St. Symeon the New Theologian: On the Fearful Day of the Lord and the Future JudgmentBeloved, there is much for us to say about the judgment, and the interpretation is difficult because it is not about things which are present and visible, but about future and invisible matters. There is therefore great need of prayer, of much effort, of much purity of intellect, both in us who speak and in those who listen, in order for the first to be able and know and speak well and for the others to listen with understanding to what is said. What then is the purpose of this discourse? Its subject is the great and manifest and fearful day of the Lord, and we write it in order to know why it is called and said to be the Day of the Lord. Read More →
Apostolic CanonsBelow we reproduce the full list of Apostolic Canons as presented by New Advent. Read More →
St. John Maximovitch: The Decline of the Patriarchate of ConstantinopleBelow we present the original pages of a report on the autocephalous Churches written in 1938 by St. John Maximovitch and published in Orthodox Word Magazine, 1972. From the translators’ introduction: “The anti-Orthodox career a11d statements of the late Patriarch Athenagoras of sorry memory have been so striking that they have perhaps tended to obscure the fact that the apostasy of this one man was merely the culmination of a long and thorough process of the departure from the Orthodox Faith of an entire Local Orthodox Church. The promise of the new Patriarch Demetrios to ‘follow upon the footsteps of our great Predecessor… in pursuing Christian unity’ and to institute ‘dialogues’ with Islam and other non-Christian religions, while recognizing ‘the holy blessed Pope of Rome Paul VI, the first among equals within the universal Church of Christ’ (Enthronement Address), only confirms this observation and reveals the depths to which the Church of Constantinople has fallen in our own day.” Read More →
Suggested ReadingContemporary Signs of the End of the World:
If Rome had not fallen away from Orthodoxy and started this whole process of apostasy, world history would have been much different. We can see even now that in the East, Orthodox countries like Greece and Russia did not have a Renaissance, or a Reformation, or even an Enlightenment period, as did the West. And if they are now bound up with the same kind of worldview as is the West, it is because they have in the last century or two finally accepted all these ideas and been poisoned by them. Therefore, they have become part of the whole world which is now involved in one single civilization, i.e. Western civilization – which is, as Solzhenitsyn rightly sees, in its dying phase.
Exploring Orthodoxy 1: Christians, You Must Know Christ!In an email, commenter Kwon Mega left me some links on the Orthodox Church. There is an Orthodox Church very close to my home, and on various occasions I’ve stopped by the bookshop and even chatted with a few people. Though I’ve never attended a service there, I’ve lately felt a desire to do so. It is probably a sign of my utter wretchedness that I’ve passed this Church daily, even drunk on occasion, for over six years without ever once attending a service. When I question why I never attended a service, I realize that until very recently, I wasn’t aware of the differences between Orthodox and Catholic. I simply assumed that the Church I was walking past was Catholic, and for that reason, I never really gave it much thought. In short, I suppose one could say I failed to worship with all of my mind.
This is the first post of a new series, Exploring Orthodoxy. I’d like to share my initial reactions to the first link Kwon Mega provided (and thanks, Kwon Mega, for providing the links, and the inspiration for this series).