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.
The podcast is designed to be listened to, so I encourage you to listen. But I’m also providing transcripts, as you may want to read along as you listen.
Welcome to Life Sentences, a new Substack podcast presented by me, Thomas Small.
You may have found yourself here via my other podcast, Conflicted, and if you are a Dear Listener, a double welcome. I hope you find Life Sentences equally stimulating.
Conflicted (and if you don’t know it, do check it out!) is an extended conversation with my friend, the former jihadist Aimen Dean, in which we explore the history, religion, and geopolitics of the Middle East and narrate—in real time, it sometimes feels—the end of the American-dominated world order that’s collapsing all around us.
But if I’m honest, though I find the Middle East and Islamic history endlessly fascinating, it isn’t my real passion. My real passion is the Church Fathers.
Who are the Church Fathers?
These were Christian writers—theologians, monks, mystics, divines—from, let’s say, the first millennium AD. So, from the first thousand years of Christianity. Though, truth be told, writings like the ones I’m talking about continue to be written and are still written today. But these older writings, the writings of the Church Fathers, are remarkable. They’re a huge source of Christian wisdom, full of psychological, philosophical, and theological insight; but perhaps more importantly, these writings lie at the heart of Christian culture, and therefore they are the foundation of whatever it is that is meant by ‘the West’—a term which I don’t really like, because I prefer the old one, ‘Christendom’.
One reason I prefer the word ‘Christendom’ to ‘the West’ is because Christendom includes, but stretches well beyond, the West as it is usually understood, certainly to include Eastern Europe, but also the Middle East. That will sound especially strange to a lot of people, but the Middle East is, after all, where Christianity was born, and it is still home to millions of Christians who trace their communities back to the very first Apostles.
With that wider geographical breadth comes greater historical depth. For Christendom, as a civilizational order, stretches back far beyond the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason or the Renaissance or even the High Middle Ages. No, it goes back to the very beginning. Via the Bible, to the very beginning of human consciousness as recorded in those Scriptures!
But more specifically to the beginning of the Christian Church—which made an indelible spiritual and cultural imprint wherever it took root, especially those areas that fell within the orbit or influence of the Roman Empire, guided and inspired throughout by the witness, the teachings, and the writings of the Church Fathers. This civilizational order is the foundation of our own, and so the Church Fathers are among the Founding Fathers of our civilization.
Yet despite their importance, these texts are sadly unknown and neglected.
Therefore, in Life Sentences, I’m going to be reading through the Church Fathers with you, adding commentary and, I hope, helping you to see how this huge deposit of Christian wisdom from the first millennium AD remains completely relevant and speaks to our human condition just as well now as it did then.
So, if Conflicted is inspired by the idea that in order to understand the present you have to understand the past, and specifically the ideas, beliefs, and ideologies from the past which continue to animate the present, then Life Sentences is inspired by the same idea. Deep beneath the surface of our culture lies a golden seam of Christian wisdom. By knowing it you can make much better sense not only of our culture, but I’d wager of yourself as well.
And over the past few years there has been a remarkable upsurge in interest in Christianity, in traditional Christianity. Young people especially are feeling their way toward the realisation that there is much more to Christianity than they were perhaps given to believe, certainly by mainstream culture but also by mainstream, let’s say, Evangelicalism. If anyone can be blamed for this resurgence in taking Christianity seriously, it’s perhaps Jordan Peterson. In the wake of Jordan Peterson’s immense popularity, a network has emerged of podcasters, bloggers, priests, and academics, each presenting the Christian tradition in the best way he can.
But there’s a problem, in my view at least. A lot of this material, this reflection on Christian teaching, on the Christian story, on Christian ritual and ethics, a lot of it is not terribly grounded in the tradition, in the intellectual or theological tradition. A lot of it is instead made up of these modern thinkers’ own ideas, which are often interesting, but sometimes I feel more would be gained if people interested in getting to grips with the true foundations of Western culture—which is to say Christianity—engaged directly with the Church Fathers.
And it’s no wonder why people are turning with interest and fascination to traditional, orthodox Christian ideas and practices. Our culture at the moment is in profound crisis; and I mean culture in the truest sense: the web of ideas, stories, civic rituals, ethical principles and ideals, often expressed through art, but equally through intellectual activity or political activity. Our culture in this wide but specific sense is in crisis. Nothing is really adding up while at the same time everything is constantly changing. Leaving people, and perhaps especially young people, with absolutely nothing to stand on, nothing in which to ground their lives, their humanity.
