In an article published in 1939--the first item in the volume Essential Wriings--she makes clear where she stands, and also how she sees herself as belonging to a tradition of Orthodox theology. It is called 'The Second Gospel Commandment'--to love one's neighbor as oneself--and her main gravamen is how easily this commandment has been sidelined or relativized. Because it is 'second,' it is often treated as secondary, an appendix to the first commandment. She starts out by pointing out how we are never encouraged to pray alone: the prayers we say morning and night as Orthodox are all prayers in which we pray, now as 'I,' but as 'we'--culminating, of course, in the Lord's Prayer, the 'Our Father.' Her first conclusion takes this form:
'Thus what is most personal, what is most intimate in an Orthodox person's life, is thoroughly pervaded by this sense of being united with everyone, the sense of the principle of sobornost, characteristic of the Orthodox Church. This is a fact of great significance; this forces us to reflect.'
She related it immediately to Khomiakov, Dostoevsky, Solov'ev: the great ninetheenth-century figures who are pillars of the Russian Religious Renaissance. She then faces two ways that seem to her to turn away the force of this sense of the fundamental place of sobornost. First, what she calls a 'holy egoism,' which accepts the value of the second commandment, the need to feed the hungry, shelter beggars and so on, but treats this as an ascetic exercise, undertaken for the salvation of the soul of each one of us. The neighbour, the one in need, provides an opportunity to further our salvation: to love like that is not to love the other at all, but use him or her as a way of loving oneself. 'One cannot love sacrificially in one's own name, but only in the name of Christ, in the name of the image of God that is revealed to us in man.'
The next problem is: the Philokalia, the pre-eminent work of Orthodox spirituality. She remarks that 'in the first volume of the Philokalia, material about the attitude towards one's neighbor takes up only two pages out of sex hundred, and in the second volume, only three out of seven hundred and fifty'--quite a different proportion from the Gospels and Epistles of the New Testament. Nevertheless, from these few pages she quotes from St Makarios the Great, from St John Cassian, from St. Neilos of Sinai (actually from Evagrius), from St Ephrem the Syrian, and St Isaac the Syrian. Here she finds enough to establish an Orthodox tradition that leads to genuine attention to our neighbor, the other, and his or her needs, and she goes on to sketch out what this entails.
She talks of work and abstinence--work that is not merely 'an unavoidable evil, the curse of Adam,' but also 'participation in the divine economy,' in which work is 'transfigured and sanctified'; abstinence that frees one to attend, an abstinence of which one is virtually unconscious, for it is the attention enabled that is important. Attention, to the other, to his or her needs, is paramount for Mother Maria. This requires the cultivation of inwardness, an inwardness that enables us to discern and respond to the inwardness of the other--something very different from an ascetic impersonality--but this respect for the attention to the other is to be neither judgmental nor indulgent. As she puts it:
'On the one hand, it is dangerous to approach a man with the yardstick of all-measuring doctrine and begin to dissect his living and sick soul; on the other hand, it is no less dangerous to accept sentimentally the whole of a man as he is, his soul along with all its sores and growths.'
We are to discern the image of God in the other, and fall before him in veneration, yet at the same time, not to ignore the way the image has been ravaged by sin, and to long 'to become an instrument of God in this terrible and scorching work.'
-- said of: St. Maria of Paris (d. 1945),
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