Metropolitan Philaret on the Ascension

Here follow my translation of two sermon for the Feast of the Ascension by His Eminence, Metropolitan Philaret of Eastern America and New York:

I.
How often we hear from faithful people how sad it is to part with Pascha. Many say that it is sad because the Lord was with us during these bright Paschal days, but now He will leave us. Yes, of course, the triumphant days of Pascha have gone silent and ended. But it must be remembered that one of the hymns which was repeated particularly often in the bright Paschal days was: “Let us who have beheld the Resurrection of Christ worship our holy Lord Jesus” – and we have just heard this, at this Vigil, at another feast, the feast of the Lord’s Ascension. This hymn demonstrates the very close relationship between two triumphs: the triumph of Pascha and the triumph of the Lord’s Ascension.

One and the same Lord Jesus Christ, Whom we praise in the Paschal night, ascends to heaven in glory, for which reason our spiritual joy must follow Him there, and not at all become sorrowful. It seems that we could grieve, as the Apostles did. But we in our hymns, which are sung during the Vigil, heard that the Lord “filled with unutterable joy in His Ascension” His disciples and His Divine Mother. Remember, that the Lord’s Ascension and enthronement at the right hand of God the Father, completed the immediate deed laid upon Him, which He completed “for us men and our salvation.”

At the dawn of human history, man dreamed of becoming equal to God, but did not at all become equal to Him and did not become God, and from being pure, innocent, and holy became an indecent sinner, “seals of anger,” as the Scriptures say. But the Lord did not abandon His creation. Man wanted to become God, but he did not become Him, but God became man, not ceasing to be God, and revealed Himself on earth as the God-Man. He took upon Himself our human nature to the extent that not in all boundless eternity there will not be another Son of God apart from the God-Man, our Lord Jesus Christ, Who desired in His boundless Divine Essence to take upon Himself our human essence, our human nature. God descended from heaven to earth, as God, and ascended into the heaven as the God-Man, that is, our human nature He not only redeemed, cleansed from sin, and sanctified, but enthroned it at the right hand of God the Father. Now, higher that all creation, higher than angels, archangels, cherubim, and seraphim is enthroned on the Divine Throne God and at the same time Man, in everything like us.

Only the wisdom of God, the infinite love of God, the grace of God, the wisdom and power could accomplish this difficult deed. Therefore remember that when we glorify the Lord Savior, ascended and sitting at the right hand of God, that we are glorifying in Him our human nature. But this is very little, He is not only with us. In the Apocalypse we read that the Lord said: “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me in My throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in His throne” (Rev. 3:21). Even to dream of this is fearful, but these are the words of the Savior, Who never spoke an untruth, never spoke an exaggeration – if He said it, it means that it will be exactly like this – it cannot be otherwise.

Therefore, we rejoice not only that he ascended to the right hand of His beloved Father, but rejoice the our human nature has not only be cleansed and sanctified, but has ascended to the heights of heaven. Therefore, the feast of the Lord’s Ascension should not be a day of sorrow, but one of eternal rejoicing in spiritual triumph. Amen.

II. The Lord came to Earth as the Son of God, and Ascended into Heaven as the God-Man.

Those who are in God’s church on the Vigil on the eve of the Exaltation of the Life-Giving Cross see a deeply meaningful rite in cathedrals where a bishop is serving. There, the cross is gradually lowered from a great height down to the very floor, and then is once again raised on high, to where it had been lowered.

This sacred rite illustrates today’s feast day: the Son of God came down from the Throne of His Glory to us, on the sinful earth in order to save perishing mankind, and did not stay on earth, but descended to the abyss of hell and from there freed the souls that were languishing there. And the Church insistently tells us in today’s bright and festive day that Christ the Savior came down from heaven as the Son of God, in His Divinity, and ascended as the God-Man.

The Savior took our fallen, sinful nature there with Him and enthroned it on the Glorious Throne of the Glory of His Kingdom, on the right hand of, right next to, God the Father, higher even than the Immaculate Virgin Mary. See what the Lord has done for our salvation! That is why the Apostles left the Mount of Olives after the Lord’s Ascension not with sorrow, but “with great rejoicing,” as the Church says.

They understood the meaning of this Podvig of Christ, that the Son of God came on earth to save mankind, and not only save Him, but enthrone Him on the Throne of His Kingdom.

The Lord, as we know from the Gospel, said: “and where I am, there shall also my servant be" (Jn 13:26) – where I am, My servant will be. Take care, soul of man, to faithfully serve the Lord God. Then in His eternal Kingdom you will be near Him, as He promised, and He never lies or tells untruths. If follows that it was and will be as He said. Amen.

The Feast of the Ascension

Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension, one of the twelve Great Feasts of the Orthodox Church. During Matins we hear the following explanation of the Feast:

On the Thursday of the sixth week from Pascha, we celebrate the Assumption of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Verses
Seated, O Word, upon the Father’s right,
Granting Initiates a surer faith.

When he was with his Disciples before his passion, he promised them the coming of the all-holy Spirit, saying, ‘It is right that I go away. For if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come’. And again, ‘When he comes, he will teach you all truth,. Therefore, after rising from the dead, he appeared to them for forty days, not the whole time, but at intervals, eating and drinking with them, proving the resurrection more surely. Finally, after promising many things about the kingdom of God, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there to receive the coming of the all-holy Spirit, and they would also be baptised through him. For they had formerly only been baptised in water by John (though later Epiphanios of Cyprus recounted that John the Theologian baptised the Mother of God, while Peter and he baptised the rest of the Apostles). He ordered them to remain in Jerusalem so that the first proclamation of the Gospel might be confirmed there, lest, by leaving for foreign places, they might be easily misrepresented. And because it was necessary, as it is for soldiers, for them to be armed with the weapons of the Spirit and so go out to battle with the enemies of Christ.

When the moment came for the assumption, he led them out to the Mount of Olives (so called because it was planted with many olive trees). He talked with them of the preaching to the ends of the earth and also of his perpetual kingdom that was to come, and when he saw that they were about to ask him what was fitting, his most pure Mother being present also, he brought Angels to show them his ascent to heaven. And indeed, as the watched, he was lifted up from among them and a cloud received him. And so, escorted by the Angels, who exhorted one another to raise the doors of heaven and were amazed at scarlet of his flesh from his blood, he ascended and took his seat at the right hand of the Father, making his flesh divine and, I dare to say, making it equal to God. Through it we have been changed, now that the ancient enmity has been abolished. However, Angels appeared to the Apostles, in the form of men, and said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand amazed, straining your gaze to heaven? The one whom you see in flesh, God Jesus, will come like this again in flesh. But not as before, in poverty and unknown, but with great glory, as you now see him, escorted by Angels’.

Then the Apostles, tired by gazing up, returned from the Mount of Olives, which is very near Jerusalem, about two thousand four hundred steps, for this is a Sabbath day’s journey. For so it was laid down by Moses as lawful to walk for this distance on Sabbath. Because the Tent of Witness was this number of steps distant from the Jewish camp. So it was possible for worshippers to go this far on Sabbath and not to walk further. And so it called a Sabbath day’s journey. Some have though because of this that Christ’s Assumption took place of Sabbath, which is incredible.

Online resources:

• Epistle reading: Acts 1:1-12.
  
• Gospel reading: Luke 24: 36-53.
• Pentecostarian service in English, Greek, Slavonic.
• St John Chyrsostom, homilies 1, 2, 3 on Acts.
  
• St Cyril of Alexandria, fragments of sermons 154, 155, and 156 on Luke.
• St Innocent of Cherson and Taurida, sermon.
• St Leo the Great, On the Lord's Ascension.
  
• St Bede of Jarrow, On the Lord's Ascension.
• Blessed Augustine, Sermon on the Ascension.
• Metropolitan Philaret of Eastern America and New York, sermon.
• Archbishop Andrew of Rockland, sermon.
• Archbishop Averky of Syracuse and Holy Trinity, Gospel commentary.
• Fr Georges Florovsky, explanation.
  
• Fr Andrew Phillips, sermon.
  
• Fr Anthony Coniaris, sermon.
• S. V. Bulgakov, explanation.
• Greek Archdiocese, explanation.
  

