Fornication

The passion of fornication is the desire for sexual pleasure.

So what’s wrong with that? That’s the question that immediately comes to mind in this age of license. Let’s start with an extreme case of fornication.

We were once scanning blogs for entries on the Jesus Prayer. There was an entry in a blog that caught our interest. The reference to the Jesus Prayer wasn’t exactly correct, and the blog was accompanied by a photograph of the blogger with bare torso. In our naïveté we wondered, now why would he have a bare torso? We followed up to the blogger’s profile. It turns out that he lives, in his own phrase, in ‘Sodom by the sea’. He has some remarks about his sexual preferences: He doesn’t mind if his partners use ‘herbals and recreational drugs’ to increase their pleasure, so long as they don't talk on and on. He prefers to be on top, but ‘an obedient boy’ can do him ‘until the cows come home’. He’s into certain kinds of bondage. There’s more. Persons interested can email him to discuss a meeting.

Here we see sexual pleasure pursued for its own sake. We see the use in a certain subculture of ‘herbals and recreational drugs’ to increase that pleasure, along with certain ‘kinky’ practices (we wonder: now just what does he mean by ‘an obedient boy’?).

This is, we hope, an extreme case. However, it indicates just what the passion of fornication is in its essence: a desire for sexual pleasure which treats others as objects (willing or unwilling) to be exploited to obtain that sexual pleasure.

Gluttony

The passion of gluttony is the desire for the pleasure that comes from eating.

St Dorotheos distinguishes two types of gluttony: the gluttony that wants to fill the stomach and the gluttony that, while it may not want to fill the stomach, wants to have very tasty food.

The first leads to fat monks; the second, to gourmet monks.

St John of the Ladder remarks that gluttony is something that is with the monk until he dies, since he can never stop eating entirely.

St Silouan the Athonite remarks, according to his disciple, Fr Sophrony (Sakharov), that the measure of eating too much is whether after eating, our memory of God is disturbed. If someone is praying the Jesus Prayer twenty-four hours a day, this is easy to gauge.

St John of the Ladder draws a connection between gluttony and fornication. He remarks that the demon of gluttony hands the monk off to the demon of fornication with a smile when the monk takes a nap after overeating. Here, St John is following Evagrius, who writes on the connection between gluttony and fornication, insisting that you cannot become victim to thoughts of fornication if you have not first become a victim to gluttony.

Although the early fathers emphasize the connection between gluttony and fornication, later writers also emphasize that overeating clouds the mind, that fasting assists the mind to engage both in mental prayer (the Jesus Prayer prayed silently) and in mental ascesis (the purification of the soul through repelling tempting thoughts).

However, St Maximos the Confessor, and those following him, teach us that we must subordinate our bodily ascesis to our mental ascesis, concentrating on mental ascesis. An excessive bodily ascesis is quite dangerous. Here we must have sound guidance and not follow our own will.

Relaxation

There is a story associated with St Anthony, probably in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, that a visitor was scandalized to see St Anthony ‘playing’ with his disciples: relaxing and engaging in repartee. St Anthony replied that the bow that is continually tensed will break.

Here is the fruit of our relaxation:

Autumn

The day is full of sun.

I ate a pomegranate and a persimmon.

At night, the full moon.

The fleeting beauty of the owl’s cry pierces my heart.

Later, we will discuss gluttony.

The Passions

There are eight passions: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sorrow, anger, accidie (sloth), vainglory and pride. Hence, when we begin to look at our ascesis, our pilgrimage towards God, in a systematic way, we begin to look at the role of these passions in our behaviour.

Thy Will Be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven

Who can pray the Our Father from the heart?

Who can turn himself over to God in his soul to pray in truth: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’?

The Old Monk

The old monk in rags said: ‘Repentance is everything. Everything else is in vain. “Vanity of vanities.”’ And he blew some imaginary dust off the palm of his hand.

The Necessity of Ascesis

The first renunciation is the renunciation of the world. The second renunciation is the renunciation of our passions: we change so as to become virtuous. In the West this is called the ‘conversion of morals’. In the West, the ‘conversion of morals’ is taken from the second renunciation of St John Cassian. We are here following Cassian’s teacher, Evagrius, in our formulation of the three renunciations.

What is the second renunciation, the conversion of morals? Both in our behaviour and in our thoughts, we purify our soul from the tendencies to sin we have inherited from Adam. We are given Grace in Baptism, but our passions, our tendencies to sin, have not been completely eliminated. We ourselves must work on eliminating our passions, on changing our habitual tendencies to sin to habitual tendencies to virtue. This requires both our own efforts and the Grace of Jesus Christ, the grace of the Holy Spirit. It requires that we be baptized, so as to receive the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.

