Not by Struggle Alone

The necessary complement and corrective to St. Porphyrios’s “do not fight evil head-on”: how his teaching stands within the great Orthodox ascetic tradition of struggle rather than against it. St. Porphyrios did not abolish asceticism, the cross, or the war on the passions; he reoriented them. His counsel is not “make no effort,” but “do not make the fight against evil the center”; effort there must be, but it is to flow from love for Christ, not to be the grim engine by which love is wrung out. Read carefully, his teaching corrects two opposite errors — the rigorism that fixates on sin, and the sentimentality that drops the cross — and keeps both struggle and love in their right order.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

The Danger of Misreading Him

St. Porphyrios’s most famous counsel — “ignore evil, look towards Christ”; “don’t struggle directly with temptation” (see Wounded by Love) — is among the most easily misread teachings in modern Orthodox spirituality. Taken crudely, it can be made to mean: make no effort; do not fast or keep vigil or fight your passions; just feel love for Christ and all will be well. That is not what he taught, and to read him so would set him against the entire ascetic tradition of the Church — against the Philokalia, against St. John Climacus’s Ladder of Divine Ascent, against the very Kavsokalyvia asceticism that formed him and that he practiced with extreme rigor as a young monk (see The Elders and the Gift). A saint who walked barefoot over rocks, slept on the floor under one blanket, and kept nightlong vigils of prostrations was no enemy of asceticism. The corrective this file offers is to read his teaching within that tradition, as a reorientation of struggle, not an abolition of it.

What He Was Actually Correcting

St. Porphyrios’s target was a particular spiritual pathology: the anxious, self-centered fixation on one’s own sin and on evil, which he saw — with real psychological insight — as counterproductive and often as a subtler form of pride. The person who is forever scrutinizing his faults, struggling grimly and directly against each temptation, anxiously praying for the bad thing to go away, has made himself and his sin the center of his spiritual life. He is looking at the dark. And St. Porphyrios observed that this fixation tends to energize the very thing it fights: attention feeds the passion; the struggle binds one more tightly to it; the anxiety becomes its own snare (Wounded by Love, trans. Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, “The struggle,” and the Theophaneia review’s discussion of “not inadvertently energizing sins by paying attention to them”).

The correction is not “stop trying” but “stop looking at the dark; look at the light.” Turn the soul’s attention and energy away from the obsessive combat with sin and toward Christ — and the sin, no longer fed by attention, loses its power. This is the garden of the soul again: do not wage war on the weeds; water the flowers, and the weeds die back (see Wounded by Love).

Effort That Flows From Love

So there is effort in St. Porphyrios — a great deal of it. But its source and its order are different from the rigorist model. In the rigorist picture, effort is the engine: by struggle and ascesis one slowly, grimly, forces oneself toward God, and love is the distant reward. In St. Porphyrios, love is the engine and effort is its overflow: when the soul is wounded with love for Christ (the divine eros of the previous file), prayer, fasting, vigil, and the cutting-off of the passions become not grim duties wrung from a reluctant will but the natural, even joyful, expressions of a soul in love. The lover does not have to be flogged toward the beloved.

This is why his counsel on the Jesus Prayer is “say it with love, not with pressure,” and his counsel on prayer is “without anxiety, without tension or compulsion” (see Prayer and the Jesus Prayer). It is the same principle: the spiritual disciplines are to be filled with love and longing, not driven by strain and fear. The asceticism remains; its spirit is transformed. Struggle there is — but not struggle alone, and not struggle as the center. Love is the center, and struggle is what love does.

