Upon first glance, it may not seem that the teachings of the Desert Fathers and the early monastic communities would have much to offer contemporary Christians. In the book, To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church, Roberta C. Bondi proves that this assessment is far from the truth. The sayings of the Desert Fathers are rich with spiritual insights. Their time in the desert provided them with deep insights into spiritual transformation. Their greatest insight can be summarized as follows: Love is the goal of spiritual transformation, and it is achieved primarily through humility.

To Love is Human

Our culture assumes that the goal of human life is individual self-development or self-actualization. However, the goal of the Christian faith is self-giving love, not self-actualization. Humility, not self-advancement, is the necessary means through which this godly love is birthed. In contrast to a society that is enslaved to its own needs and desires, those who love God and others gain true freedom.

Though it sounds odd to our ears, the call is to perfect love. We are used to thinking of “perfection” as a bad word. We unconsciously read a pagan philosophy into it rather than a biblical meaning. To the Greeks, perfection allows for no improvement. It is unchanging, static, and complete. However, to the Desert Fathers, perfect love means to love God with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love our neighbor as ourselves. “To be a perfect human being, a human being the way God intends human beings to be, is to be a fully loving person, loving God, and every bit as important, loving God’s image, the other people who share the world with us” (17). Our contemporary rejection of perfect love causes us to define humanity in relationship to our moral failings: “To err is human.” “But on the contrary, for the sisters and brothers of the desert quite the reverse was true; for them, ‘to love is human; not to love is less than human’” (18).

The challenge we all face is that many things prevent us from loving God and others as we should. The obstacles are not the same for everybody. “People are different from each other; what keeps me from being able to love is probably very different from what hinders you. What corrects my lack of love may only make your situation worse” (11). Therefore, the means of spiritual growth will be different for each individual.

Desert Humility

In order to understand the Desert Fathers’ emphasis on humility, we must reevaluate it. We often understand humility in a self-directed way – as an impoverished view of self. However, humility “has nothing to do with a low self-image” (44). Humility has more to do with how we view others than how we view ourselves. To the Desert Fathers, humility meant

a way of seeing other people as being as valuable in God’s eyes as ourselves. It was for them a relational term having to do precisely with learning to value others, whoever they were. It had to do with developing the kind of empathy with the weaknesses of others that made it impossible to judge others out of our own self-righteousness. (18)

Humility is not so much a virtue as it is an attitude of heart that underlies all Christian virtues. It is humility that keeps us from distorting Christianity into dry intellectualism or mere moralism. The goal is love, not self-actualization through the acquisition of personal qualities.

Humility puts perfection in its place. The goal is perfect love, not self-perfection. Perfection that is self-focused is self-righteous. It is the sin of the Pharisees to believe that one can be righteous enough to criticize and condemn others. “Self-righteousness is the opposite of love” (22). All good gifts are from God. We can take no credit for them. “No one is in a position to look down on another from a superior height because of her or his hard work or piety or mental superiority. We are all vulnerable, all limited, and we each have a different struggle only God is in a position to judge” (43).

Humility is the means to perfect love. Humility involves living out the attitude “that all human beings, every man, woman, and child, are beloved creatures of God” (42). Humility allows us to see people as God sees them: “When we find people’s flaws after a long acquaintance with them, we believe we are finally seeing the truth about them. Our Christian ancestors thought exactly the opposite: we see people as they really are only when we see them through the tender and compassionate eyes of God” (60-61).

Because of their view of humility, the Desert Fathers believed that the essential quality of pride “is not found in having too high an opinion of oneself so much as too low an opinion of everyone else” (76).

Ultimately, humility reflects God. “The first ingredient of God’s love is God’s humility. All of God’s dealings with us are marked by the humility of God we see so amazingly in the incarnation itself. The depth of God’s humility is simply beyond our imagining.

… Just as neither the ages above nor the ages below can grasp the greatness of God and [God’s] incomprehensibility, so also neither the worlds above or the worlds on earth can understand the humility of God and how [God] renders [God’s] self little to the humble and small. Just as [God’s] greatness is incomprehensible, so also is God’s humility. (104)

Love is the Goal

For the Desert Fathers, love is the goal. Dorotheos offers a beautiful illustration concerning how the practice of love toward others draws us into the love of God.

