Search for me,
A needle in a haystack,
Find where I lie,
Pain hidden by a rag,
Here I hide — from you? —
Blood wounds, undried and shining,
I hide, fearing
Your loving hands hold salt.
— (from a Belarusian poem)

The Moral Schism

The faith and love of every man is put to the test by something — misfortunes, psychological difficulties, moral perplexities, even by our happiness. Each of these tests is in one way or another, linked with suffering — the degree of suffering connected with the amount of evil within and around his life. All of this entails the growth of self-knowledge, a probe of his depths, and painful as it might be, it is indelibly linked with any spiritual progress.

Tests come in life, and man looks into his soul. He becomes conscious of his sin. He sees what lies on the surface of his consciousness — spiritual warps, moral inconsistencies, and defects of reason. He will, in doing this, undoubtedly experience grappling thoughts and negative emotions. And the growing knowledge of his nothingness and powerlessness, of his need for help from the outside — from God — is usually the beginning of the Christian Way.

The Way, through tests, introspection, and suffering, is hard and has many pitfalls. There is a strong temptation to look for happiness and consolation right from the beginning. If we experience disillusionment or disappointment, then we might start fearing that our journey to God might turn into torment and punishment.

We must face this fact: there can be no true comfort or consolation without first passing through radical repentance, without deep heart-knowledge of the horror and destructive force of our sin. The Christian Way is ineffably consoling, but comfort is not reached by chasing after it. If we look for Truth, Jesus Christ, and rejoice in our sufferings, according to His precepts (Matt. 5:11,12), we might reach happiness and consolation in the long run. But if we search for comfort, we will get neither comfort nor Truth, only self-deception in the beginning and despair at the end.

Only after we understand that a moral law exists, supported by God’s power, that we have broken this law and how we should properly relate to this Power, only then we begin to understand what True Christianity has to say. It says that we have fallen into such a state that we simultaneously love and hate good, and that is why we are afraid to look the facts in the face. And that is because the facts are fearsome. Thus, there is nothing to say to people who are not conscious of what they have to repent of and who feel no need for forgiveness whatsoever.

People, who live by the flesh, protesting their moral obligation to God, attempt to be guided solely by “love” in their search for Truth. To them Christianity appears to consist only of rules and regulations. It is true that morality is not in itself sufficient; virtue exists for the sake of Truth, not vice versa. Love liberates us from the power of any law, and, as Saint Macarius the Great says, “He who attains love cannot fall”.

But many deceive themselves, rejecting moral laws before time, having no love, but only a vague concept of it and even a more nebulous concept of any moral obligation. And strangely enough, it is spiritual books and study of everything spiritual that ‘help’ many to reach this miserable state of being. About the over-intellectualization of the spiritual, the Holy Fathers say: “If anyone is diligent in reading and writing, but has no corresponding increase of virtue, his end will be terrible”. The most terrible thing is the inability to love or to respond to God’s love. This is the beginning of infernal tortures. The cause of all this is not only idle curiosity about things, which our consciousness cannot hold, but also seeking after them in word and deed.

It is very dangerous to translate the experience of faith into the language of concepts. This is the beginning of numerous illusions and errors. A skilful sophist can successfully defend both thesis and antithesis, but such resourcefulness and sharpness of mind do not make a man any nobler, even in their most perfect condition. We can understand only what we are aware of, but the one who has attained ‘Christ’s mind’ does not pay any attention to his thoughts or his earthly wisdom. He is simple in the Lord. Often however, God’s wisdom is taken as foolishness and insanity in this world.

The Holy Fathers say that “God’s grace comes not only to those who search for it,” He sends His grace where He will. God foresees the response of a man to His grace, and this is the reason why we do not have Divine Gifts, such as faith, love, the Divine mind, etc. Thus, before God starts serving the man, the man should first serve God by faithfully performing his moral duty. We cannot say that all of this is easy and pleasant. No, this is so hard that the Holy Fathers compare this moral labour to death and re-birth. Saint Gregory the Theologian says: “The first birth is parental, the second comes from God, and in the third, man gives birth to himself through tears of repentance and grief”. This grief is somewhat comparable to the magnitude of the Divine Gift. For, according to Saint Isaac the Syrian, “God leads the soul into grief and temptations according to the magnitude of grace given”.

Universal Schism

Mankind was conceived as a single whole, a reflection of the image and likeness of God. Man’s attempt to break away from this whole and to live independently (individually) constitutes the tragedy of Adam’s original sin, to which we once gave and continue to give our consent. Thus, a man developed two wills — one directed outward, the other inward. The schism of human nature brought the schism of our universe. Evil was not made eternal, but was ousted into the temporal, sensual, and material domain to be corrected and eventually annihilated. It does not mean that God hid from man, leaving him to his own devices, to the illusion of human self-sufficiency, which supposes the existence of the source of being within oneself (“and you will be like God”, Gen. 3:5). God does not turn away from wicked men, for “It is silly to say,” according to Saint Anthony the Great, “that the sun hides itself from the blind”. It means that God, allowing Adam to die a material death, saved him and us from a greater evil — spiritual death in eternity (so that he would not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever).

At present, during this mortal life on earth, we are to get our food in the sweat of our face in order to keep our ‘independent’ existence. And by doing this, we are to rectify the habits of our free will, which are inaccessible to God, so that the gap between the mind and the heart, between the spirit and the soul would be closed, and we could conform our own will with God’s will towards us, as befits the purpose of our creation. Overcoming the schism of the human nature is a matter of the whole life. Its last step is death. Only by dying consciously and daily can we exhaust death “so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 COR. 5:4). Only by having started to live as an integral person and not as a biological individual fixed upon ourselves and within ourselves, can we establish contacts with other personae — with God and with men. Until we stop our ‘independent’ existence, we can never start life as it befits a man — after God’s image and likeness, in other words, become a true man.

Restoring the Unity

The first step on this path is to become oneself by a gradual elevation towards transformation into God’s image and likeness — through prayer and following the Lord’s commandments, — for it is also possible to live someone else’s life, as a poor copy of someone. Saint Isaac the Syrian says: “Sink into yourself away from sin, and there you will find steps of your personal ascent”. He is referring to a going down into the depths of one’s heart through prayer. “To put on Christ” and “to put off an old man” is to move away from the sinful self to my actual self, to my “image and likeness”. It has been called a flight from our sinful twin.

“Twin” is that with which we identify ourselves, our body and the whole psyche connected with it, i.e. thoughts and all our five senses. Our thoughts and images get materialized in our soul and form a different world with an illusory existence. When we enter it, we go away from our true selves into an imaginative reality. However, the genuine “I” is not something that belongs to me (my thoughts, features of character, etc.), — all this is transient and vanishes as smoke. “I” is eternal and is not subject to any change.

We fill up our consciousness with symbols, circuits, and terms as in a computer, but contrary to the machine, this play of imagination disappears into non-existence. It turns immediately into flesh and life. Image-building symbols are the reality we live, or better, we exist in. The ability to create existence out of “non-existence” is characteristic of a man, but we are only “small-c” creators. For example, our thoughts cause a change in the chemical composition of our blood, a thought of food brings appetite, but thoughts of spiritual matters cannot spiritualize our nature. We can only deal with our own energies, which are already created by God. But non-created energy, i.e. God’s grace, is given only by God, provided that we observe His commandment — love. To make the first step to ourselves, we need to bring our feelings into their natural condition, i.e. to reject sensual pleasures, exceeding natural needs. This, of course, does not concern those for whom sin, a departure from grace — filled to sensual enjoyments, has become a natural necessity.

To succeed in this, we should cultivate sufficient contempt for our own personal narrow interests and goals, no matter how important they might seem to us. This is the only way we can make room in our soul for another person. We must stop dialoguing with our own “twin”. It means overcoming the schism of human nature, my individualism, forgetting about and working on sinful problem areas (sinful because they are my own), seeing myself in another human being. This is the greatest happiness of overcoming our loneliness. Only by starting to work on ourselves in this manner, can we come to know spiritual labour for the sake of another human being. It means mourning over my own “dead” and starting to mourn for others and together with others. During this labour, spiritual loneliness is overcome, an all-idealising love for all creation awakens. Despite the fact that negative qualities can undermine our faith in a person, we must still have faith in his Divine essence and potential until the end, no matter how low he has fallen. This focus on the positive brings us closer to the genuine reality, to God’s original image in man and mankind.

If another person does not become higher and worthier in my own eyes than myself, then my “ego” will never step over the limits of its self-importance and individualism. That is why it is so important to place the centre of gravity outside myself, in another person. This means to be ready at any moment to renounce my own interests for the sake of someone else’s interests, to cultivate in myself a precious feeling of undivided concern for another person. It is hard to do all this, but it is extremely necessary to do so, otherwise our “twin” will cause our degradation and the decay of our consciousness.

The main goal of our life is a permanent prayer for God’s grace and help in order to enable ever-increasing labour over myself in the name of another person, to advance the departure from myself into the life of my neighbour. This is Christ’s paradise. In this way, it should not be hard for us to make a step towards a person, rather than passing him by. We will not block ourselves from someone’s joy or grief with our “twin”, nor will we prefer our personal goals and interests to sacrificing love for God and our neighbour.

It is very important to understand that we are responsible not only for ourselves, our passions and desires, but also for the others, for humankind is a single whole. However, in order to join this whole, we have to ask for forgiveness not only for ourselves, but also for our brother — if he, for example, is offended at me — to ask that he also be forgiven. This is the only way God’s image can be restored in man, through unity and mutual exchange.

The more I pray for the others or grant them practical help, the more I receive myself, for it is impossible to receive without giving. This is the law and axiom of spiritual self-perfection, perfection in love. We forget about this great spiritual law and commit a grave error by blocking ourselves from God and people with our “twin”, who suffers from different psychological complexes and pursues personal goals (his own idea of salvation, perfection, etc.)

Sometimes, it is necessary to distance ourselves from people in order to acquire love for them; but if we give them Christ’s love, we acquire it for ourselves. Thus, we will rise over our “personal” love, personal grief or joy, and will derive enormous power even from our own suffering, which would inspire the others. This is how we can fulfill the whole law, for the Gospel says: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). And we know that Christ’s law is love.

