Monastic Wisdom
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Author | Elder Joseph the Hesychast |
---|---|
Illustrator | |
Country | United States |
Language | English translation of Greek original |
Subject | Christianity |
Genre | Hesychasm |
Set in | Greece |
Publisher | St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery |
Publication date | 2016 |
Pages | 421 |
ISBN | 9780966700008 Search this book on . |
OCLC | 48092045 |
Monastic Wisdom: the letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast is a book that collects 81 letters, as well as a longer epistle, of St. Joseph the Hesychast that were composed at Mount Athos.
Front matter[edit]
- Preface by Archimandrite Ephraim (Former Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Philotheou on the Holy Mountain)
- Prolegomena by Dr. Constantine Cavarnos
Part One[edit]
- Part One
- Letters to Monastics and Laymen
- To a youth asking about “the prayer”
- To the same person about the prayer, and a reply to questions.
- To a monk entering the arena of combat.
- My child, if you pay attention to everything I write to you…
- Do not clothe yourself only with leaves.
- You write about anger in the heart of a fool.
- Listen to something that happened to me.
- Will you not endure everything for My love?
- The Creator breathed into you and gave you a living spirit.
- Grace always precedes temptations as a warning to prepare.
- I found many of the Fathers in “praxis” and “theoria.”
- Thus the nous becomes all light, all clarity.
- The grace of God doesn’t depend on one’s years.
- Truly great is the mystery of obedience.
- “So, you won’t listen to me and go back?”
- When you are ascending Golgotha, it is impossible not to fall.
- During temptations, do not desert your bastion.
- Once again I rose and waged war against all the spirits.
- Always do a metanoia when you are wrong and don’t lose time.
- Don’t despair! These things happen to everyone.
- A sin, whether small or great, is blotted out through true repentance.
- So, you don’t want to suffer? Then don’t expect to ascend.
- The cane is the remedy for every passion.
- That night God showed me Satan’s wickedness.
- The senses cease, and the one praying is caught up into theoria.
- My sister in the Lord, most pious Abbess.
- I am struggling for God. I don’t care what people say.
- To a nun about to receive the holy and angelic schema.
- Blessed is God Who raises mortals still in the body to the way of life of the bodiless angels.
- Without it being the Lord’s will, we neither get sick nor die.
- Henceforth the world has died to you, and you have died to the world.
- Faintheartedness is the mother of impatience.
- I cannot describe to you how much our Panagia likes chastity and purity.
- My child, these changes happen to all of us.
- The prayer stops, the bodily members cease to move, and only the nous is in theoria within an extraordinary light.
- Circular prayer within the heart has no danger of delusion.
- Out of my love for you and for the benefit of your souls, I am going to sketch out my life for you.
- My beloved Mother and all my brothers, relatives, and friends.
- My beloved sister, rejoice in the Lord.
- God always helps. He always comes in time, but patience is necessary.
- The springtime is at hand—the winter of sorrows is dissolving little by little.
- This, my sister, is the art of arts and the science of sciences.
- Truly, I know a brother who fell into ecstasy while sitting under a full moon.
- Be careful, my good little daughter, for you have already grown up now and thoughts begin to change.
- Greetings in the Lord, my dearly beloved son.
- This world, my child, is so vain.
- But we here have chosen the heavenly philosophy…
- Listen to my voice, my good son.
- My life has passed with pain and illnesses.
- Who knows, my child, the judgments of God?
- Blessed is he who remembers death day and night and prepares himself to meet it.
- Woe to me, the lowly wretch! What account shall I give on Judgment Day?
- Oh, my child! A person is never entirely bad.
- Living in the wilderness has its own struggles, whereas living in the world has many other different kinds of struggles.
- Teach them all noetic prayer, to say “the prayer” without ceasing.
- He Who made the ages, and existed before the ages, and in profound silence created the heavenly Powers of the holy angels.
- The beautiful rocks theologize like voiceless theologians, as does all of nature.
- As the priest was censing…
- We shall use plagal of the first tone which is joyous.
- Well even now, see to it that you come back.
- O vain world! O deceived mankind! You have nothing good in you!
- I shall write a little composition for my son…
- We do not have a wedding garment. Therefore, we must purify ourselves.
- The heart does not tolerate divisions. Thou shalt bow down to thy God alone and Him shalt thou serve.
- I beg you to cast the grief away from your soul.
- When a person confesses, his soul is cleansed and becomes like a brilliant diamond.
- This shows that your life is pleasing to God.
- If you don’t give up sinning, whatever you do will go to waste.
- Do not doubt that it is time for you to wear the holy schema.
- The beginning and end of every good thing is Christ.
- Make a good beginning so that the end may be good.
- Everything must be accompanied by perpetual, unceasing noetic prayer.
- Christ is very merciful and does not seek much from you.
- The more you love, the more you are loved.
- Put in your hundred mites, and I shall put in my thousand gold florins.
- Just be careful and apprehensive; flee from sin.
- If you read lives of saints and toil a little at night…
- Without struggling very hard, you can quickly reach great heights.
- All the yearning of the soul should absorb God.
- Once you love God, then you will also love your neighbor as yourself.
- I will not leave. I shall fall asleep here with my Fathers.
Part Two[edit]
- Part 2
- An Epistle to a Hesychast Hermit
- Prologue
- My beloved child in the Lord. Greetings, and may the grace of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be upon your soul. Amen.
- Chapter I
- On the monastic order and lifestyle; namely, how to pass a twenty-four-hour day.
- Chapter II
- Answers to questions of the same person.
- Chapter III
- On the spiritual work of the intellect, and how we must think.
- Chapter IV
- On caution. Namely, how to wrestle with the thought of arrogance when divine aid comes.
- Chapter V
- On how divine Grace comes, and how it is distinguished from delusion, and about the short path.
- Chapter VI
- On how such strugglers fall into delusions when they have no guide, and what the remedy for their cure is.
- Chapter VII
- On how divine Grace returns after it trains us well.
- Chapter VIII
- On another delusion.
- Chapter IX
- On a different aspect of the same delusion.
- Chapter X
- On the double warfare of the demons and how they fight skillfully against strugglers.
- Chapter XI
- On the three states of nature that man ascends and descends: according to nature, contrary to nature, and above nature. And on the three modes of divine Grace by which it acts when human nature is constrained, namely: purifying, illuminating, and perfecting grace.
- Chapter XII
- On love.
- Epilogue
References[edit]
- Elder Joseph the Hesychast (2016). Monastic Wisdom: the letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast. Florence, Arizona: St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery. ISBN 9780966700008.