Published by Pemptousia Partnership on November 13, 2021 Saint Nectarios of Pentapolis Love Seek love. Every day, ask God for love, because with love comes the whole host of other good things and virtues. Love and you’ll be loved by others. Give your whole heart to God, so that you may dwell in love. ‘Those who abide in love abide in God; and God abides in them’. (1 Jn. 4, 16). You must be very careful in your
Published by Pemptousia Partnership on December 16, 2021 Protopresbyter Themistoklis Mourtzanos ‘Don’t, out of vanity or sycophancy, insist on having your own way, quarrelling with and tormenting yourselves and your neighbor, just so that, afterwards, you can hear people saying that nobody can beat you’ (Abba Dorotheos) There are two ways of carrying out a task: with diligence which borders on perfectionism or with casualness, the ‘whatever’ approach. This is also true in human relationships. There are those
Published by Pemptousia Partnership, December 16, 2021 Protopresbyter Themistoklis Mourtzanos ‘Don’t, out of vanity or sycophancy, insist on having your own way, quarrelling with and tormenting yourselves and your neighbor, just so that, afterwards, you can hear people saying that nobody can beat you’ (Abba Dorotheos) There are two ways of carrying out a task: with diligence which borders on perfectionism or with casualness, the ‘whatever’ approach. This is also true in human relationships. There are
Here is how things stand so far. We have observed the five most important virtues through which the fathers in the Conferences teach us to establish the purity of heart that is the go al of Christian life. These are detachment, discernment, discretion, balance, and humility. We have observed that the fathers taught Christians to practice these virtues in order to guide them to their proper telos, which is the kingdom of God. We have
Balance, we have already noted, can only be attained through discretion and discernment. Yet, there is another key virtue that the monk must seek if he is going to walk the royal road according to the Conferences. This is the fifth and final virtue on our list, namely, humility, which, according to Abba Moses, is the foundational virtue lying beneath a Christian’s ability to practice discernment and discretion and thus, by extension, to live a
The Christian, then, must be on guard against doctrines and scriptural interpretations that lead to ruin-she must develop discernment to see such ideas for what they are. But perhaps even more pressing, according to the Conferences, is the need to develop discretion. According to the fathers of the Conferences, discretion is an intellectual virtue much like discernment, except a Christian applies discretion when considering not which ideas, doctrines, and scriptural interpretations to embrace, but when
Both discernment and discretion involve the Christian’s development of a correct relationship with various ideas and concepts. They are intellectual virtues in that to display them means to recognize certain truths and realities clearly, without being deceived. Abba Moses defines discernment in the first conference as the ability first to avoid any kind of incorrect doctrine or idea that might lead a monk astray. Whatever has found entrance into our hearts, and whatever doctrine has
According to the Conferences, to cultivate purity of heart means to live a life of Christian virtue. For the fathers, speaking about virtues is like placing the white light of purity of heart through a mental prism. Virtues are like the colors that make up the light, combining indivisibly into a single whole, but capable of being discussed on their own. Many of the fathers in the Conferences talk at length about virtues, their nature,
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