Many contemporary Christians regard priests as ministers of the Most High and as church officials who are helpful in various bureaucratic dealings, who perform the different Sacraments when they are needed or celebrate the Divine Liturgy, and in this way can satisfy the need of their souls or fulfil a traditional duty. They are regarded as magicians who work magic! We know, however, that the grace of God is not transmitted magically or mechanically, but sacramentally. It is true that even an unworthy priest performs Sacraments, but he cannot cure. For remission of sins is one thing but curing is another. Most Christians are satisfied with a formal confession or formal attendance at the Liturgy or even with a formal participation in Holy Communion and nothing more. They do not proceed to the cure of their souls. But the priests, the spiritual fathers, not only celebrate the Sacraments but they cure people. They have a sound knowledge of the path of healing from passions and they make it known to their spiritual children. They show them how they can be freed from captivity, how their nous will be freed from slavery.51
Here is how the holy Fathers view spiritual fatherhood. The pastor is also a physician. “A physician is one whose body and soul are sound, needing no plasters on them.52
St John of the Ladder is very characteristic on what the priest should do in order to give healing:
“O wondrous man, acquire plasters, potions, razors, eye salves, sponges, instruments for blood-letting and cauterisation, ointments, sleeping draughts, a knife, bandages, and freedom from nausea [so that you will not feel nausea and disgust at the stench of wounds]. If we do not have these things, how are we to practise our science? There is no way, because it is not by words but by practical intervention that physicians benefit their patients and receive payment.
“A plaster is a cure for visible, that is, bodily passions. A potion is a cure for inner passions and to drain off invisible uncleanness. A razor is humiliation which bites, but purifies the rot of conceit.
“An eye salve is for cleansing the eye of the soul which has been clouded by anger.
“An eye salve is a caustic chastisement which speedily brings healing.
“A blood-letting instrument is a quick draining of unseen stench.
“Again, the blood-letting instrument is pre-eminently an intensive and brief remedy for the salvation of the sick. A sponge is used after the blood-letting to heal and refresh the patient with the gentle, meek and tender words of the physician. Cauterisation is a ‘rule and a penance given with love to the sinner for a definite period of time for his repentance. An ointment is the soothing offered to the patient with a few words or some small consolation after cauterisation.
“A sleeping draught is that we lift the burden of him who is in obedience, and by his obedience giving him rest and waking sleep and holy blindness to his own virtues. Bandages are for binding and strengthening with patience unto death those who are enervated and enfeebled by vainglory.
“The last instrument is the knife, which is a sentence and a decree to cut off a putrid member and a body dead in soul lest he spread his contagion among the rest.
“Blessed and praiseworthy is freedom from nausea among physicians and dispassion among shepherds. The former, not suffering from nausea or disgust, untiringly strive to dispel the stench. The latter will be able to restore to life every dead soul.”53
Fr. John Romanides writes: “The successful repetition of the experience of confirmation, which in medical and patristic science is also the cure, is the truth of every science. Just as it is absurd to say that one who does not cure and does not know how to cure is a physician, so it is senseless to regard as a theologian one who is not at least in the state of illumination, who does not know What illumination and glorification are, and who does not know how these things are achieved and therefore does not cure.”54
Father John also writes: “It is assumed that above all others the therapists who guide the sick into these stages of therapy are the bishops and priests, the former having mostly come from monasticism. Today, however, after a century and a half of catastrophic neo-hellenic propaganda against hesychasm, such clergy are rare. There are few hesychast monks. The priesthood as described by Dionysios the Areopagite has almost disappeared.”55
~Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlahos, Orthodox Psychotherapy. Submitted by John Bonadeo.
51. St Thalassios, Philok. 2, p. 328, 44
52 Ladder, ‘To the Shepherd’, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston 1978 p. 232ff
53. Ibid.
54. Romanides, RR vol. 1, p. 18f. In Gk.
55. Ibid. p. 27
