Ignatius Brianchaninov on the manifestations of mercy

Ignatius Brianchaninov (a 19th century Russian Orthodox monk and bishop, and a saint of the Orthodox Church) writes as follows on the subject of the Last Judgment, mercy, forgiveness, and forgiving-ness:

We should not forgive one another only by words, but with a pure heart so that our memory of the evil will not turn the sword against us.

At the judgment of Christ, a justification for mercy will be demanded as an active expression of love, and only mercy will deserve mercy, as a manifest proof of love.

[...] Mercy will bring justification for those who love mercy, while those who rejected it will be condemned.

Mercy will stand boldly before the Lord, and present all its children to Him. It will present those who showed it materially, who fed their hungry brothers, received strangers into their homes, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned.

Mercy will present to Christ those who wrought it secretly in their souls, who had mercy upon their neighbor by refraining from judging him when he stumbled, forgiving him any insults and offences, rendering him blessings for his curses, and good deeds for his evil ones.

Mercy will present to Christ the pastors of the Church, who gave their brethren incorruptible food—the Word of God; who clothed those naked in sin with the garments of virtue, supplied spiritual medicine to those sick of soul, and patiently visited with edification those imprisoned by their unbelief or the darkness of error.

[...] Mercy will present to Christ also those who were only able to show mercy to themselves, who visited themselves with self-criticism and freed themselves from the poverty, sickness, and prison of sin through repentance.

Repentance is impossible for the hardened heart: the heart must be softened, filled with sympathy and mercy toward its catastrophic state of sinfulness.

Only when the heart is embraced and filled by mercy can it become capable of repentance.

Only when it has abandoned its condemnation of others can it turn and look at itself; and, salvifically condemning itself, apply the cure of its wounds by repentance.

Source

John Chrysostom on forgiving

John Chrysostom on forgiving:

Our having been offended will not cause us evil as much as we cause ourselves, feeding the anger in ourselves and exposing ourselves to condemnation by God for that.

If we love those who offend us, then evil will be turned on its very head, and it will continue to suffer severely.

But if we will be indignant, then we shall continue to suffer all the same even in spite of ourselves.

Quoted at Mystagogy.

See also John Chrysostom on the five ways of repentance.

Catherine of Siena on the Cross

From a letter of St Catherine of Siena to Monna Agnese:

There is no obedience without humility, nor humility without charity.

This is shown by the Word, for in obedience to His Father and in humility, He ran to the shameful death of the Cross, nailing and binding Him with the nails and bands of charity, and enduring in such patience that no cry of complaint was heard from Him.

For nails were not enough to hold God-and-Man nailed and fastened on the Cross had Love not held Him there.

Fr Zuhlsdorf on the Sunday Collects

Fr Z's theological analyses of the Sunday collects are among the best items on the Catholic blogosphere, and his latest one (on the Collect for the Second Sunday in Lent) is truly superb.

Benedict XVI: "we see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer"

When he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict wrote that "we see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer" (Behold the Pierced One, p. 19).

"Jesus at prayer" certainly seems to be one of the recurrent themes of the reading at Mass and the Office of Readings during Lent, which move from the Temptation via the Transfiguration to the Agony in Gethsemane and the Cry of Dereliction on the Cross.

From a theological point of view, the question of what it means to say that the incarnate Son of God prayed is the most dazzling and unfathomable of mysteries - one which plunges us into the very heart of the interconnected mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

It was in wrestling with this mystery that St Maximus the Confessor established the foundation for the Church's teaching on the two wills of Christ, which found concrete expression at the Third Council of Constantinople.

Pope Benedict's short address on Maximus, Gethsemane and the mystery of redemption gives an indication that this is one of those aspects of the mysterium fidei (mystery of faith) which in this life can only be viewed contemplatively and "through a glass darkly".

Over on my other blog, in addition to the Benedict/Maximus link above, I've been assembling a few patristic and mediaeval texts which suggest various responses to Benedict's invitation to see who Jesus is by seeing him at prayer":

Aelred of Rievaulx on Christ's prayer "forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do"; Leo the Great on the implications of the Garden of Gethsemane; Augustine of Hippo on Christ's prayer on the Cross; Cyril of Alexandria on the Temptation in the Wilderness.

Leo the Great on Lent

The patristic understanding of salvation outlined in my previous post has implications for how we understand Lent, as is made very clear in the Lenten sermons of St Leo the Great (d. 461).

Leo takes the view that the crucified, risen and glorified Christ has won a decisive and irreversible victory of ther devil and his army of demons, but that the devil is still trying his hardest to prevent as many people as possible from sharing in the fruits of that victory.