The Beginning of Love

True love starts when we let others be the way they are, rather than adjusting our impression of them to our own liking. Otherwise, we will love only our own fixed perception of them. It is necessary to understand ourselves and everyone else as God’s creatures, to see God’s image and dignity in ourselves and in others. He granted it to everyone of us, and if we hurt this dignity in others, we actually hurt ourselves.

We have no power to change another person, and we should not waste our time analyzing why he behaves this way or that. Let him follow his own path. We should accept people as they are, otherwise our intrusion can prove to be destructive. A person might know what we expect of him and behave the opposite way. Just as a sign of protest. Every person has his own stimuli and interior motives, which are not subject to our understanding. Therefore we must not violate the right of others to live the way they want. We have to liberate ourselves from concerns about anything that lies beyond human capabilities, and learn to depend upon the Divine Power, God. Otherwise, we reach a dead-end, where one unconquerable will tries to conquer the other unconquerable will. If God Himself has no power to lift the stone of man’s will that He has created, how much less is it within the power of man! Humility in this case signifies quiet and simple acceptance of everything that is beyond our power. We have to preserve energy for things that are within our power. Understanding that only God can make the other person change, we have to diminish all of our internal drives that oppose His power, so that it could start working in us and through us.

The only thing God cannot (or does not want to) overcome in us is our own free will, which we turn into tyranny and self-will. If we, however, are convinced that not everything depends on us and that many things, especially fateful, can be fixed only by God, then denying our self-will is paramount to saving a man, say, from despair. And we have to pay this price, if we want to obey God and offer Him the chance to work in us and through us.

If Christ occupies the most important place in our life, we do not need any technical or psychological tricks in order to restore our spiritual health and that of our neighbors. Let us assume we are suffering and can not find the way out, but this is only because we imagine that everything depends solely on us. We have to make a determined step towards God and stop tormenting ourselves, instead of trying to solve minor and numberless problems, for they only consume our energy and exhaust our spiritual potential. Let us admit our own powerlessness and thus get rid of our self-will, which blocks the way to God.

We must do only what we can, what we are supposed to do and do the best we can in that. The possibility of doing this is granted only for today. It is wrong to think that “time will come when I…”, for it means that we deceive ourselves. Right now we cannot conquer certain conditions, but if we entrust our life to God’s will right now, today, by rejecting our own will, we liberate ourselves from tension. There is no more need for struggle. However, it does not mean that we can relax and expect God’s will to work. God’s will means that I should not betray love under any circumstances in my life, no matter who I am or where I am. Relying on God’s will means to become aware that it is impossible to keep this loyalty without His help.

It is certainly possible, after the reliance upon God’s will, to turn our back not only on our problems, but even on God and our neighbor, expecting that all the work will be done for us and without us. Here and everywhere else we need a sense of measure, for such self-deception will only increase our problems.

To exclude self-deception from the very beginning, it is necessary to explore the genuine motives behind every decision, followed by concrete action. Otherwise, if we let ourselves be deceived in the very beginning, then all our hopes will be ruined by the expectation that life will be adjusted according to our own idea about it.

Therefore it is impossible to solve all the problems at once. We have to choose one aim and follow it steadily, gradually, and carefully, for slow movement, as known, brings one sooner to the destination, if we mean here the strict self-testing of genuine motives of our behaviour. And love of God is certainly the best stimulus for any action.

Our task is to learn to love by imitating Christ’s love. And the main condition here is overcoming our own egotism and self-will. This of course is not a simple task. Those, who were allowed to follow their will in childhood, have it the hardest. Obedience, i.e. renouncing your will, is an expression of love. For an adult, it means preferring someone else’s will through love. For a child, it is doing what you are told without questioning. If a man does not have this experience of obedience and love, then his psyche inevitably becomes unstable, vulnerable, and is overcome with psychological complexes and even with various diseases.

Even though God made us all potentially whole, to remain in this condition is very hard, at times just impossible. Bringing order into spiritual chaos, left by those who have been with us since the moment of our birth and “nurtured”, is not an easy task. Some resort to reading books and try to bring order into their spiritual world by changing their minds. But this way — from the outside inward — does not always bear good fruit. Very often, a person simply drowns in the whirlpools of his own thoughts, since it is difficult to bring life into this dead load of thoughts that are kept in our mind.

No work of mind can make up for the virtual experience of love, the only thing, which possesses the highest value, for it is only love that has access to the source of existence, God. As Antoine de Saint — Exupery puts it, “The human mind is not worth anything unless it is a servant of love”.

Spiritual love, according to the Holy Fathers’ teachings, destroys all kinds of passions and psychological complexes, and thus is a panacea for all diseases. It places everything where it belongs. At first, it helps us to discern the good self from the evil self. This first step of genuine self-knowledge is made through love, and we know that no spiritual progress is possible without it. This is the only way we can learn to separate ourselves from the burden of endless troubles, engendered by our “twin”. This does not mean that we will have no conflict with ourselves, for without it we would not be able to move forward. It does mean we have to have the right attitude to any provocation coming from outside or from our inside. Other people or our own motives will influence us only if we allow them to. Then we will be able to voluntarily accept pain that anyone is going to afflict on us, and this will be not as much pain, but rather joy and happiness of life according to the laws of love. Before we have achieved this state, our soul should not delve into anything that we cannot overcome, which forms a powerful protection against all evil around us.

What can words do to me, if I do not take them to my heart? Or my own complexes, if I do not attach any significant importance to them? Certainly, it is impossible to isolate myself completely from my own problems and those of my neighbour. It is however necessary to strictly observe how much to take on, conforming it with my own power and with the power of my love. The Holy Fathers say: “May each person dedicate himself to the ascetic battle only to the degree of his soulful love for God”.

Today is The Day of Salvation

However, waiting for the moment when we finally acquire love, when we finally become better and kinder, is sometimes very dangerous, especially when most urgent help is necessary. For example, hatred, rancor, and offence should be driven away from our thoughts immediately, before this poison spreads any deeper. And this has to be done as fast and as mercilessly as possible. We must not savor our emotions too long — feelings of depression, guilt, pity, and compassion towards ourselves. Otherwise, we will blow them up to the size of a tragedy, after which we can imagine ourselves martyrs. If we failed or were not able to choose the best — for example, to take offence or not, — and have already indulged into this feeling, then we need to know that we have sunk to the inferno of our sub-consciousness, and it is not us who has life any more. It is our “twin” that has life. In this case, we have to sink even deeper, and then we will find that a thick layer of guilt, offence, and psychological complexes conceal our genuine Divine essence. This is how the respect for the present self will be restored, and how the contempt for our “twin”, i.e. sin, will evolve.

Man, like God, can freely determine the manner of existence of his own nature. God’s image does consist only of external freedom and reason, for in case of deficiency in these areas, man would turn into an animal. This would be an unfair punishment. The difference between a man and an ape is first of all the ability to respond to God’s love or to reject it. This ability does not depend on human physical or psychological functions. If it was not so, how can we have the ability of self-sacrifice, which even overcomes the instinct of self-preservation? No defect of reason can deprive a man of his inner self, of his ability to communicate with himself, similar to the counsel with Himself of the Holy Trinity. Our “I” is clearly aware of its difference from the nature it occupies. It simply expresses itself in psychological and physical functions. In doing this, it creates its own world where it lives and finds its own enjoyment (instead of enjoying Divine grace). Like Dostoyevsky’s Stavrogin, we identify ourselves with this world. God says: “But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart — they defile the man” (Matt. 15:18). And as grace in the heart increases, the man stops identifying himself with what proceeds from his heart, but identifies himself with Divine grace. Self-consciousness is not destroyed, but gets broader and deeper into “itself”, into its Divine likeness. Naturally then, it forgets all its personal interests. Therefore, the Holy Fathers say: “He who has deigned to see himself is higher than the one who has seen Angels”.

This all, however, requires strict measurement. It is easy to go to extremes if we do not observe a measure in good or evil. Concentrating upon one’s own merits only means reinforcing one’s egotism, and vice versa, taking up a back — breaking load of reproach to oneself means an utmost overstrain. In this case, we will indeed destroy the last bits of self-dignity in ourselves. It will be the ultimate catastrophe for a proud man, even for a believer, who is tempted with pride. He would like to be a person of worth, but turns into nothing in his own eyes, and therefore thinks he has nothing to give to God. Thus, it is very important in this situation to restore respect to one’s true spiritual self. So that a proud man would not lose his faith in holiness, this kind of lesser evil (respect or self-esteem) is allowed.

It is necessary to arm ourselves with tenacity and patience in order to be able to control ourselves without losing power over ourselves. Not everything can come at once, and we must not expect much for the present moment. We must thankfully accept all that God has given us for the present day according to our labour and zeal, instead of being vexed that life does not become any better. This may still not be humility, but it is the real perception of life. If I see my good qualities not as mine, but given to me by God, then I will be able to accept them with genuine humility. How many unrealized plans and disappointments do we have only because we expect too much from life! “Look at the child putting his hand into a jug with a short neck, an ancient sage said, if he grabs too many sweets, he will not be able to take his hand out”.

Let us think about all the good things God gives us in our life, and then they will increase and will oust all the bad ones. But here we have to bear in mind that good does not necessarily mean pleasant. If we savour details of our misfortune, we will be sucked into the swamps of sad thoughts with the danger of suffocating in our own mud. Saint Ephraim the Syrian said: “You will smell the stench of a dung-heap, as long as you stand beside it”.

Let us learn to rejoice at all the good things the present day brings with it, then we will not burden ourselves with solving our future problems. Jesus Christ says: “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day” (Matt. 6:34). In medical terms, the preoccupation with something that has not yet taken place is called a ‘dark perspective disorder’. The Gospel warns us against this disorder by proclaiming to live in the present day. It is necessary to turn from the past and cast off thoughts about the future in order to discover unlimited potential of the present day. This day is unique, for it will never be repeated again. It comprises the whole experience of my previous life and all the potential for the future. It belongs to me and I can do whatever I want with it. I can fill it with vain trouble and anxiety, or I can dedicate to God.

