Another thought may press us hard: getting out of our former life, our former profession, and doing something completely different. Often all the arguments are useless here. The thought just keeps coming back. Here too some of the sayings of the fathers show us a way. A father who had struggled for years against the thought of visiting a certain confrere concretely imagined going to him, greeting him, and speaking to him. He imagined the meal with him, cooking something, having a good deal to eat and drink, “and immediately the struggle disappeared.”
Some people who are dissatisfied with their way of life have to get down, busy themselves with their dream and test it, in order to be cured and turn to their old one with new energy and contentment. A married man who has fallen in love with another woman can often get free of his romantic dreams only by concretely imagining what it would be like to live with this woman, to give up everything he has known before, and to be with her day after day. If he measures his dream against reality, if he actually lets it in, he can take his leave of it.
With the antirrhetic method, which we have already seen in the overcoming of acedia, the point is likewise to get to know one’s own thoughts and then to search the Scriptures for a healing text. This method of using a biblical passage to counter negative thoughts or feelings has been taken over by the American approach of so-called positive thinking. But there it often looks as if we are just manipulating our emotions, as if we just need to think positively and then everything will be all right.
Evagrius validates the antirrhetic method with the practice of both David and Jesus. Thus be writes in a letter that the intellect must first come to know the deceptive machinations of the demon. This is the prerequisite for the knowledge of Christ and for contemplation. The path in that direction passes through the struggle with the demons: “Hence it [the intellect] must fearlessly confront its enemy, as the blessed David shows, when he quotes voices as if they were coming from the mouth of the demons and then contradicts them. For when the demons say, ‘When will he die and his name pass away?’ then he says, ‘I shall not die but live and proclaim the works of the Lord’ (Ps. 118:17). And again when the demons say, ‘Flee and dwell on the mountains like the sparrow’ (Ps. 11:1), then he says, ‘For he is my God and my Savior, my strong place of refuge; I shall not waver.’ Thus, listen to the contradictory voices and love the victory, imitate David and pay heed to yourself!”
David’s method consists in dividing his soul into two parts, one that is sad and one that encourages, one that is sick and one that is healthy. And then these two domains are supposed to engage in conversation. The sick part expresses itself in negative protests, such as: “I can’t do it; nobody likes me; nobody cares about me; everything’s going wrong with me.” To fight off such thoughts one should look for a saying from Scripture, which is what Evagrius did for his brothers in his Antirrhetikon: “But because we don’t quickly come up with the words that must be spoken against our enemies, the odious demons, because those words are scattered throughout the Scriptures and it is hard to find them, we have zealously collected the sayings from Scripture, so that, armed with them, we may powerfully track down the Philistines, while standing in the battle as strong men and soldiers of our victorious king Christ.”
In this battle Christ himself is the model. When he was tempted by the devil, he quoted words from Scripture against Satan’s lying proposals: “Our Lord Jesus Christ himself, who gave up everything to redeem us, has lent us the power to tread upon snakes and scorpions, and every power of the Evil one. And together with his whole teaching he handed down to us what he himself did when he was tempted by Satan, so that in the time of struggle, when the demons fight against us and hurl their missiles at us, we may contradict them by means of the Holy Scriptures, lest the infamous thoughts remain in us and subjugate our soul by the sin that is actually committed, staining it and plunging it into the death of sin…. For whenever the soul has no fitting thought available, to quickly and effortlessly contradict the Evil one, sin gets the upper hand.”
~Anselm Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You: Wisdom from the Desert Fathers
