The Light of the Spirit

The Desert Fathers – monks who lived in the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries – were in many cases extraordinary people, as is illustrated in this passage from a book by Stelios Ramfos quoted in a fascinating essay on St Pambo of Nitria on the Logismoi blog:

Amongst the holy hesychasts of the Gerontikon, then, Pambo, Sisoes and Silvanus were literally light-bearing and their spiritual work (that is, their charism) was to concentrate in their persons the lightning of divinity and send it out into the world.

It was not by chance that their faces shone with the light of the Spirit—it was their spiritual ‘work’.

Which means that this strange and rare property had to do with their ascetic existence itself, the heart of their struggle.

In order to understand what this radiant face signifies we need to look more closely at the kind of life each of them led.

It was said of Abba Pambo, for example, ‘that for three years he persevered in petitioning God and saying, ‘Do not glorify me on earth.’ And so God glorified him, so that no-one could gaze into his face from the radiance that shone from it’.

St. Peter Chrysologus and the Priesthood of the Christian

Today is the memoria of St Peter Chrysologus, a fifth century Bishop of Ravenna and one of the great preachers of his age.

St Eanswythe of Folkestone

For the first time in a while, I've put up a new post on the Saints and Blessed Page, this time on St Eanswythe of Folkestone.

Fr Philip Powell OP on Parables

Fr Philip Powell OP has produced two fascinating reflections on how to interpret Jesus's parables:

http://hancaquam.blogspot.com/2009/07/no-future-in-parables.html

http://hancaquam.blogspot.com/2009/07/parables-do-not-save.html

Theophan the Recluse: "The Essence of the Christian Life"

Although this is a Catholic blog, I sometimes like to post quotations from Orthodox writers – not least because the best Orthodox writers have a gift for penetrating to the heart of that Biblical, Patristic and early Mediaeval wisdom which is the shared inheritance of Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

The following quotation from St Theophan the Recluse (a Russian Orthodox hermit of the nineteenth century) addresses a phenomenon which is probably universal among Christians who take their faith seriously – “a certain intuition that something is lacking and that all is not going as it should be”:

People concern themselves with Christian upbringing, but leave it incomplete. They neglect the most essential and most difficult side of the Christian life and dwell on what is easiest - the visible and external.

This imperfect and misdirected upbringing produces people who observe with the utmost correctness all the formal outward rules for devout conduct, but who pay little or no attention to the inward movements of the heart, and to true improvement of the inner spiritual life. They are strangers to mortal sin, but they do not heed the play of thoughts in the heart.

Accordingly, they sometimes pass judgments, give way to boastfulness or pride, sometimes get angry (as if this feeling were justified by the rightness of the cause), and are sometimes distracted by beauty and pleasure, sometimes even offending others in fits of irritation. Sometimes they are too lazy to pray, or lose themselves in useless thoughts while at prayer…

…Let us now take the case of one who has been falling somewhat short in the work of salvation. He or she becomes aware of this incompleteness and sees the incorrectness of their way of life, and the instability of his or her efforts. And so they turn from outward to inward piety.

They're led either by reading books about spiritual life or by talking with those who know what the essence of Christian life is, by dissatisfaction of their own efforts, by a certain intuition that something is lacking and that all is not going as it should be.

Despite all of his correctness, he has no inner peace. He lacks what was promised true Christians – peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.... He comes to understand that the essence of the Christian life consists in establishing himself with the mind in the heart before God in the Lord Jesus Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit.

In this way, he is enabled to control all inward movements and all outward actions so as to transform everything in himself whether great or small into the service of God and the Trinity, consciously and freely offering himself wholly to God.

From the website of the All Saints of North America Russian Orthodox Church

The language used in the last two paragraphs is characteristic of Russian Orthodoxy, but it seems to me that, taken together with his teaching on the New Law (Summa Theologiae I-II, 106), St Thomas Aquinas’s account of the Gifts of the Spirit (Summa Theologiae I-II, 68) is saying something very similar.

Needless to say, Theophan is not in any way criticising exterior piety and correctness or suggesting that they are unhelpful or unnecessary. Rather, he is making the point that exterior and interior piety are inextricably connected with each other, and that the former is incomplete without the latter.

