Section 05: The Teaching on Christ and Love
The heart of this collection and of St. Porphyrios’s whole legacy: the luminous teaching gathered in Wounded by Love. Its center is a single move — that the Christian life is not, at bottom, a grim war against evil but a turning of the whole soul toward Christ, who is “joy, life, light,” and that one does not defeat the darkness by attacking it head-on but by filling the soul with light. From this flow his great images: the soul as a garden to be watered with the love of God; love — eros for Christ — as the whole of it; and the conviction that holiness is reached not by struggle alone but by surrender to the love that “wounds” the soul and draws it.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 2013)
Contents
| File | Topic |
|---|---|
| Wounded by Love | (Flagship.) The central teaching of Wounded by Love: turning to Christ rather than fighting evil head-on; “ignore evil, look towards Christ”; the garden of the soul and the channeling of the soul’s power; divine eros and the soul wounded by the love of Christ; love as the whole of the Christian life |
| Not by Struggle Alone | The complement and the corrective: how his “do not fight evil directly” relates to the ascetic tradition of struggle (the Ladder); that he did not abolish asceticism but reoriented it; the danger of energizing sin by fixating on it; effort that flows from love rather than love that is wrung from effort |
How to Use
- Read Wounded by Love first: it is the flagship of the whole collection and the key to everything else St. Porphyrios taught.
- Read Not by Struggle Alone to see how his teaching stands within — and gently corrects — the ascetic tradition of struggle, so that “turn to Christ rather than fight evil” is not mistaken for a rejection of asceticism.
- The application of this teaching to beauty, creation, and children follows in Section 06; to prayer and the Church in Section 07.
Cross-References
- For the ascetic tradition of struggle his teaching reorients, see the sibling collection St. John Climacus
- For the warnings against fixating on the spectacular (here, on evil) that parallel this teaching, see The Warnings
- For the application to beauty and joy, see Nature, Poetry, and Science
- For the governing standard, see the repository Methodology