Author: Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos, trans. by Effie Mavromichali
Imported from Greece.
From the time of man's creation, God imbued him with an impetus to reach glorification from his biological state. Man is to participate in God's glory, and through his glorification to recognize God as his Creator and Lord. When this impetus is not satisfied, man is aware of an inner void and lives a sort of vapid non-existence. The enjoyment of material goods, the gratification of instincts, prosperity, and self-love not only fail to satisfy him, but actually make his existential and psychological suffering worse. All man's searching aspires to fullness of life, to the quest for God and communion with Him. Ultimately, the Orthodox Church is the appropriate place for a person to satisfy his inner existential impetus, to be healed, and to encounter the true Physician, Christ, who will give him the light and life. The discussion described in this book took place within this framework.
Metropolitan Hierotheos uses quotations from the Church Fathers and many saints to support his conviction that man's soul suffers illness which distorts his relationship with God, his fellow men and nature — to be cured in the hospital of the Church. Presented in the form of a discussion, the contents was used in a lecture series at the St. John of Damascus Faculty of Theology, University of Balamand.
The author's main conviction which permeates this present book is that Orthodoxy does not provide a "system" of moral conduct but a therapeutic treatment which cures the innermost aspect of man's personality. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos maintains that he does not innovate by stating this, but that, he just highlights a central teaching of the Fathers of the Church: man's soul suffers malady which distorts his relationship with God; his fellow-men and even nature. The Church is a hospital which receives all people and cures their spiritual illness. The cure of the soul is the "end" of the Orthodox Way and it can only be attained through the Orthodox therapeutic method — which is asceticism, as it is expressed in the neptic tradition of the Church.
