In 1982 the Indian-Catalan priest Raimundo Panikkar published Blessed Simplicity: The Monk as Universal Archetype. The fact that this book was so widely read and translated suggests the author’s thesis is well-founded. Many women and men recognize in themselves some aspects of the call which the monk or nun instantiates. Monastic experience carries universal relevance, for it is rooted in deep humanity.

Western literature is rich in archetypal monastic characters. We might think of Dostoyevsky’s Zosima, Hesse’s Narcissus, Bernanos’s Blanche de la Force or Diderot’s Religieuse. Even in northern Europe, where monasticism was wiped out in the violent sixteenth century, the figure of the monk kept a certain fascination. We find a monk’s haunting presence in Knut Hamsun’s novel Victoria. This monk, Vendt, occurs in a poem internal to the book, so is explicitly fictional, yet he matters to the plot. His creator, the writer of the poem, is a poor miller’s son aspiring to literary greatness. He sits in a town garret working on a masterpiece about love. Vendt, the monk, illustrates for him passion’s animal, instinctive power. ‘Ah’, sighs Vendt,

does not love transform the human heart into a mushroom patch, a voluptuous and shameless garden in which there grow secretive, impertinent mushrooms! Does it not cause the monk to roam through gardens enclosed and peek through the windows of sleepers at night? Does it not possess the nun with madness?

Hamsun’s monastics are far removed from Panikkar’s inclusive spirituality. The monk represents frustrated sexuality, a feverish voyeurism exercised under the cover of night’s darkness. As for the nun, she is a love-deprived lunatic.

This caricature is still in vogue. The abuse crisis has consolidated it. It may, then, come as a surprise to learn that monasticism’s sources, its textbooks, are concerned with the wise negotiation of passion. This literature is based on the conviction that every desire, even the most embodied, is a glimmer of a longing for God imprinted on our being, created in God’s image. A monastic approach to passion does not seek to block it, but to channel it, so to generate the verve required on our journey towards God while we patiently drain the mushroom-infested, boggy patches of our lives, which have become unfruitful on account of passionate overspill.

I wish to look at a few key themes on the basis of the sayings of the Desert Fathers, collections of apodictic wisdom from the fourth and fifth centuries, born of conversations among monks as they sought useful answers to timeless questions.

The ascetic life was in this period a novelty. The first monks retired to the desert without much of a structure to lean on. They saw themselves as followers of Abraham, who at the Lord’s behest set out from Mesopotamia to go he knew not where; or like the Israelites leaving Egypt, led by an angel of God through the wilderness. What they did have was the Bible. They knew it well. Their purpose and hope was to let the Biblical drama of redemption be realized in their own lives.

The Apophthegmata are a user’s manual for Scripture. How can I let God’s Word strike root in me? How can I apply it to my experience? How is Christ’s saving work realized in particular lives? These questions exercised the brothers who came to see an abba, a seasoned elder, asking for a ‘word’ to live by. Thus, as I have said, the monastic institute turned into something of a laboratory for Christian doctrine and practice.

Athanasius’s Life of Antony, for instance, can be read as evidence to prove that the dogma set out in the patriarch’s treatise On the Incarnation actually works. Athanasius shows how the life of a person like you and me is changed by Christ’s mystery as the Church expounds it. He presents the new monastic Israel as a company of heralds ushering in a new aeon. The monks drag humanity a bit further up the mountain from which it once descended in thrall to appetite and ignorance, resensitizing it to a nostalgia for Eden.

To illustrate the change humanity has undergone in Christ, Athanasius adduces the evidence of celibate chastity. ‘For who among men’, he asks,

whether after death or even while alive has offered a teaching about virginity and has not considered such a virtue impossible to practise for human beings? However, our Saviour and King of all, Christ, taught so powerfully on this subject that even youngsters who have not yet come of age profess a virginity that transcends the law.

It is axiomatic to him that such profession is the work of God: only continued consent to grace enacted by means of enlightened choices embedded in a coherent life can keep this commitment alive as a source of beatitude and fruitfulness.