Sunday of the Holy Fathers

Tomorrow is the Sunday of the Holy and God-Bearing Fathers at Nicaea. Here is what S. V. Bulgakov writes:

Devoting this Sunday to the memory of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council, the Holy Church sings: "Let us, the pious assembly of true believers, celebrate today in prayerful memory the God-bearing Fathers from every part of the world who assembled in the brilliant city of the Nicaea. For these pious wise ones put down the godless teachings of the terrible Arius, and expelled him from the unity of the Catholic Church, and clearly taught everyone to profess their faith in the consubstantial and coeternal Son of God, existing before the ages, expressing this clearly in the symbol of faith". The heresy of Arius was one of the most destructive heresies. It concerned the teaching about the divinity of the Son of God, i.e. that main doctrine of Christianity, on which all our faith and the whole Church of Christ is founded, which makes it the unique basis for all hope of our salvation. If the Arian heresy, rejecting the divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, then exasperated the whole Church and carried away with itself a great many pastors and shepherds; if this heresy had overcome the true teaching of the Church and was made dominant; then for a long time Christianity itself would no longer exist and the whole world would be plunged into its former darkness of unbelief and superstitions. The Holy Fathers at the First Ecumenical Council laid down the Orthodox teaching, having established it universally. And the Holy Church, after a comfortable time, glorifies these same Holy Fathers of Nicaea on the Sunday after the Ascension because the most glorious Ascension of the Lord serves as clear proof of the inseparable connection of the two natures in Jesus Christ, the divine and the human.

In the service for the present day, the Holy Nicaean fathers are hymned, as "the hierarchs of Christ", "hierarchs, glorious pastors", "most blessed fathers of divine knowledge", "as luminous stars bright with the truth of Christ", "keepers of the known apostolic traditions", "O divine array, God-proclaiming knights of the Lord's company, most brilliant stars of the spiritual firmament, impregnable towers of the mystical Zion, fragrant flowers of Paradise, all-golden mouths of the Word, the praise of Nicaea, the adornment of the universe".

Commemorating the efforts of the Holy Fathers of the Nicaea Council, the Holy Church glorifies them because they, "gathered all pastoral art and righteous ascetic passion, avenging the difficult rotten and pernicious wolves, with the sling of the spirit casting them out from church performance", "preaching peace, with the peace most of the world was united", and "all the gathered spiritual art and through the Divine Spirit immediately seeing the heavenly and honorable symbol of faith divinely written sketched out", i.e. as St. Demetrius of Rostov says, "a true canon of the Christian faith". According to the manual of this hierarch, firmly containing this canon of the Orthodox faith in Christ, as the bright candlestick in the darkness of this world, we should go the way of the commandments of the Lord, in order for us to inherit a bright and blessed place. With all our life we should confess, that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true God and the perfect man, and He, our Savior, will call us true servants and His confessors (Mt. 10:_2). With a loud voice we should most sweetly glorify the name of Christ, before whom every heavenly, earthly, infernal worldly knee bends, but the Lord will glorify us with heavenly glory for He says: "I will glorify those who glorify me". Continuously we should hymn Him as the true God, and He will bless us in this contemporary life with the fulfillment of His grace, and for the praise of our mouths He will satisfy our flesh and souls with the glory of eternal life in His kingdom of heaven where He in unapproachable glory reigns with the Unoriginate Father, the Coeternal and Life- creating Spirit to ages of ages without end.

Online resources:

• Pentecostarian service in English, Greek, Slavonic.
  
• Epistle Reading: Acts 20:16-18, 28-36.
  
• Gospel reading: John 17:1-13.
• St John Chyrsostom, homilies 44 and 45 on Acts.
• St John Chrysostom, homilies 80 and 81 on John.
• Metropolitan Philaret of Eastern America and New York, sermon.
• Metropolitan Anthony of Sorouzh, sermons from 1980, 1988, 1989.
• Archbishop Andrei of Rockland, sermon.
• Archimandrite Panteleimon (Lampadarios), sermon.
• Fr Anthony Phillips, sermon.
• Fr. Milan Medakovic, sermon.
• Fr Anthony Coniaris, sermon.
• Fr Alexander Schmemann, history of Council.
• Fr Constantine Callinikos, history of Council.
• A. A. Vasiliev, history of Council.
• Greek Archdiocese, explanation.
• S. V. Bulgakov, explanation.
  
  

St John of San Francisco on Theologians

The following is my translation of a sermon by St John of Shanghai and San Francisco given during the Sunday Vigil service, following the reading of the Gospel, on September 21, 1936. A reflection on the qualities that characterize the true theologian, he speaks first of the three saints whom the Church has given the title of "Theologian" – the Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian, St Gregory the Theologian, and St Symeon the New Theologian – before turning to a discussion of his own Abba, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galicia. It is worth noting, though, that the qualities he attributes to these true theologians – "purity of heart, a striving for God from earliest youth, and a complete giving-over of himself to Him" – can be taken to apply just as well to his own life of righteousness.

In the Gospel that was just read, we heard how two of Christ’s disciples went to the Lord’s grave, but returned from it with different feelings. John saw, and believed (Jn 20:8), but Peter, as it says in another Gospel, departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass (Lk 24:12). Whence such a difference in disposition? Why does Peter, who always tries to surpass the others in expressing his devotion to Christ, the first of all the apostles to confess Christ as the Son of the Living God, now not try to be the first in proclaiming the Resurrection, but instead marvels and doubts, when John already believes? The reason for relating so differently to what they had just seen is found in the different feelings that arose in them when remembering Christ and their own behavior during the time of His Passion. Peter is tortured by the recognition that he had denied Christ. The denial that he had uttered stood between him and Christ; the weight of the sin is crushing, darkening the mind, and not allowing the spiritual eyes to look on high. Peter remained in doubt and difficult thoughts until Christ Himself comforted him by His appearance and forgiveness.

The matter was entirely different with John. He did not sin before Christ. A pure youth, loving Christ with the flame of pure love, and beloved by Christ more than any of the apostles for the purity of his heart, he remained faithful to Christ in his love. He did not leave Christ when they seized Him in Gethsemane, but followed Him to the High Priest’s palace and stood at the Lord’s Cross on Golgotha, when everyone else had already left Christ, except for him and the women who had followed Christ from Galilee. John did not leave Christ before His last breath, he did not doubt in Christ, his conscience was pure before Christ. His conscience did not waver in any other actions or thoughts that would have separated him from Christ. The pure one loved the All-Pure One, he gave Him his heart and remained faithful to Him. That is why John, still during the days of Christ’s earthly life, lay on His breast at suppers, was adopted at the Cross by His All-Pure Mother, the Virgin Mary, and after the Resurrection immediately received into his heart the mystery of the Resurrection. He awaits a meeting with the Resurrected One not with doubt, but with joy, and is found worthy of this. Receiving along with the others knowledge of the mysteries of God through talks between Christ and the apostles before His Ascension to heaven, and confirmed in these through the sending down on him of the Holy Spirit, John even afterwards continues to receive revelation from God. The other apostles received illumination from the Holy Spirit, and mysteries were revealed to them, but the highest of mysteries were revealed to John. All the apostles preached to the people of the Incarnation of the Son of God, all the Evangelists described for all time the days of His earthly life among men, the revelation of His Divine power, His Passion, and His conquering of death. But only John openly reveals Christ’s divine genealogy. The other Evangelists begin their Gospels by recounting events that took place on earth, while John raises us immediately to heaven.

The other apostles, who came to Christ already in mature years, or who did not immediately and decisively follow Him in the days of their youth, were more strongly tried by the weight of the spiritual flesh, and only by many labors did they attain to the ascension to the third heaven. John, who from his earliest youth strove diligently towards purity of heart, gave his heart to Christ as soon as he saw Him, although he himself was not free from the attacks of sinful thoughts and temptations, but easily deflected and conquered them. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God (Mt 5:8). With a clean heart, John, while still in the flesh on earth, was raised in his spirit to the very Throne of God and, seeing His beloved Lord Jesus sitting on it with the Father, proclaimed with a loud voice to all the word: In the beginning with the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1). In his Gospel he lays the foundation for the dogmatic teachings of the Church, and discloses the primary foundation of Christian life: the commandment of love. Being filled with love for the Creator of all, the Word, he is full of love for His creation, and thereby comes to know the Divine Nature and Divine Providence, to the extent that this is possible for man. Thus John, “full of this love, and being full of this theology,” and proclaiming the universal and most-elevated doctrine of the Word of God, was made the “founder of our pure faith” (verse on “Glory”), or the foundation-layer of Orthodox Christian theology.

