Philokalia Ministries

At the end of the first Conference, Abbot Moses observes that they have passed naturally from purity of heart to a new subject - discretion.   Throughout this conference he will concentrate on the need for discretion, the ways of acquiring and practicing it and the great merit of discretion.

Responsibility for guarding the heart and for improving the character of our thoughts; sources of thoughts; the skill of discernment; impact of cultural trends of contemporary "spirituality"

For just as the kingdom of the devil is gained by the conniving at the vices, so the kingdom of God is possessed in purity of heart and spiritual knowledge by practicing the virtues.

All Things Pass Away But Love ". . . fasting, vigils, scriptural meditation, nakedness, and total deprivation do not constitute perfection but are the means to perfection. They are not themselves the end point of a discipline, but an end is attained through them. To practice them will therefore be useless if someone instead of regarding these as means to an end is satisfied to regard them as the highest good. One would possess the instruments of a profession without knowing the end where the hoped -for fruit is to be found." "And so anything which can trouble the purity and the peace of our heart must be avoided as something very dangerous, regardless of how useful and necessary it might actually seem to be." 8. "To cling always to God and to the things of God - this must be our major effort, this must be the road that the heart follows unswervingly. Any diversion, however impressive, must be regarded as secondary, low-grade, and certainly dangerous. Martha and Mary provide a most beautiful scriptural paradigm of this outlook and of this mode of activity." "You will note that the Lord establishes as the prime good contemplation, that is, the gaze turned in the direction of the things of God. Hence we say that the other virtues, however useful and good we may say they are, must nevertheless be put on a secondary level, since they are all practiced for the sake of this one." 10. "The demands made on the body are actually only the beginning of the road to progress. They do not induce that perfect love which has within it the promise of life now and in the future. And so we consider the practice of such works to be necessary only because without them it is not possible to reach the high peaks of love." "As for those works of piety and charity of which you speak, these are necessary in this present life for as long as inequality prevails. Their workings here would not be required were it not for the superabundant numbers of the poor, the needy, and the sick." "But all of this will cease in the time to come when equality shall reign, when there shall no longer be the injustice on account of which these good works must be undertaken, when from the multiplicity of what is done here and now everyone shall pass over to the love of God and to the contemplation of things divine. Men seized of the urge to have a knowledge of God and to be pure in mind devote all their gathered energies to this one task." 11. "Why should you be surprised if these good works, referred to above shall pass away? The blessed apostle described even the higher gifts of the Holy Spirit as things that would vanish. He points to love as alone without end." "Actually, all gifts have been given for reasons of temporal use and need and they will surely pass away at the end of the present dispensation. Love, however, will never be cut off. It works in us and for us, and not simply in this life.

Therefore, we must follow completely anything that can bring us to this objective, to this purity of heart, and anything which pulls us away from it must be avoided as being dangerous and damaging. With this as our continuous aim, all our acts and thoughts are fully turned toward its achievement, and if it were not ever firmly before our eyes all our efforts would be empty, hesitant, futile, and wasted, and all the thoughts within us would be varied and at loggerheads with one another. For a mind which lacks an abiding sense of direction veers hither and yon by the hour, and by the minute is a prey to outside influences and is endlessly the prisoner of whatever strikes it first

II. Conquest of Sin: Both eastern and western spirituality as a whole conceives of the ascetic life as a slow progress upward toward God, a climb of the hill by spiritual exercise - - prayer, mortification of the carnal lusts, growth in the knowledge of God - until the soul has become Christ like, God-like. This being true, there developed early on principles upon which asceticism might be conducted. Cassian does not develop a system to be followed, but establishes certain principles to be followed in one's spiritual life. As always he makes these principles understandable to the western mind. A. Flesh and Spirit: 1. basic antagonism between the two - a war in which neither ceases to attack or defend does not mean the material substance of the body but the carnal desires, the passions. 2. The essence of the Christian life is seen as a war within the personality. 3. Cassian experience was that the body was not evil in essence, but is inclined to and encourages evil, though its union with and war against the spirit is nevertheless for the benefit of the spiritual life. 4. the Christian way is not quiet or gentle or pleasant; it is a battle fought in the soul. This battle is the condition of spiritual progress. 