Elowsky, Church Fathers and the Passions, part 1

Transcript (edited for readability).

That's right. I always like to kind of have a caveat when I speak at groups like this, because back when I was in the parish teaching and preaching, this was while I was at Drew University working with Tom Oden on the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. I was also serving a vacancy for four years at a church in Morris Plains, New Jersey, called Holy Trinity.

Well, actually, anyway, while I was in the pulpit preaching, this is about in my fourth year of doing this, when I was teaching, I was managing a commentary, I was doing two services with Bible study every Sunday. I was in the pulpit preaching, and all of a sudden my voice started getting higher and higher until it left. It just stopped, you know, which some people wish would happen with pastors' sermons. But this was kind of strange, because I couldn't figure out what happened, and people asked me afterwards, what's happening, and I couldn't tell them because I didn't know.

So I went to all the different doctors to try to figure out what was going on. And, you know, they said I had problems with my dad, and if — even though my dad, he's a great guy. We had our issues, but no, that was not the issue, right? They said I had acid reflux, all these different kinds of things, and I finally went to Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, and I got put in. You hate to hear this from a doctor when they say, we've got an interesting case, right? You'd rather be boring, right? So they take my vocal cords and they put them up on a screen with all the interns there to see — they've got about twenty-five interns. And he turns to me and he says, well, you know, you should look to find another line of work, because you'll never talk again. You have a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, and this is incurable.

So I said, thank you for sharing. No — if I could have said it, I would have, but I couldn't. I couldn't talk. So I figured pretty much my speaking, teaching, preaching career was over.

So I went and found a doctor who was able to help me get my voice back for about two seconds, and I thought, oh, well, maybe there's possibilities, at least. But pretty much everybody gave up. I decided to just do his exercises, and I did these exercises for four years, as a mute, basically. I couldn't get sound to come out, but I finally, after four years, got something to come out. And after that, I got further and further along till I finally was able to lecture again, and ended up at Concordia, Wisconsin, where I taught for four years, and then eight years at St. Louis.

So I do this because sometimes it comes — it's still there, you know. I had gotten rid of it until COVID. Thank you, COVID, another gift that keeps on giving. But it kind of brought it back a bit. So I do struggle with it sometimes. I just say that as a caveat, in case I have trouble, so you don't think, what's going on. So the condition is spasmodic dysphonia. Look it up. It's a wonderful thing to have. Not really. But it's great to be here with you and to talk about the passions, and I frankly went through a lot of the different passions that we're going to discuss when I was struggling with some of this too.

So I thought, if we're going to talk about the passions, we probably should know what they considered the passions to be with the fathers. So I've got an outline for you that you'll see. It's in two sections. The first section is front and back, talks about the problem of the passions that we'll talk about. And, by the way, how long do I have for this? Let's see — ten-fifteen, and then we pray for half, half an hour, then ten-forty-five? Okay, good, good. So we'll take that first section, and then the second section for the second half. So I try to give you at least a little bit of an outline of what I'm doing.

So passions are not like how we talk about them today, like fulfilling your passion for music or art, or doing what you're passionate about in order to fulfill whatever dream or desire you have. Passions in the fathers of the church had a very different connotation. They would have drawn their understanding of the passions, of course, from the Scriptures, and at times also from the philosophical schools of the day.

Before the time of Christ, Stoics such as Zeno listed four categories of passion. They had distress, pleasure, fear, and desire. Well, distress and pleasure they considered as present realities, passions we experience in the present, shall we say. Well, the fear and desire, those are things that you're looking toward the future, and they may make you anxious, or you look forward to them. And these passions could in turn elicit emotions, such as anger, grief, pride, jealousy, and coveting, lust — whatever you want to put for the term epithymia.

As you know, our English word "passion" comes from the Greek word pathos, commonly translated as suffering, or to suffer. And our English word "emotion," you'll also notice, has the word "motion" in it, and the whole idea was, with the passions, the emotions, they are the result of what moves the soul, if you will. The soul can be moved in a positive direction or a negative direction.

Galatians 5, for instance, seems to posit both positive desires of the Spirit and negatives, the desires of the flesh, when Paul writes in Galatians chapter 5: I say, walk by the Spirit and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh, for the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh. Both are desires. One is rightly ordered, as the Roman Catholics would say, the other is wrongly ordered.

Now, an earlier Greek philosopher, Socrates, provides an image of how he saw this working out in a dialogue he had, the Phaedrus. In Socrates's discussion of the soul, he refers to the soul as akin to a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. And the human charioteer drives his chariot, being pulled by these two winged horses, one of which is noble and the other ignoble, as he would say. So the noble horse wants to lead the chariot upwards, you know, toward divine things, toward the divine, and the ignoble horse wants to lead the chariot down to earth toward bodily things. So, as Socrates puts it, the driving of these two gives great trouble to the charioteer, because you have this tug, you have this pull that's between these two spiritual sides of human beings and the lower, fleshly, bodily side of human beings. I mean, they're in the struggle together.

