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Tracing its origins to the original apostles and continuing an unbroken history of faithful proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Orthodox Church has been a mystery to many Western Christians.

For the past year or so my wife and I have had a growing interest in the church. A few weeks ago we visited St. Theodosius Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland, Ohio. (The beautiful and historic church was made famous by the academy-award winning film, The Deer Hunter.) The beautiful  liturgy was a holy and moving praise of God and by the whole (past and present, near and far) community of saints.

A book recommended to all English-speakers who show an interest in Orthodoxy is Bishop Kallistos Ware‘s, The Orthodox Way. Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary.)Press, 1990.

I have outlined many of the book’s compelling passages, in the hope that some of you might find and read the whole book:

FROM THE ORTHODOX WAY: 

“Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey—in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.” (8)

GOD AS MYSTERY

“’A God who is comprehensible is not God. A God, that is to say, whom we claim to understand exhaustively through the resources of our reasoning brain turns out to be no more than an idol, fashioned in our own image” (13)

“Yet,this God of mystery is at the same time uniquely close to us, filling all things, present everywhere around us and within us…Between ourselves and the transcendent God there is a relationship of love, similar in kind to that between each of us and those other human beings dearest to us.” (13)

“God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than anything else. And we find, paradoxically, that these two poles do not cancel one another out: on the contrary, the more we are attracted to the one ‘pole’, the more vividly we become aware of the other at the same time. Advancing on the Way, each finds that God grows ever more intimate and ever more distant, well known and yet unknown…” (14)

“Recognizing that God is incomparably greater than anything we can say or think about him, we find it necessary to refer to him not just through direct statements but through pictures and images. Our theology is to a large extent symbolic…Without this use of the way of negation, of what is termed the apophatic approach, our talk about God becomes gravely misleading. All that we affirm concerning God, however correct, falls far short of the living truth. If we say that he is good or just, we must at once add that his goodness or justice are not to be measured by our human standards. If we say that he exists, we must qualify this immediately by adding that he is one existent object among many, that in his case the word ‘exist’ bears a unique significance. So the way of affirmation is balanced by the way of negation.” (16-17)

“We do not mean by a ‘mystery’ merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. “(18)

In the Creed we do not say, ‘I believe that there is a God’; we say, ‘I believe in one God’. Between belief that and belief in, there is a crucial distinction. It is possible for me to believe that someone or something exists, and yet for this belief to have no practical effect upon my life. I can open the telephone directory for Wigan and scan the names recorded on its pages; and, as I read, I am prepared to believe that some (or even most) of these people actually exist. But I know none of them personally. I have never even visited Wigan, and so my belief that they exist makes no particular difference to me. When, on the other hand, I say to a much-loved friend, ‘I believe in you’, I am doing far more than expressing a belief that this person exists. ‘I believe in you’ means: I turn to you, I rely upon you, I put my full trust in you and I hope in you. And that is what we are saying to God in the Creed.

“To believe in God is not to accept the possibility of his existence because it has been ‘proved’ to us by one theoretical argument, but it is to put our trust in One whom we know and love. Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there….Faith is not logical certainty but a personal relationship.” (19)

“Faith, then, signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real.” (19-20)

“The two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal, and he is love.” (20

“God, then, is the One whom we love, our personal friend. We do not need to prove the existence of a personal friend. …If we believe in God, it is because we know him directly in our own experience, not because of logical proofs.” (22)

“There are facts which call out for an explanation, but which remain inexplicable unless we commit ourselves to belief in a personal God. Three such ‘pointers’ call for particular mention. (22-23)

First, there is the world around us.” (23)

We find a second ‘pointer’ within ourselves. Why, distinct from my desire for pleasure and dislike of pain, do I have within myself a feeling of duty and moral obligation, a sense of right, a conscience? And this conscience does simply tell me to obey standards taught to me by others; it is personal.” (24-25)

“What is the meaning of conscience? What is the explanation for my sense of the infinite? Within myself there is something which continually makes me look beyond myself? Within myself I bear a source of wonder, a source of constant self-transcendence.” (25)

“The third ‘pointer’ is to be found in my relationships with other human persons. (25)

“This encounter with the true personhood of another is, once more, a contact with the transcendent and timeless, with something stronger than death.” (26)

“It is fundamental to my character as a human being that I search everywhere for meaningful explanations. I do this with the smaller things in my life; shall I not do this also with the greater? Belief in God helps me to understand why the world should be as it is, with its beauty as well as its ugliness; why I should be as I am, with my nobility as well as my meanness; and why I should love others, affirming their eternal value. Apart from belief in God I can see no other explanation for all this. Faith in God enables me to make sense of things, to see them as a coherent whole, in a way that nothing else can do. Faith enables me to make one out of the many. (26-27)

“Because God is a mystery beyond our understanding, we shall never know his essence or inner being, either in this life or in the Age to come.”

