So, if a person, let's say, inexperienced or negligent has come from the passion of despondency to even greater negligence and laziness, then what should he do, how can he get out of such a state, how can he overcome this passion? First of all, we must keep in mind that if we do not force ourselves, then no advice, no miraculous power or supernatural assistance will help us. We need to understand that we are free beings and that much depends on our own compulsion. The Lord is always ready to help us, we can say that He has already rushed to help us, but we do not notice this help, we neglect it, we do not see it because we have plunged into the darkness of despondency to such an extent that we do not want to respond even a little to this Divine action, which strengthens us in the struggle. It happens that a person does not even do anything, but simply endures despondency and does not abandon his usual obedience or prayer rule - and immediately the grace of God begins to console his heart, he feels that the Lord is with him. One should not think that the struggle for one's salvation is such an easy and simple thing that there are no obstacles or difficulties in it.

That is why John Climacus rightly says that despondency is overcome by the memory of death. He also says - and his reasoning is undoubtedly taken exclusively from experience, there is nothing abstract or purely theoretical in it - that the most powerful remedy against despondency is prayer, which makes a person cheer up, makes him take up his work. But it is precisely this that we forget about, and we leave it. If we pray, we do not make any effort to pray attentively, but we do so to such a formal degree that our mind practically does not participate in prayer at all, and in reality it is no longer prayer. We are afraid to think about death in principle, we do not have a serious attitude to it. We forget that we are the same people as everyone else, and that we, like other countless human beings, like all generations of people, will have to cross this line of life and death. Thus we fall into such a gloomy state on the one hand, and carefree on the other. And this carelessness proves to us that it is passion that is at work in us, that we succumb to it, and that is why we experience pleasure.

For example, it seems to me that many outstanding European composers were subject to various passions to an extraordinary degree, and this is felt when listening to their musical works. I believe that Chopin was very "dull", not in the sense that he was boring to listen to, but in the sense that he had such a passion. He is a "sad" composer. But what is sadness? "Sadness, melancholy eats me," wrote A.S. Pushkin. What is this, if not despondency? It is obvious that when listening to outstanding musical works, pleasure brings us the satisfaction of this or that passion, in particular despondency, as I understand it. And this proves that any passion is pleasant, even some vile and disgusting one, which completely devastates the soul and brings it into a gloomy state, but it also gives pleasure. There is a certain contradiction here. Passion is never satisfied, it demands more and more food again and again, but at the same time, in the process of giving in to it, it brings us pleasure. About music it can be said that it all comes from despondency. If a person had fun or if he had something to do, then why would he compose music? And so, out of boredom, he begins to think about how to entertain himself and others. There is an opinion that art in general arose in order to drown out despondency. By the way, according to the biblical narrative, the first musical instruments were invented by the descendants of Cain, that is, an outcast man who resisted God. In this way, people wanted to replace the lost bliss of Paradise, that is, they tried to invent something earthly that would replace Paradise for them, make them forget about it and, consequently, remove them from repentance. Therefore, it must be said that music, like all art in general and a significant part of human culture, really comes from despondency and melancholy.

