The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel

Nicodemus’s most important original work of spiritual theology: the Symbouleutikon Encheiridion — “Handbook of Spiritual Counsel” — a treatise on the guarding of the five senses, the imagination (phantasia), the intellect (nous), and the heart, written to instruct a bishop (Nicodemus’s cousin, Hierotheos of Euripos) in the inner work of the spiritual life and the care of souls. This file treats the book’s occasion, its neptic psychology of the senses and the imagination, its place as a distillation of the Philokalic teaching for practical use, and its English translation by Peter Chamberas in the Classics of Western Spirituality.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Occasion

The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (Symbouleutikon Encheiridion) was written for a particular reader and a particular need. Nicodemus composed it for his cousin Hierotheos, who had become Bishop of Euripos, to instruct him in the interior discipline a shepherd of souls must first practice in himself before he can guide others (St. Nicodemus, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas, intro. George S. Bebis, New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1989, Introduction). The book is thus addressed to a pastor about the inner prerequisites of pastoral work — a striking inversion of the usual order, in which a manual for a bishop might be expected to treat administration and preaching. For Nicodemus, the bishop’s first task is the guarding of his own senses and heart; everything else follows from that inner nepsis (see Watchfulness and the Senses).

This occasion makes the Handbook the most accessible doorway into Nicodemus’s own spiritual mind. Where the Philokalia gathers other Fathers and the Rudder gathers the canons, the Handbook is Nicodemus speaking in his own voice, distilling the neptic tradition he had spent his life editing into a single ordered treatise of practical counsel.

The Guarding of the Senses

The architecture of the Handbook is built on the guarding of the five senses — sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch — understood as the gates through which the world enters the soul and through which, ungoverned, the passions invade. Nicodemus treats each sense in turn, teaching how it is to be guarded, purified, and turned from a channel of temptation into a means of glorifying God (Chamberas trans., Handbook, on the senses). This is classic neptic anthropology: the spiritual life is, at its base, a matter of attention at the threshold of the senses — refusing entry to the images and impressions that feed the passions, admitting and rightly using what leads to God. The Fall, in this reading, is re-enacted daily at the gate of the senses, and the spiritual life is the patient re-fortifying of that gate.

But Nicodemus is no dualist who despises the body or the senses as such. The senses are God’s gifts, the windows of the soul; the task is not to destroy them but to transfigure them — to use the beauty seen by the eye and the music heard by the ear as ladders to their Maker, while refusing them as occasions of sin. The guarding of the senses is therefore not mere negation but a re-ordering toward God of the whole sensory life (Chamberas trans., Handbook; see Watchfulness and the Senses).

The Imagination and the Heart

Beyond the outer senses, the Handbook presses inward to the imagination (phantasia) and the heart. Nicodemus gives sustained attention to the phantasia — the image-making faculty — as a particular battleground of the spiritual life. Images received through the senses are retained, recombined, and replayed by the imagination, where they can become the seedbed of passionate thoughts (logismoi) long after the sense-impression has passed. The guarding of the heart therefore requires the guarding of the imagination: the watchful rejection of the images that feed the passions, and the refusal to let the mind dwell on and elaborate them (Chamberas trans., Handbook; on the logismoi, see the neptic tradition gathered in Compiling the Philokalia).

This emphasis on the imagination is one of the places where Nicodemus’s engagement with Western devotional psychology may be felt — the Counter-Reformation literature was much concerned with the imaginative faculty (cf. the meditative use of the imagination in the Ignatian Exercises he adapted; see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises). But Nicodemus’s account is finally neptic and apophatic in its bearing: where the Western tradition often cultivates the imagination for meditation, Nicodemus is more concerned to guard against it, to free the nous from images so that it may pray purely. The destination is the heart purified and the intellect stilled, ready for the prayer of the heart and the vision of God — the goal of the whole neptic enterprise (see Orthodoxy: Theosis).

A Distillation of the Philokalia for Use

The Handbook is best understood as the practical distillation of the Philokalic tradition. Everything in it stands on the Fathers Nicodemus had edited — Evagrius on the thoughts, Hesychios and Philotheos on watchfulness, Maximus on the passions, the hesychasts on the prayer of the heart — but it is organized for use by a working pastor rather than for study. In this it is the natural companion to the Philokalia: the great anthology gives the sources; the Handbook shows one disciplined way to live them. For the reader who finds the Philokalia vast and various, the Handbook offers Nicodemus’s own ordered path through the neptic life.

The English Translation

The Handbook reached English through the translation of Peter A. Chamberas, published in 1989 in the Classics of Western Spirituality series (Paulist Press), with an introduction by George S. Bebis — its inclusion in that distinguished series being itself a mark of the book’s stature and of Nicodemus’s recognized place in the wider history of Christian spirituality (St. Nicodemus, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Chamberas, Paulist Press, 1989). It is the standard English text and the readiest English access to Nicodemus’s own spiritual teaching.

