| Dr. Walter R. Martin, an eminent expert on cults in America, confirms that at least sixty percent of Americans observe occult practices or profess an interest in the occult in one form or another. There exist at least 3,000 occult books and magazines, and even traditional magazines that, though having no real interest in this area, nevertheless print articles regarding occult ideas, astrological signs, curing by means of crystals, and so on. In Russia as well, the passion with the occult is taking on epidemic proportions. These sad facts point to a socio-spiritual degeneration and are an indication of the nearing of the Second Coming of Christ (cf.1 Tim. 4:1). The word occultism is derived from the Latin occultus, meaning something hidden and inaccessible to most. In the sphere of the occult are included various unexplainable phenomena and acts which set into motion mysterious non-physical forces. Preoccupation with the occult strives for the following goals: 1) to acquire knowledge inaccessible through normal physical means, 2) to make contact with souls or supernatural forces, and 3) to learn how to manipulate these spirits or forces. The following is a partial summary of occult teachings and occupations: fortune telling, astrology, chiromancy (palmistry), chimerology (hallucinations), theosophy (based on the society of Elena Blavatskaya), kabbala, anthroposophy, spiritualism, astral travels (also known as astral projection or out-of-body travel), several varieties of mysticism, transcendental meditation, mediumism or channeling, yoga, telesthetic (unconventional) healing, healing by biofeedback, ritualistic coding, shamanism, sorcery, and all forms of white and black magic. Presently, great popularity is being gained by the essentially occult New Age movement, which has incorporated into itself many of the more ancient occult teachings. In addition, a number of contemporary sects and cults have either originated through the influence of the spirits or carry within themselves elements of the occult and make use of occult practices. Among them we should count: the Anthroposophical Society, the American Meditation Society, the Baha’i Faith, the Children of God (Family of Love), Christian Science, the Church of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons), the Eckankar movement, the Universal Society of Hare Krishnas, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, the Self-Realization Fellowship, the Spiritualists National Movement, the Theosophical Society, the Transcendental Meditation movement, the Unification Church, the Vedanta Society, the Watchtower Society (Jehovah’s Witnesses), and Zen Buddhism—to name just a few. |
| The Bishops are Still Alive Even if little information filters in about the identity and motives of the bishops’ kidnappers, some sources within the opposition have nevertheless repeatedly reported that the bishops are still alive. “The only information that is sure for us is that two or three days ago a doctor visited the two bishops. They are well,” declared to the press Abdalahad Steipho, a member of the Syrian National Coalition, the main opposition body, on May 26, at an opposition meeting in Turkey. Abdalahad Steipho, himself Christian, presides over a committee formed by the SNC to investigate the heinous kidnappings of which rebel groups have been accused for two years. He has also stated that the committee’s efforts to make direct telephone contact have failed and that it was receiving “a great deal of contradictory information about the identity of the kidnappers and their demands for ransom.” Asked about different possible paths, the opposition member responded, “This kidnappings are sometimes committed by criminal groups, sometimes by the regime of Asad, and sometimes, we must be frank, units of the Free Syrian Army are responsible for such kidnappings, in order to arrange hostage exchanges.” Kidnapping, a Lucrative Business Now Commonplace in Syria For Hassan, a member of the community, who is attending the gathering on Sunday, “the initiative does not intend to be just for the community, but rather for humanity.” “All are invited to come. There will be Christians and Muslims,” he assures. This father, a dentist, does not hide his worry. “We hope that the bishops were kidnapped for profit, as is the case with many Syrians, and not because they are bishops,” he confides. Several Muslim dignitaries have been killed since the beginning of the Syrian conflict, two years ago, but this is the first time that Christian prelates have been victims of the belligerents. Christians, who constitute about 5% of the Syrian population, are particularly vulnerable in the context of the anarchy encouraged by the conflict that is bloodying the country, the Organization for the Defense of Human Rights emphasizes. Interviewed last September by Reuters, Youhanna Ibrahim, the kidnapped bishop of Aleppo, indicated that Aleppo’s Christians were directly affected “by the fighting that has been going on for months for control of this great city of the north of the country.” |
