St. Silouan: on the Love of Enemies
Although it is natural and usual to love those who love us and to do good to those who do good
to us (Mat. 5:46-47; Luke 6:32-33), to love our enemies is distasteful to our
nature. One can say that it isn’t in our power but is an attitude that can only
be the fruit of grace, given by the Holy Spirit. This is why St. Silouan the
Athonite writes, “The soul that has not known the Holy Spirit does not
understand how one can love one’s enemies, and does not accept it.”
The starets
repeatedly says that love of enemies is impossible without grace. “Lord, You
have given the commandment to love enemies, but this is difficult for us
sinners if Your grace is not with us… Without God’s grace we cannot love our
enemies. He who has not learned to love from the Holy Spirit, will certainly
not pray for his enemies.” On the contrary, St. Silouan always taught that this
attitude is a gift of the Holy Spirit: “The Lord has commanded us to love our
enemies, and the Holy Spirit reveals this love to us. When you will love your
enemies, know that a great divine grace will be living in you.”
The grace of the Holy
Spirit shows to him who possesses it the way to love his enemies. But it also
reveals to him the foundation of this love: the love of God for all people and
His will to save them. “No man can know by himself what divine love is if the
Holy Spirit does not instruct him; but in our Church divine love is known
through the Holy Spirit, and that is why we speak about it.” Grace also “gives
man the capacity and the strength to love his enemies, and the Spirit of God
gives us the strength to love them.”
Starets Silouan
insisted that because love of enemies is a fruit of grace, it is essentially
only through prayer that it can be obtained. Several times he urges us to “ask
the Lord with our whole being to give us the strength to love all men.” He also
advised to pray to the Mother of God and the Saints. “If we are incapable [of
loving our enemies] and if we are without love, let us turn with ardent prayers
to the Lord, to His Most Pure Mother, and to all the Saints, and the Lord will help
us with everything, He whose love for us knows no bounds.” The starets
confessed that he himself constantly prayed to God for this. “I continuously
beg the Lord to give me the love of enemies…. Day and night I ask the Lord for
this love.” Wishing in his universal love for all men to receive such a gift,
he links them to himself in his prayer. “Lord, teach us through Your Holy
Spirit to love our enemies and to pray for them with tears. Lord, as you
prayed for your enemies, so teach us also, through the Holy Spirit, to love our
enemies.” Yet obtaining the grace to
love one’s enemies presupposes other conditions.
To love one’s enemies
is also tightly bound to humility. The starets often associated these two
virtues, pointing out that almost all the difficulties we encounter in loving
our enemies are linked with pride, from which flows the afflictions that follow
upon insults: hatred, bad temper, spite, the desire for revenge, contempt for
one’s neighbor, and the refusal to forgive and to be reconciled.
But even while pride
excludes the love of enemies, love excludes pride. “If we love our enemies,
pride will have no place in our soul.” Further, it is the link between humility
and love of enemies that proves the presence of grace and the authenticity of
love. “If you have compassion for all creatures and love your enemies, and if
at the same time you judge yourself the worst of all people, this shows that
the great grace of the Lord is in you.”
The starets sometimes
also stressed the role played by peni-tence in connection with humility.
“Regard yourself the worst of men,” he advises. Doing so mani-fests an attitude
of great humility, which by its nature implies peni-tence. He who counts
himself the worst of men necessarily thinks others better than himself and will
judge and blame himself without the need to judge and criticize his enemies,
for he tends to estimate them better than himself.
St. Silouan also
exemplified another aspect of a penitential attitude, that of asking God’s
for-giveness each time one has not loved one’s enemy. “If I judge someone or
look at him angrily, my tears dry up and I fall into despondency and again I
start asking the Lord to forgive me, and the merciful Lord forgives me, a
sinner. Through such an attitude, by which the soul humbly recognizes before
God its faults and shortcomings and obtains from Him forgiveness, an opening
can be made that becomes bigger and bigger for grace and unceasing progress in
love. As to a total absence of compassion for enemies, it shows the presence
and the action of an evil spirit; sincere repentance is the only way to be
freed from it.”
