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Beloved brothers! The beginning of our word in the week of Orthodoxy is quite natural to be the question, what is Orthodoxy? Orthodoxy is true knowledge of God and worship of God; Orthodoxy is the worship of God in spirit and truth; Orthodoxy is the glorification of God by true knowledge of Him and worship of Him; Orthodoxy is God’s glorification of man, a true servant of God, by bestowing upon Him the grace of the All-Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the glory of Christians (John 7:39). Where there is no Spirit, there is no Orthodoxy. There is no Orthodoxy in the teachings and speculations of men: they are dominated by false reason - the fruit of the fall. Orthodoxy is the teaching of the Holy Spirit, given by God to people for salvation. Where there is no Orthodoxy, there is no salvation. “Whoever wants to be saved, first of all it is fitting for him to hold the Catholic faith, but unless someone keeps it whole and blameless, except for all bewilderment, he will perish forever” 45. A precious treasure is the teaching of the Holy Spirit! It is taught in the Holy Scriptures and in the Holy Tradition of the Orthodox Church. A precious treasure is the teaching of the Holy Spirit! In it is the guarantee of our salvation. Precious, irreplaceable, incomparable for each of us, our blissful fate in eternity: just as precious, just as beyond any price, is the guarantee of our bliss - the teaching of the Holy Spirit. In order to preserve this guarantee for us, the Holy Church today enumerates publicly those teachings that were generated and published by Satan, which are an expression of enmity towards God, which slander our salvation and steal it from us. Like ravenous wolves, like deadly snakes, like thieves and murderers, the Church denounces these teachings; protecting us from them and calling out from destruction those deceived by them, she anathematizes these teachings and those who stubbornly adhere to them. The word “anathema” means excommunication, rejection. When the Church anathematizes any teaching, this means that the teaching contains blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and for salvation it must be rejected and eliminated, just as poison is eliminated from food. When a person is anathematized, it means that that person has internalized the blasphemous teaching irrevocably, depriving himself and those of his neighbors to whom he communicates his way of thinking from salvation. When a person intends to leave a blasphemous teaching and accept the teaching contained by the Orthodox Church, then he is obliged, according to the rules of the Orthodox Church, to anathematize the false teaching that he has hitherto contained and which has destroyed him, alienating him from God, keeping him in enmity towards God, in blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in communion with Satan. The meaning of anathema is the meaning of spiritual church healing against an illness in the human spirit that causes eternal death. All human teachings cause eternal death, introducing their own reasoning, drawn from false reason, from carnal wisdom, this common property of fallen spirits and people, into the God-revealed teaching about God. Human reasoning introduced into the teachings of the Christian faith is called heresy, and adherence to this teaching is called evil faith 46. The Apostle also includes heresies among the works of the flesh (Gal. 5:20). They belong to the deeds of the flesh according to their source, carnal wisdom, which is “death, which is enmity against God, which does not submit to the law of God, for it can do worse” (Rom. 8:6-7). They belong to the deeds of the flesh in their consequences. Having alienated the human spirit from God, uniting it with the spirit of Satan due to his main sin - blasphemy, they subject him to the enslavement of passions as abandoned by God, as betrayed by his own fallen nature. “Their foolish heart was darkened,” says the apostle about the wise men who deviated from the true knowledge of God, “being wise, making fools,... changing the truth of God into a lie:... for this reason God gave them over in the passion of dishonor” (Rom. 1:21-26). Various prodigal passions are called the passions of dishonor. The behavior of the heresiarchs was depraved: Apollinaris had an adulterous relationship 47, Eutyches was especially enslaved by the passions of love of money 48, Arius was depraved beyond belief. When his hymn, Thalia, began to be read at the first Council of Nicaea, the fathers of the Council stopped their ears and refused to hear blasphemy, which could never come to the mind of a pious person. The waist was burned. Fortunately for Christianity, all copies of it were destroyed: we are left with historical information that this work breathed with violent debauchery 49 . Many of the works of the newest heresiarchs are similar to Thalia: in them terrible blasphemy is combined and mixed with expressions of terrible, inhuman depravity and blasphemy. Blessed are those who have never heard or read these eruptions of hell. When reading them, the connection of the spirit of the heresiarchs with the spirit of Satan becomes obvious. Heresies, being a carnal matter, the fruit of carnal wisdom, are invented by fallen spirits. “Flee godless heresies,” says Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer, “the essence of which is the devil’s invention of the evil serpent” 50. This should not be surprising: fallen spirits descended from the heights of spiritual dignity; they fell into carnal wisdom more than men. People have the opportunity to move from carnal wisdom to spiritual wisdom; fallen spirits are deprived of this opportunity. People are not