Today is the day God has given me. If I could realize what kind of gift it is to me, I would use every moment of it to make my life brighter and more meaningful spiritually. I would not look back to the past in disappointment, would not reflect anxiously about the future. I would try to live it the best I could. I would notice everything interesting and divine in my life and nature around me. Thirst for beauty, thirst for life is characteristic of every living thing, but it is conscious only in man. Today, by dying consciously for all that has nothing in common with the Divine life, we can be born into a new life in God, the name of which is love.

Monk Alexander
(Translated from Russian, July 29–31, 2000, Saskatoon)

Article and interview by Chris Parish
originally appeared in What Is Enlightenment magazine

In the following article and interview we meet a living example of purity in spiritual authority. Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain, a church that sees itself as proceeding in an unbroken lineage from the earliest days of Christianity. Having split from the Western church in 1054, Eastern Orthodoxy today has over 170 million followers and, with Russia’s new openness to religion, is growing in size and influence. For many years, Metropolitan Anthony’s sermons have been broadcast by BBC radio and television, and he is well known in Europe and Russia as “the voice and face of Orthodoxy.” Central to Orthodox Christianity is the hesychast tradition, the esoteric practice of silent contemplation under the direction of a staretz, or spiritual father. This tradition is said to go back to the early saints and Christian contemplatives known as the Desert Fathers. Metropolitan Anthony is himself a contemplative as well as a spiritual father to many. Through his books and talks, he has brought prayer and spirituality to life for innumerable others. While fulfilling the responsibilities of a patriarch in the Church organization, Metropolitan Anthony sees union with the Divine and manifesting this union in the world as his foremost task. His humility and single-minded seriousness of purpose shine through in this portrait of a rare and extraordinary human being.

It’s Sunday morning. As I approach the Russian Orthodox Church, which looks small and unimposing amid the stately Georgian architecture of affluent Knightsbridge in Central London, I am wondering what it will be like to meet Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and a man regarded by many as nothing less than a modern-day saint. In a time when organized religion seems to have fallen into disrepute and spiritual authorities in general are regarded with suspicion and mistrust, what is it that attracts this man’s parishioners to Christian Orthodoxy, and why do they and so many others hold him in such high esteem? As I pause before the pale stone front of his church, it excites me to realize that I am about to find out.

After entering through the heavy wooden door, it takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light within. But then what strikes me is just how many people are here for today’s service-hundreds, and they’re all standing. I’m surprised to see that there are hardly any chairs, though I find out later that this is the norm for services in the Orthodox Church. The atmosphere is rich with the smell of incense and the beautiful voices of an unaccompanied choir. The walls and pillars are covered with golden icons depicting the Orthodox tradition’s pantheon of saints. Candlelight shimmers in the darkness, reflected by the gold of the icons. A feeling of devotion is palpable as people pray, kneeling periodically on the bare wooden floor, or deep in contemplation, offer a candle and kiss the icons unselfconsciously. Partly in Russian and partly in English, the service lasts for a good two and a half hours, by the end of which I can hardly stand. But the people around me look as attentive as they did at the start.

The Orthodox Church is an Eastern branch of Christianity which has developed in near-total isolation from the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches of the West. Prayer has always been paramount in its tradition as a way of communion with God, and the extraordinary lives of its many saints through the centuries are testimony to its efficacy. In our time the Orthodox Church is increasingly attractive to many Western Christians who feel that it offers a depth of spiritual life not available to them in their own traditions. I’ve been told that recently an Anglican priest together with his entire congregation converted to Orthodoxy in this very church. The priest said during the ceremony that for him it was a homecoming.

Suddenly the congregation crowds expectantly to the front and an elderly archbishop with a gray beard and an ornate robe and mitre begins speaking in English. I know at once that this must be Metropolitan Anthony. As he leans on his staff, eyes closed and seemingly in meditation, his carefully chosen words emerge with a natural warmth and authority. His sermon is short, but his words command attention and have undeniable power and authenticity:

“People usually say that a heretic is someone who holds false and wrong views, but also I say a heretic is someone who doesn’t live what they preach. So let us examine ourselves. Why is it that people who meet us never notice that we are limbs of the risen Christ, temples of the Holy Spirit? Why? Each of us has got to give his own reply to this question. Let us, each of us, examine ourselves and be ready to answer before our own conscience, and do what is necessary to change our lives in such a way that people meeting us may look at us and say: ‘Such people we have never seen. There is something about them that we have never seen in anyone. What is it?’ And we could answer: ‘It is the life of Christ in us. We are His limbs. This is the life of the spirit in us. We are His temple.’ ”

Suddenly the service is over and the congregation begins to disperse. When the Metropolitan reappears after a few minutes, the robe and mitre are gone, replaced by a plain brown monk’s habit and a well-worn leather belt. People waylay him and ask with moving devotion for a quick word or a blessing for their babies. As he strides purposefully towards me, I realize how extraordinarily vigorous and solid he is for a man over eighty years old. He takes both my hands together in his and readily agrees to my request for an interview. Then he’s gone, disappearing out a side door. Although we’ve hardly spoken, I feel that I’ve just met with a fellow human being rather than with the representative of a powerful institution. Why this is so becomes clearer to me during another visit to the church to listen to the Metropolitan speak at the ordination of a new deacon:

“Let us therefore pray with him and surround him with care, with compassion, because we have sent him like a lamb among the wolves. The wolves are all the temptations that may come with new force to everyone who devotes his life to the service of God. It is also those people to whom he will be sent, of whom some will receive his words with gratitude and some will reject them with anger, because the message he is to bring is a message of total transparency, total surrender to God, and also of a heroic following of Him who has said to us: ‘I have given you an example to follow.’ ” Listening to this, I have the feeling that Metropolitan Anthony is speaking as much about himself as anyone else.

Returning a few weeks later at the time we’ve arranged for our interview, I’m surprised that it is the archbishop himself who heaves open the door to greet me. Seeing him again I realize that he is shorter than I had thought, his bearing and presence having given the impression of a man of larger physical stature. I follow him upstairs to the gallery, where we have to climb through all manner of boxes and old clothes-stored here for rummage sales-in order to get to the small space where he keeps a makeshift desk. Since the gallery is tiered and narrow, the seat he offers me is on a higher level than his own, so that I find myself looking down at the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain and feeling slightly embarrassed by this reversal of protocol. He seems to have no secretary or office and appears indifferent to such material concerns. I notice that his monk’s habit is held together by a safety pin.

The Metropolitan is very welcoming, and although his gaze is steady and penetrating, his eyes often flicker with humor. I find him down to earth, completely natural and quick to laugh, and I sense in him a fearlessness that must come from having gone through the fire himself. Because he is so self-effacing, tending to downplay his knowledge and spiritual attainment, it is sometimes difficult to draw him out about his own inner life. He seems to prefer sharing stories and anecdotes reminiscent of the teaching stories of the Desert Fathers, the early Christian ascetics of the Egyptian desert among whom the Orthodox tradition originated. He relates with amusement that the posters announcing a seminar he once gave at Oxford made it clear that believers were not invited, because it is his experience that believers think they have all the answers and tend not to be open! Having read some of his books and listened to some of his BBC radio and television broadcasts, I know his talks and writings to be an extraordinary and universal testament to the fruits of the spiritual life. But he smiles with a certain relish as he confesses that he never went to theological college.

The son of a Russian diplomat, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh was born in 1914 and spent his early years in Russia and Persia. Because of the revolution, his family emigrated to France, where he eventually became a medical doctor in Paris. He recalls that his father was a powerful spiritual influence on him as he was growing up. Once, when he returned home late from a holiday, his father told him that he had been worried about him. “Did you think I’d had an accident?” he asked. But that wasn’t what his father was concerned about. “That would have meant nothing,” his father answered, “even if you had been killed. I thought you had lost your integrity.” This incident made a profound impression on him, and has stayed with him all his life.

During the Second World War, he served in the French Resistance as well as practicing medicine. Many of his anecdotes about the conditions which really test an individual’s devotion to truth and readiness for self-sacrifice are drawn from his experiences during the war. He took monastic vows secretly in 1943 and was ordained as a priest in 1948. Soon afterward he moved in order to serve his church in England, where he has lived ever since. He became an archbishop in 1962, and Metropolitan (which means bishop of a chief city, or metropolis) in 1966.

By the Metropolitan’s own account, he was “aggressively anti-church” during his teenage years in Paris, and did not believe in God. At a certain point, while at boarding school, it occurred to him that life would be unbearable if it had no meaning. He allotted himself one year in which to discover whether life did have any meaning. He decided that if at the end of that year he had found none, he would kill himself. Months went by and no meaning appeared. Then one day he was persuaded to attend a talk by a priest who had been invited to address a Russian youth group to which he belonged. He sat through the lecture reluctantly, finding himself disturbed and repelled by the picture of Christianity which the priest presented. Returning home, he read through one of the Gospels to see if it would confirm the negative impression the lecture had given him. As he read he suddenly became aware of a mysterious and overwhelming presence in the room. To his shock and surprise he knew without any doubt that this was Christ. This direct experience was, he says, the turning point of his life, and gave him a certainty which has never left him.

Man’s aim, the end and vocation set before him, is that through and beyond his own union with God, he should make this transcendent yet ever-present God (who enfolds and penetrates all, in whom we live and move and have our being, but who remains unknown to the world, unknowable indeed from without) interior and immanent in man and through man in the world; united with his creature indissolubly, though without confusion, distinct yet not alien, still himself, still personal, still God-yet closer to the soul than breathing itself…

Thus, as he embarks on his course, the Christian must make his peace with God, with his own conscience, with men and things; relinquish all care about himself, firmly purpose to forget himself, not to know himself, to kill in himself all greed, even for spiritual things, in order to know nothing but God alone… Henceforward the worshipper must free himself from the bondage of the world by unconditional obedience — joyful, total, humble, and immediate; he must in all simplicity seek God, without hiding any of his wretchedness, without founding any hope on himself, in this active self-abandonment to God which is the spirit of watchfulness in humility, in veneration, with a sincere will to be converted, ready to die rather than give up the search.

