“Filled with love, the holy Apostles went into the world, preaching salvation to mankind and fearing nothing, for the Spirit of God was their strength. When St. Andrew was threatened with death upon the cross if he did not stay his preaching he answered: ‘If I feared the cross I should not be preaching the Cross.” In this manner all the other Apostles, and after them the martyrs and holy men who wrestled against evil, went forward with joy to meet pain and suffering. For the Holy Spirit, sweet and gracious, draws the soul to love the Lord, and in the sweetness of the Holy Spirit the soul loses her fear of suffering.”
St. Silouan the Athonite
“The only hope of salvation from the delusions and the heresies, the innovations and the traps of wicked people and of the devil is prayer, repentance and humility.”
+ Elder Joseph the Hesychast
The Elder said that the time would come when 40 people would cling to every believer for he would save them. "God would wait for a thousand years that at least one man might be saved to replenish the number of fallen angels."
Father Seraphim of Vyrytsa
"There are three stages for salvation. St. John the Golden Tongue states: a) Do not sin. b) If you have sinned, repent. c) Those who repent inadequately, have to bear their sorrows as they find them."
Elder Ambrose of Optina
Two factors are involved in man's salvation: the grace of God and the will of man. Both must work together, if salvation is to be attained.
Saint Nektarios of Aegina
Those who suffer deeply for the salvation of the whole world and help in their own way (as strugglers) and humbly entrust themselves to the hands of God, feel the greatest joy in the world. Their life is a constant doxology, for they flutter about internally like angels, glorifying God day and night. Those, however, who neglect the salvation of their souls and try to find joy and rest in this vain life, are continually tortured and entangled in endless worldly machinery and live in hell in this life.
Elder Paisios
In order to give the necessary understanding about the power and importance of repentance, Starets Ambrose would say: "What times have befallen us! Before, when somebody sincerely repented his sins, he changed his sinful lifestyle and lived chastely. But now it often happens, that during confession a person would detail all his sins and then continue his lifestyle unchanged."
Starets imparted another instructional narrative: "A demon in the appearance of a human was sitting and dangling his feet. Seeing him with his spiritual eyes, he asked him: "Why aren’t you doing something?" The demon replied: "Well there is nothing for me to do but to dangle my legs, because people are doing everything better than me."
"There are three stages for salvation. St. John the Golden Tongue states: a) Do not sin. b) If you have sinned, repent. c) Those who repent inadequately, have to bear their sorrows as they find them."
"It happens," Batushka used to say, "that although our sins are forgiven through repentance, our conscience does not cease to reproach us. As a comparison, the reposed Starets Macarius used to show his finger that was cut a long time ago: the pain had long gone but the scar remains. That is exactly the same that after repentance, the scars remain, that is, admonitions of the conscience."
"Although God forgives the sins of those repenting, every sin demands a cleansing punishment. For example, after Christ said to the wise thief: "Today you will be with Me in Paradise," his knees were broken. And what was it like to hang on his hands only, with broken kneecaps, for some three hours? It meant that he had to cleanse himself through suffering. The cleansing of those sinners who die immediately after repentance, is done through the prayers of the Church and those present, while those living, have to cleanse themselves through a change in their lifestyles and charity that would cover their sins.
Elder Ambrose of Optina
Many people who call themselves Christians say that it is through faith alone that you will be saved. This is a dangerous error. Salvation requires that we receive the Holy Spirit.
Saint Theophan comments,
"Believe, believe, and the Holy Spirit will come." This is the biggest lie. Faith is indeed an indispensable condition for receiving the Holy Spirit, but the very receiving of the gift comes about not from faith alone, but from faith through the Divinely-established Mysteries. This is how it was even in Apostolic times.Our current culture is misled by our dependence on rational thought which leads us to accept the idea that we only need to believe and we can be saved. This is an intellectual deception. We cannot intellectually think of God and then expect to receive the Holy Spirit which is His saving grace. This Spirt only comes with the Sacraments of His Church.
