Does Living on a Pole Bring You Closer to God? - Lucas Hilty

So you mentioned the asceticism that they had. You want to walk us through that a bit? You know, what was that element? Or other major components that stand out to you as this was something that was a core piece of who these people were? Walk us through some of those things.

So the asceticism of the Church of the East, or the, I should say, of the Syriac Church, is one of the things that comes through most strongly in the documents and things that are left to us.

This is why I like the Didascalia Apostolorum, is why I mentioned that, because that helps to balance out all the ascetic documents. So not everybody practices asceticism in the way that some of these documents describe. But when Jesus said to sell all you have and give to the poor, when he said that those who enter the kingdom of heaven, they don't marry or are given a marriage, are like the angels of heaven, these folks took that and asked, how could we let me live that way?

And so there became a tradition of the monks of Syria living rather extreme lives. So they would renounce the comforts of a house, the comforts of society. Sometimes they would have calling hours because lots of people wanted to come to talk to them and ask them to pray for them. And they'd say, well, only in the afternoon, between these hours.

They did lots of things that seem extreme to us. The guy who had built himself sort of a wooden box, the description is kind of hard to follow. He had these wheels and these wheels, and he kind of lay in the middle in a cell where he couldn't sit up. He never could stretch out. I think that's how he—I'm not sure if he stayed there 24/7, but he prayed in there. A story of the guy who was the two monks who were on the side of a mountain, and one was reading the gospel to the other. And then the reader said to the other one—the other one was, his name was Eusebius. The reader said to Eusebius, "So explain to me what I just read to you.

Tell me what this means." And Eusebius said, "Oh, sorry, could you repeat that?" And the reader says to Eusebius, "Brother, you've been so busy watching the plowmen down in the valley that you're not even paying attention to the scriptures." And he scolded him a little bit. And Eusebius was so convicted by that, they said, "All right, I will never look at the valley below. I'll never look at the stars above."

And for the 40 years that he lived after that, he would walk—the story goes—a path as narrow as a handbreath to go to church, because he did go to church and go back to his cell. He wore heavy chains so that he would be bowed down, so he wouldn't see the sun or the moon and stars and so on.

These stories seem extreme. They seem unhealthy to us sometimes. But again, I think they're coming from a place of really trying to do battle with your own passions. And when you talk to this monk, he wouldn't say it's sin to look at the stars. He would say, "I am trying to exercise myself to say no to myself so the devil can't get me where it really counts," in anger or lust or something. So whether he was wise to do that or not, it was this kind of thing that prevailed for a time in Manassas or something in Syria.

It seems to me possible that they were somewhat—they took the gospel, and then they were kind of interpreting the gospel in the terms of their religious context. So they were in a very multi, in a very diverse religious context. There were Zoroastrians, there were Jews, there were Manicheans eventually, and Marcionites, there were Gnostics. And so all these people, many of them had sort of a disdain for the body and had a belief that the goal in life was to rise above the constraints of human nature and physicality. So you wonder if the monks were maybe unconsciously mixing some of that into the gospel in the way that they responded.