GOOD OLD SIN

J. was horrifying me with tales of the sedate gambling places at Lake
Tahoe, the ones that are prim and country-clubbed, and which cater
to decent people, with dealerettes in prim black dresses, and soft
Muzak, and nary a drunk on the premises, and the nice old ladies
coming up to gamble in buses from the cities of the Plain. I am
utterly disheartened. What has happened to good old sin? Here I
am behind these walls, doing my bit and counting on the world to
do its bit, with barrelhouse piano and the walleyed guys in eyeshades,
with long cigars, raking in the pieces of eight, and the incandescent
floozies lolling over the roulette wheels. Tell me . . . am I wasting
my time?—

Thomas Merton, in a 1962 letter

 

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there
are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil.
But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light
and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all
things are there.

—Pseudo-Macarius

It wasn’t until I had encountered the writings of fourth-century monks such as Pseudo-Macarius and Evagrius of Pontus that I found a workable, useful, and healthy definition of sin, a realistic sense of the capacity for both evil and virtue that resides in the human heart. My husband and I, raised in the pietistic churches of the 1950s, received an education in sin that was not only inadequate but harmful. From the Protestants I got a list of rules that were not to be broken and naively thought that as long as I wasn’t breaking those rules, sin was not much of a problem for me. As a young adult, I believed that I had no conscience, a state I was fortunate to survive. From the Catholics my husband got less a sense of sin than a terrific ability to feel guilty for everything under the sun, a situation that left him less likely to recognize and contend with those things for which he might actually wish to repent.

Having grown used to the polite verbiage of modern-day counseling—we speak of “having guilt feelings” rather than actually acknowledging our guilt—I found myself delighted by the pithy language and imagery of the early monks. Here, for example, is the seventh-century monk of Sinai, John Climacus, on the subject of pride, from a book that is still read in Orthodox monasteries during Lent:

Pride is a denial of God, an invention of the devil, contempt for men. It is the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of barrenness. It is a flight from God’s help, the harbinger of madness, the author of downfall. It is the cause of diabolical possession, the source of anger, the gateway of hypocrisy. It is the fortress of demons, the custodian of sins, the source of hardheartedness. It is the denial of compassion, a bitter pharisee, a cruel judge. It is the foe of God. It is the root of blasphemy.

Welcome to the truth: that’s the feeling I have when I read such a text. And the monk Evagrius, the first to write down and attempt to codify the beliefs and practices of the desert monks with regard to sin (which they called “demons” or “bad thoughts”), not only provides me with a means of understanding my own “bad thoughts” but also with the tools to confront them. His view of anger is typically sensible. Anger, he wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.

Considering “Good old sin,” in the sense that the ancient monks understood it, exposes the vast difference between their worldview and our own. These days, when someone commits an atrocity, we tend to sigh and say, “That’s human nature.” But our attitude would seem wrong-headed to the desert monks, who understood human beings to be part of the creation that God called good, special in that they are made in the image of God. Sin, then, is an aberration, not natural to us at all. This is why Gregory of Nyssa speaks so often of “[returning] to the grace of that image which was established in you from the beginning.” Gregory, in fact, saw it as our lifelong task to find out what part of the divine image God has chosen to reveal in us. Like the other early monks, he suggests that we can best do this by realistically determining how God has made us—what our primary faults and temptations are, as well as our gifts—not that we might better “know ourselves,” or in modern parlance, “feel good about ourselves,” but in order that we might become instruments of divine grace for other people, and eventually return to God.

The tragedy of sin is that it diverts divine gifts. The person who has a genuine capacity for loving becomes promiscuous, maybe sexually, or maybe by becoming frivolous and fickle, afraid to make a commitment to anyone or anything. The person with a gift for passionate intensity squanders it in angry tirades and, given power, becomes a demagogue. There is much insight in the early monastic writings that resonates well with modern psychology. Evagrius, for example, understood that the health of the soul is revealed in conscious thoughts during the day and dreams at night. The goal of the monks was to know themselves as they truly were, warts and all, and to be able to call it “good,” not in order to excuse bad behavior but to accept the self without delusions. The point was to know the material you were working with, in order to give a firmer foundation to your hope for change.

Are monks wasting their time in seeking to convert themselves, and the world, from evil? Many have said so. For myself, I appreciate their realism about human beings confronted by evil, and the good sense that does not allow them to be easily fooled when evil attempts to disguise itself by adopting innocuous dress. Both the monks of the ancient tradition and contemporary monastics, it seems to me, have a refreshing sense of what really matters in human behavior. They know that the roots of sin are not to be found in the acts of gambling, drinking, dancing, smoking, playing dominoes (an activity that got my grandfather Norris fired by a Methodist church in 1919), or even in adultery or fornication. Looking deeper, they recognize, as one monk said to me, a man who’d sown plenty of wild oats before entering a monastery, that “even though I gave up fornicating years ago, pride and anger are still with me.” Pride and anger were recognized by the desert monks as the most dangerous of their bad thoughts, and the most difficult to overcome. Abba Ammonas said, “I have spent fourteen years [in the desert] asking God night and day to grant me the victory over anger.” In the words of Benedicta Ward, “For all sins, there is forgiveness. What really lies outside the ascetic life is despair, the proud attitude which denies the possibility of forgiveness.” All committed life is ascetic, in some sense; the word originally meant an exercise, practice, or training adopted for a certain way of life. Athletes, monks, artists, musicians, married people, and celibates all learn to recognize the practices that will hinder or foster the growth of their commitment.

As for designating despair as an aspect of the sin, or “bad thought,” of pride, I find it enormously helpful. Among other things, it defeats my perfectionism, my tendency to give up when I can’t do things “just right.” But if I accept the burden of my despair, in the monastic sense, then I also receive the tools to defeat it. I have a hope that no modern therapeutic approach can give me. “The desert fathers were convinced that the words of scripture possessed the power to deliver them from evil,” writes Douglas Burton-Christie, another scholar of the early monks. “They believed that the Word of God has the power to effect what it says.” Or, as Amma Syncletica wrote early in the fifth century, in a catalogue of Bible quotations to be used in times of temptation, “Are you being tried by fever? Are you being taught by cold? Indeed, scripture says, ‘We went through fire and water, yet you have brought us forth to a spacious place” (Ps. 66:12). She adds, “For he said, ‘The Lord hears me when I call’ (Ps. 4:3). It is with these exercises that we train the soul.”