together and I think to spend that kind of in the final part of the text after the turning point but maybe by way of preparation of getting there I could just read you an interesting passage from the Life of Evagrius, written by his disciple Palladius, where we have a number of interesting details about his life. Some of the things I told you about his life I got from this version by Palladius. But this is Evagrius speaking in the first person, telling about an experience of prayer that happened to him. And I think it probably goes a long way to explaining why he insisted so much on the relationship between gentleness and the contemplative life. He says, I was seated at night in my cell with the lamp burning, reading one of the prophets. In the middle of the night, I fell into an ecstasy and found myself as if I were in a dream.

[01:09]

And I saw myself suspended in the air up to the clouds. And I could gaze at the whole inhabited world. And the one who was holding me there said, do you see all these things? For he had raised me up to the clouds that I might see the whole world in a glance. And I said to him, yes. And then he said to me, I will give you a command. If you keep it, you will understand all these things which you see. And then he said, go be gentle and humble and fix your thoughts correctly in God. And then you will be prince over all these things. So you can feel that in Evagrius, that he's teaching from his own personal conviction, from his own experience. And I think I've drawn your attention already sufficiently to how frequently he uses the word gentleness.

[02:14]

Let's go to the turning point and follow the text from then on. That's number 107. where, from this point on, all of the proverbs are about the contemplative life. Remember that in monastic life as conceived in the Egyptian desert, we have two fundamental phases. The life of practice, or practicing asceticism, and the life of knowledge, or contemplation. We saw in the ten proverbs in the middle of the text that these two phases of the monastic life are intricately interrelated. And they really hinge around passionlessness, love and knowledge. That's the middle of the middle. We saw that. Now we're going to cross the middle and be in a much more weighted way into the contemplative life. And this is the proverb by which we do it. Like a morning star in heaven, and a palm tree in paradise, so a pure mind in a gentle soul."

[03:18]

We've said some things about the word mind and about the word soul. Let's just recall that, that mind is the deepest interior part of ourselves designed to be able to understand something of the mystery of God. Soul is an energy perhaps a little higher than that, that helps us to conduct our relationship with what we desire, with how we use our energies and how we use our minds. And we see that what we've been working on here in all of these exercises that we received from the Father is a way of making this soul gentle. In a sense, that's one of the values that keeps emerging in all the meditations. Call it gentleness, call it love, call it long-suffering, call it forgetting injuries. We've seen all of those words, all right? But now we're just going to summarize this movement.

[04:20]

And we call it a gentle soul. And that's what makes the mind pure. A pure mind, now mind is the instrument that I'm going to focus on the goal of this whole text. We cheated, we looked ahead, we saw what the goal is. The goal is knowledge of the Holy Trinity. My mind must be pure for this knowledge of the Trinity. And then he gives me images and I said, don't just take these images as a throwaway. He gives me images that help me open up an understanding. We have the morning star in heaven. and the palm tree in paradise. We just, both of these are biblical images. We're supposed to catch all the illusions. I'm just going to shotgun you with the illusions just so that you feel how, I wonder if you can remember how many places the biblical text in fact uses the image Morning Star. All of these are supposed to color my meditation. In the book of Revelation, Jesus says, I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star.

[05:28]

The second letter of Peter speaks of our keeping our attention fixed on the prophetic word until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. In Zachary's Benedictus prayer, he speaks of a day dawning from on high. Elsewhere in the book of Revelation, the Son of God, speaking to the church of Thyatira, says to the one who keeps his words until the end, I will give him the morning star. And I referred yesterday to this text from Isaiah 14, 22, how he has fallen from the heavens, the morning star, which rose at dawn, as an image for Lucifer, which literally means light carrier, as an image for pride. And then the psalm that we sing on Sunday, from the womb, before the morning star, I begot you. All of these, actually, in all of these texts, we can find de Vega's commenting on them in different of his works. They're collected in the fat book.

