scholarly journals Special Features of the Spiritual Leadership of St. Theofan the Recluse

2021 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
Михаил Степанович Иванов

Статья посвящена специфике аскетической практики известного русского подвижника благочестия епископа Феофана (Говорова). В начале статьи даётся историческое обоснование диалектическому противостоянию между миром и монастырём, которое разрешается в одну из благодатных форм христианской жизни. Далее проводится различение между понятиями «мир Божий», как сотворённая Богом Вселенная, и «мир греха», как господство зла, вторгшегося в окружающий мир по вине человека. Это различение помогает снять распространённое заблуждение относительно монашеского отречения от мира и выявить подлинные отношения, которые рождает человек, ставший на монашеский путь духовного возрождения. Развивая эти отношения, монах входит в целостное, органическое, духовное и благодатное единство с миром Божиим, что позволяет ему установить основанное на любви ко всему божественному творению подлинное отношение ко всем обитателям тварного мира. На этом основополагающем принципе монашеской жизни, как пишет епископ Феофан, Затворник Вышенский, как раз и нужно строить архипастырское руководство всеми членами Церкви - не только монашеским братством, но и мирскими людьми, тем самым продолжая духовную традицию русского старчества. The article is devoted to the specifics of the ascetic practice of the famous Russian devotee of piety, Bishop Theofan (Govorov). At the beginning of the article, a historical basis is given for the dialectical confrontation between the world and the monastery, which is resolved into one of the blessed forms of Christian life. Further, a distinction is made between the concepts of «the world of God», as the universe created by God, and the «world of sin», as the rule of evil that invaded the surrounding world through the fault of man. This distinction helps to remove the common misconception about monastic renunciation of the world and to reveal the true relationship that a person gives birth to when he embarks on the monastic path of spiritual rebirth. Developing these relationships, the monk enters into an integral, organic, spiritual and grace-filled unity with the world of God, which allows him to establish a genuine relationship based on love for the entire divine creation with all the inhabitants of the created world. On this fundamental principle of monastic life, as Bishop Theofan, the Recluse of Vyshensky writes, it is precisely necessary to build the archpastoral leadership of all members of the Church - not only the monastic brotherhood, but also the secular people, thereby continuing the spiritual tradition of the Russian eldership.

1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-177
Author(s):  
Karen Harding

Ate appearances deceiving? Do objects behave the way they do becauseGod wills it? Ate objects impetmanent and do they only exist becausethey ate continuously created by God? According to a1 Ghazlli, theanswers to all of these questions ate yes. Objects that appear to bepermanent are not. Those relationships commonly tefemed to as causalare a result of God’s habits rather than because one event inevitably leadsto another. God creates everything in the universe continuously; if Heceased to create it, it would no longer exist.These ideas seem oddly naive and unscientific to people living in thetwentieth century. They seem at odds with the common conception of thephysical world. Common sense says that the universe is made of tealobjects that persist in time. Furthermore, the behavior of these objects isreasonable, logical, and predictable. The belief that the univetse is understandablevia logic and reason harkens back to Newton’s mechanical viewof the universe and has provided one of the basic underpinnings ofscience for centuries. Although most people believe that the world is accutatelydescribed by this sort of mechanical model, the appropriatenessof such a model has been called into question by recent scientificadvances, and in particular, by quantum theory. This theory implies thatthe physical world is actually very different from what a mechanicalmodel would predit.Quantum theory seeks to explain the nature of physical entities andthe way that they interact. It atose in the early part of the twentieth centuryin response to new scientific data that could not be incorporated successfullyinto the ptevailing mechanical view of the universe. Due largely ...


2020 ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
L. Monica Lilly

 In The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho projects Santiago communicating with Nature which he refers to as the common language of the world. A study of The Alchemist will reveal how Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a bounty treasure explores the wisdom of life. His quest for the treasure buried near the Pyramids propels him to enter an unchartered territory from his homeland in Spain to the Egyptian desert. This paper aims to explore the ecological reflections mired with concepts of slants in philosophy. Ecology on one hand is considered as a branch of science but, despite providing erudition on the subject it is understood that it provides sagacity to understand the universe better. This paper rightly discusses the amalgamation of nature and literature. It is indeed a manifestation of the recurrently believed ideologies that connect human psyche and platitudes of the cosmos. The logos that interrelates the existing connection between the non human and the human species require an exceptional mastery. This paper will analyze and depict the emotions connected with nature from the spectacle of the Protagonist Santiago in The Alchemist.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 209
Author(s):  
Togardo Siburian

