“In the Orthodox Tradition sin is
not an offence against God, but an illness, we can at once see the penances not
as man’s punishments or means of appeasing God, but as a medicine for our cure.
And the Eucharist is not celebrated for sentimental reasons and moral
improvement but for deifying man…
Let us first of all perceive sin
as an illness of our nature, let us locate the illness in the darkness of the nous, at which time we will keep the Law
in order to be cured, until we may attain deification, which is the deepest
purpose of creation and of man’s existence”[1].
[1]
Hierotheos, Metropolitan of Nafpaktos, The
Mind of the Orthodox Church, (Levadia, Birth of the Theotokos Monastery,
1998), p. 181, 184
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