With regard to acedia Evagrius gives two pieces of advice. One concerns steadfastness. We are to make up our minds and stay in our cell, simply enduring whatever is going on within us: “Just accept what the temptation brings on you. Above all, look this temptation of acedia in the eye, for it is the worst of all. But it also leads to the greatest purification of the soul. To flee or avoid such conflicts
By Harry Boosalis One of the more crucial components of our spiritual life is proper training in the development of good spiritual habits. Habit is a second nature. This is why it is imperative that we train ourselves in the ways of spiritual warfare. Saint Silouan writes, “Train yourself to cut off an intrusive thought immediately … Be at pains over this, so that you acquire the habit. The soul is a creature of habit:
A PERSON who resolves to begin regular morning exercises usually does so not because he already has physical fitness but in order to get something he does not have. Once one has something he can be anxious to keep it; previous to that, he is anxious to get it. Therefore, begin your practice without expecting anything of yourself. If you are fortunate enough to sleep in a room by yourself, you can quite 1iterally and
The biblical revelation, understood symbolically, confronts us with an uncompromising anthropocentrism, which is not physical but spiritual. Because Man is at once ‘microcosm and microtheos’, both a summing up of the universe and the image of God; and because God, in order to unite himself to the world, finally became a human being; humanity is the spiritual axis of all creation at every level, in every sphere. The saints see the universe in God, pervaded
By Father Stanley Harakas All of us have heard of the saints. The names of nearly all of us are a saint’s name. We know about some popular saints, like St. George or St. Demetrios or especially, the Mother of our Lord, the Virgin Mary. But what is a saint? A common answer is “a holy person.” But what does that mean? In Greek, “holy” is “AH-yee-os.” Its basic meaning is “to be set apart
In reading the description of these nine logismoi we sense how much psychological experience Evagrius gathered in his kellion. But he thought there was something still more important than knowing about the logismoi: handling thoughts and feelings. Evagrius advises a different method for every passion. The three basic drives – eating, sex, and greed – are transformed through fasting, asceticism, and almsgiving. Here discipline is a good way not to suppress the drives, but to
By Harry Boosalis Logismoi, or these ‘evil thoughts’, may be manipulated to stir up anxiety and anger aimed against those people with whom we are closest. This often includes friends, relatives, fellow members of a parish community, as well as those with whom we are sacramentally linked or have spiritual bonds—even our own clergy and others who work for the Church. Whether well founded or not—and usually they are not—these logismoi can end up as passions of
By Father Matthew Baker In his On the Making of Man, St Gregory of Nyssa likened the human body to a kind of musical instrument, played upon by the mind of man. In the same work, he dismissed as pagan the idea of man as microcosm. Yet later, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory espoused precisely this notion of microcosm in order to express the mediatorial role of the human being between intelligible and
FROM the foregoing we understand that by prayer the holy Fathers are not referring to occasional prayer, morning and evening devotions and grace at meals, but for them prayer is synonymous with unceasing prayer, the life of prayer. Pray without ceasing (I Thessalonians 5: 17) is to be taken as a literal command. Understood in this way, prayer is the science of scientists and the art of artists. The artist works in clay or colours,
The universe is present to Man as the first revelation he receives, and it is his task to interpret it creatively, to give conscious utterance to the ontological praise of things. The world is also, in impersonally female guise, presented to Man, to be united with him in a mystical marriage, forming one flesh with him. The whole sensible universe is an extension of our body. Or rather, as we have already said, and in
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