Homilies on the Great Litany of the Divine Liturgy - Prayer for the Environment (Metr. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos)

Homilies on the Great Litany of the Divine Liturgy

Prayer for the Environment 

By Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou

 

 Man is not an autonomous being, a solitary person, a being who lives in an infinite solitude, but is born and lives in an environment, material, social and familial. This environment is a universal home in which there is a whole world, with all its elements, that is, air, land and sea. After all, God first created the material world and then man, so that he could enter as a king in his kingdom.

This is the reason why in the Great Petitions we address to God, the so-called "Great Litany", at the beginning of the Divine Liturgy, we also pray for the world that surrounds us. "For favorable weather, for an abundance of the fruits of the earth, and for peaceful times, let us pray to the Lord." That is, let us pray to the Lord for good conditions - mildness in the air, for the fruitfulness of the earth and for peaceful times.

The Theology of the Icon

A homily of His Eminence Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos and Agiou Vlasiou, delivered at the Synodical Divine Liturgy, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, 21 February 2010, in the Sacred Church of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite in Athens.

Today, on the anniversary of the restoration of the sacred icons, we celebrate the feast of Orthodoxy and in this way is shown the connection between the sacred icons with the Church and, of course, with Orthodoxy.

In one of the hymns we chanted today in the service of Matins, the glory of the Church is expressed: "Today has been manifested as a day of festivity and joyfulness. The bright light of the most true dogmas shines as lightning. And Christ's Church is glowing, for She is once again adorned with the replacement and installation now of holy icons and depictions, and the light that they radiate. And a oneness of mind among the believers has God bestowed." Church, dogmas and icons are in the light of the glory of God and are the revelation of the beauty of Orthodoxy.

Saint Tryphon the Great Martyr as a Model for our Lives

St. Tryphon of Lampsakos (Feast Day - February 1)

By Protopresbyter Fr. George Papavarnavas

"When I was in Lampsakos and cared for and herded geese, the wrath of God fell, not only on that place, but in all the surrounding area. The rage was in the vineyards, the gardens and the leaves, and the fruit rotted and no longer appeared. When I, the leastest Tryphon, saw the fruits rotting and the people languishing with sorrow for the cause of the disappearance of the fruits of the earth, the fields, the vineyards, the gardens, the vegetables and all the trees, I prayed to my Lord and God that all the beasts perish that caused the injustice and damage to the gardens, the fields, the vineyards and all the trees and vegetables, and to all those who inhabit the small town, which is located near the lake, who came by my request and invitation. And while I knelt and prayed to God with upraised hands, God, who listens to those who have established their hope in Him, He sent forth and angel, who killed the criminal beasts that destroyed the vineyards, the gardens, and the place of His servants, and these beasts he knew well by name and they are as follows: caterpillar, worm, caterpillar worm, weevil, mole cricket, locust, epimalos, kaligaris, makropoys, ant, louse, rygitis, psyllid, cutworm, claviceps purpurea, snail, catachlorops and everything else that destroys and withers the grapes and other species and vegetables. But I myself, however, have bound them to an oath for them not to come and live in the places where I am invited, but I ordered for them to go away to places that have not been stepped on by man."

Christmas with Holy Elder Porphyrios 23 Years Apart

By Fr. Andrew Konanos

When on Christmas day, in 1990, I visited the Holy (now officially!) Elder Porphyrios in Oropos, he told me the following quote, and I still remember it after 23 years. I believe it is a phrase of Saint John of Damascus. So Saint Porphyrios told me: "For the knowledge of God's existence has been implanted by Him in all by nature."

In other words, to know and conceive that God exists with your mind, is seeded and planted, archetypally, in a natural and simple way within all of creation. Everything in the universe, in a mysterious way, speaks of the existence of God.

He said this to me while holding my hands within his, and he spoke slowly, meaningfully, and he lived it. And he transferred it to our soul.

May we have his prayers and warm love.

Venerable One of God, pray for us, your children, siblings and friends. Amen.

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos

On December 24, 2013 the first mural of Holy Elder Porphyrios was completed in the Archdiocese of Belgrade-Karlovac in the Church of the Ascension of our Lord, under the direction of master artist Vladimir Karanovića of Zarka. (photo above)

Source

 

 

The Application of Orthodox Theology

By Protopresbyter Fr. John Romanides

All men regardless of nationality, race, and color have the noetic faculty and therefore the possibility of reaching illumination by means of purification and then if God pleases they may experience glorification at its varying degrees.

In any case the varying levels of theoria are the highest experiences of Orthodox spiritual life and theology.

Such a spiritual life and theology is neither Greek, nor Russian, nor Bulgarian, nor Serbian, etc., but rather prophetic, apostolic, or simply christian.

In the light of this one may put the question, what is "Russian Spirituality", and why is it presented as something higher than or simply different from other Orthodox spiritualities?

It seems that once Orthodox theologians come to the realization that the highest form of theology is theoria, which is the ongoing tradition of Pentecost in history, then they can properly take up positions for examining this tradition in its historical setting in order to evaluate correctly the applications of this theology to the relations of the Church to society and the world at large.

The most powerful element in this understanding of theology before us is that its bearer is liberated from enslavement to his environment, not by means of escape from it, but by the liberation of the noetic faculty from influence and domination by the intellect, the passions and the environment in such wise that the intellect, the passions and the environment are transformed by those who have reached illumination and theoria.

It is quite obvious that Christ prayed for the union of the Apostles and their followers in the vision of the glory of the Father in Himself by the Holy Spirit "in order that the world may believe" that the Father sent Him.

The world does not believe because of Christians in general, since they are many times no better and even worse than members of other religions. Because of such Christians many people cannot see the sense in taking Christianity seriously, even though they may accept Christ as a great religious leader and moral teacher.

It is only because of Christians in the states of illumination and theoria that the world believes that the Father sent His Son. One can readily examine how those in theoria influence their environment by studying the cult of Saints especially centered in their icons and relics.

Having this tradition of theoria in mind one begins to realize that there are many idols and myths which have invaded the modern Orthodox understanding of history by means of the official Russian tradition which after Peter the Great betrayed the Orthodox Civilization of New Rome and joined the Feudal Civilization of Frankish Europe. The unceasing tradition of theoria means that as long as this tradition continues the Patristic tradition continues, meaning simply that the central core of the Orthodox tradition continues.

At the time of the fall of New Rome this tradition was very strong among the Romans of the Patriarchates of New Rome, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.

However, soon after the foundation of the Patriarchate of Moscow, the Church of Moskovy officially condemned hesychasm, to wit the Trans-Volga Elders, known as Non-Possessors, and supported a type of monasticism which is foreign to the tradition of theoria and more like the feudal monastic establishments of feudal Europe.

Yet there is a tendency to picture the Roman Orthodox under Arabic and Turkish occupation as second-rate Orthodox Christians, and Russian Orthodoxy as the best example of everything Orthodox.

It seems rather that Churches with a strong tradition of theoria are no better of worse than the other Churches with a strong tradition of theoria. Since theoria is the same wherever it is found, so the piety, spiritual life and theology is the same also.

In any case it is clear that once the Filioque controversy broke out between Franks and Romans, the Franks automatically were forced to terminate the Patristic tradition since the Roman Fathers after St. John Damascus actively wrote against and condemned the Frankish Filioque.

It is necessary to study and get a clear picture of when and why the Russians followed the Franks in terminating the Patristic tradition. It is this Russian tradition which was taken to the new kingdom of Greece with the establishment of the Theological School of the University of Athens.

It is very significant that the Council of 1368 in Constantinople New Rome declared that St. Gregory Palamas is a Father of the Church like the other great Fathers and excommunicates all who disagree. What this Council was actually doing is condemning those who agreed with the Franks who believed that their scholastic theology is better than Patristic theology which for the Franks ended in the 8th century.

It is also very clear that the Orthodox tradition of theoria has no room whatsoever for the Latin distinction between the so-called active life and the so-called contemplative life. Both these parts of the life of celibacy of the Latin tradition of monasticism and orders are foreign to Orthodoxy.

The reason is obvious. When the noetic faculty attains to and contains the unceasing memory of God alone, the intellect, the memory, the body, and the passions continue to function, with the difference that instead of being dominated by the environment they are dominated by the noetic faculty which is completely liberated.

Because love in this state is not selfish but selfless the individual in this stage of perfection does not love God alone, but also all men and creation. He is even willing to forego his own salvation for that of others.

This means that true glorification extends from the noetic faculty and saturates the soul and body and sanctifies the environment, i.e, social and material creation.

The Orthodox warrior does not seek escape from the material world, but the sanctification of the material world by its liberation from the devil and his followers. However, he first learns how to win battles from those who have become experts in this warfare and then he teaches others.

This is what the Critical Examination of the Applications of Theology seems to be all about.

Source: "Critical Examination of the Applications of Theology".

The Respect Bees Have For Holy Icons

By Monk Simon

In the region of Kapandriti near Athens, a wonderful thing happens. Ten years ago, a devout beekeeper named Isidoros Ţiminis, thought to place in one of his hives an icon of the Crucifixion of the Lord. Soon thereafter, when he opened the hive, he was amazed that the bees showed respect and devotion to the icon, having "embroidered" it in wax, yet leaving uncovered the face and body of the Lord. Since then, every spring, he puts into the hives icons of the Savior, the Virgin Mary and the Saints, and the result is always the same.

Once I brought a handmade icon from a convent, that represented Golgotha with three crosses. Bees "embroidered" with wax the entire surface of the composition, leaving one to clearly perceive the Cross of Christ and the Thief at his right hand while the thief on the left cross was covered with a thick layer of wax.

Last time I went, we put in an icon of St. Stephen the Proto-Martyr and Archdeacon, whose name our humble publishing company bears. As you can see from the picture that we publish here, the entire icon is clothed in beeswax, leaving uncovered his face and body.

Source: The Saint's Love For Animals and the Animal's Love For the Saints. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

Holy Martyr Mamas as a Model for our Lives

Holy Great Martyr Mamas (Feast Day - September 2)

By Protopresbyter Fr. George Papavarnavas

Saint Mamas is depicted in Orthodox iconography as a horseman on a lion, and this is because he had friendly relations with animals, even the so-called wild ones. In the Orthodox Church this fact is not paradoxical, since we encounter it in the lives of many Saints. They were not tamers of wild beasts, as we see in the circus, but they calmed animals with the purity of their hearts, with simplicity and with authentic love. The Grace of the Holy Spirit flooded their existence and it made wild beasts calm and servile.

When he was young Mamas drank milk from a doe. Saint Gregory the Theologian says that each doe ran to catch up with the other in order to be the first to breastfeed the Saint. This took place because he was orphaned as a child. His parents were made worthy to shed their blood for the glory of Christ and the child grew up with an adoptive mother, Ammian, who he would call "Mama", which is why he was named "Mamas". From a young age he appeared to walk in the footsteps of his martyred parents. He had the same life as theirs and was made worthy of the same blessed end.

Whoever has purified their hearts with prayer, asceticism and the sacramental life, are proved worthy of the great gift of the Holy Spirit. They have arrived at a pre-fallen state, acquiring a living communion with the Triune God. In Paradise the First-created had love between them, together with the irrational animals, the trees, the birds, and even the wild beasts, who sat near them as calm lambs. That which disturbed and disturbs the relation of man with the rational as well as irrational creation is sin, which has social implications. Sin is a sickness. Anyone who lives in sin without seeking to get rid of it, together with the various passions that it creates, is a sick person. And sick people are those who sicken social institutions, and social institutions, in turn, sicken people more. The treatment of this sickness occurs with repentance and asceticism, with the attempt for one to live the commandments of Christ, to be purified of the passions and become a person. To experience inner freedom and true love which, according to Saint Maximus the Confessor, is the "seed of passionlessness", and this leads to personal communion with the personal God of the Church, together with a proper communion with our fellow man, as well as all of creation.

The Saints have a soft heart, love nature, and are pained when they see it destroyed, but they do not absolutize it, idolize it or worship it. They are not nature-worshipers, but are worshipers of the Triune God and love everything that He created. They rejoice over and love creation, because within it they see the logoi of being. Every creature of God has the uncreated energy of its Creator. The irrational worship of nature on the one side, and its destruction on the other, are unnatural situations, over both of which prevail selfishness and self-interest. The former protects creation not for the glory of God and out of selfless love, but out of selfishness and individualism, in order to use all of its good things and pass well with it. But in the latter, it has an interest above all to destroy nature with tragic consequences for humanity. Greed creates overconsumption, and this in turn results in hurried overproduction which destroys nature, which then "avenges humans". But in reality, man is the one who destroys himself.

I read at the beginning of last month, in an Athenian daily newspaper, that somewhere between Athens and Lamia there is a pet cemetery. Indeed, for argument's sake, they even published a photograph. They wrote that funerals for animals take place, and a lot of money is spent on their graves, some of which are quite luxurious. On these are written the names of the animals and various verses which reveal a sort of worship of them. The absence of God from a persons life leads to such extreme and unbalanced situations.

Saint Mamas, like all the Saints, was a true man and balanced. He worshiped the Creator of creation and loved and respected His creations, within which was His uncreated energies.

Finally we would like to mention that Saint Gregory the Theologian calls him not only a martyr, but a shepherd, although he had not received the sacramental priesthood. This is because the Saints are true shepherds of the people, who lead them to a correct and balanced life and ultimately to salvation.

"Shepherd thy people in life-giving pastures with the staff given thee by God. And crush the invisible enemies beneath the feet of those who praise thee. For all in danger have thee as a fervent intercessor, O holy Mamas." (Kontakion in the Third Tone)

Source: Ekklesiastiki Paremvasis, "ΜΕΓΑΛΟΜΑΡΤΥΣ ΜΑΜΑΣ", September 1998. Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

Holy Hieromartyr Athenogenes of Pedachthoe and His Ten Disciples

St. Athenogenes of Pedachthoe (Feast Day - July 16)

Hieromartyr Athenogenes and his Ten Disciples suffered for Christ during the persecution of Christians in the city of Sebastea in Cappadocia. The governor Philomachos arranged a large festival in honor of the pagan gods and called upon the citizens of Sebastea to offer sacrifice to the idols. Most of the inhabitants of Sebastea were Christians, and refused to participate in the impious celebration. Soldiers were ordered to kill those who resisted, and so many Christians received a martyr’s crown.

It came to the governor’s attention that Christianity was spreading because of the grace-filled preaching of Bishop Athenogenes. Soldiers were ordered to find the Elder and arrest him. Bishop Athenogenes and ten of his disciples lived in a small monastery not far from the city. The soldiers did not find the bishop there, so they arrested his disciples. The governor ordered that they be bound with chains and thrown into prison.

St Athenogenes was arrested when he came to Sebastea to inform the judge that those who had been jailed were innocent. While in prison, St Athenogenes encouraged his spiritual children for their impending struggle. Led forth to trial, all the holy martyrs confessed themselves Christians and refused to offer sacrifice to idols.

After undergoing fierce tortures, the disciples of the holy bishop were beheaded. After the execution of the disciples, the executioners were ordered to torture the bishop. Strengthened by the Lord, St Athenogenes underwent the tortures with dignity. His only request was that he be executed in the monastery.

Taken to his own monastery, the saint gave thanks to God, and he rejoiced in the sufferings that he had undergone for Him. St Athenogenes asked that the Lord would forgive the sins of all those who would remember both him and his disciples.

The Lord granted the saint to hear His Voice before death, announcing the promise given to the penitent thief: “Today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” The hieromartyr willingly bent his neck beneath the sword.

