What follows is a complete transcript of this week’s podcast episode, which you can listen to in the Substack app or via your preferred podcast platform.
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Welcome to Life Sentences, an exploration into the wisdom of the ancient Church Fathers presented by me, Thomas Small.
In this episode we meet St Basil the Great, a 4th-century Father of the Church who, taking us into the mind, teaches us where our focus of attention should be and that we must strive for purity of heart.
This is the third episode of Life Sentences. In the first two episodes we read through sermons by Saint Leo the Great, sermons that emphasised fasting which introduced us to Christian ascetic teaching. That teaching says that what you as a human being are is a mind and that you are at present inhabiting a body of flesh and blood in order to crucify the flesh and thereby grow in spiritual strength.
We fast, we keep vigil, we worship, we perform virtuous acts with our bodies so that by grace our minds will detach from absorption in sense perception and attach to God that we might see more clearly the invisible, spiritual realm, the Kingdom of Heaven that is within and which, according to Christ, suffers violence, so that only the violent take it by force, only those who with their whole heart, mind, soul, and strength love God, cleave unto him, stay stay in constant prayerful communion with him.
So, with St Leo having laid those foundations, we move on to another Church Fathers, an even greater Father, all things considered, one of the absolute greats, one of the Orthodox Church’s Three Holy Hierarchs: St Basil the Great, Archbishop of Caesarea.
Now, I said at the end of the last episode that we’d be moving on to the Desert Fathers, but I changed my mind. St Basil, as it happens, was extremely influenced by the Desert Fathers. He travelled widely in Egypt and the Levant, visiting monasteries, meeting ascetics, meeting holy elders, learning from them; and was one of the first men to codify and systematise their teachings, so much so that when his writings were translated into Latin, they had a huge influence on the spread of monasticism in the West. And so, though we’re not in this episode meeting a desert father per se, we are certainly meeting a man influenced by them, very eager to convey their teachings to the wider public—as he did with great success as Archbishop of Caesarea, which was the capital of the vast and important imperial province of Cappadocia in eastern Anatolia, in what is now the Republic of Turkey.
Now, St Basil was born seventy years before Leo, in the year AD 330—or 1083 as the year would have been known then, according to the Roman dating system, which began with the founding of the city of Rome in 753 BC.
In the year St Basil was born, AD 330, the Emperor Constantine formally consecrated the ancient city of Byzantium as the new Rome, soon to be known as Constantinople. That year then, in a way, is a watershed year—certainly in Christian history, perhaps in human history—the year in which we can say the Roman Empire, that byword for overwhelming military power and rational human organisation, was baptised, committing itself, in some way at least, to the Gospel of faith and peace.
It is fitting that St Basil was born in that very same year since he would be among a handful of total geniuses who over the next century would help the Roman world negotiate the transition from the old pagan religion to the new Christian faith.
Because I’ve broken the text that we’re going to read into two parts, I’m going to save St Basil’s biography for next time. That text is St Basil’s Sermon 3, entitled Be Attentive to Yourself. This sermon does not talk about fasting. It doesn’t really talk about asceticism at all. If fasting is about detaching the mind from absorption in sense perception, then St Basil’s sermon is about what you do with the mind next: be attentive to yourself.
As I say, I’m going to present this sermon over two episodes. It’s too long for one episode. And in fact, it’s too long for two episodes! So I’ve subbed it down a bit just for time. I will summarise the bits that I’ve taken out just so we can follow St Basil’s train of thought.
So here we go, part one of St Basil the Great’s Sermon 3, Be Attentive to Yourself.
Having created us, God gave us the use of logos…
Okay, I’m going to annoy everyone and stop right there. As you perhaps noticed, I did not translate one of the words there, logos, a Greek word with an extremely wide range of meanings. If you are a Christian or if you have any exposure to Christian theology, you will have encountered this word, possibly in its most customary translation into English as ‘word’ in the messianic title Word of God. Christ is the Word of God according to the Gospel of St John and the word there translated ‘word’ is logos. Because that word logos—that Greek word logos—is so important to Christian thought and has so many possible translations, just for fun, really, I thought I would leave it untranslated in this text. I hope as we go on that you’ll see why that is. I think it’s very important: to understand Christianity, especially the Christian mystical tradition, one really has to get to grips with this Greek word, logos, and all of its many nuanced senses.
And when I say it has a wide range of translations, Greeks themselves—and so many of the great Church Fathers thought in Greek, wrote in Greek, were Greeks—in Greek itself, it’s just that word, logos. So all the various senses as rendered into English were more or less present all at once to the original speakers, to the original writers of these texts. This is another reason to leave it untranslated, at least for now. It will help you, I hope, to understand the word better.
So, logos is a verbal noun of the verb lego, which means ‘to arrange, to put in order, or to gather together’. That’s its original meaning. So, it’s a verbal noun: ‘arranging, putting in order, gathering together’. And that log, the L-O-G in logos, is etymologically the same as the L-I-G in our word religion. That particle, L-I-G or L-O-G, is ultimately traceable to an Indo-European root meaning ‘to tie or bind’.
