Archive for February, 2018
David Bentley Hart: “Saint Origen”
Posted by Dallas Wolf in First Thoughts, New Nuggets, Universal Restoration (Apokatastasis) on February 28, 2018
David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American Orthodox Christian philosophical theologian, cultural commentator and polemicist. Here, in one short essay published in First Things in 2015, Prof. Hart addresses three topics that institutional Orthodoxy would prefer to avoid: apokatastasis, Saint Origen, and the church’s chronic propensity to sleep with worldly empire (e.g., Byzantium and Russia)
Father Seraphim (Aldea): Elder Sophrony on hypostasis, or person.
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Monasticism, New Nuggets on February 24, 2018
Fr. Seraphim (Aldea) – was tonsured as an Orthodox monk in 2005 at Rasca monastery in Bucovine, North Moldavia. He has a PhD in Modern Theology from the University of Durham (UK) for a thesis on Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov)’s Ecclesiology. He is currently obeying God’s calling to found the Monastery of all Celtic Saints on the Scottish Isle of Mull. This will be the first Orthodox monastery in Celtic Britain in over a millennium (See http://www.mullmonastery.com).
“In general terms, Fr. Sophrony used ‘hypostasis’ to refer to the ontological state of a being that has fully actualized its nature. And very frequently this is opposed with the idea or state of an ‘individual’.
Although they appear to be synonymous, the two concepts [‘hypostasis’ and ‘person’] carry different meanings for Father Sophrony. While ‘hypostasis’ denotes an ontological state of existence, the ‘personal’ principle, or ‘personhood’, refers to a process. It’s almost as if ‘hypostasis’ is the destination of a process [‘personhood’].”
~ Fr. Seraphim (Aldea) from a lecture on the theology of Fr. Sophrony (Sakharov) delivered in 2016.
St. Isaac of Nineveh: On Silence
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Hesychasm - Jesus Prayer, Monasticism, Patristic Pearls on February 19, 2018
St. Isaac of Nineveh – 7th century ascetic and mystic, born in modern-day Qatar, was made Bishop of Nineveh between 660-680. Here he speaks of the importance of silence in monastic life.
“Love silence above all things. It brings thee near the fruit which the tongue is too weak to interpret. At first we compel ourselves to be silent. Then from our silence something is born which draws us toward silence. May God grant thee to perceive that which is born of silence. If thou beginnest with this discipline, I do not know how much light will dawn in thee through it. Concerning what is said about the admirable Arsenius: that Fathers and brethren came to see him, but that he sat with them in silence and dismissed them in silence – do not think, my brother, that this happened by the action of his will alone, though in the beginning he had to compel himself. After some time some delight is born in the heart from the exercise of this service and by force it draws the body towards remaining in silence.”
“If thou placest all labors of this discipline [solitary life] on one side and silence on the other, silence will outweigh them.”
~St. Isaac of Nineveh, from Ascetical Treatises 65
Christos Yannaras: “Christian life”
Posted by Dallas Wolf in New Nuggets on February 8, 2018
“Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands – conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.”
Christos Yannaras
First Thoughts 