“But while God’s inner essence is forever beyond our comprehension, his energies, grace, life, and power fill the whole universe, and are directly accessible to us.” (27)

“When a man knows or participates in the divine energies, he truly knows or participates in God himself, so far as impossible for a created being. But God is God, and we are men; and so, while he possesses us, cannot in the same way possess him.” (28)

Such, then, is our God: unknowable in essence, yet known in his energies; beyond and above all that we can think or express, yet closer us than our own heart. Through the apophatic we smash in pieces all the idols or mental images that we form of him, for we know that all are unworthy of his surpassing greatness. Yet at the same time, through our prayer and through our active service in the world, we discover at every moment his divine energies, his immediate presence in each person and each thing. Daily, hourly, we touch him.” (28-29)

GOD AS TRINITY

“He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love.” (33)

“The final end of the spiritual Way is that we humans should also become part of this Trinitarian coinherence or perichoresis, being wholly taken up into the circle of love that exists within God.” (34)

“The two most helpful ways of I entry into the divine mystery are to affirm that God is personal and that God is love. Now both these notions imply sharing and reciprocity. First, a ‘person’ is not at all the same as an ‘individual’. Isolated, self-dependent, none of us is an authentic person but merely an individual, a bare unit as I recorded in the census. Egocentricity is the death of true personhood. Each becomes a real person only through entering into relation with other persons, through living for them and in them. There can be no man, so it has been rightly said, until there are at two men in communication. The same is true, secondly, of love. Love cannot exist in isolation, but presupposes the other. Self-love is the negation of love.” (34-35)

Three Persons in One Essence

“Although Father, Son and Spirit are one single God, yet each of them is from all eternity a person, a distinct centre of conscious selfhood. God the Trinity is thus to be described as ‘three persons in one essence’. There is eternally in God true unity, combined with genuinely personal differentiation.”. (36-37)

“Father, Son and Spirit — so the saints affirm, following the testimony of Scripture – have only one will and not three, only one energy and not three. None of the three ever acts separately, apart from the other two; they are not three Gods, but one God.” (37)

“In our experience of God at work within our own life, while we find that the three are always acting together, yet we know that each is acting within us in a different manner.” (38)

“The doctrine of the Trinity is ‘paradoxical’ and lies ‘beyond words and understanding’. It is something revealed to us by God, not demonstrated to us by our own reason. We can hint at it in human language, but we cannot fully explain it. Our reasoning powers are a gift from God, and we must use them to the full; but we should recognize their limitations. The Trinity is not a philosophical theory but the living God whom we worship; and so I there comes a point in our approach to the Trinity, when argumentation and analysis must give place to wordless prayer.”(39)

God the Father, is the ’fountain’ of the Godhead, the source, cause or principle of origin for the other two persons. He is the bond of unity between the three: there is one God because there is one Father… The other two persons are each defined in terms of their relationship to the Father: the Son is ‘begotten’ by the Father, the Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father.” (40)

“The second person of the Trinity is the Son of God, his ‘Word’ or Logos… It is in and through the Son that the Father is revealed to us: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life: no one comes to the Father, except through me’ (John 14:6). He it is who was born on earth as man, from the Virgin Mary in the city of Bethlehem. But as Word or Logos of God he is also at work before the Incarnation. He is the principle of order and purpose that permeates all things, drawing them to unity in God, and so making the universe into a ‘cosmos’, a harmonious and integrated whole. The Creator-Logos has imparted to each created thing its own indwelling logos or inner principle, which makes that thing to be distinctively itself, and which at the same tune draws and directs that thing towards God. Our human task as craftsmen or manufacturers is to discern this logos dwelling in each thing and to render it manifest; we seek not to dominate but to co-operate.” (40-41)

