REPENTANCE – THE MAN’S THEOLOGICAL REALITY IN HIS PROGRESS TO DEIFICATION IN THE WRITINGS OF ST. ANTHIM THE IBERIAN
REPENTANCE – THE MAN’S THEOLOGICAL REALITY IN HIS PROGRESS TO DEIFICATION IN THE WRITINGS OF ST. ANTHIM THE IBERIAN

Summary/Abstract: One of the main characteristics of Orthodox spirituality is the emphasis it lays on repentance as a state of the man's return to God, from what is against his nature to what is natural to him, that is, to his prelapsarian state. The unnatural state he got after sinning makes him incapable of receiving God in his heart, for he is now full of himself. His pride of being like God hinders him to be with God. Penitence is the only way by which the man can take back his freedom: “Abba Theodore of Pherme said that “the one who is bound by repentence is free from commandment”. After having lost the Word of God from his heart and divorced from the heavenly Bridegroom, the man can build up again the house of his soul only by mourning. Now, the only way of regaining the Kingdom of God is repentence: “There is no other way to salvation but repentance”, says the Venerable Theolipt of Philadelphia. St. Anthim the Iberian, Metropolitan of Wallachia and Martyr, following the Holy Fathers, looks deeper into the teaching of the Fathers' theology on repentance and makes a synthesis of it by saying that Christ, our Lord, “granted us the mystery of repentance by which we may uproot all the trickeries of our spiritual fiend, the devil, and, in His lovingkindness, bestowed upon us the power to become, by penitence, sinless as we used to be, free of the eternal damnation”.

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