Церковь

§ 1. Orthodoxy is the Church of Christ on earth. The Church of Christ is not an institution, but a new life with Christ and in Christ, moved by the Holy Spirit. Christ, the Son of God, who came to earth and became human, united His divine life with human life, God became man, and He gave this divine-human life to His brothers, “who believe in His Name.” Jesus lived among people and died on the cross, but was resurrected and ascended to heaven. And, having ascended into heaven, He did not separate from His humanity, but remains with it always, now and ever and unto ages of ages. The light of Christ's resurrection illuminates the Church, and the joy of the Resurrection, victory over death, fulfills it. The Risen Lord lives with us, and our life in the Church is a hidden life in Christ. “Christians” bear this name because they are Christ’s, they are in Christ, and Christ is in them. The Incarnation is not only an idea or a teaching, but first of all an event that took place once in time, but has all the power of eternity, and this abiding Incarnation as a perfect union, inseparable, although unmerged, of both natures, divine and human, is the Church. The Church is the humanity of Christ, Christ in His humanity. Since the Lord not only approached man, but also identified with him, becoming a man himself, the Church is the Body of Christ, as the unity of life with Him, obedient to Him and subject to Him. The body belongs, its life is not its own, but the spirit that inspires it, and at the same time it differs from it: it is in accordance with it and original at the same time, and here there is not unity of indifference, but duality. This same thought is expressed when the Church is called the Bride of Christ, or the Wife of the Logos: the relationship between the bridegroom and the bride, husband and wife, taken in their utmost fullness, is a perfect unity of life while preserving the whole reality of their differences: a duality that is not dissolved by duality and not absorbed by unity. The Church as the Body of Christ is not Christ, the God-man, for she is His humanity, but she is life in Christ and with Christ, the life of Christ in us: “and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). But Christ is not just a Divine Person, as such, for His own life is inseparable from the life of the Holy Trinity, He is “one of the Holy Trinity,” His life is one and consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the Church, as life in Christ, is also life in the Holy Trinity. The Body of Christ, living life in Christ, thereby lives the life of the Holy Trinity, and has Her seal on itself (which is why birth into the Church, baptism “in the name of Christ” is performed “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”). Christ is the Son who reveals the Father and does His will. In Him we recognize not only Him, but also the Father, and in Him we become, together with Him, sons of the Father, we accept sonship with God, we are adopted as sons of the Father, to whom we cry: “Our Father.” Being the Body of Christ, we take upon ourselves the reflection of the Fatherly hypostasis, together and simultaneously with the Sonship. But not only this, but also the power of Their mutual relationship, Their dual unity: “that they may all be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You” (John 17:21), this dual unity is the power of Love connecting the Holy Trinity: God is love. The Church, the Body of Christ, becomes involved in this threefold divine love: “and We will come and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). The love of God, the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, is not a simple property or relationship, but it itself has a personal existence, is hypostatic. She is the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father to the Son, resting on Him. In the Holy Spirit, the Son, begotten by the Father, exists for Him as begotten and beloved, on Whom is all His favor, and the Son in the Father’s love recognizes the Parent as a loving Father and loves Him with a reciprocal love. In the Holy Spirit is the joy of love and the mutual knowledge of the Father and the Son, its accomplishment. The Son exists for the Father only in the Spirit resting on him, just as the Father for the Son is revealed in His love by the Holy Spirit, Who is the unity of life of the Father and the Son. And the Holy Spirit Himself, being the Love of Two, according to the very nature of love, in His personal existence exists, as it were, only outside of Himself, in Others, in the Father and the Son. Such is love: it lives by dying and dies by living; for it to be means not to be in and for itself, but to be in others and by others. She makes Her hypostatic face transparent to others and, as it were, hides herself at the time when she shows her greatest strength. This is the place of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity. The Son exists as a Son only inseparably from the Holy Spirit resting on Him. And as He says: I and the Father are one (John 10:30), so this hypostatic unity of Them is the Holy Spirit, descending on Him, resting on Him, anointing Him. For Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of the Holy Spirit: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me.” The Church, as the Body of Christ, living the life of Christ, is thereby the area of ​​action and presence of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the Church is life by the Holy Spirit due to the fact that it is the Body of Christ, for in the Holy Trinity the Son does not have his own life, being sacrificially exhausted in his birth from the Father, but receives it