ABSTRACT: This article aims to look at the principles of the idea of global ethics at the implementation of the advanced city in the present day or modern city. The concept of global ethics logically can be considered in a certain local as the common foundations of ethical living in this universal city. Using literature method, the author tries to positively see from the idea of a global ethic associated with globalism, pluralism, secularism, postmodernism, ecumenism and humanitarianism that form the concept of global ethics, which are selectively used to add the principle of good livelihood for the civilization of the world today. The author subsequently tries to see a multidimensional pluralistic city today with a conflict on religious factors, which require a more fundamental principle of unity and universal living. Therefore global ethics is not a substitute for existing religious ethics, but additional ethics for people of different religion without discrimination. So the principle can be implemented at a local anywhere, including major cities in Indonesia. KEYWORDS: city, modern, crisis, ethics, global, consensus, religions, for all


On Universals ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Étienne Balibar

This chapter assesses the new “quarrel of universals” that now occupies philosophy and other overlapping disciplines. In this new quarrel, the question today is not only whether one is for or against the universal; the question is also how one defines the universal—a term whose surprising equivocity has become increasingly clear. Still more fundamentally, the question is how one should articulate the relationship between three related but heterogeneous terms whose widespread use has prompted conflicting claims: the universal, universality, and universalisms. The chapter begins by situating the question of the universal and its variations within the field that seems to constitute the strategic site of intersecting domains: philosophical anthropology, understood as the analysis of the historical differences of the human and of the problem that those differences pose to their bearers. It then outlines the difficulties which can be identified in every philosophical and political usage of the universal and its “doubles” according to three aporias. The first is the aporia of the multiplicity of the “world,” or of the universe as multiversum; the second is that of Allgemeinheit or All(en)gemeinheit, in other words, the irreducible gap between the universal and the common (or community); and, finally, that of co-citizenship, the form of belonging to a political unity to come, a unity whose law of belonging (membership) would be the heterogeneity within equality or the political participation of those foreign to the community.


Traditio ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 48 ◽  
pp. 63-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland J. Teske

William of Auvergne became a master of theology in the University of Paris in 1223 and was appointed bishop of Paris by Gregory IX in 1228. William governed the church of Paris until his death in 1249, while continuing to write the works which constitute his immense Magisterium divinale et sapientiale. Despite the fact that he was the first of the thirteenth-century theologians to appreciate the value of the Aristotelian philosophy that poured into the Latin West during the last half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, his writings have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Étienne Gilson has sketched well the impact of the influx of Greek and Arabian philosophical works into the Christian West: Up to the last years of the twelfth century, when the Christian world unexpectedly discovered the existence of non-Christian interpretations of the universe, Christian theology never had to concern itself with the fact that a non-Christian interpretation of the world as a whole, including man and his destiny, was still an open possibility.


1972 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-250
Author(s):  
Thomas F. Torrance

Everything about us today tells us that we live in a world which will be increasingly dominated by empirical and theoretic science. This is the world in which the Church lives and proclaims its message about Jesus Christ. It is not an alien world, for it is in this world of space and time that God has planted us. He made the universe and endowed man with gifts to investigate and understand it. Just as he made life to produce itself, so he has made the universe with man as an essential constituent in it, that it may bring forth and articulate knowledge of itself. Regarded in this light the pursuit of science is one of the ways in which man exercises the dominion in the earth which he was given at his creation. That is how, for example, Francis Bacon understood the work of human science, as man's obedience to God. Science is a religious duty, while man as scientist can be spoken of as the priest of creation, whose task it is to interpret the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structures and harmonies, and to bring it all into orderly articulation, so that it fulfils its proper end as the vast theatre of glory in which the creator is worshipped and praised. Nature itself is dumb, but it is man's part to bring it to word, to be its mouth through which the whole universe gives voice to the glory and majesty of the living God.