In Conversation with the Ladder

It is illuminating to set St. Porphyrios beside St. John Climacus, the classic of Orthodox ascetic struggle (see St. John Climacus). The Ladder of Divine Ascent — which St. Porphyrios, formed at Kavsokalyvia, knew in his bones — is a treatise of combat: step by step, the monk wars against each passion and ascends. One might think St. Porphyrios’s “do not fight evil directly” simply contradicts it. It does not. The Ladder itself crowns its thirty steps not with a final feat of combat but with love (Step 30, on faith, hope, and love), and it is shot through with warnings against fighting some passions head-on (vainglory and despair especially), against fixation, and against the pride hidden in ascetic struggle. St. Porphyrios stands in this stream: he draws out and intensifies the tradition’s own insistence that love is the summit and the secret, and that the whole point of the combat is to arrive at love — so much so that he counsels beginning from love, letting love do the fighting. He is not the Ladder’s opponent but, in a sense, its impatient and tender interpreter, who wants the soul to start at the top.

The Cross Is Not Abolished but Transfigured

A careful reader might still press the objection: does not Christianity stand or fall on the Cross — on self-denial, the taking up of one’s cross daily, the dying to self that the Lord Himself commands (Luke 9:23)? And does not St. Porphyrios’s “turn to Christ, do not fight evil” risk evacuating the Cross of its cost? The answer, drawn from his own life as much as his words, is that he does not abolish the Cross but transfigures it — relocates it from the center of grim attention to the heart of love.

St. Porphyrios’s own life was a life of the Cross to a degree few of his admirers grasp: the barefoot vigils of his youth; the body broken by pleurisy and then by a relentless sequence of grave illnesses; the blindness of his last years; the hemorrhaging through which he built his monastery; the death sought, in suffering, on the Holy Mountain (see Return to Kavsokalyvia). He carried an enormous cross. But he carried it out of love and into joy — not as a grim duty wrung from a reluctant will, but as the natural cost of a soul wounded with love for Christ, embraced the way a lover embraces any suffering that union with the beloved entails. His teaching on illness (see Reading Souls in the City) makes this explicit: suffering embraced with love and offered to Christ becomes a means of grace and even of joy.

So the Cross remains, in full weight; what changes is its spirit. In the rigorist picture the Cross is the grim instrument by which the self is beaten into submission. In St. Porphyrios the Cross is what love freely bears for the Beloved — the same Cross, the same cost, but now lifted by eros rather than dragged by dread. “Not by struggle alone” does not mean “without the Cross”; it means “the Cross carried by love, not by fear.” That is the precise calibration of his teaching, and it is why he can be read neither as a rigorist nor as a sentimentalist, but as a faithful witness to the Gospel’s own paradox: that the yoke is easy and the burden light (Matthew 11:30), not because there is no yoke and no burden, but because love makes even the Cross light.

Correcting Two Errors at Once

Read rightly, then, St. Porphyrios’s teaching corrects two opposite errors and keeps the tradition balanced:

Against rigorism — the spirituality of grim, anxious, self-fixated combat with sin, which forgets that the goal is love and which energizes the very evil it fights — he says: stop staring at the dark; turn to Christ; let love displace the sin.
Against sentimentalism — the misreading of his own words into a soft, effortless religion of warm feelings with no cross and no ascesis — his own life and the whole shape of his teaching say: the love I mean is the divine eros that made me walk barefoot over rocks and keep nightlong vigils; it is not the absence of the cross but its transfiguration.

The result is a teaching neither lax nor grim: a Christianity in which the cross is real and the asceticism is real, but both are taken up out of love and into joy, with the soul’s eyes fixed not on its own sin but on the face of Christ. Not by struggle alone — but not without struggle either; rather, by the love that turns struggle into the motion of the heart toward its Beloved.

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. “Ignore evil, look towards Christ”; the counsel against direct, anxious struggle with temptation; the priority of love and the persistence of ascetic effort within it.
“Book Review: Spiritual Eldership, Confession and Charisms in Wounded by Love.” Theophaneia.org. On not “energizing sins by paying attention to them” and the psychology of the garden-of-the-soul teaching.
St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (esp. the steps on vainglory and despondency, and Step 30 on love). The ascetic tradition of struggle culminating in love, within which St. Porphyrios’s teaching is read; cited via the sibling collection rather than a specific edition.