Tagged

Berenike (whom I recently had the great pleasure of meeting for the first time) has tagged me for a meme where you have to name seven things you really like. What follows is a fairly random selection; I’ve excluded anything that I listed in the favourite things meme that was around a few months ago – except for cats, which can never be left off such a list. Anyone reading this is welcome to regard themselves as tagged...

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau – I’m not Welsh (well, only a little), and I’m not a massive Rugby fan, but this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqtIlaHIqrs&feature=related

Icons – to be honest, I prefer Eastern (Catholic/Orthodox) religious art to Western, certainly from the sixteenth century onwards

Durham Cathedral – dominating the skyline around where I live, it’s glorious even as it is now, but how much more glorious must it have been before the iconoclasts destroyed all that wonderful pre-Reformation art (see previous entry) and the monastic and liturgical life that went with it…

The Sea – especially at dawn or at dusk

Cricket – as I remember it from boyhood days rather than as it is now

Catholic blogs – okay, so there are some pretty bilious bloggers and commenters out there, but there are also a lot of genuinely lovely people in the Catholic blogosphere

Cats – “How we behave towards cats here below determines our status in heaven” (Robert A. Heinlein)

St Benedict: Enlarging the Heart

The concluding paragraph of the Prologue to the Rule of St Benedict sets out the purpose of monastic life, but, like a great deal of the Rule, is applicable to Christians in all states of life, describing as it does what we need to do in order to follow Jesus Christ whatever our circumstances:

But if in some things we proceed with a little severity, sound reason so advising, for the amendment of vices or preserving of charity, do not straightway out of fear of this flee from the way of salvation which is always strait and difficult in the beginning.

But in process of time and growth of faith, when the heart has once been enlarged, the way of God’s commandments is run with unspeakable sweetness of love.

So that, never departing from His teaching, but persevering in the monastery in His doctrine until death, we share now by patience in the sufferings of Christ, that we may deserve afterwards to be partakers of His kingdom.

St Eucherius of Lyon: Two Soveriegn Duties

Our supreme duty is that which we owe to God, and the next appertains to the soul. And yet these two are such loving correlates, that though every one of the is a duty of supreme consequence, and such as by no means we may presume to neglect or omit, yet cannot we possibly perform any one of them without the other. So that whosoever will serve God doth at the same time provide for his own soul; and he that is careful for his own soul doth at the same time serve God. So that the state of these two sovereign duties in man, is by a certain compendious dependency and co-intention rendered very easy, while the faithful performance of the one is a perfect consummation of both: for by the unspeakable tenderness and mercy of God, the good we do to our own souls is the most acceptable service and sacrifice that we can offer unto Him.

St Eucherius of Lyon (c. 380 – c. 349) [from Henry Vaughan’s 1654 translation]

The Meaning of Chastity

Elder Sophrony (Sakharov) was an Orthodox monk from Mount Athos who founded a monastery in Essex (in England), and who was a disciple and biographer of St Silouan the Athonite (a twentieth century Orthodox saint).

In the following quotation, which I came across here on Aaron Taylor’s excellent Logismoi blog (an Orthodox blog which I would wholeheartedly recommend to Catholic readers), Elder Sophrony meditates on the meaning of the Greek word sophrosyne, which he translates as “chastity”, though the word encompasses a range of meaning which goes beyond the much narrower sense that “chastity” has in modern English:

Chastity—σωφροσύνη—as the word itself shows, signifies integrity or fulness of wisdom. In the Church the conception embodies not only mastery over sexual impulses or the complex of the flesh in general, and, in this sense, ‘victory over nature’, but the acquisition of the combination of perfections proper to wisdom, which will be expressed by a constant dwelling in God ‘with all one’s mind and with all one’s heart’. In its most complete realization the ascetic feat of chastity may restore a man in the spirit to his virginal state.

St John Cassian: Mary Magdalen as Contemplative

July 22nd if the memoria of St Mary Magdalen. July 23rd is the memoria of St John Cassian (c. 360-435), though this isn’t celebrated in the General Calendar, and is, I think, restricted largely to Marseille and to some Benedictine monasteries.

Cassian was a monk of Gaul who spent many years in the East conversing with the Desert Fathers, whose wisdom he recorded in his Conferences. The theology of prayer and the spiritual life contained in the Conferences exercised an enormous influence on monastic spirituality in both East and West, not least on St Benedict and, later, St Dominic, who always carried with him a copy of St Matthew’s Gospel and of Cassian’s writings.

