Part 2
The Early Church: The Healing of the Passions
The Egyptian monks contributed to Christian ethics what no philosopher had produced: a clinical account of how character is actually changed.
Passion and its opposite
Having catalogued the eight principal thoughts (Chapter 3), the tradition prescribed treatment. The principle is that a passion is not defeated by direct assault but displaced by the cultivation of its opposite virtue.
- Gluttony is treated by temperance and by fasting.
- Lust by chastity, by guarding the eyes, and by removing occasions.
- Avarice by almsgiving — the treatment being the deliberate practice of giving away the thing you are gripping.
- Anger by meekness, by silence, and by praying for the person who provoked it.
- Dejection by thanksgiving and by hope.
- Listlessness, the acedia that afflicted monks at midday and afflicts everyone else on Sunday afternoons, by perseverance and manual work. The monks' remedy for spiritual boredom was to make something with their hands.
- Vainglory by hiddenness — doing good deliberately where no one can see.
- Pride by humility, which the tradition regarded as the ground of everything else.
Notice how physical these remedies are. The Fathers did not treat character as a matter of insight. They treated it as a matter of practice, and they were right.
Apatheia
The goal of this training was given a name that translates badly: apatheia. It does not mean apathy, indifference, or the suppression of emotion. It means the state in which the passions no longer command — in which a person is no longer dragged by anger, appetite, or fear, and is therefore free to love. Evagrius made the connection explicit, teaching that love is the offspring of apatheia. The dispassionate person in this sense is not the cold person; he is the one who can finally attend to somebody other than himself.
The sayings
The desert literature makes these points in stories, and the stories are better than the summaries.
St Antony taught that virtue is not far off or foreign, but within us and needing only our willingness, since the soul's rational faculty is naturally ordered towards it. He also said that whoever has not been tempted cannot enter the Kingdom, which is a statement about how virtue is manufactured. And he located the whole thing in relationship: our life and our death, he said, are with our neighbour, because if we win our brother we win God and if we cause our brother to stumble we sin against Christ. There is no private holiness in this tradition.
St Macarius the Great, asked by a brother how to be saved, told him to go to the cemetery and insult the dead, and then to go back the next day and praise them. The brother did both and reported that the dead had said nothing either time. Macarius told him that he would have to become like that: unmoved by contempt and unmoved by flattery. Anyone who has ever checked how a post performed will recognise the diagnosis.
Amma Syncletica described the beginning of the spiritual struggle as like lighting a fire: at first there is smoke and stinging eyes and weeping, and afterwards the fire catches. Amma Theodora taught that neither asceticism nor vigils nor any form of hardship saves a person, but humility alone.
And there is a story told of St Macarius which the Coptic tradition has always liked because it punctures its own heroes. An angel told him that he had not attained the stature of two women living in a nearby town. He went to find them, expecting extraordinary austerities, and found two ordinary married women, sisters-in-law sharing a house, who told him they had done nothing remarkable: they had simply lived together for many years without ever quarrelling, and had never spoken a harsh or idle word to each other.
That story is the whole point of this chapter. The two women had no ascetic programme. They had become people who did not wound each other, which is harder than sleeping on a stone floor.
Community as the workshop
St Basil the Great argued, against the extreme solitaries, that the common life is a better school of virtue, on the plain grounds that a hermit has nobody to serve, nobody whose faults he must bear, nobody to forgive, and nobody to wash the feet of. Whose feet do you wash on your own?
This applies directly to family life. A marriage, a household with small children, an ageing parent, a difficult colleague, and a parish full of people you did not choose are not obstacles to the spiritual life. They are the equipment.
The Coptic Orthodox Understanding
The Coptic Church has never separated ethics from ascetic practice, and this is its most distinctive contribution. In many Christian traditions the monastic inheritance stayed in the monasteries. In Egypt it went home with everybody. An ordinary Coptic family keeps a discipline that in other traditions would be regarded as advanced.
Prayer. The Agpeya, the Coptic book of hours, provides seven daily offices, built largely from the Psalms with fixed prayers. Its value is not that anyone keeps all seven perfectly but that it removes the question of what to pray, and that repetition over decades furnishes the mind with something other than its own anxieties. Alongside it, the tradition urges the short repeated prayer, above all the invocation of the name of Jesus with a plea for mercy — the practice by which a person can pray while doing something else, which is most of life.
Fasting. The Coptic Church fasts more than almost any other Christian body. Wednesdays and Fridays through most of the year, the Great Fast before Pascha, the Nativity Fast, the Fast of the Apostles, the Fast of the Virgin, the Fast of Nineveh: taken together, something in the region of two hundred days a year, though the count varies by reckoning and practice. The form is generally abstinence from animal products, with periods of abstaining from food altogether earlier in the day.
