In English

Punishment and reward. Both of these are in the hands of God. But just as life on earth is no more than a shadow of that in heaven, by the same token, punishment and reward  are merely a shadow of the real punishment and reward of eternity. The main persecutors of Saint John Chrysostom were Patriarch Theofilos of Alexandria and Empress Evdoxia. After Chrysostom’s death as a martyr, bitter punishment awaited both of them. Theofilos became possessed by demons, while Evdoxia quickly succumbed to an incurable disease – her body became covered in sores from which worms emerged. The stench given off by her body was so appalling that it was unbearable for people just passing the house where she was ...

While he was always charitable towards others, Father Arsenios was very hard on himself, and, out of his great love, made prostrations and fasted for others, who were unable to do so themselves. As a spiritual Father, he did not usually impose a canon on people, but would simply try to bring them to the point of awareness, so out of philotimo, they themselves would ask to do some ascetic act (of prayer, prostrations, fasting,) or charity work or what­ever kind of good deed they felt moved to perform. Whenever he saw a small child possessed or para­lysed and determined that the parents were the cause, he would give the parents a canon, once he had cured their child. On one occasion, ...

‘Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus’. This ‘lawyer’ approached Jesus Christ, supposedly to ask what he should do to inherit eternal life, but in fact out of a desire to provoke Him. The lawyer was an educated man of his time who studied and interpreted the Law and it was his aim to trap Jesus into a discussion. Instead he received a much-needed lesson. Jesus got him to understand that it’s one thing to be well-educated and play at being clever and quite another to be a good and useful human being. Wisdom isn’t a matter of knowing who your neighbour is, but knowing what you should do for that person. Everybody knows and says lots ...

Antipathy, hatred and envy should be unknown to any Christian. We shouldn’t even know their names. How can Christians have antipathy within them? You see love everywhere, you breathe in its aroma. God is the God of love.

John was born on the island of Cyprus. His father was the eparch, a man of renown, called Epifanios. John was brought up from childhood as a real Christian and, against his will, but because his parents insisted, he married and had children. By God’s providence, his wife and children all departed this life early. John quickly became well-known for his great compassion, with the result that, in the reign of Irakleios, he was elected Patriarch of Alexandria (610). He governed the Church of Alexandria soundly for a decade, as a true shepherd, protecting it from dangers on the part of pagans and heretics. Once, when he was speaking to his flock, Saint John said: “If you wish to be ...

Secondly, God created the perceptible world in six days. He bedecked the heavens with the multitude of stars and the suns; He adorned the earth with all manner of plants and animals; He filled the air with the sweet trilling of the birds. Finally, He made people, placed them in Paradise and told them to observe His divine commandment. Alas, they broke His commandment and were exiled from the Paradise of delight and sent into this world of tears. Here, too, God employed Michael and Gabriel, the outstanding servants of His providence and judgement. Once Adam had been exiled, Michael felt sorry for him and showed him how to till the earth, since he did not know how to do ...

When God sees that you attribute to Him what you’ve achieved on your own, He, in turn, will favour you with what is His, spiritual and divine things.

When Emperor Basil I ascended the throne, in 867, major changes occurred in both the political and ecclesiastical spheres. He had murdered both Vardas and Emperor Michael III in order to achieve his goal. Wishing to appease the Pope and curry favour among the supporters of Ignatios, who were strong in the East, he dethroned Fotios, who was confined to the Monastery of the Protecting Veil, on the Bosphorus, with Ignatios being restored to the throne on 23 November 867. By then, the Pope was Hadrian II, being the successor to Nicholas, who died in 867. Despite these developments, Hadrian wanted a new synod to be called in Constantinople which would confirm the condemnation of Fotios. Considered in the West ...

What are the arrows of the devil? The wicked desires, the unclean thoughts, the destructive passions, anger, wishing ill, envy, rage, hatred, love of money and every other kind of indolence. All of them can be got rid of with the sword of the Spirit, that is the Word of God.

“Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us”. (Luke 16:26) Why is there such a gap between us? Is it perhaps because we have forgotten the ways to cultivate positive and essential relationships and have forgotten the meaning of the words we use when supposedly communicating  with one another?  Is it perhaps because we no longer have the capability to pinpoint and relay to others our many, different, conflicting emotions and our deep anxieties and thus, we say one thing, feel something else and want something totally different? Is it perhaps that we are inadequate in expressing and ...

Whatever you want to your children, say it in your prayers. Children don’t hear with their ears. It’s only when God’s Grace comes and illumines them that they listen to what we want to tell them. When you want to say something to your children, tell Our Lady and she’ll see to it. That prayer of yours will be a living-giving breath, a spiritual caress that soothes, embraces and attracts your children.

The Spiritual Continuation However, the most substantive problem that always faces monasticism is not so much the external organization and the quantitative elements, as its internal state, its spiritual life, without which monasticism, this ark of the God-given way of being, which has preserved the ecclesiastical authenticity through the ages, turns out to be salt that has lost its taste and a lamp that has gone out. A representative anthology of witnesses allows certain conclusions in this direction. According to Ecumenical Patriarch Ioakeim the Third, Karyes, the capital of the Holy Mountain, presented “an image of a very troubled city with all of the evils that go along with it.” He adds, however, that “asceticism is not affected at all.” The historian Phil. ...

How many good things will those people enjoy who’ve been granted the chance to speak to God? Because prayer’s a dialogue with God and doesn’t require a particular position of the body, a certain place and time, but a bold and sober outlook.

Following a request by the Office of Military Chaplains, part of the General Staff of the Greek Armed Forces, the Holy Permanent Synod of the Church of Greece has declared Saint Paisios the Athonite to be the Patron Saint of the Corps of Signals. Thinking Christians are often troubled by the question: how is it possible that the Church, which blesses the peacemakers (Matth. 5, 9) and has as its Head Him Who was meek and humble of heart (Matth. 11, 29), the Prince of Peace, should assign saints to be protectors of troops. This thought is reasonable and healthy as regards its starting point. From the very first years of its theological thought the Church condemned murder and war (see Origen, ...

If, my beloved fathers and brethren, I were granted the gift of acquiring one of the tongues which the angels have, as the Apostle of Christ Paul says, (“even if I speak in the tongues of the Angels”) it would be certain and only to be expected that I would be able to praise Michael and Gabriel, the Archangels of the Lord, in a manner befitting them, since it is natural that one thing can be praised and presented to others by something similar to it. Had I but one of those fiery and immaterial tongues which were given to the holy and divine Apostles, I would be able to speak with supernatural praise, as is their due, of the ...

A timely reprint – for thinking about heaven and hell. I continue to be amazed at the literalism that infects the minds of many Christians. Just because Scripture uses the language of geography to describe something does not at all mean that we should assume that it is referring to a literal geography. Those whose imaginations are filled with various versions of heaven and hell in literal terms – it seems to me – lack imagination. The accounts of Christ after the Resurrection, though marked occasionally with very physical descriptions, are clearly marked as well with things that defy everything we know of physicality. His Resurrection is the only “image” of a tangible/non-tangible sort that we can point to for the character ...

Wealth or Spiritual Poverty? Today’s Gospel reading is very well known. It’s the parable of the rich man and Lazarus and the subject it deals with is wealth, both material and spiritual. The Gospel presents two people with entirely different lifestyles. One was rich, very much so, and was a man of means. He was comfortable and enjoyed all the comforts this fleeting life has to offer. Most of all, though, he was selfish, turned in on himself, ignoring the least of his brethren, who was right next to him. This other person was at the opposite pole from the man who lived in luxury. He was a ‘poor Saint’, an unimportant, beleaguered, tormented and starving person, living in wretched conditions. The poor ...

A sign of the first fear is if you hate sin and become enraged at it, as if you’ve been wounded by a wild animal. A sign of perfect fear is to love virtue and to fear alteration, because nobody’s safe from it. In all things in this life, we shall beware of falling.