A Study Of “On The Character of Men And the Virtuous Life”: Part XX.

Introduction and Part II

The soul shares in the experiences of the body while the body does not always share in the experiences of the soul. [1] This is because there are qualities of the soul which transcend the body. “Thus, when the body is cut, the soul suffers too; and when the body is vigorous and healthy, the soul shares its well-being. But when the soul thinks, the body is not involved and does not think with it; for thinking is a passion or property of the soul, as also are ignorance, arrogance, unbelief, greed, hatred, envy, anger, apathy, self-esteem, love of honour, contentiousness and the perception of goodness.”[2]

Our aim should be to participate with the divine. Thus, we are called to meditate upon God, so that we can conform ourselves to him and participate in with the divine life. To do so, we must be of the character capable of such meditation – we must be “full of goodness, free from envy, devout, self-restrained, gentle, as generous as possible, kindly, peaceable, and so on. For to conform to God through such qualities, and not to judge anyone or to say that he is wicked and has sinned, is to render the soul inviolate.”[3] We are expected to discover within ourselves whatever faults we might have and eliminate them as we try to conform ourselves to God. This is something personal, and so we are to let others do this for themselves. “What concern is it of ours if another man is wicked?”[4]

To be the person we are meant to be, we must be devout, and in our devotions, we must seek what is proper to ourselves.[5] We are made in the image of God, and so we should find ourselves directed to God, who is eternal and uncreated; indeed, our proper inclination is toward God, not created things, because such transitory goods are alien to our natural end. [6] We must “live rightly” and “conform to God.”[7] “But he cannot live like this unless he detaches himself from worldly things.”[8] It is through a love of God we see what benefits our soul, and see that devotion to God is possible after a detachment from worldly things.[9] We must understand our own guilt for our sins, and blame no one else for our failings; and when we see someone who blames no one else for their sins, we have a “sign of a soul in which salvation is at work.”[10] Those, however, who “contrive to gain possession of transitory things by force are also attached to their desire to act violently.”[11] They ignore what is in their interest, for they follow a path which leads to suffering after death.[12]

We are called for transcendence. “We must therefore be eager to be near the good God, to be always with the Lord.”[13] We are called to experience God, and then incarnate our experience, to bring the deifying grace we receive into the world so as to transfigure it. To be transcendent, we must overcome fallen mode of existence. We are, to be sure, enfleshed, and we must recognize that the body is not evil; it is a part of who we are. We must come to understand that we are spirit as well as flesh in order to properly be the person we have been created to be. When we dismiss one or the other, we will suffer, and we will find that when we reject what God has made, it will be to our own peril. Our focus must be holistic, and we must engage all aspects of our being; if we neglect the spirit for the sake of the body and all that is material, we will not be able to control ourselves, to control the impulses of the flesh. Thus, those who find themselves living an entirely materialistic life will find themselves enslaved by the necessity contained within matter; everything will follow deterministic rules, and the forces within matter will determine how one acts. If one entirely dismisses their spiritual side, one will become an objective force without subjective control. On the other hand, without the body, the spirit’s ability to temper matter so that subjects can transcend the natural laws of necessity will be meaningless: it will be as if one is given a blank canvas, free to paint as one wills, without having the paint necessary to create a work of art.

We must be good. We must live life so that goodness will be found throughout our being; to get there, we must realize our spiritual potency, to realize the spiritual aspect of our being, and to master it. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24 RSV). We have a spiritual side, and so, if we want to realize the fullness of our being and so to realize the likeness of God in us, we must do so through our spirit. We must explore and find out what it means to have a spirit (the same is true about having a body, but, because of the fallen mode of existence, we quickly come to know our bodily nature and what it means). Our spirit, having been given free will, can and does create prisons for itself; it must find its way out of those prisons; this is what it means to purify the spirit, to make it free from necessity so that it can be open to and experience the divine life.

Because of sin, we have found ourselves turned away from a holistic approach to existence; we find ourselves fixed upon a materialistic existence. We come to know ourselves in and through the bodily senses. For most people, that is the extent of their awareness (though, of course, their spiritual senses will be working, to some extent, in an unconscious fashion). The goods of the created world, which are indeed good in and of themselves, are treated as being more than the limited goods they are meant to be; we treat them as transcendent goods and will to experience them as such. Of course, they do not satisfy us when we get them, because they end up vanishing and becoming as if they were nothing. And so, when they vanish, we look for some other similar good. We keep this up until we realize that there is a spiritual reality which underlies all material existence, with its own rules and expectations, but also, with its own rewards. Indeed, we will find, as St Symeon the New Theologian says, “The sun, the stars, heaven and earth, all things pass away; of all things man alone abides.”[14] That is, all that is around us, all that we strive for, will be seen as transient and will not last; we will find ourselves outlasting them. We may appreciate them but we must not strive for them; since we abide beyond them we must then explore what it is which allows us to do so, our spirit, and find out how find peace when we find ourselves continuing beyond all that we have sought to have in life. As as long as we have not grown accustomed to our spiritual nature, we find our desires entirely fixed upon things which will not last, and so, on things which will not satisfy.

