神父马克西姆：修道生活中的诗篇祈祷——西蒙诺佩特拉的艾米利安长老注释

joining us for the first time during this study weekend on the Psalms Prayer Book of the Church. This study weekend is organised by the parish of St John the Evangelist in Cambridge, but supported by the Orthodox Fellowship of St John the Baptist, which I represent, I’m the chair. I’m really happy to be welcoming you all to the final lecture session of the study weekend, but it’s not the end of the study weekend. We will also celebrate vespers together at five o’clock UK time and the divine liturgy tomorrow as well at 11 o’clock UK time, and thanks to the parishes in Cambridge for helping us ensure that we could join with them in worship even though we can’t be together in person. I think Father started the recording, that’s great, so I will move straight on and introduce our speaker for this session, Father Maximus Constas. Father Maximus is Interim Dean and Professor of Patristics and Orthodox Spirituality at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts in the US. He holds a PhD in Patristics and Historical Theology from the Catholic University of America which is in Washington DC.

For many years he was a Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School, after which he became a monk at the monastery of Simón Opetra on Mount Athos. He recently published a work, St Maximus the Confessor on difficulties in sacred scripture, the responses to Thalassios, which follows his edition and translation of St Maximus the Confessor on difficulties in the church fathers, the Ambigua to Thomas and the Ambigua to John. He’s the author of The Art of Seeing, Paradox and Perception in Orthodox Iconography, also Proclus of Constantinople and the Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity, as well as numerous scholarly articles and translations, including four volumes of the writings of the contemporary Athenite elder Emelianos of Simonopetra, The Church at Prayer, The Way of the Spirit, Psalms and the Life of Faith, and The Mystical Marriage. His most recent publications are Mother of the Light, Prayers to the Theotokos, and St John Chrysostom and the Jesus Prayer. His work focuses on the patristic and Byzantine theological tradition, the patristic interpretation of scripture, the philokalia and Orthodox spirituality and the theological study of Byzantine art, icons and iconography. We’re so happy that Father Maximus can be with us on Zoom so that he can join us all the way from the US. And he will be talking to us with a theme of praying the Psalms in monastic life and the commentaries of Elder Emilianos of Simonopetra. Father Maximus, thank you for joining us and I pass over to you.

Thank you. You had asked me earlier to begin with a prayer. Would you like me to do that? In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things and giver of life, come and abide in us and cleanse us from every stain and save our souls, O good one. Thank you, Margaret, for that very kind introduction and thanks also to the organizers of this event who reached out to me and invited me to participate. I was happy to do so. It was an opportunity to talk about a beloved topic but also about a beloved figure, the Abbot Elder Mirianos, who I will return to in a moment.

Before I begin, let me just give you a general idea of what I hope to cover. Over the next few minutes, I begin with some general words, general remarks about psalms in monastic life. It’s a very large topic. I’ll just touch on a few things. After that, I’ll introduce Elder Emiliano of Simanopatra, since some of you might not be familiar with him. And then after saying a few words about his psalm commentaries, I’ll focus on a theme within those commentaries, namely illness and suffering, which is a prominent feature of those commentaries on the Psalms, but they’re also a prominent feature of his thought more generally. So the title of my talk is Praying the Psalms in Monastic Life, Elder Emiliano Subsemanopetra and the Psalms.

The Psalms hold a special place in the devotional life of the Orthodox Church. There is no divine liturgy, no daily office, no occasional prayer service that does not include psalms or passages from the psalms. As the theme of this study weekend indicates, the Psalter has always been the church’s prayer book, which is why the psalms are not read in church as lessons or lections in quite the same way that the gospels and the epistles are, but rather they are read and heard more like prayers. The use of psalms in the Orthodox Church takes two basic forms. First, all church services include one or more psalms among their fixed elements, such as Psalm 103, which is read at the beginning of Vespers, or the six psalms that are read at the beginning of Matins, to mention just two examples. Second, and in monastic practice, the Psalter is divided into 20 sections, which are read section by section at Matins and Vespers so that the entire Psalter is read in its entirety once a week, every week of the year. The exception to this rule is Holy Week when the Psalter is read twice in its entirety and these sections or divisions are known as kafizmata, which means sessions since it is permissible to sit during the reading of the Psalms. It’s also noteworthy that particular psalms or psalm verses are read individually or in groups during the great feasts of the Lord and the Mother of God. And these selected psalms and verses sort of expand and build on the theme and the theological meaning of the feast being celebrated. And they’re very closely intertwined with those liturgical events. So it would not be an exaggeration to say that the psalms constitute an indispensable component of the church’s worship, providing a kind of constant undertow to all the services, and this is especially true in monastic usage.

