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The parable of the  Sower

In this language of parable, another very valuable image is that of Adam in the garden, and perhaps, paradoxically, the garden as the seedbed in man, the very soil in which: “A sower went forth to sow".

Gregory of Nyssa wrote, linking the parable of the Sower and that of the tares, and saying that the field in which the tares grow is the heart. Christian tradition retains this not only as idea, but as experience that extends the idea of the garden beyond that of mere memory to what might be described as states of memory. As the abbot of one of the Athos monasteries once said: "To be in the liturgy is to experience paradise." [ii] This is based on doctrine, but it is confirmed in experience, for in an Athonite liturgy one captures again the tears and the joys of that Garden long lost to us, which yet lies all around us: the paradise of the heart which the head can never see unaided. This paradise is approached through tears, through self doubt, through the penetrating experience of repentance ... never merely through doctrinal ideas or simple theory. Always, it involves emotional, felt experience, sharp, embarrassing, remorseful, self-­revealing, suddenly joyful, often painful, bearing strange undercurrents of sorrow perhaps, but real... above all, real; the tears of real people.

"Out of the strong came forth sweetness." ( Judges 14: 14.)

And it is in this garden that the Sower went forth to sow:

And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, "Behold, a Sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear." (Matthew 13:3-9.)

The place where the Sower spread his seed, the field where the enemy planted the tares, the wax tablet of Plato’s analogy -- in the esoteric tradition these are in the spiritual or noetic heart ... a heart which can be found by beginning from the physical heart, but is in fact something much deeper, the darkness beyond the mind, Saint John of the Cross’ thought that transcends reason. This is the field tended by the householder of God. That is why Gregory of Nyssa, quoting his sister Saint Macrina as his teacher, wrote about the parable of the tares that:

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