Saint Theophan makes this point through the story of Paul in Ephesus. When he came to Ephesus Paul encountered several believers and asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit. They answered that they had not even heard of the Holy Spirit. They had been baptized with the baptism of John the Forerunner. Saint Paul then baptized them with the baptism of Christ and after that he laid his hands on them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. The baptism they had received earlier was only a renewal and a preparation for receiving the saving Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit came through the laying on of Hands. Later the Apostles introduced Holy Chrism (a holy oil) to be used instead of the laying on of hands. Today in the Orthodox Church one is received into the Body of Christ though baptism and the sacrament of Chrismation where one receives the Holy Spirit. This sacramental act is essential.
Many Christian churches in this country do not have this sacrament. They preach the idea of faith alone. They require a confession of faith and then baptize in water, an act which is often seen as merely symbolic of their commitment to Christ. Those who follow this direction are grossly misled and never receive the Holy Spirit which they must have for union with God.
Now once you have this gift that comes through the sacrament of Chrismation, you need to nurture it so its presence and action will grow within you. If you fail to do so it will remain latent or hidden. If ignored, eventually it will become inactive. Then it is difficult to resurrect it. This is why we have the other sacraments of Holy Confession and Holy Communion to help us maintain the active work of the Holy Spirit which comes to us through these sacraments. Of course we have faith, but we also receive the Holy Spirit through Chrismation and continually renew its presence through the other sacraments. It also why we are continually engaging in ascetic efforts to purify our heart so that the "fire" of the Holy Spirit will be fanned and be allowed to act through all our bodily actions. In this way we can become virtuous and follow the Commandments of God. This is the Way to union with God and salvation.
Saint Theophan the Recluse
Reference: The Spiritual Life, p 282
Through the words of Peter of Damascus, while a Christian lives on Earth, his salvation remains between fear and hope. But humans still keep searching for total fulfillment on Earth and that from locations or from people, when Christ Himself says in the Scripture: "You will be sorrowful in this world." These words clearly show that irrespective where a Christian is located, he cannot be without some type of sorrow. There is only one solace – in fulfilling the laws of the Scriptures, just as the Psalm says: "Great peace have those who love Your law, and nothing causes them to stumble." (Psalm 119:165) If something or someone does tempt or confuse us, it clearly shows that we are not relating correctly to God’s laws, among which the greatest one is that of not judging or condemning anyone. On Judgement Day, everyone will either be glorified or shamed by their deeds. The Old Testament decrees that we attend ourselves toward salvation and betterment of our soul. It is towards this that we should concern ourselves mostly.
There isn’t anywhere that God induces us against our will, but rather offers us a choice for our determination, and it is through the personal will that individuals turn out to be either good or evil. Therefore, it is useless to blame those that live with us or surround us as interfering and impeding our salvation or spiritual improvement. Samuel lived and was brought up by the priest Elias, among his debauched sons, yet preserved himself and was a great prophet. Even in Heaven, Eve violated God’s law. While Judas, living three years in the presence of Christ Himself, did not improve even though he saw so many miracles and continually heard the Scriptural sermons, but became worse and sold his Teacher and the world’s Redeemer, for thirty pieces of silver.
Our failure to find spiritual fulfillment emanates from us ourselves, from our ignorance and our incorrect thinking which we are loathe to part with. And it is this that leads us to confusion and doubt and various perplexities; all this torments and weighs us down into a disconsolate circumstance. It would be good if we were able to understand the simple words of a holy father: "If we humble ourselves, and not mentally roam all over places where it will not improve us and maybe make us worse, we will find peace in every situation."
Elder Ambrose of Optina
"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" (John 14: 6).
Christ Is the Way
At a moment in mankind's history which had been determined by God and foretold by prophets, about 2000 years ago, in the ancient nation of Israel, the Saviour of the world was born - Jesus Christ, the Messiah Who had been foretold by the ancient prophets.
At His Incarnation a great and unfathomable mystery came to pass. In the one Person of the Son of God there were united two natures: His Divinity, Which was before all time, and the humanity Which He assumed, so as to become like us in every way.
Living among men, Jesus Christ taught them by His Words and His own example to believe correctly and to live righteously. His public ministry did not last long, only three and half years, but it was extraordinarily full. His every word and act reflected His infinite wisdom, love and moral perfection. He shone like a brilliant light that had come to us from the ideal world above, a Light Which enlightens, and will continue to enlighten, every person who seeks goodness.
