The Virtues and the Order of Progress

The constructive half of the vocabulary. Each passion has a virtue set against it, and the ascetic literature names them in pairs; humility, repentance, mourning, and compunction stand behind all of them. Two schemes order the whole: Evagrius’ praktike–physike–theologia, and the purification–illumination–union of the Dionysian tradition. This file gives both, and states exactly how far such maps bind.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Virtues Against the Passions

The ascetic writers pair each passion with the virtue that heals it, and the pairing is a working instrument: a person who knows what is attacking him knows what to practise. St. John Cassian sets out the pairs as he treats the eight vices, and later Greek writers repeat them.

Passion Greek Virtue Greek Slavonic / Russian
Gluttony γαστριμαργία self-control, temperance ἐγκράτεια воздержание
Unchastity πορνεία chastity, purity σωφροσύνη, ἁγνεία целомудрие
Avarice φιλαργυρία non-possessiveness ἀκτημοσύνη нестяжание
Dejection λύπη hope, godly gladness ἐλπίς упование
Anger ὀργή meekness, forbearance πραότης кротость
Listlessness ἀκηδία perseverance, patience ὑπομονή терпение
Vainglory κενοδοξία hiddenness, obscurity — безвестность
Pride ὑπερηφανία humility ταπείνωσις, ταπεινοφροσύνη смирение

Two cautions attach to the table. The pairing is not mechanical. The Fathers do not teach that a virtue is acquired by aiming at it directly; a person who tries to be humble in order to defeat pride has, characteristically, made the pride more interesting. And the virtues are one. St. Maximus and the tradition after him treat the virtues as facets of a single condition, unified in love, so that a person does not accumulate them severally but is healed as a whole (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1981; John of Damascus, On the Virtues and the Vices, in The Philokalia, vol. 2).

The Ground: Humility, Repentance, Mourning

Behind the paired virtues stand four terms that the tradition treats as the condition of everything else.

Humility — ταπείνωσις, ταπεινοφροσύνη — смирение. Not self-deprecation, and not a low opinion of one’s abilities, but the truth about one’s condition held without flinching and without despair. St. Isaac the Syrian calls humility the raiment of the Godhead, in which the Word clothed himself when he became man, so that whoever is clothed with it has been made like him who came down from his own exaltation (Isaac the Syrian, Ascetical Homilies, HTM Homily 77; trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2nd ed., Boston, 2011). St. Silouan’s word — keep your mind in hell and despair not — is the most compressed statement of the same thing in the modern tradition (see St. Silouan the Athonite: Christlike Humility).

Repentance — μετάνοια — покаяние. Literally the changing of the mind. The tradition treats it not as the entrance to the spiritual life but as its permanent mode: no one graduates from it, and a spirituality that treats repentance as a preliminary stage is regarded with suspicion (see Theosis: The Garments of Skin and the Ancestral Wound, which states the same point).

Mourning — πένθος — плач. Godly sorrow for sin, which St. John Climacus calls joy-creating and to which he devotes Step 7 of the Ladder. It is deliberately distinguished from λύπη, the dejection that is counted among the eight: the difference is that one turns toward God and produces hope, and the other turns inward and produces despair (Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7; trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell, New York: Paulist Press, 1982; 2 Corinthians 7:10; see St. John Climacus: Repentance and Mourning).

Compunction — κατάνυξις — умиление. The piercing tenderness of heart that accompanies genuine prayer, and the gift of tears that often accompanies it. The tradition treats tears as a gift given rather than a state to be produced, and warns against manufacturing them (see St. Isaac the Syrian: Solitude and Tears; St. Symeon the New Theologian: The Gift of Tears).

Evagrius’ Three Stages

Evagrius orders the whole spiritual life in three:

πρακτική (praktike) — the practical or active life: keeping the commandments and fighting the passions. Its term is apatheia.

