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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 18 - Page 3 |
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A spirit of understanding Boris Mouravieff wrote (in unpublished material:) 'Now, the methods developed in this way will meet a resistance that may be overcome with difficulty, which questions our authority. And if we quote for him this word of the prophet: "If you do not believe, you will not understand," this will appear to him to be bizarre, at least at first sight.' The tradition says that mere intellectual study is not enough: that only the link with experience through discernment can lead to true understanding. It is not enough simply to believe all that has been said in the earlier paragraphs. It is thus useless to study it merely intellectually, but today this millennial tradition is again available for those who will take the trouble to understand it not only in theory but in practice, bringing to this the same spirit of discernment that must guide every stage of the search for truth. One should approach slowly, in the same spirit that led to the progressive rediscovery of this tradition, a rediscovery that has now gone one for two and a half centuries, over three continents, and involving co-operation by individuals of many nations. In this spirit these pages introduce opportunities for already informed individuals to begin their own investigation of the tradition whose truth is proved only in actually coming to understand it. Links Between Boris Mouravieff's Gnosis and The Philokalia Mouravieff makes special mention of the Philokalia as a major source used in his research. (He of course worked from the fullest version of the Philokalia, the Russian Doublotroubiye, not yet fully translated into English.) The following is a study of Mouravieff's work, by demonstrating a few of the ties between what Gnosis formulates and the material out of which it was formed. In the Foreword to the first volume of Gnosis: Study and COMMENTARIES on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, first published in French in 1966, Boris Mouravieff writes "The study presented here is directly drawn from the Eastern Christian Tradition: the sacred texts, the commentaries written around these texts, and especially from the Philokalia ..."(p. xviii). In the Preface to the same volume Mouravieff provides a similar and somewhat more complete account of his sources: "The Christian esoteric Tradition is based on the Canon, the Rites, on Menology, and lastly on Doctrine. The latter is a collection of rules, treatises and commentaries given by the doctors of the Ecumenical Church. These texts were in large part assembled in a compendium called the Philokalia. In addition to these sources, there are isolated writings by other ancient and modern authors religious and secular." (p. xx)
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