What you'll notice
In Lent the line for confession gets long, and somebody near the back is reading a folded sheet of questions. Weekday services that season stop several times for a short prayer said with full prostrations, forehead to the floor:
O Lord and Master of my life, grant not unto me a spirit of slothfulness, of discouragement, of lust of power, of vain babbling. But vouchsafe unto thy servant the spirit of continence, of meekness, of patience, and of love. Yea, O Lord and King, grant that I may perceive my own transgressions, and judge not my brother.1
Four sicknesses, four cures, and one last request that cuts the legs out from under self-righteousness. That's the Orthodox moral life in about sixty words.
On Sundays, meanwhile, the choir sings the Beatitudes (The Antiphons and the Beatitudes covers them as a hymn). This entry is about what they ask of you.
What it's called
The Ten Commandments, or the Decalogue, "the ten words." The Beatitudes, from the Latin for "blessed." The sicknesses are the passions (Greek pathe, "sufferings"): not feelings as such, but desires gone wrong and grown into habits. Their opposites are the virtues. The struggle against the one and toward the other is askesis (training).
What's actually happening
The Ten Commandments
God gave them at Sinai (Exodus 20:1–17). The Orthodox count them the older Greek way, with the ban on images as its own commandment:
- "You shall have no other gods before Me" (Exodus 20:3).
- "You shall not make for yourself a carved image" (Exodus 20:4).
- "You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain" (Exodus 20:7).
- "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy" (Exodus 20:8).
- "Honor your father and your mother" (Exodus 20:12).
- "You shall not murder" (Exodus 20:13).
- "You shall not commit adultery" (Exodus 20:14).
- "You shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15).
- "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor" (Exodus 20:16).
- "You shall not covet your neighbor's house," and the rest of the list, as one commandment (Exodus 20:17).
If you grew up Catholic or Lutheran, your numbering will be one off for most of the list. Those churches follow Saint Augustine's division, which folds the images into the first commandment and splits coveting into two.2 Same words, different count. Why the second commandment doesn't rule out icons is the subject of Icons.
The Orthodox use the commandments the way you use a mirror before you leave the house. One examination of conscience given to catechumens walks through them one at a time, and its first question is about the heart, not the rulebook: "Have I been faithful in my prayers, attending Divine Liturgy, and keeping God at the center of my life?"
The Beatitudes
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). "Blessed are the pure in heart, For they shall see God" (Matthew 5:8). There are nine of them (Matthew 5:3–12). The commandments mostly say what not to do. The Beatitudes describe who you become: poor in spirit, mourning, meek, hungry for righteousness, merciful, pure in heart, a peacemaker, willing to be persecuted for it. They describe Christ, and anyone he's healing; nobody passes them like a test.
The passions and the virtues
The Church's oldest working map of the soul comes from the Egyptian desert, by way of Saint John Cassian, who wrote it down in the early fifth century. He names eight "principal faults": "first, Gluttony or the pleasures of the palate; secondly, Fornication; thirdly, Covetousness, which means Avarice, or, as it may more properly be called, the love of money, fourthly, Anger; fifthly, Dejection; sixthly, Accidie, which is heaviness or weariness of heart; seventhly, κενοδοξία which means foolish or vain glory; eighthly, pride."3 That Greek word is kenodoxia (vainglory). Cassian gives each one its own book, with its causes and its cures.4
A few need translating. Gluttony starts with food but doesn't end there; it's the habit of having what you want when you want it. Dejection is grief that has curdled into hopelessness. Accidie, in Cassian's own gloss, is "heaviness or weariness of heart," the restless boredom that makes prayer, work and people all seem pointless. Vainglory is wanting to be seen being good. Pride is believing you are.
The virtues are the same powers healed. Saint Paul's list is "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" (Galatians 5:22–23), and he calls it fruit, not achievement: the Spirit grows it. The Prayer of Saint Ephraim sets four of each side by side, the sicknesses first and then the cures.
Why it matters
A courtroom is the wrong picture. In the Orthodox imagination sin is a sickness more than a broken statute, the Church is a hospital, and the commandments are the doctor's orders (Salvation as Healing takes this further). That's why confession comes up again and again in this guide: it's where you name the disease and receive the cure (Confession).
The Beatitudes run on the same logic. "Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy" (Matthew 5:7) describes how mercy works in a person: the one who gives it becomes able to receive it. "Blessed are the peacemakers, For they shall be called sons of God" (Matthew 5:9): peacemaking is what God does, so the peacemaker starts to look like family.
It also changes what counts as progress. The measure isn't "Have I arrived?" but "Am I repenting? Am I getting back up?" The prayer that opens this entry ends by asking to see your own sins and not judge your brother, because the passion that loves to grade other people's souls is the one that blinds you to your own.
Where it came from
The commandments are Sinai's. Jesus summed them up in two, love of God and love of neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40), and the Didache opens its moral teaching the same way: "There are two ways, one of life and one of death," and "The way of life, then, is this: First, thou shalt love God who made thee; second, thy neighbour as thyself."5
The Greek count of the commandments is old. Around 200, Clement of Alexandria counts "the first commandment of the Decalogue" as the one God, makes the "second word" the ban on transferring God's honor to "things created and vain, which human artificers have made," and calls the tenth "the command respecting all lusts."6
Cassian presents the list of eight as the teaching of the Egyptian monks he had lived among, and his Institutes carried it to the rest of the Church. The Prayer of Saint Ephraim carries the name of the fourth-century Syrian poet and is prayed throughout Lent.7
What you do
If you're Orthodox: before confession, walk through the commandments honestly, then ask which of the eight passions keeps showing up behind the sins you found. Pick one virtue to practice this season; the opposite of the passion is usually the right one. Don't try to fight all eight at once. Cassian treats them one book at a time, and so can you. Pray the Prayer of Saint Ephraim on Lenten weekdays, with the prostrations if your body allows.
If you're visiting: you already know the Ten Commandments, though maybe not this count. When you hear the Beatitudes sung on Sunday, listen to them as a description of a person. And if you're in church on a Lenten weekday when everyone drops to the floor for the Prayer of Saint Ephraim, you're welcome to bow your head and say it with them.
Go deeper
- Exodus 20:1–17; Matthew 5–7.
- Saint John Cassian, Institutes, books V–XII (NPNF2 11), on the eight principal faults.
- Hapgood, Service Book, p. 41, the Prayer of Saint Ephraim; then a Lenten weekday service where it's prayed.
- Confession and Salvation as Healing.