You can maybe see how a word that means ‘to arrange’ or ‘gather together’ or ‘put in order’ would be built on the deeper sense of ‘to tie’ or ‘bind’. You can also, then, perhaps see how that verb, lego, and its verbal noun, logos, was used to mean ‘speech’, and by a further extension, how it was used to mean ‘reason’, ‘rationality’, the mental process that precedes speech, the process which speech reveals. When we reason, we are attempting to make sense of things, to arrange them, put them in order, to gather disparate facts and different impressions, to gather them together and to uncover how they’re related, to express their meaning.
The human power of logos, of reason, and of speech is truly miraculous. We take what are in themselves just chaotic sense impressions bombarding us and organise them, structure them in our minds, perceiving behind them meanings, relations, connections. It is, according to the Fathers, what makes us human more than anything, that we possess what they called rational souls, souls with the power of reason, able to perceive meanings and to express the meaning that we perceive in words, words that themselves connect the mind to the meanings that are in the objects that the mind is contemplating. Words are like a bridge between the thing contemplated and the understanding of that thing. They tie mind and object, knower and known, together.
I believe that if you pay very close attention to this power that you possess, the power of reason, you will see that it is a wholly spiritual power. In itself it is not determined by the information or the impressions that it is arranging. Rather it arranges them. And it arranges them based on purely knowable, purely non sense-perceptible intellectual categories and realities that the mind just knows, that the reason knows intuitively.
And ancient people—ancient philosophers and certainly the Church Fathers—when they were paying close attention to the operation of reason in their mind, they asked themselves, what am I perceiving when I’m perceiving meanings? My eyes see an object, but my mind sees a meaning, a name. Where is the mental reality that my mind sees, which allows it to recognize what my eyes see? What am I seeing in my mind when I’m perceiving meanings and other such spiritual intellectual realities?
The answer, in the final analysis, was God—and specifically God’s logos, God’s reason, God’s Word, the Word of Words, the source of all reason, the divine pan-cosmic power that structures everything, and that by structuring everything, imbuing it with meaning, causes it to be, causes it not to be a chaotic nothing but to be a meaningful something.
I could go on and on and on about the significance of logos and over the course of Life Sentences I’m sure I will bore you to death with all the different ways that Greek word can be understood. But I’ve said enough, I hope, to ground St Basil’s text.
‘Having created us,’ he says, ‘God gave us the use of logos…’
…so that we would reveal the deliberation of our hearts to one another and, in keeping with our communal nature, each share the hidden things of our heart with our neighbour, disclosing our intentions.
Just a couple of things to point out about that first sentence.
It’s interesting that St Basil has not said that God gave us the use of logos, of reason, or of speech, so that we can understand things. He doesn’t say that. He says that we have the power of logos in order to reveal to each other what is inside our hearts—in keeping, he says, with our communal nature. We are so used to living in an individualistic society which is based on the philosophy of liberalism, a philosophy which is based on individualism: the primary human substance, if you like, is the human individual. Humanity is a collectivity of individuals. The Church Fathers, in line with the Gospel, totally reject this. St Basil says it right here: our nature is communal.
Our nature is communal. It’s not as we believe today, that our nature is individual, and as individuals we might choose to be communal. We might choose to enter into partnerships or relationships with other individuals. That’s not what St Basil is saying. He’s saying our nature is communal. We can’t see it, and certainly today we refuse to see it, but we are actually one. And he’s saying that God gave us the use of speech, the use of rational speech, in order to affirm, confirm, and express that oneness, to share the hidden things of our heart, he says, with our neighbour, to disclose our intentions, to uncover the truth inside of us, and not to hide it.
As he says next:
For indeed if we lived as naked souls we would converse directly, mind joined to mind. But since, being covered by the veil of the flesh, our souls produce thoughts, they need verbs and nouns to make public the things lying in the depth.
So much to say about that passage.
First thing to point out, St Basil states clearly that human beings are soul and body. He is able at least to conceptualise the naked soul, the soul without the body, which reveals that, in his mind at least, souls are separate from the body. The soul is a separate substance from the body and therefore the human being is a composite, soul and body.
And then he characterises the kind of bodies we now have, bodies of flesh, as a veil. My mind, covered by the flesh and so knowing via sense perception, does not have direct unmediated access to your mind. Your body, your flesh, is a veil, veiling your mind from my mind. In its own nature, my mind could know your mind directly, not only without having to speak, but even without having to think, in the sense of producing thoughts, producing mental speech.
