GOALS

The desert of Scetis: home to the most battle-tested monastic elders and their many perfect achievements. Abba Moses was the sweetest of all those extraordinary flowers there; his practical and also his contemplative powers were full of fragrance. I wanted to get some grounding in his teaching, so the holy abba Germanus and I had to seek him out. Germanus had been with me ever since we had entered the spiritual military and started basic training, and from then on, we were such inseparable bunkmates in both the monastic community and the desert that everyone remarked on the equality of our companionship and our sense of purpose. They said that we were one mind and soul in two bodies.

And now both of us were pouring out tears¹⁹ and begging Abba Moses to edify us with his words. (We did this because we knew he was so notoriously strict that he’d agree to open the door of perfection only to people who longed for it in good faith and sought it out in a state of total anguish. He didn’t want to seem to be committing the crime of betrayal or giving into the impulse to show off. Revealing that door indiscriminately to people who weren’t up for it, or who were only sort of interested, would result in the disclosure of vital matters—things that only people seeking perfection should learn—to unworthy recipients who wouldn’t know what it all was worth.) Eventually he was worn down by our pleas and began to speak.

“Every acquired skill and every discipline,” he said, “has a scopos and a telos, some immediate goal and some ultimate goal that is particular to it. Practitioners of any skilled craft will gladly and good-naturedly work through all their fatigue and risks and costs as they keep those goals in mind.²⁰

“Take a farmer, for instance, who tirelessly breaks up the soil and plows through the untilled clods of his field over and over again, without giving up in the frost and ice or in the withering rays of the sun. He does this while keeping his eye on his immediate goal of clearing away all the thorns, purging all the vegetation, and crumbling the earth into a loamy texture. He is certain that this is the only way he’ll achieve his ultimate goal: a yield of copious produce and abundant grain that will enable him to live comfortably or even to build up his wealth. He’s even willing to draw down the produce from his storehouses when supplies are already getting low, and he works hard to entrust their seeds to the fallow farrows. He doesn’t see it as a shortage in the present, because he is focused on future harvests.

“Likewise the merchants who work in wholesale trade aren’t afraid of what might happen unexpectedly on the open sea. As long as the drive to profit propels them to an ultimate goal, there isn’t any hazard that scares them.

Not even the members of the earthly military who are stoked by ambition notice the ravages or dangers of their campaigns when they have the ultimate goal of honors and influence to look forward to. And they aren’t shattered by losses or battles in the moment, as long as they’re eagerly anticipating the ultimate goal of the promotion they’ve visualized for themselves.

“Our own profession has particular immediate and ultimate goals, too, and we devote all our labors tirelessly and even enthusiastically to them. This is why fasting doesn’t wear us out, why the fatigue from keeping vigil all night appeals to us, why constant reading and meditating on the scriptures is never enough for us, and why incessant work and nakedness and complete dispossession and this chilling expanse of solitude doesn’t scare us off. And it is undoubtedly why you yourselves rejected the affection of your families and turned away from your only homeland and from the delightful things in the world, traveling long distances so that you could visit us of all people—rednecks and hicks living in this desolate desert. So tell me: what are your immediate and ultimate goals? What’s compelling you two to endure all of this so willingly?”

Since Moses kept trying to elicit a response from us, we answered that the kingdom of the heavens was the reason to endure all these things.

He replied, “Nicely done! You’ve given an incisive answer about your ultimate goal. But before anything else, you should really know what our scopos should be. I’m talking about our immediate goal, the thing we stick to all the time so that we’re eventually able to reach the ultimate goal.”

We openly admitted that we didn’t know. So he went on: “Like I said, there is a particular scopos that leads the way in every single skill and discipline. Think of it as an immediate goal for the soul, or a relentless mental attentiveness. If you don’t focus on it with all your effort and perseverance, you won’t be able to reach your ultimate goal and enjoy the payoff you’ve been waiting for.

