УНЫНИЕ

1. The enemy brings melancholy and boredom You write that melancholy and boredom are tormenting. There is no external – visible – trouble?! So this is the enemy's business. The enemy does not like peaceful hearts... and so he somehow manages to squeeze the heart and drive out the sweet peace from it. Pray to the Lord and the Mother of God... and it will pass... Just don’t complain or be annoyed at this, but say: according to business, according to business! And add: forgive, Lord, my sins, known and unknown. The enemy languishes to no avail, and you, turning this languor into languor for sins, outwit him, making him an instrument of a good spiritual feeling (3, p. 93). 2. The appearance of despondency: a) in the absence of grace-filled inclinations; b) when satiated from reading and thinking Having said that “the Kingdom of God is revealed,” Speransky continues: “Then, when all reflections, all reasoning about heavenly objects become dry, boring, tasteless...” No, not like that: that attraction is not a consequence of this tastelessness, but tastelessness is a consequence of that attraction. It must be said this way: when that attraction is revealed, then all personal activity ceases, whether with the mind or other forces, and there is no desire for it; unless the enemy can come up and suggest something, suggesting that you need to do this or that or think about it in order to develop the incipient good state. In Speransky this is expressed too strongly: “dry, boring, tasteless,” whereas it would be enough to say: everything stops and is abandoned. If these words of Speransky are understood as they sound, then they will indicate stops in spiritual life due to dryness, tastelessness and boringness. These are attacks of the spirit of despondency, the tormentor of ascetics. But then there are no grace-filled attractions; on the contrary, their absence is the cause of despondency. There is only room for silent patience. Something similar to this also happens when someone reads for a long time with attention and thinks deeply about what he reads; the soul is then satiated and no longer wants to read, and demands rest in prayer for its tired attention. It goes without saying that the attraction here is not at all what is being discussed: here is the usual need for rest, revealed by a tired soul, just as it is revealed by a tired body (10, pp. 39–41). You might be interested in: