Selections from Seminary

St. Jacob of Alaska was also an astute observer of the native people: their habits, their customs, and sometimes even their disposition towards the gospel. Every once in a while, his journals have an aside to explain points of interest—the dangers of navigation and shipping in Alaskan waters, the entryway of native houses in different regions, and such—in some of which, he speaks about the people’s receptivity to the gospel: “In matters of religion, I found the Kuriles to be devout or, as one may say, ready to be devout. However, presumably because of very rare approaches to them on behalf of the Christian Religion, they have no proper understanding either of the Christian faith or of their obligations as Christians.” In another of these asides, St. Jacob offers an almost humorous comment on the Tlingit people as he dwells on the prospects of a Protestant missionary who has come to convert them: "February 28: (1829) A second three masted American vessel [the barque Volunteer, Capt...

Importance of Family Our town or region may not compare to 1800s Alaska, but there are plenty of lessons to be learned from St. Jacob that can be applied to any situation. Though little is made of it, St. Jacob’s relationship with his family seems to be key. He sailed to his first parish in Atka, his own mother’s villiage, with his wife and father. This simple fact challenges our modern, individualistic and independent thinking. Limitless Travelling It would be hard to find a page of St. Jacob’s journals that does not include travel in some form. Not to say that travel is the lesson we need to learn...maybe the opposite. And also not to encourage our modern propensity to extend ourselves beyond all healthy boundaries in the pursuit of achievement at work. Here is a man who would travel for months on the open sea, or on foot or sled to reach interior villages, not for personal glory, nor for good pay, but solely to fulfill the call of the gospel. The Love of the People It is clear that ...

A decade later, in 1849, after faithful service in the Yukon region, St. Jacob asked for an assistant. As Fr. Michael Oleksa says it, he was sent an “unhappy misfit”, Hieromonk Filaret, sent against his will to Alaska. He ended up attacking St. Jacob with a pistol and later an ax, and needing to be bound hand and foot and locked up. The next assistant arrived two years later, and was even worse, if that can be imagined. Hieromonk Gavriil was quite literally insane and leveled accusations against St. Jacob. "The new bishop from European Russia took Gabriel's accusations against Saint Jacob and his coworker Lukin seriously, knowing neither the Creole missionaries and their careers or the insane source of the reports." "In Sitka, the bishop immediately recognized the venerable missionary and scholar to be incapable of the crimes the crazy Gabriel, now deceased, had accused him of committing." It should make sense, but even a saint is not immune to accusation. ...

One struggle I was looking for in the journals of St. Jacob is racism. St. Jacob was half Russian, half Alaskan native. And in much of the world’s history during this colonial era, racism is thoroughly embedded. I did find one reference of such an issue from Governor Chistiakov in Sitka, when St. Jacob, his wife, and father first arrived, the governor being described by Archpriest Michael Oleksa as “racist, opposing, and attempting to prohibit Russian-native marriages". Even then, mentioned in the same source, this governor was known to be anti-clerical. Meaning: he already did not like this priest coming around in the first place, much less his native lineage. There are copious examples of St. Jacob serving alongside other clergy when he had an opportunity, which would seem to suggest that such an animosity did not actually exist. Before leaving Novoarchangelsk (Sitka) for his assignment on the island of Atka in the Aleutian Chain, he concelebrated often: "March 25: On the F...

St. Jacob followed in the footsteps of many who came before him, not only the big names like St. Herman, St. Juvenaly, and St. Innocent, but more than that, the faithful, everyday folks who worked for the Russian-American Company and lived a faithful witness among the Alaskan peoples. What we find all over St. Jacob’s journals is mentions of locals who had been baptized by laymen and just did not have access to a priest. “It remained for me only to establish them in the faith and chrismate them." "I began baptizing 72 women in the morning. In the afternoon I baptized 54 older children of the parents who had been recently converted. The rite was finished by evening, a total of 126 persons, 33 boys, 93 women and girls. From this activity I became dreadfully tired and felt pain from standing so long... However, the spiritual joy at the sight of so many souls joined to the flock of the Christian Church compensated for everything, and the bodily weaknesses disappeared. That night ...