This insistence on
prayer, humility, and penitence shows that, although St. Silouan recognized the
determining role the action of grace plays in acquiring love of enemies, he did
not neglect the role played by the efforts we must make. The starets was very
conscious of the importance of our initiating action. “I beg you, try,” he
states, “In the beginning, force your heart to love your enemies.” The efforts
one makes must manifest themselves generally with focused intention and
constant good will, stretched toward the realization of God’s command. God will
not fail to respond to such effort.
LOVE IS AN interior
disposition that cannot be described adequately, but one can specify conditions
and manifestations. In this way it is possible, by close attention to the
wisdom of the Fathers, to define different steps in the love of enemies, from
the most elementary to the highest. What follows is such a list of twenty-six
steps that serves to summarize St. Silouan’s teaching on the love of enemies.
This classification in steps does not of course pretend to establish a rigorous
hierarchy. Some attitudes can be considered as being on different levels but
each attitude more or less implies the others. Thus love, particularly this
most difficult of all loves, may be analyzed in parts but in the end is a
disposition that exists as a whole and is indivisible.
The first step, says
St. John Chrysostom, is not to be the first to cause harm.
The second step is
not to take revenge in the measure one has suffered.
While the two first
degrees do not seem to concern the love of enemies, they are its preconditions.
The tendency to attack one’s enemies or to take revenge is instinctive and
spontaneous, and receives its approbation from the Old Testament law of
retaliation when taken in its most literal meaning.
The third step is not
to take revenge at all, but to leave that to God, as the Apostle Paul said:
“Recompense to no man evil for evil” (Rom. 12:17); “Avenge not yourselves, but
rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will
repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19). St. Isaac the Syrian gives the same
advice: “Let yourself be persecuted, but do not persecute. Let yourself be
crucified, but do not crucify. Let yourself be insulted, but do not insult.”
The fourth step is
not to resist. This attitude was advised by Christ: “But I say unto you that
you resist no evil” (Matt. 5:39).
The sixth step is not
to get inwardly upset about insults, abuse, trials and affliction that our
enemies make us suffer, or as St. Simeon the New Theologian puts it: “not to
turn a hair during trials and to have an equable and uniform attitude towards
those who abuse one face-to-face, who accuse, persecute, condemn, insult, spit,
or even to those who make a show of friendship and behind one’s back act in the
same way that they can’t completely hide.” We must add that this can happen on
different planes, as this attitude also has different steps. On the lowest step
it can be allied to contempt, and so be the opposite to love; one step higher
it can be allied to indifference, and so still not be in accordance with love;
on a higher plane it can show that one has attained impassibility, and higher
still, be allied to true charity.
The seventh step is to consider offenses as a gift, to rejoice about them, and to thank God for them. He who has reached this step understands the meaning of these words of Christ: “Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake” (Matt. 5:11). The Fathers advise us to consider the person who offends us as a physician providentially come to cure our souls of its diseases, particularly pride and vainglory. They emphasize the profit one can gain from what one is made to suffer. St. Zosima said, “If someone remembers a brother who has hurt, injured, or insulted him, he must regard him as a doctor and benefactor sent by Christ. If you get upset in these circumstances, it means your soul is sick. Indeed, if you were not sick, you would not suffer. So give thanks to this brother, for through him you know your illness. Pray for him and receive what comes from him as medicine sent to you by the Lord.” St. John of Gaza writes, “If we are just, the trial sent us [by our enemies] is for our progress, and if we are unjust, it is for the remission of sins and our improvement; it is also an exercise and a lesson in endurance.”
The eighth step is to
offer yourself voluntarily to suffer offenses. This attitude is advised by
Christ and recorded for us in the Gospel. “Whosoever shall strike thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matt. 5:39).
The ninth step is to
want to suffer more than one is asked to endure.
The tenth step is to
feel no hate for those who ill treat us.
The eleventh step is
to feel no rancor, wrath, or re-sentment towards our ene-mies. St. John
Climacus wrote, “Charity is first of all to reject every thought of enmity,
because charity thinks no ill” (1 Cor. 13:5).
The twelfth step is
not to accuse our enemies, not to criticize them, not to speak ill of them, not
even to reveal the harm they have done to us.
The thirteenth step
is not to despise them.
The fourteenth step
is to feel no trace of aversion or repulsion towards them.
The fifteenth step is
not to feel the slightest bitterness towards them or to the memory of what they
have done to us nor the slightest sadness.
