The defence against chance

He had always disliked the people who encored a favourite air in the opera—'That just spoils it' had been his comment. But this now appeared to him as a principle of far wider application and deeper moment. This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards … was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself—perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.
C.S. Lewis. Perelandra

Balanced Orthodoxy

A well-balanced Orthodoxy can easily take any foreign influences that come and straighten them out, make them Orthodox; but a one-sided 'party-line' cuts itself off from the mainstream of Orthodoxy.
Fr. Seraphim (Rose)

Instruments of power

…sophisticated language, disconnected from the roots of truth, in fact pursues some ulterior motives, that is invariably turns into an instrument of power…
Josef Pieper

The redemptive act

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least to be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.
Flannery O’Conner

The Mission

The mission of the Church which is given by Christ and realized by the Holy Fathers is this: for the awareness and realization to be planted and cultivated in the soul of our people that each member of the Orthodox Church is a catholic person, an eternal and theanthropic person, that he belongs to Christ and for this reason is a brother of all human beings, and a servant of all men and creatures. This is the purpose of the Church given by Christ. Every other purpose is not of Christ but of the antichrist. For our local Church to be the Church of Christ, the catholic Church, she must constantly realize this purpose in our people. By what means can she realize this theanthropic purpose? Once again, the means are none other than the theanthropic ones, because the theanthropic purpose can be realized only through theanthropic means, never with human means or any other whatsoever.
St. Justin (Popovic)

The Holy Mountain

Apropos to Matt's return from pilgrimage to Mt. Athos we'll offer a little wisdom from said mountain.

Who is going to speak about your struggle, blessed Fathers;
Who is going to praise worthily the deeds of your asceticism?
Who is going to praise the temperance of your mind?
your unceasing prayer
your sufferings to gain virtue,
the wearing out of the body,
the struggle against passions,
the all–night assemblies for prayer,
the unceasing tears,
the humility of spirit,
the victories against demons,
and all the other gifts?
O multitude of holy men
sanctified and desired by God.
O honeycombs chosen by God,
who made wax cells,
full of the sweetest honey
of quietness in the holes and caves of the earth
in the Holy Mountain.
Delight of the Holy Trinity!
Delight of the Holy Mother of God!
Pride of Athos,
source of pride for the world.
Pray to the Lord that our souls find mercy”.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
by the intercessions of Thy Saints,
have mercy on me a sinner.
Most Holy Mother of God, save me.
St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain

In former days, the Holy Fathers first withdrew into the desert, becoming themselves a desert void of their passions by struggling. Without plans or programs of their own, they left themselves in the hands of God, avoiding honors and power, even when they arrived at measures of sanctity — unless Mother Church had need of them. They did obedience to the will of God, and they glorified the name of God with their holy life. They became spiritual blood donors, for they had acquired good spiritual health in the desert with good spiritual food and vigilant patristic watchfulness.

In our day, however, many of us, who are unfortunately influenced by worldly love, which can make no spiritual pledge, supposedly venture to do good, to donate blood, but our blood is full of spiritual bacteria and we do more harm than good.

Once two Catholics came here. They seemed to be good boys, architects. And they said to me that Orthodox monasticism doesn't produce anything, whereas theirs undertake great ministries. I explained to them that the mission of the monk is something else, different from the mission of the clergy in the world. I said, 'If we destroy the lighthouse on the rocks, what will become of the ships? But the monks are the lighthouses.'
Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos

The simple monks

But monks in the monastery are practical people; they condensed the whole theology into the practice of prayer.
Fr. Roman Braga

The Russians are coming

So this is probably my most personal revelation on this here blog, of course I'll include an apropos quote, however. I received today the wonderful news of my placement into the desired level at my summer Russian program which is third year Russian.

Carolus V, Emperor of Rome, was wont to say that the Hispanic tongue was seemly for converse with God, the French with friends, the German with enemies, the Italian with the feminine sex. Had he been versed in the Russian tongue, however, he would of a certainty have added to this that it is appropriate in converse with all of the above, inasmuch as he would have found in it the magnificence of the Hispanic tongue, the sprightliness of the French, the sturdiness of the German, the tendresse of the Italian and, over and above all that, the richness and the conciseness of powerful imagery, of the Greek and Latin tongues.
Mikhail Vassilievich Lomonosov

Middle doctrine

'Many were tempted by the idea,' [St.] Mark [of Ephesus] continued, 'that one can find a medium between two doctrines. True: one can find such expressions which, having a double meaning, could at the same time express something between the two doctrines. But a doctrine midway between two contrary doctrines on the same subject is impossible; for in this case it must be something between truth and falsehood, between an affirmation and a negation. Thus, if the Latin doctrine of the Spirit’s procession from the Son is just, then ours is false. What middle doctrine can there be here?'

