Arsenie Boca (IV): The Teaching of Cuvinte vii

The fourth article in the series on the hieromonk Arsenie Boca (1910–1989). The first two, The Life of Arsenie Boca (I): Up to Prislop (1910–1948) and The Life of Arsenie Boca (II): From Prislop to Sinaia (1948–1989), tell the story of his life. The third, Arsenie Boca (III): The Teaching of Cărarea Împărăției, examines his book of spiritual guidance, and this one, his sermons.

The texts of Arsenie Boca that we examine are given in bold, and our conclusion on each error in bold italics. Every quotation and every fact has a reference to its source.

Cuvinte vii (“Living Words”) is the collection of the sermons and meditations of the hieromonk Arsenie Boca from the years 1946–1950. According to the editor, he wrote them by hand in an untitled notebook of 267 pages, which is kept at the monastic settlement at Sinaia, the town in the Prahova Valley where he lived out his last years. The title was given by Bishop Daniil Stoenescu, who prepared the notebook for print.¹ There are 137 sermons, written between 25 November 1946 and 27 March 1950, and two of them have additions from the end of 1950. The first is from the Brâncoveanu Monastery at Sâmbăta de Sus, in the Făgăraș Land, and most of them, 111, are from Prislop Monastery, near Hațeg, where Arsenie Boca was moved in November 1948.² Most of them interpret the Gospel of the day, and almost all end with the place and the date.³

The nun Zamfira Constantinescu, a former abbess of Prislop, who edited Cărarea Împărăției (“Path to the Kingdom”) together with Father Simion Todoran, writes that Arsenie Boca himself bound his sermons into a volume. At Sinaia he left his sermons, meditations and drawings, “but also the last wish that they should not be made public”.⁴ The editor says that he printed them “after the unique, originary and original manuscript”, because some were circulating “not without mutilations, distortions, inaccuracies or omissions”.⁵ We quote them from the second edition, published at Deva in 2006.⁶

Among many pages of ordinary guidance, more or less correct, Arsenie Boca also wrote in his sermons things that do not agree with Scripture and with the teaching of the Holy Fathers. We have gathered them into nine points:

1. The creation of the world placed “in eternity”, and the account in Genesis held to be only its “reflection” “in the consciousness of ancient man”, after a text of Berdyaev that Arsenie Boca makes the “framework” of a sermon.
2. Man, who is supposed to have lost “the androgynous image” through the fall, and Jesus “androgynous”; and what the teachers of the Church say about love, “meagre and insufficient”.
3. The Lord’s body, with a “sensual inclination” to be overcome, which through death on the cross “is purified”.
4. Saint Mary Magdalene, made into “a great wanton of her time”.
5. The Mother of God, who does not forsake you “when God has cast you off”.
6. The Indian Sundar Singh, placed among the witnesses of the Resurrection and called an “apostle of Jesus Christ”.
7. Angels who might come to earth “in earthly bodies”, raised over the question whether John the Baptist was an angel.
8. Jesus, who at twelve years of age “had found out who He was”.
9. The “human person” of Christ, struck on the Cross by “the divine wrath”.

Besides these, there are other places in the book that call for examination:

• the long quotation from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, according to whom “for man, the discovery of God within him, is his own discovery” (p. 66);⁷
• the Passion of the Lord, through which “God had a temptation without equal to lay out for evil seen and unseen” (p. 147);
• the gift of healing the body, which Jesus is supposed not to have given to priests as well: “The second half, that of organic healing, He did not give us as well” (p. 106);
• Judas, who would not have lost his salvation “if he had not killed himself” (p. 257);
• the guardian angel that Jesus is supposed to have needed (p. 301);
• leprosy, “and any leprosy”, read as “the sin of the soul”, with support in “a conclusion of modern medicine” (p. 262).

Here we set out what is essential: for each of the nine points, Arsenie Boca’s text, why it is wrong, and what Scripture and the Holy Fathers say. The detailed examination we shall make later.

1. The creation of the world “in eternity”

On the Sunday of Orthodoxy of 1949, at Prislop, Arsenie Boca interprets the Gospel of the calling of Nathanael and ends it with a simple question: “Whom have you called to Jesus?” Then he turns to other hearers: “But, as I have other hearers too, much more troubled in mind, seeking Jesus, I write for you as well what follows”.⁸ For “my beloved young people, with brows bent in thought” he brings, in quotation marks, a long text from the book Esprit et liberté (“Spirit and Freedom”) by the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), who had settled in France.⁹ In it is written:

“The creation of the world could not have come about in our time, for it is a fallen time, it is the child of sin. Creation took place in eternity, as an interior act of the divine mystery of life. The biblical conception of creation is nothing but the reflection of this interior act of creation in the consciousness of ancient man.”¹⁰

After the quotation, Arsenie Boca writes in his own words:

“Let this be the wider framework, of the evidences of the Spirit, which made men Apostles of God.”¹¹

According to this text, the world was not created in time, but “in eternity”, as an “interior act” of the life of God. The time in which we live is supposed to be “the child of sin”. And the account in Genesis is supposed to be not God’s revelation, but only the “reflection” of that act “in the consciousness of ancient man”. Arsenie Boca gives the young people these three things as the “framework” of faith, without a word of correction.

The Holy Fathers carefully distinguish what this text mixes together. The Son is begotten of the Father from eternity, out of His essence. The world is made by God out of nothing, through His will, and has a beginning. Saint John of Damascus, who gathered the teaching of the Fathers in An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, writes that to beget means to produce “out of his essence” an offspring of the same essence, while to create means to produce “from that which is external, and not out of his own essence, a creation of an absolutely dissimilar nature”. That is why the generation of the Son is “without beginning and everlasting”, while creation, “being the work of will, is not co-eternal with God”.¹² Berdyaev makes creation an interior act of the divine life and places it in eternity, that is, where the Fathers place the generation of the Son.

What is eternal is God’s thought of the world, not the world itself. The same Father says that God “saw all things before they were, holding them timelessly in His thoughts”, and that each thing “comes into existence at the predetermined time”.¹³

Nor is time “the child of sin”. Saint Basil the Great says that this world was made as a “school” for the souls of men, and that together with it “was created [...] the succession of time”.¹⁴ The words “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1)¹⁵ he interprets thus: “that is to say, in the beginning of time”.¹⁶ Time is God’s creature and existed before sin. Of all the things He had made, Scripture says: “And God saw all the things that he had made, and, behold, they were very good” (Genesis 1:31).

The gravest of the three statements is the last. If the account in Genesis is nothing but the “reflection” of an interior act in the minds of men of long ago, then it is no longer the word of God, but their opinion. Saint Basil says of Moses, who wrote the book of Genesis, that he “imparts to us what he has learnt from God” and that he wrote “by the dictation of the Holy Spirit”.¹⁷

Arsenie Boca knew the teaching of the Church. In a sermon of November 1949 he writes in his own words: “First He created the world out of nothing.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy he gave the young people, as “the wider framework, of the evidences of the Spirit”, a text that contradicts it.

On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, Arsenie Boca gives the young people, as the framework of faith, a text according to which the world was created “in eternity”, as an interior act of the life of God, time is “the child of sin”, and the account in Genesis is nothing but the “reflection” of this act “in the consciousness of ancient man”. The Holy Fathers teach that the world was made out of nothing, through the will of God, that it is not co-eternal with Him, that time is His creature, and that Moses wrote what he had learnt from God.

2. “The androgynous image”

On the Annunciation of 1949, Arsenie Boca brings into his sermon a quotation that he ascribes to the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), after Berdyaev:¹⁹

“The separation of man from God, long ago, meant for man the loss of integrity, of innocence, the loss of the androgynous image, which constitutes his heavenly image, pacified from the inner temptations.

Christ is born of the Virgin, in order to sanctify anew the feminine constitution and to unite it to the masculine principle, so that man and woman may become androgynes, as Jesus was”.²⁰

An androgyne is a human being in whom the masculine and the feminine are one. According to the quotation, man’s heavenly image was androgynous, the fall meant its loss, and Christ was born of the Virgin in order to make man and woman androgynes again, “as Jesus was”. Immediately after the quotation, Arsenie Boca writes in his own words: “The German mystic has the following wonderful expression”. The “expression” is that after the fall “the Virgin, Wisdom, left men and withdrew into Heaven”.²¹ There follows a text of Berdyaev about the love between man and woman:

“The mystical meaning of love, dogmatically, is undeveloped, and, what we find on this subject in the teachers of the Church, is meagre and insufficient. The Christianity of the Fathers teaches us to gain virginity through asceticism, but in no way reveals to us the mystical meaning of love [...].”²²

On these foundations Arsenie Boca builds his exhortation at the end: “The Annunciation ought to mean, for men, a real, not only doctrinal, raising of marriage to the rank of a mystery”.²³

Scripture knows no androgynous man lost through the fall. It says: “And God made man, according to the image of God he made him, male and female he made them” (Genesis 1:27). The woman was made before the fall: “And God formed the rib which he took from Adam into a woman, and brought her to Adam” (Genesis 2:22). Of all these things Scripture says that they were “very good” (Genesis 1:31). The Saviour points back to the same beginning: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4). Saint John of Damascus says that God, knowing beforehand that men would fall, made them “male and female”.²⁴ The distinction is therefore the work of God, made before the fall. The fall did not split an androgynous man in two.

