In this step, St.
John writes about the struggle for chastity: "The man who decides to
struggle against his flesh and to overcome it by his own efforts is fighting in
vain. The truth is that unless the
Lord overturns the house of the flesh and builds the house of the soul, the man
wishing to overcome it has watched and fasted for nothing. Offer the Lord the weakness of your
nature. Admit your incapacity and,
without your knowing it, you will win for yourself the gift of chastity."
Sadly,
in today's world, these words sound foreign. As a society, we have abandoned the concept of sexual virtue
and purity. On our television
screens and in the movie theaters, we calmly watch without reaction repeated
violations of chastity. As
Christians we have come to accept and tolerate attitudes and behaviors in
ourselves and others that at another time would have been unthinkable. In so many ways we have lost sight of
the fact that Chastity is not only precious in the eyes of God but a necessary
virtue for us to obtain in our ascent to heaven. Holy Scripture makes this clear: "Now the works of the
flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness . .
. and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I told you in time
past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of
God" (Gal 5:19,21). For this
reason, St. John calls unchastity "a sort of death within us, a sin that
is catastrophic."
What
then is Chastity? St. John
answers: "The chaste man is not someone with a body undefiled, but rather
a person whose members are in complete subjection to the soul." One must remember that for St. John the
body is both adversary and friend: adversary in as much as it has been marred
by the fall, friend in as much as it remains God's creation and is called to
share in the resurrection glory.
For the Christian, the body is not a tomb or prison, not a piece of
clothing to be worn for a time and then cast aside, but an integral part of the
true self. The Christian's aim is
"a body made holy."
Likewise, the passions, although a consequence of the fall and therefore
no true part of human nature, are merely the distortion of the natural impulses
implanted by God. While
repudiating the passions, we should not reject the natural God-given impulses
that underlie them, but should restore to good use that which has become
misdirected as a result of the fall.
Our watchword should be "transfigure" not
"suppress"; "educate" not "eradicate". Therefore, physical eros is not
to be considered sinful, but can and should be used as a way of glorifying
God. Sin is evil, but not the body
and its natural impulses. In fact,
physical love can be a paradigm of our longing for God. The struggle for chastity, then, begins
with controlling the body's sexual desires, through prayer and spiritual
discipline, and ends with their transfiguration. Having overcome the passion, we are free to be our true
selves, free to love others, free to love God.
How
do we fight against the spirit of unchastity? St. John speaks a great deal about the necessity of doing
serious battle against "evil
thoughts" - that is, thoughts provoked by demons. This also includes conceptual images
such as fantasies. Through
ascetical discipline and prayer we must foster watchfulness - a state of
spiritual sobriety, alertness, and vigilance in which one constantly guards the
heart and intellect. In our
discipline we must be as relentless and cunning as the demons who tempt
us. With one difference - - We
must in humility recognize our weakness and absolute dependence upon God to
attain this virtue.
1-8 Chastity
defined: its nature and qualities.
As a rightly ordered love it shares something in common with and belongs
to all virtues.
Chastity
is a supernatural denial of what one is by nature, so that a mortal and
corruptible body is competing in a truly marvelous way with incorporeal
spirits. A chaste man is someone
who has driven out bodily love by means of divine love, who has used heavenly
fire to quench the fires of the flesh.
Chastity
is a name common to all virtues.
Anyone
trained in chastity should give himself no credit for any achievements, for a
man cannot conquer what he actually is.
When nature is overcome, it should be admitted that this is due to Him
Who is above nature, since it cannot be denied that the weaker always yields to
the stronger.
The
chaste man is not someone with a body undefiled but rather a person whose
members are in complete subjection to the soul, for a man is great who is free
of passion even when touched, though greater still is the man unhurt by all he
has looked on. Such a man has
truly mastered the fires of earthly beauty by his attention concentrated on the
beauties of heaven. In driving off
this dog by means of prayer he is like someone who has been fighting a
lion. He who subdues it by
resistance to it is someone still chasing an enemy. But the man who has managed to reduce its hold completely,
even when he himself is still in this life, is someone who has already risen
from the dead.
9-19 John
then describes the different levels of self-restraint. He warns, however, that whatever level
of restraint we may have achieved we must never trust ourselves. It the battle for chastity, we must
rely only on the grace of God. It
alone can transform nature.