With this in mind, we can perhaps understand those passages in the Gospels where Christ is portrayed as being able to read men’s thoughts. In the Gospel, Christ—being divine and possessing a body of divinised flesh—is not fallen, is not stuck in sense perception as we are. For his mind, for his body, the flesh was not a veil, not for him. He had unmediated access to other minds. And in fact, you will find throughout Christian history stories of holy men and women who also had that power, that power of clairvoyance. Through asceticism, prayer, and worship, their minds had detached from sense perception, been purified, infused by grace with divinity, which radiated downward even into their bodies, transforming their senses, enabling them to see beyond the veil of the flesh.
For all I know, all of this sounds completely mad to you. But I am just trying to express the Christian tradition, the patristic tradition. This is the world that they’re inhabiting. This is the anthropology, the vision of man, that they have.
But there’s something else. I think that when St Basil here is telling us about why God gave us the use of logos—that we would reveal the deliberation of our hearts to one another, that we would share the hidden things of our heart with our neighbour, that we would make public the things lying in the depth—I think that he’s alluding here to the Word of God, Christ, the one who reveals the hidden things of God, the one who makes public the things lying in the depth of the divine heart, the one who is himself that revelation; the God who assumes flesh, who makes himself visible, knowable, communicable; the God who in the Scriptures becomes text, becomes words, sentences, paragraphs, becomes readable, understandable, expressible.
There is no doubt a connection between our possession of the power of logos with which we love one another, revealing ourselves to each other, and God’s own Logos by which he loves us, reveals himself to us. And this is why the two greatest commandments—first, love God; and second, love your neighbour—are, in the words of Christ, alike. And it is the Logos, this divine power who is Jesus Christ according to Christian teaching, who unites all the dimensions of spiritual nature through his divinized flesh.
Perhaps too much theology there. We can move on.
Whenever, therefore [St Basil says], our thinking may apprehend a meaningful voice, carried by logos like a ferry crossing the air it passes from the speaker to the listener. If it finds deep calm and silence, like a ship entering a safe and quiet harbour, the logos settles into the ears of the learners. But if a harsh, storm-like noise from those listening blows against it, it is wrecked, dissolved in the air. So, create calm for the logos through silence, for something useful might appear, containing conveyable goods.
Create calm for the logos through silence. What a beautiful way of characterising the true life of the mind. I know, on the surface, he’s asking his listeners to shut up and pay attention so that what he has to say will enter their ears. But he’s saying more. Create calm for the Logos through silence. This is what the Christian does when he turns towards God, silencing his own mind that the Logos of God, God the Word, Jesus Christ, might settle himself into that silent calm. And he says, if you do that, ‘something useful might appear containing conveyable goods’, the goods of God, the spiritual goods of virtue and understanding, the grace that radiates from the divine being, eager to shine upon minds open to receiving it, open through silence.
That St Basil is talking about the Word of God, he makes immediately clear by invoking the Scriptures. He goes on:
The logos of Truth is elusive, easily escaping those who do not pay attention, for the Spirit has arranged it to be concise and short, so that much is expressed in few words, and its brevity makes it easy to remember. For it is the natural virtue of logos neither to obscure meanings with ambiguity, nor to be excessive and aimless, pointlessly flowing around the subject matter.
Ha! When I first read that, I immediately had an image of that sort of philosophical writing that you encounter from time to time, where you read it and honestly you don’t know what the hell it’s saying. St Basil here is saying that the Scriptures don’t work like that. In a single, short verse of scripture, God speaks directly to the heart, he’s saying, and he goes on:
Of such a kind [i.e. concise and short] is the passage just read to us from the books of Moses, which you who are diligent surely remember, unless perhaps because of its brevity it slipped past your hearing. The reading ran as follows: ‘Be attentive to yourself lest there be a secret word of sin in your heart.’
Now that passage is from the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 15, verse 9, and the rest of this sermon will be focused on interpreting it. ‘Be attentive to yourself lest there be a secret word of sin in your heart.’
We humans [he goes on] are readily inclined towards sin in the mind.
Sin in the mind. In the last two episodes we talked so much about fasting, about the mind being stuck in sense perception, the ‘carnal mind’, about fleshly pleasure and pain. Αnd I emphasised the importance of detaching the mind from absorption in sense perception that you might have got the misimpression that the flesh was sinful and the mind was somehow pure. That is not the case. The problem is the mind.
We detach the mind from absorption in sense perception so that the mind can see itself and from that point we can begin to purify ourselves from sin. Βecause sin is primarily in the mind, in the workshop of the heart. Purifying the mind, turning the mind to God, uniting the pure mind to God in prayer, this is what the Christian is after. Αnd though he cannot even begin to do this unless he, through asceticism, detaches from absorption in sense perception, the detachment is the first step only. From that point on, that ascetical movement towards detachment is like turning the key on a motor, turning on the mind’s self-perception, and from that point on, maintaining vigilant attention is the point. That’s what this sermon is about.
He goes on:
Therefore, the one who formed our hearts one by one, knowing that most sin is carried out in the impulse according to intention, has commanded us first to maintain purity in the governing part of the soul.