The sixteenth step is
not to judge them at all and only to consider one’s own faults. This in answer
to Christ’s teaching to “Judge not, that ye be not judged…. [and] Why beholdest
thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that
is in thine own eye” (Matt. 7:1-3)?
The seventeenth step
is to sincerely forgive them. This attitude makes us worthy to petition God for
the forgiveness of our own faults as the Lord taught us, asking “And forgive us
our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12), and shows that we take
seriously the words of Christ that “if you forgive men their trespasses, your
heavenly Father will also forgive you” (Matt. 6:14). This forgiveness in its
highest form does not even remember what one has suffered. St. Simeon the New
Theologian notes that in this degree, love of enemies consists in “covering
with total oblivion what one has suffered” so that we “think of nothing that
has happened, whether the persecutors are present or absent.”
Still these seventeen
first steps don’t take us into what is love proper although they form
indispensable conditions and preparatory stages one must pass. Love is not
simply the absence of enmity but rather is superior to it. In this respect St.
Maximus the Confessor writes, “To feel no envy, no wrath, no bitterness towards
the offender does not yet mean to have love for him.” One can, without any
love, avoid rendering evil for evil because of the commandment. Not to hate
someone does not yet mean to love him. One can feel for him something between
the two that is neither love nor hate. It is the following steps that will
bring us to real love.
The eighteenth step
is to strive to be reconciled with one’s enemies as ordained by Christ: “First
be reconciled with thy brother” (Matt. 5:24), “Agree with thine adversary
quickly, while thou art in the way with him” (Matt. 5:25). By this attitude we
show a desire for union that is the foundation of love, contrary to which is
the tendency toward division and separation.
The nineteenth step is to feel pity and compassion for them. This attitude is in answer to Christ’s counsel, given in the context of His teaching on the love of enemies. “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful” (Luke 6:36). This is how St. Isaac the Syrian describes him who has real compassion for all beings in creation, and so also for his enemies: “When he thinks of them, and when he sees them, tears run from his eyes. So strong and so violent is his compassion, and so great is his constancy that it wrings his heart and he can’t bear to hear or to see the least harm or the slightest sadness in creation.”
The twentieth step
implies renouncing being avenged by God but also wishing that He will not
punish our enemies. The Apostle’s instruction––“Avenge not yourselves, but
rather give place unto wrath, for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will
repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19)—seems to have been given to beginners
hardly able to give up their own revenge. This twentieth step consists
positively in wanting God to forgive our enemies, to keep and save them.
The twenty-first step
is to pray to God for them. This attitude is in answer to Christ’s command to
“pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you” (Matt. 5:44, Luke
6:28). It is evident so far that praying for enemies is implied, but to this point,
it has been a means of avoiding and being purified from undesirable attitudes
like hate, spite, resentment, and pride. In the higher stages, prayer is no
longer for oneself but for the other: it leads to compassion and to love for
the enemy and permits positive attitudes to develop and strengthen. It consists
in asking God to take pity on him, forgive him his sins, save him, and give him
what is best. A sorrowful heart and tears are the sign that the prayer is deep,
sincere, and motivated by real compassion. St. Isaac the Syrian writes “He who
is compassionate prays tearfully, at all hours, for the animals without reason,
for the enemies of truth, and for all who harm him, so that they be kept and
forgiven.” “He who loves his enemies,” says St. Maximus, “will even suffer for
them if the chance is given to him.”
The twenty-second
step is to have affection for them. St. Simeon notes that at this level love
consists in “loving them from the bottom of the soul, and more still in
engraving in oneself the face of each one of them, to kiss them impassibly as
true friends with tears of sincere charity.”
The twenty-third
step, then, is to begin to wish and do them good. This attitude is in answer to
the commandments of Christ to “bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you” (Matt. 5:44; cf Luke 6:27-28), to “love you your enemies and do good”
(Luke 6:35), and “as you would that men should do to you, do you also to them
likewise” (Luke 6:31). These commandments the Apostle repeats, saying, “Bless them
which persecute you, bless and curse not” (Rom. 12:14), “Provide things honest
in the sight of all men” (Rom. 12:17), and “Therefore if your enemy is hungry,
feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink” (Rom. 12:20). In their behavior,
the Apostles show the attitude “being reviled, we bless” (1 Cor. 4:12).