John is called the Theologian, inasmuch as it is he who chiefly uncovers and proclaims the doctrine of the Word of God, and along with it all the lofty Christian doctrine of God.

Besides John, the Church has given the title of Theologian only to the great Church Father, St Gregory the Theologian, and also recognizes St Symeon the New Theologian. What distinguishes St Gregory the Theologian? Again, the same qualities as John the Theologian: purity of heart, a striving for God from earliest youth, and a complete giving-over of himself to Him. Similar to him were other great holy hierarchs who opened for us true Orthodox doctrine. Saints Athanasius the Great and Basil the Great also strove for God from their earliest years and, preserving themselves in purity, and with the illumination of the Holy Spirit, laid out in their works the dogmas of Christ’s Church. But the depths and heights of Christian teaching are opened up with special clarity in the works of the compiler of remarkable works on the Word of God, St Gregory the Theologian. Even as a youth he betrothed himself to spiritual and bodily purity, vigilantly watching every movement of his heart and reacting strictly to the appearance of the weakness of human nature in him. He suffered from the observation in himself of inadequacies and zealously studied the way to the perfection of the human spirit, in order to make himself a habitation of the Holy Spirit. “For having searched the depths of the Spirit, eloquence was also bestowed upon him” (troparion). Having by his spirit-bearing words elevated the mind of man to the very loftiest truths, St Gregory has received from the Church the name Theologian and “supreme mind of theology” (kontakion), and he now contemplates the Holy Trinity, Whom he loved from his youth.

St Symeon, who was subsequently called the New Theologian, also distinguished himself by the special purity of his heart, which raised him to the knowledge of the mysterious spiritual life of man and the activity thereon of the grace of God, about which he proclaims in his edifying works. The Holy Fathers explained “in words of reason” the teaching that was spread through the power of the Spirit by the fishermen, who were called from the catching of fish to the catching of people – Christ’s apostles.

The works of the Holy Fathers led the Church’s children to the understanding of Divine truths and instructed them in the fulfillment of Christ’s commandments, educating a large assembly of holy God-pleasers. Over the course of centuries, however, these sacred works, written by divinely-illuminated men, began little by little to be forgotten, and in later times were known by only a very few. Even those who studied the theological sciences drew wisdom not so much from these pure sources, as from mines dug by human reason alone. But in our days a luminary of the Church has shown forth, who has opened wide the gates of true theology anew. Striving from his youth towards God, and at the age of seven decisively dedicating himself to the service of Christ’s Church, the young Alexei preserved the purity of his heart and strove not only to learn, but also to fulfill Christ’s teachings in all things. Hungering and thirsting for God’s righteousness, he desired to see the same purity of heart among those around him. While still a youth, he directed his peers on the good path. When he, decisively renouncing the world, became the monk Anthony, he completely cast away from his heart all passionate attachment to everything wordly. His mind was always striving for the eternal, and he purified his heart through unceasing compunction and deep humility. He desired salvation above all, and only that which led him to it was of value to him. But he did not wish salvation only for himself. He suffered in spirit when he saw the vices of others, and zealously tried to correct every sinner. Being himself pure of heart, he did not fear defiling himself by being with sinners. He, as it were, entered their souls, illuminating and purifying them, leaving them clean, as a ray of light illumines dark and defiled places. Everyone was dear to him: both the old and the young, both the righteous man and the sinner. His all-loving heart embraced everyone. He was zealous for bringing to Christ those who did not know Him, for the correction of the erring. Saving his own flock, he did not forget about other sheep. Placed on the lamp-stand of the bishopric, he showed himself to be a universal hierarch, not only carrying on his shoulders the weaknesses of his own flock, but also looking after the entire world. Like Paul, he had “concern for all the Churches,” and like this apostle who labored more than any other, he could say: Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not? (2 Cor 11:29).

Studying all the questions of human life, he, being a spiritual man, judged everything spiritually. He evaluated everything from the point of view of the highest truth and, being filled with veneration for the entire world, he himself remained in spirit outside this world. He deemed it a loss for the excellency of the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ; he deemed it a loss that he might win Christ, in order that he might know Him and the power of His Resurrection, to partake of His suffering and be conformed to His death (cf., Phil 3: 7-8, 10). Humbly regarding himself as nothing, he never considered himself to have attained it and, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus (Phil 3: 13-14). He was filled with desire to depart, and to be with Christ (Phil 1:23), considering that to be much better for him. Realizing, however, that he was needed in the flesh for the sake of his flock, he patiently waited for the end of his course, although while still living on earth he could say: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me (Gal 2: 20). He spiritual vision was set on the Throne of the Holy Trinity, for Whom he prepared himself as a dwelling-place, to Whom he gave all his heart, all his soul, all his mind, and all his strength. With a pure heart the holy hieararch Anthony contemplated the Holy Trinity purely and, full of love, was “filled with theology.”

Being not only a successor to the throne and a rightful communicant of the holy apostles, he was one with the great Holy Fathers of the Church, he was spiritually born of them and was a continuer of their preaching. With his mind illumined by the Holy Spirit, he understood the profound meaning of their writings and the loftiness of their teaching, and his spiritual experience opened before him the path to active knowledge of God. Metropolitan Anthony showed himself to be a new great Theologian. He extols the Holy Trinity, explaining not only how to believe in the Trinity, but also why this is essential for our salvation. He explains why the Second Person of the Holy Trinity is named the Word of God and, after the Incarnation, the Son of Man. He indicates the path to induction into His suffering and Resurrection, and explains the grace-filled action of the Holy Spirit in the world. The Most Blessed Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev opens for us the understanding of the Holy Scriptures and the commentary of the Holy Fathers with a new power.

The peculiarity of his work is that he always shows the connection between dogma and life, and from doctrine deduces moral teaching. He himself having striven to study the truths of faith not through cold thinking, but rather through spiritual rebirth and communion with the Divine nature, he calls all those who desire to know the mysteries of God to do the same. Especially loving and commenting on the God-inspired writings of the beloved disciple of Christ, John the Theologian, he, like him, received the gift of theology for the purity of his heart and his limitless love for God and His creation. By his life and work he showed us the path to God’s glory, alight with which he now approaches the Holy Trinity, praying that the darkness that is now above our peoples be dispelled, and that his flock be given great and abundant mercy.

The Light of Christ Englightens All!

The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts will be served three final times this year: on Great and Holy Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Ручьёв has posted his translation of a marvelous sermon by St Innocent of Kherson, originally delivered on Friday of the third week of Great Lent. Here is how it begins:

The light of Christ enlightens all!

One of the most significant liturgical actions of the Great Fast takes place when, between the Old Testament readings, the Royal Doors are suddenly opened, the serving clergyman appears with a candle and censer and, making the sign of the cross with them over those present, exclaims: The light of Christ enlightens all! It is not surprising that all those present bow their head to the ground at this moment, for the opening of the Royal Doors represents the opening of the very heavens; the candle and censer signify the fullness of the Holy Spirit; and the appearance of the serving clergyman is like the appearance of an Angel from heaven. Who could be so arrogant as not to bow down before these signs of the grace of God?

The Holy Church, however, seeks from us at this instance not simply a bow of the head or a prostration before the light of Christ. No, in the spiritual sense, it wants the opposite: the bowing of our head before that light, the opening before it of our entire essence, so that in this way we might be illumined with that divine light from head to foot, be completely filled with it, and made light-bearing, just as were the first Christians, about whom the Apostle Paul writes that they shine as lights in the world (Phil. 2:15).

In order better to enter the Holy Church’s intention, let us look at the power and significance of the words pronounced by the serving clergyman.

The light of Christ enlightens all!

These words suggest, firstly, the insufficiency in us all of the true light. For, if we were light-filled in and of ourselves, we would have no need for enlightenment. Truly, a person not illumined by the Gospel is darkness, deep darkness, as St. Paul teaches. Those who are illumined by the light of science and are called “enlightened” by people would not immediately agree with this. This is because these people who have studied the sciences, due to their hope in the scintillation that the sciences pour upon them, rarely and insufficiently turn their attention to the inner state of their spirit and heart, not seeing in what darkness their soul and conscience are. If, however, they were to look deeply into the quality of their knowledge and, on the other hand, would attentively delve into the true needs of their soul, then they would soon begin to see that the light borrowed from the sciences, no matter how great it might be, is hardly enough to satisfy them; and that, in relation to some of the most important things, the ignorance of which, one might say, makes one less than human, they are as ignorant as the lowest commoner; therefore, exactly like the commoner, they need to be enlightened from above.