Metropolitan Anthony
from his introduction to The Way of a Pilgrim

Metropolitan Anthony: As in every walk of life, before you can walk independently you must be taught how to walk and in what direction. If you have someone who is more experienced than you are, knows perhaps more or better, it’s natural that you should learn to listen. And the point of obedience, which we always think of in terms of being like a little dog who is given commands and obeys them-it isn’t that at all. Obedience is a word that means listening. If you learn to listen to someone else, not only to the words he speaks but to the mood and meaning he tries to convey, you become freer of your self-centeredness, of your narrowness, and you become capable of listening not only to this man but to every person, and to the totality of life, and to God. Because unless you learn to listen to one person you cannot learn to listen. But on the other hand, it is not everyone who knows a little and can teach a great deal. If you find a great spiritual guide you are lucky, but they don’t grow like grass.

WIE: In the modern world there have been many people who’ve assumed the role of mentor or teacher and abused their power, so that people have become suspicious of genuine spiritual authority.

MA: One must learn at the same time to listen with openness, and never to renounce one’s right to say, “I cannot follow beyond this point.” Because otherwise you will obey the guidance of people who have no basis for guidance, who have no reason to guide you. It doesn’t mean you have a right to judge everyone, to say, “I know better.” But it means that you must be very sure that this person knows what the answer is to your question, to the question you are asking.

WIE: I read your beautiful introduction to The Way of a Pilgrim, the famous classic of Russian Orthodox spirituality. You wrote there about the importance of a relationship with a master who is well qualified to guide one on the way.

MA: Yes, but the master doesn’t always tell you, “You do this and you do that and you will arrive at such and such a point.” At times he’s an example to you, at times there is something in him that makes you follow. I remember how I found my spiritual father. I came to a church late for the service and I saw a man coming out. There was in him such serenity, such centeredness and light that I came up to him and said, “I don’t know who you are, but would you be my spiritual guide?” And afterwards he hardly ever gave me guidance, but I’m sure he prayed for me, and I found that I was like a little skiff tied by a long rope to a great boat. He was moving in that direction and I was moving behind him, but there was always this rope between us. I saw him once or twice a year, and whenever we met I discovered I had come to a point where he was. Not in the same degree, but like a little circle and a big circle: both are a circle, but there is a difference of size, of scale. Before he died he sent a note to me, “I know now what the mystery of contemplative silence is, I can now die.” And he was dead within three days.

WIE: He was obviously an important influence on you.

MA: Yes, but he must be ashamed of me now because I have not born fruit of what he was. But he is really an image for me.

WIE: Often people don’t like the idea of obedience to authority, but you are talking about being inspired by and following the example of another.

MA: If only people thought less in terms of drill and doing what they are told, but thought instead, “If I want to learn to play the piano, I must ask someone to direct every finger of mine.” The same is true about everything we want to learn. You cannot learn the piano by simply banging and hoping it will come out right.

WIE: For the Orthodox Christian and the Orthodox Christian path, what is the ideal goal or result for a human being?

MA: I think I would answer in a way that may sound very stupid: to become a real human being. Because habitually we are not real human beings, we are human animals. We develop our intellect, we have our emotions, we have a wavering will. This is not real harmony. This is not wholeness. The perfect wholeness to us is the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The aim of the Christian life is to become disciples, people who learn from him, not only obedient in the sense of being well drilled but obedient in the sense of being able to listen deeply, to understand his thought, his heart, and to grow into the full measure of our humanity, which is His humanity.

WIE: What would it mean to grow into the full measure of one’s humanity, the full measure of Christ’s humanity?

MA: I think the ideal would be to love one’s neighbor with all one’s being-if necessary at the cost of one’s life-and to know and love God with all of one’s being, because it is His life and His love that finds perfect expression in us when we are sufficiently open.

Doing the will of God is a discipline in the best sense of the word. It is also a test of our loyalty, of our fidelity to Christ. It is by doing in every detail, at every moment, to the utmost of our power, as perfectly as we can, with the greatest moral integrity, using our intelligence, our imagination, our will, our skill, our experience, that we can gradually learn to be strictly, earnestly obedient to the Lord God. Unless we do this our discipleship is an illusion and all our life of discipline, when it is a set of self-imposed rules in which we delight, which makes us proud and self-satisfied, leaves us nowhere, because the essential momentum of our discipleship is the ability to reject our self, to allow the Lord Christ to be our mind, our will and our heart. Unless we renounce ourselves and accept his life in place of our life, unless we aim at what St. Paul defines as “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me,” we shall never be either disciplined or disciples.

Metropolitan Anthony
from Living Prayer

— From the Sayings of teh Desert Fathers

Rediscovering Mary

Interview from National Review Online with author Frederica Mathewes-Greene, April 5, 2007

Q. Frederica, you have a new book out about Mary. Have you discovered a new gospel? Where was it hiding?

A. I feel ambivalent about the title — kind of lurid, isn’t it! But my point was that there are many, many ancient Christian texts that are fully orthodox; it’s not only a matter of New Testament versus gnostics. Earlier generations of Christians read the same kind of supplemental and devotional works we do today: biographies, commentaries, letters, sermons, debates with non-believers…pretty much anything you would find in a Christian bookstore today. Except men’s dress socks with little fish and crosses on ‘em.

These works got “lost” mostly because we forgot them—our “family memory” fades after a few decades or centuries. Contemporary Western Christians have a bad case of spiritual amnesia. So I’m hoping to put a few of the more appealing and worthy works back on the shelf. In this book I present three ancient texts concerning the Virgin Mary, with new translations and verse-by-verse commentary. The first is a “gospel”, or narrative biography, of the Virgin Mary’s birth and early life.

Q. How important is the life of Mary, especially in her Son’s final days, as a model for Christians?

A. Mary’s suffering faith during our Lord’s last days is a model and inspiration for all believers. But what I found in these three documents was that the greatest interest for early Christians was in her pregnancy. The fact of the Incarnation was something early Christians continually marvelled over; also, it was the grounds on which they had to fight most often, defending the real divinity and real humanity of Jesus. And it was Mary whom God called on to provide the physical matrix for Christ’s appearance in the flesh; she was a regular human being, one of us. That means that on one side, Jesus’ grandmother was named Anna, while on the other side…you see how mind-blowing it is.

Q. What does she teach us about sacrifice?

A. The first text, the “Gospel of Mary,” shows us Mary as an adorable little girl, and then as a teenager coping with a “crisis pregnancy” that could cause her execution as a suspected adultress. This was an extremely popular work among Eastern Christians (that is, Asian, African, and Middle-Eastern) in the second century. Many of the stories here made it to Europe, but the intact text did not. A 16th century scholar who translated it into Latin named it “the Protevangelium of James;” this is how scholars know it today, but it’s not the original title (no one title stuck, actually). In this work, Mary is steadfast under this trial, and teaches us much about courage.

The other two texts illuminate other aspects of Mary’s role. The second is a very short prayer that was found on a scrap of papyrus in Egypt in 1917, and dated 250 AD; it is the earliest prayer to Mary. It begins, “Under your compassion we take refuge…”, and it’s still in use East and West (Roman Catholics know it as “Sub Tuum Praesidium.”) This second text shows us that early Christians believed that she (like all the saints) is not dead, but alive in Christ’s presence and continually in prayer, so we can call on her as a prayer partner. The third text is a beautiful and intricately complex “sung sermon”, written around 520 AD, which explores the mystery of the Incarnation and all the ways that Mary’s role is foreshadowed in Scripture.

Q. Is Mary of particular importance to women as a spiritual guide?

A. One of the things that has surprised me, as I explore early Christian spirituality and the Eastern Church, is that there is so little interest in gender division. There aren’t separate types of prayer or spiritual disciplines for men as opposed to women, or for Greek rather than Arab or Egyptian Christians, or for rich versus poor Christians—none of that seems to matter. In Western Christianity, of course, we hear a great deal about tailor-made spirituality, right down to personality type; it fits the grid of our consumer culture. But in these texts there’s very little interest in Mary’s feminity; all the emphasis is on her humanity. She is the Theotokos, the “God-bearer” in the sense of bearing a child; her example invites all people everywhere to be Theophorus, “God-bearers” in the sense of bearing God’s presence like a candlewick bears a flame.

Q. It often seems that poor Joseph doesn’t get the coverage Mary and Jesus (natch) get. What should we know of him?

A. Yes, Joseph is usually relegated to standing in the background and leaning on his staff. There’s a bit more about him in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew knew the story of Mary’s pregnancy from Joseph’s point of view, Luke from Mary’s), and in the “Gospel of Mary” he is an even more developed figure. When he discovers Mary pregnant, he becomes extremely distraught; when the High Priest tells him he must separate from Mary now that she’s pregnant, he weeps openly; when he’s making plans to bring her to the enrollment in Bethlehem, he talks about how embarrassed he is to present this pregnant woman, decades younger than he is, as his wife. Most interesting is the scene when Joseph helps Mary down from the donkey and goes to find a midwife. Suddenly all of nature is frozen: he sees the birds motionless in the air and the stream standing still. The time of Christ’s birth is accompanied by nature’s stillness and awe, just as his Crucifixion will be accompanied by noontime darkness and earthquakes.

Q. Could Mary REALLY have said NO to God?

A. There’s a toughie! It’s the unanswerable question of how God’s will is done, yet humans aren’t mere robots. I think we have to say, on the one hand, that Mary’s acceptance was free and unconstrained, and all Creation hung breathless on her reply. But, on the other hand, God knew her as well as he knows every human being; he knew her every thought and action, and so he knew that she was the right girl to ask. When my daughter was a toddler, I used to think of this puzzle this way: I knew that if she heard me open the refrigerator, she would come over and reach into the bowl on the bottom shelf for an apple. I didn’t compel her to do that, she was free not to, but I knew my daughter. He knows us that way. And God draws us in a similar way, much like a beautiful piece of fruit draws a little girl: his beauty is compelling, and anyone who’s had even a taste of his presence never forgets it, but continually hungers for more (just like a whiff of cinnamon at the mall makes you crave a cinnamon bun). Christianity is not an institution, not a brokerage for spiritual transactions, but a treasury of wisdom; it’s the “art and science” of gradually, increasingly being able to bear the light of Christ—the thing that we are made for, and yearn for.