Source

The Annual Miracle of St. Athenogenes

According to the Synaxarion of St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite, Bishop Athenogenes of Pedachthoe/Heracleopolis and his ten disciples were beheaded in the year 290, during the persecution of Diocletian and Maximian. More likely the year was 303. Pedachthoe (today Bedohtun) was a small Cappadocian village about 40 miles south of Neoceasarea. This is where the Monastery of Athenogenes and his disciples was.

St. Nikodemos writes that when Athenogenes arrived at his Monastery, where he requested to undergo martyrdom, there was a deer which belonged to the monks. Athenogenes blessed this deer and prayed that its future fawns would not fall prey to hunters, but that each deer was to bring one fawn every year as an offering. Hence, from that time till the time of St. Nikodemos, a paradoxical miracle would take place annually on the feast of the Saint. During the Divine Liturgy, at the reading of the Holy Gospel, a deer with one if its fawns would come of their own accord into the church, the deer would offer its fawn, then it would leave by itself. The Christians that were gathered in the church would take this fawn and slaughter and eat it to the glory of God and in honor of St. Athenogenes.

Apolytikion in the Second Tone

Most blessed and wise Bishop and Martyr Athenogenes, you grew as a palm tree in the Monastic life; towering as a cedar in your struggles, through your teachings you brought a number of martyrs to Christ. We honor them together with you.

Another Apolytikion in the Fourth Tone

By sharing in the ways of the Apostles, you became a successor to their throne. Through the practice of virtue, you found the way to divine contemplation, O inspired one of God; by teaching the word of truth without error, you defended the Faith, even to the shedding of your blood. Hieromartyr Athenogenes, entreat Christ God to save our souls.

Kontakion in the Fourth Tone

Following the Master’s teachings, as a shepherd you laid down your life for the flock of Christ. Therefore, we praise you and your ten disciples, who under your guidance and in the fear of God suffered with you. With His life-creating right hand the Lord has granted you a crown. Pray to Him for us all, Hieromartyr Athenogenes.

"Lord Have Mercy" by St. Justin Popovich

Lord Have Mercy

By St. Justin Popovich

Little grass, have mercy!

Little bird, have mercy!

Everything within me and around me, both the small and the great, things past and things infinite, the simple and the puzzling, the dark and the bright, the visible and the invisible, the mortal and the immortal, the good and the evil, all things and everything in all worlds that I know and feel, they motivate me to blatantly pray: Lord have mercy!

Our pain summarizes all human words in one prayer and cry: Lord have mercy!

Turned toward You we are found to overflow within our whole being only one sigh: Lord have mercy!

We would like to speak of ourselves, but our tears are pouring and we tell You of our entire soul within these two words: Lord have mercy!

Every creation has its heart, and the heart is with this heart because it sighs and tends towards You: Lord have mercy!

In this sad world man has no greater need than to be granted mercy primarily from You: Lord have mercy!

And together with You and behind You that all things and all creation grant him mercy: Lord have mercy!

Mother, have mercy!

Friend, have mercy!

Little grass, have mercy!

Little bird, have mercy!

All that is within the entire cosmos:

Have Mercy! Have Mercy! Have Mercy!

Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos

Elder Paisios and the Boiled Milk During Lent

By George Skambardonis

At Panagouda, the Cell of Elder Paisios, there are two visitors from Thessaloniki. They stand, leaning on the chestnut tree. Both in their fifties, they are pale and cantankerous. They seem to be from an ecclesiastical organization, because they are looking reproachfully at the Elder, and making comments to each other quietly. The children are playing, making a fuss - at which Paisios turns and says quietly:

"Do not make noise, because beside here, beneath the earth, Americans are hidden and we will wake them, and they will come to interrupt our silence."

The children stop, and are silently puzzled. At the opposite end, John leans sideways against the rock atop his sack. He lights a cigarette. The two visitors, who appear to be harsh pietists, continue to look at the Elder with disapproval as he boils milk and oversees that it does not spill over. One of them can't stand it anymore and tells the monk:

"Elder Paisios, we are in the first days of Lent, we have a strict fast, and you are boiling milk to drink?"

The Elder is silent. He does not respond. He grabs the pot and lowers it, since the milk is boiled.

He then goes into his Cell, bringing six small, old china cups, he puts them next to each other, and carefully pours the milk into each one. He waits a bit for it to cool off, while everyone looks at him with amazement and silence. The two pietists observe this with disgust, thinking that since there are six visitors and six cups, perhaps the monk will offer them milk during these strict days of the fast.

Elder Paisios takes the full cups one by one, places them on a wooden tray, and carries them seven meters away, where he places them down on the dirt, at the edge of a bush.

He places them there in order, then he comes, sits next to us, and begins to do something with his mouth silently, an eery whistling, while looking towards the bushes. Not a few moments pass, and over there, from the bushes, comes out a viper with five small snakes very carefully - her children. I hold my breath.

The snakes are coming, all of them approaching, one by one, slithering, passing right next to us, and they go slowly-slowly to the cups, and begin drinking calmly, slurping their morning milk.

From Επί ψύλλου κρεμάμενος (Κέδρος 2003). Translated by John Sanidopoulos.

 

Lightning Strikes the Vatican...Again

By John Sanidopoulos

Even though I'm currently on a break from posting, I could no longer bear to stay away when everyone seems to be having so much fun reporting on the lightning bolt that struck St. Peter's Basilica yesterday on the same day Pope Benedict announced his resignation. There are so many things reports are leaving out, that I just wanted to list a few of the things that came to my mind. Again, this is all in fun, but it may be of some interest as well.

Lightning and the Vatican have a long history. I'm not quite sure how far back that history goes, since what I am listing here is only coming from my memory with little research. Yet we do have an interesting story  about the Catholic Church and Protestant Churches and their reaction to the experiments of Benjamin Franklin with lightning and the kite in 1752 and the invention of the lightning rod. Many in those Churches at that time believed Satan, the "Prince of the Power of the Air",  was behind storms like those of thunder and lightning, and it was theorized, for example, that by placing bells above churches and ringing them during storms that it would help disperse the storms. While Pope Gregory XIII advocated "exorcising the demons" who "do stir up the clouds", with the invention of the lightning rod this theory was slowly fading. In 1766 Father Sterzinger attacked this theory amidst much opposition from the pious, saying of Franklin's lightning rod:

For his lightning-rod did what exorcisms, and holy water, and processions, and the --Agnus Dei--, and the ringing of church bells, and the rack, and the burning of witches, had failed to do. This was clearly seen, even by the poorest peasants in eastern France, when they observed that the grand spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which neither the sacredness of the place, nor the bells within it, nor the holy water and relics beneath it, could protect from frequent injuries by lightning was once and for all protected by Franklin's rod. Then came into the minds of multitudes the answer to the question which had so long exercised the leading theologians of Europe and America, namely, "Why should the Almighty strike his own consecrated temples, or suffer Satan to strike them?"

It was common before the lighting rod for churches to suffer damage during lightning storms. The Church of Rosenburg in Austria suffered destruction by lightning three times until they had enough, and 26 years after Franklin discovered the lighting rod they installed one, preventing any future damage. St. Mark's in Venice has also been struck and damaged on numerous occasions, yet when they installed a lightning rod 14 years after Franklin's discovery, it has never since been damaged. Some see in this a triumph of reason over superstition. In many ways, it is, but cynics have played on this folly to an extreme for a number of years, asking sarcastically: "Why does the Vatican need lightning rods?"

More on this can be read in Franklin's Lightning-Rod by Andrew Dickson White.

You can buy your own t-shirt here.

Eventually the Vatican did give in to the lightning rod, with two of them in Vatican proper and twelve in the whole area. With St. Peter's massive size, there is no doubt that lightning would strike it often. We actually do know of a few cases in history.

