Tag archive for ‘Fathers’
Pelagius: To Demetrias
Few churchmen have been so maligned as Pelagius in the Christian West. For nearly 1,500 years, all that anyone has known of the British monk’s theology has come from what his opponents said about him — and when one’s opponents are as eminent as Augustine and Jerome, the chance of getting a fair hearing is not great. Consequently, it has been easy to lay all manner of pernicious heresies at Pelagius’s doorstep.
An early creed
The Church, though dispersed through our the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit…
Palamas on fear of poverty
The truth is that people are frightened of being poor because they have no faith in Him who promised to provide all things needful to those who seek the kingdom of God. It is this fear that spurs them, even when they are endowed with all things, and it prevents them from ever freeing themselves from this sickly and toxic desire. They go on amassing wealth, loading themselves with a worthless burden — or rather, enclosing themselves, while still living, in a most absurd kind of tomb.
Augustine’s Origin of Species
North African bishop Augustine of Hippo (354–430) had no skin in the game concerning the current origins controversies. He interpreted Scripture a thousand years before the Scientific Revolution, and 1,500 before Darwin’s Origin of Species. Augustine didn’t “accommodate” or “compromise” his biblical interpretation to fit new scientific theories. The important thing was to let Scripture speak for itself.
Isaac of Syria on Humility
From Met. Hilarion Alfeyev”s The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian:
To speak of humility (mukkaka or makkikuta) meant to Isaac to speak of God, for God in his vision is primarily the One who is ‘meek and lowly in heart’. God’s humility was revealed to the world in the Incarnation of the Word. In the [...]
Can a scientist believe in the Resurrection?
The Surprising Character of Early Christian Hope: The foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that the Jewish expectation of resurrection has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian, not least the would-be scientific historian, to ask, Why did they occur?
Ancestral Versus Original Sin
As pervasive as the term original sin has become, it may come as a surprise to some that it was unknown in both the Eastern and Western Church until Augustine (c. 354-430). The concept may have arisen in the writings of Tertullian, but the expression seems to have appeared first in Augustine’s works…
Give me a word
A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.”…
When peace of heart is a problem
A brother said to an old man, “I see no warfare in my heart.” The old man said to him, “You are a building open on all sides, and whoever wishes can pass through you and you are unaware of it. If you have a door, you should shut it, and not allow evil thoughts to enter through it; for then you will see them standing outside, banging on the door, and attacking you.”
When Tradition Fractures
St. Augustine Lives on in the Great Theological Conflicts of Today.
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.
From the Little Mountain
From the Little Mountain takes you through a year at the Hermitage of the Holy Cross in West Virginia. This is a unique documentary of an Orthodox monastery in the 21st century…
The Spiritual Father in Orthodox Christianity
One who climbs a mountain for the first time needs to follow a known route; and he needs to have with him, as companion and guide, someone who has been up before and is familiar with the way. To serve as such a companion and guide is precisely the role of the “Abba” or spiritual father…
The Monastic Call
The early monastics flew into the desert not to escape the city and its newly respectable churches but rather to seek salvation at a time when increasing wealth and prestige might have been the undoing of the Church through a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle!) compromise with worldliness. In this manner the Church’s integrity in both desert and city was preserved…
The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles
The Didachē is a short catechism, probably written in Syria during the second half of the 1st century. The Didachē is concerned with practical discipline and does not deliberately teach doctrine, but from the writer’s assumptions we learn a great deal about the development of the early Church in his generation.
Deacons and bishops at the end of the first century
By the time St Paul wrote his New Testament advice to elders and overseers, the Church had been growing explosively for several decades. By the end of the first century, St John’s disciple Ignatius wrote about how the orders of clergy interacted in his experience…
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