“’Prayer is action’ (Tito Colliander)… For if your actions do not exceed your petitions, men your prayers are mere words.”(48)

“A genuine confession of faith in the Triune God can be made only by those who, after the likeness of the Trinity, show love mutually towards each other. There is an integral connection between our love for one another and our faith in the Trinity: the first is a precondition for the second, and in its turn the second gives full strength and meaning to the first.” (49)

“Made after the image of God the Trinity, human beings are called to reproduce on earth the mystery of mutuality that the Trinity lives in heaven…Each social unit — the family, the school, the workshop, the parish, the Church universal — is to be an ikon of the Trinity… [E]ach of us is committed to living sacrificially in and for the other; each is committed irrevocably to a life of practical service, of  compassion.” (49)

GOD AS CREATOR

“God’s motive in creation is his love…We should think, not of God the Manufacturer or God the Craftsman, but of God the Lover. Creation is an act not so much of his free will of his free love… By voluntary choice God created the world in ‘ecstatic’ love, so that there might be besides himself other beings to participate in the life and the love that are his.” (56) \

“Creation is continual. If we are to be accurate when speaking of creation, we should use not the past tense but the continuous present. We should say, not ‘God made the world, and me in it’, but ‘God is making the world, and me in it, here and now, at this moment and always’. Creation is not an event in the past, but a relationship in the present. “If God did not continue to exert his creative will at every moment, the universe would immediately lapse into non-being; nothing could exist for a single second if God did not will it to be.” (57)

“ln the beginning there was only God: all (the things that exist are his creation, whether in heaven or on earth, whether spiritual or physical, and so in their basic ‘thusness’ they are all of them good…That which is evil in the strict sense’, observes Evagrius, ‘is not a substance but the absence of good, just as darkness is nothing else than the absence of light.’… ‘Not even the demons are evil by nature’, says St Maximus the Confessor, ‘but they become such through the misuse of their natural powers.’ Evil is always parasitic. It is the twisting and misappropriation of what is in itself good. Evil resides not in the thing itself but in our attitude towards the thing — that is to say, in our will.”(59)

“To say that evil is the perversion of good, and therefore in the final analysis an illusion and unreality, is not to deny its powerful hold over us. For there is no greater force within creation than the free will of beings endowed with self-consciousness and spiritual intellect; and so the misuse of this free will can have altogether terrifying consequences.” (60)

“Man stands at the heart of God’s creation. Participating as he does in both the noetic and the material realms, he is an image or mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a ‘little universe’ or microcosm. All created things have their meeting-place in him…As microcosm, then, man is the one in whom the world is summed up; as mediator, he is the one through whom the world is offered back to God.” (63)

“To believe that man is made in God’s image is to believe that man is created for communion and union with God, and that if he rejects this communion he ceases to be properly man. There is no such thing as ‘natural man’ existing in separation from God: man cut off from God is in a highly unnatural state. The image doctrine means, therefore, that man has God as the innermost centre of his being. The divine is the determining element in our humanity; losing our sense of the divine, we lose also our sense of the human.” (67)

“The image signifies relationship not only with God but with other men. Just as the three divine persons live in and for each other, so man—being made in the Trinitarian image — becomes a real person by seeing the world through others’ eyes, by making others’ joys and sorrows his own.” (68)

“He can do two finings that the animals can only do unconsciously and instinctively. First, man is able to bless and praise God for the world. Man is best defined not as a ‘logical’ but as a ‘eucharistic’ animal. He does not merely live in the world, think about it and use it, but he is capable of seeing the world as God’s gift, as a sacrament of God’s presence and a means of communion with him. So he is able to offer the world back to God in thanksgiving: ‘Thine own from thine own we offer to thee, in all and for all’, (The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom).

“Secondly, besides blessing and praising God for the world, man is also able to reshape and alter the world; and so to endue it with fresh meaning: In the words of Fr Dumitru Staniloae, ‘Man puts the seal of his understanding and of his intelligent work onto creation… The world is not only a gift, but a task for man.’ It is our calling to co-operate with God; we are, in St Paul’s phrase, ‘fellow-workers with God’ (1 Cor. 3:9). Man is not just a logical and eucharistic animal, but he is also a creative animal: the fact that man is in God’s image means that man is a creator after the image of God the Creator. This creative role he fulfills, not by brute force, but through the clarity of his spiritual vision; his vocation is not to dominate and exploit nature, but to transfigure and hallow it.