A body more perfect

A new reality came into the world, a body more perfect than the world—the Church, founded on a two-fold divine economy: the work of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, the two persons of the Trinity sent into the world. …The Church is body in so far as Christ is her head; she is fullness in so far as the Holy Spirit quickens her and fills her with divinity, for the Godhead dwells within her bodily as it dwelt in the deified humanity of Christ. We may say with Irenaeus: ‘where the Church is, there is the Spirit; where the Spirit is, there is the Church.’
Vladimir Lossky

Middle without a beginning or end

The near-sighted philosophy of the previous century [i.e., the 18th] had for a time dreamt of breaking this holy union and had forced knowledge to dig a grave for faith, but what came of this attempt at matricide? Holy faith, honored by self-forgetting reason, is in a depth of the heart inaccessible to this reason, and false knowledge itself remained with its sophistries in the grave dug by it … True philosophy can exist only in a union with heaven, for true knowledge lives by and is nourished not by earth but by heaven … We are accustomed to saying the sphere of the sciences, the sphere of knowledge, and to separating it from the sphere of faith; but strictly speaking, there is no sphere of sciences and can be no such sphere. Rather, there exists only a boundless sphere of faith, whose inwardness is divided among the sciences. Knowledge without faith is a middle without a beginning or end; whoever seeks not soulless fragments but a living reasonably whole must therefore necessarily unite knowledge with faith …What in general is true knowledge, if not a natural daughter of faith? And what is true faith if not the natural end and crown of all grounded knowledge?
Archbishop of Kherson, Innokentii Borisov

Ugly and indecent

With regard to women’s clothes one should not even talk. They have always been either ugly or indecent, and most often ugly and indecent at the same time. Western dress continuously changes and is determined by so-called fashion, and what results? Somewhere (mostly in Paris) a well-known circle of people change the style of dress or hairdo according to their whims while the rest of the French and, after them, other nations hurry to adopt the change no matter how ridiculous it may be, not even daring to doubt its beauty. Consider impartially the reasons for this aping, and you will be convinced that it springs from spiritual bondage to the pseudo-superior, and wherever bondage is involved there the heart loses its purity and nobility. National dress is the free custom of the people. Its alteration for the sake of comfort may in a sense show a certain freedom, and even the reasonableness of man (for custom itself is created in this manner), but imitation of Western dress is nothing but recognition of bondage to the taste of a pseudo-superior society. Let those who like such an admission be given the respect which they deserve, the respect which man shows for an ape.
Alexey Khomiakov

The thief on the left

Today’s iconoclasts...reject the Cross of the Lord. They allow pretty pictures of various biblical events to hang in their homes, but they repudiate the veneration of icons, which remind us that salvation is attained by following a difficult path, a narrow path, such as the Lord Jesus Christ Himself followed, a path of battling one’s sins and vices, a path of fasting and prayer. Those who want to see Christianity only as something rosy and attractive—who think it possible to enter the blessedness of eternity without any particular effort, without forcing themselves, without warring with their passions—they deny all this. They follow the path taken by the thief who hung on the left; they reject all the laws which the Lord Himself delivered and which He sent the Apostles to preach throughout the world; they reject those statues and writings which are sacredly preserved by the holy Orthodox Church.
St. John (Maximovich)

To continue with a theme...

…they are incapable from the debasement of their reasonings of raising their glances to the height of truth.
St. Basil the Great

Stay out of the dust...

For since what God giveth transcends reasoning entirely, it is but reason that we need faith. But the man that thinks meanly of it, and is contemptuous and vainglorious, will not effect anything at all. Let heretics hearken to the voice of the Spirit, for such is the nature of reasonings. They are like some labyrinth or puzzles which have no end to them anywhere, and do not let the reason stand upon the rock, and have their very origin in vanity. For being ashamed to allow of faith, and to seem ignorant of heavenly things, they involve themselves in the dust-cloud of countless reasonings.
St. John Chrysostom

A dissolved partnership

‘It won’t do to have truth and justice on his side; he must have law and lawyers,' exclaims the old girl, apparently persuaded that the latter form a separate establishment, and have dissolved partnership with truth and justice for ever and a day.
Bleak House - Charles Dickens.