Photograph: His Eminence, Archbishop Job of Chicago and the Midwest celebrating the Presanctified Liturgy at Holy Ascension Church in Albion, MI, on April 9, 2008. Courtesy of Eighth Day Photography.

The Mountain of Silence

I'm about half way through reading Kyriacos C. Markides' The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality, and have become so frustrated by it that I'm wondering whether to continue. The book is made up essentially of conversations between Dr Markides, a professor of sociology at the University of Maine with a long-standing interest in what can only be called New Age spirituality, and a "Fr Maximos," who is in fact a thinly disguised Fr Athanasios, now Metropolitan of Lismassol in the Church of Cyprus.

In his Prolegomena, Dr Markides speaks of his journey from agnosticism, to transcendental meditation, to interest in the lay mystics and healers of Cyprus. Having heard of Mt Athos for the first time, he felt himself "ready for an adventure within the mystical, experiential traditional of organized Christianity that survived in a few ancient monasteries unknown to the West and to mainstream Christianity" (5), a "Christian equivalent of Tibet" (6). Herein lies the book's false premise: namely, that there is a specifically "Athonite mystical spirituality" at all. Granted, Mt Athos has an incomparably rich spiritual tradition and is a place of extraordinary holiness; it is not my intention to deny this one bit. As any Athonite monk would insist, however, there is nothing essential present on Mt Athos that can not be found in any Orthodox church where the Eucharist is offered, and nothing inherent in their "spirituality" that can not be found in any other part of the Church, however humble. The spiritual life that the Athonite monks practice, far from having survived in a few forgotten monasteries, is in fact the very heart of mainstream Orthodox Christianity, even if many of its members fail to live up to this standard. Again, this is not to deny that the Holy Mountain has a tremendous spiritual heritage from which we can all profit. My point is, following St Irenaeus of Lyons, that any "esoteric" Christianity is inherently gnostic and therefore heretical. The full wealth of the Church's spiritual treasures are open to all who have entered it.

St Gregory of Nyssa's words on the Holy Land could equally well apply to the Holy Mountain:

We confessed that the Christ Who was manifested is very God, as much before as after our sojourn at Jerusalem; our faith in Him was not increased afterwards any more than it was diminished. Before we saw Bethlehem we knew His being made man by means of the Virgin; before we saw His Grave we believed in His Resurrection from the dead; apart from seeing the Mount of Olives, we confessed that His Ascension into heaven was real. We derived only thus much of profit from our travelling thither, namely that we came to know by being able to compare them, that our own places are far holier than those abroad. Wherefore, O ye who fear the Lord, praise Him in the places where ye now are. Change of place does not effect any drawing nearer unto God, but wherever thou mayest be, God will come to thee, if the chambers of thy soul be found of such a sort that He can dwell in thee and walk in thee. But if thou keepest thine inner man full of wicked thoughts, even if thou wast on Golgotha, even if thou wast on the Mount of Olives, even if thou stoodest on the memorial-rock of the Resurrection, thou wilt be as far away from receiving Christ into thyself, as one who has not even begun to confess Him. Therefore, my beloved friend, counsel the brethren to be absent from the body to go to our Lord, rather than to be absent from Cappadocia to go to Palestine; and if any one should adduce the command spoken by our Lord to His disciples that they should not quit Jerusalem, let him be made to understand its true meaning. Inasmuch as the gift and the distribution of the Holy Spirit had not yet passed upon the Apostles, our Lord commanded them to remain in the same place, until they should have been endued with power from on high. Now, if that which happened at the beginning, when the Holy Spirit was dispensing each of His gifts under the appearance of a flame, continued until now, it would be right for all to remain in that place where that dispensing took place; but if the Spirit “bloweth” where He “listeth,” those, too, who have become believers here are made partakers of that gift; and that according to the proportion of their faith, not in consequence of their pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

To add a word from personal experience, when I was a graduate student I attended a tiny little church in the storefront of an old building in a bad neighborhood of a large city. The services were entirely in Church Slavonic, the priest had a speech impediment that made nearly everything he said difficult to comprehend, and not more than two or three old babushki showed up for Vigils. Nonetheless, I came to appreciate that there was just as much holiness in that humble little Bethlehem of a church as anything I had encountered in my travels through the churches and monasteries of the Holy Land, Greece, Russia, and Romania. So, simply put, there's no such thing as a specifically Athonite mystical spirituality that can't be found anywhere else in the Orthodox Church. It's telling that the author never speaks of the Church, only of the Ecclesia, which he defines thusly: "The sum total of the practices, methods, sacred texts, and testimony of saints and their teachings on how to know God. In includes the organizational structure of the Church" (emphasis mine). This is true in so far as it goes, but for Dr Markides it is a way of acknowledging the truth within the Church without identifying the truth with the Church. The "mystical spirituality" of the Ecclesia is something more expansive than the Church itself.

Then there is the problem of Dr Markides' methodology. Here he summarizes how he engaged Fr Maximos in conversation:

In my mind, however, I carried on a continuous but silent dialogue between the teachings of the holy elders of Christianity and the secular thinkers of the West [he names Nietzsche, Freud, and Frankle earlier in the paragraph] as well as the wisdom traditions coming out of Buddhism and Hinduism. When he [Fr Maximos] talked about "purifying the heart," I could hardly avoid contrasting it with the Buddha's "eightfold path." (62)

He admits, however, that the very people with whom he was talking would not have approved of this method:

I was fully aware, however, that devout Christians, the Athonite monks included, are averse to any comparisons between Christian revelation and spiritual practice and the mysticism and spiritual exercises of the East. In the eyes of such Christians, comparisons may undermine belief in the centrality and divine uniqueness of Christian revelation, a fear that as an academic I could not share. (62)

That is a strange and telling passage. His assessment of the attitudes of many Christians towards a comparative approach is quite true. My own feeling is that there's nothing wrong with an objective comparative approach, but that the author so often gets so many of them so wrong that the reader can easily be misled into making facile comparisons that are in fact completely misleading. One further marvels that the good professor has been so blinded by the academic refusal to make "value judgments" and "truth claims" that he simply refuses to open his eyes to the possibility that the Christian revelation may, in very fact, be true.

The result is that, again and again, Fr Maximos will say something perfectly correct (in fact, I haven't found any of his recorded words in any way objectionable) and then the author will distort them beyond recognition. I'll give just one example. Fr Maximos cites St Maximos the Confessor's use of the term "eros maniakos" to describe the intense love that saints feel for God. He makes a point of saying that this eros was a matter of "shifting your energy exclusively in the direction of God" (emphasis mine). All of this is perfectly correct and Orthodox. But this is how Fr Markides interprets these words:

Having been blessed only with the experience of human eros, I could not possibly fathom what the eros maniakos might feel like. I could only imagine such a state intellectually. I could accept, for example, that all erotic relationships at all levels of intensity from the grossest to the most sublime are different manifestations of the all-consuming love of the absolute God. It is like the sun emanating its rays. Human eros is the experience of the rays. Eros maniakos must be the entrance into the sun itself.

In other words, Professor Markides takes the human sexual experience (even the grossest), multiplies it infinitely, and then projects this on God. He even suggests that "the experience of eros maniakos was best captured in stone by Bernini in his portrayal of the Ecstasy of St Teresa, stabbed through the heart by an angel, symbolizing divine love. She surrendered in his arms in a state of ecstatic rapture." Now, as I have argued elsewhere, this is precisely the opposite of what St Maximos in fact taught.

The book's fatal flaw can, to my mind, be captured in the words of the friend who introduced the author to Fr Maximos: "At last we have found a real master who also happens to be a Christian." The emphasis is mine, and critical.

This is not a book I would recommend to anyone who doesn't have a basic grounding in the history and theology of the Orthodox Church. Those who do have this knowledge should be able to cut through the crap, so to speak, and benefit from Fr Maximos' words. As I've written before (I don't recall which post), it is our mission to preach Christ crucified and not "mystical spirituality," Athonite or otherwise. All of that is premised upon entry into the Church through Baptism.

This book could have been a real treasure if only the author had written himself out of it.