so strongly influenced by carnal wisdom, because in them natural goodness is not destroyed, as in spirits, by the fall. In people, good is mixed with evil, and therefore indecent; In fallen spirits, only evil dominates and operates. Carnal wisdom in the realm of spirits has received the most extensive, complete development that it can only achieve. Their main sin is frantic hatred of God, expressed in terrible, incessant blasphemy. They became proud of God Himself; They turned obedience to God, natural to creatures, into continuous opposition, into irreconcilable enmity. That is why their fall is deep, and the ulcer of eternal death with which they are struck is incurable. Their essential passion is pride; they are dominated by monstrous and stupid vanity; They find pleasure in all types of sin, they constantly revolve in them, moving from one sin to another. They grovel in the love of money, in gluttony, and in adultery 51 . Not being able to commit carnal sins physically, they commit them in dreams and sensations; they have adopted into their ethereal nature the vices inherent in the flesh; they have developed in themselves these unnatural vices incomparably more than they can be developed among people 52 . “Fall from heaven,” says the prophet about the fallen cherub, “the morning star rises; crushed on the earth... You said in your mind: I will ascend to heaven, I will set my throne above the stars of God, ... I will be like the Most High. Now you will go down to hell and to the foundations of the earth, you will be cast down on the mountains like a dead man” (Isaiah 14:12–15, 19). Fallen spirits, containing within themselves the beginning of all sins, try to involve people in all sins with the goal and thirst for their destruction. They draw us into various pleasures of the flesh, into greed, into the love of glory, painting before us the objects of these passions with the most seductive painting. In particular, they try to draw into pride, from which hostility towards God and blasphemy vegetate, like the seeds of a plant. The sin of blasphemy, which constitutes the essence of all heresy, is the most serious sin, as a sin that actually belongs to the rejected spirits and constitutes their most distinctive property. Fallen spirits try to cover up all sins with a plausible guise, called “justifications” in the ascetic writings of the Fathers 53 . They do this for the purpose of making people more easily deceived and more easily agreeing to accept sin. They do exactly the same with blasphemy: they try to cover it up with a magnificent name, magnificent eloquence, and sublime philosophy. A terrible weapon in the hands of spirits is heresy! They destroyed entire nations through heresy, stealing Christianity from them, unbeknownst to them, replacing Christianity with blasphemous teaching, adorning the deadly teaching with the name of purified, true, restored Christianity. Heresy is a sin committed primarily in the mind. This sin, being accepted by the mind, is communicated to the spirit, spills onto the body, defiles our very body, which has the ability to receive sanctification from communication with Divine grace and the ability to become defiled and become infected by communication with fallen spirits. This sin is hardly noticeable and incomprehensible to those who do not know Christianity with certainty and therefore easily catches in its net the simplicity, ignorance, indifferent and superficial confession of Christianity. The monks Ioannikis the Great, Gerasim of Jordan and some other saints of God were caught in heresy for a time. If holy men, who spent their lives in exclusive concern for salvation, could not suddenly understand the blasphemy covered in disguise, what can we say about those who spend their lives in worldly concerns and have an insufficient, very insufficient concept of faith about faith? How can they recognize deadly heresy when it appears to them dressed in the guise of wisdom, righteousness and holiness? This is the reason why entire human societies and entire nations easily fell under the yoke of heresy. For the same reason, it is very difficult to convert from heresy to Orthodoxy; much more difficult than from unbelief and idolatry. Heresies that come closer to atheism are more easily recognized and abandoned than heresies that are less removed from the Orthodox faith and therefore more hidden. The Roman Emperor, Equal to the Apostles, the great Constantine wrote a letter to Saint Alexander, Patriarch of Alexandria, denouncer of the heresiarch Arius, exhorting him to stop the debate that was disturbing the peace because of “empty” words. With these words, which are called “empty,” the Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ was rejected and Christianity was destroyed 54. So the ignorance of the holy man, a zealot of piety, was deceived by the machinations of heresy, inaccessible to his comprehension. Heresy, being a grave sin, a mortal sin, is cured quickly and decisively as a sincere sin of the mind, by anathematizing it from the bottom of my heart. Saint John Climacus said: “The Holy Catholic Church receives heretics when they sincerely anathematize their heresy 55 and immediately honors them with the Holy Mysteries, and those who have fallen into fornication, even if they have confessed and forsaken their sin, commands, according to the apostolic rules, to be excommunicated from the Holy Mysteries for many years” 56. The impression made by carnal sin remains in a person both after confession of sin and after leaving it; the impression made by heresy is immediately destroyed when it is rejected. Sincere and decisive anathematization of heresy is a cure that finally and completely liberates the soul from heresy. Without this