Falsehood and lying, and we went through it last time, we went through the text itself and this time we'd like to think about it a little more, and my danger, my temptation is always to add too much, you know, to theorize too much about the thing, but the subject of falsehood and the subject of truth is a very important one, and also Dorotheus leads us into the core of the question of truth, right at the end of his discourse. His things, like the rule of Saint Benedict, they seem, sometimes they seem conversational or something like that, as if he's sort of putting them together accidentally or casually, but he's really not, he's quite systematic, he's carefully planned what he's going to say. And you notice at the end of his discourse here, he's talking about the falsehood in life, or hypocrisy, because this is the man whose very life is a lie, he is not a simple but a two-faced man, he is one thing on the outside and the other on the inside.

[01:06]

We have now spoken about falsehood, which comes from the devil, and we have spoken about truth, and God is truth. Let us flee from falsehood, brothers, that we may be delivered from the hands of the enemy. Let us struggle to take hold of the truth so that we may be united to the one who said I am the truth. May God make us worthy of this truth. So he ends up with that ontological statement that God is the truth. Then we all have a dim sense of the fact that truth is an ambiguous word, and we use that word so much. Two people can be arguing with one another, and both of them say, well, look at the truth, you know, and they both look at the truth the best they can, and they see two different truths that seem to contradict one another. Let's think a little bit about the question of falsehood, and kind of, if you can get some unity between the three kinds of falsehood that he is talking about, and then relate them, relate them to truth, and think about truth a little bit. Now remember, he talks about three species of falsehood.

[02:08]

The first is falsehood in your mind, and for him that means suspicions. It means having all these kind of paranoid thoughts about other people, and he gives examples of people who have had this carried to a very intensive, very absurd level, and then they find out that they're wrong. And it's strange that he doesn't talk about other kinds of falsehood in the mind. He doesn't talk about vainglory, or other heretical errors, or things like that. He just talks about these suspicions. And the second kind of falsehood that he talks about is falsehood in words. But for him, what it is, is to say something and have another thing in your heart. Either you say something that falsifies who you are, or what you're like, or you say something which falsifies your motive. In other words, you say it in order to get something, but what you're saying and what you're thinking, what you're wanting and working towards, is called an ulterior motive. Now there are two different motives. And then the third kind of falsehood that he talks about is falsehood in life, where

[03:13]

a person pretends to be something that he is not. And this is in the gospel, in the New Testament, this is called hypocrisy. So one reference that I didn't give you to the biblical sources is under the term hypocrisy. There's a good article on it in the Old Standby, the Dictionary of Biblical Theology, and it's by this Father Leon Dufour, who's extremely good. When you find one of his articles, you can usually expect it to be excellent. See, this is a central concept in the New Testament. If you think of all the times that Jesus runs into the scribes and the Pharisees, and what he's accusing them of, it's precisely this. It's precisely this lie in one's life, which also is a mental lie, and is a lie in words. Because he says, this people speaking, taking up the words of God in the Old Testament, this people serves me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

[04:15]

I'm just going to read part of this article, it's not very long. Following in the steps of the prophets and the sages, but with unequaled vigor, Jesus laid bare the roots and consequences of hypocrisy, especially that of the Pharisees. Clearly, a hypocrite is one whose actions do not correspond to the thoughts of his heart. He is also called blind by Jesus. That's strange, because first of all, it seems like the person is deliberately lying with his life, but then he himself is called blind. Now, how do you get those two things together? And strangely, we'd say, well, if he's blind, then he's not guilty, then it's not his fault. But Jesus says, if you, what did he say in John, if you did not say, we see, you would have no guilt. But you say, we see, and therefore your sin remains. This is where he's talking about, I didn't bring in a testament, this is where he's talking about the Pharisees as blind men. It's a strange passage. Next.

[05:17]

I'm looking for it in John, because he quotes the other Gospels, but it's not as richly. Here we are. This is John 9, after he's healed the man blind from birth. John 9, verse 40 and so on. For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind. Okay, that's mysterious enough. Some of the Pharisees heard him, and they said to him, are we also blind? Jesus said to them, if you were blind, this is what he says, I quoted it long before. If you were blind, you would have no guilt, but now that you say, we see, your guilt remains. If you could admit that you were blind, you wouldn't have any guilt, if you could admit your blindness. But now that you say, we see, we are not blind, your guilt remains, because you won't admit your sin.