By way of honouring both St Mary Magdalen and John Cassian, here’s a passage from the Conferences in which Abba Moses presents Mary Magdalen as a model of contemplative life:

when Martha was performing a service that was certainly a sacred one, since she was ministering to the Lord and His disciples, and Mary being intent only on spiritual instruction was clinging close to the feet of Jesus which she kissed and anointed with the ointment of a good confession, she is shown by the Lord to have chosen the better part, and one which should not be taken away from her....

You see then that the Lord makes the chief good consist in meditation, i.e., in divine contemplation, whence we see that all other virtues should be put in the second place, even though we admit that they are necessary, and useful, and excellent, because they are all performed for the sake of this one thing.

For when the Lord says: “you are careful and troubled about many things, but few things are needful or only one,” He makes the chief good consist not in practical work, however praiseworthy and rich in fruits it may be, but in contemplation of Him, which indeed is simple and “but one”.

He declares that “few things” are needful for perfect bliss, i.e., that contemplation which is first secured by reflecting on a few saints, from the contemplation of whom, he who has made some progress rises and attains by God’s help to that which is termed “one thing,” i.e., the consideration of God alone, so as to get beyond those actions and services of Saints, and feed on the beauty and knowledge of God alone. “Mary” therefore “chose the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

John Cassian: Conferences 1.1.8.

St Thomas Aquinas: "The Law of the New Testament is Instilled in Our Hearts"

The New Law is the law of the New Testament. But the law of the New Testament is instilled in our hearts. St Paul, quoting the authority of Jeremiah 31:31,33, says: ‘Behold the days shall come, says the Lord; and I will perfect unto the house of Israel, and unto the house of Judah, a new testament’...

..The New Law is chiefly the grace itself of the Holy Ghost, which is given to those who believe in Christ. This is manifestly stated by St Paul who says (Romans 3:27): ‘Where is…your boasting? It is excluded. By what law? Of works? No, but by the law of faith’; for he calls the grace itself of faith ‘a law’. And still more clearly it is written (Romans 8:2): ‘The law of the spirit of life, in Christ Jesus, has delivered me from the law of sin and of death’.

Hence Augustine says that ‘as the law of deeds was written on tables of stone, so is the law of faith inscribed on the hearts of the faithful’; and elsewhere…‘What else are the divine laws written by God Himself on our hearts, but the very presence of His Holy Spirit?’

St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274; Summa Theologiae IaIIae, q.106, a.1)

St Theophan the Recluse: "Like Mosquitoes in the Summer’s Heat"

You’ve got to get out of your head and into your heart. Right now your thoughts are in your head, and God seems to be outside you. Your prayer and all your spiritual exercises also remain exterior.

As long as you are in your head, you will never master your thoughts, which continue to whirl around your head like snow in a winter’s storm or like mosquitoes in the summer’s heat. If you descend into your heart, you will have no more difficulty.

Your mind will empty out and your thoughts will dissipate. Thoughts are always in your mind chasing one another about, and you will never manage to get them under control.

But if you enter into your heart and can remain there, then every time your thoughts invade, you will only have to descend into your heart and your thoughts will vanish into thin air. This will be your safe haven. Don’t be lazy. Descend. You will find life in your heart. There you must live.

St. Theophan the Recluse (1815-1894; Russian Orthodox)

I found this on Joseph Patterson’s excellent Mind in the Heart blog, which cautions “Heart does not mean the emotions in Orthodox Christianity. If you want to learn more about what the ‘Fathers’ mean by the heart then read Dr. Bradshaw’s excellent paper ‘On Drawing the Mind into the Heart: Psychic Wholeness in the Greek Patristic Tradition’”.

Moreover, as is clear from Theophan’s description of “thoughts” (in Greek, logismoi), emptying one’s mind of “thoughts” does not in any sense mean abandoning proper rational and intellectual activity.

G.K. Chesterton: God's Mirth

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.

The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual.

The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something.

Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something.

I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.

There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936; from Orthodoxy, ch. 9)

Abba Pimen: "True Silence"

A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, that is, he says nothing that is not profitable.

Abba Pimen (an early Desert Father)

(From the Balamand Monastery website)

St John of Kronstadt: "When You Are Praying Alone..."

When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God. Truly they do; for they are all one in God, and where God is, there are they also. Where the sun is, thither also are directed all its rays. Try to understand what this means.

