For then shall be perfectly fulfilled in us that prayer of our Savior, in which He prayed to the Father for His disciples, saying: 'that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and they in Us,' and again: 'that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, in Me and I in Thee, that they also may be one in Us'—when that perfect love of God, wherewith He first loved us, shall have passed also into the affection of our heart, this prayer of the Lord being fulfilled, which we believe can in no way be made void. And this shall come to pass when all our love, all our desire, all our zeal, all our endeavor, all our thought, all that we live, that we speak, that we breathe,
shall be God, and that unity which now exists of the Father with the Son and of the Son with the Father shall have been transfused into our understanding and mind—that is, that just as He loves us with a sincere and pure and indissoluble love, so we too may be joined to Him with a perpetual and inseparable affection; so coupled to Him, indeed, that whatever we breathe, whatever we understand, whatever we speak, may be God; arriving, I say, at that end of which we spoke before, which the same Lord in praying desires to be fulfilled in us: 'that they all may be one as We are one, I in them and Thou in Me, that they also may be made perfect in one'; and again: 'Father, those whom Thou hast given Me, I will that where I am they also may be with Me.'
This, therefore, ought to be the aim of the solitary; this ought to be his whole intent: that he may deserve to possess in this body the image of future blessedness, and that in some way he may begin to foretaste in this little vessel the pledge of that heavenly conversation and glory. This, I say, is the end of all perfection: that the mind, thinned out from all that is carnal, may day by day be lifted up to things spiritual, until his whole conversation and every revolving of his heart be made one continual prayer. GERMANUS: Greater grows in us the magnitude of amazement toward the admiration of that past conference, on account of which we have hastened back hither.
For as much as we are inflamed by the incitement of this teaching to a desire for perfect blessedness, by so much the more do we fall down in greater despair, being ignorant in what manner we may be able to seek out or to obtain a discipline of such great sublimity. Wherefore those things which, seated in our cell, we had begun to revolve in long meditation—since it is needful that they be brought forth perhaps in a wordy discourse—we beseech that thou patiently permit them to be unfolded by us; although we know that thy blessedness is not wont to be offended by any of the follies of the weak, which are for this very reason to be brought forth into the open, that whatever is absurd in them may be corrected.
According, therefore, as our opinion holds, the perfection of any art or discipline must needs, beginning from certain soft rudiments, be first imbued with easier and most tender beginnings, so that, nourished as it were by a certain reasonable milk and brought up, it may little by little grow and thus ascend gradually and by degrees from the lowest to the highest; and when it has entered upon the plainer principles and, as it were, the gates of the profession it has undertaken, it may consequently and without labor arrive also at the inner sanctuaries of perfection and its lofty summits. For how could any of the boys pronounce the simple couplings of syllables, unless he had first diligently learned the characters of the letters?
Or how shall he attain a quick skill in reading who is not yet fit to join together the short and very narrow descriptions of nouns? By what reasoning shall he who is less instructed in the skill of the grammatical discipline attain either rhetorical eloquence or philosophical knowledge? Wherefore to this most sublime discipline also, through which we are instructed to cleave unceasingly to God, I do not doubt that there are certain foundations of instruction, which being first most firmly laid, thereupon the lofty summits of perfection, superimposed, may be raised up.
We slenderly conjecture that these are its first principles: that we first know by what meditation God is held or thought of; then, this same matter, whatever it be, in what manner we may be able to keep it unmovingly—which we also do not doubt to be the crown of all perfection. And therefore we desire that there be shown to us a certain matter of this remembrance, whereby God may be conceived by the mind or perpetually held, so that, holding it before our eyes, when we have felt ourselves slipped away from it, we may have ready at hand that to which, recovering our senses, we may straightway return, and be able to resume it without any delay of circuitous wandering or difficulty of search.
For it happens that when we have wandered away from spiritual contemplations and are turned back to ourselves as though from a deadly slumber, and, as if awakened, seek matter whereby we may be able to rekindle that spiritual remembrance which lies buried, being delayed by the very delay of the search, before we find it we are again rolled away from our endeavor; and before some spiritual insight is brought to birth, the intention conceived in the heart vanishes away. And it is quite certain that this confusion befalls us for this reason: that we do not stably hold some special thing set before our eyes, as it were a certain formula, to which the wandering soul may be recalled after many windings and various excursions, and, after long shipwrecks, may enter as it were the harbor of rest.