Suppose we were to take a compass and insert the point and draw the outline of a circle. The center point is the same distance from any point on the circumference. . . . Let us suppose that this circle is the world and that God himself is the center: the straight lines drawn from the circumference to the center are the lives of human beings. . . . Let us assume for the sake of the analogy that to move toward God, then, human beings move from the circumference along the various radii of the circle to the center. But at the same time, the closer they are to God, the closer they become to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they become to God. (25)

This metaphor not only illustrates how love draws us to God, but it also puts God in his proper place – at the center of all things and all relationships. “It assumes that God is present in a real way in God’s own universe, at the center, metaphorically speaking, drawing all people and things to God by a natural love for God, placed in their nature by their creator” (25).

If the goal is love, and love toward others draws us into the love of God, then the opposite is also true. Refusing to love others draws us away from the love of God. Keeping the goal of love in mind is an antidote against the mistaken idea that one could actually be a good Christian if it were not for other people!

Grace and Effort

God’s kind of love does not come about by effort alone. Effort is necessary, but it must be accompanied by God’s grace. Origen of Alexandria explains the relationship between our effort and God’s grace with the following metaphor:

It is like traveling in a sailing ship on the ocean. Our life is like the ship, and we are the captain. All our skill, energy, and attention are necessary to avoid shipwreck and arrive in port, for the ocean is dangerous and inattention is disastrous upon it. Our ship, however, also needs the wind. It is the wind that fills the sails and moves the ship, and when the two are weighed against each other. The skill of the captain seems very small compared with the contribution of the wind. In Origen’s metaphor the wind represents God’s help and grace. Great as that grace is, the human being must work, with all the skill and energy he or she can muster, in order to love.

The more we rely on grace, the more grace is given (Matthew 25:29). However, “[t]he receiving of grace is never automatic; it depends upon a constant attentiveness and willingness to listen and to look” (40).

Love is Not Easy

Since the goal is love, the Desert Fathers had no illusions about the difficulties entailed in achieving the goal. Real love is not easy. It is difficult, “something to be learned over a very long time” (27). Truly, “Learning to love is a slow business” (84).

Love is not about heroic feats, but about daily laying down our lives for our neighbors. When asked what this means, Abba Peomen answered, “When a [person] hears a complaining word and struggles against himself [or herself], and does not . . . begin to complain; when a [person] bears an injury with patience, and does not look for revenge; that is when a [person] lays down his [or her] life for his [or her] neighbor” (47).

The Desert Fathers teach that love is expressed, not in great acts, but in small acts done with great love.

How much easier it is to daydream about the dramatic acts of love and self-sacrifice I or the church might make to prove our love of God or neighbor! But the temptation to regard such small actions as unimportant while there are so many serious social problems in the world is the temptation to understand the Christian life only in heroic proportions. (47)

While we dream of heroic acts of love, we often fail to simply love others in small ways:  “If we wish to love our neighbor, we start small by trying first to avoid harming the neighbor, refusing to gossip about the neighbor, and offering small help” (48).

The assumption of the Desert Fathers was that “it is the little things we do over a long period of time that form character and make our relationships with ourselves, others, and God what they are” (76). Through small steps we express God’s love: “If you are able to extend one small act of kindness to another human being or an animal, you have already begun to live out of [God’s] love” (103).

Love First

Nothing should keep us from love. True love does not worry about purity of motive or freedom from self-interest. This is “to confuse the means, that is, a life of Christian discipline, with the end, the life of love” (48).

Keeping this in mind keeps us from descending into moralism: “If the fulfillment of the moral law for its own sake is seen to be the point of the law, the temptation is, in cases of doubt, to err on the side of caution. But if the point of the law is love, then the Christian must be prepared to take real risks for the sake of other people” (50).

Quotes excerpted from To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church by Roberta C. Bondi
© Richard J. Vincent, 2007