Presence,
Participation, Performance: The Rememberance of God in the Early
Hesychast Fathers
By: Vincent Rossi
Pub Date: 2001 Paths to the Heart Conference, University of South
Carolina
Format: RealPlayer Audio
Status: Available
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Part 1 - 32 minutes
Part 2 - 32 minutes
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Vincent Rossi is Director of Education for the American Exarchate of
the Jerusalem Patriarchate of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He also
serves as the U.S. Director of the U.K.-centered Religious Education and
Environment Programme. He was the founder and for twelve years the
editor of the journal Epiphany.
The Hesychast traditin of the Christian East, as transmitted through
the classic texts of the Philokalia, is described by its original
compiler, St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain of Athos, as "a
mystical school of inward prayer", teaching the method of the
spiritual path that leads to attainment of sonship with God and
deification in Christ. Characteristic of this tradition is a radical
insistence upon apophatic theology in its doctrine of God, that is, the
absolute ineffability of the Divine nature. Equally characteristic of
the Ph8ilokalia is its unwavering insistence that the key to all
Hesychast practice and prayer is the remembrance of God. But to
"remember" God must be in some sense to know Him who is
essentially unknowable. How is this possible?. Rossi explores this
paradox.