Q. Are Catholics too into Mary?

A. When you picture Christ on the Cross looking at his mother, and think about how much he loved her at that moment, and how he said to John (and through him to us), “Behold your mother” — surely no amount of love we give her could ever displease him. But I think that over the centuries her role has sometimes been misunderstood and exaggerated, in ways that must distress her. Folk belief has sometimes held that she can overrule her Son, that she has her own magic powers, that she is something of a demigod. But the leading characteristic of her life was humility and service; her whole goal was perfect union with God’s will! Mary has been sometimes misunderstood over the centuries, and accorded imaginary powers, separate from her Son, things that would probably sadden her. I saw an anti-Catholic comic book once that showed Mary kneeling before God’s throne and asking him to have mercy on people who exaggerate her role, and the thing is, that’s a pretty good picture of what the best of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian belief says about her: that she us praying for us, that she is our friend and prayer partner.

Q. Is there a message in your book for non-Christians?

A. One of the interesting things about the Gospel of Mary, that I hope will intrigue non-Christians, is that it is such a strong depiction of a little girl being loved. When I read Julia Duin’s extraordinary 4-part series in the Washington Times about sex-selection abortion in India I was heartbroken; I had never before visualized the century after century of little newborn girls being strangled, buried alive, left out for wild animals to devour—simply because they were female. Now sonagrams and abortion are making this killing a prenatal matter, and the ratio of newborn girls to boys is plummeting. Well, that’s the way much of the world has been, for much of history; the most endangered human being on the planet is a little girl.

But in the Gospel of Mary we see the birth of a girl greeted with a cry of exultation, and watch as the girl is treasured and cuddled and loved throughout her childhood. There’s a lovely 14th century mosaic icon in a church outside Constantinople, that shows her parents, Joachim and Anna, embracing and kissing her. Whatever else was going on in the rest of the world, among Christians in the second century it was easy to believe that a little girl was precious. That’s worth thinking about.

Q. What about Mary in the Easter story is most revealing?

A. It’s funny, but the texts I look at in my book don’t focus Easter; they’re primarily concerned with Mary’s conception of Jesus. So many splinter groups at the time were denying either that Jesus was God, or that he was human, and the obvious place to emphasize that he was both was in Mary’s womb. But of course, Mary’s role at the Cross, on Easter and on Pentecost, is resoundingly significant. What most intrigues me is the hints in the Scriptures that at the time of the conception of Christ, she had only a partial idea of what God’s plan was. The hymn she sings after the conception of Christ, known as the “Magnificat”, clearly expects that the Messiah will be a military leader and expel the Roman oppressors. That didn’t happen; very tragically the reverse, and the utter devastation of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. So it must have surprised Mary when Symeon told her, on her first visit to the Temple after Jesus’ birth, that “a sword will pierce your soul also.” In Orthodox Christian hymnography, as Mary sees Jesus carrying the Cross, she calls out to him and asks where he is going; perhaps to another wedding at Cana, to turn water into wine? We know that in a deep sense this moment is, in fact, the entrance of the Bridegroom, and that he is going to a feast and he will provide the wine. These hymns, which we will sing Thursday night in Eastern Orthodox churches, portray her grief with great intensity; it’s a good idea to bring some tissues to dry your eyes.

Q. What are you doing for Easter?

A. We Orthodox Christians have about a dozen services in the days leading up to Easter, and many churchs will host all-night vigils on Friday night, as the psalms are read aloud next to Christ’s tomb. We observe Easter (we call it Pascha) with a midnight service on Saturday night. We’ll begin in a darkened church with some ancient hymns, have a candlelight procession outside, and then come back in to find the church transformed with light and flowers. The service that follows takes about 3 hours! When it’s over we gather for a breakfast feast with champagne and all the foods we’ve been fasting from during Lent. The last person rolls out the door around dawn—just when our neighbors are heading out for their Sunrise Service. It’s a powerhouse of an evening, and I don’t think I could handle it more than once a year!

Article originally appeared on Frederica.com
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Every year, on Hallowe’en, I sit on the front porch of my house with a bowl of candy, a box of beeswax candles, and a large icon for the Feast of All Saints.

Every child who comes to the house gets a piece of candy, and may also light a candle and place it before the icon. Very few kids (even the jaded teenagers) turn down the opportunity.

For those who ask, I tell them that the meaning of the word “Hallowe’en” is “the eve of the Feast of All Saints”.

If they press me on the point, I tell them that they can think of the true meaning of Hallowe’en as being that, because of Christ, they can dress up like ghosts and goblins and whatnot, because we do not need to fear those things any longer.

I wish I had a few photos of the kids in Satan masks, lighting a candle and placing it before the icon…

Brendan O’Neill writes in spiked:

I am avowedly atheist. But listening to the bishops’ drab, eco-pious Christmas sermons, I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Bring back God!’

They say we get the leaders we deserve. We also get the bishops we deserve. And in an age of petty piety, where relativistic non-judgementalism coexists with new codes of personal morality, giving rise to a Mary Poppins State more than a Nanny State, it’s fitting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a trendy schoolteacher type who dispenses hectoring ethical advice with a smarmy grin rather than with fire-and-brimstone relish.

In his Christmas sermon, delivered at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams finally completed his journey from old-world Christianity to trendy New Ageism. His sermon was indistinguishable from those delivered (not just at Christmas but for life) by the heads of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Williams did not speak about Christian morality; in fact, he didn’t utter the m-word at all. He said little about men’s responsibility to love one another and God, the two Commandments Jesus Christ said we should live by. Instead he talked about our role as janitors on planet Earth, who must stop plundering the ‘warehouse of natural resources’ and ensure that we clean up after ourselves.

More…

by John Stamps

When it comes to St. Augustine, the great fifth-century bishop of Hippo, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox all have a similar reaction: none of us quite know what to do with him. Or at least that was my impression, based on the conference I attended at Fordham University last June.

The event was star-studded, at least on an intellectual level. Fordham managed to pull together an amazing collection of theological heavy-hitters: Jean-Luc Marion and Fr. David Tracy from the University of Chicago; Fr. Andrew Louth from Durham (UK), along with his wife, Dr. Carolyn Harrison, herself an Augustine scholar of no mean reputation; Fr. Brian Daley of Notre Dame; David Bentley Hart, lately of Providence College; Fr. John Behr of St. Vladimir’s Seminary; David Bradshaw of the University of Kentucky; and more.

The conference attracted an equally fascinating cross-section of the Christian world. In addition to all the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic priests and monastics, I saw a distinguished-looking Coptic priest and a motley crew of divinity students from across the theological spectrum. From where I was sitting, I could see students with name tags from Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Ft. Worth, Reformed Seminary in Jackson, Mississippi, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, St. Vladimir’s, Harvard Divinity School, and of course Fordham.

My next-door neighbor in our Spartan dorm was a Roman Catholic abbot from Orange County. With the conference held in the Bronx, we were able to hang around Little Italy and talk theology into the night with a Black American Baptist pastor from Berkeley, who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on St. Augustine’s controversy with the Donatists. I even encountered an old seminary friend, a faithful Presbyterian pastor for many years.

The Fordham organizers did an excellent job of pulling together speakers and presentations on St. Augustine that avoided the worst excesses of Augustinian advocates and detractors alike. The lectures were brilliant, the one exception being the reader who claimed his paper was eaten, not by his dog, but by his PC. Even the sharpest of disagreements were polite, but the flash points surprised me: David Bradshaw ended up the target of most potshots and not St Augustine himself. There was little evidence of what the medievals called odium theologicum, that is, the intense hatred generated when partisans argue over minute points of theology little understood by anyone except the cognoscenti.

Fr. Andrew Louth’s keynote lecture set the tone for the conference. Fr. Andrew freely acknowledged all the usual Orthodox sore spots with St. Augustine: his arguments for the filioque clause; his contentious teachings about original sin, grace, and dual predestination; his endorsement of government-sanctioned violence against fellow Christians; and so on. But he wisely decided instead to put Augustine’s famous theological works (for example, “On the Trinity”) or his more polemical works (for example, his writings against the Pelagians and the Donatists) on the backburner, and focus instead on Augustine the bishop, who preached the Bible to his flock in Hippo, week in and week out, for over 30 years. Indeed, the consensus of the conference seemed to be that we’d all be better off reading Augustine’s sermons on St. John’s Gospel or the Psalms than focusing on his more divisive writings.

If I had to choose my favorite speaker in the conference, it was Fr David Tracy from the University of Chicago. On a personal note, his book Blessed Rage for Order fried my mind when I was a young impressionable seminary student at Princeton back in the late 70s. The revisionist theologian of Blessed Rage and the wise grandfatherly character who spoke with such affection for Metropolitan Zizioulas hardly seemed to me like the same person. When I saw David Tracy’s name on the program, I didn’t know what to expect, but it certainly wasn’t insightful reflections on the “Christological fragments” scattered throughout the Augustinian corpus. I was charmed.

Almost by way of footnote, Tracy observed that the famous 17th century Bishop Cornelius Jansenius (1585-1638), spiritual father of the Jansenist movement and the spiritual grandfather of Blaise Pascal, had read through the entire massive Augustinian corpus 20 times. But the problem with Jansenius was his misplaced zeal. In an attempt to return the Western Church back to Augustine’s true doctrine of grace, he had read Augustine’s writings against the Pelagians 31 times. For AGAIN readers who don’t recognize Bishop Jansenius, his massive work Augustinus was condemned not once but at least three times by various popes (Urban VIII in 1642, Innocent X in 1653, and finally Alexander X in 1665). Perhaps Jansenius was condemned for good reason. The 17th century Latin church wasn’t ready for a St Augustine who sounded more like John Calvin than St Thomas Aquinas.

