… Evagrius of Pontus … defines apatheia as the very health of the soul…. This tradition reaches its most profoundly developed form in the thought of Maximus the Confessor, whose Chapters on Love is a virtual manual of instructions for the cultivation of apatheia, which is to say, for him, the cultivation of a spiritual […]
Read More“We must show the way to find out whether a phrase is literal or figurative. And the way is certainly as follows: whatever there is in the word of God that cannot, when taken literally, be referred either to purity of life or soundness of doctrine, you may set down as metaphorical. Purity of life […]
Read MoreHumility and love are the supreme characteristics of the Orthodox. From these qualities come the modesty, the sincerity, the simplicity which are so incompatible with the spirit of proselytizing, the authoritarian spirit … which prevails elsewhere. Orthodoxy does not persuade or try to compel; it charms and attracts. Such is its method of working in […]
Read More… the eucharistic gathering, as an image of the last times, certainly should involve only the baptized. In this sense, we are talking about a closed community which comes together ‘the doors being shut’ (John 20:19 …). The Eucharistic gathering can never be a means and instrument of mission, because in the last times, which […]
Read MoreMost believers more inhabit their religion than reflectively assent to it, at least in the way that one might ascent to a simple proposition. In some very real and not at all dishonorable sense, their belief rests upon the experience of belief only, and that of the most generously imprecise kind. It does not need […]
Read MoreLike the Church of Rome, Orthodoxy too, as it developed first in Byzantium and then in the Russian East of the Church of Moscow, suffers from papalism– not consciously dogmatic, clearly or responsibly formulated, but actual and psychological. Orthodoxy is grounded in sobornost, the communality of the body of the Church, and not in the […]
Read More“…the secondary question of whether this defiant rejection of God for all of eterniy is really logically possible for any rational being; and the primary question of whether the God who creates a reality in which the eternal suffering of any being is possible — even if it should be a self-induced suffering — can […]
Read More… the very concept of an “omnipotent entity” is contradictory. Real omnipotence would require a power co-terminus with the whole of being, from its innermost wellsprings and principles to its outermost consequences and effects; it would even require possession of the power belonging to the deepest source of all the acts of every rational will, […]
Read MoreIt is not to deviate from the perfect worship of God that we allow the production of icons made of wax and colors. For we make no icon or representation of the invisible divinity: in fact, the holy angels themselves cannot understand or penetrate it totally. But since the only Son himself, Who is in […]
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RJB
December 12, 2023
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