Now the use of the psalter has been central to early monastic life since the beginning of the fourth century, when an unprecedented wave of enthusiasm for the singing and intoning of the Psalms swept from the Greek East to the Latin West. Early monks, such as those in Egypt and Palestine, spent much of their time intoning the Psalms in a kind of low monotone. The aim was not choral singing or a corporate act of liturgical praise, but rather an aid to meditation. And there are many stories that describe the monks of the Egyptian desert keeping vigil at night by reading the Psalter, or interrupting their work during the day at intervals to recite psalms. Eventually a daily office evolved which incorporated the psalms into formal worship, and these are known for example as the Hours, which continue to be read in monasteries and in some cases in some parishes.

In the monastic tradition, the Psalms also played and continue to play an important role in the spiritual life, especially in the struggle with thoughts and temptations. This is already clear in the life of Anthony, where the saint cites Psalm 3815 as a biblical warrant for ignoring the taunts of the demons. I wait for you, O Lord. You will answer, O Lord my God. The idea is that the saint himself does not respond to the demonic thoughts or temptations. He waits for the Lord to respond to them. Saint Anthony also invokes Psalm 188.6. The Lord is with me. I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me? In fact, in the life of Anthony, the saint cites psalm verses only when he is battling demonic temptations and teaching other monks about this kind of warfare, which points to the specific role that the Psalms played in early monastic life and in the struggle with temptation. Evagrius of Pontus, a younger contemporary of Saint Anthony, compiled a book on this subject called the Andiritikos, which is translated as talking back, and the subtitle that the modern translator gave it is a monastic handbook for combating demons. This is a short work listing various thoughts and how to respond to them by reciting the appropriate scriptural passage. Many of these passages are taken from the Psalms, but others are from the New Testament. So for example, Evagrius says, and I quote, in response to the thoughts that make us grieve over the failings of the brethren, let us say, bear one another’s burdens and in this way you fulfill the law of Christ, which is Galatians 6.2. This practice continued into the Byzantine period, and a writer like Maximus the Confessor tells us that, quote, when the demons have banished chastity from your mind and surround you with thoughts of fornication, turn to the Lord and say, quote, they have banished me and now they have surrounded me. My joy, deliver me from those who surround me, which is a combination of Psalms 1711 and 37. A poem from the later Byzantine period, which is inscribed on the first page of a Psalter, likewise sums up this practice. And you have the quotation on the screen, the Psalter of David, whose sayings are like stones, crush the passions as if they were another Goliath. So the practice of rebutting negative thoughts with biblical verses was inspired by Christ himself, who, when tempted by the devil, rebutted the temptations of the devil by citing passages from Deuteronomy. And the reason that they’re from Deuteronomy is because the Lord is in the wilderness and he’s recapitulating the time of the Israelites in the wilderness as described in Deuteronomy. But the practice of rebutting temptations or thoughts with scriptural passages or scriptural verses is something that the early monks saw authorized in the life of Christ himself. Let’s now introduce the Athonite abbot, Elder Aemilianos, whose commentaries on the Psalms we will look at in some detail.

Elder Aemilianos was born in a suburb of Athens in 1934. He graduated with a theological degree from the University of Athens in 1959. He became a monk and was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood over the years 1960 and 1961 and lived at monasteries in central Greece including the great Meteora. He and his brother relocated to the monastery of Simonopetra in 1973, and I just want to share with you two pictures of the monastery of Simonopetra in case you haven’t seen it or in case you’re not familiar with it. Here’s one, and I have another one here taken on the other side from down in the garden. The elder served as abbot at Simonopetra from 1973 until the year 2000. He was a prolific speaker, and the monastery archive contains an astonishing 3,000 recordings of his talks given over a period of about 30 years. Many of these talks were given to monastic audiences, but a large number were given at parishes in Greece and Cyprus. And these recordings are now the basis for the growing number of his published works. And the elder reposed in the Lord on the 9th of May in 2019. Elder Aemilianos was a learned monastic leader, and he encouraged spiritual reading and spiritual study with particular emphasis on sacred scripture. There were no monks at his monastery who had not read the whole of the Bible many, many times over, and the general rule for reading scripture that he stipulated was that for each chapter read from the New Testament, the monk had to read twice that number from the Old. So if you read two chapters from the New Testament, you read four from the Old Testament. Now, the reason for this was obviously partly practical, because the Old Testament is a much larger book, and it’s longer to get through. But it was also, and I think more importantly, because the elder had a special devotion to the Old Testament, and in particular to the Book of Psalms. This devotion can be seen, for example, in the elder’s revival of the Psalter as a collection of psalms to be sung. So at this point in the monasteries and in the Greek Orthodox Church in general, psalms were no longer being sung. They were simply read as appointed in the service. But under the elder’s influence, a lengthy work, this volume that you see in front of you, of nearly 700 pages containing original music settings for 51 of the 150 psalms in the Psalter. The psalms are arranged in numerical order, and this was a welcome development since, as I said, whereas the psalms continue to be read, it was not often that they were sung, and the collection has led to a revival of their use as chants. And those of you who are not familiar with what Byzantine notation looks like, here are a couple of pages from the book that I just showed you. I don’t know what sorts of customs or practices you follow in your parishes, but it’s entirely possible that some of you actually sing these in your church because they have been translated into English with different kinds of musical notation.

Now for the remainder of my talk, I would like to focus on the theme of sickness and suffering, about which the elder has a great deal to say in his commentaries on the Psalms. The elder understands illness to be a blessing, a gift from God given to us so that we may draw closer to God and be united to him. Illness is not something that happens by chance or randomly, but is a concrete expression of God’s providential care for us. It should be noted that for many years the elder bore the cross of severe illness which gives his words special weight and authority. I would now like to spend the rest of my time with you here, sharing with you some of the elder’s words on sickness and suffering, which are also relevant to any kind of trial or any kind of tribulation or difficulty that we might face. And what follows here are simply quotations from his commentaries and his writings that I’ll be sharing with you. When we get sick or fall ill, we become psychologically anxious. This is because the larger horizon of illness is death. It is a reminder of our mortality, and most of us do not know what we’re supposed to do with the knowledge of our own mortality. But if we do not come to terms with death, we will never really live a fully authentic life. For the person of faith, illness is the bridge to the other world. It is the bridge that can carry us from this earthly and mortal existence to God. This is true of all difficulties, not just of sickness. Elder Pius, who’s now Saint Pius, once said that three years of cancer were worth more than a lifetime of asceticism. Illness and sickness can thus be a blessing, but it all depends on how we respond to it. Illness is not simply an opportunity or a gift from God, but it is the very presence of God himself. Now, these are themes to which the elder returns in many of his talks, especially, as I’ve said, in his reflections on the Psalms, where he says that God comes to us in and through our difficulties in the very midst of our afflictions. And he reminds us that God dwells in the dark cloud, that God makes darkness his hiding place and clouds and darkness surround him. He says that this visitation of God can be terrifying, but we need to have absolute trust in God during those times of visitation.