That is, any passion, including despondency, brings pleasure to a person, which is why we, in fact, succumb to it: we want to enjoy, to revel in our passion. And the drunkenness that I mentioned, of course, also comes from despondency, only it is a grosser way of finding some kind of tranquility, and a more refined way is when we begin to enjoy works of art, some abstract activity, and thus drown out the inner anguish. If we take a sober look at ourselves and see that we are discouraged not because there is a serious reason, but because we are pleased with it, then we will draw a different conclusion, we will behave differently. We will understand that the cause is not outside of us, but in ourselves. If there were no passion, there would be no reason, we would not see a reason for despondency. A blind person cannot see anything, a deaf person cannot hear anything. If there is no passion of despondency in us, it means that we cannot be discouraged, if there is no anger in us, we cannot be angry. And our words about the reason for succumbing to this or that passion are only self-justification, even if our reasons were really serious, and not as small and insignificant as usual. We always do what is easy for us, what is interesting to us, and we can almost not force ourselves to do what is difficult and in which we need to overcome ourselves. And this quality of ours, which is manifested in some ordinary human affairs or occupations, is also manifested in spiritual life. If something is not given to us, we immediately give up. It is not possible to pray at once like Elijah the prophet, through whose prayer it began to rain - we think: "Well, then I will not at all." We also think: "Here I have been asceticizing for three whole days, and I still do not have unceasing prayer - what is it?" or "Here I am for three years in the monastery, and I still do not have impassibility - how can this be?" We fall into dissipation, give up, and don't want to do it at all. We come to the monastery with zeal, with a kind of fervor: some want to repent, some want to change, renew their lives, who, perhaps, are inspired by the books of the Holy Fathers we have read, and then, after a while, all this ardor passes, cools down, because we see that we need to work here, but we do not want to work. In ordinary worldly life, as a rule, the more valuable, the higher the reward, the more you need to work for it. Sometimes a person makes efforts for many years to achieve some goal. Everyone knows such typical cases when a person works hard and saves money for several years to buy a car or an apartment. The more valuable a thing is, the more we have to work for it - and this is clear to everyone, and when it comes to heavenly and spiritual treasures, we lose common sense here. We have a preconceived opinion that everything spiritual is so intangible, inexplicable, amorphous, vague that there can be no strict definitions in relation to it, everything should be simple, easy and accessible. And when it suddenly turns out that in fact we need to work even harder, even more diligence is required, we fall into dissipation from the very first difficulties. But even in worldly life, a person has failures. For example, a person wanted to enter a university, but did not prepare, could not pass, for example, chemistry. What does such a person begin to do if he still wants to study at this institute? He hires tutors, prepares carefully, and teaches chemistry. The next year, he managed to pass chemistry for a satisfactory grade, and he entered the institute. And no one is surprised by anything like this. I am fine. When a person wants to acquire some virtue in the spiritual life and suddenly fails, he must also ask himself the question: why did this happen to him? In this he needs to improve. Let's say I'm doing everything right, but I have pride. So I need to pay attention to the struggle with pride. Or: I do everything right, but I do not have sufficient zeal for prayer, I pray absent-mindedly. So you need to force yourself to pray. And we do not want to draw such a simple, elementary conclusion that the world would have made even without any extraneous prompting. And again we begin to lose heart instead of starting to work. If it didn't work out the first time, it will work out the second, the third, in general, it will definitely work. Even this struggle itself, the very compulsion of oneself to correct oneself in one way or another, already brings consolation and grace to the soul of man, in contrast to what happens in the world. And no matter what we do, wherever we struggle, everywhere we receive benefit, consolation, support, and in the end we achieve what we have planned and striven for.