The other day, while pondering this first episode, I came across a journal entry that I wrote in the summer of 2020. I don’t need to remind you how unsettling and weird that summer was. Covid was in full flow. Lockdowns were everywhere. Then, in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd, protests and riots broke out, along with a renewed explosion of radical left-wing ideas, which were then countered by radical right-wing, or at least radically contrarian, ideas. It was a fraught time, with a lot of heat, a lot less light. And in this journal entry, I was reflecting on how everything had broken down and wrote this:
‘What is required? My answer: whatever it is that Christianity used to provide but no longer does, either because it is worn out, or because we’ve killed it, or because we killed it because it was worn out. What was it that Christianity used to provide? A unifying, sanctifying metaphysic. A mythopoeic soul fantasy that united the outer and inner worlds. A means of grace that transformed our inner world into a fertile seedbed of moral virtue and spiritual knowledge, and transfigured the outer world into a theophanic revelation of the great beyond.’
Not all my journal entries are written in that register, I can promise you. But it is my belief—and I’ll be honest, that belief is based on 25 years of fairly devout Orthodox Christian practice and contemplation—it is my belief that the Church Fathers in all their diversity do provide the key to unlocking Christianity’s power to bring about that spiritual theophanic transformation of the soul. Αnd in Life Sentences I will be showing you that.
It won’t be a systematic presentation. Systematic presentations of something as vast and complex as the Christian tradition only serve to misrepresent or overly simplify that tradition. Instead, you’ll just have to stick with me as in each episode we read through a patristic text. (‘Patristic’ is the adjective used for writings of the Church Fathers, patristic coming from the word for father in Greek, pater.)
Just to make it clear, in each episode I will be reading a text to you and commenting on it—to explain it to you, to help you understand it, to give you contextual information, to define unusual terms. This way of engaging with texts is quite mediaeval, really. Someone who was literate, who was familiar with the text, would sit before a group of people and simply read the text from a manuscript, commenting as he goes to make it clear. This is the sort of thing that I’m doing in Life Sentences and I hope you’ll agree with me that by engaging directly with the text in this way, much is gained. And if you do stick with me, and wrestle with these wonderful, challenging, but rewarding texts, over time you will build up a comprehensive and rather intuitive understanding of what the Christian tradition promises to those who walk the path.
Oh and I’m not going to censor the Fathers. I’m not going to pretend that they weren’t writing in a very different time from ours, with a very different way of understanding most things. The Fathers were operating within a completely different set of assumptions from ours, assumptions about spiritual things. By spiritual things I mean theological, yes, but more importantly intellectual, psychological, and even cosmological; and it is my belief that their assumptions about spiritual things were more correct than ours are. I won’t try to defend that belief here, but Life Sentences over time will, I hope, be one big defence of that proposition: that the Church Fathers understood more about the nature of reality than we do, all of this corresponding with their ancient tripartite vision of the human being, made up of spirit or mind, soul, and body.
You’ll understand what all of that means the more you follow along to Life Sentences.
And who knows, if the Substack proves popular and enough people take out paying subscriptions—which frankly I would need them to do in order to carry on with it, so please subscribe!—then in addition to texts by the Fathers, I could widen the scope and include interviews with monks, thinkers, academics, and so on.
With all that said, after this very short break, we will embark on our very first Church Father, St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome. I’ll be right back.
*****
Welcome back!
Right, St Leo the Great, Pope of Rome. The next episode is also going to focus on a sermon by St Leo so I will wait until next time to give you detailed historical information about Leo. For now I’ll just say that he was Pope in the mid 5th century, between 440 and 461. He wrote in Latin and his sermons are usually characterised by great clarity but also rich depth. Each sentence is pregnant with meaning and I will hope to uncover that meaning for you.
I am going to read through one of St Leo’s sermons, Sermon 19. He delivered this sermon in the weeks leading up to Christmas, during the Nativity fast of the Church, and the sermon is really all about fasting, on the reasons for fasting, on the proper ends and goals of fasting. I thought it would be good to start with a sermon about fasting because, as you’ll see, the foundation of Christian spirituality, and therefore the foundation of everything that the Church Fathers write about, is asceticism—of which fasting is the base.
A brief word about asceticism. You may associate that word with extreme bodily mortification. Or with an attitude toward the body that is wholly negative, one which regards the body itself as somehow evil. That is not how the Church Fathers understand it. As you’ll see, the Church Fathers, and especially the Desert Fathers, the great Christian ascetics, did take fasting to what we would regard as an extreme. But Church tradition never advocated that for most people. Rather, the Fathers always affirmed the essential goodness of the body. They held that being embodied is essential to being human. Even our weak fleshly bodies—destined to decay, die, and dissolve back into the earth—even these bodies were given us by God as vehicles in which to work out our salvation in cooperation with God’s grace.
Over this podcast we’ll discuss these topics in great detail, so don’t worry. For now, it is enough to know that the word asceticism comes from the Greek word askesis and that word simply means ‘training’ or ‘exercise’, in the sense of athletics, in fact. So it includes more than just fasting. It includes the whole range of disciplines which Christians undertake to restrain selfishness and sensual indulgence and to cultivate self-control and mental clarity—what the tradition calls ‘sobriety’.
As we’ll explore throughout Life Sentences.
Okay. So here we go. St Leo the Great’s Sermon 19.
When the Saviour would instruct his disciples about the advent of God’s Kingdom and the end of the world’s times…
Okay, I’m just gonna stop. Right away, I’m stopping.
‘The advent of God’s Kingdom.’ Christ began his ministry on earth announcing that ‘the Kingdom of God’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’, was near. And because the Kingdom of God was near, Christ called on people to repent. This is the basic datum of Christianity: The Kingdom of Heaven is near! Repent! Each in its own way, the texts that we will be reading on Life Sentences will be interpretations of that basic preaching: the Kingdom of Heaven is near, repent.
That advent—the advent of God’s Kingdom—is associated with ‘the end of the world’, ‘the end of the world’s times’, as St Leo has evocatively said here, ‘the end of the world’s times.’ Christianity is about the eruption into the soul of ‘the Spirit’ which transcends ‘the world’s times’. Transcends the fluctuations of ordinary life that tend towards dissolution, decay, and death, and imbues the mind with a concrete experience of that which is eternal, of that which transcends ‘the world’s times’.
As you see, immediately in sentence one, St Leo, using this traditional symbolical language, is invoking very lofty spiritual realities. So, ‘When the Saviour would instruct his disciples about the advent of God’s Kingdom and the end of the world’s times…’
…and teach his whole church in the person of the Apostles, he said, ‘Watch yourselves! Lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life.’
(That’s from Luke 21:34.)
And assuredly, dearly beloved, we acknowledge that this precept applies more especially to us, to whom undoubtedly the day denounced is near, even though hidden, for the advent of which it behoves every man to prepare himself, lest it find him given over to gluttony or entangled in cares of this life.
If, in the 5th century, St Leo can say that that advent, ‘the advent of God’s Kingdom which is near though hidden’… You see how he’s revealing in subtle terms that this advent is a spiritual advent, and this end of the world is a spiritual end of the world that happens inside the soul… If he says, in the 5th century, it was nearer than it was before, how near is it now to us in the 21st century? For that reason, we perhaps should take St Leo very seriously when he says we must prepare ourselves and not be given over to gluttony or anxiety.
And frankly, if you think about 21st-century life, what characterises that life better than gluttony and anxiety? Yet if we are to prepare ourselves for this spiritual advent, we must resist gluttony and anxiety.
St Leo goes on:
For by daily experience, beloved, it is proved that the mind’s edge is blunted by overindulgence of the flesh, and the heart’s vigour is dulled by excess of food.
That’s a wonderful expression. ‘The mind’s edge is blunted.’
The Church Fathers’ whole program of spirituality is about sharpening the mind so that the mind sees more of reality. And it is a basic proposition of the Church Fathers, and it is a basic teaching of Christianity, that the first obstacle to clarity of mind, the thing which blunts the mind’s edge first, is overindulgence of the flesh. Gluttony. Pleasure-seeking.
And note that St Leo links the mind here to the heart. The mind’s edge is blunted and ‘the heart’s vigour is dulled’. Again, as you’ll see, for the Church Fathers, the mind and the heart are linked. This is one of the ways in which their way of thinking is different from ours. We experience our minds with our brains, with our heads. The Church Fathers would say that this is a problem, that the mind is naturally meant to be centred on the heart, not the head.
So there you see, in that one sentence is implied a whole spiritual anthropology, if you like. Which will become clearer to you as we go along in Life Sentences.
St Leo continues:
The delights of eating are even opposed to the health of the body, unless reasonable moderation withstand the temptation, and the consideration of future discomfort keep from the pleasure.
This is clear, I think, to anyone who’s ever lived. We all know that in order to maintain healthy bodies, we must resist a tendency to gluttony, to overindulgence. And if that’s true of the body, St Leo is saying even more so is that true of the mind.
He goes on:
For although the flesh desires nothing without the soul and receives its sensations from the same source as it receives its motion, yet it is the function of the same soul to deny certain things to the body which is subject to it, and by its inner judgement to restrain the outer parts from things unseasonable, in order that it may be the oftener free from bodily lusts and have leisure for divine wisdom in the palace of the mind, where away from all the noise of earthly cares it may in silence enjoy holy meditations and eternal delights.
I mean that sentence is amazing. It’s long! But it is amazing. In it is encoded a whole program of Christian spirituality and a whole metaphysic about what the human being is.
