St. John of Kronstadt · 4 of 49

Part I · Part 4

Truth is the foundation of everything that has been created. Let truth be also the foundation of all your works (both inward and outward), and especially the foundation of your prayers. Let all your life, all your works, all your thoughts, and all your desires be founded upon truth.

Take the trouble to spend only one single day according to God's commandments, and you will see yourself, you will feel by your own heart, how good it is to fulfil God's will (and God's will in relation to us is our life, our eternal blessedness). Love God with all your heart at least as much as you love your father, your mother, and your benefactors; value with all your strength His love and His benefits to you (go over them mentally in your heart, think how He gave you existence and with it all good things, how endlessly long He bears with your sins, how endlessly He forgives you them; for the sake of your hearty repentance, by virtue of the suffering and death upon the Cross of His only-begotten Son, what blessedness He has promised you in eternity, if you are faithful to Him); enumerate besides His mercies, which are endlessly great and manifold. Furthermore, love every man as yourself--that is, do not wish him anything that you would not wish for yourself; think, feel for him just as you would think and feel for your own self; do not wish to see in him anything that you do not wish to see in yourself; do not let your memory keep in it any evil caused to you by others, in the same way as you would wish that the evil done by yourself should be forgotten by others; do not intentionally imagine either in yourself or in another anything guilty or impure; believe others to be as well-intentioned as yourself, in general, if you do not see clearly that they are evilly disposed; do unto them as you would to yourself, or even do not do unto them as you would not do unto yourself, and then you will see what you will obtain in your heart--what peace, what blessedness! You will be in paradise before reaching it--that is, before the paradise in heaven you will be in the paradise on earth. "The kingdom of God is within you," says the Lord. "He that dwelleth in love," teaches the Apostle, "dwelleth in God and God in him."

"Worship God in spirit and in truth." In truth, for instance, when you say, "Hallowed be Thy Name." Do you really desire that God's name should be hallowed by the good works of others and by your own? When you say, "Thy Kingdom come," do you indeed desire the coming of God's Kingdom? Do you wish to be the abode of the Spirit of God, and not the abode of sin? Would you not more willingly live in sin? When you say, "Thy will be done," do you not rather seek your own will than that of God? Ay, it is so! When you say, "Give us this day our daily bread," do you not say otherwise in your heart, "I do not need to ask this of Thee--I have enough without asking; let the poor ask for this"? Or else, do we not greedily seek for more, and are not satisfied with the little, or with that which God has given us? We do not thank God for what we have as we ought to. In the prayer: "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us," do you not think in yourself: "God knows that I am not such a great sinner. It seems to me that I do not live any worse than others, and there is no need for me to ask that my trespasses or sins should be forgiven"? Or else when you thus pray is there not any displeasure or anger in your heart against anyone?--for if so, you lie shamelessly to God in your prayer. You say, "And lead us not into temptation," but do you not yourself rush impetuously into every sin, without even being tempted? You say, "Deliver us from evil," but do you not live in friendship with the Devil or with evil of every kind, of which the Devil is chief? Beware, then, that your tongue is not in discordance with your heart; see that you do not lie to God in your prayer. Always keep this in view when you say the Lord's Prayer, as well as when you say other prayers. Watch whether your heart agrees with, everything that your tongue pronounces.

The purer the heart is, the larger it is, and the more able it is to find room within it for a greater number of beloved ones; whilst the more sinful it is, the more contracted it becomes, and the less number of beloved can it find room for, because it is limited by self-love, and that love is a false one; we love ourselves in objects unworthy of the immortal soul—in silver and gold, in adultery, in drunkenness, and such like.

If God communicates an invincible, incomprehensible Divine power to the Life-giving Cross, then why should it be wonderful that He communicates a similar incomprehensible power, in order to regenerate our nature, to the most pure, terrible and Life-giving Sacrament of His Body and Blood? O, how great art Thou, Lord! and how wonderful are Thy works! How endless is Thy omnipotence! Whatever is touched by Thy power and Thy grace becomes life-giving.

If you wish to correct anyone from his faults, do not think of correcting him solely by your own means: you would only do harm by your own passions, for instance, by pride and by the irritability arising from it; "but cast thy burden upon the Lord," and pray to God "Who trieth the hearts and reins," with all your heart, that He Himself may enlighten the mind and heart of that man. If He sees that your prayer breathes love, and that it really comes from the depth of your heart, He will infallibly fulfil the desire of your heart, and you yourself will soon tell, seeing the change that has taken place in him for whom you have prayed, that it is the work of "the right hand of God, the most High."

