The Agony of the Church

CHAPTER I

THE WISDOM OF THE CHURCH SOPHIA

"The most magnificent sanctuary of the Eastern Churches is called St Sophia (Holy Wisdom), whereas the most magnificent sanctuaries of the Western Churches are called St Peter's, St Paul's, or St John's, etc. As every hair on our head and every line on the palm of our hand has a certain significance, so these dedications of the Church have doubtless certain significance. And this significance is typical of the religion of the East and the West. Western Christianity, grown upon the soil of a youthful individualism, preferred this or that apostle's personality and dedicated their best temples to him. The aged East, tired of individualistic ambitions, tired of great men, flagellated by the phantom of human greatness, was thirsty for something higher and more solid than any human personality. Adoration of great personalities being the very wisdom of this world, the East stretched its hands to a superhuman ideal, to the Holy Wisdom. It is a psychological fact that youth sees his ideal in personal greatness, progressed age in holiness. The East asked for something more eternal than Peter, Paul or John. There is wisdom, and there is holy wisdom. Philosophical or personal wisdom existed from the beginning of mankind, but Holy Wisdom entered the world with Jesus Christ. Christ was the embodiment of God's wisdom, the very incarnation of Holy Wisdom. This Wisdom stands above all human wisdom and revives and illuminates it. Holy Wisdom includes the essential wisdom of Peter, Paul, John, and any other apostle or seer, or any other thing or creature, as the ocean includes the water of many rivers. In the darkest times of dissension, uncertainty or suffering, the Christian East did not rely so much upon the great apostles, either Peter, or Paul, or John, but looked beyond time and space to the Eternal Christ, The Logos of God, and asked for Light. And it looked to Eternity through this church in Constantinople, St Sophia, as the all-embracing and all-reconciling, holy symbol. Whenever Peter, or Paul, or John, or any other apostle, or prophet, became the ground upon which the believers quarrelled, it was in the Holy Wisdom that they sought refuge and healing from their intellectual one-sidedness and ill-will.

Online Source for Translation Work

Here is a good Website for translation work.  They even have St. John Cassian's Conferences available to translate from Latin.

Sine labore nihil.

The Origin and Nature of Demons

As this conference serves as a continuation of its predecessor, St. Germanus asks Abba Serenus, "Should it be believed that these powers (demons) were created by the Lord for the purpose of warring against human beings in grades and ranks?" (8.2)

Abba Serenus immediately begins to explain the nature of the Holy Scriptures and how to interpret them. The Holy Scriptures at times state things clearly for all to understand, while at other times conveying things in a shroud of mystery. Why? Because certain things need to be veiled in order to distinguish the faithful from the profane and the lazy from the zealous with regards to virtue and prudence (8.3.2). The Holy Mysteries provide an excellent example, because the Eucharist separates the faithful from casual inquirers and slothful members. 

Quotes on Education and Understanding

"Any purely logical thinking is frightening; it is without life, without fruit. A rational and logical person is hardly able to repent....

The essential error of the modern man is to identify life with activism, with thought, etc., hence an almost complete inability simply to 'live', i.e., to feel, to appreciate, to live life as a continuous gift. To walk to the train station in a light that feels like spring, in the rain, to be able to see, to sense, to be conscious of a morning ray of sun on the wall--all of these are the reality of life. They are not conditions for activism or for thought, they are not just an indifferent background, they are the reason one acts and thinks. Only in that reality of life does God reveal Himself, and not in acts and thoughts.... The same is true of communication. One does not communicate through talks and debates. The deeper and more joyful the communication, the less it depends on words. On the contrary, one is almost afraid of words because they might destroy the communion, cut off the joy." - Fr. Alexander Schmemann, Journals

"To educate man is the art of arts, for he is the most complex and mysterious of all creatures." - St. Gregory the Theologian

"Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life." – Charlotte Mason

Wisdom from Mount Athos

On Creativity:

"In my young days, through a Russian painter who afterwards became famous, I had been attracted to the idea of pure creativity, taking the form of abstract art. This engrossed me for two or three years and led to the first theological thought to originate within my own mind. Just as every artist apprehends objective reality through the forms and modes of his art, so I derived ideas for my abstract studies from life around me. I would look at a man, a house, a plant, at intricate machinery, extravagant shadowscapes, on walls or ceilings, at quivering bonfire flames, and would compose them into abstract pictures, creating in my imagination visions that were not like actual reality. This was how I interpreted the teaching of my master - not to copy natural phenomena but to produce new pictorial facts. Fortunately, I soon realised that it was not give to me, a human being, to create from 'nothing', in the way only God can create. I realised that everything that I created was conditioned by what was already in existence. I could not einvent a new colour or line that had never existed anywhere before. An abstract picture is like a string of words, beautiful and sonorous in themselves, perhaps, but never expressing a complete thought. In short, an abstract picture represented a disintegration of being, a falling into the void, a return to the non esse from which we had been called by the creative act of God. I therefore abandoned my fruitless efforts to derive something entirely new, and the problem of creative work now became closely linked in my mind with the problem of cognition of Being. The whole world, practically every visual scene, became mysterious, uncommonly beautiful, profound. Light changed, to caress and surround objects with a halo, as it were, of glory, imparting to them vibrations of life impossible for the artist to depict with the means at his disposal. I was filled then with reverent worship for the First Craftsman, the Creator of all things, and a longing to meet Him, learn from Him, know how He created."

