Little known in the West, Mark’s writings have always been popular in the Christian East. They are included in the first volume of that classic collection of Orthodox spiritual texts The Philokalia; in the Byzantine period there was even a monastic adage, ‘Sell everything and buy Mark’. Reacting against the Messalians (an ascetic movement originating in fourth-century Syria), Mark insists in trenchant terms upon the completeness of baptism. He is speaking, of course, about sacramental baptism:
However far someone may advance in faith, however great the good he has attained … he never discovers, nor can he ever discover, anything more than what he has already received secretly through baptism…. Christ, being perfect God, has bestowed upon the baptized the perfect grace of the Spirit. We for our part cannot possibly add to that grace, but it is revealed and manifests itself increasingly, the more we fulfil the commandments …. Whatever, then, we offer to Christ after our regeneration was already hidden within us and came originally from Him.
Mark ends – for he is strongly Pauline in spirit – with a quotation from Romans 11:35 – 36: ‘Who has first given a gift to God, so as to receive a gift in return? For from Him… are all things.8
Baptism, according to the Monk’s teaching, confers upon us a total purification from all sin, both original and personal; it liberates us from all ‘slavery’, restoring the primal integrity of our free will as creatures formed in God’s image; and at the same time, through our immersion in the baptismal font, Christ and Holy Spirit take up their abode within us, entering into what Mark terms ‘the innermost and uncontaminated chamber of the heart, the innermost and untroubled shrine of the heart where the winds of evil spirits do not blow’.
At this point Mark makes a crucial distinction, summed up in the two Greek adverbs m u s t i k v V meaning ‘mystically’ or ‘secretly’, and e n e r g u v V , meaning ‘actively’. Initially, at sacramental baptism -and Mark seems to envisage primarily the situation of infant baptism – the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit is given to us ‘secretly’, in such a way that we are not at first consciously aware of it. We only become ‘actively’ conscious of this presence if we acquire a living faith, expressed through our practice of the divine commandments. In this way baptism plants within us a hidden seed of perfection, but it rests with us – assisted always by God’s grace – to make that seed grow, so that it bears conscious and palpable fruit. While we cannot ‘add* to the completeness of baptism, God nevertheless awaits a response on our part; and if we fail to make that response, although the Spirit will still continue to be present ‘secretly’ in our heart, we shall not feel His presence ‘actively’ within us, nor experience His fruits with full conscious awareness.
Such is Mark’s map of the Christian pilgrimage. Our starling-point is the presence of baptismal grace within us ‘secretly’ and unconsciously; our end-point is the revelation of that grace ‘actively’, with what he terms ‘full assurance (p l h r o j o r i a ) and sensation (a i s q h s i V )’. As he states:
‘Everyone baptized in the Orthodox manner has received secretly the fullness of grace; but he gains assurance of this grace only to the extent that he actively observes the commandments.’
Our spiritual programme can therefore be summed up in the maxim ‘Become what you are’. We are already, from the moment of our sacramental baptism as infants , ‘Spirit-bearers’ in an implicit and unconscious manner. Our aim is therefore to acquire conscious experience – several times Mark uses the Greek term p e i r a – of Him who already dwells within us:
‘All these mysteries we have received at our baptism, but we are not aware of them. When, however, we condemn ourselves for our lack of faith, and sincerely express our belief in Christ by performing all the commandments, then we shall acquire experience within ourselves of all the things that I have mentioned; and we shall confess that holy baptism is indeed complete and that the grace of Christ is invisibly hidden within us; but it awaits our obedience and our fulfilment of the commandments.’
We are now in position to assess the answers which Mark offers to our three questions.
- It is abundantly clear that Mark allows for an indwelling presence of the Spirit that is unconscious yet nonetheless real. Such, in his view, is precisely the position of those who have been baptized in infancy. They receive a genuine indwelling of the Paraclete, and this ‘secret’ indwelling will never be altogether lost, however careless or sinful their subsequent lives may be; as Mark puts it, ‘Grace never ceases to help us in a secret way. l2 At the same time Mark regards this ‘secret’ presence as no more than an initial starting-point; and he clearly affirms that the vocation of every baptised Christian without exception is to advance from this to a conscious awareness of the Spirit.
- In Mark’s view, this conscious awareness of Spirit experienced ‘actively’ and ‘with full assurance and sensation’ is in no sense a new grace, distinct from the grace conferred in water baptism, but it is nothing else than the full ‘revelation’ of the baptismal grace conferred upon us at the outset. The baptized Christian ‘never discovers, nor can he ever discover, anything more than what he has already received secretly through baptism’. Everything is contained implicitly in the initial charisma of baptism.
- As to the outward experiences which accompany this conscious awareness of the indwelling Spirit, Mark is reticent. He does not speak about visions, dreams, trances and ecstasy.
Nowhere have I found in his writings anything that could be interpreted as a reference to speaking with tongues. His allusions to tears are infrequent; so far from exalting the gift of tears, he warns us, ‘Do not grow conceited if you shed tears when you pray.’13 He does indeed believe that our aim is to experience consciously the energies of the Spirit’ and to reach the state above nature’, where the intellect (n o u V ) ‘discovers the fruits of the Holy Spirit of which the Apostle spoke: love, joy, peace and the rest’ (cf. Gal. 5:22).14 But he does not specify what precise form these ‘energies’ and ‘fruits’ are to take.
When interpreting an author such as Mark, it is helpful to make a distinction between ‘experience’ (in the singular) and ‘experiences’ (in the plural). There are surely many Christians who feel able to say in all humility, ‘I know God personally’, without being able to point to any single event such as a vision, a voice, or a concentrated ‘conversion crisis’ of the kind undergone by St. Paul, St. Augustine, Pascal or John Wesley. Personal experience of the Spirit permeates their whole life, existing as a total awareness, without necessarily being crystallized in the form of particular ‘experiences’. When Mark and other Greek Fathers refer to our conscious awareness of the ‘energies’ or ‘fruits’ of the Spirit, they may well have in view an all-embracing ‘experience’ of this kind, rather than any specific and separate ‘experiences’.