The first comes from reports during Vatican 1, on the two most important days of the sessions: December 8, 1869 and July 18, 1870. These were considered the stormiest and darkest days Rome had ever seen. On the first date was the Episcopal Voting of the new dogma of Papal Infallibility, and the second date was the Papal Proclamation of this new dogma. As the votes were taken and the proclamation read, flashes of lightning struck the Vatican and loud clasps of thunder accompanied the reading. It was also reported that a thick envelope of darkness overcame St. Peter's Basilica, to the point where the Pope found it difficult to read the Proclamation of this new dogma without the artificial light of a candle. It was interpreted at the time that this was either a condemnation of Gallicanism and liberal Catholic theology, or a divine attestation of the new dogma in the same way lightning and thunder accompanied the giving of the Law at Sinai, or it was seen as an evil omen of impending calamities to the Papacy.

To read the article from the New York Tribune that describes this from an eye-witness, see here.

Another incident of lightning striking the Vatican comes from December 22, 1938. The report for this can be seen here, and it read as follows:

During a violent thunderstorm lightning struck the Vatican Palace, smashing the windows of the loggia in the Raphael Gallery. The Pope, who was working nearby in his private library, was not affected.

With the odd coincidence of lightning striking St. Peter's on the day Pope Benedict announced his resignation, it has left many wondering, like it did during Vatican 1, whether this is a sign of condemnation, attestation, or an omen. Or maybe, like most other lightning strikes that hit churches, it is a natural event. Time can only tell for sure. While the optimist can see this as an attestation, like the people of Israel experienced at Sinai, others can equally recall Jesus saying in Luke 10:18: "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven." Some say occultist Eliphas Levi in the 19th century depicted the Baphomet symbol to display this biblical verse by the gestures of the Baphomet's hand, but this isn't entirely the case. Nonetheless, conspiracy theorists can have a heyday speculating on connections between Satanism and the Vatican with this event. Yet, lightning is indeed seen as a sign of judgment and coming calamities, as was seen in the 2003 movie The Core when Rome and the Vatican were destroyed by lightning:

Personally, I lean towards this being a coincidental and natural event with nothing really much behind it, except for the fact that the professional photographer who took the video and photo was at the right place at the right time to allow us to speculate and circulate good stories. My only purpose here was to inform my readers that when they see the video and photo circulating, to realize that lighting and the Vatican have a long and interesting history. Here is the video:

Dog Turns Up to Dead Owner's Church Every Day

Two months after his owner died, a dog in Italy keeps turning up each day at the church she used to attend.

Nick Squires

January 16, 2013

The Telegraph

Ciccio, a 12-year-old German shepherd, waits in vain in front of the altar of the Santa Maria Assunta church in the village of San Donaci in the southern region of Puglia.

He heads to the church as soon as the bells begin to ring each afternoon, just as he did for years when his owner was alive.

The woman, who was known in local dialect as "Maria tu lu campu" - "Maria of the fields" – died suddenly in November.

Ciccio attended the funeral, following his mistress's coffin as it was carried into the church.

The dog's devotion has so impressed villagers that they have adopted him as their own, giving him food and water and letting him sleep in a covered area outside the church.

The local priest, Donato Panna, allows him to sit in front of the altar during Masses, baptisms and other services.

He is now hoping to find a new home for the faithful hound.

His behaviour is reminiscent of Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye Terrier who became famous in Edinburgh for spending years guarding the grave of his owner.

Did God Create Water?

By John Sanidopoulos

A question that should seem obvious is in fact an often asked question among skeptics. Reading Genesis 1:1, they read that God created "the heavens and the earth", but there seems to be no mention of water, though water suddenly appears in the narrative.

However, the rest of Genesis 1:1 clearly states "The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep." "The deep" referenced here is water, so when God created the earth, it was without dry land or shape, but full of darkness and water. That is the original earth. Dry land does not appear until Day 3 of Creation. Also, the Hebrew word for "heavens" in Gen. 1:1 is "Sha-mayim", which literally means "the upper waters". So in the beginning, we have God creating the upper waters and the lower waters, and later in Gen. 1:9 God separates the two allowing dry land to appear.

Water here represents a sort of chaos, which may be why in Revelation 21:1 it says: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea." There is no such chaos in the New Heaven and Earth.

It should also be pointed out that Genesis is not the only book in the Bible with a Creation narrative. In fact, there are more than a few dozen Creation narratives in the Bible that could shed further light on this question.

For example, Colossions 1:16 says: "For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him." We can safely assume that "water" is included among the "all things" mentioned here.

Proverbs 8:22 also says: "The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of old." Solomon is talking about here that God had human beings on His mind before the creation of the world. Among "His works of old", Solomon says in verse 24 that God created the waters.

Perhaps the clearest Scriptural Creation narrative that reveals God created water is found in Psalm 104:5-9, which elaborates on Genesis 1:9:

"He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved. You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains. But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight; they flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them. You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth."

Having looked more deeply into Genesis 1 and seen that the Bible contains more than one Creation narrative, I believe it becomes clear that God did indeed create water.

Does Ikaria in Greece Hold Secret to Longevity? (Video)

6 January 2013

BBC News

The inhabitants of a small Greek island live on average 10 years longer than the rest of western Europe.

Stamatis Moraitis, who is 98, was diagnosed with lung cancer and given nine months to live 45 years ago.

He says he survived because of good food, good wine, and good company on the island of Ikaria.

Doctors agree there is something special about the island.

The Salvation of the World According to St. Silouan

Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia analyzes the soteriology of St Silouan the Athonite. Identifying the similar sense of cosmic unity found both in Dostoevsky and St Silouan, the Metropolitan discusses the influence of St. Isaac the Syrian on both men, moving on to examine St. Silouan's burning desire and constant prayer for the salvation of the whole world and its theological implications.

We Must Pray for All: The Salvation of the World According to St. Silouan

By Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia

‘Love all creation’, says Starets Zosima in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov:

Love all creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand within it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.

This ‘divine mystery’ of which Starets Zosima speaks is precisely the interdependence, the reciprocal coinherence, of all created things in God.

Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else: touch one place, and you set up a movement at the other end of the world.[1]

Such is Dostoevsky’s vision of cosmic unity. The created world constitutes an individual whole, and so the salvation of each individual person is inextricably bound up with the salvation of all humankind and, yet more widely, with the salvation of the entire universe. ‘We are members of one another’ (Ephesians 4:25) needs to be given the broadest possible application. It is not only we humans who depend on each other as the limbs of a single body; but we have bonds of kinship with the animals as well, and also with trees and plants, rocks and earth, air and water. We live in them, and they in us.

Precisely the same sense of cosmic unity is expressed by St Silouan the Athonite:

He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures, more especially for those who do not know God, or who resist Him and therefore are bound for torment. For them, more than for himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord (352).[2]

The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with that love (367).

Archimandrite Sophrony, in his book on Starets Silouan, sums up the teaching of the Starets on cosmic coinherence in these words:

The life of the spiritual world, the Staretz recognized as one life and because of this unity every spiritual phenomenon inevitably reacts on the state of the whole spiritual world (101).

We shall not be distorting the meaning of the Starets – or that of Fr Sophrony – if we give to these words an all-inclusive scope: instead of saying ‘the spiritual world’ and ‘every spiritual phenomenon’, we can correctly say ‘the created world’ and ‘every phenomenon’. As Fr Sophrony states elsewhere, St Silouan believed that each person who truly prays to God ‘integrates everyone into his own eternal life whatever the geographical distance or the historical time between them’ (233). Indeed, he integrates not only every person but every thing. Nothing is alien to him. In Dostoevsky’s words, ‘Everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else.’