“In a variety of ways— through the cultivation of the earth, through craftsmanship, through the writing of books and the painting of ikons — man gives material things a voice and renders the creation articulate in praise of God… It is likewise significant that, when at the Eucharist we offer back to God the firstfruits of the earth, we offer them not in their original form but reshaped by the hand of man: we bring to the altar not sheaves of wheat but loaves of bread, not grapes but wine.” (69-70)

When I am told, ‘Return into yourself: know yourself, it is necessary to inquire: Which ‘self am I to discover? What is my true self? Psychoanalysis discloses to us one type of ‘self; all too often, however, it guides us, not to the ‘ladder that leads to the kingdom’, but to the staircase that goes down to a dank and snake-infested cellar. ‘Know your¬self means ‘know yourself as God-sourced, God–rooted; know yourself in God’.” (72)

“Suffering cannot be ‘justified’; but it can be used, accepted — and, through this acceptance, transfigured. The paradox of suffering and evil’, says Nicolas Berdyaev, ‘is resolved in the experience of compassion and love.’” (73)

“Besides the evil for which we humans are personally responsible, there are present in the universe forces of immense potency whose will is turned to evil. These forces, while non-human, are nevertheless personal… Evil, as already emphasized, is ‘no thing’; it is not an existent being or substance, but a wrong attitude towards what in itself is good. The source of evil lies thus in the free will of spiritual beings endowed with moral choice, who use that power of choice incorrectly… He is a God of love. Love implies sharing, and love also implies freedom. As a Trinity of love, God desired to share his life with created persons made in his image, who would be capable of responding to him freely and willingly in a relationship of love. Where there is no freedom, there can be no love…. God took a risk: for with this gift of freedom there was given also the possibility of sin. But he who takes no risks does not love.”

“Without freedom there would be no sin. But without freedom man would not be in God’s image; without freedom man would not be capable of entering into communion with God in a relationship of love.” (75-76)

“The ‘original sin” of man, his turning from God-centeredness to self-centeredness meant first and foremost that he no longer looked upon the world and other human beings in a Eucharistic way, as a sacrament of communion with God. He ceased to regard them as a gift, to be offered back in thanksgiving to the Giver, and he began to treat them as his own possession, to be grasped, exploited and devoured. So he no longer saw other persons and things as they are in themselves and in God, and he saw them only in terms of the pleasure and satisfaction which they could give to him. And the result of this was that he was caught in the vicious circle of his own lust, which grew more hungry the more it was gratified. The world ceased to be transparent – a window through which he gazed on God – and it grew opaque; it ceased to be life-giving, and became subject to corruption and mortality….” (77)

“The effects of man’s fall were both physical and moral. On the physical level human beings became subject to pain and disease, to the debility and bodily disintegration of old age…In consequence of the fall, men and women also became subject to the separation of soul and body in physical death. Yet physical death should be seen, not primarily as a punishment, but as a means of release provided by a loving God. In his mercy God did not wish men to go on living indefinitely in a fallen world, caught forever in the vicious circle of their own devising and so he provided a way of escape. For death is not the end of life but the beginning of its renewal. We look, beyond physical death, to the future reunion of body and soul at the general resurrection on the Last Day.” (77-78)

“On the moral level, in consequence of the fall human beings became subject to frustration, boredom, depression.” (77)

“Man is a tangled mesh of self-contradictions: only through asceticism can he gain spontaneity.” (79)

“The Orthodox tradition, without minimizing the effects of the fall, does not however believe that it resulted in a ‘total depravity’, such as the Calvinists assert in their more pessimistic moments. The divine image in man was obscured but not obliterated. His free choice has been restricted in its exercise but not destroyed. Even in a fallen world man is still capable of generous self-sacrifice and loving compassion. Even in a fallen world man still retains some knowledge of God and can enter by grace into communion with him… Yet it remains true that human sin — the original sin of Adam, compounded by the personal sins of each succeeding generation — has set a gulf between God and man such that man by his own efforts could not bridge.” (80)

