The South has always been a people very
mindful of tradition. One tradition of
the Orthodox Church which colonial Southrons brought with them from Europe was
the veneration of saints, as may be seen, for ensample, in the dedication of
their early churches to various saints, such as St Anne, St Stephen, etc. (D.
H. Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 1989, p.
235, note 10). One of the unfortunate
effects of the Great Revival in the South which established Evangelical
Protestantism as the dominant form of Christianity in Dixie was its antagonism
toward the honoring of the saints.
Thus, as she strives to revive the good
old ways of Southern life, one of the best areas where she could focus her
attention and efforts to her great benefit is the cultivation within her borders
of the Church’s tradition of honoring the saints. Priest-monk Damascene goes into detail on why
this is so important for Christians:
St. Justin [Popovich
of Serbia, +1979] wrote: "What are Christians? Christians are
Christ-bearers, and, by virtue of this, they are bearers and possessors of
eternal life.... The Saints are the most perfect Christians, for they have been
sanctified to the highest degree with the podvigs of holy faith in the
risen and eternally living Christ, and no death has power over them. Their life
is entirely Christ's life; and their thought is entirely Christ's thought; and
their perception is Christ's perception. All that they have is first Christ's
and then theirs.... In them is nothing of themselves but rather wholly and in
everything the Lord Christ." [1]
The Saints live in
Christ, but Christ also lives in them through His Divine Energies, His Grace.
And where Christ is, there is the Father and the Holy Spirit also. Christ says,
Abide in Me, and I in you; and elsewhere He says, If a man love Me, he will
keep My words: and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make
Our abode with him (John 15:4; 14:23).
Thus, St. Justin
makes bold to say that the Lives of the Saints not only bear witness to the
Life in Christ: they may even be said to be the continuation of the Life of
Christ on earth. "The Lives of the Saints," says St. Justin,
"are nothing else but the life of the Lord Christ, repeated in every Saint
to a greater or lesser degree in this or that form. More precisely, it is the
life of the Lord Christ continued through the Saints, the life of the incarnate
God the Logos, the God-man Jesus Christ Who became man." [2]
This is an amazing
thing that St. Justin is saying: when we read the Lives of the Saints, we are
reading the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ. This in itself should be enough to
convince us of the importance of filling our souls with the Lives of the
Saints.
St. Justin also says
that the Lives of the Saints are a continuation of the Acts of the Apostles.
"What are the 'Acts of the Apostles'?" he asks. "They are the
acts of Christ, which the Holy Apostles do by the power of Christ, or better
still: they do them by Christ Who is in them and acts through them. "And
what are the 'Lives of the Saints'? They are nothing else but a certain kind of
continuation of the 'Acts of the Apostles.' In them is found the same Gospel,
the same life, the same truth, the same righteousness, the same love, the same
faith, the same eternity, the same 'power from on high,' the same God and Lord.
For the Lord Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever
(Heb. 13:8): the same for all peoples of all times, distributing the same gifts
and the same Divine Energies to all who believe in Him." [3]
With these words of
St. Justin before us, we might well ask ourselves if Orthodox spiritual life is
even possible without the testimony of the Lives of the Saints. The answer to
this, I believe, must be "no." True spiritual life begins when we
live in Christ and Christ lives in us, right here on this earth. And the Lives
of the Saints bear witness to us that the Life of Christ on earth did not end
with His Ascension into Heaven, nor with the martyrdom of His Apostles. His
Life continues to this day in His Church, and is seen most brilliantly in His
Saints. And we, too, in our own spiritual lives, are to enter into that
continuing, never-ending Life.
I spoke recently to
an Orthodox priest who had converted to Orthodoxy from Protestantism. He told
me that, when he was received into the Church, the officiating priest told him:
"You will never be truly Orthodox without reading the Lives of the
Saints." Later, when he himself became a priest, he found that the most
pious people in the churches are those who read the Lives of the Saints, and
that those who make the most progress in the spiritual life are those who read
the Saints' Lives.
The Orthodox Faith is
not, first of all, of the head. First of all, it is of the heart: it is felt
and believed by the heart. Through the Lives of the Saints, we develop an
Orthodox heart. Our monastery's co-founder, Fr. Seraphim Rose, emphasized
constantly this "Orthodoxy of the heart," especially in his writings
and talks at the end of his life; and he frequently referred to Lives of the
Saints as a means of developing this.
2.
How to Make Use of the Lives of the Saints
Having looked at the
importance and meaning of the Lives of the Saints, let us look now at the various
ways we can make use of them in our spiritual lives.
First, we look to the
Saints as our examples. Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ (I
Cor. 11:1), the Saints say to us along with the Holy Apostle Paul. As
Christians, we want to grow in the likeness of Christ, to have that likeness
shine in us. For this to occur, we need to look often to the Saints to see that
shining likeness: we must look to them for real, practical examples of how to
live. St. Basil the Great gives this analogy:
"Just as
painters, in working from models, constantly gaze at their exemplar and thus
strive to transfer the expression of the original to their own artistry, so too
he who is eager to make himself perfect in all kinds of virtue must gaze upon
the Lives of the Saints as upon statues, so to speak, that move and act, and
must make their excellence his own by imitation." [4]
Secondly, we must
look to the Saints as our heavenly friends, as our brothers and sisters in the
Faith, and as our preceptors. We read about them not as people who are dead,
but as people who are living. And this is even more immediate than just reading
a biography about someone who is still alive. Let's say we are reading the
biography of some famous living person. As we read it, we may dream of perhaps
one day meeting this person, or perhaps of writing him a letter and having it
actually reach him, and even of receiving a reply from him, despite the fact
that he is so famous that thousands of people are probably writing to him.