St. John of Kronstadt (1829-1908; Russian Orthodox)

(From the Balamand Monastery website)

St John Chrysostom: Law, Freedom, Virtue

For Christians above all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force...it is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.

St. John Chrysostom (c. 347-407)

(From the Balamand Monastery website)

St Benedict: "The Divine Presence Is Everywhere"

We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that ‘the eyes of the Lord are looking on the good and the evil in every place’. But we should believe this especially without any doubt when we are assisting at the Work of God. To that end let us be mindful always of the Prophet's words ‘Serve the Lord in fear’, and again, ‘Sing praises wisely’, and ‘In the sight of the Angels I will sing praise to Thee’. Let us therefore consider how we ought to conduct ourselves in the sight of the Godhead and of His Angels, and let us take part in the psalmody in such a way that our mind may be in harmony with our voice.

St. Benedict (480-547)

(From the Balamand Monastery website)

"I Have Set Before You Life And Death"

In Deuteronomy 30:19-20, God presents Israel with a choice between life and death, blessing and curse:

I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

In Deuteronomy, God calls on Israel to make a choice which will affect her own destiny as a nation, and the consequences of her various choices (which see her lurching from idolatry to fidelity, from the choice of death to the choice of life, from curse to blessing) is the major theme of the "Deuteronomic History" (i.e. those historical books of the Old Testament – Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, 1&2 Kings – which reflect the theological emphases of Deuteronomy).

In today’s Office of Readings, St Ignatius of Antioch (martyred some time between 98 and 117 AD) takes up this Deuteronomic theme of choosing between life and death, between God and the world, but applies it to the individual.

All things have an end, and two things, life and death, are side by side set before us, and each man will go to his own place. Just as there are two coinages, one of God and the other of the world, each with its own image, so unbelievers bear the image of this world, and those who have faith with love bear the image of God the Father through Jesus Christ. Unless we are ready through his power to die in the likeness of his passion, his life is not in us.

For St Ignatius, choosing life is now a question not of God’s temporal and political blessing (as it was for the Deuteronomists) but of sharing in the life of Christ, which we do by conforming ourselves (in one way or another) with his passion and by receiving his life-giving blessing in the Eucharist, so that eventually we might enter not into an earthly Promised Land but into the heavenly Promised Land of eternal life – the fullness of life in Christ.

Image: Icon of the Martyrdom of St Ignatius

Zephaniah 3:17-18

We’re accustomed to thinking in terms of angels singing to God, of monks and nuns devoting their lives to chanting the praises of God, and of Christians being called to celebrate God with hymns and psalms and sacred songs.

Zephaniah 3:17-18 introduces a startlingly different image:

The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty Savior; He will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love, He will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals.

"Judge not, that you may not be judged"

Jesus has some strong words to say about judging others:

Judge not, that you may not be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye? Or how sayest thou to thy brother: Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam in thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. [Matthew 7:1-5]

Of course, whenever one talks or even thinks about this whole question of judging others, one risks falling into the trap of judging judgmental people for their judgmentalism, and so ending up like the Pharisee in the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee:

Two men went up into the temple to pray: the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee standing, prayed thus with himself: O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, as also is this publican. I fast twice in a week: I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes towards heaven; but struck his breast, saying: O God, be merciful to me a sinner. I say to you, this man went down into his house justified rather than the other: because every one that exalteth himself, shall be humbled: and he that humbleth himself, shall be exalted. [Luke 18:10-14]

The Epistle of Saint James offers a corrective to the kind of judgmentalism that arises out of “bitter zeal” – a kind of zeal (often a zeal for that which is in itself good and true and holy) to which all believers are prone when we feel threatened or attacked or powerless in the face of what is going on in the Church and in the world (it’s well worth reading Madame Evangelista’s post on this):

Who is a wise man, and endued with knowledge among you? Let him shew, by a good conversation, his work in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter zeal, and there be contentions in your hearts; glory not....But the wisdom that is from above first indeed is chaste, then peaceable, modest, easy to be persuaded, consenting to the good, full of mercy and good fruits, without judging, without dissimulation. And the fruit of justice is sown in peace, to them that make peace. [James 3:13-18]

Anyone who cares about things that matter is going to be guilty of “bitter zeal” from time to time – it comes with the territory. However, the following quotation from St Seraphim of Sarov (a saint of the Orthodox Church) which has recently appeared on a couple of Orthodox blogs (Salt of the Earth and Mind in the Heart) suggests that a tendency to judgmentalism and bitter zeal (including the kind that condemns judgmentalism and bitter zeal in others, and including the kind that is sincere in its defence of that which is good and true and holy) requires a radical reappraisal of our own inner life:

You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgment. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.