When the Apostle writes that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), he is speaking of the unity of all who belong to Christ. He does not say that men and women become androgynes.

Christ was not “androgynous”. The Gospel says that the Child was circumcised at eight days (Luke 2:21) and presented to the Lord according to the Law, which speaks of “Every male that openeth the womb” (Luke 2:23). At Pentecost the Apostle Peter proclaims “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you” (Acts 2:22; Greek anēr, a male), and the Apostle Paul says that God will judge the world “by that man whom he hath ordained” (Acts 17:31). Nor is the purpose of His birth from the Virgin the union of two principles. The Apostle John says that God “loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

The Wisdom which in Böhme “withdrew into Heaven” is, for the Apostle, Christ Himself: “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). This Wisdom did not leave men after the fall, but became man for their sake.

Berdyaev’s judgement of the Fathers is unjust, and Arsenie Boca lets it stand before the faithful. Saint John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, writes of husband and wife who become one body: “See again a mystery of love!”²⁵ Interpreting the Apostle’s words “This is a great mystery” (Ephesians 5:32), he says of the man who leaves his parents and cleaves to his wife: “A mystery it is indeed.”²⁶ For the Fathers, marriage is a mystery in fact, not only in doctrine.

On the Annunciation, Arsenie Boca gives the faithful, without a word of correction, Böhme’s teaching about an androgynous man lost through the fall and about an “androgynous” Jesus, calls it “wonderful”, and lets stand Berdyaev’s judgement that what the teachers of the Church say about love is “meagre and insufficient”. Scripture says that God made human beings male and female from the beginning, and it calls Jesus a man. Saint John Chrysostom calls the union of husband and wife a mystery of love.

3. The Lord’s body that “is purified”

On the second day of Pascha in 1949, Arsenie Boca writes about the Incarnation and about the death of the Lord:

“Becoming man He becomes flesh, with all its inclinations. But Jesus did not obey them all. The sensual inclination was overcome, so that it should have to be overcome by us too. [...] Through death on the cross the body is purified and becomes the expression and direct means of the divine Spirit, it becomes the true spiritual body of the God-Man, risen.”²⁷

The next paragraph begins: “Likewise we too, we pray God to cleanse our life of defilement.”²⁷

Here Arsenie Boca places in the Lord’s body two things that the Church does not know in Him. First, “the sensual inclination”, that is, the body’s impulse towards pleasure, which Christ is supposed to have had and to have had to overcome. Then, a cleansing of the body through death, which he makes an example for our cleansing “of defilement”.

The Lord assumed our whole nature, but without sin. Saint John of Damascus confesses that He assumed “all the natural and innocent passions of man”, because “He assumed the whole man and all man’s attributes save sin”. These innocent passions are, he says, “hunger, thirst, weariness, labour, the tears, the corruption, the shrinking from death, the fear”. Sin is not among them, because it “is not natural, nor is it implanted in us by the Creator”. That is why temptation did not touch the Lord from within: the wicked one attacked Him “from without, not by thoughts prompted inwardly”, and “that which was natural did not in the Lord assume command over the will”.²⁸ The same Father says that the Lord, being also God, “by nature made whatever is good His own and whatever is bad foreign to Him”.²⁹ A “sensual inclination” to be overcome has no place in His body.

Nor did the Lord’s body have any cleansing to receive. The Epistle to the Hebrews calls Him a High Priest “holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners” (Hebrews 7:26), and says that He “had by himself purged our sins” (Hebrews 1:3), not His own. Saint John Chrysostom writes: “sinful flesh it was not that Christ had, but like indeed to our sinful flesh, yet sinless”.³⁰ At the resurrection, the Lord’s body became incorruptible, that is, free from hunger, thirst, weariness and death.³¹ It had no defilement to be cleansed of.

Arsenie Boca knew all this. On the next page he names Saint Maximus the Confessor, and in Cărarea Împărăției he had written that the Lord was born “outside the way of sin” and, following the same Father, that He remained “unreached and untouched” by the temptations of pleasure.³² In the sermon these words are missing, and in their place stand “the sensual inclination” overcome and a body that “is purified”.

Arsenie Boca places in the Lord’s body “the sensual inclination”, which Christ is supposed to have had to overcome, and a cleansing through death, which he makes an example for our cleansing from defilement. The Church confesses that the Lord assumed our nature without sin, that temptation attacked Him only from without, and that His body, “undefiled”, had nothing to be cleansed of. Saint Maximus, whom Arsenie Boca quotes, says that He remained untouched by the temptations of pleasure.

4. Saint Mary Magdalene, “a great wanton of her time”

On the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers of 1949, Arsenie Boca tells the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, one of the women who came with spices to the Lord’s tomb:

“She was a great wanton of her time. No one could resist her. Beautiful she was; a golden serpent, coiled on her bare arm, heightened her enchantment; rich, too, she was. With high society she stood well; all fell at her feet. She heard things about Jesus different from those about the other men of the world. A proud longing to know Him sprouted in her heart. She wanted to tempt Jesus.”³³

Further on he writes that the demons “leave her one by one, up to seven — says the Gospel. They were the seven capital sins, which corrupt human nature”. Then he makes her one with the sinful woman who washed the Lord’s feet with tears, “in Bethany, the village of the sisters of Lazarus, in the house of Simon the Pharisee”.³⁴ He ends by saying that the love of Jesus “transformed her from a profaned woman of her time, into a myrrhbearer, a model for all times”.³⁵

Arsenie Boca turns Saint Mary Magdalene, whom the Church honours as Myrrhbearer and Equal of the Apostles, into a famous harlot who is supposed to have sought out Christ in order to tempt Him. The Gospel says nothing of all this.

Of her past, the Gospel says one thing only: that the Lord had cast seven demons out of her. Saint Luke counts her among the women “which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities” (Luke 8:2). Saint Mark writes that the risen Christ “appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils” (Mark 16:9). Saint Luke puts the demons beside infirmities and speaks of healing, not of the forgiveness of sins. The Gospel does not say that the demons went out “one by one”, and it does not call them sins.

Her Romanian Life says that she was tormented by seven unclean spirits “according to the unsearchable judgements of God – so that the works of the Son of God might be shown in her, as He Himself says of the man born blind”.³⁶ Of that blind man the Saviour had said: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3). Mary Magdalene’s torment was not the wages of harlotry.

Mary Magdalene was not a harlot. Saint Modestus, Archbishop of Jerusalem, who reposed in the year 634, writes in his discourse on the myrrhbearing women that “the histories teach that this Magdalene was a virgin all her life”. He also mentions her martyrdom, in which, “because of her perfect virginity”, she “appeared to the torturers like pure crystal”. His discourse has been preserved for us by Saint Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, in the book called the Bibliotheca.³⁷ Arsenie Boca thus turns a virgin into a “profaned woman of her time”.

The opinion that Mary Magdalene was the sinful woman in the Pharisee’s house comes from Saint Gregory the Dialogist, Pope of Rome. He writes: “This woman, whom Luke calls a sinful woman and John names Mary, we believe to be that Mary from whom, as Mark testifies, seven demons had been cast out.” And he asks: “And what is signified by the seven demons, if not all the vices?”³⁸ Saint John Chrysostom, however, distinguishes Mary, the sister of Lazarus, from the woman who anointed the Lord in the house of Simon, and he does not call the latter Mary Magdalene.³⁹ The Church commemorates them separately. The woman who had been a harlot and anointed the Lord with myrrh she commemorates on Holy and Great Wednesday, and the synaxarion of the day does not call her Mary Magdalene.⁴⁰ Saint Mary Magdalene she commemorates on 22 July, as Myrrhbearer and Equal of the Apostles.

