Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 8
Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
An elder said: ‘Let us practise meekness and forbearance and longanimity and love. For these are the things that make a monk.’ He further said: ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ [horos christianou mimēsis Christou].’
You know the old maxim, ‘The habit does not make the monk’. Here we are told what does. These sayings are typical of the Fathers’ economy of style. We must turn them over in our mind carefully to draw out the sense they carry. As foreign readers we are up, too, against challenges posed by translation. Since the Fathers used words sparingly, their choice is significant. It will be worthwhile to pause over a few specific terms.
To start from the end: when I put in my translation, ‘What defines a Christian is the imitation of Christ’, I paraphrased a little. I saw no other way. The saying in Greek is more elegant and denser. It juxtaposes two parallel formulations. First it speaks of horos christianou. A horos is an outward boundary. The horos of South Wales is the Bristol Channel. We get the image of the Christian as a formless landmass bounded by a demarcation line that gives him or her definitive shape, territorial integrity. This demarcation line is defined as mimēsis Christou. The word mimesis is now well established as part of the English language. We can responsibly render it by ‘imitation’, as long as we do not think of ‘imitate’ as ‘ape’. Mimetic imitation stands for the interiorisation of a pattern; mimesis conditions, potentially transforms, personality. What constitutes a Christian, what defines him or her in soul, mind, and body, is Christlike life, life in Christ. Our constant goal is this, nothing less.
Four qualities are listed as expressions of this kind of life. The first sounds hopeless. We have made of the word ‘meek’ a term almost of abuse. So let us remember: the term in Greek is that of the third beatitude, of those who will inherit the earth. This word’s resonance is wonderful, in fact. It suggests kind affability, clemency, serenity, characteristics born of strength, not weakness. We might grasp the sense of it best by way of an example. I think of a passage in the life of St Silouan of Athos, born in 1866. One day, while he was still a youth, he was out harvesting with his father. It was a Friday. It was the boy’s turn to prepare the midday meal.
Forgetting that it was Friday, he prepared a dish of pork for their lunch, and they all ate of it. Six months later, on a feast-day in winter, [his] father turned to him with a soft smile and said: ‘Son, do you remember how you gave us pork to eat that Friday in the fields? I ate it but, you know, it tasted like carrion.’ ‘Why ever didn’t you tell me at the time?’ ‘I didn’t want to upset you, son.’
This is an example of meekness: readiness to swallow a grievance and to retain a correction for months in order to deliver it peacefully and for it to be heard in peace. Silouan, a luminous paragon of monastic virtue, truly a modern Desert Father, said late in life: ’I have never reached my father’s stature. He was quite illiterate: he even used to make a mistake in the Lord’s Prayer which he had learned by listening in church. But he was a man who was gentle and wise.’ We are called to be like that.
The second quality I have called ‘forbearance’. In Greek it is anexikakía, literally: ‘strength to endure bad things’. Such strength is acquired through a right perspective. It is a curious fact that grand Byzantine emperors carried as part of their ornaments an object called anexikakía. On state occasions they carried it in their right hand while their left held the sceptre. The anexikakía was a cylindrical, purple silk pouch that contained a handful of dust, a symbol of its bearer’s transience. The emperor carried it as a reminder that status is fickle, that he himself would one day return to dust. To bear current tribulation, or heavy duty, with courage, aware that all flesh is grass, but that God’ s gracious promise endures: this is forbearance.
‘Longanimity’ comes next. I could have put ‘patience’, but opted for the Latinate, admittedly awkwarder term because it renders an element explicit in the Greek makrothumía. The word thumos stands for temper; makros means broad. A broad-tempered person is no longer a slave to his or her moods of the moment. He or she has learnt to contain a kind of temperamental extension allowing dust to settle, passions to cool, before what is inwardly felt is articulated in a word or action. Longanimity is connected with magnanimity. People who have learnt to structure their personality in this way become necessarily generous, and pleasant company.
The fourth quality is love, agapē. Self-control is no end in itself. It is a means to prepare oneself for gracious encounters, to be an agent of communion. We read in John’s First Epistle: ‘Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’ Life in Christ, mimēsis Christou, stands for entry into a divine mode of being. For all their devotion to the Passion and trust in the power of Christ’s Cross, the Fathers never forgot that the finality of human life is participation in God’s loving nature. That is why their words, even when they are stern, are light, and full of light.
The horos of South Wales! view towards Nash Point.