When Tradition Fractures

Something bad has happened to Christianity in the West, and it’s hard to know who is at fault, and where and when exactly to place the blame. For many, St. Augustine seems like a good place to start. The existentialist philosopher Karl Jasper credits him with being “the first modern man.” The Confessions of St. Augustine continue to appeal deeply to contemporary readers because he sounds just like us. He is the poster child of deep psychological introspection, without peer in the ancient world and perhaps even today: “I had become a great question to myself” (IV.4.9). In psychological terms, Augustine reveals that he is a deeply conflicted individual, as in his half-hearted prayer to God: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet” (VIII.7.17). His internal torment as he wrestles with overcoming his sinful passions portrays someone just like us. He also sounds modern as he tries on various lifestyle options. As a People magazine addict, I like nothing better than a good sinner-to-saint conversion story. When trying to understand modern sources of the self, we Westerners can’t understand ourselves if we don’t come to grips with St. Augustine. As Charles Taylor put it, “On the way from Plato to Descartes stands Augustine.”

The Fordham conference brought to the surface the problem of this Augustinian inheritance. Many speakers took potshots at David Bradshaw because his book, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom, argues that Augustine is in part responsible for so many Western dead-ends in theology and spirituality. For example, Augustine’s elevation of the Platonic intellect spawned a nasty streak of rationalism. Bradshaw’s tour de force clearly describes how Augustine’s emphasis on God’s absolute simplicity makes him difficult to assimilate within Eastern Orthodoxy. Augustine’s stress on God’s intelligibility - God is for the mind to understand, as body is for the eye to see - doesn’t easily mesh with the profound sense of God’s mystery encountered in the Divine Liturgy.

The Christian West itself couldn’t take the Doctor of Grace’s ferocious theology of grace without serious dilution. For roughly 1000 years, the Christian West survived the unstable synthesis of St. Augustine’s doctrine of predestination with his doctrine of the Church. John Calvin once chortled, “Augustine is completely on our side” about predestination. But ironically, it was Augustine’s doctrine of the Church, “For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church,” that kept the rest of his theology from unraveling.

Eventually Martin Luther, John Calvin, and a host of others who wanted to stress Sola Scriptura and recover Augustine’s stress on dual predestination kept chipping away at the weak spots until the synthesis fractured into thousands of denominational shards. The only thing that held the Western Church together were the forces of the tradition that quietly corrected Augustine’s excesses. Ever since that historical structure fractured, we in the West, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, have been trying to piece together the fragments of the shattered tradition into some kind of coherent whole.

Intellectual historians like Jaroslav Pelikan easily summarize where the various fault lines lay in Western thought by referring to Augustine: “What was embarrassing about Augustine on the real presence in the Eucharist was his vagueness; what was embarrassing about him on Predestination was his clarity.” The only thing needed was someone with a big enough sledgehammer to start pounding. That someone, with a hammer in one hand and a list of grievances in the other, was a young Augustinian monk named Martin Luther.

A perfect storm of social, political, economic, and religious forces converged in Luther to shatter the tradition that had previously united Western Christendom. He unleashed a massive revolt against authority that we are still struggling with today. Ironically, it was St. Augustine who was the inspiration behind the Reformation, as B.B. Warfield, the famous nineteenth-century Princeton theologian, argued: “The Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.”

What was apparently a seamless garment of grace and Church for St. Augustine was shredded in the Reformation. Augustine perceived no contradiction between the absolute necessity of God’s grace and the mediation of that grace through the sacramental life of the Church. But Luther and other reformers wanted Augustine’s theology of God’s sovereign election undiluted, in full strength.

The only consistent Augustinian I know of is Augustine himself, and he was inconsistent. The theological garment Augustine wove together in his own person, his most fervent disciples rent asunder from top to bottom. Comparing Augustine’s vision of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in The City of God with its numerous Protestant progeny, the triumph of “grace” over “Church” was no victory at all.

Among Augustine’s many retractions, he repudiated his earlier view that miracles had stopped with the early Church. Previously, Augustine thought miracles were necessary only long enough to jumpstart the Church and provide her with divine credentials for her astounding truth claims. But after witnessing several miracles himself, Augustine came to relish the evidence of God’s miraculous power at work through the relics of the saints (The City of God, XXII.8 C10).

Sadly, these very relics are what finally created the decisive breach in Western Christianity, precisely along the Augustinian fault lines of grace and the sacraments. The triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over his doctrine of the Church only meant that the Church’s sacraments, her apostolic succession, her visible unity, and her miracles and relics, so dear to Augustine’s heart, were swept away as so much useless detritus by the Reformers. Such a “triumph” of his influence is at best a Pyrrhic victory which Augustine himself would have not recognized. The great American historian Phillip Schaff once speculated that if Augustine had lived in the 16th century with Luther and Calvin, “he might, perhaps, have gone half way with the Reformers.” But because Augustine loved the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church so much, Schaff couldn’t imagine that he’d jump ship and create his own weird Augustinian version of the Donatist schism (which he despised). Instead, Augustine “would have become the leader of an evangelical school … within the Roman Church.”

Maybe so. Unless he could have met St Cyril of Alexandria first.

St. Augustine and the Christian East

St. Augustine bequeathed an amazing patrimony to the Christian West. He wrote more theology - and retracted a good chunk of it! - than any normal person could digest in a single lifetime. Augustine’s significance cannot be overestimated. We simply cannot understand the Christian West without St. Augustine’s looming influence, whether for good or ill. His contemporary, St. Jerome, himself no stranger to the company of great men, even considered Augustine “the second founder of the Christian faith.”

But you’d never know Augustine’s significance from Eastern Orthodox reactions. An unsuspecting Orthodox reader would never guess the sheer magnitude of Augustine’s impact on Western Christianity from the terse reference to him in the Prologue of Ochrid. The problem in the East may be an embarrassment of riches. The fourth to eleventh centuries produced one amazing theological luminary after another: Athanasius; Basil the Great, his little brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus; John Chrysostom; Cyril of Alexandria; Maximus the Confessor; John of Damascus; Symeon the New Theologian, and more. But based on sheer historical impact, no theologian was comparable to Augustine in the Eastern Church, except perhaps the heretic Origen.

The Christian West had no such plenitude. After Augustine died, the Latin West suffered a major theological vacuum that wasn’t filled until St. Anselm of Canterbury came along in the eleventh century. To steal Lord Whitehead’s comment about Plato, Western theology was (and still is) a series of footnotes going back to Augustine. The liberal 19th century German church historian Adolph von Harnack claimed Augustine is the intellectual ancestor of all of us: “Just because his rich spirit embraced all these discrepancies and characteristically represented them as experience, has Augustine become the father of the Church of the Occident. He is the father of the Roman Church and the father of the Reformation, of Biblicists and of mystics; yes, even the Renaissance and modern empirical philosophy (psychology) are indebted to him.” Even his harshest critics concede grudgingly that St. Augustine is historically the single most important theologian in the Christian West. The Western problem with St. Augustine was essentially imbalance: the singular and almost isolated emphasis on Augustine proved harmful for the West, as well as the exclusive stress on particular doctrines of his.

By contrast, the Christian East continued to correct herself against her own worst tendencies, for example, the universalist strain in Origen and St Gregory of Nyssa. We might even construe the millennium of Eastern Orthodox history ranging roughly from Athanasius to Gregory Palamas as the ruthless purging of those elements in philosophy that were harmful to her theology. St Gregory Nazianzus suggested ways that the semi-Arians and the Eunomians could spend their time more usefully than attacking Orthodoxy. He suggests, for example, they should profitably criticize Platonism! “Attack the Ideas of Plato, and the Transmigrations and Courses of our souls, and the Reminiscences, and the unlovely Loves of the soul for lovely bodies.” Against all heretics ancient and modern, the Orthodox Church has argued that the dividing line between the Uncreated and what the Triune God has created ex nihilo is the most fundamental distinction in the universe, not the Platonic difference between what is intelligible and what is sensible. St Gregory certainly didn’t share Augustine’s enthusiasm for Platonic forms! Recall also that the Eastern Orthodox Church condemns Plato’s Ideas (”Anathema, anathema, anathema!”) during the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

We should remember that “Blessed Augustine,” as we Orthodox typically call him, is a saint of good standing in the Eastern Orthodox Church. His feast day on the Orthodox calendar is June 15. On the other hand, the East for over 800 years was afflicted with nearly invincible ignorance of his teachings. Despite the minority opinion of vigorous but lonely voices of Orthodox supporters like the enthusiastic Fr. Seraphim Rose, Augustine’s theology has had negligible impact on the Christian East. Here perhaps St. John of Damascus’ Fountain Head of Knowledge (650 C750) is our most accurate bellwether. John of Damascus never mentions Augustine, nor is Pelagius included in his voluminous list of 103 heresies.

This blindness to Augustine did not signify rejection, but merely ignorance. Constantine had moved the capital of the Roman Empire to his new imperial city of Constantinople, and Rome quickly became a cultural backwater. In many ways, the East simply forgot about the West. As a result, we shouldn’t be shocked that the translation from Latin into Greek of Augustine’s treatise on the Trinity, which had been so crucial for Western thinking about the nature of God, had to wait until the thirteenth century.

Fr John Meyendorff somewhere observed that St Gregory Palamas was the most “Augustinian” of Orthodox theologians. That statement which puzzled me - and infuriated Fr John Romanides - suddenly made sense when Reinhard Flogaus at the conference demonstrated how St Gregory liberally quotes the Maximos Planoudes translation of St Augustine’s De Trinitate in his own work, The 150 Chapters (see chapters 27 C38, 125, 132), and even in a couple of his sermons! The problem is, ancient standards of scholarship being what they were, St Gregory didn’t reveal his sources here. He used the Planoudes translation word-for-word (from Books 4, 13, and 15 of De Trinitate) but never attributes his source. No wonder Palamas sounds Augustinian!

Nevertheless, this lack of overlap between Eastern Orthodoxy and the Christian West, St. Augustine in particular, makes it hard to find points of agreement. “What if?” scenarios come to mind. What if Augustine hadn’t died in 430 and could have made his way to the Council of Ephesus? What if, despite barbarian invasions, St. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, and St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, could have met face to face?

One of the very few Christians in the ancient world who could bridge East and West was St John Cassian. An almost exact contemporary (360-430) of Augustine, he couldn’t bring himself to criticize St Augustine by name. Through the mouthpiece of Abbots Germanus and Chaeremon (Conference XIII), John Cassian disagrees strongly with Augustine’s view of free will but he conducts his critique with gentle restraint, surely an aberration in the history of theology, West or East.

The Orthodox East and the Latin West find themselves like two ships passing unaware in the night, so close yet so far. By contrast, Roman Catholics and Protestants of nearly all stripes participate in a centuries-old argument in which they share deep points of contact (or conflict as the case may be) that make little sense to Eastern Orthodox Christians. The problem is further exacerbated for Orthodoxy by the fact that being “Protestant” doesn’t make sense apart from specific reactions to the Roman Catholic Church.

St. Augustine and the Introspective Conscience of the West

We Orthodox ignore St. Augustine to our own spiritual peril. We need to understand him, if only to understand why we think the way we do, so that we don’t trip over our own mental furniture. For better or worse, few saints speak to us like Augustine. There really is a good reason why Augustine’s Confessions continues to be read as part of the Western “canon,” even in the most politically correct of universities, like Stanford or Berkeley. To read his Confessions is like looking in a mirror: we see ourselves in him and we see him in ourselves.

For example, the famous French actor, Gerard Depardieu, recently read selections from St. Augustine’s Confessions at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Anyone who knows about Depardieu’s superstar lifestyle might be puzzled. But Depardieu stated the reason in an interview: “I was heavy with spirituality without knowing it. I was touched by the light of St. Augustine. St. Augustine’s quest touched me personally because it reflected my own fragility.” My heart warmed hearing how a charming reprobate like Gerard Depardieu is attracted to St. Augustine. Depardieu’s testimony makes a lot of sense, though, if we think of St. Augustine as the patron saint of the introspective conscience of the West.

But moralists, Christian or otherwise, have never liked Augustine. His radical view of God’s grace undercuts the vital nerve of striving in the ethical life. What’s the point of human effort if the moral life depends exclusively on God and not on us? When the British monk Pelagius heard Augustine’s Confessions read in the company of the Roman governor of Campania, Paulinus of Nola (one of Augustine’s friends), he stormed out in rage. If you believe you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps into ethical perfectionism, Augustine’s prayer leads to passivity: “Grant what You command, and command what You will” (X.29.40).

Polemics with the theological opponents of his day (first the Manichees, then the Donatists, and finally the Pelagians) certainly tended to sharpen the final shape of Augustine’s thought into black-and-white thinking that didn’t allow for much nuance. Here David Bradshaw’s magnificent book on God’s divine energies might help our Western friends avoid the apparent impasse in Augustine’s one-sided view of grace. It may be paradoxical, but St. Paul shows us how human actions can also be God’s actions, without one negating the other: “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12 C13). We act, but God is acting in us.

The real problem we Eastern Orthodox have with St. Augustine is perhaps not so much his theology as our sheer lack of spiritual acquaintance with him. Since Eastern Orthodox theologians don’t write summas anyway, we Orthodox aren’t really interested in an intellectual synthesis of East and West. Worship and prayer drive the engine of Eastern Orthodox theology. Both Fr. Seraphim Rose and St. John Maximovitch of San Francisco understood this, which is why they encouraged regular celebration of so-called “Western saints” and their feast days by Orthodox Christians. In 1955 St. John Maximovitch commissioned a complete liturgy, including Vespers and Orthros, to Blessed Augustine.

Eastern Christianity subscribes heartily to Prosper of Aquitaine’s axiom, Lex orandi lex credendi: If you want to know what we believe, look at the way we worship. Until we Orthodox sing Augustine’s troparion and kontakion on his feast day in his honor, and until we ask St. Augustine himself to intercede with Christ God for us sinners, we will be hopelessly unacquainted with him, at least in any way that truly matters.

To learn more about St. Augustine, here’s a suggested reading list:

David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Not an easy read, but certainly worth the intellectual effort.

Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Reprinted with Epilogue (London: Faber/Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Biography without the theology.

Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Theology without the biography.

Alister E McGrath, The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).

St. Augustine, The Augustine Catechism: Enchiridion on Faith Hope and Love (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999). There’s no substitute for understanding St. Augustine by reading his own work. Enchiridion literally means “in the hand.” Augustine intended this little book as a summary of the central convictions of the Christian faith, based on his exposition of the Creed. Surprisingly, here Augustine teaches not once but twice that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (9, 38), without the double procession of the filioque clause! You can also read for yourself his vexing exegesis (26) of Romans 5:12 (”in him all have sinned”), with its logical consequences for his view of original sin.

John Stamps is currently Senior Technical Writer at BMC Software in Sunnyvale, California. He holds a BA in Greek from Abilene Christian University, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and did work towards an STM in philosophy of religion at Yale University. He is married to Shelly Stamps and attends St. Stephen Orthodox Church in Campbell, California.

This online exclusive is expanded from an article originally published in AGAIN Vol. 29 #3, Fall 2007.

From the Little Mountain takes you through a year at the Hermitage of the Holy Cross in West Virginia. This video is an attempt to portray some of the beauty and struggle of monastic life using quotes from the Scriptures and the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church. Insights about monasticism from one of the senior monks at the monastery are given as you are visually taken through the Church liturgical year and the changing seasons in the mountains.

This is a unique documentary of an Orthodox monastery in the 21st century, but the imagery and principles set forth are as ancient (and relevant) as those written by the 6th century instructor of monks, Abba Dorotheos.

Preview the DVD here:

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Order directly from Holy Cross Hermitage.

O Michael the victorious,
My pride and my guide,
O Michael the victorious,
The pride of mine eye.

I travel this an all days,
With Michael as my guide,
On the hill or in the meadow,
Always at his side;
Though I should cross the ocean
The whole of the world
No harm can ever befall me
‘Neath the shelter of thy shield;

O Michael the victorious,
Jewel of my heart,
O Michael the victorious,
God’s shepherd thou art.

Be the Sacred Three of Glory
At peace with me,
With my wife and with my children,
With flocks and my land.
With the crops growing in the field
Or ripe in the sheaf,
On the machair, on the moor,
In cole, in heap, or stack.

To the Sacred Three of Glory,
Belong everything,
And to Their servant, Michael,
The victorious.

Even though the veneration of the Theotokos is old-fashioned and obscure in the modern world, this veneration and supplication for her intercession lie at the very heart of the Christian faith. Our fellowship with the Virgin and our communication with her are realities that exist at the center of life.

There is no such thing as Christian faith without regard for the Virgin Mary. Our supplications to the Theotokos cannot be optional or secondary. The reason why Orthodox Tradition gives so much devotion to the Mother of God is not because it is superstitious or obscure. It calls us to venerate the Theotokos, and to call upon her intercession simply because Orthodoxy is so completely Trinitarian and so fully Christological. We are Marian in the Orthodox Church because we are “conservative” in the best sense of the word – we maintain a deep fidelity to the Apostolic witness of the “theanthropos,” the “God-manhood” of Christ.

The Christian faith, which is fully realized in the Orthodox Church alone, is not merely a set of beliefs and propositions. Orthodoxy is better described as a “relationship” – and even this modern word is inadequate. It is better to use the old word perichoresis, or “co-inherence.”

This old Patristic term describes the current of love which flows within the Tri-Hypostatic Union of the Godhead, wherein the Father begets the Son, Who adores the Father and is glorified by the Holy Spirit, Who proceeds eternally from the Father. That Trinitarian love is the opposite of self-absorption. Instead, Trinitarian love proceeds in Grace, through an infinity of Names, to create the spiritual and physical universe, to redeem that which is lost in sin and death, and to set life upon the way of infinite perfection and communion. Trinitarian love is the source of all beauty and truth.

There is no determinism in the Divine plenitude of love. The Archangel Gabriel announced to the Theotokos, as the very first essentially Christian proclamation, “With God nothing is impossible!” (Luke 1.37). This crucial affirmation is the great theme of all prayer, supplication and intercession. Prayer is possible, simply because “with God all things are possible.” The future is not a prison in the apostolic testimony of the Orthodox Church – it is a mystery charged by the brightness of redemption, an endless set of possibilities that are always changeable by prayer.

That theme of “co-inherence” also describes the relationship of the Virgin Mary with her Son, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It describes the mutual surrender and the gift of self to the other. Thus, it beautifully depicts the profound and life-long surrender of the Theotokos to her God, her Son and Saviour.

When there is this deeply psychic exchange of life, Mary represents her Son to humanity. She becomes the pre-eminent icon of the Christian, the example to us all in how life should be lived, and how holiness should be pursued.

But there is another side to the exchange. Jesus, in turn, represents His Mother and all humanity to the Godhead. God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respond to human need and concern. God responds because the Holy Spirit moves His creatures to pray – and the one who is most sensitive to the promptings of the Spirit is the Virgin Mary herself. She prays best, because she knows God best – more than any other saint, more than even the angels. She was the first to receive Jesus into her heart, and she bore Christ God in her womb, and suckled the Son of God in the Manger.

She knows God better than the Angels, because she knew Christ in His humanity. She knows God better than the rest of mankind, because she knew Jesus in His divinity. She adores her God Who is also her Son. Jesus, the Son of God, loves His Mother, who is also His creature.

In that singular perichoresis between God and the Theotokos, there is the tenderness of Mother and Son … there is also the compassion of the Infinite God for His creature, and the awestruck adoration of the deified Virgin Mary for the Everlasting God.

It is that singular relationship we appeal to whenever we pray. Our prayer to God is founded and rooted in this very first Christian “co-inherence.” Our supplications to the Theotokos rely upon the primacy of the Virgin Mary over all humanity, in her ability to intercede in her “maternal boldness,” with her Son Who is also God.

