My friends, do we ever think about how valuable the treasure that has been given to us by the Lord is? As Orthodox Christians, we have this precious treasure, and if we were to try to estimate it, we would be amazed by its overwhelming value. That is, if we can even come close to a true estimate! How can we estimate something that is truly priceless? However, we will attempt a quick assessment of this treasure so that we may become aware of its value. First, we have the Holy Scriptures, which are a wonderful treasure in themselves. If we were to realize what Scripture is, especially the New Testament, written in our own language (Greek). This is a great privilege for those of us who are Hellenic. We also have the Holy Liturgy, through which we have the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, the very Body of the Master, which makes us one Body and one Blood with Him. We have the seven Ecumenical Councils and the Local Councils with the canons of the Church, which regulate the moral life and guard the dogmatic truth of our faith. These holy canons serve as a protective parapet that prevents us from falling into deception and losing our salvation. We have the precious writings of the Fathers of our Church and especially the writings of the Greek Fathers of our Church. We have monasticism with its boundless flowers, which have given our Church over eighty percent of the canonized saints. But monasticism is greatly misunderstood today, even by the Orthodox clergy, although this is not surprising, since the Devil will always attack anything that has great spiritual value. We also have our matchless and incomparable services. These services magnetized the non-Orthodox of Europe. The blacks of Central Africa are attracted to our faith only by the splendor of the Divine Liturgy. We have historical evidence of this.
Russia embraced Orthodox Christianity during the 10th century, even though Rome was very active and tried several times to attract the Russian people to papism. Moreover, Rome exercised very powerful means of proselytism over Russia and the entire Western world. And yet, Russia became Orthodox and submitted to the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The splendor of the Divine Liturgy and Byzantine music so amazed them that they exclaimed: “Here is heaven on earth!”
Our services have a heavenly beauty, a holy beauty. If we only knew the essence of all these church services, when they are performed in their order, we would realize that they are a twenty-four-hour unceasing liturgy and doxology to the Holy God, the Trinity. We also have our dogmatic iconography. And the West paints, but that is all – it paints beautiful pictures, while our Byzantine dogmatic iconography is something extraordinary and unparalleled, something wonderful.
We also have our published and unpublished hymnography. It would take hundreds of years to extract all the wealth from the libraries and museums, not only in Greece, but also in the rest of the world. The museums of Europe and America are loaded with a large volume of unpublished works of the Fathers of the Church. Who would attempt to estimate the unpublished volumes of this amazing wealth? Not to mention the fact that they represent only a part of all that have perished due to the vicissitudes of time, man-made destruction, wars, fires, and the like.
Archimandrite Athanasius of Mytilene
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