Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 15
Below is the text of the fifteenth 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. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Moses said again: ‘Through tears a man acquires the virtues and through tears the forgiveness of sins comes about. Therefore, when you weep, do not raise the voice of your sighing, and may your left hand not know what your right hand is doing — as for the left hand, it is vainglory.’
The virtue of compunction finds expression in a peculiar kind of grief. The Fathers speak about this grief a lot. This can seem strange to us, for they are not, on the whole, a downcast lot. They stand before us kindly and hospitable, their behaviour marked by an alacrity that makes us think of Abraham welcoming angels at Mamre, when the patriarch, though ancient, rushed about making gracious preparation for his guests, displaying the zest that is the hallmark of truly spiritual persons. The Fathers were filled with this vivacity.
Yet at the same time they wept. Their word for the grief to which they aspired was penthos. Again it pays off to pay attention to their terms, to note connections that might otherwise escape us. Penthos is the quality referred to in the second beatitude: ‘Blessed are those who grieve, for they shall be comforted.’ It is, too, the term the Gospel uses for the sorrow that will fill the wedding guests once the bridegroom is no longer with them, a grief born of loss.
The early Church portrayed this grief by means of meditations on Adam shut out from Paradise, suddenly aware of the consequence of his betrayal, aghast at the realisation of what he had forfeited. One such text, a poem contemporary with many of our Fathers, touches me viscerally. Imagining Adam crouching outside the enclosure wall of paradise, access to which is barred now by an angel with a flaming sword, the poem shows him shedding hot tears, ‘beating his face with his hand’ while he cries out:
I am polluted, I am ruined, of my slaves I am a slave; for the wild beasts and reptiles that I mastered by fear fill me with terror. No longer do the flowers give me joy; thorns and brambles the earth raises for me. Of my own will I overthrew the table spread without toil.
‘Where have I landed?’, Adam asks: ‘Fallen from a pedestal to the ground, from divine communion to wretched existence.’ We may have known such moments, when an action or a word of ours has ruined something precious; when that which, a moment ago, was integral and dear lies at our feet in pieces, mud-splattered. At such times the voice of God resounds in our inner ear: ‘Adam, where are you?’ And we have no answer. We only know: I am not where I should be, or where I wish to be. Our grief at such times is the grief of estrangement, the grief of exiles longing for home. What is that home?
We are told in an invaluable book, a masterpiece of spiritual theology written in the 1940s by the French Jesuit Irénée Hausherr on the subject of Penthos: ‘From a Christian point of view there is one word which expresses all that is desirable: salvation. Nothing but that which endangers salvation should make us sad.’ Hausherr cites Saint Barsanuphius: ‘One must absolutely not be saddened by anything in this world, but only by sin.’ He goes on to remark:
John Chrysostom had already taught that, in beings destined for eternity, the only justifiable sorrow is for the loss of eternal happiness through sin. Here then is the first concept of penthos: mourning for lost salvation, whether one’s own or that of others.
This reflection is helpful for two reasons. It invites us to let go of a notion stubbornly lodged in most of our minds, which sees salvation as a prize to be won or a riddle to be worked out. Once we come to think of it instead as shorthand for ‘all that is desirable’, the object of our yearning, we shall pursue it more whole-heartedly, less calculatingly. Secondly Hausherr lets us realise that the Fathers, when they sat weeping — like Arsenius who, at manual labour, ‘kept a napkin on his chest on account of the tears that fell from his eyes’ — were not weeping over their sins in the sense that they kept picking at old wounds; they wept at having chosen sin and scorned love, at having belched in the face of a loving presence that offered them happiness and innocence.
Think of a line from the Christmas carol Adeste fideles: ‘Sic nos amantem, quis non redamaret’: ‘Who would not love in return one who has so loved us’. Well, I am such a one. I pray that that knowledge will never cease to draw forth tears from me. Abba Moses, you remember, had a past in crime. His motives for repentance may have been more spectacular than those of many of his brethren. What kept his tears flowing, though, was the same insight as theirs: awareness of a wilful, tragic lack of correspondence to God’s love manifested in Christ. The tears drawn forth from the Fathers’ hearts show that these hearts were no longer compact stone. They were like the rock Moses struck, pierced by the rod of God’s word, producing life-giving water.
The sure hope of salvation illumines ascetic grief, enabling the Fathers to speak, with sublime paradox, of ‘joy-bearing’ penthos. When I know my deficiency and own it yet trust firmly in God’s power and will to save me, careful all the while to resist any kind of vain, self-centred display, then I begin to be formed into a Christian.
The tears of St Peter, the prototype of Christian penthos, painted by El Greco. The painting is now in the El Greco museum in Toledo.