Wounded by Love

The flagship file of this collection: the central teaching of St. Porphyrios as gathered in Wounded by Love. Its core is a single, decisive reorientation of the spiritual life — away from the head-on war against evil and toward the turning of the whole soul to Christ, “who is joy, who is life, who is light.” From this flow his great images: that you do not defeat darkness by fighting it but by letting in the light; that the soul is a garden whose God-given power is to be channeled toward the good rather than spent against the bad; and that the whole of Christianity is love — a divine eros for Christ that wounds and draws the soul. Reported here from the text, in the Elder’s own remembered words.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)

A Teaching Gathered, Not Written

St. Porphyrios wrote almost nothing himself. What we have of his teaching reaches us through Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios — compiled after his repose by the Sisters of the Holy Convent of Chrysopigi from an archive of notes and recordings of his conversations, first published in Greek in 2003 and in John Raffan’s English translation in 2005 (Denise Harvey). The book is thus a record of remembered conversation, not a treatise, and that is exactly its character: warm, repetitive, image-laden, personal. Per this collection’s methodology (METHODOLOGY §2.4), the teaching is reported from that text, in his reported words, with its compiled and conversational provenance kept in view. What follows is the heart of what the book attests him to have taught.

“Christ Is Everything”

Everything in St. Porphyrios begins and ends with the person of Christ, loved. He did not teach a system; he taught a Person. “Love Christ and put nothing before His love,” runs his counsel; “He is joy, He is life, He is light. Christ is everything” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Love of Christ”). This is not pious decoration but the literal center from which his whole teaching is generated. The Christian life, for St. Porphyrios, is not in the first place a moral project, a program of self-improvement, or a campaign against one’s faults. It is a love affair — the turning of the whole person toward Christ in love, and the discovery that He is the joy and life and light the soul was made for. Get that center right, and everything else follows; get it wrong — make the spiritual life about anything other than loving Christ — and no amount of effort will avail.

The Great Reversal: Do Not Fight Evil — Turn to Christ

From this center comes the single most characteristic and influential move of St. Porphyrios’s teaching, and the one that most distinguishes him: he counsels the soul not to fight evil head-on, but to turn instead toward Christ and the good. The text is direct: “You won’t become saints by hounding after evil. Ignore evil. Look towards Christ and He will save you” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The struggle”). And again, on temptation and one’s own sins: “Don’t struggle directly with temptation… don’t pray for it to go away” — that is, do not make the temptation the focus of your attention and your combat (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Spiritual struggle,” as summarized in the Theophaneia review).

The reasoning is both spiritual and psychological, and St. Porphyrios understood both. Spiritually, the soul is healed not by emptying out the darkness but by letting in the light: turn to Christ, fill the soul with His love and light, and the darkness has nowhere to remain — as light fills a room and the dark simply ceases, without ever being fought. Psychologically, he grasped that fixating on a sin, struggling against it directly, anxiously praying for it to go away, often energizes it — keeps it at the center of attention, feeds it with the soul’s energy, and binds the person more tightly to the very thing they are trying to escape. The way out is not to push against the dark but to turn toward the light. “Don’t look at evil,” he taught; “look into God’s arms” (St. Porphyrios, paraphrased and quoted in iconandlight.wordpress.com, from Wounded by Love).

This is treated more fully, in its relation to the ascetic tradition, in the companion file (see Not by Struggle Alone); the essential point here is that for St. Porphyrios the positive — Christ, light, love — is primary, and the negative is defeated by being displaced, not by being assaulted.

The Garden of the Soul

St. Porphyrios’s favorite image for this teaching is the garden of the soul. He compared the power God has placed in the human soul — the soul’s energy, its capacity for desire and effort and love — to the water with which one nourishes a garden: a single source of power, which the gardener may channel where he wills. “It is up to him how he channels it” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “The garden of the soul,” as summarized in the Theophaneia review).

The image carries the whole teaching. The soul has a fixed quantity of vital energy; the question is not how to destroy the weeds by direct assault but where to direct the water. Channel the soul’s energy into cultivating the good — into love of Christ, prayer, beauty, the virtues — and the good grows, and the weeds, deprived of the water that was feeding them, wither of their own accord. Spend that same energy fighting the weeds directly, fixating on them, and you water them with your attention even as you struggle against them. The gardener’s art is not war but cultivation: he grows flowers, and the weeds lose. So with the soul: do not fight your passions head-on; channel the soul’s God-given power toward Christ and the good, and the passions, unfed, die back. The garden is the same insight as “ignore evil, look toward Christ,” given in an image any Evia shepherd could understand.

