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Dostoevsky or Nietzsche? God-Man or Man-God?

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“What is man?” This question shapes all of Dostoevsky’s thought and writing. And perhaps his most important insight is that humanity today is faced with a great choice: between the God-man (Christ) and the Man-God (most visible in Nietzsche’s Übermensch or Overman). Sadly, key figures of Western culture have been increasingly pursuing the second alternative for several centuries, seeking to become divine on their own terms and by their own efforts—striving to re-create the world and human nature itself according to their own will.

Nikolai Berdyaev — along with Frs. Florensky and Bulgakov one of the brightest lights of the Russian Religious Renaissance in the pre-Bolshevik decades — traces this choice (between Man-God and God-man, between Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, between Sodom and the Mother of God) with great insight here, despite his occasional forays into historicism in other parts of the book from which these excerpts are drawn.

The Little Things in Life are More Important than the Bigger Things

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Do you think that to live according to the faith and to fulfill the will of God is very difficult? Think again, says St. John Maximovitch. Fulfilling the will of God is very easy if we first pay attention to the little things. St. John tells us how.

Recent Articles

How to Read the Holy Scriptures

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Because Orthodox worship is replete with scriptural references, the Orthodox tend to take them for granted, says Fr. Seraphim Rose in this lecture given in 1979. Instead, we should read them more often and with greater diligence because they have great benefit in the spiritual life. St. Seraphim of Sarov for example, used to read the entire New Testament once a week.

Fr. Seraphim says, “Reading scripture is a great defense against sin, and the ignorance of scripture a great misfortune, a great abyss.” His warning to us is stark and sobering, “Not to know anything from the word of God is a disaster. This is what has given rise to heresies, to immorality; it has turned everything upside down.”

Time and Place in the Healing of the Paralytic

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Fr. Alexander Webster, Dean of Holy Trinity Seminary, masterfully compares chronological time and sacred time in the biblical story of the Healing of the Paralytic to reveal that both culminate in the healing work of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The paralytic waited for the stirring of the waters every year in order to be healed. Thirty eight years he waited because he had no one to carry him to the pool. One day the Messiah came and asked the paralytic if he indeed wanted to be healed. When the paralytic responds in the affirmative, Jesus heals him by the power of His Word.

This event shows us, writes Fr. Alexander, that sacred time is never far from chronological time and one enters into the other through the person of Jesus Christ. If and when the Lord comes to us and asks if we want to be healed, be ready to say yes.

Met. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos (and Fr. John Romanides) – On The Mystery of Pentecost

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“Why was it necessary for the Ascension to happen and for the Holy Spirit to descend?”

In two volumes of Empirical Dogmatics, Metropolitan Hierotheos offers us a once-hidden treasure: the unwritten teachings of Fr John Romanides, one of the greatest Orthodox theologians of the last century. These “spoken teachings” (recorded from lectures at the University of Thessaloniki, as well as more informal venues) convey Fr John’s theological views in a vivid and engaging manner, explaining the Orthodox Way as leading, by means of purification (askesis) of the soul, through illumination (theoria) to the experience of glorification (theosis) or participation in the uncreated grace of God.

“At Pentecost Christ’s human nature returns from now on to the Church…This is the mystery of God’s presence in the world…This is the new way in which the human nature of Christ is present in the world…This mode of God’s presence in the world, particularly in [those who have been] glorified, starts for the first time from the Ascension and Pentecost.”

Orthodox Spirituality and the Technological Revolution

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Technology has led us into a dangerous new arena. As Fr Aimilianos puts it, whereas in industrial society people were ccnsumers enslaved to the products they had made, in post-industrial society they are “ becoming consumers and slaves to [the] images and information which fill their lives.” Contrary to the technocrats with blind faith that technology will somehow itself offer the solution to how it should be regulated, the Orthodox Church looks to monastic tradition and practice for a model of how technical applications can be used to help us meet our needs in a way that is friendly to beauty and that frees us to worship the Creator.

Looking to the monastic prescriptions of St Basil the Great, the author prescribes 1) a restraint which would limit technology to the salvation of the soul and sustaining the life of the body, and 2) a spiritual vigilance that can save us from the “cunning distraction” inherent in “the culture of information technology and images.” These virtues, as much in a technological world as in the world of late antiquity, will allow us to live within the world without attachment to it, to deal with the world as if we had no dealings with it (I Cor 7:31).

