Theophan the Recluse: "The Essence of the Christian Life"

Although this is a Catholic blog, I sometimes like to post quotations from Orthodox writers – not least because the best Orthodox writers have a gift for penetrating to the heart of that Biblical, Patristic and early Mediaeval wisdom which is the shared inheritance of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

The following quotation from St Theophan the Recluse (a Russian Orthodox hermit of the nineteenth century) addresses a phenomenon which is probably universal among Christians who take their faith seriously – “a certain intuition that something is lacking and that all is not going as it should be”:

People concern themselves with Christian upbringing, but leave it incomplete. They neglect the most essential and most difficult side of the Christian life and dwell on what is easiest - the visible and external.

This imperfect and misdirected upbringing produces people who observe with the utmost correctness all the formal outward rules for devout conduct, but who pay little or no attention to the inward movements of the heart, and to true improvement of the inner spiritual life. They are strangers to mortal sin, but they do not heed the play of thoughts in the heart.

Accordingly, they sometimes pass judgments, give way to boastfulness or pride, sometimes get angry (as if this feeling were justified by the rightness of the cause), and are sometimes distracted by beauty and pleasure, sometimes even offending others in fits of irritation. Sometimes they are too lazy to pray, or lose themselves in useless thoughts while at prayer…

…Let us now take the case of one who has been falling somewhat short in the work of salvation. He or she becomes aware of this incompleteness and sees the incorrectness of their way of life, and the instability of his or her efforts. And so they turn from outward to inward piety.

They're led either by reading books about spiritual life or by talking with those who know what the essence of Christian life is, by dissatisfaction of their own efforts, by a certain intuition that something is lacking and that all is not going as it should be.

Despite all of his correctness, he has no inner peace. He lacks what was promised true Christians – peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.... He comes to understand that the essence of the Christian life consists in establishing himself with the mind in the heart before God in the Lord Jesus Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

In this way, he is enabled to control all inward movements and all outward actions so as to transform everything in himself whether great or small into the service of God and the Trinity, consciously and freely offering himself wholly to God.

From the website of the All Saints of North America Russian Orthodox Church

The language used in the last two paragraphs is characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy, but it seems to me that, taken together with his teaching on the New Law (Summa Theologiae I-II, 106), St Thomas Aquinas’s account of the Gifts of the Spirit (Summa Theologiae I-II, 68) is saying something very similar.

Needless to say, Theophan is not in any way criticising exterior piety and correctness or suggesting that they are unhelpful or unnecessary. Rather, he is making the point that exterior and interior piety are inextricably connected with each other, and that the former is incomplete without the latter.