Arsenie Boca has the same identification and the same interpretation of the seven demons, and he adds what is not written in the Gospel: the woman whom “no one could resist”, the golden serpent on her “bare arm”, the thought of tempting Jesus, and the demons that go out “one by one”. And for the demons that go out “one by one” he appeals to the Gospel: “says the Gospel”.

Arsenie Boca turns Saint Mary Magdalene, Myrrhbearer and Equal of the Apostles, into “a great wanton of her time”, who is supposed to have wanted to tempt Christ, and a virgin into a “profaned woman of her time”. The Gospel says only that the Lord had cast seven demons out of her, and counts her among the women who were healed. Her Life ties this torment to the unsearchable judgements of God, as with the man born blind, and Saint Modestus of Jerusalem says that she was a virgin all her life and died a martyr. Arsenie Boca did not understand the saint’s life, and he cast a stain upon her.

5. The Mother of God, who does not forsake you “when God has cast you off”

On the Dormition of the Mother of God in 1949, in a sermon written at Arad, the city of the diocese to which Prislop then belonged, Arsenie Boca says:

“God sometimes forsakes us; the saints are not heard, but a mother’s love turns the severity of God’s Justice back into love.”⁴¹

He brings the example of Moses, who by his prayer stopped the wrath of God against the people that had bowed down to idols, and asks: “Who is Moses and who is the Mother of God?” Then he answers:

“When God has cast you off and not even the saints pray for you any more, there is still someone left who has not forsaken you: it is the Mother of God, and the Mother of God is heard.”⁴¹

Here Arsenie Boca sets the Mother of God face to face with God. God “forsakes us”, “has cast you off”, and His justice has a “severity” that only “a mother’s love” can still turn back “into love”. The saints are silent, and the Mother of God alone “has not forsaken you”. From these words it follows that there would be more mercy in the Mother of God than in God, and that the one cast off would be saved through her mercy, against His severity.

Scripture says that the love of God is greater than that of any mother: “Will a woman forget her child, so as not to have compassion upon the offspring of her womb? but if a woman should even forget these, yet I will not forget thee” (Isaiah 49:15). The Psalmist says the same: “For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord has taken me to himself” (Psalm 26:10). And the Apostle John shows where all mercy springs from: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

The Church, with confidence, calls the Mother of God “the hope of the hopeless”.⁴² But the Church asks her to entreat her Son, because He is merciful. At the Sixth Hour, one of the short daytime services of the Horologion, we pray: “We have no boldness because of the multitude of our sins, but entreat Him Who was born of thee, O Virgin Theotokos, for the prayer of a mother has great power to win the favor of the Master. Do not despise the supplications of sinners, O allpure one, for merciful and strong to save is He Who willed to suffer for us!”⁴³ The lack of boldness is ours, because of our sins. The Mother of God entreats her Son because He is “merciful” and willed to suffer for us. In Arsenie Boca, God “has cast you off”, and mercy has remained only with His Mother.

Arsenie Boca sets the saints aside as well: “not even the saints pray for you any more”. In Cărarea Împărăției he had written otherwise: “The assembly of the Saints with the Mother of God at its head intercedes with great zeal for the enlightenment of us earth-dwellers”.⁴⁴ There the Mother of God stands at the head of the saints and prays together with them.

Arsenie Boca sets the Mother of God face to face with God: He “has cast you off”, the saints no longer pray, and she alone “has not forsaken you” and turns “the severity of God’s Justice” into love. The Church asks the Mother of God to entreat her Son, because He is merciful and suffered for us. Scripture says that God does not forget man even when his mother might forget him, and that all love springs from Him.

6. Sundar Singh among the witnesses of the Resurrection

Sundar Singh (1889–1929) was an Indian who became a Christian in 1904 and was baptized in 1905 in an English church at Simla, in India. He disappeared in 1929, on a journey towards Tibet.⁴⁵ In February 1949, Arsenie Boca tells how Jesus appeared to him, and writes that Sundar Singh “became a ‘Shadou’, that is, a teacher or apostle of Jesus Christ, now in our age”.⁴⁶ In October 1949, speaking of those who wondered who Jesus is, he writes:

“But after the proof of His Resurrection, the proof of the divinity, after His appearing and His entering above nature through the locked doors, after His unseen abiding near human thoughts, after His appearances on the road to Emmaus, to Luke and Cleopas, on the road to Damascus, to the persecutor Saul, to another persecutor of our age, the Indian Sundar Singh, — with almost a cloud of witnesses, we can no longer be without an answer.”⁴⁷

Arsenie Boca places Sundar Singh’s vision in the line of the appearances of the risen Christ, as a “proof” of His divinity, beside Emmaus and the road to Damascus. Eight months earlier he had called him an “apostle of Jesus Christ”.

The faith of the Church in the Resurrection rests on the witness of the Apostles. The Apostle Peter says of the appearances of the risen Christ: “Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:41). The appearances at Emmaus and on the road to Damascus are written in Scripture. The vision of a man of the twentieth century, baptized outside the Orthodox Church, cannot stand in their line and cannot be “the proof of the divinity” of Christ.

Nor is the honour of “apostle” due to him. The word that Arsenie Boca writes “Shadou” and explains as “teacher or apostle” is “sadhu”, which means “a usually Hindu mendicant ascetic”.⁴⁸ Arsenie Boca gives the honour of “apostle of Jesus Christ” to a man outside the Orthodox Church.

Arsenie Boca knew the measure by which visions are received. Three days earlier he had written of the East that “even real visions it refuses — not out of bad faith or out of a spirit of opposition, but out of the care not to err by accepting anything at all”.⁴⁹ In Cărarea Împărăției he had shown that even the Apostle Paul, after the light on the road to Damascus, was sent to the Lord’s servant in Damascus and then went to the other Apostles, “lest perhaps he should be in delusion”. And he had added: “Revelation is complete, and what is still lacking, we await at the second coming.”⁵⁰ Sundar Singh’s vision he does not examine by any measure, and yet he makes it a proof of the faith.

Arsenie Boca places the vision of Sundar Singh, an Indian baptized outside the Orthodox Church, among the appearances of the risen Christ, as a proof of His divinity, and calls him an “apostle of Jesus Christ”. The faith of the Church in the Resurrection rests on the witness of the Apostles, chosen beforehand by God. Arsenie Boca himself had written that the East refuses even true visions and that revelation is complete.

7. Angels “in earthly bodies”

In December 1949, Arsenie Boca interprets the Saviour’s word about John the Baptist: “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face” (Matthew 11:10). He knows the two meanings of the word “angel” (in Greek angelos, which the King James Version renders here as “messenger”): the heavenly creature, and the “‘sent one’ of God — with a mission”. Of John, however, he writes:

“But as regards John the Baptist, the equivalence Angel = sent one, begins to be no longer satisfactory.”⁵¹

The wings with which John is painted in icons he reads as “the signs of the angelic nature”. Then he asks:

“So angels can return to earth in earthly bodies, whenever they are sent? Their reincarnation [...] is no longer properly the Indian doctrine of reincarnation.”⁵²

Here Arsenie Boca sets aside the interpretation according to which John is called an “angel” because he was sent by God. In its place, he reads the wings in the icon as a sign of the angelic nature, and asks whether angels can come to earth “in earthly bodies”, whenever they are sent. Such a coming he calls a “reincarnation” of angels, distinct from the Indian one. At the end he calls his questions vain, but he has already put them before the faithful.⁵³

Angels have no body and are not born of woman. Saint John of Damascus says that an angel is “an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal”. When they appear to men, they reveal themselves not “as they really are”, but “in a changed form”, and they “take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God”.⁵⁴ An angel cannot, then, “return to earth” in an earthly body, born of woman.

John was a man. The Gospel says: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John” (John 1:6). The Saviour counts him among “them that are born of women” (Matthew 11:11). Asked whether he was Elijah, John answered: “I am not” (John 1:21). The angel who announced his birth said that he would go before the Lord “in the spirit and power of Elias” (Luke 1:17).

The interpretation that Arsenie Boca finds unsatisfactory is that of the Fathers. Saint John Chrysostom says that John is called Elijah “not because he was Elias, but because he was fulfilling the ministry of that prophet”.⁵⁵ The Venerable Bede, an Anglo-Saxon theologian of the eighth century, writes that John is called an angel “not by community of nature [with the angels], according to the heresy of Origen [...] but by the dignity of his office”.⁵⁶ Origen, a theologian of Alexandria in the third century, held “that the Baptist May Have Been an Angel Who Became a Man”.⁵⁷ Arsenie Boca’s question is therefore Origen’s question.

Arsenie Boca holds that “angels and men are distinct orders” and rejects the reincarnation of men.⁵³ All the harder, then, to accept the question he leaves behind, about angels who might come “in earthly bodies”.

Arsenie Boca finds unsatisfactory the interpretation of the Fathers, according to which John is called an angel for his ministry as one sent, and asks whether angels can come to earth “in earthly bodies”. Angels are incorporeal and appear to men only in forms taken at the bidding of God. John was “a man sent from God”, born of woman, and the opinion that he was an angel become man is Origen’s, which the Venerable Bede calls a heresy.

8. Jesus, who “had found out who He was”

On New Year’s Day 1950, Arsenie Boca interprets the Gospel about Jesus at twelve years of age in the temple. He tells how the Child, seeing the sacrifice of a lamb, “identified himself with the pain of the lamb and suddenly there was opened to Him the mystery that this sacrifice prefigured”. Then he concludes:

“Jesus had found out who He was and what He had to do in the world. Behold a destiny understood at 12 years of age. The encounter with the sacrifice of the Temple and with the rabbis, was for Jesus revelatory of the destiny.”⁵⁸

In the sermon on the Baptism of the Lord he writes that “The confirmation of the voice of God strengthened Jesus for His destiny in the world”. A month later he writes that Jesus had His destiny “clarified, already from 12 years of age” and “confirmed in the wilderness of the Jordan at 30 years of age”.⁵⁹

Arsenie Boca here presents a Jesus who did not know who He was and what He had to do until, at twelve years of age, the mystery was “suddenly” opened to Him, at the sight of a slaughtered lamb and in conversation with the rabbis. The voice at the Jordan is then supposed to have “confirmed” and “strengthened” Him in this calling. It is the portrait of a man who gradually discovers his purpose, not of the Son of God made man.

The account follows, in its details and sometimes sentence by sentence, the book The Desire of Ages (1898) by the American Ellen G. White (1827–1915), one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In her book, the Child watches the victim bleeding on the altar: “The mystery of His mission was opening to the Saviour.” Arsenie Boca names her in a sermon of 12 January 1950.⁶⁰

In Christ there is one single Person, that of the Son of God. The Child who was growing up in Nazareth was the Word of God Himself, Who knows Himself from eternity and had nothing to find out about Himself. Saint Cyril of Alexandria writes of the growing Child: “He is filled with wisdom Who is Himself all wisdom.” When the Gospel says that He increased in wisdom, Saint Cyril explains that He increased “not as receiving fresh supplies of wisdom”, but “because God the Word gradually manifested His wisdom proportionably to the age which the body had attained”.⁶¹ The increase belongs to the human nature that He assumed. Saint Athanasius the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria, says that “the manhood advanced in Wisdom, transcending by degrees human nature, and being deified”.⁶² And Saint John of Damascus says that the soul of the Lord was enriched with the knowledge of the future “on account of the identity of subsistence and the inseparable union”, that is, because it is the soul of the Son of God, united with Him in a single person. Those who hold that the Lord received “some addition” of wisdom are, he says, “giving heed to the foolish Nestorius”, who divided the one Christ into two.⁶³

In the Gospel of that day, the Child says to His Mother and to Joseph: “wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). One who speaks thus of His Father did not find out only then who He is. Arsenie Boca himself reads in these words that He “is not the son of Joseph, but the Son of God”, but he places them after the “finding out” at the sacrifice of the lamb.⁶⁰

Nor did the voice at the Jordan come to strengthen Jesus. Saint John Chrysostom says that it came so that the multitude should not think John greater than Jesus. The Spirit, in the form of a dove, made it evident to all that “This” was spoken “of Jesus who was baptized”.⁶⁴ Of another voice that came from heaven, the Lord Himself said: “This voice came not because of me, but for your sakes” (John 12:30).

Arsenie Boca, too, knew otherwise. In Cărarea Împărăției he had written of “the fact of the clarity of consciousness of His divine filiation” at twelve years of age, and in November 1949 he wrote: “In Jesus, the knowledge of the man was doubled by the divine knowledge.”⁶⁵ In January 1950 he left these aside for the account of Ellen G. White.

Arsenie Boca preaches to the faithful, after a book by Ellen G. White, a Jesus who found out at twelve years of age who He is and what He has to do, from the sacrifice of a lamb and from His conversation with the rabbis, and Who was then “confirmed” in His destiny by the voice at the Jordan. The Church confesses that the Child who increased was the Word of God Himself, Who gradually manifested His wisdom, and the Gospel of that day shows Him speaking of His Father. The voice at the Jordan, says Saint John Chrysostom, was for the multitude.

9. “Target of the divine wrath”

The last sermon in the book, sermon 137, is of 27 March 1950 and interprets the Saviour’s word about the cup that He was to drink (Mark 10:38). Arsenie Boca writes that Jesus had “to take, He, the innocent one, the punishment of sin from God”.⁶⁶ The abandonment on the Cross he calls “the hardest trial possible” and “this fearful condemnation”. Then he writes:

“Jesus, out of love for men, had taken upon Himself the whole burden of sin, — which by one man entered into the world —, and thus the Son of Man became the target of the divine wrath, that upon sin, which struck with death also the human person that had assumed it, but delivered the other men from the same condemnation and wrath.”⁶⁷

In this sentence, it is no longer the Son of God who suffers on the Cross, but a “human person”, whom the wrath of God strikes with death. And the abandonment on the Cross becomes a condemnation that comes from God upon the Son. Both are foreign to the faith of the Church.

In Christ there is no human person. There is one single Person, that of the Son of God, Who assumed the whole human nature, with body and soul. The Fourth Ecumenical Council, held at Chalcedon in 451, confesses that the Lord is “one and the same”, with the two natures “united in one Person and subsistence”, that is, one single person, “not separated or divided into two persons”.⁶⁸ Saint John of Damascus says that the flesh of God the Word “did not subsist as an independent subsistence, nor did there arise another subsistence besides that of God the Word”.⁶⁹ The Fifth Ecumenical Council, held at Constantinople in 553, says that, since One of the Holy Trinity was made man, “the Holy Trinity has not been increased by the addition of another person or hypostasis”.⁷⁰

That is why the Church confesses that it was the Son of God Himself who suffered on the Cross, in the flesh. In the twelfth of his anathematisms, articles of faith that end with the condemnation of anyone who does not accept them, Saint Cyril of Alexandria requires the confession “that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, that he was crucified in the flesh, and that likewise in that same flesh he tasted death”.⁷¹ Saint John of Damascus writes: “The Word of God then itself endured all in the flesh, while His divine nature which alone was passionless remained void of passion.”⁷² A “human person” struck by wrath makes the Crucified One someone other than the Son of God.

Arsenie Boca knew the right words. On the Annunciation of 1949 he had written: “God united himself with human nature in the person of Jesus”.⁷³ In November 1949 he spoke of “His divine person”.⁷⁴ In the last sermon of the book, however, he writes “the human person”.

Nor are the wrath and the abandonment the Son’s. The Father and the Son have one will, says Saint Gregory the Theologian: “as We have one Godhead, so We have one Will”.⁷⁵ The Son went to the Cross willingly: “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). On the evening of the Passion, He says: “and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me” (John 16:32), and on the Cross He gives up His spirit into the Father’s hands: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). The Apostle Paul writes that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

Of the cry from the Cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), Saint Gregory the Theologian says: “It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought”. The Lord “was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken”.⁷⁶ Saint John of Damascus writes that the Lord “appropriated both our curse and our desertion”, “not that He Himself was or became such”, but that He took upon Himself “our personality”.⁷⁷ What Arsenie Boca calls the Son’s “fearful condemnation”, the Fathers call our abandonment, which He took upon Himself.

That the Innocent One took our punishment upon Himself is the word of Scripture: “the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and by his bruises we were healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Saint John Chrysostom writes that God “hath suffered Him that did no wrong to be punished for those who had done wrong”.⁷⁸ But the same Father, interpreting the Apostle’s word in Romans 8:3, says that “it was not the smitten flesh which was condemned and perished, but the sin which had been smiting”.⁷⁹ The wrath of God condemned sin, not the Son.

In the last sermon of the book, Arsenie Boca writes that on the Cross the wrath of God struck with death the “human person” of Christ, and he calls the abandonment on the Cross a “fearful condemnation”. The Church confesses that in Christ there is one single Person, that of the Son of God, and that it was the Word of God Himself who suffered on the Cross in the flesh. Saint Gregory the Theologian says that the Son was not forsaken by the Father, and Saint John of Damascus, that the curse and the abandonment were ours and that the Lord took them upon Himself.