Who is it that so wisely, delicately and beautifully arranges and transforms the ugly--that is, the sightless, formless substance of the earth into flowers? Who gives them their wonderful forms? Creator, grant that we may salute in the flowers Thy wisdom, Thy goodness. Thine omnipotence.

Our inward disposition, even when unexpressed by outward signs, strongly affects the inward disposition of others. This very often happens, though it is not everyone that notices it. Supposing that I am angry, or that I have unkind thoughts of another; he feels it, and begins likewise to have unkind thoughts about me. There is a certain communication between our souls, besides our bodily senses. As regards the action of our soul upon others through the senses, it would seem that one soul can act wonderfully upon another man through the sense of sight, even when he is at a distance from us, but as long as he is accessible to our sight, and is alone at the time when we direct our gaze upon him. Thus by the eye we can place another man in an awkward position, and confuse him. It has happened to me more than once to look fixedly out of the window of my house at the people passing by, and they, as if drawn by some power to the very window from which I was looking, looked round at the window, seeking to find a human face in it; whilst others became confused, suddenly quickened their pace, and set themselves to rights, readjusting their neckerchiefs, hats, etc.; there is some kind of mystery in this.

Observe the difference between the presence of the life-giving spirit and the presence of the spirit that deadens and destroys your soul. When there are good thoughts in your soul you feel happy and at ease; when peace and joy are in your heart, then the spirit of good, the Holy Ghost, is within you; whilst when evil thoughts or evil motions of the heart arise within you, you feel ill at ease and oppressed; when you are inwardly troubled, then the spirit of evil, the crafty spirit, is within you. When the spirit of evil is in us, then, together with oppression of heart and disturbance, we generally feel a difficulty in drawing near to God in our heart, because the evil spirit binds our soul, and will not let it raise itself to God. The evil spirit is a spirit of doubt, unbelief--of passions, oppression, grief and disturbance; whilst the spirit of good is one of undoubting faith, of virtue, of spiritual freedom and breadth--a spirit of peace and joy. Know by these tokens when the Spirit of God is within you, and when the spirit of evil, and, as often as possible, raise your grateful heart to the most Holy Spirit that gives you life and light, and flee with all your power from doubt, unbelief, and the passions through which the evil serpent, the thief and destroyer of our souls, creeps in.

Sometimes in the lives of pious Christians there are hours when God seems to have entirely abandoned them--hours of the power of darkness; and then the man from the depths of his heart cries unto God: "Why hast Thou turned Thy face from me, Thou everlasting Light? For a strange darkness has covered me, the darkness of the accursed evil Satan, and has obscured all my soul. It is very grievous for the soul to be in his torturing darkness, which gives a presentiment of the torments and darkness of hell. Turn me, O Saviour, to the light of Thy commandments and make straight my spiritual way, I fervently pray Thee."

If you do not yourself experience the action of the wiles of the evil spirit, you will not know, and will not appreciate and value as you ought, the benefits bestowed upon you by the Holy Spirit: not knowing the spirit that destroys, you will not know the Spirit that gives life. Only by means of direct contrasts of good and evil, of life and death, can we clearly know the one and the other: if you are not subjected to distresses and dangers of bodily or spiritual death, you will not truly know the Saviour, the Life-Giver, who delivers us from these distresses and from spiritual death. Jesus Christ is the consolation, the joy, the life, the peace and the breadth of our hearts! Glory to God, the Most Wise and Most Gracious, that He allows the spirit of evil and death to tempt and torment us! Otherwise we should not have sufficiently appreciated and valued the comfort of grace, the comfort of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, the Life-Giving!

The Lord God, as Life itself and the superabundance of Life, everlastingly the same, as has been said by St. Gregory the Theologian, moves and remains in the Three Persons--that is, God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You ask how there can be Three Persons in God. I answer: I do not understand how; but I know that it must be so and cannot be otherwise. You further ask: why is the Third Person in God called the Spirit, and why is He a separate Person, when, without this, God is a Spirit? I answer: God's Spirit is called Spirit in relation to His creatures. God breathed through the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, and there appeared at His call an innumerable multitude of spirits. "All the host of them by the breathing of His mouth."

