Another View 5

Each time I pick up Monastic Wisdom by Elder Joseph, one of the greatest ascetics of the 20th century, I am touched deeply by its simplicity, by its austerity of word and wisdom. You can hardly enter a monastery on the Holy Mountain (Mt. Athos) in which a portrait of “Papou” is not prominent somewhere near the entrance. It is because he is a savant of the “science of sciences,” of the “mystery of mysteries.”

This writing is a collection of the Elder’s letters, and while extreme sometimes in its ascetical offering, I’ve over and again found it to be instructive to my path, and restorative at the most critical times. His 22nd letter addresses a subject I found difficult to fathom for some time, and after weeks of praying and querying and even fighting against the structure of thought, I found myself surrendering to it with gratitude.

In this letter, he asks so simply the question: “If our sweet Jesus doesn’t withdraw His grace, how will you learn the art of all arts and the science of all sciences?…What possible virtue can you show when grace is present?”

Well, I had never begun to imagine for a second that grace might ever be withdrawn -- not ever. It seemed completely contrary to the Divine’s nature to do this. Would not the human being simply crumble in despair? How would one find one’s way through the maze of life without this divine virtue being ever present, every second? We humans are so very apt to take our gaze and face away for the shortest of times from the God’s gaze -- is God so cavalier?

One of the questions I infrequently will ask is: “Is there any place that God is not?” Though a bit awkward in its phrasing, the provocation is, after wrestling for its logic, “No, God resides in all places and at all times. God is!” Correct. So, how does this find its relationship to the withdrawal of grace?

St. Maximos the Confessor reminds, “spiritual knowledge without ascesis, without the struggle to purify the soul, is the theology of the angels of darkness.” That is a strong statement! What does it mean? It means that we can be the possessors of “spiritual knowledge,” and that the implicit danger is that without cultivating an appropriate climate where that knowledge can be practiced, then we are still far from “union” with God.

There it is -- where there is no practice, a seeming pre-requisite for grace, spiritual knowledge de-sacralizes itself and becomes simply knowledge -- the way in which we reason things out without participating in the action of that reason -- we simply live in isolation with “knowledge” that has lost its source. “What good is virtue without practice?” is another way of asking the question.

God’s grace, though implicit in God’s presence, will not source knowledge without practice. It is not plugged in, so to speak, with its Source until it becomes participated in, which is ascesis. The practice, of course, is the difficult part for most of us human beings. We find that practice brings accountability, and accountability brings a kind of suffering, for we had rather remain “in our heads,” sucklings of “knowledge” without the rootage of practice. Practice reminds us that “follow me” is truly not so easy; rather, it is demanding, and we must “change,” or “reorient” our lives -- which of course, is a matter of “who is in charge here?” -- and most of the time, we know the answer to that, don’t we.

So -- we stand at that point “outside of grace,” and hence comes the creation of our own point-in-time suffering. This is not something new. Rather, it has been always known by the early mothers and fathers of this great faith, and for them, it would never be considered Another View.