And so it is that, hindered perpetually by this ignorance and difficulty, the mind is always tossed about, wandering and as it were drunken, through diverse things; and it does not hold for long and firmly even that spiritual thing which has met it by chance rather than by industry, since, always receiving one thing out of another, it perceives neither their entrance and beginnings, nor likewise their end and departure. ISAAC: Your inquiry, so minute and subtle, betokens a sign of purity near at hand.
For no one will be able even to inquire about these things—not to say to look into and discern them—save him whom a diligent and effectual industry of mind and a watchful solicitude has advanced to search out the depth of these questions, and whom the continual intentness of a chastened life has, through experience, made to attempt actively the thresholds of this purity and to knock at its gates.
And therefore, since I see that you have taken your stand not, I would say, before the doors of that true prayer of which we are speaking, but are in a manner already touching its inmost recesses and interior parts with the very hands of experience, and even now grasping certain of its members, I do not believe that I shall have to labour to lead you, who are as it were already wandering within its hall, into its very sanctuary as well, so far as the Lord shall direct; nor that you will be held back by any obstacle of difficulty from looking into the things that are to be shown. For he is near to knowledge who prudently recognizes what he ought to inquire after, and he is not far from understanding who has begun to perceive what he does not know.
And therefore I do not fear to incur the charge of betrayal or of levity, if I now disclose those things which, when in the earlier discourse I was treating of the perfection of prayer, I had withheld from the discussion; for I judge that their power, to you who are engaged in this exercise and pursuit, was destined to be unlocked even without the ministry of our word, through the grace of God.
Wherefore, following that method which you have most wisely devised for the instruction of little children (who otherwise cannot grasp the first teaching of the letters, nor recognize their outlines, nor with a steady hand trace the characters, until by certain models and shapes diligently impressed upon wax they grow accustomed, by constant contemplation and daily imitation, to reproduce their likeness), a formula of this spiritual contemplation too must be handed on to you, upon which, ever fixing your gaze most tenaciously, you may either learn to revolve it wholesomely with unbroken constancy, or by its use and meditation be able to ascend to loftier visions.
This, then, is the formula of that discipline and prayer which you seek, which shall be set before us; upon it let every monk, striving toward the continual remembrance of God, grow accustomed to meditate by the ceaseless revolving of his heart, having driven out the whole variety of thoughts; for he cannot in any way retain it otherwise, unless he has been freed from all bodily cares and anxieties. And as it was handed on to us by the few who remained of the most ancient fathers, so by us too it is imparted to none but the very rarest and those who truly thirst. This, then, shall be the formula of piety inseparably set before us for possessing the perpetual remembrance of God: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.
For this little verse has not without reason been culled out of the whole instrument of the Scriptures. For it takes in all the affections that can be brought upon human nature, and is fittingly and quite competently adapted to every state and to all assaults. It contains, indeed, against all perils the invocation of God; it contains the humility of a pious confession; it contains the vigilance of perpetual solicitude and fear; it contains the consideration of one's own frailty, the confidence of being heard, the assurance of a protection ever present and standing by. For he who continually invokes his protector is certain that he is always present.
It contains the ardour of love and charity; it contains the contemplation of snares and the dread of enemies, by whom, seeing himself hemmed in day and night, he confesses that he cannot be delivered without the aid of his defender. This little verse is for all who labour under the assault of demons an impregnable wall, an impenetrable breastplate, and a most fortified shield. It does not suffer those set in listlessness and anxiety of soul, or in sadness, or depressed by any thoughts whatever, to despair of the remedies of salvation, showing that He whom it invokes continually beholds our struggles and is not absent from His suppliants.