The teachings of Jesus Christ contained everything that people needed to know in order to live rightly; however, man had become morally weakened, so much so that he was unable to attain spiritual renewal by his own efforts alone. Sin had grown its roots too deep in human nature; evil had acquired such immense strength in all aspects of human life that men could not throw off its yoke by their own unaided efforts.
Therefore, out of unfathomable compassion for us sinners, and moved by His immeasurable love, the Righteous One took upon Himself the sins of all men - the sins of each one of us - and on their account offered a redemptive sacrifice on the Cross. With His most pure Blood He washed away our guilt before God; by His Death He conquered our death. Then, descending into the depths of hell, He, as Almighty God, freed and led out the souls of all those who wished to return to God and to live rightly. He took away Satan's power over men and set the day of his final condemnation in fiery Gehenna.
Why was it necessary to have such a terrible sacrifice as the shameful and excruciatingly painful death on the Cross of Christ, the God-Man? Was there not any other way for God to bring about man's salvation? These are mysteries which we cannot comprehend. We only know that Christ's redemptive sufferings, together with His glorious Resurrection from the dead, contain a power by which we can be born again. Through this great power, which overcomes all obstacles, any sinner, no matter how deeply he has sunk in the mire of vice, can undergo a complete spiritual renewal; he can become a righteous person, and even a great saint.
Forty days after His Resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, where He now abides as the God-Man. He is the Head of the Church, and together with the Father and the Holy Spirit He governs the world. On the fiftieth day after His Resurrection, Jesus Christ sent down the Holy Spirit on His Apostles and disciples and founded the Church, to which He entrusted everything needed for the salvation of believers.
If the Son of God Himself undertook to perform such extraordinary acts, coming down to the earth, taking on Himself human nature, suffering and dying the shameful and exceedingly painful death of the Cross, it is clear that there cannot be any way to salvation other than that which is offered to us by Jesus Christ.
Thanks to all that our Lord Jesus Christ did, everyone is now able to be freed from sins, to throw off the burden of passions, to be spiritually renewed and to start to live rightly, with the help of His grace. Anyone who wishes can now attain eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. The devil cannot stop us, unless we fall away from Christ through our own carelessness or lack of seriousness.
Thus, thanks to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, immortality and the bliss of paradise are not the dream of poets or the fantasy of philosophers, but a reality accessible to all. Everyone who wishes can reach the kingdom of heaven by following the path indicated by the Saviour, and by imitating Him as much as possible. He is the ideal of moral perfection, the supreme criterion of truth, the infallible spiritual authority and the inexhaustible source of inspiration.
Truly, He is our Way, Truth and Life! All other "great teachers" of mankind (such as Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, and including the founders of today's totalitarian cults) turn out to be poor parodies if they are set up in opposition to Christ, or if they are used in an effort to "correct" or "improve" what He said and did.
Christ Is the Truth
God the Father foreordained that men should find salvation through His Only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. All that Jesus Christ did and said is contained in the New Testament portion of the Bible, in what are called the Gospels, of which there are four. The Old Testament portion of the Bible contains the writings of the prophets who lived before the time of Christ. Their purpose was to prepare the human race to receive Christ as the Messiah, that is, the Saviour anointed by God. The books of the New Testament were written by the disciples of Christ, the Apostles, and set forth the teachings of Jesus Christ more fully and in greater detail.
The first book of the Bible, Genesis, teaches that everything visible and invisible was created by God from nothing. First God made the invisible world of the angels (heaven), and then our visible or material world (earth). To crown His creation of the material world, God made man, adorning him with His own image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27). The physical world was made by God not all at once, but in stages, which are called in the Bible "days." God did not make the world out of any necessity or need for it, but because of His all-good desire that other beings, created by Him, should enjoy the gift of life.
Being infinitely good, God made everything good, beautiful and pure. Just as the angels were, man was also predestined for eternal life and everlasting blessedness in a union of grace with His Creator. The Creator was pleased to honour man with His most precious gift, free will, in order that man might grow towards perfection in the moral life. By this gift God gave rational beings a dignity incomparably greater than the rest of irrational nature, but at the same time it was a test. Being a boundless ocean of love (1 John 4:8-12), God wanted us all to love Him with the purest and most selfless kind of love, as tender children love their caring father. It was His desire that we should run to Him because we ourselves wanted to do so, and that we should grow steadily towards perfection by imitating Him to the best of our ability.