[06:25]

This is a little complicated now, a little complicated to straighten out, because you've got like three levels. You've got the person's life, you've got the truth, and then you've got what the person thinks in between, and what the person says. Now he can think that he's right, and he can still be guilty, because his life is separated from the truth. If you were blind, you would have no guilt, if you would admit that you're blind, if you could see that you're a blind man, you would have no guilt, because then you would be, in accepting your sins, somehow your guilt is open to the light. But now that you say, we see, your guilt remains. Now the horrible part of that is, that in saying, we see, the guilt itself becomes invisible. In saying, we see, you both sin and say that you don't sin, so you both sin and you hide the sin from yourself. That's the scary thing about it. So there's a sin that we're not aware of, and it's somehow in our will to such an extent

[07:32]

that we say, we see, we see, we're right. That's a kind of argument of the heart. There's a connection now, that seems to justify both meanings. That is the hypocrisy, the lying with one's life, and then the being blind. By trying to deceive others, the hypocrite deceives himself, and himself becomes blind, unable to see the light. So as we pretend, we begin to believe our pretense, and maybe we believe it a little bit from the start, and so we become blind ourselves. And so there's this contradiction in us somehow, that in our heart we're doing one thing, and in our life and also in our mind, not just in our life, in our external life, and also in our mind, we don't see it. This is important to meditate upon, because this is in the way of self-knowledge, and

[08:35]

as we live in the spiritual life, we find more and more of this in ourselves. See when you see it first in the Gospels, you remember that chaplain down at, the chaplain's name was Flixenstein, there was a thing, a gospel about the Pharisee, and he started out by telling the nuns, oh when we hear this gospel, first we'll know it's about the Pharisee. And so he had the nuns laughing before he got to the contradiction, the darn Pharisee. And then he went into how it's really in ourselves, and the Gospel is talking to us. And see it's very graphic in the Scripture, it's all black and white. Here you have Jesus over here completely in the truth, and here you have the Pharisees over here that were completely in the error and in the dark, and we align ourselves naturally with Jesus in looking at the Pharisees, and it's completely graphic there. But then it's only as we somehow digest the word that it begins to draw on us that we're really not way over here, we're not just looking at the Pharisees, but we are the Pharisees. And we learn it more and more and more, that that dualism, that conflict is really inside

[09:41]

of ourselves. And the sin itself, the hypocrisy, is a mixture of voluntary and involuntary, and that's the mysterious thing about sin, that when Adam sins then he hides himself right away, and he's even hidden from himself, he can't find himself. He can't find his true self, his sort of luminous self, and he can't find the sinning self either. He doesn't know, he doesn't know where he's at. Religious hypocrisy is not simply a lie, it deceives another in order to win his esteem by means of religious deeds which are not performed from a simple intention. We've got another article on simplicity. The hypocrite seems to be, this is the key thing now, the hypocrite seems to be acting for God but actually is acting for himself. The hypocrite seems to be acting for God but actually is acting for himself. And like the whole story of the spiritual life is moving from this position of thinking that we're doing it all for God and doing it for ourselves in our conversions, in our conversion

[10:47]

and we have this big, what would you call it, wave of grace and we think we're completely drenched in that wave of grace and it's changed us completely and now we're doing everything for God, but actually we're doing it considerably because he makes us feel so good about it. And then when that good feeling drains out gradually and we find out gradually the split widens and we find out that really we only served him when he was good to us. And when that happiness drains away, we're really not that faithful. There's a whole thing, if you think about the stages of the spiritual life, I think even according to John of the Cross, I haven't checked this out exactly, but there's something like this, that you have an initial, let's see how this goes, suppose we start here and we have an initial sort of conversion which pulls us away from our satisfaction in this

[11:53]

world, another kind of point of happiness that tends to align us for spiritual development. So there's a kind of trilation here, which you can consider that something like that according to the United Nations, but we learn to respond to the interior reality rather than the exterior reality, so we get pulled away from the outside and we move towards the inside. And then we really get won over, maybe, to the interior. And then we begin to, we begin maybe to move up and to find more and more satisfaction in God, in the interior life. And maybe at the same time, this begins to, in some way, provide an infringement of self-knowledge in that the person will talk about spiritual things and so on, and that way gain a certain

[12:57]

figure, a certain image in the public. Okay, so what happens? We get way up here, and really, we're serving God with a great deal of self-interest. We're serving God still largely because of this aspect of the eternal self, our own ego, in one way or another. And then, it's a kind of a repeat, I think, isn't it? Then there's the real crisis. Then the real purification begins, in which it's not only the question about turning from external goodies to internal goodies. Here, excuse me, I shouldn't have used that line. Because they're real spiritual things. Only it's the delights of the Lord that we turn to, or at least the hope of that. But then, there's a point where the ego itself actually has to die. Where the thing, the self-serving instinct in ourselves actually has to be self-moving. And that's what the night of the Spirit is about, I think, in John's book. So after this peak, then, you've got to start dying.

[13:58]

And then, that one's really deep, you know? That's the real death. And that really corresponds to the death of Jesus. It was compassion and death. And then, there's a resurrection. And there's no limit to the fulfillment there. But this is the hard one here. And a lot of people stop there. Some people never get there. Some stop here. Some get discouraged here and give up. Quite a few people in yoga, if you get there, pretend it's stated, that that's a good place to be. Like St. Peter said, let go of your pre-attachment and be one. Because that corresponds to the transfiguration. It also corresponds, in the history of the Jews, to the whole thing of Judaism. David and Solomon. Solomon was serving God for his own good. David wasn't so much that way. He was kind of on his side. But Solomon served God more and more for his own satisfaction. And number of his wives, and his idolatry, and his ungrateful life. And then what happens to Israel?

