7. THE FATHERS ON SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE (2)

Now that we have got it straight—that spiritual knowledge is not what we know but what we do—we can define it more exactly.

St. Diadochus puts it in a nutshell when he says that spiritual knowledge consists “wholly of love.”¹  

If this is so, the advice of St. Thalassius the Libyan is logical enough: “love God, and you will attain spiritual knowledge.”²  But how do we love God?

In answer to this question St. Diodochus says that if someone has become angry with us for no reason, “then spiritual knowledge bids us to visualize this person with an overflowing of compassion in our soul and so fulfil the law of love in the depths of our heart.  For it is said that if we wish to have knowledge of God we must bring our mind to look without anger even on persons who are angry with us for no reason.”³  So the person who is angry at us is exactly the occasion for the knowledge of God.

St. Maximus advances in essence the same opinion as that of St. Thalassius at a more abstract level when he says that spiritual knowledge is hidden in our hearts and can only be revealed “by means of the commandments.”⁴ Why is this? 

St. Mark the Monk says that “the Lord is hidden in His own commandments, and He is to be found there in the measure that He is sought.”⁵

This view evidently has nothing in common with the common opinions that we are earning God’s favor by keeping the commandments, or that we buy our way into Heaven by keeping the commandments, or that we have a duty to keep the commandments.⁶  All such opinions divorce Christ from his own commandments, and we want nothing without Christ.  St. Ignatius offered the Ephesians the finest praise in the world when he said to them, “You do all things in Christ.”⁷

Let’s summarize all that we have learned about spiritual knowledge.  “The practice of virtues constitutes the truest form of spiritual knowledge.”⁸  This spiritual knowledge is itself love, which we already have in our hearts, waiting to be revealed by the commandments of Christ.

How do we connect the commandments of Christ with the virtues?  St. Theodore of Sanaxar says that “virtue is the fulfilling of the commandments.”⁹  St. Theodore also rebuts the legalistic view of the commandments when he says that as we fulfil them, “we should have constant remembrance of God and prayer so as to receive the Lord’s help.”¹⁰

St. Maximus also says something very practical and simple:  that the New Testament “endows the man practicing the virtues with the principles of true knowledge,” since it “fires the mind with love and unites it to God.”¹¹  Note the condition that we practice the virtues in order to benefit from reading the New Testament—head-knowledge just has no value among the Fathers.  And, until we find someone who will be angry at us and so allow us to attain to knowledge of God, we can read the New Testament to acquire love for God.

This completes our detour on the cure of spiritual ignorance.  We will next resume discussing those states of mind which fall short of certitude.

ENDNOTES

1.  The Philokalia, tr. G.E H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard and Kallistos Ware, vols. 1-4 (London:  Faber & Faber, 1979-1995; reprint, New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983),

1:290.

2.  Palmer, 2:326; cf. 328.  

3.  Palmer, 1:290. 

4.  Palmer, 2:109.

5.  Palmer, 1:123. 

6.  Cf. St. Mark’s strictures on keeping the commandments (Palmer, 1:126).

7.  Eph. VIII.1.

8.  Palmer, 1:302.

9.  Little Russian Philokalia, (Platina, CA:  St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), vol. 5, Saint Theodore of Sanaxar, 79.

10.  Ibid., 80 f. 

11.  Ibid., 2:256.