Sarx

Difficult Love to the End…
N SOME Very shallow ways, these are the chapters that a liberal will love the most. Olivier Clement draws on the deepest, mystical teachings of the Church to give the Gospel the most inclusive, the most Universalist readings possible. When I was at St Gregory’s Church, these chapters can [...]

HERE IS one last post brewing in the series on The Roots of Christian Mysticism: the last section and any “final thoughts”. I’ve been sketching it out in my head. But I’ve not got anything on paper yet.
Sorry it’s late. I’m guessing I’ll be done with it by tomorrow night.

HE STUFF talked about in the current reading from Clement is at once terribly important and quickly (and rightly) relegated to the background.
By the 14th Century this sort of chapter becomes enshrined in the dogmatic understanding of the Eastern church, although there are hints of it in the words of the earlier fathers. [...]

HE PATRISTIC Take on the Bible must, at once, seem very liberating to anyone who has suffered under a fundamentalism and yet infuriating to anyone who wants to dissect the text, crossed with historical research and cultural anecdotes about the “real meaning” of a certain phrase or political antecedents of such-and-such set of imagery.

AINT Irenaeus offers “where the Church is there the Spirit of God is also; and where the Spirit of God is, there the Church is…” and I’m mindful of that prayer that begins all services in the Eastern Rite, that addresses the Holy Spirit as “everywhere present and filling all things”.

ONG TIME Friend and reader of these pages, Fr E, in his current post on Scripture, Tradition, and Ecumenical Councils (Part 5 of a series that is informed by our reading of Clement) contains this line:
In other words, our definition of Christ is composed of four negatives without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. [...]

HEN I First read this book, I was blown away by the Patristic Quotes. I’ve got them littered all over my life: I used Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory the Great and Gregory Nazianzus in my graduation project for college. The quotes roll randomly by in the side bar here.
But this time around [...]

N PAGE 23 of my text there are two quotes from two works of St Augustine of Hippo (Commentary on 1st John and Commentary on Ps 41), arranged as poetry rather than prose, and introduced by some words of the author. I decided to weave the two quotes together, nearly line by line, and [...]

HE FIRST Sentence is the most important in the entire book: Christianity is in the first place an Oriental religion, and it is a mystical religion.