The Great Paterikon — Abba Matoes on backbiting
Abba Matoes said: A brother came to me and told me that backbiting is worse than fornication. And I said: That is a hard saying. Then he said to me: And how do you reckon the matter? And I said: Backbiting is an evil thing, but it is quickly healed. For many times the one who speaks evil of another repents, saying: I have spoken evil! But fornication is bodily death.
Not a Hierarchy of Sins, but a Science of Healing
The hasty reader hears Abba Matoes lowering backbiting, as though he had said: “Come now, it’s a small sin.” But the old man says no such thing. He says: “an evil thing.” The brother’s question weighs sins by their gravity; the abba’s answer weighs them by the time of their healing. The brother brings a ranking, the abba gives a diagnosis. One looks at sin as at a tribunal, the other as a physician looks at a disease: he does not ask “what penalty does it deserve?” but “how long will the patient need to recover?”
Matoes’s first answer is telling too: “That is a hard saying.” It is the very dread of the disciples at Capernaum: “This is a hard saying; who can hear it?” (John 6:60). The old man is in no hurry to approve either a large judgment or a small one. He needs a pause, to see behind the saying the disease within it.
The Word Without Which Healing Is Not Possible
“I have spoken evil!” — four words in the Romanian, a handful in any tongue. Matoes’s whole science lies in them. Healing does not come from applying a method but from a sentence: it must be possible to say it. The wisdom of Scripture rests on the same axis. David, rebuked by Nathan, writes no treatise; he says: “I have sinned against the Lord,” and the prophet answers on the spot: “The Lord also hath put away thy sin” (2 Kings 12:13 LXX). The publican in the temple has only a single phrase — “God, be merciful to me a sinner” — and “went down to his house justified” (Luke 18:13-14).
Repentance begins, in this way, as a problem of vocabulary. A sin that has a name in the mouth has a road to the heart. The one whose name for it has been taken has had the road taken too.
The Man Whose Words Were Stolen
Here Abba Matoes becomes the question of our day. For “I have spoken evil!” is a sentence modern man says with ever more difficulty, not because he speaks less evil, but because what he does has begun to bear other names. It is called “feedback,” “honest opinion,” “I’m just telling the truth,” “I was venting,” “transparency,” “just so you know,” “a comment.” The Greek word in the Paterikon, katalalia, means “speaking against.” Our own word for it has almost vanished from the language.
Psychology has named the mechanism: Albert Bandura calls it euphemistic labeling, the “prettying up” of a deed by a gentler name, one of the paths by which people loosen their conscience from what they do. Orwell saw further still in 1984: before it forbids thought, the regime cuts the vocabulary. And Wittgenstein said it coldly: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. If I have no word for the evil I do, it is no longer an evil I do, only something that “happens to be done.”
We can now see why Matoes’s healing is no longer so “quick.” It is quick only for the one who still has the word. The brother whose word has been taken remains with the sickness and without the cure.
The Pharisee Who Prayed and Spoke Evil
There is a prayer in the Gospel that is backbiting to the letter: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican” (Luke 18:11). Observe: the Pharisee slanders in his prayer, with the publican standing there, and in the same breath he mentions “adulterers” as his measure of comparison. This is how the two sins of the apophthegm are tied together: whoever measures his purity by another’s fornication has already begun to speak evil.
Psychology has measured this too: “downward comparison” (Wills) raises my sense of worth by lowering another’s. And the primatologist Robin Dunbar has shown that gossip performs for human beings the role that mutual grooming performs for apes: it binds us together. That is why backbiting does not feel like sin but like the warmth of the group, like justice, like being well informed. A sin that feels like virtue has no one to question it, and therein lies its danger.
The Other’s Wound Does Not Heal Quickly
Let “quickly” not deceive us: it is the one who spoke who heals quickly, not the one spoken of. A stained name is not gathered up like spilled milk. The Psalmist says: “Him that privily slandereth his neighbour, him did I drive away” (Psalm 100:5), and the Apostle James presses it home: “The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity” (James 3:6). Paul ranks nothing either: in the same lists stand the backbiters and slanderers beside the fornicators (Romans 1:29-30; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10), equally far from the Kingdom.
For our own age one must add how much this wound has been made heavier. Once the spoken word was lost within a room. Today it is copied, redistributed, indexed. “I have spoken evil!”, said with the whole heart, can no longer recall a thousand copies. Matoes’s optimism assumed a speech that could still be taken back.
Fornication: The Death That Shows
“Fornication is bodily death.” Abba Matoes does not say it is a fall beyond mending: neither Scripture nor the Paterikon knows a sin that repentance cannot cover. He says where it kills: “Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Its death is seen in the body, in shame, in the unease from which Adam, naked, knew to hide (Genesis 3:10). The body testifies where the word might lie.
