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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 Leo the Great, Pope of Rome, takes us even deeper into the spirituality of asceticism, and we learn how behind the practice of fasting lies a sophisticated doctrine about the nature of the human mind.
Last time we read through St Leo’s Sermon 19. In it, St Leo introduced us to Christian asceticism, explaining that through fasting, vigil, and almsgiving, we learn to restrain carnal desires, turning away from attachment to objects of sense perception so that we can turn inward and instead attach ourselves to God.
In this episode, in another sermon, St Leo will reveal even more to us about not just fasting, but about the understanding of the human being which underlies the Church’s teaching on fasting, especially the way that Christianity understands the role of the human mind.
But before the sermon, I think I should tell you a little bit more about St Leo himself.
Leo was born in the year AD 400. He was born in Rome but his family were originally from Tuscany. They were aristocrats who’d long before moved to Rome and so had become an established part of the Roman elite.
But the Roman Empire was no longer what it had been. 88 years earlier, in AD 312, the Emperor Constantine became a Christian—in some sense, at least, he became a Christian. He began to favour Christianity, eventually founding in AD 330 a new capital in the east named after himself, Constantinople (which today is Istanbul), symbolising the new pro-Christian imperial settlement he inaugurated. Then in AD 380, only 20 years before Leo was born, the Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. Pagan worship was steadily outlawed.
And so the Roman Empire fundamentally changed, and the aristocratization of the Christian episcopacy (that’s the order of bishops) had begun. Bishops adopted a grander style than before, leading to criticism from people who felt this was a betrayal of the Christian ethic of otherworldly poverty. But this development also worked the other way, because the empire’s governing ethos was shifting to embrace Christian moral and theological values.
This was a big change. The pagan Roman Empire—the empire that we see in sword-and-sandal epics produced by Hollywood—was not Christian. And that made a big difference; it was not informed by Christian moral and theological values, quite the contrary. But now, through Christianization, the old blood sacrifices to pagan gods were out. The rational worship, as it is called, of the Christian liturgy was in. Church institutions like hospitals, offering welfare for the poor, became a state concern, managed by the bishops, who were taking on the roles that the old patrician senatorial class or the old local aristocratic class had played before, as the primary source of cultural and social patronage, but with a difference because now the teachings of Christ were at the fore.
There’s sort of a parallel with our own age. In the 19th century, new civic, cultural, and religious institutions rose and grew, founded from below by Christians at the parish level, both Protestant and Catholic. Schools, hospitals, museums, concert halls, libraries, insurance schemes, welfare schemes, mortgage lending schemes—which in the early 20th century, with the rise of liberal progressivism and the managerial welfare state, were absorbed by the state in the form of new government agencies or new regulatory powers, leading to a wholesale change in the modern state’s governing ethos, as well as in a new class of liberal government technocrats who were either themselves from the old elite or else came up through new elite university institutions to win positions of power and influence. This radical change, which is still underway, happened and happens slowly enough that sometimes you can’t notice it, but it’s there.
Something like that was underway in the Roman Empire when Leo was born. He was born into an elite class that had Christianized itself and, having done so, managed to maintain their elite status.
But there’s another parallel with our age. This transformation of the past hundred years towards the liberal progressive welfare state, which is pretty positive from the point of view of morality (in many ways at least), has been accompanied by a palpable sense of cultural and social decline, generating widespread anxiety. The same was happening in Leo’s day. The Roman Empire, especially in the West, was being rocked by destabilising forces, including forces familiar to us, like plague (i.e. pandemic), new inward migration (i.e. so-called barbarian invasion), and rising geopolitical multipolarity (in the form of a Cold War with the Persian Empire of the Sassanids). And all of this taken together was causing sociopolitical shockwaves across the empire, again especially in the western half of the empire centred on Italy.
In fact, in AD 410, the year after Leo was born, Italy was invaded by the Goths, whose warlord Alaric spent the next nine years laying waste to the countryside. He put Rome itself under siege twice, and in AD 410, when Leo was nine years old, Alaric and the Goths sacked Rome.
The Empire was shook down to its bones. The Eternal City had fallen to barbarians, only thirty years after officially embracing Christianity. This was never supposed to happen. No one quite knew what to make of it.
But because Roman nobles had fled the city to their country estates, often in North Africa, there was a vacuum of leadership in Rome, in Italy, which the papacy would start to fill. So Leo came of age in a time of great change; great decline in one sense, but one in which the Church’s power, and therefore—and we must be honest about this—the influence of the Church’s Gospel preaching was increasing.
Leo’s career mapped this. He became a churchman at a young age and worked his way up, proving himself an able diplomat in negotiations with provincial rulers and barbarians. And he proved himself an able theologian, playing an important role in the Church’s debates with various fifth-century heretics.
And so it was that in AD 440 he was made Pope, the first Pope to be called ‘the Great’.
And great he was. He was a great pastor of souls, with truly compassionate insight into the spiritual nature of human being. He was a great and subtle writer and speaker. His writings, all in very elegant Latin, I’m told, are very accessible and yet contain great depth.
And he was a great man in the political sense of the term. Because in A.D. 452 Italy was invaded again, this time by the Huns and their fierce warlord Attila, the scourge of God. Rome was again in the barbarian sights. Another sacking by another barbarian group would no doubt have been fatal.
