The Experiential Knowledge of God

This English translation of the sermon of Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol (Cyprus), delivered on February 4, 2015, was recorded for otelders (Orthodox Teaching of the Elders) by Peter Eliades.

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Metropolitan Athanasios:

We read, listen about God, accept him orthodoxically and we have no doubt in our mind that He, God is indeed the true God which we are taught. But this knowledge is clearly intellectual knowledge, comes from the brain. And, of course, it influences on our mental world when faith is powerful and we practice the works of God. But the true knowledge, the “second faith of theory”, containing the word “theory”—derived from the ancient Greek verb “theoro/θεωρώ” which means “to see”—is this kind of knowledge, this faith which is born not merely out of intellectual knowledge but from the experience of God. 

[…] 

As St. Silouan [the Athonite] said and it is written on his icon and it was the desire of his Soul and he said “Lord, if I could go to the tallest place of earth and shout so that all people can hear me and say how much You Love us, just this”… it was the desire of his heart and afterwards he said “I pray thee, O merciful Lord, for all the peoples of the earth, that they may come to know thee by thy Holy Spirit”. It was his fervent praise and desire that “everyone would come to know the Lord in the Holy Spirit”. You see, he was a hermit, an ascetic monk but the real feeling of the experience of God, turned him immediately “global”, to hug and fit the whole world, the whole Adam and to give birth to the desire so that “all the peoples of the earth would come to know the Lord in the Holy Spirit”.