[15:00]

Think about that. It gets turned out into exile. And that exile is the death of the collective ego of Israel. The death of the national ego. And then the resurrection, it happens in a transcendent way. It's only a testament to the coming of Jesus. But we go through the same thing. Every one of us goes through the same thing. As far as we're willing to go. So this is a point of... There's a lot of hypocrisy still there. There's a lot of self-serving. And this is a thing that's still there. It's kind of theory, but I think there's a lot of substance behind it. In the scripture and also in the tradition. For instance, in John the Apostle. I think that's what he's talking about. David? You know the difference between the first and the second? Okay. Now it's not that they're entirely separate. Because the person, when he's heading down here. Suppose you start out here with an ordinary life. And then you have a conversion experience.

[16:01]

And maybe there's bound to be a hump here. In fact, one graft doesn't really cover it. But that person begins to go through a purification. Away from the external satisfaction. So he really begins to go through some suffering. There's a desert. The other analogy in the scripture is a desert. And then the actual passion and death. The desert and the exile for Israel. The desert temptations of Jesus. And first we'll start with the school experiment. The desert temptations of Jesus. And then the passion and death. Israel's 40 years in the desert. And then the exile of Israel. Which is an attempt of no end to the restoration of Hebrews. So. In this one here, we have the kind of setup. The graft doesn't cover this. It only expresses the up and down of the general tenor of life.

[17:04]

It would be better to start this way. Okay. So the person is converted. And immediately feels a lot of happiness and death. A lot of joy. And then gradually they change the way. Gradually they change the way. He finds himself going through a purification. In which all of that emotional happiness and so on disappears. And he really has to go through a desert. And that's the night of ascension. And meanwhile, that's a very sincere thing. It's not that he's talking at that time. That's to be sincere. And yet he still hasn't basically been. The roots of his selfishness have not yet been cut out. It's like unhooking him from the external addictions that he has. The external needs and compulsions and desires and passions. But the root of the thing is still there. And then when he's purified from the external passions and their satisfaction. He begins to taste the goodness of God in an interior way.

[18:04]

Now that's already happened here. But then it's in such a subtle way that he's not ready for it yet. That's why it disappears. When the external emotions are washed away. He's not purified yet to perceive the interior. So he has to go through the desert. But then he begins to perceive it. It begins to shine through. And he gets somewhat purified. Disappears. So then gradually he begins to become more and more fulfilled with this interior prayer. With the real light of God. But as he emerges out into the sunlight again. This kind of illuminated stage as it's called. Remember? What we say is a purgative illumination. And he begins to come out into the sunlight again. Up onto the mountain. In this illuminated stage. The selfishness keeps hitting him. Because he's pretty high up. Obviously. He's doing pretty well for himself now. And he thinks maybe he's going to take it. So he begins to build himself kind of a house. Remember when David built his house. And he walked up on the roof. And he got into trouble.

[19:06]

It's a little like that. And the prince benefits. He begins to assume it. And the person gradually gets. Like Solomon. He gradually begins to. His worship is less pure. See David had worshiped purely. Because he was. He was sort of down here. He was under water a lot of the time. But Solomon in all his glory begins to adulterate the whole thing. Begins to become very ambiguous for Solomon. His personal work. And so does God. And so we have people who do this and people who do that. But the difference here is that we're one away from the external things. To the interior. Okay. But the ego is still there. And it's feeding on it. It's just changing its diet. But here the ego inserts into the afterlife. Now what's left when the ego dies? Well there's something like an ego that resurrects to itself. I'm going to quote. It's hard to say whether.

[20:17]

We talk about the death of the ego. Can we talk about the resurrection of the ego too? Because we mean a couple of different things by ego. The ego that rises is not selfishness. Okay. But ego means two things first. It means the center, the focus. The active focus of your personality. With which you just encounter the world. But it also means a shell around you. Which separates you from other people. And also means your selfish self. Right. Because at least there's three different meanings for ego. So the selfish self and the shell die. And don't die together. But the other ego which is the sort of operating center of your personality. Okay. Just like your body comes back in another direction. So there's a certain ego or a certain center of your personality in the body that must be there. Otherwise you wouldn't really be human. But to be human you need that ego. That sense of self. Which is even a local thing. So this is really, this is the palace of hypocrisy up here.

[21:19]

This is the temple of hypocrisy. And see the prophets are the guys who stay in the desert. The prophets stay in the desert. And they look at Solomon. And they look at the kings. They have all their glory and all their hypocrisy. And they really zero in right on them. They tell them their hypocrisy. They tell them how much ambiguity and falseness there is in their glory. And in what they call the service of God, worship of God. And then finally they brought this guy together. Which is another desert. And at that point the temple is destroyed. It's a symbol isn't it? The temple, the destruction of the temple. It's a symbol of the destruction of that self. Remember the prophecy of Jeremiah. God told Jeremiah, I'm going to take away the delight of your eyes. And that day his wife died. And he says this means that I'm going to destroy the temple. And the people will be carried up. Do you see what's happening? We call it ego.

