Guard the Treasure

The Small Neglects by Which the Heart Grows Cold

“Turn away from evil, and do good… remain thereafter in wakefulness, so that you might preserve them.”

— St. Maximos the Confessor

Synopsis of Tonight’s Group on The Evergetinos Volume III Hypothesis IX Section C-D2

There is something almost frightening about the stories preserved for us in the Evergetinos. They are frightening not because they portray extraordinary wickedness, but because they reveal how quietly the heart can change.

The monk described by Palladios is not a beginner. He is a man of profound silence and prayer, one who has surrendered himself so completely to God that even the necessities of his bodily life have been entrusted to Providence. His life has become contemplation. Prayer is his delight. God provides for him in a miraculous manner. He has tasted something of the life of the age to come.

And yet the beginning of his fall is almost imperceptible.

He sleeps a little longer.

His prayer becomes somewhat shorter.

His attention wanders.

Earthly concerns begin to occupy a little more space within him.

Thoughts once immediately rejected are permitted to remain for a moment.

Nothing, at first, seems catastrophic.

That is precisely the warning.

The Fathers understood that the great falls of the spiritual life rarely begin as great falls. They begin with small permissions. Something formerly guarded carefully is treated casually. Something that once troubled the conscience is dismissed as insignificant. A thought is entertained rather than rejected. Prayer is postponed. Vigilance relaxes. A little comfort is allowed to become necessary. The heart whispers that such things hardly matter.

But they matter because the heart matters.

There is something extraordinarily precious hidden within the human person: the place of communion with God. The Fathers speak of guarding the heart so insistently because they know what has been entrusted to us. Grace has entered there. The Name has been received there. Desire for God has been awakened there. A fire has been kindled that does not originate in ourselves.

The spiritual life, therefore, is not primarily the anxious avoidance of infractions. It is the guarding of a treasure.

This changes how we understand vigilance.

We do not guard ourselves because God is waiting to punish the smallest mistake. We guard ourselves because love is delicate. Communion can be obscured. Desire can cool. The eye of the heart can become clouded. What has become luminous through prayer can gradually become opaque again.

The evil one understands this very well.

He does not always attempt to tear a person immediately away from God. With someone who has given himself deeply to prayer, such an assault might be too obvious. Instead, he waits. He works through what appears negligible. A little negligence. A little self-confidence. A little relaxation of watchfulness. A thought that seems harmless enough to entertain.

The enemy is patient because he knows that a heart need not renounce God explicitly in order gradually to lose sight of Him.

Palladios gives us an extraordinary image of this darkening in the bread.

At first the monk receives heavenly bread, pure and provided by God. As his interior life becomes disordered, the bread appears grimy and gnawed. Later it is almost entirely spoiled. What is happening visibly to the bread corresponds to what is happening invisibly within the monk. The gift has not ceased to be gift, but his capacity to receive it has become corrupted.

The tragedy is not simply that temptation has appeared. Temptation comes to everyone. The decisive moment comes earlier: he notices the diminishment and does not respond to it.

He regards the first symptoms as trivial.

This is one of the most penetrating insights in the story. The monk does not suddenly decide to abandon his vocation. He fails to take seriously the cooling of his love.

The Fathers would have us become sensitive to precisely this.

When prayer becomes burdensome, notice.

When mercy toward another begins to disappear, notice.

When resentment becomes pleasurable, notice.

When the imagination begins feeding upon something we would once have rejected, notice.

When silence becomes uncomfortable and distraction increasingly necessary, notice.

When we begin excusing in ourselves what once brought us immediately to repentance, notice.

Not because every movement of weakness is a catastrophe, but because small movements reveal the direction in which the heart is turning.

The story attributed to St. Maximos makes the warning still more sobering. The young monk possesses astonishing spiritual authority. Even wild animals obey him. Those around him naturally interpret such gifts as evidence of sanctity.

St. Anthony is less impressed.

He sees a ship filled with precious cargo and says, in effect: Yes—but will it reach the harbor?

Everything is contained in that image.

Grace received is not yet grace preserved.

Virtue acquired is not yet virtue safely possessed.

Spiritual gifts are not guarantees.

Years of asceticism are not guarantees.

Miracles are not guarantees.

The harbor is reached only through perseverance.

This is why Maximos interprets the command to “turn away from evil, and do good” as something more than the avoidance of sin. We must fight to diminish the passions; we must labor to acquire the virtues; and then—we must remain awake in order to preserve what has been given.

He connects this with Adam’s vocation in Eden: to cultivate and to keep.

The heart is a garden.

Grace cultivates it with us. Prayer waters it. Tears soften its soil. The remembrance of God makes it fruitful. Virtue slowly becomes something beautiful and living within us.

But the garden must also be kept.

Perhaps this is why the Fathers can appear severe about things modern people consider insignificant. Their severity is not necessarily born from fear. At its deepest, it arises from wonder.

They know what the heart can become.

They have seen human beings filled with God.

They have seen the mind made luminous through prayer, the passions transfigured, the hardened heart made merciful, and ordinary human beings become bearers of the Holy Spirit. Having seen such things, they cannot regard anything that gradually extinguishes that life as trivial.

The treasure is too precious.

And yet neither story finally teaches despair.

Palladios’ monk awakens. Remarkably, his awakening comes while he is teaching others. He hears himself speaking truths that he has ceased to live, and suddenly sees himself. The contradiction becomes unbearable. He runs back into the desert, casts himself upon the ground, and repents.

God receives him.

The angel’s words are filled with mercy: “God has accepted your repentance and has had mercy on you.”

Something has nevertheless changed. The miraculous bread does not return. His remaining years are marked by mourning. This is not because God refuses forgiveness. Rather, the story preserves the terrible seriousness of freedom. Forgiveness is complete, yet our choices are real. Grace is not magic, and repentance does not make our history unreal.

The Fathers hold together what we so often separate: immense mercy and immense seriousness.

Never despair.

But never presume.

Never imagine that a fall places you beyond the mercy of God.

But never imagine that what darkens the heart is therefore insignificant.

The Christian life is lived between these truths.

Perhaps the most important question, then, is not simply, Have I committed some great sin?

It may be much quieter:

What is happening to my desire for God?

Is the flame growing brighter or dimmer?

Is prayer becoming more truthful or merely habitual?

Is my heart becoming softer or harder?

Am I becoming freer to love, or increasingly absorbed in myself?

Have I begun calling “small” those things that slowly make me forget the One whom I love?

The evil one is willing to wait. He knows that great falls can grow from tiny seeds of forgetfulness.

We too must learn to wait—but differently.

We remain before God.

We keep the heart.

We cultivate the garden.

We guard the treasure.

And when we discover even the smallest cooling of love, we do not panic and we do not despair. We turn again toward Christ. Immediately. Simply. Humbly.

For vigilance, rightly understood, is not living in terror that we might lose God.

It is living with the knowledge that nothing is more precious than having found Him.