St. Jacob of Alaska has left us a wealth of information in his journals. We have translations of his journals, with entries almost every day spanning nearly forty years of missionary efforts. It is clear in many sections of his journals that part of the purpose of journaling was to record vital statistics to pass on to superiors in the Church and in the Russian-American Company. Though not often mentioned, there is also a feeling that he thinks of these journals as, what we might call, clinical notes: partially processing what is happening, partially recording information that might be useful to himself or others who come back to these same places, and partially studying his own mission efforts so that he may improve upon his methods over time. As such, these “missionary clinical notes” provide us with a wealth of information for our own missionary endeavors. Studying his processes and thinking provides us with lessons that would apply to any number of situations, even though the speci...

Then, 2 Peter starts off running: Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature (ἵνα διὰ τούτων γένησθε θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως), having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. Not only is he speaking of partaking of the divine nature, but clearly connecting that with a practical, lived-out life of virtue, “escaping corruption”. Throughout Peter’s epistles, he develops this lived knowledge of God, which is important to understand when reading the Cappadocians in their response to Eunomius. Peter continues, For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ —importantly, immediately...

In reading all these responses to specific theological problems, we all too easily lose our way trying to understand how much of God we will know and how the whole process works. St. Gregory the Theologian brings us back to the right path: “What God is in nature and essence, ... In my opinion it will be discovered when that within us which is godlike and divine, I mean our mind (νοῦν) and reason (λόγον), shall have mingled with its Like, and the image shall have ascended to the Archetype, of which it has now the desire.” In other words, he is saying, ‘I think we will find that out some day’. However, immediately following those words, he warns that this way of thinking, “as it seems to me, is altogether philosophical speculation ” (Καὶ τοῦτο εἶναί μοι δοκεῖ τὸ πάνυ φιλοσοφούμενον, ἐπιγνώσεσθαί ποτε ἡμᾶς, ὅςον ἐγνώσμευα). The Cappadocians, when speaking affirmatively of the life in Christ and knowing him, see no disconnection in their teaching from that of the Gospels, the Apostles, or ...

Out of necessity, St. Basil the Great responds to the Eunomian teaching primarily to negate the fallacies. Meaning, in those responses, and those of the other Cappadocian fathers after him, they are stating more of why those teachings are problematic and less setting forth a full and affirmative understanding of the knowledge of God. St. Basil, himself, mentions the need for a “more accurate” approach to combat Eunomius: “Now marveling at the beautiful things is not difficult, but attaining an accurate comprehension of the things at which one marvels is hard and nearly impossible.” In Basil’s homily on the first two verses of the Gospel of John, he boils down his argument to what the people would need to hear to avoid confusion about such teachings. He points out how St. John’s statement, He was with God in beginning , places “he was” in perfect apposition to “in beginning”, leaving no room for misunderstanding. However, when speaking directly against Eunomius, that is, back in the lan...

What do we know about God? How intimately can we know God? The fathers of the Church had no inclination to speak on these topics of their own volition, until questionable teachings began to arise which threatened the very foundation of life in Christ. We do not need to know the relationship between the persons of the Trinity simply to know the proper title when addressing our prayers to God; our life in Christ is little more than having another human friend if we are not in Christ, and he, in the Father. In the early parts of the fourth century, the Arian teaching threatened the Church. Arius, and those in line with his thought, taught that the Word of God, since he was begotten, was not eternal with the Father. In the years following the First Ecumenical Council, the Arian teaching grew more radical, and in doing so, more obviously problematic. These “neo-Arians” held to “anomoianism”, that is, that not only is the Son and Word not of the same essential being as the Father, but that h...