In order for us to get to know Him more fully, God revealed to us that He is not simply Oneness (a monad), but Three-in-Oneness, or Trinity. This means that in God there is one divine nature or essence, but three free and rational Persons - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - Who dwell in perfect harmony and love with one another. In the Deity, God the Father is the source of the divine nature which is common to all three; this is His hypostatic characteristic (what characterizes Him as a distinct Person). The Son was "begotten" from the Father before all time; the Holy Spirit "proceeds" from the Father before all time; these are their hypostatic characteristics. The words "begotten" and "proceeds," however, do not carry any connotation of time. God was always the Trinity - the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Since God is three in Persons, but One in essence, He desired that the human race which He created should also reflect His three-in-oneness to a certain degree. In other words, He desired men to live, not as isolated individuals, solitary "I's," but as "we," as an integral and cohesive society, held together by love, in which each one takes the joys or sorrows of his neighbour as his very own. This, of course, was the ideal intended by the Creator. This all-encompassing unity was not meant, however, to suppress the personalities of rational beings. On the contrary, just as in the Creator Himself each Person possesses His own personal qualities, which are beyond our comprehension, so too in human society each distinct person was meant to preserve his own individual and unique characteristics, his particular talents. This unity in multiplicity was the type of existence that man was called to live, first of all in family life, then in society and finally on the level of the whole human race.
As we have already said, sin did great damage to human nature. As a result, mankind was not only torn away from its Maker, but it was also broken into a multitude of individuals, who were mutually jealous and at odds. Jesus Christ intended to bring men back to the path of unity with their Maker and closeness with one another; therefore, He began His preaching with the good news, or glad tidings (which is the meaning of the Greek word Evangelion, or "Gospel"), that "the Kingdom of God is at hand." God is ready to forgive each one of us and to accept him as His son, on condition that a man believe in the Saviour Whom God has sent, accept His divine teachings and begin to live rightly. Everything that Jesus Christ did and said had the purpose of teaching people and inspiring them to start to live for God, for the good, for inner renewal. The kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ had to begin within believers, in hearts made new by love.
After His glorious Resurrection from the dead, and shortly before His Ascension into heaven, Jesus Christ revealed that He will come to the earth again before the end of the world. This Second Coming of Christ will not be like the first, when He came in the form of an ordinary man, as the merciful and compassionate Saviour. He lived in poverty and meekly endured all the reproaches of sinners. Before the end of the world He will come in His heavenly glory, as the terrible and just Judge, surrounded by a multitude of angels and saints, and He will give each one the reward of his deeds. Immediately preceding the Second Coming of Christ the worldwide miracle of the resurrection of the dead will take place at His almighty command. The bodies of all the people who have ever lived on the earth will rise up out of the dust in the twinkling of an eye and will be reunited with their souls. At that time every man will be restored in his bipartite nature, in which soul and body form a single human being.
Let us recall that man was created for eternal life. Death, in the sense of complete annihilation or reduction to non-being, simply does not exist. What we call death is only the temporary separation of the soul and the body. When the body loses its life-giving principle, which is the soul, the body decomposes into the elements of which it was made up. The soul, the very personality of man, in a fully conscious and aware state, crosses over into some sphere of existence which is unknown to us, where it remains until the day of Christ's Last Judgement. At His Second Coming Christ will resurrect us in our twofold nature.
With the Second Coming of Christ the history of the human race will come to an end. The earth and everything on it, matter and the whole cosmos, will be subjected to fiery flame. Yet this fiery furnace will not be the destruction of the material world, but rather its transfiguration, as if in a smelter that removes all impurities. The physical world will be transformed into "a new heaven and new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness" (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21:1-2).
Christ will pass judgement not only on men, but also on the devil and his demons. This judgement will decide the eternal fate of every rational creature. All who did not wish to respond to God's love with love, all who did evil and spread falsehood, will be condemned to fiery Gehenna. This will be a "second death," which will not be annihilation, but rather complete separation from God in unending and fruitless sufferings.
On the "new earth," under the "new heaven," in the "new Jerusalem," a new life will begin, the happy and endless life which God foreordained from all eternity for those who love Him. There will be that true salvation, for which each man thirsts, thought not always knowingly. The purpose for which God in His boundless love created us will finally be realized.
