By Fr. Maximos (Constas)
The shift from exterior to interior is not simply a monastic idea. It’s part of basic Christian living. We don’t do this because we’re told to, but because it’s what’s good and best for us. This is what’s best for us. I’m reminded of one of the many wonderful quotes from Augustine’s Confessions where he says to God, “I was looking everywhere for you, but I was looking outside of myself.” I think many of us look for happiness outside of ourselves, or consolation or redemption in other people and things and achievements, striving for some tomorrow that will come when everything will be better by virtue of the external things we acquire. This is illusory and delusional. St. Maximus says that the person who has virtue doesn’t need anything else. But if you don’t’ have God it doesn’t matter how much you have, you’ll never be happy. So St. Augustine says, “And all the while that I was on the outside, You were on the inside.” So much of his earlier life was spent in this vain pursuit of externals until he realized that the fulfillment and love that he sought had its root deep within his own person. So the solution to our distracted and fragmented psyches is the practice of inwardness, inner attention, and watchfulness, which means sobriety in the sense of being alert and vigilant. To withdraw, if only partly or for a time, and return our attention to our heart, the center of our being. All of this is clear from the Scriptures I quoted and from the whole history of Orthodox spirituality.
If we take a text like the life of St. Anthony the Great as a normative and foundational text in the history of monasticism and spirituality in general, what is the very first practice that he is described as doing? He begins to slowly dispossess himself of property, and before he leaves for the desert he begins to practice an ascetic life on his family’s estate. The first thing he does is to attend to himself—let us be attentive. He wasn’t concerned with the neighbors or politics or the news. His attention was turned inward. St. Basil, a younger contemporary of St. Anthony, has a whole homily on this theme called Attend to Yourself.
This passage of attending to yourself is from Deut. 15:9 where Moses speaks to the Israelites and tells them, Attend to yourself, lest a secret lawless word enter into your heart. In that short phrase the early Christian ascetics and spiritual strivers found their whole spiritual program—this idea of attending to oneself and maintaining vigilance over the mind and heart, lest secret lawless words enter into your heart. If you don’t keep vigilance over your mind and heart every manner of evil thing will get in there. It’s easy to let our thoughts roam at will, and daydream and drift away in fantasies, be they pleasant, sexual, revenge, or whatever. We actually have a choice here. We can let these thoughts drift into ourselves and accumulate within and acquire their own energy within us, or we cannot allow them to have entry. When I first read this I thought it was just a Christian version of the Socratic “Know thyself,” but there’s actually a tremendous difference between knowing thyself and attending to yourself in the manner that I’ve described.
In the first place, I’m not sure we can know ourselves. For Plato and Socrates, knowing yourself was related to the idea of a previous life, or the recollection of innate or possibly prenatal knowledge acquired in a previous existence. It’s very different. Even in Christian theology I don’t know that we can know ourselves, because the person is a mystery, and that mystery has an infinite depth that no one can fully fathom. When Elder Sophrony was writing the Life of St. Silouan he began by saying what a bold and even rash thing it is to presume to write the Life of another man. Who can know the heart of another man? We can’t even know our own hearts, how can we know another’s? Knowing thyself is off the table for us. But to attend to yourself is within our ability and that has tremendous practical value.
I’ll give you a simple example. The other day I was on campus and someone said something to me that was very rude, and passive aggressive. It was kind of hurtful, but I was so busy at the time that I couldn’t think about it, but it did strike me as weird. I didn’t have time to engage it or let it affect me, but when I got back to my apartment at night, and had a moment of silence, guess what? That thought was there. It waited for me all day. I heard something telling me, “What? You’re going to let him get away with that? You’re going to take that from him? If you let him get away with it then they’ll think you’re weak and walk all over you.” I looked at it for a minute but then I thought, “No, I’m not going to go down this road.” I could have succumbed to that negative, outer edge of my bruised pride, festering all day and waiting for me. The mind magnifies, distorts and self-justifies, but I resolved to not go down that path which is just a dead-end. That’s what it means to attend to yourself, which is very different from the Socratic, “Know thyself.”
But why this attention to the self? Because it can be misunderstood. It might sound like just more self-centeredness and solipsism. Aren’t we already so self-absorbed? The answer is no—this is not self-centeredness, but rather something very different. The reason we focus our attention on our heart is because at our baptism we received the gift of the Holy Spirit, which is why the celebrant says, “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit,” and the Tradition of the Church is that that gift is placed within the center of our heart. The locus of the Spirit’s presence within us is the heart. It is in the center of our being. That’s why all the attention to the center of the heart—it’s not about me and getting in touch with my feelings. It’s about me getting in touch with this Divine element placed within me. Now here’s the key—yes, we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit; but how? As a tiny seed, or as a small spark. As a seed. This is Biblical language.
~ “Prayer of the Heart in an Age of Technology and Distraction” delivered by Fr. Maximos (Constas) on Feb. 2014 to the clergy of diocese of LA and the West of Antiochian of N. America at the invitation of His Eminence Metropolitan Joseph. The audio version of this lecture first appeared on Patristic Nectar Publications, and is published here by permission.
Fr. Maximos is the presidential research scholar at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of theology in Brookline, MA. He is an Athonite monk, one-time professor at Harvard Divinity School, accomplished author and translator and lectures internationally in both academic and parochial venues.
