Saint Nicholas Velimirovich

 

Inequality is wiser and is preferable to equality. Inequality was placed as the very foundation of the created world. We should rejoice over this inequality and not rebel against it, because it was put in place by love, not by hatred; by wisdom, not derangement. Our life isn’t wretched through a shortage of equality, but because of a lack of love and spiritual understanding among us. Add more of the love of God and a better spiritual understanding of life and you’ll see that even twice as much inequality couldn’t vitiate the bliss people would feel. People are unequal because they’re not all needed in the same way: Alexander the Great and Diogenes weren’t equally weak; Peter and Alexios, again, weren’t equally able to love; Paul and Judas weren’t equally fitted to justice.

Making everything equal results in a weakening of creation. Life is based on inequalities.

If you really look carefully at yourself, you’ll see that you don’t really want equality. What you actually want is the elevation of the small and weak to the same level as the great and mighty. This is a very noble aspiration. But, because you don’t have the power to elevate the small and weak, you bring down the great and the mighty to the lower level.

If you’re interested in life, you’re also just as interest in victory. But a life that contains the word victory, must also contain the word inequality. God gave strength to the powerful so that they could help the weak; wealth to the rich so that they could carry out works of charity; wisdom to the wise, so that they could teach the ignorant and make the foolish understand.

The Lord shared his gifts among people in an inequal way so that, because of this inequality, there’d be constant activity in people’s life. Nobody’s to blame that they didn’t enter this life with greater potential. But they will be responsible if they don’t develop their gifts to the full, if they don’t use their gifts to justify their existence and to carry out their mission.

Source: pemptousia.com


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Pemptousia Partnership

Pemptousia and OCN have entered a strategic partnership to bring Orthodoxy Worldwide. Greek philosophers from Ionia considered held that there were four elements or essences (ousies) in nature: earth, water, fire and air. Aristotle added ether to this foursome, which would make it the fifth (pempto) essence, pemptousia, or quintessence. The incarnation of God the Word found fertile ground in man’s proclivity to beauty, to goodness, to truth and to the eternal. Orthodoxy has not functioned as some religion or sect. It was not the movement of the human spirit towards God but the revelation of the true God, Jesus Christ, to man. A basic precept of Orthodoxy is that of the person ­– the personhood of God and of man. Orthodoxy is not a religious philosophy or way of thinking but revelation and life standing on the foundations of divine experience; it is the transcendence of the created and the intimacy of the Uncreated. Orthodox theology is drawn to genuine beauty; it is the theology of the One “fairer than the sons of men”. So in "Pemptousia", we just want to declare this "fifth essence", the divine beaut in our life. Please note, not all Pemptousia articles have bylines. If the author is known, he or she is listed in the article above.

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