The Trap of Romanticism

This exploration is coming soon. It will cover the romantic idealization of the Orthodox and hesychast tradition as a specific obstacle to genuine engagement with it.

The exploration will examine the pattern — common among contemporary converts and seekers — of being drawn to the tradition through its beauty and then discovering that the actual practice is far more demanding and far less aesthetically satisfying than anticipated. It will address why the tradition's masters consistently distinguished between the love of the beautiful — which the very name Philokalia invokes — and the romantic attachment to spiritual aesthetics that leaves the practitioner essentially unchanged, and what a more honest relationship to the tradition's genuine demands looks like.