But, according to Church historians, and modern-day historians have cast aspersions on Church accounts, but according to one account from the time, and certainly according to mediaeval chroniclers, Pope St Leo went out to confront Attila. Paul the Deacon, a historian writing in the late 700s, so 300 years later, he tells the story:
‘Leo spoke to Attila, saying, “The Senate and the people of Rome, once conquerors of the world, now conquered, come before you as suppliants. We pray for mercy.” As Leo said these things, Attila stood silent, as if thinking deeply. And lo! Suddenly there were seen the apostles Peter and Paul, standing beside Leo, the one on the right hand, the other on the left. They held swords stretched out over his head, and threatened Attila with death if he did not obey the Pope’s command. Following which, Attila was appeased and withdrew back beyond the Danube.’
It’s a great story.
After this break, we will read St Leo the Great’s Sermon 49.
Welcome back to Life Sentences.
Here we go, this episode’s text: St Leo the Great’s Sermon 49.
St Leo gave this sermon during the period of Great Lent. This is a 50-day period of fasting that precedes Easter, or Pascha, as it is called in most of the non-English speaking world. And of all the fast periods in the Church’s year, Great Lent is the most rigorous. For that reason, I suppose, St Leo, in Sermon 49, lays out with special clarity what fasting is all about, as we will hear.
At all times and in every season, dearly beloved, some signs of the divine goodness are set before us, and no part of the year is destitute of sacred mysteries, in order that, so long as proofs of our salvation meet us on all sides, we may the more eagerly accept the never-ceasing calls of God’s mercy.
Now, if you remember in the previous episode, I talked about how St Leo, at one point, drew a connection between the material world all around us—the creation—and the Scriptures—the Gospels—which illumine the mind to invisible spiritual realities. And St Leo was implying that these two dimensions, the created and the scriptural, are in fact one. You might think that’s what he’s saying here, but in fact the Pope is referring to the Church’s liturgical year. So, ‘at all times and seasons,’ he says, ‘some signs of the divine goodness are set before us.’ Meaning, set before us by the Church in worship.
And the liturgical churches that still maintain a full calendar of worship—certainly the Orthodox Church of which I’m a part—continue to perform this function. You go to Church and a particular feast is being celebrated or a particular saint is being commemorated or the lectionary readings of that day invite you to contemplate one thing or another. The Pope here calls all of this material, the sacred mysteries that the Church presents to the faithful, ‘proofs of our salvation’.
And he doesn’t mean ‘proof’ there as we understand proof often today, as, well-proven undeniable fact. He means proof in the sense of a sign or an imprint or evidence of something, an indication of something. All of these mysteries that the Church sets before us are proofs of salvation in that sense. They are given to us to contemplate with our minds and perform with our bodies, that we might better come to know and indeed integrate the saving truth that the Church claims to proclaim.
And very interestingly, St Leo says that the point of all of this is so that we ‘may the more eagerly accept the never-ceasing calls of God’s mercy’. If you’ve ever been to an Orthodox Church you’ll be struck by how often the congregation calls on God’s mercy. Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy! Lord, have mercy! It’s said over and over again. And the Pope is suggesting here that though we might say that with our lips, in our hearts we may not accept it. We may not actually believe that God’s mercy has come to us. And he’s saying that the Church’s sacred mysteries, all these ‘proofs of our salvation’ are there so that we may eagerly accept these calls for God’s mercy, so that when we say, ‘Lord have mercy!’, we believe it.
One thing that this means is that the physical, material, sense-perceptible means of our salvation that the Church presents us with—incense, icons, rituals, words, sounds, bells, bread, wine—all such things are given to us by the Church to affect an inner change, in this case a change away from doubt to trust in God’s mercy, according to St Leo.
He goes on:
But all that is bestowed on the restoration of human souls in the various works and gifts of grace is put before us more clearly and abundantly now, when no isolated portions of the faith are to be celebrated, but the whole together.
St Leo is saying that, outside of the Paschal season—outside of the period on either side of Easter—the Church’s festivals, fasting periods, the lectionary readings, everything that the Church presents for us to contemplate, he says manifests a portion or a fragment or a partial dimension of the whole faith, but that in the Easter season, during Pascha, the whole of the faith is celebrated at once.
This is saying something not just about the Church’s worship, not just that Easter, Pascha, is the most important feast, though it certainly is. It’s saying something about the Gospel, about the import of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. Everything else—his birth, his baptism, his miracle-working, his teaching; and after his life on earth, the descent of the Holy Spirit, the spread of the Church, the death of the martyrs, the growth in the numbers of saints—all of these things are but workings out of the primary fact of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
And so, St Leo goes on:
For, as the Easter festival approaches, the greatest and most binding of fasts is kept, and its observance is imposed on all the faithful without exception, because no one is so holy that he ought not to be holier, nor so devout that he might not be more so. For who is there living in the uncertainty of this life that is either exempt from temptation or free from fault?
