Story II, 17 of St. Anastasius the Sinaite — a model for an Orthodox ecclesiological mystagogy

Story II, 17 of St. Anastasius the Sinaite — a model for an Orthodox ecclesiological mystagogy

19 September 2017

This study aims to highlight the hagiographical dimension of theology, starting from the premise that Lives of the Saints represent a substantial source for the theological discourse, being an organic part of Tradition, which is nothing else but the uninterrupted pulse of the Spirit in the Church and its members. In other words, the lives of the saints are a true mystical transfusion of God's evangelical truths in the spiritual arteries of man, an existential assumption of Scripture and Tradition by grace, liturgical experience and asceticism. In Story II, 17, St. Anastasius the Sinaite gives us a model of an Orthodox ecclesiological mystagogy. Instead of developing a systematic theology, the Anastasian stories show us, prisoners of the textbooks and their tendencies of excessive conceptualization, that theology must be understood as a song of glory of creation.