5. Apart from this violence of warring, there is nothing but indifference, lukewarmness. Advance to attack expresses Cassian's outlook; for the lustful will is the chief adversary of man. B. The Goal: 1. the ultimate goal is the kingdom of heaven, but the aim(skopos) of the purgative process is purity of heart. The purgative process must place a person in a state of freedom from the passions, to produce in the mind a concentration of thought upon God, in the soul an indifference to all apart from the Creator. To this goal the monk must march along the royal road unswervingly, must close his eyes like the competitor in a shooting contest to all but the bullseye. Asceticism is a means toward the skopos 2. Behind this theory lay the ideal of the angelic life. This was the notion that man must aim at contemplating and worshipping and praising God like the angels and at doing his will on earth as the angels in heaven. But according to Cassian sinlessness is impossible, temptations never cease in this life and there is always the need to fight. 3. Perfection in this life is relative perfection, not to be identified with sinlessness but rather with the completion of the purgative process, which can be described as the state of purity of heart. It is possible to achieve freedom from the grosser passions, but this does not mean immunity from temptation. Purity of heart is but the moral platform from whence God can be seen. C. The Principal Sins: 1. Cassian list contained eight principal sins: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, accidie, vainglory, pride. Cassian treated them as sin produced by corresponding temptations. 2. The order is not random. They are linked together as cars in a railroad train. Because they are so intimately coupled an attack upon one is an attack upon all and conversely a surrender to one is a surrender to all, and because gluttony acquires its capital place in the list as the root instigator of the corrupting series, fasting and abstinence must become the first and most valuable element in all ascetic practice. 3. Cassian writing is intended to drive the mind to seek the reason for sin, not in superficial symptoms but in the latent evil in the human heart. Fight, strive, press on, struggle, resist, conquer - - are all key words. Cassian can only repeat, "here is the evil - fight against it. 4. In all of this grace is presupposed: God is both the goal and the means by which the goal is attained. Grace is what leads us to embrace methods of spiritual progress. D. The Motive of the Life of Virtue: 1. Three things enable men to control and remedy their faults: a) the Fear of hell, or the penalties of earthly laws, b) the thought of and desire for the kingdom of heaven and c) a love of goodness and virtue in itself. 2. These three motives are not equally excellent, but correspond to different grades in the spiritual life, in which the third, the selfless motive must be the highest aim of all who seek after God. The Christian is seeking to be united with God. 3. The soul must love and follow God for his own sake and not in the hope of personal advantage or enjoyment. Ethics are the instrument to the love of God. E. The Virtues: 1. virtue for Cassian consists in not committing sin. Where he thinks of virtue, he normally treats it as the opposite of vice: chastity means not fornicating, patience not being angry, humility not being proud, temperance not being gluttonous. 2. Charity, or love of God, was the transcendent virtue in which all individual virtues were absorbed. For this reason he was uninterested in the discussion of the specific virtues and the distinctions of later moralists. 3. morality acts as an instrument to the contemplation of God, and so Cassian invariably treats good deeds not as the flowing outcome of the love of God but as a useful aid in the struggle for personal perfection. Good works and acts of virtue will even disappear in heaven where all is caught up in the contemplation of God. 4. He normally conceived the fight as a battle against the pressing, insidious powers of evil, rarely as a battle for the good. The assaulting sins are much more numerous than the defending virtues. III. Grace: A. The Doctrine of Cassian: 1. His thought centers upon the strife between flesh and spirit. The carnality of man which is the result of the Fall, has not made man incapable of doing good: it has rather produced a tension in human nature whereby sinful desires pull against the spiritual desires. In the middle of the strife, between the flesh on the one side and the spirit on the other, the free will is set maintaining the tension. He calls the free will the balance in the scales of the body. 2. Cassian's view stirred him to emphasize the powers of the human will - - even if it is weakened. The whole weight of his thought is thrown upon the necessity for exertion. The monk must fight to achieve purity of heart, he must work to eject the seeds of vices, he must fast and watch and labor with his hands, he must direct his mental process and ward off temptations. In all of this grace is not discarded but thoroughly assumed, on account of the enormous importance he attaches to prayer. 3. Cassian never suggests that sin can be overcome, that the Christian road can be travelled, unless God grant his grace. Rather his teaching emphasizes two truths of the Christian faith - - that man depends absolutely upon God, and that his will has full responsibility for choice between good and evil. 4. Cassian is the teacher, emphasizing opposite sides of the same question for practical reasons. Grace is not set in antithesis to freedom of the will, but to laziness. B. Grace in the Conferences: 1. In Cassian, as opposed to Augustine, the human will is not portrayed so darkly. After the Fall, while having a bias toward and desire for evil, man still has knowledge of the good; and since the human race has this knowledge of the good, it can sometimes perform it naturally, of its own free will unaided by grace except in so far as God is regarded as granting his grace when he originally created man capable of doing good. In Augustine the will to good is dead: in Cassian it is not dead, but neither is it healthy. Rather he conceives the human will as sick, needing constant attention from healing grace, but like a sick man still capable occasionally - if revived by medicine - of healthy acts. 2. In a more subtle argument, Cassian teaches that grace is sometimes removed for the benefit of the soul. To prevent the will becoming slothful and idle, grace may wait for some move on the part of the will. We see here again the connection in his mind between grace and laziness. IV. The Life of Contemplation: A. Sinlessness: 1. although some ascetics considered sinlessness to be within the power of human nature, Cassian denied the possibility. The soul is bound to leave the divine vision because of that law in human nature resulting from the Fall. The word saint is not a synonym of the word immaculate for Cassian. 2. Cassian will allow that an ascetic may achieve the destruction of all his faults. Yet this is not sinlessness, since the mind cannot maintain it hold upon the contemplation of God; and in the eyes of the saint even momentary departure from contemplation is the vilest of sin. Full possession of the virtues may be attained, but not the possibility of keeping the mind concentrated on God. 3. The principal barrier for the monk lies not so much in the commission of external sin, but in the slippery thought of his own mind. Thus there can be perfection attain in the active life, but not in the contemplative life. B. The Mind 1. Cassian regards contemplation as the mind seeing God; union as the linking of the mind to God. Since the mind through the Fall is so unstable and wandering that it can never be still, the problem of contemplation consists in fixing the mind to a single point - God. Cassian reverts to the difficulty of the mobile mind perhaps more frequently than to any other subject dealt with in the Conferences. 2. Swarms of thoughts enter the mind, whether suggested by devils or by earthly distractions. Yet, Cassian did not seek the stripping naked of the mind, but rather the mind must attempt to control the ascending and descending of thoughts, until the former predominate over the latter. 3. In later stages, there is progressive simplification until the state of pure prayer is reached where the prayer is so concentrated upon God alone that the mind has come to unity from diversity and holds one prayer, one thought. C. Prayer and Contemplation 1. Cassian's teaching on prayer is not unlike the consensus of Egyptian monastic thought upon the beginnings of contemplation: from the discursive use of the mind in meditation, the soul passes by a gradual simplification of thought to a condition where it does not need mental variety in order to pray, but can rest "satisfied, and more deeply satisfied, with a simple look at God than it was at first with much thinking. In the early stages the soul is frequently filled with sensible sweetness, with spiritual delight in God. This sweetness vanishes as advance is made upon the contemplative way, until the soul confronts God in a cloud of unknowing, dimly and ignorantly, while the intellect without concepts and without images, is not only at rest but cannot think discursively at all. In pure contemplation all the faculties of the intellect and the heart are silenced in face of the simple longing for God. 2. For Cassian, the supreme goal of life, the kingdom of God itself, is to be found, in the direct perception of God. He is at one with Egyptian tradition in believing that none may enter upon this way who has not first undertaken the practical training of the active life. The monk cannot contemplate if he is proud, unchaste or dejected, if he is not seeking detachment from created things. 3. As prayer is reduced from a multiplicity of thoughts to simplicity, the object of contemplation, which began by being complex, becomes little by little a unity. The ladder of contemplation has three rungs: the contemplation of many things, the contemplation of a few, the contemplation of one alone. 4. Cassian only mentions the effects of contemplation occasionally. It brings union with, by union of wills though not in essence. The soul comes to the image and likeness of God feeds on the beauty and knowledge of God, it receives the indwelling Christ the Holy Spirit, it is illumined attains to the adopted Sonship and possesses all that belongs to the Father. The soul is so filled that it begins to share in the love of the Blessed Trinity. For John, contemplation is a formless thoughtless, vacuity. Rather it is a unity wherein fullness is found: where God shall be all our love, and every desire and wish and effort, every thought of ours, and all our life and words and breath, and that unity which already exist between the Father and the Son, and the Son and the Father, has been shed abroad in our hearts and minds. V. Conclusions: Cassian bequeathed to Western Christianity the idea that the spiritual life was a science in which prayer reigned:that is possible to analyze temptation and the nature of sin: that methods of prayer and mortification are neither haphazard nor individual, but order according to established experience. All the guides to spirituality in which western Europe later abounded are his direct descendants.

JOHN CASSIAN How Cassian must be read Cassian himself ceaselessly reiterated that you cannot understand the monastic life unless you are attempting to live it. The same could be said about the spiritual life. None of us are monks and few of us have embraced the spiritual life in the way that Cassian or the monks of his day did. We must then take care in the way we read his writings and approach them with humility - as beginners sitting at the feet of a master. Background: + Lived c. 365-435 A.D. +Time like our own: season of councils - a period when the old and new, traditional and innovative surfaced in a myriad of combinations. season of great experimentation that revealed the possibilities and limitations of monastic life. season of doctrinal development when the Church was faced with questions concerning the relationship in the Trinity and the human and divine natures of Christ. All of this is reflected in John's writings. In this they become an example of the problem faced by a Christian obliged to reconcile the past with the needs and burdens of his day. John was responding to the old problem of what to make of the life one has been given by God. + John's life: John was not passive in his response. Somewhere about the year 380 he set out with a friend, Germanus, to visit the holy places of Palestine. In Bethlehem they became monks. But in those days the heart of the contemplative life was in Egypt and before long they went into that country, and visited in turn the famous holy men. For a time they lived as hermits under the guidance of Archebius, and then Cassian penetrated into the desert of Skete there to hunt out the anchorites concealed among its burning rocks and live with the monks in their cenobia. For some reason unknown, about the year 400 he crossed over to Constantinople. He became a disciple of St. John Chrysostom, by whom he was ordained a deacon. When Chrysostom was uncanonically condemned and deposed, Cassian was among those sent to Rome to defend the Archbishop's cause to the Pope. He may have been ordained priest while in Rome. Nothing more is known of his life until several years later, when he was in Marseilles. It was at this time that Cassian was asked by a Bishop in the Diocese of Apt to write a description of the practice of the monks in the east to be applied in a western monastery. Cassian responded by choosing and interpreting the eastern traditions of the east to create body of institutes suitable to the west. Cassian had a long experience of the East. Meditating on the monastic life as presented to him in Egypt, he dismissed some suggestions and developed others. He certainly revered Egypt and its spirituality, but not everything he found there. Out of the diversity of Egyptian ideas and practices, he began to create a coherent scheme of spirituality. For beginners in the monastic life and for those planning to found monasteries, John wrote the Institutes; and for those interested in the Egyptian ideal of the monk he composed twenty four In these writings, it was Cassian's conviction that the monastic ideal can indeed be practiced. The disciple needs common sense, moderation, perseverance, patience and a willingness to endure. If he has these, then the soul will find that the way of life to God is strengthening and joyful. Cassian's one warning, however, is that it does little good to share the insights of the Egyptian masters with those who are not prepared to receive them - - for those driven more by curiosity than by desire for God. His intentions were simple. First, he wanted to point to the highest modes of prayer. Second, he wanted to show his monks how to create a good and harmonious community. In this task, Cassian was a great ethical guide, a man of distinctive common sense and sensibility. The goal was perfection of life and the end of perfection was always charity. Perfection is full of movement - a direction toward, a loving aspiration after God © a loving response to the love of God. In Cassian's view, the solitary way was best but the communal life of the coenobium was the necessary training ground of beginners; only when the ascetic had purged his soul of the common vices by the practice of virtue and mortification in community might he pass to the higher contemplation of the solitary. The coenobium is the kindergarten. After having lived with hermits in the desert, Cassian knowing his unworthiness and inability to embrace the higher practice returned to the kindergarten. General