The devil, according to Leo, hates Lent with a vengeance - primarily because he can see people from all over the Roman Empire, barbarians included (Leo is writing, clearly, for a fifth century audience) preparing themselves for Easter baptism.

Every time a someone is baptised, the devil suffers a defeat, which he takes very personally. He also takes is personally when existing Christians pray, fast, give alms, fight against their unruly passions, and preserve orthodox faith and morals - all of which, again, are things that happen in an especially focused way during the Lenten fast.

Leo sees the devil, fearful of losing ground to the ever-growing Kingdom of God, as redoubling his efforts against the Church during Lent - in terms both of attacks on the Church as a whole, and in terms of attacks (mostly in the form of temptation to sin and heterodox belief) on individual believers.

Lent, accordingly, becomes a battlefield - a time in which the unceasing warfare between the Kingdom of God and the worlds, the flesh and the devil assumes an unparalleled intensity. Christians are fighting their passions, fighting the demons, fighting anything and everything that might allow the enemy to catch them off guard.

The idea that Lent is a time for doing penance and making reparation for past sins is not a prominent one in patristic literature, and very much reflects St Anselm's account of salvation as an act of satisfaction for sin. Leo and his contemporaries are less interested in making reparation for past sins than they are, so to speak, in repairing hearts, minds and bodies which have subjected themselves to sin and to the passions - and thus, ultimately, to death and corruption.

This process of "repairing" is the corollary of the ongoing fight against the demons (for fighting results in injuries, and injuries require repair-work...), and is undertaken through what Leo calls the "threefold office" of prayer, fasting and almsgiving, and also by participation in the liturgical life of the Church - in which, for Leo, we are presented with a divine remedy (remedium) for our sickness and with an example (exemplum) of how to appropriate that remedy.

Leo, like many of the Western Fathers, uses the word salus to denote salvation - a significant choice, inasmuch as salus denotes "health" as well as "salvation" - and Lent is, above all, a time of fighting and a time of healing.

St Patrick, paganism, and salvation

I once saw a TV documentary in which an Irish priest of decidedly liberal leanings argued that Irish paganism was Ireland's equivalent of the Old Testament. Just as the New Testament fulfilled and perfected the Old Testament, he suggested, so also Irish Christianity fulfilled and "completed" Irish paganism.

St Patrick, of course, would not have seen it like that. If anything, he would have regarded Irish paganism as equivalent to the religion of the Canaanites that the Israelites discovered when they first entered to Promised Land - a demonic religion of unimaginable horror and wickedness.

I think it's Peter Brown in The Rise of Western Christendom who explains that, in the period of Late Antiquity, the Church understood the work of redemption very much in terms of Christ's victory of the devil - a victory which encompassed his victory over hell, death, the demons, and the pagan deities who were themselves regarded as demons.

According to this way of looking at salvation, the devil and his armies of demons had suffered a decisive and irreversible defeat, but the retreating battalions continued to engage in skirmishes with the victorioius Christians, and were determined to drag as many human beings as possible down to hell with them.

The Church, accordingly, brooked no compromise with pagan gods and goddesses, and either destroyed their shrines or else transformed them into the shrines of martyrs - that is, of those saints who personified better than any other what it meant to participate in Christ's triumph over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Exercising his ministry in the middle part of the fifth century, it is inconceivable that Patrick would not have shared this approach to paganism. The story of his driving all the snakes out of Ireland may or may not be true at a literal level, but, at the level of theological symbolism, it sums up very accurately how he would have understood his preaching mission - that is, as the deliverance of Ireland from its occupation by demons and false divinites.

The words of St Patrick's Breastplate reflect the theological presuppositions of the fifth century Church as it gradually expanded the borders of Christendom. Patrick surrounds himself with the power of the Trinity and incarnation and the various mysteries of the life of Christ to ward off and overcome the forces of darkness and malevolence.

In the light of the patristic understanding of salvation in terms of an ongoing and bitter conflict (notwithstanding that the war has already been won) against the principalities and powers and against the world, the flesh and devil, Patrick's idea of a spiritual lorica (breastplate) needs to be seen not just as a piece of poetic imagery but also as an absolutely necessary piece of equipment for the Christian who is under constant attack.

This being the case, it seems fair to say that St Patrick would have been utterly aghast at the suggestion that Irish paganism stood in the same relation to Irish Christianity as the Old Testament to the New. Indeed, he would have viewed the neo-pagan tendencies of modern society (in their various manifestations) with absolute horror.