This verse admonishes us, when set in spiritual advances and in gladness of heart, that we ought by no means to be exalted or puffed up over our prosperous state, since it testifies that this cannot be retained without God our protector, while it implores Him not only always but also swiftly to bring us help. This verse, I say, is found necessary and useful for each one of us, in whatever condition he passes his life. For he who desires always and in all things to be helped, makes it manifest that not only in hard and sorrowful matters, but also in prosperous and glad ones, he equally needs God as helper; that just as He rescues him from the former, so He may make him abide in the latter, knowing that in neither can human frailty subsist without His succour.
I am gripped by the passion of gluttony; I seek out foods which the desert knows not, and in the squalid solitude there are wafted to me the odours of royal dishes, and I feel myself most unwillingly dragged to desire them: therefore I must say: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. I am urged to anticipate the hour of the appointed refection, or with great grief of my heart I strive to keep the measure of a just and accustomed frugality: with a groan I must cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. Weariness of stomach, or the dryness and constriction of the belly, forbids and deters me, needing strictness in fasting on account of the assault of the flesh:
that the desired effect may be granted, or at least that the fires of carnal concupiscence may be quieted even without the tempering of a stricter fast, I must pray: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. When, at the lawful hour bidding it, I come to my refection, I shudder at the taking of bread and am shut out from all eating even of natural necessity: with wailing I must cry: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.
When I wish, for the stability of my heart, to apply myself to reading, a pain of the head interrupts and forbids me, and at the third hour sleep dashes my face down upon the sacred page, and I am compelled either to overstep or to anticipate the appointed time of rest; and finally a most grievous onset of sleep forces me to cut short the very canonical measure of the assembly and of the psalms: likewise I must cry: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. When drowsiness has been taken from my eyes, I see myself for many nights wearied by diabolical sleeplessness, and all refreshment of nightly rest shut out from my eyelids: with sighs I must pray: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.
While I am still set in the wrestling of vices, a titillation of the flesh suddenly pricks me and by an alluring delight strives to drag me while sleeping into consent: lest a strange fire, blazing up, should burn the sweet-smelling little flowers of chastity, I must cry: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. I feel the incitements of lust extinguished and the generative fervour grown cool in my members: that this acquired virtue, nay rather this grace of God in me, may endure long or perpetually, I must intently say: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. I am disturbed by the goads of anger, avarice, sadness, and am compelled to break off the gentleness set before me and dear to me:
lest by the disturbance of fury I be led away into the bitterness of gall, I must with deepest groaning cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. I am tried by the elation of listlessness, vainglory, pride, and my mind by subtle thinking flatters itself somewhat over the negligence or lukewarmness of others: lest this pernicious suggestion of the enemy prevail in me, I must with all contrition of heart pray: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. Having laid aside the swelling of pride, I have acquired by the continual compunction of the spirit the grace of humility and simplicity:
lest again the foot of pride come upon me and the hand of the sinner move me, and I be more grievously stabbed by the elation of my victory, I must with all my strength cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. I am inflamed with the innumerable and diverse wanderings of the soul and with the instability of the heart, nor can I restrain the dispersions of my thoughts; and I cannot pour out my very prayer without interruption and without the phantom of empty images and the recollection of words and deeds; and I feel myself so constricted by the dryness of this barrenness that I feel I can give birth to no offspring at all of spiritual understandings:
that I may deserve to be freed from this squalor of soul, from which I cannot extricate myself by many groans and sighs, I must of necessity cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. Again I feel that I have obtained the directing of my soul, the stability of my thoughts, the alacrity of my heart, together with unspeakable joy and rapture of mind, by the visitation of the Holy Spirit; and by an exuberance of spiritual perceptions I feel overflowing the revelation of most sacred understandings, and by a sudden illumination of the Lord I have perceived things before wholly hidden from me: that I may deserve to abide longer in these things, I must anxiously and frequently cry: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.