[06:30]

You don't get this in the little one. But it's enough to just kind of put these understandings together and say, we're meant to look, we, ourselves, are meant to look in the sky and see the morning star and to see its beauty there. This is what a pure mind in a gentle soul looks like. The whole cosmos tells this story. And another image that we have for it is the palm tree in paradise. A just man shall flourish like a palm tree. Actually, I think in this text there's probably a gradation from paradise to heaven. And the thing that makes me think that is listen to this interesting text from Origen, whom Evagris knew thoroughly. I think the saints, when they leave this life, will remain in a place on the earth which the divine scriptures call paradise. Remaining there is in a place of instruction, a lecture hall or a school of souls, so to speak, where they may be taught about the things that they have seen on earth and receive understanding about them, as well as outlines of future things.

[07:43]

Then, if in paradise someone will be pure of heart and even more so pure in mind and well-trained in intelligence, then he will progress more rapidly and will ascend quickly into the air and will reach the kingdom of the heavens. passing through those mansions of various stages which the Greeks call spheres and the divine scriptures call heavens." Well, that sort of jerks your mind around, but it's a mysterious text, rather typical of Origen. But what Origen does is speak of paradise as a first level beyond this life from which we ascend to the heavens. And what we're learning about in paradise is the meaning of all the things that we ever saw on earth. Well, as we move through the text here now, we're going to see that Evagrius distinguishes level of knowledge. We've said again and again in sort of broad strokes that Evagrius wants to move us from the ascetical life to knowledge of the Trinity, but you just don't jump

[08:49]

from passionlessness to knowledge of the Trinity. One has to move through an understanding of all the things in this world. So there's levels of understanding to that. Let's see them, actually, in the next Proverbs that unfold. As we take the turning point in the text, the first thing he tells us is, the wise man will investigate the reasons of God, while the unwise man mocks them. What I've translated here as reasons of God would have been more commonly translated words of God. The word is the same in Greek, but I've translated here reasons of God to indicate how Evagrius understands... all realities in this world, including words that come out of one's mouth. They all are something to be penetrated and to perceive within them the Logos of God. That is, that order with which He created and sustains all things.

[09:55]

In Greek, The word for reason and the word for word is the same word. It tells you something about what they think words are. That a true word is a word that speaks the inner meaning of a thing. So, to bring out that nuance, I've translated here that the wise man will investigate the reasons of God, and the reasons of God are found in all of God's words, but ultimately in all the things that God has done. I've already passed the word wisdom under your nose. I'll remind you how Evagrius always, always uses it. It is virtue in the rational part of the soul designed especially for contemplation of created realities. We'll see in a later text why.

[10:58]

But reason, so that he's mentioning wisdom here and not talking about temperance is no accident. We've taken a turn in the text and we're now going to concentrate on contemplation. Number 109, he who hates the knowledge of God and rejects his contemplation is like the one who pierces his own heart with a spear. As an image you can dwell on it on your own but it's, you know, it's a stupid thing to pierce your own heart with a spear. It's a stupid thing to avoid the whole purpose of our existence, knowledge of God. Here in number 110 we have the levels of knowledge. Better is knowledge of the Trinity than knowledge of the incorporeals and the contemplation of it beyond reasons for all the eons. Here we have some unusual language. It would not be unusual if we listened to Evagrius year after year on those Saturday night conferences. But he speaks, and we'll just let ourselves come to the text as we do, but he speaks of corporeals and incorporeals, knowledge of both of these.

[12:08]

He also speaks of eons, and he speaks of judgment and providence. All these are types of knowledge. What does he mean by these terms? It actually takes a lot of meditation and a lot of work with Evagrius to get a sort of solid feeling for what he means, but I can summarize it in this sense. You know, the most obvious thing that you see when you see the world are bodies, my bodies and the bodies of trees and the bodies of the land and the bodies of the clouds. It's a material bodily world. And this is the wisdom of the Creator to give us a world like this. But one hasn't understood what any of those things are unless one sees that there is an interior and invisible dimension to them all. Above all, in the human person, which is also just bodies like other bodies, in the human person there is what we could call a fundamental creation, much deeper than the body, and in no way reducible to the body.

[13:20]

And the name for that deeper creation, that original creation, which the body can either beautifully portray or very much betray, you can do one or the other, the original purpose, but the original purpose of every human being is to be mind. That is, to be that capacity to reflect the very Trinity itself. And Evagrius, and the father's with him, it's not his own teaching, but Evagrius says, if the mind is really in the image of God, and if it's really made to receive God as God is, then the mind itself must be incorporeal as God is. So there's, that's beautiful. You've got to stretch to reach it. Do you understand it? No, no one does.

[14:22]

But you touch up against it with this language. You touch up against an intuition about what he's talking about here. There's a part in me that is incorporeal. There's a part in, and that part in me is waiting, dying to receive this touch of the Holy Trinity. To know the Holy Trinity, you have to know first that we're made that way. And that's knowledge of the incorporeals. But there's something better than knowledge of the incorporeals, knowledge of the Trinity itself. And also something better than the reason for all the eons, all of the different worlds. Why is the world so big? Why is the universe so big? Why are there so many ages upon ages? Who understands that? All of that, when, I remind you, if Agrius is suspended in the air and receives a command, how will I ever understand this?

[15:24]

Gentleness and humility, then you will understand that all of these things are moving together as one. So, we've reached pretty high in that explanation of 1.10, but don't forget this, 1.11, the gray hair of old men, gentleness. their knowledge, their life, knowledge of truth. Okay? Knowledge and gentleness side by side. And so it unfolds about gentleness and not scandalizing people in the next several Proverbs, keeping love under our eyes as the only actual practical virtue we'll consider in this part of the text. But I want to come now to number 118, 119 and 120. This is a very important part of the text and I like to refer to it really as the Christological anchor of the text. Remember the first time we came upon Christ's name this morning in number 21, we did it after a lot of just sort of exercise in asceticism and it was kind of like, you know, you might forget that Christ is the purpose of all this and so we have a nice reminder of Christ dropped right into the middle of that.

[16:42]

These three proverbs here in the final portion of the text, all devoted to knowledge, really show in an extremely solid and tight way Christ's role in this whole process. And if we use the image of architecture of a building like we did last night, And when we notice things that are being especially carefully constructed in the text, we learn in that way that this is an especially important part of the spiritual life. Well, we can't find anything more tightly constructed than these three proverbs. Let me read them and then begin to unravel how tight the construction is. Flesh of Christ, virtues of praktike, He who eats it, passionless shall he be. Blood of Christ, contemplation of created things. He who drinks it, by it becomes wise.

[17:47]

Breast of the Lord, knowledge of God. He who rests against it, a theologian shall he be. It's beautiful this, huh? On many levels. But let's just observe the structure first of all. Flesh, blood, breast. We are obviously inside the Eucharistic mystery. Okay? Then let's observe this. Praktike, contemplation of created things, knowledge of God. This is the hierarchy of the movement. Praktike is where one begins the monastic life. Knowledge of something or contemplation of something is where we pass to, and we start with created things, but we move on from there to the very knowledge of God in Himself. This is our goal. So there's a progress there as well. So we're marking the progress from flesh to blood to breast, obviously a movement

[18:56]

of greater intimacy also is a progress of the spiritual life from praktike to contemplation of created things to the very knowledge of God. But let's look at the virtues that he names. And he speaks of the Eucharistic action here. He who eats the flesh of Christ, passionless shall he be. We already saw that passionlessness was a description of Christ in his very being. Christ is all the virtues. Christ is sheer gentleness, sheer temperance, sheer wisdom. And it's a reminder to us of, you know, as we work hard in the ascetical life, sometimes we think, gosh, I guess I don't have enough strength. No, you don't have enough strength. This is the point. You must receive this strength. And you receive it from Christ. But notice here that what we receive from Christ, among the things we receive from Christ, are one of the, what we saw were the intermediary goals of the monastic life.

[20:04]

The whole goal of praktike is that I should become passionless. I receive that from Christ. Indeed, I receive it from the mystery of His incarnation. Watch the three mysteries overlapping here. The mystery of His incarnation is for my deification. His flesh touching my flesh, which is so troubled by the passions, and instead inserts into my so troubled by the passions flesh, he inserts into that his passionlessness. And then I move on from there to the blood of Christ, the contemplation of created things. What's the word he uses for that? A word I told you he uses with utter consistency. Wisdom. Wisdom is not a word that he ever applies to knowledge of the Holy Trinity, for example. It's always a word that he applies to knowledge of all of the things in this world, to the multiplicity of this world.

