Dear Father Mamas,<\/p>\n
May the blessing of the Lord be with you!<\/p>\n
Thank you for your letter. I wondered when I sent my little note: maybe this will just evoke another \u201copen letter\u201d such as your monastery is famous for? But I thought: No, it is so obviously a purely personal note that an \u201cofficial answer\u201d won\u2019t be seen as necessary. But you did make such an answer, after all.<\/p>\n
Why such an \u201cover-reaction\u201d on your part? Like so many of the letters from your monastery, there are many correct points in it, which in my case I never intended to challenge; but also there is so much that is unnecessary, as if you wish to make sure that I know you are qualified to teach me. And the parts of your letter that are wrong you (in my view) would require much effort to explain, and given the tone of your letter you would not yet be receptive to such an explanation in any case.<\/p>\n
My short note to you was purely personal, and I aimed at your heart, not your head; if I misled you into thinking I in principle favor second-hand translations and \u201cpious fables\u201d and \u201cOld Believerism,\u201d I am sorry, especially since I caused you to take such unnecessary time explaining things to me which I had no thought of questioning in the first place.<\/p>\n
But when all is said and done, my initial feeling remains: I am afraid for you. So you have a \u201ccommunity\u201d and an \u201celder\u201d\u2014I didn\u2019t \u201coverlook\u201d them, I was only trying to speak to you personally. Do I have to remind you that a group passion can be even more deadly than an individual passion? Forgive me, but I feel passion in your letter\u2014a passion that will be expressed also in your translations, no matter now many work on them with you. Do you realize what times we live in? We live in an atmosphere of such spiritual fakery that it infects us and spreads even when we are reading accurately- transmitted Patristic texts. We are all sick with this plague\u2014and can we be so self-confident about our Patristic translations, about our community and our elder? There is nothing automatic or infallible about an elder, a community, about obedience, or any of the words of the Scripture and the Fathers; they all can be merely outward and without effect for salvation; the only test of them is the effect they truly produce upon the soul.<\/p>\n
I will not answer your letter on the level you wrote it; you were not writing to me, but to a straw man you could shoot down. It is pointless for me to defend myself when you \u201ccorrect\u201d me on points I never held and never defended. Even on the \u201cliteral\u201d level, you read our Blessed Paisius book so carelessly that you didn\u2019t find there the passages you thought you had to translate yourself, and then tell me that it is a \u201cgreat pity\u201d we didn\u2019t translate them!'(See Blessed Paisius, pp. 81, 119, 180. 183, etc.) I\u2019m not saying this to prove you\u2019re \u201cwrong\u201d and I\u2019m \u201cright, or to score one more \u201cpoint\u201d against you\u2014we\u2019re all wrong so much of the time, if not with the head then certainly with the heart, that none of us have anything to boast about. I use this merely as an example of how unnecessary so much of your letter was.<\/p>\n
I only wish, once more, to speak a word to you personally, using an example or two from your letter.<\/p>\n
You mention Vladika Andrew and his \u201cmistake.\u201d Frankly, this story doesn\u2019t ring true to me; it seems like a \u201cpious fable\u201d in reverse\u2014one intended to show how \u201csimple\u201d the Russians are, and how \u201csmart\u201d we others are. Some Russian priests, it is true, make this simple mistake, and it is rather a joke among some of them; I would doubt that Vladika Andrew would make this mistake\u2014but even if he did, how could it be that you, who know both English and Russian, \u201chad a hard time figuring out\u201d what he was talking about? Any convert or Greek who knows Russian should have got the point immediately; are you sure this wasn\u2019t some misunderstanding on your own part, or on that of the translator if there was one, or some joke of Vladika Andrew that you didn\u2019t get? But that\u2019s secondary; * the point is: you stored up the incident to \u201cuse\u201d later on, and the way you use it does not reflect well on you. You will say that you are \u201ccorrect\u201d; but your attitude is superior and cold (that\u2019s my feeling from your words), and you do ill to repeat the story in this way. I have heard Russian clergy tell similar stories about bishops\u2019 mistakes, but it was with warmth and affection; \u201ccorrectness\u201d is thereby maintained, but without any of the coldness and superiority I feel in your words.<\/p>\n
