A vertical old age

Sexagenarios de ponte deici oportet! came with a Roman saying. Let's throw the sixty-year-olds off the bridge! It does not appear that such a slaughter has ever been put into practice in Rome except metaphorically, as when on the Ides of May puppets of rushes were thrown into the Tiber with their hands and feet tied: stunts of the sexagenarians of the proverb? Even when old age did not last as long as it does today, even when society was not measured only on productivity, there was a certain annoyance towards the elderly: so much so that Cicero felt obliged to emphasize that the "guilt" of old age was not age, but the way to live it.

The Romanian philosopher Andrei Pleşu points out that the protagonists of the Gospels are young people, from John's eighteen to Peter's thirty-two. Whenever we speak of "presbyters" we never refer to age, but to the public function: either members of the Sanhedrin or custodians of religious tradition. The only time John uses that term is in the episode of the adulteress to be stoned: when Jesus says the fateful "Which of you is without sin" and the first to leave are the elders, well aware of being laden with sins. In the Acts, Apocalypse, Catholic and Paul's Letters, "presbyter" mostly means "priest" or "messenger": the idea, which later will belong to Augustine, that one is never too old to learn and that advancing in age requires an additional spiritual effort. Older men should be sober, Paul writes to Titus, dignified, wise, steadfast in the faith ... Older women should not be slanderers or slaves of wine, but know how to teach good (Tit, 2,2-3).
In the Christian view, venerable old age is not calculated by the number of years, says Saint Ambrose. It is calculated from purity and wisdom, says Chrysostom. There are immature old men and wise young men, as in the story of the old man of the desert who gets angry with a disciple and drives him away; but the next day he finds him outside the door and says to him: «He enters; from now on you are an elderly man and a father, and I am a young man and a disciple. "

Sometimes in the same person there are infantile aspects and other wise ones. The inner life does not have a linear, predictable, flat path, nor does it know infallible techniques to "arrive". Indeed, its characteristic is never to arrive. The goal is always beyond. Spiritual life is free, sovereignly free: like every person, like grace, like human desire. Gregory of Nissa compares it to walking in the fog "from beginning to beginning", until the "youth without old age" of the day without sunset. We must be reborn "from above", Jesus says to Nicodemus, and also to us. As I have trampled on death with my death, you trample your old age with a vertical old age made of patience, silence, prayer, acceptance of marginality and solitude. But also a smile: an amiable, tender, benevolent smile. Like God's smile on you.


Flaminia Morandi
NP February 2022