This active purification of the soul from the passions for the acquisition of virtue is the basis of all our asceticism. However, seen from this point of view, our asceticism is no longer pointless or aimless: we can consciously discuss or discern what our passions might be; we can discuss or discern how we might then eliminate those passions. This elimination of the passions and this acquisition of virtue is our pilgrimage to God. There is another stage of the pilgrimage, the stage of contemplation. This is the third renunciation. We will discuss it another time.

What is a Monk?

The word ‘monk’ comes from the Greek μοναχός which means ‘alone’. A monk is someone who lives alone. Are all people who live alone monks? No. Do all monks live alone? No. Then what does the word ‘monk’ mean?

In the Orthodox service of consecration of a monk, the person about to become a monk is asked: ‘Why have you come here falling down before the Holy Altar?’ You see, a monk is someone who consecrates himself to God. The answer that the would-be monk gives is this: ‘I desire the life of asceticism.’ The person consecrating himself to God desires the life of asceticism. The life of asceticism is the road to God. St John of the Ladder (also known as St John of Sinai) writes that a monk is he who denies nature in order to attain to that which is above nature. The officiant asks: ‘Do you wish to be enrolled in the choir of those who live alone?’ The person answers: ‘Yes.’ The monk is he who lives alone because he gives up marriage. St Paul teaches us that he who is married must please his wife whereas he who remains unmarried can devote himself to pleasing God. Next, the officiant asks: ‘Do you renounce the world and the things in the world?’ The would-be monk answers: ‘Yes.’ Evagrius teaches us that the renunciation of the world is the first movement towards God, the foundation of all progress in asceticism. The service continues with the more particular vows of the monk; we will discuss them at another time.

In the Orthodox Church, the service of tonsure, of consecration of a person to God as a monk, is exactly the same for men and for women. There is no difference.

The Tempting Thought

One of the most fundamental concepts in Hesychasm is the ‘tempting thought’ (from the Greek, λογισμός or ‘thought’). Mental ascesis is the practice of refusing tempting thoughts. This mental ascesis is ordinarily practised with the mind in the heart and in coordination with the repetition of the Jesus Prayer. The goal is to attain to a practice of the Jesus Prayer in which the mind is in the heart and free of images. This practice of the Jesus Prayer in the heart free from images is called the ‘guard of the mind’. It is a state of peace. It is a drinking from the silence of God.

A ‘tempting thought’ is a thought that invites us to one of the eight sins. It begins with the formation in the mind of an image of a sensible object. When the image of a sensible object arises in our mind, we ‘converse’ with the image, which invites us to partake of the sin that the image suggests. Hence, the notion of the tempting thought. ‘The temptation of the monk is the thought that arises from the passionate part of the soul and darkens the mind; the sin of the monk is the consent to the forbidden pleasure that the thought suggests.’ (Evagrius.) That is why in the guard of the mind there are no images in the mind, only the repetition of the Jesus Prayer: the monk has been purified of the tendencies to sin in him and immediately refuses any tempting thoughts that come to him. He is now ready to contemplate God and his creation.

The Jesus Prayer in the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches

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UPDATE August, 2010: Readers coming here from the Byzantine Catholic Forum should go to this post and to this second post for our discussion of the comments on that thread.

We have been asked by an interested party to comment on the practice of Hesychasm in the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. We are reluctant to do so since this web log was never, repeat never, intended for ecclesiastical controversy, even as a means to attain notoriety. However, the practice of the Jesus Prayer (or, Hesychasm) in the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches does fall within the scope of this web log. So we will speak to this spiritual matter, since from our discussion our readers might be able to grasp something of the nature of the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm.

The Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, in a few words, came about in this way. When the Orthodox Church and the Western branch of it came to go their separate ways, the papacy developed a theoretical dynamic (theology) of reunion with the papacy: this is intrinsic to the self-understanding of Roman Catholicism. This dynamic took many forms. After the Fourth Crusade there was an attempt through the Council of Lyons (13^th Century) to unite ecclesiastically with the papacy a Byzantine Empire recently conquered by the armies of nations under the jurisdiction of the papacy. That failed. There was another attempt at ecclesiastical union with the independent but failing Byzantine Empire in the Council of Florence (15^th Century). This failed. However, in the 15^th Century, originally in what is now the Western Ukraine, there was a movement towards union that took another route: through the agency of the Jesuit order, certain Orthodox prelates were induced to sign accords of union with the Roman Pontiff. The treaties spelled out certain rights and obligations for members of the dioceses that were to be united with Rome in this way. Thus were born the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. We are not historians and we may have some details in the above sketch wrong.

