The Evergetinos: Book Three - Chapter IX, Part IV

There is something almost frightening about the stories preserved for us in the Evergetinos. They are frightening not because they portray extraordinary wickedness, but because they reveal how quietly the heart can change.

The monk described by Palladios is not a beginner. He is a man of profound silence and prayer, one who has surrendered himself so completely to God that even the necessities of his bodily life have been entrusted to Providence. His life has become contemplation. Prayer is his delight. God provides for him in a miraculous manner. He has tasted something of the life of the age to come.

And yet the beginning of his fall is almost imperceptible.

He sleeps a little longer.

His prayer becomes somewhat shorter.

His attention wanders.

Earthly concerns begin to occupy a little more space within him.

Thoughts once immediately rejected are permitted to remain for a moment.

Nothing, at first, seems catastrophic.

That is precisely the warning.

The Fathers understood that the great falls of the spiritual life rarely begin as great falls. They begin with small permissions. Something formerly guarded carefully is treated casually. Something that once troubled the conscience is dismissed as insignificant. A thought is entertained rather than rejected. Prayer is postponed. Vigilance relaxes. A little comfort is allowed to become necessary. The heart whispers that such things hardly matter.

But they matter because the heart matters.