[22:24]

They didn't have the word ego in the old days of course. That comes from contemporary psychology. These expressions are so tricky that they overlap. But they never mean exactly the same thing. The hypocrite seems to be acting for God but actually is acting for himself. Highly recommended practices like almsgiving, prayer, fasting are thereby perverted by the anxious care of making a show. This habit of putting a distance between the heart and the lips teaches how to cover up bad intentions with a crafty air. And so on. Hypocrites Jesus yelled at them. Isaiah prophesied well of you when he said this people honors me with their lips but their heart is far from me. Formalism can be cured. Formalism is when we do things and they're not really in touch with our heart. But hypocrisy is close to hardness of heart. The whited sepulchres end up taking as true what they would like others to believe.

[23:27]

They think they are just and they become deaf to every call to conversion. Like an actor in the theater. See that's where the Greek word comes from. Hypocrite. That's an actor. The hypocrite continues to play his role and all the more so if he holds a higher position than the people obey his word. It's more of a following. The guru thing is typical of this. A lot of the gurus who come over to the West and begin to pile up a following and begin to pile up money and glory and all this stuff. And some of it is very transparent because they just revel in their big cars. They don't have this prophetic thing so prevalent in Hinduism. So it's easy to get away with that kind of thing. But of course the real spiritual teachers in their own tradition see right through them. The prophetic word which is in the Judeo-Christian tradition just comes right out and cuts through that. But the same thing happens in the church. And you can even trace in the history of the church a kind of pattern like this.

[24:28]

Where the church has its times of glory and great power and then that starts to crumble. And something splits. And the hypocrisy that was in that glory and power begins to appear. Now we're very conscious of that nowadays, you see. The triumphalism of the church of one time. We just can't stand, at least a lot of people can't, can't stand that kind of thing. And Protestantism is like the exaggeration of the prophetic voice which hits the church's triumphalism and the hypocrisy that creaks into us at a certain point in its history. After the medieval peak there, you see, the big peak, the medieval peak, when you have a Christendom which is glorious in some way. And then you have the Protestant revolt and you have these various harsh words coming towards the church, hypocrites. And things begin to fall apart and really go under. So now it's as if for a couple of centuries

[25:30]

we've been on that downward curve and swinging down here. And who knows whether we're ready for the emergence. Vatican II would suggest we're ready. Excuse me for being so theoretical with this thing. But I think it verifies itself in so many places. Even personal history in general. The purification of selfishness on two levels. The purification of selfishness on the external level which is the first conversion. And the purification of that spiritual selfishness which is the most tricky thing. It's kind of the worm that creeps into the heart of our religion. And which is at the heart of the second death, the second purification. There's an awful lot of this in the gospel community. But Jesus, he just...

[26:31]

This is what makes him angry though. Interesting. In order to break down the gates of their hearts Jesus makes them lose faith before others. Evidently there's only one way to get through to these people and that is by stripping them of some of that external approval. Stripping their faces bare, as it were. And so he uses harsh words on them. He never uses harsh words, I don't think, on anybody else. Just on the Pharisees. By denouncing their basic sin and secret rottenness. This is better than letting them share in the lot of the wicked. This is better than letting them be damned. Yeah. So the basic thing is this split within the individual. And this seeming, claiming to be acting for God

[27:31]

but actually acting for ourselves. Another place where you see this is in fundamentalism. There's more than one kind of fundamentalism. But the kind of fundamentalism which is out to get converts for your own satisfaction and sort of identifies itself completely with the truth. I think I've got Christ and I've got the truth completely. I know it completely. And you don't know anything. You can see the egoism in it. And when Christianity gets aggressive like that and then goes over to the East, it's disastrous. It's just disastrous. Because other people... There are a lot of people who are deeply developed in this way. They're deeply purified in this way. Especially simple people. And they see right through that kind of thing. And then they judge the whole of Christianity on that basis. So that's how we betray the Lord. So there's a kind of unity in these three kinds of falsehood.

[28:37]

We talked about that before. Because the first kind of falsehood in the mind, those suspicions, if you look at them carefully, they involve this persona thing. This idealized self-image thing. So that's really a lie about ourselves. It seems to be falsehood about somebody else that we're thinking. But really it relates to ourselves. Otherwise we wouldn't be thinking it. We've got a very strong compulsion to judge other people, to judge them rashly and to have these suspicions about them. So that's actually a way of denying our own sinfulness. Or a way of denying what we are and claiming to be something else. Notice how as soon as we make a judgment about somebody else, a negative judgment, any kind of judgment, in fact, to some extent, we begin to push ourselves absolutely into the truth. You notice? When we judge, we take the position of absolute truth. And not just of being a sinner myself and so on. It's as if we have to make a movement of humility,

[29:40]

almost a penitential right, and then come back to the middle. Before we can make a judgment about somebody else. And our judgments always have to be open judgments, because we're just not God. So that first kind of lying also is a denial of who we are. The second kind of lying is a denial of who we are. When we pretend to do one thing in our words and then we're really doing something else. And the third kind, more obviously, is a lie about ourselves. It's a pretense of being one thing and then really being another. So all three of them are together in that. It's the business of the persona and the shadow and the denial and the projection on somebody else in the first place. And all three of them are a kind of denial of reality by the ego. This thing which leads us suddenly to the false self, which I've talked about enough in the past, I'll just read a couple of things from Martin Luther King.

