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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, St Basil the Great continues urging us to be attentive to ourselves, and explains how, because he is made in the divine image, by knowing himself, man can know God.
We started St Basil the Great’s Third Sermon, Be Attentive to Yourself, in the last episode, and we will finish it in this episode. But, before we resume the reading, I think we should get to know St Basil better.
As I said last time, St Basil the Great was born in the year 330 A.D. He was born in the Roman province of Pontus on the Black Sea coast in what is now northeastern Turkey. His family was both noble and spiritually distinguished. They were upper-class government officials with large estates. They were members of the Roman one percent—or, literally, according to modern scholarly estimates, the Roman 1.2 to 1.7 percent. St Basil’s family was of the decurion class, meaning they sat on the city senate. (This is how the Roman elite managed to govern their vast empire: indirectly, by recreating at the local level the institutions by which they governed the city of Rome, primarily a senate.) And as I say, St Basil’s family was spiritually distinguished. For at least two, possibly three generations before Basil, his family had suffered at the hands of the state during different rounds of official persecution of the church.
So, they were immensely wealthy, and also Christian. This was not unusual. We think of early Christianity as a religion of the poor, and so it was, but from the very beginning it also attracted well-to-do adherents. St Basil’s family practiced their faith by setting aside a portion of their wealth for the Church, in this way Christianising an ancient political tradition wherein the rich would demonstrate their honour by lavishing amenities and entertainments upon the public. Only now, wealthy Christians were lavishing their wealth upon their fellow Christians, creating in a way a city within a city, a holy city, a City of God, the Church.
St Basil wasn’t the only saint produced by his family. His grandmother, Macrina the Elder; his father, also called Basil, and his mother, Emmelia; his older sister, also called Macrina; and his younger brothers, Peter, Naucratius and (most notably) Gregory of Nyssa, they are all canonised saints, which goes to show both the family’s piety—and also their status.
When St Basil was twenty years old, to begin his formal higher education in rhetoric, he moved to Caesarea, the capital of the province of Cappadocia, where he would eventually become bishop. In Caesarea, he met someone who would become his greatest friend and who would also become a revered church father, Gregory of Nazianzus, known as ‘theTheologian’. Together, the two friends went to Athens for a further three years of higher study. Intriguingly, one of their fellow classmates was a member of the imperial family, Julian, remembered by history as ‘Julian the Apostate’.
But then tragedy struck. His brother, Naucratias, who’d been living an ascetic life as a forest hermit on the family estate back in Pontus, died in a hunting accident, and Basil returned home. According to his younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa, when Basil came home from university he was immensely conceited and regarded himself as superior to absolutely everyone—a painfully familiar quality in most well-educated young men. But his older sister, St Macrina, who dedicated herself to a fully Christian life of virginity and charity, called him up on his pride and won him over to the Gospel, specifically to what she called ‘the life of philosophy’—Christian style.
He’d already spent five years in Athens, so he’d have been familiar with the pagan philosophical schools. But now, having been won over to Christian philosophy by his older sister, Basil embarked on a tour of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, even Mesopotamia, where he could study the Christian philosophical life at its most intense.
About a hundred years before, beginning in Egypt but soon spreading to Palestine and Syria, Christian monasticism stepped onto the stage of history. It had already existed in some form. Sworn virginity, ceaseless prayer, and withdrawal from the world into intentional communities had existed from the very beginning of the church, and indeed stretched back even further into the foggy mists of Second Temple Judaism, and even before that into the period narrated by the Old Testament as well, which portrays communities of ‘prophets’, as they’re called, living together, praying together—praying praying in a way that can only be described as ecstatic, oracular, visionary—and also practicing asceticism, a tradition associated in the Old Testament with the figure of Elijah the prophet, whose spirit, according to the New Testament, rested upon St John the Baptist, a celibate, a solitary, and a great ascetic who lived in the wilderness.
St John the Baptist is associated with a Jewish ascetic and millenarian movement known as the Essenes, who produced the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. And out of that movement, a group of Jewish mystic monks emerged in Egypt in the decades before Christ, known as the Therapeutae, those who ‘attend to’ or ‘serve’ God. These desert dwellers each lived in his own separate cell, where all alone he would recite the Psalms as a preliminary to intense contemplative prayer, gathering with his fellow ascetics once a week on the Sabbath for communal worship.
So clearly, Christian monasticism, as it emerged in the third century A.D., drew on these precedents. The foundation of Christian monasticism is associated with a man whose own writings we will certainly cover on life sentences, St Antony the Great, an Egyptian Christian whose life of intense asceticism and, frankly, godlike powers of virtue and vision would make him famed throughout the Christian world, even within his own lifetime.
