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warm."

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Let us also recall how the lamp of the Church, St. John Chrysostom, wrote from exile in a letter to Olympias (his spiritual daughter), blessing her to take care of her health and encouraging her to do so by his own example: "... I beseech your honesty, and as a great mercy I ask you to take greater care of the healing of the disease of your body. True, even despondency109 produces sickness; but when the body has also suffered and is completely weakened and remains in great neglect, does not use either doctors, or the well-dissolved air, or the abundance of necessary things, then consider that from this there is a considerable increase in danger. Therefore, I ask your honesty to use various experienced doctors and medicines that can eliminate this kind of disease. In the same way, a few days before, when, owing to the state of the air, our stomachs were disposed to vomit, we also took advantage of other kinds of care, as well as the medicine sent by my lady, the most respectable Synclitia, and eliminated the disease, without finding it necessary to use it for more than three days. Therefore, I ask you to use it yourself and see to it that it is sent to us again, because when we began to feel upset again, we again took advantage of it and corrected everything."110

Such examples are not isolated, they can be doubled. All of them show that ascetics even have a certain freedom in relation to their body, exhausted by feats and sorrows, but that this freedom must be used skillfully. Those who do not have the mind of Basil and Chrysostom, or even just a good Christian, that is, beginners, should ask for the blessing of their elder and spiritual guide in what is permissible. "Whoever has any disease," the ancient saints teach,111 "should inquire about it to one of the fathers and do everything according to his advice. For sometimes it happens that an elder has

and secretly gives healing, so that bodily physicians are not always

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are needed by the patient." It is all the more necessary to question the elders since there are no such definite rules according to which it would be clear who and when should be treated, and when not. Sex, the age of spiritual and physical life, circumstances, and so on, modify the answer, which, as we have seen above, can deviate both in the direction of curing the disease and vice versa. However, so it is in any other virtue.

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Those who wish to asceticize must nevertheless remember that for them the general inclination should be in the direction of abstaining from treatment, for often demons deceive us. It happens that when it is necessary to stand for prayer, it seems to a person as if death

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She came, and she overpowers herself, instantly removes everything like a hand. That is why the same Holy Father, who allowed in one case to be treated, in another, when he noticed in someone an excessive addiction to the body, taught: "Brother! I see that you are much concerned about the healing of bodily illnesses, and I think that the fathers did not care about it. Your second thought (to leave everything to God. — Bishop Barnabas) is better than the first, for the second contains complete faith in God, and the first (to go to the doctor. — Bishop Barnabas) is unbelief. One contains patience, from which comes art (experience), and from this is born hope that does not shame (Rom. 5:4-5); the other contains (spiritual) exhaustion — the sister of faint-heartedness, in whom lives lack of faith — the mother of doubt, alienating from God and bringing people down to perdition. One thought makes people friends of God, another – enemies of God. One is an intercessor for the Kingdom of Heaven, and the other is an intercessor for Gehenna... One (thought) is guided by the following reasoning: "He who sees the hidden infirmities can heal my illness also"; the other is full of foolishness about God, that He may or may not heal him."114

But since a person has decided to call a doctor at all costs, then, based on all the above, we must at least adhere to the following order:

1) to repent in one's soul of all previous sins, without any self-justification or self-defense;