I think you will find that hesychastic fathers leave no doubt that we are born in complete depravity, slaves to sin (oh yeah, the Calvinists would love that part!), unable to choose anything but evil, and that we are saved by God's loving grace out of that rot.
I am no expert on Greek of course, but is it correct that the ancient Greek term for "slave" became the modern Greek word for "laborer" or "bondsman?" Ancient Greeks considered every man who worked for someone else not feee. Only those who worked for themsleves were considered free men. Anyone serving anyone else was not.
If man is bonded one way or another, man is never truly free. Yet Scriputre tells us just the opposite: unlike the animals, who are driven by necessity and are bonded to necessity, we are free to choose. Adam and Eve were free to choose not only God but evil, thus being totally and truly free.
If we were bonded to God, then we would do nothing that He doesn't want us to do, we couldn't sin. The error of Protestants is precisely their claim that once they accept Christ they cannot sin. And they have issues with the church or Papal infallibility?
"I think you will find that hesychastic fathers leave no doubt that we are born in complete depravity, slaves to sin (oh yeah, the Calvinists would love that part!), unable to choose anything but evil, and that we are saved by God's loving grace out of that rot."
I don't think so, Kosta. None of the Fathers save perhaps Augustine, believed in the total depravity of man at birth. The Fathers taught that while we might have lost the "likeness" of God at the Fall, we didn't lose the "image" of God. As +John of Kronstadt wrote: "Never confuse the person, formed in the image of God, with the evil that is in him, because evil is but a chance misfortune, illness, a devilish reverie. But the very essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement." It is fair, however, to say that without grace we cannot move from a state of being a bondsman or servant to sin towards theosis.
"I am no expert on Greek of course, but is it correct that the ancient Greek term for "slave" became the modern Greek word for "laborer" or "bondsman?"
No. The Greek word then and now for slave as we today think of slaves is "sklavos".
"Ancient Greeks considered every man who worked for someone else not feee. Only those who worked for themsleves were considered free men. Anyone serving anyone else was not."
Not quite, but close. There were many people who worked for others but were not sklavoi or douloi. The distinction to make is that there were different types of people who come under the English word slave and different states of life that we generically call slavery. Justin Martyr sort of makes this distinction:
"To yield and give way to our passions is the lowest slavery, even as to rule over them is the only liberty. The greatest of all good is to be free from sin, the next is to be justified; but he must be reckoned the most unfortunate of men, who, while living unrighteously, remains for a long time unpunished. The end contemplated by a philosopher is likeness to God, so far as that is possible."