In the introduction to The Life in Christ , Boris Bobrinskoy repeatedly claims that Cabasilas sees the Eucharistic communion as the layman’s communion in Christ. I had an immediate and negative reaction to such statements due to my aversion to the false dichotomy between “lay” and monastic spirituality, but especially in the current climate of quarantine at home and isolation from the parish and Eucharistic communion, a time of sharpened attention to communion and what that means when we do not have the Eucharistic communion. I will admit that I attempted to prove Bobrinskoy wrong and to find references from Cabasilas that would also support communion with Christ in other ways outside of the Eucharist. Certainly, Cabasilas speaks of union with Christ in our heart, but I will have to concede that the Eucharist is his focal point: “So perfect is this Mystery [the Eucharist], so far does it excel every other sacred rite that it leads to the very summit of good things. Here also is the...

Not to set up Schmemann’s work for rejection again, but his language about our salvation is exactly what I was just mentioning as fadish among Orthodox—he is not at all wrong and can say these things with the full weight of the Fathers behind him—salvation is a healing, or in this case, restoration of our nature: “It is Paradise, not sin, that reveals the true nature of man; it is to Paradise and to his true nature, to his primordial vestment of glory, that man returns in Baptism.” And also, “Christ came not to replace ‘natural’ matter with some ‘supernatural’ and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God.” That is all true, and Orthodoxically beautiful to say, but notice Cabasilas’s language on the same topic, mentioning not only “uniting our nature to Himself”, but also “paid the penalty”, a phrase rarely heard in today’s Orthodox dialect: “By this He paid the penalty for the sins which we had audaciously committed; then, because of tha...

There are some spots where it is helpful to have a man from our own times speaking on Baptism. Schmemann, writing on the tail of the greatest wave of cultural change in America, the tumultuous 60s, can speak to our mixed up, modern confusion...in this case, about death. “Seemingly, from a modern perspective, nothing has happened to biological death with Christ’s death, because we still all die,” runs the thinking of a modern atheist looking at Christianity. He is able to respond to this confusion with the fundamental Christian vision of death: it is that death “in which the ‘biological’ or physical death is not the whole death, not even its ultimate essence. For in this Christian vision, death is above all a spiritual reality, of which one can partake while being alive, from which one can be free while lying in the grave.” Cabasilas rightly speaks of this spiritual death in Baptism by saying that “in the sacred mysteries, then, we depict His burial and proclaim His death. By them we ...

Fr. Alexander made a good point, but a point that was so good it almost undercut his entire book in my mind. He posed this question: “Are we not somewhat restoring, even though restoring is always artificial”, and emphasizing his own point, “all restorations are always artificial”. He argues long and hard for faithfulness to the original services of Baptism and Chrismation, to make sure we are serving them as they were written to be served. And that would...or could be artificial, even in his own estimation. Therefore, it is essential to keep in mind when reading Fr. Alexander’s book, that it is not for some romantic or “archeological” love of the past or to see a perfect historical restoration of the services, “but because of our certitude that only within this original structure can the full meaning of Baptism be grasped and understood.” That I understand: if we cut out chunks of the service we lose meaning. Clear. Later, though, it feels as though the tentative understanding we ju...

This is an absolutely unfair and completely biased and subjective opinion—I think my emphasis is quite clear in saying how the following probably should not be said in a proper and balanced evaluation of these two books, but will be anyway, for I think it is helpful to the reader in determining how to interpret my thoughts on these two books—but Schmemann’s book seems too theologically “uppity”, where Cabasilas is more like hearing wise thoughts that may be partially over the listener’s head, but the understood pieces become pearls to cherish. [ This is where you choose to read any of the following articles or not. I am not anti-Schmemann; I loved the book, but this work, and I am assuming others of his as well, are written "higher" than necessary. ] St. Nicholas’s book, for all of its distance from us in time and geography and culture, seems to treat Baptism in a way that hits our modern context more directly than Fr. Alexander's book. It is not better, and Fr. Alexa...

Fr. Alexander Schmemann starts off his book with a lamentation about our need to understand Baptism. That clearly reveals his intended audience: Orthodox Christians. Over and over throughout his book, he finds every exhortation, every inspirational liturgical detail, every symbol lost on the modern ear to help reconnect modern Orthodox Christians with the richness of Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist. And that is a message that needs to be heard, especially in the 1970s when he wrote it. He makes references to abbreviation or outright removal of seemingly redundant, meaningless, or outdated parts of the baptismal service, which to him is particularly abhorrent because such changes usually proceed from ignorance of the sacrament. St. Nicholas Cabasilas seems to have had a different audience in mind. On the surface, he, too, is speaking to Orthodox Christians, though it is difficult to say if that be to his own flock, because there is much uncertainty as to whether he ended his l...

In reading some of the context surrounding St. Lupicinus of Jura's life, who was commemorated yesterday, I read an excellent passage written by Father Seraphim Rose in the introduction to Vita Patrum . In these days when we are, more or less, forced to sit still and stay in one place, this is a word from Fr. Seraphim that we can find of encouragement. "With modern means of communication, the very ideal of losing oneself from the eyes of the world  has been all but forgotten, and to live in one place for one's whole life is almost unheard of. ... If we are helpless to imitate such stability today, let us at least understand its importance: Christianity in practice, and monasticism above all, is a matter of staying in one place and struggling with all one's heart for the Kingdom of Heaven. One may be called to do the work of God elsewhere, or may be moved about by unavoidable circumstances; but without the basic and profound desire to endure everything for God in one...

This past Sunday, the first Sunday of Great Lent, we celebrated the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which (to state in an overly simplified way) is the restoration of the use of icons. With that in mind, I will post a couple of articles about the Iconoclasm movement which brought about the controversy. “History makes no sharp turns.” That is what my history professor back in college would say over and over. Just as with everything else in the quest to understand history, the story of the struggle over the use of icons in the Church is wrapped up in a tangled web of issues which delve into the spiritual, practical, political, monetary, military, cultural, linguistic, and class issues of the time. Though I will not treat of these issues at any depth, and you will undoubtedly be able to question some of the statements I make, a few of the issues involved in the Iconoclasm crisis of the 8th century in the Christian east have have some overarching themes which will help us to understand the strug...

How did David so clearly discern God's will? We might assume an audible voice, but there seems to be a clue into a slightly different manner of communication with God that we might not have thought of. In 1 Kingdoms 23 (1 Samuel), Saul had just wiped out the family of Abimelech for giving David the showbread, that is, aiding the "enemy". Abimelech's son, Abiathar, escapes and finds refuge with David, with an ephod. The writer makes clear that Abiathar, a Levite, a priest, had the ephod. We read of David discerning, early in the chapter, whether he should go attack the Philistines to save the city of Keilah. Soon afterward, David finds out Saul is coming for him, and David needs to know what to do. He says to Abiathar: "Bring the ephod of the Lord ." I wondered if it was the ephod which held the Urim and Thummim, the lots used in the Temple to find the Lord's will or judgment in a matter. I had to look it up, but the Urim and Thummim are actually ...

In Letter 51, a letter from St. Basil the Great to Bishop Bosporius, we catch a quick glimpse into St. Basil’s beautiful pastoral heart. Bishop Bosporius thought Basil had anathemetized a fellow bishop named Dianius for listening to the Arians, and evidently had written Basil about it. Letter 51 is Basil’s reply. Now, “anathemetized” is not a word we use all that often these days, obviously, but avoiding a deep historical analysis, which may be possible, but too much for our current read on this letter, it at least means that Bishop Dianius would not be considered a canonical bishop of the Church and that his beliefs would be “denounced”, of a sort, so that nobody would follow his example. These were days when the decisions hammered out at the First Ecumenical Council were still being practically decided in the everyday life of the Church, and Basil was not only on the front lines, but was practically surrounded by opposing bishops. So, back to the letter concerning Bishop Dia...