MESSAGES OF THE THREE HOLY HIERARCHS BASIL THE GREAT GREGORY THE THEOLOGIAN AND JOHN CHRYSOSTOM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
MESSAGES OF THE THREE HOLY HIERARCHS BASIL THE GREAT GREGORY THE THEOLOGIAN AND JOHN CHRYSOSTOM FOR THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Summary/Abstract: The Three Holy Hierarchs Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian and John Chrysostom, whom the Church honors particularly and under whose protection the large family of Christian theological education, and not just it, has placed itself, year after year, entered the conscience of the Orthodoxy as “equal in habits to the Apostles” and “teachers” or educators “of the world”. Their contribution to the growth of the Church teaching consists in the fact that they formulated a theological word representing, truly, a radical change in the core habits of the man of their time. They did not ignore the human wisdom of various times and, especially, the Greek thinking of the Antiquity, but went beyond this wisdom, reviewing human life based on the evangelical principles. Thus, they highlight that one cannot talk about a Hellenization of the Christian faith or about a Christianization of Hellenism, but about the fact that the Christian faith is founded on the holy-spiritual experience of the grace-based work of the Holy Trinity and is expressed by dogmas and concrete ascetic and liturgical forms, creating a manner of living totally new for the world of those times, a unique experience of the relation of man with the God revealed in the Old and The New Testament, a unique expression of the relation of man with God, with the visible and invisible world, with the society he lives in and with himself. From the Three Holy Hierarchs’ teachings and living one can understand many messages for the contemporary world, such as: “the importance of the ecumenicity of the «Gospel»”; “the unity between contemplation and practice” or, in patristic language, “between the vision of God and action”; “the need for education and the benefit of the permanent spiritual cultivation of man”; “the dynamic, not static, character of the Holy Tradition”; “the service and social mission of the Church”; “the holy-spiritual life stages and the fact of theologizing in the Church”; “the role of repentance in the holy-spiritual life”; “the Holy Mysteries of the Church and their grace-filled work”; “the relation between the Greek philosophy of the Antiquity and the Christian teaching: combination (σύγκραση), synthesis (σύνθεση) or opposition (ἀντίθεση)?”; “the Church and the world” etc. In the celebratory word, which finally took the shape of a study, I have limited myself, on the one hand, only to the brief presentation, with the help of the Lord and of the Three Holy Hierarchs’ intercession to Him, of the first three messages, leaving the rest for other opportunities, and, on the other hand, I have added other little known aspects of the lives of these Holy Hierarchs or in connection with them, all being relevant for the contemporary world.

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