| A man or woman (Slavonic: Starets, Starissa), often (though not exclusively) monastic, gifted with spiritual discernment (diakrisis) who is able to offer wisdom to members of a monastic community or the wider church as they pursue the Orthodox Christian life. Most probably a practice originating in the desert monasticism of the early church, elders were individuals specially recognized as teachers and advisers, spiritual mothers and fathers, as a result of their ascetic lives, their evident practice of virtue, and possession of the spiritual gift of discernment. Informed by the traditions of teaching and care existing in lateancient philosophical schools, the goal of disciple-elder relationships within ascetic and other Christian communities was the growth of the soul. The collections of “sayings” (Apophthegmata) from desert fathers and mothers are a written record of responses to specific questions regarding how to live a Christian (and often ascetic) life. One of the best examples of this is the material preserved in the traditions associated with Sts. Barsanuphius and John, though the famous text of the Ladder by St. John Klimakos also demonstrates the principle, and the writings of St. Symeon the New Theologian give high priority to the relation of elder and disciple (Turner 1990). The responsibility of the elder to the disciple is to pray, rightly discern individual needs, offer encouragement and discipline, and when necessary apply oikonomia (“economy” or “condescension”), the adjustment of rules in the light of what discipline will best help a particular person return to proper conduct. While in practice an elder is often a monastic, neither monasticism nor ordination is a requirement. The consistent practice of confession with an elder often confuses the question of ordination as it became a primary sacrament long after its inception as an essential practice of the spiritual life. The elder’s authority is granted through the recognition of wisdom by the larger community, and may or may not have any official correspondence. Consulting with a trusted elder continues to be encouraged among the Orthodox, often designated by the more modern phrase “spiritual direction,” but with a much more specific and deeper sense of spiritual bonding under the eyes of God than this phrase often conveys. |
| Diadochos of Photike (mid-5th century) took up the teaching of Evagrios on “pure” prayer, and he offered a practical method whereby this image-free prayer may be attained: through the invocation “Lord Jesus,” that is to say, through what later became known as the Jesus Prayer. In common with Evagrios, Diadochos believed that inner prayer leads to a vision oflight: first, an experience of the light of the nous, and then an experience of divine light. But this vision of light is aneideos, without form or shape; it is an experience of pure luminosity. The unknown author of the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500) followed Clement and Gregory of Nyssa in interpreting the mystical ascent as an entry into the darkness of Sinai. At that same time, he (or she) insisted upon a “coincidence of opposites”; at the divine level there is a convergence between the symbols of light and darkness. Just as Gregory of Nyssa described the darkness as luminous, so Dionysius wrote: “The divine darkness is the Light to which no one can approach” (Letter 5; cf. 1Tim. 6.16 ). Dionysius proposed a threefold scheme of the spiritual life: purification, illumination, union. While this Dionysian scheme was widely adopted in the Latin West, it is the somewhat different Evagrian scheme that prevailed on the whole in the Greek East, most notably in Maximos the Confessor (ca. 580–662). Some writers, such as Niketas Stethatos (11th century), combined the two schemes together. MIDDLE BYZANTINE PERIOD John Klimakos (ca. 570-ca. 649), abbot of Sinai, in Step 27 of his Ladder of Divine Ascent, provided a classic definition of what it is to be a hesychast: “The hesychast is one who strives to confine his incorporeal self within the house of the body, paradoxical though this may sound.” Thus hesychasm is an entry within oneself, a discovery of the indwelling Christ within the secret sanctuary of the heart. Hesychasm, Klimakos continued, involves nepsis, “wakefulness” or “vigilance”: the hesychast is one who says, “I sleep, but my heart is awake” (Song of Songs 5.2). Hesychia is in this way a continual awareness of God’s presence: as Klimakos put it, “Hesychia is worshipping God unceasingly and waiting upon him.” This continual awareness is maintained through the Jesus Prayer: “Let the remembrance of Jesus be present with your every breath. Then indeed you will appreciate the value of hesychia.” The hesychast seeks union with God on a level free of mental images and discursive thinking. Adapting the words of Evagrios, Klimakos wrote: “Hesychia is a putting- away of thoughts.” From all this it is evident that, for Klimakos, hesychia meant not primarily the life of a hermit but a way of inner prayer. |