As it happens, St Anthony’s death, aged 105, coincided almost exactly with Basil’s journey to Egypt. So, though history associates St Basil with the beginnings of monasticism, for reasons that we will see, St Basil would have considered himself a latecomer who’d just missed the first and most creative flowering of the monastic movement that he’d go on to develop further.
And develop it he sure did, first back in Pontus, where he lived a rather gentlemanly sort of ascetic life on the family estate, and later in the large city of Caesarea, where he was ordained a priest and then became bishop, and where he organised larger and more regimented monastic communities. Following a horrible famine which struck the whole region, St Basil built a large charitable complex manned by monks to provide poor relief, including medical care, perhaps the earliest example of urban charity-oriented monasticism that still thrives today across the Christian world.
Basil was a bishop for only nine years before he died in the year 379, aged only 49, his body weakened from his ascetic labours. But they were an eventful nine years, full of ecclesial politics and intrigue, and, in the great theological controversy of the era, Basil became a key advocate of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s divinity, which became Orthodox dogma.
Now, we needn’t spend any more time on St Basil’s biography. His Third Sermon, which we began last time and will now finish, was preached when he was a priest in Caesarea, but before he became bishop. In the first half of the sermon, if you remember, St Basil emphasised that sin is primarily in the mind, and therefore stressed the importance of keeping the mind pure by remaining intensely attentive to ourselves, focusing on guarding our heart against all provocations to evil, keeping our mind clear, able to see invisible, spiritual realities noetically, which is to say intuitively, directly, with the nous—spiritual realities such as the virtues which we must pursue with all fervour and diligence.
So here we go, the second part of St Basil’s Sermon 3, Be Attentive to Yourself.
Be attentive to yourself. Be sober, deliberative, a guardian of the present and mindful of the future. Do not through laziness lose what you already have, and do not imagine the pleasure of things that are neither present nor are likely to be, as if they were already in your hands.
Okay, so right off the bat, St Basil is returning to his theme, be attentive to yourself, and he lays out a few dimensions of that inner attention.
He says to ‘be sober’. The word he uses there for sober, niphalios, is an adjectival form of an extremely important Christian contemplative term, nepsis, a Greek word that means sobriety or watchfulness. The fathers put sobriety at the centre of their spirituality. And just to be clear, by sobriety I don’t primarily mean abstaining from alcohol. I mean innersobriety, clarity of mind, vigilance, watchfulness, really everything that St Basil has been saying in this sermon, that inner attentiveness through which we guard our hearts.
St Paul in the First Epistle to the Thessalonians also urges sobriety on Christians. He writes, ‘You are children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep as others do but let us keep awake and be sober.’ And of course, Christ himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he saw that his disciples had fallen asleep after he asked them to pray with him, cried out, ‘Were you not able then to watch with me for a single hour? Watch and pray so that you may not enter into temptation.’
So the text from Deuteronomy that St Basil has been commenting on in this sermon, the text ‘Be attentive to yourself’, Christ himself echoes that Old Testament text in his own preaching: to stay awake, to watch and pray so that you don’t enter into temptation, so you keep your heart pure, maintaining that purity of heart which Christ says is blessed, granting you the vision of God, as we’ll see.
So yes, St Basil says be sober. He also says ‘be deliberative’. That’s also a nuanced word, vouleftikos. Uh, it means to be thoughtful, reflective, discerning—really, the opposite of instinctive or impulsive. As we’ll see later, St Basil says that the Christian should not be instinctive, should not be impulsive. Using his mind, he should subject everything to careful, attentive deliberation, so that his mind is never overwhelmed by passion, never subjected to compulsion from outside itself.
So he says, ‘be sober, be deliberative’, and then he says to be ‘a guardian of the present and mindful of the future’. And he explains that we mustn’t, through laziness, lose what we already have, by which I think he means lose what virtue we’ve already been granted by God. It reminds me of that parable of Christ when he talks about the demon that’s been expelled from a house deciding to come back and, finding the house vacant, Christ says, sets off and brings seven other even worse spirits with him. I think St Basil is referring to this, saying that, you know, vacancy, laziness, not remaining attentive to yourself, will cause you to lose whatever virtue you have already acquired.
Which is why he says, ‘be mindful of the future’, meaning, I think, both that you never know what’s going to happen, you never know which temptations down the line will come, but also you know that judgment awaits, you will be held accountable, so stay attentive.
