SPIRITUAL COMBAT. – Ascetic repression of temptations and vicious inclinations, the attainment of the moral ideal. The struggle for life and for its improvement and elevation exists not only as a sublimating and selecting force in the organic and social worlds, but in a particular way in the spiritual and supernatural realm.
That the spiritual life of the Christian is a struggle is one of the concepts most insistently inculcated by the New Testament Scriptures: “He shall not be crowned except he who has striven lawfully” (2 Tim 2:5).
The teaching that spiritual life is a struggle is particularly developed in the Pauline Epistles. The life of the Apostle after his conversion is a “good contest” (1 Tim 6:12). Christian life is represented by him as a bitter struggle, with alternating fortunes, ending only with death, a struggle of the utmost importance, since eternal life is at stake (1 Cor 9:26-27; Heb 12:4).
Within us there are, as it were, two beings, “two men”: the new man, regenerated, a product of grace, living in the “spirit,” striving to actualize and develop the supernatural organism begun with Baptism; but alongside him there subsists the “old man,” the “animal” or “natural” man, living in the “flesh,” indulging in the disordered tendencies deriving from original sin.
In this “old man,” not annihilated by Baptism in his evil tendencies—i.e., in “concupiscence”—lies the enemy to be fought. Concupiscence is threefold: “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 Jn 2:16). The struggle of the “new man” against the unruly attraction of sensual pleasures and earthly goods, and against pride, is made more bitter by the intervention, in support of the internal enemy, of two other terrible external enemies: the world (i.e., the complex of those who oppose Christ, with their doctrine and way of life, to which the Christian must be “crucified” and vice versa: Gal 6:14; cf. 1 Cor 7:31); and the devil, through whose envy sin, death, and unbridled concupiscence entered the world, and against whom one must struggle perpetually (Eph 6:12).
These three enemies of our soul are in reality one. The “old man,” carnal, inevitably comes into conflict with the “new man”; they cannot coexist, but one must necessarily die, since while the “carnal man” is enticed by pleasures without moral concern, the “spiritual man” abhors forbidden pleasures, sacrificing them to duty, i.e., to the divine law.
Hence the so-called perpetual spiritual combat, which transforms the Christian into an “athlete” and “soldier,” struggling until death for an immortal crown (Eph 6:10-16: the armor of the soldier of Christ). The struggle knows no truce during earthly life, since all efforts to free oneself from the “old man” only weaken him, strengthening the “new man” against him.
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers, with an eminently ascetic background, all develop the concept of Christian life as spiritual combat. This is particularly evident in the first part of the Didache, the moral catechesis (chs. 1-6), also called the “Book of the Two Ways”; Pseudo-Barnabas summarizes in chs. 18-21 the doctrine of the “two ways” expounded in the Didache. Notable references to spiritual combat are also found in the Shepherd of Hermas, which teaches “encratism” understood in the orthodox sense of asceticism. Christian life is likened to spiritual combat especially in the Second Pseudo-Clementine Epistle, a homily in which the speaker, after a brief introduction on Jesus Christ (chs. 1-4), proposes his theme (chs. 5-7), namely the spiritual combat that the Christian must wage against the world; the concept of this struggle is developed in chs. 8-17 (this heavenly combat consists especially in the cultivation of Christian virtues: penance, purity, charity, confidence, etc.), and concluded in chs. 18-20 with a fervent exhortation to serve God and to fight for Him, whatever the cost. The patristic literature of the 2nd-3rd centuries is literature of combat, for the Church found itself in a century of struggle.
The Epistle to Diognetus develops the concept of the struggle between flesh and spirit (chs. 5-7). Clement of Alexandria conceives the “Pedagogue,” i.e., Christ, not only as a father but also as a helmsman and general who guides Christians.
Clement of Alexandria develops the concept of the Christian’s struggle against the devil, the world, and the flesh (De principiis, III: PG 2, 425-562, 641-1632). St. Ephrem, whose spiritual doctrine exercised a great influence in Eastern monasteries, views spiritual life in the light of a combat of which he indicates the weapons ready to sustain the Christian in life, namely fasting, temperance, prayer, holy reading, the exercise of virtues, and in particular charity, virginity, patience, humility, and penance (cf. G. S. Assemani, Opera omnia graece, latine, syriace, series graeca, I, Rome 1732, p. 66; II, pp. 321-22, 461; particularly in the Treatise on Spiritual Life, series graeca, I, pp. 258-82; and in that on the Formation of Monks, III, pp. 337-56), a concept taken up again by St. John Chrysostom, St. Nilus the Abbot, and all Eastern monasticism. Of these, F. Cayré writes (I, p. 497 ff.) that they seem particularly to have meditated upon the fact that this life is a combat; they have understood and savored the words with which St. Paul exhorted the Ephesians to put on the armor of God. The enemies against which the monk must fight are the devil and the vices. The monk was particularly to be vigilant against Satan, temptations, demonic obsessions and illusions, learning to recognize aggression in the unrest of the soul and resorting to the three weapons: prayer, work, and fasting. This teaching is well expressed in St. Jerome and in the *Institutiones* and *Collationes* of Cassian addressed to monks.