Its purpose must be stated exactly, because it is so easily mistaken. Fasting is not dieting, not a health regime, not a demonstration of toughness, and not a way of impressing God or anyone else. It is training in the ability to say no to a legitimate desire, undertaken so that the ability exists when the desire is not legitimate. It is also, in the Coptic understanding, a matter of solidarity — food not eaten is money not spent, and the tradition explicitly links fasting to almsgiving.
The Church has always dispensed. Illness, pregnancy and breastfeeding, childhood, old age, hard physical labour, medication requiring food, and travel are all recognised grounds for relaxation, and the decision is made with a priest rather than alone. A fast that damages a person's health has stopped being a fast. And a specific caution belongs here: anyone with a history of disordered eating should not undertake fasting without both medical and pastoral advice, because religious language can be captured by an illness and turned into cover for it. Chapter 25 treats this at length. No one should ever be shamed for eating.
Confession is the Coptic tradition's principal instrument of transformation, as Chapter 3 described: not a tribunal but a consultation, in which the pattern is examined and a practice is prescribed.
Holy Communion. The Coptic Church communicates frequently and prepares seriously: fasting beforehand, confession, and reconciliation with anyone one is at odds with, since the Liturgy itself requires it. St Cyril of Alexandria insisted that this is not a symbolic transaction but a real physical union with Christ, who enters the communicant bodily and works transformation from within. This is why Orthodox ethics can be so demanding without becoming moralistic. The demand is not that we generate holiness. It is that we present ourselves regularly to the One who has it.
Almsgiving, hospitality, and service complete the pattern. And hiddenness is insisted upon throughout: the Coptic tradition is deeply suspicious of visible spirituality, and its heroes are people who took considerable trouble to be mistaken for ordinary.
Pope Shenouda III taught extensively on the interior life, on humility as the ground of all virtue, on the danger of spiritual pride in those who keep the disciplines strictly, and on the necessity of a spiritual guide. I characterise his teaching rather than quoting it.
St Gregory of Nyssa supplies the horizon. Reflecting on Moses, he argued that the soul's progress into God has no terminus: because God is infinite, growth into Him is unending, and perfection consists in never ceasing to grow.[^c4-13] This is a startling and consoling doctrine. It means that the question "have I arrived?" is malformed. There is no arriving. There is only travelling, for ever, further in.
Other Christian Views
Roman Catholic moral theology has the most developed virtue tradition, principally through St Thomas Aquinas, who distinguished acquired virtues, built by repeated human action, from infused virtues, given directly by God, and analysed each virtue with great precision. The Catholic sacramental system serves the same function as the Coptic one, and Catholic ascetic practice, though generally lighter in the modern period, has the same monastic roots.
Reformation Protestantism was suspicious of much of this, and the suspicion deserves a fair hearing rather than a dismissal. The Reformers were reacting to a late-medieval religion in which ascetic achievement had visibly become a currency — where merit could be accumulated, counted, and even transferred. Their charge was that this reverses the Gospel by making human effort the ground of standing before God. Protestant theology therefore speaks of sanctification as the work of the Holy Spirit applying Christ's finished work, and emphasises Word, sacrament, prayer, and Christian community as the means, while treating fasting and similar disciplines as permissible but not required.
Within Protestantism there is considerable range. The Wesleyan and holiness traditions have a strong doctrine of growth in grace and of Christian perfection understood as perfect love. The Reformed tradition emphasises the ongoing struggle and the persistence of sin in the believer. Pietist and evangelical movements have produced their own rich practices of self-examination and accountability.
Where does this leave the Orthodox reader? With a real disagreement about mechanism and a large agreement about substance. Orthodoxy speaks of synergy: God's grace and human freedom cooperating, with grace always first and always primary. Classical Reformed theology worries that synergy gives the creature a share in its own salvation. Orthodoxy replies that the New Testament plainly requires human cooperation, and points to St Paul saying in one breath that he worked harder than all of them and that it was not he but God's grace (1 Corinthians 15:10). Christians should be able to argue about this without either side accusing the other of denying grace or denying effort. Both denials would be heresies, and neither party is actually committing them.
Secular virtue ethics has undergone a substantial revival since the middle of the twentieth century, associated with Elizabeth Anscombe's critique of modern moral philosophy in 1958 and with Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue in 1981, which argued that modern moral discourse consists of fragments of an older tradition whose framework has been lost. Christians can welcome the recovery of character as a moral category. The difficulty MacIntyre himself identified remains: a virtue is an excellence relative to a purpose, and it is hard to say what human excellence consists in without saying what human beings are for.
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