On a saying of Abba Nisterus the Great
Abba Nisterus the Great was walking through the desert with a brother. And seeing a dragon, they fled. The brother said: “You too are afraid, Father?” And the Elder said to him: “I am not afraid, my son, but it was profitable for me to flee, for otherwise I could not have escaped the spirit of vainglory.”
An Innocent Question
The scene has the simplicity of every page of the Paterikon: two men, sand, a danger. The brother’s question is not malicious. It only says what he believed about the elder: that such a man stands above fear. But in a single sentence an image was held out to the old man, the image of the man without fear. Every image is a pedestal, and a pedestal is the place from which one falls the farthest.
Let us not see a culprit in the brother. He asks as a disciple asks, with wonder and with love. The evil, if it is anywhere, is not in the question but in what the question can awaken in the one asked: the desire to rise to the height of the face another offers us. The elder sensed this movement before it became an act. The Paterikon is, at bottom, a school of this sensing.
Two Dragons
Psalm 90 promises the one who dwells in the help of the Most High: “You shall tread upon the asp and the basilisk, and trample the lion and the dragon” (Ps. 90:13 LXX). The Apocalypse names the adversary “the great dragon, the ancient serpent” (Rev. 12:9). Tradition has always read on two levels: the beast in the sand and the beast in the heart.
The dragon of the desert can kill the body. But the Lord said: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Mt. 10:28). The elder knew the real danger was another, a quieter one: it has no fangs, it has applause. It does not tear, it inflates. And the irony of the scene is that the visible dragon becomes the instrument of the unseen one. The presence of the beast offers the occasion for the “feat of valor”, and the presence of the brother offers the onlooker. From both a spectacle is made, and in the spectacle the soul is lost more surely than in the beast’s mouth.
A Flight That Is Not Fear
“I am not afraid,” says the elder. Let us read him carefully. Natural fear of death is not a sin. The Lord Himself, in Gethsemane, took upon Himself the movements of our nature, full of distress and of sweat like blood (Lk. 22:44), and St. Maximus the Confessor teaches that these natural movements, assumed without sin, are not a weakness of the will. Sin is not to feel fear, but to be ruled by it, or to fear what one should not.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (III, 8), draws a distinction that illuminates the elder’s word. The courageous man fears what he should, for the right end, as reason directs. And near true courage stands a civic courage, born of shame at being despised and of the desire for honor. It resembles virtue but is not virtue, because it draws its strength from the eyes of others. The brother thinks within this frame: to stand is courage, to flee is fear. The elder thinks otherwise: the question is not “do I stand or flee?” but “for whom do I stand?”.
At first glance Scripture seems to contradict him: “the righteous is bold as a lion” (Prov. 28:1), while the ungodly flee when no one pursues. But those men flee from their own conscience, while the elder flees a real pursuer whom others cannot see. The righteous man’s boldness is trust in God, not a pose; and true trust has no need of a witness.
The Gaze
Social psychology has named the same thing in different languages. Charles Cooley spoke, at the start of the twentieth century, of the “looking-glass self”: we see ourselves as we think others see us. Erving Goffman described everyday life as a stage on which we present ourselves, with a front and a backstage. Sartre made the gaze of the other a category of existence: under another’s eyes, he said, I become an object, and shame is the recognition that I am as the other sees me. Research on the “spotlight effect” (Gilovich and colleagues, 2000) shows how much people imagine they are watched. And Gardner and Steinberg (2005) showed that, among adolescents and young people, the mere presence of peers raises risk-taking, though not to the same degree in adults.
Pascal observed that vanity is so anchored in the human heart that a soldier, a cook, a porter boasts and wants admirers, and philosophers too. Kierkegaard said that the crowd is untruth, because no one answers there as a person.
The desert seems a place without a stage, but a single witness is enough: the brother. Vainglory does not require a crowd. It is the inner rewriting of every act in the third person, the silent question “how do I look?”. Here is the elder’s moment: the dragon appears, and the mind of the man hungry for admiration begins a rapid calculation. The elder saw the calculation begin. This is watchfulness (nepsis), the guarding of the mind: not to have no thoughts, but to see them coming, before they become masters.
The Subtlest of the Passions
Evagrius Ponticus calls the thought of vainglory most subtle, one that slips easily in among the virtues. John Cassian describes it as a many-sided passion that can find food in clothing, in gait, in voice, in fasting, in vigils, in prayer, and even in silence. St. John Climacus (Step 22) calls its slave a hidden idolater, who honors God in name but in fact wants to please men.