In a series of reflections on Psalm 16, 4, For the sake of the words of your lips, I have kept ways that are hard. The elder says, Whether we wish to or not, we are going to experience suffering. God will ask us to make many sacrifices and expect many deprivations in our life. How will we be able to endure them all? In the same way that David did, namely, for the sake of the words of your lips. It is enough for me to know, O Lord, that this is what you have asked for, that this is what you have willed for me. There is only one way to explain our difficulties. They are exactly the things that God wants us to experience and endure. And so, for the sake of the words of your lips, I have kept ways that are hard. David senses that not only has the law been ordained by God, but so too have his sufferings, which are likewise expressions of the divine will. And he goes on. The psalmist must discover and accept the proper relation to his suffering. If he can do this, he will have transformed his suffering so that in the end his only reality will be God. But if he continues to resist his suffering, refusing to find his salvation in it, his anguish will continue unabated. The question then is ultimately this. Will he offer himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the will of God or not? And these continue to be the words of the elder, just so we’re clear about that. It follows then that the experience of suffering consists essentially of a conflict, for this is the moment when the soul is passing, as it were, through the clashing rocks of ancient mythology. In this dangerous passage, the soul has to make a choice, and the outcome will either break it into pieces or enable it to sail to its destination in God. And the choice comes down to this. Will the soul accept or reject suffering? Will it make this suffering its own or struggle against it, seeing it as something alien to itself? Spiritual health is not found in the avoidance of suffering, but in its joyful acceptance. The psalmist’s dilemma lies precisely in whether or not he will accept his sufferings or reject them, which is another way of saying that the choice he needs to make is whether to accept or deny God. It is precisely the mistaken negative attitude towards suffering that constitutes the separation between him and God. But if I cease to exist, if my relation to my suffering changes, then I can be united to God. This union depends on the denial of myself so that God can come into my life. Now elsewhere the elder describes this conflict, this struggle with God, in terms inspired by Jacob’s struggle with the angel. And this in fact is one of his more beloved kinds of images or metaphors that he returns to often, as in this example here. Through sickness, we become acutely aware of ourselves and the fragility of life. But if my I prevails, my journey will be a descent into death. If God prevails, then our life together may begin. The choice between God and the ego is the choice between life and death. Anyone who wishes to live a spiritual life must accept the fact that such a life will be a struggle, a fight to the finish. I’m in one corner and God is in the other. One of us will be defeated, knocked down, obliterated. It is not possible for both of us to survive. One of us must be destroyed, annihilated, ravaged, and consumed by the other. We therefore have a paradox. If I win the fight, my life will be, or I myself will be, the absence of God, devoid of God. This is why we said earlier that sin is separation from God, a violent cutting out of God from the heart, and there is no middle ground. You will either live or die. The choice is between God and darkness, between light and the absence of light, which we call night and death.

In one of his more remarkable statements, the elder goes so far as to identify human pain and human suffering as the suffering of God. He says, what is this pain that I feel? It is my participation in the pain of God. It is my experience of God’s thirst for me, for God thirsts to be thirsted for. It is the pain of God’s running, his loss of breath, as he hastens to rescue me before I collapse and fall into the pit. The phrase that appears in quotation marks, that God thirsts to be thirsted for, is taken directly from Gregory the theologian’s oration on baptism. Gregory was a fourth century writer and the friend of Saint Basil the Great. And the idea is, of course, that the words “I thirst” are among the last words that Christ utters from the cross. So his desire for human beings, his love for human beings, his thirst for human beings leads him to the voluntary self-sacrifice of the cross from where he says, I thirst. He thirsts to be thirsted for. So the idea here, and it’s an extraordinary idea, is that the pain that we feel, the difficulties that we feel, whether they be physical pain or psychological pain of some kind, they’re not simply or solely ours. He describes them in the striking way as the pain of God who is seeking the lost human being. And he describes God with the image of a runner. So God is running and his muscles ache and he’s out of breath and he’s dehydrated and he’s in anguish from this extremely arduous running that he is doing to try and catch up with us before it’s too late.

So he describes illness as a time of crisis, but crisis in the rich sense of judgment. The Greek word crisis means judgment; it means you have to make a choice. So the time of crisis is time in that sense of kairos and not chronos, right? Some sort of moment pregnant with possibility and not just the duration of a kind of chronological space. An illness, he says, is the very visitation of God himself, and the moment when we stand before God’s throne as he examines our hearts and reigns, which of course is a quotation from Psalm 7:10. Illness is also a criterion, a standard by which the life and the depth of a person is measured. Illness is like a mirror, he says, in which you can see your spiritual state. And so excessive anxiety about illness reveals a lack or deficiency in one’s spiritual life. When someone is focused solely on his or her illness, which is a gift of God, it’s like he or she is focused on creation and not the creator. It is as if that person’s mind, heart, and strength were directed toward himself and not God. And to be preoccupied with my health, to talk about my aches and pains, to live in fear and anxiety about my health problems, and even to pray to God to make me well can be, he says, and it’s a very strong phrase, it can be a form of idolatry. It’s like a turning away from God to what God has created or allowed to exist. He says illness is natural for us because it can lead us to God. But the instinct for self-preservation, the instinct to survive in this world and in this life, is so worldly and so unnatural that it can lead us away from God. Then he asks the question, why? He says, why do we ask why when sickness comes when we know the answer? God gives us illness so that he can bring us closer to him. So we’re not really asking why to find out why, but because we cannot or will not endure the affliction, so we blame God. The why then is in part a blaming and an accusing of God. It is to place God on trial and put him in the role of defendant.