The
man who struggles against this enemy by sweat and bodily hardships is like
someone who has tied his adversary with a reed. If he fights him with temperance, sleeplessness, and keeping
watch, it is as if he had put fetters on him. If he fights with humility, calmness, and thirst, it is as
though he had killed the enemy and buried him in sand, the sand being lowliness
since it does nothing to feed the passions and is only earth and ashes.
The
fox pretends to be asleep; the body and the demons pretend to be chaste. The former is on the watch to seize a
bird, the latter to catch a soul.
So as long as you live, never trust that clay of which you are made and
never depend on it until the time you stand before Christ himself. And never imagine that abstinence will
keep you from falling. It was a
being who never ate that was nevertheless thrown out of heaven.
Do
not imagine that you will overwhelm the demon of fornication by entering into
an argument with him. Nature is on
his side and he has the best of the argument. So the man who decides to struggle against his flesh and to
overcome it by his own efforts is fighting in vain. The truth is that unless the Lord overturns the house of the
flesh and builds the house of the soul, the man wishing to overcome it has
watched and fasted for nothing.
Offer up to the Lord the weakness of your nature. Admit your incapacity and, without your
knowing it, you will win for yourself the gift of chastity.
20-26 John
warns that we must not be fooled by periods of continence. Rather we must take precautions against
the enemy, studying how he works.
When
our spiritual foes are drawn up to do battle with us, we should ponder what it is
they can do, just as we would take precautions in a visible war. For those foes have their proper tasks,
strange as this may seem.
In
the battle against ascetics and those leading the solitary life, the devil
regularly uses all his force, zeal and low skill, all his intrigue, cleverness,
and evil designs to overpower them by means that are unnatural rather than
according to nature. And so it
happens that when ascetics meet women and find themselves assailed neither by
desire nor by evil thoughts, they occasionally come to imagine that they have
achieved true blessedness. Poor
idiots! They do not realize that a
smaller lapse was not required since a major fall had in fact been prepared for
them.
Our
relentless enemy, the teacher of fornication, whispers that God is lenient and
particularly merciful to this passion, since it is so very natural. Yet if we watch the wiles of the demons
we will observe that after we have actually sinned they will affirm that God is
a just and inexorable judge. They
say one thing to lead us into sin, another thing to overwhelm us in
despair. And if we are sorrowful
or inclined to despair, we are slower to sin again, but when the sorrow and the
despair have been quenched, the tyrannical demon begins to speak to us again of
God's mercy.
27-51 In
the following paragraphs John tells us that in striving for chastity we need
not only cultivate temperance, but the virtues of obedience wherein one
learns to renounce his own life and desires to God, stillness through
which one develops and accurate knowledge of his feelings, thoughts and
perceptions, and humility wherein one acknowledges his absolute
dependence upon the grace of God.
In every way we must be sober and watchful, guarding each of the senses,
knowing the times when temptation is most likely to come, and arming ourselves
with the necessary weapons for battle.
The
mother of chastity is stillness and obedience. Often the dispassion of body attained by stillness has been
disturbed whenever the world impinged on it. But dispassion achieved through obedience is genuine and is
everywhere unshakable.
The
man who imagines he can conquer the demon of fornication by gluttony and by
stuffing himself is quite like someone who quenches fire with oil. And the man who tries to put an end to
this struggle by means of temperance only is like someone trying to escape from
the sea by swimming with just one hand.
However, join humility to temperance, for the one is useless without the
other.
The
body can be defiled by the merest touch, for of all the senses this is the most
dangerous.
We
have to be especially sober and watchful when we are lying in bed, for that is
the time when our mind has to contend with demons outside our body. And if our body is inclined to be
sensual then it will easily betray us.
So let the remembrance of death and the concise Jesus prayer go to sleep
with you and get up with you, for nothing helps you as these do when you are
asleep.
When
temptation comes, our best weapons are sackcloth and ashes, all-night vigils
standing up, hunger, the merest touch of water and most important of all,
humility of heart; and if possible a spiritual director or a helpful brother,
old in wisdom rather than years, should also support us. Indeed it would come as a great
surprise if anyone could, by his own efforts alone, save his ship from the sea.
52-60 It
is also important to know the reasons behind periods of continence. We must guard against becoming prideful
or easing up on our discipline.
Demons, John warns, often hide themselves in order to bring about a
greater fall. Therefore, we must
never look upon or listen to those things which may lead to impurity. We must not subject ourselves even once
to anything that is sinful. To do
so is to weaken our resolve and to expose ourselves to future conflict.
If
we have to go out into the world one some legitimate task, we have the hand of
God to guard us, probably because our spiritual director is praying that we may
not be a cause of blasphemy against the Lord. Sometimes we are protected by our insensitivity or by the
fact that long experience has exhausted for us the spectacle of the world, its
sounds and all its works. But
sometimes the reason lies in the fact that the devils have left deliberately so
that only the demon of pride remains to take over from all of them.
But
all of you who wish to practice purity and preserve it would listen now to
another cunning stratagem of that deceiver, for I have been told by someone who
had to suffer the experience that the demon of sensuality often hid himself
completely. Then he would have a
monk sit or talk with women. He
would inspire him with great piety and even a flood of tears, and then suggest
that he speak about the remembrance of death, judgment, and chastity. The unfortunate women, deceived by his
words and spurious piety, would rush to him, thinking him to be a shepherd
instead of the wolf he really was.
Acquaintance would grow into familiarity, and the wretched monk would
suffer his downfall.
We
should strive in all possible ways neither to see nor to hear of that fruit we
have vowed never to taste. It
amazes me to think we could imagine ourselves to be stronger than the prophet
David, something quite impossible indeed.
The
serpent of sensuality has many faces.
To those who have had no experience of sin he suggests the idea of
trying it once and then stopping.
Then the crafty creature, exploiting the recollection of having sinned
once, urges them to try again. And
many of the people without experience feel no conflict within themselves
because they do not know what is evil, whereas the experienced, knowing the
evil for what it is, suffer disturbance and conflict . . .
61-74 John
gives us an analysis of the process of temptation in order that we might learn
how the demons seek to incite us to sin.
He admits, that while one may understand this process, the onslaught of
a disturbance and thought is often so swift that it is beyond a man's
recognition. This demon is
persistent and patient. It is
cunning; even when thwarted by our efforts it will always seek a new point of
entry. We must fight hard and get
into the habit of waging war for, as John warns, this demon tries harder than
all the others.
Among
the discerning Fathers, distinctions are recognized between provocation,
coupling, assent, captivity, struggle, and the disease called passion, which is
in the soul. These blessed Fathers
say that provocation is a simple word or image encountered for the first time,
which has entered into the heart.
Coupling is conversation with what has been encountered, whether this be
passionately or otherwise. Assent
is the delighted yielding of the soul to what it has encountered. Captivity is a forcible and unwilling
abduction of the heart, a permanent lingering with what we have encountered and
which totally undermines the necessary order of our souls. By struggle they mean force equal to
that which is leading the attack, and this force wins or loses according to the
desires of the spirit. Passion, in
their view, is properly something that lies hidden for a long time in the soul
and by its very presence it takes on the character of a habit, until the soul
of its own accord clings to it with affection.
The
first of these conditions is free of sin, the second sometimes, the condition
of the soul determines whether or not the third is sinful. Struggle can earn a crown or
punishment. Captivity is judged in
different ways, depending on whether it happens at the time of prayer or at
some other time, whether it happens in regard to what is unimportant or in the
context of evil thoughts. But
passion is unequivocally denounced in every situation and requires suitable
repentance or future punishment.
From all of which it follows that he who regards the first encounter with
detachment cuts off with one blow all the rest that follow.
The
most exact of the spiritual Fathers point to another more subtle notion,
something they call pararripismos, or disturbance of the mind. What happens is this. In a moment, without a word being
spoken or an image presented, a sudden passionate urge lays hold of the
victim. It comes faster than
anything in the physical world and is swifter and more indiscernible than any
spirit. It makes its appearance in
the soul by a simple memory, which is unconnected with anything, independent of
time and inexpressible, and in some cases comes without the person himself
realizing the fact. Someone who
has been able to detect such a subtlety, someone with the gift of mourning, may
be able to explain how with the eye alone, with a mere glance, by the touch of
the hand, through a song overheard, the soul is led to commit a definite sin of
unchastity without any notion or evil thought.
After
we have fought long and hard against this demon, this ally of the flesh, after
we have driven it out of our heart, torturing it with the stone of fasting and
the sword of humility, this scourge goes into hiding in our bodies, like some
kind of worm, and it tries to pollute us, stimulating us to irrational and
untimely movements. This
particularly happens to those who have fallen to the demon of vainglory, for
since dirty thoughts no longer preoccupy their hearts they fall victim to
pride. Such people can discover
whether or not this is true if once they have attained a certain stillness they
quietly take stock of themselves.
