Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko, Dean Emeritus of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and who currently serves as priest to the nuns at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City, PA, gave a talk for the Orthodox Christian Fellowship at the University at Buffalo at the beginning of this past Lent discussing how we can come to know God. In it, Fr Hopko highlights a few prominent points in the Eastern Christian ascetic practice and theological method. In the West, especially with the rise of Scholasticism, theological method and prolegomena became bogged down in the study of philosophy, history, languages, etc, so that one could either produce logically deduced statements about God or exegete, by means of various historical-grammatical methods, the Holy Scriptures. ... more

''THEOSIS'' IN SAINT SILOUAN THE ATHONITE
AND STARETS SOPHRONY OF ESSEX
by Christopher Veniamin

''Coming into contact with Father Sophrony was always an event of a most especial kind. His monastics, first and foremost, but also those who made up his wider spiritual family, ''lived,'' as Father Zacharias put it, ''in an abundance of the word of God.''

As a young boy, I had the blessing of serving each Sunday in the altar of the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, Essex, England. One day when I was still a lad of only fifteen or sixteen years of age, following the Divine Liturgy, and whilst standing in the Prothesis of All Saints Church, Father Sophrony asked me why I was looking so thoughtful. Embarrassed that I was preoccupied with such mundane matters, I had to confess that school examinations were on the horizon, and that I wanted to do well in them. To my surprise, however, Father Sophrony did not belittle my worldly anxiety, but gently nodded his head, and agreed that it was indeed important to do well in examinations, and that to do so required much toil and sacrifice. But then he also added, as though to a friend, that ''in this world there is nothing more difficult than to be saved.''

The force of the truth of these words struck deep in my heart. We often encounter, in ourselves and in others, the attitude which suggests that Salvation is something that we can leave until later; once, that is, we have taken care of more pressing matters. Father Sophrony's perspective was quite different, however. By pointing to the incomparable difficulty of attaining to Salvation, he was clearly placing it at the very top of our list of urgent priorities. And when one pauses to consider all the great achievements of mankind, past and present, whether they be of a scientific or literary character, in the world of politics or finance or physical endeavour. Father Sophrony's words seem bold and even provocative - ''a hard saying'' (John 6:60) - but nevertheless fundamentally quite true.

Upon later reflection, I realized that the reason why Father Sophrony's words rang so true that day is because of the wealth of meaning which Salvation has for us in the Orthodox Church. By others, Salvation is often understood simply in terms of ''deliverance from sin and its consequences and admission to heaven,'' in terms of escaping damnation, that is, and reaching a safe place where we can no longer be tormented by the enemy. According to the Fathers of the Church, however, Salvation is not so prosaic a matter, for it involves the ''theosis'' (the deification or divinization) of the entire human person in Christ; it involves, that is, becoming like unto Christ to the point of identity with Him; it involves acquiring the mind of Christ (as Saint Paul affirms in the second chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, verse sixteen), and indeed it signifies the sharing in His very Life.

In our brief and humble examination of the content and meaning of theosis or deification in Saint Silouan and Staretz Sophrony, I should like to focus on three main areas: 1. Christ as the measure of our deification, 2. Love for enemies as the measure of our likeness to Christ, and 3. Holy Relics as a witness to the love of Christ in us.