Vigils Reading

THE AUTHOR OF ENVY

From the “Conferences” by John Cassian2

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Let us not look for peace outside ourselves and let us not count upon another’s patience to rescue us from our sins of impatience. For just as the kingdom of God is within us so too is it the case that ‘the enemies of a man are of his own household’. No one fights against me more than my own heart, which is surely close to me in my own household. If we are careful, however, we can suffer the minimum harm from the enemies within. When the enemies in our own household are not at war with us, then, in the tranquility of the spirit, the kingdom of God becomes a possession. To put the matter quite clearly to you, I cannot be harmed by the malice of any man if my own unquiet heart does not set me against myself. If I suffer harm it is not from the attack of an outsider but because of the snare of my own impatience…

One needs to know that the disease of envy is harder to cure than any other. I would say that someone stricken by its poison is almost beyond healing. This is the pestilence described figuratively by the prophet: ‘See, I will send you serpents against which there are no incantations and they will bite you’. The bites of envy are quite rightly compared by the prophet to the lethal poison of the basilisk. For it was because of this that the very first to perish and to fall was the one who is the source of everything deadly. He brought about his own downfall long before he poured the virus of death over man, of whom he was jealous. ‘Death came into the world because of the devil’s envy…

“The devil was first to be ruined by this scourge, and he kept at bay the cure of penance and the warmth of healing medicine. And in similar fashion those who have allowed themselves to be gnawed in the same poisonous way have barred all the efforts of the holy exorcist, for they are tormented not by the faults of the one they envy but rather by his good fortune…

“This is the reason why to escape one of the lethal bites of the basilisk, to keep everything alive in us, to have ourselves, so to speak, under the living sway of the Holy Spirit Himself, we must ceaselessly beg for the help of the God to whom nothing is impossible. As regards the poisonous bites of other snakes–and here I mean the sins and the vices of the flesh–human frailty, despite the speed with which it falls into them, is just as readily purged of them. The wounds that they cause leave their own evident marks on the flesh. And although the earthly body swells up most dangerously because of them, yet some very skilled declaimer of the divine words of Scripture can provide an antidote or saving cure of those words and the rampant poison will not bring everlasting death to the soul.

But like the poison spurted out by the snake, the bane of envy shuts out the very life of religion and of faith before the wound can ever be diagnosed in the body. For the fact is that a blasphemer rises up not against a man but against God. He launches his complaints against nothing other than the good fortune of his brother. He criticizes not so much the fault of a man as the judgment of God. Here surely is that ‘root of bitterness cropping up’, raising itself up on high to hurl spite against the One who bestows all that is good upon man… For God is certainly not the author of envy