Wounded by Love: The Divine Eros

The title of the book is itself a doctrine. Wounded by Love renders St. Porphyrios’s teaching that the soul’s relation to Christ is, at its height, a divine eros (theios eros) — a love so intense that it “wounds” the soul, leaving it lovesick for God, drawn out of itself toward the Beloved. This is not sentiment; it is the language of the Fathers and of the Song of Songs, the tradition of the soul as the bride wounded with love for the Bridegroom. “Love towards Christ is something even higher, infinitely higher” than all other loves, St. Porphyrios taught (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Divine eros”). The whole of the spiritual life, for him, is the awakening and feeding of this eros — and once it is awake, it does the work that no amount of grim effort could: it makes prayer effortless, struggle joyful, virtue spontaneous, because the soul now wants Christ more than it wants anything else.

This is why he could counsel against fighting evil directly: a soul wounded with love for Christ is not fighting its sins; it has simply fallen in love, and the love has displaced the sin. The negative program (defeat evil) is swallowed up in the positive one (love Christ). “Look, that’s how we must love Christ our God” (St. Porphyrios, Wounded by Love, “Divine eros”).

The Psychology of the Teaching

One reason St. Porphyrios’s teaching has reached so many modern readers is that it is, among other things, psychologically astute — and consciously so. He understood, in a way that anticipates much modern psychology, that attention is a kind of energy, and that what we attend to grows. To fixate on a fault, to struggle anxiously against a temptation, to monitor oneself constantly for sin, is to keep that fault, temptation, and sin at the center of the mind’s energy — and thereby, paradoxically, to feed it. The harder one fights a thought head-on, the more firmly one fixes it in place. This is the psychological core of “don’t struggle directly with temptation”: the direct struggle is often self-defeating, because the very act of fighting an obsessive thought is a way of attending to it (Wounded by Love, “The struggle”; the Theophaneia review’s discussion of “not energizing sins by paying attention to them”).

St. Porphyrios’s remedy is to redirect attention rather than to intensify the struggle. Do not try to empty the mind of the dark thought by force; turn the mind toward Christ, fill it with His light and love, and the dark thought, deprived of attention, loses its hold and fades. This is not a denial of the reality of sin or of the need for repentance; it is a strategy for the actual mechanics of how a soul is changed. He grasped that one does not become good by staring at one’s badness, any more than one learns to walk a tightrope by staring at the ground one fears to fall onto. The eyes go where the heart is fixed, and the feet follow the eyes; fix the heart on Christ, and the whole person moves toward Him. The garden image carries the same psychology: attention is the water, and the gardener grows what he waters. This unusual marriage of patristic spirituality and psychological realism is part of why St. Porphyrios speaks so directly to anxious, self-scrutinizing modern people, who have so often made their own spiritual lives miserable by precisely the head-on, fixated struggle he warns against.

Love as the Whole of It

In the end, for St. Porphyrios, the whole of Christianity reduces to love — love of Christ, and, inseparably, love of every person and of all creation as droplets of God’s love (a theme carried into the next section: see Nature, Poetry, and Science). His deepest desire, the one he carried to his deathbed, was the unity of all in the love of Christ — his last words, by the witnesses, were Christ’s own prayer “that they all may be one” (see Return to Kavsokalyvia). He taught that the great mystery of the spiritual life is to identify oneself with one’s brother, to carry the other’s burden, so that the “me” in “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” comes to enclose the pain and the need of everyone (Elder Porphyrios: A Short Biography, OrthoChristian.com, on his teaching of unity).

This is the teaching in sum: Christ is everything; love Him; do not fight the dark but let in the light; channel the soul’s power toward the good; be wounded by His love; and love every soul and all creation as His. It is a Christianity of astonishing positivity and warmth — and it is precisely calibrated, as the companion file shows, so as not to collapse into a sentimental rejection of the cross and the struggle (see Not by Struggle Alone).

References

Wounded by Love: The Life and the Wisdom of Saint Porphyrios. Translated by John Raffan. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey (Publisher), 2005. (Greek original, Holy Convent of Chrysopigi, 2003.) “Christ is everything”; “ignore evil, look towards Christ”; the garden of the soul; divine eros; love as the whole.
“Book Review: Spiritual Eldership, Confession and Charisms in Wounded by Love.” Theophaneia.org. On “don’t struggle directly with temptation” and the garden-of-the-soul image as drawn from the book.
“Don’t Look at Evil. Look into God’s Arms… St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalivia.” iconandlight.wordpress.com. The “look into God’s arms” counsel from Wounded by Love.
Elder Porphyrios (Bairaktaris): A Short Biography. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/66300.html). His teaching of unity (“that they may be one”) and of carrying the brother’s burden.