Cautions for the Modern Reader

The guardrails file. This vocabulary is monastic in origin, was written for people living under obedience in a settled discipline, and is routinely misapplied — as psychological diagnosis, as a self-directed programme, as moralism, as a technique, and as a language for assessing other people. Each caution below states a misapplication and the reason it is one. The file is written to be usable by a priest handing this literature to someone who has just discovered it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Cautions Are Part of the Doctrine

The warnings in this file are not a defensive appendix. The tradition that produced this vocabulary produced the cautions in the same breath — the desert told its cautionary stories at the same time as its counsels, St. John Climacus wrote his warnings into the steps themselves, and St. Ignatius Brianchaninov spent as much of his life anatomizing the failure modes as commending the practice. A reader who has the terms without the fences has half the tradition, and it is the more dangerous half.

1. This Is a Monastic Literature

Almost every source quoted in this collection was written by a monk, for monks, in a setting that included a rule, an elder, a stable community, manual labour, and the daily services. The Church has always also given this material to laypeople, but with adaptation, and the adaptation is not optional.

Two things follow. Counsel is addressed to conditions. A saying given to a hermit of fifty years, or to a novice under obedience, does not transfer unaltered to a person with a job and three children — and the tradition’s own governing virtue, diakrisis, exists precisely to make such adjustments (see Discernment and the Measure). The rhetoric is monastic. The desert wrote in a register of hyperbole and absolute demand which its first readers knew how to hear. Sayings about hating one’s body, fleeing all human company, or weeping without ceasing are not legislation.

2. The Passions Are Not a Taxonomy of Mental Illness

This must be said plainly, because the harm done by getting it wrong is real and is not hypothetical.

The eight thoughts are not diagnostic categories, and this literature is not a substitute for medical or psychiatric care. Akedia is not clinical depression; the descriptions overlap and the conditions are different, and treating a depressive illness with the remedies for akedia — stay in your cell, keep the rule, work harder — can be actively dangerous. Intrusive thoughts of the kind that characterize obsessive-compulsive disorder are not logismoi in the moral sense, and applying the language of assent and guilt to them feeds the disorder rather than addressing it; the tradition’s own teaching that the prosbole carries no guilt is the correct pastoral word here, and it does not replace treatment (see What a Thought Is and the Stages of Assent). Scrupulosity is not watchfulness. Disordered eating is not fasting, and a person with an eating disorder must not be given the Church’s fasting rule as though it were therapy — the canonical tradition already exempts the sick, and a confessor who does not adjust the rule in such a case has misread it. Psychosis is not prelest, whatever superficial resemblance the phenomena may have (see What Plane and Prelest Name).

Seeking treatment is not a failure of faith. The Orthodox tradition honours physicians — Scripture commands that the physician be honoured (Sirach 38:1–4 LXX), and the Church venerates the unmercenary physician-saints and prays for healing through medicine as well as through prayer. Nothing in Orthodox teaching requires a person to choose between a doctor and a confessor, and any counsel that presents the choice that way should be refused.

The right rule of thumb: this vocabulary describes what a healthy person does with what arises in him. Where the underlying capacity is impaired — by illness, by trauma, by exhaustion, by chemistry — the description does not fit, and applying it produces guilt without remedy.

3. It Is Not for Self-Directed Practice

The whole structure of safeguards in this tradition is external to the individual, because the conditions it guards against are self-confirming (see The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards). A person who reads the Philokalia and constructs his own programme from it has removed the one component the authors regarded as indispensable.

The honest difficulty is that experienced guides are rare, and the tradition faced this squarely in the nineteenth century. St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s answer remains the standard one: live by counsel — testing one’s path against Scripture, the Fathers, and the advice of sober contemporaries — rather than in the fantasy of an obedience one does not have; keep to plain and safe forms of prayer; refuse the specialized techniques; and treat humility, repentance, and the commandments as the guide that does not deceive (Brianchaninov, The Arena, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus, Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991; see St. Ignatius Brianchaninov: Discernment for a Weakened Age; The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance).

What is safely given to anyone: the prayer rule of the Church, said with attention rather than at speed; the Jesus Prayer in its oral and mental forms, prayed penitently and imagelessly; the memory of God through the day; the fasts as the parish keeps them and as a confessor adjusts them; regular confession and communion; and the ordinary duties of one’s state in life. What is not taken up without direction: the psychosomatic method, extended solitude, escalated rules of prayer or fasting, and any programme aimed at producing states.

