Nikitas Stithatos
Philokalia, vol. 4, On the Inner Nature of Things and on the
Purification of the Intellect:
One Hundred Texts
Who am I when no one is watching? When I’m not striving for success, frantically checking items off to-do-lists, or managing the impression I make on others? What remains of me if I lose my job, professional status, perfect performance of tasks or others’ admiration?
Suppose you are successful at your work, have received promotions, met important people and were awarded several awards. Suppose also that you have failed to complete projects you started, and you were fired once. Consider finally where, in your perception of your successes, you place your daily virtues, such as loving and nurturing your children or your willingness to sacrifice yourself for others.
Most of us, consciously or unconsciously, construct a “public self” that highlights our successes, skips the failures and discounts the everyday virtues and domestic joys that we believe are not spectacular enough to impress.
Our self-presentation often conceals perceived shortcomings or simple pleasures that we don’t believe would be recognized as accomplishments by others.
Such presentation of ourselves leaves in the shadows supposed failures or ordinary virtues and joys we don’t believe others see as accomplishments, creating an internal friction between the self we present and the one we possess.
Curating a version of ourselves based on what we believe others value is exhausting. Yet most of the time we are hardly aware of the editing process we automatically undertake. This is because we are convinced that our story for ourselves is true. The constant work of hiding the discarded parts of our identity, however, breeds a profound, anxious disconnect.
Nikitas Stithatos emphasizes the importance and, indeed, necessity of knowing ourselves.
“To know oneself is the goal of the practice of virtues.” Nikitas Stithatos tells us.
True knowledge of ourselves will free us from our “addiction to success, ”(as Arthur C. Brooks calls it, in his book From Strength to Strength), and from the burden of constantly curating our persona so that it elicits the maximum praise and admiration.
Knowledge of our true self can only be achieved through humility. Conversely, humility can be only achieved and maintained by cutting through delusions and cravings for admiration and understanding who we really are.
For if you do not yet know yourself you cannot know what humility is and have not yet embarked truly on the task of cultivating and guarding. To know oneself is the goal of the practice of virtues.
The more we recognize our weakness, the stronger we will be in spiritual warfare and the freer we will feel from our attachment to the stories we construct for ourselves.
We live authentically when we stop being driven by the quest for others’ approval and seek, instead, an understanding of who God, and not man, wants us to be.
One way to judge our ability to live authentic lives in humility is by examining the “fruits” of our labor, not just our own rhetoric and conclusions. Our claim of satisfaction and success, for example, seems hollow when we feel discontent, spend sleepless nights agonizing, miss out on things we claim are important or look at the future with fear and dread.
Stithatos is clear about the true fruits of the Holy Spirit and those that uncover “vanity and pretentiousness of soul.”
The fruits of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, goodness, long-suffering, kindness, faith, gentleness, self-control ( cf. Gal.5″ : 2 2-23). The fruits of the spirit of evil are hatred, worldly despondency, restlessness of soul, a troubled heart, guile, inquisitiveness, negligence, anger, lack of faith, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, abusiveness, censoriousness, the lust of the eyes (cf. 1 John 2 : 1 6), vanity and pretentiousness of soul. By these fruits you may know the tree (cf. Matt. 1 2 : 3 3), and in this way you will certainly recognize what kind of spirit you have to deal with…
God looks not at the outward form of what we say or do, but at the disposition of our soul and the purpose for which we perform a visible action or express a thought. In the same way those of greater understanding than others look rather to the inward meaning of words and the intention of actions, and unfalteringly assess them accordingly.
“Man looks at the outward form, but God looks on the heart,” Stithatos points out and quotes cf. I Sam.I 6 ; 7.
We need to focus on cultivating the heart, building lives of inner contentment, love and faith rather than those of achievements and external admiration.
Readings in Philokalia 