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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 6 - Page 5 |
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It is given in church - six to eight hours a day - sometimes more. It is given in prayer in the solitude of their cells. The duration varies but is typically about five hours a day. Then they give time to 'obedience'. This varies from the many tasks necessary for the survival of the monastery: gardening, fishing, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, office work, caring for the many guests ... to additional tasks undertaken by the monks. For example, one monk, a young man who has from time to time given much of his little 'free' time to me when was visiting his monastery, recently translated whole massive sections of the Orthodox liturgy into Swahili for use in the Monastery mission in Zaire.
There
is a joke about this that plays on the Victorian English statement that
divides life into: ‘Eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep, eight
hours to play.’
The
monk on Athos speaks instead about: ‘Eight hours to work, eight
hours to sleep, eight hours to pray.’ Only these monks don’t often
sleep as long as that.
Now let me make an important point: all of this is intended to be more than simply an exploration of ideas. In exploring these ancient ideas in the right way, in discovering how Christians thought in earlier times, and in the meaning you discover by doing so, you may bring these ancient ideas to life and, if you do so, may also discover yourself.
Detailed investigation shows that this was an interpretation which had come into being so long ago not in the attempt to change the original gospel teaching, but with the direct intention of protecting and preserving its original meaning. Because of this element in its character it was a teaching that developed in stages, each new innovation arising to correct a new problem, a new misunderstanding, a new kind of thought in the communities within which the churches existed. It is this constant need, ‘the need to innovate in order to keep to the faith’, which was responsible for the debates which make the history of the church appear so full of conflict.
This book from which my explanation is developed, this
700 year old book which we have just retranslated, the first volume of
St. Gregory Palamas’ Triads, does as much as any important text
from that era of the church to make clear what is not so widely known,
that this ‘inner interpretation’ of the early saints was an
experiential view based on self-knowledge, which is to say, on inner
awareness. This book is also one of those which helps to confirms the
connection between the remarkable character of many of those saints and
the form of self-knowledge they studied and then taught. Palamas uses the first section of this First Triad to
distinguish between these two different kinds of knowledge which, he
makes clear, are produced by what Saint Paul described in ???, and in
this First Triad Palamas says clearly that these are Paul’s ‘wisdom
of the world,’ and ‘wisdom of God’. This means that as we continue
our studies of this book, we will discover that these two ways of
knowing differ from one another in a number of important ways.
Thus, the early Christian idea of ‘knowledge’ differed from our modern
idea of knowledge in its two main conclusions about life. |
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