| The disappearance of the living and immediate bearers of this memory created of itself the clear need to stress the teaching authority of the Bishop, just as at another time (see 1 Clement and the Didache), the disappearance of the Apostles had required stress to be laid on the lifelong and permanent priesthood of those who offer the eucharistic Gifts. But apart from this reason, the stress on the teaching authority of the Bishop also became imperative as an answer to the challenge of the Gnostic heresy. If the heresies of those times can be regarded as anti-historical 454 , then Gnosticism more particularly can be said to constitute the most intellectualized form of religion. For the history of the notion of catholicism, it is a fact of especial importance that it was the Gnostics and not the Orthodox who first introduced the idea of apostolic succession. This indicates that the expression of the consciousness of catholicity did not have orthodoxy as its focal point from the beginning. The first reference to apostolic succession is to be found in the Gnostic epistle of Ptolemy to Floras (165 AD) 455 who appears again reiterating the claim of his teacher Valentinus to apostolic succession. This is explained if one takes into account that the Gnostic heresiarchs remained within the Church for a long time while they were already preaching their heresy 456 . Rome was full of teachers and philosophical schools in the second century AD; and heresiarchs such as Marcion, Basileides and Valentinus contrived for years to be in contact with the Church while they were teaching heretical doctrines. Why did the Gnostics claim apostolic succession? The reason should be sought in the fact that the primary and most grave accusation against them was that they were teaching “new things”. In order to refute this accusation, they maintained that they possessed a secret and “hidden” tradition going back to the Apostles 457 . But what is characteristic in the present instance is that they understood this succession as a succession of teaching (the type of succession that existed from the teachers of the Greek philosophical schools), which forced the Church to stress the already existing, but not greatly emphasized, capacity of the Bishop as teacher and of the Church as the storehouse of truth 458 . |
| 2 . The center of the science-fiction universe (in place of the absent God) is man – not usually man as he is now, but man as he will “become” in the future, in accordance with the modern mythology of evolution. Although the heroes of science-fiction stories are usually recognizable humans, the story interest often centers about their encounters with various kinds of “supermen” from “highly-evolved” races of the future (or sometimes, the past), or from distant galaxies. The idea of the possibility of “highly-evolved” intelligent life on other planets has become so much a part of the contemporary mentality that even respectable scientific (and semi-scientific) speculations assume it as a matter of course. Thus, one popular series of books (Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods?, Gods from Outer Space) finds supposed evidence of the presence of “extraterrestrial” beings or “gods” in ancient history, who are supposedly responsible for the sudden appearance of intelligence in man, difficult to account for by the usual evolutionary theory. Serious scientists in the Soviet Union speculate that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was due to a nuclear explosion, that “extraterrestrial” beings visited earth centuries ago, that Jesus Christ may have been a “cosmonaut,” and that today “we may be on the threshold of a ‘second coming’ of intelligent beings from outer space.” 15 Equally serious scientists in the West think the existence of “extraterrestrial intelligences” likely enough that for at least 18 years they have been trying to establish contact with them by means of radio telescopes, and currently there are at least six searches being conducted by astronomers around the world for intelligent radio signals from space. Contemporary Protestant and Roman Catholic “theologians” – who have become accustomed to follow wherever “science” seems to be leading – speculate in turn in the new realm of “exotheology” (the “theology of outer space”) concerning what nature the “extraterrestrial” races might have (see Time magazine, April 24, 1978). It can hardly be denied that the myth behind science fiction has a powerful fascination even among many learned men of our day. |