St Antony certainly did not look like Zurbaran imagined him in this painting, now in the Hulton Fine Art Collection, produced around 1640. It is pleasing all the same, with the Father of Monks got up more or less like a Cistercian. ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe,’ said Antony to his brothers on his deathbed.

What caused men and women in the early Christian centuries to relinquish property, status and family to devote themselves full-time to the search for God in the monastic state? These days we would posit a vocation requiring discernment; indeed, a mystique of discernment has emerged, as if being in discernment were a vocation in its own right. We largely look in vain for such a quest in early Christian literature. The Desert Fathers tend to be matter-of-fact, practical, even pragmatic in accounts of their life choice. They rarely invoke Damascus Road epiphanies. What they do speak of is a rational decision to follow Christ without compromise.

For some, hearing a word of Scripture proved decisive. Antony the Great set out on his journey after hearing Jesus’s words to the rich young man: ‘If you would be perfect, sell what you own, and follow me’ (Matthew 19.21). The words pierced him; he was certain they were for him. For others, remembrance of baptism was a motivating factor. Abba Gregory spells out what this sacrament requires of any baptized Christian: ‘As far as the soul is concerned, right faith; as far as the tongue is concerned, truth; as far as the body is concerned, temperance’ (I.3). He saw that life in the world made it hard to live up to this standard. So he went into the desert.

Once our eyes have been opened to faith as something real, a reorientation of existence is called for. Faith in the Son of God made man requires of me an embodied response, made concrete in a life of conversion, not just in the rehearsal of abstract sublimities. ‘Be perfect,’ said the Lord (cf. Matthew 5.48). This summons is intrinsic to a Christian perception of discipleship. A brother once asked Abba Macarius what perfection was about. The abba answered:

Unless a man obtains great humility of both heart and body, so that he entirely ceases to compare himself with others and rather submits humbly to every creature, without judging anyone other than himself; unless he endures insult and weeds out every trace of evil from his heart, while forcing himself to be patient and of benefit to others, a friend to his brethren, temperate and master of himself; unless he uses his eyes to see what is right; unless he guards his tongue and averts his ear from all useless speech that harms the soul; unless he works righteousness with his hands, keeping his heart pure and his body immaculate before God; unless he keeps death before his eyes daily and renounces all anger, all spiritual evil; unless he renounces the lust of matter and the flesh, as well as the devil and all his works; unless he binds himself steadfastly to God, the King of the universe, and to all his commandments, so to remain close to God at all times, in all circumstances, in all his occupations; well, then he has no chance of approaching perfection (I.16).

These are not banal requirements. They were understood, as they must be, to be obligatory and non-negotiable. When men and women left familiar lives and set out for the desert, it was to avoid the most obvious temptations and distractions, so that they might focus all energy on striving towards the one thing necessary.

In this regard, I should underline a couple of points. First: even if monasticism was seen as a help to Christian perfection, it was never regarded as holding a monopoly on perfection. The literature refers again and again to austere monks sent by God’s Spirit to meet, say, a cobbler in Alexandria or a clown in Antioch, folk who, in the middle of the city’s bustle, had attained greater perfection than they. Secondly: the monk is not permitted, even for a second, to nurture illusions that he makes progress towards an evangelical life under his own steam. Abba Marcos sums up the insight of tradition when he says that it is not human virtue, but alone Christ’s cross, that enables Christians to serve perfectly under the law of perfect freedom (I.17).

The motivation underlying a decision to embrace the pursuit of perfection is, then, objective and rational. It springs from a desire to follow the Gospels and to live up to obligations contracted at baptism. At the source is a decision rooted in free will, carried by faith. This is later instilled with spiritual desire, so that affectivity can make its contribution. An experienced monk wrote lyrically of the blessed repose – hesychia – which establishes the tonality of the monk’s desire for God:

O repose! Every day, every night you await Christ while keeping the lamp from going out. You desire him and sing incessantly: ‘My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready!’… O repose, Christ’s field: wonderful is the harvest you bear!’ (II.35).

