THE FEAR OF GOD is the beginning of virtue, and it is said to be the offspring of faith. It is sown in the heart when a man withdraws his mind from the attractions of the world to collect its thoughts, wandering about from distraction, into reflection upon the restitution to come.
To lay the foundation of virtue, nothing is better than for a man to contain himself by means of flight from the affairs of life, and to persevere in the illumined word of those straight and holy paths, even that word which in the Spirit the Psalmist named a lamp.
Psalm 118:105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
Scarcely a man can be found who is able to endure honor, and perhaps such a one cannot be found at all. This, one might say, is because of a man’s sudden receptivity to change, even if he be a peer of the angels in his way of life.
The beginning of the path of life is continually to exercise the mind in the words of God, and to live in poverty. For when a man waters himself with one, it aids in the perfection of the other. That is to say, to water yourself with the study of the words of God helps you in achieving poverty, while achieving freedom from possessions affords you the time to attain to constant study of the words of God; and the help provided by them both speedily erects the entire edifice of the virtues.
No one can draw nigh to God save the man who has separated himself from the world. But I call separation not the departure of the body but departure from the world’s affairs.
This is virtue: that in his mind a man should be unoccupied with the world. As long as the senses have dealings with external things, the heart cannot have rest from imagination about them. Outside of the desert and solitude, the bodily passions do not abate, nor do evil thoughts cease.
Until the soul becomes drunk with faith in God by receiving a perception of the power of faith, she can neither heal the malady of the senses, nor be able forcibly to tread visible matter underfoot, which is the barrier to things that are within and beyond perception by the senses.
Reason is the cause of free will, and a fruit of both is aberrations1. Without the first2, there is no second3; and where the second is lacking, there the third4 is held as with a bridle.
When grace is abundant in a man, he easily scorns the fear of death on account of his longing for righteousness, and he finds in his soul many reasons for the necessity of suffering tribulation for the fear of God. All things that are through to harm the body and that suddenly attack its nature, consequently causing it to suffer, are reckoned in his eyes as nothing in comparison with what is to be hoped for hereafter. It is not possible for us to know the truth unless temptations are allowed to come upon us; and a man’s mind gives him assurance of exactly this, and further, of the fact that God takes very great forethought for men, and that there is no human being who is not under His providence, and this especially he sees pointed out as clearly as by a finger in the case of those who go out to seek Him and endure suffering for His sake. But when lack of faith is planted in a man’s heart, then all we have said is found to be nearly the opposite; for him knowledge is greater than faith, since he relies on investigation; trust in God is not present in everything he does, nor is God’s providence for man taken into consideration, but such a man is continually waylaid in these matters by those who ‘in a moonless night lie in ambush to shoot down a man with their arrows.’
Psalm 10:2 The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor; let them be caught in the plots which they have devised.
The beginning of a man’s true life is the fear of God. But the fear of God will not be persuaded to dwell in a soul together with distraction over outward things. For by serving the senses, the heart is scattered, driven away from delight in God; for our inward thoughts, it is said, are bound by their perception to the sensory organs that serve them.
Doubting hesitation of the heart introduces cowardice into the soul, but faith can make firm her volition even in the cutting-off of the body’s limbs. In the measure that love for the flesh prevails in you, you can never become brave and dauntless, on account of the host of adversaries that constantly surround the object of your love.
A man who craves esteem cannot be rid of the causes of grief.
There is no man who, with a change of circumstances, will not be subject to a comparable change in his mind.
If desire, as it is said, is the offspring of the senses, then let them be silent who profess to keep their mind peaceful in the midst of distraction5.
Not he is chaste who, in the strain and crisis of combat and struggle, says that shameful thoughts cease within him, but rather he who, by the uprightness of his heart, makes the vision of his mind so pure that he cannot gaze on lewd thoughts without shame. And when the gaze of his eyes is held fast, thus bearing witness to the holiness of his conscience, then shame is like a veil that hangs over the hidden place of his thoughts, and his purity becomes like a chaste virgin being faithfully kept for Christ.
There is nothing so capable of banishing the inveterate habits of licentiousness from our soul, and of driving away those active memories which rebel in our flesh and produce a turbulent flame, as to immerse oneself in the fervent love of instruction, and to search closely into the depth of the insights of divine Scripture.
When a man’s thoughts are totally immersed in the delight of pursuing the wisdom treasured in the words of Scripture by means of the faculty that extracts understanding from them, then he puts the world behind his back and forgets everything in it, and he blots out of his soul all memories that form images embodying the world. Often he does not even remember the employment of the habitual thoughts which visit human nature, and his soul remains in ecstasy by reason of those new encounters that arise from the sea of the Scripture’s mysteries.
And again, even in the mind [only] floats on the surface of the waters, that is, of the sea of the divine Scriptures, and its perceptions cannot fathom the great depths so as to be able to grasp all the treasures in its deep, yet even this practice in itself, by the power of its fervent love, will suffice the mind firmly to pinion its thoughts by a singe thought of wonder, and to prevent them from running to the body’s nature, as one of the God-bearing Fathers said. And this he says is because the heart is feeble and cannot sustain the evils that it encounters from inner and outer warfares. And you know that an evil bodily thought is oppressive. If the heart is not occupied with study, it cannot endure the turbulence of the body’s assault.
Just as the heaviness of weights impedes the quick swaying of a balance in a gust of wind, so shame and fear impede the aberration of the mind. In proportion to the lack of shame and fear, there is an abundance of the dominion of liberty in the mind. And just as a decrease in the weight in the pans will be a cause for them to sway more easily to and fro, so an increase of liberty through removal of fear from the soul causes the scales of the mind to sway easily from side to side. Therefore the mind’s mobility is a consequence of liberty, and mental changes are a consequence of aberration.
