Unceasing Prayer

Before Abba Isaac began his second conference on prayer St. John inserted a historical account of a disagreement among the Egyptian brethren, which provided the background for this conference's topic. This theological disagreement dealt with how man was made in the image of God. One party's failure to properly understand how man was made in God's image caused detrimental blasphemy to the Orthodox faith at the time (10.1). St. John related how Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria sent a letter (A.D. 399) to the monasteries in Egypt arguing against the Anthropomorphites who were a group that assigned physical, human characteristics to God. This letter sparked a controversy, because a large number of the monks thought that man was literally created in God's image. Among those caught in this error was Serapion who was an aged, pious monk (10.2.2).  Abba Paphnutius received a learned deacon at the monastery in hopes that he would settle this dispute amongst the brethren. The deacon pointed out to Serapion and the brethren that man is the image of God in a spiritual sense rather than in a physical sense (10.3.3). After realizing his error Serapion was greatly distressed, because he had to give up his anthropomorphic image of the Godhead, which he had always mentally envisioned during prayer (10.3.4). In tears he cried out, "Woe is me, wretch that I am! They have taken my God from me, and I have no one to lay hold of, nor do I know whom I should adore or address" (10.3.5). How many of us ignorantly fall into such errors? This error is why the Church forbids mental images during prayer--because we could end up praying to our image of the Trinity instead of the Holy Trinity. By such an error we could even run "the risk of everlasting death" (10.4.1). We could ignorantly undo all spiritual progress, as Serapion bitterly experienced. How can we expect to properly unite with God when we do not rightly understand Him from the beginning? Nevertheless, God's grace is sufficient, and he that seeks God finds Him.

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.'