And all praise to you, Kolokotronis, for passing along that advice! Hope lots of folks out there in "the marrying state" will avail themselves of it.
Of course, such would be a most rude awakening and rebuke to the fem-libs out there. But then they are self-deranged anyway, and so possibly hopeless. :^)
As for the putative cultural inaccessibility of John's Gospel way back when (i.e., in the period of which we are presently speaking): Any student of Plato would have felt very much "at home" with John, beloved apostle, in this speaking of the very greatest, of the most tremendous things ordained by God (Plato's "Beyond"), as directly experienced and contemplated in the human psyche: the "site and sensorium" of conscious experience that Plato called the Metaxy, the "In-Between" of human experiential reality....
Oh. I can see how/why such issues should complicate theology....
Still, I am unable to discern any conflict between the Platonic insights and those of the dispensation inaugurated by the Crucifixion.
Have you noticed any such, dear Kolokotronis?
Christ is Risen!
“As for the putative cultural inaccessibility of John’s Gospel way back when (i.e., in the period of which we are presently speaking): Any student of Plato would have felt very much “at home” with John, beloved apostle, in this speaking of the very greatest, of the most tremendous things ordained by God (Plato’s “Beyond”), as directly experienced and contemplated in the human psyche: the “site and sensorium” of conscious experience that Plato called the Metaxy, the “In-Between” of human experiential reality....”
Most of the catechumens then, as now, were not educated in the Greek Philosophers, BB. As for those who were, well actually reading +John might have been even more dangerous for them spiritually since while +John, and the subsequent Greek Fathers, used Platonic vocabulary, they made a point of the fact that they were the New Israel not the New Athens. The godfather of a convert friend of mine always used to tell him that we Greeks were very thankful to God that so many of our ancient statues and writings had been preserved since they remind us of what the Incarnation saved us from!
Christ is Risen!
“Of course, such would be a most rude awakening and rebuke to the fem-libs out there. But then they are self-deranged anyway, and so possibly hopeless. :^)”
Now this is an interesting response. I have always read that sermon as being far more advice and admonishment to husbands than to wives! I guess that shows why the popular response to +John Chrysostomos is hardly gender specific. In any event, were a man to be married to a feminist, this sermon makes it clear that his duty to her does not change any more than it does if she is no longer the svelt bride of his youth.
Once upon a time I was asked to be the “koumbaros” or sponsor (like a best man) at the wedding of a very conservative fundamentalist Protestant to an Orthodox convert woman. His understanding of the relevant verse from Ephesians had light years more to do with his future wife submitting to him than recognizing his role in her theosis and hers in his. At the wedding dinner in my toast I quoted the passage from Homily XX I snipped here earlier. After their honeymoon he asked me where it had come from and I gave him a copy of the entire sermon. Some months later he told me that that sermon had transformed his whole concept of marriage and the husband’s role it it.
He went on to become Orthodox, by the way! :)