Compassion
As we have noted, the idea that charity and good works are important for Christians, and that life in the world offers a lot of opportunities to do them, is probably quite obvious. The work of developing compassion, however, which is the topic of this section, requires a little more discussion.
First, we should define the term “compassion” as we mean it here. While the modern English word tends to delineate a certain feeling of empathy or perhaps pity for another person, and a turning of heart toward mercy, its Latin root is somewhat less subtle and, in this case, it is the sense of the Latin that we wish to capture. The Latin root of “compassion” means “to bear with,” or, “to suffer with,” and the word can denote such co-suffering quite literally. To experience compassion is to undergo the same experiences and bear the same burdens as another person. For the Christian, it is to enter into the pain and spiritual shortcomings of their experience, bearing with them one yoke and one cross. Compassion is thus, in its basic form, a very simple act of the mind. It is a decision on the part of a person to suffer along with someone suffering, to simply cast himself as a compatriot to another rather than a bystander, enemy, or judge. Yet, as we will see in a moment, from such a simple mental act much is accomplished in our pursuit of Christian love.
In the Conferences, the fathers are fond of illustrating their points with stories from life. One of the most striking such tales comes from Abba Moses in the second conference and illustrates beautifully the importance of compassion. Abba Moses begins by making the point that not all elders in the desert are equally skilled in the arts of spiritual guidance, and that the old age of a particular elder is not always a sure sign of his wisdom.20 Some elders (Abba Moses actually says it is most of them) are lacking in the discernment and discretion necessary to guide other, younger monks on their quest for purity of heart.21 Abba Moses tells the tale of one such unskilled elder. According to the story, a diligent young monk came to one of the elders in the desert to confess his feelings of impure sexual desire. Instead of offering advice and comfort about this common struggle, however, the elder monk berated the younger, and the young man left feeling hopeless and despairing.
Sometime after, another elder of the desert, Abba Apollos, found the young man in his cell, broken with depression, and evidently gratifying himself sexually, having given up all hope of overcoming his passions. When Abba Apollos discovered what had happened, he sought to comfort the young monk and encouraged him to go back to struggling against the passions. The young man recovered and returned to his prayer and fasting.
After this, Abba Apollos prayed to God that the foolish elder might be taught a lesson by being allowed to be assaulted by the same kinds of thoughts that had troubled the young monk. Apollos’ prayers were answered and the foolish elder was seen running out from his cell as if in madness, suddenly agonized with uncontrollable sexual thoughts prompted by demons. Abba Apollos offered the foolish elder some advice as well.
“Return to your cell,” said Apollos, “and finally recognize that until now you have been either ignored or dismissed by the devil rather than counted among those whom he attacks and with whom he wrangles every day, riled by their hard work and earnestness. Look at you—after persisting for so many years in this way of life, you were not able for a single day to look past just one of his darts fired in your direction—to say nothing about resisting it! This is why the Lord let you be wounded like this-so that, at least in your old age, you might learn to co-suffer in the weaknesses of others.22
There are two key points to observe here about Abba Apollos’ comments. First, Abba Apollos assumes that the foolish elder’s previous lack of temptation was a sign of the devil’s lack of interest in him. As the quotation makes clear, the assumption on the part of the fathers of the Conferences is typically that those who are not disturbed by demons at least somewhat are not progressing very well spiritually. The idea is simply that the demons need not bother with those who are not drawing any closer to God. As a result, here and throughout the Conferences, a lack of spiritual temptation is generally considered to be a very worrisome sign that a particular person may also be lacking spiritual progress. In light of this basic assumption, the implication of the above passage is that the foolish elder was, in fact, less spiritually advanced than the young man, and yet able to be arrogant about his own lack of disturbing thoughts. After so many years, how could the elder make such a mistake?
The answer to this question comes by way of our second observation about the above passage. Abba Apollos identifies the key problem with the foolish elder’s treatment of the young monk as arising from the elder’s lack of compassion. In the case of the foolish elder, this lack of compassion led to him dispensing bad advice that neatly destroyed the spiritual life of a man suffering temptations. God’s willingness to respond to Abba Apollos’ prayers, and send temptation to the bad elder, was meant as a corrective to this problem, as Abba Apollos says.
And so, the purpose of this beneficial series of events has been realized; by them, the Lord meant to set that young man free from dangerous desires and to teach you something about the violence of their attack, and also about the feeling of compassion. As such, let us together implore him in prayer, that he may be pleased to remove chat goad with which he thought it right to strike you for your own good. 23
The last line of Abba Apollos’ words here illustrates that the bad elder’s temptations are not, in themselves, a good thing, but that they have been meant to teach him about what he is lacking. In this case, Abba Apollos explicitly identifies this shortcoming as a lack of compassion. In short, the elder chose to sit in judgment of the young man rather than suffer along with him.
Yet, an outright miracle corrected the bad elder in the most powerful way imaginable. When Abba Apollos’ prayer brought the same temptation upon the foolish elder as the young monk had suffered, the elder in that moment was forced by the power of God to experience the passions of the young man absolutely literally. He was thereby given an experience of the deepest form of compassion conceivable. He literally entered into the young monk’s suffering and it became his own. This forced experience of co-suffering provided the foolish elder with a lesson in what compassion means, and why one cannot guide other monks without it.
While the character of the foolish elder in the story illustrates the profound risks of failing to engage other people with compassion, the figure of Abba Apollos provides an example of what is possible when one embraces it. By approaching the young monk with a desire to suffer his various temptations with him, Abba Apollos made possible a personal connection the results of which were love and encouragement for the young man, and a great lesson learned for the foolish elder. It is probably difficult for any of us to imagine the kind of spiritual tranquility and depth of love that must have been present in Abba Apollos for him to react to the young monk as he did. To walk in on a person actively engaged in masturbation (which the story strongly implies was what the young monk was up to) and to simply sit down to offer encouragement is probably beyond most of us. Yet, this is precisely what the situation demanded. Abba Apollos knew this because, when he saw the young monk in his sin, his heart’s first reaction was to suffer with him—to experience compassion in its Latin sense.
~Daniel G. Opperwall, A Layman in the Desert
20 We return to his comments to this end in our discussion of confession in chapter five, p. I 70.ff.
21 Conf. 2.XIII.I.
22 Conf. 2.XIII. 9.
23 Conf. 2.XIII. II.