healing, the poison of blasphemy remains in the human spirit and will not cease to shake it with perplexities and doubts produced by unexterminated sympathy for heresy; thoughts remain that are “charged to the mind” of Christ (2 Cor. 10:5), making salvation inconvenient for the one possessed by them, obsessed with disobedience and resistance to Christ, who is in communion with Satan. Medicine has always been anathema and considered necessary by the Holy Church against the terrible disease of heresy. When Blessed Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus, appeared at the Fourth Ecumenical Council before the fathers of the Council, wanting to justify himself in the accusations brought against him, the fathers demanded of him, first of all, that he anathematize the heresiarch Nestorius. Theodoret, who rejected Nestorius, but not as decisively as the Church rejected him, wanted to explain himself. The fathers again demanded that he resolutely, without reservations, anathematize Nestorius and his teaching. Theodoret again expressed a desire to explain himself, but the fathers again demanded that he anathema Nestorius, threatening otherwise to recognize Theodoret himself as a heretic. Theodoret uttered anathema to Nestorius and all the heretical teachings of that time. Then the fathers glorified God, proclaimed Theodoret an Orthodox shepherd, and Theodoret no longer demanded an explanation, having cast out from his soul the reasons that aroused the need for explanation 57 . This is the attitude of the human spirit towards the terrible disease of heresy. Having heard today the formidable proclamation of spiritual healing, let us accept it with a true understanding of it and, applying it to our souls, we will sincerely and decisively reject those disastrous teachings that the Church will anathematize for our salvation. If we have always rejected them, then we will be confirmed by the voice of the Church in rejecting them. Spiritual freedom, lightness, strength, which we will certainly feel in ourselves, will testify to us the correctness of church action and the truth of the teaching it proclaims. The Church proclaims: “We please and praise those who captivate their minds in obedience to Divine revelation and those who strive for it; those who oppose the truth, if they did not repent before the Lord, who awaited their conversion and repentance, if they did not want to follow the Holy Scriptures and the Tradition of the primal Church, we excommunicate and anathematize.” “Those who deny the existence of God and assert that this world is original, that everything happens in it without the providence of God, by chance: anathema.” “To those who say that God is not a spirit, but a substance, who also do not recognize Him as righteous, merciful, wise, omniscient, and who utter similar blasphemies: anathema.” “To those who dare to assert that the Son of God is not consubstantial and not equal in honor with the Father, and also to the Holy Spirit, and to those who do not confess that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God: anathema.” “Those who allow themselves to say that our salvation and cleansing from sins do not require the coming into the world of the Son of God according to the flesh, His voluntary suffering, death and resurrection: anathema.” “To those who do not accept the grace of redemption preached by the Gospel as the only means of our justification before God: anathema.” “To those who dare to say that the Most Pure Virgin Mary was not a Virgin before the Nativity, at the Nativity, or after the Nativity: anathema.” “To those who do not believe that the Holy Spirit made the prophets and apostles wise, through them he announced to us the true path to salvation, testifying to it with miracles that He still dwells in the hearts of faithful and true Christians, guiding them to all truth: anathema.” “To those who reject the immortality of the soul, the end of the age, future judgment and eternal reward for virtues in heaven, and condemnation for sins: anathema.” “To those who reject the sacraments of the holy Church of Christ: anathema.” “To those who reject the Councils of the Holy Fathers and their Traditions, consistent with Divine revelation, piously preserved by the Orthodox Catholic Church: anathema” 58. The Divine Truth became human in order to save us, who perished from accepting and assimilating a murderous lie. “If you continue in my words,” she says, “if you accept My teaching and remain faithful to it, you will truly be my disciples, and you will understand the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31–32). Only those who decisively reject, will constantly reject all teachings invented and invented by rejected spirits and people, hostile to the teaching of Christ, the teaching of God, slandering its integrity and inviolability, can remain faithful to the teachings of Christ. The revealed teaching of God is preserved in inviolable integrity solely and exclusively within the bosom of the Orthodox Eastern Church. Amen. Symbol of Saint Athanasius the Great, Patriarch of Alexandria. Psalter with resurrection Life of St. Ephraim the Syrian Fleury. Church history. Volume 2, book. 27, ch. 28 His own. Volume 1, book. 10, ch. 36 and book. 11 Epistle 1 to the Grallians Saint Ignatius the God-Bearer. Epistle to the Philippiseys Saint Basil the Great calls the fallen spirit the parent of passionate carnal weaknesses. Prayers from desecration, canon Venerable Abba Dorotheos. A lesson about not making up your mind Fleury. Church history. Volume 1, book. 10, ch. 42 “The Ladder”, Homily 15, ch. 47 Council of Laodicea canon 6 Fleury. History of Christianity. Volume 2, book. 20, ch. 24 Worship on the Week of Orthodoxy You might be interested in: