Natural virtues, truthful mind and the grades of the spiritual knowledge in the mystical and spiritual teaching of elder Artemy Troitsky

Abstract

In the present article I study a few fundamental aspects of mystical and ascetical teaching of starets Artemius of the Trinity contained in his 14 extant letters. Examination of these aspects is followed by the new identified sources of Artemius’s texts. I also pay an attention to the Slavonic translation of patristics (especcialy, to the ascetic genre) in order to show the intellectual context of Artemius working and to clarify some unclear moments of his views. The first aspect is his teaching on natural virtues, wich I consider for the first time. Artemius believes that human essence includes such virtues among the other properties of essence and, thereof, considers them to be put in essence originaly by the Creator. The corruption of the virtues is a consequence of the fall and the following replacement of virtues by non-essential passions. The second aspect is Artemius teaching on istinnyi razum (true knowledge, comprehension, reason), wich had been studying by scholars for a long time. I distinguish the philosophical (knowledge of beings), mystical (knowledge and contemplation through the exercise in virtues, love and faith) and Christological (knowledge and union with Christ) way of understanding of the istinnyi razum. The especial focus on the Christological way allows us to reveal the new sources of Artemius understending of istinnyi razum such as Corpus Areopagiticum and Gregory the Sinaite’s works and not to restrict them to the treatises of Isaac the Syrian. Finally, the third aspect is the hierarchy of the three states (grades) of man (flesh, state of soul and spiritual) from the point of view of the spiritual, incorporeal comprehension. I explain that flesh state is the beast-like state, as Artemius puts it; state of the soul is the grade, which indicate a Christian making the spiritual journey from wich he can stray. If we speak on hightest, spiritiual knowledge we should focus on the transtion from the comprehension of intelligible entities (the angels and the paradigms in the mind of the God) through bodily symbols to the direct comprehension of the spiritual world, which is belong to the such grade, as Artemius believe.