And the gods don't have this problem, he says, because they're simply spiritual, without the entanglements of the material world. Human beings, on the other hand, are made up of body and soul, spirit and matter. The latter, matter, can weigh you down if you let it reign. And so the goal is to train the pair to soar toward the spiritual heights rather than toward the earthly depths. And guess whose job that is? That's the job of the charioteer, which for human beings is the reason, or the nous, the mind, if you will. Well, that's easier said than done.

But inherent in this description is the idea that human beings were created with an affinity toward spiritual uplift, but also a spiritual downdraft, if you will. So in the first part of this presentation, we're going to discuss the downdraft; in the second part, we're going to look a little bit at the uplift, we hope, or at least kind of the remedy of it, of the downdraft, if you will.

But first we come back to what the passions are. The fathers use this term for all kinds of things, frankly. Sometimes they are movements on the soul; other times they are movements of the soul, depending on which father you're talking about. A number of the fathers, in fact, did not believe that the passions were part of the composition of the soul, because they assumed that a primary attribute of God was apatheia, that is, passionless, without passion. And of course, the result of the Theopaschite controversy was a determination that God is impassible. He's incapable of suffering, and therefore, the goal of those created in his image and likeness is to be impassible, as well, as much like him as we can be. The highest attainment of the Christian, then, is not letting the passions have any control over you — letting, in other words, the noble horse win out, so to speak.

So, for example, when John tells us that Jesus wept, the fathers will emphasize that he only wept a little bit, you know, as an example to us, not to let grief get the better of us. It's one of those less-than-satisfying exegetical moves, if you will, in my opinion, but it's there, depending on who you read.

Well, as Dave Maxwell notes, my colleague at the seminary, when Jesus talks about the passions, he talks about them proceeding out of the heart. That's Matthew 15, right? For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, Jesus says, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile anyone.

Now you've got Paul, though, in Romans 7, on the other hand, who talks about his own struggle with the passions that he says takes place in my members, that rage against the mind. In Colossians 3, he says, put to death, therefore, whatever is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion — pathos — evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry, anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth; do not lie to one another.

So in Scripture, whether it is the body, the heart, or the mind, both Jesus and Paul often frame the encounter with the passions as a battle. And the church fathers would pick up on that, and they run with it. So that's what I want to talk to you about this morning.

When the plague confronted Bishop Cyprian — you know, he had to deal with his own COVID event, shall we say, back in 250 — his flock was devastated. It attacked his own flock with devastating ferocity, as well as the neighborhood, shall we say. He penned these words that encapsulate the battle as he saw it. And again, he's in the midst of a plague. He's in the midst of the Decian persecution, too, by the way, which also was happening at the time. I mean, this was not a good time to be a Christian, shall we say. It was that little season that Bill mentioned in his sermon.

So he said this: Our warfare is with greed, with immodesty, with anger, with ambition. On top of that, there is our diligent but toilsome wrestling with carnal vices, with enticements of the world. The mind of man besieged, and in every quarter infested with the onslaughts of the devil, can hardly meet the various points of attack, scarcely resists them. If greed is humbled, lust springs up. If lust is overcome, ambition takes its place. If ambition is despised, anger exasperates, pride puffs up, drunkenness entices, envy breaks; conquered, jealousy severs friendships. Yet you are constrained to curse, which the divine law forbids; you are compelled to swear, which is not lawful. He says, there are so many persecutions; the soul suffers daily with so many risks, and yet the heart, wearied, delights to abide here long among the devil's weapons.

He says, I just don't get it. In other words. So he frames the encounter with the passions as a battle, an encounter that verged on war — war with the passions and with ourselves. But not all was right with his world, and he could not understand the attachment of his people to a world that was frankly structured to tear them down, to wear them down with an endless onslaught of spiritual attacks, abetted by the human passions. Passions, in Cyprian's view, are our weak spot, our vulnerability, that the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh, they all seek to exploit.

As Michel Meyer puts it in Robert Barsky's translation, "The Philosophy of the Passions: Toward a History of Human Nature," he says: Passion is the sign of the contingency in man. That is to say that what he wishes to master, by being the place where temporality and the reversal of all truth into its contrary converge, passion upsets, destabilizes, and disorients by reproducing the uncertainty of the world in the course of events. It is, in fact, the other, he says, in us. Without which we would not exist, but with which it is difficult and dangerous to be. Passion is the word for all risks, as well as the one for infinite promises, he says. There's a moral choice implied in passion, on account of the fact that it opens up contradictory choices, alternatives. If passion and morality have always been closely associated, it must not be forgotten, he says, that pathos was originally this sensible, unreflected consciousness which plunges us into the stream of life, and which pushes us to flee from dangers as much as to seek pleasure, he says.

So you'll notice at the end of this quote that Meyer also sees a positive aspect to the passions, which I hope to maybe include in the end of my second presentation, but right now I'd like to talk about the focus on the disruption they can cause.

