Saint Philaret the New Confessor: On Humility and Repentance

Greek source: St. Philaret of the Russian Diaspora: A Contemporary Ascetic, Confessor, and Hierarch (1903-1985), by Bishop Klemes of Gardikion, Holy Monastery of Sts. Cyprian and Justina, 2015, pp. 97-99.

 

 

With his experience, the saintly Metropolitan Philaret was able to teach true humility and repentance with words that were flowing with life, expressing the Orthodox ethos in summary as follows:

“Sometimes people say about themselves, ‘Oh, I am very religious; I am deeply pious.’ And they say this with sincerity, thinking that they can actually say such about themselves with justification…

“We see from Church life that those who indeed have true faith think about themselves and about their faith in a very humble manner, and always think and have a sense about themselves as having little faith…

“He who indeed believes does not have confidence in his [personal] faith, but sees himself as having little faith. One who does not intrinsically have true faith thinks that he believes profoundly…

“We see the same anomaly in the moral and spiritual assessment of a person… Righteous men see themselves as sinners, while sinners see themselves as righteous.

“Within the soul of the sinner unenlightened by the Grace of God, who does not think about spiritual life, who does not think about his correction, who does not think how he will give an account before God, everything has been jumbled up, and he cannot do anything about it. Only God, Who sees all, knows the wretched condition of such a man’s soul, while the man himself does not feel or observe it, thinking that he is not so bad and that the parts of the Gospel that refer to great sinners do not pertain to him at all. Of course, he may not imagine himself a Saint, but nevertheless he supposes that he is not so pitiable…

“All those who are pleasing to God think about themselves in a completely different way, seeing themselves and their spiritual nature in a completely different light.

“There was an ascetic who mourned continually. His disciple asked him, ‘Father, why are you lamenting?’ ‘For my sins, my child,’ he answered. ‘But what sins do you have? And why do you grieve for them so much?’ ‘My child,’ answered the ascetic, ‘if I were to see my sins as they are, in all their ugliness, I would ask that you also weep for them, together with me’! This is exactly how these exceptional men spoke of themselves.

“We, however, who are ordinary people, do not see our sinfulness or feel its weight. For this reason there occurs what I have just said: for someone to go to Confession not knowing what to say! A certain woman who went to Confession said to her spiritual Father, ‘Father, I have forgotten everything!’

“But what do you think if some person has a pain in his hand, foot, or some internal organ and goes to a doctor—will he forget that he is in pain? So it is with the soul. If it is truly enflamed by the feeling of repentance, it will not forget its sins. Of course, nobody can recall all of his sins—to the very last one, without exception. But true repentance never fails to keep a man conscious of his sinfulness and feeling sincere remorse for it.

“During Great Lent, we pray to the Lord to grant us to see our transgressions—our own transgressions, and not those of other people. But we must pray for this, not only during Lent, but at all times. Let us pray that the Lord will teach us to see ourselves as we should and not to think about our supposed ‘righteousness.’

“Yet we must remember that it is only the mercy of God that can open the eyes of man with regard to his true spiritual state and, through this means, set him on the path of true repentance!”

 

English source: 

Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XXXIII (2016), No. 1, pp. 7-8. Translated by Schemamonk Chrysostomos Agiogregorites.