This we see portrayed in tender warmth in the very first of the Gospel miracles, the Wedding at Cana. In this homely and familiar story, we see the Mother of God become aware of a very human, humble concern. The problem strikes us as unworthy of a miracle. It is a wedding party, after all, and the problem seems not to be as serious as later needs for the miraculous intervention of Christ. The need is for wine, as it ran out prematurely. That does not seem so important as the need for healing or exorcism. But despite the smallness of the need, the Virgin Mary presents this request to her Son.

And despite the apparent priorities of the ministry of Christ, Jesus is moved by His mother’s maternal boldness to respond to the need. And, as is always true of His miracles, His intervention results in an excess of Grace. His miracles are always “more than enough.” There is never mere “efficiency” in Grace: the Trinitarian radiance of Love can never be characterized as “just enough.” There are always leftovers in the aftermath of the Power of God. There is too much wine. There are twelve baskets of bread. There is 153 fish in a net. There are aliens, Canaanites and Samaritans who are accidentally healed, despite historical strictures. There are Messianic secrets that are always broken. Animals speak, the rocks cry out, entire storms are soothed into Peace.

This was always true in the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. Now that Christ has ascended, and now that Christ has assumed His Mother into His fellowship in Paradise, the miracle of the Wedding of Cana is repeated over and over again. It is replayed, afresh, beautiful like the first time, established in truth in a myriad of enactments, every single occasion when we call upon the Virgin Mary for her help and intercession.

She is present with us, borne upon the wings and breath of the Holy Spirit. While she is not omnipresent and omniscient, the Holy Spirit certainly is. The entirety of the Theotokos’ intercessory ministry is enabled by the inspiration and fullness of the Spirit of God. It is by the Grace and Power of God that the Theotokos hears our supplication. It is by this same Grace and Power that she responds. And it is by her relationship with her Son – a relationship that is the example for all human adoration of God – that our prayers are answered.

I say all this, not only because of the moment this day’s Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, but mainly because the intercessory ministry of the Virgin to us in the twenty-first century is crucial, and cannot be done without.

Can this be doubted? Are you surprised that I emphasize so strongly the necessity of the Virgin’s prayerful assistance? It is a symptom of the age, and how myopic and dark it has become, that it is possible to even consider that we could do without the intercessions of the Theotokos.

There is no such thing as Christian faith without regard for the Virgin Mary. Here, at the conclusion, I would go one step further. It is impossible to continue on as an Orthodox Christian in this age of idols and confusion, without the intercession of the Virgin. It is impossible to even “be” a Christian at all anymore, without the intercession of the very first and best Christian, who is the Virgin Mary and Mother of our God.

There are many today who try to be Christian on their own, in their own little self-enclosed, existentialist envelope. They try to live for Christ without appealing to the Saints and the Mother of God. Theirs is a desperate struggle that will grow all the more difficult as the years pass by, and as the future rushes toward the Day of Judgment.

As time goes on, I want you remember this: the coldness of unbelief, and the darkness of the modern age, will boil down the Christian options of civilization into only one hopeful possibility – and that will be the Holy Apostolic Church, charged with liturgy, hiearchy, sacraments and tradition, eternal order, and filled with the veneration of the Theotokos.

And the main reason for this single possibility is mainly because of the tender, maternal affections of the Mother of God, whom we glorify this day.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In discussing this passage, Father Stephen Freeman quotes Archimandrite Zacharias:

Fr. Sophrony [Sakharov], in his book on St. Silouan, presents this theory of the “inverted pyramid.” He says that the empirical cosmic being is like a pyramid: at the top sit the powerful of the earth, who exercise dominion over the nations (cf. Matt. 20:25), and at the bottom stand the masses. But the spirit of man, by nature [unfallen nature as given by God], demands equality, justice and freedom of spirit, and therefore is not satisfied with this “pyramid of being.” So, what did the Lord do? He took this pyramid and inverted it, and put Himself at the bottom, becoming its Head. He took upon Himself the weight of sin, the weight of the infirmity of the whole world, and so from that moment on, who can enter into judgment with Him? His justice is above the human mind. So, He revealed His Way to us, and in so doing showed us that no one can be justified but by this way, and so all those who are His must go downwards to be united with Him, the Head of the inverted pyramid, because it is there that the “fragrance” of the Holy Spirit is found; there is the power of divine life. Christ alone holds the pyramid, but His fellows, His Apostles and His saints, come and share this weight with Him. However, even if there were no one else, He could hold the pyramid by Himself, because He is infinitely strong; but He likes to share everything with His fellows. Mindful of this, then, it is essential for man to find the way of going down, the way of humility, which is the Way of the Lord, and to become a fellow of Christ, who is the Author of this path.   — Archimandrite Zacharias in The Enlargement of the Heart

Father Stephen continues:

This clear teaching of the Apostle, which only echoes the utterly consistent teaching and example of Christ, has a history of being obscured within Christianity — with Christians forgetting this essential teaching and following after a human Lordship and model of salvation.

In a wide variety of places and situations, Christians have thought to establish some image of the Kingdom of God (or even the Kingdom itself) here on earth through means other than the path of humility set forth by Christ and the faithful Tradition of the Church. The result has been varied - but has often been merely a tyranny in the name of God, which is no better than a tyranny in the name of something else.

I am reminded of a statement by Stanley Hauerwas, Protestant theologian and professor at Duke University:

The Christian community’s openness to new life and our conviction of the sovereignty of God over that life are but two sides of the same conviction. Christians believe that we have the time in this existence to care for new life, especially as such life is dependent and vulnerable, because it is not our task to rule this world or to “make our mark on history.” We can thus take the time to live in history as God’s people who have nothing more important to do than to have and care for children. For it is the Christian claim that knowledge and love of God is fostered by service to the neighbor, especially the most helpless, as in fact that is where we find the kind of Kingdom our God would have us serve.   — in A Community of Character

In countless lectures and seminars in which I participated while a student at Duke’s Graduate School of Theology, I heard Hauerwas echo this quote with the assertion that “so soon as Christians agree to take responsibility for the outcome of history, we have agreed to do violence.” This violent outcome is a complete perversion of the “downward Way” described by Archimandrite Zacharias and the Orthodox Tradition. Our goals are thus never measured by the “outcomes of history” but by the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

This same contradiction, in narrative form, can be found in Dostoevsky’s classic chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor,” in The Brothers Karamazov. The Grand Inquisitor lashes out at Christ for His failure, as measured in the outcomes of history, and justifies Christians’ use of tools such as the Inquisition as an improvement over the weakness of God. The argument of that famous chapter, as well as the previous chapter, “Rebellion,” mark the high-point of Dostoevsky’s summary of the argument against God and the Orthodox Christian faith. The answer to that diatribe is not a counter argument, but the person of the Elder Zossima, who lives in the Tradition of the Holy Elders of the Faith such as St. Silouan, St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Elder Sophrony, and a host of others. Their lives, frequently hidden from the larger view of the world, are the continuing manifestation of the Kingdom of God in our midst — fellows of the sufferings of Christ — who freely and voluntarily bear with Christ the weight of all humanity. It is this secret bearing that forms the very foundation of the world - a foundation without which the world would long ago have perished into nothing. It is the emptiness of Christ, also shared in its depths by His saints, that is the vessel of the fullness of God, the source of all life and being. We can search for nothing greater.

by Mother Ephrosynia of the Convent of Lesna, France

A brother went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can I say my prayer rule, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

This is what monasticism is: a longing for God that knows no limits. It is the beginning of the Age to come, of the Kingdom of Heaven still here on earth. The Church calls monasticism the Angelic Life. According to holy tradition, in the 4th century an angel appeared to St. Pachomius, the first of the monks struggling out in the Egyptian desert to establish a monastic community, and gave him a bronze tablet inscribed with a Rule for his monks to follow. From apostolic times to the present day thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people have left everything they had and scorned everything that this world has to offer in order to follow Christ and to live the Gospels more fully.

At times this impulse has been stronger, at times weaker, and the Holy Fathers speak of monasticism as a barometer of spiritual life in the Church. When monastic life flourishes, the faithful are really striving spiritually, and conversely, when few people find inspiration in the monastic ideal, monasteries diminish and are ignored, spiritual life amongst the faithful is on the decline. At the end of the 4th century, when persecution of Christians ceased and the Church knew peace for the first time, but the zeal of converts hadn’t cooled and many Christians desired to give everything to Christ, monasticism even became a mass movement.

One of the travel writers of the period, St. Palladius, tells of his visit to “Oxyrhynchus, one of the cities of the Thebaid (in Egypt). It is impossible to do justice to the marvels which we saw there. For the city is so full of monasteries that the very walls resound with the voices of monks. Other monasteries encircle it outside… The temples and capitols of the city were bursting with monks; every quarter of the city was inhabited by them… The monks were almost in the majority over the secular inhabitants… and there is no hour of day or night when they do not offer acts of worship to God… What can one say of the piety of the… people, who when they saw us strangers.. approached us as if we were angels? How can one convey an adequate idea of the throngs of monks and nuns past counting? However, as far as we could ascertain from the holy bishop of that place, we would say that he had under his jurisdiction 10,000 monks and 20,000 nuns. It is beyond my power to describe their hospitality and their love for us. In fact each of us had our cloaks torn apart by people pulling us to make us go and stay with them.”

Closer to our own time, in Russia in 1907, towards the end of the spiritual revival of the 19th century and before the Revolution there were 24,000 monks and 66,000 nuns, about 90,000 monastics, living in 970 monasteries. On the bleak side, the countryside of France, where my monastery is, is peppered by empty monasteries in ruins, remnants of the Age of Faith, as historians call the Middle Ages. They are testimonies to the spiritual barrenness of France, where more people believe in astrology than in Christ, and people spit at me on the streets because they think I’m a Moslem. It would never occur to them that a woman wearing black might be a nun. The scene at the airport here in Ottawa when I arrived was nothing like the scene in Oxyrhynchus when St. Palladius walked through the gates, and you could probably travel clear across Canada or America and not see a single monastery nor meet a single monk or nun.

But is monasticism completely a lost cause today? True, to mod