And then, having said that we shouldn’t relish in our imaginations the pleasures of things that we don’t actually possess...You can imagine yourself fantasising about, oh I don’t know, a delicious pizza or something, or even, you know, even more extravagantly, fantasising about being very wealthy. He’s saying, don’t do that, and he has this long and I think very evocative, psychologically relatable passage. He writes:
This sickness is natural to the young is it not? That with frivolity of mind, they believe they already possess the things they hope for. For whenever they’re not doing anything, or in the quiet of the night, they invent baseless fantasies for themselves, carried away by their agility of thought to whatever they please, imagining a life of distinction, a brilliant marriage, many children, a deep old age, and honours from everyone.
Then, having nowhere to anchor these hopes, they become puffed up with pride concerning the greatest things in human affairs. They acquire beautiful and large houses. Having filled them with all kinds of treasures, they surround themselves with as much land as their vain thoughts can carve out from the entire creation. Like before, they lock all this wealth up in the treasuries of vanity, and to it they add livestock, a multitude of servants beyond count, political power, leadership of nations, military commands, wars, trophies, even kingship itself.
After adding all these things to the other empty fictions of their minds, due to their excessive folly, they imagine they are already enjoying what they hoped for, as if it were already present and within their grasp.
I think that passage, possibly with the exception of the livestock, is very relatable. I think we all know what it feels like to relish the pleasure of fantasising a rich, luxurious, illustrious life for ourselves. And this passion of soul, this fantasising about pleasure, really relishing the fantasy of pleasure in the mind, is a kind of gluttony, gluttony of the mind. And in a way, it’s a more insidious form of gluttony than the common form of gluttony, which involves overeating. People, if they’re not careful, can fall into really believing these fantasies and losing their sense of reality. And at its worst extremity, a kind of narcissism can really take over the soul. All of which would prevent that attentiveness to reality, attentiveness to what’s really happening inside, honest inner attentiveness. A retreat into fantasy of that kind really prevents that.
He goes on:
A particular sickness, this, of a sluggish and lazy soul, to see dreams while the body is awake. Therefore, to suppress this mental foolishness, this fever of thoughts, and to restrain the thinking mind’s instability as if with a kind of bridle, the Logos delivers this great and wise command: ‘Pay attention to yourself,’ he says, not by imagining things that do not exist, but by dealing with what is present in a way that is beneficial.
Dealing with what is present. Remaining present. Remaining in the moment through attentiveness. A lot of us will be familiar with techniques of meditation, today often called ‘mindfulness techniques’, which advocate this kind of present-cantered contemplation. And this is one way in which what the Fathers taught overlaps with modern ideas. By no means is mindfulness, as it is popularly practised today, the equivalent of patristic or Christian prayer and contemplation. Not at all. But they do share this one thing in common: this commitment to remaining grounded in the present through strict and careful attentiveness.
And so, having addressed the passion of mental gluttony, St Basil goes on to describe another passion that attentiveness is very useful against. He says:
I think the lawgiver has also given us this exhortation in order to eliminate another habitual passion, namely meddling in the affairs of others, which we’d much rather do than examine our own affairs. To keep us from falling into this passion, he says, ‘Stop busying yourself with other people’s evils. Do not give your thoughts the free time to scrutinise someone else’s sickness. Rather, be attentive to yourself.’
That is, turn the eye of your soul towards your own self-examination. For according to the Word of the Lord, many notice the speck in their brother’s eye, but do not perceive the beam in their own eye.
Another teaching that’s so common and familiar, it’s almost cliched, you know, don’t judge other people. But if you think about it, the degree of conscious inner attentiveness it would take truly never to judge other people—never to occupy your mind with other people’s business, especially other people’s sins or mistakes or foibles, the things about other people that you find annoying—never to do that would require an extreme degree of attentiveness.
So, though Christ’s teaching, ‘Judge not lest you be judged,’ is a cliché, it’s so well-known, we often fail to understand it properly as a real spiritual activity, a spiritual discipline demanding attentiveness, not giving our thoughts, as St Basil says, ‘free time to scrutinise someone else’s sickness’, but rather to ‘turn the eye of our soul’, he says, toward our own self-examination.
And he goes on:
Do not cease, therefore, thoroughly examining yourself to see whether your own life is progressing according to the commandment. But do not look at external things to see whether you might discover some fault in someone else, like that severe and arrogant Pharisee who stood justifying himself and belittling the tax collector.
