Discourse 40

Interpretation of the Orders of Behaviours: On the Power of the Practice of Each One of Them. 40. The bodily behaviour of stillness: it purifies the body from the elements within it. The behaviour of the mind: it purifies the soul and frees it from the thick disturbances that come from perishable things. From that which is sensibly moved, it is moved towards that which is its own contemplation. And this one brings it to the incorporeality of the air, that which is called the immaterial contemplations, which is the spiritual behaviour. This, then, when it lifts the intellect from earthly things, brings it to the first contemplation of the spirit, and sets the intellect before God in a vision of ineffable glory, and it is delighted intellectually in the hope of the future things. What and how each one of these: the bodily behaviour towards God calls the labours of the body. Let them be for the purification of the body, through the practice of asceticism, by the manifest works in his station, by which it is freed from the coarseness of the flesh.

s the mind. The behaviour of the mind: it is the labour of the night, which is without disturbance in the stillness; that of the great silence of the future, and the continuous prayer of the heart; and in its expansion and its cessation in God, who is beyond the world; through solitary and interior groanings, together and to guard the boundaries of the inner passions, so that none of them may reach the hidden place and the spirit. This is the labour of the heart, which is called the behaviour of the mind. In this labour of behaviour, which is called spiritual service, the heart is cut off and separated from the partnership of corruption, from the passions that are outside nature. From it, from here, every movement begins at all times in thought concerning those things that are perceived, those things that are for the stimulation of the natural faculties of the body's growth, and through the service of their powers, they give strength to the four elements of the body. The spiritual behaviour is: service without senses. This is what is written for the fathers: that when the states of the holy ones receive the vision of their standing, then the thickness of the body is also removed from the middle, and the vision from then on will be spiritual. The vision of their standing speaks concerning the first pure creation. That from here on, the interpretations will be moved concerning that which is called solitary knowledge, which is like a clear interpretation: a door to God.

This is the order of that great conduct of the future: which is given in the freedom of the life of immortality, in that transformation after the resurrection. In that which is no longer interrupted by the natural course from that place: from the continuous intoxication with God, towards something from creation to be added. For if there were something else that would delight him, he would be delighted in it, and would be delighted in that. But if the beauty of everything that is in that future state is beneath the beauties that are his own, how can the mind go out in its vision beyond this? What then? Mortality constrains him, or the burden of the flesh, or the remembrance of his brothers, or the ascent of the just one, or the obstacles of the found, or the negligence of ignorance, or the imperfection of the just one, or the negligence of the elements, or the mixture of one with another, or the cessation of the agent, or the weakness of the flesh. But if even in this world, when all these exist, when in delight the mind is stirred and freed from the pains before the eyes of thought, and gazes upon that glory, immediately the mind is carried away into the deep. And if God had not set a limit for these desires in this life, how great would be the delay in them throughout the whole life of a person if he were left, he would not go out from that place.

Thus we know that all these things are not, and that conduct is without limit. And in it, through acts that are of the essence of standing, we are now within, from the generations of the kingdom, if our conduct is equal. Again, there would be for him an exit from the mind, to be distant from the vision of the wonder of God, to find something else? Woe to us who do not know ourselves, that it is a vain conduct that we practice. And to these lives of purity and the order of the living, and to the world and its afflictions and its evils and its life, we consider that something exists. Christ, who alone is the hope: blessed is the man who is your helper, and who raises you up in his heart. You, O Lord, turn our faces from the world by the desire for you, that we may see it as it is, that shadows may no longer be considered as realities. O Lord, cast into our mind a concern before death, that at the time of our departure, we may know what our entrance and our departure from this world have been. So that when the work that is not completed is called, like your thought, by which we are anointed in these lives beforehand, it may be sealed in the mind that is full of trust, for the reception of the great ones, which are like the promises of the scriptures in the creation of the two that are prepared for your love, those that are kept for us, whose remembrance is in the faith of the mystery.

Purity of the body is: restraint from defilement. Purity of the soul, however, is: liberation from hidden passions. It is established by means of contemplation. Purity of the mind is: that which is purified by revelations from the motion that is above every effort beneath the evil sensation of their thickness. Even their children, the youths, who are still in the body, and in their souls they are without passions. For no one calls them pure in mind. Purity of the mind: it is the perfection of the contemplation of the heavenly visions, which is moved without sensations by the spiritual powers of the worlds above, which are wondrous and surpass measure, distinct in their transformations and intermingled in their service to the invisible, which by the motion of divine revelations are stable in their changes without limit.