In order for one to understand the Saints and
the Fathers of the Church, it is not sufficient merely to read them.
The
Saints spoke and wrote after having lived the mysteries of God. They
personally experienced the mysteries. In order for one to understand them,
he too must have progressed to a certain degree of initiation into the
mysteries of God by personally tasting, smelling, and seeing. You can
read the books of the Saints and become very well versed in them with a
«cerebral» knowledge without even minutely tasting that which the Saints
tasted, who wrote these books through their personal experience.
In order to understand the Saints essentially,
not intellectually, you must have the proper experiences of all that they
say; you must have tasted, at least in part, of the same things as they. You
must have lived in the fervent environment of Orthodoxy; you must have grown
in it. You must have tasted of training, effort, and struggle for Christian
perfection. You must have bent very low to pass through the narrow door that
leads to the Kingdom of Heaven. You must have been humbled; you must have
been freed from the vain burden of human values and have detached your heart
from that which men consider great and worthy of respect. You must have shed
tears of repentance for the vanity in which you lived, tears of fervent
supplication to the Lord to deliver you from darkness and to send down a ray
of the Holy Spirit into your heart.
A whole new world must be born in a
Westerner’s heart in order for him to understand something of Orthodoxy. How
can someone who has breathed the dry air of rationalism from the cradle and
learned to worship human cleverness as an idol be humbled and become simple
as a child? How can one who has learned to pursue those things esteemed
«high by men» and «abominations before God» and has been taught to regard
the turn to the inner man as «navel gazing» be saved from the thorns of
worldly cares? How can he, who has been taught to regard vanity as a value,
shed tears over the vanity of life?