When a man who was
being ill-treated asked him how to act, St. John of Gaza had only one answer:
“Do good to him.” St. Isaac advises to “Show the greatness of your compassion
by rendering good to those who were unjust to you,” and he writes that “it is a
great thing to do good to sinners more than to the just.” St. Maximus teaches
that one only really loves when one is able to “return naturally good for evil”
and that “to be capable of doing good to those who hate us is only given to
perfect spiritual love.” Love, then, does not only consist of doing good to our
enemies, but also in thinking well of them.
The twenty-fourth
step is to consider those who harm us in the same way as those who do us good
and to love them in the same way. St. Barsanuphios teaches that one must manage
“to consider he who strikes as he who caresses, he who despises as he who
esteems, he who insults as he who honors, he who afflicts as he who consoles.”
More than all the Fathers, St. Maximus advises us to treat all men equally and
to love them all without making any difference, friends or enemies, just or
sinners. He wrote, “Blessed the man who can love all men equally…. He who is
good and impassive, by the disposition of his will, loves equally all men, the
just for their nature and their good disposition, the sinners for their nature
and with the compassionate pity one has for a fool wandering in the night.” He
adds that “perfect love loves all men equally. He loves the virtuous as
friends, and the depraved as enemies…. If you detest some people and feel for
others neither love nor hate, if you love these but moderately and those very
much, know by this inequality that you are still far from perfect, as [perfect
love] loves all men equally.” Indeed “the friends of Christ truly love all
beings.” St. Isaac the Syrian gives the same teaching: “Consider all men,
whether unbelievers or murderers, as equal in good and honor, and that each one
by his nature is your brother, even if without knowing it he has wandered from
the truth…. Compassion,” he says “is a sadness born from grace; it feels for
all beings with the same affection…. He who loves all beings equally, with
compassion and discernment, has reached perfection.”
The twenty-fifth step
is to treat our enemies in the same way as our friends. “He who really loves
his enemies,” writes St. Simeon, is capable of “receiving them too as friends
at meeting for meals, without at all returning to the past.” St. John
Chrysostom says the same: “We act towards them who have harmed us as towards
real friends, and love them as ourselves.”
The twenty-sixth step
is to love our enemies not only as ourselves, but more than ourselves. Charity,
says St. Maximus, “leads harmoniously to this praiseworthy inequality through
which each prefers his neighbor to himself, as much as in the past he wanted to
push him to the side and put himself forward.” In the Apophthegmata, we read
that the monks of Sketes in the desert west of the Nile Delta sought to love their
enemies even more than themselves.
But, if one examines
the teaching of St. Silouan on the love of enemies, one notices that while he
is not unaware of the elementary steps, he mostly considers the higher levels.
This confirms what we have already said, that the teaching of the starets is
the expression of a personal experience at the highest level of spiritual life.
For the person as yet
unable to love his enemies, St. Silouan teaches that at least he must not hate
them, curse them, or snub them, and must refuse thoughts of anger against them.
In that way at least progress is made towards love.
The love of enemies implies that one not only must
bear the a fflictions that they make us suffer, but also that
one suffers them with joy for God’s sake. It also implies correlatively that
one thanks God for all these afflictions. As we have seen, they contribute to
our spiritual progress and for this reason must be received as a providential
gift of God for our salvation.
The love of
enemies also implies that, face-to-face with the violence one suffers, one
should maintain peace of soul and body. In other words, not only must one not
show irritation in return, but one must not even become agitated. Starets
Silouan also recommends that in learning to not accuse his enemies, one must
not think badly about them or even judge them at all. Rather than accuse
others, we must feel guilty ourselves.
For the
starets, the love of enemies supposes that one forgives them their offenses and
prays for them. But forgiving is not yet loving; prayer can precede love and
not yet be a manifestation of it. “When I was still in the world, I liked to
forgive with all my heart,” he said. “I forgave easily and I liked to pray for
those who had offended me, but when I came to the monastery, while I was still
a novice, I received a great grace and it taught me to love my enemies.”