When he says, ‘Although the flesh desires nothing without the soul and receives its sensations from the same source as it receives its motions,’ St Leo is articulating what is a more or less Aristotelian understanding of the human composite of body and soul. The soul animates the body, it is the principle of the body’s movement; and because the human soul is rational, the bodily movement that it affects is under our rational control, can be determined by the soul rationally.
This is different, let us say, from what is known as the vegetative soul. So you look at a tree. It grows, it is moving. Βut that movement is not rational in the sense of under the tree’s control. The tree’s movement is informed by a soul that is not rational. The tree grows organically, let us say automatically, into what it is, based on its vegetative soul. And for that reason, it would make no sense to say of a tree that it had sinned, to attribute to a tree something like morality. The tree was not in the position to deliberate between good and less good options and choose one in the course of its development. It is simply becoming what it is.
The human soul, however, is rational. So human beings participate in what it is they are becoming through the exercise of their own rational will. And for that reason, human beings, their behaviour, their development, can be subject to moral scrutiny. Human beings are in the position to go astray, to, as it were, sin—as we will certainly see as we explore the Church Fathers more fully.
So St Leo is articulating this Aristotelian understanding that the physical body, the body of flesh, is animated by a soul. It is the soul that gives the body its powers of sensation and underlies the body’s motions.
Yet he also says that it is the function of the soul to deny certain things to the body which is subject to it. So the soul is able to resist the body’s urges and must resist those urges, sometimes at least, as he said earlier, in order to maintain the health of the body and indeed the health of the soul.
And this resistance of the soul to the body’s urges is carried out by what is called here the soul’s ‘inner judgement’, which ‘restrains the outer parts [i.e. the body] from things unseasonable…’—things out of season, things unreasonable, immoderate things, beyond what is necessary—‘...in order that it may be the oftener free from bodily lusts.’ So, by resisting the body’s desires, the soul frees itself from those desires and it then has leisure for divine wisdom in ‘the palace of the mind, where away from all the noise of earthly cares, the soul may in silence enjoy holy meditations and eternal delights.’
This is the whole Christian program of asceticism. Withdrawing the mind from attachment to objects of sense perception through desire so that the mind can more clearly and silently contemplate eternal spiritual realities. This is what Christianity aims at. To contemplate things that are eternal. Not temporal. Eternal.
St Leo continues:
And although this is difficult to maintain in this life, yet the attempt can frequently be renewed, in order that we may the oftener and longer be occupied with spiritual rather than fleshly cares. And by our spending ever greater portions of our time on higher cares, even our temporal actions may end in gaining the incorruptible riches.
So St Leo here is clearly expressing that this asceticism—turning away from the soul’s attachment to objects of sense perception through desire—he says it’s difficult. And it is difficult. So he’s making it clear, this is not easy.
But he says the effort is ‘renewed frequently’ and what he’s referring to there is Christian ritual life, the pattern of feasts and fasts which characterise the Christian year, as he’ll go on to explain:
This profitable observance, dearly beloved, is especially laid down for the fasts of the Church which, in accordance with the Holy Spirit’s teaching, are so distributed over the whole year that the law of abstinence may be kept before us at all times.
Interesting. He says that the Church has laid down periods of fasting so that we will always keep ‘the law of abstinence’. Fast periods aren’t those periods when we practise asceticism. They are the periods where we are reminded to practice asceticism always.
Christianity is a deeply ascetical religion. It is my view that in losing the ascetical dimension of Christianity, the West lost its religion. And that underlies a huge number of our problems today. The problem of consumerism. The problem, frankly, of gluttony, of avarice, of always needing more and more material goods. And therefore the problem of tremendous anxiety, status anxiety, the anxiety that naturally follows upon a perceived need for an abundance of material possessions. At some point in the past, Christianity’s ascetical dimension was lost and Christian culture became overwhelmed by gluttony, by greed, and therefore by profound anxiety—which of course everyone is familiar with.
The cure to that, St Leo is suggesting here, is the Church’s liturgical year, punctuated by periods of feasting and periods of fasting, which taken together are meant to remind us always to live lives of abstinence, to live lives that do not overindulge the flesh.
These Christian terms can raise hackles in some people, for various reasons. But these terms, these traditional terms, are translatable into a modern register. That’s what I’m trying to do here.
St Leo goes on:
Accordingly, we keep the spring fast in Lent…
That’s the Lenten fast before Easter.
…the summer fast at Pentecost…
This is a fast that follows Pentecost.
…the autumn fast in the seventh month…
This is a fast that precedes the feast of the Assumption or the Dormition of the Virgin, of the Virgin Mary.
