Orthodox Christians † 🇬🇷🇨🇾📿

The author, writing in Greek, reflects on the relationship between secular knowledge and spiritual life. Knowledge of oneself, he says, is worth more than all the knowledge of the world, yet evil begins in the mind when it turns only around science and stays far from God. Science helps much, but it also clouds much. People who put inner formation, the formation of the soul, first and use external education for that inner purpose are quickly transformed spiritually.

If they also practice spiritually, they help many people, drawing them out of the anxiety of damnation and toward heavenly joy. Such people of God may have fewer diplomas, but they help more because they have much Grace rather than many papers. Intellectuals who have themselves inside them instead of God cannot grasp this, because they carry barren worldly knowledge with its worldly spiritual sickness, and the Holy Spirit is absent.

The Holy Spirit, he writes, does not come down by machines; He comes down on His own when He finds the spiritual prerequisites in a person. Knowledge and education are good things, but if they are not sanctified they are lost things. God gave man the mind to find his Creator. Europeans, he says, wore out the mind, fell into confusion, and head toward the cliff because they removed God from their lives.

Some use their minds for good and invent good things, others for destruction. Worldly logic has no place in the spiritual life, because miracles cannot be explained by logic: you simply live them and believe them. Angels and saints enter through the window, you see them, speak with them, and they leave; if you try to examine this with logic, it does not work. The text notes it continues in the comments.

A short exhortation from the late Bishop Augoustinos Kantiotes of Florina, Prespes and Eordaia, written for the times he calls cursed, when the devil has used all his power to uproot faith from human hearts. He warns readers to be very watchful, because salvation requires faith: faith in God, faith in Christ, and faith in what the Church teaches.

He urges believers to hold the faith of Christ, the faith of their fathers, deep in their souls, so that no force can tear it out, and to listen to the Church. He then turns to the end of life, contrasting two deaths from the Gospel. The first is the end of Herod, who was rejected by the almighty God.

The second is the end of the thief on the cross, who prayed: 'Remember me, Lord, when You come in Your kingdom' (Luke 23:42). Kantiotes asks that our own end be like the thief's, marked by that same prayer, rather than like Herod's. The text closes with his name and title, remembered as Bishop of Florina, Prespes and Eordaia.

Bishop Augoustinos Kantiotes of Florina recalls that when he served on a synodal committee, he was asked to perform a blessing of waters (agiasmos) in the Hellenic Parliament. He answered that he would come, but that he would also bring Father Porphyrios. He describes what he would have said to the Parliament: asking it what its name is, and answering that it is a legion of demons, that all the devils have gathered inside it, the demons of adultery, of prostitution, of atheism, and of unbelief.

Because of this, he says, the Parliament does not need a blessing of waters but an exorcism. Since he calls himself a sinful man, he says he would call on Father Porphyrios to come, raise the Cross, and exorcise them all. He calls this the madness of being a Christian: a time is coming, he says, when the world will call Christians mad, and then they will be happy to be called mad.

He states that the madness of the Cross will save the world. He repeats that the Hellenic Parliament does not need a blessing of waters because it mocks the things of God, and that he would preach to its members that they need an exorcism, with Father Porphyrios raising the Cross and exorcising the demons that have nested in the heart of Greece.

The quote is attributed to the late Bishop of Florina, Father Augoustinos Kantiotes. The post presents the passage as a word of counsel and rebuke addressed to Greek public life, framed around the contrast between a ceremonial blessing and the casting out of demons, and around the willingness of Christians to be counted as fools for the Cross.