11 Ιουλίου 2017

Byzantine and post-Byzantine Musical Manuscripts of Mount Athos and their Importance in Modern Research* The year is 1907 and the place is Mount Athos. A young man of not more then twenty-five years of age named Henry Julius Wetenhall Tillyard visits the Holy Mountain for the first time. The purpose and interest of his visit is the study of the musical manuscripts of Mt. Athos in his quest to decipher the earlier phases of Byzantine music1. With this visit of Tillyard to Mt. Athos the modem phase of musicological study of Byzantine music is born. To appreciate the significance of this event even more, let us mention that today, with our modem means of transportation, the tlip from the city of Thessalonike ...

5. According to the mystical interpreter Saint John of Damascus, in the human world the God-man, Christ, is "the only thing new under the sun."2 Indeed, this eternal news applies not only to His Theanthropic Presence but also to His Theanthropic Work and His Theanthropic Body, the Church. And man also is always new, eternally new, ("a new creation") in his theanthro­pic newness, in all his theanthropic experiences on the road to salvation, to sanctification, to transfiguration, to theosis, to becoming like the God-man. In this terrestrial world everything ages and everything dies. St. Justin Popovich (right) together with Elder Cleopa of Romania - Chelije Monastery, 1977 Only the person who has embodied himself in the God-man and is becoming like ...

The late Elder Ioakeim was a real Athonite. He loved the Mother of God, the Holy Mountain its history and the Athonite fathers. He was distinguished for his devotion to works, learning and virtue. He avoided care and verbosity. He was a forgotten, humble and good monk. His poverty gave him a rich heart. Fault was found with Elder Ioakeim, but he never found fault with anyone else. He was born Ioannis Balasis, in 1893, in the village of Dafni, in Kalavryta,  of devout parents who had many children. He was the oldest child of eight. As a child, his first words, in a weird and wonderful fashion, were “I’m going to be a monk”. After leaving school, he worked for ...

Despite this, we can’t ignore the value of medical science, which comes as a gift from God to comfort us in the sickness of our spiritual and bodily condition. Christ Himself came into the world as the doctor of our souls and bodies. His manifestation of the kingdom of God was marked by the cure of the sick. But the various cures which have been effected by saints in the world are recognized as being the result of God’s special grace. And typically these cures involve the completion of a bodily organ, as in the case of the man who was blind from birth and was healed by the Lord, but also the transplantation of a body part, such as ...