15 Quotes by Venerable Justin (Popović)

1. Sins are earthquakes that overturn minds, souls and hearts, forming in them stony gorges, crevasses and rocks. They leave us wandering through these inner bottomless ruins. At the same time, every sin is a disease of the mind, the heart and the soul; a disease that always produces death and everything mortal. Above all, every sin is hell, as long as it is in the heart, in the soul or in the mind.

2. In our earthly world, the reality is obvious: we are only as human as much we are willing to let God in ourselves. The less God there is in man, the less human he is.

3. Only in the Ultimate Man is human thought gradually transformed into the ultimate Thought and the ultimate Sense. Outside the God-man, human thought is completely meaningless. Only erected on the Eternal, that is, on the theanthropic grounds, it overcomes all deaths and conquers all demonism, wherever it may come from.

4. A person is stretched across the sky of life as a rainbow, whose ends are not visible. One end is immersed in matter, while the other end lies in supermatter, i.e., in spirit. A human being is a ladder from minerals to spirit, a transition from matter to spirit, and back, from spirit to matter.

5. In medicine, in science, in philosophy, we do not conquer death itself, but only its precursors: diseases and illnesses. Moreover, we defeat them only partially and temporarily. What are the triumphs of science, philosophy and technology in the face of the terrible fact of the mortality of everything human? It is nothing more than the muttering of confused and frightened children.

6. To feel the Lord Christ as the soul of your soul, as the life of your life – this is the immortality of man, for it ensures the endlessness and infinity of thought, the very sensation of life. For a true Christian, immortality is natural and logical, since endlessness and infinity is with him and in him. This is what ensures and makes possible the endless moral improvement, bringing a Christian towards God, the Center of every vastness, all infinity and perfection.

7. If you think, if you feel, if you act as if you have already risen from the dead, then you are already participating in that divine-human progress; you have already conquered death and entered eternal life. Indeed, believing in the risen Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart, with all your soul and with your thought already makes you a conqueror of death and partaker of eternal life.

8. The church is nothing but a divine workshop in which the human perception and consciousness of personal immortality and infinity are constantly rejuvenated, refreshed and strengthened. Doesn’t prayer make the soul endless by linking it to God? Don’t practices like mercy, kindness, meekness or fasting make a person immortal, raising both his heart and soul into the eternal Kingdom of Christ’s Truth? Let us not deceive ourselves: every prayer and every gospel virtue gradually conquers death in us, while all together they establish victory over death and bring us to eternal life.

9. It is obvious that the aspiration for infinity could not be promoted in man by his material nature, which is limited in itself and does not presuppose such a striving. In the same way, the human body could not introduce that idea into human spirit, due to also being limited. The following postulate offers the only logical explanation: the human striving for infinity and for immortality lies in the very essence of the human spirit. Created in the image of God, man is fully manifested in this striving, for godliness in a human being is an aspiration to the boundless truths of God in all worlds.

10. By His Resurrection He forever ensured for human nature the victory over death, by His ascension making us partakers of immortal life in the eternity of the Triradiate Godhood. Therefore, He is the only one in the human race Who can rightly say about Himself, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).

11. Where there is no sin, there is no death, since only sin creates death. Just as sin is the only creator of death, so sinlessness or perfect holiness is the only originator of immortality.

12. The Apostolic Orthodox Church brings everything in Christianity, the doctrine, the truth, the goodness and life itself, to the life-giving personality of the God-man The image of Christ as the incarnate God is the highest value of the church and also her greatest treasure,  radiating all the other values, coming from Him like rays from the sun.

13. Divine humanity is a single category in which all manifestations of Orthodoxy come to life and realization. God comes first in everything – man comes second; God leads – man is led; God works – man cooperates. It is not some transcendental, abstract, deistic God, that is meant here, but the One of the most immediate historical reality; God Who became a man, lived in the categories of our human life and in the most obvious way showed Himself to be absolutely holy, absolutely kind, absolutely wise, absolutely righteous and absolutely true in everything.

14. An Orthodox Christian never belongs to himself, but to all the saints, and through them to the Most Holy Lord Jesus. Having studied his own spirit, an Orthodox Christian says to himself: my spirit is nothing if it is not filled and perfected by the Holy Spirit.

15. It is not conforming or adapting the God-man Christ to the spirit of the time, that is the only true mission of the Apostolic and Orthodox Church in the world, but the conformity and adaptation of the spirit of the time to Christ’s eternity and Christ’s God-manhood.

Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Source: https://obitel-minsk.ru/chitat/den-za-dnyom/2020/15-citat-prepodobnogo-iustina-popovicha

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