Which is not, of course, to say that we should refrain from speaking out on behalf of that which is good and true and against that which is wicked and false. It is, however, to say that, if that is what we are going to do, we probably need to measure the way we go about doing it against the kind of standard laid down by St James, and we need to be sure that, in expressing our anger or outrage or sense of injustice (all of which may at one level be entirely justified), we are not damaging our inner life.

"Free From All Corruption"

A number of the Church Fathers (Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria are prominent examples) understand salvation as consisting, at least in part, in the bestowal of incorruptibility.

The idea is that sin introduces a fundamental instability into human nature, which results in bodily corruption, the dissolution of body and soul, and, in short, a disorder – an inordinatio, to use Aquinas’s expression – which culminates in physical and spiritual death.

For writers such as Athanasius and Cyril, the mystery of the incarnation means that Christ is the Word of God made flesh – fully divine yet also fully human. Consequently, his flesh - which is truly human, but which is also "deified" in virtue of the fact that the divine Word has united himself to it - is incorruptible, with the result that his human nature is not destined for dissolution and death.

Because Athanasius and Cyril share a very strong sense of the real presence of the Incarnate Word in the eucharist, it follows from this that Christ’s eucharistic flesh is nothing other than the incorruptible body of Christ.

Moreover, in addition to being incorruptible, Christ’s eucharistic flesh conveys and communicates incorruption, so that all those who eat his flesh themselves become incorruptible – not in the sense that they are exempt from bodily death and decay, but in the sense that (i) they are exempt from spiritual death, and (ii) they are guaranteed the reunion of their now incorruptible soul with their re-created (and henceforward incorruptible) body so that they can enjoy eternal life in all its fulness.

Today’s second reading from the Office of Readings, which is taken from the De Mysteriis of St Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), reflects this characteristically Patristic way of viewing Christ’s work of salvation:

Consider now which is the more excellent: the bread of angels or the flesh of Christ, which is indeed the body that gives life. The first was manna from heaven, the second is above the heavens. One was of heaven, the other is of the Lord of the heavens; one subject to corruption if it was kept till the morrow, the other free from all corruption, for if anyone tastes of it with reverence he will be incapable of corruption. For our fathers, water flowed from the rock; for you, blood flows from Christ. Water satisfied their thirst for a time; blood cleanses you for ever.

(Text from Universalis)

St John Damascene on "The Holy and Immaculate Mysteries of the Lord"

St John Damascene (c. 676-749) is one of the principal links between the Greek Fathers and mediaeval Latin theology. His De Fide Orthodoxa was in many ways an epitome of Greek patristic thought, and was one of the major influences on St Thomas Aquinas, ensuring that the thought of Aquinas was never one-sidedly Augustinian, but that it truly represented a blend of the Latin and Byzantine traditions.

In the following extract (taken from De Fide Orthodoxa IV, 13), Damascene outlines the way in which God communicates His goodness to creatures, offers human beings a special communion in His life and goodness, and then, in Christ, enters into communion with human nature in order to remedy the effects of sin and advance us to an even deeper communion with Himself:

God Who is good and altogether good and more than good, Who is goodness throughout, by reason of the exceeding riches of His goodness did not suffer Himself, that is His nature, only to be good, with no other to participate therein, but because of this He made first the spiritual and heavenly powers; next the visible and sensible universe; next man with his spiritual and sentient nature.

All things, therefore, which he made, share in His goodness in respect of their existence. For He Himself is existence to all, since all things that are, are in Him, not only because it was He that brought them out of nothing into being, but because His energy preserves and maintains all that He made; and in especial the living creatures. For both in that they exist and in that they enjoy life they share in His goodness....

Man, however, being endowed with reason and free will, received the power of living in continuous union with God through his own choice, if indeed he should abide in goodness, that is in obedience to his Maker.

Since, however, he transgressed the command of his Creator and became liable to death and corruption, the Creator and Maker of our race, because of His bowels of compassion, took on our likeness, becoming man in all things but without sin, and was united to our nature.

