Selected Quotes from Fr. Schmemann's Journals

"The temptation of piety is to reduce Christianity to piety; the temptation of theology--to reduce it totally to history."

"'A quiet and silent existence' is the summit of intelligence, of wisdom, of joy, and--I don't know how to say it better--of 'interestedness.' Humility is not to be crest fallen, dejected, nor to be a bigot. It is a royal and kingly virtue because humility stems from wisdom, from knowledge, from contact with life overabundant. The contemporary man is a man who constantly jumps to action. Our whole civilization is an energetic 'jump to action'--and man finds himself exactly where he was before he jumped."

"Amazing--in nature, in the world, everything moves. But in this movement (falling snow, branches lit by the sun, fields) each moment reveals a divine immobility, a fullness, in an icon of eternity as life.

Another strange thought: the  whole world lives at the same time, the whole world lives this very minute, owns this minute; the rest is abstract numbers on a calendar."

St. Simeon the New Theologian on Faith

"It is good to preach God’s mercy before all men and to reveal to one’s brethren His great compassion and ineffable grace shed on us. I know a man who kept no long strict fasts, no vigils, did not sleep on bare earth, imposed on himself no other specially arduous tasks; but, recollecting in memory his sins, understood his worthlessness and, having judged himself, became humble—and for this alone the most compassionate Lord saved him; as the divine David says: ‘The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit’ (Ps. xxxiv. 18). In short, he trusted the words of the Lord and for his faith the Lord received him. There are many obstacles obstructing the way to humility; but no obstacles bar the way to belief in the words of God. As soon, as we wish with all our heart, straightway we believe. For faith is a gift of the all-merciful God, which He gave us to possess by nature (infused in our nature), subjecting its use to the authority of our own will. Consequently, even the Scythians and barbarians have natural faith and believe one another’s words. But to show you an actual example of whole-hearted faith, listen to a tale, which will confirm this.

There lived in Constantinople a young man by the name of George, about twenty years old. All this happened in our lifetime, in our own memory. He had a handsome face and in his walk, his bearing and his manner there was something ostentatious. Owing to this, people, who see only what is on the surface and, ignorant of what is hidden inside each man, come to mistaken conclusions about others, made various evil suppositions about the youth. He made the acquaintance of a certain monk, who lived in one of the monasteries in Constantinople, a man of holy life."

Read the rest of this article here.

The God-Man

"All the truths of Orthodoxy emerge from one truth and converge on one truth, infinite and eternal. That truth is the God-man Christ. If you experience any truth of Orthodoxy to its limit, you will inevitably discover that its kernel is the God-man Christ. In fact, all the truths of Orthodoxy are nothing other than different aspects of the one Truth--the God-man Christ.

Orthodoxy is Orthodoxy by reason of the God-man, and not by reason of anything else or anyone else. Hence another name for Orthodoxy is God-manhood. In it nothing exists through man or by man, but everything comes from the God-man and exists through the God-man. This means that man experiences and finds out about the fundamental eternal truth of life and the world only with the help of the God-man, in the God-man. And it means something else: man learns the complete truth about man, about the purpose and meaning of his existence only through the God-man. Outside of Him a man turns into an apparition, into a scarecrow, into nonsense. Instead of a man you find the dregs of a man, the fragments of a man, the scraps of a man. Therefore, true manhood lies only in God-manhood; and no other manhood exists under heaven.

The Christian Concept of Death

"'He suffered and was buried. And He rose again...' After the Cross, after the descent into death there is the Resurrection from the dead — that principal, fundamental and decisive confirmation of the Symbol of Faith, a confirmation from the very heart of Christianity. Indeed 'if Christ is not risen, then your faith is in vain.' These are the words of the Apostle Paul, and they remain fundamental for Christianity to this day. Christianity is a belief, first of all and above all, in the fact that Christ did not remain in the grave, that life shone forth from death, and that in Christ’s Resurrection from the dead, the absolute, all-encompassing law of dying and death, which tolerated no exceptions, was somehow blown apart and overcome from within.