| It is true enough, to be sure, that an Orthodox awakening would be much to be desired in our days, when many Orthodox Christians have lost the salt of true Christianity, and the true and fervent Orthodox Christian life is indeed rarely to be seen. Modern life has become too comfortable; worldly life has become too attractive; for too many, Orthodoxy has become simply a matter of membership in a church organization or the “correct” fulfillment of external rites and practices. There would be need enough for a true Orthodox spiritual awakening; but this is not what we see in the Orthodox “charismatics.” Just like the “charismatic” activists among Protestants and Roman Catholics, they are fully in harmony with the spirit of the times; they are not in living contact with the sources of the Orthodox spiritual tradition, preferring the currently-fashionable Protestant techniques of revivalism; they are one with the leading current of today’s apostate “Christianity:” the ecumenical movement. Early in 1978 Archbishop Iakovos of the Greek Archdiocese of North and South America finally gave his official approval to the activities of Fr. Eusebius Stephanou, including permission for him to preach everywhere specifically on the “gifts of the Holy Spirit;” thus the church organization in its most modernist and ecumenist figure joins hands with the “charismatic revival,” reflecting the deep kinship that unites them. But true Christianity is not there. There have been true Orthodox “awakenings” in the past: one thinks immediately of St. Cosmas of Aitolia, who walked from village to village in 18th-century Greece and inspired the people to return to the true Christianity of their ancestors; or St. John of Kronstadt in our own century, who brought the age-old message of Orthodox spiritual life to the urban masses of Petersburg. Then there are the Orthodox monastic instructors who were truly “Spirit-filled” and left their teaching to the monastics as well as the laymen of the latter times: one thinks of the Greek St. Symeon the New Theologian in the 10th century, and the Russian St. Seraphim of Sarov in the 19th. St. Symeon is badly misused by the Orthodox “charismatics” (he was speaking of a Spirit different from theirs!); and St. Seraphim is invariably quoted out of context in order to minimize his emphasis on the necessity to belong to the Orthodox Church to have a true spiritual life. In the “Conversation” of St. Seraphim with the layman Motovilov on the “acquisition of the Holy Spirit” (which the Orthodox “charismatics” quote without the parts here italicized), this great Saint tells us: “The grace of the Holy Spirit which was given to us all, the faithful of Christ, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, is sealed by the sacrament of Chrismation on the chief parts of the body, as appointed by the Holy Church, the eternal keeper of this grace.” And again: “The Lord listens equally to the monk and the simple Christian layman, provided that both are Orthodox.” |
| The cause of this was a woman captive who lived among them.” Rufinus had lived for 24 years both in Egypt and Jerusalem, where he may well have come in contact with Iberians. Rufinus’ version of the Conversion of Kartli was later copied by the Greek historians Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret. Recent scholarship has also traced links between Rufinus’ Greek version and Gelasius of Caesarea. The versions of the Life of St. Nino as recorded in the sources of the 10th to 13th centuries show some distinctive if incompatible facts about her life; the common elements of the different versions include the healing activity of St. Nino, the vision of King Mirian, and the miracle of the pillar. The texts of the Conversion of Kartli and a version of the Life of St. Nino by Leonti Mroveli contained in the Life of Kartli both connect the establishment of Christianity in Kartli with the Jewish communities already resident there. When Christianity was established as a state religion in Kartli, it was introduced in its Hellenistic form, but significant Judeo-Christian traditions remain in the written sources (see Mgaloblishvili and Gagoshidze 1998) and speak eloquently of Semitic origins as also significant for the Georgian Church. In the 4th century Kartli was a constant ally of Byzantium in its ongoing struggle with Persia for influence in the Caucasus. The Truce of Nisibis made with the Persians in 298 had enabled Emperor Diocletian to benefit from forty years of peace in the eastern regions, including Armenia and Iberia. It was precisely during this period that Iberia declared Christianity an official state religion (326/330). According to her Life, Nino approached Kartli from the mountains of the southern province of Javakheti and stopped at Lake Paravani. Following the River Mtkvari, she is said to have arrived at Urbnisi, where she stayed a month with local Jewish inhabitants. It is also recorded that the very first Christian converts in Georgia were Jews: Abiatar, his daughter Sidonia, and her friends, who first recorded Nino’s missionary activities. |