Reading the Lives of the Saints offers us much more than this, because the
Saints are alive in God, and are not bound by time and space in the same way we
are. We can address them in prayer immediately and at any time, even right in
the middle of reading their Lives. And they will hear us. Besides our private
prayers to them, the Church offers us many other ways of communing with them as
our friends and honoring them as our preceptors. We sing their troparia, we
venerate their icons, we perform services to them, and with a blessing from our
Bishop we can even compose services in their honor.
As we read the Lives
of the Saints each day, we will discover little by little those Saints whom our
hearts go out to. They will become our close friends, those whom we pray to
most of all, those in whom we confide our joys and sorrows. As Archimandrite
Aimilianos, the present Abbot of the Holy Monastery of Simonos Petras on Mount
Athos, writes: "These close friends will be the guides of our choice and a
great comfort to us along the strait and narrow way that leads to Christ. We
are not alone on the road or in the struggle. We have with us our Mother, the
All-Holy Mother of God, our Guardian Angel, the Saint whose name we bear, and
those close friends we have chosen out of the Great Multitude of Saints who
stand before the Lamb (Rev. 7:9). When we stumble through sin, they will raise
us up again; when we are tempted to give up hope, they will remind us that they
have suffered for Christ before us, and more than us; and that they are now the
possessors of unending joy. So, upon the stony road of the present life, these
holy companions will enable us to glimpse the light of the Resurrection. Let us
search, then, in the Lives of the Saints, for these close friends, and with
all the Saints let us make our way to Christ." [5]
St. Justin Popovich,
as we have said, called the Lives of the Saints "applied dogmatic
theology." The Saints are proofs and illustrations of the reality of
Christ, of His saving work of redemption. The Saints are transformed human
beings, proof positive that people are redeemed, purified, illumined,
transformed and recreated by Jesus Christ.
St. Justin also calls
the Lives of the Saints "applied ethics." They are embodiments of the
life of Divine virtue that is possible only in Jesus Christ. They are
embodiments of the life of Grace in the Church, through the Holy Sacraments,
through the life-giving Body and Blood of the Lord.
Learning about the saints also fits
well in Southern life in two other ways:
1. It was the custom of Southerners to read about
the lives of virtuous men and women of classical Greece and Rome (e.g.,
Plutarch’s Lives) in order to help
form the virtues displayed by them in their own lives. Reading the lives of the saints, as Fr
Damascene points out above, allows for the same thing, only to a higher degree,
because the saints have purified themselves of all heathen errors and passions.
2. Reading the lives of the saints is in essence
an exercise in story-telling, one of the South’s favorite pastimes. And what these Christian stories recount is
truly worth remembering and passing on to others: the rise of Christian nations, battles with evil
ghostly powers and man’s fallen nature, sin and repentance, the healing of the
creation, and so on.
However, as we alluded to in the
opening, there has been a rupture in Southern life with the Apostolic Church. Good traditions like honoring the saints have
largely been thrown to the wayside. This
is most unfortunate, for in doing so she has sundered herself all the more from
the true Christian civilization of the West which she tries so hard to situate
herself within.
There are not three Christian Europes
with equal truth claims - Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox. There can be only one truly Christian Europe,
and it is Orthodox Europe. The
‘Christian Europes’ of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are deceptive
simulacrums which grew out of the re-founding of the Church on the Neoplatonism
of Origen and St Augustine, first with Charlemagne and his short-lived
heretical empire (rejecting the Seventh Ecumenical Council and adding the
Filioque to the Nicene Creed), then from 1054 onward with the heretical Popes
of Rome and Protestant Reformers. This
is not to say that the later Western confessions have done nothing good in the
world, only that they will tend more and more to apostasy as time goes on
because of their rejection of the true Apostolic teaching, which we are seeing.
For the South, if she really does wish
to stand in the true Christian tradition of the West, must befriend the saints
of her forebears of Orthodox Europe (and Orthodox Africa, for the two cultures
are interwoven. See, e.g., the life and
writings of St John Cassian, https://oca.org/saints/lives/2018/02/28/100623-venerable-john-cassian-the-roman.). She must stand and bathe again in the stream
of holiness that they made to flow over all the Western lands. There is no starting anew. Dixie either returns to the fountainhead of true
faith and grace, or the souls of her people and her Christian culture will die.
Prayer to
all the Saints that shone forth in the lands of the West
O ye saints
of the West, that in times of old confessed the true faith of our Saviour
Christ and for it fought even unto death, thus making yourselves worthy of
heavenly glory and heirs of everlasting life! Now do we, your unworthy
successors, fall to our knees before you, and humbly beg you: as ye have boldly
interceded for us before the throne of God unto this day, so from this time on
do ye pray, O our beloved saints, for all the lands of the West! Pray that the
Merciful and Long-Suffering God grant them forgiveness of sins and correction
of life, and turn them, through His judgements, to repentance and the true
faith for which ye sacrificed yourselves.
Again we
pray unto you, O saints, for all the right believing faithful of the West who
have need of your help and mercy: protect us with your prayers from all the
temptations that befall us; strengthen us in the true faith and grant us zeal
to preach it; guard us from all the wickedness of enemies seen and unseen; and
show us victorious before the unfaithful, for the glory of God and for your
honour. That through you, O saints of the West, the true faith may once again
shine forth in the West with power, as it shone forth in times of old, and that
the light of Christ may enlighten all.
And thus, O
ye saints, who through Divine Providence have shown yourselves to us in these
latter days, receive us also, as the workers of the eleventh hour, for your
veneration. And pray for us, who unworthily sing unto you songs of praise, that
our God, Who easily forgiveth, make us also partakers of heavenly bliss,
granting us salvation, as the God Who is Good and loveth mankind. That thus,
together with you, beloved saints of the West, we may sing unto Him and worship
Him as the All-Merciful God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, now and
ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!