St. Silouan
sees compassion as one of the principal dimensions of the love of enemies. Such
compassion consists first of all in feeling pity for them. This pity is partly
a result of being conscious that those who harm us or want to do so have a sick
soul and act under a demonic influence. In this condition, they suffer
profoundly. To the question, “How can a subordinate keep a peaceful soul if his
superior is a violent and bad man?” the starets answers, “An irascible man
endures great suffering caused by a bad spirit. He suffers torment because of
his pride. The subordinate must know this and pray for the sick soul of his
superior.”
On the other
hand, this pity results from the knowledge that he who causes harm and is
opposed to the truth or doesn’t know it, lives aloof from God, deprives himself
of His gifts, wanders far from the way to salvation, and is heading for the
plains of hell, the beginning of which he already suffers here on earth. “The
soul has compassion for enemies and prays for them because they have wandered
away from the truth and are going to hell…. A good man thinks, ‘each man who
has wandered far from the truth is going to his fall,’ and this is why he feels
pity for him…. He who has been taught by the Holy Spirit to love will suffer
all his life for those who don’t save themselves. Many tears run down his
cheeks for mankind, and the divine grace gives him strength to love his
enemies…. They are to be pitied who don’t know God and are opposed to Him––my
heart suffers for them and tears run down my cheeks. We can clearly see both
Paradise and the torments––we know this through the Holy Spirit, and the Lord
Himself said, “the Kingdom of God is in you” (Luke 17:21). So eternal life
already starts here on earth, and the eternal torments too start here.”
We see here
that pity is accompanied by compassion, that it consists in suffering what
others are suffering as if one felt it oneself, in showing true solidarity with
them in their suffering, in putting oneself in their place in their troubles.
Such is an authentic and unlimited love. The starets gives us an example of his
own compassion that is deeply lived, is accompanied by pain and tears, and is
permanent. It is as deep as what one feels for one’s loved ones when they are
in pain or trouble. “The Lord teaches us to love enemies in such a way that we will
feel compassion for them as for our own children.” We must, says the starets,
be compassionate not only for our own enemies and the enemies of truth, but for
the demons who suffer infernal pains for turning away from God and denying Him
in their voluntary deprivation of heavenly goods, their refusal to love God and
to be loved by Him. “Taught by the Holy Spirit, one will feel com-passion even
for demons, for they are separated from goodness, they have lost humility and
God’s love.”
For the
starets, compassion for enemies is linked to the compassion one must have for
all creatures without exception: “One must feel compassion for every person,
every creature and all of God’s creation.”
“The Spirit
of God teaches us to love all that exists, and the soul feels compassion for
each being, and also loves enemies and pities demons, because in their fall
they were detached from the good.” Compassion makes no exceptions. “There are
people who wish damnation and the torments in the fire of hell for their
enemies or enemies of the Church. They think in this way because they haven’t
learned from the Holy Spirit to love God. He who has learned love weeps for the
whole world! You say, ‘Let him burn in the fire of hell!’ But I ask you, ‘If
God gave you a good place in Paradise and that from there you could see in the
fire the man to whom you wished this torment, wouldn’t you feel pity for him,
whoever he is, even if he is an enemy to the Church?’ Or do you have a heart of
metal?”
The starets
felt so much pity and compassion for those who have to endure the sufferings of
hell because he had himself experienced the beatitude of Paradise and the
dreadful wretchedness of hell, and he knew the painful distance that separated
both. For him, the love of enemies implies wishing and doing good to them. He
who loves his enemies wants what is best for them—that they should repent, know
God, and obtain the grace of salvation. “We must only have one thought,” says
St. Silouan “that all be saved.”
Another
factor of the love of enemies on which St. Silouan insists is prayer. “It is a
great work in God’s eyes to pray for those who offend us and who make us
suffer.” For the starets, prayer for and love of enemies are intimately
connected. “The Lord has given on earth the Holy Spirit who teaches the soul to
love our enemies and to pray for them… Lord, teach us through your Holy Spirit
to love our enemies and to pray for them with tears… Lord, as You prayed for
your enemies, teach us also, through the Holy Spirit, to love our enemies… The
soul that has been taught to pray by the grace of God loves with compassion all
creatures, and especially man.”
Prayer indeed
awakens in us love for our enemies, and at the same time results from love and
is a witness to it. Prayer not only awakens the love of enemies, the love of
enemies awakens prayer.
An article by Jean-Claude Larchet
