January
28, 2001
"Directions
on the Spiritual Life - Part IV"
Abba Dorotheus of Gaza
We will continue our study on the teachings of
Abba Dorotheus of Gaza, one of my own personal favorites among the
Desert Fathers. Abba Dorotheus lived at the end of the sixth and
beginning of the seventh centuries. As a wealthy young man, he was an
ardent student of the secular sciences and was quite well educated by
the standards of his day. After completing his secular education, Abba
Dorotheus lived for a while near his birthplace, not far from the
monastery of Abba Serid, located in either Ashkalon or Gaza. He soon
made contact with Abba Barsanuphius and Abba John and became a ardent
student of their teachings. He soon became convinced to renounce
everything and take monastic vows in Abba Serid's monastery. Abba
Dorotheus soon completed his monastic education under Barsanuphius and
John and served in the monastery's hospice and infirmary. After Abba
Serid and Abba John died, and the great Barsanuphius shut himself up
completely in his cell, renouncing all contact with the outside world,
Abba Dorotheus left the monastery and became the abbot of another
monastery. It was at this point in his life that Abba Dorotheus began to
deliver homilies to his disciples -- 21 in all -- which were preserved
and passed on to us by his followers. The date of his death is not
known.
We will continue our multi-part study today of
these teachings, and will follow these with a multi-part series from St.
Isaac of Syria. Together, the teachings of these two great spiritual
fathers of the Early Church will provide us with the guidance we need to
start the new year with a commitment to growing spiritually in the weeks
and months ahead. Today's study focuses on love and fear, in both their
perfect and imperfect states.
BEGIN:
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PERFECT LOVE AND PERFECT FEAR
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22. St. John says, "Perfect love casteth out
fear" (I John 4:18). How is it then that the holy Prophet David
says, "Fear the Lord, all ye his saints" (Psalms 33:9)? This
shows that there are two kinds of fear: the first, initial, the second
perfect; one belongs to beginners, the other to perfect saints, who have
attained to the measure of perfect love. He who obeys God's will through
fear of torment is still a beginner; and he who fulfils the will of God
through love for God in order to please Him, is brought by this love
into perfect fear; and through this fear, when once he has tasted the
delight of being with God, he is afraid to fall away, is afraid to be
deprived of it. It is this perfect fear, born of love, which casts out
the initial fear.
23. No one can attain to perfect fear unless he
first acquires the initial fear. The wise Sirach says, "To fear the
Lord is the beginning of wisdom . . . The fear of the Lord is a crown of
wisdom" (Ecclesiasticus 1:14, 18). By the beginning is meant the
initial fear, on which follows the perfect fear of the saints. The
initial fear belongs to the state of our soul. It protects the soul from
every fall, for it is said, "By the fear of the Lord everyone
departs from evil" (Proverbs 15:27). But a man who departs from
evil from fear of punishment, like a slave in fear of his master,
gradually comes to doing good voluntarily -- at first like a hireling in
the hope of some reward for his good action. If he continues thus
constantly to avoid evil from fear, like a slave, and to do good in the
hope of reward like a hireling, then, abiding by God's grace in the good
and thus correspondingly uniting with God, he finally acquires a taste
for the good, comes to a certain sense of what is truly good, and no
longer wishes to be parted from it. Then he attains to the dignity of a
son and loves good for its own sake; and although he fears, he does so
because he loves. This is great and perfect fear.
24. This sequence is expressed by the Prophet
David in the following words: "Turn away from evil, and do good;
seek peace, and pursue it" (Psalms 33:14). "Turn away from
evil," that is, avoid all evil in general, turn away from every
action which leads to sin. But having said this he did not stop there,
but added "and do good." For sometimes a man does no evil, but
neither does he any good: for example, he harms no one but also does not
show mercy; or he does not hate but neither does he love. Having said
this David continued, "seek peace, and pursue it." He did not
merely say "seek," but pursue it with diligence to acquire it.
Follow carefully these words in your mind and note the subtlety shown by
the Saint. When it is granted to a man to turn away from evil and
thereupon, with God's help, diligently to do good, he becomes at once a
prey to attacks from the enemy. And so he labors, strives, sorrows, now
fearing to return to evil like a slave, now hoping for a reward for good
like a hireling. In suffering attacks from the enemy, struggling with
him and resisting him from these motives, though the man does what is
good, he does it with great effort and grief. But when he receives God's
help and acquires a certain habit of good, then he finds rest, then he
tastes peace, then he experiences what grievous warfare means and what
mean the joy and gladness of peace. Then he begins to seek peace, to
strive after it assiduously in order to attain it, to possess it wholly
and to establish it in himself. He who has reached this stage tastes at
last the blessedness of the peacemakers (Matthew 5:9). And henceforth
who can impel his soul to do good for the sake of anything but the
enjoyment of that good itself? Then such a man knows also perfect fear.
25. The fathers said that man acquires the fear
of God if he keeps death and torments in his memory, if each evening he
questions himself as to how he spent the day, and each morning how he
passed the night, if he is not presumptuous and, finally, if he remains
in close communion with a man who fears God. For they relate that once a
certain brother asked a staretz, "What should I do, father, in
order to fear God?" The staretz answered, "Go, live with a man
who fears God; and by the very fact that he fears God, he will teach you
too to fear Him." We repel the fear of God from ourselves by doing
everything contrary to what has been said -- we have neither memory of
death nor memory of torments, we have no attention on ourselves and do
not question ourselves about how we spend out time, but live heedlessly
and commune with men who have no fear of God, and we are presumptuous.
This last is the worst of all -- it is utter ruin -- for nothing drives
the fear of God away from the soul more than presumptuousness. Abba
Agathon, when asked about it, once said, "Presumptuousness is like
a strong scorching wind, from which all flee when it begins to blow, and
which kills all the fruit on the trees." May God save us from this
all-destructive passion -- presumptuousness. END
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NEXT WEEK -- ABBA DOROTHEUS DISCUSSES "PRESUMPTUOUSNESS"
AND HOW TO FIGHT IT
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from E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, "Early
Fathers from the Philokalia," (London: Faber and Faber, 1981),
pp. 158 - 160
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