Now, early Greek and Roman philosophers perceived what Paul intuited in Romans 7. There are contradictory forces at work in us that fight against one another and against ourselves. Our sinful passions, Paul says, have declared war on the new man of our baptism, so that the good we want to do, we don't, right, and the evil we don't want to do, that's what we end up doing, to paraphrase Paul. And even Socrates, as you saw, recognized this struggle, albeit without the Christian emphasis. Passion has always been opposed to reason, the soul to the body, nature to human nature, and instinct to intelligence.

As I mentioned at the beginning, when the fathers talk about the passions, they are talking largely about what moves the soul, moving it one way or the other. There's either progress or regression, movement forward or backwards. There's no stasis of the soul. That's what Gregory of Nyssa says. You're either moving toward God or you're moving away from him. And the fathers also caution that if someone thinks they have reached an equilibrium, a place where the soul is at rest, that person had better watch out, because pride rears its ugly head. Take heed if you stand, lest you fall, right? Pride goeth before the fall — or, as the full quote of the proverb reads, pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Well, as we saw with Cyprian, when the fathers write negatively about the passions, it's usually in the context of a perception about their Greco-Roman society, a society that seemed largely structured to wear down the Christian with its united front against the temptations and allurements of the world. Here I'm talking about society, I'm talking about culture. They had their own culture wars, I suppose.

There were intellectual forces among the Stoics, Cynics, and Middle Platonists, by the way, who held up high moral ideals that were very much in agreement with Christian morality. So I don't want you to get the idea that everybody was just against Christian morality. And the apologists often used this fact in seeking to justify Christianity's existence and its benefit for the empire that way. But the practical reality of Roman life was something different, the lived reality, as we'd say.

Kyle Harper, in his book "From Shame to Sin" — I brought this book along; it's a fascinating text — "The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity" — he writes that the material environment of the Greco-Roman city of late antiquity was unusually adapted for stimulating the appetites. Harper describes the empire at its height as, quote, the Indian summer of classical nudity, when prosperity carried the culture of public baths and gymnasia further than ever before, and then, frankly, erotic art was ubiquitous and refined in popular media, unquote.

So Harper, for instance, singles out the popularity — get this — of erotic lamps, from the second century AD to the late fourth or early fifth century. He says the Romans not only had sex with the lamps on, they had sex by the flickering light of lamps that had images of them having sex by lamplight on them. At the basis of this erotically charged culture was the Roman slave trade, though, and its unruly growth, as he calls it. The flesh trade made pleasure cheap and unceremonious. The inhabitant of the Roman Empire was constantly bombarded with visual allurements. So moderation was a virtue called upon constantly to perform heroic feats of restraint. And so, you know, we're stuck with our screens today that are ubiquitous, shall we say, but they had their own temptations and trials too, that way.

And on top of it, I mentioned the slave trade there. Most upper- and middle-class homes had slaves. The unwritten rule was that slaves were fair game for sexual encounters whenever their master might feel the urge. And it could be a teenage male or female slave, depending on one's proclivity, shall we say. This was also the justification for brothels. If a man had the urge, better to satisfy it with a prostitute than cause dishonor on a Roman noblewoman.

So Harper further highlights that homoerotic desire was also an underlying current among the intelligentsia, and perhaps also other strata of society, too. There was a peak age, if you will, of when it was acceptable to seduce a teenage boy. I mean, it was gross to read some of this. I felt I had to take a shower, you know. He says perhaps until he was eighteen or twenty. But if he went much past this age, it was looked down upon socially. Greco-Roman culture operated within the realm of honor and shame. It was more about, oh, bad form, or indiscretion, rather than guilt or sin. At least up until the Constantinian era and the advent of Christianity coming out of the closet, so to speak, into the mainstream — although it was already prominent in the empire even before Constantine came on the stage. I mean, Christianity was already kind of making inroads in the empire, even up to the emperor's household itself.

Now, as I've noted elsewhere, in an article I wrote for Christian History magazine, much like the internet and the TV of today, the Greco-Roman cities were filled with distractions. Besides the slave trade and everything else, they were filled with these distractions that would stimulate the appetite and satisfy the need to be entertained. You have gladiators and charioteers from the ancient world, but they were pretty much like the World Series or the Super Bowl stars of the day, that we're going to be celebrating as our national holiday. Right next to — I guess it's next Sunday, I think. Yeah. I thought it was this Sunday. That shows you how much attention I'm paying. My wife even said, so are we going to watch the Super Bowl? So we didn't, obviously — it's not there — but we at least had some good food.

So beyond the sports memorabilia you could buy at the circuses, there was a lot of sex, drinking, and gambling going on as well, to satisfy the passions. I mean, have you ever seen the display that's going around for Pompeii in the museums? Some of it you can see online too. And they have like the scenes when the volcano erupted and people are caught in whatever state they were. And some of this they weren't even publishing, because it was so erotic and everything else. Well, I mean, the graffiti too is pretty bad in Pompeii. It's quite revealing, literally, shall we say — sexual innuendos and conquests, homosexual liaisons, bar fights, thefts, among other things. They're all there in the graffiti for you to read. Scribbled on the walls is a message about the gladiator Crescens, that fighter whom the girls call sweet and charming. And there's Celadus the Thracian gladiator, who is the delight of all the girls. They write this stuff on the walls in Latin, so it looks, you know, like at least — well, Latin makes everything look better, right?

