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Homilies

St Photius the Great, tr. Mango, 1958

16. Tyrophagy Week

XIII

Homily Delivered from the Ambo of the Great Church on the Wednesday of the First Week of Lent

All ye who by your baptism unto salvation have been, as it were, born of one womb and enrolled as brothers one of another, and ye whom the judgment of the children in the Lord has assigned to the clergy, let us make the beginning of the fast a beginning of virtue,¹ so that we may confirm in works our sharing in spiritual travail, and preserve unadulterated the dignity of the adoption, and so that we may reap the fruit of our cultivation at the time of the recompense, and not, while we deprive the body of food, fill the soul with incurable passions, nor contrive to treat a disease with a disease, taking license of evil practice at our own expense, nor hide sin with sin, covering up our blindness with foul tatters, but let us wipe off illness with health, and wash off our trespasses with righteousness.

For there are, yea, there are some who, while they practise fasting, destroy² its grace by man-pleasing, and miserably scatter the profit of their toils which they ought to keep, acting like some insane merchants who, after traversing the immense deep of sea and ocean and escaping unharmed the storms and tempests of the passage, yet, when they put in at the very edge of the shore, sink all their merchandise at the landing pier, no differently than if they had done it in the sea itself. Such is the plight of those who look up to human esteem while undergoing the toil of the fast. Some again, while they emaciate their appearance through lack of food, swell and inflame it with the puffing of vainglory, having fattened themselves thoroughly on this evil regimen and striven to hide the first passion, that of gluttony, with a worse passion, that of conceit. Others again ennoble their body with abstention from food, while they grievously devour the flesh of their neighbours with their tongue and ridicule. It would be better for them to be possessed of the devil and gnaw on their own limbs, rather than consume the lives of their neighbours with slanders, and be for ever meddling and fault-finding at their expense. For madness, being as it is an involuntary and grievous plight, is, I believe, capable of moving to pity those that encounter it, and it does not bar divine favour at the time when our lives are examined; whereas the man who willingly commits an insane, devilish and inhuman act draws upon himself with good reason the stigma and hatred of his fellow-countrymen, and makes divine judgment implacable and terrible for himself.

Why dost thou leave aside thine own affairs, O man, and examinest thy neighbour? Why, while bearing the beam that is in the pupil of thine eye, dost thou consider the motes of thy brother?³ Why dost thou not hearken to the law of the Lords which enjoins, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,”⁴ but having, as it were, enrolled thyself as a subject of some other lawgiver, thou declarest thy opposition to us, not by thy writ, but by thy life? Perchance thou judgest thy neighbour and takest delight in calumnies against him at the cry and bidding of thy lawgiver. Nay, for ours does not say such things as these, “Judge that thou mayest not be judged,” and, “Strike and wound others with abuse that befits thyself, that thou mayest avoid the appearance of being such an one, and hide thy wickedness with calumnies and accusations of others.” Our Lawgiver and God asserts, on the contrary, “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged.” “Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant?”⁵ He speaks again in reproof through the divine Paul, “for,” quoth He, “wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself.”⁶ What force impels thee to such a pitch of sin? What expectation of gain from this madness urges thee on to such shamelessness, so as to disregard the injunctions of an evil-hating Lord, while bowing down to the command of a man-hating tyrant? Or rather, what penalty does not ensue for them that labour at such vain toil?

