FRUSTRATION

[Germanus said to Abba Serenus:] “You insist that we should have reached a perfect state of our inner person²⁷ by thinking about how long and how isolated our life as monks has been. But in doing this we’ve gotten just a single takeaway: we have learned what we’re incapable of being! It didn’t actually make us become what we desperately wanted to be. We’ve come to realize that what we know hasn’t helped us attain the steady and stable clarity we’ve been seeking, or any sort of hardiness—only more disorder and shame.

“Seriously: I make the effort every day to practice all our forms of discipline. I even succeed in these halting attempts to attain an expertise that’s reliable and consistent, and I start to know what I’d only barely known or was totally unaware of at first. I advance in the discipline and make what I’d call real progress, and things evolve perfectly, without a hitch. By contrast, when it comes to all the effort I’ve spent striving for a state of clarity, I’ve discovered that I’ve only advanced to the point of knowing what I can’t be. Consequently I feel that I won’t get anything out my heart’s severe anguish, other than hard work. I’m never short on tearful feelings,²⁸ and yet I can’t stop being the kind of person I shouldn’t be.

“So what’s the use of learning what’s best if you can’t actually obtain it? Even when we feel our heart heading straight toward its goals, the mind imperceptibly turns the other way, then in one intense paroxysm it backslides into its earlier meanderings. The daily claims on its attention mean that it’s perpetually being taken captive, in a series of countless kidnappings, so at this point we’ve nearly lost hope of improving the situation, and our regimen seems completely ineffectual.

“If the distracted mind is occasionally led back from its slippery detours to a fear of God or to spiritual contemplation, it gains strength in those moments initially, but then it becomes even likelier to pull its vanishing acts. And when we come to and discover that our mind has deviated from what we’d planned to focus on, we want to lead it back to that contemplative practice it had deserted and bind it so extremely tightly with the attention of our heart that it’s essentially handcuffed. But when we try to do that, it slips out of the mind’s burrows, faster than an eel.

“The result is that we keep up these intense daily practices without seeing our heart become any more stable or strong. So now that our expectations have been dashed, we’re drawn to this opinion: we believe that these profound distractions of the soul are present in the human species because of an inherent flaw, rather than any personal flaw on our part.”

Serenus said: “It’s dangerously presumptuous to jump to conclusions about the nature of something without having properly sorted out the issues or conducted a reliable analysis—let alone to speculate on the basis of one’s own flimsy experience rather than drawing on the actual attributes and properties of the discipline in question, or on the experiential knowledge of other people, to reach a judgment.

“Say that someone didn’t know how to swim and knew that the weight of his body couldn’t be supported by water, then tried to conclude on the basis of his own lack of experience that nobody whose solid flesh was surrounded by liquid could possibly stay afloat! But his opinion shouldn’t be validated. Not only is swimming not impossible; in fact it’s really easy for some people. Relying on accurate analysis, and seeing it ourselves, proves this beyond a doubt.

“The nous or mind is defined as aeikinētos kai polykinētos, always and very much on the move. Solomon describes it in the Book of Wisdom in another way: kai geōdes skēnos brithei noun polyphrontida, ‘And the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things.’ So because of its natural state it can’t ever come to a standstill and do nothing. Unless it has some plan for where to direct its motion and how to keep itself busy, its inherent instability makes it run around and flit all over the place. Only after an extended period of training and habitual long-standing practice—which both of you are saying is pointless work!—will it gain the experience to learn what kind of things it should be outfitting its memory with.²⁹ Then it will fly in tireless circles around those memories and obtain the power of rootedness. And in doing so it will become strong enough to drive off the enemy’s stimuli that used to pull it in different directions, and to firm up its character and its condition as it desires.

“And so when our heart gets distracted we shouldn’t chalk it up to human nature or to God, its creator. In fact scripture actually states that ‘God made man upright. And they themselves have searched out many thoughts.’ The essence of those thoughts depends on us, because as it says, ‘a good thought will draw near to them who know it, and a prudent man will find it.’ Since our ability to find something is predicated on our good sense and energy, not finding something should unquestionably be ascribed to laziness or ignorance, not to some defect of nature. The psalmist agrees with this idea too: ‘Happy the man whose support is from you, O Lord; ascents he arranged in his heart.’ So you see that we have firm control here: we determine in our hearts both the ascents—thoughts that reach out to God—and the descents—thoughts that sink into earthly and physical matters.

“And if our thoughts weren’t within our power, the Lord wouldn’t have rebuked the Pharisees: ‘Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?’ He wouldn’t have commanded through the prophet: ‘Remove the evil of your thoughts before my eyes.’ And ‘How long are the thoughts of trouble within you?’ We wouldn’t be questioned about those thoughts along with our works on Judgement Day, as the Lord threatened through Isaiah: ‘I am coming to gather their works and their thoughts with all the nations and their tongues.’ And we certainly wouldn’t deserve to be condemned or defended on the evidence of our thoughts in that terrifying and fearsome judgment, as the blessed apostle expressed it: ‘and their thoughts between themselves accusing or also defending one another, in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men according to my gospel.’ ”