This repose is a function of the soul’s reconquered harmony. It expresses our true human nature, which only through sin’s alienation becomes chaotic and violent.

To refer to sin, the Fathers sometimes (e.g. V.46) use the word πλημμέλημα [plēmmelēma]. It literally means ‘a striking of wrong notes’. Our authentic being is sweet music to the Lord. Only when we are no longer faithful to ourselves, does dissonance arise.

What is required of us is not to transcend human nature, as if we had to leave our incarnate self behind to become angelic. No! The transformation the Fathers had in mind was a reconquest of true humanity. One who would serve God, said Abba Poimen, ‘must refrain from all that militates against his nature, that is to say, against anger, irritation, hatred and slander of his brother; from all that pertains to the past’ (I.21). What should interest us is what lies ahead. In Ephesians, St Paul speaks of the Christian’s call ‘to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’ (4.13). The Apophthegmata have this finality in mind when they say: ὅρος χριστιανοῦ μίμησις Χριστοῦ, a dense phrase I can only render paraphrastically: ‘The measure of the Christian is his – or her – imitation of Christ’ (I.37). We approach perfection in so far as Christ lives in us so that his life becomes ours.

The repose I have spoken of is no sweet slumber. On the contrary, it presupposes battle. Abba Antony states this squarely: ‘He who lives in the desert in repose [ἡσυχάζων] is freed from three kinds of battle: the battles of hearing, speech, and sight. He is concerned with only one, namely the battle of the heart’ (II.2). The monk escapes worldly distraction in order to attend to voices that arise from within in the form of intimate thoughts, temptations and desires.

A Desert Father once demonstrated the foundation of contemplative life by means of a physics experiment. When asked what the benefit was of living far from the haunts of men, he poured water into a bowl and told the enquirers: ‘Look at the water!’ They looked, but saw nothing: the water was muddy. After a while, the abba said: ‘Look again at the water.’ His visitors did as they were told and, true enough, ‘they saw their own faces as in a mirror.’ The abba then said, ‘This is the way of one who lives in the middle of others; on account of all the unrest, he is unable to see his own sin. But once he finds repose [ὅταν δὲ ἡσυχάσῃ], above all here in the desert, his eyes are opened to all his failings’ (II.29). Ascetic rest reveals the heart’s unrest. The budding contemplative must learn to deal with this first.

What is the source of unrest? Memories, above all. An experienced nun once told me she had spent her first years in the monastery with the sense that all she had hitherto lived through was projected on an interior cinema screen. She had to sit through the entire performance, without a fast-forward option. This experience is typical for novices. As soon as we unplug outward providers of visual and auditive impressions, a corresponding bombardment of impressions begins from within. We had no idea we were carrying them all. Experiences, images, words and emotions we thought (and possibly wished) we had forgotten are drawn forth in a flood of remembrance. The scene is potentially set for an experience of Aristotelian catharsis, but a version of me is the protagonist of the drama I am watching.

St Mary of Egypt, who spent an energetic career as a prostitute in Alexandria for seventeen years, told Abba Zossima that she lived, after her conversion, with vivid mental and physical memories of her professional life for a corresponding seventeen years. This sort of baggage, tradition tells us, must be dispatched; it is well to get the job done before we find ourselves at check-in. For that to happen, we must sit still and look at ourselves as we are. When Abba Moses told a monk to remain in his cell faithfully, ‘and the cell will teach you everything’ (II.19), this is the sort of thing he had in mind. To learn to know God, we must first know ourselves. That is not always easy. Abba Dioscoros said: ‘If I could truly see my sins, the strength of five men would not suffice to bewail them.’ Abba Poimen, who tells the story, adds: ‘This is what a man is like who knows himself’ (III.23).

Patience is required to live in this way; courage, too. Still, the stilled water in the desert monk’s bowl offers encouragement. Abba Nilos reassures us:

Any passion which is not actively stimulated will gradually move towards greater temperance, and will eventually cease entirely. With time it loses strength. When the passionate inclination is gone, only remembrance of the deed remains (II.23).