St Leo here has just introduced the primary themes of his sermon, that this life is uncertain, in flux, always changeable, unstable; and that, for that reason, our minds, with their bodies of flesh attached to this uncertain fluctuating world, are always laid open to temptation; and even, beyond temptation, are always, in some way at least, implicated in sin. To be a human being, a rational mind in a body of flesh, inherently involves us in some sin, in some pollution, in some impurity.
And frankly, if you pay attention at all to yourself, you’ll realize that we all carry around a burden of shame. It’s part of being a human being. You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize it. Even Freud knew this very clearly. To be human is to be somehow shame-ridden, guilt-ridden, haunted by the feeling that one isn’t good enough, that one has done something wrong. We simply live with this as part of our incarnate selves. And the Church teaches that for fallen humanity, this is an unavoidable consequence of our very state of being rational minds in fleshly bodies, rational minds that can perceive eternal truths, if only dimly, connected to fleshly bodies that in order to remain alive must remain connected to this world of flux and change, of death and decay.
This is the human predicament that, according to the Church, Christ came to save us from, as we’ll see.
So, ‘who is there,’ he asks, ‘that is either exempt from temptation or free from fault?’ And he goes on:
Who is there who wishes to add no virtue or remove no vice…
No one is perfect. No one is perfect.
Who is there who wishes to add no virtue or remove no vice, seeing that adversity harms us and prosperity spoils us, and not to have what we want at all is as dangerous as having it to the full. There is a trap in an abundance of riches, and a trap in the distress of poverty. The one lifts us up in pride, the other incites us to complain. Health tries us, sickness tries us, so long as the one fosters carelessness and the other sadness. There is a snare in security, a snare in fear, and it makes no difference if the mind given over to earthly thoughts is taken up with joys or with cares, for it is equally unhealthy to languish under empty delights as it is to labour under racking anxiety.
Wow, that’s a rather lengthy passage, but I thought I would just read it in full. It paints a really vivid picture of life in this world, that we’re never exempt from temptation. Everything we encounter in the world is a potential temptation. If you’re rich, the temptation is to be proud. If you’re poor, the temptation is to be resentful. If you’re healthy, the temptation is to become slothful and careless. If you’re sick, the temptation is to become depressed and weighed down.
And that last bit is particularly relevant to us today, I think, when he says that it makes no difference if the mind given over to earthly thoughts is taken up with joys or with cares. Ours is a pleasure-seeking age. Human beings are, in their natural state, inveterately pleasure-seeking. And in our age, given the technology available to us given the general level of prosperity, our innate tendency towards pleasure-seeking is empowered. Sitting before the television, sitting before the computer, our minds are certainly given over to earthly thoughts taken up with joys, if you like. Pleasures. Entertainment.
And the question is, why do we spend so much of our time vegging out in front of more or less mindless entertainment? Obsessed with entertainment? Why is that? Why do we fear that entertainment being taken from us?
Is it because, if our minds were no longer able in that way to indulge earthly thoughts taken up with joys, our earthly thoughts would be taken up with cares?
We medicate our underlying anxiety, our underlying unhappiness, unease with entertainment, with pleasure-seeking. But St Leo is here saying that it is equally unhealthy to languish under empty delights as it is to labour under racking anxiety. Fleeing to entertainment, to pleasure, is no solution to the anxiety that we feel, to that shame that we feel.
St Leo’s doctrine here is profoundly challenging to us today. Afraid to stare our shame, our anxiety in the face, we flee to pleasures, but because indulgence in pleasure is unnatural for our minds, fleeing to pleasure only builds up more anxiety and more shame inside of us, as we will see.
St Leo goes on:
And thus is perfectly fulfilled that assurance of the truth by which we learn that ‘the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life.’ [That’s Matthew 7:14.] And while the wide road that leads to death is crowded with great multitudes, the steps are few of those walking the path of salvation. And why is the left road more thronged than the right, save that the multitude is prone to worldly joys and carnal goods.
I want to stop and point something out. Because when we hear ‘the wide road that leads to death’ contrasted with ‘the path of salvation’, we may be tempted to think of the afterlife here. We may be tempted to think that St Leo is primarily talking about something that happens to us after we die: most of us go to hell, some of us go to heaven.
That would be a very elementary school level of interpretation of what the saint is saying. As you see in the following sentence, he’s defined the left road as being ‘prone to worldly joys and carnal goods’. So the death to which the wide road leads is attachment, is immersion in worldly joys and carnal goods. If you are attached to objects of sense perception, to the pleasure that those objects give you—and pleasure is a broad tent, there are many kinds of pleasure—but if your mind is attached to pleasure, then you are dead. You are walking the road that has led to your death.
And the alternative road, the ‘narrow hard way’, leads to salvation. Which is to say, is the rescue of the mind from attachment to pleasures of sense perception, and its return to its proper place, contemplating eternal realities.
So yes, St Leo says the multitude is prone to worldly joys and carnal goods, and goes on:
And although that which it desires is short-lived and uncertain, yet men endure toil more willingly for the lust of pleasure than for the love of virtue.
That is a key passage. St Leo there has just shined a light on a very key conceptual distinction, key to Christian asceticism. And it’s surprising.
We think today that the opposite of pleasure is pain. But the Fathers knew better.
The opposite of pleasure isn’t pain. The opposite of pleasure is virtue.
We think that we will be saved from pain by fleeing to pleasure, but that is wrong. Pleasure and pain are not opposites. They are two sides of the same coin.
The pain we feel as human beings, that existential anguish that haunts us, is not opposed to pleasure. It is caused by pleasure.
And so it is no solution to that pain to flee towards pleasure. Rather, the solution to that existential anguish, our salvation, lies in virtue.
And virtue requires pain, a degree of pain. Therein lies the heart of the Christian conception of temptation.
Christ’s Way of the Cross is saying the path to salvation is through the pain that is attendant upon being a human being. The devil, who wants to deny us that salvation, who wants us to stay in our pain, holds out pleasure to us, knowing that if we listen to him and turn towards pleasure, we will be stuck in our pain forever.
See how backwards we are. The saint says, ‘Men endure toil more willingly for pleasure than for virtue.’ In order to acquire pleasure we work like dogs. We slog our guts out. We do jobs we hate. We study subjects that bore us to death. We maintain personal relationships with people that we despise, all so that we will be afforded pleasure. Pleasure enough to numb our anxiety.
Whereas St Leo would say, no! Rather, toil after virtue. Because that struggle—which does involve some pain, some discomfort, some deprivation—is salvific. That will solve the problem. Virtue will lighten the pain. The very pursuit of virtue with faith will lighten the pain of that pursuit.
This is the mysterious dynamic of Christian asceticism, as you’ll see.
He goes on:
Thus, while those who crave things visible are unnumbered, scarcely can any be found who prefer the eternal to the temporal.
St Leo is just echoing there what I’ve said many times before.
There’s visible, sense-perceptible reality to which our minds can become unnaturally attached; and there’s invisible, eternal reality to which our minds naturally attend.
As St Leo will now go on to say in a paragraph that is absolutely key, this is of monumental import if you want to understand Christianity. Please pay attention closely.
And therefore, seeing that the Blessed Apostle Paul says, ‘The things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal,’ the path of virtue lies hidden and concealed to a certain extent, since ‘by hope we were saved’, and true faith loves above all that which it reaches without any intervention of the flesh.
Right, that sentence is key, as I say, and we must unpack it.
First having drawn this distinction—between visible, sense-perceptible, temporal reality, always in flux; and invisible eternal reality, that is stable and true—St Leo says that the path of virtue—the path away from attachment to visible reality toward attachment to invisible, eternal, spiritual reality; the path of virtue—lies hidden, lies concealed inside the human heart; and is accessed, he says, by true faith, which is an energy of the mind inclining towards invisible spiritual realities. Realities that cannot be seen. Realities that therefore cannot be subject to the same degree of empirical verification as objects of sense perception.
The mind, given to know invisible, spiritual realities, is stuck in sense perception, is stuck in temporality, is stuck in the visible material world. And that’s why faith is needed. Faith is the first movement of the mind towards the invisible. Moving from visibility to invisibility—from a kind of light to what seems to you to be darkness—is a leap in the dark, is a leap of faith. But it is actually a movement away from real ignorance, which is what absorption in sense-perceptible reality is, towards real knowledge, knowledge of spiritual eternal truths.
If you wish to be saved from the tragedy of your mind’s enmeshment in sense perception, there is no alternative to faith. Faith is the salvation. Faith is when the mind takes that big gulp and says, ‘The truth lies in what is not seen.’ And according to the Christian tradition, that faith is immediately rewarded with knowledge, with an intuitive understanding—first a glimpse, then a glimmer, but ever growing more clear—an understanding of spiritual eternal truths.
And after this quick break, St Leo will show us how the soul, by embracing faith, by orienting itself away from the temporal and toward the eternal, must then brace itself for what inevitably follows: spiritual warfare.
Back in a sec.
Welcome back. St Leo has just told us that faith is required—the mind’s leap in the dark away from absorption in sense perception and toward absorption in God. What follows after is the hard part: the Way of the Cross.
St Leo goes on:
With the numberless allurements of pleasure to ensnare it on all sides, hard labour it is then to keep our wayward heart from all sin, and not to let the vigour of the mind succumb to any attack.
Wow, it sounds there that St Leo is setting before us an impossibly high standard. To keep our wayward heart free from all sin, not to let the vigour of our mind succumb to any attack—of selfishness, of pleasure-seeking, of indulgence.
But don’t worry, that’s his point. He’s building up an image. He’s painting for us a picture of just what perfection would entail. As he goes on:
Who touches wet tar and is not defiled by it? Who is not weakened by the flesh? Who is not soiled by the dust? Who indeed is of such purity as not to be polluted by those things without which one cannot live?
So you see here it’s as I said earlier. Simply living in these bodies of flesh, we come into contact with pleasurable, sense-perceptible reality that bewitches our minds to some extent, that pollutes our minds to some extent. We cannot avoid it, but we must struggle against it.
As he now says:
For the divine teaching commands by the Apostle’s mouth, ‘Let those who have wives live as though they had none. Let those who weep live as though they wept not. Those who rejoice live as though they rejoiced not. Those who buy as though they owned nothing. And those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.’
He’s saying along with St Paul that we live in this world of change, of flux, of decay and death; we are implicated in it through our bodies. But we must struggle against being fully immersed in it, losing ourselves in it.
