Orthodox Psychotherapy

A Review

Seven or eight years ago I had this idea to start a used book sale business on the side, and began asking for spare books that people no longer wanted. As it turned out, people at my Baltimore area parish dumped a large amount of Orthodox Books into my collection. I never ended up selling books as planned, probably because many of the books I received I didn’t want to actually part ways with. One of those books happened to be, Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers, by Metropolitan of Nafpaktos Hierotheos. It managed to sit on my bookshelf, in boxes, back on my bookshelf in Texas, until finally just this past January, I  decided to read it. Waiting so long to read it was certainly to my spiritual detriment. Perhaps the name scared me off, as I have a knee-jerk reaction about modern Psychology. The book isn’t about that all, but rather the World’s most true science, practiced and taught by the Orthodox Church Fathers. 

I was pleased to find this book to be the most thorough synthesis of Orthodox Spirituality as taught by the Church Fathers that I’ve ever read. It begins by explaining that Christianity itself is the only therapeutic solution to cure our souls that have been sickened by the fall. The Orthodox Church being the hospital of the soul, and our theology itself is the Therapeutic science.