| Here are the signs, courses and proofs of those who are practising solitude in the right way: an unruffled mind, sanctified thought, rapture towards the Lord, recollection of eternal torments, the urgency of death, constant hunger for prayer, unsleeping vigilance, wasting away of lust, ignorance of attachment, death to the world, loss of gluttony, a sure understanding of divine things, a well of discernment, a truce accompanied by tears, loss of talkativeness, and many such things which the common run of men are wont to find quite alien to them. And here are the signs of those who are practising solitude in the wrong way: dearth of (spiritual) wealth, increase of anger, a hoard of resentment, diminution of love, growth of vanity; and I will be silent about all the rest which follow. 432 But our chapter has now reached the point at which we must consider the case of those living in obedience; all the more so because this chapter is especially meant for them. The signs of those who are lawfully, unadulterously and sincerely wedded to this orderly and fair obedience, both in reality and according to the teaching of the inspired Fathers, are these–and everyday (if only we have consecrated a day to the Lord) 433 they reach forward and obtain increase and progress so that they become perfect in due time: an increase of elementary humility, a lessening of bad temper (for how can it not decrease as the gall is exhausted?), dissipation of darkness, access of love, estrangement from passions, deliverance from hatred, diminution of lust through continual scrutiny, ignorance of despondency, increase of zeal, compassionate love, banishment of pride. This is the achievement which all should seek, but few attain. A well without water does not deserve the name. And what follows, he who is capable of thought already knows. 434 A young wife who has not been faithful to her marriage bed has defiled her body; and a soul who has not been faithful to his vow has defiled his spirit. Reproach, hatred, thrashings and, most wretched of all, separation will befall the first. The other will have to face: pollution, forgetfulness of death, insatiability of stomach, lack of control of the eyes, working for vainglory, pining for sleep, hardening of the heart, deadness and insensibility, rank growth of wrong thoughts and an inclination to allow them, captivity of the heart, disturbance of spirit, disobedience, contradiction, attachment, unbelief, scepticism, talkativeness and, worst of all, free familiarity; and still more wretched, a heart without compunction which in the negligent is followed by in difference, the mother of devils and falls. |
| Philip G. Kreyenbroek, Yezidism – Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition 63 . Michael Azkoul, St. Gregory of Nyssa and the Tradition of the Fathers 64 . John Fulton and Peter Gee (editors), Religion in Contemporary Europe 65 . Robert J. Forman, Augustine and the Making of a Christian Literature: Classical Tradition and Augustinian Aesthetics 66 . Ann Matheson, Theories of Rhetoric in the 18th-Century Scottish Sermon 2 See the July and October Feasts dedicated to the Fathers in the Menaion of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Church. 3 St John of Damascus. Imag. II, 6 PG 94 1288C; St Theodore the Studite. Antirr. II, 18 PG 99 364C; and see the discussion in Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (vol. 3): The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700) . Chicago, 1974, p. 15f. If only for this reason, it is incredible that the Greek Orthodox scholar, Constantine Tsirpanlis, counts heretics (e.g., Origen, Tertullian) among the Fathers of the Church, for then it would be impossible to speak of a patristic consensus “or agreement among the Fathers on the fundamental tenets and beliefs of a Christian Confession” (See his Introduction to Eastern Patristic Thought and Orthodox Theology. Collegeville [Minn.], 1991, pp. 21 –23). Such an “ecumenical” declaration could only fall from the lips of one who fails to recognize the doctrinal and ecclesiological boundaries set up by the Fathers. 5 Editor’s Foreword to Holy Transfiguration Monastery’s revised translation of St John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Boston, 1991, xxix-xxx. Cf. C.N. Tsirpanlis, Introduction ..., p. 13. Lossky rightly states that it is unfair to speak of “the Platonism of the Fathers every time the subject of ’contemplation’ is raised. Contemplation is not the exclusive appanage of Platonism; and if it were, Platonism in a broad sense would simply mean spirituality which tends towards communion with eternal realities, where the degrees of contemplation correspond to the progressive deification of human beings immersed in the contingent. |
| 4348 It is Nathanael, not Jesus, who is the new Jacob here (1:47; Jesus is greater than Jacob, 4:12); 4349 Jesus is Jacob " s ladder (what Jubilees calls the «gate of heaven»), 4350 the way between God and the world (14:6). 4351 If later rabbis could claim that Moses was greater than Jacob because he not merely saw angels but ascended into their domain, no one could dispute that Jesus was greater than Jacob, 4352 for angels depended on him as the true connection between the worlds (cf. also 3:13–15, where Jesus is the true ascender superior to Moses). This confession climaxes the human christological titles of 1:19–50; Jesus is Christ, the lamb, the Son and the King, but only when the disciples recognize him as the exalted Son of Man and way to the Father do they recognize the full heavenly reality behind the other titles. 4353 3790 As one would expect from 1:6–8, 15 (Barth, Witness, 133–54). 3791 One should begin a narrative at its most natural starting point (Dionysius of Halicarnassus Thucyd. 10–12); political biographies often opened in adulthood (Plutarch Caesar 1.1–4; also the Life of Aesop, Drury, Design, 29). Smith, lohn (1999), 78–80, compares 1:19–51 with the introductory infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, but it might fulfill better the role of the remaining introductions of Matt 3–4 and Luke 3–4. It might function as a (lengthy) transition between the proem and main narrative (cf. Seneca Dia1. 1.1.25). 3792 Cf. Schenke, «Entstehungsgeschichte»; «Israel» appears again in this Gospel only in 3:10; 12:13. 3793 Burridge, Gospels, 197–98. 3794 Niccacci, «Fede,» observes correspondences between 1:19–51 and 20:1–29, suggesting that both model coming to faith (one in Jesus» messiahship, the other in his resurrection). That the Baptist " s witness is paradigmatic for others» witness in this section is clear; earlier Christian writers employed it similarly (cf. Luke 3:4; 9:52; 10:1; in Tannehill, Luke, 1:49). 3795 Cf. Dschulnigg, «Berufung,» on 1:35–51. 3796 Scholars have proposed various theories concerning the opening days of this Gospel, some connecting them with the idea of a new creation (cf. |
| 61 Hsychia, ‘stillness’, ‘quiet’, ‘silence’, ‘peace’; also ‘leisure’, ‘rest’ (Latin otium). From this root is derived the technical term ‘hesychasm’, the science and practice of contemplative prayer, and also ‘hesychast’, one who practises interior prayer. 67 Psalm xxxix begins: ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, and He inclined to me and heard my cry.’ 71 I.e. the feast of the Baptism of Christ, corresponding to some extent to the Western Epiphany. 98 Lit. ‘seal’. In the Orthodox service of Confirmation each anointing is accompanied by the words ‘The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit’. Cf. 2, Cor. i, 22. 101 In some manuscripts there is dislocation here. The first sentence of Step 5 is sometimes placed here. 143 Justinian built a fort on Mount Sinai as well as a church and monastery (Procopius, De aedificiis, V, viii). Today the fort is represented by the actual monastery; cf. E. A. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (1887), Kastron, Clim. P.G., 88, 79A, 812B, ‘now the Monastery of Mount Sinai’. 160 Cf. Ezekiel xxxiii, 13–20. This ‘unwritten saying’ of Christ is recorded by St. Justin (Dial. 47). 166 Genesis xix, 30–8. ‘Materials’ that dry up tears are wine and food taken to excess, while honours, power and authority are fuel for pride. 173 Our author is speaking allegorically. By ‘skin’ he means the body, by ‘oil’ he means meekness, and by ‘waves’, pride and anger. The ‘ship’ may mean the community, or brotherhood, or just a single person. 175 The ‘Prayer of Jesus’ used in the Orthodox Church is ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’. What is said in this paragraph applies equally to the Lord’s Prayer, especially the clause ‘forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’. 187 More exactly, ‘On accidie’. It means ‘languor’, ‘torpor’, ‘tedium’, ‘spiritual gloom’, ‘low spirits’, ‘indifference to the work of salvation’, ‘distaste for spiritual things’, ‘spiritual sloth’. 194 The fourth century Evagrius of Pontus was a follower of Origen and was condemned with him in the 5th Ecumenical Council in 553. |
| Prayer cannot be pure if the mind is actively engaged in following thoughts. For prayer to be pure, it must arise from a pure spirit; and this can only occur when one first stands watch and thus rises above thoughts and images. That is why Christ said, «Watch and pray»: prayer and watchfulness are inseparably bound. As St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, a nineteenth-century Russian ascetic in the Philokalic tradition, writes: «The essential, indispensable property of prayer is attention. Without attention there is no prayer». 597 The Tao is Spirit; in Jesus Christ that Spirit enters into flesh. So too with the inward life of His followers. Before His coming, followers of the Tao like Lao Tzu sat in open, objective awareness; after His coming, that spiritual awareness «takes flesh» in the form of prayer, bringing it to a new dimension. That is why attention (corresponding, in connection with Lao Tzu, to the pre-Christian era) and prayer (corresponding to the Christian era) are inseparably linked. Prayer cannot exist without the attention that must come before it and must work along with it. At the same time, however, attention is not enough in itself, now that the Tao has taken flesh. St. Symeon the New Theologian, in the fourth volume of The Philokalia, provides one of the best explanations we have found for the relationship between attention and prayer: «Watchfulness and prayer should be as closely linked together as the body to the soul, for the one cannot stand without the other. Watchfulness first goes on ahead like a scout and engages sin in combat. Prayer then follows afterwards, and instantly destroys and exterminates all the evil thoughts with which watchfulness has already been battling, for attentiveness alone cannot exterminate them. This, then, is the gate of life and death. If by means of watchfulness we keep prayer pure, we make progress; but if we leave prayer unguarded and permit it to be defiled, our efforts are null and void». 598 St. John Climacus (sixth-seventh centuries A.D.) was the abbot of the ancient Monastery of St. Catherine at the base of Mount Sinai, where the Prophet Moses received his revelation. His work on inner purification, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, has for centuries been considered a spiritual classic of the first magnitude, and was one of the first books to be printed in the Western hemisphere. Icon by Photios Kontoglou. |
| 12 The Letters of Saint Boniface, tr. by Ephraim Emerton, Octagon Books (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), New York, 1973, pp. 25–27. 14 Ladder of Divine Ascent, tr. by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, Eastern Orthodox Books, 1977, pp. 120–21. 16 The One-Hundred Eighteenth Psalm, Interpreted by Bishop Theophan, Moscow, 1891, reprinted Jordanville, 1976, pp. 289–90; see the English summary printed by New Diveyevo Convent, Spring Valley, N.Y., 1978, p. 24. 19 Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, tr. By George F. Dole, Swendenborg Foundation, Inc., N.Y., 1976, section 421; sections in parentheses in the text above are all from this book. 20 R. L. Tafel, Documents Concerning Swedenborg, vol. 1, pp. 35–6. See Wilson Van Dusen, The Presence of Other Worlds (The Psychological-Spiritual Findings of Emanuel Swedenborg), Harper and Row, N.Y., 1973, pp. 19–63, for a description of the opening of Swedenborg’s “spiritual eyes.” 21 Benjamin Walker, Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral Planes, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1974, pp. 117–18. 22 A. E. Powell, The Astral Body, The Theosophical Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill., 1972, p. 123. 24 Robert Crookall, Out-of-the-Body Experiences, The Citadel Press, Secaucus, N.J., 1970, pp. 11–13. 25 Only a few sects far from historical Christianity teach that the soul “sleeps” or is “unconscious” after death: the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, etc. 26 C. G. Jung, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1955, p. 128. 27 Robert A. Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, Anchor Books (Doubleday), Garden City, New York, 1977 (first printing, 1971). 28 This latter experience is very similar to that undergone by many people today in close encounters with “Unidentified Flying Objects” (UFOs). The occult experience of encountering the fallen spirits of the air is always one and the same experience, even though it is expressed in different images and symbols in accordance with human expectations. (For a discussion of the occult side of UFO encounters, see Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, St. Herman Monastery Press, 2nd Edition, 1979, ch. VI.) |