Hemmed in by the nightly terrors of demons, I am harried and disquieted by the phantoms of unclean spirits, and the very hope of my salvation and life is withdrawn by the horror of trembling: fleeing to the saving harbour of this little verse, I will with all my strength cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. Again, when I have been restored by the consolation of the Lord and animated by His coming, and feel myself as it were fenced round by innumerable thousands of angels, so that I dare suddenly to seek an encounter with, and provoke to conflict, those whom before I dreaded worse than death, and whose touch, nay whose very nearness, I felt with horror of mind and body:
that the vigour of this constancy may by the grace of God abide longer in me, I must with all my strength cry out: O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me. Therefore the prayer of this little verse must be poured out with unceasing constancy, that in adversities we may be delivered, and in prosperities preserved and not exalted. Let the meditation of this verse, I say, be revolved unbrokenly in your breast. Set at any work or ministry or on a journey, cease not to chant it. Meditate upon it both while sleeping and while eating, and in the lowliest necessities of nature.
This revolving of the heart, made for you a formula of salvation, will not only keep you unharmed from every assault of demons, but will also, purging you from all the vices of earthly contagion, lead you on to those invisible contemplations and heavenly things, and will carry you up to that ineffable ardour of prayer experienced by very few. Let sleep steal upon you as you meditate on this verse, so that, shaped by the ceaseless exercise of it, you may grow accustomed to chant it even through slumber. Let this be the first thing to meet you when you awake; let it forestall the thoughts of your waking mind; let it, as you rise from your bed, send you down to the bending of your knees, and thence lead you on to every work and act; let it accompany you at every time.
You shall meditate on it, according to the precepts of the lawgiver, sitting in your house and walking on the way, sleeping and rising. You shall write it upon the threshold and the doors of your mouth; you shall set it upon the walls of your house and in the inmost recesses of your breast, so that when you bow down to prayer this may be your chant as you lie prostrate, and, when you rise up thereafter and go forth to all the necessary uses of life, it may become your upright and continual prayer.
This, this formula let the mind hold without ceasing, until, strengthened by the unceasing use of it and by continual meditation, it casts away and refuses the riches and vast substance of all thoughts, and thus, constricted by the poverty of this little verse, it may with ready ease arrive at that Gospel beatitude which among the rest of the beatitudes holds the primacy. For 'Blessed,' He says, 'are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' And so, whoever through such poverty becomes eminently poor, will fulfil that prophetic word: 'The poor and needy shall praise the name of the Lord.'
And indeed what poverty can be greater or holier than that of him who, knowing that he has no defence, no strength of his own, seeks his daily help from another's bounty, and, understanding that his life and substance are sustained at each single moment by the divine aid, professes himself, and not without reason, a true beggar of the Lord, crying to Him daily in supplication: 'But I am a beggar and poor; God helps me.' And so, ascending by God's own illumination to that manifold knowledge of God, let him begin thenceforth to be fattened upon loftier and more sacred mysteries, according to that which is said through the prophet: 'The high mountains are for the harts; the rock is a refuge for the hedgehogs.'
This is quite properly fitted to that sense of which we have spoken, in that whoever, persevering in simplicity and innocence, is harmful or troublesome to none, but, content with his own simplicity alone, desires only to guard himself from the prey of those who lie in wait, is protected, like a spiritual hedgehog, by the continual covering of that Gospel rock; that is, fortified by the remembrance of the Lord's Passion and by the ceaseless meditation of the aforesaid verse, he escapes the snares of the assailing enemy. Of these spiritual hedgehogs it is likewise said in the Proverbs: 'And the hedgehogs, a feeble folk, who have made their houses in the rocks.'
And indeed, what is weaker than a Christian, what more infirm than a monk, to whom no vengeance for injuries is supplied, nay who is not permitted to let even a slight and silent emotion spring up within? But whoever, advancing from this state, not only possesses the simplicity of innocence, but is also fortified by the virtue of discretion, becomes an exterminator of venomous serpents, having Satan crushed beneath his feet, and attains by the alacrity of his mind to the figure of the rational hart, shall be pastured upon the prophetic and apostolic mountains, that is, upon their most exalted and lofty mysteries.
Invigorated by their continual pasture, taking into himself all the affections of the psalms too, he will begin so to chant them that he utters them not as though composed by the prophet, but as though brought forth by himself, as his own prayer, with profound compunction of heart; or at least he reckons that they were directed to his own person, and recognizes that their sentiments were fulfilled not only then, through the prophet or in the prophet, but are daily borne out and fulfilled in himself. For then the divine Scriptures are laid more clearly open to us, and in a manner their veins and marrow are unfolded, when our experience not only perceives but even anticipates their meaning, and the senses of the words are disclosed to us not by exposition but by our own proofs.
