Cure (Therapy)

From Issue No 209 of "Ecclesiastiki Parembasi", December 2013

(article in greek: Θεραπεία)

Since we have said that Christianity and theology are primarily a therapeutic science, we must now outline briefly what therapy is. What does Orthodoxy with its theology and worship cure in us?

Therapy of the soul essentially means therapy and freeing of the nous. Human nature became ‘sick’ through its fall away from God. This sickness is mainly the captivity and fall of the nous. The ancestral sin is that man withdrew from God, lost divine grace, and this resulted in blindness, darkness and death of the nous. We can say
more accurately that “The fall of man or the state of inherited sin is a) the failure of the noetic faculty to function properly or to function at all, b) its confusion with the functions of the brain and the body in general and c) its resulting enslavement to anxiety and the environment.

Each individual experiences the fall of his own noetic faculty in varying degrees as he becomes exposed to an environment of non-functioning or sub-functioning noetic faculties…The result of malfunctioning noetic faculties are abnormal relations between God and man and among men and the use of both God and fallen man for one’s own understanding of security and happiness.” This loss of the grace of God deadened man’s nous; his whole nature sickened, and he handed this sickness on to his descendants as well.

In Orthodox teaching this is how we understand the inheritance of sin.

( Extract from the book "Orthodox Psychotherapy" by Metropolitan of Nafpaktos and Saint Vlassios Hieorotheos)