But it was the violence that kept people coming back. And Christians are in this whole environment. They're not living indifferently in the face of such violence and temptation. You get the fathers kind of fighting back, like Theophilus of Antioch, who explains to Autolycus, his pagan friend, that Christians avoid sex outside of marriage and are forbidden so much as to witness gladiator shows, lest they become partakers and abettors of murders. So there's all those — there's the games and everything else publicly, where also, by the way, you were expected to pinch some incense to the gods, too. That was part of life. And if you didn't, you were affecting the pax deorum, the peace of the gods. And this is what got the Christians in trouble in the first place, and frankly why the persecution started, because they thought the Christians were not doing their civil duty by offering obeisance to the gods and glory to them.

And on top of that, you've got the romance literature of the day that was filled with sexual conundrums, prostitution, and again, homoerotic allusions, in heterosexual guise, such as in Achilles Tatius's "Leucippe and Clitophon." The theater held classic comedic productions by artists such as Seneca and Terence — I'm sorry — but the subject matter often revolved around sex and infidelity, that today probably would be rated R, if not NC-17. It's no secret that actors were often considered on the same level of society as criminals and prostitutes. I mean, they actually have canons that said women cannot marry actors, and men can't either, because then you would be committing a heinous sin, because they considered them just criminals.

Chrysostom — it's interesting — excoriated his congregation for coming to church, if they could even make it there, and then rushing off to the theater to, quote, see naked women swimming. So again, there's this constant bombardment of images, not from screens like we have today, but images nonetheless, meant to tempt. And if not to tempt, then to distract. And if not to distract, then to coarsen and desensitize the conscience. It was a progression, but you could see what it was doing to the inner life, the soul, of their people. That's what the bishops were worried about.

So when you read Clement of Alexandria too, you almost get the idea — and Clement was a second-century church father who was teaching in Alexandria — you almost get the idea when you read his stuff that they could have filmed "Wall Street" right there in Alexandria. Remember that movie, with Martin — Gordon Gekko — who said greed is good? He would have had a field day in Alexandria. I mean, the lust for greed, another one of the passions, could be satisfied quite easily in the great cities of the ancient world, such as Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, or Antioch. The rich would get richer and the poor got poorer. Sounds familiar.

The second-century churchman, as I said, Clement of Alexandria, he lived in probably one of the wealthiest cities of the empire. It was like the New York City, if you will, of the ancient world. And he preached a sermon on whether the rich could even be saved. That was the title of his work: "Can the Rich Man Be Saved?" Because there were doubts, due to the distractions and distortions to the faith their wealth could produce. And his conclusion was this: wealth definitely had its drawbacks, but where would the church get its funding? So he's just like a twenty-first-century pastor. But of course, he's talking about helping the poor and the destitute too.

So, as Chris Hall says, Gregory of Nyssa, in his analysis of Roman materialism, links the desire for more and more stuff to the dulling effect of the passions on the human mind, and especially on our memory. I mean, this is kind of a theme. These passions can just dull you, desensitize you, to what's going on in your life. Too quickly we forget, Gregory believes. Everything begins with God's grace, the grace that richly offers human fulfillment to God's image-bearers, as Chris says. Forgetfulness of God's grace and gifts foments a decline into materialism, where the pursuit of more and more stuff becomes the end of all of life. As Gregory puts it, a sinful image-bearer, left to himself, is, quote, almost completely involved in the pursuit of material things. And that's the problem, because then the spirit kind of gets left out. The ignoble horse drags him down, shall we say.

But Clement — going back to Clement — also noted in his Stromata that there's hope for Christians in all this mess. He says, while inhabiting the city, the Christian despises the things in the city which are admired by others. He lives in the city as in a desert, so that he may not be pressured into conforming to his environment, but instead chooses to exhibit a life lived justly.

So the key to fighting against the passions, in other words, the fathers thought, whether it be greed or lust or whatever it is — I thought it was to live life like a monk out in the desert, or maybe out in a retreat center like this. These monks aspired to passionlessness, just like we talked about the attribute of God. Ambrose praised the fourth-century bishop Eusebius of Vercelli, who was capable of living in the city, he said, while observing the rules of the monks and ruling the church with fasting and temperance. For the grace of the priesthood is much increased if the bishop constrained young men to the practice of abstinence and to the rule of purity, and forbade them, though living in the city, the manners and mode of life of the city. So it was kind of set up here, the city versus the desert, if you will. And in Iowa, we used to have the country versus the city, kind of softball games. I suppose they're maybe looking at it like this.

And think about Ambrose. I mean, he was a fourth-century bishop who served as a city magistrate. He was well aware of the advantages of the city, but also its temptations and the desire to indulge the passions. And so this is why the fathers often counseled those who were struggling with the passions to behave as if they were in the middle of a bustling city.