For receiving the same affection of heart in which each psalm was chanted or composed, we, become as it were its authors, shall rather anticipate its meaning than follow it; that is, gathering the force of the words before their knowledge, we shall in a manner recall, as we chant, what has been done in us or is daily being enacted by our assaults, the meditation of the psalms coming over us; and what our negligence has begotten in us, or our diligence acquired, or the divine providence conferred, or the enemy's instigation cheated us of, or slippery and subtle forgetfulness stolen away, or human frailty brought upon us, or unforeseeing ignorance deceived us in.
For all these affections we find expressed in the Psalms, so that, perceiving whatever befalls us as in a most pure mirror, we may more effectively recognize it; and thus, instructed by our very affections as by teachers, we may lay hold of them not as things heard, but as things beheld; and may bring them forth from the inward affection of the heart not as things committed to memory, but as things implanted in the very nature of things, so that we may penetrate their meaning not by the text of a lesson, but by preceding experience. And thus our mind will arrive at that incorruption of prayer to which, in the earlier discourse, so far as the Lord deigned to grant, the order of our conference ascended:
which is not only occupied with the gaze of no image, but is distinguished by no utterance of voice, no following out of words, but is brought forth with a fiery intentness of mind, through an ineffable rapture of heart, with an insatiable alacrity of spirit; and which the mind, made beyond all senses and visible matter, pours out to God with groanings that cannot be uttered and with sighs. GERMANUS: We think that you have expressed clearly enough and lucidly enough not only the tradition of this spiritual discipline which we sought, but its very perfection itself.
For what can be more perfect or what more sublime than to embrace the remembrance of God by so compendious a meditation, and by the revolving of a single verse to migrate from all the bounds of visible things, and in a manner to enclose in a brief phrase the affections of all prayers? And therefore we pray that the one thing which still remains be expounded to us: namely, how we may steadily retain this same verse which you have handed to us in the place of a formula, so that, just as by the grace of God we have been freed from the trifles of worldly thoughts, so we may immovably hold fast whatever things are spiritual. For when our mind has conceived the opening of any psalm, without our perceiving it, that being withdrawn, it rolls away, unknowing and dumbfounded, to the text of some other Scripture.
And when it has begun to revolve that within itself, before that has been fully winnowed, the arising remembrance of another testimony excludes the meditation of the former matter. From this too it is carried over to another, as yet another meditation steals in; and thus the mind, ever rolled from psalm to psalm, leaping from the text of the Gospel to the reading of the Apostle, rolled from this also to the prophetic utterances and thence borne on to certain spiritual histories, is tossed unstable and wandering through the whole body of the Scriptures, prevailing at its own discretion neither to cast anything off nor to hold it, nor to finish anything with full judgment and examination, becoming only a toucher and taster of spiritual meanings, not a begetter or possessor of them.
And thus the mind, ever mobile and wandering, even at the time of the assembly is distracted through diverse things as though drunken, discharging no office fittingly. For example, when it prays, it recalls a psalm or some reading. When it chants, it meditates on something other than what the text of the psalm itself contains. When it recites a reading, it revolves something that is to be done, or recollects something that has been done. And in this manner, receiving or letting go nothing with discipline nor opportunely, it seems to be driven as it were by chance assaults, having no power to retain, or to abide in, those things in which it delights.
It is therefore necessary for us above all to know how we may fittingly fulfil these spiritual offices, or at least how immovably to guard this same verse which you have handed to us in the place of a formula, so that the risings and endings of all our senses may not fluctuate in their own volubility, but may stand fast under our own control. ISAAC: Although, I think, when we were long ago disputing about the state of prayer, it was sufficiently expressed, yet, since you ask that these same things be repeated to us, I will briefly set forth concerning the confirmation of the heart. There are three things that make a wandering mind steadfast: vigils, meditation, and prayer, the assiduity and continual intentness of which confer upon the soul a steadfast firmness.