Rather, do not stop scrutinising yourself, whether from passion you have sinned in your thoughts, whether your tongue has slipped by rushing ahead of your thinking, or whether in the works of your hands you have done anything without deliberate choice. And if you find many sins in your life (and you certainly will, being human), say the words of the tax collector, ‘O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’
If you don’t know the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector from the Gospels, do go look it up. You can find it in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18. It’s a really important parable. I think it’s quite clear. Don’t be severe and arrogant, St Basil says, like the Pharisee, justifying yourself and belittling other people. Instead, pay attention to yourself.
But I want to zero in on this sequence of sinning, really, that he lays out for us. He says to scrutinise yourself and see whether from passion you have sinned in your thoughts, whether your tongue has slipped by rushing ahead of your thinking, or whether in the works of your hands you have done anything without deliberate choice. I think we can see here three levels in a descending movement of will, really, three levels of sin.
The lowest level being these ‘works of your hands’ that you do without deliberate choice. Again, this emphasis on deliberation, on doing things deliberately, on not finding yourself having done things, which is all too often the case. We sort of come to ourselves and realise, oh, I just did that thing. Why did I do that? I didn’t want to do that. Or you snap out of a period of reverie and think, what have I just been doing? Not being deliberate about your actions is, I would suggest, the lowest, most basic way of potentially sinning, of being overcome by impulse and just misbehaving.
And then the level above that would be when your tongue, he says, ‘slips by rushing ahead of your thinking’. I mean, God knows, I know what that feels like. You just find yourself having mouthed off, just saying something, and you don’t know why you’ve said it. Or you start down a road of complaining, or criticising, or expressing your anger, and you can’t stop. It’s like an avalanche. You just say more and more and more, digging, ever deeper, a grave for yourself. Again, without deliberation, without attentiveness.
And then finally, at the highest level, and this is really ultimately where the Fathers of the Church are focused, where he says, ‘from passion you have sinned in your thoughts’. And that’s the degree of attentiveness he really wants us to strive for: being so consciously attentive that we don’t sin in our thoughts. Because if we don’t sin in our thoughts, if we’re so attentive, so deliberative, so conscientious that we don’t allow our thoughts to entertain sin, then we could never sin with our tongues or with our bodies. And ultimately, actually, as we’ll see in future episodes, the Fathers taught that when you do inattentively entertain passionate, sinful thoughts, you will sin, either with your tongue or with your body, and that therefore when you do sin with your tongue or with your body, that’s not really the sin. The sin preceded what you said or what you did, and was in fact contracted in your thoughts, which is why we must be attentive.
Not that St Basil is under any illusion that we could live our whole lives never sinning. That’s why he says, if you find sins in your life, and in parentheses he says, and you certainly will, being human, say the words of the tax collector, ‘O God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ An indication, first, of why it might be that God allows us to fall into sin, so that we would, through humility, learn to truly repent from the heart.
But also, and I’ll just say this, really, as an aside, this exclamation of the tax collector, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’, underpins what is known as the Prayer of the Heart, or the Jesus Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. As we will see in future episodes, Orthodox Christian contemplative spirituality is rooted to this prayer, which monks and lay people alike practice in constant, focused repetition: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner! Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner! And in fact, in time, it was through the Prayer of the Heart, through the Jesus Prayer, that attentiveness was most systematically cultivated.
We’re actually going to skip the next section of this sermon. In it, St Basil says that ‘be attentive to yourself’ is a maxim that applies both when things are going very well and when things are not going very well. If you’re rich and happy and beautiful and healthy, then attentiveness will remind you always not to take that for granted, remind you that death is just around the corner, remind you to be grateful for the blessings you’ve got from God. And when things are not going well, when you’re poor, when you’re in ill health, when you’re unhappy, inner attentiveness reminds you to be focused on the heavenly and not on the earthly, to be grateful for what you do have and not to envy others or to be resentful for what you don’t have.
And in the midst of that passage, when he’s describing the contemplations that inner attentiveness can give the man who’s going through a difficult time, he writes this:
Remember first of all that you are a human being, the only creature fashioned by God. Is this not enough, when considered wisely, to bring you the highest joy, that you were formed by the very hands of the God who made all things? Moreover, having been made in the image of the Creator, are you not able, through a virtuous life, to ascend to the rank of the angels? You have received a rational soul, through which you contemplate God, perceive the nature of things through reason, and reap the sweetest fruit of wisdom.