φυσική (physike) — natural contemplation: the perception of the logoi, the inner principles or divine intentions of created things. St. Maximus developed this into a full cosmology (see St. Maximus the Confessor: The Logoi of Creation).

θεολογία (theologia) — in this vocabulary, not the academic discipline but the direct knowledge of God in prayer. Evagrius’ most quoted sentence makes the identification: the one who prays truly is a theologian, and the theologian is the one who prays truly (Evagrius, Chapters on Prayer 60; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972).

The Slavonic and Russian tradition renders praktike as деятельная жизнь and theoria as созерцание or видение, and the pair “active and contemplative life” in Russian spiritual writing usually translates this distinction rather than the Western monastic one.

Purification, Illumination, Union

The other standard scheme — κάθαρσις, φωτισμός, ἕνωσις (or τελείωσις): purification, illumination, union or perfection — comes into the tradition from the Dionysian corpus and became the ordinary framework of later Byzantine and Russian spiritual writing. St. Theophan the Recluse organizes his systematic works around a version of it (Theophan, The Path to Salvation, trans. Seraphim Rose and the St. Herman Brotherhood, Platina, CA, 1996; see St. Theophan the Recluse: The Path to Salvation).

The two schemes map onto one another roughly — purification to praktike, illumination to physike, union to theologia — and are often used interchangeably.

How Far the Schemes Bind

This is the point at which a reference work has to be exact, because the schemes are constantly presented as though they had the authority of dogma. They do not.

No council has defined them. They are theological instruments of great antiquity and usefulness, elaborated by particular authors — one of them, Evagrius, under condemnation for other reasons (see The Sources and Their Limits). What the Church confesses is the healing of human nature in Christ and the participation of the creature in the divine life; the mapping of that into three stages is theological work built upon it.

The stages are not sequential in practice. The Fathers who use the schemes also say plainly that God gives illumination to beginners and withdraws it from the advanced, that a person may be far along in one respect and untouched in another, and that the whole ascent may be traversed in a moment by grace. St. John Climacus wrote thirty steps and then remarked that the order is not a timetable.

No one graduates from the first stage. Purification is not completed and left behind. The saints of this tradition describe themselves, at the end of long lives, as beginners in repentance, and they mean it as a description rather than a formula.

The schemes are dangerous to apply to oneself. A person who locates himself on the map has performed exactly the self-assessment the tradition forbids (see The Marks of Delusion and the Safeguards; Theosis: The Dogmatic Guardrails). Their proper use is descriptive and pastoral — a way of understanding what one is reading and of recognizing that the literature addresses different conditions — not diagnostic.

Synergy: Whose Work This Is

A last structural point without which the whole account is distorted.

The virtues are not achievements that oblige God, and the ascetic labour is not the cause of what follows it. The Orthodox account is synergistic: God’s grace and the creature’s consent both real, neither replacing the other, and the initiative God’s. The labour is genuine and necessary — the tradition has no patience with a piety that expects transformation without effort — and it does not produce the result; it removes the obstacles and consents to the physician (see Theosis: Synergy and the Mysteries; Theosis: Asceticism, Prayer, and the Church).

Two errors are excluded together. The first treats the ascetic programme as a technique that produces states — the error that ends in prelest. The second concludes, from the fact that grace does the work, that the labour is unnecessary — the error the Church refused in her rejection of both Pelagian and quietist accounts. The vocabulary of this collection belongs entirely inside the space between them.

See Also

References

  • Cassian, John. The Institutes, Books V–XII. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
  • Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, esp. Chapters on Prayer 60. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.
  • Isaac the Syrian. The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, HTM Homily 77. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. 2nd ed. Boston, 2011.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 7. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • John of Damascus. On the Virtues and the Vices. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  • Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  • Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The purification–illumination–perfection triad.)
  • Theophan the Recluse. The Path to Salvation: A Manual of Spiritual Transformation. Trans. Seraphim Rose and the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1996.
  • Scripture: 2 Corinthians 7:10.