Here we find two insights of capital importance for anyone aspiring to chastity. First, Abba Nilos ascertains that any passionate thought or deed leaves a mark – and remember, the ‘passions’ the Fathers spoke of were not just sexual, but likewise referred to wrath, envy and so forth. An actively nurtured passion lives in us like a vital principle, an autonomous impulse. ‘A habit’, the Apophthegmata insist, ‘which is strengthened over time acquires the force of nature’: the ἔθος [ethos] masquerades as φύσις [physis] (IV.67), so that it can be hard to tell one from the other. It is obvious that we must be on our guard with regard to the impressions we admit into our heart and mind. To get rid of them once they are there is easier said than done. The second insight is this: destructive passions can be starved to death, provided we take responsibility for them and deliberately reject them, all with God’s help, naturally. The remembrance of sin remains. But once the sting has been excised, it is harmless. It can even be of benefit, spurring us on towards humility.

We have looked at the shock of grace that may cause a man or woman to wish to begin a new life. We have considered ways of dealing with wounds from the past. What of the way forward here and now? It is marked by an ongoing battle against primary impulses that, in the sense in which, above, we defined ‘sin’, would draw the monk away from his true goal.

These impulses may seem primitive, but are in reality most subtle. Also, they are interconnected. For this reason the Fathers may, for instance, recommend a period of fasting to fight irritability; or exercises in humility to overcome erotic temptation. Instead of considering the passions in isolation, they developed an overall strategy to underpin ascesis.

This strategy is rooted in an endeavour concerned with seeing. The monk strives, first, to see his desire for what it is in order to see himself in truth. Secondly, he would see his fellow men and women with Christian clarity. Thirdly, he hopes to see God on the terms set out by the Beloved Disciple, not on the basis of human projections, but ‘as he is’ (1 John 3.2). Let us consider these three aspirations in turn.

How do I see myself as I am? First, I must identify and name the factors that motivate the options that shape my life. Next, I must own the consequences of these options. We find a matter-of-fact example of what this might mean in a story attributed to Abba Zeno. Zeno recounts how, one torridly hot day, he found himself walking past a cucumber field. He was hungry and thirsty. We know from the Pentateuch how appetizing cucumbers can be for desert wanderers (cf. Numbers 11.5). Zeno stood by the fence and looked at the crop, his mouth dried out. There was no doubt about what he wanted. He did not, however, simply give in to his appetite. Instead he asked himself lucidly: ‘Am I then strong enough to sustain the punishment a thief deserves?’ The cucumbers, after all, were someone else’s. In order to find out, he took up position right there, under the scorching sun, as if placed in the stocks. After five days he could not stand it any more. ‘Therefore he said to his thought: “If you cannot [bear the sanction you deserve], don’t steal, and don’t eat.”’

Note: ‘he said to his thought.’ The thought in question was the voice of concupiscence saying, ‘Go on: have a cucumber! The sun is harsh, you are worn out, and the farmer has lots.’ Zeno refused to identify himself with that thought. He related to it the way we would relate to a telephone sales agent: he would not hear of an investment (in the form of action) until he knew exactly what the proposal might entail. To find out, he gave up five days of his life.

Did he not have better things to do: baskets to weave, prayers to say? No doubt he did. But nothing seemed to him more important than to reach clarity regarding the voice in his heart (IV.17). We have seen how a habit that is strengthened over time can acquire the force of nature. In Zeno’s case we see a staunch refusal to allow an ethos (even one as innocent as thirst on a hot day) to overwhelm his physis. To tell one from the other, he applied reason.

The Fathers would call this approach sane, responsible and human. Variations on the theme can be found in different keys throughout the literature. Another monk felt tempted to leave the desert to find himself a wife. ‘Oh well’, he said to himself: ‘so you want to get married? But have you strength to ensure the upkeep of a wife and children?’ Without further ado, he made two figures of clay and said: ‘Here is your wife. Here is your son. From now on you must work twice as hard, that they may live.’ After a few days he was exhausted. He concluded: ‘If you haven’t the strength to maintain a family, you shouldn’t acquire one’ (V.50).

