Either life will be renewed by Gospel love or we will see the catastrophic ruin of humanity…The basis of everything is pure and genuine love for God…This love for God naturally generates in us feelings of love towards our neighbor.

In this heartfelt and insightful text Archbishop Averky goes straight to the roots of our modern alienation from God and each other. He explains the central role of asceticism in leading a spiritual life and reveals a fully Christian understanding of it. We are shown that through the renewal of Gospel love the conscience is reawakened and that we can begin to experience true freedom: A freedom founded on the acquisition of virtue and the overcoming of vice, together with all its associated distractions. All of this is seen to demand effort: A Struggle for Virtue.

Based on lectures given in Europe after the end of the Second World War, these texts are shown to be remarkably prophetic, as we see the outworking in our own day of the abandonment of Christian virtue described by Archbishop Averky.