Notice there that he says ‘the one who formed our hearts one by one’. He means God there and he’s alluding to a verse in the Psalms: ‘He that fashioned their hearts one by one, who understands all their works.’ One of the ways in which Christianity was rather unique in the ancient world was its insistence that the God of all, God Almighty, the Father in heaven, had intimate direct knowledge of every person. He isn’t distant, he’s very close to us, directly fashioning our hearts. And he knows, St Basil says, that sin happens when in an impulse of our will we carry out an intention of our mind. It begins in our mind with intention, and therefore first of all above everything else we must he says maintain purity in ‘the governing part of the soul’. The governing part of the soul is the mind.
And then he goes on:
For wherein we are most easily prone to sin, there has he expected greater vigilance and diligence.
St Basil would have learned all of this from the Desert Fathers he met in Egypt and Syria and Palestine. 99.9% of the ascetic life, of the contemplative life—of a hermit, of a monk, even ideally of any Christian—is diligent, vigilant, guarding of the mind; maintaining the mind’s purity; through prayer directed to God in a mind quiet and calm, focusing the eye of the heart on the inner landscape of the soul, keeping at bay all sinful thoughts. This is the work: with great effort, remaining vigilant, attending diligently to one’s heart, to one’s mind, keeping it pure.
Our minds are very weak, as he goes on to say:
Just as the most prudent doctors take precautions against the weakest part of the body well in advance, so the common guardian and true healer of souls, seeing where we are most likely to slip into sin, has fortified it with stronger safeguards.
God knows that our minds are weak. It is through our minds that we are deluded, tricked into sinning. We fail to judge rightly good from evil. We pursue evil, thinking it’s good, our minds being deluded, and we sin. Our minds are weak, and so God has, St Basil says, fortified the mind with this commandment, this verse: ‘Be attentive to yourself’. Inner attentiveness, vigilance, guarding of the heart is a safeguard against delusion, and will protect the mind from sin.
He goes on:
Physical actions require time, opportunity, effort, helpers and other resources. But the movements of the mind are carried out timelessly, accomplished effortlessly, performed without weariness, and they are always at the ready.
I mean, how true is this? If you have any experience of paying attention to your mind, you will know how quickly it moves, how it can cross time and space in a moment, how in the very same second it can be lofty and utterly base, how it seems to work on its own accord, powered or energised by some source we don’t know, just moving, thinking, imagining, wondering, without us even having to do anything. It’s just happening.
So yes, it’s almost like the mind, when out of control, has a mind of its own. After this short break, St Basil will describe for us the inner condition of a man who, despite his outward appearance, is not in control of his mind at all.
Welcome back. Having explained just how labile, lively, and potentially unruly the human mind is, St Basil will now paint a picture for us of the sort of person whose calm outer appearance belies a vicious, chaotic interior.
How often does someone, the type of serious person who knits his brows for the sake of dignity, clothed outwardly in the pretence of self-control when seated among those who often bless him for his virtue, how often is such a person, in his mind, through the unseen movement of his heart, in fact slipping away to the place of sin. He imagines the things he desires, entertains improper thoughts, and in the hidden workshop of his heart paints a vivid picture of pleasure for himself. Thus he commits inner sin, without any witness, unknown to all—that is, until the One arrives who reveals the hidden things of darkness and brings to light the intentions of the heart.
The scenario that St Basil painted there is extremely familiar to every person, I’m sure. We all know how on the outside we can seem absolutely put together and on the inside our mental pig snouts can be rummaging in the mud. So the phenomenon of inner sin—sin of the mind, in the imagination, sin that no one can see—is clear.
At least, as St Basil says, we think no one can see it. But one can see it, the One that matters. And yes, St Basil here is invoking the end of the world when, according to the Christian tradition, Christ returns in glory and our hearts are laid bare. But perhaps more proximately he’s expressing another teaching which is that this happens at our deaths.
It’s very out of step with the way most people think today about death, but Christianity is clear: death is not the end of the person. Death is the separation of the body from the soul, the body decomposing and returning to dust, but the soul now naked, exposed, exposed to judgement, unable to hide its dark deeds from anyone. It’s a rather terrifying prospect, one which all the saints affirm will happen. And therefore, with that in mind, we really should sort ourselves out, as St Basil goes on to say:
So guard yourself, lest at any time a hidden thought in your heart becomes a sin. For ‘whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’
That’s from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a hard teaching, but Christ said that sinning in your heart, sinning in your imagination, entertaining the thought of sin, was the equivalent of enacting the sin.
As I say, it’s a hard teaching, and the road to that degree of sinlessness is a hard road, but it’s the road that Christ walked, it’s the road that he commanded us to walk, it is the Way of the Cross.
And it’s especially hard because we seem to have no control over our minds. We seem to be totally at the mercy of our minds, as St Basil goes on to say:
So, though the actions of the body are often easily interrupted, the one who sins in his intention swiftly completes his sin in his thoughts. Therefore where the offence is sharp, swift is the guard given to us. It warns us, never let a secret thought in your heart become a sinful act. Rather, be attentive to yourself, it says.