When we begin our spiritual ascent, we find that our spiritual senses have been weakened because we have not used them. Indeed, they can become so atrophied they do not seem to work. No matter how bad they are, they can be healed, they can be brought back to work, but it requires care and attention. Just like a bright light will hurt the eyes of one who has been in the dark, their reawakening will, at least initially, bring similar pain, but as one matures and grows in their use, that pain will vanish.

What is of the flesh is certainly a part of us. What we see through our bodily senses leads to bodily desires. We experience pleasure and pain in the flesh. We interpret the world through our sixth sense – through the physical aspect of our mind, the brain – and for many of us, that is the height of our conscious noetic experience. Most people allow these six senses (if one includes the brain and its intellectual perception based upon its integration of the other five) to be their primary forms of perception, allowing for other forms of their conscious, while still there, to work without efficiency and, often, to work unconsciously. Everyone experiences higher spiritual realities which transcend the physical senses, but most people to not realize the spiritual content of these forms of consciousness, and so do not examine them and understand how they can be employed by the one who focuses on them and purifies them. One can talk about two or three levels of consciousness (depending on whether one just looks at them as material/spiritual or material/soul/spirit); we are capable of influencing all our forms of consciousness if we are aware of them, while they influence us and control our choices if we do not explore them and purify them from their fallen, deceptive, modality of activity.

The physical level of existence, of course, is where we are most aware. But even then, we often let the senses and their input confuse us. We let momentary pleasures direct us and we pursue them, without realization of the consequences of our actions. We ignore the higher, greater spiritual reality in which we move and live. Our spiritual existence is indeed moved by our physical experiences, and so, when we experience pleasure, we experience as a whole person, and when we experience some physical pain or sorrow, we experience it as a whole person. However, there is more to us than the pure physical experience, there is the interpretation of that experience, there is a higher mode of living out that experience. We can be in pleasure of some sort while suffering angst, showing us, of course, that there is more to us than what is physical. If we want to overcome that angst we must work with our psychic nature and see how it is not only influenced by the physical experiences we live out, but by its own experiences and modes of consciousness, and see how we can change those aspects of consciousness which detour us from our goal, that being, deification. As long as we are focused on the material world to the exclusion of what is spiritual, we will never be able to attain the happiness we seek.

There are many ways we can map out the levels of consciousness, and the different ways our body, soul and spirit interact. Each map can and will have its value, but we must also understand what underlies all such maps. We must understand we are one holistic person; while perceptions can be of the body, soul or spirit, they penetrate each other, and are not to be read as totally independent from each other. The greatest depth of who we are lies not in the material, but in the spiritual levels of consciousness, those aspects of us which are the least deterministic and thus where we are most free to creatively establish our identity. When try to map out the various forms of consciousness we can find in our holistic, integral person, we must realize the nature of that map is that the shapes we outline do not exhaust the reality of our identity, and are, in some ways, arbitrary (though useful) constructs which must be given both the apophatic negation which underlies such constructs as well as the positive assertion that they do represent something which is real and significant and so by mapping them out in this fashion, we come to realize truths about ourselves. They give us a means by which we can begin our spiritual transformation, but, in the end, we must not be attached to any such model, because it can end up limiting our ascent into God.

The physical forms of consciousness are six – the five senses which we have come to know, plus the sixth, associated with the brain, which integrates those senses, uses them to help the body to live, but also begins to create associations and understandings with those five senses. It is both powerful and limited; it is a bridge to the spiritual side of oneself, providing to the spiritual side all the sensual data and receiving from the spirit the choices of the spirit so as to move and manipulate one’s physical body (explaining why, materialists often reduce everything spiritual to it).

