“HERE IS an image of the kingdom of heaven; a rich man …” Take this parable of our text. It seems a straightforward piece of Scripture if ever there was one, and yet it is rightly explained and commented on by many different authors in many different ways, but no one can so get to the bottom of it that all possible interpretations are exhausted, that posterity cannot add a word to what has already been said. In any case, whatever may be said of anything with wisdom and truth, no matter what form it takes, exists from eternity, totally contained at once and forever in every possible way in eternal wisdom and truth….
Have all due respect for the opinion that faithfully and fittingly interprets this vineyard of our text as the whole Church, Christ being the vine, Christians the branches, the Father the gardener and the rich man, the daylight the whole of time or the life of man, the hours the ages of the world or of individuals, the market-place this world’s grasping and insatiable business. For my part, I view my whole self, soul and body both and not just my soul, as the one vine that I may not neglect, but must dig about it and cultivate it to prevent it being overrun by unwelcome weeds and by the roots of other plants or be smothered by its own offshoots. Pruned it must be or it will grow wild: trimmed so that it may yield more fruit. It must be altogether fenced-in or every passer-by will freely plunder it; the greatest danger of all being that the wild boar from the thickets that solitary beast, may ravage it. To sum all this up briefly: it must be cultivated with the greatest care, otherwise the noble shoots of this choice vine will go to seed, will turn into a worthless vine and, far from delighting both God and man, may only succeed in saddening both of them. It must also be guarded with the utmost watchfulness that all the exertion spent on it and hopes placed in it may not be wiped-out, eighter by stealthy stealing of those who devour the poor in secret or by sudden and unlooked-for disaster. It was in this sense, as though referring to a vine in his keeping, that the First Man was given Paradise that, as Scripture says, “he should cultivate it and keep it” ….
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Therefore, dearest friends, at the very first enlightenment of grace at the decisive day-break of one’s turning to God when a person emerges from the night of sin and of carnal behavior and begins to attend to man’s proper work, one comes up against one’s conscience and sees how evil one’s evil life was. One perceives in the light what one was like in the darkness. Conscience, you see, is sent into the vineyard first of all in the sense that when self-accusation calls everything possible to mind, brings all to memory, such humble self-abasement certainly means digging deep, means cutting-out the roots of injustice and turning to self-cultivation unto justice. So true is it that the just man is ever his own accuser. But turning to God and earnestly accusing oneself of past sins is not all; one must also carefully judge and severely examine the seriousness, number and motive of one’s misdeeds. In this way, reason will shrewdly evaluate the disapproving conscience and the way it works in the vineyard; and so reason’s careful judgment of what is presented to it may be followed by sorrow and grievous contrition of heart….”
One who emerges from darkness and the shadow of death, in other words from turning-away from God and from perverted turning to the world or to self in order to turn back to God, moves, as it were, from the back to the front of the head. In so doing, the very first thing one meets is the memory of past evil deeds and the fear of things to come, anguish over what one has done and dread of what one has still to suffer. The process begins with recalling one’s evil life and fearing being still more evil when one comes to die; here you have the first to labor in the vineyard, conscience accusing itself.
This self-accusation is the first grace given to the penitent, the first hour of conversion. The next stage is that what memory recalls it presents to the heart, that is, the power of desire. This power is said to reside in the heart, just as power of understanding is supposed to have its place in the head. Rational understanding is usually spoken of as including the threefold faculty of discernment, reason and memory; it is considered that in the heads of animals these three faculties occupy each a particular section, in the order of front, middle and back of the head, where each exercises its particular function.
When, then one comes to his senses, passing from the back to the front of the head, forgetting, as the Apostle says, what has been left behind, pressing on to what lies ahead, the first thing met, as already mentioned, is the memory of past deeds. One begins to see how ill things were with one when one was evil. As to power of desire or affection, it is to be understood in two ways, corresponding to the heart’s two reactions of either love or hatred to what discernment, reason and memory put before it. These two reactions, according to the different points of view that differences of time bring to the changeable, time-affected heart, give rise to those four well-known and noted emotions that are the very substance and stuff of all virtues and vices; as one might say, the first principles of whatever virtue and vice there may be. It was of these that Lady Philosophy sang as she consoled her foster-son:
Drive out both joy and fear!
And from all hope keep clear!
Let sadness not come near!