Bp Atanasije and Fr Justin on ROCOR-MP

The following is my translation of comments made by Bishop Atanasije (Jevtic), retired Bishop of Zahumlje and Herzegovina and a close spiritual son of Archimandrite Justin (Popovich), during a question and answer period at the Sretinsky Theological Seminary in Moscow in 2001, in reply to a question concerning his opinion of the prospects of reconciliation between the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the Moscow Patriarchate (MP):

I have said for a long, long time that the Russian Church Abroad must unite with the Russian Orthodox Church, and I even influenced Patriarch Pavle to write about this, because the Serbian Church has an immediate connection to this question, and we have a sort of responsibility to the Russian Church Abroad, to the Karlovtsy, because they were with us [in Serbia]. They received their autonomy within the Serbian Church, similarly to during the time of Justinian II, when the Syrians and Arabs invaded Cyprus, and the Cypriots needed to flee to Asia Minor. They were given a region near Dardanelles, at the Sea of Marmara, and they preserved their ecclesiastical autonomy there. That serves as an example, and the canons even allow this, but temporarily. The Serbian Church wrote that the Russian Church Abroad must return to its Russian Church. Their reaction was mixed. But, in general, they must unite.

I heard a few days ago that Metropolitan Vitaly left, who was irreconcilable not only in relation to the Russian Church, but in other regards as well. Now there is Vladyka Laurus, who is moderate and intelligent, and younger. Union will likely take place. The Moscow Patriarchate did a good thing in never condemning them.

When there was a Serbian schism in America, Fr Justin (Popovich) wept, begging Patriarch German to do everything he could to avoid schism. Schism is always difficult to overcome. That the Moscow Patriarch did not condemn them is a good thing. We are doing the same with our Macedonians: they were given autonomy, but they wanted to make themselves autocephalous. No one recognized them and now it seems that they will come back. This has not yet decisively happened, but may God grant that they return and be in a normal relationship, because now they are completely isolated. A great danger here is coming from the side of the Vatican, which is forever trying to spread their influence on them. The Serbian Church put this question before a trial, but did not complete the trial process, and did not defrock them, although there was good reason to.

But when union takes place one need not, as the Serbs say, hunt truth down to the end. There is a Latin expression: "Absolute truth is absolute falsehood." Driving truth to the end is not humane, it is not loving. There must in fact be oikonomia [condescension]. They have good priests, good order, and in America they have preserved the Divine Services precisely. So may God grant that there will be union. I've written and spoken about this for a long time.

Father Justin (Popovich) frequently spoke about the martyric Russian Church and about the Church Abroad: "I understand them, they did not want to cooperate with the Soviet power; but this was compelled, and one must understand them. The Martyric Church… it bears this." He advised the Church Abroad to unite with the Moscow Patriarchate

I advised those whom I know in ROCOR: "You need to unite." They are against Metropolitan Sergius. Alright, be against Sergius. But Sergius has already died, so now what? I have always been especially against their interference in the affairs of the Russian Church and their coming into conflict with it, accepting certain priests or certain parishioners. May God grant that He not punish them, inasmuch as it always happens that those who do harm to the Church, create dissension, lose God's grace. Even the blood of martyrdom can not heal schism in the Church, as St Cyprian and others have said. St Irenaeous and St Ignatius said that one must keep unity as the apple of one's eyes: with the bishops, with the priests, with the clergy, the people.

This union did in fact take place on the Feast of the Ascension, 2007.

ROCOR Liturgy at the Holy Sepulchre

Here is my translation of an exclusive news story from the French-language blog Moinillon au Quotidien, from which the two photographs have also been taken (I've added the hyperlinks):

Yesterday evening, for the first time in many years, a bishop of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia celebrated the Liturgy at the Holy Sepulchre. Bishop Agapit [of Stuttgart, vicar of the German Diocese] (in gold vestments) celebrated with Metropolitan Aristarchos [of Constantia] of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

During the Soviet period, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (as did the majority of official Orthodox Churches) ceased official relations with ROCOR at the request of the Patriarchate of Moscow.

After the reunification of the Russian Church, on the Feast of the Ascension two years ago, Patriarch Alexy [II] wrote to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The response came two years later: the Patriarch of Jerusalem, in a benevolent letter addressed to Moscow, formalized the relations between the Church of Jerusalem and the reunited Russian Church.

It is particularly joyful that it was precisely Bishop Agapit of Stuttgart – one of the most humble of our Church – who had the joy of participating in this Eucharistic communion.

A few additional historical remarks: While it is true that, following the reemergence of the Moscow Patriarchate onto the world scene following the Second World War, ROCOR clergy were prevented from serving at the Holy Sepulchre and concelebration between clergy of the Jerusalem Patriarchate and ROCOR was indeed rare, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem never ceased to recognize ROCOR's canonical validity. All Divine services performed in ROCOR's Russian Ecclesiastical Mission were done with the Patriarch's blessing, on antimens consecrated by the Patriarch, and with the Patriarch's name commemorated. Clergy and laity were allowed to receive Holy Communion at Divine Liturgies performed at the Holy Sepulcher, but not to serve there. My friend and former colleague Andrei Psarev offers further historical background here:

The Second World War brought changes to the course of political events in the USSR regarding the Russian Orthodox Church, and redrew the political map of Europe. These events could not have failed to reflect on the relationships of ROCOR to other local Orthodox Churches. Other local Orthodox Churches recognized the Moscow Patriarchate, and this acknowledgement required them to attentively regard the persistent expectations from Moscow that they abrogate their relationship with ROCOR. While in Jerusalem in 1952, Bishop Seraphim of Mahopac met with Patriarch Timotheos, who explained that Bishop Seraphim had been denied the opportunity to serve at the Holy Sepulchre because the Church of Jerusalem had recognized the Moscow Patriarchate. The promise made to Moscow to no longer pray with “the Karlovites,” however, did not prevent Patriarch Timotheos from serving liturgy in May 1954 at the Convent on the Mount of Olives with Bishop Leontii of Geneva. Just as before, all heads of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, as well as the abbesses of monasteries, were affirmed by official letters issued by the Jerusalem Patriarchate.

The reestablishment of full and normal relations between ROCOR and the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, and particularly of the reacquired blessing of celebrating the Divine Liturgy at the Holy Sepulchre, is joyous news indeed.

The Theology of Illness (1 of 3)

Question of health and sickness have been very much on my mind these past two years, and for this reason I have decided to return to two books authored by the remarkable French Orthodox scholar, Jean-Claude Larchet: The Theology of Illness and Mental Disorders and Spiritual Healing, (the third volume of the trilogy, The Therapy of Spiritual Illness is due out in English this summer from Alexander Press). I hope to blog about these two books over the course of the next several days, covering one chapter a day.

The co-translator of the book, Fr John Beck, describes the structure of The Theology of Illness in these words:

The author begins with consideration of the relation between sickness and sin, providing a traditional yet refreshingly contemporary view of human nature and the human person. The questions he considers are fundamental: the origins of sin in a fallen world, its impact on physical health, and the healing of human nature by the incarnate Son of God. In the second chapter, he discusses the positive value of illness: how it can engender spiritual growth, patience and prayer. Finally, he takes up the matter of healing as a means of glorifying God, stressing again the crucial role of prayer and sacramental grace in promoting genuine health.

In his introduction, Dr Larchet notes:

The development of medicine in a purely naturalist perspective served to objectify illness, making of it a reality considered in itself and for itself. Illness came to be construed as uniquely physiological and somehow independent of the afflicted person. Rather than treat the person, many physicians today treat illnesses or organs. This fact – complicated by diagnostic methods that are increasingly quantitative and abstract, together with therapeutic methods that are more and more technical – has had as its primary consequence the effect of considerably depersonalizing medical practice.

As a result “a great many of our contemporaries to expect that salvation comes from medicine and encourage them to make of the physician a new priest of modern times, a king who holds over them the power of life or death, and a prophet of their ultimate destiny.

