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THE ORTHODOX FAITH:
What's Orthodoxy?
Who started it?
Is it 2000 year old,
before catholicism
and protestantism?

BYZANTINE HYMNS:
Athos Monks[play]
Meteora[play]
Th. Vassilikos[play]

Light and darkness.


Inasmuch as modern knowledge has penetrated into the past history of mankind, it appears apparent that two great ideas were initially inherent to man: faith in God and a notion of eternity (in the Bible — of the heavenly "tree of life"). It was always understood that if there was no eternity in God, then for every man in the future, after a short and always uncertain, although perhaps even a "happy" course of life, death will come, meaning collapse, emptiness, darkness. And this hopeless latter outcome — death — completely erases the meaning of the former: the earthly life. In the very "worldview" of the unbelieving person the final line is emptiness and darkness.

But the Christian worldview is different, named shortly "faith." The Lord Jesus Christ taught his disciples and other people about faith in the Sermon on the Mount: "Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there will you heart be also." "The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, (in the Slavic, "prosto" or "simple," that is, in direct, healthy condition) thy whole body shall be full of light." (We shall clearly see our steps, our acts and ourselves). "But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!? (In Slavonic, the translation is, how many times is it greater! — Matt. 6:20-23) What kind of darkness awaits a person in the future, if he has already removed himself from Godly light here on Earth… Protect yourself, human, so that you do not declare yourself unbelieving, an atheist, and thus predetermine your fate in the "absolute" darkness (in the Slavonic, the word "kromeshniy" for absolute stands for "krome," or "without," "outside of" God’s light), external in relation to the omnipresent God…

The author of the non-canonical, but Church-revered book "The Wisdom of Solomon," in the last two chapters of the book, gives a frightening image of absolute "Egyptian darkness," which befell Egypt before the exodus of the Jews. This is a symbol of the other one, "eternal darkness."

For the believing person, for the Christian, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" (John 1:5). And in addition to the words of the Sermon on the Mount quoted above, the Evangelist Luke adds the following words of the Lord: "If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light" (Luke 11:36).

On such candles of faith does the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church have its beginnings and is established.

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