Undusted Texts

St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite "For not for us is the battle against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the worldrulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."--Eph 6:12 There has always been need for the faithful to do battle.  I do not mean physical battle, which God only commanded for a time, but spiritual battle.  Even in the Garden, Adam was called to fight against the serpent and failed, as one tradition views it.  So Satan and his demons have since then been lurking on the earth, "prowling like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."  Yet God has not abandoned us to the maw of the dragon: He gives us the grace to defeat the wicked one.  Christ trampled death by death, and He also trampled Satan and his power.  He Who cast out demons while on earth continues to cast them out when we call upon Him.  In the spiritual life, then, we are alwa...

  "There is no other virtue that is either higher or more necessary than sacred Prayer, because all the other virtues--I mean fasting, vigils, sleeping on the ground, ascesis, chastity, almsgiving, and all the rest--even though they are ways of imitating God, even though they cannot be taken away from us and constitute the immortal ornaments of the soul--do not united man with God, but only render man fit to be united.  Sacred Prayer, and it alone, unites.  It alone joins man with God and God with man, and makes the two one spirit." Nikodemos (Nicodemus) the Hagiorite (of the Holy Mountain) (1749-1809), a Greek Orthodox saint, wrote the above passage on the necessity of Prayer.  This view of the necessity of Prayer led to what is probably Nikodemos' most famous work: the Philokalia .  The Philokalia is a collection of texts by saints and other holy writers from the origins of Christianity until around the 15th century, compiled by Nikodemos an...

Dom Lorenzo Scupoli, C.R.'s Il combattimento spirituale ( The Spiritual Combat ) is one of the classic works of Catholic spirituality regarding spiritual warfare.  The author was a member of the Congregation of Clerks Regular of the Divine Providence, better known as the Theatines, who lived between 1530 and 1610, publishing this work, his most famous, in 1589.  For centuries, this work has been an ascetic classic in the Western Church: one great devotee of the work was St. Francis de Sales, a Doctor of the Church, who carried it in his pocket for 20 years. The work's popularity did not stop in the Western Church, though: it migrated to the East, making this classic one revered by both lungs of the Church, West and East.  Nicodemus the Hagiorite (Hagiorite means "of the Holy Mountain," that is, Mount Athos in Greece), a Greek Orthodox saint of the 18th century, came across this text and was enamored by it.  Seeing its potential for spiritual growth among the Orth...