Principles of the Institutes and Conferences To search his writings for an intricate mystical ladder would be misguided. No system is distinguishable in his writing, only certain general lines of thought. The Monastery: A. The Three Counsels: chastity, poverty and obedience 1. Cassian treats them not as vows but as virtues. Egyptian thought censured the practice of vows in the fear that they might lead either to pride or perjury. chastity was not only abstention from corporal acts, but a limpid purity of soul, cleansed from desire and virgin to all but God. Poverty was not just the complete sacrifice of riches; abandonment of property was the first step - the monk must pass to crush the sin and the desire that proceeds from possessions and rise above the things that are not God. Beyond poverty is the separation from all created things which is the condition of a pure love of God. All of this is a conformity to the lowliness of the Lord - a descent to the want and poverty of Christ. Obedience was paramount over every virtue, the ABCs in the learning of perfection. The junior is not to trust his judgment, but to pronounce that to be good or bad which is considered good or bad by his elder. They must reveal their thoughts of every kind, good or bad, to receive comment and direction from their guide. B. Admission of Novices 1. postulant must first lie outside the door for 10 days or longer. When he had shown persistence, he entered the house to be stripped of his property and money and to exchange the clothes of the world for the monastic dress. Secular garments were stored as a silent reminder of expulsion in penalty for disobedience. 2. novice remained for a probationary year in the guest house excluded from full membership of the community, instructed by an elder and responsible for visitors. Cassian alone required so long a period before admission. At the end of the year the novice was admitted formally and placed with other juniors under the supervision of a senior monk. C. Work: 1. seen not as creative nor even as primarily useful to the community, but as an expedient method of keeping the body and mind occupied. Although work increases the ability for contemplation, cures accidie, and acts as an aid to prayer, it need fulfill no useful purpose. Manual labor preferred. However, writing and reading were customary exercises, but done with the purpose of growing in spiritual knowledge. D. Worship: 1. motivated by humility monks normally fled the idea ordination and the primitive practice was not to receive communion frequently for fear of partaking unworthily. 2. Cassian agreed with the view on ordination of which he saw himself unworthy receiving and fear being drawn away from the quiet life. Communion, however, ought to received often in order to receive medicine and cleansing for our souls. In his monasteries they may have received daily! 3. Cassian introduced the eastern customs of common prayer, but adapted them for the western monk. Egyptian custom celebrated Vespers and Nocturns only and allowed the day time for continuous prayer in private. a. Nocturns, the midnight office(matins): 12 psalms with prayers between each, followed by two lesson from the OT and NT. b. dawn office(lauds) - - immediately after matins: psalms 148-150. c. morning office(prime): marked the beginning of the days work. psalms 51, 63, 90. d. Terce, Sext, None: 3 psalms each, no lessons. e. Vespers: 12 psalms and 2 lessons as at Nocturns no compline, which first appeared in the rule of Benedict; psalmody was done in such a way to ensure understanding and prevent haste. E. Acts of Mortification: 1. The search for God reveals the somber truth that the carnal instincts of human nature are a barrier to pure worship and saintly character. A monk could only mould his will upon the divine will if he conquered the instinctive self-centeredness of fallen humanity by ceaseless mortification; the sinful desires must die. 2. Cassian had three principles of mortification: first it is an instrument to be used or unused according to need; secondly it is to à remain secret; thirdly it must be restrained; 3. discretion was the indispensable virtue in the ascetic life; one must balance his way between the twin abysses of laxity and excessive austerity. Submission to the elders is nowhere more important than in the practice of mortification. 4. repudiating fanaticism, Cassian still demanded an exacting self-discipline in the common and sober acts of austerity.