Some fall into despondency and discouragement, they give up because they seem to have begun the spiritual life too late, in middle age or even at an advanced age. But we know from church history that some people began their spiritual life precisely in such old years, but nevertheless they prospered highly. Our revered saint, who asceticized in the Siberian land, Basilisk of Siberia, began to engage in mental work at the age of forty. Of course, he was prepared by his previous life: he was greatly humbled by the ordinary sorrows of life, and he asceticized in the wilderness. But it so happened in his life that there was no one to teach him mental work, because at that time in Russia, and throughout the world in general, intellectual work was in oblivion. And so his own disciple Zosima Verkhovsky, perhaps simply because he was more well-read in the works of the Holy Fathers, began to speak to the elder about mental work, and he, having listened to him, began to asceticize and attained the highest spiritual success. I repeat, he began at the age of forty. And we are discouraged at twenty-five: everything is lost, nothing will work. The ancient ascetic of piety, Paul the Simple, left his wife and children, came to Anthony the Great at the age of sixty and succeeded thanks to his obedience and zeal. People have different virtues. One is obedient, the other is diligently engaged in the Jesus Prayer, but all must have one common quality - zeal. And so, jealousy forced Paul the Simple to give himself up to complete obedience to Anthony the Great, and at the age of sixty he achieved such great success that he cast out demons and performed amazing miracles. Imagine: a sixty-year-old grandfather who had worked all his life somewhere in the world would come to our monastery, retired and now ask to come here. How would we react to it? They would probably say: "Well, okay, try it, let's see how you do." And this grandfather would become a miracle worker. There are cases when people acquired the grace of God very quickly and in the most unusual conditions. For example, St. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, who was elected to the patriarchate from the senatorial rank. Intellectually, he was an amazingly capable person - a scientist who read a huge number of works and compiled his own book - "The Library", where he described all the Christian, theological, pagan, and fiction works he read (if I am not mistaken, about 2000 titles), and gave a more or less extensive assessment of each. So, this learned man made a great career at the imperial court. Unfortunately, I do not know at what age he was elected patriarch, but I think he was not young, because the very study of all kinds of sciences, the career itself had to take many years, and it was necessary to make considerable efforts. Perhaps he did not deliberately try to make a career, but simply wanted to conscientiously fulfill his duties, but nevertheless, by the time of his election, some significant period must have passed, that is, this man was most likely middle-aged.

And the administration of all these churches and the clergy of the reigning city gave Photius many troubles. At the same time, he did not forget his scientific studies: he was a great lover of books and reading books was the greatest pleasure for him, he was the first of the Orthodox hierarchs-theologians who wrote theological works himself. However, it was during his patriarchate that he acquired the gift of unceasing prayer, as Paisius Velichkovsky says. Nothing prevented him: neither his age, nor his studies (I mean the management of the patriarchal cathedra), nor his scientific hobbies, to which he devoted a lot of time. But he had many sorrows, since at that time the Church was torn apart by internal disorder and the opponents of St. Photius was confronted; moreover, there was a struggle against papism, and he was the first to condemn the heresy of the Filioque. And with such busyness, with such worries and sorrows, man found time for prayer. The main thing that is necessary for prayer is a serene state of mind, and it is as if he did not have it, but nevertheless acquired unceasing prayer. And age also did not become an obstacle.

Therefore, there is no need to be discouraged by the fact that we have some external obstacles: age, established character, habits, passions or any other circumstances, this is not a matter for despondency. Nothing external to the inner life, which is what I have said, can prevent us from progressing spiritually. Our own negligence hinders us. The cause, the fault of all your troubles must be sought in yourself. And this path of self-reproach, the most real, sincere self-reproach, and not some kind of self-insult without faith in what you call yourself, makes a person truly spiritually fruitful. And if we succumb to the passion of despondency and fall into dissipation because something is not as we would like, then we will remain barren and ultimately lose it, and not someone else. So, in my opinion, the most important reason that we succumb to this passion is our unwillingness to work. That is why I really like the name proposed by Gregory the Sinaite instead of the name of despondency - "laziness". The opposite of laziness, as you know, is diligence. So you need to acquire spiritual diligence. Work is, as they say, difficult. We may not want to, but we know that it is necessary, and, overcoming fatigue and sometimes pain, we do what we need to do. Work is caused by necessity, we do not everything only with pleasure. For the most part, work brings comfort only when we have already completed the work and seen its result. And even when we start doing something with pleasure, we still involuntarily face difficulties and there is a desire to quit it. Just imagine: a surgeon performs an operation, but it has dragged on for something, it goes on for three whole hours, I am already bored. He throws a scalpel: "Let someone else sew it up, but I'm tired, you're standing here, already sweating all over." What will happen then? You will understand that laziness in obedience (in the sense of work) is bad for the human soul, but much more terrible is laziness in relation to the spiritual. If the Lord may still condescend to the lazy in work and have mercy, then for the lazy in prayer, in the struggle with thoughts, in the struggle with passions, there is no way out. And therefore we need to acquire such diligence.

