Category: Uncategorized

Ignorance is terrible and more than terrible, a truly palpable darkness (cf. Exodus 10:21). Souls suckled on ignorance are tenebrous, their thought is fragmented, and they are cut off from union with God. Its upshot is inanity, since it makes the whole person mindless and insensate. Waxing gross, it plunges the soul into the depths of hell, where there is every kind of punishment and pain, distress and anguish.

Conversely, divine knowledge is luminous and endlessly illuminating: souls in which it has been engendered because of their purity possess a godlike radiance, for it fills them with peace, serenity, joy, ineffable wisdom and perfect love.

~Nikitas Stithatos

The tripartite deiform soul possesses two aspects, the one noetic and the other passible. The noetic aspect, being in the image of the soul’s Creator, is not conditioned by the senses, is invisible to them and is not limited by them, since it is both outside them and within them. It is by virtue of this aspect that the soul communicates with spiritual and divine powers and, through the sacred knowledge of created beings, ascends naturally to God as to its archetype, thus entering into the enjoyment of His divine nature.

The passible aspect is split up among the senses and is subject to passions and prone to self-indulgence. It is by virtue of this aspect that the soul communicates with the world that is perceptible to the senses and that fosters nutrition and growth; and sustenance for self-preservation, life, growth and health. Since the passible aspect is modified by what it comes into contact with, it is sometimes incited by impulses contrary to nature and develops disordered desires; at other times it is provoked and carried away by mindless anger, or is subject to hunger and thirst, to sorrow and pain, and finally to physical dissolution; it luxuriates in self-indulgence, but shrinks back from affliction. Thus it is rightly called the passible aspect of the soul, since it is to be found in the company of the passions.

When the noetic aspect of the soul holds sway and this mortal aspect is swallowed up by the Logos of life (cf. 2 Corinthians 5:4), then the life of Jesus is also manifested in our mortal flesh (cf. 2 Corinthians 4:11), producing in us the life-quickening deadness of dispassion, and conferring the incorruption of immortality in response to our spiritual aspiration.

~Nikitas Stithatos

The Logos justifiably rebukes the tardiness of those who drag out their time in the practice of the virtues and do not wish to advance beyond this and rise to the higher state of contemplation. ‘Fools and slow of heart,’ He calls them (Luke 24:25)–slow to place their trust in Him who can reveal the meaning of the contemplation of the inner principles of the created world to all who spiritually explore the depths of the Spirit.

For not to wish to progress from the initial struggles to those that are more advanced, and to pass from the ‘exterior’ or literal meaning of Holy Scripture to its inner or spiritual meaning, is a sign of the sluggish soul, one with no taste for spiritual profit and extremely resentful about its own advancement.

Such a soul, since its lamp has gone out, will not only be told to go and buy oil from those that sell it; but, finding the bridal chamber closed to it, it will also hear the words, ‘Go away, I do not know you or whence you come’ (cf. Matthew 25:9, 12).

~Nikitas Stithatos

A person who keeps turning round and round on the same spot and does not want to make any spiritual progress is like a mule that walks round and round a well-head operating a water-wheel. Always to be battling with your carnal proclivities and to be concerned only with disciplining the body through various forms of ascetic labor is to mistake God’s purpose and unwittingly to inflict great damage on yourself. ‘The gain to be derived from bodily discipline is but limited’, says St Paul (1 Timothy 4:8)–at any rate as long as the earth-bound will of the flesh has not been swallowed up in tears of repentance, as long as the life-quickening deadness of the Spirit has not supervened in our body, and the law of the Spirit does not reign in our mortal flesh.

But true devotion of soul attained through the spiritual knowledge of created things and of their immortal essences is as a tree of life within the spiritual activity of the intellect: it is ‘profitable in all things’ (cf. 1 Timothy 4:8) and everywhere, bestowing purity of heart, pacifying the soul’s powers, giving light to the intellect and chastity to the body, and conferring restraint, all-embracing self-control, humility, compunction, love, holiness, heavenly knowledge, divine wisdom, and the contemplation of God. If then, as a result of great spiritual discipline you have attained such perfection of true devotion you will have crossed the Red Sea of the passions and will have entered the promised land, from which flow the milk and honey of divine knowledge (cf. Exodus 3:8), the inexhaustible delight of the saints.

~Nikitas Stithatos

As you pray and sing psalms to the Lord, watch out for the guile of the demons. Either they deceive us into saying one thing instead of another, snatching the soul’s attention and turning the verses of the psalms into blasphemies, so that we say things that we should not say; or, when we have started with a psalm, they cause us to skip to the end of it, distracting the intellect from what lies between; or else they make us return time and again to the same verse, through absentmindedness preventing us from going on to what comes next; or, when we are in the middle of a psalm, they suddenly blank out the intellect’s memory of the sequence of the verses, so that we cannot even remember what verse of the psalm it was that we were saying, and thus we repeat it once more….

We should persevere strongly, however, and continue the psalm more slowly, so that through contemplation we may reap the profit of prayer from the verses and become rich with the light of the Holy Spirit that fills the souls of those who pray.

~Nikitas Stithatos

If you generate the honey of the virtues in stillness, you will through struggle and self-discipline transcend the lowly estate of man’s fallen condition and by overcoming your presumption you will restore the soul’s powers to their natural state. Your heart purified by tears, you will now become receptive to the rays of the Spirit, will clothe yourself in the incorruption of the life-quickening deadness of Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 15:53, 2 Cor. 4:10), and will receive the Paraclete in tongues of fire in the upper room of your stillness (cf. Acts 2:3).

You will then be under an obligation to speak unreservedly of the wonderful works of God (cf. Acts 2:11) and to ‘declare His righteousness in the great congregation’ (cf. Psalm 40:10), for you will have received inwardly the law of the Spirit (cf. John 7:38; Romans 8:2); otherwise, like the wicked servant who hid the talent of his own master, you will be cast into eternal fire (cf. Matthew 25:30).

~Nikitas Stithatos

The mystery of prayer is not consummated at a certain specific time or place. For if you restrict prayer to particular times or places, you will waste the rest of the time in vain pursuits. Prayer may be defined as the intellect’s unceasing intercourse with God. Its task is to engage the soul totally in things divine, its fulfillment–to adapt the words of St Paul (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:17)–lies in so wedding the mind to God that it becomes one spirit with Him.

~Nikitas Stithatos

You cannot be indifferent to both fame and disgrace, or rise above pleasure and pain, unless you are enabled by grace to perceive the upshot of all worldly preoccupations. For when you realize that the resultant of fame, pleasure, indulgence, wealth and prosperity is naught, since death and decay await them, then you will recognize the blatant vanity of all things worldly and will turn your eyes to the consummation of things divine.

You will cleave to the realities that truly exist and cannot perish; and, making these things your own, you will rise above pain and pleasure; above pain in that you have defeated that which in your soul loves pleasure, fame and money; above pleasure, in that you have become impervious to worldly sensations. Thus you are the same whether you are honored or scorned, attacked by bodily pain or endued with bodily ease. In all things you will give thanks to God and you will not be cast down.

~Nikitas Stithatos