By Fr. Stephen Freeman, February 18, 2015 Man is a musical composition, a wonderfully written hymn to powerful creative activity. – St. Gregory of Nyssa (PG 44, 441 B) In St. Gregory’s thought, man is not only a singer, but a song. We are not only song, but the song of God. Indeed, within one theme of the fathers, all of creation is the song of God, spoken (or sung) into existence. “Let there be light,” is more
In many ancient traditions, as still today in India, salvation is understood as dissolution into the vastness of the universe, re-absorption into an impersonal divinity; but the Fathers insist that humanity must ‘personalize’ the universe; not save itself by means of the universe, but save it by communicating grace to it. And all the while human beings must also humbly decipher the ‘Bible of the world’; they elevate themselves above all life in order to
Witnesses to Silence and Stillness (II) In a hospital room a number of years ago, a close friend lay dying. For years he had rebelled against God and against his Orthodox faith, expressing that rebellion by indifference to everything connected with the Church. In the last years of his life he had come home. With the simplicity and openness of a child he now turned his face to God and prayed. You could see in
The ancient philosophers loved to stress the central place of Man in the universe. They said that Man is the only animal which stands upright, and so symbolizes the dimensions of space, first the high, or heavenly, and the low, or earthly. Other animals walk on all fours or crawl. Their space is purely earthly; it is only by Man that they are connected to the heavens. True, trees and rocks stand upright, symbolizing the
A woman, whose comeliness today might have won her the crown at a beauty pageant and whose reckless escapades would have commanded the headlines in scandal, chose in the third century to serve Him who had worn a crown of thorns, and after exchanging a life of debauchery for the life of ascetism, commanded a respect that earned her sainthood. The story of St. Pelagia was not unlike that of countless others who have gone
Today we celebrate the memory of the Holy Mark the Ascetic (5th c.), also known as St Mark the Monk. Although St Mark wrote some very important hesychastic treatises, which have been included in the Philokalia, little is known about his life. An ascetic and wonderworker, he was made a monk at the age of forty by his teacher, St John Chrysostom. Mark spent sixty more years in the Nitrian desert in fasting, prayer and
Witnesses to Silence and Stillness (I) To close this series of reflections on silence, solitude and inner stillness, it seems most appropriate to share a few very modest, personal experiences that I have been blessed to undergo over the years. These involve encounters with unpretentious yet holy persons whose example can guide all of us who long to acquire these virtues or qualities for ourselves. In the early 1970s a community of French Roman Catholic
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, (flourished c. 500), probably a Syrian monk who, known only by his pseudonym, wrote a series of Greek treatises and letters for the purpose of uniting Neoplatonic philosophy with Christian theology and mystical experience. These writings established a definite Neoplatonic trend in a large segment of medieval Christian doctrine and spirituality—especially in the Western Latin Church—that has determined facets of its religious and devotional character to the present time. Historical research has been unable to identify the author, who, having assumed the name of
No, the God of Christians is not the summit – reassuring and plain to see – of a pyramid of beings. He is the depth who reveals depths everywhere, making of the most familiar creature a thing unknown. We are like drunken potholers; every face we see reveals the hidden side of the earth. It is a wonderful and compelling vision. ‘Do not try to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy; all must be
I think we are in the beginnings of a Trinitarian Revolution. History has so long operated with a static and imperial image of God—as a Supreme Monarch and Critical Spectator living in splendid isolation from what he (and God is always and exclusively envisioned as male in this model) created. His love is perceived as unstable, whimsical, and preferential. Humans become the God we worship. So it is quite important that our God is good and
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