[21:05]

And where did he... Why? Is that arbitrary? Is that his bright idea? No, he's reading the scriptural text very closely. that says, the Lord made all things with wisdom. And the wisdom is the way of his manifold life. Let me read you a few texts that will sort of uncover this, speaking about the manifold wisdom of God. This is from the letter to Melania. And let this serve, there would be many examples but we can just, we just have time for one. Let this serve as a description of the contemplation of created things in their multiplicity. What is the reason, I mean there's so many things, the world is so beautiful. If you're really gentle and really pure, you'll look at all of that and penetrate not just that it's beautiful, but what its meaning is.

[22:15]

Here's an example. As the man who stands at the seashore is struck with amazement by its immensity, its taste, its color, by all that it possesses, by the fact that the rivers, torrents, and streams which pour into it become themselves boundless and unlimited, possessing every quality which the sea has. Thus also he who observes the making perfect of all intellects, of all minds is amazed and greatly marvels because he sees all these various distinct knowledges and understanding merging into one essential and unique knowledge and all those become one forever in the one Father, Son and Spirit. So he's just giving you a text to just

[23:19]

Make you lean, make you lean through it all. This is wisdom. Not only if you see the multiplicity, but that the multiplicity has a one. That multiplicity brings you to knowledge of God. And Evagrius learned this language trick from Basil, from Gregory Nazianzus, and from Gregory of Nyssa. Whenever they spoke of God, the Trinity, in his eternal being, as opposed to his action in this created world, they always reserved the word theology for that. Theology meant only that. Theology meant only talk about the Holy Trinity, and thus, breast of the Lord, knowledge of God, he who rests against it, a theologian shall he be. This one will be able to talk not about the created world anymore, but about God in his eternal being. Let me give you another text from a different thing that Evagrius wrote that will help us to feel this use of the word theologian a little better.

[24:35]

This is from the chapters on prayer. And a very strong text of Evagrius, the chapters on prayer, in which by, remember we saw the hour of prayer means the hour of contemplation of the Trinity. This whole text is devoted to that. I'm just going to dive into it in the middle, in which we see him talking just like he's talking in this part of Admonikos that we're in. He says, even if the mind gets beyond the contemplation of corporeal nature, It has not yet seen the place of God in its perfection. So see how he's defining, he says, now, I was just explaining, hey, we've got to get beyond the corporeal nature into the incorporeal nature. But he says, even if you get that, you're not there yet. Don't think you are. For it can remain in the knowledge of intelligible beings and be caught up in their multiplicity. Next thought. You go away and come back a week later. Here's the next thought. If you want to pray, And by now we know from this text, praying means if you want to know the Holy Trinity.

[25:42]

If you want to pray, then you need God, who gives prayer to the one who prays. Therefore, call on him, saying, Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, that is, thy Holy Spirit come, and thy only begotten Son come. For thus did he teach when he said that the Father is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth." Goes on to explain that worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth is worshipping the Father in the one who said, I am the truth, in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. This is Trinitarian worship. So we know the Father by the Son and the Spirit. If you want to know God, you need God. I'll translate that into Trinitarian terms.

[26:43]

If you want to know the Father, you need the Son and the Spirit, who alone know the Father. So say, Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come means, let come the Spirit and the Son that will teach me worship in spirit and in truth. Number 60, and don't worry about the numbers. Here's the next one. The one who prays in spirit and in truth honors the creator on the basis of his creature, no longer honors the creator on the basis of his creatures. So, you know, we could say, oh boy, the world is beautiful, we praise you, oh Lord. That's a nice prayer. But this is not prayer in spirit and in truth. The one who prays in spirit and in truth no longer honors the creator on the basis of his creature, but praises him out of his own self. Now we're way inside the Trinitarian mystery. Praising God out of his own self.