The Resurrection of Christ comprises, I repeat, the very heart of the Christian faith and Christian Good News. And yet, however strange it may sound, in the everyday life of Christianity and Christians in our time there is little room for this faith. It is as though obscured, and the contemporary Christian, without being cognizant of it, does not reject it, but somehow skirts about it, and does not live the faith as did the first Christians. If he attends church, he of course hears in the Christian service the ever resounding joyous confirmations: 'trampling down death by death,' 'death is swallowed up by victory,' 'life reigns,' and 'not one dead remains in the grave.' But ask him what he really thinks about death, and often (too often alas) you will hear some sort of rambling affirmation of the immortality of the soul and its life in some sort of world beyond the grave, a belief that existed even before Christianity. And that would be in the best of circumstances. In the worst, one would be met simply by perplexity and ignorance, 'You know, I have never really thought about it.'

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See all seven parts here.

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.

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 Ascetic Ideal and the New Testament

"If the monastic ideal is union with God through prayer, through humility, through obedience, through constant recognition of one’s sins, voluntary or involuntary, through a renunciation of the values of this world, through poverty, through chastity, through love for mankind and love for God, then is such an ideal Christian? For some the very raising of such a question may appear strange and foreign. But the history of Christianity, especially the new theological attitude that obtained as a result of the Reformation, forces such a question and demands a serious answer. If the monastic ideal is to attain a creative spiritual freedom, if the monastic ideal realizes that freedom is attainable only in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and if the monastic ideal asserts that to become a slave to God is ontologically and existentially the path to becoming free, the path in which humanity fully becomes human precisely because the created existence of humanity is contingent upon God, is by itself bordered on both sides by non–existence, then is such an ideal Christian? Is such an ideal Biblical — New Testamental? Or is this monastic ideal, as its opponents have claimed, a distortion of authentic Christianity, a slavery to mechanical 'monkish' 'works righteousness'?"

Read how the New Testament answers such questions in Fr. Georges Florovsky's reflections here.

The Gulag of Pitesti

"Slavery to ideas is as serious a form of slavery as any other. Through His Church, Jesus offers you the deep mystery of His Divinity and His friendship. you are no longer called a slave but a friend if you discover the mystery of divine things." - Fr. George Calciu (Fourth Meditation, Sermons to Young People)

Watch the entire four part video here.

More can be read about Fr. George Calciu here and here.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on the Jesus Prayer

Bless the Lord - Psalm 103 (104)

Blagoslovi, Dushe Moya

Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Ghospoda.
Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi.

Bozhe moy, vozvelichilsia yesi zelo.
Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi.

Vo ispovedaniye i v velelepotu obleklsia yesi.
Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi.

Na gora stanut vodi.
Divna dela Tvoya, Ghospodi.

Posrede gor proydut vodi.
Divna dela Tvoya, Ghospodi.

Fsia premudrosliyu sotvoril yesi.
Slava Ti, Ghospodi, sotvorivshemu fsia,
sotvorivshemu fsia

Pop (The Priest)

A film about an Orthodox priest during WWII in German occupied Russia.  You can read a summary and review of the film here.

The Dangers of Labeling

"(The mind) expects and assumes the worst from the world, from other people, and ultimately from God. Every detail in the universe is measured by the mind against its usefulness to the mind's story of the self, the ego. The mind attempts to replace the real center of being, the heart, with a center of its own creation.

Cherubic Hymn

English:

Russian:

Greek:

Bless My Enemies, O Lord

Prayer LXXV, Prayers by the Lake, St. Nikolai of Zica

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Enemies have driven me into Your embrace more than friends have. Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.

Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath Your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul. Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Read more here.

Russians Defend Christianity

"And when you hear that we look for a kingdom, you suppose, without making any inquiry, that we speak of a human kingdom; whereas we speak of that which is with God, as appears also from the confession of their faith made by those who are charged with being Christians, though they know that death is the punishment awarded to him who so confesses. For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain; and we should strive to escape detection, that we might obtain what we expect. But since our thoughts are not fixed on the present, we are not concerned when men cut us off; since also death is a debt which must at all events be paid." - St. Justin Martyr, First Apology, Chapter 11

Pascha Chants

Christ is risen!

Χριστός ἀνέστη!

Христос воскрес!

Christus resurrexit!

Christ ist Erstanden! 

English:

Church History Timeline

 

A nice summary of how all branches of Christianity have historical ties to Orthodoxy.

 

See full size image here.