The desert fathers, by the way, both the anchorites, the ones who would go out into the desert by themselves, or the cenobites — those are kind of the distinction, the ones who would come together and have communal meals together and worship together — both of these were the spiritual advisors of their day. They were the ones that a lot of people were looking to for guidance. They often thought that their bishops were too taken up by the cities, by the passions and the desires. So that's when people would go out into the desert to seek this wisdom, whether it was even higher government officials, even emperors going out there sometimes to like see Simeon Stylites on his pillar that was fifty feet up, and you'd have to just bring food up to him in a basket, and these kinds of things. They wanted to get away from it all, and people still found him. So it wasn't easy to do.

But then you'd get people like Anthony who would go even deeper into the desert to try getting away from the people. They'd still follow him too. But they also went out into the desert, especially the monks did, because they believed that that's where spiritual battle was. They actually believed that. And you read this in the Life of Anthony, for instance, when Satan shows up on his doorstep, and he says, what are you doing here? This is my territory. To which Anthony said, forget about it, it's Jesus's territory. So they were going out there to invade, actually, the devil's territory, and it was ripe for an invasion from Christian spiritual Rambos, you know, who were ready for battle, or looking to get battle-tested, shall we say.

So I'd like to move on to some of the lessons they can perhaps teach us here in controlling the passions. As I mentioned, the fathers view the battle of the passions as a battle for the soul, and a battle with the evil axis of Satan, the world, and our own sinful flesh. As early as the period of the apostolic fathers, the fathers of the church spoke about a problem they saw in their parishioners, and especially people who were considering joining the church, who wanted to be baptized. They referred to this as double-mindedness, and in Greek it's dipsychos, literally of two souls. So you're supposed to have a unified, harmonic soul, but they saw in their people a dual soul, which brings us back again to that charioteer imagery.

And we find this language especially in the Shepherd of Hermas, which is a second-century document that is quite an interesting text. Have you ever read it? The Shepherd of Hermas. It's got its weird parts, and it's got its really pungent parts that just kind of challenge you right to your soul when you read it. And there is a section where the Shepherd warns against the dangers of double-mindedness for those who are on the precipice of faith, as he calls it. Double-mindedness can drive you over the cliff, and it will be difficult, but not impossible, to get back in the fold, he says.

And there are some aspirants, hearers of the word, who were frankly afraid of the demand of baptism. I mean, the Christians took baptism very seriously back then. You could not just show up and say, I want to be baptized. You had to have somebody who was your sponsor, and not just your sponsor who showed up, but they vouched for you, and if you made them look bad, that was not going to go well. So they would be there as your sponsor, and they would even have what they called the scrutinies later on, where you would have to talk about your past way of life. And you weren't supposed to hold anything back. And if you did, guess what? You could be booted out, or at least have to go through a long period of penance. So this was all in preparation for baptism, plus, on top of that, you had the catechesis that the pastor would be doing, the bishop would be doing, with lectures before baptism too.

So he says that you've got these people who are looking to be baptized, and then they see all of this, and there are those who have heard the word and want to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then, when they remember the purity of the truth, they change their mind and run again to their evil passions. So not everybody made it to be baptized, even, because it just was too much of a commitment, if you will. And the key, Hermas said, was to have the soul in balance, in agreement, and not give way to the passions. Well, my response is, easier said than done. They took quite a bit of time in preparing people for baptism, as I said, including the sponsorship and everything else, but it was still a difficult time. And early Christians had to deal with this duplicity a lot. The passions were always there in the background, ready to surface.

I like to look at Origen of Alexandria. Are you familiar with Origen? I mean, he was a very, very pious person, even as he was a very, very intellectual guy. Some say he may have even taken Jesus's words literally when, you know, if an offending member offends, cut it off. Well, I don't know. I mean, I do know this: that when you read the canons of Nicaea, the very first canon — get this, these are the rules for the church, right — is, don't castrate yourself. I'm thinking, where did that come from? But it may have come from people imitating Origen's piety, shall we say. The bishops had to counsel against that. I'm glad we don't have that. Is that in our bylaws anywhere? No, sorry.

So Origen was known as Adamantius, by the way, which I find interesting Marvel has picked up on, the Marvel comics, you know — that adamantium. The idea of having that strength — you know, he was considered strong, not in physical ways, but in his spiritual stance and dealing with his passions. That's why they called him Adamantius. And he was, of course, also the intellectual fountainhead, shall we say, for much of what the desert fathers practiced. No doubt writing from experience himself, he provides the schema for how to battle the passions in his treatise "On Prayer." And I took my African students through this text. I taught on the Lord's Prayer in Africa, and I talked about the African fathers, Cyprian, Tertullian, and Origen.

So this schema he worked out has the idea that a human being is made up of flesh, soul, and spirit, according to Paul's model in 1 Thessalonians 5. And just like Paul and Socrates, he understood that in the psyche, the soul, there were passions that would war against each other, moving one toward the sarx, the flesh, or toward the spirit. And so again, it's the job of the nous, the mind, to be the charioteer in keeping these passions moving in the right direction. And when I say mind, by the way, I'm not just talking about the intellect. He's talking about the intellect, the spirit that is in union with God. So, you know, we kind of hear "mind" and we just think of, you know, what are you thinking? But it's not just that. It's the rational, spiritual side of us, if you will.