For since He bestowed on us His own image and His own spirit and we did not keep them safe, He took Himself a share in our poor and weak nature, in order that He might cleanse us and make us incorruptible, and establish us once more as partakers of His divinity.

Recent Ordination

One of my blog followers has just been ordained to the priesthood. Congratulations and ad multos annos to Fr Paul Johnson.

St Theophan the Recluse: "How Is Your Prayer?"

I found this quotation on an excellent Orthodox blog called Milk and Honey. It's from St Theophanes the Recluse (a saint of the Orthodox Church); the full text (a mini-essay on prayer) can be found here.

Let me recall a wise custom of the ancient Holy Fathers: when greeting each other, they did not ask about health or anything else, but rather about prayer, saying “How is your prayer?” The activity of prayer was considered by them to a be a sign of the spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. If the body has breath, it lives; if breathing stops, life comes to an end. So it is with the spirit. If there is prayer, the soul lives; without prayer, there is no spiritual life.

Incidentally, is there any reason why most Catholic bloggers seem to prefer Blogger while most Orthodox bloggers seem to prefer Wordpress? There are numerous exceptions on both sides of the equation, but I've observed a very definite pattern.

(Having said that, a lot of Thomists also seem to favour Wordpress...)

St Ælfheah (Alphege) of Canterbury

Ælfheah, or Alphege (954 –1012), was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be martyred... Read more at the Saints and Blesseds Page...

Prayer and Salvation

Fr Stephen Freeman is an Orthodox priest in Tennessee whose blog Glory to God for All Things is well worth reading. His recent posts entitled Salvation, Prayer and Communion with God and The Communion of Prayer are superb.

St Irenaeus and St Cyril of Alexandria

I've recently posted on the Saints and Blesseds Page on St Irenaeus of Lyons and St Cyril of Alexandria.

Icons

In the combox of a post about sacred art and music on Madame Evangelista’s blog, Madame Evangelista and Turtle have been pondering the “transgressive nature of icons as windows to divinity”. Googling “transgressive” and “icons” only seems to turn up articles about the theory of Hollywood celebrity, but I did find the following semi-official definitions of how Orthodoxy understands icons. The idea of a window onto heaven appears in both extracts. Comments from Orthodox and Catholic readers would be most welcome.

Icons are images of Christ, of His angels, of His saints, and of events such as the Birth of Christ, His Transfiguration, His death on the Cross, and His Resurrection. Icons actually participate in and thus reveal the reality they express. In the image we see and expe rience the Prototype. An icon of Christ, for example, reveals something of Christ Himself to us. Icons are windows to heaven, not only revealing the glory of God, but becoming to the worshiper a passage into the Kingdom of God. The history of the use of icons goes back to the early Church – Tradition tells us Luke the Evangelist was the first iconographer. Orthodox Christians do not worship icons, but they honor them greatly because of their participation in heaven's reality.

From the website of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America

An icon is a holy image which is the distinctive art form of the Orthodox Church. In actual practice the icon may be a painting of wood, on canvas, a mosaic or a fresco. Icons depict such figures as Christ, Mary the Theotokos, the saints and angels. They may also portray events from the Scriptures or the history of the Church, such as Christmas, Easter, etc. Icons occupy a very prominent place in Orthodox worship and theology. The icon is not simply decorative, inspirational, or educational. Most importantly, it signifies the presence of the individual depicted. The icon is like a window which links heaven and earth. When we worship we do so as part of the Church which includes the living and the departed. we never lost contact with those who are with the Lord in glory. This belief is expressed every time one venerates an icon or places a candle before it. Many Orthodox churches have icons not only on the iconostasion but also on the walls, ceilings, and in arches. Above the sanctuary in the apse, there is very frequently a large icon of the Theotokos and the Christ Child. The Orthodox Church believes that Mary is the human being closest to God. This very prominent icon recalls her important role in the Incarnation of the Son of God. The icon is also an image of the Church. It reminds us of our responsibility to give birth to Christ's presence in our lives. High above the church, in the ceiling or dome, is the icon of Christ the Almighty, the Pantocrator. The icon portrays the Triumphant Christ who reigns as Lord of heaven and earth. As one gazes downward, it appears as though the whole church and all of creation comes from Him. As one looks upward, there is the feeling that all things direct us to Christ the Lord. He is the "Alpha and the Omega," the beginning and the end. This is the message of Orthodoxy.

From the website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America