“For the Orthodox tradition, then, Adam’s original sin affects the human race in its entirety, and it has consequences both on the physical and the moral level: it results not only in sickness and physical death, but in moral weakness and paralysis… The doctrine of original sin means rather that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider.” (80-81)

 GOD AS MAN

“The eternal Logos and Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, he becomes true man, one of us; he has healed and restored our manhood by taking the whole of it into himself.” (89)

Jesus Christ “is the Theanthropos or ‘God-man’, who saves us from our sins precisely because he is God and man at once. Man could not come to God, so God has come to man — by making himself human. In his outgoing or ‘ecstatic’ love, God unites himself to his creation in the closest of all possible unions, by himself becoming that which he has created. God, as man, fulfills the mediatorial task which man rejected at the fall. Jesus our Saviour bridges the abyss between God and man because he is both at once.” (91-92)

“The Incarnation, then, is God’s supreme act of deliverance, restoring us to communion with himself.” (92)

“When God becomes man, this marks the beginning of an essentially new stage in the history of man, and not just a return to the past. The Incarnation raises man to a new level; the last state is higher than the first. Only in Jesus Christ do we see revealed the full possibilities of our human nature; until he is born, the true implications of our person-hood are still hidden from us…. The Incarnation, then, is not simply a way of undoing the effects of original sin, but it is an essential stage upon man’s journey from the divine image to the divine likeness. The true image and likeness of God is Christ himself; and so, from the very first moment of man’s creation in the image, the Incarnation of Christ was in some way already implied. The true reason for the Incarnation, then, lies not in man’s sinfulness but in his unfallen nature as a being made in-the divine image and capable of union with God.” (93-94)

“The Virgin Mary is Theotokos, ‘Godbearer’ or ‘Mother of God’. Implicit in this title is an affirmation, not primarily about the Virgin, but about Christ: God was born. The Virgin is Mother, not of a human person united to the divine person of the Logos, but of a single, undivided person who is God and man at once.” (94)

“God in his transcendence is subject neither to birth nor to death, but these things are indeed undergone by the Logos incarnate.” (95)

‘There are in Christ not only a divine will but also a human will; for if Christ did not have a human will like ours, he would not be truly a man as we are. Yet these two wills are not contrary and opposed to each other, for the human will is at all times freely obedient to the divine.”(95)

“Complete in what is his own: Jesus Christ is our window into the divine realm, showing us what God is.” (97)

“Complete in what is ours: Jesus Christ is the second Adam, showing us the true character of our own human personhood. God alone is the perfect man.

“Who is God? Who am I? To both these questions Jesus Christ gives us the answer.” (97)

“Christ shares to the full in what we are, and so he maks it possible for us to share in what he is, in his divine life and glory. He became what we are, so as to make us what he is.” (97)

“Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life’; he ’empties himself and we are ‘exalted’ (Phil.:5-9).God’s descent makes possible man’s ascent.” (98)

“Christ enables us to share in the Father’s divine glory. He is the bond and meeting-point: because he is man, he is one with us; because he is God, he is one with the Father. So through and in him we are one with God, and the Father’s glory becomes our glory. God’s Incarnation opens the way to man’s deification. To be deified is, more specifically, to be ‘christified’: the divine likeness that we are called to attain is the likeness of Christ.” (98)

“Christ lives out his life on earth under the conditions of the fall. He is not himself a sinful person, but in his solidarity with fallen man he accepts to the full the consequences of Adam’s sin. He accepts to the full not only the physical consequences, such as weariness, bodily pain, and eventually the separation of body and soul in death. He accepts also the moral consequences, the loneliness, the alienation, the inward conflict.” (99-100)

“Hell is a point not in space but in the soul. It is the place where God is not.”(104)

“Love and hatred are not merely subjective feelings, affecting the inward universe of those who experience them, but they are also objective forces, altering the world outside ourselves. By loving or hating another, I cause the other in some measure to become that which I see in him or her. Not for myself alone, but for the lives of all around me, my love is creative, just as my hatred is destructive. And if this is true of my love, it is true to an incomparably greater extent of Christ’s love. The victory of his suffering love upon the Cross does not merely set me an example, showing me what I myself may achieve if by my own efforts I imitate him. Much more than this, his suffering love has a creative effect upon me, transforming my own heart and will, releasing me from bondage, making me whole, rendering it possible for me to love in a way that would lie altogether beyond my powers, had I not first been loved by him. Because in love he has identified himself with me, his victory is my victory. “(109)