So the mind, the soul, and the flesh are all needed, each needing to be dealt with, if a Christian wanted an effective encounter with God, Origen would say. He was of the opinion that the flesh, as well as the soul, if not properly ordered, would get in the way of such an encounter. But the flesh is also the first proving ground for a Christian. And the Christian who wants to progress in his sanctification needs to restrain his flesh, first of all, and bring that under submission, as Paul talked about pummeling his own body into submission like a boxer, he would say, in 1 Corinthians 9. But the real battleground, he would say, ultimately, is going to be the rational soul.

And in his discussion on the petition "lead us not into temptation," this is what Origen has to say. He says: I do think that God deals with each rational soul in such a way as to lead it to eternal life, though, he says, it always possesses free will, and on its own account may ascend to the summit of goodness, through the better things, or may otherwise descend to a certain degree, on account of heedlessness, to the extent of wickedness. And he goes on to say that in order to cure our passions, sometimes God lets us struggle with our passions and temptations and trials.

And I have to say, when I was not able to talk for four years, I struggled with the passions, and probably the biggest one was acedia — the idea of just, there's no reason to live. You know, "It's a Wonderful Life," when George is on the bridge, was real for me to think about that. So I know what he's saying, and I couldn't understand why God did not resolve this sooner, so I could get back to preaching, teaching.

So he says this, that since a speedy and rapid cure may bring about contempt in some people for the disease into which they have fallen, so that they contract it a second time after regaining their health, so he may in such cases reasonably allow the evil to increase — not, so to speak, to augment it within them as to be incurable — so that, wallowing in the evil for a long time and being surfeited with the sin after which they longed, they may be sated, and may be aware of the harm that they have done to themselves, and so learn to hate what formerly they had welcomed, so that when they are healed, they may enjoy more steadfastly the health which has come to their souls through their healing.

Now, there he's talking about sin. He's not talking about kind of the struggle, but he's saying that sometimes God lets us wallow in that sin, and sometimes even makes it worse, but for a purpose, so that you don't want to be around it. And he cites the example of Numbers 11, where the Israelites were complaining they had no meat to eat. So what does God do? Remember? He provides so much meat that they can't stand it. This, and same thing with the manna. As Origen says, that you shall not spend five days only eating meat, nor twice that, nor even twice that, but you shall spend a whole month eating meat, until that which you thought so good is coming out of your nostrils, together with your loathsome passion and your culpable and base desire. In this way, God says, will I release you from your desires in your lives, so that when you emerge, you may be pure from all desires, and remember the suffering that you underwent in order to be released from it. So you will be unable ever to fall into it again, or, should this have happened due to forgetfulness after long intervals of time of the sufferings you underwent on account of your desire — should you fail to assimilate to yourselves the word which perfectly releases you from every passion, should subsequently fall into evil and desire earthly things again, and be a second time to obtain those things which you presently desire, you will come to hate what you desire, and so hurry back to good things and to the heavenly nourishment so despised by those who long for wickedness.

They liked long sentences. Sorry about that. But, you know, that almost sounds to me like aversion therapy. Indeed, he relates what he's saying here to Paul's push against the culture and its preoccupation with homosexuality. He uses Paul's language of Romans 1, that it will go similarly for those who exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of a corruptible mortal, who on this account have been abandoned and handed over to impurity in their desires of the heart, so that they might dishonor their bodies. Origen says, who have ascribed to a body without intelligence or feeling the name of the one who has bestowed on all sentient and rational creatures not sense alone, but rational sense, and to some the grace of a completely admirable ability to sense and to reason.

I mean, what Origen is getting at here is, in order to deal effectively with the passions, he implies that sometimes God lets them get the better of us. Those who respond in repentance and faith are repaired, and they're rescued; those who do not are given over to the desires, and end up following that ignoble horse right down into the ditch, and right down ultimately to their demise, sometimes literally.

So, Athanasius is another figure I'd like to talk about. Origen kind of gives us the lay of the land, if you will, but Athanasius was influenced by Origen, who was a fellow Alexandrian. And Athanasius too describes the soul as moving either toward the nothingness from which it was created — he has this whole idea that we were created from nothing, and that's where we want to end up, almost like gravity, if you will — so you can move that way, or toward participation in God, which is who we were created for and to be with. He says there's no middle ground either, as these two tendencies vie for control. So gravity always seems to be more difficult to overcome, though.

And so he describes the role of the charioteer again, the nous, but in a little different way than we saw in Socrates. He says: The soul is like a charioteer who mounts his horse in the stadium, and then pays no attention to the goal toward which he is supposed to be heading; turning away from it, he simply drives the horses whichever way he can, and his capacity corresponds to his wishes. So he would often crash into people he comes across, and drive out of bounds, carried wherever the speed of the horses carries him, and thinking that by racing like this he will not miss the goal, for he only looks at the track, and does not see that in fact he has got away from the goal. So it is with the soul when it has turned from the path to God and moves the members of the body to whatever is improper, or rather, it is itself moved by itself along with them. Thus it sins and creates evil for itself, not seeing that it has strayed from the path and missed the goal of truth, in regard to which the blessed apostle Paul, that Christ-bearing man, said, I press on toward the goal, the prize of the upward call of Jesus Christ. He says that, by the way, in "Against the Greeks."

