Fr. Rafail Noica: Saint Silouan and the Feeling of God-Forsakenness
Excerpt from a conference held on May 30, 2013 in Cluj, Romania
Fr. Rafail: Christ as a Man took part in all of our lived experiences, especially the painful ones, again pain being a great mystery. And He was in solidarity with man, and one aspect is that - and I think I am not wrong in this, but it does not cover everything - if a person feels abandoned by God, and sometimes he feels that he is abandoned in his most terrible inner states, then Christ the Man let Himself be abandoned by God exactly when He was dying in obedience to His Father for our salvation. However, observe one more thing: after He cried “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He says, “into Your hands, Father, I commit My spirit.” Behold a Man, Who being forsaken by God, did not lose His trust in the Father, to the point of entrusting His soul to the hands of Him Who forsook Him. Is there such a thing as being forsaken? If you look at the book about Saint Silouan…If Saint Silouan had not gone through the experience of hell, as he said, it is horrible to even think about that moment in which I clearly felt that my soul could not be saved, that hell is eternal even from now; but somehow this man, who was not a God incarnate, he was a peasant, uneducated, but there was something in him that made him not lose his trust in the God Whom he called unyielding. At one point he cried out in his soul: “You are unyielding!” Yes, but half an hour later or so he went to Vespers, and after Vespers, he saw Christ Himself in front of the icon of Christ; for a moment, only a moment! But this meant everything to him all his life because it was a Divine moment. And he says that if that moment were prolonged, I would have died because our body cannot bear so much blessedness. That is why I think eternal torment is the blessedness that our bodies cannot bear.
Even more, he was in torment for 15 years afterward, night after night, trying to pray, and he no longer was able to find God. Not knowing how to live with grace, man loses it, and there is an order which has been observed in the spiritual life: an initial grace, a second period of grace, and for those who still are alive bodily, a third period in which grace returns. The second period is the period of withdrawal of grace. In the first period, a person may have loved to pray, and may have thought: why is that person not praying? It is so good, it is so beautiful, it is so easy. He liked to go to church. In the second period, everything becomes difficult. And now through asceticism, we must try to acquire what we had experienced in the beginning. No, it was not youthful enthusiasm, because usually, that grace comes in the adolescent years; it was a reality, and I would say a promise which is now our duty to acquire as our personal possession, but we acquire it through prayer, through a dialogue between myself and my God. But it is a period of suffering, greater or smaller, God knows the measure of each person. For Silouan it was 15 years of suffering, his cell was full of demons, and he could not draw near to God. What does it mean “full of demons”? When our mind is full of thoughts, especially when we want to pray and exactly then thoughts storm us, these are the demons. Each thought is a good or evil spirit. If it stops us from praying then I assure you it is not a good thought. But he actually saw them and their ugliness. And just as thoughts do not allow us to find a certain prayer, a certain inner settling, so too did the demons not allow him to draw near to God. And when he was crushed, he sat down and told God: “Lord, You see that I want to pray and the demons do not let me.” Then the response came: “the proud suffer from demons.” And instead of feeling crushed, that on top of everything else God also calls him proud, after those 15 years–this trust in God; if God speaks it means that something is happening. “Lord,” he says, “my soul knew You”–it knew Him in that [Divine] moment–“You are merciful, tell me how to free myself from the demons,” no, “how to humble myself.” And God gives him that surprising saying which I see on all levels of human life, in one form or another: “Keep thy mind in hell,” comma, “and despair not.” I say “comma” because someone who read this saying in another context without the comma read it in later translations with the comma, and he said this made him understand everything. [Laughing] I understood that the comma is important. There are two separate aspects there which we must understand, but what I want to say now so as to not deviate: if he had not had that suffering to the point of hopeless forsakenness by God, he would not have been able to see God; if he had not those 15 years of torment which signified an experience for him, he would not have understood the saying.
