A brother came to Abba Anthony and said, “Tell me what I can do, that I may find life." The Abba replied, “If you can bear to have your words and thoughts treated as of no account, and find joy in this, you will cause the angels to wonder."-The Sayings of Abba Anthony
Traditionally, we list Seven Christian Virtues as opposed to Seven Deadly Sins. The sins we’re familiar with, if not from memory, then by experience: pride, envy, anger, greed, gluttony, lust and sloth. The Virtues corresponding to these sins are: humility, kindness, patience, charity, temperance, chastity and diligence. This means that the “offsetting” virtue to sloth is diligence, of gluttony, temperance, and so on.
The wisdom embodied in these simple lists, and the understanding of human temptation and spiritual combat they teach has been lost of late. They’ve become the subjects of clever cartoons in Playboy and witty essays in The New Yorker. The Deadly Sins have become human foibles. The “post-Christian” world is in the not-too-slow process of transmuting the Deadly Sins into the New Virtues.
If old Sin becomes new Virtue, what of the old Virtues?
If we can’t quite bring ourselves to banish virtue, we can at least relegate it to inoffensiveness. Some of the harder to grasp virtues—chastity and humility, for example—are best ignored, in hopes they’ll go away. Others, like temperance and diligence, can be made into civic virtues—AA or one of its offspring, for example, can become a pigeonhole for temperance. The rest, if not good for everybody (because nothing’s bad for everybody), are good for some people—patience and kindness, for example, are good for grandparents.
Of all the Christian virtues, the most understood of the list is humility. Humility makes us uncomfortable, mostly because we don’t know what it is. Instead of being the highest of virtues—fierce in its combat with pride, the deadliest of sins—humility is the virtue of the milquetoast, the refuge of the anemic.
So read what Abba Anthony has to say about humility. His words breathe fire: “Can you bear to have your words and thoughts, to have even your presence treated as nothing?”
Take that notion into your heart and mind and ruminate over it for a few minutes. How would you respond if you were treated that way? How do you respond when somebody cuts you off in traffic or interrupts you in conversation? Our response to these things is instantaneous and visceral. We snap and snarl at what we perceive as mistreatment.
Abba, however, doesn’t only say, “Can you take it?” He presses harder: “Can you find joy in it?”
What kind of disordered psychology is this? Take pleasure from being disregarded, when all our lives we’ve been taught to stand up for our rights? When every third best-seller on the New York Times Bestseller List insists that we “Learn the Power of No!”
We don’t need somebody to tell us to “love ourselves” or “forgive ourselves” or “value ourselves.” We do those things naturally (not the same thing as saying we do those things “healthily” but that’s because of that Inconvenient Truth—Original Sin). In Abba Anthony’s day, people then were just like us, in all the essential, unchangeable ways of our race. They had their own versions of Oprah and Dr Phil, etc.
Aristotle (who I do not equate with either of the last-mentioned), said that humility was “the virtue of slaves,” not to be counted as a virtue by the wise. It was for milquetoasts and cripples.
Abba Anthony has a different vision—a Gospel vision—of humility. He sees humility at the center of the arsenal of spiritual combat; the invincible weapon with which God has armed each soul in its warfare against “the world, the devil and the flesh.” Humility is a weapon so powerful, few Christians have the courage to wield it. Each who does quickly discovers the identity of his greatest, most deadly foe: himself.
(Part Two tomorrow)
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