Christ is the Life
The goal, then, of our earthly life is to inherit eternal life in the kingdom of heaven. To reach it our loving Creator requires of us only that we respond to Him with the kind of sincere, pure and selfless love with which He loves us.
Such love is a spring which flows from this temporal life into the beauty of eternal life. The reason for man's life is to become more and more like God and to draw nearer and nearer to Him. The substance of our life should be the continuous upholding of everything in us that furthers nearness to God and rejection of everything that takes us away from Him.
How can the fire of such love and such striving be kindled in the soul? Once it is lit, how can it be guarded, so that it is not allowed to go out, but rather, as much as possible, it is turned into the flame of salvation, which burns up all impurity in the heart? Man cannot do this by his own power, no matter how sincerely he desires it. The winds and waves of the passions are too strong, and they come from sources hostile to man: the world which lies in sin, the flesh which loves sin and the devil, the originator of all evil.
For salvation, therefore, it is necessary to cling to Christ with all one's strength, to become one with Him. Then His divine power and His love will fill our souls. They will protect, sanctify and strengthen us; they will lead us on the sure but narrow path to eternal life. Christ speaks thus about the necessity of staying with Him: "I am the Vine, ye are the branches. The branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine" (John 15:5). In other words, authentic spiritual life, which brings forth good fruit, is impossible unless one is united in the closest possible way with the Source of spiritual strength - Christ.
The Need for the Church
The mystery of the Church, the kingdom of God - a mystery which is great and wise, surpassing our understanding - was brought into being by Christ in the following way. First, when He was baptized by John in the Jordan, at the moment when the Holy Spirit came down and the voice of the Father was heard, He sanctified the nature of water. By this act the water of Baptism became a conduit of God's grace, which gives a man new birth. Christ taught that a man is spiritually born and becomes a member of the Church only by being "born of water and of the Spirit" in the sacrament of Baptism (John 3:5).
Just as a newborn infant requires nourishment in order to grow, so also one who is born anew in the mystery of Baptism requires spiritual nourishment, which the Lord gives us in the sacrament of Holy Communion, of which He says: "I am that bread of life. ... The bread that I will give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. ... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you. ... He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent Me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth Me, even he shall live by Me" (John 6:48-57).
At His Mystical Supper, the evening before He suffered on the Cross, Christ Himself first changed bread into His true Flesh and wine into His true Blood and gave Them in communion to His disciples, thereby showing them how the Sacrament of Holy Communion should be observed.
From that time on, the sacrament of Holy Communion has been celebrated at a divine service, called the Liturgy. Believers receive the Flesh and Blood of Jesus Christ and are thereby united with Him, and not in a purely abstract or mystical sense, but really and truly! The whole being of a man, spiritual and physical, partakes of the spiritual and physical life of Jesus Christ, the God-Man. Love opens a path to spiritual closeness; moreover, in Holy Communion, while people are united with Christ, they are united with one another at the same time, and in Christ they become a single whole, a living organism, called the Church. This is why the Apostle Paul called the Church the Body of Christ (Col. 1:24).
Just as the Incarnation of the Son of God was accomplished by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Virgin Mary, so also the Church was founded on the day of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, Whom Jesus Christ sent from the Father to the Apostles on the fiftieth day after His Resurrection. Since that day the Holy Spirit has remained with the Church constantly, giving it life, illuminating it and cultivating it as a single living organism of the Body of Christ, consisting of many "members," faithful Christians.
There is something which must not be forgotten, especially in our times when Christianity is being split up into more and more churches and "jurisdictions." Man is called to be saved not by a mere mental acknowledgement of the truth of Christianity, and not merely by his own best efforts, but by belonging organically to the living body of the Church. Only in the Church, in this mystical Body of Christ, does the believer find correct spiritual guidance and the strength necessary for an authentically Christian life.
God is kind, He wants us all to be saved. If only a few were to be saved,why then was Christ crucified?
The gate into Paradise is not narrow.There is room for all those who bow humbly and are not puffed up with pride, as long as they repent and give the burden of their sins to Christ, then there is plenty of room to pass through the gate.
Man can be saved with a single humble thought, or with a proud one lose everything.