Professor Larchet begins his first chapter with the assertion that “God cannot be considered to be the author of illness, suffering and death.” Man in the original state of his nature was immortal, but “the incorruptibility and immortality of the first man were due solely to divine grace.” The prelapsarian state of man was what we call paradise; here the Fathers affirm that man was not created in paradise but placed there by God. Here Larchet offers this tantalizing footnote concerning the place of Adam in human history:

The Fathers have radically different conceptions of the origin of man than those held by modern science. The history of man as it is conceived by human paleontology, as compared with the point of view of Holy Tradition, refers only to the history of humanity outside of paradise. The Fathers would see homo habilis not as a representative of humanity as he emerged from the hands of God, but as already fallen from his original state, fallen in the lowest state of his “involution,’ and beginning to develop himself according to a new mode of existence. (It is important, therefore, to avoid confusing the state of spiritual infancy attributed by the Fathers to Adam at the time of his creation [...] with the historical “infancy” or a state of underdevelopment that characterized the earliest human beings.) The original condition of man as is presented by Scripture and the Fathers is situated in another temporal order than that of historical knowledge: it does not belong to the time of sensible realities (chronos), but to the duration of spiritual realities (aion), which eludes historical science because it belongs to the sphere of spiritual history. Without being “non-temporal” (because it had a beginning in time and developed over time, which it in fact began), the existence of Adam in his primitive state is “ante-historical,” just as human existence following the parousia will be post-historical. Spiritual history, then, cannot be replaced by historical science The teaching of Tradition about human origins is neither more nor less incomplete with our present knowledge of human paleontology than is the faith of the Church in the eucharistic transformation of bread and wine into Body and Blood of Christ with the findings of the science of chemistry, or faith in the Ascension of Christ with the findings of physics and astronomy. In each of these cases, we are dealing with two different modes of apprehension that cannot be reduced one to another. Each concerns different modes of being and becoming. Faith and spiritual knowledge correspond to a domain in which the laws of nature are transcended and to a mode of existence that is, in the proper sense of the term, “super-natural.”

Larchet, following the Fathers, states that “the source of illness, infirmities, sufferings, corruption, and death, together with all other evils that presently afflict human nature, in the personal will of man, in the bad use to which he has put his free will, that is, in the sin which he committed in Paradise.” Yet the world was created good, but it was man’s responsibility to preserve it as such: “God created man as a microcosm within the macrocosm, so that man might recapitulate every created being.” According to St Maximus the Confessor, “man’s primary mission was to unite Paradise with the rest of the earth, and thereby to enable all other created beings to participate in the conditions of Paradise.”

Larchet next poses the question of whether people are responsible for the illness that afflict them. He answers that individuals are not; the responsibility is in the nature we inherited from Adam. Larchet clarifies that, according to the Eastern Fathers, “men inherit not the sin of Adam itself, but rather its consequences.” St Cyril of Alexandria writes:

Nature fell ill from sin through the disobedience of a single man, Adam. Thereby the multitude of human beings was made sinful; not because they shared Adam’s sin – they did not even exist yet; but because they shared his nature which had fallen under the law of sin.

For this reason one can say that “illnesses that afflict human beings appear to be due not to their person sins, but to the fact that they share in the fallen human nature of their first father Adam.” But not everything can be blamed on Adam, since we imitate him:

All men, in fact, bear responsibility to the degree that they have become imitators of Adam. It is because Adam’s descendants have also committed sin that the consequences of Adam’s sin have affected them. This is precisely St Paul’s teaching: “by one man sin entered into the world, and by sin death; thus death spread to all men, because all men sinned."


We are all co-responsible with Adam; we have developed and multiplied the consequences of his fall; there is a “solidarity in evil between Adam and his descendants.” This leaves us with a “collective responsibility in the face of misfortune that strikes our neighbor, of which illness is merely one expression.”

Larchet goes on to consider the healing of human nature by the Incarnate Word:

By His Incarnation, Christ has overthrown the barrier which separates our nature from God and has opened nature once more to the deifying energies of uncreated grace. By his redemptive work, He has freed us from the tyranny of the devil and destroyed the power of sin. By His death, He has triumphed over death and corruption. By His resurrection, He has granted us new and eternal life. And it is not only human nature, but also the creation as a whole which Christ heals and restores, by uniting it in Himself with God the Father, thereby abolishing the divisions and ending the the disorders that reigned within it because of sin.

Yet that begs the question of why illness persists. Larchet replies:

The restoration and deification of human nature accomplished in the hypostasis of Christ remains potential for human hypostases unless and until they are incorporated and united in His. This incorporation and uniting are accomplished within the Church – which is the Body of Christ – by the grace of the Holy Spirit communicated in the sacraments. It is necessary, nevertheless, that man collaborate in this transformation of himself by grace. He must work (cf. Phil 2:12) to appropriate it; he must open himself to it and assimilate himself to it by constant effort. Through baptism he puts off the “old man” (Eph 4:22) and puts on Christ (Gal 3:27). Thereby he becomes the “new man” – but only potentially. He needs to actualize this transformation in himself from his fallen nature to a restored and deified nature. This can only occur by virtue of a process of growth which presupposes first a constant renunciation of the fallen state of human nature, an ongoing struggle against temptations and self-purification, and second, acquisition of a renewed nature in Christ by practicing the commandments (cf. Mat 7:14; 11:12), one falls again and again, and no one can claim to be without sin (cf. 1 Jn 1:8-10; Rom 3:10-12).

It will only be at the end of time “that the restoration of all things will take place,” when “the order and harmony destroyed by sin will be restored and the benefits acquired by Christ in his work of redeeming and deifying our human nature will be fully communicated to all.”

Larchet concludes with a consideration of the connection between illnesses of the body and illness of the soul, offering the surprising proposition that the “illnesses of the body, far form being directly engendered by illnesses of the soul, are to the contrary provoked by the health of the soul.”

This is a remarkable work, deeply steeped in the patristic tradition yet eminently readable, and one that I would urge all to acquire and read attentively. I hope to treat chapter two tomorrow.

Fr Justin on the Sunday of the Paralytic

Here follows my translation of a homily given by Archimandrite Justin (Popovic) on the Sunday of the Paralytic at the Ćelije convent, 1978. That year this Sunday coincided with the day commemorating St John the Theologian (May 8):

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

In four words is expressed the entire mystery of this (and the other) world, and of every person, and of the mystery of my being, and of the mystery of your being. If there were no Risen Lord, His Resurrection would not be; if there were no Risen Lord, we would not be. There would be no Christian in the world.

How did the Lord Christ conquer this world, how did Christianity conquer this world? You know that in the beginning of Christianity the great and powerful Roman Empire persecuted Christians everywhere for 330 years. They did not defend themselves with guns and airplanes, no! They defended themselves through prayer and God’s help. And for 330 years they turned wolves into sheep. Recall the Savior’s words to His disciples: Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves (Mt 10:16). A great miracle took place, brethren: the wolves were turned into sheep, and the wolves did not devour the sheep, did not tear up and destroy them. What is this? What is this power? This is that power about which you heard today in the words of the Apostle Peter, when he says to Aeneas: Arise, and he immediately rises (Acts 9:34); and when he says to Tabitha: Arise, and she rises from the dead as from sleep (Acts 9:40). What is this, what happened to this world? A great mystery has been explained, the mystery of this world and the mystery of man. What does the Lord Christ’s Resurrection demonstrate? It demonstrates that man is an eternal being. Death is defeated – that is what the Lord Christ’s Resurrection means. Life Eternal is provided for all human existence. It was for this that the Lord came to this world.

This world had been constantly under the power of terrible death. What is more terrible than death? Nothing! This entire planet, this holy land of God, had been a cemetery and tomb, an enormous tomb, and people were plucked into this tomb one after another. So the Lord Christ, through His Resurrection, showed us all that we people are eternal beings, that we are created for Eternal Life. Yes, for Eternal Life, and nothing less. If Christ be not risen, says the Apostle Paul, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain (1 Cor 15:14). What is Christ to us, if He has not conquered death? How then do we, Christians, differ from other people? Here, look: today, and yesterday, and always throughout the history of the world there are continuously valiant men, heroes. But who are they, what are they? Mosquitoes…

Only the Lord Christ stands as the Conqueror of death and the Giver of life. In this lies His exceptionally greatness. Our faith is faith in the Resurrection of the Lord Christ and in our own resurrection. Christ is risen, which means that we are all risen! He is risen in order to give us Life Eternal, in order to ensure us victory over death, this only true victory in this world. All other victories are just mockeries. Millions of people perish – for what? Why do people perish today? Not for the reason for which they were created, not for Life Eternal, but for earthly, corruptible, simple, negligible things.

When people in their madness forget God, when people in their madness persecute the Lord Christ, what happens to these people, what is this land then? Then this land is a madhouse! To persecute the Lord Christ, the most elevated Being in this world, this great Lover of mankind – what is this? This is madness, insanity. We people, we turn this world, this little star of God called Earth, we turn it into a madhouse. Therefore every condemnation of man and mankind is just. All of us people are responsible in this world for death in this world, for sin in this world, for the devil in this world. What will happen to us if we start a war against God? We are always weaker than He; we will always be defeated.