Be wise, then, and lay the fear of God as the foundation of your journey, and in but a few days it will bring you before the gate of the kingdom with no windings on the way.
Do not, like the pupils of teachers, over-scrutinize words that are written from experience for the fostering of your way of life, which render your soul great because of the greatness of the insights found within them.
Discern the purport of all the passages that you come upon in sacred writings, that you might immerse yourself deeply in them, and might fathom the profound insights found in the compositions of enlightened men.
Those who in their way of life are led by divine grace to be enlightened are always aware of something like a noetic ray of light running between the written lines, which enables the mind to distinguish words spoken simply from those spoken with great meaning for the soul’s enlightenment.
When a man reads in a common way lines that contain great meaning, he makes his heart common and devoid of the holy power which gives the heart a most sweet taste through perceptions that awe the soul.
Everything is wont to run to its kindred; and the soul that has a share of the Spirit, on hearing a phrase that has spiritual power hidden within, ardently draws out its content for herself.
Not every man is wakened to wonder by what is said spiritually and has great power concealed in it. A word concerning virtue has need of a heart unbusied with the earth and its converse; for when a man’s mind wearies itself with care about transitory things, the concerns of virtue do not awaken his thoughts to a longing and a quest to gain them.
Liberation from material things precedes the bond with God, even though often with some, through the economy of grace, the latter is found to precede the former, such that love covers love6. Economy’s usual order is different from the order of the community of men; but as for you – keep to the common order. If grace comes within you first, that is its own affair; but if not, make the ascent of the spiritual tower by the path common to all men, on which they have journeyed one after another.
Everything that is effected through divine vision, and on account of which a commandment is fulfilled, is wholly unseen by the eyes of the body. Every virtuous action is effected through righteous activity (praxis) is composite: for the commandment, which is but one (i.e. righteous activity), requires both, theoria and praxis, on account of our corporeal and incorporeal parts. For the combination of these two is one. For this reason the enlightened mind understands [the commandment] in a twofold manner, as formerly the blessed Moses commanded [it], namely, what is simple is understood as well as what is twofold.
Works having purity as their goal do not shake off the memory’s awareness of blameworthy deeds committed in the past, but they take the grief of the recollection away from our mind. Henceforth it happens that when the recollection passes through our mind, it does so to our advantage.
The soul’s insatiability for gaining virtue seizes for its own the portion of desire for visible things that belongs to her woke-mate, the body.
Moderation adorns all things; for without moderation, even things deemed good become harmful.
Do you wish to commune with God in your mind by receiving a perception of that delight which is not enslaved to the senses? Pursue mercy; for when something that is like unto God is found in you, then that holy beauty is depicted by Him. For the whole sum of the deeds of mercy immediately brings the soul into communion with he unity of the glory of the Godhead’s splendor.
Matthew 5:45-48 That you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
Spiritual unity is an unsealed and perpetual recollection that incessantly blazes in the heart with ardent longing; and from perseverance in the commandments, the heart receives its capacity for this bond, not figuratively, nor in a natural way. For there it finds material for the soul’s divine vision so as to be sustained in this [union] hypostatically. For this reason the heart comes to awestruck wonder as the eyes of the twofold senses close: those of the flesh and those of the soul.
There is no other path toward spiritual love, which forms the invisible image, except by first beginning to show compassion in proportion to the Father’s perfection, as our Lord said. For He commanded those who obey Him to lay this as their foundation.
Luke 6:36 Therefore be merciful, just as your Father also is merciful.
Matthew 5:46-48 For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.
A word born of righteous activity (praxis) is one thing, and beautiful words, another. Even without experience, wisdom is clever at imparting beauty to her words, at speaking the truth without really knowing it, and at making declarations on virtue while the man himself never makes trial of it in his deeds. Speech that comes from righteous activity is a treasury of hope; but wisdom not based on righteous activity is a deposit of disgrace. Just as when an artist frescoes water on the walls and cannot relieve his thirst with it, or just as a man dreams, even so is speech not based on righteous activity. But a man who talks of virtue from the experience of his own labor transmits virtue to his hearer as he that distributes money earned from his own commerce, and as it were from out of his own possessions he sows his teaching in he ears of those who give him ear. Such a man opens his mouth with boldness before his spiritual children, even as the elderly Jacob said to Joseph the Chaste, ‘Behold, I have given thee one portion above they brethren, which I took from the Amorites with my sword and my bow.’
Genesis 48:22 Moreover I have given to you one portion above your brothers, which I took from the hand of the Amorite with my sword and bow.
This temporal life is beloved of every man whose way of life is defiled; and second to him is the man deprived of knowledge. Well has one said, ‘The fear of death distresses a man with a guilty conscience, but the man with a good witness within himself longs for death as for life.’ Count no man truly wise who, because of this temporal life, enslaves his mind to timidity and fear.
Let whatever good or evil things that befall the flesh be reckoned by you as dreams. For it is not only with death that you will have release from them, but often before death they retire and leave you alone. But if any of these things that befall you should have communion with your soul, then consider them to be your acquisitions in this age, and they will also go with you into the next. If they are good, rejoice and give thanks to God in your mind. But if they are evil, be grieved and sigh; and as long as you are still in the body, seek to be set free from them.
Of everything good wrought within you noetically and in secret, be certain that baptism and faith have been the mediators whereby you received it; through these you were called by our Lord Jesus Christ to His good labors, to Whom with the Father and the Holy Spirit be glory, honor, thanksgiving, and worship, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