Despite the striking parallels between the Russian novelist and the Athonite monk, it is highly unlikely that St Silouan had ever read Dostoevsky. More probably, the similarities arise because both are shaped by the same living tradition, and both are drawing on the same sources. St Silouan (almost certainly) and Dostoevsky (possibly) have been influenced by a Mesopotamian hermit of the seventh century, St Isaac the Syrian, who writes in a famous passage of his Ascetical Homilies:

What is a merciful heart? It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, and for every created thing. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a person’s eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart; as a result of his deep mercy his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation. This is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals and for enemies of truth, even for those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy.[3]

What exactly does Starets Silouan mean when, faithful to the teaching of St Isaac, he affirms that the saints ‘embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with their love’? Let us note the all-embracing love and prayer that constitute our true vocation as human persons. There is first his firm conviction that God calls every human being to salvation. Secondly, there is his conception of the ‘total Adam’ and, linked with this, his insistence that my neighbour is myself. Thirdly, there is his firm assurance that in God’s total plan it is not only human beings but the entire cosmos that is to be redeemed and transfigured.

‘Divine love desires salvation for all’

‘It was particularly characteristic of Staretz Silouan to pray for the dead suffering in the hell of separation from God’, writes Fr Sophrony, and he goes on to recall an exchange that he overheard between the Starets and a somewhat dour hermit:

I remember a conversation between him and a certain hermit, who declared with evident satisfaction, ‘God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.’

Obviously upset, The Staretz said:

‘Tell me, supposing you went to paradise and there looked down and saw somebody burning in hell-fire - would you feel happy?’

‘It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,’ said the hermit.

The Staretz answered him with a sorrowful countenance:

‘Love could not bear that,’ he said. ‘We must pray for all’ (48).

This universal intercession commended by St Silouan, so far from being sentimental or Utopian, has on the contrary a clear Scriptural foundation: ‘God desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’ (1 Timothy 2:4). This is the key text that the seventeenth-century Arminians invoked when opposing the strict Calvinist doctrine of double predestination; this is the text that inspired the dynamic missionary preaching of John Wesley in the eighteenth century; and this is equally a saying that the twentieth-century Athonite keeps steadfastly in view:

My soul longs for the whole world to be saved (291).... Divine love desires the salvation of all (328).... The Lord’s is such that He would have all men to be saved (368).... Our one thought must be that all should be saved (379).... The merciful Lord sometimes gives the soul peace in God but sometimes makes the heart ache for the whole universe, that all men might repent and enter paradise (426).

According to St Silouan, this burning desire for the salvation of all humankind is to be found to a supreme degree in the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary:

She, like her beloved Son, desired with her whole heart the salvation of all (406).... She loved mankind and prayed ardently... for the whole world that all might be saved (365).

The fact that God desires the salvation of all does not of course mean that our salvation is automatic and inevitable. As the Letter to Diognetus states, ‘God persuades, He does not compel, for violence is foreign to Him.’[4] God’s call to salvation comes in the form of an invitation, which we on the human side are free to accept or to reject. But, although the response varies, the call is universal.

St Silouan’s belief that God does indeed desire the universal salvation of the human race can be summed up in four short injunctions: love all; pray for all; weep for all; repent for all.

(1) Love all. When as a young monk, attending a service in the Church of the Holy Prophet Elijah, St Silouan received a vision of Christ (26), the effect of this vision was to flood his soul with ‘a rare feeling of love for God and for man, for every man’ (34). This all-embracing love remained with him throughout his life: ‘Love cannot suffer a single soul to perish’, he wrote many years later (272). Comprehensive love of this kind he saw as par excellence the characteristic of the saints (not that he would have made any claim to be himself numbered among them):

The holy saints have attained the Kingdom of Heaven, and there they look upon the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ; but by the Holy Spirit they see, too, the sufferings of men on earth. The Lord gave them such great grace that they embrace the whole world with their love (396).

This ardent love, as the Starets envisages it, extends beyond the living to the dead and to those not yet born. In Fr Sophrony’s words:

In seeking salvation for all men love feels impelled to embrace not only the world of the living but also the world of the dead, the underworld and the world of the as yet unborn – that is, the whole race of Adam (108).

For St Silouan, as we have seen from his conversation with the dour hermit, this love for our fellow-humans includes even hell within its scope. Expounding the teaching of the Starets, Fr Sophrony writes:

Dwelling in heaven, the Saints behold hell and embrace it too in their love (116).

This is possible for them, because the love that is at work in their hearts is nothing else than the love of God Himself; and God’s love is present everywhere - even in hell:

God is present in hell, too, as love (115).... Even in hell Divine love will embrace all men, but, while this love is joy and life for them that love God, it is torment for those who hate Him (148).

In the words of Vladimir Lossky, ‘The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves.’[5]

In thus teaching that the power of love extends even to hell, the Starets is once more following St Isaac the Syrian:

Even those who are punished in Gehenna are tormented with the scourging of love. The scourges that result from love – that is, the scourges of those who realize that they have sinned against love – are harder and more bitter than the torments which result from fear.... The power of love works in two ways: it torments those who have sinned, just as happens here on earth; but those who have observed its duties, love gives delight. So it is in Gehenna: the contrition that comes from love is the harsh torment; but in the case of the sons of heaven, delight in this love inebriates their souls.[6]

‘The power of love works in two ways’: what the saints in heaven feel as joy, those under condemnation in hell experience as intense pain. But it is the same divine love that is present in them both.

If those in hell are not deprived of God’s love, if they are embraced also by the love of the saints, may it not still be possible for them to respond to this love that surrounds them on every side? Is there not still a hope that they may ultimately be saved? St Isaac certainly seems to have believed in universal salvation:[7] as a member of the Church of the East, dwelling safely beyond the confines of the Byzantine Empire, he had no reason to fear the anti-Origenist anathemas of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (553).

What of St Silouan? Fr Sophrony maintains that the Starets was no Origenist (109),[8] and I agree with him. St Silouan insists that our loving intercession should extend even to those in hell, we are to sorrow ‘over those who are not saved’ (377) and to weep for those ‘who do not know God’ (386). Further than this, however, he does not go. With characteristic reticence, he avoids all speculation about a final apocatastasis. He does not attempt to specify who can be saved and who cannot; that is a mystery known at present only to God. For his part he answers only with the words, ‘I do not know’:

Father Cassian used to say that all heretics would perish. I do not know about this – my trust is only in the Orthodox Church (483).

When reflecting on the possibility that in the Age to Come there may be some who remain for ever unreconciled, burning in hell-fire, the Starets says simply, ‘Love could not bear that.’ Further than this he does not go.

What of the demons? Might they also be saved, and in that case should we not pray also for them? St Isaac the Syrian, as already noted, affirms that the merciful heart is ‘on fire’ with compassion for the demons, but he does not actually say that we should pray for them. St Silouan speaks in similar terms. We are to ‘pity’ the demons, but nothing is stated about intercession on their behalf:

The Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being, loves her enemies and pities even devils because they have fallen away from God (469).

The Starets was emphatically a man of the Church; and so, if asked whether we may legitimately pray for the demons – Fr Sophrony does not in fact record any occasion when he was so asked – surely his answer would have been that the Church has no such practice; and in all such matters we must follow the Church’s rule of prayer. But at the same time it is not for us to set limits to the divine mercy.

(2) Pray for all. Love and prayer go together; if, then, we are to love all human persons, this signifies that we are also to pray for them. So the Starets writes:

I pray Thee, O Merciful Lord, let all mankind, from Adam to the end of time, come to know Thee (319).... I will pray for the whole human race, that all people may turn to the Lord and find rest in Him (328).... I beseech Thee, O Lord, let all peoples come to know Thee (332).

The Starets quotes with approval the words of an ascetic monk with whom he once talked:

Were it possible I would pray everyone out of hell, and only then would my soul be easy and rejoice (468).

‘Were it possible’: the Starets does not say that it actually is possible. The Starets sees this all-inclusive intercession as the proper and characteristic vocation of the monk.

The constant prayer for others constitutes the monk’s way of serving society as a whole:

Thanks to monks, prayer continues unceasing on earth, for through prayer the world continues to exist.... When there are no men of prayer on the earth, the world will come to an end.... The world is supported by the prayers of the saints (407-8).

In this connection Fr Sophrony refers appropriately to the sixth-century elder St Barsanuphius of Gaza, who asserts that in his day there were three men who through their prayers were preserving the whole human race from catastrophe (223).[9] Barsanuphius mentions the names of the first two, who significantly are otherwise unknown to the annals of history. He does not say who the third was, presumably because God had revealed to him that it was Barsanuphius himself.[10]

By thus praying for the world, the monk not only helps the Church and human society at large, but he also helps himself. Here the Starets describes his own experience as a monastery steward. Most monks consider that this particular ‘obedience’ renders it impossible to preserve continual prayer and inner peace, for it involves contact with large numbers of people throughout the day. Starets Silouan disagrees. If the steward will only intercede constantly for those under his charge, saying ‘The Lord loves His creation’, all will be well: he will find that he is freed from distractions and can maintain an uninterrupted remembrance of God (418).

In the monk’s relationship with the world, St Silouan distinguishes a double movement. First, through prayer the monk withdraws into himself, shutting out the world, gradually liberating himself from visual imagery and discursive thinking, and so entering into the image-free stillness of the heart. But then, within the depths of his own heart, he rediscovers his solidarity with all humankind and with the whole creation. So the monk’s flight from the world turns out to be not world-denying but world-affirming. In the words of Fr Sophrony:

In his longing for God he ‘hates’ the world and retires totally into the depths of his own heart. And when he does so totally, in order there to do battle against Satan, in order to cleanse his heart from every single passion, in the depths of this heart of his he meets with God, and in God begins to see himself indissolubly linked with the whole of cosmic existence; and then there is nothing alien, nothing that is extraneous to them.

As St Silouan observes, ‘True, Arsenius the Great was bidden to “shun” people but in the desert, too, the Spirit of God teaches us to pray for people and for all the world (296).

(3) Weep for all. True prayer cannot but be costly; loving intercession involves an inner martyrdom, a willingness on our part to accept suffering. As St Silouan says, ‘Praying for people means shedding blood (236); ‘The greater the love, the greater the suffering’ (338). It is not enough simply to read lists of names; we are required to intercede with tears of sorrow. ‘Pray for all’ means ‘Weep for all’:

My heart aches for the whole world, and I pray and shed tears fro the whole world, that all may repent (341).... My soul weeps for the whole world (371).... O Lord, grant me tears to shed for myself, and for the whole universe’ (385).

(4) Repent for all. St Silouan would have us go yet further on the path of mutual coinherence. Not only are we required to weep for all, but we should also repent for all. In his view this is part of what St Paul meant when he said, ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way fulfil the law of Christ’ (Galatians 6:2). As Fr Sophrony points out, if viewed in purely juridical terms the notion of vicarious repentance – of laying one person’s guilt upon another – makes no sense; it is simply ‘not fair’. But the love of Christ is not limited to juridical norms:

The spirit of Christian love speaks otherwise, seeing nothing strange but something rather natural in sharing the guilt of those we love – even in assuming full responsibility for their wrong-doing. Indeed, it is only in this bearing of another’s guilt that the authenticity of love is made manifest and develops into full awareness of self (120).

Adam’s fall consisted precisely in his refusal to accept that he too was involved in the guilt of Eve’s sin. ‘Adam denied responsibility, laying all the blame on Eve and on God who had given him this wife’, and so he shattered the unity of the human race. If only, instead of justifying himself, he ‘had taken upon his shoulders the responsibility for their joint sin, the destinies of the world might have been different’ (121). We in our turn, when we refuse to repent for others, are repeating Adam’s sin, thus making his fall our own.

Strange though this concept of vicarious repentance may seem to most modern readers, it has in fact an excellent Patristic pedigree. One author who expresses this idea in strong terms is St Mark the Monk (?early fifth century):

The saints are required to offer repentance not only on their own behalf but also on behalf of their neighbour, for without active love they cannot be made perfect.... In this way the whole universe is held together in unity, and through God’s providence we are each of us assisted by one another.[11]

‘Adam, our father’

St Silouan’s consuming desire for the salvation of all stands out in yet sharper relief when we take into account his teaching about what may be termed the ‘total Adam’. This is not, I think, a phrase that he himself employs, but it accurately sums up his point of view.

For St Silouan, Adam is ‘our father’ (451), the ‘father of all mankind’ (448). Following St Paul (1 Corinthians 15:22, 45), the Starets sees Adam the first-formed man as the collective head of the human race, containing and recapitulating within himself the whole of humankind. There are obvious parallels here between St Silouan and St Irenaeus of Lyon, even though the Starets was probably unfamiliar with the Irenaean writings. This solidarity and recapitulation in Adam renders all human persons ‘consubstantial’ and ‘ontologically one’, as Fr Sophrony puts it (123, 51, 217). This ontological unity is not merely abstract and theoretical but specific and actual, ‘for the whole Adam is not an abstraction but the most concrete fullness of the human being’, to quote Fr Sophrony once more (222). It was the denial of this ‘consubstantiality’ that constituted, as we saw earlier, the essence of Adam’s fall.

This unity in the ‘total Adam’ is movingly expressed in the best-known of all St Silouan’s writings, ‘Adam’s Lament’ (448-56). Here the Starets takes up and develops in his own way the liturgical texts for the Sunday before Lent, the ‘Sunday of Forgiveness’, on which the Orthodox Church commemorates the expulsion of Adam from paradise. In particular he has used the ikos appointed for that day:

Banished from the joys of paradise, Adam sat outside and wept, and beating his hands upon his face, he said: ‘I am fallen, in Thy compassion have mercy on me.’...

O paradise, share in the sorrow of thy master who is brought to poverty, and with the sound of thy leaves pray to the Creator that he may not keep thy gate closed for ever. I am fallen, in Thy compassion have mercy on me.[12]

As we read St Silouan’s prose-poem ‘Adam’s Lament’, it becomes clear that this is the lament not just of Adam but of Silouan himself, and not of him alone but of the whole human race. Adam’s sorrowful repentance is our repentance also:

The soul that has lost grace yearns after the Lord, and weeps as Adam wept when he was driven from paradise (326).... O Lord, grant unto us the repentance of Adam (271).

Nor is this all. It is the lament not of humankind alone but of the entire creation, for all created things are involved in Adam’s fall:

Thus did Adam lament,

And the tears streamed down his face onto his beard,

onto the ground beneath his feet,

And the whole desert heard the sound of his mourning.

The beasts and the birds were hushed in grief (449).

Lo, the whole earth is in travail (452).

The sin of Adam is cosmic in its effects, destroying as it does the primal harmony that prevailed between humans and the rest of creation. So Adam exclaims in his ‘Lament’:

In paradise was I joyful and glad:

the Spirit of God rejoiced me,

and suffering was a stranger to me.

But when I was driven forth from paradise

cold and hunger began to torment me.

The beasts and the birds that were gentle

and had loved me turned into wild things,

and were afraid and ran from me (455).

Because of our solidarity in the ‘total Adam’, writes Fr Sophrony, all of us share in Adam’s guilt (120). This does not mean that either he or St Silouan would endorse an Augustinian doctrine of original sin, in a fully developed form. But it does mean that, united as we are as members of a single human family, we are each of us ‘responsible for everyone and everything’, to use the phrase of Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Yet, if we are subject to a solidarity in guilt, we enjoy egually a solidarity in salvation: in the words of Khomiakov, ‘No one is saved alone.’[13] My personal salvation is bound up with the salvation of the entire human race, and indeed of the whole creation. Fr Sophrony neatly illustrates this interdependence in both sinfulness and salvation by recounting a conversation that he once heard between two Athonite monks:

The first said,

‘I cannot understand why the Lord does not grant peace to the world even if only a single person implored him to do so.’