Every animal has been given by God, who created everything, the means to protect its own nature. If you observe carefully, you will find that most animals have an instinctive aversion to harm and are naturally drawn toward what benefits them. Therefore God, who educates us, has given us this great commandment, so that what is instinctive for animals might come to us through reason, and what animals achieve without thinking might be accomplished by us through vigilance and constant control of our thoughts.
God educates us. God is an educator, a teacher. This should give us hope. Teachers root for their students. Teachers know that their students start out ignorant. Teachers don’t blame students for their ignorance. They know they’re ignorant. Their whole vocation is to transform that ignorance into understanding, into knowledge, into wisdom. God relates to us in that way. He educates us. What is more, He educates us like a loving father, a father teaching his children.
It’s important to bear that in mind because, I can tell you, the activity that St Basil here is advocating—the activity of being constantly vigilant, constantly attending to yourself—can be very dispiriting. When you take a cold, hard, endless look at the filth inside your heart, at the chaos of your mind—at the envy, the resentment, the anger, the lust, the avarice, the greed, the vanity, the deceit, the fear and paranoia, the whole panoply of vices and disorders of
of the mind, most of which today are known by other terms, clinical terms from the world of psychology, but those terms are just expressing what the Church Fathers knew as the vices—when you take that hard look at what’s inside, it would be easy to despair. So we must bear in mind, God knows the situation that we’re in. He does not judge us for the situation that we’re in. He is trying to teach us, he’s trying to help us, he’s educating us.
As he says:
Let us be careful guardians of the opportunities given to us by God, avoiding sin as animals avoid poisons in their food, and pursuing righteousness as they seek out nourishing plants. Be attentive to yourself so that you can discern between what is harmful and what is beneficial.
Remember the drama of the Garden of Eden. Human beings got knowing good from evil wrong, and disaster followed. Well, St Basil is saying the first stage of recovering from that disaster, illuminated by God, is getting that knowledge right, getting the knowledge of good and evil right in the mind.
As he says:
Now, being attentive is of two kinds. One kind focusing on visible things with the physical eyes and the other kind contemplating invisible things using the noetic power of the soul.
How many times have I drawn this distinction between visible things and invisible things? Well, here it is again. Perhaps you’re getting the message. It’s key.
And here, St Basil states that the contemplation of invisible things is carried out by what he calls here, and what the Fathers know as, ‘the noetic power of the soul’.
Noetic is the adjective of the noun nous, spelled in English n-o-u-s, nous. Put simply, nous means ‘mind’. Sometimes it’s translated as ‘intellect’. I think both of those translations have their problems. ‘Intellect’ can suggest thinking in the sense of discursive thinking, like a philosopher puzzling out a logical conundrum. Intellectuals in our society are people who think, who have ideas, who write those ideas down or express them in speech. So ‘intellect’ can be a problem. The noetic power of the soul that St Basil invokes here is not that activity.
So, ‘mind’ is better. I have mainly used ‘mind’ for that word up to now, although ‘mind’ is also very broad in English. The imagination, discursive thought, reverie, daydreaming, memory, all of these things fall within the compass of ‘mind’ in English, whereas the nous and its noetic power are different and quite specific.
And St Basil will now draw that out. So he said that there are two kinds of attention, one focusing on visible things, the other on invisible, and he goes on:
But if we say that the commandment…
He means, ‘Be attentive to yourself’.
…that the commandment applies to the eyes, we immediately prove it impossible. How can anyone watch over their whole body with their eyes? The eye itself cannot see itself, nor reach the top of the head, nor know the back, or the face, nor the disposition of the internal organs. Therefore, because it is wrong to say that the commandments of the Spirit are impossible, we must apply the commandment to the operations of the nous.
He means there not the visible eye but the eye of the mind, the nous. But before I go on, I want to point out the other thing he’s just said, that ‘it is wrong to say that the commandments of the Spirit are impossible’. It’s a very provocative statement. Especially if, like me, you come from a Protestant background. A lot of Protestant theology is based on the proposition that the commandments of God are designed to be impossible, that we could never carry them out, and that that’s why Christ came and died, so that instead of worrying about all these commandments, which anyway are impossible and are only there to reveal to us how sinful we are, we have faith in Christ and his resurrection and that’s enough, we don’t need to worry about practising the commandments.
That’s a very simplified form of Protestant theology. I don’t mean to tar all Protestantism with that brush. But certainly, popular Protestantism today emphasises that kind of story and it is totally not in harmony with the Church Fathers. Not at all. As St Basil says here, it is wrong to say that the commandments of the Spirit are impossible. They are possible. We can follow them, and we must.