I asked, and many asked me what the saying “Keep thy mind in hell, and despair not” means. That uneducated peasant understood it at once, and he did as the Lord told him. And it is an extraordinary saying whose dimensions I understand more and more, and I spoke about this; and in two words, if you would like: “Keep thy mind in hell” I paraphrase as “be realistic.” You see yourself as sinful, well that is what you are. Do not compare yourself to someone else, do not comfort yourself with anything, do not try to not be sinful; confess: “This is what I am.” To not despair means that [this state of sinfulness] does not mean that God forsook you or will forsake you, but it means that you can begin from where you are and not from somewhere else. God takes you from there, and you must be aware of what you are so that God can begin to work out your salvation, that is, for you to do it by praying–we do not have the power [to do it] because we are created, and God gives us the power through our prayer, and this is how the road to salvation begins. From where we are. And Saint Sophrony told someone in the West–with all their western mentality, mannerisms–who asked him “how should I pray to God?” and Saint Sophrony responded: “You do not need to be polite with God. Pour out your heart to Him just as it is, and let Him work.” That person discovered a prayer, it seems at the beginning, of such intensity: she would put her head on the ground at night and would weep all night in prayer. And she would weep–I am not talking about whining, but an intensity of prayer which took hold of her all night sometimes. And she became Orthodox.
But without the torment through which Silouan lived, with all those 15 years, God would not have been able to show Himself to him; God would not have been able to tell him those salvific words for himself and us. Father Sophrony–for those of you who read his autobiography which we called We Shall See Him As He Is–if he had not experienced the sufferings which he experienced–intense ones–neither would he have been able to become Father Silouan’s disciple. I say “neither would he” because he was his only disciple. No one in the monastery was of the same measure as this uneducated peasant. And when he had a demonic temptation, a vision, and he asked four of the greatest ascetics among his spiritual fathers about it and not one of them could give him a response, he had to find out on his own at some point that it was from the demons.
So then, what can we say? Is suffering a good or bad thing? I feel like only saying: “Lord, be with us and give us strength, and give us the strength to live what You arranged for our salvation.” But the greatest power is discernment. I said it before: Orthodoxy–I regret that we Romanians have this atavic tendency in us of scrounging: we scrounge words from other languages and do not make them our own. We could have also called Orthodoxy “right worship,” but in Greek, Orthodoxy [comes from] “doxa,” which means glory; and “orthos” which means right; orthopedia, for example, means right education. Doxa originally comes from the word dokéō (δοκέω) which means “I am of the opinion that.” “I have”–more than just an impression– “this thought about someone.” Thus, right worship, Orthodoxy, can also be translated in certain contexts as right understanding. And if we do not have the right understanding, all of our path is mistaken. And that is why the Fathers said that the greatest sin of all is heresy. What is heresy? Skewed understanding. Adam fell through heresy. Adam was not a bad man, by contrast. However, what was his heresy? He let himself be deceived by the vision of the snake who told him: “you will not die if you eat from that tree, but God knows that if you eat from it your eyes will be opened.” He did not say that God does not want his eyes to be opened. He let him come to understand this because it is much more effective when you understand than if it is forced down your throat. And then Adam began to imagine a God Who did not want his eyes to be open; a God Who did not want him to become a god. Heresy is exactly what God wanted: for Adam to become equal to God, but not by means of human understanding. God knows what it means to be God, not creation. He shows us what God is. All who wanted to deify man throughout history, you know how they deified humanity, but God is something completely different as Isaiah says, that God’s thoughts and man’s thoughts are different and that as far as the heavens are from the earth, so far are the counsels of God from the counsels of man. And God is only love. And when for a moment Adam, or Eve respectively, believed that God is not a God of love, he acted contrary [to God]. He did not want to do it, afterward, he repented because otherwise, we would not have existed if Adam and Eve had taken the eternal path of perdition as Lucifer, Satan, did in his time. But sinning from heresy, from incorrect understanding, he found himself outside the life of God, and now he needed bodily death in order for evil to not become eternal as Scripture says–if you do not know it read the first chapters of Genesis–and God allowed man to return to the dust from which he was taken in order for evil to not become eternal in the state in which it was so that Christ Incarnate could come into history at some point and bring about man’s salvation; and now with “Christ is Risen” and the icons of the Resurrection, the descent into Hades, we celebrate the emptying of hell.