts by its promises of eternal life as the reward for victory over the passions. “To the victor I will give to sit with Me on My throne” (Apok 3:21).

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A wondrous thing. The same man who stands in reverence before the Creator and sees His creation in its beautiful, marvelous aspect and is full of wonder, love, and reverence before Him—is also capable of low, unclean, sinful, cunning, and lustful thoughts and desires of the flesh, and can imagine in his mind the most unclean, bestial lusts and pleasures, and become deeply defiled in his thoughts and feelings. What contradiction in you yourself! What a drive toward sin is in you! How sin in the form of every kind of uncleanness strives to actualize itself in deed and defile you. What an inner spiritual struggle continually lies before you—to combat the uncleanness within you and to reclaim your noble spirit and the purity of your soul and body! Otherwise you will deprave and defile your nature—your soul and body. Truly, “the kingdom of heaven” is seized by effort and those “who use effort” gain “it” (Mt 11:12). “To the victor I will give to sit with Me on My throne, as I also conquered and sat down with My Father on His throne” (Apok 3:21). Constant warfare with sin is necessary for as long as we are on earth; we cannot sit idle, or else sin will overcome us and conquer us and subject us to eternal captivity, shame, and torment.

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Do you know what we are all poor and misshapen in and what we most need? We are all conceived and born in lawlessness and poverty in righteousness and holiness—for unrighteousness and uncleanness have been conceived with us in our mother’s womb, in our father’s loins, and with our growth have grown and taken root and made themselves like weeds in a field amid wheat, or like dry, fruitless fig trees. This is worthy of weeping and tears. We were born in Christianity or have joined the Orthodox Church, and therefore we ought to live in purity and every virtue, but we live carelessly, mindlessly, vainly, as it comes, and do not think to strive toward the perfection of Christ, forgetting that we have been told by the Lord: “Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).

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“The kingdom of heaven,” that is, holiness, purity, righteousness, self-restraint, prayer, chastity, love for God and neighbor—“is seized by effort” (Mt 11:12), that is, by the gracious help of God and by one’s own diligence—“and those who use effort” attain “it.” The flesh opposes the spirit, that is, every virtue, so that we might not do what we wish to do for God’s sake and for the salvation of our soul and for the good of our neighbors. What is required is man’s resistance to all evil, to every passion of flesh and spirit, to every lust, and the practice and acquisition of every virtue.

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The creature strives against the Creator; the creature mocks the Creator or thinks it mocks Him, while at the same time it mocks itself to its own destruction; but behold it will be solemnly defeated: “for He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1Cor 15:25-26). In the Fall, more grace was given to man than was given before the Fall. Wonderful is the exceedance of Thy goodness over the malice of the Devil, O Lord! May the excellency of Thy goodness be revealed, O Lord! Glory to Thee!

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My God! How the enemy has dishonored and continues to dishonor Your creation, which was created in Your image, and to this day dishonors it in all of us day and night with countless sins and passions, with absurd, unclean, blasphemous, harmful, disturbing thoughts! What attentiveness, what prayer, what self-restraint, what struggle must there be within us against invisible enemies! O God, help us all, especially those who are faithful and attentive to themselves!

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You have fallen into captivity to the Devil through inattention, through ingratitude, through pride. Strive to free yourself from this captivity with the help of the Almighty Warrior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who conquered our common enemy and adversary. On this you have been given all divine powers. Look to the example of the struggle of the Apostles, holy hierarchs, martyrs, and all the saints and imitate them. And they always help those who call upon them with faith.

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O God is in complete disregard and without honor among you, brothers and sisters, because of your sinful attachments, because of your lack of love for one another. You dream only of earthly things and not at all of heavenly things, you care about physical health but not at all about the salvation of your soul. “Our citizenship is in heaven, from where we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:20).

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There is nothing more certain than that evident truth that men and human societies, from the very beginning of their existence, from the very beginning of sin, have been in a state of fall. The fall of mankind has become constant and inevitable. Men neglected the first commandment of God, which was to keep them from falling, turned away from it, did not fulfill it through pride, recklessness, and negligence. And from that time the life of mankind has been an unceasing, uninterrupted series of falls—falls of individuals, whole families, and societies. Even to this day men continually stumble and fall. No matter how many laws you write for human societies, fundamental and of all kinds—these laws are not able to keep men in family and social order. Families, clans, and peoples are turbulent, in ferment, cannot live peacefully. All kinds of passions disturb human societies, disrupt the peaceful course, produce disorder, infidelity, betrayal in social life, everything is turned upside down. The paternal, governmental, and supreme power are shaken, are close to falling, and fall. What a picture of falls! This is a picture of centuries, of millennia.

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What is the history of mankind? It is a history now of falls, now of risings; a history of the wavering of human thought, of family and social life, and a history of the falls of kingdoms and peoples or separate cities and institutions. And what picture does our time present? A picture of the falls of all societies. Where is the cause of such weakness of minds, estates, and institutions, deliberately gathered to establish a wavering state and, meanwhile, still wavering. Where is the cause of darkness, weakness, and fall? In disbelief, in falling away from God, from His wise commandments, in relying on one’s own blind reason, in following one’s passions. And it serves them right—without God, without God’s reason, without God’s law, without the “Church of God, which is the pillar and foundation of truth,” (1Tim 3:15), societies cannot stand firm and their institutions cannot have a firm foundation. Therefore they all fall apart, for it is said: “Without Me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5).

