Category: Articles

I wonder if we do not all have this as part of our history: a feeling that we are inadequate? That we would have been better as someone else? That, […]

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Nina Simone (1933-2003) was not an ordinary person. She was not. I wish I had time to do justice to her achievement, but she was talented to an extraordinary degree. […]

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Introduction Before I came across Gurdjieff, and I was very young at the time, only eighteen, I was attracted by the idea of a mystic union with God. I had […]

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Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam (Bloomsbury, 2017) is an intelligent, stimulating and important book. It really is about the “strange death” of a continent: […]

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Further to recent discussions of the proper form of layout for Maronite churches, I chanced across the splendidly illustrated and recent book by Nicholas N. Patricios, The Sacred Architecture of […]

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Meaning and Etymology First, what does the word mean? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says that the root, ”hate,” has the primary meaning of “to hold in very strong dislike,” […]

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Sentimentality is a disease. Orage said that it is “an escape of emotional gas but not through the centre for which it was intended” (Gurdjieff’s Emissary, 455). That is, the […]

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The feast of St Isaac of Monteluco (died c. 550) is celebrated on 23 August. He is often confused with St Isaac of Nineveh (died c. 700). Both are also […]

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In his treatise on sobriety, Nicephorus the Solitary says that the method which he will teach has the happy effect of “leading him who practises it, without labour or sweat, […]

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Kadloubovsky and Palmer open their selection, Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart (1951) with a text by Nicephorus the Solitary known as “On Sobriety,” or, to provide […]

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