[30:41]

The grandmaster of the false self, really, in our tradition. He's the one who coined the expression in spirituality, not in psychology. There are other people who have thought about it in psychology. My false self is the one who wants to exist outside the radius of God's will and God's love, or outside of reality and outside of life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion. My false self is the one I want to exist outside reality, therefore not known by God, and so on. On and on about that. Especially in new seeds of contemplation. The exterior eye has a compulsive need to measure up to greatness, heroism and infallibility. Therefore it's in the midst of truth. The false self we create in our relationship with other men by reason of their esteem for us, or our desire for it,

[31:42]

or by reason of our own self-esteem or efforts at it. And this hinders us from the path to truth. So that false self you can see very clearly as a persona. We create it in our relationship with others by reason of their esteem for us. In other words, it can come without our deliberate leave. We don't start it ourselves. But we sort of accept it, and then we hang on to it. Or by reason of our own self-esteem or efforts at it. You can see some people who are very concerned in some way with some idea they've got of themselves. And their whole life is lived in obedience to some kind of an idea that they've got of themselves. And it really runs amok, and it really inflates them. And we all have it to some extent, I suppose. The Freudians talk about the super-ego, you know, which is an idea of the way you should be, which you got from somebody else, but which is really not part of you. It's really not you. The exterior self is made up of your attitudes.

[32:45]

The self, which is enclosed within the limitations which you make for yourself by your attitudes, opinions, prejudices, your way of thinking about things, your style, the way you do things. These limit us. We think and function within these limits. They hinder our true freedom. We are mostly limited by deciding things beforehand. This or that is no good, our reaction. We must admit that we are this lower self, that this false self is being destroyed by God's action. I think the problem I have with Merton, as I said before, is that he dualizes the thing, so that all you've got is the false self, which is being destroyed, and which is phony right to the core. And you've got this true self, which is a very transcendent thing, which is way down below, and which would never be fully realized in this life. And so in between the two, there's not much. There doesn't leave room for much, for much ordinary nature, which results in a very tense situation which you try to live out in your life.

[33:47]

And it's always a warfare between absolute truth and absolute falsehood. There's not much room for being human. There's not much room for being human. There's not much room for this present life. So I think there's an exaggeration. If you look in the Gospel, you don't seem to find that, do you? Because Jesus allows for a lot of nature in the way that he relates to people. And he doesn't immediately polarize everything between the perfect and the absolutely right. It's not a matter either of complete holiness or, you know, white encephalopods, Pharisees and so on. Even the Pharisees, you know, basically they seem to have been good people. God's patience with this present situation and the fact that there is a nature, there is a basis of nature in between. There's not a completely dualistic situation. And this, I think, I'll read something from St. Augustine. It's sort of maybe of the old, this kind of thinking. We must take upon ourselves the burden of suffering and the burden of contradiction

[34:47]

and the necessity of humiliation which comes from having this lower self. It means fully accepting ourselves exactly as we are and all that is wrong with us. We are stuck with this exterior self. We have to accept this and we have to sweat it out for 50 or 60 years, however long. I have to sweat it out. Anything else is unrealistic. Gosh. I don't think Martin was really like that in his life. I don't think he really thought of himself that way. He did to a certain extent, but there's not enough room for a healthy self-love. That word healthy self-love is a tricky one too. Something's missing. There's that core that goes right through.

[35:49]

The core of the true self. Okay, Martin would say that, but also there's simple humanity in between. And we have to be able to be at peace with that simple humanity, not demand either that way. We don't want our life to be a warfare, just an out-and-out continual warfare between complete evil and perfect good. It doesn't seem to be. That has to be there, but we can get schizophrenic or something. Okay, now I want to read a couple of passages from St. Augustine. There's a bit of that in there already. Remember that quote from the City of God the other day. This is just one side of St. Augustine. This is a synthesis of Augustine. It's a marvelous, very helpful, useful book. An Augustine synthesis by Fr. Kutzweiler, who was quite an Augustinian scholar. It's a long anthology.