Dispassion: St. John's words in this chapter are a wake-up call. They remind us of how far we are from spiritual perfection. They humble us. They motivate us. They set the goal before us. The goal is high: dispassion leading to illumination. The height of the goal reaffirms the necessity of struggle. Nothing in this life comes easily. The more important it is, the more work it requires. Thus, in our spiritual lives, when we are tempted to despair, to quit, to accept second best, to abandon the struggle, we must remind ourselves of just how wonderful the prize is. St. John says: "Think of dispassion as a kind of celestial palace, a palace of the king of heaven." This is where we must want to dwell. A small hut may be easier to attain, but it is not where those zealous for God and wish to be near him want to live. They have their eyes set on something more. "Blessed dispassion raises the poor mind from the earth to heaven, raises the beggar from the dunghill of passion. And love, all praise to it, makes him sit with princes, that is with holy angels, and with the princes of God's people."  Love:   As we remarked in the very beginning of our study, the Ladder of Divine Ascent is a way to union with God. This is the goal of the spiritual life: direct, unhindered and undistracted communion with the Holy Trinity. Everything that St. John has outlined, the negative and the positive, has been presented with this goal in mind: to prepare ourselves to know God and, in knowing God, to experience Eternal Life. What is the highest pinnacle of the knowledge of God? When is our labor no longer preparation for, but actual enjoyment of the presence of God? St. John answers: "when we love." He writes: "Love, by its nature, is a resemblance to God, insofar as this is humanly possible. In its activity it is inebriation of the soul." In another paragraph he explains: "Not even a mother clings to her nursing child as a son of love clings to the Lord at all times." In still another place, he writes: "Love grants prophecy, miracles. It is an abyss of illumination, a fountain of fire, bubbling up to inflame the thirsty soul. It is the condition of angels, and the progress of eternity." It is truly significant that St. John isolates love as the highest expression of spirituality. For those of us who have grown up in the West, we have tended to associate great spiritual progress with either intellectual achievement or social action. Neither of these is antithetical to the spiritual life, but neither represents its highest attainment either. The person who truly knows God is love even as God is love. This too is an important consideration. We all from time to time love. Love is something we do and something we give. At best, love is an "attribute" which is part of our inner selves. In this respect, for us, love is most often "premeditated." We think and plan to love. This is the beginning of the spiritual life. Those fully deified do not "love" as an expression of forethought or will, but they themselves have become love. Here is where true union with God takes place. To know the heart of God is to know love. "Love" is not an attribute of God, which takes its place among the other "attributes" of God. Love is God and God is love. Everything He does, even His punishment and wrath against sin, is an expression of His love. To love is to be obsessed by and with the thing or person which is loved. The deified ones are completely overtaken by desire for God Himself. St. John explains: "Someone truly in love keeps before his mind's eye the face of the beloved and embraces it there tenderly. Even during sleep the longing continues unappeased and he murmurs to his beloved." This kind of consuming and exhilarating love for God is a gift, a grace, which comes from Him. This is the mystical side of the spiritual life. We can prepare ourselves to receive God's love; this is the ascetical side. But true love comes from God and draws us back to God. Having ascended the Ladder through the practice of the virtues, at its pinnacle, we encounter the Eternal Mystery, we are drawn into that Light which is also Darkness and that Darkness which is also Light and we learn the meaning of the parable: "We love because He first loved us." We encounter Someone bigger, more powerful and more real than all of our feeble attempts to understand Him. We find the End of our search, and in experiencing Him, realize the End to be simply the Beginning.