| About Pages Проекты «Правмира» Raising Orthodox Children to Orthodox Adulthood The Daily Website on How to be an Orthodox Christian Today Twitter Telegram Parler RSS Donate Navigation The Two Paths Source: Pemptousia Protopresbyter Georgios Dorbarakis 01 November 2021 The path of wickedness is easy; the path of goodness is difficult. ‘As easy as it is for the upright to change and fall away, it’s just as difficult for the others, the wicked, to alter’ (Saint John the Sinaite, The Ladder of Divine Ascent , discourse 24, 11). Changeability is a characteristic of human nature. God alone is immutable and utterly unalterable- he alone is truly stable. We aren’t now talking about created spirits, the angels and demons. After the fall of the first angel, Lucifer, they were made partially immutable: the angels, on the one hand anchored in goodness; the demons, on the other, fixed in evil and wickedness. What a tragedy for us humans, however. Shifting towards wickedness is infinitely easier for us than turning towards goodness, towards God. You’re one of God’s creatures, he upholds you with his loving providence, he’s constantly urging you towards your true goal- a living relationship with him- and yet you ceaselessly lean towards the opposite. What a mystery is concealed in our freedom. How can we explain something which we can’t logically understand? Our creation demonstrates this: at the instigation of the evil one, we showed disobedience towards our Father and Maker. It’s also shown by the whole course of the first revelation in the Old Testament: chosen Israel constantly doubts and reacts against God’s interventions. It’s proved in the most conspicuous manner by the coming of Christ, God himself, as a human person: people scorned him, doubted him, crucified him. And since then, the same thing all over again: ‘he is destined for the falling and rising of many and to be a sign that is opposed’. ‘His own did not receive him’. We see it ourselves in our daily lives: we turn more easily towards wickedness. Evil, though- naturally- beautifully wrapped, attracts us more. There’s a verse in a Greek folk song which says: ‘the drink of sin is sweet’, and it seems that this is true of us. |
| And by happiness is meant some average set of emotional-physical joys and conveniences. Having “waved away” the ascetical experience collected by the Church over the centuries, man handicaps himself, makes his life catastrophically truncated, because he rejects help in the most difficult and most important work—discovering the fullness of love and harmony with God. Moreover, having completely immersed himself in emotional-fleshly life, man completely loses the true concept of spiritual life. He may even know about it from books, can think about it and discuss it, but no more than that. This is because the living experience of discovering the grace of the Holy Spirit, the experience of growing in the knowledge of God is acquired in no other way than by “love for the very venerable commandments and sacredly fulfilling them.” Without this experience, eternal grace-filled life becomes a certain culturological fact, and nothing more. Any arch-complex and ultra-modern problem, if we look at it strictly, has its own spiritual dimension. And the laws of cause and effect in spiritual life have not changed since the time of Adam and Eve. Only the external trappings change. The holy fathers’ deep penetration into the essence of human life is just what’s needed to help each one of us to better understand ourselves, to make sense of the causes of many personal problems, and find the path to their proper resolution. The written experience of ascetic life is under no circumstances an example for mindless imitation, but rather a spiritual compass toward which all we Christians should strive, by which we should test all the many forms of our emotional and bodily life. You could call it a spiritual lighthouse that enables us to stay on course and not get lost forever in the darkness of this mad world. Departure from an understanding of the true dimensions of human life, from the awareness of what it should be in eternity, leads to a person’s shameful shallowness. The person lowers himself to the level of an irrational creature, differing only in that every irrational creature knows no sin, because it abides within the boundaries determined for it by the laws of nature. |
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