…and the Winter Fast in this which is the tenth month…
That reveals that this sermon was given before Christmas. Because there is also a fast before Christmas: the Nativity Fast. Those of you who practise the Christian tradition of an Advent calendar, where you open up the little window and there’s a piece of chocolate inside, that’s an irony. The Advent calendar is downstream of the old Advent fast, during which the last thing you were meant to do would be enjoying chocolate.
Indeed, the indulgence of the flesh that attends the weeks preceding Christmas in the modern West is a powerful symbol of how Christian culture has changed in this regard. A period that was meant to be one of abstinent expectation of the advent of Jesus Christ has become a period of extraordinary and exorbitant indulgence. Drunkenness. Greed. Gluttony. Spending. Expectations of receiving. Whereas in this sermon, before Christmas they were fasting.
So he says we keep fast in spring, in summer, in autumn, and in winter, in all four seasons. He goes on:
…knowing that there is nothing unconnected with the divine commands, so that all the elements serve the Word of God to our instruction, so that from the very hinges on which the world turns, as if by four Gospels, we learn unceasingly what to preach and what to do.
In that beautiful passage there, St Leo is revealing, on the one hand, the inner meaning of the natural world that is present to our senses; and, on the other, the inner meaning of the Holy Scriptures, ‘the divine commands’ as he calls them here. And those two meanings are in fact the same. St Leo here has explicitly said that the four seasons of the year, which determine everything that we see outside of ourselves, are four Gospels. He’s linking the natural world with the world revealed by the Scriptures, and ultimately Christianity is a revealed truth leading to an understanding of the whole created order. That’s its goal.
St Leo continues (he’s about to quote the Psalms):
For when the prophet says, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament shows his handiwork! Day unto day utters speech, and night shows knowledge!’, what is there by which the truth does not speak to us? By day and by night his voices are heard and the beauty of the things made by the workmanship of the one God ceases not to instil the teachings of reason into our heart’s ears, so that the invisible things of God may be perceived and seen through the things which are made, and men may serve the Creator of all, not his creatures.
If you were ever thinking that Christianity teaches that the created world is to be held in contempt in any way, here St. Leo says that’s not the case.
It certainly is the case that, over the last several centuries, Western society has evolved in such a way that we tend to treat the whole created world as dead matter, only there to be exploited, and that we have come to adopt an ideology which would say that the only thing that is real is that aspect of the dead matter that is measurable.
This way of thinking—which underlies the tremendous environmental crisis and indeed spiritual crisis that we are living through—this way of seeing things was a revolt against the Christian way of seeing things, which, as St Leo makes clear here, saw nature as one great work of art by the great Divine Artist in which he revealed himself—and also revealed, to our minds, ourselves. Revealed the reason for our own being, the way in which we were meant to thrive as spiritual beings. It’s a very different way of engaging with the natural world.
I’m going to take another quick break, but when I return we’ll continue exploring St Leo’s Sermon 19, where this saint will break down for us how fasting and self-restraint in general help us to purify our minds as a necessary component to living a spiritual life.
I’ll be right back.
*****
Welcome back. St Leo has been telling us that could we but see it, all of the creation is a revelation of God. A theophany.
Though we cannot see it. Because we are enslaved to sensual desire. We are attached, in our minds, to objects of sense perception. And sense perception gets in the way of the intuitive, spiritual perception which is natural to our minds.
The cure to this problem begins with self-restraint, as St Leo now states:
Since, therefore, all vices are destroyed by self-restraint and whatever avarice thirsts for, pride strives for, luxury lusts after, is overcome by the solid force of this virtue…
Namely, self-control.
…who can fail to understand the aid which is given us by fasting? For therein we are bidden to restrain ourselves, not only in food, but also in all carnal desires.
All carnal desires. Do not mistake what he means there. We think the expression ‘carnal desire’ applies only to sexual desire, and though it certainly can apply to sexual desire, in the writings of the Church Fathers it more often applies to avarice, to greed, to the desire to acquire material objects and to call them our own. This is carnal desire because it is through sense perception, through the flesh of the body, that the mind perceives objects of sense perception and desires to possess them. That’s why greed is a carnal desire.
And St Leo is saying here that though, in fast periods, we fast from food, we are fasting from food as a means of restraining all carnal desire, restraining all greed. And this is why, as you’ll see later, fasting is always accompanied by almsgiving, by charitable giving, by giving your own possessions away to combat greed.
He goes on:
Otherwise it is lost labour to endure hunger and yet not put away wrong wishes. To afflict oneself by curtailing food, and yet not to flee from sinful thoughts. That is a carnal, not a spiritual fast, where the body only is stinted, and those things persisted in which are more harmful than all delights.