Our soul is the life force which gives our material body motion. It is also a bridge, mediating all that is contained in our spirit and bringing it down into the brain, and vice versa. But, because it bridges the two, when allowed, it gets beyond itself, creating a false notion of the self. It takes all that is above it and all that is below it and unites the two, creating its concept of the self, but it does so in a problematic, closed fashion. It doesn’t want what it finds to change, but rather, it tries to reify what it observes, even if what it reifies would not be good for it. It is this which leads us to egotism, this false individualization which seeks to understand itself in an independent fashion.  The soul wants what is good for itself, that is, wants what will promote the continuation of life, of its life, at all costs, and it creates the consciousness of such an individualized life. One must confront it and overcome this consciousness, to understand its relative and not absolute truth, if one wants to purify the self—one must transcend the soul and enter the realm of the spirit if one wants to truly become the person they are meant to be.

The soul is not to be rejected, but its hermeneutic of life must be transcended; we must overcome the perception of the self created by the soul. We exist as persons; we are relational entities who exist in communion with others and with God. The person can be misunderstood and quickly individualized by the soul, where the soul takes the noetical aspects of the spirit, unites them with the experiences of the body, and tried to create through the two, an egotistical union which sees the self as those two together cut off from the rest of creation. However, the higher, noetical aspects of ourselves, which the soul uses to create the construct of the individual, are constantly changing as a result of the choices we make, causing new and varied psychic experiences. We are constantly changing, but the soul seeks to stabilize the person, to make what we are in a given moment as to what we are as an individual, an individual which, of course, does not exist;  to reify it would be to our detriment. The one who has come to grips with their spiritual reality, with the way their spirit changes, will be able to use their spirit to overcome such inclinations of the soul, to prevent such reification, which is necessary if we want to be deified and to find eternal beatitude. This is what happens when we die to the self. But, again, if one has not come to terms with one’s spiritual nature, then the soul reifies the persona and individualizes it, creating a false individual which seeks immortality; it ends up decrying all change even when such change is necessary for real happiness. And, since we are, as a whole, focused on the material instead of the spiritual realm, when we reify ourselves, those aspects of the material nature which are not satisfied would, then, for all eternity be unsatisfied, explaining how the physical reification can and would lead to perpetual angst. The fall, in many ways, lies in a disordered orientation to everything physical at the exclusion of the fullness of being. This has led us to confusing what is perceived in matter as being all that is, and therefore, what we learn via matter is all there is to know about existence. Once we accept this, we become enslaved, cut off from transcendence and incapable of being the people we are meant to be, as Berdyaev observed:

In such a way men have subjected themselves to external nature. But this means that the Fall is no more than the repudiation of Freedom. Man was turned into a part of nature. But as has been said and more than once already, man, in virtue of his own image, man as personality is not a part of nature, but has within him the image of God. There is nature in man, but he is not nature.[15]

When we begin to explore ourselves and see those aspects of ourselves which we have neglected, we can begin to see the relationship between the material and spiritual side of our existence how they work together to create the person we have become and the person we are becoming. We must, therefore, be willing to look at the whole and to understand how those aspects which we use for our identity tend to be spiritual while our awareness of others and the world at large tends to be material. We can see how the material side of ourselves is in flux and interacting with other material beings (as atomic science demonstrates), allowing us to appreciate how this is true also in the spirit. We are interacting with others, and becoming who we are as a person in and through our communion with them (with God being the Other who we find this is most true). But we must come to realize how our spirit is working, to interact with it (so to speak) so as to make sure its communion with others is perfected. Purification is to happen in the spirit, not the body. The body, to be sure, sends out impulses, which, if we have not perfected ourselves according to the spirit, could lead us astray and to act blindly. But it is not the body which is at fault:  it is the spirit which has not learned how to interpret those impulses and to use them wisely. We must not see it is the body but the one who acts only in accordance to bodily perceptions which is at fault; we must integrate those perceptions to the whole of the person, instead of acting as if they were that whole. This is what it means to put the body in check.

When, thanks to grace, we are purified, we are then able to help others; but if we have yet to attain such purity, who are we to look to others and focus on them and their errors?

Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, `Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye (Luke 6:41-2 RSV).

It is yet another temptation for us to focus on others and their wretchedness, when we are the ones who need purification. Focusing on the faults of others is just a way for us to ignore our spiritual needs, to feel superior to them, giving us an excuse so as not to change our own ways, even though we must do so if we want to be saved. When this happens, the soul, once again, is finding a way to keep it itself, this time, in looking to others to form a view of itself. The soul, in trying to preserve what it has, will do so, not just by looking at its spiritual content, but by looking at others and finding out how it is “not that” as a way to justify its reification of “I am this.”

Love opens us up and makes sure we transcend ourselves, which is why love for God opens us up to God and purifies us from all that would turn us away from Him. A love for God leads us to loving others, not as we would have them, but for who they are in and of God. When we draw close to God, we will draw close to everyone and everything else, because God is found in all things and everyone.