The Romanian word for it, desfrânare, keeps a picture inside it: the horse slipped from its bridle. The Greek of the Paterikon says something sharper still: porneia comes from the same stem as pernemi, “to sell.” Fornication is, at the root of the word, a sale. The two words together describe the state of man today: unbridled and put up for sale.
That is why the sin that blushes is often nearer to repentance than the sin that justifies itself: the publican goes home justified, the Pharisee does not. But we live in an age that has taught itself to give new names to this death as well: “relationship,” “experience,” “choice,” “freedom,” “content,” so that no one may blush any more. The theft of words has gone in both directions.
Trafficking in Living Flesh, With Oneself
The law forbids, and rightly, the trafficking of human beings. Those who end up in it through poverty, deceit, debt or abuse are victims, and the Church does not look on them with a stone in her hand but with a hand held out: she has kept with love the names of Mary of Egypt, of St. Thaïs, of St. Pelagia, whose lives prove that no one is too low for God. But there is another trade that no law can stop, because no one is forced: the man or woman who sells himself.
He sells himself for pleasure, and then he is his own client. He sells himself for money, and then his body is the merchandise. He sells himself for display, and then his face becomes an advertisement and strangers’ eyes become currency: “followers,” “views,” “attention.” He sells himself for a beautiful life, for clothes, holidays, a table, a position, and then intimacy is the entrance fee to a better way of living. Each time the same structure: procurer, merchandise and buyer in a single person. There is no longer any need for someone to lead you to the market: you go yourself, phone in hand. These four motives are found in women and men alike: the man too sells himself, for money, for a post, for a comfortable bed; and he who buys keeps the market alive, however much he says he “has harmed no one.”
St. Paul cuts at the root: “Ye are not your own, for ye are bought with a price” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). You cannot sell what is not yours. And the Epistle to the Hebrews puts the fornicator in the same verse as Esau, who for a single meal sold his birthright (Hebrews 12:16). The price is always smaller than the thing sold: a meal, an evening, a gift, a thousand glances. Solomon weighs it sadly: the price of a harlot is no more than a loaf of bread (Proverbs 6:26), while the loss is the precious soul.
We do not say this to condemn, but to name. For, as Matoes teaches, healing begins with the word, and the man who says “I have sold myself” is nearer home than the one who says “I have a business.”
Self-Devouring: The Body That Is Consumed Before It Is Given
There is a true devouring in fornication, which Scripture says from the beginning. Solomon counsels his son not to give his strength to others, lest strangers be filled with his vigour, and lest he repent at the end, when his flesh and body are consumed (Proverbs 5:9-11). The verb belongs to food, to consuming: whoever eats from others eats himself. Sin is not content to take; it consumes itself.
Paul adds a gravity our world has forgotten: “What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body?” (1 Corinthians 6:16). Not a passing touch but a union: every bond sewn and torn leaves torn threads. And at the end of the road stands a mystery, marriage, in which two become “one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31), as a gift of self. But a gift requires that you have something to give. He who has squandered piece by piece what he was meant to give whole comes to the altar with hands full of past and emptied of gift. He marries consumed: not only in body, but in the way he has grown used to taking and leaving rather than giving and staying. That habit does not vanish on the wedding day.
This concerns women no more than men. The man who feeds his eyes on images and his body on passing encounters is consumed in the same way, and Christ says so of him by name: whoever looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28). From the first drop of the glance the draining begins. At its end stands a man who can no longer love a person, only a stimulus.
What Medicine Says, Without Fear and Without Shame
Medicine does not speak of sin; but it has words for what Matoes calls bodily death. The World Health Organization estimates that more than a million curable sexually transmitted infections occur every day worldwide among people aged 15 to 49, which is more than 376 million a year, for chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and trichomoniasis alone. Most pass without symptoms, so a person carries them and passes them on without knowing. More than 500 million people have genital herpes, which is not cured, only held in check, and around 300 million women have an HPV infection, a virus linked to nearly all cervical cancers and to some throat and anal cancers.
Left untreated, chlamydia and gonorrhoea lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, in women and in men; syphilis can reach the nervous system and the heart; several of these infections raise the risk of HIV; and a mother can pass some of them to her child, with stillbirths or birth defects. The condom lowers the risk but does not remove it, especially for HPV and herpes, which also spread by skin contact. The number of partners multiplies exposure, since every bond carries into it all the other bonds of the other person. And there is the unplanned pregnancy: either a life to be protected, or a termination with its medical risks and with a grief that many women carry for a long time (research on the psychological effects of abortion is disputed, but the pain many of them live through is real).
