Dear Brother in Christ, Nicholas [Eastman?],<\/p>\n
Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. I pray you are faring well in the Fast and will be prepared to meet the Holy Passion and Resurrection of our Saviour. This is spiritually a very rich part of the year for us, with the long services, the special Lenten tone of life, the readings from the Holy Fathers. I imagine all the readings there are in Russian, but I hope that somehow you are able to get benefit from this practice of readings during the services. Here we have been reading the Ladder, the Lausiac History, Abba Dorotheus, and the Life of the Fathers of St. Gregory of Tours. Reading some of these books over again every year only puts them deeper into one\u2019s Orthodox consciousness, and there are always \u201cnew\u201d things there no matter how often one has read them\u2014which, of course, only shows how dense we are and how much we need such things.<\/p>\n
I hope that in the midst of your learning (which we pray may be very fruitful!) you are also getting the feel for that which can\u2019t be directly taught\u2014the tone of Orthodox life and thought which comes \u201cbetween the lines\u201d as it were, the respect for the older generation which is handing down the sacred treasure of Orthodoxy, the approach to the teaching of the Holy Fathers which should be not academic but practical, and should see beyond superficial \u201cdisputes\u201d to the deeper meaning of the Patristic teaching. The Patristic \u201cexperts\u201d of the newer school miss this, and this is a great temptation in our Church now also, since everyone is now affected to some degree or other by the soul-less academic air around us. Of late we have noticed how shallow has been the discussion of Blessed Augustine\u2014a cold, calculating approach to him which would either condescendingly \u201caccept\u201d him or else \u201cthrow him out of the calendar\u201d based solely on an abstract analysis of his teaching. But the true Orthodox perspective is, first of all, to distrust ones abstract \u201ctheological\u201d outlook and ask: what do our elders think; what did recent Fathers think? And taking these opinions respectfully, one then begins to put together the picture for oneself. But the \u201cnew theologians,\u201d when they hear that our recent fathers such as St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain or our own Archbishop John had great respect for Blessed Augustine, can only say with disdain\u2014 \u201cthey were under Western influence\u201d\u2014and throw out their weighty opinions with a quite \u201cWestern\u201d lack of feeling and understanding. Anyone who has read Bl. Augustine\u2019s Confessions with Sympathy will not readily want to \u201cthrow him out of the calendar\u201d\u2014for he will see in this book precisely that fiery zeal and love which is precisely what is so lacking in our Orthodox life today! Have you read this book, by the way?\u2014you should. Archbishop Philaret of Chernigov, in his 19th century Patrology, while setting forth clearly Bl. Augustine\u2019s mistakes\u2014or rather, overemphases\u2014still highly praises this book for its warmth and piety. And perhaps Bl. Augustine\u2019s very \u201cWesternness\u201d makes him more relevant for us today who are submerged in the West and its way of thought; it is surely pride for us to think that we will read only the great \u201cEastern\u201d and \u201cmystical\u201d books.<\/p>\n
Well, I didn\u2019t really mean to digress so much on this subject. But at least you know that we are thinking of you and are very anxious for you to get the maximum from your seminary and monastery experience. Above all, keep your heart open to learn to be a little detached from the many intellectual arguments and currents that buzz about our Church. Let us know how you are doing. Pray for us\u2014 we have started to print the book on the Life of Blessed Paisius, which is an immense project for us. (Tell that to Br. Macarius\u2014he asked us about it and I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve answered him yet.)<\/p>\n
With love in Christ,
\nS. M.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Brother in Christ, Nicholas [Eastman?], Greetings in our Lord Jesus Christ. I pray you are faring well in the Fast and will be prepared to meet the Holy Passion and Resurrection of our Saviour. This is spiritually a very rich part of the year for us, with the long services, the special Lenten tone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1388\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}