[27:47]

That means praising the Father out of the Son and Spirit who praise the Father. And he finishes this development by saying, if you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you will be a theologian. That's the development. All that we really have here in this tight little package of three proverbs firmly anchoring this whole movement of the text in the incarnation, in the mystery of the incarnation. In the mystery of that incarnation, what the incarnation means for me is I've got flesh, I've got blood, and I've got a breast I can rest on that will bring me to being a theologian, which means it will bring me to praise the Father in spirit and in truth. This is orthodox Trinitarian doctrine.

[28:57]

very nicely applied to the spiritual life. And this is why I bothered to spend so much time about Evagrius' life last night, to see how much he would have cared about the Trinitarian orthodoxy of the Council of Constantinople. He has several other works where he develops this Trinitarian dimensions that justify kind of the interpretation that I've been giving to him here. At the time of the Council of Constantinople, both before and after, there were lots of counter doctrines going on, what we may call false knowledge. And that is the reason for, in the center of this whole section of the text, the chain of ten that we looked at last night. The concern in the chain of ten is about true versus false knowledge. Let's just romp through it briefly. Number 123.

[29:59]

Wisdom knows about the dogmas of the demons. Prudence tracks down their crafty ways. I mentioned last night that wisdom and prudence are the two virtues which function in the rational part of the soul. Evagrius actually goes into some length about each one of them, saying that they actually look different ways. Prudence has as its main task just being skilled in the tricks of the demons, particularly as they try to undermine my life of practice. You know, the eight principle thoughts are also called eight principle demons. Well, prudence is kind of being on to them, knowing the kinds of tricks that they're going to pull on you. Whereas, and that's the rational part of your soul doing that, whereas the Another dimension of the rational part of your soul is wisdom, and that has to do with teaching about contemplation.

[31:01]

Well, the demons are at work there too, trying to make you contemplate multiplicity in such a way that it won't lead you to the Trinity, but that will lead you to something else. And that's what this proverb of 10, let's read number 126 together, which I mentioned is really the centerpiece of this and its central line speaks about wisdom and prudence and it's the center of 126 as well as the center of all 10. He says, Now therefore, son, listen to me. Do not approach the doors of lawless men, For indeed I have often spoken with them. Their dark teachings I have tracked down in the venom of asps I found in them. There is no prudence and there is no wisdom in their teaching." That's the crunch. This is the danger that he's warning his reader against. We know also from Evagrius' life that he had moments when he was debating with Arians and with other branches of heresy that were available at the time.

[32:09]

He was a very skilled arguer with them. So he's referring to his personal experience here. All who receive them will perish, and those who love them will be filled with evils. I have seen the fathers of these dogmas, and in the desert I plunged in with them. For the enemies of the Lord met up with me, and demons through their teaching struggled against me, and I did not see light in their words. Okay, so that chain ends at number 131 with a final meditation on wisdom and prudence. The wisdom of the Lord raises up the heart. His prudence purifies it. And now we're ready for the final climbing, the final mounting of the text to its high point. The reasons of providence are dark. and hard for the mind are the contemplations of the judgment, but the manapraktikeya will know them.

[33:10]

Reasons of providence and judgment. These are two more technical terms, rather complex really in what they offer, but summarizing how Evagris uses the terms. Evagris uses these terms to talk about the original fall. original sin, if you will. He doesn't use that term. But he has a sort of sense together with Origen of what we might call a pre-cosmic fall. That's the term that scholars use for it. And this is one of the points where Origen and Evagrius, Didymus the blind and other teachers in this tradition are often misunderstood or perhaps this is problematic in their teaching. This is where they touch up against what later generations would conceive of as heresy.

[34:11]

Let me explain what their teaching was and also kind of a soft version of it so that I'm sure it's not heretical. Basically, you know, this idea that the essential creation is the mind, that is, creatures with the capacity to know God. Well, the original creation was a creation of what Origen and his whole tradition called rational creatures, meaning by that not big brains floating around in the air, but meaning creatures capable of grasping something of the mystery of God. These rational creatures were created so deeply in the image of God that one of their fundamental traits was freedom. Freedom to use this capacity to know God or not. And in fact, this freedom was badly used.