I like that passage, because it’s such a clear expression of the Christian teaching of what a human being is: uniquely and intimately fashioned by God to be in his image. Which, St Basil clarifies, means that we are rational. We have received a rational soul, which allows us to contemplate God and, through that contemplation, to perceive the nature of things that God has created, and therefore reap what he calls ‘the sweetest fruit of wisdom’, the contemplative vision of how creation and God are one in the Logos, joined together through wisdom as one great theophany, one manifestation of the divine.
But he also says, and I love this, that having been made in the image of God, we can, through a virtuous life, ascend to the rank of the angels. This is another reminder of what we are essentially—minds, like angels. We have different bodies. Angels have angelic bodies, spiritual bodies. We have fleshly bodies. But we are both minds, rational minds, we and the angels. And though, because now our minds are in the darkness of the flesh and therefore we don’t perceive the truth clearly, we are at a much lower intellectual rank than the angels are, St Basil says that through a virtuous life we can ascend up to the rank of the angels, which is where we are destined to end up.
God’s providence and all of his salvific activity is oriented towards raising human beings up to the rank of the angels, as Christ himself says in the Gospels, that when we are ‘raised up’, we will be ‘like the angels in heaven’.
And, after this quick break, St Basil will enumerate even more ways in which God’s saving providence transforms and transfigures the human being who, struggling manfully against the passions, remains attentive to himself.
So, having set forth a list of things that someone suffering from poverty and misery and ill health can attend to to remain rooted in objectivity and gratitude to God, he goes on:
These are human things, but there are things greater even than these. For your sake, God among men; the Holy Spirit shared out; death destroyed; the resurrection hoped for; divine commands that perfect your life; progress towards God through the commandments; the kingdom of heaven made ready; and crowns of righteousness prepared for those who do not abandon the labours of virtue.
St Basil gives there a precis of the whole specifically Christian revelation. ‘For your sake,’ he says, ‘God among men.’ He’s referring clearly to the incarnation of Christ, but also, I think, to the sacrament of Holy Communion, when ritually we partake of Christ’s divinised body and blood, therefore refreshing, restoring, and illumining our spirits. And therefore, he says, ‘the Holy Spirit shared out,’ and indeed through faith and through incorporation into the life of the Church, the Holy Spirit is granted to us, illumining us from within, uniting us with God in Christ spiritually. ‘Death destroyed,’ he says, referring of course to Christ’s passion, but doing so in a way that makes it clear that death has been destroyed. What you think death is, is what death was, but is no longer. No longer a movement of separation from God, but a movement towards union with God. Death is destroyed because it’s no longer death, it’s actually life, the life we receive through faith in Christ’s saving death and glorious resurrection. And so, St Basil says, ‘the resurrection hoped for,’ the hope that we, through this faith and through this dying to self with Christ, we will ourselves participate, be incorporated in His resurrection. And because of this faith, we can take ‘the divine commands,’ he says, ‘that perfect our life’ and ‘make progress towards God through carrying out the commandments,’ drawing ever closer inside ourselves, through increasing purity of heart, to the kingdom of heaven which is made ready, where we will receive, he says, ‘crowns of righteousness,’ as long as, he says, ‘we do not abandon the labours of virtue.’ And he goes on:
If you are attentive to yourself, you will find these things around yourself, and even more than these. And you will enjoy present things and will not lose heart over what you lack.
Notice what he says there: ‘you will find these things around yourself.’ It’s very interesting. The Church Fathers are always careful. They never identify with the gifts of God. As they grow in the Spirit, they never confuse the Spirit with themselves. They always remember that it is by grace that they are saved. The good things that they are communing in by grace are not themselves. They are not identified with those good things, those virtues, those illuminations, those purifications. Those things are of God. He, through his love and condescension, wraps himself around us, putting his good things ‘around us,’ as St Basil says, but those things are not us.
And I point this out because these days, spirituality is often framed in the other way. Spirituality is often described as a realisation of who you really are, or of an uncovering of the God that you are, or of the fact that your essence is the divine essence. This kind of language, where you are encouraged to identify with the divine, the Church Fathers are extremely careful never to do that. They don’t identify with God. They don’t unite themselves with him and thereby lose themselves, nor do they unite themselves with him and become identified with him. They become one with him in communion with him, remaining always essentially themselves, but surrounded by him, penetrated by him, through inner attention, finding these things around themselves, in the language of St Basil, and therefore remaining always rooted in gratitude and humility, knowing that whatever good they know and have, they have been given by God, who is the Good. The goodness is God’s, though he graciously gives of his own goodness.