To which the other replied,

‘And how could there be complete peace in the world if but a single malicious man remained?’ (200)

This understanding of the ‘total Adam’ means that, on each occasion when we say the Lord’s Prayer, we offer it not only on our own behalf but on behalf of everyone. As Fr Sophrony says, ‘When we pray “Our Father” we think of all mankind, and solicit the fullness of grace for all as for ourselves’.[14] St Gregory of Nyssa emphasizes this same point when he states that, since we ‘share in Adam’s nature and therefore share also in his fall’, in consequence the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, is something that we offer for Adam’s sake as well as for our own.[15] This fits exactly with St Silouan’s line of thought.

On the basis of this theology of the ‘total Adam’, the Starets is able to give a particularly powerful interpretation to Christ’s command, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 19:19). I am able to love my neighbour as myself, because by virtue of the unity of all humankind in ‘Adam our father’, my neighbour is myself. I am likewise to pray for others as I pray for myself: ‘All my desire’, says St Silouan, ‘is to learn humility and the love of Christ, that I may offend no man but pray for all as I pray for myself (350: italics in the original). In the same way the suffering of the other is my suffering, and my neighbour’s healing is healing for me as well; ‘my brother’s glory will be my glory also.’[16] ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it’ (l Corinthians 12:26).

This leads St Silouan to affirm in a strong and literal sense that my neighbour’s life is my own: ‘Blessed is the souls that loves her brother, for our brother is our life’ (371: italics in the original). For the one who prays, says Fr Sophrony,

The existence of mankind is not alien and extraneous to him but is inextricably bound up with his own being.... Through Christ’s love all men become an inseparable part of our own individual, eternal existence (47).

Christ has taken up the ‘total Adam’ into Himself and has suffered for him; we therefore should take up into ourselves ‘the life of all mankind’, looking upon every other person as our ‘eternal brother’:

Each of us must, therefore, take heed not only for himself but for this single whole (47-48).

So it is that, according to the Starets, ‘in his deep heart the Christian after a certain fashion lives the whole history of the world as his own history’; for ‘no man is alien to him’ (234).

Exactly because my neighbour is myself, because my brother’s life is my own, I am required to love my enemies.

Only in the light of St Silouan’s teaching on the ‘total Adam’ can we truly appreciate the crucial importance that he attached to love for enemies. I am to love my enemy, because my enemy is myself; I am the other whom I regard as my enemy. His life is mine, and mine is his. Love for enemies is a direct corollary of our mutual coinherence in ‘Adam, our father’.

‘Weep with me, forest and desert’

Sin and salvation, however, are not merely human in scope, but they also involve the entire created order. When Adam fell, the whole creation fell with him; and by the same token our human salvation will inaugurate the salvation of the total cosmos. As Fr Sophrony puts it, ‘Every saint is a phenomenon of cosmic character’ (223). We are not saved from but with the world.

This cosmic understanding of sin and salvation has a firm basis in Scripture. St John the Baptist, for example, greets Jesus with the words, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (John 1:29). The Forerunner does not say ‘the sins’, but he says ‘the sin’ (in the singular) ‘of the world’. Beyond the personal sins of individual humans, there is a deeper sinfulness that involves the world as a whole. St Paul in his turn states that the entire created universe is at present ‘in bondage to decay’ and ‘groans as if in pangs of childbirth’, waiting ‘with eager expectation for the revealing of the children of God’. When we humans enter into our ‘glorious liberty’ in Christ, then the whole creation will also be set free (Romans 8:19-22). Our fall, that is to say, entails the fall of all creation, and our redemption will likewise bring liberation to creation as a whole. The New Testament concludes with a comprehensive vision not only of a ‘new heaven’ but of a ‘new earth’ as well (Revelation 23:1).

The same understanding of the cosmic dimensions of Christ’s saving work finds expression in the service books of the Church. Let us take as an example a text with which St Silouan was certainly familiar: the ‘Praises’ or ‘Encomia’ recited at Matins on Great Saturday in front of the Epitaphion depicting the dead Christ laid out for burial.[17] In the first place the ‘Praises’ emphasize that Christ’s death and resurrection bring forgiveness and new life to all the human race:

Uplifted on the Cross, Thou hast uplifted with Thyself all living people; and then, descending beneath the earth, Thou raisest all that lie buried there.

Stretched out upon the Wood, Thou hast drawn us mortals to unity; pierced in Thy life-giving side, O Jesus, Thou art become a fountain of forgiveness unto all.

We notice how the atonement is not selective but universal in its scope. But the ‘Praises’ go further than this, proclaiming that Christ’s death upon the Cross has transformed the entire created order:

The whole creation was altered by thy Passion: for all things suffered with Thee, knowing, O Word, that Thou holdest all in unity.

This is a remarkable statement, but it does not stand alone. The ‘Praises’ return frequently to the theme of this all-inclusive co-suffering:

Though Thou wast shut within the narrowest of sepulchres, O Jesus, all creation knew Thee as true King of heaven and earth.

The whole earth quaked with fear, O Word, and the daystar hid its rays, when thy great Light was hidden in the earth.

Of old the lamb was sacrificed in secret; but Thou, longsuffering Saviour, wast sacrificed beneath the open sky and hast cleansed the whole creation.

O hills and valleys, the multitude of humankind, and all creation, weep and lament with me.

The sun and moon grew dark together, O Saviour, like faithful servants, clothed in black robes of mourning.

Come, and with the whole creation let us offer a funeral hymn to the Creator.

The whole earth mourns with us humans for the dead Christ laid in the tomb; and to an equal degree the whole earth is raised to new life, along with us humans, through the Saviour’s resurrection from the dead. Paschal salvation extends beyond the human realm to the world of nature, involving animals, trees, hills and valleys, sun and moon, and the totality of the material creation.

Faithful to this all-inclusive understanding of Christ’s redemptive work, the Starets believes that our personal salvation is integrally connected with the salvation of the whole world. The precept ‘Love all’ means that we are to love the entire creation: humans first, but also animals, plants, and each and every part of nature. Ours is to be a ‘love without limits’, to borrow the title of one of Fr Lev Gillet’s books.[18] We are to feel ‘compassion for the whole universe and every living creature... a love for every one of God’s creatures’, says St Silouan. ‘Weep for all’ means that ‘you will shed abundant tears for your fellow-man and for every thing that hath breath, and all creation’ (427). ‘When the soul learns love of the Lord, she is filled with compassion for the whole universe (443); and when she mourns for the withdrawal of God’s grace she calls on all creation to lament with her:

Weep with me, forest and desert. Weep with me, every creature created by God, and comfort me in my grief and sorrow (365).

In St Silouan’s teaching concerning the bonds that unite us humans to the rest of creation, there are three points that I find particularly interesting:

(1) The Starets underlines the spiritual value of the human body. While he adopts a negative attitude towards the passions, he is fundamentally positive in his estimate of our human physicality. We are to hate, not our bodies as such, but the sinfulness that corrupts them. In its present fallen state the body may appear to us as our adversary, but in its true and natural condition, as originally created by God, it is our helper and our friend. God calls us to a total sanctification:

The Light of the Lord will be in the souls and minds and bodies of the Saints (290).... The Holy Spirit pervades the entire man - soul, mind and body (353) (italics in the original).

Advancing on the spiritual way, a person becomes ‘sensible’, consciously aware, of the grace of the Holy Spirit in body as well as soul (283); the ninth of the ten ‘rewards’ that the monk receives from God ‘even here on earth’ is that ‘he feels the grace of God in his body, too’ (501)/ ‘The man with grace in soul and body knows perfect love’ (368).

‘Perfect love’, then, leads to the transfiguration of the body:

The fourth and perfect kind of love for God exists when a man possesses the grace of the Holy Spirit in both soul and body. His body is then hallowed, and after death his earthly remains become relics (343).

