The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel: Concerning The Guarding of The Five Senses

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain wrote this counsel without his books, on the barren island of Skyropoula, trusting a memory stocked with Scripture, the Fathers, and years of monastic discipline. He first composed it for his cousin Hierotheos, a newly consecrated bishop who feared that governing others without governing himself would endanger both pastor and flock. From that urgent request comes a searching book about the gates of the soul: the eyes, ears, imagination, memory, heart, body, and nous, the spiritual intellect that must return from dispersion to the heart. Nikodemos can move from tobacco and idle talk to the ordering of desire without changing key, because he sees each habit as part of the same struggle against the passions. The book is practical, severe, and often startlingly exact. It asks for slow attention. Its register belongs to an older ascetical world, dense with quotation and moral anatomy, but it rewards the listener who wants counsel that does not flatter distraction. For listeners new to the tradition, the audiobook’s introductory chapter, a biography of Saint Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and a contemporary reading of the work, offers the bearings needed to hear him in his own world and in ours.