We may smile as such stories. They seem to us naïve, and so they are; not in the sense the adjective has acquired in current speech (connoting gullible), but in its original sense of ‘uncontaminatedly lucid’ – naïf is derived from nativus. The Fathers refused to rationalize their desires. They considered them concrete proposals with concrete impact. This was true not least for passion in its most embodied form. The Apophthegmata deal fearlessly with porneia, the wide spectrum of sexual temptation. They display a reflexivity that may amaze us, accustomed as we are to explicit but often superficially pondered engagement with such issues.

Here, too, it matters to see what – and whom – one is dealing with; indeed, it is paramount to see, not just to listen. Once a young brother came to an abba in despair at his unclean thoughts. Why, he cried, was he not helped by grace when he was praying all the time? The elder, enlightened by God’s Spirit, saw what was going on: the young man had indeed tried to pray, but had nonetheless remained sitting next to the demon of impurity, chatting with it in between devotions. Nearby stood God’s angel powerless, since the brother would not be helped. Graced with this insight, the old monk was able to teach the young man how to act. His advice was simple: ‘Don’t engage in talk!’ (V.23). In the heat of battle he should not try to understand or persuade his opponent, nor try to make sense of tempting thoughts. Rather he should be alert to their provenance. ‘As soon as they begin to speak, you must withhold your answer; instead rise, throw yourself on the ground and say, “Son of God, have mercy on me!”’ (V.37). The early monks knew that the demon of impurity rarely shows its face. It talks sweetly. It seems reasonable. Yet tradition insists: if by grace we get to see it face to face, we find that ‘it stinks’ (V.27).

The Desert Fathers were not, on the whole, dualists hostile to the body. Abba Antony speaks for mainstream tradition when he says that the body’s impulses as such are natural and morally neutral. Yet a twisted, passionate urge can cause these impulses to diverge from nature. This urge appears in two forms. The first is purely physical. It comes about when we pamper our bodies voluptuously. This is why the pursuit of chastity is inseparable from fasting, which we should understand not merely as disciplined eating but as a psychobiological, therapeutic practice of liberation from self-centredness. The second form of the passionate urge is spiritual, born of the devil’s jealousy (V.1). The father of lies does not want us to be sanctified in truth. He confounds us where we are most vulnerable.

A sign of a given temptation’s diabolical origin is its tendency to induce hopelessness. A monk who falls prey to it thinks that he is abandoned by God; that for him there can be no pardon. This is the greatest temptation. The Apophthegmata praise monks who, in battle against impurity, refuse to abandon hope of God’s grace (V.47). Even the darkest thoughts are powerless if we do not grant them entry to our heart. We are safe as long as we refuse to be impressed. Trouble begins the moment we close our eyes and entrust ourselves to the tempter’s soft voice, which draws us into the realm of chaos from which it issues.

What about seeing my brother – the representative and present other – in truth? To introduce this topic, we may consider a story about Macarius the Great:

It was said about Abba Macarius the Great that he, on a journey through the desert, found a skull lying on the ground. The elder touched it with his staff and said: ‘And you, who are you? Answer me!’
The skull answered: ‘I was high priest of the pagans here in this place. And you are Abba Macarius, bearer of the Spirit. When you have pity on those who are punished [beyond the grave], they are comforted a little.’
Abba Macarius asked: ‘Wherein does this comfort consist?’
The skull answered: ‘As far as heaven is from earth, so far fire extends under our feet and under our head; when we stand in the middle of the fire, we cannot see each other face to face, for we are bound back to back. But when you pray for us, each of us can glimpse the face of the other.’
The elder wept and said: ‘Woe to the day on which man was born, if this is what counts as comfort in eternal torment!’ (III.19).

We need not be detained by the technical challenges the text throws up (why and how are the damned tied back to back?); we are dealing with a fraught manuscript tradition with many variants. What matters is this: damnation is conceived of as inability to see the face of others. It spells the annihilation of personhood, a state in which a person’s identity is reduced to, and enclosed in, mere individuality.

A damned human being, cut off from God, is consumed by loneliness. A holy human being, in contrast, one living in communion with the triune God, is utterly personal. Oriented towards the other in purity and love, he or she carries blessing right into hell.

The Fathers drew practical consequences from this sublime theology, applying it to daily life. We constantly read of situations in which the question is whether one person sees his fellows or really has eyes only for himself. The examples are of perennial relevance. Epiphanios, a monk who had become bishop of Cyprus, once invited his old friend Abba Hilarion to visit when they were both of a great age. While they were talking, the bishop’s housekeeper served a nice roasted bird. Hilarion declined politely but firmly, saying, ‘Forgive me, Abba, but since receiving the habit, I have not eaten meat.’ The bishop responded, ‘And I, since I was clothed, have never let another go to rest [at night] with something against me, even as I have never gone to rest with something against another.’ ‘Forgive me, Abba’, said Hilarion, ‘your way of life is higher than mine’ (IV.15).

What is more important here: my high principles or delicate attention with regard to a friend? The story implies that the superior ascesis consists in courtesy, a high form of self-transcendence.

We find this principle more drastically illustrated in the story of a young monk tormented by impure thoughts. When he went to an abba to open his heart, the old man, in spite of his grey hair and beard, turned out to be ἄπειρος [apeiros], ‘without experience’: he violently scolded the brother and told him that a man who entertains such thoughts is unworthy of the monk’s habit. The young disciple was saddened, lost heart and decided to abandon monastic life. Thank God, on his way back into the world, he ran into Abba Apollos. Apollos was a perceptive man. He had eyes to see. He noticed at once the brother’s burden of sadness, and asked, ‘But child, why are you so downcast?’ The young monk told his story. Apollos consoled him: ‘Child, this is nothing to be astonished about. Don’t give up hope! I myself, ancient as I am, am often plagued terribly by thoughts! Don’t lose courage on account of a fever which no human zeal, but only God’s mercy can heal. Give me a day or so, then you can return to your cell.’

The young man settled down, heartened, while Apollos took his staff and went to pay a visit to his old colleague, the one who had been harsh. Taking position outside this man’s cell, Apollos prayed: ‘Lord, you let temptations come to those who may benefit from them. Let [my young] brother’s battle be transferred onto this old man so that he… may experience what a long life has not taught him, so to show mercy to those who do combat.’ Apollos’s prayer was heard. Forthwith the old man came running out of his door, shouting ‘like a drunkard’, unable to endure the temptation, running for the world. Apollos stopped him and explained what was going on. With high sarcasm he said, ‘Probably the devil thought you unworthy of temptation, and that is why you were cruel to the brother who was having a hard time’ (V.4).

This story teaches us a lot: that the weakness of the flesh is a universal experience; that sexual temptations are composite; that temptation can serve a useful purpose if it leads us into humility; that acquaintance with our own weakness teaches us compassion with others; and that we, when we see another human being in truth – weak but with capacity for and will towards the good – see him or her the way God sees them, that is, with infinite mercy.

As for the quest to see God, the passage of sixteen centuries has removed nothing of the pathos of Abba Isaiah’s lament: ‘Woe is me! For your name surrounds me, yet I serve your enemies!’ (III.13). To be surrounded by God’s name is to live in God’s presence. To live in God’s presence, though, is not tantamount to seeing God; and if we do not see God we are prone to forget that he is there, surrounding us.

The Beatitudes proclaim that God is visible to the pure of heart. Monastic wisdom takes this reference seriously. Cassian saw purity of heart as the goal of monastic life. If we set out to reach it, a long way opens up before us. It has rough patches. Often, contemplation of God is perceptible first as an experience of absence. What I long for seems so remote. Increasingly, I come to see that the absent one is not God, but I. I am the one who has left the Father’s house and gone off into a far country. Having come to my senses, I can start the work of conversion and repentance.