These figures are not a punishment; they are a map. What the Fathers called death shows itself, in the language of the laboratory, as infertility, cancer, chronic disease, lost births.
What Psychology Says, With Measure
Psychology is more cautious than medicine and must be read with restraint: it shows associations, rarely causes, and its results are not unanimous. But what it shows deserves a hearing.
- Regret. In a well-known study of students (Eshbaugh and Gute, 2008), more than two thirds of those who were sexually active reported regret over at least one casual encounter. Regret is not proof of sin, but it is a witness: conscience speaks before the person has learned to give it another name.
- Sadness. Some research (Grello and colleagues, 2006) links casual sex to more depressive symptoms, especially in women; other studies find no link. The question remains open of which drives which: does the saddened person seek more encounters, or do the encounters sadden?
- Self-objectification. The theory of Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) shows that whoever views himself from outside, as an object to be looked at, lives with more shame, anxiety and depressive symptoms. Self-display is not a game of the eyes: it is a habit of the mind, which learns to see itself as merchandise.
- Pornography. Several studies link frequent use to lower satisfaction in couples and to compulsive use, in which the reward system demands ever larger doses; many therapists describe people whose arousal no longer answers to a real person.
- Attachment. It is debated whether frequent change of partners blunts the capacity for bonding. Some studies (Teachman, 2003) link more premarital partners to more divorce; others show the link fades once age, religiosity and context are accounted for. Plausible, but unproven.
- The sale of the body. Studies of people in prostitution show very high rates of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress, especially when the road began in poverty or abuse. Many describe a splitting: they learn to be absent from their own body.
The Fathers had other words for all of this: the darkening of the mind, the hardening of the heart, slavery. Psychology cannot prove that sin is sin; it can show what happens to the person who commits it. And what it shows resembles strikingly what Matoes had said: not punishment, but death as consequence.
Waking From the Death
What does a man do who has recognized the word? Paul gives a command of a single word: “Flee” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Other passions you fight face to face; this one you flee. Joseph leaves his garment in the hand of Potiphar’s wife and goes out (Genesis 39:12): he loses the garment, he keeps his body. What the Fathers give after him are small means: guarding the eyes, fasting that cuts the passion’s food, the short prayer at the first stirring, confession without wrappings and, for those without the gift of continence, marriage as a remedy (1 Corinthians 7:9).
But no Father leaves a man in death. Christ asks the woman taken in adultery: “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” and tells her: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:10-11). (It is worth noticing that the man she was caught with is missing from the passage.) And the Psalmist promises the one who returns: “Thy youth shall be renewed like the eagle’s” (Psalm 102:5). Mary of Egypt, after years of debauchery, spent nearly fifty years in the desert and reached a purity she could never have imagined. The consumed body can be received back, renewed, but not without repentance and not without the word.
How the Word Is Won Back
The Fathers do not leave a man with the diagnosis alone. They give a few simple things:
- Call the thing by its name. Not “I vented,” but “I spoke evil.” Not “it was only a conversation,” but “I condemned him.” At confession, the same: without wrappings.
- Set a guard on the mouth. “Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips” (Psalm 140:3). Silence is not the absence of speech but the gate at which speech chooses its exit.
- Pray for the one you spoke of, by his name. It is the one “return” no network can stop.
- Be reconciled with him, when it is possible: “First be reconciled to thy brother” (Matthew 5:24).
Two Deaths and One Sentence
Abba Matoes leaves us between two deaths: that of the body, and that of the neighbour’s name. Modern man commits both and calls them freedom: he sells his body and uses his tongue against another, and finds no words for either. The way out begins with a short sentence, which has several forms but a single root: “I have spoken evil.” “I have sold myself.” “I have sinned.” Whoever can say it is still alive; whoever has lost it has lost not just a word but the cure. Keep the sentence.
Apophthegms
A brother came to an old man and said: “Father, I have not spoken evil of anyone; I only told the truth about a brother.” The old man asked him: “At what hour did you say it?” “At mealtime.” “And in whose mouth did you set the truth: his, or yours?” The brother fell silent.
And the old man said: “The truth you tell about another is a stone in your hand. Whoever throws it forgets to ask first what name his own sin has.”
A young man said to an old man: “My body is mine; I give it to whom I will.” The old man asked him: “And who made it?” “God.” “And who paid for it?” “Christ.” “Then tell me: on what terms do you sell a thing that is not yours?” The young man fell silent.
And the old man said: “He who sells himself thinks he has set the price; but the price is always set by the buyer.”
