Or, Monkicism Tangibilated

Monk Cosmas

              We hear a lot of talk about spirituality, but we may not always understand what people mean, since they sometimes mean something very different than you and I might have in mind.  What has come to be very important to me is the concept of sobriety as we find it in the Orthodox Monastic Fathers.  Naturally when the Fathers talk about sobriety they are not using the term in the literal sense, that is, as the opposite of literal drunkenness.  What we find, rather, is that they use drunkenness or intoxication in a metaphorical sense to refer a state in which we find ourselves in bondage to our own thoughts, emotions, and fantasies.  Sobriety—also understood metaphorically—is the freedom from that bondage.  The warnings the Fathers offer us have been pretty much lost in modern thinking.  Let’s look, for example, at something that passes for spirituality in the secular world.  In her book The New Peoplemaking, Virginia Satir describes an exercise which, she claims, can deepen one’s experience of spirituality.  She suggests that we begin by sitting comfortably, closing our eyes, noticing our breathing, and then—

… silently go inside and give yourself a message of appreciation that might sound something like this:  “I appreciate me.”  This is to give your spirit strength from your actions. (Mountain View, CA: Science and Behavior Books, 1988.  Italics in original.  p. 338-9)

Later she recommends that we live out our fantasies.  As she says:

To have happy and productive experiences in later years, it is important to let yourself know clearly what your pictures and fantasies really are.  These pictures have a strong influence on your adjustment.  Knowing them consciously enables you to deal with them and compare them with reality as you know it.  These pictures are sources of thought, and thought is powerful (p. 347).

            I am not picking on Virginia Satir in particular.  Her approach is so characteristic of modern thought that most of us are probably influenced by it without even thinking about it.  As Paul C. Vitz notes in his book Psychology as Religion:  The Cult of Self-Worship, “psychology has become more of a sentiment than a science and is now part of the problem of modern life rather than part of its solution” (published jointly by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and Paternoster Press, 1994.  p. x).  Psychology itself, though, is not the root of the problem, but rather a sign of deeper cultural assumptions.  We see this in practices such as beginning the day in front of a mirror and repeating a set of affirmations such as, “I’m good enough, smart enough, handsome enough, and people like me,” a practice which has been the subject of numerous comedy skits.  As somebody has pointed out, though, telling yourself what you want to believe is like printing your own money—deep in your heart you know it isn’t worth anything in the real world.  This focus on the self can lead to what Vitz calls “existential narcissism,” which differs from the textbook pathologies because everyone assumes it to be normal.  As Vitz explains:

There are other kinds of narcissism that result from neurotic experiences such as an unstable or overindulgent childhood, but existential narcissism follows from a modern approach to living often chosen in adult life.  Its end is the psychological death (in some cases, the physical death as well) of the self.  Death may come from greater and greater devotion to sensation (sex, violence, or drugs) or from retreat into the isolated, machine-like world of the careerist ego—cold, calculating, often fueled by amphetamines.  In either case there is an ever-tightening, self-inflicted solitary confinement based on continually repressing the need for love (p. 158).

            The Orthodox Monastic Fathers would agree with Vitz that thoughts, fantasies, mental pictures, and self-affirmations are dangerous.  They characterize this sort of narcissism as delusion, entrapment by the passions, bondage to them, and spiritual drunkenness.  They warn us against the very things that modern thinkers such as Satir recommend.  As Abba Dorotheos says at the beginning of his Discourse on Vigilance and Sobriety, “Let us look to ourselves and be sober, brothers.”  He explains more fully:

For it is a very grave thing to let loose our passions and not to check them.  And I will tell you a parable to illustrate this:  A man who gives way to his passions and suffers for it is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, catches the arrow in his hands, and then plunges it into his own heart.  A man who is resisting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, and although the arrow hits him, it does not seriously wound him because he is wearing a breastplate.  But the man who is uprooting his passions is like a man who is shot at by an enemy, but who strikes the arrow and shatters it or turns it back into his enemy’s heart.  (Dorotheos of Gaza.  Discourses and Sayings.  tr. Eric P. Wheeler.  Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1977.  pp.170-1)

            We find a similar treatment of spiritual drunkenness and sobriety in the writings of Nicephorus the Solitary, who was spiritual father to St. Gregory Palamas.  He discusses examples taken from Orthodox Monastic Fathers up to his time, offering us a view of the spiritual life in direct opposition to today’s secular outlook.  As he says in A Most Profitable Discourse on Sobriety and the Guarding of the Heart:

… [Paul of Latros] revealed to [his readers] a method through which they could gain strength, free themselves from their former passionate dispositions and avoid new seeds of passions.  You see how this father teaches his pupils, who do not know him, a method through which they could turn aside the impinging of the passions.  And this method is none other but the guarding of the mind, for the repelling of suggestions is the business of the mind and of nothing else (Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart.  tr. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer.  London and Boston:  Faber and Faber, 1992.  p. 26)

In the final section of his Profitable Discourse, Nicephorus explains as follows:

Some of the saints have called attention the safe-keeping of the mind, others—the guarding of the heart, yet others—sobriety, yet others—mental silence, and others again by other names.  But all these names mean the same thing.  Just as of bread one can say, a round, a slice, a piece, so also understand about this (pp. 31-2).

            Contrary to the culture of self-worship, the Orthodox Monastic Fathers warn us that a life of bondage to thought, emotion, and fantasy is a sort of intoxication.  Sobriety allows us to see life as it really is, in communion with God and our neighbor.

Cosmas (formerly Cyril) was born at the mid-point of the twentieth century, in 1950.  He was raised Methodist and was the son of a minister.  Soon after entering college he drifted away from Christianity, seduced by the allurements of secularism and decadence, and spent many years in the spiritual far country of depravity, degeneracy, defiance, and bad attitudinality.  He entered the Greek Orthodox Church in 1996 the old-fashioned way as a repentant sinner.  Anything that might be construed as a journey to Orthodoxy was confided to his spiritual father in life confession and sealed with the prayers for absolution.  He is a tonsured reader / chanter.  In 1997 he joined the translation team to complete the Orthodox Study Bible by producing a version of the Old Testament with commentary which conformed to the Septuagint Greek text and was made chairman of the translation committee.  His work on that project continued until 2004, when he joined the brotherhood of the Monastery of St. John.  He was tonsured to the small schema on March 20, 2008 with the name Cosmas.  His patron saint is Cosmas of Aetolia.  Among the obediences and other activities at the monastery of Fr. Cosmas are copy editing, proofreading, translating, and some writing for Divine Ascent Press, hauling trash to the dump, dipping and chopping candles, and making coffee.  You can learn more about the monastery at http://www.monasteryofstjohn.org/