Pseudo-Macarius

The soul is united in will with whatever it is joined and bound to as its master.  Either it has, therefore, the light of God in it and lives in that light with all of its powers, abounding with restful light, or it is permeated by the darkness of sin, becoming a sharer in condemnation.

Most want to possess the kingdom without labors and struggles and sweat, but this is impossible.

A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today, edited by James R. Payton, Jr.

Sin

Adam violated the command of God and obeyed the deceitful serpent.

Satan clothed the soul and all its substance with sin.  That evil prince corrupted it completely, not sparing any of its members from slavery – not its thoughts, neither the mind nor the body – but he clothed it with the purple of darkness… And so the entire body fell a victim to passion and corruption.

One could read this as the definition of total depravity.  You might think this a quote from Luther’s Bondage of the Will, or Calvin’s Institutes.  Which brings me to a regularly recurring thought: I wonder about the lines we draw that divide different Christian denominations and traditions.  We make these so solid, so black and white.  But it seems to me that on many issues, the gray takes up far more of the space than does the black or the white.  For some reason, we don’t like living in the gray – and so, we artificially divide.

The same idea is stated in other ways, as follows:

We have received into ourselves something foreign to our nature – namely the corruption of our passions through the disobedience of the first man…

We are all his children of that dark race and we all inherit the same stench.

All of us look like Adam.

Forgive the length of this next one.  It is quite worthwhile:

Death has its grip on the children of Adam and their thoughts are imprisoned in darkness.  And when you hear mention of tombs, do not at once think only of visible ones.  For your heart is a tomb and a sepulcher.  When the prince of evil and his angels have built their nest there and have built roads and highways on which the powers of Satan walk about inside your mind and in your thoughts, then are you not really a hell and a sepulcher and a tomb dead to God?

I don’t think I can add anything of value to this.

The enemy never stops waging war against humanity.  Satan is without mercy and hates humans.

It is clear, and I find it true in my own life: the battle never ends, and Satan’s pressures and schemes only increase whenever I feel I am in a good place with God and my neighbor. 

God’s Grace

To uproot sin and the evil that is so imbedded in our sinning can be done only by divine power, for it is impossible and outside human competence to uproot sin.  To struggle, yes, to continue to fight, to inflict blows, and to receive setbacks is in your power.  To uproot, however, belongs to God alone.  If you could have done it on your own, what would have been the need for the coming of the Lord?

Another gray area, I think.  The statement is close to but not completely in accord with the popular understanding of sola gratia.

God indeed gives help to one who turns away from sordid pleasures and from his former habits, who centers with might and main all his thoughts always on the Lord, and who denies himself and ardently seeks only the Lord.

But the Lord descends into the souls of those who seek Him. … He breaks through the heavy stones that cover the soul.  He opens the tombs.  He truly raises the dead person to life and leads that captive soul forth out of the dark prison.

However I consider it, my growth is a joint effort – God and me.  Is God’s help prompted by my turning away, or is my turning away due to God’s help?  Is He descending into my soul because I seek Him, or do I seek Him because He has descended into my soul?

I have given up thinking about such things, trying to fall completely on one side or the other.  We have been commanded to believe certain things and act in certain ways.  It is sufficient for me to take this counsel and pray that I can live into it.

What great mercy of the Lord has been shown to us from the very beginning!  He has shown us an ineffable kindness through His crucifixion in order to convert us and bring us into life.  And yet we are not willing to give up our love for the world nor our evil tendencies and habits.

Contemplating the reality that the Creator of all out of nothing died in order to bring salvation to man – to me.  If that doesn’t humble me, nothing will.

…even when we are gifted by divine grace, we are still tested by wicked and obscene thoughts.

As noted above, the more divine grace, the bigger the temptations driven by wicked thoughts.  Satan doesn’t compromise or cut deals or give up.

Theosis / Sanctification

The godly person regards himself as the greatest of all sinners.  He carries this thought ever with him as part of his very makeup.  And the more he progresses in knowledge of God, the more simple and unlearned he considers himself.  And the more he studies and learns, the less he feels he knows.

Yes.

