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Dear Parish Faithful,
GREAT LENT: The Eighth Day
Vladimir Solovyov
I have been reading the book of an Orthodox religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov who, in this particular book (God, Man & The Church), writes in a straightforward style that is not speculative or overly-laden with difficult concepts and vocabulary. He is outlining a life of prayer, almsgiving and charity within a biblical understanding of these practices. He begins the book with the type of statement that we do not encounter much of today, because he speaks openly of truth and immortality - almost taboo subjects within our secular world and postmodernism, and hardly even approached by today's "wise men." Then Solovyov sets out some of the basic principles of his approach in these few excerpts:
"Endless life without truth and perfection would be an eternity of torment, and perfection without immortality would be rank injustice and an indignity beyond measure. But if our better part, the soul, desires eternal life and truth, the order of nature as we know it deprives us of both. Left to himself, man is able to conserve neither his life not his moral dignity, he comes upon bodily death and spiritual death."
"Man the animal submits to such a fate in spite of himself, but the human heart will not do so, for it has within itself the pledge of another and different life.""First of all man has to have a loathing for evil, to know it to be sin; then he has to undertake an interior fight against it; lastly, convinced of his own insufficiency in the contest, he has to turn to God and ask his help. So in order to receive grace there are required a reprobation of moral evil or sin, an effort to get free from it, and a turning to God ("conversion")."
"The human will cannot be forced: a man may be driven by fear or violence to do a wicked deed but he cannot be driven to have a wicked will, for the will is independent of external force; in the same way it is only of his own volition that man can turn his will from evil towards the only good ... If we don't want to believe, then we shall not believe: God does not will to be an external fact forcing himself upon us, but an interior truth whom we are morally obliged freely to recognize. To believe in God is a moral obligation: if man does not fulfill his moral obligation then he of necessity loses his moral dignity.""We must, then, believe that good exists in itself, and that it is the one truth: we must believe in God. This faith is both a divine gift and our own free act."
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GREAT LENT: The Ninth Day
I am staying with the Orthodox religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovyov, a bit longer as he writes about prayer, almsgiving and fasting in his book, God, Man & the Church. Solovyov understands that the realization that God is the source of all goodness, and that the will of God is essential in guiding our own wills toward our immersion in the good. This realization, in turn, will lead us to prayer. He openly states that self-autonomy is nothing but "lunacy." We can ask ourselves during Great Lent: what is the "highest wisdom?"
"He who does not associate his will with the Supreme Will, or who lacks faith in it, does not believe in good, or else esteems himself the absolute possessor of it, exalting his own will as perfect and almighty. Not to believe in good is moral death; to believe oneself the source of good is lunacy; the highest wisdom and the principle of moral perfection is to believe in the Divine Source of good, to pray to him, and to abandon oneself utterly to him."
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GREAT LENT: The Tenth Day
In this brief passage, Vladimir Solovyov places almsgiving in the context of God's unmerited "charity" to all of us for the gift of grace and salvation:
"When God helps and saves us he does not inquire if we have a right to help and salvation; and when we give to one who asks, without enquiring whether he is deserving or not, then we are doing as God does: true alms-giving is the extension to others of the grace which God sends to us in answer to sincere prayer.