For, whereas we ought to mourn for our own transgressions, and repent, and punish sin with fasting, and, by not judging our neighbour, anticipate beforehand the goodwill of the common Judge, and obtain His mercy, we pay to all this no sort of attention; we leave our own sores unattended, but set ourselves up as severe investigators into those of others, which are no concern of ours; we pry into their talking and walking and smiling (need I say that our habit of malice, exercised by daily practice, most easily and convincingly forges for them actions which they have never committed, and, fostering these forgeries by our ingenuity, brings pain and injustice into human life?); and this we do as though a righteous judge, presiding according to divine decrees, had given license to the flow of our tongue, and we do not blush at acting thus shamefully all day long. If this is the study of our life, if this is what we dwell on, how can we but draw upon ourselves the misery of the ultimate punishment, from which there is no release? For, by lying in ambush with our shameless words against other men’s lives⁷ with the purpose of destroying them, we have maltreated our own life with various evils by having degraded it to the depravity of slanderers, and, lifted up to judge others, we fall ourselves into the pit of the condemned. And then, who are they that do these things? The worthless condemn the good, the wicked condemn the gentle, not to mention other matters more preposterous still. Do you wish me to tell you my plight as well? The sheep condemn the shepherd, and the passengers the captain; and they, for whose salvation he watches, slumber on, indifferent to his guarding; and would that they were asleep, instead of moving limb and hand and every stone⁸ in order to distress him at any cost, and thereby, having made him who presides over their care more negligent, as can well be understood, they may embark without hindrance on any deed directed towards insanity, just as their impulsive will, which has rejected the laws of obedience, ordains them, and as if there were no one to lead them by the rein and attend to them. Thus fasting results in no benefit, when⁹ the incontinence of judging and condemning others is not punished.

This is the foul deed of the Evil one’s craft. This is the artifice of that envious and malicious nature. This is the device of the man-hating Devil: to blunt virtue with evil, to trouble the calm of the fast with the tempests of envy, and, on the storm of garrulousness, to blow man into a sea of passions, and sink him together with his helmsman, the mind. What is the benefit of fasting when calumny acts wantonly¹⁰ in thy lips? What is the emaciation of thy body, when thy tongue is fattened and takes delight in reviling thy neighbour? Why need thou keep a face clear of the intoxication¹¹ of wine, when thy thoughts are drunk with slanders of others, and infuse the red dye of murder into the very depth of thy soul? Jezebel too set up once a fast as a veil for an abomination, as she enacted the death of the righteous Naboth. For Scripture says of her: “And she sent the letter to the elders and to the freemen who dwelt with Naboth. And it was written in the letters saying, Keep a fast, and set Naboth in a chief place among the people. And set two men, sons of transgressors, before him, and let them testify against him ... and let them lead him forth, and stone him, and let him die.”¹² ...Thereafter it says, “And she¹³ proclaimed a fast, and they set Naboth in a chief place among the people ... and the men of the defection from Naboth¹⁴ bore witness against him, and they led him forth out of the city, and stoned him with stones, and he died.”¹⁵ Seest thou how this fast, when greed and calumny were combined with it, not only was of no benefit, but became the veil behind which the murder of the righteous man was enacted? How then could a man, while pursuing sinful actions, think that fasting will be reckoned unto him for righteousness? For considering, as it is plain to see, that when greed met calumny, the fast permitted their secret union to be accomplished, and to beget so great an abomination, it is indeed a zealous admirer of that wicked and wretched woman, or rather an executor of her command, who, without the other virtues and righteous deeds, hides under the mask of fasting. For he too proclaims the fast on his face until the secret drama of wickedness, which he has in mind, reaches the climax of lawlessness. “I have not chosen this fast,”¹⁶ saith the Lord Almighty. To them who masquerade with such a fast, He crieth out in wrath, “Your fasting and rest from work, your new moons also, and your feasts my soul hateth.”¹⁷