We must be able to distinguish between sorrow for sins and wrong sorrow. Sorrow for sins gives a person zeal, spiritual vigor, makes him capable of labor, while false sorrow, that is, despondency over his sins, on the contrary, leads a person to a state of weakness, makes him spiritually and morally lazy. These two things need to be distinguished very clearly and clearly. Those who grieve over their sins must always remember about the ultimate goal, about the fact that like it or not, you will have to answer for them, and it is necessary to purify your soul, to prepare it for eternal life. Those who forget about this can, of course, become despondent and relaxed from the very remembrance of sins, and draw the conclusion that if they fail, they will never succeed, that they have already had multiple falls and that there is no way out, and therefore it is useless to work. And the one who sees the ultimate goal - how can he calm down? So, the most important conclusion that I would like to draw is this: despondency is laziness, laziness to spiritual life, laziness to spiritual labors. Therefore, it is necessary to acquire spiritual diligence, which in the Gospel is called compulsion: "The Kingdom of Heaven is wanting" (Matthew 11:12). This compulsion is necessary throughout life, and not in such a way that now you understand everything, you work for three days, and then the incentive to compulsion disappears. No. A person develops and, having changed for the better in some way, needs to force himself again and again to achieve greater virtues. In this way, he steadily moves towards eternal life, sometimes achieving the most sublime spiritual results, the most beautiful and, as it seemed to him before, the most difficult virtues to achieve. When our first parents fell, the Lord said to Adam: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread" (Gen. 3:19). In the literal sense, these words refer to ordinary human labor, work for subsistence. But in a broad sense, they can also be attributed to spiritual life. St. Isaac the Syrian says that our Lord Jesus Christ, shedding bloody sweat during prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, replaced the sweat of labor with the sweat of prayer. That is, for the sake of partaking of spiritual food, which nourishes our soul and strengthens it for eternal life, we must now shed sweat in prayer, just as the Savior did; The ancient commandment remained, but its meaning now became spiritual. And if we accept the interpretation of some of the Holy Fathers that the "daily bread" in the Lord's Prayer is the bread "supersubstantial" and "supersubstantial," that is, first, the Body and Blood of Christ, and second, any spiritual food in general that nourishes our soul, then it turns out that, indeed, for the sake of tasting this spiritual bread, we must also shed the corresponding sweat. Of course, this does not mean that one should literally make so many prostrations in order to be drenched in sweat, although many ascetics did this as well; I think that the deep meaning of life here lies in working spiritually as a person who sweats to buy bread for his livelihood works. Everyone in the world is working like this now. We, having left the world, have lost all common sense. Everything that we had, some sensible notions, reasoning, we discarded and became, as it were, completely incomprehensible people, forgetting that we worked in the world, that even when we were studying at school or at the institute, we had to make some effort, but for some reason we did not want to make it in a monastery. But the commandment remains the same, only in relation to a different subject. We have to work hard. To work with the extreme zeal that a person has, who sheds sweat during his work.

Question. Father, but no matter how much a person forces himself, no matter how hard he works, he still cannot do it without the grace of God.

Answer. We are not talking about this now, but about what a person should do on his part. The Lord is always ready to help us and has already rushed to help us, but we ourselves do not want to accept it. And you want to say again that the Lord does not help and therefore you do not succeed. We came to the monastery to save our souls. We work out of necessity, because we have to take care of ourselves, earn our bread. Exactly out of necessity. And first of all, we must work with all our might for our salvation. One must have diligence, both in general and in private matters of the inner life, to work hard: if it doesn't work today, it will work tomorrow. It is necessary to look for the cause, to reason - of course, under the guidance of the eldress, the spiritual father - to look for the snag, to eliminate it, to work again and again, to work and that's it. In the end, we will achieve the result. Even if it is not something special, the work itself will also be imputed to us, perhaps as impassibility or miracle-working, if only we work all our lives.