St. John refutes predestination and such

But perhaps someone will say, If all that the Father gives, and whomever He shall draw comes to You, if none can come to You except it be given from above, then those to whom the Father does not give are free from any blame or charges. These are mere words and pretences. For we require our own deliberate choice as well, because whether we will be taught is a matter of choice, and also whether we will believe. And here, by saying ‘which the Father gives Me’, He declares nothing else than that ‘believing in Me is no ordinary thing, nor one that comes of human reasonings, but needs a revelation from above, and a well-ordered soul to receive that revelation.’
St. John Chrysostom

Confusion leading nowhere

Applicable to Christianity, I believe:

I am a student of Chinese philosophy, and it is my belief that I must rely upon the Chinese traditional viewpoint, rather than follow the newly invented and untraditional arguments of modern scholars. To do the latter would result in depriving Chinese philosophy of all criteria of meaning and value; it would end in a state of confusion leading nowhere.
Gi-ming Shein (Professor of Fr. Seraphim Rose)

Countless reasonings

For since what God giveth transcends reasoning entirely, it is but reason that we need faith. But the man that thinks meanly of it, and is contemptuous and vainglorious, will not effect anything at all. Let heretics hearken to the voice of the Spirit, for such is the nature of reasonings. They are like some labyrinth or puzzles which have no end to them anywhere, and do not let the reason stand upon the rock, and have their very origin in vanity. For being ashamed to allow of faith, and to seem ignorant of heavenly things, they involve themselves in the dust-cloud of countless reasonings.
St. John Chrysostom

Khomiakov and Orthodoxy

As I promised yesterday I am going to offer up a few thoughts on Alexei Khomiakov's thought and it's relation to modern Orthodoxy. I am by no means qualified to do so but I will try to make something coherent.

Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) is most well known for his treatise on the unity of the Church entitled The Church is One and as the founder of the so-called “Slavophile” thought circle. [By the way: This page is linked only because it has a very good introduction to Khomiakov and his life. I in absolutely no way endorse anything else that may be found therein.] This essay was not published until after Khomiakov’s death so it is interesting to see the reception that Khomiakov had during his life and after his death in relationship to his writings. Khomiakov was first known as a poet (unfortunately I’ve only found one translated poem). Here is the one that I have found:

Oh, grief afflicts me! There descends thick gloom
In the distant West, the land of holy wonders:
The former lights are fading, burning out,
And the brightest stars are tumbling from the heavens…
Oh! Since creation earth has never seen
Above itself such fiery lights of heaven!
But grief! Their age has passed, a deathly veil descends
And covers up the West. There shall be gloom so deep…
So hear the voice of fate, arise in a new glow,
Awake, O sleep-bound East!

This poem illustrates the biggest question for Russia during the 19th century (now that I think harder it was a question longer than that, but I’ll leave it be…) – What is/should be Russia’s relationship to the West? Has, indeed, their age passed? This question was approached from different points of view, with different aims and with different goals. For Khomiakov, as a faithful Orthodox, this question, of course, was looked at from a spiritual point of view. He looked at the schism that had created by the Christians of the West by the breaking of unity with the Church:

In the ninth century the West, unfaithful to the tradition of the Church, appropriated the right to alter the ecumenical creed without consulting with its Eastern brothers and sisters… What was the inevitable logical consequence of this usurpation? When the logical principle of knowledge expressed in the exposition of the creed was separated from the moral principle of love expressed by the unanimity of the Church, a protestant anarchy was established in practice. … No sophistry can allow one to avoid this consequence. Either the truth of faith is given to the union of all and to their mutual love in Jesus Christ, or it can be given to every individual without regard to all other individuals.

For Khomiakov the schism was a breaking of the bond of love “because it [the West] received death itself into its bosom when it decided to imprison itself within a dead letter; because it condemned itself to death when it decided to be a religious monarchy without organic principle”.
Khomiakov, along with his associates, had many interactions and debates with the Westernizers from the 1830s to the 1850s; however most of this took place in verbal interactions in salons or in personal correspondence. The government was very weary of Khomiakov’s “extreme” patriotism. In the words of an attendant of the Empress Khomiakov

shocks polite society very much because he wears a beard and dresses like a peasant…Government people call him a red revolutionary, and consider it very daring for anyone to have a greater mind and greater patriotism than they.