He breathed through His Spirit into the human structure, "and man became a living soul;" and from this breath men were born and will yet be born until the end of the world, according to the commandment: "Be fruitful and multiply." If by His Holy Spirit God has created such separate individual creatures, then how can the Holy Ghost be other than a separate Person or an individual creating Being Himself? "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit."You see that the Holy Ghost is called the Spirit as one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. If there are innumerable multitudes of created individual spirits, then why should God Himself remain without a spirit, as without One of the Persons of the Trinity, separate and independent? Is not the Son the Wisdom of the Father, personal and living, indispensable to God? Look upon yourself. You are a creature; and even in you there is such wisdom that many wonder at it; sometimes you even create wonderful things, and you are extolled as the creator of these things. And yet this is only you, an insignificant, infirm creature. Then consider how can there not be a personal Wisdom in God?—how can God be a Creator without His own Living, Independent Wisdom? Look upon everything in the world, how wise everything is!—how in the smallest things you may notice the amazing wisdom and the wonderful work of the All-Wise thought with its marvellous accuracy and irreproachable neatness! How can God be without a Personal Wisdom? Consider, how can God, Who has created a multitude of reasonable, individual, wise, living creatures, not engender for Himself a Personal Wisdom? Is it possible? Is it reasonable? Is it in accordance with all the other perfections of the Creator? Thus in God there must be a Personal Wisdom, or the Personal Word of the Father, as well as the Life-giving Holy Ghost, Who proceedeth from the Father and Who resteth in the Son. In you there is breath, material and impersonal, while in God, as the Life Itself, there is a Personal Spirit, not diffusible, but single and giving life to everything.

The unnatural mastery of the flesh over the spirit is expressed, amongst other things, by the fact that the spirit is as though buried within the flesh, and is bound by it. This is especially visible when the matter relates to God's service; then the man mostly draws near to God with his lips only--that is, with his flesh, falsely, and not with his heart, not with his spirit, and thus does not worship Him truly. Indeed, we often so live as though we had no spirit in us, and the highest degree of human depravity is manifested by the fact that the spirit is completely stifled and the man becomes as though he were flesh alone. "My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh."

Look more closely into the matter of men's reverence for God; you will see how in this respect the flesh endeavours to dominate over the spirit. In the saints we see the dominance of the spirit over the flesh, because they live by the spirit and see the spirit throughout the whole world, the Wisdom, the Omnipotence, and Goodness of God; they see in every phenomenon, in every work, the impress of the spirit. In sensual men the dominance of the flesh over the spirit is shown by their only seeing that which represents itself to their senses; in fact, as the saying is, they do not see beyond their nose. The carnal, sensual man looks at the world and sees it like an unreasoning animal: he does not marvel at the Wisdom, the everlasting Power and the Goodness of the Creator, as shown in it; when he reads a holy book, he sees in it only the letters; when he prays he says the prayers mechanically, without penetrating into their spirit: he does not know the art of worshipping in spirit and in truth. The flesh predominates also in men's education. (Look, are pupils in the schools taught that which concerns the Christian more than anything--Prayer? Are they taught to see God?) The flesh will prevail in the world until the end of ages. "When the Son of man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?"And unbelief is the work of the flesh, as it was in the beginning of the world.

It is pleasing to God when a man begins to notice His action in the heart, because He is the Light and the Truth, whilst the Devil especially fears this, being himself darkness and falsehood; and the darkness cannot come to the light for fear its doings shall be revealed. The Devil is powerful only through darkness, deceit, and falsehood; reveal his falsehood, place it before the light, and all will disappear. He induces men into every passion through deceit, and thus he lulls them to sleep and prevents their seeing things in their true light. The Devil's covering lies over many things.

Why does not the sinful soul obtain remission of its sins before it feels all their foolishness, all their destructiveness, and all their falsity from the whole heart? Because the heart is our soul; as it committed the sins, finding them at the time pleasant and plausible, therefore it must now repent of them and recognise them as leading to destruction and entirely wrong. This repentance is accomplished painfully in the heart, as the desire to sin is also usually in the heart.