Original Sin According to St. Paul

"In regard to the doctrine of original sin as contained in the Old Testament and illuminated by the unique revelation of Christ in the New Testament, there continues to reign in the denominations of the West--especially since the development of scholastic presuppositions--a great confusion, which in the last few centuries seems to have gained much ground in the theological problematics of the Orthodox East. In some circles this problem has been dressed in a halo of mystifying vagueness to such an extent that even some Orthodox theologians seem to expect one to accept the doctrine of original sin simply as a great and profound mystery of faith (e.g., Androutsos, Dogmatike, pp. 161-162). This has certainly become a paradoxical attitude, especially since these Christians who cannot point their fingers at this enemy of mankind are the same people who illogically claim that in Christ there is remission of this unknown original sin. This is a far cry from the certitude of St. Paul, who, of the devil himself, claimed that "we are not ignorant of his thoughts" (noemata).^{[ 1 ]}

  

If one is to vigorously and consistently maintain that Jesus Christ is the unique Savior Who has brought salvation to a world in need of salvation, one obviously must know what is the nature of the need which provoked this salvation.^{[ 2 ]} It would, indeed, seem foolish to have medical doctors trained to heal sickness if there were no such thing as sickness in the world. Likewise, a savior who claims to save people in need of no salvation is a savior only unto himself.

 

Undoubtedly, one of the most important causes of heresy is the failure to understand the exact nature of the human situation described by the Old and New Testaments, to which the historical events of the birth, teachings, death, resurrection and second coming of Christ are the only remedy. The failure to understand this automatically implies a perverted understanding of what it is that Christ did and continues to do for us, and what our subsequent relation is to Christ and neighbor within the realm of salvation. The importance of a correct definition of original sin and its consequences can never be exaggerated. Any attempt to minimize its importance or alter its significance automatically entails either a weakening or even a complete misunderstanding of the nature of the Church, sacraments and human destiny."

Read the rest of this essay here.

The Mind and Demons

Before Abba Serenus began his conference on spiritual warfare between the demons and the soul St. Cassian expressed his frustrations with his spiritual progress in the desert, "Nonetheless I find that, as I strive laboriously in this purity, I have progressed in this alone: I know what I cannot be. Hence I think that nothing but hard work will be my lot as a result of such contrition of heart, so that there may always be reason for weeping. Yet I do not cease to be what I must not be" (7.3.2). This line is so comforting. Often we forget that the saints were men and women like us with their own struggles and battles to fight. We have great comfort in this solidarity, as we summarize this conference on spiritual warfare and consider the principalities and powers of this painful world.

The mind, the demons, and spiritual progress are the focus of this conference. When these three realities are properly understood, the nature of spiritual warfare is perceived with great clarity.

Fr. Seraphim Rose on Nihilism

"What is the Nihilism in which we have seen the root of the Revolution of the modern age? The answer, at first thought, does not seem difficult; several obvious examples of it spring immediately to mind. There is Hitler's fantastic program of destruction, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Dadaist attack on art; there is the background from which these movements sprang, most notably represented by several 'possessed' individuals of the late nineteenth century--poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, revolutionaries like Bakunin and Nechayev, 'prophets' like Nietzsche; there is, on a humbler level among our contemporaries, the vague unrest that leads some to flock to magicians like Hitler, and others to find escape in drugs or false religions, or to perpetrate those 'senseless' crimes that become ever more characteristic of these times. But these represent no more than the spectacular surface of the problem of Nihilism. To account even for these, once one probes beneath the surface, is by no means an easy task; but the task we have set for ourselves in this chapter is broader: to understand the nature of the whole movement of which these phenomena are but extreme examples.

Christ is All

St. Tikhon of Zadonsk on how Christ reveals Himself as being all in the heart of man:

"Do you desire good for yourself?

Every good is in Me.

Do you desire blessedness?

Every blessedness is in Me.

Do you desire beauty?

What is more beautiful than Me?

Do you desire nobleness?

What is more noble than the Son of God and the Holy Virgin?

The Way of the Ascetics

"Chapter One: ON A RESOLUTE AND SUSTAINED PURPOSE

IF you wish to save your soul and win eternal life, arise from your lethargy, make the sign of the Cross and say:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Faith comes not through pondering but through action. Not words and speculation but experience teaches us what God is. To let in fresh air we have to open a window; to get tanned we must go out into the sunshine. Achieving faith is no different; we never reach a goal by just sitting in comfort and waiting, say the holy Fathers. Let the Prodigal Son be our example. He arose and came (Luke 15:20).

However weighed down and entangled in earthly fetters you may be, it can never be too late. Not without reason is it written that Abraham was seventy-five when he set forth, and the labourer who comes in the eleventh hour gets the same wages as the one who comes in the first.

The Suffering of Holy Persons

Why do the righteous suffer?  Why does God allow it? St. Cassian and St. Germanus posed these questions to Abba Theodore after two Palestinian monks had been killed by bandits (6.1.1).  These monks were so beloved by the people that two nearby towns fought over the right to their burial and relics (6.1.2).  We ask in our frustration, "Why were these righteous monks allowed to be brutally murdered?"

We have to look no farther than ourselves to discover why we are so disturbed by such evil occurrences.  Souls with "little faith and knowledge" are troubled when evil befalls the righteous, because they assume that the righteous get their rewards in this life rather than the next (6.2.1).  If this erroneous assumption were true, we would be the most miserable of men.  Instead of ignorantly and faithlessly assuming in despair we must rather focus on the nature of how things are between God and His creation. Only then will we gain true understanding about this perceived problem.

Things in this world are good, bad, or indifferent. The only good is the virtue of the soul--divine faith that makes us cling to the unchanging Good.  The only bad in this world is sin, which separates us from the unchanging Good God and unites us with the devil (6.3.1).  These ontological truths are fixed and unchanging (6.4.1).  Therefore, we must properly understand these truths so that our faith can be strengthened by real knowledge and remain undamaged by temptations.