The Evergetinos: Book Three - Chapter IX, Part IV

There is something almost frightening about the stories preserved for us in the Evergetinos. They are frightening not because they portray extraordinary wickedness, but because they reveal how quietly the heart can change. The monk described by Palladios is not a beginner. He is a man of profound silence and prayer, one who has surrendered himself so completely to God that even the necessities of his bodily life have been entrusted to Providence. His life has become contemplation. Prayer is his delight. God provides for him in a miraculous manner. He has tasted something of the life of the age to come. And yet the beginning of his fall is almost imperceptible. He sleeps a little longer. His prayer becomes somewhat shorter. His attention wanders. Earthly concerns begin to occupy a little more space within him. Thoughts once immediately rejected are permitted to remain for a moment. Nothing, at first, seems catastrophic. That is precisely the warning. The Fathers understood that the great falls of the spiritual life rarely begin as great falls. They begin with small permissions. Something formerly guarded carefully is treated casually. Something that once troubled the conscience is dismissed as insignificant. A thought is entertained rather than rejected. Prayer is postponed. Vigilance relaxes. A little comfort is allowed to become necessary. The heart whispers that such things hardly matter. But they matter because the heart matters. There is something extraordinarily precious hidden within the human person: the place of communion with God. The Fathers speak of guarding the heart so insistently because they know what has been entrusted to us. Grace has entered there. The Name has been received there. Desire for God has been awakened there. A fire has been kindled that does not originate in ourselves. The spiritual life, therefore, is not primarily the anxious avoidance of infractions. It is the guarding of a treasure. This changes how we understand vigilance. We do not guard ourselves because God is waiting to punish the smallest mistake. We guard ourselves because love is delicate. Communion can be obscured. Desire can cool. The eye of the heart can become clouded. What has become luminous through prayer can gradually become opaque again. The evil one understands this very well. He does not always attempt to tear a person immediately away from God. With someone who has given himself deeply to prayer, such an assault might be too obvious. Instead, he waits. He works through what appears negligible. A little negligence. A little self-confidence. A little relaxation of watchfulness. A thought that seems harmless enough to entertain. The enemy is patient because he knows that a heart need not renounce God explicitly in order gradually to lose sight of Him. Palladios gives us an extraordinary image of this darkening in the bread. At first the monk receives heavenly bread, pure and provided by God. As his interior life becomes disordered, the bread appears grimy and gnawed. Later it is almost entirely spoiled. What is happening visibly to the bread corresponds to what is happening invisibly within the monk. The gift has not ceased to be gift, but his capacity to receive it has become corrupted. The tragedy is not simply that temptation has appeared. Temptation comes to everyone. The decisive moment comes earlier: he notices the diminishment and does not respond to it. He regards the first symptoms as trivial. This is one of the most penetrating insights in the story. The monk does not suddenly decide to abandon his vocation. He fails to take seriously the cooling of his love. The Fathers would have us become sensitive to precisely this. When prayer becomes burdensome, notice. When mercy toward another begins to disappear, notice. When resentment becomes pleasurable, notice. When the imagination begins feeding upon something we would once have rejected, notice. <p style="text-align: justify