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The will of God
If God is perfect, then His will is infallible, and therefore, obedience to the will of God protects and delivers man from errors and delusions. If God is love, then His will is all-good and obedience to it leads man to every good.
The will of God, for all believers and loving and rational people, is law…
God is our life, our strength, our Judge!
Therefore, it’s only natural that the purpose of man’s life is to follow the one will of God and coordinate our will with it. And our mind and heart must strive for this knowledge of the will of God, because the Lord isn't only the Father and Creator of all of mankind, but also Love itself, and all His actions are nothing but loving.
It’s also clear that no one can be in communion with God save those who fulfill His will. This statute is repeatedly shown in Holy Scripture, and fulfilling it is called the source of all goods, while violating it is the source of all evils. Thus, God promised Abraham a blessing, and not to him alone, but also to his posterity, on the condition of obedience: Walk before Me, and be thou perfect (Gen. 17:1). The same law was declared to the people of Israel as well when they were chosen by the Lord.
And Christ the Savior said to us all: Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father Which is in Heaven (Mt. 7:21).
Consequently, the path that we must freely choose in order to fulfill our purpose is self-evident: It’s the path of the will of God. Only God, Who created us rational and free and chose a high calling for us—to be in living communion with Him—can show us the right way for us to achieve and remain in this communion with God.
To know the will of God, knowledge in general, spiritual development, life experience, humility, and patience aren’t enough; faith is much more necessary. People listen to and accept the one whom they believe as their well-wisher, guide, and mentor; they believe the one whom they love.
The higher and lower will
All people are aware that they have two wills in them, invisibly struggling with each other: one is rational, higher, and the other is sensual, lower, irrational, secret, passionate, carnal.
The good will is the will of God, of Christ, that not a single sinner should perish, but be saved while still on earth, because after death, the soul’s labors and struggles can no longer change any properties it acquired in its earthly life, in sinful habits, but it’s freed by death from contact with the realm of the spirit of malice.
That people might become perfect on earth, even if it requires the soul to grieve when it’s full of passions, and for the body to suffer when it destroys the soul with its lusts.
That mankind, struck by the humility, self-sacrifice, and boundless love of the Son of God and His victory over the ancient evil, would resolve to undertake the feat of salvation and follow His path into the abode of the Heavenly Father.
That Christians, to whom He revealed all the secrets of the present and future, would be left with not only His Church and His power in the Sacraments, but also His world, for which He prayed to His Father to the point of bloody sweat that He might preserve and enlighten them for Him; that they might be reborn in the knowledge of such Divine love and begin a new life, detached from all perishable, mortal, and temporary things, and understand that they are near to God, dear to Him, and are to live with Him now, forever, and eternally in His glory, in blessedness, and in the life-giving light of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, is it possible not to understand this good will, God’s will, and not be able to distinguish it from the will of the flesh, which demands carnal pleasure and bodily satisfaction and comfort in evil?
Imagination
Imagination is an irrational force. It works mechanically, pictorially, artificially, according to the laws of image association. The imagination distracts people from God, directing attention to everything vain and sinful and disturbs a man’s spirit and good mood. We suffer from the imagination not only when awake, but also in sleep.
Thus, preserving all that is sensual and carnal in our mind and heart, the imagination hinders the ascent to God in the spiritual life, disperses our thoughts and defiles them with impure notions and memories of past falls and pleasures. It aggravates, robs of peace, and deprives you of grace. For the spiritual life, the imagination is a harmful and pernicious force.
If imagination brings not only harm but also good in secular life, when it directs a man to the idea of the blessedness of the future life, helping him cross into the Heavenly world, then why does the imagination cause only harm in the spiritual life?
Because the omnipresent, omnipotent, and all-righteous God is above and beyond all imagination. Therefore, the imagination is incapable of uniting man with God. This was proven by the fall of the angel who dreamed of being equal to God and turned into the devil. He filled his mind with imaginations and thus invented this force, which is used to destroy people.
The memory and imagination preserve all the sensory things a man has seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. Therefore, both memory and imagination should be of great importance in our lives as forces guiding our hearts along the same good and safe paths that our lives followed in the past.
But since the structure of secular life distorts our external senses, it’s not difficult to understand what great evil these powerful forces—memory and imagination—bring to men, keeping so much that is sinful and destructive in their hearts and minds, and so little that is bright and salvific.
In view of this, for the sake of salvation, man must fight more with the memory and imagination than the passions and his obvious shortcomings.
