Hermitage Note - The Evangelical Counsels: Model of Piety and Devotion

Saint John Kronstadt wrote, “It is pleasing to God when a person begins to notice His action in the heart, because He is Light and Truth. The devil especially fears this, being himself darkness and falsehood, and darkness cannot approach the light, lest its works be revealed.

The devil is powerful only in darkness, deceit, and falsehood; reveal his falsehood, place it before the light, and everything will disappear. He leads people into every passion through deceit, thereby lulling them to sleep and preventing their seeing things in their true light. The devil’s cover of darkness lies over a great many things.”

I am reading the Catechetical Lectures of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem.

Part of my interest is in knowing what the ancient ones taught and wrote concerning Christianity and what it meant to them to live the Christian life. Part of my interest is in being obedient to something that Saint Benedict tells me, and all of us for that matter, to do when he wrote,

“We have written this Rule that, observing it in monasteries, we may show that we have acquired at least some moral righteousness, or a beginning of the monastic life. On the other hand, he that hasteneth on to the perfection of the religious life, hath at hand the teachings of the holy Fathers, the observance of which leadeth a man to the height of perfection. For what page or what utterance of the divinely inspired books of the Old and the New Testament is not a most exact rule of human life? Or, what book of the holy Catholic Fathers doth not loudly proclaim how we may go straight to our Creator? So, too, the collations of the Fathers, and their institutes and lives, and the rule of our holy Father, Basil—what are they but the monuments of the virtues of exemplary and obedient monks? But for us slothful, disedifying, and negligent monks they are a source for shame and confusion." [Holy Rule Ch. 73]

Saint Cyril’s lectures predate the time of Saint Benedict in the 6th Century and definitely qualify as one of the collaborations of the Fathers that Benedict is recommending for those who become students of his.

I have begun reading Cyril’s fifth lecture. The fifth lecture centers on faith. In the second paragraph he wrote,

“Here then it is further required, that each of you be found faithful in his conscience: for a faithful man it is hard to find: not that thou shouldest shew thy conscience to me, for thou art not to be judged of man’s judgment, but that thou shew the sincerity of thy faith to God, who trieth the reins and hearts, and knoweth the thoughts of men. A great thing is a faithful man, being richest of all rich men. For to the faithful man belongs the whole world of wealth, in that he disdains and tramples on it. For they who are in appearance are rich, and have many possessions, are poor in soul: since the more they gather, the more they pine with longing for what is still lacking. But the faithful man, most strange paradox, in poverty is rich: for knowing that we need only to have food and raiment, and being therewith content, he has trodden riches underfoot.”

Bear in mind that Cyril was not talking to inquirers or postulants at a monastery. He was talking to catechumens going through the early stage of what was then the equivalent of our modern Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. He was teaching people how to die to themselves in order to live as ordinary everyday Christians in the Church.

The teachings of the ancient Fathers cuts across the grain of quite a lot of what is being passed around as popularly acceptable contemporary pulpit-fodder. These words in Cyril’s fifth lecture definitely go against the grain of the modern prosperity gospel being heralded as good news by the modern-day independent charismatic movement.

Even more sadly, to me anyway, is the silent drought in the Catholic Church where there is no encouragement toward anyone, regardless of their age, to consider any way of life that includes vows to poverty. I have yet, as a Protestant convert to the Catholic Church in 2007, to hear a homily from a bishop or parish priest encouraging Catholic people to consider any kind of monastic vocation that involves vows to the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

These are integral to the genuine Gospel message. Without the Evangelical Counsels, the Church loses its counter-cultural character – a loss that the devil relishes and uses to his advantage as he casts his cover of darkness to hide the void that has been created by the loss. A lot of diabolical things then go on in that void under the cover of his blanket of darkness – and it goes on until things once obviously sinful become acceptable social norms that are flaunted in the face of those who refuse to let go of their old moral ideals.

Whether lived in the context understood by those entering into monastic vocations or lived in a context of fidelity as Christians living in the secular world, the Evangelical Counsels are foundational to all else that is honored and kept by the Church in the deposit of faith entrusted to her. The Evangelical Counsels present a definite, definable, and viable pathway leading toward the development of personal faith and piety. Historically, until Vatican Council II came along, this pathway was seen by the Church and her members as a significant and necessary model of Christian piety and devotion.