The life of virtue is a life of death to self and resurrection into the life of God. To pull together what we have learned from St. Maximus the Confessor this week—we could say that the ethic of love oriented towards God is also a resurrectional ethic within which the body prefigures its final deified…
Tag: lent
Mortification (Living the Resurrection through Ascetic Struggle:Maximus the Confessor and the Lenten Fast, Part 5)
Christ died that we all might find life. Yet, to approach that life we must go through the valley of the shadow of death. We are buried with Christ in Baptism. We die to self in turning away from sin. We die a natural death at the end of our lives. We also, especially during…
Just Be Natural (Living the Resurrection through Ascetic Struggle:Maximus the Confessor and the Lenten Fast, Part 3)
“Just be natural.” Variations on the theme of the importance of nature are common in our culture, but what is nature? Sometimes we mean the material world as science reveals it to us. At other times we mean the untrammeled wilderness or the world as it is unmodified by human technique. Most often, I think,…
What is Love? (Living the Resurrection through Ascetic Struggle: Maximus the Confessor and the Lenten Fast, Part 2)
Love is the key to understanding both Good Friday and Easter and their meaning for our lives. It is also the key to understanding what St. Maximus the Confessor has to teach us about our fasting during Lent and Holy Week. So we must ask “what is love?”—at least, as far as Maximus understands it….
Living the Resurrection through Ascetic Struggle:Maximus the Confessor and the Lenten Fast, Part 1
Socrates died to find life. Though he had been unjustly condemned and his friends offered to rescue him, he drank the hemlock, denying his body in pursuit of higher goods. The Christian, too, must die in order to live, but the good we pursue is different than that sought by Socrates in at least one…
