The truth about this is stored up in the hidden treasury of wisdom and will be disclosed at the time when we are taught the mystery of the resurrection in deed, when we will no longer need words to reveal what we hope for. If at night wakeful people discuss at length what the light […]
Read MoreAccording to Gregory … evil has no substantive existence, but arises from the act of the will in refusing the good and deliberately turning away from light…. But the discord arising from evil cannot finally defeat God’s purpose. God must eventually be “all in all.” The purpose of the Incarnation is to restore all created […]
Read MoreIf you have something above your daily needs, give it to the poor, and then go with boldness to offer your prayers, that is, to converse with God as a son with his Father. Nothing can bring the heart so near to God as almsgiving, and nothing brings such serenity to the mind as voluntary […]
Read MoreHe sighed again and for several seconds merely gazed in silence at the softly shining water. “Belief is such a slippery concept among humans. So often your kind professes beliefs that your actions belie. I scarcely know what the word means to you. All I know is that my instincts incline me in that direction […]
Read MoreFor the earliest and greatest of the church fathers in general, the story of salvation was really quite uncomplicated: We were born in bondage, in the house of a cruel master to whom we had been sold as slaves before we could choose for ourselves; we were born, moreover, not guilty or damnable in God’s […]
Read MoreThe most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity, or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. […]
Read More… 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 […]
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RJB
February 19, 2024
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