In this case, we can and must follow the commandment, ‘Be attentive to yourself.’ And so, saying that the commandment must apply to the operations of the nous, the noetic power of the mind, St Basil goes on:
Be attentive to yourself, that is, examine yourself from every direction. Keep the eye of your soul always vigilant for your own protection. You are walking among traps. Hidden snares have been set by the enemy in many places. Watch everything carefully, so that, like a deer, you may be saved from traps, and like a bird, from snares. For because their vision is so keen, deer cannot be caught with traps, and birds, light of wing, easily rise above hunters’ snares when they are alert. See to it, then, that you are not worse than animals in protecting yourself, lest you fall into traps and become the Devil’s prey, captured by him to do his will.
A couple of charming animal analogies again. St Basil seems to like his animal analogies. But he’s also invoked for the first time in this sermon the spectre of the Devil. We’ve been talking about the mind, how the mind seems to operate on its own accord, how swift moving it is, how weak it is. And here we are reminded that that mental weakness is subject to demonic assault.
Demons are, like us, minds. Unlike us, they have subtle bodies, subtle invisible bodies that can penetrate our bodies of flesh and directly drop thoughts into our minds, or cast them into our minds like darts. Throwing thoughts. This is the patristic teaching, that in addition to human beings, there are other minds out there, including the demons. And with demons in mind, we must be attentive to ourselves, hyper-vigilant of the movements of our soul, the movements within our heart, the attempts of the demons to sow seeds of vice inside us.
And St Basil now goes on to draw some more very important distinctions. He says:
‘Be attentive to yourself’ means pay attention not to what is yours, nor to what is around you, but to yourself alone. For we are different from what belongs to us and what is around us. What we are is the soul and the nous made in the image of the One who created us. Our body and its senses are what belongs to us. And what is around us, things like wealth, skills, and other aspects of life.
So there you have it clear as crystal, if you were ever in doubt. Just like St Leo, here again St Basil is making it clear: what you are is a mind. A mind is what you are. You, a mind, possess a body; and, through that body, you, a mind, interact with the world around you. I’m stressing this again because generally today we do not believe this. We have been taught instead to think of ourselves as bodies who possess minds, the opposite of what the Fathers taught.
I think the Fathers are right. I think that your life will make more sense to you if you stop believing that fiction—that you are first a body—and instead embrace the truth that you are a mind.
A lot of Christians today—and if you’re listening to this you probably are a Christian, not necessarily, but you probably are—a lot of Christians today have also been taught theologically that we are bodies. There are many reasons for this. A tendency towards biblical literalism is one reason. In the Book of Genesis, the creation of Adam is portrayed in such a way where it seems like God first creates a body and then blows life into that body. So a strictly literal interpretation of the text could lead you to affirm the modern scientifically inflected belief that we are bodies, and a lot of Christians want to harmonise their faith with modern scientific categories, fine. But then also, by extension, a lot of Christians interpret the incarnation of Christ as somehow a sign that we are bodies; and what is more, the bodies that we are, these bodies of flesh, are noble in themselves. Because if they weren’t noble, why would God or how could God have incarnated himself as one of them?
This is the opposite of what the Church Fathers say. On the one hand, the Church Fathers affirm what St Basil has said here: what you are is a soul with a noetic power, a mind, and that soul possesses a body. And what is more, that body of flesh—a veil, as St Basil earlier called it—far from being noble, has been given to us precisely so that we would crucify it. And Christ’s incarnation into the flesh is a sign, not of the flesh’s nobility, but of God’s humility, his mercy and goodness!, that he, the great and almighty Son of God, would deign to be incarnate in a body of weak flesh—in the words of St Paul even, ‘becoming sin’ for us.
Christ came in the flesh to save us, minds, from the mortal consequences of our absorption in fleshly sense perception and everything that follows, as I’ve said many times before.
St Basil goes on:
What then is the logos saying? Do not pay attention to the flesh, or pursue its well-being at all costs: health, beauty, pleasures, and long life. Do not admire wealth, fame, or power. Do not consider as great the things that serve your temporary life, neglecting the care of your true self. Rather, take care of your true self, that is, your soul. Adorn it and care for it through vigilance, removing any stain of wickedness, cleansing all shame from evil, adorning it and brightening it with every virtue.
There you see again the same dichotomy between the rational soul—the mind, the soul with its noetic power—and the fleshly body. And there you also see the distinction that St Leo drew in the last episode, the distinction, not between pleasure and pain as if they were opposites, but between pleasure and virtue. St Basil is saying, don’t pay attention to the flesh by pursuing pleasure, rather pay attention to the soul, take care of your soul, by pursuing virtue through vigilance of mind, staring into yourself, seeing the wickedness there, removing it; seeing the shame there, cleaning it, brightening and beautifying the soul.
He goes on:
Examine yourself, what you are. Understand your nature, that your body is mortal but your soul is immortal. And so our life, in a sense, is dual; the life that is familiar to the flesh, passing swiftly, and the life that is kindred to the soul, admitting no limitation.