The Diabolist: Remembering a Youthful Encounter with Evil1

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In this recollection of his youth, the noted English writer G. K. Chesterton reflects on the terrifying and lingering impact of an encounter with evil in the person of one of his companions. The narrative is made unusually powerful by the skill with which Chesterton reveals the invisible concealed within the visible, the supernatural cloaked within the natural and mundane, deep metaphysical realities emerging from within what could easily be taken as a banal and everyday encounter. Along the way, he dramatizes the ancient insight (forming the great, underlying claim of Plato’s “Republic”) that evil corrodes and ultimately devastates the soul of the evildoer himself.

How to Establish a Prayer Rule

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Establishing and maintaining a prayer rule does not have to be an onerous experience, one that is more likely to fail than succeed, writes St. Theophan the Recluse. We need a prayer rule because we need discipline, but that discipline has to be doable, one that delivers the fruits of prayer and not one that drives us to frustration, or worse, despair, because we don’t have the strength to maintain it.

Understanding Orthodoxy

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Dogma, Fr. John Romanides taught, exists to guide the faithful and to safeguard against false teaching. Dogmas don’t contain the substance of the encounter with God, they describe and direct it. Dogma itself must be experienced, lit with the fire of Divine Life to effect salvation — the healing, redemption, and restoration — of the believer. Theology, in other words, must be living, and a living theology is exemplified by a life in and with Christ as the Apostles experienced it in the early centuries of the Church.

Christ Has Risen Within Your Heart!

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In 1978, Fr George Calciu delivered seven courageous homilies, one on each Wednesday of Lent, addressing the youth of Romania, knowing that his defiance would earn him even more long years of communist imprisonment. These became monuments of resistance to the tyranny of communism, and stirred the heart of a nation with the words: “What do you know of Christ, young man? If all you know is what they have taught you in atheism classes, you have been deprived [of] the only truth that can set you free.”

It’s Pascha, Not Easter!

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The right word can make the meaning of something clear, and the wrong word can obscure or even hide its real meaning. The right word for the celebration of the resurrection of Christ is the Greek word “Pascha” which means “Passover” in English. It opens up the rich and necessary association of Christ as the “Pashal Lamb” with the paschal lamb of Exodus and the flight of the children of Abraham from the tyranny of Pharoah.

The Symbolism of Palm Sunday

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Although it was an historical event that took place at a particular time and place, Our Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem has other dimensions as well. For example, it fulfills in a remarkable way the clear and precise prophecy of the Prophet Zacharias. But beyond this, it also has a mystical, symbolical meaning addressing the salvation of each of us. St Nikolai Velimirovich explicates here the rich symbolism of Christ’s mystical entry into the “spiritual Jerusalem” of the soul.

An Independent Operator

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The Leo Ray Miller he had sown that night at the reception sprouted and spread like an ugly weed. It grew up through the cracks of whatever lies he told himself. It choked every intention, it poisoned every relationship and turned every so-called good deed into a self-serving con. He wanted to believe. There had to be some relief beyond his short-term capacity to fool himself. He wanted hope.

Is Music Sacred?

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If there is no pre-existing, intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it – which is the Creator – what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and degenerates into an obsession with techniques. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes purely arbitrary.

In Depth Articles

Original Sin According to St. Paul

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In regard to the doctrine of original sin as contained in the Old Testament and illuminated by the unique revelation of Christ in the New Testament, there continues to reign in the denominations of the West a great confusion, which in the last few centuries seems to have gained much ground in the theological problematics of the Orthodox East.

The Divine Liturgy as Mystical Experience

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There are cases in scripture where God appears directly and sensibly to man—indeed, does not only appear to him, but walks, speaks, dines, and even wrestles. There is no suggestion that, because God is “purely spiritual,” such appearances are not of God “as He is in Himself.”

Nature and City in the Greek East

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The poet seems to suggest that we can now find the natural city only in the imagination. The bridge for the modernist poet is now an interior, and even a psychological function. It was not always so.

Lost in Manhattan

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