4. It Is Not Moralism

The passions are not a checklist of vices, and progress is not a matter of scoring better on it. The Orthodox frame is therapeutic rather than juridical: the human condition is a wound to be healed, not principally a record to be cleared (see Soteriology; Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin).

Three consequences. The aim is love, not blamelessness — and the tradition says so structurally, by placing love above dispassion (see From Dispassion to Love). Effort does not earn the outcome; the account is synergistic, and a programme of self-improvement with religious vocabulary is not what is being described (see The Virtues and the Order of Progress). Severity proves nothing. The desert distrusted spectacular austerity precisely because it is compatible with the whole enterprise having become an exercise in self-regard.

5. “The Passions” Are Not “Emotions”

The most consequential single confusion in modern use. A passion is a settled disposition contrary to nature; an emotion is an episode, mostly involuntary, and mostly innocent. The Fathers do not teach the suppression of feeling — they teach the redirection of the soul’s desiring and incensive powers, which are created goods (see What a Passion Is; The Passible Part and the Garments of Skin).

The proof is at the summit of the tradition, not at its margins: St. Isaac’s dispassionate man weeps for animals and for demons, and cannot bear to see any creature suffer (see St. Isaac the Syrian: The Merciful Heart). Any reading of this literature that produces emotional flatness has gone wrong at the beginning.

6. It Is Not a Technique

The resemblance between watchfulness and modern attention practices is real at the level of method and misleading everywhere else: the object, the end, and the frame all differ (see Watchfulness and the Guard of the Heart). The ascetic disciplines are not tools for stress reduction, productivity, or self-optimization, and they do not work as such — not because they are too holy for it, but because their operation depends on being ordered to God rather than to the self.

A related caution: the psychosomatic method has a long history of being extracted from its setting and marketed as a technique. Every serious authority in the tradition, including those who describe it, restricts it to those under direction (see Attention, Prayer, and the Descent of the Nous).

7. It Is Not a Vocabulary for Assessing Other People

This literature is diagnostic in the first person. Used in the third, it becomes slander with technical terms — and judging the neighbour is itself named among the passions, with particular severity in the Russian sources from which the most-used English term, prelest, comes (Matthew 7:1–5; see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions; The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards).

The confident diagnosis of another person’s spiritual state is, by the tradition’s own marks, characteristic of the very condition it is usually deployed to name.

8. It Is Not a Substitute for the Church

The ascetic literature presupposes baptism, the Eucharist, confession, the liturgical year, and a parish. It is not a private path running alongside them, and every one of its authors would have regarded a reader who intensified his inner discipline while drifting from the sacraments as in serious danger. The most reliable external mark of the whole family of errors treated in this collection is exactly that drift: the inner programme grows and the ordinary life of the Church, the family, and the neighbour shrinks (see The Jesus Prayer (hub article); Theosis: Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

9. How to Read the Sources

Four practical rules for anyone going to the primary texts.

Get the glossary first. Read the glossary printed in the English Philokalia before reading the texts, and know that “intellect” there means nous and not reason (see The Sources and Their Limits).

Know who is speaking and to whom. The Philokalia is an anthology spanning eleven centuries, addressed largely to monks, edited with a programme. “The Philokalia says” is never a sufficient citation (see The Philokalia: Reading the Philokalia).

Read the plainer authors first. The tradition’s own counsel, and the counsel of every modern Orthodox guide to this literature, is to begin with the Gospels and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, then Climacus and the Russian nineteenth-century writers who wrote for a general readership, and to leave the technical hesychast texts until much later or never.

Read with a confessor’s knowledge. Not permission-seeking, simply telling someone what one is reading and what it is doing. This is the tradition’s own instrument, and it costs nothing.

The Cautions as a Set

Read together, these are not nine separate warnings but one, seen from nine sides. The vocabulary describes a healing that happens to a person inside the Church, under obedience, aimed at love, and administered by God. Detach it from any of those four and the terms remain and the thing they name does not: without the Church it becomes a private path, without obedience a self-confirming one, without love a moralism, and without grace a technique.

The tradition’s own summary is shorter. Seek nothing in prayer but repentance and the mercy of God; tell someone what happens; and measure yourself by whether you have become easier to live with.

See Also

References

  • Brianchaninov, Ignatius. The Arena: An Offering to Contemporary Monasticism. Trans. Archimandrite Lazarus. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1991.
  • Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Glossary.)
  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
  • Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974.
  • Scripture: Matthew 7:1–5; Sirach 38:1–4 (LXX).