“The Son of God suffered ‘unto death’, not that we might be exempt from suffering, but that our suffering might be like his. Christ offers us, not a way round suffering, but a way through it; not substitution, but saving companionship.” (109)

“Christ rises from the dead, and by his rising he delivers us from anxiety and terror: the victory of the Cross is confirmed, love is openly shown to be stronger than hatred, and life to be stronger than death. God himself has died and risen from the dead, and so there is no more death: even death is filled with God. Because Christ is risen, we need no longer be afraid of any dark or evil force in the universe.”(111)

 GOD AS SPIRIT

“The whole aim of the Christian life is to be Spirit-bearer, to live in the Spirit of God, to breathe the Spirit of God.” (119)

“Spirit does not reveal to us his own face, but shows us always the face of Christ.” (120)

“The action of the Holy Spirit cannot be  defined verbally. It has to be lived and experienced directly.” (121)

“First, the Spirit is a person… one of the three eternal persons of the Trinity; and so for all his seeming elusiveness, we can and do enter into a personal ‘I-Thou’ relationship with him…coequal and coeternal with the other two.” (121-122)

“Just as the Spirit sends the Son at the Annunciation, the Baptism, and the Transfiguration, and just as the Son in his turn sends the Spirit at Pentecost, so after Pentecost it is the Spirit’s task to bear witness to Christ, rendering the risen Lord ever present among us.” (124)

“This immediacy and personal directness in our relationship with Jesus is precisely the work of the Spirit…The Holy Spirit: he points, not to himself, but to the risen Christ.”(125)

GOD AS PRAYER

The Three Stages of the Way: Purification, Illumination, and Union

“The real purpose of Bible study is  to feed our love for Christ, to kindle our hearts into prayer, and to provide us with guidance in our personal life. The study of words should give place to an immediate dialogue with the living Word himself. ‘Whenever you read the Gospel,’ says St Tikhon of Zadonsk, ‘Christ himself is speaking to you. And while you read, you are praying and talking with him.” (148)

“We are to hold in balance two complementary truths: without God’s grace we can do nothing; but without our voluntary co-operation God will do nothing. ‘The will of man is an essential condition, without it God does nothing’ (The Homilies of Si Macarius). Our salvation results from the convergence of two factors, unequal in value yet both indispensable: divine initiative and human response. What God does is incomparably the more important, but man’s participation is also required.” (149-150)

“Repentance marks the starting-point of our Journey. The Greek term metanoia, as we have noted, signifies primarily a ‘change of mind’. Correctly understood, repentance is not negative but positive. It means, not self-pity or remorse, but conversion, the re-centering of our whole life upon the Trinity. It is to look, not backward with regret, but forward with hope — not downwards at our own shortcomings, but upwards at God’s love. It is to see, not what we have failed to be, but what by divine grace we can now become; and it is to act upon what we see. To repent is to open our eyes to the light. In this sense, repentance is not just a single act, an initial step, but a continuing state, an attitude of heart and will that needs to be ceaselessly renewed up to the end of life.” (152)

“To repent is to wake up. Repentance, change mind, leads to watchfulness. The Greek term used here, nepsis, means literally sobriety and wakefulness…The ‘neptic’ man is one who has come to himself, who does not daydream, drifting aimlessly under the influence of passing impulses, but who possesses a sense of action and purpose.” (152)

“Watchfulness means, among other things to be present where we are — at this specific point in space, at this particular moment in time. All too often we are scattered and dispersed; we are living, not with alertness in the present, but with nostalgia in the past, or with misgiving and wishful thinking of the future… The ‘neptic’ man, then, is gathered into the here the now. He is the one who seizes the kairos, the decisive moment of opportunity.” (153)

“Growing in watchfulness and self-knowledge, the traveler upon the Way begins to acquire the power of discrimination or discernment (in Greek, diakrisis). This acts as a spiritual sense of taste. He learns the difference between the evil and the good, between the superfluous and the meaningful, between the fantasies inspired by the devil and the images marked upon his creative imagination by celestial archetypes.” (154)

