Between Christ and
Freud
How many kinds of abstinence are they?
“ For there
are eunuchs who were born so from their mother ‘s womb, and there are
eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who made
themselves eunuchs because of the kingdom of heavens” ( Matthew19
:13)
This article is a late answer to a very much discussed question
a writer – doctor put : How can one live in abstinence without deranging
himself, since medicine has proven a long time that the cause of many
mental and even organic diseases is most of the time the sexual
dissatisfaction ?. The organism needs the sexual activity as much as
food or air. Man is part of nature and he submits the laws of nature ,
that is why bending ? them cannot be without destructive
consequences.
The classic reasoning that everybody knows about.
Nothing one can say against this sensible description that has been
demonstrated by the so long a practice of medicine. We read about it in
the magazines, we hear about it on TV, We learn about it in
school.
We are bombed from all over the place by advertisements of
all kinds: “ Do it this many times a day and you will be more beautiful!
Those who this and that don’t grow old! ”. And so on.
We all know the
looks of an abstinent person . He has pimples on the face, he is
nervous, even hysterical , he is tyrannized by fantasies who give him a
sullen look, in one word, he is a cradle of complexes.
It is
difficult to use this argument when you present it to a young monk who
does not show any of these symptoms. Male and female monks are in an
overwhelming rate extremely beautiful people , first of all physically,
people happy to be alive, and secondly embellished by an unusual
sensitivity.
“ Never mind! We know, they have their own women, in the
worst case they are all homosexuals!”
I wouldn’t want to argue a so
spread an opinion about monks and neither will I defend the right of the
monasticism to exist .I want to attend shortly and precisely to what is
real. It is sure that monasticism exists, weather it infringes or not
the laws of nature. This is the reason my answer is not a defense, but a
story about a phenomenon that has been with us for 2000 years,
gracefully overtaking the laws of biology.
Yes, man has instincts,
Freud is right. So is Darwin, to a certain extent. Man is slave to these
instincts and he satisfies them with animal appetite. I personally saw
people deranged because of sexual dissatisfaction, women with hairy
necks and lustful eyes. All this is true and I have no reason to
contradict the medical point of view. To support the tradition of our
Church I need not destroy scientific truths. On the contrary, I will use
them in my argumentation because they are also my truths.
Indeed, if
we cast God away from the Universe, as Darwin and Freud did, if we
consider death the limit of human life , then man is a simple rational
animal, who is born, grows, has descendants and dies. A healthy member
of the species must carry out all these commandments , he must be a link
between generations. In this picture, monks and the abstinent are dead
links, parasites who ruin the natural harmony.
The man raised in this
limited space, tyrannized by the imminence of death, the man who sees
only sick and old people has reason to rely on this theory. He knows he
was born, he watched himself grow, he sees himself taken over by organic
impulses and therefore believes.
It is faith that determines the
reactions and the state of man.
Freud knew it very well when applying
his method of plunging into the patient’s past. He needed the memories
and obsessions of his patient to devise for him a story that was good
enough to believe! Out of these images and obsessions – that for the
patient may have not even been related, Freud put together a creed. The
creed was the easier to accept the more it consisted of very familiar
but also very mysterious elements. This way, the patient regained
coherence of thinking, and coherence made him healthy.
There are in
a man’s life familiar things, new things, some of them pleasant, some
unpleasant and shocking things. All depends on the tradition in which
one was educated. Education determines to quite an extent not only
mental reactions, but also the organic ones. For example, there comes to
mind a story told by friends who worked somewhere in Astrahan cutting
trees. It is known that locals eat dogs. They happened to be at a supper
where they ate their fill, without knowing what they ate and, of course,
liked it. It is just that when they were told what they had eaten, they
ran outside and threw everything up. Their organism had taken the food
in, but their mind, because of their education, expulsed it furiously,
breaking the natural necessity the body felt.
The same happens in
case of sexual necessity. A man educated in a society that is Freudian
par excellence – such as ours, is natural to feel the symptoms described
by the Viennese scientist.