Question. What does Archimandrite Sophrony's advice to keep one's mind in hell mean? Are we talking about the memory of death or does it have its own peculiarities? I can imagine how to keep one's mind at the Last Judgment, but not at hell.

Answer. Archimandrite Sophrony received this work from his elder-leader St. Silouan, and it is not suitable for everyone. This is very difficult, it requires guidance and, as it seems to me, high success, so it is better for us to simply humble ourselves, repent, force ourselves to every humble thought about ourselves, and, who knows, perhaps the grace of God acts in this or that person in such a way that he will feel himself really worthy of hell, and what exactly does "keep the mind in hell" mean, I, unfortunately, I cannot say, because I have not experienced anything like this myself, I do not have such an experience, I can even say the opposite, that when, having read the book "Elder Silouan", I tried to imitate him and lower my mind into hell, then I either did not succeed in any of this at all, or despondency appeared, and I gave up my attempts. Often this turns out to be humility in the bad sense of the word, because it is one thing to sincerely think something about yourself and another thing to repeat some saying that does not reach your heart.

It was once revealed to Anthony the Great that a certain man in Alexandria, a tanner, had succeeded more than he. Then he came to him and found out that the man had deep humility and believed that everyone in that city would be saved for their good deeds, and only he would perish for his sins. And Anthony, as already a very experienced ascetic, appreciated his high success, the significance of his work, which proceeded from the deepest humility, and he himself began to imitate him. He also took up this feat - to consider himself perishing with all his heart, as if he had condemned himself to perdition. From that time on, this thought began to be called the thought of St. Anthony. After some time, perhaps after one generation of monks, a certain ascetic, I have forgotten his name, said of himself: "Who can now bear the thought of St. Anthony? However, I know one person who can do this." The ascetic, of course, had himself in mind, but out of modesty or humility he did not want to say it aloud. That is, he believed that in his time - and this was the so-called "golden age" of monasticism - there were no more people capable of bearing this idea. This does not mean that people could not repeat the words of St. Anthony in their minds. Yes, we can repeat them. But if we sincerely begin to think of ourselves in this way, we will fall into such despair that not only will we not receive any benefit, but we may perish from such an unbearable burden, from that spiritual burden that we are not able to take upon ourselves. This is what it means to carry such a thought. To do this, you need to have grace, strength of spirit. And if we do not have them, then it will lead us not to salvation, but to destruction. If already in that generation, in ancient times, in the fourth or fifth century, the ascetic believed that there were no people capable of holding such a thought, then what can we say about us who weep because someone in the cell slammed the door. What kind of mind is there to keep in hell. We should keep our minds in the monastery so that it does not fly away somewhere. In addition, it is necessary to understand such an important thing: the doing of St. St. Anthony or the like is not humility itself, but only a means to achieve it. After all, the most important thing is that there is humility of heart. The Saviour said: "Learn from Me, that I am meek and lowly in heart" (Matt. 11:29), and again: "Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts" (Matt. 15:19). The heart is the source of human life. If a person is convinced of something in his heart, it means that he is really convinced of it. If you are humble in heart, then you are truly humble. You may not express any thoughts, you may not have any images, but humility will be there. And vice versa, you can convince yourself as much as you like that you are dust and ashes, as the righteous Abraham said (Gen. 18:27), or, like the prophet David, that you are a worm and not a man (Psalm 21:7), but in fact you will think: "Behold, I am a worm, and not a man, therefore I am better than all these people. After all, they do not think of themselves as worms and not people, but I think that is why they are worms, and I am a man." And from this we can conclude that you should not force yourself so unwisely, but you need to humble yourself more in your heart.

Question. Can a novice have a crown from God if he does not yet have a real struggle with the passions?