That’s the Christian way. That’s the Way of the Cross.
As he goes on:
Blessed therefore is the mind that passes the time of its pilgrimage in chaste sobriety and loiters not in the things through which it has to walk, so that as a stranger rather than the possessor of its earthly abode, while not lacking human affections, it relies on the divine promises.
Another excellent sentence, packed full of wisdom. He first says that we are minds on pilgrimage, minds on a journey, minds forced to walk in these bodies of sense perception so that we would struggle against becoming attached, through pleasure, to sense perception and instead learn to rely on the ‘divine promises’—to hope, in faith, in God.
If you reorient your thinking away from how you have been given to understand yourself as essentially a body, a mechanical body that is automatically producing a conscious self as a kind of illusion… This is the way in which modern people are given to understand themselves. We are simply meat machines generating consciousness, but it’s all an illusion. If you get away from that way of understanding yourself and instead remember that you are a mind—a knowing, loving subject that is, in turn, known and loved. You are a mind that is currently knowing via a sensual body, but which body actually is a veil obscuring the eternal truth that your mind wants to know.
This situation has been given to you so that you will, with effort, turn away from pleasure towards faith in God.
It’s like the scene in the first Star Wars movie where Obi-Wan Kenobi is teaching, for the first time, Luke how to use a lightsaber. And he puts the mask over Luke’s head, and Luke says, ‘How am I supposed to fight? I can’t see a thing in this helmet!’ And what does Obi-Wan say? ‘Use the Force.’
Now, George Lucas in his superlative wisdom has created a scene there that expresses very well our state as human beings. We are born onto this planet like Luke Skywalker destined to become a spiritual hero. But these fleshly bodies are like that helmet, veiling our minds. But not as something evil, as something good—a training device, so that our minds, using their own freedom, will learn to turn towards the invisible eternal God. To rely, as St Leo says, on ‘the divine promises’.
And now he’s going to start talking about the spiritual warfare that all of this demands. He writes:
And dearly beloved, no season requires and bestows this courage more than the present, when by the observance of a special strictness a habit is acquired which must be preserved in.
I am glad that St Leo invokes courage there, because courage is a great foundational virtue, precisely for this reason. It takes courage to turn the mind away from the visible to the invisible. It takes courage to take that leap in the dark. It takes courage to withstand the temptations towards pleasure and enmeshment in the flesh, and to resist that movement and keep your attention on the spiritual instead.
As C.S. Lewis, the great Christian writer, once wrote, ‘Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.’
C.S. Lewis there, and I know St Leo would have agreed, is pointing out something really important, that ‘courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point’. This is why courage is foundational. This is why the very word virtue comes from the Latin vir which means ‘male’. Not in a sexist way, but because courage is associated with masculinity; it is considered a masculine virtue. And therefore every virtue is, in a sense, a form of courage; and therefore virtue only grows in the soul when the soul is put to the test, when the soul is forced to summon courage to withstand temptation.
And temptations come, as St Leo now says:
For it is well known to you that this is the time when throughout the world the devil waxes furious, and the Christian army has to combat him, and any that have grown lukewarm and slothful, or that are absorbed in worldly cares, must now be furnished with spiritual armour, and their ardour kindled for the fray by the heavenly trumpet inasmuch as he ‘through whose envy death came into the world’ is now consumed with the strongest jealousy and now tortured with the greatest vexation.
St Leo is writing during the Lenten season, during that Lenten fast; and he’s saying that during this fast especially the devil becomes angry and turns his attention towards destroying Christian virtue.
And it’s interesting there that he quotes that passage in the Old Testament book, the Wisdom of Solomon, when he says of the devil, ‘through whose envy death came into the world’. If you remember in the last episode, St Leo enumerated four principal vices, one of which was envy. And a lot of Church Fathers say that envy was the devil’s sin, or at least it was the sin that drove the devil out of heaven.
The story behind that is really fascinating, and one day I’m sure it will come up in this podcast. For now, it is enough to know that the Church Fathers imagine the devil as a hugely powerful, envious mind. Envious of human beings and the love that human beings are given by God. The devil hates human beings. He envies them. He feels he’s better than us and yet knows that God favours us, and he hates this.
He hates seeing the image of God in us, which is what he sees when we are performing virtue. When we perform virtue, we are radiating divine life, divine qualities, and this drives the devil crazy. He does whatever he can to prevent it and to stop it. Especially, St Leo says, during fasting periods like Great Lent.
And he goes on:
For he, the devil, sees whole tribes of the human race brought in afresh to the adoption of God’s sons and the offspring of the new birth, multiplied through the virgin fertility of the Church.
Here’s a direct indication of that transformative period that the Roman Empire was undergoing during St Leo ’s life. Christianity had been declared the official religion of the Roman Empire and the Church had been given great power as a result of that, and yet most people had not been Christian, they had been pagan, and yet now were joining the Church in great numbers, through baptism ‘being adopted’, as St Leo said, ‘as God’s sons’, ‘offspring’, as he says, ‘of the new birth, multiplied through the virgin fertility of the Church’.