The causes of the metabolic
disfunctionalities that the abstinent described by Freud and
postfreudian medicine experiences are not necessarily organic, but first
of psychical .I personally met and I am still meeting persons with
emotional problems who were recommended by doctors to lead a more
intense sexual life . But they didn’t get to lose their neck hair, or
get rid of their depressions, nor improve their relationships with
others. On the contrary, after coming to sell things and gold from the
house and giving money away to neighborhood teenagers “ for the
treatment”, somebody I knew ended up killing herself. I think there are
many ending up this way, I don’t have statistical results.
The
atheist doctors’ belief in this hypothesis of sexual healing has been
dreadfully exaggerated, al least in Romania. I know very well that in
mental hospitals patients are released so they could mate like animals,
and after a while surgeons come and perform abortions on the poor female
patients. I wonder weather this method of treatment is more “human” than
monasticism.
It is not the lack of coitus and the seminal deposits
that put the patient to misery, but the lack of affectivity. Freud also
took notice that the alienated melancholic masturbate a lot, so one way
or the other, they fulfill their physiological needs. Nevertheless, this
does not awaken their vitality and does not cure their diseases. If a
temporary amelioration after this type of treatment was noticed ( I know
doctors create couples of patients ), there must be that the poor
people, humiliated this way, may have united their souls , beyond this
animal- like, saddening seminal discharge, there is to say they must
have known love, as much as made possible for them.
In order to
understand the paradox of the fortunate abstinence of monks one must
separate the world in two. There is the Freudian space – in which the
contemporary society dwells and there is the Christ’s space, in which
all saints have been dwelling since the beginning of time until the end
of it.
Freudian space is limited – on one side , by the mystery of
birth and on the other by the absurd, imminent death. Inside this morbid
arch man has very few pleasures at hand, in exchange has lots of phobias
; fear of death, fear of malady, fear of growing old, fear of poverty,
fear of loneliness.
From this perspective, a man’s life is a painful
absurdity that he is compelled to transform into something beautiful.
That is why man is bound to any opportunity for pleasure life offers him
: sexual pleasure, the most powerful of them , the pleasure to create
beautiful objects, the pleasure of knowledge, even the trivial pleasure
of eating well.
From this respect, the evolution of Greek hedonism is
interesting as explained by scientists like Mircea Eliade or Walter Otto
. Greeks were not a non – religious people, they were not unaware of
immortality or the intervention of supernatural forces. It is just that
gods whom Greeks believed in were not philanthropic , they felt no
compassion for the suffering of men and did not support them. On the
contrary, when Prometheus , a minor god, wanted to bring fire to men,
Zeus punished him severely , tying him up to a rock where vultures would
chop his leaver that grew back over night to be devoured forever. These
men filled with despair – amplified by their belief in an unchangeable
destiny, at the end of which the flames of Hades awaited, ,decide to
experience pleasure here, on earth. So the theaters, Dionysus’s orgies ,
Olympic games increased.
The Freudian man, who is anybody who watches
TV with delight, has even more reasons than Greeks to demand his right
to pleasure. After being born against his will, man is thrown in a world
full of injustice, is compelled to do things he doesn’t like and
eventually grows old and die.
The most powerful pleasure towards
which man aspired since childhood , according to Freud’s opinion –
without reasonable doubt, appears to man as a liberating oasis. This is
sexual pleasure, adorned with the garlands of a minor mysticism - in the
best case , like some oriental beliefs.
This pleasure becomes purpose
and an evaluation criterion. A man is more of a man if surrounded by
women and a woman more of a woman if surrounded by men. In one word, to
live means to satisfy your physiological needs.
It is natural that
the young man who has no access to these pleasures for various reasons
feel unfulfilled, a waste. This state is bothering him and plunges him
into the hell of melancholy and inutility. He creates o world of hidden
thoughts in which he is a hero, had a motorcycle and money. He is never
at rest, faces of mermaids take him out of the troubled waters of his
imagination to the black shores of illness.
Here is the cause of
Freud’s falling ill : the sensation of one’s inutility and failure,
while threatened by the intransigent death closing in, and not at all
the trivial unsatisfying of physiological needs.
Monks do not suffer
any of these complexes. Their universe is configured differently. Monks
are truly dead, that is to say they lost consciousness of the past or
the future, they have only the present, a moment long present. Beyond
this moment eternity begins .