Prayer For our prayer to lead to union with God, it is always necessary for it to be offered in a spirit of contrition. St. John notes: "Even if you have climbed the whole ladder of the virtues, pray still for the forgiveness of sins." If we ever appear in God's presence and think that we belong there, if we ever lose sight of the priority of grace and our need for it at all times, then we have lost prayer. It is for certain that we are not talking to God but only to ourselves or worse yet to Satan who has the capacity of transforming himself into an angel of light. Contrition is the key to being delivered from spiritual delusion. Those who pray in a spirit of repentance are not easily fooled by Satan and his demonic hosts. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, we must understand that prayer is not something gained simply from the teaching of others. St. John writes: "You cannot learn to see just because someone tells you to do so. For that, you require your own natural power of sight. In the same way, you cannot discover from the teaching of others the beauty of prayer. Prayer has its own special teacher in God. He grants the prayer of him who prays. And He blesses the years of the just." Dispassion In Step 29, St. John shows us the heights of spirituality - - the exalted state of dispassion. And when we listen to his descriptions, we have to admit that they are pretty amazing. It is hard for beginners in the spiritual life to imagine being cleansed of all corruption; it is equally as difficult to imagine being beyond all temptation. It is truly hard to comprehend being master of one's senses. We may consider it a "good day" if we have not given in to our senses; if we have restrained them. It is a spiritually successful day if we have held our tongues when provoked by the misbehavior of others. Our whole lives are spent dealing with our passions and trying to restrain them. But what St. John is describing is quite different. He is talking about a spiritual state where the passions no longer exist! Why does he lay this out before us? For at least two reasons: a) to keep us from spiritual pride and b) to motivate us to spiritual labor. It is easy for us to become complacent in our spiritual life, to be satisfied with what we have achieved and to lose the impetus to pursue more. This, of course, is a Satanic ploy, for the reality is that once we have stopped pursuing God we begin to lose what we have already gained. If we are not going forward in our spiritual lives, we can be certain that we are going backwards. It is equally easy for us to falsely assume that we are at the heights of our spiritual endeavor when we are yet at its beginning. In this chapter, it is as if St. John is standing before us and proclaiming: "There is more! There is more! Listen to his words: "O my brothers, we should run to enter the bridal chamber of this palace, and if some burden of past habits or the passage of time should impede us, what a disaster for us!" In another place he says: "Brothers, let us commit ourselves to this, for our names are on the lists of the devout. There must be no talk of `a lapse', `there is no time,' or `a burden.' To everyone who has received the Lord in baptism, `He has given the power to become children of God.'" If we honestly observe ourselves, we will notice a sinful tendency to be satisfied with something less than dispassion. We grow weary of the struggle and we long to "be there" already. In our laziness we then lower the goal. We reduce holiness to a set of external rules; to a repeatable pattern of external behaviors. Once we have lowered the goal, we then don't have to struggle as much. Once we have equated holiness with "external correctness" we can then feel good about ourselves. We can "be holy" and "feel good about ourselves" at the same time. We begin to say to ourselves, "I have not committed any major sins; nor do I place myself in situations of temptation"; "I am disciplined in my spiritual life - I have not broken my fast - I have kept the rule of prayer." Soon we begin to see ourselves as authentic spiritual guides for others. We begin to compare ourselves with others and can even fancy ourselves as reliable judges of their holiness. And so without being aware of it, we have fallen into what is called prelest, or spiritual delusion. St. John's words in this chapter are a wake-up call. They remind us of how far we are from spiritual perfection. They humble us. They motivate us. They set the goal before us. The goal is high: dispassion leading to illumination. The height of the goal reaffirms the necessity of struggle. Nothing in this life comes easily. The more important it is, the more work it requires. Thus, in our spiritual lives, when we are tempted to despair, to quit, to accept second best, to abandon the struggle, we must remind ourselves of just how wonderful the prize is. St. John says: "Think of dispassion as a kind of celestial palace, a palace of the king of heaven." This is where we must want to dwell. A small hut may be easier to attain, but it is not where those zealous for God and wish to be near him want to live. They have their eyes set on something more. "Blessed dispassion raises the poor mind from the earth to heaven, raises the beggar from the dunghill of passion. And love, all praise to it, makes him sit with princes, that is with holy angels, and with the princes of God's people."    

