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The Orthodox

Pastoral Service

Professor Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern)

Translated from Russian by Tatiana Pavlova

Content:

The Orthodox

Pastoral Service

Professor Archimandrite Cyprian (Kern)

Translated from Russian by Tatiana Pavlova

Part 1.

The Bases of the Pastoral Service.

The Ideological Foundations of Pastorship.

On pastoral serivce in general.

Pastoral Vocation.

The Pastoral Mindset.

Preparation for the Priesthood.

Ordination/ The Hierotonia.

Pastoral Temptations.

Material Support of the Priest.

The Family Life of a Priest.

The Behavior of a Priest, His Outward Appearance.

Part 2.

The Spiritual care.

The Value of Confession.

The Typology of Sinners.

On the Sin Generally.

The Pastoral aid in the matter of Confession.

Sins against God and the Church.

Sins against the Neighbor.

Carnal Sins.

The Pastoral Psychiatry.

Part 3.

The Pastoral Image According to Apostle Paul

Archbishop Athanasius (Kudyuk)

Qualities of pastors according to the Pastoral Epistles.

Deacons’ qualities.

Excerpts from the Scripture.

Advice of Father Alexander Yelchaninov

(+1934 г.) to Young Priests.

Part 1.

The Bases of the Pastoral Service.

The Ideological Foundations of Pastorship.

We must, before moving on to the study of traditional questions of pastoral theology, explain the underlying principles which must become the basis of pastoral service, and which must be built upon in complete agreement with the fundamental givens of the Orthodox worldview. The priesthood in and of itself assumes the existence of a certain environment. To be a pastor in the desert and in a hermitage is impossible. The secluded life is a special form of service to God, but there is no place in it for pastoral activity, which crosses into everyday life and the society of people. We must explain, therefore, what attitude a future pastor should have toward this world and towards man. We must determine the relationship of man to the world. A pastor must correctly appraise this world and society, which attracts man to the world and frequently distracts him from God.

The first question that arises before us is: “What is the world?”

We must recognize from the beginning that this term is unclear, and is frequently ambiguous in theological literature. The word “world,” in addition to its direct meaning, is used both in theology and in catechism with an understood ascetic meaning. Here we will turn first to this second sense of “world” in its spiritual and moral understanding, and later will discuss the world in its literal sense.

Asceticism understands the word “world” as a certain state of our soul. This “world” is not that which lies outside of a man, but rather is in himself. The Scriptures and all patristic literature teach us the same. The writings of St. John especially clearly express this attitude of the Christian mind: “the whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John 5:19). “The world knew him (God) not” (John1:10; 17:25). The Apostle Paul adds: the world by wisdom knew not God (1 Cor. 1:21). Moreover, “the world hates God and Christ” (John 7:7; 15:18-19). From this we must conclude: it is not possible to love the world and God (1 John 2:15). Therefore the pessimistic view on this world is understandable: “And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever” (1 John 2:17). The Old Testament phrase comes to the mind: “vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Eccl. 1:2). Everything passes, everything it is perishable, and all aspirations of the sons of man are only a dream…

If we review pastoral testimonies, then “the world” in their understanding is a total combination of the forces and aspirations around man, hostile to God and to that which is good. The entire world lies in the evil; it is totally poisoned and infected by sin. However, we should not reach any rash conclusion. Only the shell of this world is sinful. The Fathers see evil not in the essence of the world and its nature, but in what surrounds and envelops it. The world by itself is not wicked, but it lies in wickedness.

Here are several fragments of patristic works, written by the strictest Fathers who, it would seem, must be disposed more irreconcilably to the material. Saint Isaac the Syrian writes: “The world is the collective name, which consists of the enumerated passions. The world is the carnal life and flesh philosophy” (words 2 and 85Abba Isaiah the Wanderer teaches: “The world is the space for sin, the arena for affectations; it is the fulfillment of its carnal desires; this is the thought that you will always be in this life. The world is the care about ones body more than ones soul. The world is the concern about that which one day you will leave” (the Philocalia, Vol.1, p.372). St. Mark the Ascetic adds to this: “because of the passions we received the commandment is neither to love the world, nor that what is in it. But not in the sense that we should hate the creations of God in a foolhardy manner; rather, we must cut off occasion for the passions (the Philocalia 1, p.529). Theolipt of Philadelphia expresses that as follows: “I call the world love for the sensual things and for the flesh” (the Philocalia 5, 176).

From the above it is clear that in the language of Orthodox asceticism the “world” indicates not nature, the empirical world, or creations of God, but a certain category of negative spirituality. Creation is not in and of itself suspect. There are many stories about the love of the ascetics for a creature, for nature and beasts. The joyful acceptance of a creature with love and great respect is characteristic of the Orthodox asceticism.