[36:50]

It's separated under chapter heads with pretty good translations and well-selected passages. Okay, there's a section here on from man to God, from man untruth to God truth. Now here you can see the root sort of of Martin's thinking. Seek what the property of man is, and you will find sin. Seek what is the property of man, and you will find untruth. Remove sin, and whatever you then perceive in man is of God. Let not, therefore, man love that which is proper to himself. Seek not, then, sin, and you will not seek what is your own. Seek not untruth, and you will not seek what is your own. For truth is of God, untruth is yourself. And in this we could have a lot of our tradition. Also, remember the rule of St. Benedict where he says whatever is good in yourself attribute it to God, whatever is evil in yourself attribute it to yourself, because that's what the monk does. Now, here we have to distinguish sort of two levels. You've got to distinguish the practical level

[37:52]

or the level of what you do and how you sort of orient your heart. And then you have to separate kind of a level of ontology or the level of what's really there. Then we have to bring it back into the context of the masculine. We can find that that dualism may be too tight. See that the risk is, in the end, that we get God against ourselves. I said that before. We've got that God out there and above us. And we're down here and we're just nothing without God. But in the end we end up hating either ourselves or possibly God. So you have to go one way or the other. And if you get so much on God's side that you hate yourself, well, that can not be helpful for you. If you get so much on your own side that you just turn away from God with anger, something can snap in between. John? Self-love isn't indefinitely real. It's hating. It really is hating a part of ourselves. That's right. There's a part that we really love. That's right. There is a part that we really have to love. That's right. You know, a lot of people will talk about,

[38:54]

let's say Augustine was this way, that he'd talk like this, or Merton, you know, they'd talk like that and then in the person himself you'd see an enormously healthy human being with a lot of healthy self-love. Sort of a human person and organism that's just sort of humming with vitality and with that kind of circulation of life which is a necessary self-love, we have to call it that, you know. And yet they'll talk in those terms because it's a pastoral thing, and especially among the monks. This is true in the Eastern tradition in another way. They don't knock down nature so much, they use a slightly different language in the East. But you notice that kind of intimidating rhetoric that we get all the time, also in Dorotheus. We say, we're all rotten, you know, and we haven't yet begun, you know. He goes on and on like that, but he doesn't do that ontological thing that happens in the West. And it may have gotten us into trouble. Now here he talks more clearly about the old man. The old man, that is Adam,

[39:59]

is concerned with lying. The new man, the son of man, that is Christ God, is truth. Now that's biblical, okay? And that's true. And yet even Adam himself wasn't just concerned with lying. There was something. If you would be a man, you will be a liar. Be not minded to be a man, and you will not be a liar. Put on Christ, and you will be truthful. That the words which you shall speak may not be your own, may not be yours as if your own, and originated by you, but truths, enlightening and illuminating you. For if you be deprived of the light, you shall remain in your own darkness, and shall be able to speak nothing but lies. For the Lord himself says, He who speaks a lie, speaks of his own, for every man is a liar. Whoso therefore speaks the truth, speaks not of his own, but of God's. Now this is an eerie, eerie bridging to get. Not indeed in such sense as we should say he speaks what is another's, for they become his own

[41:00]

when he loves what he receives, and renders thanks to him who gave. As far as pertains to the man himself, he is a liar, but by the grace of God he is made true. You can almost hear Luther behind this, because for Luther, man himself remains a radical sinner, and God justifies him in an exterior way. God comes along and says, OK, we're just, but ontologically he's still a mess. Ontologically he's still a wreck. His nature is still the same as it was, and it's ruined. So the danger here is when you pull away from a kind of positive ontology of the human being being a positive thing, a good thing, that you end up that God is only dealing with you from the outside, and you yourself remain radically rotten, rotten at the core, and then with a kind of external garment of justice. And that has all kinds of consequences. All kinds of consequences.

[42:00]

We can never really find ourselves, we can never really find, what should I say, the goodness that God wants to see in ourselves. We don't find the new creation, you see, because the problem there is the lack of emotion of the new creation, which takes you at the center and makes you over again. And that's where we're headed along this line, of course, is towards that radical recreation, which is already there. But all these other layers of selfishness on the outside. Therefore it is most truly said that every man is a liar, but God is true, who said, You are gods, and all of you the sons of the Most High, but not you are God, and the sons of the Most High. But you, like all men, shall die and shall fall like one of the princes. This is from, as you read, from the psalms, the commentary of the psalms. For if all men are liars, so far they will not be liars, as they are not men. See, it's those radical statements, those radically dualistic statements that get us into trouble afterwards. Because rhetorically they're true.

