“Gustav Krklec wrote it down somewhere, I must admit that I was amazed to find it in him, that no one had yet truly understood the revelations of Petar II Petrović Njegoš. Thinking about him and reading his works countless times, and recently especially his The Light of Microcosm and his shorter poems, I increasingly realize that these words of Gustav Krklec are truly true words.”
“No one has been written and spoken so much in our country as about Petar II Petrović Njegoš. Only Saint Sava surpassed him with his presence and the traces he left and continues to leave in the people’s memory and in the being of the Serbian people.”
"Saint Sava and Petar II Petrović Njegoš – these two are truly the ones who have written themselves in indelible letters in the book of our historical, spiritual, poetic, philosophical and overall being."
“With Njegoš, especially in his Light of the Microcosm, we have pre-existence – what happens in history and what is the foundation of metahistory, what we call the eschaton. This has already been experienced by Njegoš, it has happened and is happening, it was conceived at that moment and at that time when the Word of God created everything out of nothing. This is one of the fundamental truths of Njegoš’s theology: that the Word of God, the Word of God, which, as he will say in Light of the Microcosm, “was clothed in humanity”, that this Word of God created everything out of nothing and everything is subject to its law. This Word of God, naturally, he discovered, it was revealed to him, he found it in the worship of the Church, although it is said that he was not a great lover of worship, of liturgy.”
“From the outside, it seems that way. However, Njegoš, if anything, in his overall experience, is primarily a liturgical being, only his liturgy is not what happens in the temple and what happens in man as an insignificant temple and what happens in the temple in which he serves, but his liturgy is a liturgy that embraces the entire being. There is no being, no creature, nothing from the beginning that happens that is not touched, that is not included in what he calls the sacred liturgy of the all-holy – an expression that, as far as I know, was the only and first used in the Serbian language by Petar II Petrović Njegoš.”
“So, millions of stars, these are lamps that shine day and night before His face. With this theological-prayerful, liturgical vision of the Holy of Holies and the hearth of the Holy of Holies, Njegoš undoubtedly ranks not only among the greatest theologians, poets, sages and prophets of the Serbian people, but in general, among the greatest European and world sages, mystics and poets.”
“This is my, I must admit, more recent experience of Njegoš, having just returned to Njegoš and reread him, precisely in this context of the liturgy, in the context of that deepest truth of the life of the Church and the theology of the Church.”
Excerpt from the lecture by Metropolitan Amfilohije "Theological and Prayerful Figure of Peter II Petrovic Njegoš", held in 2013 at the Orthodox Theological Faculty in Belgrade, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Peter II Petrovic Njegoš.
Listen to the full lecture on the website of Radio "Svetigora", as part of the program "Katedra".
Prepared by: O. B.
https://svetigora.com/