This attitude and the acceptance of the physical world introduce an important amendment to how we use the word “world.” “The world” indicates not only the combination of passions and the arena of sin, but first off, God’s creation, and we must remember that this creation is “very good.” The physical world is the projection of the other, non-physical plan, according to which the Creator made this cosmos, which surrounds us. The richest Greek language was satisfied by on and the same term “cosmos” for the designation of the “world” and the “beauty.” Creation, even the fallen creation, is of Divine origin. Ideas about the world already existed in the God’s plan for the world “before the mountains came to be.” This Divine structure of the world, the mapping in it of the other, not empirical, reality gives the richest material for the so-called “symbolic realism” of the Holy fathers, and from there the abundant means for plunging into oneself and into the contemplation of this world. Only a creature of Divine origin is capable of being blessed and changed. If the world were evil in and of itself, then this would indicate that it is the creation of an evil source. But evil, as St. Maximos the Confessor teaches, “is not in the nature of creation, but in its unreasonable and sinful use.”

We must draw from Orthodox dogmatic theology completely full and sober conclusions. We must cease to suspect that, what it is not suspect by God, and which God has not disdained. It is not possible to confess the Chalcedon symbol about the incarnation of God dogmatically and at the same time to be a Manichean, a Bogomil, or eunuch in life and in worldview. Orthodoxy conquered the Monophysites dogmatically, but, in the correct words of a western historian, it did not overcome certain “psychological monophysitism.” The latter, being the disdain of man and world as the creation of God, very finely and strongly envelops asceticism, liturgy, the way of life and ethics of a Christian. A pastor must first of all understand this and to oppose this psychological monophysitism in every possible way. We must always keep in mind the decisions of the Council of Hague, which condemn immoderate asceticism and false-pious puritanism, which have no place in a sober Orthodox world view. This must become the cosmological foundation of pastoral service.

Several excellent thoughts of the writers and spiritual persons contemporary to us can explain the above. Thus, for instance, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (“Humanisme integral,” p.p. 113-118) ingeniously distinguishes three large heresies in the view on the world in the history of thought. 1. “Satanocratic,” which considers that the world is entirely evil by itself, that it is doomed and immune to the changing light of the Christianity.” The entire Reformation easily adheres to this, especially Bartianism, our sectarianism, some branches of the Old Believers, and “netovshchina.” 2. The “theocratic” heresy, which considers that the world can become the Reign of God, that this latter can be fulfilled in the limits of this historical epoch. This is the temptation of Byzantium and the same temptation of the Papacy to a considerable extent). 3. The “anthropocentric humanism” of the type of August Comte's philosophy. This is the already reversed picture, since here is present “laization” of the Reign of God. The world is and must be only the field of man’ activity. God must be banished from it. This, in other words, is utopia of the pure humanism.

In confirmation of the said above and different approaches to the “world” and about the danger to judge “the world and what is in it,” it is appropriate to give a quotation from the traveler’s diary of one pilgrim of The Holy Mountain, Mt. Athos, from the middle of the past century (Archimandrite Anthony Kapustin). “In the customary complaint of the monks about the world there is something logically unclear. For a monastery of the holy mountain, for example, the world begins behind the isthmus; for the celliots — the monastery is already the world; to a recluse — the cell is the world; for the hermits — the world is everything, behind the wall of their caves. However, what is, therefore, the world? The world is the human society. But human society is a human being himself. However, where one can escape from him?”

One of the best Russian women, abbess Ekaterina (Ephimovskaya), the founder and dean of the Lesninsky monastery (which is in Kholmshchina), who valued and loved literature, life and people, used to repeat: “It is necessary not only to escape from the “world,” but also to save the world.”

Thinking of the ideological foundations of being a priest, we must answer the second of the presented questions. A pastor must also know what his attitude to man should be.

A pastorologist expects as numerous difficulties in these apologetic prerequisites of pastoral service, as is described in the first question. Here it is much more dangerous than in the first case to yield to the temptation of simplification of the task and to solve it optimistically and primitively.

Anthropology is the science of man; it is the part of the philosophical system and has somehow a biological aftertaste, because science approaches man predominantly from the point of view of the naturalistic, treating him as an aggregate of cells, tissues, nerves and as the complex ball of different physiological processes. “Science,” in the words of Nesmelov, “can examine man only as the quarry for sepulchral worms.” Therefore, for the philosopher and theologian it is appropriate to raise the question not about the science, but about the mystery of man. Man is more likely a mysterious hieroglyph, which requires attentive, thoughtful and benevolent treatment in each individual case. The Delphian expression “get to know oneself” has an eternal value and application. To base it logically and rationally is frequently impossible. It is very easy to be tangled in human paradoxes, and it is dangerous and naive to make quick judgments about this or that act of a person.

Man belongs to the two worlds and two plans of existence: spiritual and physical. He is not only the simple thing of the physical world, to which he belongs with the body and the entire complex system of physiological processes, which were mentioned. By his spirit and personality he denies this world, he is not subordinated to the obligation and compulsion of its inexorable laws. He feels oppressed within the tight frameworks of determinism, he escapes from them. He protests against these laws of nature by means of his freedom, his personality, and by his thirst for creation. A human is a contradiction between the available content of life and its ideal application. The mystery of man lies in the understanding of this contradiction. The goal, which any person finds in life, cannot be reached easily and optimistically. The achievement of this goal in the world of natural necessity stands before the inevitable acknowledgement of the impossibility to reach this goal.

The ideal, spiritual side of man interests the philosopher, theologian and pastor most of all. All those difficult-to-solve knots, which compose the internal riddle of man, belong to this side. Let us attempt to outline some important of them, at least.
1. Personality. In this field, the Orthodox religion most completely disclosed this unique source, placed in man, who is different from any other persons. Personality was not revealed in the ancient pagan world. Hellenic thought, raised to the apexes of philosophical consciousness, did not even find the name for personality, which aroused the sharp interest in the period of those theological disputes, conducted around the Trinitarian and the Christological dogmas. Orthodoxy proved the Divine origin of the personality. The Trinitarian disputes gave a theological explanation for the human, recognizing the Person, Hypostasis, in God. The Greek language in the creations of its highest philosophical minds — Plato and Plotinus — was satisfied by the pronoun ekastos “each,” characterizing the term o ekastos, thus giving to it exact individuality. Nevertheless, this remained to be only a pronoun, something, that was “instead of the name.” Only the theological concept of the “Hypostases,” as of the independent “existence in itself,” was capable of filling that void in the language, which the contemporary dictionary replaces with the word “personality.” This is not only the “individual,” as the part of mankind, as the creation of the biological ancestral process or something mortal like a number of the naturalistic series, not one-piece, but somehow completely repeated. Personality is an imprint of God, His creation, but not the creation of a kind. Personality is spiritual and belongs to the spiritual world first of all. This is the highest value of the spiritual existence.

All these differences between the individual and the personality, so vividly described in the philosophy of Berdyaev, serve to augment his observation on the fact that “man is not a fractional part of the world, but in him is the whole puzzle and solution” (“On the Purpose of Man,” p. 50). The human personality is not a product of society, of the natural world or even of the birth and family. Each person is a direct creation of God in the spiritual sense. Therefore man does not depend on birth or the world in his origin. The human spirit is higher and wider, and the main thing, before birth, society, and world. These collaborations do not give birth to the spirit of man; therefore this spirit is not the part of the mentioned “birth, society and world.” On the contrary, it envelops them, accepts or rejects them. Birth and society consist of human individuals, but the spirit of man, his personality is not the component part of them. The human spirit can depend on them, in the way it wants to, but it is neither the property of these public organisms, nor their slave. Personality is higher than society, before it and more important. Furthermore, every personality is unique and cannot be replaced by another “similar” personality. A “similar” personality does not exist. There exist “similar” impressions, imprints, serial numbers, like production of some machine, but each personality, however many billions of them the historical process gives birth to, is unique. A pastor must know this, take this into account, and always remember it.

2. Freedom. Man reveals his Divine origin in this quality as well. The reflection of Divine freedom rests in man. All the other creatures, composed of race, geneses, societies, herds, flocks, etc., are subordinated, whether they wish it or not, following natural laws, by which these groups are arranged and live; however, man can posess the desire to rise against these laws of the natural existence (for example: monasticism) or be subordinated to them more or less implicitly. It is always possible for man, due to his Heavenly origin and the reflection of the Divine freedom in him, not to accept this nature and its laws. It is possible for man not go with the society and race; he can contradict them, in a way that bees or ants or animals cannot.

But, speaking about the man’s freedom, first we must remember well that theology speaks not about political freedom, for which people fight at the speaker’s platforms and which lives in the dreams of a young insurgent in the period of the “storm and impulses.” The only human freedom which can interest a thinking creature, and especially a theologian, is spiritual freedom. Its purpose is not in social or political independence, but in the release of the human spirit from everything that reduces it and deprives of Divine foundation. This freedom is not the despotism that anarchists and insurgents dream of, this is not tyranny, but the release of ones spirit from everything that can lower its primacy and replace this primacy with other, non-spiritual values. This freedom is insubordination to the authority of the evil, sin, mundane or other temptations, but this is also the freedom from the absolute power of the birth and society over the religious independence of man. The primacy of freedom is perhaps the feeling most deeply placed in man, but at the same time, the most paradoxical.

A) First of all, man mayt have no idea of freedom at all, since this concept is a rather complex product of the development of thought, however he cannot have any consciousnesses of freedom, because actually he acts only in the name of this consciousness.

B) Furthermore, as unconditional the primacy of freedom above all the others in man is (feeling of a kind, family, society, etc.), this freedom is given to man by force. Man is not asked at his birth, if he desires to be born having a free spirit, or being a slave or a part of some herd or beehive and so forth. Our freedom is given to us without our free will. This perhaps is the largest paradox of freedom.

C) Freedom, in spite of the way that all those, who dream about it, desire to acquire it, is at the same time such a big burden, — since it is always connected with the understanding of responsibility, — that man easily rejects it. Dostoyevsky, that same subtle inquisitors of souls, understood that love of patronizing through the “dictatorship of the conscience,” which can be easily named the elder’s teaching, although it has nothing in common with real elders. A pastor must know and understand this.
3. The Moral Dignity of man is also one of the problems of Christian anthropology, which is subject to no simplification, no matter how tempting these simplifications may be. The tendency towards holiness and purity belongs to man as to the image of God, but at the same time, the entire life experience teaches the impossibility of reaching this ideal. We have melancholy towards our celestial native land inside, melancholy about the lost paradise, and at the same time the burden of enormous gravity lies in us, and draws us down. No one expresses this better than Apostle Paul did in his study of the two laws (chapter 7 of Epistles to the Romans), — the law of the mind and the law of the flesh within us. Those words, constantly resounding inside as a reproach, are the experience not only of his life, but also of the whole of humanity, which tries to fulfill the law of the mind: “I do not what I want, but what I hate.”

The entire Christian asceticism strives to overcome this contradiction of the two laws and to fulfill the ideal of the moral purity. But here dangerous underwater stones are waiting for a simple layman or monk, and for their leader, the pastor, in the same manner. Asceticism must not be reduced only to the negative. This means that if monasticism can be acknowledged as the highest moral aspiration of the Christian spirit (that does not completely mean that the monks are always ideal Christians), then this aspiration fences itself by the three known precepts of the monastic life: benevolence, obedience and abstention. This indicates: not to have ones own property, not to get married, not to give in to any bodily pleasures and not to have ones own will. However, these four “nots” cannot be treated as the ideal spiritual practice for all Christians, since they by themselves require only nonperformance. This relates only to the first part of the verse of the psalm: “keep thyself from evil” but leaves the second disregarded: “and do good.” Man is called to do good things; moreover making good things is not only the product of some moral values. Man is commanded to be a creator, who bears the image of the Creator, Who made him. Therefore, man must, here on earth, in obedience to his Creator, produce all kinds of good both in the sphere of the moral virtues and in the spiritual, artistic, scientific world. This is exactly how the words of the Bible “on the image and similarity” were seen by the most thoughtful theologians among the writers of the antiquity: St. Gregory of Nyssa, blessed Theodoret, Basil the Selevcian, St. Anastasias of Sinai, St. Photius of Constantinople, St. John Damascene, and St.Gregory Palamas.

Man must create good, and not just abstain from doing evil. In his activity, a human rises above the usual imitation. He does not copy as a monkey does, but creates things of value to the spiritual world, science, beauty, thought and so forth, which did not exist before. In the area of such creation, a pastor must be especially wise and thoughtful, since in this he has rich educational and healing means for the pastoral care of souls.

We find a precise weapon for fighting many temptations in the creative instinct placed in man. He can use the innate forces of creation to do evil and these can lead him to their incorrect application, but they can turn out to be the rescue, a means for the transformation of his bad instincts and impulses, directed towards the lowly. The “sublimation” of the forces resting in us, which the contemporary psychoanalysis knows about, is especially applicable here. In man — the slave of passions and vices — a pastor can wake up the spirit of a creator and artist and save him from despondency and hopelessness.

Without speaker longer on the questions presented here, it is possible to say that the puzzle of man, about which the Orthodox thinker Nesmelov, the Roman Catholic psychologist Johan Klug and the Protestant theologian Emil Brunner wrote, cannot to be limited by a pastor only by the moral categories of good and evil, holiness and sin, alone, but it passes very frequently to the sphere of suffering and tragedies, conflicts and paradoxes. Plotinus said in antiquity: “But indeed man is not harmonic,” — and the pastor who desires to graze his herd wisely and save it from all contemporary dangers and paradoxes should understand this. It is not possible to define a man as a sinner or a righteous man, since this mysterious hieroglyph contains such things as fall outside the boundaries of the moral theology, and require thoughtful Christian moral psychoanalysis.