| On the cross Christ reunited the whole of the terrestrial cosmos to Paradise: for when He allowed death to enter Him to consume it by contact with His divinity, the darkest place on earth becomes radiant; there is no longer any accursed place. After the Resurrection, the very body of Christ mocks spatial limitations, and in an integration of all that is sensible, unifies earth and heaven. By the Ascension, Christ reunites the celestial and terrestrial worlds, the angelic choirs to the human race. Finally, He Who sits at the right hand of the Father introduces humanity above the angelic orders and into the Trinity Itself; and these are the first fruits of cosmic deification. Thus we cannot rediscover the fullness of Adamic nature except in Christ, the second Adam. But to understand this nature better, we must pose two difficult, though, as it happens, connected problems: the problem of sex and that of death. Is the biological condition in which we find ourselves today that of man before the Fall? Is this condition, connected to the tragic dialectic of love and death, rooted in the paradisiacal state? Here the thought of the Fathers, precisely because it cannot evoke the earth-paradise except through the accursed earth, risks becoming incomplete, and thus opening itself to non-Christian influences which would make it partial. A dilemma emerges: either a biological sexuality exists in Paradise, as the divine order to multiply suggests. But then is this not, in man’s first condition, a weakening of the divine image by the presence of an animality at once implying multiplicity and death ? Or the paradisiacal condition is pure of all animality. But then sin exists in the very fact of our biological life, and we fall into a sort of Manichaeism. Certainly the Fathers have rejected, with Origenism, this second solution. But they have succeeded only with difficulty in clarifying the first. Starting with the undeniable connection, in the fallen world, of sex and death, of animality and mortality, they ask themselves whether the creation of woman, raising up a biological condition linked to finitude, would not have threatened from the beginning of Paradise the potential immortality of man. |
| Benjamin asked several psychiatric doctors to evaluate the boy for possible surgical procedures to feminize his appearance. They couldn’t come to a consensus on the appropriateness of feminizing surgery. That didn’t stop Benjamin. On his own, he began offering female hormone therapy to the boy. The boy went to Germany for partial surgery, and Benjamin lost all contact with him, making any long-term follow-up impossible. The Tragic Story of the Reimer Twins The third co-founder of today’s transgender movement was psychologist Dr. John Money, a dedicated disciple of Kinsey and a member of a transsexual research team headed by Benjamin. Money’s first transgender case came in 1967 when he was asked by a Canadian couple, the Reimers, to repair a botched circumcision on their two-year-old son, David. Without any medical justification, Money launched into an experiment to make a name for himself and advance his theories about gender, no matter what the consequences to the child. Money told the distraught parents that the best way to assure David’s happiness was to surgically change his genitalia from male to female and raise him as a girl. As many parents do, the Reimers followed their doctor’s orders, and David was replaced with Brenda. Money assured the parents that Brenda would adapt to being a girl and that she would never know the difference. He told them that they should keep it a secret, so they did—at least for a while. Activist doctors like Dr. Money always look brilliant at first, especially if they control the information that the media report. Money played a skilled game of “catch me if you can,” reporting the success of the boy’s gender change to the medical and scientific community and building his reputation as a leading expert in the emerging field of gender change. It would be decades before the truth was revealed. In reality, David Reimer’s “adaptation” to being a girl was completely different from the glowing reports concocted by Money for journal articles. By age twelve, David was severely depressed and refused to return to see Money. In desperation, his parents broke their secrecy, and told him the truth of the gender reassignment. At age fourteen, David chose to undo the gender change and live as a boy. |