It is not primarily the memory of particular sins that forms the basis for repentance, the joy-bearing penthos to which the Fathers aspired. This sorrow, made explicit in the beatitude of weeping, is wholly unlike depressive tristesse. The monk sorrows blessedly in so far as he discovers whom he has wounded by his faithlessness; in so far as he realizes God’s immense philanthropy. Abba Isaac once saw Abba Poimen in ecstasy at prayer. ‘Where, Abba, was your thought?’ he asked afterwards. Poimen said, ‘Where St Mary stood and wept at the Saviour’s cross. How I desire to weep like that always!’ (III.31).

Of the fulfilment of contemplative longing the Apophthegmata speak with restraint. ‘Secretum meum mihi’ is what the desert’s sons and daughters murmur still in response when we, intrusive gawkers, become too curious: ‘My secret is my own’ (cf. Isaiah 24.16 in the Vulgate). Even the holiest monks insist that they have hardly begun to work on their conversion. Still, we get a faint idea of what it means to see God when, now and again, we catch a glimpse of transformed lives.

The monastic life is lived in the light of Christ’s resurrection. ‘About Abba Arsenios it was said that he, on Saturday evening, while the glory of Sunday readied itself, turned his back to the sun and, hands raised towards heaven, remained standing thus, praying, until the sun illumined his face’ (XII.1). This sabbath vigil from sunset to sunrise displays the monk’s vocation and purpose. His attention is drawn towards the east from which Christ, according to his promise, will return. When existence is oriented, eternity’s light reveals its splendour in transitory vessels.

When Abba Lot asked Abba Joseph about the sense of Christian asceticism, ‘the elder arose, extended his hands towards heaven, and his fingers became like ten glowing lamps. Then he said, “If you wish, you can become fire entirely”’ (XII.9). The God whom the desert ascetics longed to see has become man in Christ; faith in the incarnation saturates their lives. Further, when the monks, with the words of the Psalms, cried out, ‘Lord, show me your face!’, they were conscious that the Lord has a way of manifesting himself in human faces. At the end of his long life, Abba Antony said: ‘I no longer fear God. I love him’ (XVII.1). He had become living proof that love can drive out fear. He had become an icon of Christ, irresistibly beautiful. When the aged Antony asked a visiting disciple what he could do for him, the young man said, ‘Father, it is enough for me to see you’ (XVII.5). In Antony’s features he discerned evidence of God’s present agency. He saw what he himself was called to become.

The texts we have considered put forward an ideal relevant for all of us. They reveal how eyes are opened, how the Lord may answer us when we pray with blind Bartimaeus, ‘Lord, that I might see!’ (Mark 10.51). The beginning of living chastely in the world is to see it as it is, with reverence, desiring to encounter what I see, but freed from the need to possess.

Such seeing is grace. Grace presupposes endeavour. I must shed habits that obscure and weigh down my nature, created light in order to be light. To see truly is to be changed by what I see. It is important to remember this in a climate inducing me to think that reality ought to adapt itself to me, not I to it.

The classical terminology of passions and ascesis, ethos and physis, sprang from a yearning to recapture what is natural to man, created in God’s image, called to realize his likeness. Formed by Christ’s commandments, the desert ascetics declared war on all in them that compromised their dignity and beauty as sons and daughters of God. They took it for granted that the divine image imprinted on their being was marred. But they were certain that God could restore it to full splendour. The aim of monastic life, according to Panayotis Nellas, is ‘to retrace the path of Adam in reverse, to cleanse the “garments of skin”, and to raise the functions of their existence to the level of the natural iconic functions which existed before the fall’. All Christians are called to follow this path, according to their state of life. The one true, worthy goal of human life is the redeemed love of God and neighbour that transforms our being and makes it Godlike.

In calculating, risk-averse times it is hard to see life as a process of conversion, healing and change. It is counter-cultural to live with empty hands and to tread this earth chastely, freed from the will to domineer. We may think this bright ideal so far out of reach that we stop striving for it and languish in cocooned darkness. We need the testimony of the Fathers. It reminds us: ‘If you wish, you can become fire.’