Look at how many dead souls, at how many corpses there are among the Serbian people alone. People reject the Lord Christ, they reject Life Eternal – for what? What is this world offering them? But we stand with the Apostle Paul for Eternal Truth: Christ is risen, so that we too would be risen (1 Cor 15:20-23). This is the foundational truth for us Christians. The Orthodox Church glorifies the Resurrection of the Lord Christ, His feast, not for a day or two, but for forty days – until the Ascension – continuously glorifying the Resurrection of the Lord Christ. And not only then: the Resurrection of the Lord Christ is glorified every Sunday; every Sunday, brethren, we remember the Resurrection of the Lord Christ. The Resurrection? It does not grow old in our soul. The power of the Lord Christ is poured out on us through His Holy Resurrection, through this infinite joy.

Today you heard from the Epistle of St John the Theologian what he said about the Lord Christ: that which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life… we bear witness unto you (1 Jn 1:1,2). This we bear witness unto you, the Lord Christ, Who grants Eternal Life. We, like His disciples, have handled Him with our hands. Christianity, persecuted for almost two thousand years already, is created stronger than all earthly things. Many nightmares and storms will come, but the Church of Christ will remain and not perish. People perish, but not the Church! People perish, but not the Church! St John the Theologian, a man who witnessed and witnesses with all his being and all his conviction that Christ is the God-Man, says: if you want to possess Life Eternal, then believe in the Lord Christ, in His Resurrection, believe in what He has done (c.f., 1 Jn 5:5, 12-13).

Look at the Apostle Peter, how he resurrects people and performs miracles. Sheep turn wolves into sheep and lambs. St Basil of Ostrog today, too, performs miracles, as does St Prochorus of Pchinja, and all the countless Serbian saints. How does this come about? From the Resurrection of the Lord Christ, from the Feast that is celebrated for forty days and on Sundays throughout the course of the entire year. This is what supports us Christians in this world. We laugh at our persecutors; we do not fear death, we are children of the Risen Lord, for He gave us the power and strength to defeat everything that separates us from God, that separates us from his Righteousness, His Truth, His Goodness.

May the Good Risen Lord confirm us through His Disciple, St John, through the All-Holy Theotokos, and through all the Saints, in this faith in the Resurrection of the Lord Christ, in our resurrection, in the fact that we are eternal beings. Our calling in this world is to manifest the Resurrection of the dead and the victory over death. This victory over death is experienced by every one of us when we live evangelically, when we strive in faith in the Lord, in love, and in prayer to fulfill our lives. All this, deeply engraved on our souls, will lead us to Life Eternal.

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia

The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (also known as ROCOR or the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad) celebrates the memory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia today, the Sunday nearest to the anniversary of the martyrdom of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and Gallich, the first bishop killed during the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified (i.e., canonized) the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981. The following is from the epistle of the Synod of Bishops, then led by Metropolitan Philaret, to announce the glorification:

Those who fought against God celebrated their victory over their innocent victims. The meek tsar, who had been forsaken by everyone, they slew, as a symbol of the Orthodox realm; they put to death the pastors of the Church who held it together, as well as monastics and members of the laity, those who loved Christ - men, women and even innocent children. With subtle moral tortures, they committed murder, they desecrated, they shot down, they battered to death, they slew with starvation, with cold, and with onerous labors in death camps. Drunk on the blood of their victims, the tormentors reached the point of total insanity: they buried people alive, drowned them in rivers, cut out their tongues, hanged them in churches from the Royal Doors, murdered their wives and children.

A single charge, was sufficient to result in execution: this is a servant of God, a believing Christian!

The faithful went like lambs to the slaughter, mute, submitting to the will of God, even unto death. Nothing was able to separate them from their love for Christ, not tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword (Rom. 8:35).

This struggle illumined the Orthodox Church with new glory during those days of persecution; they became our glory, our victory, our joy. They departed from the Church Militant as conquerors and entered into the everlasting joy of the Church Victorious.

But the Church of Christ is one, and both aspects thereof, earthly and heavenly, live a single life, through love for Christ alone! Gazing upon their feat, we suffered with them, we prayed for them. Yet more and more often the faithful inquired whether it was not time to pray to them instead of for them. For it was beyond doubt that they had already entered into the joy of their Lord.

The epistle goes on to state that normally each autocephalous (self-governing) Orthodox Church glorifies its own saints. In this case, however, it was not possible for the Church in Russia to participate:

The Russian Church in the Soviet Union is not now able to do this, since it is deprived of the ability to speak its mind and to act according to its conviction. It is squeezed in the vice of the godless administration which has made the Church's subjection its task, to be followed by its total annihilation. It does not have bishops who function and participate freely, who would promulgate an official act of canonization. They are silent.

It is important to note that the epistle here calls the Moscow Patriarchate the "Russian Church in the Soviet Union," never denying this status and the reality of their hierarchy. The epistles states that this Church is not able to perform this glorification because "it is deprived of the ability to speak its mind and act according to its conviction. These words should be born in mind: the bishops were not judging or condemning the Moscow Patriarchate, only stating that it was impossible for them, due to the conditions of living under the Communist regime (bear in mind that this was still during Brezhnev's time), to act on its own convictions.

In 2000 the Council of Bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate did in fact glorify the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Nothing better symbolizes the reconciliation of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russian with the Moscow Patriarchate than the joint participation in laying the foundation of a church in the Butovo Field outside Moscow, and then jointly consecrating and serving the first Divine Liturgy in the newly-built church. Fr Sergei Sveshnikov explains the significance of the Butovo Field in the following sermon:

Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the former Russian Empire suffered for faith, and by this showed their loyalty. In many cities and villages of Russia, churches are now being restored on the places of their executions, on the blood of the new-martyrs. Here is just one of the most fearful examples. On Butovo Field, the NKVD [People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs] shot tens of thousands of people from the 1930s to the 1950s. In the years 1937 and 1938 alone, in fifteen months 20,765 people were shot there. As research has shown, about a thousand of them suffered for Christ and loyalty to His Church. The place where shots and dying groans of uncountable executed people so recently sounded without ceasing is now a place of church prayer. As in the first centuries of Christianity, services were performed over the tombs of the martyrs, even today the Butovo Field has become a place of offering the Bloodless Sacrifice.

On May 15, 2004, Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow and All Russia and the First Hierarch of the Russian Church Outside of Russia, Metropolitan Laurus, laid the foundation of a church in the memory of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia on the Butovo Field. This year on the May 20, both hierarchs will perform the consecration of the church. There, at every service prayer will be offered to the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors.

Another richly symbolic moment was the presentation of the vestments Metropolitan Philaret had worn at the glorification of the New Martyrs in 1981 to Patriarch Alexei. Protodeacon Nikita Chakiroff, Metropolitan Philaret's personal attendant, left the set of the latter's vestments with a note containing these words:

My health is poor, and the doctors say that I will not live long; that is why I leave them to you to safeguard, and when the time comes, when the Lord frees Russia, our Homeland, when blessed days arrive, foretold by St Seraphim of Sarov the Wonder-worker, then take them to our Homeland. Give them to His Holiness the Patriarch of All Russia, and one set must be given to Diveevo Lavra, and tell them whose they were. Say that we preserved them as a treasure, and say that Vladyka Metropolitan Philaret, as he performed the rite of the glorification of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, in his sensitive soul, endured the suffering of every martyr and rejoiced at their staunchness and unwavering strength and devotion to the Truth.

These vestments were in fact presented to Patriarch Alexei by a ROCOR delegation on November 29, 2006. The Act of of Canonical Communion between ROCOR and the Church in Russia was signed, and the first join Liturgy served, on the Feast of the Ascension, 2007.

A key to the above icon can be found here.

Bright Tuesday: Fr John (Krestiankin)

CHRIST IS RISEN!