The vices which St Leo is especially interested in combating are, let us say, the spiritual vices, vices in our minds, in our thoughts. Vices like greed, the thought, ‘I want that.’ The thought, ‘That is mine.’ The thought, ‘I will do what it takes to acquire that.’ These are thoughts, in the mind, that follow from carnal desire, from desire linked to sense perception, from the mind’s failure to contemplate spiritual, eternal truths.
That’s what St Leo is laying out here, as he goes on to say:
What profit is it to the soul to act outwardly as master and inwardly to be a captive and a slave? To issue orders to the limbs and to lose the right to her own liberty? That soul for the most part and deservedly meets with rebellion in her servant which does not pay to God the service that is due.
St Leo is saying here, if you undertake bodily fasting only—let’s say certainly in order to be seen to be fasting, but even in order to uphold in yourself a self-image of a spiritual person: ‘I’m fasting. I’m not overeating.’—St Leo is saying that if you do this on its own, without attending in prayer to God, and without combating higher, more drastic vices like greed, then you will likely fail even in the bodily fasting that you’re undertaking.
And I can tell you this is the case. When you fast outwardly, especially if you do so for display, it is almost always the case that behind closed doors you are not fasting. That when you get home, you close the door behind you and no one can see, you probably then will succumb to an overwhelming desire to indulge.
And people who struggle with gluttony—and I am one of those people who are often dieting—find dieting to be so difficult, I think, precisely for this reason, though they don’t know it. That because our dieting is ultimately informed by vanity, and because God, as it were, is disinclined to reward vanity, often we gluttons are not, as it were, empowered to fulfil our diets. And though we are right to know that there is something wrong in our gluttony, and that the impact that gluttony has on our bodies is an indication that something is not entirely right, insofar as that perception is yoked to vanity and not to love of God—which is to say not to a desire for contemplative union with spiritual truth but rather a desire for the praise and esteem of other people—then that dieting is undermined.
So instead of dieting, let us fast, and let us fast properly: spiritually, not only carnally. As St Leo says:
When the body therefore fasts from food, let the mind fast from vices, and pass judgement upon all earthly cares and desires, according to the law of its King.
It is a law of Christ the King that we not indulge anxieties and cares about this life. He says it in the Sermon on the Mount. We are to consider the lilies of the field who, though they do not work, though they do not toil, receive all that they need from God. So we are also meant to put our trust in God and his providence and not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by anxiety and care for the things of this world. That’s the Christian view.
He goes on:
Let us remember that we owe love first to God, secondly to our neighbour, and that all our affections must be so regulated as not to draw us away from either worshipping God or benefiting our fellow slave.
Now, St Leo here is invoking worship. Worshipping God is the first law of the soul. The soul is made, first of all, to worship God.
So, though I’ve been presenting this sermon so far, let us say, in more psychological terms, it must be stressed that at the heart of the Christian way is a call to worship God, to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength. And this activity of worship is a universal human norm. It’s only modern Western people who either don’t worship at all or, it might be said, worship in a wholly sentimental or emotionally indulgent way. It is only modern Western people who don’t worship with all of their heart, mind, soul, and strength. Yet according to St Leo, according to the Church Fathers, and indeed according to most thinkers throughout human history, the human being is the worshipping animal par excellence.
So St Leo’s call here to fast, to turn the mind away from objects of sense perception, to resist the soul’s inclination to desire objects of sense perception—that whole program of asceticism is meaningless if it’s outside the context of worshipping God. You’re turning away from passionate attachment to objects of sense perception in order to turn towards God. And what that means, to turn to God, is really what this podcast is all about because it is what is meant by Christ’s command to ‘repent’, metanoia in Greek, which literally means ‘change’ or ‘turn the mind’.
St Leo goes on:
But how shall we worship God unless that which is pleasing to him is also pleasing to us?
This is what he meant in the sentence just before when he talks about ‘regulating all of our affections’ so that we aren’t drawn away from worshipping God. St Leo is aware that in general our wills run counter to the divine will and our affections incline towards passionate desire of objects of sense perception. So regulating those affections, conforming our will to God’s will, which, as St Leo stated, is very hard—and it is hard indeed—this is the whole point. In order to fulfil that first commandment to worship God, to love God fully, we must conform our will to his. And this is hard because we are weak, because our minds are in flesh.
All of this will slowly but surely make sense to you, I promise, if you stick with me.
St Leo continues:
For if our will is his will, our weakness will receive strength from him from whom the very will came.
This is the Christian way. Because our minds are rational, we have at the very least a dim knowledge of eternal realities, of realities which are expressions of God’s being. God, as it were, echoes in our mind. Yet that mind, at present united to a body of flesh, is for that reason weak and we therefore fail to conform our wills to God’s will. God knows this. He calls on us, despite our weakness, to turn to him, to struggle to conform our wills to his. And seeing that struggle, he, St Leo says here, will grant us his strength. For, he says, ‘If our will is his will, our weakness will receive strength from him from whom the very will came...’
