God’s freely given grace is a humiliation to the ego because free gifts say nothing about being strong, superior, or moral. Thus only the soul can understand grace, never the mind or the ego. The ego does not know how to receive things freely or without logic. It likes to be worthy and needs to understand in order to accept things as true. The ego prefers a worldview of scarcity or quid pro quo, where
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 28, 2015 It has long been known that people tend to see what they think they are seeing. This is particularly the case where what we think is familiar and expected. The case of “mistaken identity” flows from our assumptions and expectations. This is nowhere more true than when we are reading Scripture. If a passage has years of associations, it is almost impossible to see anything else. I have noticed this
The sin of Adam is cosmic in its effects, destroying as it does the primal harmony that prevailed between humans and the rest of creation. So Adam exclaims in his ‘Lament’: In paradise was I joyful and glad: The Spirit of God rejoiced me, and suffering was a stranger to me. But when I was driven forth from paradise cold and hunger began to torment me. The beasts and the birds that were gentle and
For the monks humility is the courage to face the truth, the courage to accept their own earthliness, their humanity. The monks test one another in humility, so as to find out whether someone really is a man of God. “A monk was highly praised to Anthony by the brothers. Then Anthony took him and put him to the test, to see if he could endure insults. When it became clear that the man couldn’t
The idea of a truly trinitarian anthropology is chiefly associated with St Gregory of Nyssa, the most speculative of the Cappadocians. In little tracts dismissed rather hastily by his detractors as works of philology he attacks the ‘erroneous custom’ whereby Man is spoken of in the plural and God in the singular; in both cases personal plurality is quite consistent with unity of essence. We ought to say that in Christ, the new Adam, ‘Man
Why did Paul come to the subtle but crucial understanding of the limited and dangerous possibilities of law/requirements? Probably because Paul himself had been a man of the law, and he saw that it led him to “breathing threats to slaughter the Lord’s disciples” (Acts 9:1). As he tells us in Philippians (3:4-6), Paul was a perfect law-abiding Pharisee: “As far as the Law can make you perfect, I was faultless,” he says. He seems
By Fr. Stephen Freeman, March 23, 2015 People gather at the end of Church for a “travel blessing.” A priest chants a prayer and sprinkles water over them with a brush. They cross themselves and have some sense that their travels will now be better. Many modern people watching this procedure would describe the process as “superstitious.” It appears to them that physical actions (sprinkling water) are expected to have some remote effect on later
St Silouan’s consuming desire for the salvation of all stands out in yet sharper relief when we take into account his teaching about what may be termed the ‘total Adam’. This is not, I think, a phrase that he himself employs, but it accurately sums up his point of view. For St Silouan, Adam is ‘our father’, the ‘father of all mankind’. Following St Paul (1 Corinthians 15:22, 45), the Starets sees Adam the first-formed
The following remark has been attributed to Anthony: “If you see that a young man is striving for heaven with his own will, grasp his feet and drag him down; for it will do him no good.” It makes no sense for young people to meditate too early on, to take the path to mysticism too soon. First they have to come to terms with their own reality. They have to take a good look
Personal existence has a ‘vertical’ dimension, a desire to be plunged into the fullness of God. And this fullness is not a solitude but an ocean already alive with the movement of infinite love. The depth is not unrelieved gloom; it contains reciprocal activity, interchange, the presence of the other, while duality is avoided in the communion of the Three in One. The depth itself suggests the inexhaustible character of the Persons and of their
© 2020 Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