Archimandrite John (Krestiankin) was born on April 11, 1910, in Oryol, Russia, the eighth and final child of Mikhail Dimitrievich and Elizaveta Ilarionovna Krestiankin. He was actively engaged in Church life from his earliest youth, first expressing an interest in monasticism at the age of twelve. As a boy he approached Bishop Nikolai (Nikolsky), who was being sent to a new diocese. The bishop looked at him and asked “For what do you want a blessing?” “I want to become a monk,” the boy replied. The bishop put his hand on the boy’s head and said: “First finish school, work, and then take holy orders, and in time you’ll certainly become a monk.” Such is exactly what happened. He was ordained to the diaconate on January 14, 1945, by Metropolitan Nikolai (Iarushevich), and to the priesthood on October 25, 1945, by Patriarch Alexy I, shortly after completing seminary as an external student. He served in the Church of the Nativity of Christ in Ismailovo, Moscow, where he regularly preached and was much loved by his parishioners. When the Communist authorities began to pressure him to cooperate, he appealed to Patriarch Alexy I for guidance. Here is how Fr John recalled the Patriarch’s reply to his question of how to deal with demands to compromise: “‘Dear Batiushka! What did I give you when I ordained you?’ ‘A service book [sluzhebnik].’ ‘There, you see. Everything that’s written in it, fulfill; and endure whatever follows.’” In 1946 Fr John moved to the newly reopened Trinity-Sergius Lavra, but a year and a half later he returned to his parish in Ismailovo. He studied as an external student at the Moscow Theological Academy, writing his thesis on St Seraphim of Sarov, but was arrested in April, 1950, shortly before its defense. This mugshot was taken after his arrest in 1950:

He spent four months in various prisons before being sentenced to seven years of imprisonment on October 8, 1950, for “anti-Soviet agitation.” He spent the next five years in labor camps, finally being released on February 15, 1955. For the next decade the authorities transferred him from parish to parish in the Pskov and Riansk Dioceses (he had been forbidden to return to Moscow). He was tonsured a monk on June 10, 1966. In 1967 he was transferred to the Pskov-Pechersk Monastery, where he spent the rest of his life. It was in Pskov that he became famous as an Elder (although he strongly protested against being called an Elder, saying that it was one thing to be an old man [старик], and quite another to be an Elder [старец]), daily receiving scores of people for spiritual council from morning until night. This photograph shows Fr John with Mr Putin on August 2, 2000:

Archimandrite John reposed at the age of 96 on February 5, 2006, after a long illness. One book by Fr John exists in English translation: May God Give You Wisdom: The Letters of Fr John Krestiankin, many excerpts of which can be read be read online, beginning here (search the same site for other installments – there are at least twenty). Parts of his Guide to Confession can also be found scattered online. A lovely video of Fr John delivering a sermon (Russian only – but worth watching, even if you don't understand a word) can be viewed here. The following is my translation of a sermon of his entitled “On Bright Week”:

Now all things are filled with light; heaven and earth, and the nethermost parts of the earth… Christ is Risen!

Children of God! From a fullness of unearthly joy I greet you with words full of Divine power: “Christ is Risen!” The holy fire of this salvific tiding has burst anew with bright flames over the Lord’s Tomb, and has spread throughout the world.

The Church of God, filled with the light of this fire, gives it to us: “Christ is Risen!”

Beloved in Christ brethren and sisters, my friends! You of course will have noticed that, of all our great and joyful Christian feasts, the feast of the Luminous Resurrection of Christ is characterized by a special solemnity, a special joy: it is the feast of feasts and the festival of festivals!

No service in our Orthodox Church is more magnificent, more heartfelt, than Paschal Matins. Therefore all the faithful rush to God’s church on the Paschal night. Indeed, the Paschal Divine service resembles a magnificent banquet prepared by the Lord for all those who stream under the grace-filled protection of His House.

Contemplate the contents of St John Chrysostom’s “catechetical homily”! With paternal tenderness and cordiality the Lord accepts those who love Him with all their being. “Blessed is he who has wrought from the first hour” – these are those who from their youth undeviatingly follow His Divine steps.

Yet he does not reject those who, overcoming doubt in their souls, approach God only in their mature or even elderly years. “Let him not fear for having delayed, for the Lord in His love will accept the last even as the first, accepting the deeds and welcoming the intention.”

Undoubtedly all who were in church on the Paschal night experienced an unusual delight… Our souls rejoiced, filled with a sense of gratitude to our Lord and Savior for the eternal life He has given us all. Indeed, Christ’s Resurrection raised the human race from earth to Heaven, giving an elevated and noble meaning to human existence.

The human soul yearns for the eternal life of joy. It seeks it… Therefore people rush to the luminous Matins in God’s church. And not only the faithful, but even those whose consciousness is from the Christian religion.

They come here not simply to look at the solemnity of the Christian service. Their souls, given by God to everyone at birth, are attracted to the light of the inextinguishable Sun of Truth, seeking the truth.

Faithful people on this holy night feel an abundant outpouring of the luminous joy of Christ’s Resurrection with particular power. And no wonder! Christ’s Resurrection is the foundation of our faith, the inviolable pillar of our earthly life.

By His Resurrection, Christ has given to people to comprehend the truth of His Divinity, the truth of His elevated teaching, the salvific nature of His death. Christ’s Resurrection is the completion of His earthly deed [podvig]. There could not have been any other end, for this was the direct consequence of the moral sense of Christ’s life.

If Christ be not risen, the Apostle Paul writes, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is futile. But Christ is risen, and He has raised all mankind with Him!

The Savior brought perfect joy to people on earth. Therefore on the Paschal night we hear a hymn that we ourselves take part in: “Angels in the heavens, O Christ our Savior, praise Thy Resurrection with hymns; deem us also who are on earth worthy to glorify Thee with a pure heart.”

In His prayer before His suffering on the Cross, He asked His Heavenly Father for the gift of this great joy for people: Sanctify them by Thy truth… that they might have My joy fulfilled in themselves (Jn 17:17, 13).

Through the Resurrection of Christ, a new world of holiness and true blessedness has been opened unto man.

During His earthly life the Savior repeatedly pronounced words that are precious to the faithful soul: Because I live, ye shall live also (Jn 14:19); My peace I give unto you (Jn 14:27); These things have I spoken unto you, that My joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full (Jn 15:11).

The Apostle Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, writes: For if we have been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection… Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him (Rom 6:5, 8).

A new life has been opened unto man. He has been given the possibility to die to sin in order to be raised with Christ and live with Him.

“A Pascha that hath opened the gates of Paradise to us,” we sing in the Paschal canon.

There is no joy, my beloved, more luminous than our Paschal joy. For we rejoice that, in the Resurrection, our eternal life has been opened unto us.

Our Paschal joy is joy for the transfiguration (change) of our life into an incorrupt life, in our aspiration for imperishable good, an incorruptible beauty. We now celebrate the greatest mystery, the Resurrection of Christ, the defeat of the Life-giver over death! Our Savior triumphed over evil and darkness, and therefore the Paschal Divine service of our Orthodox Church is so jubilant and joyful.

The faithful awaited this solemn service, preparing themselves for it during the long weeks of the Holy Forty Days. It is natural that their hearts are now filled with inexpressible joy.

The deepest meaning of Christ’s Resurrection is in the eternal life that He gave to all His followers. For 2000 years already His followers have unwaveringly believed not only that Christ arose, but in their own coming resurrection to eternal life.

Christ the Savior spoke many times during His earthly life about Himself as the bearer of life and resurrection. But then these words of the Divine Teacher were incomprehensible not only to the people who listened to Him, but even to His disciples and apostles.

The meaning of these words became clear only after Christ’s Resurrection. Only then did His apostles and disciples understand that He is, indeed, the Lord of life and the Conqueror of death. And then they went to preach throughout the entire world.

We, beloved, great each other during these joyful days with the words “Christ is Risen!” We will continue to greet one another in this way for the course of forty days, until the day of the Lord’s Ascension.

Just two words! But these are marvelous words, expressing unwavering faith, which gives joy to the human heart, in the truth of our immortality.

Christ is Life!

He many times spoke of Himself as the bearer of life and resurrection, as the source of eternal life, which is without end for those who believe in Him.

Christ is Risen! – and may our souls rejoice in the Lord.

Christ is Risen! – and may our fear of death vanish.

Christ is Risen! – and our hearts are filled with the joyful faith that we, too, will rise with Him.

To celebrate Pascha – this means to know with all one’s heart the power and grandeur of Christ’s Resurrection.

To celebrate Pascha – this means to become a new person.

To celebrate Pascha – this means with all one’s heart and mind to thank and glorify God for His ineffable gift, the gift of resurrection and love.

In these days we all exult and joyfully celebrate, praising and glorifying the deed [podvig] of the triumph of Divine love.

Christ is Risen!!!

Let us throw open our hearts to meet Him Who suffered, and died, and arose for our sake. He will enter and fill our life with Himself and His Light, transfiguring our souls. We answer this by striving towards Him along our way of the Cross, for at its end, there is no doubt, shines our own resurrection to life eternal.