Now what interests us is the spirituality practised in the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. It can very easily be verified that as a historical fact these Churches, especially the Eastern Rite Churches that arose in the present-day Western Ukraine, are very heavily Westernized in their everyday spirituality. Some of the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches, for example the Melkite Churches, are less Westernized in their spirituality. An honest Eastern Rite Catholic cannot deny these things. For verification, one need only visit an Eastern Rite church, look around and talk to a parishioner. However, there is always the question: was this intrinsic to the dynamic of union, or a historical accident?

So that what we are saying makes sense, let us give a few examples. The Basilian Order in the Ukrainian Catholic Church was constructed by the Jesuits out of what they found. Hence, the structure of the Basilian Order is essentially Western. The Order of Studites (monks) in the Ukrainian Catholic Church founded by the Schiptitsky brothers before World War II in the present-day Western Ukraine (please forgive our lack of historical precision; we do not have the sources immediately available) has a rule which is essentially Western. At a house of that order the spirituality was mainly a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and, perhaps, the reading of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. All of this, of course, in the context of the celebration in the Byzantine Eastern Rite Catholic Churches of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom with a change that shows the influence of Roman Catholic theology: the Epiclesis is transposed to before the words of institution, because, contrary to the Orthodox teaching, the Roman Catholic Church believes that the consecration takes place at the words of institution, not at the Epiclesis (Invocation of the Holy Spirit). Moreover, although the articles of union permitted the Orthodox practice of a married secular clergy, in the West this was abrogated so as not to cause scandal. (We understand that a married clergy is now permitted in the West in at least some cases.)

Now the devout Eastern Rite Catholic can argue that these are all historical accidents. Indeed, now that the extant Byzantine foundational typikons have all been published, it is to be expected that a new Eastern Rite Catholic monastic foundation would include elements of those typikons. However, is it so simple? Or does Roman Catholic theology (not to mention a historical tendency to a theoretical Latinism that treats the Eastern Rite as a transitional dispensation to be gradually replaced by full Latinization) play a role?

Let us turn to the issue that we want to address, treating all of the above merely as a necessary historical introduction. There are serious differences of opinion between Roman Catholic theology and Orthodox theology concerning the nature of God, the knowability of God, the nature of grace and the nature of man. These are the presuppositions of any mystical psychology. The Orthodox theology has very deep roots, going back even to St Basil the Great and his brother St Gregory of Nyssa (4^th Century). The Roman Catholic theology concerning these things was largely formed in the scholastic period, especially by the work of St Thomas Aquinas. Thomism has had a pervasive influence on Roman Catholic theology ever since its formal acceptance by Rome. True, since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has made an effort to return to its patristic sources. However, the men and women who are going back to those patristic sources have had their mentality, their outlook, formed by centuries of scholastic, primarily Thomist, theology.

As concerns the practice of the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm, the differences between Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology came to a head in the Hesychast controversy of the 14^th Century, in the disputes between St Gregory Palamas and Barlaam, and later Akyndinos. The theology of St Gregory Palamas was vindicated in the Orthodox Church, and his opponent, the originally Orthodox Barlaam, imbued with Western scholastic theology, ended up a Catholic bishop in Italy. To this day, the Roman Catholic Church has been uneasy with the theology of St Gregory Palamas. In any hypothetical union, it is doubtful whether the Roman Catholic Church would accept to have St Gregory on the church calendar as a saint, even as a local Orthodox saint. Hence, it is extremely doubtful that an Eastern Rite Catholic is ‘on track’ if he accepts Palamite theology. That is, as a member of the Catholic Church, he is obliged to accept the teachings of the Roman Pontiff. However, it is extremely doubtful if that allows him to accept Palamite theology.

The fellow who asked us to comment directed us to this quotation from Pope John Paul II:

The hesychast controversy marked another distinctive moment in Eastern theology. In the East, hesychasm means a method of prayer characterized by a deep tranquillity of the spirit, which is engaged in constant contemplation of God by invoking the name of Jesus. There was no lack of tension with the Catholic viewpoint on certain aspects of this practice. However, we should acknowledge the good intentions which guided the defense of this spiritual method, that is, to emphasize the concrete possibility that man is given to unite himself with the Triune God in the intimacy of his heart, in that deep union of grace which Eastern theology likes to describe with the particularly powerful term of “theosis”, “divinization”.