Rule any of their kind
They ever cloud the mind
And with a bridle bind. (Boethius, Consol Phil 1,1)
Conditioned then by present, past and future, joy and hope come of love, fear and sorrow arise from hatred. Love and hatred each proceed from our capacity for coveting and for rejecting respectively. So, if the head is described as having three compartments, the heart may be said to have two. Man’s soul itself, fully constituted by the powers of understanding and of desire that belong to its nature, is in its complete actuality of covering, rational and irascible thing. This explains why the first of this trio to meet the transgressor who returns to himself is what he had taken leave of last on his departure, the capacity for rejecting that third aspect of the whole soul.
Becomingly enough, at the third hour the second grace is sent into the vineyard, so that, when conscience working through memory brings forward its well-reasoned accusations compunction or interior sorrow, in the measure and degree of the guilt involved, may inflict its penalty through the power of rejection. In this way, the sweet self-indulgence of one’s past life becomes the unforgettable self-reproach of compunction; as Scripture expresses it, “With bitter heart I pass all my years in review.” Reconsideration comes first, later comes bitterness, the latter is the third house, the former is daybreak. It is misery and madness to forget one’s sins; still more wretched is it to remember them with unrepentant heart; the most hateful thing of all is delight in the recalling of one’s sins.
At the sixth hour good-will comes into operation—six and work have been long associated. The power of desire, as you remember, gives each deed its name; it is by the fruit of the labor invested that the quality of the intention is ascertained. As the poet says: you will easily perceive the inner disposition from the outer deportment. Conversely, a change of heart leads, inevitably, to change of behavior. The disposition of the heart, lording it as it does over the deportment of the body, uses it as its subject and slave. Consequently, in so far as the movement of the body depends on the free choice of the will, it is not to be held answerable for its actions. Only the movement of the heart, be it obedience or disobedience, virtuous or vicious, is liable to judgment, because to it alone has freedom of choice come from God. Consequently, turning from God and delighting with the evil one means making over one’s natural power as slaves to what the devil himself was slave to, “to impurity and wickedness, till all was wickedness/” Conversion to God on the other hand, consists of making over one’s natural powers as slaves to right-doing, till all is sanctified. At the sixth hour the third grace, training of the body, is sent into the vineyard, so that as sorrow furrows one’s inner being, labor should furrow one’s outer self, with fasting chastening, toil tiring and vigils wearying one. When man comes out from the darkness of the flesh into the light of the world, thought born to labor, he starts out from sorrow. In like manner, one who comes out from carnal darkness to spiritual light not only starts out from sorrow, but grows up to toil, as Scripture has it: “Man is born to toil.” (Job 5:7) Yes, and the words that follow, “and the bird to fly,” fit in perfectly with the sequence I have been developing. The word “bird” is rightly understood as referring to the faculty of reason by which man transcends the brute beasts and their earth-bound ways and shares the same nature as the angels. At the ninth hour the fourth grace is sent into the vineyard, and man is raised far above the active life with its use of the less excellent faculties of the soul, and, in his search for God, soars on the wings of reading, meditating and prayer with the love of God for his objective.
As at the ninth hour reason, so at the eleventh delight is sent into the vineyard. Once the active life has achieved its purpose, what is left for the soul expect the contemplative life, the consummation of which is the sight of and delight in God. During this pitiable pilgrimage of ours, however, everything is imperfect, nothing is found perfect. As the Parable shows the active life does not attain to the then of the denarius, nor does the contemplative life reach the twelfth hour of the day. So delight comes last, labor is least and is rewarded first. As the Psalm says, “The way of your commandments has brought me delight greater than all riches.”
It follows that whatever comfort, delight and enjoyment we find in our observances and toil is an undoubted foretaste of the reward of our labors, if only because until we learn to delight in the correction which the Lord sends and come to live it, we scarcely support, barely stand-up to the day’s burden and the heat. In grief and constraint, subject to fear and grumbling everything makes us sad and spiritless. But at the eleventh hour when the fifth grace joins love with observance and good-will is linked with our efforts, so that we are able to delight in and to enjoy whatever comes, as every burden is light, every yoke is easy, there begins a death of fear and of labor, of grief and of sadness. The evening of the first and morning of the send day, on the other hand, are the beginning of love and of enjoyment, of zeal and of merriment; in other words, of pure pleasure and encouragement, and genuine gaiety and mirth of mind. Such joy as this is known only to the one who receives it. This is indeed the beginning of the perfection that puts an end to our first lessons; the beginning of the fulfilment that sweeps away what is imperfect; the beginning, lastly, of the perfect love that drives out fear, that takes away labor and wipes away sorrow.”
– Isaac of Stella, Sermon 16 & 17 –
