Apropos to the Feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch

…light is beautiful apart from all divisions, apart from form.  It is beautiful in itself, and it makes all that is visible beautiful.  ‘There is no object so repulsive that intense light would not make beautiful,’ says one almost contemporary writer. [Emerson] … Beauty, as a certain manifestation or disclosure of that which becomes objective, [...]

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Followup: The Ark of salvation

…the Catholic Filioque, that naïve product of excessive piety and half-baked theology Fr. Pavel Florensky

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The speech of faith

Separate aspects of faith disintegrate only for scholastic theology, but, in living life, these aspects, each retaining its independence, become so closely interwoven that one idea imperceptibly evokes another. For a scholastic theologian, it is easy to say that the concepts Church, Holy Spirit, and Son of God are different: easy, because in his consciousness [...]

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The foundations of science

…Our entire understanding of life, our entire science (I speak not of theologial science but of science in general, the scientific spirit) is based on the idea of Logos, on the idea of God the Word. This holds true not only for science but even for the whole of life itself, for the whole structure [...]

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The Kingdom of God is within you

All that belongs to God carries the seal of immortality. And, the Kingdom of God is immortal. If we desire to breathe the air of immortality, we must enter within ourselves, within our hearts, within the Kingdom of God. Outside of ourselves is the air of time, the air of transitoriness and decay in which [...]

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The righteous

From today’s readings for Vespers: But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are [...]

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On the Nativity

‘Spiritual light,’ sometimes combined with spiritual ‘warmth’ and ‘fragrance,’ is in fact the reasonable intuition we have been seeking, the intuition that includes the series of its own groundings. It is perfect beauty as the synthesis of absolute concrete givenness and absolute reasonable justifiedness. Spiritual light is the light of the Trihypostatic Divinity Itself, the [...]

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The good of the ascetic

For it is not fasts and other bodily exercises, not tears and good works that are the goods of an ascetic, but a personality restored in its integrity, a personality that has regained its chastity. “Nothing,” says St. Methodius, “is evil by nature. Things become evil by the mode of their use.” Fr. Pavel Florensky

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Integrity of the saints

For it is not fasts and other bodily exercises, not tears and good works that are the goods of an ascetic, but a personality restored in its integrity, a personality that has regained its chastity. Fr. Pavel Florensky

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To Live

And I stamped my foot angrily: ‘Are you not ashamed, unhappy animal, to whine about your fate? Are you not able to free yourself of subjectivity? Are you not able to forget yourself? Can you not (O shame!) understand that you have to surrender to the objective? The objective, standing outside of you, standing above [...]

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On “institutes”

In particular, only true virginity is capable of understanding the whole significance of marriage. A height is measurable only from a height; a mountain grows in the eyes in proportion to the ascent to the opposite peak. In the same way, one can understand the holiness of marriage and its qualitative difference from debauchery only [...]

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Surgery for the world

The Holy Eucharist pours healing balm into the wound of repentance, but the Eucharist also judges the communicant. Is it not in this same way that the Anointing and Comforting Spirit will come to heal the wounds of creation with a baptism of fire after the Terrible Day of surgery for the world, after the [...]

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The Urals of my soul

Again and again, every sin, every ‘petty’ baseness is present, ineradicably distinct, in my consciousness. More and more deeply, ‘petty’ inattentions, egotism, and heartlessness are branded into the soul with letters of fire, gradually crippling it. Not that there was anything clearly bad, anything clearly, tangibly sinful. But always it was in the petty things. [...]

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Khomiakov and Orthodoxy

As I promised yesterday I am going to offer up a few thoughts on Alexei Khomiakov’s thought and it’s relation to modern Orthodoxy. I am by no means qualified to do so but I will try to make something coherent. Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) is most well known for his treatise on the unity of the [...]

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Heavy and oppressed hearts

When one hears of so many modern doctrines ostensibly in sympathy with Christianity, but actually proclaiming openly the alleged impotence of Christianity and its inability to branch out into the tree of life, and insisting that it should surrender all spheres of life, except our inner consciousness, to some self-sufficient activities “after the rudiments of [...]

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The contemplation of love

For if reason is not associated with being, then being is not associated with reason, is alogical. Illusionism and all kinds of nihilism, which end in flaccid and pitiful skepticism, are then inevitable. The only way out of this quagmire of relativity and conditionality is the recognition that reason is associated with being and that [...]

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Knowledge according to love

For if reason is not associated with being, then being is not associated with reason, is alogical. Illusionism and all kinds of nihilism, which end in flaccid and pitiful skepticism, are then inevitable. The only way out of this quagmire of relativity and conditionality is the recognition that reason is associated with being and that [...]

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The guise of altruistic emotions

But one cannot make a greater error than to identify the spiritual love of one who knows the Truth with altruistic emotions and the striving for the “good of mankind,” a striving that, at best, is grounded in natural sympathy or in abstract ideas. For “love” in this sense, which we call “Judaic,” everything begins [...]

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True Philosophy

Rationalism, i.e., the philosophy of concept and rationality, the philosophy of things and lifeless immobility, is wholly connected with the law of identity and can be succinctly characterized as a homoiousian philosophy. It is a fleshly philosophy. By contrast, Christian philosophy, i.e., the philosophy of idea and reason, the philosophy of persons and creative acts, [...]

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The harmony of the Divine Liturgy

…what…is the baptismal formula? [In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit] It is essentially no more and no less than an expression of the dogma of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity. Thus, everything that precedes the Creed is a preparation for ‘attending’ to the word ‘consubstantiality,’ ὁμοούσια. ‘Consubstantiality’ [...]

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