The Bishop as the First Ascetic

The most striking premise of the Handbook is its order of priorities: a treatise written to instruct a bishop begins not with the duties of governance, preaching, or administration but with the interior guarding of the bishop’s own senses and heart (St. Nicodemus, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas, intro. George S. Bebis, New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1989, Introduction). For Nicodemus the shepherd cannot give what he has not first received; the cure of souls presupposes the cure of one’s own soul, and the pastor must therefore be, before all else, an ascetic — a man who has done the inner labor of watchfulness in himself. This inversion is not a slight to the public office of the episcopate but a statement about its root: outward pastoral authority is hollow unless it flows from an inwardly purified person (Chamberas trans., Handbook, Introduction). The book thus reads as a kind of mirror for bishops written entirely in the key of nepsis, holding that the most pastoral thing a shepherd can do is to keep his own heart.

This premise belongs to the wider Orthodox vision of spiritual fatherhood, in which the one who would guide others must himself have been guided and purified (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). The bishop, in Nicodemus’s account, is the first ascetic of his flock — the one whose interior discipline sets the measure for the whole community he serves (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974).

Each Sense in Turn

The Handbook‘s treatment of the senses is not a single undifferentiated counsel but a patient passage through each gate in turn, for each sense admits its own characteristic temptations and requires its own particular guarding (Chamberas trans., Handbook, on the senses). Sight, the most far-reaching of the senses, drinks in images that lodge in the memory and feed the imagination long after; the eye must therefore be governed not by blindness but by a disciplined, reverent looking. Hearing opens the soul to slander, flattery, and the seductions of song, but also to Scripture and the chant of the Church, and so the ear is to be closed to the one and opened to the other. Smell, taste, and touch — the senses most bound to bodily appetite — are the seedbed of gluttony, luxury, and sensuality, and their guarding is the classic ascetic labor of temperance (Chamberas trans., Handbook; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974). In treating the senses severally rather than collectively, Nicodemus follows the precision of the neptic Fathers, who anatomized the soul’s warfare with a physician’s exactness, and he gives the working pastor a concrete, gate-by-gate discipline rather than a vague exhortation to vigilance.

Transfiguration, Not Rejection

It would be easy to misread the Handbook as a manual of mere suppression, but its deepest note is the transfiguration of the senses rather than their rejection (Chamberas trans., Handbook; see Watchfulness and the Senses). The senses are God’s gifts and the windows of the soul; the body is not the soul’s prison but its companion in the spiritual life and its partner in the deification to which the whole person is called (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). The discipline of the Handbook is therefore double-edged: it refuses the senses as occasions of passion precisely so that it may restore them as ladders to God — the eye lifted from lust to the contemplation of created beauty and thence to the Creator, the ear turned from idle and corrupting sound to the words and music of the Church (Chamberas trans., Handbook). This is the neptic answer to the perennial charge that asceticism despises the body: the guarding of the senses is finally for the senses, an ordering of the whole sensory life toward its true end, which is the glorifying of God and the participation of body and soul together in His life (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974).

The Imagination and the Western Touch

The sustained attention the Handbook gives to the imagination (phantasia) repays a closer look, for it is here that Nicodemus’s neptic anthropology meets — and decisively re-forms — the devotional psychology of the West (Chamberas trans., Handbook; see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises). The Counter-Reformation literature that Nicodemus adapted elsewhere was intensely concerned with the image-making faculty, often cultivating it — composing vivid mental scenes of the life of Christ as the very engine of meditation. Nicodemus’s instinct runs the other way. For the neptic tradition the goal of prayer is the nous freed from all images, stilled and unclothed before God, so that the phantasia is less a workshop of devotion than a battleground to be guarded (Chamberas trans., Handbook; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974). Images received through the senses are retained, recombined, and replayed by the imagination, becoming the seedbed of passionate thoughts (logismoi) long after their occasion has passed; the guarding of the heart therefore requires the guarding of the imagination. Where Nicodemus borrows from the West, he passes the borrowing through this apophatic neptic filter, so that whatever serves the stilling of the mind is kept and whatever would entangle it in images is restrained — a small but telling instance of the discerning patristic mind at work in his own most personal book (see Watchfulness and the Senses).

See Also

• Christian Morality and Hymnography — Nicodemus’s other original spiritual and liturgical writing.
• Watchfulness and the Senses — the neptic theology the Handbook applies.
• Compiling the Philokalia — the sources the Handbook distills.
• Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises — the Western devotional psychology that touches the Handbook’s treatment of the imagination.
• Orthodoxy Guide: Theosis — the deification that is the goal of the guarded heart.
• Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction — the spiritual fatherhood the bishop-ascetic embodies.

References

• Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas, intro. George S. Bebis. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1989. The standard English of the Symbouleutikon Encheiridion; for the occasion (Bishop Hierotheos of Euripos), the guarding of the senses and the imagination, and the neptic teaching.
• Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Encheiridion / Handbook among his works.)
• Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. On the Handbook and its place in his spiritual writing.