And St Basil then goes on to specify other ways in which the commandment, Be attentive to yourself, is helpful. He writes:
If you keep it always with you, this commandment will be hugely helpful. For example, has anger overpowered your thoughts? And under the influence of rage, have you uttered inappropriate words or acted with harsh brutality? If you are attentive to yourself, you will subdue your anger like an unruly and stubborn colt, striking it with the whip of reason as if with a lash, and restraining your tongue, you will not lay hands on the one who provokes you.
There you see again the same three levels of sin: the mind, the tongue, and the hands. And you also see there with his image of using reason like a whip, lashing the passion of anger as it rises in your mind—you see in that image something almost stoical in its insistence on remaining in control of yourself. The way of the Fathers, indeed the Way of the Cross, is hard. The Christian is expected to wrestle with his fallen, passionate nature, not to take things easy, but to be serious.
And having talked about anger, he goes on to talk about lust. He writes:
Or base desires, having driven the soul to frenzy, lead it into uncontrollable, licentious impulses. But if you are attentive to yourself and remember that what is now pleasant will end in bitterness, and that the tickling sensation now rising up in your body from pleasure will give birth to the venomous worm eternally tormenting us in Gehenna, and that the burning of the flesh will become the mother of eternal fire, immediately the pleasures will flee, driven away, and a marvellous and tranquil peace will arise within, surrounding the soul, like the noise of unruly maidservants being silenced by the presence of a wise mistress.
Here we have in Life Sentences, I think, the first explicit mention of hell, of the fire of hell, of the ‘eternal fire’, St Basil says, the pyr aionion, in Greek, the fire of the next age, the otherworldly fire tormenting us in Gehenna; and that this otherworldly, eternal fire is somehow linked to the burning of fleshly lust in this life.
There’s no need to mince words here. This is extremely provocative language for us today. I think the entire sexual revolution can essentially be laid at the feet of finding this kind of imagery repulsive, this kind of negative attitude towards sexual desire and the threat of eternal torment. We don’t like these ideas these days.
How to understand them?
In our second episode, St Leo laid out for us the pleasure-pain dynamic and taught us that the opposite of pain is not pleasure but is virtue, and that pleasure and pain are really flip sides of the same coin. Based on that logic it makes sense, at least, that the pleasures of sexual desire—which is really the greatest of all the pleasures—would be the flip side of the greatest degree of pain. And in a psychological sense I think we can see how that could be true. When we are overcome with sexual desire, that desire being thwarted is indeed very psychologically painful—and indeed bodily quite uncomfortable. The yearning for fleshly union, the yearning for the pleasure of fleshly union, what would that yearning feel like after death? After your soul, desiring that fleshly pleasurable union, is separated from the fleshly body and therefore no longer has the means of satisfying that desire, what would that feel like, being stuck in that thwarted desire forever? It could feel like hell.
The Fathers will have more to say about sex, about sexual desire and lust, and about the afterlife and the link between sexual desire and what is known as the fire of hell. And just to point out, in this Christianity is not unique. Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, certainly has similar ideas. Islam does. In fact, it’s a universal spiritual intuition.
And for now, I just want to point out that the marvellous and tranquil peace that St Basil says will arise if, being attentive to yourself, you remember the dire consequences of misusing sexual desire: he says that that peace will surround the soul. Again, that image of something divine, something of God, in this case peace, surrounding the soul.
He goes on:
Be attentive to yourself, therefore, and know this: what is rational and noetic is of the soul, as is what is passionate and irrational. And by nature, the rational exists to rule. As for the passionate, it exists to obey reason and to be persuaded by it. So never allow your nous to be enslaved, to become a servant of the passions. Never allow the passions to rise up and rebel against reason and to wrest control of the soul for themselves.
St Basil has just laid out there a summary of the patristic view of the soul, and the patristic understanding of how the person is supposed to keep his soul in good order. He says that the soul is basically bipartite. It has a rational, noetic half and an irrational, passionate half. The rational half by nature is superior. It is the ruling faculty of the soul. It is meant to keep the passions in line. The passionate half, therefore, exists to obey reason, to listen to it, to allow reason to keep it in line. But being rational, the soul has free will. The soul can direct its rational intention where it likes, and therefore there is always the threat that the mind, the nous, will be enslaved, will be enticed by the promise of pleasure which the passions hold out to the mind, and will be conquered by the passions, who will rebel against reason and take control.
A passionate mind, a carnal mind, is a mind whose reason has been overwhelmed by passion. That mind is enslaved. Its freedom has been compromised. It cannot see clearly. It cannot discern good from evil clearly. And therefore, to prevent this scenario from happening in us, we must be attentive to ourselves and bear this scheme in mind. Remind ourselves that at the summit of our souls is a nous, is a rational mind, and it must be in control.