Pope John Paul II's Angelus Message, August 11, 1996

This indicates to us that Pope John Paul II did not accept Palamite theology: ‘There was no lack of tension with the Catholic viewpoint on certain aspects of this practice. However, we should acknowledge the good intentions which guided the defense of this spiritual method,…’ When a Roman Catholic speaks of admitting the good intentions of someone, he wants to say that the fellow was wrong, but at least he meant well. We concede that a Roman Pontiff has never pronounced infallibly, so a member of an Eastern Rite Church might be able to claim that he is not bound in conscience, but that is his own affair with his own conscience. In our view, a member of an Eastern Rite Catholic Church has to clarify within himself just what his theology is, and how it is to be constrained by the principles of Roman Catholic theology. Otherwise he is in danger of a ‘cafeteria Catholicism’ of the right: a picking and choosing without regard to consistency with his own basic principle of allegiance to the Pope. Hence, just how consistent is it for an Eastern Rite Catholic to quote the Abbot of an Athonite monastery? And, indeed, when the Abbot is himself quoting St Gregory Palamas? Are we not just fooling ourselves?

Let us get to the heart of the matter: the role of these theological difference in the practice of the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm.

Let us first point out that the serious practice of the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm is a rather isolated event in the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. By the ‘serious practice’, we mean, the way that it is practised, say, on Mt Athos by Hesychasts. We recognize that some people pray the Jesus Prayer for an hour a day, either vocally or silently, as a devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus or because of high blood pressure, or even to ask mercy from the Lord.

The first problem is the interpretation of the expression ‘bringing the mind into the heart’. A study of Roman Catholic theology will make it clear that this expression has no meaning in Thomist psychology. It is an absurdity. It can at best, in Thomist psychology, be treated as a metaphor for praying with feeling or intention—for praying with the sentiment—or as a description of a somatic practice. The Orthodox do not mean ‘praying with the sentiment’ when they speak of bringing the mind into the heart, and they do not treat the Jesus Prayer as a somatic practice. There is much more to Hesychasm, and the Orthodox monk means that his mind descends to the physical region of his heart. How is the Eastern Rite Catholic who is being consistent with his own theological principles going to bring his mind into his heart? Is he not just picking and choosing what he wants to hear?

We find this description of Hesychasm in the above remark of Pope John Paul II, who was a neo-Thomist: ‘In the East, hesychasm means a method of prayer characterized by a deep tranquillity of the spirit, which is engaged in constant contemplation of God by invoking the name of Jesus.’ Let us concede that Pope John Paul II was speaking to a general audience and that he might have had a much deeper knowledge of Hesychasm. While the invocation of the name of Jesus (which taken in and of itself is a well-known Roman Catholic practice) is part of the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm, there is much more to the Orthodox practice than that. The practice of Hesychasm involves a very delicate mental ascesis in conditions of isolation based on refusing tempting thoughts, the result of which mental ascesis is a purity of soul identified by St Hesychios, for example, with the ‘purity of heart’ of the Gospel. Moreover, the reason we bring the mind into the heart is to engage in this mental ascesis in the heart, with our consciousness centred in the heart. This mental ascesis is combined with the uninterrupted repetition of the Jesus Prayer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. When in this way the Hesychast has attained to a practice of the Jesus Prayer in the heart without images—recall that he is through mental ascesis refusing tempting (indeed, all) thoughts—then he is said by St Hesychios to be engaged in the ‘guard of the mind’. It is from the ‘guard of the mind’ that the Hesychast is raised to contemplation. But these concepts simply do not make sense in the context of Roman Catholic mystical psychology. What is the Eastern Rite Catholic to do?

Finally, Pope John Paul II finishes his remark by saying: ‘…that is, to emphasize the concrete possibility that man is given to unite himself with the Triune God in the intimacy of his heart, in that deep union of grace which Eastern theology likes to describe with the particularly powerful term of “theosis”, “divinization”.’ Now as far as it goes, that is the meaning of theosis or divinization. But there is a problem. In Roman Catholic theology, grace is created. In Orthodox theology, grace is uncreated. Moreover, there are serious issues between Roman Catholic theology and Orthodox theology concerning the nature of the union with God given in mystical experience. Hence, there is implicit in Pope John Paul II’s remark a reinterpretation of the Orthodox concept of divinization into Roman Catholic theological terms. What is the Eastern Rite Catholic going to do?

Basically, the Eastern Rite Catholic has these three options open to him: He can pursue Hesychasm and the full form of the Jesus Prayer in an Orthodox way, at the cost of a deep tension between his spiritual practice and his Catholic identity. Or, he can attempt to reinterpret the Jesus Prayer in a Catholic way—most likely by turning it into a Catholic devotion, since reinterpreting the full Orthodox form of Hesychasm in a Catholic way would require very great theological talent. Or he can drop the Jesus Prayer and Hesychasm, and turn to an essentially Western Catholic spirituality. Historically, very few people have chosen the first alternative; more have chosen the second; and most have chosen the third.

For these reasons, and others, we think that the reason that the Eastern Rite Catholic churches manifest such a Westernized spirituality is not merely historical accident, but an inner dynamic of conformity to Roman Catholic theology and practice.