So, influenced and perhaps instructed by both Origen and Athanasius, the monks, as I noted, they like to follow Origen's askesis, which is their term for kind of spiritual discipline, if you will, the spiritual athletes of the ancient world. They recognized the battle for what it was, recognizing that the passions also had allies to move the soul in one direction or another. This was not just a struggle where your emotions get the better of you. This was spiritual warfare that called for nothing less than vigilance and a calling up of the guard.

Satan has his reconnaissance team on the lookout for weaknesses, for signs of weakness in us, Athanasius would say. And in his account of the Life of Anthony, he notes that the devil is able to use what captivates us, what we are preoccupied with, as an ally in moving our passions toward the direction Satan wants. And in his account of the life of the desert monk Anthony, Athanasius describes Satan's tactics and the monk's counter-tactics this way. This is what he has to say.

He says: If even the devil tells you that his power is gone, you should utterly despise both him and his demons. And since the enemy, with his hounds, only has these kinds of tricks up his sleeve, we, having gotten to know their weakness, are able to despise them. And so let us not fall into despondency like this, or become cowards, or make up things to be afraid of, saying, for instance, I'm afraid that a demon might come and overthrow me, since such a demon might just lift me up and slam me down, or he might rise up against me all of a sudden and confuse me. Do not let your mind even entertain such thoughts, he says. Do not despair, as though you were losing everything; instead, be courageous, and always rejoice, believing that you are safe.

And he goes on to say: Let us consider in our own soul that the Lord is with us, the one who put the evil spirits to flight and broke their power. Let us consider and take comfort in the fact that, while the Lord is with us, our enemies cannot harm us. For when they come, they approach us in a form corresponding to the state in which they discover us, and adapt their delusions to the condition of mind in which they find us. So he's talking about the devil's tactics here. If, therefore, he says, they find us timid and confused, they immediately storm the place like robbers, having found it unguarded. And they use what is ever on our minds, and even more. For if they find us fainthearted and cowardly, they mightily increase our terror by their delusions and threats, and they continue to use these in tormenting the soul that they've saddened.

But, he says, if they see us rejoicing in the Lord, contemplating the bliss of the future, mindful of the Lord, deeming all things in his hand, and that no evil spirit has any strength against the Christian, or any power at all over anyone — when they behold the soul fortified with these thoughts, he says, they become uneasy, and they start backpedaling. Notice how the enemy, seeing Job fenced round with these thoughts, withdrew from him, but finding Judas unguarded, took him captive. Thus, if we want to despise the enemy, let us meditate on what the Lord can do, and let the soul always rejoice in hope. Then we shall see that the snares of the demon are like smoke, and the evil ones themselves flee rather than pursue. For they are, as I said before, exceedingly fearful, always looking forward to the fire prepared for them.

A good reminder. The soul needs to be strategically fortified against the onslaughts that will inevitably come. I mean, he's saying, get ready for it, because it's going to come. And often the monks would talk about weighing your thoughts that way. When you go to bed at night, what is it that you think about, they would ask. Whatever it is, probably says a lot about where your heart is at the moment, and whether there is a need for repentance, or a need for more fervent prayer, they would say, or meditation on Scripture.

There's another desert monk I like to bring up. His name is Abba Moses. Have you heard of Abba Moses? He's also known as Moses the Black. And I like to bring him up because my African friends don't think that there were any church fathers who were black. They're told that Christianity is a Western import. I mean, I've had to lecture, I don't know how many times, on "Is Christianity the white man's religion?" Because Islam will say that Christianity was imported, and Islam is the indigenous religion of Africa. So part of my mission, when I teach, is to kind of debunk that, shall we say. And Abba Moses is a great example, and he's somebody who's got an interesting history.

I mean, he was a robber before he was a monk, shall we say. He even got so ticked off at one guy that, when they dissed him — he was across the river, he put the knife in his teeth, swam across, and killed four of his sheep, just to say, don't mess with me. And then, have a nice day in Christian love. No. But I look at him kind of as the Clint Eastwood of the monks. I could see him kind of the pale rider, riding around and going, you want to go? Let's go. So, but once he became a monk, he left it behind, I think, most of it anyway. But he's stern in the struggle against those very passions that had controlled his life, and it wasn't just the passion for greed and violence, but there was also fornication there, and he talks about this.

