Blog Readings

Here's an excerpt from an interesting post by the Ocholophibist at Energetic Procession:

Very much inferred in all this is the notion that to be in the presence and love of the Word is to be free, but to chose corruption means to be instantly bound to the determinisms of death. If we choose death, we choose the patterns and cycles and cosmic consequences of death. Though I am no scholar of St. Athanasius, it seems to me that it is consistent with his line of thought to believe that the cycles of death and corruption that we witness in the universe are brought about because of man’s choosing of corruption. Only we male and female persons are the likeness and image of the Word. We men and women are the mediating microcosms of the cosmos, and the rest of the material cosmos is bound to the determinisms we introduce, or to the freedom we introduce (that being relative freedom, for only God is completely free - our freedom resting in mimetic contingency upon God). In this manner we either bless or we curse the entire cosmos in our own volitional acts to either preserve our likeness through constant contemplation of the Word (a restoration and preservation now made possible through Holy Baptism and the Mysteries) or to choose that which is corruptible.

There are also some worthwhile comments associated with the post.

Readings

Here are a couple of books I've recently completed:

The Beauty of the Infinite - David Bentley Hart

From the book:

One moves in God's infinity only if one moves upon surfaces. To be raised up eternally into glory, to be deified, is to traverse every series of being in such a way as to see God's beauty expressed in each, in endless variety. Sin, violence, cruelty, egoism, and despair are the discords that disrupt the surface, but always as privation, a failure of love; they are no part of being's deep music, but only shrill alarms and barren phrasings, apostasies from music altogether. Evil, for all its ineradicable ubiquity, is always originally an absence, a shadow, a false reply, and all violence falls within the interval of a harmony not taken up, within which the true form of being is forgotten, misconstrued, distorted, and belied. This is not to imagine being as a music without dissonances, but as one without ultimate discords for the soul that turns its motion toward God's all-embracing eternal order of love, seeking to recover the theme of this love and articulate it anew forever.

An interesting book, in spite of my inability to fully penetrate, let alone master, the dense layers of philosophical prose and nomenclature. A variety of reviews can be found online, or purchased from various journals; however, seeing that I'm not entirely satisfied with any of the free ones, I'll defer recommendations.


Unseen Warfare - as edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse

From the book:

This book, which profits the soul, is justly named 'Unseen Warfare'...For it teaches not the art of visible and sensory warfare, and speaks not about visible, bodily foes but about the unseen and inner struggle, which every Christian undertakes from the moment of his baptism, when he makes a vow to God to fight for Him, to the glory of His divine Name, even unto death. (It is of this warfare that the book of Numbers speaks allegorically: 'Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the Lord' [Numbers xxi. 14].) It speaks of invisible and incorporeal foes, which are the varied passions and lusts of the flesh, and of the evil demons who hate men and never cease to fight against us, day and night, as the divine Paul says: 'For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places' (Eph. vi. 12)
This book teaches that the warriors who take part in this unseen war are all who are Christians; and their commander is our Lord Jesus Christ, surrounded and accompanied by His marshals and generals, that is, by all the hierarchies of angels and saints. The arena, the field of battle, the site where the fight actually takes place is our own heart and all our inner man. The time of battle is our whole life.

I enjoyed this book; it was quite practical, and more accessible than the heavier ascetical works within the Philokalia collection of writings and St. John's Ladder.

Icons

I've stumbled across an interesting article on icons. Here's an excerpt:

When the baptised person has entered the seemingly insignificant door of his heart, he finds himself in Paradise, in the open space where Christ walks with his disciples. He is transfigured, and sees things otherwise unseen. As St. Maximus wrote, one pure in heart experiences "a change in his senses and passes from the flesh to the Spirit. The Spirit brings about a transformation of his sensible energies and strips away the veils of passions from the intellectual faculty" ( 10). And again, "In Christ, those who were baptised become light in light, and they know the one who begot them " Then the iconographer paints those whom he has seen with his own spiritual eyes. Then he paints not images of images, but an image taken from the living prototype. Certainly he will receive the physical likeness of the saint from existing icons, but these icons he experiences sacramentally, not as a replacement for the real thing, but as a sacramental bearer of the very person depicted. He meets the saint personally in Christ through the Holy Spirit, just as Peter, James and John met Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. The outer likeness he receives from the Spirit through icons, and the "inner" likeness, the personal relationship with the saint, he receives from the same Holy Spirit through purity of heart. In that way the physical likeness which the iconographer receives through icons is not something exterior to his life in the Spirit, because the Spirit who has guarded this likeness through icons is the same Spirit who fills his heart with light.