It’s an image straight from the Gospel, of the Church as a fertile field into which human beings were being planted, each human like a seed being placed in the earth. A death of sorts, that is. However, in fact, a new birth, arising to new life. A turning of the mind away from the death-drivenness of the sense perceptible world and towards Christ—who, as Saint Paul says, in his ascension into heaven, into the realm of eternal truth, is now a life-giving spirit.
This development—of more and more people embracing the Way of the Cross—is driving the devil crazy, St Leo says.
And he goes on:
He sees himself robbed of all his tyrannic power and driven from the hearts of those he once possessed, while from either sex thousands of the old, the young, the middle-aged are snatched away from him and no one is debarred, neither by his own sin nor by original sin, where righteousness is not granted as payment for work done but simply given as a free gift.
This is key.
Christianity teaches that justification—being made righteous, being vindicated— is not given as a payment for virtue. If it were given as a payment for virtue, then the devil would have the advantage because he can so easily through temptation knock us off the way of virtue, can so easily entice us into vice.
No, righteousness is given as a free gift, given as a result of faith in Christ, in the gift, in the saving power of the resurrection. And it is that faith that makes a man righteous and, more than anything, empowers the soul to resist demonic temptation and remain virtuous.
It’s quite a tricky logic to wrap your mind around, the Christian doctrine of justification. And much has been written and said about it that is wrong. But justification—being made righteous, being made virtuous—is a free gift given by God by faith. Faith which empowers the soul to resist demonic attack.
Demonic attack which continues, as St Leo is now going to say, and yet which is undermined.
He [the devil] sees too those that have lapsed and have been deceived by his treacherous snares, washed in the tears of penitence, and by the Apostles’ key unlocking the gates of mercy, admitted to the benefit of reconciliation.
The gift that Christ gives, the gift of justification, is a dynamic gift, empowering us to resist temptation. But when we fall, included in this gift of faith is the means of our reconciliation. Tears of penitence is how St Leo defines it. So, both at the outset of our Christian journey and in the midst of our Christian journey, the grace of Christ is there redeeming us, vindicating us, and empowering us to resist the devil’s snares.
St Leo then goes on:
He feels moreover that the day of the Lord’s passion is at hand, and that he is crushed by the power of that cross which in Christ, who was free from all debt of sin, was the world’s redemption and not a penalty.
Wow. The doctrine of redemption in Christianity is one of the hardest doctrines to understand. Like the doctrine of justification, much is said of it that is wrong.
St Leo is characterising redemption here by pointing out that crucifixion is normally an instrument of punishment. The worst criminals were punished by crucifixion, the implication being that they were punished justly by crucifixion. Crucifixion therefore being a great symbol of the death that our sin causes us, the death that our own criminality—our own deviation from the good that we all instinctively know in our consciences, in our hearts—crucifixion, the cross, is a symbol of the death that follows that deviation, the death that is experienced as the mind’s absorption in material, sense-perceptible reality, in the soul’s obsession with status, selfishness, ambition, possession; by waves of envy, jealousy, anger, anxiety, gluttony, rage, judgmentalness, that roll over us to the extent that we are attached to material things.
This spiritual death caused by our obsessive pleasure-seeking, in our desperation to avoid pain; all of this spiritual death—being a penalty for this deviation from the good—is radically reversed by Christ in his passion because he was perfect. He had no sin. He put death in contact with his own perfection, perfecting it thereby into a means of our redemption, not our punishment.
And so, believing in Christ, we can now embrace death. We can pursue self-abnegation. We can pursue self-emptying. We can pursue selflessness. We can lay down our flesh. We can cut off our attachment to sense perception. We can experience the egoic dissolution that all of that entails, the sense that we’re losing ourselves, our egos are dying, our grandiose or idealised self-image is crumbling—all of that death now becomes, for us, in Christ, salvation.
And after one final quick break, St Leo will explain how this salvation is the basis not of doing whatever we want, but of the union of our will with God’s will, by following Christ’s commandments.
Welcome back. Having summarised the logic of our salvation through faith in Christ’s passion and resurrection, St Leo now explains what is required of us: resisting temptation by following Christ’s commandments.
He writes:
And so, that the malice of the raging enemy may affect nothing by his rage, a keener devotion must be cultivated to the performance of the divine commands, in order that we may enter on the season when all the mysteries of the divine mercy meet together, with preparedness both of mind and body, invoking the guidance and help of God, that we may be strong to fulfil all things through him, without whom we can do nothing.
The divine commands, Christ’s commandments in the Gospel, taken together, teach us the Way of the Cross. Following Christ, dying to self after the pattern of his own passion, receiving thereby in faith the power to, with him, be resurrected into new and eternal life. Eternal life understood not primarily as some post-mortem experience of bliss in a place called heaven, not primarily understood that way. Eternal life primarily understood as virtue, as solidity in goodness, as a loving heart, as the mind’s constant contemplation of truth and not falsehood.
And as St Leo says, we fulfil the commandments through Christ, through him without whom we can do nothing. It’s not a question of being given some rules and simply doing them. We do them in faith. We invoke the name of Christ. We participate in the Church’s mysteries, which unite us with the Spirit of Christ that grants us his power, his strength, guiding us on our way towards perfect oneness with all.
So yes, we do all things through him, St Leo says.