…For it is God, as the Apostle says, who works in us both to will and to work for his good pleasure. And so a man will not be puffed up with pride nor crushed with despair if he uses the gifts which God gave to his glory and withholds his inclinations from those things which he knows will harm him.
The temptation either, on the one hand, to be puffed up with pride or, on the other hand, to be crushed with despair, the Church Fathers write a lot about.
The two poles of temptation: either to be puffed up with pride, or crushed with despair. As you’ll see in this podcast, the Church Fathers attribute this dynamic to the demons. A demon on one shoulder tries to make you feel very proud, while a demon on the other shoulder tries to make you feel like a piece of shit. And maybe if you’ve suffered, as I certainly have, from that very postmodern experience of ego inflation followed by profound depression—a kind of unstable inner self-image that swings wildly from grandiose to utterly dejected—you will perhaps understand what the Church Fathers mean by that.
And St Leo is saying here that the true therapy for that ego inflation-deflation dynamic is to use the gifts that God gives us to God’s glory and to withhold our inclinations from those things which we know will harm us:
For in abstaining from malicious envy, from luxurious and dissolute living, from the perturbations of anger, and from the lust after vengeance, he will be made pure and holy by true fasting and will be fed the pleasures of incorruptible delights, and so he will know by the spiritual use of his earthly riches how to transform them into heavenly treasures, not by hoarding up for himself what he has received, but by gaining a hundredfold on what he gives.
St Leo is here talking about almsgiving as an absolutely necessary dimension to fasting. You fast from food while you give alms, while you give to the poor, while you practise charity. And through this you regulate your body’s carnal desire and your soul’s carnal desire. Your body’s desire for food and your soul’s desire for acquiring material things.
But I’d also like to point out these four species of vice which he says we need to abstain from. First he says malicious envy, then luxurious and dissolute living, then perturbations of anger, and finally the lust after vengeance.
Now, let’s be honest, our contemporary postmodern society is absolutely shot through with envy, dissolution, anger, and lust for vengeance. If for no other reason, that’s why it’s tearing itself apart. And though it’s fairly clear what envy, gluttony (i.e. luxurious and dissolute living), and anger are, I want to zero in a little bit on lust after vengeance and suggest what are perhaps unfamiliar associations with that particular vice, the lust after vengeance.
First of all, I think it is true that what goes by the name of justice today is more often a lust for vengeance—and therefore not justice at all. A lot of our politics on either side of the aisle are now animated by lust for vengeance in the name of justice, and this is a problem.
But also I think we should focus on the word lust there in the expression ‘lust after vengeance’. Because we often use the word lust in the context of sex, and we often think of sex as, let us say, a species of gluttony, a species of pleasure-seeking, that we pursue sex because of the pleasure of orgasm, and that a highly sexual person could be understood, maybe, to be a highly pleasure-seeking person. Fine.
I think that there is a deeper dimension to sex, though, which is closer to lust after vengeance than it is to pleasure-seeking. I think that’s why we use the word lust, both in terms of sex and in terms of vengeance. And you know, this is maybe not safe for work here, but if you imagine yourself into your experience of sex—and I think I’m speaking especially to men here, because I’m a man and I can’t necessarily understand what it’s like for a woman to have sex, I’m just being honest—certainly, as a man, if you imagine what the actual sex act is like, I think you will recognize that it can overlap, often quite clearly, with something like extracting vengeance or punishing, and that therein lies, in fact, some of the deeper or finer pleasure of the act. As I say, sex can overlap with vengeance or a desire to punish, or to be punished—I’m not saying it always does, and certainly I’m not saying it ideally does. Ideally sex is about something truly exalted, indeed truly divine. But today especially, sex more often than not falls short of that ideal.
And as we all know, pornography is widely consumed today. It’s interesting that consumption of pornography, though it begins perhaps more or less innocently as a desire for pleasure—a desire to just, you know, get your rocks off—the more pornography is indulged, the more that pornography inclines towards a more, let us say, sadomasochistic dimension, where sexual fantasies overlap more and more with fantasies of punishment, and where sexual desire overlaps with anger and a thirst for vengeance.
That’s just to crack open a bit this lust after vengeance thing that St Leo invokes here. But also to shine a light on that aspect of our society: on the one hand, often calling for justice in a way that is in fact calling for vengeance; and on the other hand, increasingly sexualized in a way that also is really a lust for vengeance. So, the desire for vengeance is extremely prevalent today and St Leo is saying that is a problem.
