Research project and scientific committee

In the tradition of the undivided Church, Holy Scriptures and the Word of God that they contain have always been the living fount of the believer’s spiritual life, of life according to the Spirit. The Word of God lives in the baptized, the Holy Spirit nourishes in us this divine life and makes it grow. The fathers very soon applied to Scripture itself the words that the Gospel uses of the Kingdom of God. “The Word of God,” writes Maximus the Confessor, “is similar to a mustard-seed, it appears quite small before being cultivated. But when it has been cultivated it embraces the meaning of all beings” (On theology, II.10). This is the hermeneutical principle that Gregory the Great, known in the East as Gregory of the Dialogue, expresses with the formula Scriptura crescit cum legente: the understanding of Scripture increases with the spiritual maturing of the person who reads and interprets it (cf. Homilies on Ezechiel, I, SC 327:244–245).

Reading the Scriptures, however, especially in the Eastern Churches, is always a reading in  the Spirit, hence also in the community of believers gathered together by the same Spirit, in a living unity of carrying out the commandments, prayer, and the giving of thanks in the liturgy. Lectio divina is a meeting with a living person, with God himself who speaks and because of this, according to the fathers, it presupposes a certain level of spiritual maturity and cannot be loosed from a life of asceticism totally oriented towards God. “Whatever you do, base yourself on the testimony of the Holy Scriptures,” said Antony, the father of monastics (Alphabetical series, Antony 3).