The temporal and the eternal
Man so passionately desires to enjoy the temporary, the perishable, the perverted, the defiled, which he can feel, see, and contain within himself, even though he enjoys it with anguish, despondency, tears, and sometimes even with mourning and despair, that he closes his eyes to the future, the eternal, that which is promised for faith in the word of God, which undoubtedly exists, irrefutably proven by men themselves both through their righteousness in temporal life and by those who have departed to that world.
He pushes all this away with indignation, as if unnecessary now, replaced by human love, foolish and temporary attachments. He doesn’t want to hear or see anything eternal, joyful, true, or blessed, even the infinitely strong and perfect, life-giving, all-seeing, unchanging, incomparable love of God; he doesn’t want to see his true happiness—true, deep, inexplicable.
Pride
The root and cause of all human suffering and falls is pride. All sins are vile before God, the Holy Fathers say, but viler than all is pride; it’s expressed in vanity, conceit, and arrogance, and is proof of the poverty of the mind.
“Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil … the mother of condemnation … a source of anger, a door of hypocrisy … the guardian of sins, the patron of pitilessness, the rejection of compassion, a bitter inquisitor, an inhuman judge … a root of blasphemy,” says St. John Climacus.1 Therefore, God resists the proud; good people don’t tolerate the proud.
Pride is therefore difficult for people to recognize, because it has many forms and degrees. St. John Climacus defines the degrees of this vice this way: The beginning of pride is vanity, the middle is the disdain of others, the shameless preaching of your own labors, self-praise in the heart, hatred of reproof, and finally, the rejection of God’s help, arrogant self-reliance, and a demonic temper.
Usually, the grace of God leads the proud and self-reliant to fall into the very sin that previously seemed impossible to them, in order to bring them to the knowledge of themselves.
Thus, fathers lose their wealth due to their inability to manage them; they squander their last penny, and their families continue to exist with God’s help and even feed the unfortunate fathers. Mothers repent of their former views on the upbringing of children and their everyday worries, seeing that their children have grown up weak in body and spirit, faint-hearted, and of little faith. Leaders become guilty of their subordinates’ mistakes or of the general disorder, and realize their former arrogance. State and public figures who thought highly of themselves receive, according to the assessment of their subordinates, the reputation of incapable and impractical wheelers and dealers, and so on.
It’s not hard for us to come to the realization that misfortunes, disasters, and bodily illnesses are sent to us deluded, arrogant, and proud people in order for us to come to self-knowledge and humble ourselves. It only takes one day of observing your thoughts, words, deeds, and actions, in order to convict yourself of untruth, hypocrisy, infatuation, and pride.
The fight against pride
To combat pride and destroy vanity, conceit, and arrogance in ourselves, the holy elders counsel, first, that we understand that we can’t do any true good worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven by ourselves, and therefore we’re completely insignificant. This conviction can be achieved by clear and correct thinking.
We’re born naked and crying, says St. Tikhon of Zadonsk; we live in troubles, misfortunes, and sins.We die with fear, sickness, and sighing; we’re buried in the ground and turn into dust. There you can’t tell where lies a rich man, a poor man, a noble, a servant, a master, a slave, a wise man, or a foolish man. Why should earth and dung exalt itself?
Second, to destroy vanity, arrogance, and conceit within ourselves, we must renounce ourselves and the world and seek help in humble, fervent prayer. Entreating what’s necessary, useful, good, and even more so the gifts of the Holy Spirit, there’s no doubt that we’ll truly receive them.
Third, we have to learn how to repel the works of the evil spirit, and in doing so, we must be cautious to a certain degree and remember that our enemies are innumerable and the struggle against them is beyond human strength, because the evil spirits are cunning, tireless, resourceful, and can transform into an illusory or false good and secretly set traps and snares along the path of virtuous living. Excessive harshness and self-confidence in relation to the world of evil spirits is spiritually harmful.
Fourth, when we fall, when we’re arrogant, conceited, vain, and proud in general, there’s no need to be confused, to ponder and waste time, but rather seek salvation in repentance and in the consciousness of our own infirmity. God allows us to fall so we might better know our weaknesses and thereby learn to despise our passions. True humility is based on knowledge, on the experience of our powerlessness and unreliability.
Finally, to destroy pride within ourselves, we must remember the words of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself: Without Me ye can do nothing (Jn. 15:5).
The pride of the mind
“To be foolish by nature is not a fault,” says St. John Chrysostom, “but to become foolish by the abuse of the mind is impermissible and entails great punishment.” These are those who, because of their wisdom, have great dreams for themselves and fall into extreme arrogance.
