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Note: these excerpt threads are subject to continual revision and updating as opportunity and priority permits Timothy Ware: "Just as each person is made according to the image of the Trinitarian God, so the Church as a whole is an icon of God the Trinity, reproducing on earth the mystery of unity in diversity. In the Trinity the three are one God, yet each is fully personal; in the Church a multitude of human persons is united in one, yet each preserves her or his personal diversity unimpaired. The mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity is paralled by the coinherence of the members of the Church. In the Church there is no conflict between freedom and authority; in the Church there is unity, but no totalitariansim... | The Orthodox approach to religion is fundamentally a liturgical approach, which understands doctrine in the context of divine worship... Orthodoxy see human beings above all else as liturgical creatures who are most truly themselves when they glorify God, and who find their perfection and self-fullfilment in worship. Into the Holy Liturgy which expresses their faith, the peoples have poured their whole religious experience. It is the Liturgy which has inspired their best poetry, art, and music. Among Orthodox, the Liturgy has never become the preserve of the learned and the clergy, as it tended to be in the medieval west, but it has remained popular - the common possession of the whole Christian people... | In most of the sacraments the Church takes material things - water, bread, wine, oil - and makes them a vehicle of the Spirit. In this way the sacraments look back to the Incarnation, when Christ took material flesh and made it a vehicle of the Spirit; and they look forward to, or rather they anticipate, the apocatastasis and the final redemption of matter at the Last Day. Orthodoxy rejects any attempt to diminish the materiality of the sacraments. The human person is to be seen in holistic terms, as an integral unity of soul and body, an so the sacramental worship in which we humans participate should involve to the full our bodies along with our minds..." [240|266|274-275] The Orthodox Church "The hesychast, in the true sense of the word, is not someone who has journeyed outwardly into the desert, but someone who has embarked upon the journey inwards into his own heart; not someone who cuts himself off physically from others, shutting the door of his cell, but someone who returns into himself, shutting the door of his mind. He came to himself, it is said of the prodigal son (Lk 15:17); and this is what the hesychast also does. As St Basil puts it, he returns to himself; and having so returned inwards, he ascends to God... | Prayer ... is a laying aside of thoughts a return from multiplicity to unity. Now when we first make a serious effort to pray inwardly, standing before God with the mind in the heart, immediately we become conscious of our inward disintegration -- of our powerlessness to concentrate ourselves in the present moment, in the kairos... This lack of concentration, this inability to be here and now with the whole of our being, is one of the most tragic consequences of the Fall... It is surely evident to each one of us that we cannot halt the inward flow of our images and thoughts by crude exertion of will-power... The flow of images and thoughts will persist, but we shall be be enabled gradually to detach ourselves from it. The repeated invocation will help us to let go the thoughts presented to us by our conscious or unconscious self... This, then is the ascetic strategy presupposed in the use of the Jesus Prayer. It assists us in applying the second or oblique method of combating thoughts: instead of trying to obliterate our corrupt or trivial imaginings by a direct confrontation, we turn aside and look at the Lord Jesus; instead of relying on our own power, we take refuge in the power and grace that act through the Divine Name. The repeated invocation helps us to detach ourselves from the ceaseless chattering of our logismoi... | St Isaac the Syrian says that it is better to acquire purity of heart than to convert whole nations of heathen from error. Not that he despises the works of the apostolate; he means merely that unless and until we have gained some measure of inner silence, it is improbable that we will succeed in converting anybody to anything..." [93|99|110] Collected Works: V1: The Inner Kingdom "I would like to share with you a patristic model, a recurrent model in the Fathers that can be summed up in the words microcosm and mediate. Human beings are a complex unity. My personhood is a single whole, but a whole that embraces many aspects. As humans we stand at the center and crossroads of the creation. Saint John Chrysostom thinks of the human person as bridge and bond. In a Sufi phrase quoted by Pico della Mirandola, the human person is 'the marriage song of the world.' Each of us then, is a little universe, a microcosm, each of us is imago mundi — an icon of the world. Each reflects within herself or himself the manifold diversity of the created order. This was a recurrent theme in various pagan authors and was taken over by the early Fathers... Now because we stand in this way on the crossroads of creation, because each of us, in the words of Saint Maximus the Confessor, is a laboratory or workshop that contains everything in a most comprehensive fashion, we have a special vocation, and that is to mediate and to unify. Standing at the crossroads, earthly yet heavenly, body yet soul, our human vocation is to reconcile and harmonize the differing levels of reality in which we participate. Our vocation is to spiritualize the material, without thereby dematerializing it..." Glorify God With Your Body "We cannot mediate if we are ourselves fragmented; we cannot unify unless we are at unity within ourselves, Only if we accept our physical body as integral to our humanness can we bring together into harmony the spiritual and the material, and offer them together to God their Creator... Only on a holistic view of human personhood, which regards body and soul as an undivided unity, does it become possible for us to carry out our uniquely human vocation as mediators. When we speak in this way of the human person as mediator, we have of course to add that in the ultimate sense there is only one mediator: Jesus Christ, the ‘God-man' or Theanthropos. He is the mediator; we can only mediate in and through Him." The Unity of the Human Person - Orthodox Tradition "Jerusalem, we are told, is built as a city at unity with itself. We, each one of us, must be a city at unity with ourselves. If we are to be peacemakers, we need to rediscover our inner unity. The great principle about peacemaking is from within outwards. You can’t expect peace to be imposed by governments. It’s got to come from the human heart. From within, outwards - and we might also add from heaven, earthwards. Our human vocation is to be microcosmos, microtheos - to be a mediator, to unify creation. This was the vocation given to the first Adam in paradise. Failing to fulfill it, in his fall he brought about division rather than unity. But this vocation of mediation is restored to the human race by the second Adam, Christ. I cannot unify unless I am inwardly at one... If we look at scripture, we do not find in the Old or New Testament any contrast between head and heart. In the Bible, we don’t just feel with our hearts - we also think with our hearts. The heart is the place of intelligence and wisdom. In scripture, feeling and thinking are held together... In the hesychast tradition, entering the heart means the total re-integration of the human person in God... all these things like anger and pride which a writer in the Evagrian tradition would regard as demons, are considered by Abba Isaiah as a natural part of our personhood, created by God. Desire or anger is not in itself sinful. What matters is the way in which it is used. Our ascetic strategy is not to mortify but redirect, not eradicate but educate, not eliminate but transfigure... If we can learn to use our passions in the right way, then we should be, each of us, a true peacemaker." The Passions: Enemy or Friend? |