Month: March 2018

How can anything be accomplished without moral judgment? It is born of the intelligence and constitutes the mean between craftiness–that is, excessive astuteness–and thoughtlessness. Craftiness pulls moral judgment towards cunning and guile, and injures the soul of the possessor and as many other people as it can; lack of thought makes one obtuse and trivial, and does not allow the intellect to concentrate on divine matters or on something of profit to one’s soul or to one’s neighbor….

The man of moral judgment…neither climbs arrogantly upward seeking to harm others, nor descends foolishly only to be harmed by someone else. Choosing the middle way, he keeps to this with the help of Christ our Lord; to whom be glory and dominion throughout the ages, Amen.

~St Peter of Damaskos

To speak of love is to dare to speak of God; for, according to St John the Theologian, ‘God is love; and he who dwells in love dwells in God’ (1 John 4:16)….’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deuteronomy 6:5)….’with all your soul’ means with the intelligent, incensive and desiring powers of the soul, because it is of these three powers that the soul is composed. Thus the intellect should think at all times about divine matters, while the desire should long constantly and entirely, as the Law says, for God alone and never for anything else; and the incensive power should actively oppose only what obstructs this longing, and nothing else….

~St Peter of Damaskos

The Lord Himself said that the children of this world are more astute in dealing with their own kind than are the children of the kingdom of heaven (Luke 16:8). And He was quite right: for the children of this world long to make good and to grow rich, to be clever and to win praise, to gain power and so on; and even though they are likely to fail in their aspirations and their effort will prove vain, they still exert more than human strength to attain these things.

But the children of the kingdom aspire to things that are completely different, and because of this they often receive in this world a foretaste of the blessings held in store. Like the children of this world they exert themselves, but they do this so that by grace their intellect may be liberated and may thereby become unforgettingly mindful of God. In this way it comes to know the divine thoughts to which the Holy Scriptures and those with experience in spiritual knowledge bear witness; or else in its perplexity it realizes that in spite of its great knowledge it is still ignorant of them.

~St Peter of Damaskos

St John Chrysostom says that it is a great blessing from God that some parts of the Scriptures are clear while others are not. By means of the first we acquire faith and ardor and do not fall into disbelief and laziness because of our utter inability to grasp what is said. By means of the second we are roused to inquiry and effort, thus both strengthening our understanding and learning humility from the fact that everything is not intelligible to us.

Hence, if we take stock of the gifts conferred on us, we will reap humility and longing for God from both what we understand and what we do not.

~St Peter of Damaskos

[Solomon] himself describes how God has sent subtle temptations to the sons of men, so that they might be distracted by vain things (Ecclesiastes 1:13) and thus prevented from turning towards what is even worse. All this is clear from the very nature of things. For if, when there are thousands of distractions, some still find opportunity to commit sins, how much more would this be the case if our lives were without distractions?

In such circumstances, it is better for us to be superficially distracted, and so prevented from devoting ourselves to holy things and holy thoughts, rather than for us to do many other things which are in fact worse.

~St Peter of Damaskos