If the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, then the beginning of foolishness is ignorance of the Lord. People carried away by pride and high-mindedness make an idol out of their own mind. There’s nothing more dangerous than this condition, because it’s difficult to treat and nigh unto incurable.
The pride of the mind is much more disastrous than the pride of the will, because the pride of the will can be observed by the mind, which can insist on the will’s subjection to itself. But when the mind is proud and believes that its thoughts and judgments are indisputable and better than those of others, then who or what can make the mind submit? Therefore, the holy Apostle Paul writes: If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise (1 Cor. 3:18).
Let the Christian fear excessive knowledge and idle curiosity, for together with the necessary knowledge, the enemy of salvation can also cause us to acquire useless, vain, and harmful knowledge, which only weakens the mind.
The enemy usually conceals his bitterness under the guise of sweetness and creates attractive and beautiful illusions to deceive minds by imitating the truth. The devil attempts to defeat those who are strong and firm in their spiritual life through the mind, so as to take control of both mind and heart. To this end, he usually instills in them lofty, subtle thoughts, astounding to both the man himself and those around him. Witty people are more susceptible to this deception than others. Being carried away by their lofty thoughts, they forget to guard the purity of their heart and humble their self-righteous minds.
In order to avoid high-mindedness, truly spiritual don’t relate passionately to the affairs and events of the world, don’t attach their hearts to it, and therefore they seem like backwards, imperfect people. As St. Basil the Great says: “May hearing worldly news leave a bitter taste in your mouth, but hearing the stories of holy men be as sweet as honey.”
Sins
Only those who still work for sin don’t see their sins. A man will never master himself until he repents, he won’t repent until he condemns himself, and he won’t condemn himself until he comes to know his sins.
Therefore, those who understand the need for constant repentance should more often give themselves a clear account of whether they see and are aware of their sins. We have to know our sins—precisely, clearly by number and all separately. We have to reflect on our sins to determine the peculiarities of our character, the disposition of our heart, and, so to speak, the spirit of our life.
We must strictly clarify whom we serve: the Lord, ourselves, or sin? Do we always have the Lord and His glory in mind, or ourselves? Whose name do we stand for: the name of God or our own? The penitent sinner must see and be aware of all this, and then he will undoubtedly admit his own guilt in countless sins.
We all sin so much out of inattentiveness, bad tendencies, out of striving for earthly goods, for bodily rest, out of infirmity, infatuation, bad examples, condescension to ourselves and others, and ignorance, that if we delve into ourselves and compare the state of our souls with how they should be in truth, according to the Savior’s teaching, then we ourselves will fear the gravity of our sins.
Sinners
People who are darkened by sin very often lose awareness and a sense of the omnipresence of God and think that by hiding from the gaze of men they avoid the gaze of God. The thief, the adulterer, the drunkard, satisfying their passions in secret, certainly don’t think about how they’re sinning before all the inhabitants of Heaven. Does this not prove the spiritual blindness of the sinner?
The Gospel parable says that the Prodigal Son took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living (Lk. 15:13). People who have lost their faith and don’t recognize anything holy act the same way. They also depart to places where nothing will remind them of religion, of God, of the rules of morality, and where their forcibly suppressed conscience won’t reproach them.
In this freedom from God, from all that is pure and good, they indulge in their passions, squander the inheritance they received from the Heavenly Father, lose their talents, abilities, and lofty feelings in debauchery, and then even the concepts of the purity of heart and soul, of decency, honor, truth, goodness, and pure love.
The loss of the gifts of grace brings with it the loss of natural human advantages—the natural properties of the heart disappear, and it becomes dry, hard, stubborn, insensitive, and envious. Mental abilities change as the brain becomes sluggish, dull, and at the same time irritable, malicious, angry, and devoid of memory. Health is lost because the entire nervous system becomes disordered.
The sweetness of sin treacherously deprives men of their gifts and talents.
Unrepentant sinners, given over to an animal-like life and their passions, hardened in their minds and godless, fall away from the Lord and become the property of fallen spirits. Then they begin to suffer from demonic possession: Passions lead them to all vices, to the darkening of mental abilities, to the perversion of human feelings. In a mad rush towards sensuality alone, they destroy their health and exhaust their nervous system. They begin to be tormented and pursued by cruel anguish, which arouses envy for everything joyful and pure, and hatred for everything good and moral. Gradually intensifying, this hatred turns into malice, into a need for evil, for enmity towards everything that speaks of God, of everything that reminds one of holiness, of the truth of life—and leads one to transgressions.
