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

Introduction and Part II

Our God has granted immortality to those in heaven, but for those on earth He has created mutability, giving life and movement to the whole of creation; and all this for man’s sake. So do not be ensnared by the worldly fantasies of the demon who insinuates evil recollections into the soul, but immediately call to mind the blessings of heaven and say to yourself: ‘If I so wish, it is in my power to win this struggle against passion; but I shall not win if I am set on fulfilling my own desire.’ So struggle in this way, since it can save your soul.[1]

We must struggle against our desires, not because desire in and of itself is wrong, but because we can easily be led by our desires to some lesser good instead of the good which truly satisfies. It is not that the lesser good does not have its place, but our desire can keep us attached to it, to remain with it, treating it as an absolute instead of relative good. This turns the relative good into an idol. We should be seeking the absolute good, the only good which can completely satisfy us, and that good is God. As St. Augustine says, our hearts are restless, seeking after the good, and it is only when we find God, find ourselves joined with God, can we find peace.[2]In and through God, all other goods are able to be enjoyed, according to their nature, but when we try to hold on to some good apart from God, it can prevent us from finding God and knowing the happiness which comes through God. Thus, what is good can be used for evil, even if it itself remains good.

Our hearts are full of all kinds of desires, for we desire, rightfully even, all kinds of good things. However, we often do not know how to properly fulfill those desires, and so we try all kinds of things, trying all kinds of goods which promise us some satisfaction. Our desires can be satiated, at least temporarily, by transitory pleasures, but by their mutable nature, such pleasures do not last and we come back to the point where we once again seek a way to satisfy our desires. Many people get stuck in a rut, going in circles, seeking the same transitory pleasure time after time; they see the pleasure they receive is relatively easy to attain and so do not see why they should look elsewhere to satisfy their desires. They do not understand that as they find themselves attached to a lesser, transitory good, the pleasures they receive masks the real anxiety and suffering contained in their lives. As long as they are attached to a lesser good, whatever difference lies between the lesser good and the actual good they should attain will be the source of their suffering, the hole in their lives which needs healed. And the longer they remain attached to that lesser good, the greater that hole will become, and even what they are attached to will lead to less and less temporal satisfaction, until at last, they will have to look for something to either supplement their desire through quantity or through quality. An increase in quantity, of course, will only increase the hole, becoming a never-ending circle without satisfaction; an increase in quality allows one to transcend one’s state and to move closer to the good, but to seek that increase in quality, one will have to put behind one’s attachments, even if it means one must struggle against the habits one has formed. Tose struggles are difficult, but as long as one does not give in and stop struggling, they will slowly be able to overcome their habits and form the virtue they need to transcend their present state. And, for every good which we place higher than it deserves in our lives, we must also struggle to put it in its proper place. When we treat something as an absolute good, we cut ourselves off completely from God and find ourselves in “mortal sin.” On the other hand, when we treat some good as a higher value than we should, without actually treating it as an absolute good, we can be said to be in “venial sin,” because we have not, in the process, used that good to block our access to the highest good, God.

The way to overcome temptations is to see through them, to see the end which they bring us. We will be able to see the good as well as the bad, and so, we will know how and why giving in to a temptation will not lead us to the good which we truly desire. We must understand that, through grace, we have been given the power to overcome evil in our lives, to become holy and pure. “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Philip. 4:13 RSV). Through grace, perfection in life is possible, and so through grace, we are able to achieve victory against temptation. But we must engage grace, cooperate with it, if we want that victory. Perfection is possible but we must be shown to be worthy of the promises of Christ, that we are willing to struggle for that perfection:

It is only right that our first step should be to take the yoke of Christ’s commandments on our shoulders. We should neither kick nor drag behind, but go forward in these things straightly and surely until our death. We should transform ourselves into the new paradise of God, until such time as the Son with the Father enters us through the Holy Spirit and dwells within. Then, when we possess him completely as our guest and teacher, he can command any of us, no matter how great may be the task with which he entrusts us, and we shall simply stretch out our hand to it and accomplish it with all eagerness just as he intended. [3]

Our struggle must be an interior struggle, one where we confront our temptations head on. This is understood as spiritual warfare, where we confront those forces which would try to impose themselves upon us as well as those habits which we have acquired on our own. These forces can come from many different sources: social pressures, for example, have a profound impact on how we act. Tradition teaches us that another such source is demons. We must be careful here. There is a question as to what demons are and are not. They are fallen angels, fallen spirits, which have cut themselves off from God and so have lost the center of their being. They have, in a way, become chaotic powers, with no personal center; one can say they no longer are “beings” in the proper sense, “the wretched Devil is not now a being, even if he was such before he exalted himself against God, the sovereign Lord of all, and was utterly expelled from his own order.”[4]  Nor can they be called “persons” in the proper sense; they lose all sense of free will and personality as they turn in on themselves and make a fallen essence the fullness of their reality, closing in on it instead of letting it be open to and penetrated by God and all those united with God, as Hans Urs von Balthasar explains:

Unlike man, however, the pure spirit is in a position to attain its ultimate goal in an indivisible act by which it grasps itself completely. Accordingly, if it totally renounces this goal, it loses its personality; it cannot even hold on to itself as a quasi-intact conscious subject since, as both the classical doctrine and St. Thomas say, this conscious subject does not have a ‘purely natural’ goal. As the refusal of grace is unique and indivisible, it would be meaningless for God to continue to hold out the offer of grace; it would be unworthy of him. This means that the subject that has fallen from its personal truth can only continue to exist in a fragmentary form, full of internal contradictions: perversion, the lie, the lack of communication, but also the urge to destroy everything that lives by truth and communication.[5]

Thus, they have become unchanging, and they act like any other impersonal force which we find in the world. Because they are fallen spirits, they have an appearance of personality, an appearance which comes out of the remnant of their original nature; they are pure individuals without true interpersonal relationships, but when confronted by persons, will have the mask of personality. In their blind instinct, they strike out as forces of unbeing, seeking to corrupt and destroy anything which comes in their path, trying to make all things cut off from the goodness of God.