“For instance, as I said before, the farmer whose ultimate goal is to live comfortably and prosperously off his plentiful yields of grain operates with the scopos or immediate goal of clearing all the thorns from his field and getting rid of all the weeds. He doesn’t assume that he’ll achieve his ultimate goal—getting rich—by doing nothing; he knows for certain that he’ll possess what he really wants to have only by means of his plan of hard work and hope.

“The same is true of the merchant. He never gives up the drive to procure merchandise, which is such a lucrative way for him to accumulate wealth. It would be pointless for him to pursue profit without deciding how to get there.

“As for people who want to be honored with some particular distinction the world has to offer: the first thing they do is decide what job or office to land on, so that by setting their hopes on the right course of action, they can arrive at their ultimate goal of the accolade they’ve always wanted.

“In the same way, when it comes to our own path, the end point is the kingdom of God. But as for what our scopos might be, we should really make a careful investigation. If we don’t figure it out like other people do, we’ll wear ourselves out to the point of exhaustion—all for nothing, because if we don’t follow a path, our work is a journey that goes nowhere.”

As we sat in astonishment at what he’d said, the old man made this proposition: “As we said, the ultimate goal that is specific to our profession is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the heavens. And in fact our immediate goal, our scopos, is clarity and tranquility of the heart.²¹ Without that clarity, it’s totally impossible to reach the ultimate goal.

“So we should fix our navigation on this immediate goal, like we’re steering ourselves along a set line down a very straight route. And even if our thinking were to veer away from it a bit, we would hurry to set it in our sights again, like making a precise correction with a ruler—a ruler that keeps drawing all our ventures back to this one guideline and alerting us immediately if our mind takes even a little detour from the course in front of us.

“Take, for example, people who are trained in handling military projectiles. When they want to showcase their expertise in this skill in the presence of a king in some part of the world, they shoot their javelins or arrows at miniscule targets that have prizes depicted on them. They’re sure that the only way to obtain the ultimate goal of the prize they’re after is to follow the sightline of their immediate goal. And then in the end, they do get that ultimate goal, when they to stick to their set scopos.

“But if the target happened to be taken away, nobody—not even an inexperienced shooter who aimed way off the right trajectory—would know whether they’d deviated from the designated line, because they wouldn’t have any indicator to tell whether their aim was true or crooked. And the result of having dumped their useless shots into the open air would be that they couldn’t tell where they went wrong or where they were misled, obviously because there wouldn’t be any telltale sign of how far they’d gone off course. If your eye doesn’t know where to look, it can’t offer any guidance about where to adjust or realign your aim.

“So as I was saying, the ultimate goal that has been set before us is everlasting life, as the apostle Paul declared: ‘Ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.’ The scopos here is clarity of heart, and the word he used for it was ‘holiness,’ with good reason. Without clarity of heart, the ultimate goal he mentioned would be unattainable. It was as if he’d said in so many words ‘Ye have your scopos unto clarity of heart, and the end everlasting life.’ And the same blessed apostle literally used the word scopos in teaching us about this immediate goal. He said: ‘Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the goal for the prize of the high calling of the Lord.’

“The connection is more obvious in the Greek original: ‘I press toward the immediate goal’ is kata skopon diōkō. It’s as if he’d said, ‘with this immediate goal I forget the things behind me—the weaknesses of the person I was before—and I go after the ultimate goal of the celestial prize.’²²

“And so whatever can point us toward this immediate goal of clarity and tranquility of heart should be followed with all our might, and whatever drags us away from it should be treated as a destructive and toxic thing. Everything we pursue and put up with, we do for the sake of this scopos. For its sake we disregard families, homelands, professional advancements, wealth, the world’s charms, really every single pleasurable thing: all to maintain a clear heart always.

“And once this immediate goal is in front of us, our actions and thoughts should always be steered along the straightest path toward achieving it. If it isn’t constantly propped up in front of our eyes, it would make all our efforts hollow and flimsy. It would be a waste—all that to no end, with no payoff.

