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Cassian's vocabulary highlights the active, determinative character of this system. There
is consistent use of terms for struggling, resisting, overcoming, fighting, prevailing. He
relics on words for attaining, achieving, gaining, winning victory. His writings are
saturated with the language of vigilance, discrimination, watching, weighing. Such a
lexicon is possible only where there is a fixed discrimination of opposite realms.
The regimen of perfection proceeds systematically by building upon succeeding levels of
self-discipline. For example, the monk must refrain from overeating because one cannot
enter larger spiritual arenas of combat if already "smitten down in a struggle with the
belly." Through fasting, recollection of past defeats, "sighing at one time with horror at
sin, at another time inflamed with the desire of perfection and saintliness," one should
bring the body into subjection inorder to prepare for bringing the mind into subjection (
Inst. 5.14-21). Cassian's argument runs:
For if a man is unable to check the unnecessary desires of the appetite how
will he be able to extinguish the fire of carnal
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lust? And if a man is not able to control passions, which are openly
manifest and are but small, how will he be able with temperate discretion
to fight against those which are secret, and excite him, when none are
there to see? And therefore strength of mind. is tested in separate impulses
and in any sort of passion. [ Inst. 5. 20]
Cassian's attitude toward the sin of pride is instructive here. Certainly he believed that
man could attain nothing on his own without God's grace; yet his acknowledgment that
"all is given by God" was not a theory deemphasizing human effort but itself an act of
piety. The sin of pride is the sin of self-sufficiency and trust in one's own power. And yet
pride is here "just" a sin, a vice, and not, as with Saint Augustine and the Calvinists,
identified with human nature itself. Thus, Cassian can innocently note that pride is
particularly threatening to "those who are perfect" ( Inst. 12. 1). Pride can be counteracted
by its antithesis, humility.
And so God, the Creator and Healer of all, knowing that pride is the cause
and fountainhead of all evils, has been careful to heal opposites with
opposites, that those things which were ruined by pride might be restored
by humility. [ Inst. 12.8]
With humility itself conceived as such an antidotal medicine, humans are hardly
powerless. The monk became an expert in selflessness, and thoroughgoing obedience to
the abbot was an effective part of this process. Pride, the "beast" in the following passage,
can be joined and subdued in battle:
Wherefore the Christian athlete who strives lawfully in the spiritual
combat and desires to be crowned by the Lord, should endeavour by every
means to destroy this most fierce beast, which is destructive of all virtues,
knowing that as long as this remains in his breast he not only will never be
free from all
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kinds of evils, but even if he seems to have any good qualities, will lose
them by its malign influence. For no structure (so to speak) of virtue can
possibly be raised in our soul unless first the foundations of true humility
are laid in our heart, which being securely laid may be able to bear the
weight of perfection and love upon them. [ Inst. 12.32]
The final terms of this exhortation, that is, building up a structure of virtue on the
foundation of humility, express well the methodical, technological character of Cassian's
spiritual world.
Cassian advocated a confident, discriminatory examination of self. His focus was on how
the soul which in the following quotation is the implied actor and overseer must
steadily and carefully monitor its own contested realms:
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We should then constantly search all the inner chambers of our hearts, and
trace out the footsteps of whatever enters into them with the closest
investigations lest haply some beast . . . passing through has furtively left
the dangerous marks of his track, which will show to others the way of
access into the secret recesses of the heart, owing to a carelessness about
our thoughts. And so daily and hourly turning up the ground of our heart
with the gospel plough, i.e. the constant recollection of the Lord's cross,
we shall manage to stamp out or extirpate from our hearts the lairs of
noxious beasts and the lurking places of poisonous serpents. [ First Conf.
of Abbot Moses22]
But note that subjectivity as a problem has not fully emerged here. The one who stamps [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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