Elder Paisios
If we carefully considered and examined the weight of the Lord's Cross, our own cross would seem minute and light as a feather. The Lord was hanging
on the Cross completely naked and without any help from anyone. This is why He voiced, "My God, My God, why hath Thou forsaken Me?" (Mt. 27:46). We, on the other hand, are neither naked nor nailed to and hanging from such a cross.
On the contrary, we receive considerable consolation from our friends and
relatives during difficult moments. Additionally, God has promised to be next to
us in times of sorrow, and with His help we can endure any hardship.How pathetic we are! Our true God endured various tortures and suffered
such a cruel death on account of our sins. We insignificant and wretched sinners, on the other hand, cannot tolerate even the slightest pain, which our good Lord sends for our own benefit and correction. Oh, how foolish it is for us to seek
Christ in comfort and pleasure!
Christ prayed for them who crucified Him: "Forgive them, O Father, for they do not know what they are doing" (Lk. 23:34), whereas we do not want to forgive anyone who hurts us even a bit. The good thief confessed Christ while he was on
the cross, and we ungrateful sinners ridicule Him along with the evil thief saying, "If You are the Son of God, save Yourself and us" (Lk. 23:39). In times of difficulty we deny Him by contending, "If You
are God, deliver us from our cross, and we will believe in You (Mt. 27:43).
You should allow ungodly and evil people to suffer, not us. We have done nothing wrong..."Oh, how unrighteous and insensitive we are! We sit back and allow a thief to surpass us in the faith! A condemned criminal in a state of such harsh
suffering and punishment was able to understand better than us the benefit of sorrows! We should mimic the good thief and confess Christ during every sorrow and hardship—even bitter death itself
—, welcoming difficulties not as remorseful and repentant criminals but as true Christians and genuine children of God.
If the Lord entered into the glory and bliss (which He as the rightful owner was always entitled to)
after first suffering and enduring His Passion (cf.Hb. 12:2), how much more fitting is it for His servants to suffer in order to inherit the Kingdom that does not belong to them? How is it possible for us slaves to have it easier than our Master, or as
students to be greater than our Teacher? Christ
suffered for us, and we do not want to suffer in order to save our own soul? The Son of God chose to ascend to the Father through scorn and humiliation, and we worthless worms desire recognition and praise?
My dear brothers, when we experience difficulties and sorrows, let us not only endure them patiently without complaining, but let us rejoice—because,
indeed, "The sufferings of this present life are not worthy of and cannot be compared to the future glory that will be revealed to us" (Rom. 8:18).
It is truly foolish for us to flee from sorrow—
because the more we try to avoid sorrow and suffering, the more they overpower us. Conversely, when we greet difficulties and sorrows with joy,
they become frail and collapse before us, just as when Christ voluntarily proceeded to meet His enemies:“When Jesus went forth and said unto them, ‘Whom seek ye?’ they answered, ‘Jesus of
Nazareth.’ Jesus then said unto them, ‘I am He.’
As soon as He said ‘I am He,’ they went backward and fell to the ground” (Jn. 18:4-6).
We can actually experience the joy of Paradise when we find ourselves nailed to the cross of sorrows, if we thank God in times of difficulty and confess that we deserve to suffer, just as the good thief did while hanging on the cross.
He acknowledged Christ as the Lord and rebuked the other thief, “Dost not thou fear God? We indeed suffer justly, for we receive the due reward of our
deeds” (Lk. 23:40-41).
Do you see the gratitude of this thief? People who love the Lord behave in the same manner. They realize that they are worthy of condemnation; however, as they hang from their cross they do not lose hope but rather professChrist
to be the Almighty God, and they beseech Him to be deemed worthy of entering His Heavenly Kingdom.
The more we patiently endure our cross, the lighter it becomes for us. If we carry our cross eagerly and joyfully, it will become a source of great delight, an
inseparable memory of our Savior, and a certain
hope of eternal life with in Paradise, as took place with the good thief, who heard these blessed words from the Lord: “Verily I say unto thee, today shalt thou be with Me in paradise” (Lk. 23:43)
.
An exceptional degree of perfection exists, indeed, when a person remains patiently affixed to the cross with determination for the love of God, and without
complaining to God or others that his cross is unbearable.