Fasting is acceptable to God when abstention from food is accompanied by refraining from sins, from envy, from hatred, from calumny, from vainglory, from wordiness, from other evils. He who is fasting the true fast that is agreeable¹⁸ to God ought to shun all these things with all his strength and zeal, and remain impregnable and unshakeable against all the attacks of the Evil one that are planned from that quarter. On the other hand, he who practises abstention from food, but does not keep self-control in the face of the aforesaid passions, is like unto one who lays down splendid foundations for a house, yet takes serpents and scorpions and vipers as fellow-dwellers therein. For just as the establishment of goodly foundations for that house becomes a deadly trap to those that come nigh, as the lurking reptiles fall upon them unawares with their poison, so also that person who has established his fame among men by means of fasting, while fostering within him the beastlike heads of the passions, is fatal to those that meet him. For his neighbour approaches him as he fawns sweetly in the reputation of his fasting; but he hides within him his vainglory and hatred of his brother and calumny and creeping envy, and covertly expels his poison, and then, especially if his heart be overflowing with the malice of the plot, bites shrewdly with his words, and injects with all his force into his innocent and perhaps friendly neighbour the ten thousand stings of the wound; but if that neighbour be immune to the attacks, if he refuse to suffer or to imitate his assailant, then his assailant shall see him crowned victor according to the Lord’s decrees, while he himself wastes and destroys himself yet worse, as the destructive passions within him¹⁹ rend him body and soul at the sight of the immunity and fair repute of him whom he has envied and assailed. Thus virtue knows how to save him who fortifies himself with her, even if a thousand assailants strike him from without, while evil destroys its possessor, and, even unwilling, submits to what is contrary to his designs, so conferring on him a double tyranny, by showing him the failure of his intended insults and plots, and by filling him with its own perversity and wretchedness.

Dost thou abstain from food? Thou doest well. For this is a weapon against the passions for those who use it rightly. Abstain also from envy, so that thy fasting may be considered as fasting by God too, and not be a mask, hiding the other evils as with a veil behind the feigned abstinence from food; but that it should take root in the folds of thy soul like a flourishing and many-branched stock, and should propagate the other virtues, and show them, along with itself, fructified with that blessed and truly immortalizing joy of paradise. Abstain, O man, from envy. Envy is the delight of the devil, the crop raised by that evil nature. Dost thou abstain from the food proper to men?²⁰. Much rather shouldst thou refrain from the diet of demons. It is good for man to eat the bread of angels,²¹ but the bread of demons is fatal. For that proved to be the first and last surfeit, drunkenness, inebriation and ruin of him who had been allotted the first place in heaven; since, having inebriated himself with the pale draught of envy, and cast an envious glance at man, Lucifer wretchedly fell down from the orb of heaven, and dwelt in Hell, and from that time breathes murder at our kind. For murder is the offspring of envy, and it is most difficult for those who have once inebriated themselves with it to return to sobriety. Dost thou abstain from food? Abstain from vainglory. She is the mother of envy, having taken folly to husband. For indeed the envious one is moved to envy those who excel him; while he who imagines about himself vain²² and great things which do not at all become him strives to outstrip everyone else, and being foolishly lifted up by such thoughts, he falls into the pit of the envious, and when he is surpassed he wastes away, having wretchedly given himself up to folly and vainglory. Abstain from slander and calumny; for they too are the offspring of envy and the firstborn sisters of murder. Since envy, as a rule, first begets those out of us, and thereafter is born murder as a last and fatal offspring both for its begetter and for the ones who are envied. Let us avoid, beloved ones, their plague, let us abominate their evil, let us not wish to draw near even to the experience thereof. But let us offer God a pure fast that embellishes the soul with brotherly love, that adorns the body with humility, that sanctifies the mind with proper praise-giving, that makes the lips fragrant through decorous speech about one another, and that, by means of an attentive practice of these things, leads us to freedom from passion.

If you live in this wise and show in actions that you are keeping my exhortations, you will enable me to converse with you more often, sometimes with addresses, sometimes by reading the Holy Writ, and the time of the coming week will provide the proof thereof. As for yourselves, you will win the kingdom of heaven, of which may we all be deemed worthy through the grace and mercy of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, to Whom is due all glory, honour and veneration, together with the eternal Father, and the co-eternal and co-everlasting Spirit, the consubstantial and life-giving Trinity, now and for ever and ever. Amen.

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