The Starets mentions from his own experience an instance of bodily glorification:

At Vespers during one Lent at the Monastery of Old Russikon-on-the-Hill the Lord allowed a certain monk to see Father Abraham, a priest-monk of the strict rule, in the image of Christ. The old confessor, wearing his priestly stole, was standing hearing confessions. When the monk entered the confessional he saw that the grey­haired confessor’s face looked young like the face of a boy, and his entire being shone radiant and was in the likeness of Christ (403-4).

In this way St Silouan’s theology of the human person is firmly holistic. Divine grace embraces the total person, soul and body together; the body is deified along with the soul. This has an immediate relevance for his attitude to the material creation. It is through our bodies that we relate to our physical environment, which passes within us and becomes part of us through the exercise of the five senses. If, then, sanctification involves not only our soul but our physical nature, it follows that through our body we can experience the material world as holy, and through our body we can in turn transmit holiness to the material world around us. Our body is the essential intermediary between our inward being and the world of nature; and, because our body can be filled with grace, it is clear that our own sanctification forms a single mystery with the redemption of the material creation.

As a monk of the strict Athonite tradition, St Silouan had been formed by an austere physical discipline. But never did he interpret this ascetic self-denial in a dualistic sense. The monk’s aim, in the words of St John Climacus, is precisely ‘a body made holy’.[19] He seeks the sanctification of the body, not its destruction.

(2) St Silouan gave careful thought to our relationship as humans with the animals. This is only to be expected. He had grown up in an agricultural community. The Holy Mountain which then became his monastic home abounds in living creatures, in birds, butterflies, snakes and jackals, and also (at any rate in the days of the Starets) in wolves and wild boar, not to mention the domestic animals, the horses and mules, that the monasteries used to keep in great numbers before the advent of the tractor and the jeep. Animals were his constant companions.

His attitude towards them is marked by two characteristics: by loving compassion and by realism. He displays both gentleness and detachment. Loving compassion inspires him to write:

Once I needlessly killed a fly. the poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory....

One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God (469).

At the same time the Starets urges us not to grow unduly attached to animals, and not to bestow on them the love that we ought rather to give to God and to our fellow-humans:

Feed animals and cattle, and do not beat them - in this consists man’s duty of kindness towards them; but to become attached, to love, caress and talk to them - that is folly for the soul (470).

‘I left that passage out from the first English edition,’ Fr Sophrony once said to me. ‘I knew the English would never be able to understand that.’

Incidentally, St Silouan nowhere suggests that there is anything intrinsically sinful in eating animal flesh. As an Athonite monk he would not have eaten meat, but there are many days in the year when the monastic rule permits fish. There was even a time, so he tells us, when he had to struggle against an almost obsessive desire to consume fish (470-1). If the monk abstains from meat, this is for ascetic and disciplinary reasons, not because meat-eating is in itself wrong. Indeed, the Orthodox Church had never advocated vegetarianism as a general principle.

St Silouan’s compassion for the suffering of animals did not make him lose sight of the truth that God has given this world to us humans for our use. Man, as he puts it, is the ‘supreme creation’ (376). In Fr Sophrony’s words, ‘The world itself was created for man.’[20] Of course this does not in any way justify a cruel and selfish exploitation of our natural environment. On the contrary, in our enjoyment of the world, we are to show the utmost humbleness and sensitivity. God has indeed given us ‘dominion’ over the animals (Genesis 1:28), but dominion does not signify tyranny.

(3) The compassionate love of St Silouan extends beyond animals to plants: ‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees’ (Revelation 7:3). On one occasion when the two of them were walking together, Fr Sophrony struck out with his stick at a clump of tall wild grass. The Starets said nothing, but he shook his head doubtfully; and at once Fr Sophrony was ashamed (94). In his own writings St Silouan says:

That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked – it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376).

The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being (469).

Thus cosmic compassion, this sense of our human responsibility towards the whole of creation, makes the Starets very much a saint of our own time, living as we do in an era of global pollution. His words, written over half a century ago, are marked by prophetic insight. With good reason the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, in the timely statement on Orthodoxy and the Ecological Crisis published in 1990,[21] includes St Silouan the Athonite among the witnesses that it cites, along with the Prophet Isaiah, St Isaac the Syrian and Dostoevsky.

Yet there is a tension, even a paradox, in St Silouan’s attitude towards the created order. He urges us to ‘love every created thing; and emphasizes the beauty of nature:

From my childhood days I loved the world and its beauty. I loved the woods and green gardens, I loved the fields and all the beauty of God’s creation. I liked to watch the shining clouds scurrying across the blue sky (286).

If we lose our sense of wonder before the beauty of nature, so he believed, this suggests that we have at the same time lost our sense of God’s grace (96).

On the other hand, the Starets maintains that the true monk ‘forgets the world’ (501). So he writes:

After I came to know my Lord, and He made my soul His prisoner, everything changed, and now I no longer want to contemplate the world (286).... My soul... has no wish to look upon this world, though I do love it (381).... My soul is filled with love of Thee and knows no desire to look upon this world, beautiful though it be (284).

Such is St Silouan’s order of priorities. However much we value the beauty of the creation, we should feel an incomparably greater love for God the Creator.

* * * *

For St Silouan, then, there is a single and undivided mystery of salvation, at once personal, pan-human and cosmic: everything, like the ocean, flows and enters into contact with everything else. There can be no disagreement between our personal salvation and the salvation of the world. The two form a unity. Our own salvation is necessarily linked to the salvation of every other human being, for ‘our brother is our life’. At the same time, the transfiguration of us humans inaugurates the transfiguration of the cosmos. Not without reason, on the last page of Fr Sophrony’s book on the Starets, do we find a prayer that is all-embracing in its scope:

O Lord, give unto us this love throughout Thine whole universe (504).

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[1] F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, book 6, chapter 3.

[2] All quotations from St Silouan or from Fr Sophrony, unless otherwise indicated, are from Archimandite Sophrony (Sakharov), Saint Silouan the Athonite (Monastery of St John the Baptist, Tolleshunt Knights, By Maldon, Essex 1991). References to the relevant page are included in the text.

[3] The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, tr. Dana Miller (Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, Mass. 1984), pp. 344-5; A.M. Allchin (ed.) and Sebastian Brock (tr.), The Heart of Compassion: Daily Readings with St Isaac the Syrian (‘Enfolded in Love’ series: London 1989), p.9. My own rendering is eclectic, drawing on both translations, but mainly following Dr Brock.

[4] Epistle to Diognetus vii, 4.

[5] The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (London 1957), p. 234.

[6] Ascetical Homilies, tr. Miller, p. 141; tr. Brock, p. 53.

[7] Ascetical Homilies, tr. Miller, p. 141; tr. Brock, p. 52.

[8] Indeed, was Origen himself an ‘Origenist’, in the sense envisaged by the Council of 553?

[9] See Barsanuphius and John of Gaza, Correspondence, §569.

[10] This is the opinion of the first editor of Barsanuphius, St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, Vivlos Varsanouphiou kai Ioannou (2nd edn, Sotirios Schoinas: Volas 1960), p. 267, n. 1.

[11] On Repentance 11 (PG 65:981AB).

[12] The Lenten Triodion, tr. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware (London/Boston 1978), p. 175.

[13] The Church is One, §9.

[14] Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life is Mine (London/Oxford 1977), p. 68.

[15] On the Lord’s Prayer 5. We should not read into this statement an Augustinian doctrine of original guilt.

[16] Archimandrite Sophrony, His Life is Mine, p. 61.

[17] This service is usually held on the evening of Good Friday. For the full text of the ‘Praises’, see The Lenten Triodion, tr. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, pp. 623-44.

[18] Un Moine de l’Eglise d’Orient, Amour sans limites (Chevetogne 1971).

[19] The Ladder of Divine Ascent 1 (PG 88:633C).

[20] His Life is Mine, p. 70.

[21] Issued in collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature International (WWF), and obtainable from WWF, World Conservation Centre, Avenue du Mont-Blanc, CH 1196, Gland, Switzerland.

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