Blessed is the man who not only thanks the Lord in times of poverty, sickness, loss of his family members, and various other misfortunes, but also blesses and glorifies the Lord always—even when death itself approaches—, and joyfully embraces every cross for the love of God. Such a person resembles the holy martyrs who glorified the Lord as they were tortured on the cross and thanked Him for allowing them to die on account of His holy name.
O my beloved Christians: we find and acquire glory upon the Cross—not within pleasure and enjoyment!
No one is exempt from sorrows and difficulties in this life. Therefore, we must try to endure life's difficulties joyfully because there is no other more
beneficial road leading to the salvation of our soul as the narrow and sorrowful path of hardships, through which we mimic and follow our Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered so much in this life. He chose this path for both Himself as well as His followers, and advised us that we cannot become His disciples if we do not carry our cross and follow Him:
"And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and
come after me, cannot be my disciple" (Lk. 14:27).
We cannot hope to make progress in the spiritual life and become Christ's co-heirs along with all the Saints in Paradise if we do not first swim through the waters of sorrow, just as our Lord and all the Saints were glorified after first carrying their Cross. This cross of suffering is so noble and so highly regarded by the Lord that He Himself promises to be next to the person who suffers, to deliver him from his affliction, and to glorify him in a wondrous manner: "I will be with him in affliction; I will deliver him, and glorify him" (Ps. 91:15).
Who then will not embrace life's difficulties with joy and not seize the opportunity to acquire such a sweet, faithful, and almighty Companion? God, in His compassion and wisdom, allows us to be faced with these small and transient sorrows in order to
grant us the indescribable and eternal riches in His heavenly Kingdom.
Truly, we must thank them who harm and ridicule us more than them who help and support us. They who wrong us become purifying agents of our soul,
through which we receive forgiveness of our sins. When our merciful Lord allows us to be confronted with difficulties and sorrows, He expresses greater love for us than when He grants us temporary enjoyment and spiritual consolation.
Indeed, we should despise them who impede us from the Cross and love them who grieve us, just as the Holy Gospel teaches. When Peter, moved by
love for Christ and not wanting to see his Master suffer, urged Him not to die on the Cross, the Lord rebuked him, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me:for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men" (Mt.16:23).
From this, we mustrealize that sorrows are pleasing to the Lord; moreover, that we must shun them who advise us to forsake our cross, whereas thank them who harm us.This is precisely what the Lord did:
He referred to Judas as His "friend"(Mt. 26:50)
when he betrayed Christwith a kiss, showing us in this manner that we must consider our persecutors as friends and agents of our salvation.
Abba Moses gave the following seven precepts to Abba Poemenius, which if followed will lead to salvation by anybody whether they be in the cenobium, or in solitude or in the world:
1. In the first place, as it is written, love God with all your heart and with all your mind.
2. Love your neighbour as yourself.
3. Bring to death all evil in you.
4. Do not judge your brother in any dispute.
5. Do no evil to another person.
6. Before departing this life cleanse yourself of every fault of mind or body.
7. Always be of a humble and contrite heart.
These things can be achieved by anyone who thinks of his own sins and not his neighbour's, and trusts in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns world without end. Amen
From The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
When Joseph's brothers threw him into the well(desiring his demise), they did not comprehend what a great sin they had committed. However, when God later allowed them to be overcome by hardship, they confessed and admitted that they were rightly suffering everything on account of theirsin against their brother:
“And they said to one another, ‘We are verily guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul when he besought us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us”(Gen. 42:21).
Do you see how much benefit issues from adversity? Do you see how hardship gives light to the blind and wisdom to the unlearned?
The Apostle Peter did not want to allow Christ to wash his feet because he was unaware his Teacher’s sensible and judicious intent. As Christ Himself attested: "What I do, thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know thereafter"(Jn. 13:7).
But when Jesus warned Peter that he would not have any part with Him if He does not wash his feet, the disciple stood motionless in fear and allowed Christ to wash his feet. Similarly, at present you are uncertain of the Lord’s objectives as He washes you with the cleansing waters of suffering and hardship;
however, one day, when you witness the radiance and glory that your soul has been adorned with,after being immersed in the bath of sorrows, you will thank your all-wise Lord. For if He had not given you a bath, you would have no part with Him in His Heavenly Kingdom. Up until the prodigal son possessed his paternal inheritance and wealth, he splurged in luxury, he entertained himself with food and drink, he carried out all his sinful desires, and never even once thought of repenting (cf. Lk. 15:11-20).