Demonic powers are not the source of our desires, but they act upon them to lead us astray. We must not blame them for our own actions, nor assume that if we are tempted, it is necessarily from a demonic power. “For slothful human beings, giving away to their desires, go all awry when left to themselves without the presence and provocation of the Devil…”[6] However, their presence is found throughout the world, and they engage Christian and non-Christian alike. They are able to use our thoughts against us, encouraging us to focus on some lesser good and hold our attention to it until we end up attached to it. Their actions lead us to think about and ponder those things which lead us to follow our inordinate desires and to sin. However, our thoughts can be controlled by us, and when properly directed, can be used to our advantage, because we will grasp what it is which confronts us and renounce it:

All the demonic thoughts import concepts of perceptible things into the soul. The mind, being imprinted on by them, bears about in itself the shapes of these things and from the thing recognises at length the demon that has drawn near. Thus, if the face of one who has wronged or dishonoured me should appear in my thinking, the thought of grudge-bearing is proven to be approaching. Or again, if a recollection of wealth or glory should appear, what is afflicting us will be clearly recognised from the thing. It is likewise for the other thoughts: you will find who is present and suggesting them from the thing. But I do not mean that all memories of such things result from demons. After all, when one sets it in motion, the mind itself naturally brings up appearances of created things. I refer only to such memories as unnaturally draw along one’s irascibility or desire. [7]

Once we know what it is which lies before us, what is tempting us, we can confront it. We can respond to it, pointing out why we should not give in, just as Jesus responded to his temptations. However, his path to victory tells us it is one of struggles, and if we are to follow his example, we must also struggle. He went out into the desert, he practiced self-discipline to make sure his passions are put into proper order and his will remained naturally inclined to what was good, and then, when Satan tempted him he was able to see through the temptation and point out the true good which Satan tried to pervert. Jesus pointed to the true good, the good established by God, in response to an imperfect notion of the good, as given to him in temptation; we called to follow his example and overcome our inclinations by transcending ourselves, but to do so, we must, like him, also go into the spiritual desert and put ourselves to the test and use whatever ways we can to properly order our desires (prayer, fasting, acts of charity, et. al.).

We can keep with us those goods which do not distract us or prevent us from attaining God, but when something gets in the way, something which tries to take the place of God in our life, we must displace it, push it back to where it belongs. This is what Jesus means when he says:

He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it (Matt. 10:37-39 RSV).

He is telling us that we must keep God our priority, as the central love of our life. We should love the Lord our God, and then in and through that love, we should love our neighbor as ourselves. God does not want us to deny what is good in others, but to remind us that such good such point us to the highest good, God, from which every blessing flows; when we treat a relative, but true, good as absolute, we must deny it, even if it means cutting ourselves away from that good, until at last we can appreciate it in God without letting it get in the way of our experience of God.

We must explore our temptations, and see what it is they offer, and what it is they fail to offer:

We should judge them not as the world and the senses do, but as they are judged by right reason and the Holy Spirit, or by the word of the divinely-inspired Scriptures, or that of the holy fathers and teachers of the Church. For if this examination and deepening of knowledge is right and proper, it will quite certainly enable us to understand clearly that we must with all our heart regard as valueless, vain and false, all that the blind and depraved world loves and seeks.[8]

We should look at our temptations from all angles, including, and especially, in the light of death. We must remember that the pleasure promised by them will end, but what will the consequences of our actions be for us, both later in our own life, but also in the seat of judgment? This is the path by which we can gain wisdom, to overcome ignorance, the ignorance which blinds our judgment and helps our passions gain a hold on our lives. In this way, we will know how to respond to temptation, to declare outright where it fails to lead us to our true desire, so we can tell it off even as Jesus withstood Satan in the desert.

If we have a sinful habit, this struggle might require great labor, great discipline, to train ourselves properly in how we should act; in this fashion, we will slowly develop a contrary virtue to that habit. But we must not assume victory too soon. When we have overcome temptation once, twice, three times,  we must not think we have attained final victory; if we do not continue to develop a virtuous habit to replace a sinful one, we will find the sinful habit will come back when we least expect it, often stronger and more difficult to overcome than before:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none.  Then he says, `I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order.  Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. (Matt. 12:43-45 RSV).

As long as we live, sin can and does limit our will, but it does not entirely limit it. We still have freedom, and we can still choose to work against sin. The changeable nature of temporal life is thus an advantage to us – we still are free to change our ways, to transcend ourselves, and to open ourselves up to grace so that in and through that grace we can attain eternal beatitude. This is what our passage means about mutability being given to us for our sake; God has given us livelihood, given us a life, in order to make something of ourselves, to have a creative interaction with God to determine who it is we are in eternity.

Since we know a central message of Anthony is the need to overcome those demonic forces which impel themselves upon us and try to manipulate us so as to lead us to sin, this passage offers little difficulty in being recognized as something Anthony would say or consider important to write down. And elsewhere, he does suggest that various impulses are led by demons which we must confront.[9] The notion that our changeable nature is given to us as a gift from God, a nature which we have because we are earthly, might seem somewhat odd, and it is not the kind of phraseology we expect out of Anthony, however, the concept is sound and helps show us how and why an otherwise negative attitude toward the earth could still see it as a good and thus prevent Anthony from being an outright Gnostic.