Abba Irenaeus, Paterikon
Abba Irenaeus said to the brothers: Let us fight and endure when they war against us, for we are soldiers of Christ, of the heavenly King. And as the soldiers of the earthly king have helmets of bronze, so our host has for helmets the good virtues. They have a breastplate of mail; we have a spiritual breastplate tempered in faith. They have a spear; we have prayer. They have a shield; we have hope in God. They have a buckler; we have God Himself. They shed their blood in wars; we bring before Him our free will. For this reason too the heavenly King has permitted the demons to war against us, that we may not forget His benefactions. For in time of ease, most people often do not pray at all. And if they pray standing together with others at prayer, they do not pray truly, or their mind runs hither and thither. Praying, they are as though they did not pray. For those who speak to God with their lips, while with the heart they speak to this world, how shall they be heard? But when we are in distress, then we pray soberly, and often, with the lips saying nothing, we pray with the heart, lifting up to Him the voice of the heart and speaking to Him with sighs. So let us also, brothers, imitate the soldiers of the corruptible king and fight with zeal. Or rather, let us follow the three youths, and trample the furnace of the passions underfoot with purity, quench the burning coals of temptations with prayer, and put to shame the immaterial Nebuchadnezzar, the devil. And let us offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, and set before Him our devout mind as a whole burnt offering. Abba Irenaeus
The Host Whose Blood Is the Will
Abba Irenaeus places the monk in an army and sets beside each weapon of the earthly soldier a spiritual one: for the helmet, the virtues; for the breastplate of mail, the breastplate tempered in faith; for the spear, prayer; for the shield, hope; for the buckler, God Himself; for the blood, the free will. The catalogue begins from Ephesians 6:11-17 but does not copy it. In Paul the sword is the word of God; in Irenaeus the spear is prayer, the weapon that strikes. And where the Apostle speaks of the shield of faith, the Father climbs a step: the buckler is not a thing received but the Person: “I am your shield” (Gen 15:1). This also clarifies the Apostle’s word, for the armor of Ephesians is “the armor of God” (Eph 6:11), which the Lord Himself first puts on (Isa 59:17): the monk does not forge his weapons but clothes himself in His.
The last line of the catalogue is the one that holds all the others: “they shed their blood in wars; we bring before Him our free will.” The Apostle had said that the struggle is not “against flesh and blood” (Eph 6:12); if the enemy is not the man beside us, there is no blood left to shed, neither another’s nor our own, but something else, more precious: the will. The war is therefore interior, and philosophy suspected it early: Heraclitus says that war is the father of all things (fr. B 53), and Plato, in the Republic (IV, 439e-440b), shows the spirited part of the soul, thymos, taking the side of reason against appetite, in the story of Leontius, who, tempted to look at corpses, grows angry with himself and tells his eyes to take their fill. Evagrius too understands the irascible part as a power given to man to fight the demons, not to make war on his neighbor. The Apostle asks the soldier for the same restraint: “no soldier on service entangles himself in the affairs of this life” (2 Tim 2:4); that is why Irenaeus sends the brothers to imitate the zeal of the soldiers of the corruptible king, in the measure of the word that those run for a wreath that withers, while we run for one that does not (1 Cor 9:25).
The War Permitted and the Benefaction Forgotten
“The heavenly King has permitted the demons to war against us, that we may not forget His benefactions.” The word is to permit, not to cause: “God tempts no one” (James 1:13), and in Job the enemy’s power stands under the limit set by the Lord (Job 1:12; 2:6). Scripture gives the motive too: Israel is left among the nations “to test Israel… that they might learn war” (Judg 3:1-2). Irenaeus’s fear is that of Deuteronomy: “When you have eaten and are full… lest your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord” (Deut 8:12-14); and of Hosea: “They were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot Me” (Hos 13:6). The Psalmist makes of it a confession: “Before I was humbled I went astray; therefore I have kept Your word” (Ps 118:67 LXX), and another Psalm describes the whole rhythm: “When He slew them, they sought Him” (Ps 77:34 LXX). Abba Anthony says the same in prose: take away temptations, and no one is saved.
Psychology gives the mechanism the name hedonic adaptation (Brickman and Campbell, 1971): a constant good ceases to be perceived as good, and withdraws the attention that gratitude should have received. Heraclitus had said it in his own way: sickness makes health pleasant, hunger satiety, weariness rest (fr. B 111). Unbroken benefaction is like background noise: it is no longer heard. Distress lifts it out of the background. But measure must be kept here too: war is not to be sought, for “you shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Matt 4:7), and the Apostle’s thorn (2 Cor 12:7-9) was received, not sought. God makes of the war He permits a school; He does not make it the rule of life.
The Lips in Time of Ease and the Voice of the Heart in Distress
“Praying, they are as though they did not pray.” The word is Isaiah 29:13, which the Lord quotes (Matt 15:8): “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.” Psychology has measured the distance: in a study of thousands of people, Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) found that a person’s mind wanders from what he is doing in nearly half of his waking time. “Their mind runs hither and thither” is therefore the ordinary state, not an exception of the weak. Evagrius defines prayer as the ascent of the mind to God and binds theology to it: the theologian is the one who prays truly. If the mind is away, the words are a body without breath. And the Ladder, at the step on prayer, teaches not to multiply words, because a single word of the publican drew down mercy.