St. Paul names it by name, kenodoxia, “empty glory”: “let us not become conceited” (Gal. 5:26) and “do nothing from vainglory” (Phil. 2:3). And the Lord says to the Pharisees: “How can you believe, who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (Jn. 5:44). The Evangelist adds of some: “they loved the glory of men more than the glory of God” (Jn. 12:43).
The Fathers’ observation is grave: vainglory is often born precisely from victory over the other passions. The more the fighter has won, the greater his danger. Elder Nisterus was a man who had beaten many foes. For that very reason his greatest danger was the onlooker.
The Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple
The devil takes the Lord to the pinnacle of the Temple and quotes to Him from Psalm 90 itself: “He will give His angels charge over You… they will bear You up in their hands.” And the Lord answers: “It is written again: You shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Mt. 4:5-7). The temptation was not to fall but to turn faith into a demonstration.
To stand before the dragon in order to show that God protects the saint would be the same temptation, dressed in the garment of faith. The elder refused it. Not because he doubted God’s power, but because he knew how to tell trust from putting God to the test.
The Lord does the same with glory: after the multiplication of the loaves, when they wanted to take Him by force and make Him king, “He withdrew again to the mountain, alone” (Jn. 6:15). Not from weakness, but for our instruction. The elder walks in His footsteps.
The Price of Truth
What does the elder do when the question is put? He has two comfortable answers at hand. He could let the brother believe he is fearless, or he could say humbly “Yes, I am afraid”, which would be a lie, and moreover a new bait, humility for show. He chooses a third answer, the costly one: he tells the truth, even though it shows him, in the brother’s eyes, as less worthy than the brother had thought. He accepts being thought fearful so as not to be caught in glory. Here is the real victory over vainglory: you are no longer so bound to your image that you would defend it at the price of truth.
“It is profitable for me” is the language of the physician. The Fathers weigh deeds by the profit of the soul: “all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable” (1 Cor. 10:23). And “otherwise I could not have escaped” is the confession of a man who does not boast of having conquered the passion, but knows his own measure. This is the essence of discernment (diacrisis): not more intelligence, but the knowledge of one’s own limit. A mind that calculates endlessly is not yet discernment. Discernment knows whom it is dealing with and what it can do. St. Paul says it differently: “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10).
And the elder calls him “my son”. He does not defend himself and does not accuse his disciple. He gives him, with love, from within his own experience, a lesson the disciple would never have learned had the elder stayed on the pedestal.
When a Man Must Stay
Let us not turn this saying into a cover for fear. The martyrs stood before the beasts, and did well: what was at stake there was the confession of Christ, not their image. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, unlike the hireling, who flees when he sees the wolf (Jn. 10:11-13). If the elder had had with him a child, a sick man, someone who needed his protection, he would have stayed.
The criterion is not standing or fleeing, but what is at stake. If faith or the neighbor is at stake, you stay. If only your own face is at stake, you flee. And this distinction, however subtle, is not made alone: it is made in the light of conscience, with the counsel of a spiritual father. That is why the tradition never left anyone alone with his own calculations.
The Dragons of Our Day
Today the onlooker no longer walks beside us in the desert; he sits in our pocket. Courage has become content, risk has become spectacle, and danger is filmed before it is lived. But vainglory has quieter faces too: displayed humility, pain exhibited as a brand, piety shown. We are not speaking here of particular people, but of a movement of the heart that we all have, and the one who writes these lines first of all.
Contemporary psychology has named the healthy side of this: autonomous motivation, which comes from the worth of the act itself, as against controlled motivation, which comes from the approval of others (Deci and Ryan). The former goes with more peace. The Fathers said the same in other words: what is done for God brings rest, what is done for men brings restlessness.
The elder’s method is simple, and it takes courage, another kind of courage: to see the thought when it comes, to leave the occasion, to tell the truth when asked, and to accept the loss of one’s image. It is not a method of the weak, but of those who have understood where the real battle is fought.
The victory over the dragon belongs to Christ: “You crushed the heads of the dragons in the water” (Ps. 73:14 LXX), and by the Cross “He disarmed the principalities and powers” (Col. 2:15). All we have to do is not appropriate a glory that is not ours. Elder Nisterus understood this with his feet, by fleeing. And we can keep it in our hearts with the words of the psalm, in which all of it is gathered:
“Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Your name give glory.” (Ps. 113:9 LXX)
