Month: August 2017

The capacity for unintelligence is rooted so deeply in human nature through the senses that the majority think that man is nothing more than flesh, which possesses sense faculties so that he can enjoy this present life.

The Lord said, ‘First seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness’ (Matthew 6:33), that is, seek the knowledge of truth before all things, and therefore seek training in appropriate methods of attaining it. In saying this, He showed clearly that believers must seek only divine knowledge and the virtue which adorns it with corresponding actions.

~St Maximos the Confessor

***There is a new podcast on Ancient Faith Radio entitled, The Patristics Podcast which is very good, and I encourage anyone interested in the writing of the early church fathers to give it a try at:

http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/patristicspodcast

Faith is a relational power or a relationship which brings about the immediate, perfect and supranatural union of the believer with the God in whom he believes.

~St Maximos the Confessor

Again, he who does not limit his perception of the nature of visible things to what his senses alone can observe, but wisely with his intellect searches after the essence which lies within every creature, also finds God; for from the manifest magnificence of created beings he learns who is the Cause of their being.

~St Maximos the Confessor

The devil is both God’s enemy and His avenger (Psalm 8:2). He is God’s enemy when he seems in his hatred for God somehow to have acquired a destructive love for us men, persuading us by means of sensual pleasure to assent to the passions within our control, and to value what is transitory more than what is eternal….He is God’s avenger when–now that we have become subject to him through sin–he lays bare his hatred for us and demands our punishment.

For nothing pleases the devil more than punishing us….he does this not with the intention of fulfilling God’s command, but out of the desire to feed his own passion of hatred towards us, so that the soul, sinking down enervated by the weight of such painful calamities, may cut itself off from the power of divine hope, regarding the onslaught of these calamities not as a divine admonition but as a cause for disbelief in God.

~St Maximos the Confessor

From created beings we come to know their Cause; from the differences between created beings we learn about the indwelling Wisdom of creation; and from the natural activity of created beings we discern the indwelling Life of creation, the power which gives created beings their life–the Holy Spirit.

~St Maximos the Confessor

Reformation of life, angelic worship, the willing separation of the soul from the body, and the beginning of divine renewal in spirit–these are proclaimed in the veiled language of the New Testament. For instance, by the term ‘spiritual circumcision’ Scripture denotes the excision of the soul’s impassioned attachment to the body (Philippians 3:3 & Colossians 2:11).

It is entirely fitting and just that those who gladly accept the devil’s cunning suggestions to commit sins through their own volition should also be chastised by him. For through the passions to which we willingly accede, the devil is the begetter of pleasure, and through the experiences that we suffer against our will he is the inflicter of pain.

~St Maximos the Confessor

An intellect faithful in the practice of the virtues is like St Peter when he was taken captive by Herod (Acts 12:3-18). The name Herod means ‘made of skins or leather’, and so Herod signifies the law of leather, that is, the will of the flesh.

St Peter is guarded by two squads of soldiers and shut in by an iron gate. The two squads signify the attacks suffered by the intellect from the activity of the passions and from the mind’s assent to the passions.

When through the teaching of practical philosophy, as though with the help of an angel, the intellect has passed safely through these two squads or prisons, it comes to the iron gate which leads into the city. By this I mean the obdurate and stubborn attachment of the senses to sensible things.

None the less, the gate is opened automatically through spiritual contemplation of the inner essences of created beings; and such contemplation then fearlessly impels the intellect, now liberated from Herod’s madness, towards the spiritual realities where it truly belongs.

~St Maximos the Confessor

God, who yearns for the salvation of all men and hungers after their deification, withers their self-conceit like the unfruitful fig tree (Matthew 21:19-21). He does this so that they may prefer to be righteous in reality rather than in appearance, discarding the cloak of hypocritical moral display and genuinely pursuing a virtuous life in the way that the divine Logos wishes them to. They will then live with reverence, revealing the state of their soul to God rather than displaying the external appearance of a moral life to their fellow-men.

~St Maximos the Confessor

Since it is the nature of every evil to destroy itself along with the habits which brought it into being, man finds by experience that every pleasure is inevitably succeeded by pain, and so directs his whole effort towards pleasure and does all he can to avoid pain. He struggles with all his might to attain pleasure and he fights against pain with immense zeal. By doing this he hopes to keep the two apart from each other–which is impossible–and to indulge his self-love in ways which bring only pleasure and are entirely free from pain. Dominated by the passion of self-love he is, it appears, ignorant that pleasure can never exist without pain. For pain is intertwined with pleasure, even though this seems to escape the notice of those who suffer it.

~St Maximos the Confessor