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Shorter Rules

St Basil the Great, tr. Lowther Clarke, 1925

Rule 16: Why is It that the Soul at One Time Feels Compunction Even Without Effort,…

Such compunction is God’s gift and is sent to stir up desire that the soul having tasted the sweetness of such sorrow may strive to cultivate it; or to prove the possibility of the soul always possessing such compunction with the help of diligent care, that those who have lost it through indolence may be without excuse. But to constrain oneself and yet not be able is at once a proof of our neglect at other times—for it is not possible for a man having come to a thing suddenly to master it without much and frequent practice in company with others—and it shows that our soul is dominated by other passions and not allowed by them to be free in the directions in which it desires freedom, according to the principle laid down by the apostle: “But I am carnal, sold under sin. For not what I would that do I practise, but what I hate, that I do.”² And again: ‘But now it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.”³ Indeed God has allowed this to happen to us for our good, if haply the soul through its involuntary sufferings may come to perceive who it is that dominates it, and recognising the things in which it is involuntarily a slave to sin may regain soberness and escape from the snare of the devil, finding the mercy of God ready to help those who truly repent.

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