For they will then discover that deep down in their hearts, like a snake
in dung, is the notion that by their own efforts and enthusiasm they made great
advances in purity. Poor
wretches! They forget the saying:
"What have you got that you did not receive as a gift either from God or
as a result of the help and prayers of others?" (cf. 1 Cor 4:7). Let them beware then. Let them with all zeal eject from their
hearts the snake mentioned above. Let them kill it with great humility . . . .
This demon is especially on the lookout
for our weak moments and will viciously assail us when we are physically unable
to pray against it.
The
effort of bodily prayer can help those not yet granted real prayer of the
heart. I am referring to the
stretching out of the hands, the beating of the breast, the sincere raising of
the eyes heavenward, deep sighs and constant prostrations. But this is not always feasible when
other people are present, and this is when the demons particularly like to
launch an attack and, because we have not yet the strength of mind to stand up
against them and because the hidden power of prayer is not yet within us, we
succumb. So go somewhere apart, if
you can. Hide for a while in some
secret place. If you can, lift up
the eyes of your soul, but if not, the eyes of your body. Stand still with your arms in the shape
of the cross so that with this sign you may shame and conquer your Amalek. Cry out to God, Who has the strength to
save you. Do not bother with
elegant and clever words. Just
speak humbly, beginning with, "Have mercy on me, for I am weak" (Ps.
6:3). And then you will come to
experience the power of the Most High and with help from heaven you will drive
off your invisible foes. The man
who gets into the habit of waging war in this way will soon put his enemies to
flight solely by means of spiritual resources, for this is the reward God likes
to bestow on those who put up a good struggle, and rightly so.
All
demons try to darken our minds so that they may then suggest to us what they
want us to do, and so long as the mind stays awake we will not be robbed of our
treasure. But the demon of
fornication tries harder than all the others. First, by darkening our minds, which guide us, it urges and
inclines us in the presence of other people to do things that only the mad
would think of. Then when our
minds are cleared we become ashamed of these unholy deeds, words, and gestures,
not only before those who saw us but before ourselves, and we are astounded by
this earlier blindness of ours.
75-79 In
these final paragraphs John poetically describes the mystery of the human
person, the disunity that we experience within ourselves and the nature of our
quest for personal integration.
By
what rule or manner can I bind this body of mine? By what precedent can I judge him? Before I can bind him he is let loose, before I can condemn
him I am reconciled to him, before I can punish him I bow down to him and feel
sorry for him. How can I hate him
when my nature disposes me to love him?
How can I break away from him when I am bound to him forever? How can I escape from him when he is
going to rise with me? How can I
make him incorrupt when he has received a corruptible nature? How can I argue with him when all the
arguments of nature are on his side?
If
I try to bind him through fasting, then I am passing judgment on my neighbor
who does not fast - with the result that I am handed over to him again. If I defeat him by not passing judgment
I turn proud - and I am in thrall to him once more. He is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent,
a protector and a traitor. I am
kind to him and he assaults me. If
I wear him out he gets weak. If he
has a rest he becomes unruly. If I
upset him he cannot stand it. If I
mortify him I endanger myself. If
I strike him down I have nothing left by which to acquire virtues. I embrace him. And I turn away from him.
What
is this mystery in me? What is the
principle of this mixture of body and soul? How can I be my own friend and my own enemy? Speak to me! Speak to me, my yoke-fellow, my nature! I cannot ask anyone else about
you. How can I remain uninjured by
you? How can I escape the danger
of my own nature? I have made a
promise to Christ that I will fight you, yet how can I defeat your
tyranny? But this I have resolved,
namely, that I am going to master you.
And
this is what the flesh might say in reply: "I will never tell you what you
do not already known. I will speak
the knowledge we both have. Within
me is my begetter, the love of self.
The fire that comes to me from outside is too much pampering and care. The fire within me is past ease and
things long done. I conceived and
give birth to sins, and they when born beget death by despair in their
turn. And yet if you have learned
the sure and rooted weakness within both you and me, you have manacled my
hands. If you starve your
longings, you have bound my feet, and they can travel no further. If you have taken up the yoke of
obedience, you have cast my yoke aside.
If you have taken possession of humility, you have cut off my
head."
This
is the fifteenth reward of victory.
He who has earned it while still alive has died and been
resurrected. From now on he has a
taste of the immortality to come.
