Cassian and Germanus Consult Abba Nesteros, an Anchorite near Panephysis
Nesteros said: “If you want to arrive at the true knowledge of the scriptures, the first thing you need to do is start pursuing steady self-abasement in your heart right away. That humility will make you compassionate, and in doing so it will lead you to knowledge that enlightens you rather than inflates you. After all, it’s impossible for a muddled mind to receive the gift of insight into the meanings of scripture.42 You need take every precaution to avoid a situation in which your serious reading causes your own downfall because you’ve become pointlessly conceited—instead of generating luminous knowledge and the eternal glory that educational enlightenment can offer.
“Then, after you’ve driven out every concern and mundane thought, you need to devote all your energy to sacred reading, and to do it continually—or better, nonstop!—until that constant recitation and reflection saturates your mind and shapes it into a kind of likeness of itself. Think of it as transforming your mind into the Ark of the Covenant, containing two stone tablets signifying the eternal endurance of the two testamentary records, a golden vessel signifying a clear and sound memory that perfectly preserves manna within it forever (the manna representing the everlasting heavenly sweetness of that bread of the angels: the spiritual perceptions), and the rod of Aaron leafing with the evergreen of undying memory, signifying the salvific banner of our true and highest priest, Jesus Christ. This rod is in fact the branch that had been cut away from the root of Jesse, only to grow back even more vigorously after it was killed off.
“All these objects are guarded by two cherubim, signifying the full extent of historical and spiritual knowledge,43 for the cherubim are interpreted to mean all that is known. They keep constant watch over God’s sanctuary—that stillness in your breast—and they will protect you from every demonic onslaught. In this way, your mind will be transported, not just to the Ark of the Divine Covenant, but even to the priestly kingdom. Through an unshakeable feeling of tranquility it becomes, in a way, swallowed up in spiritual forms of conduct, and it fulfills that priestly command issued by the Lawmaker: ‘Neither shall he go out of the holy places, lest he defile the sanctuary of his God’—meaning his heart, where the Lord promised he would reside perpetually. As he said, ‘I will dwell in them and walk among them.’
“That’s why we should resolutely commit the whole series of the sacred scriptures to memory and go over them all the time. This nonstop meditation is doubly beneficial. First, while the mind’s attention is engrossed in reading and internalizing texts, there’s no way for toxic thoughts to entrap it. Second, while we’re working hard to memorize certain passages by going over and over them, we can’t understand them in the moment because our mind is so engaged—but after we’ve been cut loose from the pull of things that keep happening and popping up, especially at night when we’ve fallen silent in meditation and keep turning the scriptures over in our minds, we see things so much more clearly. It’s when we are still, just as if we’re plunged deep in sleep, that we perceive the things that were most obscure to us, things that we barely understood when we were wide awake.
“But there is more. As our mind is gradually remade through this sustained effort, the shape of the scriptures begins to be remade, too, and it’s as if the beauty born of this more sacred perceptiveness grows as we grow. How the scriptures look depends on what the human senses are capable of: to physical modes of perception they appear to be earthly, and to spiritual modes they appear to be divine. As a result, people who see the scriptures cloaked in a dense fog can’t make out their fine features or bask in their brightness.
“By way of example, it’s enough to proffer one piece of evidence from the Law to help clarify what we’re trying to lay out here. With it we can prove that all heavenly teachings speak to every human being, commensurate with where we stand. In the Law it is written: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ A person who is still prone to inappropriate sexual impulses observes this literally, for their own good. But a person who has already sworn off those dirty behaviors and filthy mentality needs to heed the spiritual sense of the same commandment. This means distancing oneself from idolatrous rituals, and from all the superstitions of the pagans and soothsayers, and from prognostications and the astrological charting of signs and days and phases. It also means not getting caught up in telling fortunes based on certain words and terms—a practice that defiles the integrity of our faith.”44
[Nesteros went on:] “And even a person who is able to avoid such scenarios should take care not to lapse into the failure of fornication through subtler sins—distracted thoughts, in other words—because from the point of view of a perfect man, every disgusting thought, every pointless thought, every thought that distances itself from God even the tiniest bit, is an utterly obscene act of fornication.”
