Loneliness on the threshold of eternity

A conversation about loneliness in old age. Photo: UOJ

We are so afraid of growing old that we have learned to hide it even from ourselves. We buy creams, anxiously examine new strands of gray hair in the mirror, brush off twinges in our hearts, and pretend that eternal youth lies ahead. Illness frightens us more than disasters in the outside world because it exposes our helplessness. We imagine that a person whose body is failing must inevitably lose their dignity, sinking into bitterness or forgetfulness.

And when we open the writings of ancient authors, we subconsciously expect familiar platitudes: “Endure, brothers, do not complain. The soul matters more than the perishable body.” We imagine the great saints were carved from some special kind of stone, impervious to pain.

​But history has preserved a very different testimony. In the solitude of his Cappadocian estate at Arianzus, near the end of his earthly life, one of Christianity’s greatest theologians wrote poems that were anything but optimistic. St. Gregory the Theologian left us a record of human decline. As we read the yellowed pages of his late poetry, we find ourselves transported in our imagination to his deserted cell in the mountains.

An evening of sorrow in exile at Arianzus

Having left behind the bustling capitals, episcopal sees, and bitter controversies, the saint returned to his ancestral estate at Arianzus. There, his health finally gave way. Fevers plagued him, his joints ached in the damp, and his strength diminished day by day.

In his poetic cycle Mystical Hymns, he leaves us a remarkable self-portrait. The saint describes himself without embellishment, looking reality squarely in the face: “My gray head and wrinkled body have already bent toward the evening of a sorrowful life.” And a little earlier comes another striking observation: “Youth is a fleeting surge of vitality; gray hair is the sorrowful sunset of life.”

“Vladyka, does even faith in God’s Providence fail to protect us from the searing loneliness of old age?” I ask him across the centuries.

The saint sighs bitterly, leaning on his wooden staff.

“I have no caring wife to relieve me of my incurable troubles... I have no beloved children to cheer me, in whose presence old age takes heart and begins once more to walk with youthful steps. Neither blood relatives nor friends console me: some have been taken by cruel death, while others... tremble at the slightest disturbance.”

Far from pretending to be an unfeeling Stoic, the saint acknowledges that having no family and losing loved ones in old age leaves a deep, bleeding wound. He mourns his deceased brother Caesarius, suffers over the betrayal of his companions, and bitterly feels his abandonment in an empty house where there is no one even to bring him a cup of water.

The aging theologian’s personal enemy

His most remarkable poem from this period is titled On Illness. In it, the saint addresses his own affliction as though it were a living being, a treacherous enemy that has invaded his cell.

“Why do you speak so harshly to your pain, Vladyka? Would it not be better to endure it humbly?” I ask in bewilderment.

The saint furrows his brow, recalling his sleepless nights, and once again addresses his illness: “You attacked my sturdy flesh and weakened me from head to foot, loosening the bonds of those humors with which God moistened the dry substance within me... You came with murderous designs and poured out upon poor me all the poison of your bitter malice.”

At the same time, he openly calls the flesh a flattering adversary that constantly torments the soul. His body becomes a burden that hinders prayer, a source of pain. Yet it is precisely through this crucible of physical decay that the saint learns to see himself without illusions.

Alone with his failing flesh, he asks an existential question that every human being has asked at least once: “What was I? What am I now? And what shall I be?”

And he answers it himself with striking honesty as he reflects during his solitary walks: “I am nothing fixed or permanent, but the current of a muddy river, flowing ceaselessly and never stopping for a moment.”

Remedies for bodily frailty

Recognizing his own transience and fragility does not plunge the saint into despair. Having grasped the full extent of his helplessness in the face of old age, he develops a strategy for resisting it. In his poem Lamentation over the Sufferings of His Soul, he lists six remedies he practiced in the seclusion of Arianzus.

“What should we do when our strength begins to fail?” I ask the weary elder.

The saint looks at me sternly, prescribing a demanding ascetic discipline.

Gray hair and bodily frailty become for him not grounds for self-pity but instruments of purification. If the flesh is irreversibly deteriorating, the suffering that accompanies its decline can be turned to good through voluntary humility.

St. Gregory’s experience restores our hope. It turns out that fear of old age and frailty is a normal, natural feeling experienced even by the great pillars of the Church. The saints were not born as unfeeling machines. They, too, feared loneliness, suffered pain, and mourned their fading youth.

But the difference between them and us is that they did not shut themselves off from their fears. They brought those fears into their conversation with God, transforming their failing bodies into instruments of salvation for their souls.

On the threshold of eternity, the saint leaves us with a simple parting message: “Do not fear the fading of the flesh, for through the dissolution of the temporal man, the eternal man is born within you.”

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