The Faithfulness of the Whore who Married the Governor
Abbot John the Dwarf said:
‘If a king wanted to capture the town of his enemy, first of all he would cut off its water supply and prevent food from getting in. The enemies, dying of hunger, would surrender. In the same way we should treat the passions of the flesh. If someone lives in fasting and hunger, in a short while the enemies of his soul get exhausted.’
One day, speaking about conversion of the heart, the Abbot told this story to one of the brothers:
‘Once there was a woman if ill repute in a city. She had many lovers. The governor approached her and said: “If you promise me you will behave properly, I will take you for my wife.” She promised, he married her and took her to his own home.
The lovers, who still wanted her, said: “That official has taken her. If we risk going into the palace, he’ll catch us and punish us. But we’ll get out of that. Let’s go round the back and whistle to her. She’ll hear it and come down, and then we’ll be all right.”
‘But the woman, when she heard them whistling, blocked her ears, bolted the doors and hid herself in the innermost part of the house.’
The old man explained the story. The woman of ill repute is our soul. Her lovers are our passions. The governor is Christ. The innermost part of the house is our heavenly dwelling place. The whistlers are the devils. But the soul can always find refuge with its Lord.
Sayings of the Desert Fathers (PG6S, 208)
Detach Passion from the Image
What keeps the spirit free in the face of external realities and of the images of them is spiritual love and the mastery of self.
The soul that loves God does not fight against these realities nor against their images which appear in the imagination, but against the passions that attach themselves to them.
For example, one is not seduced by a woman, nor bitter towards someone who has caused one to suffer, nor even troubled by the images that arise in the mind, but by the passions that attach themselves to these images.
External realities are different from the images of them, and the passions attached to them are different again. Thus, a man, a woman, money are material things. Merely to remember these things is to make an image of them in the mind. An unreasoning affection or a blind hatred for these same things is a passion.
A passionate image of them is a thought composed of an image and a passion; detach the passion from the image and there remains a simple thought.
How can we detach them? We have the weapons, if we have the will to use them: spiritual love and the mastery of self.
Maximus the Confessor Centuries on Charity, 3, 38ff. (SC9, pp.136ff.)
~ Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain, A Patristic Breviary: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