However, when the wise physician cauterized him with the flame of hunger, famine, and poverty, he aband
oned the pleasures of the flesh and quickly returned to his paternal home, much wiser and more mature.
What the mill stone does to wheat, what the grinding wheel does to steel, and what the furnace does to silver,
this is precisely what life’svarious trials and sorrows do to man: they purge him of all unsightly imperfections and polish him to a brilliant shine.
Since difficulties and sorrows are so advantageous and are the cause of such benefit for us, why should we foolishly detest them? Why shouldn't we instead thank and glorify the unerring heavenly Physician Who sends them to us in order that we may acquire the health of our soul, just as we thank and gladly pay the physicians who heal our body?
Blessed is the person who realizes that life's difficulties are sent to us by the Lord for our salvation, and who gratefully embraces them withpleasure.
The Holy Scriptures describe that the stones used to build the Temple of Solomon were first shewn
and chiseled outside of the Temple. Once the stones had been prepared and carved with utmost attention and diligence, they were then transported to the Temple and set in place gently, without being struck by a
hammer or other tool again: “And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither; so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building” (3 Kings 6:7).
Similarly, it is necessary for the people who will be placed as precious stones within the framework of the
divine manor found in Jerusalem above to be struck here in this present world with the hammer and chisel
of discipline and sorrow. This is because in the heavenly manor on high, there is no sorrow, trouble, hunger, thirst, punishment, or pain, as St. John the Evangelist describes in the book of the Revelation(cf. Rev. 21:4)
. This is why God allows His friends to suffer and face various sorrows here in this present life. Thus,we
must be extremely happy when adversities appear: we should receive them as a gift, as a blessing, and as medicine, which our Heavenly Father sends to us with much love.
Our Lord censured the Apostle Peter when he attempted to prevent Him from being apprehended and led to
death: “Put thy sword into the sheath! The cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” (Jn.18:11). If the Lord referred to the imminent ridicules, torments, and death itself (that He would endure for our salvation) as a cup sent from His Father, why shouldn’t we repeat the same words, “Shall I not drink it?”
and believe that all the sorrows and difficulties that we encounter area therapeutic cup containing medicine sent to us by the Heavenly Physician with paternal love for our salvation?
Behold, dear reader, how every sorrow (whether it originates from the devil, people, or some other source) is in fact a therapeutic remedy sent to you by your Heavenly Father, in order to purify your soul. Do not become upset if the drink tastes bitter,because this bitterness will help you acquire your cherished health, just as bitter and unpalatable medications prescribed by physicians help us get better.
All the sorrows and difficulties we are faced with in this life are spiritual medications sent to us by the Heavenly Physician for the benefit of our soul. According to St. Gregory the Theologian, the gall that Tobit placed on his eyes,through which he regained his sight (cf. Tob. 11:8-14), signified this truth—that every sinful person is delivered from spiritual blindness through bitter sorrows. Indeed, eyes that have been blinded by sin are enlightened and recover their vision through suffering.
Although the Holy Fathers praised monasticism as the angelic state, and although many of the greatest saints lived their lives and attained perfection in the deaf and lifeless desert, nevertheless, the Orthodox Church does not recommend tonsuring to all the faithful. "Neither all those in the desert were saved nor all those in the world were lost," said one saint. To a city dweller who, with no inclination for monasticism, desired to enter the monastery, St. Niphon said: "My child, a place neither saves nor destroys a man, but deeds save or destroy. For him who does not fulfill all the commandments of the Lord, there is no benefit from a sacred place or from a sacred rank. King Saul lived in the midst of royal luxury and he perished. King David lived in the same kind of luxury and he received a wreath. Lot lived among the lawless Sodomites and he was saved. Judas was numbered among the apostles and he went to Hades. Whoever says that it is impossible to be saved with a wife and children deceives himself. Abraham had a wife and children, three-hundred-eighteen servants and handmaidens, much gold and silver but, nevertheless, he was called the Friend of God. Oh, how many servants of the Church and lovers of the desert have been saved! How many aristocrats and soldiers! How many artesians and field-workers! Be pious and be a lover of men and you will be saved!"
St. Nikolai Velimirovich
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).
St. Silouan the Anthonite