Being out
of this world, having the immutable belief that the earth is just a
rented hotel room he will soon desert, the monk leads a rather out of
body life as Saint Paul the Apostle wrote: “ But if Christ is in you,
though the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is life because of
righteousness”. ” For the law of the Spirit of life has freed me in
Christ Jesus from the law of sin and of death” . “So then, brothers, we
are debtors not to the flesh to live according to the flesh” (Romans
8.10,2,12.) Lodging, food and all his occupations represent and nourish
this way of living called “angelic”.
In order to stop caring for the
body, monks don’t even cut their hair or beard and oldtime ascetics did
not wash their bodies – and so are doing many monks from Athos and from
monasteries that are not open for public. According to monastic rules,
monks sleep dressed with the same clothes they wear during the day ( or
at least with the same type of clothes – the monachal clothes) , leather
belts tied around their waists, like slodiers always ready to die. This
helps them get rid of the obsession for the body and its
necessities..
The unfaithful always mocked the non-hygienic
conditions of Christian ascetic way of living. Soviet atheists used very
seriously this aspect in their lectures as to prove the inhumanity of
Christian religion that dishonours the dignity of man in the name of an
absurd and sadistic God who enjoys the humiliation of his creature. How
many of those have ever had the opportunity of knowing or at least
seeing a true ascetic?
The bodies of these man don’t exhale the
unpleasant smell of filth , as they should. I personally had the joy of
living by the side of such a holy oldman , 93 years of age and I can
share this with you. A trustworthy monk ( who is a graduate of the
Faculty of Medicine of Bucharest) told me about another “unwashed”
oldman of the kind from a Romanian monastery, whose hand he kissed and
smelled like roses. He was not a monk at the time, and he said he was’t
too keen on kissing it, as he stood tousled in a cell full of spiders,
especially since he was not a priest , but a deacon. After leaving the
room he asked the friend who brought him along ( who also became a monk)
if they had given the oldman a bath, since he smelled so sweet. He was
told the oldman had not taken a bath in ten years. The oldman weighed so
heavily that he brought rain at drought time with his prayers.
The
active passions make a body stink and exhale the scent of death. The
body divinized by the gift of the Holy Spirit may spread an unnatural
perfume, the same we experience in the closeness of the holy relics If
bodies that have been dead for hundreads of years, others for two
thousands – like those of the Saints smell so sweet there is no wonder
they smell the same while alive.
To make myself understood, I am
going to use an example more familiar and easy to verify. The
slaughterers of pigs, bulls and whethers know very well that the males
marked for sacrifice must be castrated a while before to spare the meat
of the charasteristic odour. This odour is not a consequence of the
filth of the animal, but the result of hormone activity. The men who had
cleansed themselves of passions and smothered in themselves any desire
or bodily interior motion , the holy monks we I speak about, spared
their bodies of the stink of instincts that others cannot remove with
the aid of the most expensive soaps and perfumes.
The monk’s central
preoccupation is putting an end to fancy, to any human imagination, even
of rigtheous subjects, in order to make way to the gift of the Holy
Spirit. Therefore a monk advanced in virtue practically has no personal
desires, it is no longer he who lives, but it is Christ who lives in him
( Galatians 2:20)., like one who has no past nor future, only the
premonition of eternity, better said, lives eternity.
Under these
conditions, the abstinent for Christ are protected of the factors that
can cause organic and psychologic damages. Fantasies that entertain and
amplify the Freud man’s suffering, as far as Christians are concerned,
are either totaly missing or last shortly and so are unable to divert
the will from its main goal which is Christ.
In order to put a
perfect end to fancy, the orthodox ascetic tradition , unlike the
catholic one, forbids any attempt to imagine even the aparently divine
subjects like The Judgement Day, Christ on the throne or Christ hanging
on the Cross.” He who sees nothing when he prays, sees God” , said Saint
Simon The New Theologian. With the aid of this uninterrupted practise
and the participation of the Holy Spirit, the ascetic comes to the point
where he no longer dreams, which means he is able to control even the
subconscious motions during sleep. It is understood the reason such a
man controls very easily the so brutal the impulses of lust, perfectly
ending them.