Do not be disturbed when malice rages within you and strives to discharge itself in words of bitterness, but command it to be silent and to die within you. Otherwise, being accustomed to see your obedience and to flow from your lips, it will master you. As water standing behind an earth dam, and finding an aperture, washes it wider and wider and filters through it, if we do not strengthen the dam, or strengthen it insufficiently, at last, with growing weakness on our part and with repeated efforts, the water gets through with greater and greater force, so that at last it becomes very difficult, and even impossible to stop it; so also with malice hidden in the heart of man: if we let it pierce through once, twice, and thrice, it will pour out more and more powerfully, and may at last break through and overflow your dam. Learn that in the soul there are waters of evil; as has been said by the Psalmist: "The waters are come in unto my soul."

When you have sinned against God, and your sins torment, burn you, then seek quickly the only Sacrifice for sins, eternal and living, and lay your sins before the face of that Sacrifice. Do not think you can obtain salvation by your own means.

The Lord might have made the whole world, heaven and earth, into His own body; or instead of creating the world, He might have created for Himself a temple for His body; and it is only on your account that He deigned to create to Himself a Body similar to your own, in order to save you, and having created the world from nothing, He has also created out of a small part of it His Body to give life to you, leaving the world to remain as He created it. O goodness and mercy of God! "We are members of His Body" through the communion of His life-giving Mysteries!

The world, as the work of the living, Most Wise God, is full of life. There are life and wisdom in everything, and we find everywhere the expression of thought in the whole, as also in every separate part. This is the true Book, from which, though not so clearly as from revelation, we may learn the knowledge of God. Before the world was, there was only the living infinite God. When the world was called into being from its non-existence, God, of course, did not become finite; all the fulness of life and of infinity have remained in Him. But this fulness of life and infinity are also expressed in creatures, living and organic, which are innumerable, and which are all endued with life.

The world, and especially the man, are finite. The world is only a point of rest for corporeal creatures, in order that they should not disappear into infinity.

The Holy Scriptures speak more truly and more clearly of the world than the world itself or the arrangement of the earthly strata; the scriptures of nature within it, being dead and voiceless, cannot express anything definite. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"Were you with God when He created the universe? "Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being His counseller, hath taught Him?"And yet you geologists boast that you have understood the mind of the Lord, in the arrangement of strata, and maintained it in spite of Holy Writ! You believe more in the dead letters of the earthly strata, in the soulless earth, than in the Divinely-inspired words of the great prophet Moses, who saw God.

You do not understand how the saints in Heaven can hear us when we pray to them. But how do the rays of the sun bend down from Heaven to us, lighting everything throughout the earth? The saints in the spiritual world are like the rays of the sun in the material world. God is the eternal, life-giving Sun, and the saints are the rays of this wise Sun. As the eyes of the Lord are constantly looking upon the earth and upon terrestrial beings, so also the eyes of the saints cannot but turn towards the same direction as the provident gaze of the Lord of all creatures towards where their treasures (their bodies, their works, the holy places, and the persons devoted to them) are to be found. "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

You know how quickly, how far, and how clearly the heart can see (especially the objects of the spiritual world); you notice this in all the sciences, especially in the spiritual ones, where a great deal is adopted by faith only (the vision of the heart). The heart is the eye of the human being. The purer it is, the quicker, farther, and clearer it can see. But with God's saints this spiritual eye is refined, even during their lifetime, to the highest degree of purity possible for man, and after their death, when they have become united to God, through God's grace it becomes still clearer and wider in the limits of its vision. Therefore the saints see very clearly, widely, and far: they see our spiritual wants; they see and hear all those who call upon them with their whole hearts--that is, those whose mental eyes are fixed straight upon them, and are not darkened or dimmed when so fixed by unbelief and doubt; in other words, when the eyes of the heart of those who pray, so to say, meet the eyes of those they call upon. This is a mysterious vision. He who is experienced will understand what is meant. Therefore, how easy it is to communicate with the saints! It is only necessary to purify the eye of the heart, to fix it firmly upon a saint known to you, to pray to him for what you want, and you will obtain it. And what is God in reference to sight? He is all sight, all light, and all knowledge. He everlastingly fills both Heaven and earth, and sees everything in every place. "The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good."

A hearty belief in the spiritual world, especially in the all-enlightening and all-life-giving Sun, rejoices and vivifies the soul that possesses a pure conscience. Faith ought to reach the eye of the heart; this means that the soul ought to stand as though it were higher than anything sensual, higher than anything carnal, higher than its dark nature, and ought to penetrate with as pure a vision of the heart as possible into the spiritual world. Here it will be happy, for here is its true life, its peace and its joy. This is from experience.