[43:03]

Rhetorically they're true, but if you take them as philosophical statements, then you get into real trouble. And that's what's always happening. See, people, they preach a sermon, and they use rhetoric, and then afterwards somebody takes that rhetoric and makes a philosophy out of it. And then you get into real trouble. That could happen even in the gospel. You take some of the words of Jesus and make a philosophy out of it, and then neglect his other words, and you could really arrive at a terrifically blossoming philosophy, which is what people have done. For if all men are liars, insofar they will not be liars, as they are not men, since they will be gods and the sons of the Most High. O man, a liar by your own sin, true by the gift of God, and therefore no longer a man. See, it's that thing. It's that dualism where you bounce back and forth. If you're true, you're not a man. If you're a man, then you're a liar. So, something's left out when Augustine is writing. It's like the third pole,

[44:04]

which is that unitive pole between God and man, which arrives somehow in the Holy Spirit in our creation. I don't want to go knocking through Augustine's poem, showing this side of his writing, which has been so critical for the Western tradition. You see, a lot of our history has evolved with this. The East didn't have the same problem with the human nature. So we've gone a different track from it. Now, this is our destiny. Here's a little more explicit. A man living according to man and not according to God is like the devil. For even an angel must live not according to an angel but according to God, that he may stand fast in the truth and speak truth from him and not lies from himself. Okay, what's the difference between that and Merton, for instance? Even an angel must live not according to an angel but according to God. It's the suggested contradiction between being an angel and being according to God,

[45:05]

or being a man and being according to God. Merton would say that a man is most truly himself when he speaks from God, okay? A man or an angel is most truly itself when it speaks most truly according to its own nature when it speaks from God, of God. But that's disappeared. That was in the Greek tradition too. It's disappeared. When therefore a man lives according to the truth he lives not according to himself but according to God. See, that according to himself is ambiguous. In one sense it means according to himself ontologically. Sure, he always does that when he's speaking the truth. But in another way it means proudly. It means centering the world around himself. See, it's this sense of selfishness which makes us feel that our nature is somehow rotten right down to its core. It's the center of that false self that we feel so acutely.

[46:05]

And I think that Augustine felt so acutely too. Merton, you'll find, is very much drawing from Augustine like when he makes his anthropology in The New Man. He's very much in terms of Augustine. And he tries to work with this by means of his notion of the true self. He tries to bridge this gap that's crept in between God and man, God and nature. When therefore a man lives according to the truth he lives not according to himself but according to God. For God himself said I am the truth. But if a man lives according to himself that is, according to man not according to God assuredly he lives according to a lie. Not that man himself is a lie. For God is his author and creator. And he is certainly not the author and creator of a lie. But you don't get the sense that God himself has somehow put himself into. It's a way of speaking. When Augustine writes about the image of God it's marvelous. But because man was created upright that he might live not according to himself

[47:06]

but according to him by whom he was created. That is to say, to do God's will rather than his own. For man not to live as he was created to live as a lie. There is a thing in St. Augustine there are these three levels. It comes out in the other passages that endow him with quotes of Augustine. He got the levels of sort of matter to send. You have got the level of matter to the level of the senses to the level of the soul to the level of God. So for the soul to turn down in this direction

[48:06]

is pretty nearly false. The soul has to turn beyond itself actually to find truth. It has to turn and enter the world. So if you turn down here, you're nearly turning to falsehood, you're turning to untruth. On the level of the senses, on the level of matter, which was already true to some extent in Augustine's time, and a whole other notion of truth tends to come in, and people start saying, well, no, what's true is what squares with itself according to physical science, okay? And you get a terrific tension between the two, the interior truth and the exterior truth. And that's where we've been for a long while now. So this terrific tension between faith and science, faith and empirical knowledge, and how do you get the two together? You have to have a third term in some way, don't you? You have to have some way of bridging that gap of a kind of understanding that both relates to nature and relates to God and to his word. And there have been times in the past when that's been so, because there are always some

[49:18]

people, I suppose, some Christians who can make that kind of synthesis. But I think it's kind of a personal growth thing, it's kind of a personal development in that it's not very easy to communicate. I think it's that gnosis that we hear about, you know? It's almost like we've got three things instead of two. You put reason over here, and nature over here, and you put faith over here. And here you put science, and you put a lot of your own experience. And here you put the word of God, and you put the church, and society, and theology, and doctrine. You can have a real pull between those two. And then you bring in a third element, which, I'll call it gnosis, as Fr.

[50:25]

Heisenberg would call it, as he did in his lectures, which somehow brings the two together. A deeper level of reason, which doesn't relate to things just in terms of numbers, for instance, just in a chemical or according to positive science. And a kind of faith which has begun to be enlightened, which has begun, that is, to send out its roots within the nature of the human person, okay? Because what is reason, actually? It's just an operation of our nature. And it's not in contradiction to faith, it can't be. It's only that faith comes in on such a radically new level, and comes in with a new reality, which is to transform nature, that they can seem to be contradictory at a certain point. And a lot of the problem arises from the fact that you're studying an old nature when you study physical science, you know, when you study the insects and so on, and the atoms and the molecules, and those things are creations of reason in a way. We're studying the old creation, not the new creation.

[51:27]

The new creation begins in another way. But there's a way in which nature does relate to that new creation, but not so much at the bottom, on the level of reducing things to atoms and molecules, but on another level of something. And there's a way in which our own nature begins to be transformed by the new creation, and at the same time begins to see God in the first creation, begins to see God through the creation. And that's that Gnosis I'm talking about. This part, which I call natural contemplation. You mean to say, in this particular scheme, the alphabetic word for Gnosis is wisdom? Yes. In fact, in some ways that's better. Gnosis is a Greek word, after all, and sapientia, wisdom, is a Latin word. Although, remember that the Greek word for wisdom, actually, is sophia. I didn't use this here because it was kind of broader, and it's got the general feel about it. Gnosis is a little more specific. So, our tradition has largely lost the grip on Gnosis.