As we noted in the beginning of our study of The Ladder, the goal of all spiritual labors is communion with God. We do not seek an abstract vision of the Divine, nor do we labor for a legal verdict declaring us "not guilty." Rather, we aim at communion and union; we set our sights on the true, intimate knowledge of God which is "life eternal" (John 17:3). According to St. John, prayer must be looked at as both the means to and the achievement of this knowledge. The goal of prayer is God. This is important to note as we begin. In prayer and through prayer we seek Him. How easy it is for us to reduce prayer to the fulfillment of some external "rule of prayer" which must be completed before we can continue on with the fulfillment of our other "external" requirements. The great tragedy of our spiritual lives is that prayer itself can become part of this "world and its ways" rather than an abandonment of this world so as to pursue the next. "Rise from the love of the world and the love of pleasure. Put care aside, strip your mind, refuse your body. Prayer, after all, is a turning away from the world, visible and invisible. What have I in heaven? What have I longed for on earth besides You? Nothing except to cling to You in undistracted prayer. Wealth pleases some, glory others, possession others, but what I want is to cling to God and to put the hopes of my dispassion in Him" Understood in this light, prayer thus is itself a means of purification and of judgment. "War reveals the love of a soldier for his king, and the time and practice of prayer show up a monk's love for God. So your prayer shows where you stand." Prayer is a mirror, showing to us the true nature of our desires and of our love. If we love God, we will love to pray. The stronger the love for God, the greater our hearts will be drawn to the dialog of prayer, the more He will be the object of our thoughts and desires, the more He will consume us and become the end of our struggles. Prayer has its external aspects: the words, the discipline, the posture, the knots on the prayer rope. But these external aspects must find their realization in the internal state of our soul. St. John outlines a continuous method of prayer which incorporates both of these: "Get ready for your set time of prayer by unceasing prayer in your soul." For the true struggler for God, prayer is not episodic; it is a way of life. Its external expression changes: sometimes it is the reading of psalms, other times the singing of hymns, still further it may be the quiet saying of the Jesus prayer or the recollection of God in the fulfillment of our daily tasks. Gradually, prayer itself establishes its own rhythm in our lives. In the beginning we force ourselves to pray; in the end it is prayer itself which forces us. For those who are beginning the spiritual life, prayer requires hard work. Here the external aspects of prayer dominate. We can only learn to prayer one way: by doing it. And by doing lots of it . . . over and over again, training our hearts to recognize and feel the words spoken by our mouths and considered in our minds. We force ourselves to practice. Very often this seems strange and foreign to us. It does not seem natural; we totter and stumble. We finish our prayers and feel as if we have simply said "words" without really praying them. We may often feel "hypocritical" in our prayers, as if they are external and therefore fake. This is the beginning of prayer. If we persevere, pushing ourselves to say the words and urging our hearts to join the mind and the mouth, prayer will become internalized. Prayer will not be something which comes from the outside, but it will come from the inside out. The words will flow from our hearts, rather than off the page. We will still say and think the same words, but these words will be ours, rather than someone else's. Our mouths, minds and hearts will be one. Our being will be united in prayer. This is the middle stage of prayer. If we persevere in this, not allowing our hearts to become distracted, the experience of prayer becomes so much a part of us that the words themselves fade away and prayer becomes ecstasy and the immediate presence of God. This is the third and final stage; this is deification, the heights of theosis, to which only the saints rise in this life. As we struggle to pray, there are several attitudes which we must be careful to maintain. The first is humility. Satan tries to rob us of our humility during prayer by taking away from us the simplicity necessary to true prayer. He divides us by getting us to think about ourselves even as we are praying. We observe ourselves from the outside, thinking about how well we are praying, how long we have been praying, etc. To pray is to lose ourselves in God; it is to abandon the pursuit of self by pursuing God. Satan also tries to rob us of our humility after we pray by telling us how good we are and how effective and powerful our prayers are for others. Once again, notice how he tempts us to externalize our prayer and to focus not on God, but on ourselves as "pray-ers" The truth is: we cannot pursue God so long as we think about ourselves. Another important attitude necessary for true prayer is gratitude. St. John advises: "Heartfelt thanksgiving should have first place in our book of prayer." All prayer to be true prayer must be eucharistic. This means that prayer must flow out of a thankful heart. Before it becomes intercession, prayer is first a response to grace received. A thankful heart is of necessity driven to give thanks. It cannot remain silent, but is must communicate its thankfulness to the Source of all blessings. Still further, for our prayer to lead to union with God, it is always necessary for it to be offered in a spirit of contrition. St. John notes: "Even if you have climbed the whole ladder of the virtues, pray still for the forgiveness of sins." If we ever appear in God's presence and think that we belong there, if we ever lose sight of the priority of grace and our need for it at all times, then we have lost prayer. It is for certain that we are not talking to God but only to ourselves or worse yet to Satan who has the capacity of transforming himself into an angel of light. Contrition is the key to being delivered from spiritual delusion. Those who pray in a spirit of repentance are not easily fooled by Satan and his demonic hosts. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, we must understand that prayer is not something gained simply from the teaching of others. St. John writes: "You cannot learn to see just because someone tells you to do so. For that, you require your own natural power of sight. In the same way, you cannot discover from the teaching of others the beauty of prayer. Prayer has its own special teacher in God. He grants the prayer of him who prays. And He blesses the years of the just."