Philipians 2.1-11 October 17 2021
Sue Hanna
The poet TS Eliot wrote “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.”
Last week we explored the noxious thought of vainglory, which is the close relative of the final noxious thought, Pride! to the extent that when Pope Gregory formulated the seven deadly sins, he conflated vainglory with pride.
As I was preparing this week, I recalled a chapter in CS Lewis’s book, Mere Christianity. I wonder if any of you are familiar with this book, which is a classic introduction to the vices and virtues of the Christian faith. Lewis’s describes Pride as “The Great Sin” and wrote of it: “There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which everyone loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves”.
Lewis describes Pride as an anti-God state of mind, as enmity, enmity between man and man, and enmity to God. “As long as you are proud you cannot know God”, wrote Lewis. “A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”
Evagrius understood pride to be caused by a demon – you recall last week we explored how Evagrius understood demons would pray on the mind of the monk at prayer, to tempt him into false ways of thinking. Evagrius wrote “The demon of pride is the cause of the most damaging fall for the soul. For it induces the monk to deny that God is his helper and to consider that he himself is the cause of virtuous actions. Further, he gets a swollen head in regard to the brethren, considering them stupid because they do not all have the same opinion of him. Anger and sadness come following on the heels of this demon, and, last of all, comes in its train the greatest of all maladies – derangement of the mind, associated with wild ravings and hallucinations of whole multitudes of demons in the sky.”
Oh gosh! This so resonates with my teenage self, when I was convinced that I was a misunderstood genius! I suspect we have all had a taste of this moment, though I wonder, as Lewis posits, whether we are prepared to admit it. There is a lostness and an emptiness that comes with pride – it is a place where the soul has turned away from God, only to find itself coming up empty handed.
Evagrius himself was no stranger to the temptation of pride, as a young man the ecclesial world was at his feet – he could have “had it all”, as it were. And yet an Angelic dream told him to pursue monastic life in the desert. The popular story says he had fallen in love with a married woman – and his flight to Egypt was to escape ruin. However, it is also very probable Evagrius also chose to become a monk out of a sincere desire to pursue the highest form of the spiritual life. He was reputed to have asked “How is it that we, with all our education and our wide knowledge get nowhere, while these Egyptian peasants acquire so many virtues?”[1] I think perhaps he was running away from the empty life that beckoned him. His flight to the desert was a clear case of losing his life in order to save it.
Evagrius’s monastic life had two stages, for the first few years he lived in a monastery before he was considered ready to pursue the hermit life in the desert. Those early years in the monastery were not easy for him, many of the monks mistrusted his motives. In The History of the Monks of Kellia, it is recorded that early in Evagrius’s monastic life he offered an opinion, only to be told that in the company of monks, his opinion was meaningless. This rebuttal was to a man who had a life among the intellectual elite, he was used to being taken seriously when he spoke. Perhaps he was arrogant on arrival at the monastery. However, in time Evagrius was reputed to have developed a distinctive humility and gentleness of spirit.
The period of monastic training Evagrius underwent was to prepare the monks to live as hermits in the deserts. Ironically, you might think that hermits would not need to be too concerned about their interactions with others – because they were hermits. But the hermit life Evagrius lived was ironically a very rich communal life. The solitary life was committed to prayer, for which the monk was responsible. But on top of that, Evagrius was reputed to have met with up to half a dozen people in his cell daily, he met weekly for Eucharist with his brothers and would spend time with them to talk and teach. Hospitality remained as essential aspect of monastic practice.
However, the monks understood what would ensure their survival in the desert was not self sufficiency – it was humility! Spiritual discipline was a necessary part of the monks training before he was permitted to pursue the hermits life. They were required to reach sufficient training so that they were able to constrain their passions and live humbly, to ensure their survival. A monk needed to have the humility to accept help from another brother if required, of food or clothing. If he was too proud, the consequences would disrupt the delicate balance of communal life – perhaps with even fatal consequences. Humility was fundamental virtue to building a harmonious and sustainable communal life.
It’s such a contrast from our culture, which emphasises self sufficiency, to be responsible for meeting our needs first. The desert monks had a more holistic vision of community, that placed harmonious relationships first, rooted in the desire to be more like Christ!
The second thing we can learn from Evagrius’s life in the desert was that he understood the spiritual life as a pathway to good health. You will recall for Evagrius, God was conceptualised as the original intelligence, and human beings were fallen intelligences. But because humans had intelligence, Evagrius considered humans to be made in God’s image, he believed in an original innocence, that humans were essentially good.
A soul that was subject to impulses and passions was considered to be disordered, even diseased! Sin was equated with poor health, rather than criminal conduct. For Evagrius, the most natural and healthy state of the soul was apatheia, where the nous, human intelligence, was in full control of the body. Full contemplation of God was the overriding goal of life, the fruit of which was a healthy soul, which enabled the monk to think and act most effectively. In our discussion after the service last week, Sarah helpfully said the rational thought monks aspired to is best understood as a holistic and clear understand of reality.
It’s such a contrast from the legacy of Western spirituality that frames sin in terms of crime and punishment, where sin becomes a matter of shame, and our first instinct is to hide it. How much more positive the view of sin that it’s a sickness that through spiritual practice will result in calmer, more rational, and happier self. The peak of this state, apatheia, was understood to bear the fruit of agape – self giving love.
For Evagrius, sin was simple a malady that could be cured over time, with prayer and practice, just like his own pride on arrival in the monastery. The cultivation of virtue, through prayer and a disciplined life, was therefore understood to be the pathway to good health. Evagrius held a conceptual ideal from Gregory of Nyssa, that the human soul is destined to be the mirror in which God shines. The monk at work in prayer in his cell was clearing his soul of the logismoi, the noxious thoughts, in order to reflect God’s light and love in the world. It makes the desert monastic life sound very attractive, like a wonderful community to live in!
As I consider pride, I imagine it be a life so turned on itself that it exists in refusal to be genuinely vulnerable in relationship. A life that is self sufficient, that does not consider it requires help from another. It is the ultimate anti-community state of mind. And yet mental health practitioners tell us one of the critical building blocks to good mental health, is human relationships. God created us to need the Trinity! And God created us to need each other!
Our reading today takes us one step further in the life of Jesus Christ, who modelled humility to the point of personal vulnerability, in which his love for the world took him to death on a cross.
The passage reads:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
6 who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Like Christ, if we wish to be humble it will take us to the place of radical vulnerability to follow God’s will on our lives. Even though Christ knew he would die on the cross, he remained vulnerable and open to his calling. As I look around the world today, there is so much fear! Fear of the future, of climate change, of Covid vaccinations, fear of war, of economic collapse, fear of the future.
But the vocation of humanity has never been fear, but love. Love that begins with a radical trust in God, trust in the power of Love to guide us through the challenges that lie ahead of us. The starting point to accept, it’s not all up to us. But what we can do is open ourselves to God’s call on our lives, in our small corner of the world, to be the body of Christ in reverence and humility. Amen.
References
Lewis CS (1963), Mere Christianity, Collins, London.
Harmless, (2004) W. Desert Christians: an Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford University Press, New York.
Tilby A (2009) The Seven Deadly Sins: Their Origin in the Spiritual
Teaching of Evagrius the Hermit, SPCK, London.
[1] Harmless, W. Desert Christians: an Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p311.
Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, p311.