Notes

1. Cuvinte vii, p. 6, in the foreword by Bishop Daniil Stoenescu, “‘Cazaniile’ de la Prislop” (“The Prislop ‘Homilies’”) (pp. 5–8): “The manuscript of 267 pages of His Reverence, untitled, kept at the Monastic Settlement of Sinaia, and which contains 137 sermons for Sundays and the holy feasts, Gospel meditations and spiritual words in the philokalic spirit, which with humility and lowliness I have dared to name, preparing them for print, ‘CUVINTE VII’ (Acts of the Apostles 7:38 Brit. ed.)”. On Arsenie Boca’s years at Sinaia, see the second article of the series. ↩
2. Cuvinte vii, p. 6 (the years: “between 25 November 1946 and 27 March 1950”) and p. 7 (the places: “of the 137 spiritual words or meditations, only 26 were not written at Prislop, as were the other 111 titles”). The first sermon, from Sâmbăta de Sus, of 25 November 1946, is a “Rezumat după omilia I.P.S. Mitropolit Nicolae Bălan” (“Summary after the Homily of His Eminence Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan”) (p. 11). Two additions bear the dates 19 November and 11 December 1950 (sermons 82 and 88, pp. 211 and 223), after the closing date given by the editor. The move to Prislop, in November 1948: the second article of the series. Cărarea Împărăției we quote, as in the previous article, from the 4th edition, edited by Father Simion Todoran and the nun Zamfira Constantinescu, Arad, Editura Sfintei Episcopii Ortodoxe Române a Aradului, 2003; where the pages of the 1995 edition differ, we give them too (“1995 ed., p. …”). ↩
3. The dates are those in the lines at the end of the sermons; sermon 5 has only the place, without a date (p. 19). Many of these lines also give the day in the church year, and the date falls most often on its eve. Where the line does not give it, as in sermons 13, 20 and 22, the day in the church year that we name in the article (the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the second day of Pascha, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers) is our reckoning from the date of Pascha in 1949, 24 April. ↩
4. Cărarea Împărăției, p. 342 (1995 ed., p. 343), in “Notă asupra ediției I” (“Note on the First Edition”): “Here he left, in perfect order, both sermons and meditations and drawings, but also the last wish that they should not be made public.” “Here” is the settlement at Sinaia. On the same page, the note announces that after Cărarea “there will follow the sermons — which also circulate in I know not how many variants -, which he bound himself into a volume”. The note is signed by the nun Zamfira Constantinescu (1995 ed., p. 346; the page with the signature in the 2003 ed. is missing from our scan). She writes of herself that in 1959 she was “at that time the abbess of Prislop Monastery” (p. 340; 1995 ed., p. 341). ↩
5. Cuvinte vii, p. 6: “Some are known, having circulated for decades among the people, not without mutilations, distortions, inaccuracies or omissions”; “That is why we have deemed it fitting ‘to give to the press the things that are the press’s’, but not just anyhow, rather after the unique, originary and original manuscript, written with much care, beauty and love by Father Arsenie himself in His Reverence’s miniature script”. The foreword does not say who gave the sermons their titles, their numbering and the references to Scripture. ↩
6. Father Arsenie Boca, Cuvinte vii, edited by Bishop Dr Daniil Stoenescu, 2nd ed., revised, Deva, Editura Charisma, 2006, ISBN 978-973-88006-1-8 (hereafter: Cuvinte vii); the details are from the CIP description on p. 2 and from the title page, p. 3. We have not seen the first edition, and the foreword does not say what was revised in the second. The quotations have been checked against the OCR text of the scanned pages and, where the OCR text is uncertain, against the image of the page. Arsenie Boca’s texts are translated from this edition; “[...]” marks words left out of a quotation. For each sermon we give its number in the book, its title, and the place and date written at its end. ↩
7. Sermon 16, “Marele examen” (“The Great Examination”), Prislop, 27 March 1949, pp. 64–71; the quotation from Tagore, pp. 65–67. On Tagore: the page of the laureate of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, on nobelprize.org. ↩
8. Sermon 13, “Chemări la apostolie” (“Calls to Apostleship”), Prislop, 13 March 1949, p. 47. “My beloved young people”: p. 48. ↩
9. The quotation runs from p. 48 to p. 50 and ends with Arsenie Boca’s reference: “(N. Berdiaeff, ‘Ésprit et liberté’ pp. 211-216)” (p. 50; “Ésprit” is so spelled in the edition). On Berdyaev: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyayev”, and the authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The oldest French edition of the book in the BnF catalogue is that of Paris, Éditions “Je sers”, 1933; Arsenie Boca does not say which edition he used. That the sentences are Berdyaev’s can also be seen in the Russian original, Философия свободного духа (“The Philosophy of the Free Spirit”), part II, ch. VI, “Бог, человек и богочеловек” (“God, Man and the God-Man”), on azbyka.ru (https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Nikolaj_Berdyaev/filosofija-svobodnogo-duha/4_2), an electronic edition without pages; there, at the beginning of the quotation, the subject is “the great Christian mystics”, while in Arsenie Boca the word “Christian” (“creștini”) is missing. ↩
10. Sermon 13, p. 49. ↩
11. Sermon 13, p. 50. ↩
12. St John of Damascus, Exposition, I, 8, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 7 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.i.viii.html): “For generation means that the begetter produces out of his essence offspring similar in essence. But creation and making mean that the creator and maker produces from that which is external, and not out of his own essence, a creation of an absolutely dissimilar nature.” And: “But generation in Him is without beginning and everlasting, being the work of nature and producing out of His own essence [...]: while creation in the case of God, being the work of will, is not co-eternal with God. For it is not natural that that which is brought into existence out of nothing should be co-eternal with what is without beginning and everlasting.” ↩
13. St John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, I, 9, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series (hereafter: NPNF II), vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, English trans. S. D. F. Salmond, part two, p. 12, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.i.ix.html), which keeps the pages of the printed volume: “For He saw all things before they were, holding them timelessly in His thoughts; and each one conformably to His voluntary and timeless thought, which constitutes predetermination and image and pattern, comes into existence at the predetermined time.” The texts of the Fathers in this article are quoted from the English versions named in the notes. ↩
14. St Basil the Great, Homilies on the Hexaemeron, Homily I, 5, NPNF II, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Blomfield Jackson, p. 54, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf208/npnf208.viii.ii.html): “To this world at last it was necessary to add a new world, both a school and training place where the souls of men should be taught and a home for beings destined to be born and to die. Thus was created, of a nature analogous to that of this world and the animals and plants which live thereon, the succession of time, for ever pressing on and passing away and never stopping in its course.” Before the visible world, Saint Basil places the invisible world of the heavenly powers, in a condition “outstripping the limits of time, eternal and infinite” (also p. 54); time begins together with the visible world. ↩
15. The verses are quoted, for the New Testament, from the King James Version, in the standardized text of 1769, and for the Old Testament from the English translation of the Septuagint by Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, published in 1851; both are taken from the electronic editions on eBible.org (https://ebible.org/eng-kjv/ and https://ebible.org/eng-Brenton/), consulted on 31 October 2026. These are electronic editions, without pages. Old Testament references follow Brenton’s numbering and book names; in the Psalms this is the numbering of the Septuagint (Psalm 26:10 in Brenton is Psalm 26:16 in the Romanian Synodal Bible). Verses quoted by Arsenie Boca himself are translated from his text. ↩
16. St Basil the Great, Homilies on the Hexaemeron, Homily I, 5, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 55, at the same address: “Thus the writer who wisely tells us of the birth of the Universe does not fail to put these words at the head of the narrative. ‘In the beginning God created;’ that is to say, in the beginning of time.” And: “after the invisible and intellectual world, the visible world, the world of the senses, began to exist.” ↩
17. St Basil the Great, Homilies on the Hexaemeron, Homily I, 1, NPNF II, vol. 8, p. 52, at the same address: “It is this man, whom God judged worthy to behold Him, face to face, like the angels, who imparts to us what he has learnt from God. Let us listen then to these words of truth written without the help of the ‘enticing words of man’s wisdom’ by the dictation of the Holy Spirit”. The Romanian text of this article renders “by the dictation of the Holy Spirit”, more freely, as “după îndemnul Duhului Sfânt” (“at the prompting of the Holy Spirit”). ↩
18. Sermon 63, “În fața haosului...” (“In the Face of Chaos...”), Sibiu, 3 November 1949, p. 180: “First He created the world out of nothing. Nothingness articulated the cosmos.” Likewise in Cărarea Împărăției, p. 300: “out of nothing God made the creation”. ↩
19. On Böhme: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Jakob Böhme”, and the authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Arsenie Boca’s reference, at the end of the quotation: “(I. Böehme, ‘Misterium magnum’ C.v. quoted by Berdiaeff.)” (p. 61). In the Russian original of Berdyaev’s book (ch. VI, on azbyka.ru), the first sentences of the quotation are Berdyaev’s, and only the sentence about Christ is quoted by him from Böhme. In the same place, Berdyaev calls Böhme’s teaching on the Virgin-Sophia “brilliant”; Arsenie Boca calls it “wonderful”, in his own words. ↩
20. Sermon 15, p. 61. ↩
21. Sermon 15, p. 61: “The German mystic has the following wonderful expression, concerning the new state of the human race after sin: ‘through the fall from the original purity, the Virgin, Wisdom, left men and withdrew into Heaven’, leaving men to become ‘only flesh’ (Genesis 6:3) and from there to come to the flood.” ↩
22. Sermon 15, p. 62; Arsenie Boca’s reference, at the end of the quotation: “(N. Berdiaeff, ‘Ésprit et liberté’, pp. 220-222)”. In the Russian original (ch. VI, on azbyka.ru), the sentence about “the teachers of the Church” is Berdyaev’s. ↩
23. Sermon 15, p. 63. Elsewhere, Arsenie Boca follows the Fathers: “The known manner of the birth of bodies came to man precisely because of the fall; for, according to the Holy Fathers, and above all according to Saint Maximus the Confessor, whom we follow, another manner of multiplication too would have been possible, passionless and sinless” (Cărarea Împărăției, p. 212). ↩
24. St John of Damascus, Exposition, IV, 24, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 97 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iv.xxiv.html): “But God, Who knoweth all things before they have existence, knowing in His foreknowledge that they would fall into transgression in the future and be condemned to death, anticipated this and made ‘male and female,’ and bade them ‘be fruitful and multiply’.” The verses from Genesis and Matthew are from the same edition of the Bible as all the others; see the note on Scripture. ↩
25. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Colossians, Homily 12, NPNF I, vol. 13, ed. Philip Schaff, p. 318, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf113/npnf113.iv.iv.xii.html): “They come, about to be made one body. See again a mystery of love!” NPNF I means Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series. On Saint John Chrysostom: his life on the website of the Orthodox Church in America (https://www.oca.org/saints/id/lives/103292). ↩
26. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Ephesians, Homily 20, NPNF I, vol. 13, p. 146, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf113/npnf113.iii.iv.xxi.html): “For indeed, in very deed, a mystery it is, yea, a great mystery, that a man should leave him that gave him being, him that begat him, and that brought him up [...] and be joined to one who was never even seen by him and who has nothing in common with him, and should honor her before all others. A mystery it is indeed.” At the beginning of the homily (p. 143): “there is a certain love deeply seated in our nature, which imperceptibly to ourselves knits together these bodies of ours.” ↩
27. Sermon 20, “Moartea care dobândește învierea” (“The Death That Gains the Resurrection”), Prislop, 25 April 1949, p. 79. Pascha in 1949 fell on 24 April; the reckoning is ours. ↩ ↩2
28. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 20, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, pp. 68–69 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xx.html): “We confess, then, that He assumed all the natural and innocent passions of man. For He assumed the whole man and all man’s attributes save sin. For that is not natural, nor is it implanted in us by the Creator, but arises voluntarily in our mode of life as the result of a further implantation by the devil, though it cannot prevail over us by force. For the natural and innocent passions are those which are not in our power, but which have entered into the life of man owing to the condemnation by reason of the transgression; such as hunger, thirst, weariness, labour, the tears, the corruption, the shrinking from death, the fear [...]” (p. 68); “The wicked one, then, made his assault from without, not by thoughts prompted inwardly, just as it was with Adam.” (p. 68); “but they were above nature because that which was natural did not in the Lord assume command over the will.” (p. 69). ↩
29. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 14, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 60 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xiv.html): “But the Lord being not mere man but also God, and knowing all things, had no need of inquiry, and investigation, and counsel, and decision, and by nature made whatever is good His own and whatever is bad foreign to Him.” ↩
30. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans, Homily 13 (on Romans 8:3), NPNF I, vol. 11, pp. 432–433, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf111/npnf111.vii.xv.html): “For sinful flesh it was not that Christ had, but like indeed to our sinful flesh, yet sinless, and in nature the same with us.” ↩
31. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 28, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 72 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xxviii.html): corruption means, in the first sense, “all the human sufferings, such as hunger, thirst, weariness, the piercing with nails, death”; “Indeed, after the resurrection of our Saviour from the dead, we say that our Lord’s body is incorruptible even in the first sense of the word.” ↩
32. Cuvinte vii, p. 80: “I make use of the teaching of him who is among the saints, our Father Maximus the Confessor”. Cărarea Împărăției, p. 26: “Jesus Christ had no need of His own salvation, but without His descent, in the body of a re-created man, born outside the way of sin, our salvation would have been impossible”; p. 139, following Saint Maximus (Questions to Thalassius, after the Filocalia, vol. 3, as Arsenie Boca refers; we have not checked the text against the Filocalia): the Lord let the temptations try Him “through pleasure”, and they were caught in their own wiles, “inasmuch as He remained unreached and untouched by them”. ↩
33. Sermon 22, “Mironosițele” (“The Myrrhbearers”), Prislop, 8 May 1949, p. 89. ↩
34. Sermon 22, p. 90: “Before holiness her devils can do nothing. They leave her one by one, up to seven — says the Gospel. They were the seven capital sins, which corrupt human nature.” And: “Jesus then met this Mary Magdalene in Bethany, the village of the sisters of Lazarus, in the house of Simon the Pharisee.” ↩
35. Sermon 22, p. 91: “This power of Jesus, this trust that He gave her: His pure love, for His creature, transformed her from a profaned woman of her time, into a myrrhbearer, a model for all times.” ↩
36. “Viața Sfintei Mironosițe, întocmai cu Apostolii, Maria Magdalena” (“The Life of the Holy Myrrhbearer and Equal of the Apostles Mary Magdalene”), on doxologia.ro (https://doxologia.ro/viata-sfintei-mironosite-intocmai-cu-apostolii-maria-magdalena), an electronic edition, without author and without reference to a printed book, consulted on 30 October 2026: “She lived at the time of the coming to earth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and from her youth, either according to the unsearchable judgements of God – so that the works of the Son of God might be shown in her, as He Himself says of the man born blind –, or by divine permission for some profit of the soul, she was tormented and troubled by seven unclean spirits.” Further on, the Lord “drove out of her those seven cruel tormenting devils”. The Life does not mention the anointing of the Lord’s feet. On the same site, her service is placed “In this month, on the twenty-second day” (https://doxologia.ro/slujba-sfintei-mironosite-maria-magdalena). ↩
37. St Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 275, where the discourse of Saint Modestus, Archbishop of Jerusalem, “On the Myrrhbearing Women” (“Μοδέστου ἀρχιεπισκόπου Ἱεροσολύμων εἰς τὰς μυροφόρους”), is summarized, from the Greek text and the French translation on remacle.org (https://remacle.org/bloodwolf/erudits/photius/hesychius2.htm), an electronic edition, without the name of the editor of the Greek text or of the translator: “Ὅτι φησίν, αἱ ἱστορίαι τὴν Μαγδαληνὴν ταύτην διὰ βίου παρθένον διδάσκουσι.” (“He says that the histories teach that this Magdalene was a virgin all her life.”); “Καὶ μαρτύριον δὲ αὐτῆς φέρεται, ἐν ᾧ λέγεται διὰ τὴν ἄκραν αὐτῆς παρθενίαν [...] ὡς ὕαλον αὐτὴν καθαρὸν τοῖς βασανισταῖς φαίνεσθαι.” (“An account of her martyrdom is also handed down, in which it is said that, because of her perfect virginity, [...] she appeared to the torturers like pure crystal.”); “ἐκεῖσε τὸν δρόμον τὸν ἀποστολικὸν διὰ τοῦ μαρτυρίου ἡ μυροφόρος Μαρία ἐτελείωσε” (“there the myrrhbearer Mary, through martyrdom, finished her apostolic course”). The translations are ours. Saint Modestus reposed in 634, according to his life on the website of the Orthodox Church in America, on 18 December (https://www.oca.org/saints/all-lives/2026/12/18). Saint Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, lived in the ninth century, according to the same site, on 6 February (https://www.oca.org/saints/all-lives/2026/02/06). ↩
38. St Gregory the Dialogist, Homilies on the Gospels, Homily 33, from the Latin text in Patrologia Latina, vol. 76, ed. J.-P. Migne, Paris, 1849, reproduced on thesermonarchive.org (https://thesermonarchive.org/sermons/gregory-the-great/homiliae-in-evangelia-33-33/) after the Corpus Corporum of the University of Zürich, an electronic edition without columns: “Hanc vero quam Lucas peccatricem mulierem, Joannes Mariam nominat, illam esse Mariam credimus de qua Marcus septem daemonia ejecta fuisse testatur.” And: “Et quid per septem daemonia, nisi universa vitia designantur?” The translation is ours. The same passages, in English translation, are in the Catena Aurea, the collection of patristic commentaries compiled by Thomas Aquinas (Oxford, J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1842), vol. I, p. 878 (https://ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/catena1.ii.xxvi.html), and vol. II, p. 341 (https://ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/catena2.iii.xvi.html). The life of Saint Gregory, commemorated on 12 March: the website of the Orthodox Church in America (https://www.oca.org/saints/all-lives/2026/03/12). ↩
39. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 80 (on Matthew 26:6–7), NPNF I, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. George Prevost, revised by M. B. Riddle, p. 461, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110/npnf110.iii.LXXVI.html): “This woman seems indeed to be one and the same with all the evangelists, yet she is not so; but though with the three she doth seem to me to be one and the same, yet not so with John, but another person, one much to be admired, the sister of Lazarus.” ↩
40. “Synaxarion: Holy and Great Wednesday”, on orthochristian.com (https://orthochristian.com/46062.html), 20 April 2011, after synaxis.info, translator not named, electronic edition: “On Holy and Great Wednesday the divine Fathers ordained a commemoration to be kept of the woman who was a harlot [...]”; and: “Let it be known that there are two women who anointed the Lord with myrrh, as the divine Chrysostom says.” The name of Mary Magdalene does not appear in the synaxarion. The synaxarion is the text that tells the story of the feast of the day or the life of the saint commemorated. ↩
41. Sermon 32, “Maica Domnului” (“The Mother of God”), Arad, 15 August 1949, p. 122. Prislop had passed under the Diocese of Arad in the spring of 1949; see the second article of the series. ↩ ↩2
42. “A Prayer to the Most Holy Theotokos”, at Small Compline, one of the evening services of the Horologion, in The Office of Small Compline on the website of the Orthodox Church in America (https://www.oca.org/PDF/Music/Rubrics/Horologion/office-small-compline.pdf; © 2022 The Orthodox Church in America), an electronic edition without pages, consulted on 31 October 2026. The heading of the prayer, printed in capitals, carries the attribution “by Paul, a monk of the Evergetis (Benefactress) Monastery”. The prayer begins “O spotless, undefiled, incorrupt, immaculate, and pure Virgin” and addresses the Mother of God as she “who alone art the hope of the hopeless”. ↩
43. The Sixth Hour, the hymn to the Mother of God (Theotokion) after “Glory to the Father… Now and ever…”, in The Sixth Hour on the website of the Orthodox Church in America (https://www.oca.org/PDF/Music/Rubrics/Horologion/sixth-hour.pdf; © 2021 The Orthodox Church in America), an electronic edition without pages, consulted on 31 October 2026. The hymn has no heading on the page; “allpure” is printed as one word. ↩
44. Cărarea Împărăției, p. 317: “For those who are to be taken out of torment, both the Church militant on earth prays and the Church triumphant in Heaven intercedes with God. The assembly of the Saints with the Mother of God at its head intercedes with great zeal for the enlightenment of us earth-dwellers”. ↩
45. The authority record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb121145098), which gives his years, his conversion to Christianity in 1904 and his disappearance in 1929, on a journey towards Tibet. For the baptism, the author page on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/singh), an electronic edition: “Against great opposition, he was baptized on his birthday in 1905, in an English church in Simla.” On a book put under his name, Arsenie Boca wrote: “How beautifully Sundar Singh writes, and of what poor quality is this apocryphon, the work of a fanatic, uneducated and lying” (Cărarea Împărăției, p. 343, facsimile; 1995 ed., p. 344). ↩
46. Sermon 9, “Vameșul și fariseul” (“The Publican and the Pharisee”), Prislop, 13 February 1949, p. 30. ↩
47. Sermon 39, “Cine e Iisus?” (“Who Is Jesus?”), Prislop, 13 October 1949, p. 134. ↩
48. “Sadhu”, in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, electronic edition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sadhu): “a usually Hindu mendicant ascetic”. ↩
49. Sermon 37, “Dincolo de chip” (“Beyond the Image”), Prislop, 10 October 1949, p. 130: “The East meditates without images, even against images, and even real visions it refuses — not out of bad faith or out of a spirit of opposition, but out of the care not to err by accepting anything at all.” ↩
50. Cărarea Împărăției, pp. 194–195 (1995 ed., p. 195): the Saviour sent Saul “blind to His servant in Damascus”, and Paul, “after other visions, signs and rapture into Paradise, nevertheless went to Jerusalem, to meet the other Apostles and to tell them too the Gospel that he was preaching, lest perhaps he should be in delusion”. On the next page: “The Tradition of the Eastern Church guards itself against visions” and “Revelation is complete, and what is still lacking, we await at the second coming” (p. 196; 1995 ed., p. 197). ↩
51. Sermon 108, “Taina lui Ilie și Ioan” (“The Mystery of Elijah and John”), Prislop, 14 December 1949, p. 272. On the same page: the word “angel” means both “the heavenly creatures” and the “‘sent one’ of God — with a mission”; the wings in icons, “the signs of the angelic nature”. ↩
52. Sermon 108, p. 272. The whole sentence: “Their reincarnation (although only one, Elijah or John, poses the ‘problem’ thus, — so that we do not generalize), is no longer properly the Indian doctrine of reincarnation.” ↩
53. Sermon 108, p. 272 (“Angels and men are distinct orders. Dogmatically.”) and p. 273 (reincarnation “has no basis in Revelation”, with Hebrews 9:27, quoted by Arsenie Boca; the conclusion: “I have let the questions strike against all the barriers of the mystery and prove their vanity, dashing against the limits of what is permitted”). ↩ ↩2
54. St John of Damascus, Exposition, II, 3, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, pp. 19–20 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.ii.iii.html): “an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal” (p. 19); “it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing” (p. 19); “They take different forms at the bidding of their Master, God, and thus reveal themselves to men and unveil the divine mysteries to them.” (p. 20). ↩
55. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 57 (on Matthew 17:10–13), NPNF I, vol. 10, p. 337, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110/npnf110.iii.LV.html): “not because he was Elias, but because he was fulfilling the ministry of that prophet”. ↩
56. The Venerable Bede, on Mark 1:2, as quoted in the Catena Aurea, the collection of patristic commentaries compiled by Thomas Aquinas, in the Oxford English translation (J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1842), vol. II, St Mark, p. 8 (https://ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/catena2.iii.i.html): “But John is called an angel not by community of nature, according to the heresy of Origen [...] but by the dignity of his office; for angel in Greek is in Latin, nuntius [...], by which name that man is rightly called, who was sent by God, that he might bear witness of the light”. On Bede (672/673–735), Anglo-Saxon theologian and historian: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Saint Bede the Venerable”. ↩
57. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Book II, ch. 25, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 9, p. 341, from the text on ccel.org (https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf09.xv.iii.ii.xxv.html): the title of the chapter, “Argument from the Prayer of Joseph, to Show that the Baptist May Have Been an Angel Who Became a Man.” On Origen (c. 185 – c. 254), probably born at Alexandria: Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Origen”. ↩
58. Sermon 128, “Un destin înțeles” (“A Destiny Understood”), Prislop, 1 January 1950, pp. 318 (“suddenly there was opened to Him the mystery”) and 319. ↩
59. Sermon 130, “Botezul lui Iisus” (“The Baptism of Jesus”), Prislop, 12 January 1950, p. 325; sermon 132, “În pustia Carantaniei” (“In the Wilderness of Quarantania”), Prislop, dated at the end “5.II.950; 24.III.50”, p. 328: “Although Jesus had a destiny clarified, already from 12 years of age in the Temple in Jerusalem and confirmed in the wilderness of the Jordan at 30 years of age, nevertheless He was not spared its testing in the wilderness of Quarantania.” ↩
60. On Ellen G. White: Ellen G. White Estate, “Ellen G. White – A Brief Biography” (whiteestate.org/about/egwbio/), and Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ellen Gould Harmon White”. We checked the text against the electronic edition on egwwritings.org, which numbers the paragraphs by the pages of the printed edition: 78.1 is the first paragraph on p. 78. A few correspondences: “When the little child Jesus saw the sacrifice and the burning of the lamb [...] suddenly there was opened to Him the mystery that this sacrifice prefigured” (Cuvinte vii, p. 318) – “He beheld the bleeding victim upon the altar of sacrifice. [...] The mystery of His mission was opening to the Saviour.” (The Desire of Ages, ch. 8, paragraph 78.1); “They did not admit that anyone should teach them” (p. 319) – “they would have scorned to admit that they could receive instruction from anyone” (paragraph 80.2); “What was He answering them, in other words? — That He is not the son of Joseph, but the Son of God” (p. 319) – “He had disclaimed kinship to Joseph, and had declared His Sonship to God” (paragraph 81.6). The quotation signed “(White)” is in sermon 131, “Ioan, capătul proorocilor” (“John, the End of the Prophets”), Prislop, 12 January 1950, p. 326, and is The Desire of Ages, ch. 10, paragraph 104.1. In Arsenie Boca, Joseph and Mary seek Jesus for “four days” (p. 319); the Gospel says that they found Him “after three days” (Luke 2:46). We do not know in what language Arsenie Boca read the book. ↩ ↩2
61. St Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, Sermon 5 (on Luke 2:40–52), English trans. R. Payne Smith, A Commentary upon the Gospel according to S. Luke, by S. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, part I, Oxford, University Press, 1859, pp. 29–30, from the transcription on tertullian.org (https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/cyril_on_luke_01_sermons_01_11.htm): “He is filled with wisdom Who is Himself all wisdom.” (p. 29, in the first paragraph of the sermon); “And so He is said also to have increased in wisdom, not as receiving fresh supplies of wisdom [...] but because God the Word gradually manifested His wisdom proportionably to the age which the body had attained.” (p. 30). The paragraph comes, according to the note of the transcription, from the Syriac version of the commentary. ↩
62. St Athanasius the Great, Third Discourse against the Arians, 53, NPNF II, vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, p. 422, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204/npnf204.xxi.ii.iv.vi.html): “not Wisdom, as Wisdom, advanced in respect of Itself; but the manhood advanced in Wisdom, transcending by degrees human nature, and being deified, and becoming and appearing to all as the organ of Wisdom for the operation and the shining forth of the Godhead.” ↩
63. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 22, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, pp. 69–70 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xxii.html): “But those who hold that He progressed in wisdom and grace in the sense of receiving some addition to these attributes [...] giving heed to the foolish Nestorius they imagine some strange relative union and mere indwelling”. On the knowledge of the Lord’s soul, III, 21, p. 69 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xxi.html): “on account of the identity of subsistence and the inseparable union the soul of the Lord was enriched with the knowledge of the future as also with the other miraculous powers”. On Nestorius, who divided the one Christ into two (“Those, then, who say that He is a servant divide the one Christ into two, just as Nestorius did.”): also III, 21, p. 69. ↩
64. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 12, NPNF I, vol. 10, p. 73, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf110/npnf110.iii.XII.html): the voice came “in order therefore that this opinion might not prevail with the multitude” (the opinion that John was greater), and the Spirit in the form of a dove came “drawing the voice towards Jesus, and making it evident to all, that This was not spoken of John that baptized, but of Jesus who was baptized.” ↩
65. Cărarea Împărăției, p. 148: “It is, however, worth noting the fact of the clarity of consciousness of His divine filiation, at an age when human sons have not yet done with play.” Cuvinte vii, sermon 79, “Respinși, chemați și trimiși” (“Rejected, Called and Sent”), Prislop, 18 November 1949, p. 203. Also in Cărarea, p. 282, Arsenie Boca gives Jesus at twelve years of age as an example of those who “find out more quickly who they are and what mission they have from God”, but says of Him that, “as true man, He had no separating veil”. ↩
66. Sermon 137, “Paharul și Botezul” (“The Cup and the Baptism”), Prislop, 27 March 1950, p. 341: “which Jesus had to drink with His Holy Soul and Body and to ‘be made sin for us’ (2 Corinthians 5:21) and to take, He, the innocent one, the punishment of sin from God, so as to win for us thereby also the redemption or salvation.” ↩
67. Sermon 137, p. 342. The preceding fragments, on the same page: “Then came also the hardest trial possible, the abandonment of God”; “The sun too was darkened and the earth too was shaken at this fearful condemnation. This was the baptism of the spirit, — inasmuch as in Jesus there was also a true human soul.” Arsenie Boca writes “from God” and “of the divine wrath”; the Father is not named. ↩
68. The Fourth Ecumenical Council, “Definition of Faith”, NPNF II, vol. 14, ed. Henry R. Percival, pp. 264–265, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214/npnf214.xi.xiii.html; after Labbe and Cossart, Concilia, vol. 4, col. 562): “the Son [of God] and our Lord Jesus Christ is to be confessed as one and the same [Person] [...] and being united in one Person and subsistence, not separated or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and only-begotten, God the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ”. ↩
69. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 9, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 53 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.ix.html): “For the flesh of God the Word did not subsist as an independent subsistence, nor did there arise another subsistence besides that of God the Word”; and III, 27, p. 72: “So that the subsistence of Christ is always one.” In the English translation, “subsistence” renders the Greek word hypostasis. ↩
70. The Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople, 553), chapter V, NPNF II, vol. 14, ed. Henry R. Percival, p. 313 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214/npnf214.xii.vii.html): “For since one of the Holy Trinity has been made man, viz.: God the Word, the Holy Trinity has not been increased by the addition of another person or hypostasis.” And chapter X, p. 314: “If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema.” ↩
71. St Cyril of Alexandria, the twelfth anathematism, NPNF II, vol. 14, p. 217, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214/npnf214.x.ix.xiv.html): “Whosoever shall not recognize that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, that he was crucified in the flesh, and that likewise in that same flesh he tasted death and that he is become the first-begotten of the dead, for, as he is God, he is the life and it is he that giveth life: let him be anathema.” ↩
72. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 26, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 71 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xxvi.html): “The Word of God then itself endured all in the flesh, while His divine nature which alone was passionless remained void of passion.” ↩
73. Sermon 15, “Buna-Vestire” (“The Annunciation”), Prislop, 25 March 1949, p. 60. ↩
74. Sermon 62, “Fățărnicia la răspundere” (“Hypocrisy Called to Account”), Prislop, 2 November 1949, p. 178: “Behold the Truth in His divine person, degraded to a chaotic street appraisal.” In sermon 130, of 12 January 1950, He Who takes “the burden of human sins and curses” is He Who “had given the Law to Moses on Sinai” (p. 324). ↩
75. St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 30 (the Fourth Theological Oration), 12, NPNF II, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, p. 314, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207/npnf207.iii.xvi.html): “for as We have one Godhead, so We have one Will.” ↩
76. St Gregory the Theologian, Oration 30 (the Fourth Theological Oration), 5, NPNF II, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow, p. 311, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf207/npnf207.iii.xvi.html): “It was not He who was forsaken either by the Father, or by His own Godhead, as some have thought [...]. But as I said, He was in His own Person representing us. For we were the forsaken and despised before, but now by the Sufferings of Him Who could not suffer, we were taken up and saved.” ↩
77. St John of Damascus, Exposition, III, 25, NPNF II, vol. 9, part two, p. 71 (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf209/npnf209.iii.iv.iii.xxv.html): “And it was in this way that our Lord appropriated both our curse and our desertion, and such other things as are not natural: not that He Himself was or became such, but that He took upon Himself our personality and ranked Himself as one of us.” Likewise, III, 24 (p. 71): “nor was He ever forsaken by His divinity: nay, it was we who were forsaken and disregarded”. ↩
78. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, Homily 11 (on 2 Corinthians 5:21), NPNF I, vol. 12, p. 334, from the text on ccel.org (https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf112/npnf112.v.xi.html): “But now He hath both well achieved mighty things, and besides, hath suffered Him that did no wrong to be punished for those who had done wrong.” ↩
79. St John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans, Homily 13 (on Romans 8:3), NPNF I, vol. 11, p. 432, at the address given in the note on the same homily: “it was not the smitten flesh which was condemned and perished, but the sin which had been smiting”; and: “So you see it is sin that getteth condemned everywhere, and not the flesh, for this is even crowned with honor”. ↩

In the same series

• The Life of Arsenie Boca (I): Up to Prislop (1910–1948)
• The Life of Arsenie Boca (II): From Prislop to Sinaia (1948–1989)
• Arsenie Boca (III): The Teaching of Cărarea Împărăției