Friday, April 27, 2007

On "Ecumenical dialogue"

...the cosmological dimension of the event of salvation and its ontological content is an area of little concern for the 'ecumenical dialogues' of our times.
Christos Yannaras

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Name your favorite modern master of Biblical exegesis

...giving themselves up to the distorted meaning of allegory, have undertaken to give a majesty of their own invention to Scripture. It is to believe themselves wiser than the Holy Spirit, and to bring forth their own ideas under a pretext of exegesis. Let us hear Scripture as it has been written.
St. Basil the Great

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Ecumenical Throne

...has value and usefulness only when it sheds abroad upon all the earth the sweet and unsetting light of Orthodoxy. Lighthouses are useful if and as long as they light the way for those who travel on the sea to avoid the reefs. When their lights is extinguished, then they are not only useless but harmful, for they are themselves transformed into hazards.
Archimandrite Epiphanios (Theodoropoulos)

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

On Wisdom

...the Wisdom of God is Christ His Only-begotten Son: and he by his doctrine degraded the Wisdom of God into a female element...
St. Cyril of Jerusalem
I think you'll agree with me that there have been many of these "he's", especially in these modern times, i.e., the last 100-150 years.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Proper posture

Standing in God's temple, picture to yourself that you are in heaven itself, that you stand before God with the higher powers and do with them everything that they do. In picturing this to yourself, make a rule for yourself that under no circumstances will you leave church before the end of the service.
If you stand thus perfectly in order as said above, and from this standing you become very tired, or you become exhausted from some bodily illness or old age, then sit wherever there is a place in church, in order not to tempt your brother.
Examine yourself, whether it be not despondency or laziness that make you tired, whether it be not distraction of mind and bodily passions that make you lose your strength and manly courage. Reflecting thus, accuse yourself of impatience, of infirmity, of weakness, of laziness, and again be ashamed before God and His angels and men, and reflect in your conscience that he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved (Mk. 13:13).
If while standing in prayer you become completely unable to endure some natural necessity, or if some great affliction strikes you, accuse yourself likewise, just as written above. ...
And if you will thus reflect and accuse your own soul, and if you endure unto the end, you shall proceed from strength to strength and shall receive invisibly from God health of body and enlightenment of soul.
Elder Nazarius

Friday, April 20, 2007

You must know Christ!

You reason about salvation, yet you do not know what salvation is, why men are in need of it, and finally, you do not know Christ, the only means of our salvation. ... You must know Christ! You must realize that you do not know Him, that you deny Him if you acknowledge salvation possible without Him for any kind of good works! He who acknowledges salvation to be possible without Christ denies Christ and, perhaps without knowing it, falls into the grave sin of blasphemy. ... To be sure, you had a revelation from above on this subject, concerning what is contrary and what is not contrary to Divine mercy? -- No, it was sound reason that pointed it out. Ah, your sound reason! Still, where in your sound reason did you find out that it was possible to understand, with your own limited human mind, what is contrary and what is not contrary to the Divine mercy?
St. Ignatius (Brianchaninov)

Thursday, April 19, 2007

My fear and trembling increase

...all the more at the thought that, while the strength and zeal of the leaders of the Church of Christ today are far from rivaling those of the Apostles, they must do battle with considerably stronger enemies and overcome considerably more powerful obstacles and difficulties in this service. The holy Apostles, after all, had to do with a fervent--even if falsely directed--striving toward truth, whereas we, in our time, must have to do with a hardened rejection of truth and even of the very idea of the Living God and His indispensability for the human heart. With all their dark sides, their insufficiencies and errors, the paganism and Judaism of antiquity were nonetheless an honest seeking of God, and honest desire to serve Him, a living and active exemplification of thirst for communion with Him. But the unbelief of today, every conceivable form of error and frenzy--both learned and illiterate, both anti-religious and anti-moral--and the whole public life of today: do they not express in men a complete unwillingness to know God, and unwillingness even to admit His existence, but on the contrary the desire to be completely rid of Him, to do without Him, to live solely by the accomplishments of the proud human mind and culture?
Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh) of Petrograd

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

The presence of Christ

Only by severely downgrading or eliminating altogether the importance of initiation into the life of the Church can one speak of Orthodox witness to the heterodox in the framework of ecumenical encounter. Ultimately, this translates into denying the existential reality of the Church itself (the life in Christ), and hence, by extension, the very diachronic presence of the Incarnate Christ Himself.
Fr. Peter Alban Heers

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

On Orthodox "unity" in America

Administrative union among Orthodox Churches is the least thing that is needed today. Those who are practicing true Orthodoxy are already one and united in spirit. What is actually needed is personal podvig in the full Orthodox Tradition from everyone who consciously calls himself Orthodox. No other kind of Orthodoxy has ever produced saints, in America or anywhere else.
Gleb (Fr. Herman) Podmoshensky

Monday, April 16, 2007

The essence of the question

It is not a question of one or another valuation of the conduct of Cardinal Humbert; it is not a question of any personal falling-out between Pope and Patriarch that could be easily healed by mutual Christian forgiveness; no -- the essence of the question lies in those deviations from Orthodoxy which have become rooted in the Roman Church during the course of centuries...
Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky)

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Stalin's mistake

Stalinist culture considered that it represented the only escape from history and that the rest of the world had not yet entered the realm of pure mythology but remained historical. And it was here that Stalinist culture encountered its limit--it was swept away by the forces of history, because unlike Christianity it had failed to establish itself in the superhistorical; and when the extrahistorical competes with the historical, it inevitably loses, because it is fighting on alien ground.
Boris Groys

Monday, April 09, 2007

Christ is Risen

No one is so all-embracing as is the Lord Jesus. Who, of those so-called philanthropists of mankind, teachers, leaders or enlighteners ever attempted to perform any good for the dead?
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

The order of knowledge

...the lovers of God are not simpletons because they know God well enough that they are able to love Him. Of all human knowledge, this knowledge is more important and greater. To this must be added that the enemies of God cannot be more knowledgeable, even though they consider themselves as such, because their knowledge is unavoidably chaotic, for it does not have a source and does not have order. For the source and order of all knowledge is God.
St. Nikolai (Velimirovic)

Monday, April 02, 2007

Where is your goat's trail to be found?

Most men are surrendered unto Satan and run after wealth and other things of this life. But there are a few who believe with simplicity in the words of Christ. And again among these are found a few who go and live far away from the world, struggling and walking their whole life on the narrow and arduous goat's trail which our Lord showed us. They go to the desert and seek to find the hidden door of Paradise. These blessed men are not mistaken, but rather, know well where their ancient Fatherland is found.
From the life of St. Mark the Anchorite