Like John lying on his Master’s breast at the Last Supper, and later, in old age, seeing the dazzling face of the Lord of the universe, the monk is fascinated by the incomparable beauty of the Risen Christ. In him eros is altogether robed in the beauty of love and light, all the more beautiful because it shines through the disfigurement of the Passion and the Cross. There is no more room here for another expression of eros; the Disfigured and the Transfigured Christ are distinct and the same; here the monk sees the extent of the ‘mad love’ of God for him and for all, and what other love could he need?
We must love God with all the strength of eros. St John Climacus said that we must love him as we should a lover or spouse. The monk burning with such love becomes ‘apostolic’; knowing God with all his being he speaks of him as of right. His is not armchair theology, acquired from books, but true theology learned in pure prayer. He speaks of God like someone describing his travels. It is a journey he has made and paid for with his blood. These excellent monks make their pilgrimage into the vastness of God, in order to return to us with faces shining like the face of Moses when he came down from Sinai. Without them the Church would be dying. The Church needs martyrs and monks for her health.
In a society in love with wisdom as well as power we should expect to find not only laboratories for scientific research, but spiritual laboratories dedicated to the more important ‘research into God’. Eventually we see that squabbling about the existence of God is ridiculous. Better to pay close attention to those who know God from experience, whose humanity is evidently not degraded, but rather enhanced, by their faith and the integrated knowledge which results from it.
We need spiritual people who can be our spiritual fathers. We have been orphans for too long. We have turned the cure of souls into a crude form of psychoanalysis. We also need the contemplatives who practice their ‘art of arts and science of sciences’, monks able to discern spirits and to enter deep into the ‘heart’ (which is rather deeper than the unconscious of the psychoanalysts), experts in the strategy of unseen combat. Monks are indispensable!
The traditional monastic vows make it possible to love God ‘with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind’.
Obedience sets freedom free by crucifying the love of self. The person who is committed in all confidence, in sheer faith even, to a ‘father’ who is further advanced along the path of liberation, overcomes self-importance, breaks the hold of the ‘passions’, and achieves detachment and inner peace, being lifted up in prayer and carried into the communion of saints. Obedience annihilates self-worship, which is the root of all idolatry; it learns to submit to all life in order to magnify it; in other words it teaches the monk to become a ‘father’ in his turn.
Poverty, or simplicity of life, together with obedience, exposes us to God’s power; to humble ourselves at God’s hands is to allow him to recreate us. At every moment I receive myself from him, I receive everything, and everything is freely given. Poverty is the other face of celebration. The layman committed to the world can cultivate an inner poverty, and so overcome the worship of wealth, refusing to take seriously the obsession with producing and consuming. Thus the foundation is laid for Paul Evdokimov’s world-wide economy based on sharing, and directed towards communion by means of the true miracle of the loaves: the Eucharist.
Chastity is a rich and profound element in the Tradition of the early Church, as valid for the married person as for the monk. Chastity signifies harmony, inner peace, self-restraint, integrity. Chastity is to be found where eros, the natural life force, is really integrated into the person. Self-abandonment to the blind movement of eros results in disintegration. And to kill eros without restoring it to new life in the Spirit engenders a somewhat inquisitorial hard-heartedness, a peculiarly monastic vice. But if we can turn it into the immensity of personal love, then the driving force of our life becomes the celebration of an encounter, a hymn to tenderness; love for the ultimate beauty of Christ, perhaps, as he reveals the secret of all faces, the gentleness of the whole created being. We think of St Teresa, in the cloister of Avila, dancing for sheer joy, and accompanying herself on the tambourine. It might also be, and there is no contradiction, the face of the beloved causing the poet to exclaim, in words so commonplace but so true:
‘How beautiful is the world, beloved, how beautiful is the world!’
Obedient, poor, chaste, the monk becomes the world’s watchman. The Patriarch Justinian, giving a rule to the monks of the Romanian Church in 1953, enjoined them ‘to pray for those who do not know how to pray, or cannot, or will not’. Similarly, a monk of Athos said to a passing guest, during the almost interminable night offices, ‘Truly we are obliged to conquer all the sleep of the world.’
Such are the violent who take the Kingdom by force; they see all things in the light of the coming Christ, and thus hasten his coming.
Nevertheless, a true monk is not at all indifferent to feminine beauty, in its essential, or what we might call its ‘paracletic’ aspect, from the name of the Paraclete, the Spirit, the ‘comforter’. On
Athos, for instance, nothing feminine is allowed, but everywhere, at the heart of every monastery, we find the icon of the Mother of God, and Athos is often called the Virgin’s Garden. So by the mediation of the most feminine face, eros ascends towards eternity. In the same way a spiritual friendship can play a precious part in a life dedicated to adoration.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