If it is not in control, we cannot live lives of virtue. We cannot love if our rational minds are swamped by passion and therefore we’re motivated by selfishness, pleasure-seeking, self-seeking. How could we love? How could we be patient if our minds are swamped with passion, if we’re demanding, if we cannot stand having our wills thwarted? How can we be kind if our reasons are overwhelmed by passion? If we lack empathy with other people, if we put our own desires first, how could we be kind?
So, we must hold in our memories, with careful attention, this fact of our nature, that our nous, our rational mind, must remain supreme. And indeed, remaining cognizant of this fact will itself help us to maintain that inner order, as St Basil goes on to say:
And in general, a precise understanding of yourself will provide you sufficient guidance even toward the knowledge of God.
Notice that—and this is really where the sermon is going to reach its climax. He stated it clearly. If you understand yourself precisely, you will be guided through that understanding toward the knowledge of God. And the word ‘knowledge’ there in Greek, ennoia, en-noia, ‘in the nous’—this is intuitive, noetic knowledge of God that, he says, we will gain to the degree that we have a precise understanding of ourselves.
He goes on:
For if you are attentive to yourself, you will not need to turn to the physical composition of all things to discern the Creator, but within yourself, as in a microcosm, you will behold the great wisdom of the One who created you. Understand from the incorporeal soul existing in you, that God is incorporeal and is not confined to a place. For not even your own nous intrinsically resides in a place, but becomes located in a place only through its association with the body.
Also by considering your own soul, believe that God is invisible, since it too is imperceptible to bodily eyes. For it has neither colour nor shape, and isn’t circumscribed by any bodily characteristic, but is known only through its operations. For this reason, when it comes to God, don’t use your eyes to look for Him. Rather, turning faith over to the thinking mind, have noetic comprehension of Him.
There is so much packed into that paragraph. You see there that he has called us ‘a microcosm’. This is a classic teaching, that the soul of the human being, that our inner world, is a microcosm, is a mini-world, and bears the same relationship to God as the whole universe bears to God. And that therefore the wisdom that we see present in the universe outside of us, the wisdom which has called the universe into being, that sustains it in being, that holds it in unity, that great wisdom, which is the Logos, who is Christ, is pre-eminently discoverable inside us.
Discovering that wisdom inside ourselves is why we are attentive to ourselves, which is why we maintain our reason in its proper place at the summit of the soul, so that the mind is clear, so that the heart is pure, so that it can see God, see the One who created us.
St Basil then says that the spiritual soul inside of us images God, and that therefore our soul is like God, inherently incorporeal like God. The soul, in itself, is a separate substance, separate from the body, incorporeal, and therefore not confined to a place. Space is, by definition, an arena of bodies. The soul in itself, not a body, is not in a place, not in itself. St Basil says no, the nous is only in a place through its association with a body. It is in the body that the uncircumscribable nous is circumscribed, and like the nous, like the soul, God too is not confined to a place. God is everywhere and nowhere, not in or of space.
Like the soul, which you cannot see with your eyes, God is not sense perceptible. He is invisible. You can’t imagine him like you can’t imagine your soul. When I imagine myself, I’m imagining my body, not my soul. I cannot see my soul. I cannot imagine my soul. It has no shape. It has no colour, no form, and, St Basil says, is only known through its operations. I know that there is a soul because of its operations. I am thinking, so I am a soul. I am feeling, so I am a soul. I am remembering, so I am a soul. What the soul is, I cannot see or determine or define, but I know that the soul is there because I can see what the soul is doing, and God is the same way.
We cannot know God directly. He is infinite. We cannot see him. We cannot define Him. He transcends all definition. But we can know him through his operations, through what He’s doing. We see the creation all around us, we see beings, and so we know God in his act of calling things into being, as the very act of being whereby beings possess their being. We see beauty in objects. We see goodness in objects. We contemplate the truth, the meanings of objects. In those contemplations, we’re not knowing God directly. We are knowing him as the One who beautifies, who illuminates, who perfects things and makes them good.
So, seeing the effects of God’s operations—with our eyes when it comes to visible objects, with our thinking minds when it comes to rational objects—seeing those effects, we intuit the Cause, the invisible Cause causing those effects. And intuiting the Cause, we, as St Basil puts it, turn faith over to our thinking minds, which grants us noetic comprehension of him—direct, invisible, silent, intuitive contemplation of the cause that is God.