Imagination and representation are the vision of the heart, or of the soul, creating or reproducing a certain object; therefore this vision is rapid, instantaneous, and bears a spiritual character. It is a photograph made by the soul of a certain object. The mind is an artist, taking a photograph from it.

If the Lord were not long-suffering, if He were not the Lover of men, would He have borne with our great offences? would He have been incarnate? would He have suffered and died for you? would He have given you His most pure Body and Blood, upon which even the angels look with fear and trembling? would He have saved you from sin and spiritual death so many innumerable times? Had it been otherwise He would have said: "Be tormented, if you are so evil by nature; I will not deliver you again after having delivered you so often before." But now, during all our life-time He bears with our innumerable offences, and still waits for our conversion. Glorify, then, His love and long-suffering. Picture to yourself what it would have been without Him, without Him to save? Horror and trembling fill the soul at the idea of it. But impenitent sinners will indeed be overtaken at the last by God's wrath "in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God."

When you are about to pray to Our Lady the Holy Virgin, be firmly assured, before praying, that you will not depart from Her without having received mercy. To think thus and to have confidence in Her is meet and right. She is, the All-merciful Mother of the All-merciful God, the Word, and Her mercies, incalculably great and innumerable, have been declared from all ages by all Christian Churches; She is, indeed, an abyss of mercies and bounties, as is said of Her in the canon of Odigitry.Therefore to pray to Her without such assurance would be foolish and audacious, for doubt would offend Her goodness, just as God's goodness is offended when people pray to Him without hoping to receive what they pray for. How do people hurry for alms to any great and rich man whose kindness is well known, and has been proved on many occasions? Generally with the most perfect assurance and hope of receiving from Him that which they desire. Likewise, in praying we must neither doubt nor be faint-hearted.

As a mother teaches her child to walk, so also God teaches us to have a living faith in Him. A mother will make the child stand, and leave it for a while by itself, then she will tell it to come to her. The child cries without its mother; it wants to go to her, but is afraid to attempt to move its feet; it tries to walk, makes a step, and falls down. God teaches the Christian faith in Him in a like manner (faith being the spiritual way); our faith is as weak, as elementary as the child beginning to walk. The Lord leaves the man without His help and gives him up to the Devil, or to various distresses and afflictions, and afterwards, when he is in extreme need of help of being delivered from them (for we are not ready to go to Him until we are in need of salvation), He bids us look on Him (we must absolutely look upon Him) and come to Him for that help. The Christian endeavours to do so; he opens the eyes of his heart (just as the child moves its feet) and tries to see the Lord by means of them, but his heart, not being taught how to see God, is afraid of its own boldness, and stumbles and falls. The enemy and inborn sinful corruptions close the newly-opened eyes of his heart and cut him off from God, so that he cannot approach Him, though God is near, ready to take him into His arms; only God must be approached with faith, and an effort must be made to see Him fully with the spiritual eyes of faith. Then He will Himself stretch out His helping hand, will take the man into His arms and drive away the enemies. Then the Christian feels that he has fallen into the arms of the Saviour Himself. Glory be to Thy goodness and wisdom, Lord! Thus during the efforts of the Devil against us, and in every affliction, we must see clearly with the eyes of the heart, as if He stood before us, the Saviour, the Lover of men; and look upon Him with boldness as upon our inexhaustible treasury of goodness and mercies, and pray to Him with all our hearts, that He may give us a portion of this inexhaustible fountain of blessings and of spiritual help; and we shall immediately obtain what we are praying for. The chief thing is faith, or the spiritual vision of the Lord and the hope of receiving everything from Him, as the Most-merciful, the Most-true. This is the truth! This is from experience! By these means God also teaches us to acknowledge our extreme moral infirmity without Him, to be contrite in heart, and constantly in a prayerful frame of mind!

The Christian has no reason to have in his heart any ill-feeling whatever against anyone--such ill-feeling, like every other evil, is the work of the Devil; the Christian must only have love in his heart; and as love cannot think of evil, he cannot have any ill-feeling against others. For instance, I must not think that anyone else is evil or proud without having positive reasons to think so, or I must not think that it will make him proud if I show him respect, or that if I forgive him he will again offend me and will mock at me. We must not let evil in any form nestle in our heart; but evil generally appears in too many forms.