“Through discrimination, then, a man begins to ‘take more careful note of what is happening within him, and so he learns to guard the heart, shutting the door against the temptations or provocations of the enemy.” (154)

“An essential aspect of guarding the heart is warfare against the passions. Our aim is not to eliminate the passions but to redirect their energy… To ourselves and to others we say not ‘Suppress’, but ‘Transfigure’.” (155)

“The spiritual value of bodily fasting: We do not fast because there is anything in itself unclean about the act of eating and drinking. Food and drink are on the contrary God’s gift, from which we are to partake with enjoyment and gratitude. We fast, not because we despise the divine gift, but so as to make ourselves aware that it is indeed a gift — so as to purify our eating and drinking, and to make them, no longer a concession to greed, but a sacrament and means of communion with the Giver. (156)

“Purification of the passions leads eventually, by God’s grace, to what Evagrius terms apatheia or ‘dispassion’. By this he means, not a negative condition of indifference or insensitivity in which we no longer feel temptation, but a positive state of reintegration and spiritual freedom in which we no longer feel temptation, but a positive state of reintegration and spiritual freedom in which we no longer yield to temptation. Perhaps apatheia can best be translated ‘purity of heart’

‘The ‘dispassioned’ person, so far from being apathetic, is the one whose heart burns with love for God, for other humans, for every living creature, for all that God has made.”

“”The second stage upon the threefold Way is the contemplation of nature — more exactly, the contemplation of nature in God, or the contemplation of God in and through nature.” (157)

“To contemplate nature is to become aware of the dimensions of sacred space and sacred time. This material object, this person to I am talking, this moment of time — each is holy, each is in its own way unrepeatable and so of infinite value, each can serve as a window into eternity.” (158)

“All things are permeated and maintained in being by the uncreated energies of God, and so all things are a theophany that mediates his presence. At the heart of each thing is its inner principle or logos, implanted within it by the Creator Logos; and so through the logoi we enter into communion with the Logos . God is above and beyond all things, yet as Creator he is also within all things -‘panentheism’, not pantheism.” (158)

“In and through each created thing we are to discern the Creator. Discovering the uniqueness of each thing, we discover also how each points beyond itself to him who made it.” (160)

“We are to see all things as essentially sacred, as a gift from God and a means of communion with him. It does not, however, follow that we are to accept the fallen world on its own terms. This is the unhappy mistake of much ‘secular Christianity’ in the contemporary west.” (160-161)

“All things are indeed sacred in their true being, according to their innermost essence; but our relationship to God’s creation has been distorted by sin, original and personal, and we shall not rediscover this intrinsic sacredness unless our heart is purified. Without self-denial, without ascetic discipline, we cannot affirm the true beauty of the world. That is why there can be no genuine contemplation without repentance”.

“Natural contemplation signifies finding God not only in all things but equally in all persons. When reverencing the holy ikons in church or at home, we are to reflect that each man and woman is a living ikon of God…Christ is looking at us through the eyes of all those whom we meet. Once we recognize his universal presence, all our acts of practical service to others become acts of prayer.” (161)

“The more a man comes to contemplate God in nature, the more he realizes that God is also above and beyond nature. Finding traces of the divine in all things, he says: ‘This also is thou; neither is this thou.’ So the second stage of the spiritual Way leads him, with God’s help, to the third stage, when God is no longer known solely through the medium of what he has made but in direct and unmediated union.” (162)

“Reaching out towards the eternal Truth that lies beyond all human words and thoughts, the seeker begins to wait upon God in quietness and silence, no longer talking about or to God but simply listening. ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ (Ps. 46:10). This stillness or inward silence is known in Greek as hesychia.” (163)

“For the ultimate purpose of the spiritual Way is not just a person who says prayers from time to time, but a person who is prayer all the time.” (165)

“The laying aside of thoughts and images leads not to vacuity but to a plenitude surpassing all that the human mind can conceive or express.” (165)

“Its aim is to bring us to a direct meeting with a personal God, who infinitely surpasses everything that we can say of him, whether negative or positive.” (167)

“This union of love which constitutes the true aim of the apophatic approach is a union with God in his energies, not in his essence.” (167)

“They participate in the energies of God, that is to say, in his life, power, grace, and glory.” (168)