Here I’d like to share with you a very remarkable story that the elder once shared about a monk in the monastery called Father Arsenios. And I like to call the story Thy Will Be Done. Father Arsenios had a problem with his eyes and was told by the doctor that he had cataracts and would need surgery. But not right away, the doctor said. They needed to wait until the condition had progressed a bit further. Father Arsenios waited, but then suddenly lost his eyesight. He went to another doctor for the surgery, but the other doctor told him, unfortunately, it’s too late. You should have come to me sooner. It’s too late now. I can’t do anything for you. You’re going to be blind for the rest of your life because you didn’t have cataracts like the other doctor told you. It was something else. Instead of getting angry, instead of getting depressed, instead of blaming the first doctor, Father Arsenios said, may it be blessed. God knows what is best for me. And it was God who, quote, blinded the first doctor when he made his mistaken diagnosis. And the elder says, until the day he died, he never said one word against the first doctor, nor were his thoughts ever troubled about the matter. And the elder goes on to say that another kind of person can have an accident or mishap or be diagnosed with an illness or have a problem and become angry at God and doubt the very existence of God. This is a very human response, but it is ultimately a denial and a rejection of the will of God. It is a refusal or an inability to accept the reality of divine providence, or of a God who is love as the foundation of life. Rather than look at God, such a person looks only at his health or his cure. And instead of choosing God, he chooses his illness, often at the cost of his own spiritual loss. But, he continues, there are those who accept all things as gifts from God, and they use them in their growth toward perfection in Christ, and thus they are sanctified and become saints. He says, there is no one who cannot become a saint, but we do not become saints because we want to become something else. Then he says, we light the flame of faith, but we don’t want to be burned. That is, we don’t want to deny ourselves. We do not want God, but we choose ourselves instead. And then my last quotation from the elder, he says, if you mount an earth-moving struggle for your health and to extend your life, what happens then? If you live, what did you gain? Tomorrow, you’re still going to die. And if you live, is this going to make you holier? But you’ll say, maybe my illness will shorten the days of my life. Maybe I should ask God to give me more time, like Hezekiah, so that I have time to repent for my sins. But the church prays for God to give us time for repentance, not years. Sometimes you only need five minutes to repent, or even one minute. It’s enough to say, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, with a deep sense of repentance. Conversely, having or thinking you have many years is not necessarily good for your spiritual life, because it will lead you to postpone the work that you need to do.

Conclusion. Illness is one of the ways that God works on us. Similar to the way one kneads a lump of dough, or carves a piece of wood, or chisels a piece of stone into an image of Christ, God takes hold of us through illness, and he works on our soul, refashioning it and reforming it. We often think that God will come into our life by means of some pleasant experience that will require little or no change on our part. However, God is more likely to enter our lives through a crisis, like a serious illness or some other affliction. For these are the signs, not of God’s absence, but of his active presence. As we see in the Elder’s commentary on the Book of Psalms, God comes to us in the dark cloud. God comes to us in the eye of the storm, in the midst of our difficulties, in the midst of our pain, and in the midst of our suffering. God is at once the source of affliction and the gentle healer. And this seems to be because affliction alone can tear us away from our isolated individual existence and transform us into something much more whole and much more open. The self-consoling dreams and delusions of the ego make it hard for us to perceive the reality of God. But when all the illusions are swept away by some affliction, it is then that I begin to call and cry out to God, like the psalmist who said, quote, “In my affliction, I cried out to the Lord and he heard me,” Psalm 18.5. And so the crisis that engulfs me, the pain that I feel is a kind of birth pang, for it is the initial movement of my soul longing to be united to God. And my longing for God is met by God’s longing for me. For it is God who is seeking me in and through my sufferings, in and through my pain, so that in the end, a spiritual crisis is not the agony of man struggling to find God, but the agony of God struggling to find man. Thank you.