“It would also stir up all sorts of conflicting thoughts. When the mind doesn’t have a headquarters to return to and to keep in close contact with, it will inevitably get bounced around by all sorts of distractions, and it will just keep taking on the shape of whatever external stimulus it comes across next.

“We have seen this at play among people who don’t put any stock in pricey assets—whether it’s piles of cash in gold and silver, or even luxe estates—only to be shaken up about a knife, a stylus, a needle, a pen.²³ But if they were keeping their heart’s concentration tidy, there’s no way they would let small things clutter it up, given that they’d already decided to get rid of their sizeable and valuable holdings so as not to run into the same problem!

“It’s often the case, for instance, that some people will guard a book so jealously that they can barely stand to let someone else read or even touch it. In the process, they turn opportunities to reap the rewards of being accommodating and charitable into opportunities to reap the rewards of intolerance and death. Although they’ve distributed all their wealth out of love for Christ, they still hold onto their heart’s old proclivity for the most insignificant things, and they can rapidly fly into a rage over them, just like those people who do not have apostolic charity and are rendered unproductive and sterile. The blessed apostle foresaw this in his spirit and said that ‘if I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’

“Clearly this proves that perfection can’t be attained the instant you strip yourself down, or deprive yourself of all your properties, or jettison your titles—unless you have that charity whose component parts the apostle described, this love that can be found only in the clarity and tranquility of the heart. After all, what does it mean to not be competitive, not be pompous, not be irritated, not be misleading, not misbehave, not be self-serving, not take pleasure in things that are wrong, not think about evil, and all the rest? What does it mean except to offer a refined and spotlessly clean heart to God always, and to keep it away from any and all psychological turbulence?

“And so everything we do and strive for should be done for the sake of clarity of heart. Solitude should be pursued for it. We know that we should take on fasts, vigils, manual labor, nakedness, reading, and other feats for it—so that we can condition our heart and keep it unharmed from all those toxic pathologies,²⁴ climbing those steps to a perfect state of love. And if some legitimate and pressing task happens to come up and we can’t carry out our usual strict regimen, we shouldn’t get sad or angry or annoyed. The very point of our regimen is to overcome such disturbances!

“After all, the advantages of fasting don’t make up for the loss incurred when we’re angry, and the benefits of reading don’t make up for the damage done when we despise a brother. We’re supposed to practice this series of exercises—fasts, vigils, isolation, meditating on the scriptures—for the sake of the fundamental scopos, for the sake of clarity of heart, which is love. We shouldn’t counteract this fundamental source of strength in us simply for the sake of our exercises. If something in the series has to be skipped, nothing will harm us as long as that power remains intact and unharmed. It won’t do us any good if we perform the entire sequence while having abandoned what we’ve said is the fundamental reason to accomplish anything.

“This is why people work quickly to set up and outfit themselves with the tools of whatever their trade is: the point isn’t to get their hands on some knick-knacks, or to lay claim to the bare value that the equipment itself might be worth, but to use them to gain expertise and attain the ultimate goal of the discipline they were designed for. So you see, fasts, vigils, meditating on the scriptures, nakedness, and total dispossession don’t amount to a state of perfection. They are only the tools of perfection, because the ultimate goal of our discipline doesn’t reside in them; it is reached through them.

“It’s useless to undertake these exercises if you’re satisfied with fixing your heart’s attention on them alone, as if they were the greatest good, rather than on achieving your ultimate goal—which is the whole reason to strive to do these exercises. Even with the tools of the discipline in your hands you’ll have expended all your effort and strength without knowing what the ultimate goal really is. Everything that is profitable is related to that goal. So anything that is capable of disturbing that clarity and calm of our mind, no matter how useful or essential it seems, should be treated as toxic. This is the ruler that will enable us to correct course from all our missteps and distractions, and to reach our desired goal along its clear straight line.”