We genuinely find ourselves and our life for the first time when we sacrifice ourselves and our empirical isolation and self-enclosedness, and establish our entire being in another – in God, as the original source of all life. But by doing so we connect ourselves – in the most profound, ontological manner — with all living things on earth and, first and foremost, with our neighbors and their fate. Let us recall Abba Dorotheus’s famous trope: If we imagine that people are moving along the radii of a circle, the closer they come to the center of the circle, the closer they come to one another.[16]

When we turn away from someone because of some sin we perceive in them, we find ourselves turning away from God, who resides in them, and turning in upon ourselves, as some self who is “not that.” If we want God, we will focus on God and love where God is found, which is why we should not turn our backs on anyone. Of course, as fallen sinners, even when we know the truth of this, we often do not do as we know we should, and so we must strive against our inclination, and contemplate the good in them so as to help draw us closer to them. We must also contemplate the good in us, the good which preserves us even when we fail to do as we know we ought, when we fail to love as we know we should, so as not to end up in despair. We must see the kingdom of God in ourselves, which can only be done if we stop, meditate, and purify ourselves from everything which is not of love. Once we see the kingdom of God is within us, we can see it within all (not merely as a concept, but as a reality). We will no longer turn ourselves away from anyone; we will love them because we will love what God has made.

These three chapters, for the most part, complement ideas we have already seen, and resemble sentiments which are in accord with what we know of Anthony. Much of what we find here was commonly accepted in his time.  Indeed, we already seen, looking at previous chapters, how Anthony understood virtue as being what is natural to the person. Nonetheless, we can find Athanasius describing him such that he believed, like these passages, that such virtue was connected soul’s inclinations:

Wherefore virtue hath need at our hands of willingness alone, since it is in us and is formed from us. For when the soul hath its spiritual faculty in a natural state virtue is formed. And it is in a natural state when it remains as it came into existence. And when it came into existence it was fair and exceeding honest. For this cause Joshua, the son of Nun, in his exhortation said to the people,” Make straight your heart unto the Lord God of Israel,” and John, “Make your paths straight.” For rectitude of soul consists in its having its spiritual part in its natural state as created. But on the other hand, when it swerves and turns away from its natural state, that is called vice of the soul.[17]

Here, we find a similar point being made with what we find in these three chapters. In The Life of Anthony, of course, the point is made to monks, with Anthony’s exhortation for them to keep to their ascetic life. However, the point is founded upon the notion that worldly things are a distraction to the soul, alien to who we are, and so our attachments must not be on them, but on matters of the spirit which will lead to our conformity with God.

Nonetheless, we must acknowledge there is something here (and in previous discussions) which could call into question Anthonite association. Athanasius’ description of Anthony brings some doubt as to whether or not the non-judgmental approach to the wicked would be accepted, let alone written about, by Anthony. Athanasius said that Anthony would not hold communion with the Meletians, [18] and told others to avoid the Meletians and the Arians because of their wickedness and impiety.[19]

While this does pose some challenge, nonetheless, there are avenues one could pursue which, though speculative, would nonetheless give credence to both this text and what Athanasius has to say. For example, one could suggest that Athanasius’ political interests sometimes gets in the way of his portrayal of Anthony; though he is not necessarily intending deception on his part, he is providing us his understanding of Anthony and emphasizing those aspects which best suit his own theological and political purposes.[20] Or one could say that Athanasius got Anthony right, and he suggested that we should avoid those who are known to be unrighteous. This, however, would be an issue of prudence, not judgment.  One wants to be with those who offer good, not bad, examples. However, this is not to say they are to be judged and condemned. By avoiding them, the monk is ignoring their wickedness, as they are ignoring much of what is tempting in the world. What the wicked do really is no concern. This, however, does not mean one cannot care for them, pray for them, or teach them if they came for help. The point is, one is not to go looking for them and think we are the ones who will change their ways by our concern, rather, if and when they are ready, they will come and ask for help to change their ways; then one can show them mercy and teaching them, knowing that they have begun the process which leads to righteousness. They are attempting to leave their wickedness behind,  and so onecan and should help them. But until then, what business is it for the monk to see them sin and condemn them because of it?  If this is the sentiment being given, it would explain why Anthony would not have anything to do with those he believed were wicked, while nonetheless, writing elsewhere to have little or no thought of their wickedness. Nonetheless, we must recognize this is an attempt at explaining how two things would relate, and even if we can find a way to synthesize the evidence to show it can be Anthonite, this does not mean it is, and the unusual nature of our text must be acknowledged as we try to discern whether or not it is truly Anthonite.