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Our life on earth is a dream, a fantasy, and constant and gradual dying, not life. I desire a true, genuine, divine life, befitting a being created in the image and likeness of God. My God, but what dreams when we sleep at night, in the morning or evening! These are fantasies, daydreams, and often sinful ones! This is a loss of time for God, for life in the love of God, in God’s holiness, in incorruptibility, in the light of His Godhead, in peace, in the expansiveness of the heart!

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What is our life on earth? We are not living, but raving consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. When will we actually live and serve God, who serves us constantly and pleases us with countless blessings of life, with all manner of help, all sorts of healings, comforts, warnings, and all manner of keeping and cherishing and forgiveness of our sins? When will we think, feel, speak, undertake, and act in a way pleasing to God, reasonably, and savingly? Are not all our sinful passions delirium on our part, not vanity?

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You intellectuals have abandoned heavenly wisdom and grasped at earthly vanity, lies, mirage, and impenetrable fog, and you will be punished by your own folly and your own passions. You have scorned living water, life-giving light, the salt of the earth, and you will wither in your own eternal corruption and will never see the light of God, but will remain in darkness. You have preferred to Leo Tolstoy, to eminent worldly writers who have multiplied their hasty scribbling to infinity, so that there is no time for a Christian to take up the Word of God, which is the source of purity, holiness, justice, light, eternal life, and blessedness.

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With bodily beauty and momentary pleasure the enemy seduces, while from the Source of spiritual and eternal beauty, from God, the enemy turns us away, accounting Him as nothing and hastening us toward death. What madness! But you, long for eternal, spiritual beauty—God, Creator of all beauty. Rise from that corruptible, decaying, and fetid beauty toward the incorruptible, eternally fragrant beauty that has marvelously perfumed the bodies of the saints, both living and even after death. O God, in what captivity mankind is held! In captivity to all kinds of sins that blind the mind and heart of man.

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O Lord, You have caught the one who caught us, our murderer the Devil, have slain him, and have delivered us from his jaws. For this the Church cries out to the Sovereign Theotokos in one hymn: “The bow of the mighty ruler was shattered by Thy childbearing, O Sovereign Lady. For Thou didst supply the divine incarnation as a luminous hook, the righteous catch of our enemy the Devil, to the Word-Father. Wherefore we cry to Him: Glory to Thy power, O Lord!” (song 4, service August 1). What senselessness of sin, or of our old man! Through what have we been defiled, corrupted, darkened, gone mad, become dead, deprived of God’s blessing, and subjected to a curse and eternal torment? And are we continually striving, rushing, desiring the constant repetition of corrupting sin of any kind? For what? For momentary pleasure, a stirring of the flesh, the intoxication of carnal delight. O accursed sin! O accursed carnal passion—blind, all-destructive, death-dealing! How long will you live and reign in us and destroy us? O holy men of God of all ranks, we bless you for you warred boldly and constantly against the flesh, scorned it, trampled it, mortified it, and through this made God dwell in your heart and became a spacious dwelling of the Holy Spirit. Help us also to mortify it, which kills us every day.

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Friendship with our flesh and the seduction of carnal pleasures—are the cause of our sins, the cause of coldness toward God, of attachment to the world and its imagined, fleeting, vanishing blessings, the cause of our spiritual sloth and negligence. “They slumbered and slept!” (Mt 25:5).

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Mark the many-passioned flesh of yours—what a greatest enemy it is to you: through a thousand lusts it desires to distance your soul from God, to weaken it, to defile it, to kill it—it weakens you through sloth and coldness toward prayer, toward prostrations, toward meditation on God. O home-dwelling, all-cunning, flattering enemy! How long shall I be with you? “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom 7:24).

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Whoever sleeps long, to that one spiritual interests become foreign, prayer becomes difficult, external and not from the heart, while the interests of the flesh come to the forefront—food and drink, profit, games, various diversions. Excessive sleep is harmful—it weakens soul and body.

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“One who suffers in the flesh ceases from sin” (1Pet 4:1). This is why suffering, the cross, is necessary for the Christian: without suffering, without affliction, our flesh plays the fool, rages, sins, angers God, and creates tribulation for itself and our soul. O wretched, many-passioned flesh, on account of which all the troubles in mankind! O many-passioned heart, foul! “The things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those are what defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy of the eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness—all these things proceed from within and defile a man” (Mk 7:20-23). Here is the source of evil in man—the heart! “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps 50:12). “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” (Ps 50:9). O goodness, O almighty power, O justice, O wisdom of God! O simplicity of the being of God!

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Bathing and prolonged sleep, all things taken together, very much do not favor the spiritual life and develop sloth and lust. Avoid coddling the flesh by all means and treat it harshly for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

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From the all-good God only good proceeds, and not evil—and even your sickness itself is a good, yet you grumble, lose courage, despair. Endure and give thanks. For voluntary pleasures in youth—involuntary sufferings in old age.

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During fasting, especially for a priest, you must abandon the pleasures that irritate the flesh and not indulge it, but afflict it: sleep little, teach the people the Word of God, genuine repentance, fruitful repentance; arouse hatred for every sin, explain how it is contrary to our nature and contrary to God, how sin (contrary to nature) has become ingrained in our nature and acts in it powerfully, insatiably, and fatally.

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Regard the world and all that is in it as a passing shadow and cling to nothing; do not have attachment. The spiritual, eternal world is essential, and the Lord who created it: cling to Him with all your soul.