[35:17]

This freedom with this capacity to know God was used not to know God, but to grow cold in my adherence to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity. And so what happened is the creatures began to fall away from God. And God could have just let them fall, fall, fall, fall forever. But he didn't. He intervened with his providence. He intervened with his mercy to stop the fall. And how did he stop the fall? He stopped the fall by causing these minds to fall into something that would stop them there. And what they fell into were souls and bodies. Now, let me just have a little footnote here and say what the problem with that is, but then I'll go back to the main text and say what's good about that. The problem with that is, is it makes it look like the body and the soul and the created world as we know it is the result of sin, even if it's the action of mercy.

[36:27]

And that is obviously an anti-biblical teaching. God does not make anything and is not forced to make anything as a result of sin. But let me give you the evagrious version of it, which I'm personally convinced is not heretical. But you can see we're walking a tightrope here, all right? But just how is it useful for our souls? How is it useful, this understanding? What Evagrius' way of talking about it helps us to see is, first of all, what we've already seen in the text. This fundamental center of the human person is a capacity for knowing the Trinity. But this fundamental center finds itself in a body. and in a soul, which, as we have seen in the text, but as we see more from our life, it can betray us. This world that we're in can lead us far, far away from knowledge of the Holy Trinity.

[37:30]

These energies in my soul can lead me far, far away from God. What explains that? What explains that? One possible explanation, and this is what Evagris is working against, is that the body is evil. But that cannot be an explanation, Evagris would say. So what the judgments of providence, or what the reasons of providence and judgment are, is basically understanding why God has placed me in the kind of world and in the kind of body He's placed me in. Learning to understand what my body is good for and what the energies of my soul are good for. My whole body actually is designed by an act of the mercy of God to just orient me utterly toward knowledge of the Trinity.

[38:32]

and all the energies of my soul are designed to orient me utterly toward knowledge of the Trinity, such that though I'm not there now, though I'm in what is, who could argue, something of a fallen condition now, though I'm in a fallen condition now, by means of my body and by means of the energy of my soul, I can mount upward toward knowledge of the Holy Trinity. There are three basic kinds of bodies that these lukewarm souls fell into. Angelic bodies, human bodies, and demonic bodies. Angelic bodies are bodies that have fallen less far. What do we all three have in common? We're all three rational creatures. What do we all three have in common? We all three fell. What don't we have in common? We fell more or less far away. The demons fell so far that they're stuck in bodies, mad as hell about it, and are going to just stay in there, stay there.

[39:34]

Angels are doing just fine, and it won't be long until they're utterly adhering to the knowledge of the Trinity again. Demons hate humans. Angels love them. Because why? We're in the middle ground. We can go either way. That's our future. Our future is either a demonic future or a future like the angels. Demons come to throw off our bodies and to throw off our souls and to throw off our minds. Angels come as friends to that whole process. Knowing that that's the way the world is and that I must therefore conduct myself with prudence and wisdom in such a world like this. Knowing what's from the demons and what's from the angels. All that is called judgment and providence. Judgment is the kind of body you've been put in. Providence is that you were put in one as a way of coming back to God. You can see what he means when he says in 132, the reasons of providence are dark, and hard for the minds are the contemplation of the judgment.

[40:44]

I mean, I'm giving you pretty heavy stuff here, huh? But how will you know them? By your virtue in the practical life. You will ultimately know them by your gentleness, which is what he says in the next proverb. He who purifies himself will see intelligible natures, Reasons of incorporeals a gentle monk will know. He who says that the Holy Trinity is a creature, which was one of the options of the Arian position, he who says that the Holy Trinity is a creature blasphemes God and he who rejects his Christ will not know him. Contemplations of worlds enlarge the heart. Reasons of providence and judgment lifted up. We've been contemplating worlds, as I've spoken about, angelic worlds, human worlds, demonic worlds. This is good for your insides. It makes you larger.