It says: On one occasion Abba Moses of Petra was engaged in a war against fornication, and he could not endure being in his cell, and he went and informed Abba Isidore of it. Notice that: he went and got help. And the elder entreated him to return to his cell, but Abba Moses would not agree to this, having said, Father, I cannot bear it. Well, the elder took him up to the roof of his cell, and said unto him, Look to the west. And when he looked, he saw multitudes of devils, with troubled and terrified aspects, and they showed themselves in the forms of phantoms, which were looking for a fight. Abba Isidore said unto him, Now look to the east. And when he looked, he saw an innumerable number of holy angels standing there, and they were in a state of great glory. And then Abba Isidore said unto him, Behold, those who are in the west are those who are fighting with the holy ones, and those whom you have seen in the east, they are those who are sent by God to help the saints, for those who are with us are many. And having seen this, Abba Moses took courage and returned to his cell without fear.

Because he realized he had all these allies that he didn't know he had, because all he saw were the forces arrayed against him. And that's often what the devil does, when these passions overwhelm. The fathers of the desert believed there were spiritual allies in the heavenly places, not only interceding for us, but actually engaged in battle with the forces of darkness and sin. And sin was just as dark in the fourth century as it is today. The powers of darkness arrayed against Abba Moses back then are the same forces arrayed against you today. But even more importantly, the holy angels who were there to assist him are here to assist you today. And so are the Word and the sacraments, of course, too. They're all there as allies with us. They're the strong Word that Martin Franzmann wrote about, a word that is stronger than the darkness, because it is the light that no darkness can overcome, right?

So I want to come back to the city for a second and talk about a bishop in Rome in the fifth century who knew that his parishioners were having a rough time. This is, of course, Leo the Great, and he is writing at a difficult time when the empire is falling apart, basically, in the latter days. And he says: The old enemy does not cease to transform himself into an angel of light, and to spread everywhere the snares of his deceptions, and to make every effort to corrupt the faith of believers. He knows whom to ply with the zest of greed, whom to assail with the allurements of the belly, before whom to set the attractions of self-indulgence, in whom to instill the poison of jealousy. He knows whom to overwhelm with grief, whom to cheat with joy, whom to surprise with fear, whom to bewilder with amazement. There is no one whose habits he does not sift, whose cares he does not winnow, whose affections he does not pry into. And wherever he sees a person most absorbed, that is where he looks for an opportunity to injure him.

So you notice the insights are similar to Athanasius. In fact, we see a common thread with the fifth-century Leo, the fourth-century Anthony, Athanasius, and Moses, and the third-century Cyprian. They all understood that we're at war, not with flesh and blood, but with the rulers of this age, the principalities and powers, who are in league with the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh. The delivery system may change, and how the temptations come to us. I mean, back then the temptations seemed to be more overt and in your face, with the persecutions, the public violence, the erotic art depicted in the graffiti. Well, today we have the internet or screens that enter the privacy of our homes and schools. There are algorithms that anticipate our desire. If any of you saw the movie "The Social" — what's that, social media, I think it was — "The Social Dilemma," that just scared me to death. And my son, as a software developer, said, that's all real. So we've got our own conundrum here today, of course, too. But the temptations he uses are the same old tricks dressed up in newer, fancier techniques, shall we say. Their goal is to return us to the darkness and the chaos that has been the world's fallback position ever since Adam and Eve invited the Prince of Darkness in. So the charioteer has a tough time keeping the ignoble horse at bay from winning the day.

So I want to conclude this first section with a final story from the Egyptian desert. And it's about someone who comes to visit an old man out in the desert, and he's been struggling with all of this, especially with the passions, and he says, I want to be a holy man. That's his request to the desert monk: I want to be a holy man, but I'm not sure what to do.

So the story goes like this. A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, Abba, give me a word, that I may be a holy man. So the old man said, Go to the cemetery — interesting — and abuse the dead. So the brother went there — that's what the monk said to do — abused them, and threw stones at them, and then he returned and told the old man about it. And the old man said to him, Well, did they say anything to you? And he replied, No. I can almost picture Yoda here, yeah. And so the old man said, Go back tomorrow and praise them. So the brother went away and praised them, calling them apostles, saints, and righteous men, and he returned to the old man and said to him, Did they not answer you? And the brother said, No. Well, the old man said to him, You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them, and they did not speak. So you too, if you wish to be saved, must do the same, and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praise, and you can become a holy man.

So this encounter from the desert teaches us at least two things. What do you ignore? And what do you love? These are good questions to consider when dealing with the passions, because the passions have a tendency to pull us in one direction or the other — sometimes in multiple directions, but always, always diverting our attention from where it should be focused, on Christ. And the church fathers saw this was a problem, and I sometimes wonder if twenty-first-century Christians do, who are assured of the grace of God, but they're not so sure whether it needs any follow-up, shall we say.

And so let me conclude with Neil Postman, who observes in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," he says: I believe I'm not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether. So the church fathers would respond with a loud amen to Postman's words. They were aware of the deadening effect the wrong kind of entertainment has on the human soul, and unhesitatingly argued that some kinds of entertainment are simply wrong. But they also recognized: when you're getting pulled, look to the one who brought you into this world to begin with and gave you that soul, and rejoice in it.

So I'm going to stop at that point. I think we're right at time, and we'll move to the second lecture once we've met. Thank you for your paying attention.