There is no other way to be saved except through the neighbor.

I take that this refers to the command to love our neighbor. 

Allow me some rambling.  I have written before that I see a difference between justification and sanctification: by justification – all God’s effort – I am saved; sanctification – requiring some level of cooperation between me and God – I grow more like Christ. 

Loving my neighbor is a fruit of my having been justified; by loving my neighbor, I grow in sanctification.  I know that such distinctions are influenced by my Protestant upbringing and are buried deep within me.

I don’t believe Eastern Orthodox think this way.  The idea of “being saved” is all of it – all of what I label justification and sanctification.

I see both of these views as having validity.  I see in both of them the same outcome, the same action from me: I am commanded to love my neighbor.  I know that by loving my neighbor, I will grow in sanctification – grow more like Christ.

I guess the difference I see: the Protestant in me sees being “saved” as avoiding hell.  What I see in the Orthodox view is that being “saved” means growing more like Christ – in other words, continually purging more and more of the corruption that is in me.  But, yeah, also avoiding hell.

This difference might be nothing more than a difference in understanding, not a difference in result.  But there is something appealing to me about how I understand the Orthodox view…if I understand it anywhere near correctly.

I am open to correction or clarification from any Protestant or Eastern Orthodox reader….

And the Lord has clothed them with the garments of the Kingdom of unspeakable light, the garment of faith, hope, love, joy, peace, goodness, human warmth, and all the other divine and living garments of light, life, and ineffable tranquility.  The result is that, as God is love and joy and peace and kindness and goodness, these the new man may become by grace.

If the soul perseveres without letting down its guard in any area, it begins to emerge victorious as it sees through the deceits, and so it wins the crown of victory over sin.

The soul is able to persevere only after the Lord has clothed us with the garments of the Kingdom; when we are clothed with the garments of the Kingdom, we are better able to persevere.  Here, again, we can have theological debates about chickens and eggs, but in the end: how do we live?  Wherever we come down in the debate, for me the answer to this question is the same.

The world of Christians is of a special kind, their style of living, their thinking, their speech, and all their actions.  That of the people of this world is completely different.

A point made numerous times by Lloyd-Jones in his examination of the Sermon on the Mount: what Jesus taught in this Sermon is the life all Christians are called to, and it is a life so completely different than the life that the world praises.

The more you wish by knowledge to search and penetrate God, the more deeply you descend away from Him and you comprehend nothing.

Prayer, fasting, worship, and charity.  These might give us a better comprehension of God.

Persons who love truth and God, who thoroughly wish to put on Christ with great hope and faith, do not need so much encouragement or correction from others.

Purity of heart is, when you see the sinners and the weak, you have compassion and show mercy toward them.

Each person will be responsible for the fruits of virtue in proportion to the benefits bestowed on him by God, whether natural or given by divine grace.

The person who wishes to come to the Lord…ought to begin first by believing firmly in the Lord and giving himself completely to the words of His commands and renouncing the world in all things…

For this reason He was called Christ in order that we also, being anointed with the same oil as He was anointed, may become Christs.

Other

…we really do not like to repent.

…when we do sin, He is ready to lift us up; …when we fall, He is not ashamed to take us back….

…the two ways of existing – namely, according to the principles of light and darkness – vie for dominance within the same heart.

From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”

…the prince of evil holds all people engrossed in earthly concerns.  By these concerns he disturbs people, keeps them anxious and in a state of nervous action.  The result is that they are disturbed by vain thoughts and base passions and are in bondage to earthly attachments to this world.

This captures why I have, for the most part, moved off of writing about libertarian theory, politics, the corruption of society, etc., at my other blog.  It is why I have focused on the things I write about at this blog.  Not completely, either way, but a significant shift in emphasis.

If anyone stands solely on his own righteousness and redemption, he labors in vain and to no purpose.

For by grace are ye saved through faith….

Biographies / Sources

The specific author is unknown; it is a late fourth century work.  The works were originally attributed to Macarius of Egypt, but scholarly examination has shown that the approach to godliness was more Syrian than Egyptian.  As there is no scholarly consensus on the author, the pseudonymous designation is retained.