That’s very interesting. I mean, not only is he stating that the soul is immortal, but he’s making it clear that the soul is immortal because the soul, possessing a rational mind, possessing a nous, admits of no limitation at all. It is potentially and certainly ideally an infinite substance able to know infinite realities, able to know those realities and unite with those realities. All of this follows from the fact that the soul has been made in the image of God, who is infinite, who is eternal, who is perfect.
So, St Basil says:
Be attentive to yourself, neither clinging to mortal things as if they were eternal, nor despising eternal things as if they were transient. Rise above the flesh, for it passes away. Take care of the soul, for it is immortal.
Your soul is immortal. You have an immortal soul. I know, this is not what people believe today. They think, my body dies, that’s it, I blink out of existence. But that is not so. In fact, the opposite. Your soul, at death separated from the veil of the flesh, will experience an infusion of greater life, of greater vision, of greater seeing. And God help you if what you see is horrifying.
As it very well could be if you don’t, as St Basil goes on:
Observe yourself with all precision so that you may know how to allocate to each of these two dimensions of life what is appropriate: to the body, food and clothing; to the soul, doctrines of piety, graceful conduct, practice of virtue, correction of passions.
The Bible says the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. And God is the great seer, the One who sees, the One who reveals the truth. God is Truth. He is the light shining in the darkness. And so yes indeed, we should fear the brutal revelation of our spiritual state, of our state being exposed to everyone to see. We should wake up now while we can. Turn our mind away from an indulgent life of absorption in sense perception and fleshly desire, towards the life of virtue. Turn towards God and learn the doctrines of piety, the graceful conduct, the practice of virtue that will help us to correct our passions before we die and before we face that fearful self-revelation.
But I don’t need to tell you that. That’s why you’re listening to Life Sentences.
St Basil goes on:
Do not overly pamper the body nor be zealous about the multitude of bodily concerns. For since ‘the flesh desires against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, and these are opposed to each other’, see that you do not, by giving in to the flesh, grant a disproportionate amount of power to the inferior.
Ho, there you go! That is a key Bible verse that St Basil has just alluded to, a verse which will come up in a lot of the texts that we’ll be studying. The verse, ‘For since the flesh desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh and these are opposed to each other.’ That verse from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians grounds a lot of the wisdom, the ascetic teaching of the Desert Fathers especially.
In it you can see expressed what I was saying a while ago about the fleshly body not being noble–in its own nature, not being noble. The flesh desires against the spirit, it says here, and the spirit against the flesh. And for that reason, St Basil has said, don’t give in to the flesh. Do not give the body more attention, more power than it deserves.
Because, St Basil goes on:
For just as in the scales of a balance, if you weigh down one side, you necessarily make the other side lighter, likewise in the case of the body and soul, excess of the one necessarily results in privation of the other. For when the body is indulged and burdened with much flesh, the mind must inevitably be sluggish and weak in its proper functions. But when the soul is vigorous and, through studying the virtues, uplifted to its proper greatness, it follows that the body’s condition will weaken.
A lot of people know this in an everyday sense. Fasting for mental acuity is popular. In general, people know that if they overeat or if they don’t exercise or if in any way they’re living an unhealthy life, they often know that their mind doesn’t work as well as it otherwise would. Students, especially high-performing students, often are very zealous about maintaining a healthy lifestyle to keep their minds sharp.
Fine. That’s not really what St Basil’s talking about here. St Basil has no interest in anyone trying to become a lawyer or a physicist at Harvard. He doesn’t care about that kind of mental work. That’s not what he means by the soul being uplifted to its proper greatness. As he states here, a vigorous soul studies virtues and through virtues are uplifted to proper greatness. That’s why he says that when the soul is uplifted to its proper greatness through virtue, the body will weaken. He’s not invoking an image of a kind of, you know, influencer on YouTube who goes to the gym and teaches you the right nutrient shakes to drink or whatever, you know, to get your macros right so that you can, you know, achieve your lift gains, all that crap. He’s not talking about that. He’s talking about a reality in which, pursuing virtue, the soul is uplifted while the body weakens. A virtuous soul will be virtuous to the same degree that the flesh is weak.
Very provocative for us, such a teaching, but actually, in the 4th century, very provocative then as well. The Hellenic ideal, the ideal of ancient Athens and Rome, was quite close to our own ideal. Healthy body, healthy mind. If you’ve seen Greek sculptures, if you know anything about the life of the Greek gymnasium where, in the nude, men would wrestle and work out and perfect their bodies, perfecting their beauty and their strength and their health, while debating and fine-tuning their use of reason and their powers of rhetoric, that was the Hellenic ideal. Into that ideal Christianity came like a grenade, saying, no, the way you use your mind is vain sophistry leading you nowhere, and the way you use your body is equally vain and certainly not able to rescue you from your inevitable fate of death and decay.
Instead, the Christians said, pursue true virtue, the Way of the Cross, crucifying your flesh, weakening your body, so that your mind united with God, your whole being will be transfigured, and after death your flesh itself will be transformed into spirit. That’s what the Christians said, and that’s what the Church still teaches.
And, St Basil goes on:
This instruction [i.e. be attentive to yourself] is equally useful for both the sick and the healthy. With respect to illnesses, doctors instruct the ill to be attentive to themselves and not to neglect any of the means available for healing. Similarly, the healer of our souls, the Logos, through this modest remedy, heals the soul afflicted by sin. Therefore, be attentive to yourself so that the therapy you receive may be in proportion to the fault.
So it should be clear that when he says that the commandment ‘Be attentive to yourself’ is useful equally for the sick and the healthy, he means spiritually sick, spiritually healthy. Because he’s talking about the doctor of our souls, the Word of God; the Word of God who is himself present in the scriptural injunction, ‘Be attentive to yourself’; who is present in the action that the scriptural injunction is commanding, the attentiveness itself. If you’re attentive to yourself in obedience to the Scripture, you are communing with the Word of God. He is present in you, in the attentiveness itself, healing your soul.
Therefore, St Basil says, again, ‘Be attentive to yourself, so that the therapy you receive may be in proportion to the fault…’
Is the sin great and grievous? Much confession, bitter tears, intense vigil, and constant fasting are required. Or is the transgression light and bearable? Let the repentance be equivalently so. Only be attentive to yourself, so that you may recognize the degree to which your soul is in good health or sickness. For profound inattention causes many people to suffer serious and incurable illnesses—without even knowing that they are ill.
That last bit, how can you know the state that your soul’s in unless you look inside and pay attention to yourself? How can you know? Maybe your external life is great. Maybe you have a great career, a happy family, a lovely house. But for all you know, inside, you’re a wreck, you’re rotten, you’re full of rage and envy. How do you know? You haven’t looked at yourself? Profound inattention, St Basil says, causes many people to suffer serious and incurable illnesses. Incurable because the cure, the inner attention itself, is lacking.
But there’s more here. Notice, he says that perhaps you’re not burdened by tremendous transgression. Perhaps through attentiveness and purification your degree of sin is ‘light and bearable’, as he says. And so your degree of repentance should be light and bearable.
What he’s suggesting there is there might be a kind of inattention that in fact exaggerates the degree to which one is broken inside. In fact, he must be saying this. I think we all know that it is possible to be in the grip of an inordinate degree of self-hatred and self-disgust; or a sort of false humility, a performative penitence that feigns sinfulness in order to attract the attention of others. That kind of inattention is as bad as the other kind, the self-satisfied kind, the purely pleasure-seeking or status-seeking kind.
St Basil is saying here, be attentive. Be honest with yourself, brutally honest. And love God, worship God, pursue virtue accordingly—using your freedom and drawing on what wisdom has been granted to you.
And having covered the spiritually ill, St Basil continues:
But great also is the benefit from the commandment for those who are strong in their actions, so that it both heals the sick and perfects those who are healthy. For each one of us who are disciples of the Logos is a servant of a certain work assigned to us by the Gospel. For in this great house, the Church, there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, and likewise various skills. For the house of God, which is the Church of the Living God, has hunters, travellers, architects, builders, farmers, shepherds, athletes, and soldiers. This brief saying applies to all of these, imparting to each one both precision in work and zeal in purpose.
Now in the sermon, and we’ve now reached the breaking point, really, of this episode, he then goes on, in greater detail, to go one by one down that list of different skills, as he calls them— hunters, travellers, farmers, soldiers—spiritually interpreting what those skills are. So, a hunter is a missionary, hunting souls. A farmer is a spiritual guide, pruning the rotten branches, digging round the roots, mixing in good fertiliser and soil to help it grow, etc. Athletes are great ascetics. Soldiers are combating demons. He has a whole list of these spiritual skills, saying that each can only be carried out properly if one is attentive to himself, so that he pursues these virtues with precision and zeal, he says.
And funnily enough, after that long interpretation of those virtues, he finishes by saying:
I lack the time to describe in full the pursuits of those who work together in the Gospel of Christ and the power of this commandment, how it is well suited to all.
And so we will pause here and in the next episode we will finish St Basil’s third sermon, Be Attentive to Yourself.
So far he has helped us to contemplate the meaning of logos; the use of reason and speech; the fact that sin is primarily a question of the mind and that therefore our focus must be to maintain purity in the mind through attention; that we must guard our heart, ensuring that nothing evil, vicious or sinful captures our attention away from the good; and, using the noetic power of the soul, contemplate invisible things—invisible things like the virtues, which we should pursue with diligence.
And having established all this, in the second half of his sermon St Basil will go on to reveal that because we are made in the image of God, if we pay attention to ourselves, if we know ourselves properly, we will thereby know God.
That’s it for this episode of Life Sentences. As always, I hope you enjoyed it.
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Episode 3: Be attentive to yourself