And he goes on:
For the commandment is laid on us so that we would seek the aid of him who lays it.
Christ’s commandments seem very hard. Lay down your life? Love your enemy? Never harbour a condemnatory thought towards someone else in your heart? These commandments are mega!
And yet, St Leo is saying they are that way so that we would seek God’s aid. Because only God can fulfil these commandments, and he fulfils them in us by faith.
St Leo goes on:
Nor must anyone excuse himself by reason of his weakness, since he who has granted the will also gives the power, as the blessed Apostle James says, ‘If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who gives to all liberally and does not reproach and it shall be given.’
I would hate for you to take away from all of this talk of walking the road of virtue as if Christianity is simply a question of doing the right thing. Αs if God has told us what to do, now just do it. Christianity is not so naive.
And anyway, moral goodness for its own sake isn’t really the point. The real point is union with God—the mind’s union with God. A union that then reverberates throughout the whole being, absorbing the body itself, transforming everything. That’s the goal, union with God.
Which is why, when confronted by Christ’s commandments, the first order of business is turning to God in prayer, calling on God, invoking his help: Lord have mercy! Help me, God! Help me, God! Teach me your commandments! Empower me to fulfil your commandments! Without you I can do nothing!
This whole activity—walking the Way of the Cross, practising the commandments with this sort of spirit—is an activity oriented towards and slowly leading us towards union with God, which is the point.
Not simply doing the right thing, being good people. That’s not the point—although it does follow naturally from union with God, who is absolute goodness.
An absolute goodness which St Leo says we know in our hearts. He goes on:
Which of the faithful does not know what virtues he ought to cultivate, and what vices to fight again? Who is so partial or so unskilled a judge of his own conscience as not to know what ought to be removed and what ought to be developed? Surely no one is so devoid of reason as not to understand the character of his mode of life or not to know the secrets of his heart.
St Leo is making clear what St Paul also makes clear, especially in the Epistle to the Romans.
The law of God is inscribed in our hearts. Everyone knows God to the extent that everyone has an instinct for moral judgement, for distinguishing between right and wrong. If we didn’t know, in our hearts, God, the Good, then by what absolute standard would we ever be able to make any moral judgement? Any judgement presupposes a standard against which the judgement is made.
Of course, some philosophers—atheistic, nihilistic—claim that that standard that we think that we know, and therefore the moral judgements we think we are right to make, are all illusions. And you are free to believe that if you like.
But it is not true. And everyone knows it, really. No one could live that way.
St Leo then goes on:
Let him not then please himself in everything, nor judge himself according to the delights of the flesh, but place his every habit in the scale of the divine commands, where some things being ordered to be done and others forbidden, he can examine himself in a true balance by weighing the actions of his life according to this standard. For the designing mercy of God has set up the brightest mirror in his commandments, wherein a man may see his mind’s face and realise its conformity or dissimilarity to God’s image, with the specific purpose that we may throw off our carnal cares and restless occupations, and betake ourselves from earthly matters to heavenly.
Scrutinising one’s conscience, being merciless with oneself in that sense, staring oneself in the face and owning up to the ways in which we fall short of ‘the scale of the divine commands’, as St Leo says, is a fundamentally important plank in Christian spirituality.
On the level of Church practice, confession is a sacrament of the Church for this reason, where in a ritual way you go before your confessor, a priest, and reveal to him the ways in which you have fallen short of God’s command and, with penitence, receive absolution.
But in addition to that ritual dimension, every Christian is commanded to remain attentive to his conscience at every moment.
In fact, most spiritual fathers advise, before you sit down to pray in any formal way, you take a minute, reflect on your actions, on your thoughts, on your feelings over the previous period, and be honest with yourself—how did I fall short?— and repent of it.
The light of self-knowledge that divides, in our hearts, good from evil—that light is the light of Christ. It is the light that became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and revealed to the world the truth of God.
We must cultivate that inner light. We must be honest with ourselves. We must cling to the truth, the truth of who we really are, and allow the truth to burn away our sins.
And all of this must be done with an attitude of great mercy, as St Leo then says:
But because, as it is written, in many things we all stumble, the feeling of mercy should be aroused first and the faults of others against us forgotten, that we may not violate by any love of revenge that most holy contract to which we bind ourselves in the Lord’s Prayer. So that, when we say, ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,’ let us not be miserly in forgiving. For whichever we act on, whether the lust for revenge or the kindness of mercy, will come back upon us.
When I was in Greece, first learning about Orthodox spirituality, the monks that I was talking to would often invoke what they called ‘the spiritual law’. And it sounded to my ears like karma, or what my understanding of karma was. You know, we have an idea of karma: the evil that you do, you will yourself somehow experience down the line. There’s a kind of action-reaction dynamic at the heart of the world.
Well, the truth is Christianity also teaches this and it is known as ‘the spiritual law’. And it focuses especially on the question of judgement, on passing judgement of other people. As St Leo has articulated here when he says, ‘For whichever we act on, whether the lust for revenge or the kindness of mercy, will come back on us.’
So in Christianity, it’s certainly not as vulgar as, if I steal something, something will be stolen from me; if I murder someone, then I will be murdered; if something bad happens to me in this life, it’s because I’ve done something bad. That might be the case, I don’t know. But what St Leo is talking about here is something much more specific and something much more inward.
If you judge people harshly, you will be judged harshly. If you look at people’s faults, God will look on your faults. If you are not merciful, he will not have mercy on you.
And this is what we want, God’s mercy! Because God’s mercy is purifying, cleansing. It is through God’s mercy that those faults that we see in others and in ourselves are purified.
So, if we condemn someone, we cut ourselves off from the mercy without which we will remain sinful. We will remain in that state of shame-ridden, anxious anguish—which is what we want to be saved from.
And so, St Leo says:
Given that everyone is constantly exposed to the dangers of temptations, surely we should prefer for our own faults to go unpunished than to ensure that other people’s faults are punished.
Very powerful, that. He goes on:
And what is more in harmony with the Christian faith than that there should be forgiveness of sinners?
You know, you see it there in black and white, St Leo saying so clearly that we must forgive sinners, and then you think, how often does the Church, do Christians, judge and condemn and set themselves up as self-righteous puritanical prigs?
How often have Christians fallen short of this basic teaching that there should be forgiveness of sinners?
It’s shameful, it’s pathetic how often Christians fail in this fundamental way.
And, St Leo says:
Not only in the Church but also in the home.
There should be forgiveness of sinners not only in the Church but also in the home. We don’t just forgive sinners in a public way, we forgive them in a real way, in our home. We forgive the people who are closest to us, our family members—and everyone knows that it is with family that the deepest resentments, the most sublime irritations, and often the greatest lust for vengeance obtains.
It is in the home that we must be forgiving above all.
He goes on:
Let threats be laid aside, let chains be loosened, for he who will not loose them will bind himself with them much more disastrously. For however a man judges another, so does he judge himself by the same ruling. Whereas, ‘Blessed are the merciful, for God shall have mercy on them.’ And he is just and kind in his judgments, allowing some to be in the power of others to this end, that under fair government both the usefulness of discipline and the mildness of clemency should be held in balance, and that no one should dare to deny that pardon to another’s sin which he wants to receive for his own.
In that sentence you really see how the eruption into the Roman Empire of Christ’s commandments changed everything.
St Leo, the Pope of Rome, now a very exalted political office in the Empire, a man sent on diplomatic missions to barbarians, a man with many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people looking to him as judge; this man is defining fair government as a kind of government where there is no punishment for its own sake. There is no vengeance. Where, as he puts it, the ‘usefulness of discipline’—which is to say remedial punishment, not vengeful punishment, remedial punishment—and mercy, ‘the mildness of clemency’, are held in balance, and that you should pardon people as much as possible so that you yourself will be pardoned.
This is a huge change from the prevailing standard of justice in the ancient pagan world, a world where sometimes thousands of men would be crucified, their crosses lined up along the road, dying, exposed to the elements, exposed to vultures pecking out their eyes, sometimes for the meanest infraction of the most arbitrary rule, where the power of the potentate to pass judgement was absolute, his word was law, and there was no higher law.
That kind of world—which, it must be admitted, Roman jurisprudence itself had done a lot to redress through the exercise of reason—was fully and finally rejected when the Empire became Christian, and when the Church was given the authority to hold up that Gospel standard of justice to the rulers of the world.
As St Leo continues to do, as he writes:
Furthermore, as the Lord says, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.’ So let all conflict and hate be laid aside, and let no one who has neglected to restore brotherly peace think to have a share in the paschal feast. For he who is not in charity with the brethren will not be reckoned in the number of the sons of the Father on high. Furthermore, let our Christian fasts grow fat on the giving of alms, and on caring for the poor, and let each bestow on the weak and destitute those luxuries which he denies himself. Let pains be taken that all may bless God with one mouth. And let him that gives some portion of his own wealth understand that he is but a minister of the divine mercy, for God has placed the cause of the poor in the hand of the generous man, that the sins which are washed away, either by the waters of baptism or the tears of repentance, may also be blotted out by almsgiving. For, as the scripture says, ‘As water extinguishes fire, so almsgiving extinguishes sin,’ through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with the Father and with the Holy Spirit lives and reigns forever and ever. Amen.
So, like in the sermon we heard last time, St Leo is emphasising here the role that almsgiving has in fasting. Without giving away those possessions—that we have been given so that we give them away!—the spiritual renewal we hope from fasting cannot be achieved.
That was St Leo the Great’s Sermon 49. We are now going to leave St Leo the Great and move on to other Church Fathers.
But St Leo has done us a great service: laying the foundations of our exploration of Christian spirituality. First, by highlighting the important role that asceticism plays; and then, expanding on that, by revealing why fasting is so important, revealing how it is that our minds, made to contemplate divine truth, are at present enmeshed in sense perception, and without fasting and without faith the mind cannot be detached from that enmeshment, cannot be saved and illumined in the way that it is meant to be.
In the next few episodes, we’re going to be spending time with the so-called Desert Fathers, the greatest ascetics in Christian history, and really the greatest teachers of the spiritual way. So, with the foundations that St Leo has laid, we will now build up our edifice of Christian wisdom.
Thank you very much for following along. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found it illuminating.
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Until next time, stay well.
Episode 2: You are a mind