Distress does what the weak will does not: it gathers attention. Easterbrook (1959) showed that tension narrows the field of attention to the few essential things, and Simone Weil says that unmixed attention is prayer. Irenaeus names it more simply: sobriety (nepsis). Then the voice withdraws from the lips and stays in the heart. Moses says nothing at the Red Sea, and God says to him: “Why do you cry to Me?” (Exod 14:15). Hannah prays at Shiloh with her lips moving and her voice not heard, so that Eli takes her for drunk (1 Sam 1:13). “Out of the depths I have cried to You, O Lord” (Ps 129:1 LXX) is the cry from the bottom of the well. And the sighs of which Irenaeus speaks are Paul’s: “the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26), that is, prayer becomes true when it ceases to be wholly ours.
Irenaeus’s words hold both a reproach and a summons. The reproach is that most people do not pray at all in time of ease. The summons is that what distress has taught should not recede when it departs: that the sobriety gained in war be kept in peace. This is why “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17) is not a command for hard hours but for all; and whoever has learned the voice of the heart in need has no reason to wait for need.
The Furnace, the Coals, and the Immaterial Nebuchadnezzar
Irenaeus does not choose his examples at random. The three youths are commanded to worship a golden image at the sound of music, and at that sound “all the peoples… fell down and worshiped” (Dan 3:7). Asch’s experiments (1951) showed how rarely a man resists a unanimity, even when he sees its falsity. Against everyone stand three, and their answer is the fullest word of freedom in the Old Testament: “Our God… is able to deliver us… But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods” (Dan 3:17-18). But if not: the sacrifice of the will does not hang upon success. This is Irenaeus’s “free will,” not a means of obtaining deliverance but a gift for which deliverance is no condition.
The furnace is heated sevenfold (Dan 3:19), and in the furnace there are not three but four, “and the appearance of the fourth is like the Son of God” (Dan 3:25); the flame becomes “a moist whistling wind” (Song of the Three Youths). Irenaeus reads the furnace as the furnace of the passions, known from Proverbs: “Can a man carry fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned?” (Prov 6:27). The furnace is trampled “with purity,” that is, with holding the whole creature, body and mind, under a single rule, and the coals of temptations are quenched “with prayer.” To quench is not to suppress: Wegner (1987) showed that a thought driven off by force returns more often, like the white bear one must not think of. Prayer does not suppress but displaces: it puts a Person in the place of the thought. Evagrius teaches the same in the Antirrhetikos, when he answers each thought with a word of Scripture, after the Lord’s example in the wilderness (Matt 4). The same coal, moreover, may burn or cleanse: the one the Seraph touches to Isaiah’s lips (Isa 6:6-7) is the fire of God, who is “a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29), and each man is entrusted to one of the two.
The “immaterial” Nebuchadnezzar is the devil, who demands, like the one on Dura, worship of an image, not of the Image. Worship of a made image, of what a man wants to seem, is precisely vainglory, and “to put him to shame” is not to defeat him by force but to deprive him of witnesses: the three youths come out of the furnace without the smell of fire (Dan 3:94), and the king himself ends by blessing their God. So the fight ends: not by the annihilation of the enemy, but by the witness of a freedom he could not take.
The Living Sacrifice and the Whole Burnt Offering
“Let us offer our bodies to God as a living sacrifice” is Romans 12:1, where the living sacrifice is called “your reasonable service” (logike latreia). For Irenaeus the sacrifice is one: the will. A soldier’s blood is taken; the will cannot be taken, only given. Aristotle says it in his language: moral virtue is a state of choice (prohairesis, Nicomachean Ethics II, 6), and Epictetus places the whole of freedom in what is up to us, that is, in prohairesis. Frankl, from the camp, speaks of the last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any circumstance. And self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) shows that a gift made under constraint feeds no one, not even the giver: only what is assumed becomes a man’s own. The Psalm says the same: “With a willing heart I will sacrifice to You” (Ps 53:8 LXX). A forced sacrifice is not a sacrifice.
Saint Maximus the Confessor adds a dogmatic understanding. In Christ the human will never opposed the divine, not even in Gethsemane: “Not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). In us the will either hesitates or divides; therefore Maximus distinguishes the natural will, which all have, from the deliberative will (gnome), in which sin creeps in. To bring the will as a sacrifice means to let this divided will be healed in contact with the will of the One who remained whole. And the “bodies” are not an addition: fasting, prostrations, vigil are the place where the decision of the will becomes deed, not an idea about it.
Irenaeus’s last word is “whole burnt offering” (holokautoma, Lev 1:9): the entire sacrifice is laid on the altar and nothing remains for the one who brought it, unlike the peace offering, of which the offerer ate. A devout mind brought so is a mind that keeps back no part, no corner of its own judgment, no reserve of self. From a whole burnt offering nothing returns, but a fragrant aroma rises (Lev 1:9; Eph 5:2). And so the image of the host closes: the earthly soldier dies for a king who remains; the soldier of Christ gives his will and finds that the King, instead of taking it, gives it back to him made whole.