1995 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 539-544
Author(s):  
Taha J. Al Alwani

By the time secularist thought had succeeded, at an intellectuallevel, in challenging the authority of the Church, its roots had alreadytaken firm hold in western soil. Later, when western political and economicsystems began to prevail throughout the world, it was only naturalthat secularism, as the driving force behind these systems, shouldgain ascendency worldwide. In time, and with varying degrees of success,the paradigm of positivism gradually displaced traditional andreligious modes of thinking, with the result that generations of thirdworld thinkers grew up convinced that the only way to “progress” andreform their societies was the way of the secular West. Moreover, sincethe experience of the West was that it began to progress politically,economically, and intellectually only after the influence of the Churchhad been marginalized, people in the colonies believed that they wouldhave to marginalize the influence of their particular religions in orderto achieve a similar degree of progress. Under the terms of the newparadigm, turning to religion for solutions to contemporary issues is anabsurdity, for religion is viewed as something from humanity’s formativeyears, from a “dark” age of superstition and myth whose time hasnow passed. As such, religion has no relevance to the present, and allattempts to revive it are doomed to failure and are a waste of time.Many have supposed that it is possible to accept the westernmodel of a secular paradigm while maintaining religious practices andbeliefs. They reason that such an acceptance has no negative impactupon their daily lives so long as it does not destroy their places ofworship or curtail their right to religious freedom. Thus, there remainshardly a contemporary community that has not fallen under the swayof this paradigm. Moreover, it is this paradigm that has had the greatestinfluence on the way different peoples perceive life, the universe,and the role of humanity as well as providing them with an alternativeset of beliefs (if needed) and suggesting answers to the ultimate questions ...


Author(s):  
Hermann S. Schibli

Pythagoreanism refers to a Greek religious-philosophical movement that originated with Pythagoras in the sixth century bc. Although Pythagoreanism in its historical development embraced a wide range of interests in politics, mysticism, music, mathematics and astronomy, the common denominator remained a general adherence among Pythagoreans to the name of the founder and his religious beliefs. Pythagoras taught the immortality and transmigration of the soul (reincarnation) and recommended a way of life that through ascetic practices, dietary rules and ethical conduct promised to purify the soul and bring it into harmony with the surrounding universe. Thereby the soul would become godlike since Pythagoras believed that the cosmos, in view of its orderly and harmonious workings and structure, was divine. Pythagoreanism thus has from its beginnings a cosmological context that saw further evolution along mathematical lines in the succeeding centuries. Pythagorean philosophers, drawing on musical theories that may go back to Pythagoras, expressed the harmony of the universe in terms of numerical relations and possibly even claimed that things are numbers. Notwithstanding a certain confusion in Pythagorean number philosophy between abstract and concrete, Pythagoreanism represents a valid attempt, outstanding in early Greek philosophy, to explain the world by formal, structural principles. Overall, the combination of religious, philosophical and mathematical speculations that characterizes Pythagoreanism exercised a significant influence on Greek thinkers, notably on Plato and his immediate successors as well as those Platonic philosophers known as Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists.


When the great Copernicus had revived the true system of the world, it was objected against it, that the planet Venus ought to be seen with different phases like the moon; to which he answered, that some time or another that very thing would perhaps come to pass. Who then would have thought, that this prophecy was so near being fulfilled, and that, by means of combining a convex and a concave glass, the common uses of which had been known for near 300 years before, the sight of man was to be extended almost to the remotest parts of the universe? This instrument, with nothing but its being so common hinders us from regarding with the greatest wonder, was invented, about 170 years ago, by one of those happy accidents, to which we owe many of the finest discoveries.


Humaniora ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 1246
Author(s):  
Frederikus Fios

Jacques Derida is a phenomenal philosopher through his philosophy of deconstruction theory. Derida showed systematically the death of structuralism. His speech shocked the world of academics in France and almost all of America and Europe. Deconstruction is a new way of reading the text, by shifting the core of a text to the side, and put the idea on the edge (the unnoticed, hidden ideas) to the center or importance. Derida rejected dichotomous, binary opposition, bipolarity, thinking model or ways of thinking that one is privileging and marginalizing other ideas. Derida thought the model that would proclaim democratic, open, and dynamic diversity that would make room for multiple interpretations of meaning or open horizon that tolerate differences in interpretation of a text. What was conceptualized by Derida is found legitimacy in practical adequacy in the figure of Pope Francis, the Catholic Church's highest leader. Francis shows a deconstructive way to lead contemporary Catholic Church. Francis has opened a new, broader, and other meaning in looking the praxis of the Church. He does not prioritize elitist lifestyle, yet puts a simple and frugal lifestyle. He changes conservative theology into progressive-liberal theology. He realized Church needs not theology but a living testimony of a good, caring, generous, compassion life that does not use religion for immoral behavior, dehumanization, and corruption. Derida did philosophical deconstruction, Francis did spiritual-leadership deconstruction. What unites both of them is a word called "deconstruction".  


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