The struggle of passions is not done however and by
whomever. On the contrary, very few, even among monks, reach the level
described above. The ascetic is first of all an expert of the human
soul, a great psychologist and even psychiater. In order to gain this
knowledge he studies treatises of astonishing preciseness his
predecessors wrote, which are included in The Philocalia ( an
encyclopedia of monastery life) and other works. Therefore no ignorant
novice cannot penetrate and maintain himself in this dangerous space of
virginity for Christ; this is proved by the many who have gone insane
because they carried this fight without skilful masters - I mean
especially the lay who attempt to imitate monks after reading without
proper guidance the works easy to find today. Indeed, there are many
among them in sorrow, cruely tormented by melancholy and irritability,
which are the inevitable fruits of lust. But this doesn’t occur because
virginity is impossible, but because they practise it wrongly, pray
incorrectly and high – mindedly think they are doing something
important. Therefore God takes away His gift, apart from Which we can do
nothing ( John 15,5) leaving the man by himself with his wretched
weapons against the irrational fury of this monstrous passion.
Man
cannot stand alone to this furios ocean, cause love is as tough as
death, and jealousy as horrid as hell ( The Songs of Songs). Therefore
it is not easy to explain the phenomenon of joyous abstinence to the
unfaithful who cannot accept the work of the Holy Spirit within man. The
ascetis has the organic and psychologic configuration of any oyher man,
so he is vulnerable. But he is protected as if under a bell by the gift
of the Holy Spirit. All his refraining efforts are meant to prevent the
desertion of the gift once he has earned it. More precisely, the
refraining are meant to gain lowliness that God shall not persecute ( Ps
50)
Life After Death
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Father Cleopa: The Elder of Romanian Orthodoxy
The Life and Works of PROTOSINGELOS IOANICHIE MOROI of Sihăstria Monastery
Glossologia (speaking in tongues) - Elder Cleopa
About Holy Scripture by Elder Cleopa of Romania
About Holy Tradition by Elder Cleopa of Romania
Magic and Occultism - by Elder Cleopa
On the Presuppositions of our Personal Salvation - by Elder Cleopa
The Second Coming of Christ - by Elder Cleopa
On the Thousand Year Reign (Chiliasm) - by Elder Cleopa
Movies for children - The Phenomenon Harry Potter - Resemblance to the occult activity
The mysteries of music - THE TRUTH ABOUT ROCK MUSIC
"CHRISTIAN" INTEREST IN UFO ( aliens )
Charismatic Revival As a Sign of the Times - by Fr. Seraphim Rose
About Evolutionism - SCIENCE AND RELIGION
How to Read the Holy Scriptures - Fr. Seraphim Rose
Orthodoxy in America - by Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose)
Signs of the Times - by Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
THE FUTURE OF RUSSIA AND THE END OF THE WORLD - by Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
THE HOLY FATHERS SURE GUIDE TO TRUE CHRISTIANITY - by Fr. Seraphim Rose
The Orthodox World-View - by Blessed Father Seraphim Rose
Fr. Seraphim (Rose) Speaks - Excerpts from His Writings
The Orthodox Revival in Russia AS AN INSPIRATION FOR AMERICAN ORTHODOXY - by Fr. Seraphim Rose
Buddism and orthodoxy - Through The Eastern Gate - By Nilus Stryker
Orthodox Catechism
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About Holy Angels
The Saints speak out on abortion
Hieromonk Savatie Bastovoi:
About pornography, pollutions and monasticism - A reply for a stranger who could be just anyone of us
THE FIRST LOVE
Between Christ and Freud
What I Intended to Understanding while Watching “The English Patient”
About the movie “The Last Temptation of Christ” (From the Byzantine Icon to the TV Set)
WHY DO THEY KILL THE LIGHTS IN DISCO CLUBS?
FREEDOM MEANS PUTTING NO BREAKS ON LOVE
WHO IS AFRAID OF SAINTS?
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The scandalous commandment
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Zodiacs, horoscopes …
The holiday of undeification
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With a kiss closer to death
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SINGING UNDER WATER
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About the contradictory opinions regarding the obedience