1 38
Spiritual Exercises
the doctrine of Christ our Savior. It is composed of praktike, of physics, and of theology." 97
Apatheia plays an essential role, not only in theoretical constructions such as Evagrian metaphysics, but also in monastic spirituality. There, its value is closely linked to that of peace of mind and absence of worry: amerimnia98 or tranqui/litas.99 Dorotheus of Gaza100 does not hesitate to declare that peace of mind is so important that one must, if necessary, drop what one has undertaken if one's peace of mind is endangered. Peace of mind tranquillitas
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animi
had, moreover, always been a central value within the philosophical
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tradition.101
For Porphyry, as we have seen, apatlreia was a result of the soul's detachment from the body. Here we touch once again upon the philosophical exercise par excellence. As we saw above, Plato had declared: "those who go about philosophizing correctly are in training for death." 102 As late as the seventh century, we still find the echo of this saying in Maximus Confessor:
"In conformity with the philosophy of Christ, let us make of our life a training for death." ioJ
Yet Maximus himself is only the inheritor of a rich tradition, which repeatedly identified Christian philosophy with training for death. We encounter this theme already in Clement of Alexandria, 1114 who understood such training in a thoroughly Platonic sense, as the attempt spiritually to separate the soul from the body. For Clement, perfect knowledge, or gnosis, is a kind of death. It separates the soul from the body, and promotes the soul to a life entirely devoted to the good, allowing it to devote itself to the contemplation of genuine realities with a purified mind. Again, the same motif recurs in Gregory Nazianzen: "Make of this life, as Plato said, a training for death, while
- to speak in his terms - separating the soul from the body as far as possible." 105 "This," he tells us, "is the practice of philosophy." Evagrius, for his part, expresses himself in terms strikingly similar to Porphyry's: To separate the body from the soul is the privilege only of Him who has joined them together. But to separate the soul from the body lies as well in the power of the person who pursues virtue. For our Fathers gave to the training for death and to the flight from the body a special name: anachoresis [i.e. the monastic life ].106
It is easy to see that the Platonic concept of the flight from the body, which exercised such an attraction upon the young Augustine, was an element added 0'1
to Christianity, and not essential to it. Nevertheless, this concept determined the orientation of the whole of Christian spirituality in a quite specific direction.
So far, we have noted the permanent survival of certain philosophical spiritual exercises in Christianity and mono11tici11m, nnd we hnvc tried to make
Ancient Spiritual Exercises
1 39
comprehensible the particular tonality that their reception introduced into Christianity. We must not, however, exaggerate the i"'l>ortance of this phenomenon. In the first place, as we have said, it manifested itself only in a rather restricted circle: among Christian writers who had received a philosophical education. Even in their case, however, the final synthesis is essentially Christian.
To be sure, our authors strove to Christianize their borrowings as much as possible; but this is perhaps the least important aspect of the matter. They believed they recognized spiritual exercises, which they had learned through philosophy, in specific scriptural passages. Thus, we saw Basil of Caesarea making a connection between prosoche and a text from Deuteronomy .107 Then, in Athanasius' Life of Antony, and throughout monastic literature, prosoche was transformed into the "watch of the heart," under the influence of Proverbs, 4:23: "Above all else, guard your heart." 1118 Examination of one's conscience was often justified by the Second Letter to the Corinthians, 13:5:
"Examine yourselves . . . and test yourselves." 109 Finally, the meditation on death was recommended on the basis of First Corinthians, 1 5: 3 1 : "I die every day." uo
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to believe that these references were enough, all by themselves, to Christianize spiritual exercises. The reason why Christian authors paid attention to these particular biblical passages was that they were already familiar, from other sources, with the spiritual exercises of prosoche, meditation on death, and examination of the conscience. By themselves, the texts from scripture could never have supplied a method for practicing these exercises. Often, in fact, a given scriptural passage has only a distant connection with a particular spiritual exercise.
More important is the overall spirit in which Christian and monastic spiritual exercises were practiced. They always presupposed the assistance of God's grace, and they made of humility the most important of virtues. In the words of Dorotheus of Gaza: "The closer one comes to God, the more one sees oneself as a sinner." 1 1 1 Such humility makes us consider ourselves inferior to others. It leads us to maintain the greatest reserve in both conduct and speech, and to adopt certain significant bodily positions, for instance prostration before other monks.
Two .other fundamental virtues were penitence and obedience. Penitence, inspired by the fear and love of God, could take the form of extremely severe self-mortification. The remembrance of death was intended not only to make people realize the urgency of conversion, but also to develop the fear of God.
In turn, it is linked to meditation on the Last Judgment, and thereby to the virtue of penitence. The same holds true of the examination of conscience.
Obedience - the renunciation of one's own will, in complete submission to the orders of o superior - completely transformed the philosophical practice of s1>irilual direclion. We can Nee 10 juHI what extremes such obedience could
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Spiritual Exercises
be taken in Dorotheus' Life of Dositheus. 112 The director of conscience had an absolute power of decision over his disciple's possessions, eating habits, and entire way of life.
In the final analysis, all these virtues were transfigured by the transcendent dimension of the love of God and of Christ. Thus, to train for death, or to separate the soul from the body, was at the same time to participate in the death of Christ. To renounce one's will was to adhere to divine love.
Generally speaking, we can say that monasticism in Egypt and Syriam was born and developed in a Christian milieu, spontaneously and without the intervention of a philosophical model. The first monks were not cultivated men, but Christians who wanted to attain to Christian perfection by the heroic practice of the evangelical prescriptions, and the imitation of the Life of Christ. It was, therefore, natural that they should seek their techniques of perfection in the Old and the New Testament. Under Alexandrian influence, however - the distant influence of Philo, and the more immediate influence of Origen and Clement of Alexandria, magnificently orchestrated by the Cappadocians - certain philosophical spiritual techniques were introduced into Christian spirituality. The result of this was that the Christian ideal was described, and, in part, practiced, by borrowing models and vocabulary from the Greek philosophical tradition. Thanks to its literary and philosophical qualities, this tendency became dominant, and it was through its agency that the heritage of ancient spiritual exercises was transmitted to Christian spirituality: first to that of the Middle Ages, and subsequently to that of modern times.