And he goes on:
Marvel at the craftsman, at how he has bound the power of your soul to the body, so that, extending to its extremities, it brings the widely separated members into one harmony and communion. Consider the power that is imparted from the soul to the body, and the sympathy that rises from the body to the soul, how the body receives life from the soul, and the soul receives various types of suffering from the body. What storehouses of learning the soul possesses. Why the addition of new knowledge does not obscure the understanding of what was previously learned, but the memories remain distinct and clear, as if engraved on a bronze tablet in the governing part of the soul. How the soul, slipping into the passions of the flesh, loses its inherent beauty and how, being cleansed from the disgrace of evil, through virtue it returns to the likeness of its Creator.
So, in that paragraph, St Basil is describing the relationship between soul and the body. The soul, he says, brings the disparate parts of the body into one harmony and communion. The soul unifies the body. The soul is the principle of the body’s unity. Which is why at death, when the soul is separated from the body, the body dissolves, losing its unity. But that when the soul is present, the body receives life. It is vital. It is alive.
And through the body, the soul experiences. It receives suffering, St Basil says. All that knowledge in the mind, invisibly present to the mind.
And finally, the moral movement of the soul, from beauty into disgrace through slipping into the passions of the flesh, as he puts it. But then the counter-movement, from disgrace back to likeness with its Creator, through virtue, he says—virtue, an ascetical struggle to return the reason to its rightful place at the summit of the soul, where, once situated again on the throne of the soul at the top, it can contemplate God, which is what it is meant to do.
And St Basil goes on:
After contemplating the soul, consider, if you will, the structure of the body. Marvel at how the master craftsman has created it as a fitting dwelling place for the rational soul. Alone of all the animals did God form man to stand upright, so that from this very posture you might know that your life is from the higher kinship, for all four-footed creatures are inclined toward their belly, but not man. His gaze is fit for looking up at heaven, so as not to be preoccupied with the stomach or the passions below the stomach. Rather, his whole impulse is directed toward the upward journey.
Mankind’s unique upright posture has long been seen as a symbol of his intelligent nature. And St Basil simply repeats this long-held view, which in itself expresses the way in which the Fathers, like all peoples before the modern age, contemplated the world around them as symbols carrying spiritual meaning.
Today we see that human beings stand upright, and we interpret it in strictly material instrumental terms. Our posture helps us to survive. It gives us an advantage in some way. That’s not how the Fathers thought. Without denying the material dimension, they allowed their perception of the material world to illuminate their minds to higher symbols, to higher truths about themselves. We alone of all the animals stand upright because we alone of all the animals possess reason, possess nous, made in the image of God, able to contemplate eternal realities, able to see how the animals, the trees, the stars, the sun, are themselves expressions of the eternal realities that we can see, how that would ideally move us towards love for those animals, for those trees, for the whole world around us, recognising that the created order, in the words of the Bible, declares the glory of God.
And so, our eyes do not incline towards the earth, our eyes look upwards at the stars, this posture itself symbolising our moral destiny. Not to be preoccupied, as St Basil says, with the stomach or the passions below the stomach, but to direct our whole impulse towards what he calls ‘the upward journey’ back to ‘our higher kinship’, as he says, our kinship with the angels, our kinship with God.
And then he goes on to describe in great detail various aspects of the body, especially the position of the eyes and the ears and what all of that means, revelling in the profound harmony and wisdom that is evidenced by this incredible creation, our bodies.
And he finishes:
Through all these you will observe the unfathomable wisdom of the one who made you, so that you too may say with the prophet, ‘Your knowledge has become wonderful to me.’ Be attentive to yourself therefore, so that you may be attentive to God, to whom be glory and dominion forever. Amen.
There you have it. We are attentive to ourselves, maintaining purity of mind, guarding our hearts, keeping our minds from entertaining any sinful thought, so that, kept pure, in prayer and through faith, our minds might begin to see the invisible light of God, the uncreated light which God fills the pure heart with. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,’ Christ said. And the prerequisite for attaining and maintaining purity of heart, in cooperation with God’s grace, is being attentive to yourself.
And that brings St Basil the Great’s third sermon to a close. We will one day, I’m sure, return to St Basil. He left behind a huge number of writings of great spiritual and moral insight, works that support the contemplative life, theological works that make sense of the deposit of faith. He was a great Father of the Church.
But we will say good-bye to him for now, and leaving Cappadocia, we will travel southward, to the heartlands, really, of Christian contemplation: to Egypt and the Desert Fathers, specifically a great desert father, St John Cassian.
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Episode 4: To know God, know yourself