[41:46]

It gets you realizing how big is all the mystery. And reasons of providence and judgment, that's what I just explained, that lifts your heart just to know about it. But that's not the end. The end is where it ends. Knowledge of incorporeals raises the mind and presents it before the Holy Trinity. Presents it there. This is where the text ends. It ends at a new beginning. It says, in a sense, nothing about the Trinity. And actually, Evagrius has a habit in which he refuses to speak about the Trinity. Only in a few occasions will he go into detail. He says, it must be a mystery adored in silence. He's presuming the sort of general knowledge that we have of the Holy Trinity by means of the creed. But that it, he doesn't risk talking about it.

[42:49]

Only in the letter to Melania and in another letter called the letter of faith. Both these letters really are beautiful and profound. Really, in all patristic literature, it's some of the most profound writing on the Holy Trinity that I know of. Both of these, he thought, were going to be private letters, no circulation, and he just very carefully, but very boldly, entered into the mystery of the Trinity. I'm not going to read you that, but I want to read you something that summarizes this text rather like the others. This is the beginning of his work, the Praktikos, which is a three-part work, which is the whole first part called the Praktikos is all about the ascetical life. The second part is the bridge to the life of knowledge.

[43:50]

And the third part is life is about knowledge of created things. It's not about knowledge of the Trinity, but knowledge of created things. But listen to him introduce that whole work. He says, Christianity is the dogma of Christ our Savior, which is composed of practice, natural contemplation, and theology. Okay, so that's not so obscure to you now, I don't think. Three things. Practice, natural contemplation, theology. the ascetical life, the meaning of all things that are created, and the trinity in itself. That's what our faith is about. The kingdom of heaven is passionlessness of the soul along with true knowledge of beings. So two things there, the kingdom of heaven, which is what Jesus is all the time preaching about. It would be being passionless,

[44:53]

But it would also be knowing, truly understanding created things. But the Kingdom of God, see he distinguishes here between the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity. coextensive with the substance of the mind and surpassing its incorruptibility." That's just supposed to blow you apart, you don't know what he just said, okay? And he gives you this word and you say, Father, I don't understand the word. He says, memorize it, go home, chew on it, you'll get it. Okay? We can get it. The Kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity coextensive with the substance of the mind. What have I been saying about the mind? I said the mind is something really that's me. It's a substance, not in a physical sense, but it's a something.

[45:59]

And it's me. It's my mind. What is the kingdom of God? It's when my mind and the Trinity touch each other co-extensively. The substance of what the Trinity is and the substance of my own mind are touching. And I'm understanding the Trinity in a way that surpasses my mind's incorruptibility. One of the things I said about the mind was, it's incorporeal, it's incorruptible, because it's designed to receive God. And you need to know that about your mind. But that's not knowing everything, that's just knowing something. The knowledge of the Kingdom of God is knowing the Trinity itself. So you've surpassed knowing about your mind's incorruptibility. And you are coextensive with the Trinity itself. I'll read it again, it will make perfect sense to you.

[47:02]

The Kingdom of God is knowledge of the Holy Trinity, coextensive with the substance of the mind, and surpassing the mind's incorruptibility. Just sit on that forever. This is knowledge of the Trinity. This is adoration in spirit and in truth. If you find your mind not getting it, be more gentle then. Love harder. You will get it. This is hard for the mind. The mind must keep working. This is what our whole life is for. Keep stretching with it by means of charity. Not by turning your brain up. By turning your charity up. Because faith is the beginning of love. The end of love is knowledge of God. Okay?

[48:05]

We're out of time, but whenever I talk about this whole text of Admonikos like this, I ask as my reward what Evagrius asks in his last proverb. Remember the one who has given you in the Lord clear proverbs and do not forget my lowly soul in the hour of prayer. So, can you pray for me, please? And just a quick sign-off. To the sisters, first of all, really glad that you were able to join us for these last three conferences. It's a treat for me to know you. And then to the monks at Mount Savior, really, and Father Martin, to thank you for the invitation. And you've all been so kind to me. And I just hope that by my days with you, I can have encouraged you in your own monastic way. And I'll be remembering you on the other side of the continent. OK? God bless you and thank you so much.

[49:00]

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