| Sa Sainteté a rappelé que Baselios Marthoma Paulose II était déjà venu à Moscou. En 1988, alors qu’il était le plus jeune évêque de l’Église malankare, il avait assisté aux célébrations du millénaire du baptême de la Russie. « Cet évènement avait été un tournant, un moment historique dans la vie de notre Église, a témoigné le patriarche Cyrille. Cette célébration mettrait un terme à la rude époque des persécutions et des répressions de la part du pouvoir. L’Église allait pouvoir porter à son peuple la bonne nouvelle du Christ, sur les immenses espaces de l’Union soviétique d’alors. » Ayant constaté que l’Église russe avait beaucoup changé depuis, le patriarche Cyrille a, notamment, déclaré qu’il avait été possible de restaurer ou de bâtir 30 000 églises. « Cela revient pratiquement à trois églises par jour sur le territoire de notre Église » a-t-il poursuivi. La restauration de la vie ecclésiale s’est poursuivie sur le territoire de l’Union soviétique puis, plus tard, sur celui d’états comme la Russie, l’Ukraine, le Kazakhstan, la Moldavie, l’Azerbaïdjan, les républiques d’Asie centrale et les Pays Baltes. » Dans le courant de la conversation, le patriarche Cyrille de Moscou et de toute la Russie a constaté que les Russes ont toujours été intéressés par l’Inde. « Il y a eu des passionnés qui sont partis pour l’Inde à pied, sont revenus en Russie et ont raconté leur voyage à leurs compatriotes, parlé du pays merveilleux qu’ils avaient visité. Beaucoup ont découvert avec surprise l’existence d’une communauté chrétienne forte en Inde, qui n’était le résultat d’une mission occidentale, mais existait depuis les temps apostoliques. Le fondateur de cette communauté fut l’apôtre Thomas. C’est pourquoi il y a toujours eu un intérêt mutuel et une aspiration réciproque à des relations plus étroites », a dit Sa Sainteté. C’est en 1851, a remarqué le patriarche Cyrille, que des chrétiens d’Inde sont entrés en contact avec l’Église orthodoxe russe pour la première fois. Cependant, les guerres de l’époque ont empêché que cette initiative ait des suites. |
| „În mod special vreau s salut componena pedagogic i ucenicii de la coala „Athoniada”, care s-a situat în cldirile pustii ale schitului”, a spus în continuare Întâistttorul Bisericii Ortodoxe Ruse. „Doresc elevilor s se întreasc în credin i raiune, sub conducerea îneleapt a monahilor s cunoasc frumuseea Ortodoxiei, inclusiv pe baza exemplului acestei catedrale frumoase”. Remarcând importana colii, Sanctitatea Sa Patriarhul, în special, a pomenit c monahii rui ar putea înva aici limba greac, care este limba de contact pe Athos. Sanctitatea Sa a dus în dar sfântului lca pentru pomenirea în rugciuni icoana Preasfintei Nsctoare de Dumnezeu „Kasperovskaia”. Apoi Sanctitatea Sa Patriarhul Moscovei i al întregii Rusii Chiril a mers în arhondaric, unde a avut loc o convorbire cu fraii schitului. Schitul „Sfântul Andrei” de pe Sfântul Munte Athos este situat nu departe de Kareea, centrul administrativ al Athosului. O alt denumire a schitului este „Serai”, adic „palat”. Pân la secolul al XV-lea pe locul lui s-a aflat mnstirea în cinstea sfântului Antonie, pomenit înc în primul Statut al Sfântului Munte. Dup devastarea mnstirii de ctre pirai, ea a fost înlocuit cu o chilie, din a crei frii au ieit doi Patriarhi ai Constantinopolului: sfânii ierarhi Atanasie III (†1614) i Serafim II (†1768). Sfântul Patriarh Atanasie a trit în Serai când a ieit la odin i a decedat, aflându-se în cltorie de pelerinaj ctre sfintele relicte ale Rusiei. Moatele lui se odihnesc la catedrala „Bunavestirea Maicii Domnului” din Harkov. În anul 1814 chilia a fost procurat de monahii rui Visarion i Varsonufii i în continuare a fost transformat în schit al vieii de obte. Lcaul sfânt s-a aflat sub ocrotirea familiei ariste ruse. La începutul secolului al XX-lea numrul frailor a ajuns la 800 de persoane. În legtur cu anumite evenimente, legate de micarea drept mririi numelui i de revoluia în Rusia, s-a creat o criz, care a dus la pustiirea schitului. O daun simitoare schitului a fost incendiul din 16 august 1958. Ultimul monah din vechea frie a ruilor Sampson a decedat în anul 1971. Dup aceea schitul a stat pustiu timp de douzeci de ani, fiind supus devastrii; a disprut vestita colecie de icoane. |
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