For Khomiakov Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy went hand in hand as he saw the Russian social structure, which had always been based upon the mir--the organic village commune, as inherently Orthodox. Khomiakov’s patriotism was one of the main reasons why he wasn’t allowed to publish during his lifetime. The ecclesiological essays published during his lifetime were published under a pseudonym ignotus [The Unknown One] and in the foreign press. These essays are responses to various articles by Western Christians, and his responses are generally clarifications about Orthodoxy and, I won’t mince words, condemnation of “Romanism” and Protestantism.

However, for all Khomiakov critique of the spiritual path of the West he did not totally discount everything about it. He was quite interested in the mechanization/electrification of Russia and even exhibited an engine in London that he had invented.
…
So now I will just state some general thoughts on Khomiakov’s acceptance in the Orthodox world. [I realized I’m going to have to do a lot more research in that area.] Since Khomiakov’s time there have been many critiques of the “Slavophile” school and, of course, as Khomiakov was at its head these critiques mainly focus on him (at least the ones I’ve seen). After Khomiakov’s death in 1860 his works began to be published in Russia and an introduction to his collected works was written by his good friend and pupil Yuri Samarin in 1867. He concluded this glowing appraisal of Khomiakov with a bang in describing him as a “teacher of the Church”—one who “by a logical clarification of one or another side of Church teaching, could win for the Church a decisive victory over some error or other”. I’m not going to analyze the validity of this statement at the present time but I will just move on to something else…

St. Pavel Florensky wrote a short essay on Khomiakov in 1916 that is highly critical of the above statement of Samarin and of Khomiakov’s way of reasoning in his critique of Catholicism and Protestantism. I’m not in a capacity to completely analyze this critique so I will just put that fact out there.
Berdiaev wrote a book on Khomiakov of which I’ve read the three chapters that have been translated; however, I’m not even going to venture on that territory…

After all this reading I’ve realized that as with all Orthodox writers (and saints) one has to take out what is beneficial and, depending on the leftovers, not put on the same level or even disregard some of their thought. In Orthodoxy there is no one authority but Christ and all others are seen through his eyes.

One thing that I have noticed in all of this, as I have many times before, is the wonderful harmony we have in Orthodoxy between our various thinkers and saints, and that it takes all of them to make the world go round…

The expression of the Church

Certainly, Christianity has a logical expression contained in the Creed; but this is not separate from other manifestations. It also has a logical teaching, which we call theology. But this is only a branch of general teaching. To isolate it is a great error; to give it exclusive preference is madness; to see in it a heavenly gift tied to certain functions is a heresy. That would be to establish a sacrament of rationalism.
The Church does not recognize a teaching Church other than herself in her totality.
Alexey Khomiakov

The path of redemption

God has freely willed a synergistic path-of-redemption in which man must spiritually participate. God is the actor, the cause, the initiator, the one who completes all redemptive activity. But man is the one who must spiritually respond to the free gift of grace. And in this response there is an authentic place for the spiritually of monasticism and asceticism, one which has absolutely nothing to do his the 'works of the law'
Fr. Georges Florovsky

Stating the obvious

So when I was in high school my friends and I had a silly game that if someone stated the obvious you could punch them...this guy would be punched real hard:

Since for Xomjakov [sic] true philosophy could exist only in the realm of faith, in considering Xomjakov [sic] the philosopher one must consider Xomjakov [sic] the theologian. In his writings the line between philosophy, religion, and Orthodoxy often becomes dim, and the demarcation more convenient than precise. Conversely, his concept of sobornost’ although Christian, religious in character, has also ethical, ontological and epistemological significance.
Peter Christoff

It amazes me that a person could write a whole book on Khomiakov and yet state something like that. But on the other hand it makes perfect sense as he is approaching Khomiakov's thought, and Orthodoxy by association, in an academic and rationalistic way.

For those who disparage our modern holy fathers:

A man who does not express desire to link himself to the latest of the saints (in time) in all love and humility owing to a certain distrust of him, will never be linked with the preceding saints and will not be admitted to their succession, even though he thinks he possesses all possible faith and love for God and for all His saints. He will be cast out of their midst, as one who refused to take humbly the place allotted to him by God before all time, and to link himself to that latest saint (in time) as God had disposed.
St. Symeon the New Theologian