[Cassian.] When I heard these things, I was deeply moved at first by an inner sting of remorse, and then I began to moan. I said, “Everything you’ve so thoroughly laid out here makes me feel even more at a loss than I already was. Because even leaving aside those common entrapments of the soul, which I’m certain keep battering vulnerable people from the outside in, there is a particular obstacle to salvation in my way. And that is my passing acquaintance with literature. I was steeped in those texts thanks to the insistence of my teacher and the attention I gave to bouts of reading, so now it’s like my mind is tainted by that poetry. Even when it’s time to pray, my mind meditates on the silly stories and military histories that it soaked up back when I was a little boy in elementary school.45 And when I’m singing psalms or making entreaties for my sins to be pardoned, an insolent memory from those poems will pop up, or heroes will start battling it out before my eyes. These mental images are always toying with me, keeping my mind from reaching more celestial vistas, and I can’t even drive them off through my daily practice of weeping.”
Nesteros said: “This problem may have made you lose hope of ever getting rid of it, but there is a quick and effective cure that can be developed. You only need to be willing to apply the same dedication and tenacity to reading and meditating on spiritual writings that you said you’d kept up in your nonreligious studies. The time that your mind spent occupied by those poems: that’s how long it will have to spend tending a new crop of things within itself, carrying out the work with the same effort and persistence, and producing spiritual and divine thoughts instead of those unproductive earthly ones.
“And when the mind is schooled in those subjects and starts thinking deeply and soaringly, it can gradually drive out that older material or utterly destroy it. After all, it’s impossible for the human mind to empty itself of all thoughts. So if it isn’t spending much time on spiritual activities, it’s inevitably going to get caught up in things it learned a long time ago. When it doesn’t have a place to go to keep up its inexhaustible exercises, it inevitably falls back on what it absorbed when it was young, and it keeps repeating the things it has practiced and thought about for ages.
“Consequently, this scriptural knowledge should be strengthened into an enduringly solid state in you. It should no longer be something you enjoy only fleetingly, like other people who grasp it only vicariously rather than through their own efforts: they experience it like a wafting scent, I’d say. But for you, it should be grounded in your senses as if you’d seen and touched and digested it. And to accomplish all of this, you should concentrate completely on respecting the following principle: that even when it’s the case that someone is talking about things you already know really well, you shouldn’t treat what you already know as unappetizing or unappealing. Instead you should entrust that information to your heart with the same hunger we’re supposed to feel when the choice words of salvation are poured unceasingly into our ears and uttered nonstop by our mouth.
“No matter how often a discussion of sacred subjects comes up, a person whose soul thirsts for true knowledge will never be put off or sated. Every day they treat it like it’s a brand-new thing they’ve been waiting for. The more often they drink it in, the more voraciously they listen and talk. And rather than get bored by a conversation they have repeatedly, the repetition instead verifies the knowledge they’ve already acquired. It’s a clear sign that a mind is lukewarm and arrogant if it’s careless or squeamish about taking the medicine of lifesaving words, no matter how energetic the efforts are to prescribe it for them. A soul in plenitude scorns honeycombs, but to the needy soul even bitter things appear sweet.
“If a person handles these discussions carefully, sets them in the back of the mind, and stores them in a specially designated silent cellar, the heart will later emerge like a sweetly fragrant wine that maketh glad the heart of man. Once they have been aged by mature perspective and long-standing endurance, they will emerge from the bottle of your breast full of aroma. And like a never-ending fountain they will overflow through the veins of your expertise and the arteries of your strength in a constant course, as if they were pouring out of some bottomless sea in your heart.”