“Human speech is adapted to delineate that which exists in space and time, and even here it can never provide an exhaustive description. As for what is infinite and eternal, here human speech can do no more than point or hint.” (169)

”Being divine, the uncreated energies surpass our human powers of description; and so, in terming these energies ‘light’, we are inevitably employing the language of ‘sign’ and symbol. Not that the energies are themselves merely symbolical. They genuinely exist, but cannot be described in words; in referring to them as ‘light’ we use the least misleading term, but our language is not to be interpreted literally.” (170)

GOD AS ETERNITY

“Although the Last Things should form our point of constant reference throughout this earthly life, it is not possible for us to speak in any detail about the realities of the Age to come.” (178)

“Scripture and Holy Tradition speak to us repeatedly about the Second Coming. They give us no grounds for supposing that, through a steady advance in ‘civilization’, the world will grow better and better until mankind succeeds in establishing God’s kingdom upon earth. The Christian view of world history is entirely opposed to this kind of evolutionary optimism. What we are taught to expect are disasters in the world of nature, increasingly destructive warfare between men, bewilderment and apostasy among those who call themselves Christians…. This period of tribulation will culminate in the appearance of ‘the man of sin’ or Antichrist, who, according to the interpretation traditional in the Orthodox Church, will not be Satan himself, but a human being, a genuine man, in whom all the forces of evil will be concentrated and who will for a time hold the entire world under his sway. The brief reign of Antichrist will be abruptly terminated by the Second Coming of the Lord, this time not in a hidden way, as at his birth in Bethlehem, but ‘sitting on the right hand of power’ and drawing near upon the clouds of heaven’ (Matt 26:64). So the course of history will be brought to a sudden and dramatic end, through a direct intervention from the divine realm.” (180)

“As Christians we believe not only in immortality of the soul but in the resurrection of body. According to God’s ordinance at our first creation, the human soul and the human body are interdependent, and neither can properly exist without the other. In consequence of the fall, the two are parted at bodily death, but this separation is not final and permanent. At the Second Coming of Christ we shall be raised from the dead in our soul and in our body; and so, with soul and body reunited we shall appear before our Lord for the Last Judgment.

“The Last Judgment is best understood as the moment of truth when everything is brought to light, when all our acts of choice stand revealed to us in their full implications, when we realize with absolute clarity who we are and what has been the deep meaning and aim of our life. And so, following this final clarification, we shall enter – with soul and body reunited — into heaven or hell, into eternal life or eternal death.”

“Christ is the judge; and yet, from another point of view, it is we who pronounce judgment upon ourselves. If anyone is in hell, it is not because God has imprisoned him there, but because that is where he himself has chosen to be.” ((181)

“‘’A new heaven and a new earth’: man is not saved from his body but in it; not saved from the material world but with it.” (183)

“This resurrection kingdom, in which we shall by God’s mercy dwell with our soul and body reunited, is … a kingdom which shall have ‘no end’.” (183)

“First, eternity signifies an inexhaustible variety. If it is true of our experience in this life that holiness is not monotonous but always different, must not be true also, and to an incomparably higher degree, of the future life? God promises to us: ‘To him that overcomes will I give… a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no man knows except the one who receives it’ (Rev. 2:17) Even in the Age to come, the inner meaning of unique personhood will continue to be eternal secret between God and me. In God’s kingdom each is one with all the others, yet each is distinctively himself, bearing the same delineaments as he had in this life, yet with these characteristics he renewed and glorified.”

“Secondly, eternity signifies unending progress, a never-ceasing advance… The age to come is not simply a return to the beginning, a restoration of the original state of perfection in Paradise, but it is a fresh departure. There is to be a new heaven and a new earth; and the last things will be greater than the first.” (184)

“The soul possesses God, and yet still seeks him; her joy is full, and yet grows always more intense. God grows ever nearer to us, yet he still remains the Other; we behold him face to face, yet we still continue to advance further and further into the divine mystery. Although strangers no longer, we do not cease to be pilgrims. We go forward ‘from glory to glory’ (Cor. 3:18), and then to a glory that is greater still. Never, in all eternity, shall we reach a point where we have accomplished all that there is to do, or discovered all that there is to know. ‘Not hit present age but also in the Age to come’, says St Irenaeus, ‘God will always have something more to teach man, and man will always have something more to learn from God.’” (185)

Amen