You mention \u201cEastern Orthodox Books\u201d\u2014which, by the way, is not \u201csomehow affiliated\u201d with us, but is an independent enterprise. Their printing of St. Isaac, in the copy we have, does not indicate a publisher at all, and I understand this was done deliberately to avoid giving \u201cOrthodox approval\u201d to it; the very few copies printed were for customers of the more expensive edition. Perhaps they should have printed the Introduction too\u2014but my point here is that again you have \u201cstored up\u201d this information to \u201cuse\u201d at the right time (and you even had to do a little research to know that Eastern Orthodox Books printed it). But then Why didn\u2019t you store up some \u201cgood\u201d information about Eastern Orthodox Books. Why didn\u2019t you mention in the Foreword to the Ladder (I assume you were part of this group effort\u2014if not, forgive me for the mistake) that Fr. Lazarus\u2019 translation has been in print these several years and is still available in paperback with an introduction by I. M. Kontzevitch? Aren\u2019t you, in many cases, selectively \u201cstoring up\u201d information that makes others look bad or \u201csimple\u201d or non-existent? Is this the Christian spirit? (I am speaking this to you personally\u00b7, please do not write another letter defending your monastery against thinking evil of others; I\u2019m only writing this to hit your heart, and I\u2019m not attacking your monastery or sending this letter to your \u201cenemies.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Only one more point: you \u201ccatch\u201d us teaching \u201cthe baptism of the dead\u201d! Good heavens! Are you going to let this image throw you? Well, perhaps if there are readers like you such images should be excised\u2014you will extract the last drop of blood from them. But even so, the \u201cdeductions\u201d you draw from it! No papalist would be so scholastically \u201clogical\u201d as you were! Would you really \u201ceat, drink and be merry\u201d if you thought there was \u201csome sort of baptism after death\u201d as described in this story? I don\u2019t know a single Orthodox Christian who would! And because someone might want to pray for his unbaptized grandfather (in the way handed down to us by Fathers like Elder Leonid of Optina, Theophan the Recluse, and Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd)\u2014is he really teaching that God is \u201cthe ultimate cause of the damnation of sinners and unbelievers\u201d?! Really, your reasoning is so outlandish that I am at a loss to \u201cdefend\u201d myself\u2014just line me up against the wall and shoot me down! Do such accusations benefit those you show them to? I sincerely doubt that they benefit either you or me.<\/p>\n
Well, enough. It seems I\u2019ve now lined up my own accusations against you! Please forgive me, I am not the one to humble you\u2014but I do hope you will extract whatever good you can for yourself from my words, sinful and passionate as they may be. My heart is sad for you; I feel there is something you miss. I think you need a big dose of warmheartedness and simplicity; may God grant that you get it! I say this because your letter was so overblown and so unnecessary. If you think images like the \u201cbaptism\u201d one are unwise (an image which none of our readers who has mentioned it has taken literally), perhaps you could say so in a sentence or two, without making all those \u201cdeductions,\u201d which I think are an unfruitful use of your time.<\/p>\n
Please forgive me for my words if they seem harsh or unkind; I assure you of my sincere love and prayers for you. Please pray for us.<\/p>\n
With love in Christ,
\nUnworthy Hieromonk Seraphim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dear Father Mamas, May the blessing of the Lord be with you! Thank you for your letter. I wondered when I sent my little note: maybe this will just evoke another \u201copen letter\u201d such as your monastery is famous for? But I thought: No, it is so obviously a purely personal note that an \u201cofficial […]<\/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-1453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453","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=1453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orthodoxaustralia.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}