And because we are so in thrall to the lust for vengeance—as indeed we are to malicious envy and to luxurious and dissolute living and to anger—we are not being fed what he calls ‘the pleasures of incorruptible delights’, i.e. spiritual contemplation, the pleasures of uniting ourselves in the mind with eternal realities, through which we would know that instead of focusing on what we want to acquire, we would focus instead on giving to others. As he then finishes:
And hence we warn you, beloved, in fatherly affection, to make this winter fast fruitful to yourselves by bounteous alms, rejoicing that by you the Lord feeds and clothes his poor, to whom assuredly he could have given the possessions which he has bestowed on you, had he not in his unspeakable mercy wished to justify them for their patient labour, and you for your works of love.
So St Leo here has invoked the spectre of Divine Providence, that all things are ultimately in God’s hands. Something which could offend our modern socio-political sensibilities. He’s clearly invoking inequality here. Some people have possessions, other people don’t. And in our day and age, we see this as an injustice, and indeed this is one of the ways in which we can express that sense of injustice in explicitly vengeful terms. We see the economic or material inequality in the world and it moves us to wrath and to a thirst for vengeance.
St Leo is not adopting that view. He, in fact, explicitly contradicts that view by making it clear that both the haves and the have-nots fall within the compass of God’s Providence, that God has chosen some to have and some to have less. But he also reveals why that is. Which is that so both the haves and the have-nots be saved via different virtues. The have-nots are saved through the virtue of patience amidst their struggles in the world. They learn to patiently turn towards God in hope and faith that he will take care of them and fulfil their needs. Whereas the haves are saved by giving what they have to the poor so that in fact the divine intervention that the poor patiently wait for comes about through the charity of the rich, and both the haves and the have-nots are saved together.
As I say, this way of understanding economic inequality in society can offend our modern sensibility. But I think it is the most illumined way to understand that inequality, and that the extent to which, these days, on both sides of that divide, angry injustice and a lust for vengeance tends to inform the way inequality is contemplated, to that extent that inequality is not properly being addressed. Whereas if the have-nots would turn again to worshipping God and, through living a life of fasting and simple virtue, humbly await divine mercy; and if the haves would also turn again to worshipping God and loving God and would love their neighbour by giving generously of their wealth to the poor; then we would be several steps further toward a truly just society.
Whereas until then, all of this anger and lust for vengeance is getting us nowhere.
St Leo finishes:
Let us therefore fast on Wednesday and Friday and on Saturday keep vigil with the most blessed Apostle Peter, and he will deign to assist with his own prayers our supplications and fastings and alms, which our Lord Jesus Christ presents, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.
From the very first century of the Christian era, Christians fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. The church to which I belong, the Orthodox Church, still maintains this ancient rule of faith. And by fasting, the basic goal is not to eat to satiety but to remain slightly hungry.
The more specific rule on fasting days is to abstain from all animal products (with the exception, weirdly, of shellfish), all oil, and all alcohol; and, for those with the strength, to abstain completely from food until noon; or if you’re able, until 3 p.m.; or if you’re strong enough, until 6 p.m. So, the Orthodox Church’s rules are not hard and fast, they are more like guidelines, but the guidelines are clear and are easily followed. And so here, at the end of this sermon, St Leo is expressing a fasting practice which the Orthodox Church still holds.
As indeed it still tends to maintain vigil on Saturday. He says, ‘Let us fast on Wednesday and Friday and on Saturday keep vigil.’ Keeping vigil is an ancient Christian ascetical practice. It basically means not to go to sleep. To stay up all night—or to stay up as much as you can—and, instead of sleeping, to pray and to read the Scriptures. Christians traditionally did that every Saturday night in preparation for the Liturgy, for Holy Communion on Sunday morning, and that practice is still maintained, certainly in monasteries, but even in some parish churches.
Both of these basic ascetical practices—fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays and not getting a full night’s sleep on Saturday nights—are the foundational ways in which the Christian soul begins his journey towards cutting off his mind’s passionate attachment to objects of sense perception and turning instead towards God and towards eternal spiritual realities that are the rational soul’s true food.
And with that, we have reached the end of St Leo the Great’s Sermon 19. You now see what Life Sentences is all about: in each episode, I will read through one text from a Church Father, offering commentary as I go. I hope you found it illuminating, or at least interesting.
If you have found it illuminating, and if it speaks to something in you that you would like to explore further, you may wish to consider becoming a Christian—or practising the Christian tradition in its most ancient and integral fashion. If that’s the case, I can suggest that you inquire at your nearest Orthodox Church.
With that I leave you. Next time on Life Sentences, we will be reading through another sermon by Pope St Leo the Great.
Until then, stay well.
Episode 1: Starting with the basics