[52:30]

Okay? And so, that's how this warfare. And with Gnosis, there's a kind of ontology, a kind of philosophy, in which faith and reason come together. Now, this reason we're talking about is not just the reason of physical science. It's an intuitive reason. See, Augustine's using his reason all the time. In his writings, he's always using his reason. I think he's a thinking type, you know. If the Jungians got a hold of him and made him do that test, they'd find out he was a thinking type. I mean, he's also a very appealing type. But, that reason that he's using is a highly intuitive reason. The way he reads about, you know, on the way he does... Anyway. He doesn't have that problem, but we have the problem afterwards. And that's what happens very often when we look at the whole of reality through one man and the whole of reality through the writings of one person. We take their words, and if we don't understand them with the understanding that they had when they said their words, there's a fatal split that happens.

[53:31]

Because he had the understanding, that's for sure. Well, it's time I just finish this today. I really shouldn't go on with this next time. I had some other... See if I can find one good quote from Martin about reality and the spiritual life. Because, in the end, he makes the spiritual life consist entirely in our relation to reality, which is our relation to truth. And he said we've got a truth inside of ourselves, which comes from God, and we've got a truth outside of ourselves, in the world. Which is not just the world of physical science. You make a mistake when you look at it. It's the external world of our dealings with one another. It's the world of humanity. The existential world, as they say nowadays. And it's in living between those two truths, those two realities, that we become real somehow,

[54:33]

that we work out our own reality. Even though the two may seem to be in contradiction at some points, and that's where the cross is. The cross, Jesus on the cross, is Jesus at the contradiction, the surface of contradiction between those two realities. The internal reality and the external reality of his time. Which is simply the sinfulness of man, the sinfulness of the world. And sometimes it's like that, but it's not like that all the time. Especially since the death of Jesus, something new is in the world. The Holy Spirit, which has a way of pulling those two realities together. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about koinonia, when we talk about the heart of the church. Where those two realities become one. And one aspect of it is the gnosis, and the other aspect is the koinonia. That oneness between men, and then there's the oneness between nature and God. And the two things are one. Somehow the church is about that. I'll try to find one meaty quote on this here. Number 441.

[55:39]

This comes from a tape. If you're going to hold the world together, you're going to have to be an element of reality in the world. What makes the world fall apart is unreality. See, there's a fundamental trust in truth that we have to have. We can't think that, sort of, if we distinguish God from truth, and we say, well, I want God, I don't care about the truth, I want God. We're making a mistake. And somehow we're mistaking the Trinity. Or if we oppose the word of God to truth, as I always say, there are two kinds of truth. Ultimately there can't be truth. And we don't see the connection yet, but all truth is one. This is important. It turns out to be important in life. The monk's prime job is to be real. The monk's prime job is to be real. We should contribute an element of reality to the universe. We should be the most real people. We should be true monks, true men. Repeating this word again. There is in us a truth, and we have been brought to the monastery by the scruff of our necks so that this truth may come out.

[56:46]

Truth hidden from ourselves and others, which we have spent a lifetime covering up. When we reach the end of our rope, which happens every two or three years, it is a sign that you have to look for truth in a more simple way than you have been. We have complicated things too much and missed the truth. He's talking about the mind here. He's not talking about the infiltration of selfishness that we were talking about when we drew that curve before. He's talking about the complication of things. But the two are not entirely unrelated. There's a reason why we complicate things. We have to give ourselves to God to allow him to purify our source, our truth. We must learn to submit to truth instead of trying to make truth, that is reality, submit to us. When you accept truth, you have life. The truth is always life, even if you're accepting the truth that you are a sinner. You are at that moment beginning life anew. The only reason why truth, that is reality, what is, hurts us is because we don't accept it. And the basic thing in asceticism is to get a person adjusted to reality, to truth.

[57:48]

Now, if that's true, I mean, even spiritual direction and those things take on a different life. If the basic question in asceticism and in the monastic life is to get a person adjusted to reality, the fact is that there isn't any shortage of reality. It's all over the place. We've got too much of it, in a sense. That's what bothers us, and that's why we build a wall around ourselves. The problem is to get through our blindness and be able to relate to it, to see it and respond to it. Because God is always, he speaks to us in everything. Okay, that's enough about that, unless there are some questions, if there is, so we can do it. Then we'll go on to the next conference, which is on... On purpose and sobriety, those two things. Purpose and sobriety, the translation is a little bit different than that. But it's scopos and nepsis. You know the word nepsis?

[58:51]

I don't know if you've heard of sobriety. You'll see what Dorotheus means by it in the conference. That's number ten. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

[59:02]