The Byzantine Tradition of Dying with Christ in Monastic Ascesis in Comparison to the Stages of Grieving According to E. Kübler-Ross: an Attempt of Interdisciplinary Approach

Abstract

The authors’ perspective in this article is based on the statement that ‘the illness is a kind of immediate sign of lesion human nature had obtained through the sin’ (His Holiness Patriarch Kirill). The theological perception of the interconnection mentioned above, on the one hand, appeals to modern interdisciplinary research based on the up-to-date achievements in humanities; on the other hand, it unavoidably involves in the orbit of problems at sight the history of the Orthodox Christian Tradition. The Orthodox Christian Tradition has always looked upon the sin as the terminal illness and the suffering connected with it. This perception continued the Greek tradition of philosophy that was rooted in Socrates and Plato teaching about healing of man by correcting his mind by the true philosophy. With coming of the Hellenistic word in the Church the term “true philosophyˮ was accepted by Christianity: Christian monasticism continued the search started by Greek philosophers that kept together theoria and praxis. One of the keys to the inner world of the Byzantine monks, who considered themselves deadly wounded by sin, is the most valuable corpus of hymnographical texts, the quintessence of dogmatic, mystics and ascesis of the Orthodox Church (according to Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev)). This research is the first attempt of comparing these texts with stages of ‘grieving’ well-known in modern psychology of terminally ill patients according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004) and is important both for cultural analysis of attitude to death and also for practical purposes, including pastoral counselling sufferers.