from the Father, and this is the Holy Spirit, the life-giving one, resting on him eternally. The Holy Spirit is the life of the Son, given to Him from the Father, and He has no other life, His own. This is the character of the duality of the Son and the Holy Spirit, revealing the Father: this duality is expressed in the identity of Their lives with the difference in Their hypostases. But it is this identity of life that is revealed in the Church as the Body of Christ, which has within itself the life of Christ: this is life in Christ and, therefore, by the Holy Spirit, or, conversely, grace-filled life in the Holy Spirit and therefore in Christ: “If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ (i.e., the Holy Spirit), he is not His” (Rom. 8:9). On this basis, the Church can be viewed directly as the grace-filled life in the Holy Spirit or, according to the expression sometimes encountered, it is the Holy Spirit living in humanity. Its historical disclosure also corresponds to this essence of the matter. The Church is the work of the incarnation of Christ, it is this incarnation itself, as the assimilation by God of human nature and the assimilation of divine life by this nature, its deification (Θέωσις), as a consequence of the union of both natures in Christ. But at the same time, the work of churching humanity into the Body of Christ has not yet been accomplished by the power of the incarnation alone and even the resurrection: “it is better for you that I should go (to My Father)” (John 16:7); it demanded the sending of the Holy Spirit, Pentecost, which was the accomplishment of the Church. The Holy Spirit descended into the world in tongues of fire and rested on the apostles, headed by the Mother of God and representing in their 12-number the totality of the human race. These languages ​​remained in the world and remain, constituting the treasury of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit abiding in the Church. The gift of the Holy Spirit was given in the primal Church by the apostles with full clarity for everyone after baptism, and this now corresponds to the “seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit”, given in the sacrament of confirmation. § 2. So, the Church is the Body of Christ, as participation in the divine life in the Holy Trinity of the existing God, life in Christ, abiding in indissoluble unity with the entire Holy Trinity, life in the Holy Spirit, who adopts us to the Father, crying out in our hearts: Abba, Father, and revealing to us Christ living in us. Therefore, before any historical revelation and definition, it must be understood as a certain divine given, abiding in itself and self-identical, as a fact of divine will taking place in the world. The Church exists or is given in a certain sense and regardless of its historical origins - it arises because it exists - on the divine, superhuman plane. And it exists in us not as an institution or society, first of all as a kind of spiritual self-evidence or given, as a special experience, as life: “about what was from the beginning, what we heard, what we saw with our eyes, what we examined and what our hands touched, about the Word of life - for life appeared, and we have seen and testify to you this eternal life, which was with the Father and appeared to us - about what we have seen and We have heard that we proclaim to you, that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1-3). And the preaching of early Christianity is a joyful, triumphant proclamation of this new life. Life is indefinable, although it can be described and defined. Therefore, in general there cannot be an exhaustive and satisfactory definition of the Church. “Come and see”: only through experience and grace can the Church be known through participation in its life. Therefore, before any external definitions, the Church must be recognized in its mystical essence, which lies at the basis of all church self-definitions, but does not fit into them. The Church in its essence, as a divine-human unity, belongs to the divine world, it exists in God, and therefore exists in the world, in human history. In the latter, it is revealed in temporary existence: therefore, in a certain sense, it arises, develops and has its own history, its own beginning. However, if we see it only in historical formation and, on the basis of it, only form an idea of ​​the Church as one of the earthly societies, then we pass by its originality, its nature, in which the eternal is revealed in the temporal, the uncreated in the created. § 3. The essence of the Church is the divine life revealed in the created; the accomplished deification of creation by the power of the Incarnation and Pentecost. This life, although it constitutes the greatest reality and has self-evident authenticity for those involved in it, is a spiritual life hidden in the “hidden man,” in the “cage” of his heart, is, in this sense, a mystery and a sacrament. It is supernatural or superworldly, although it is combined with life in this world, and both this premiumness and this combination are equally characteristic of it. In the first sense, the Church is “invisible,” in contrast to everything that is “visible” in the world, that is accessible to sensory perception among the things of this world. We can say that it does not exist in this world, and on the path of “experience” (in the sense of I. Kant) we will not encounter such a “phenomenon” that would correspond to the Church, so the hypothesis of the Church for experimental world science turns out to be as redundant as the hypothesis of God in the cosmological constructions of Laplace. Therefore, it is possible and correct to speak, if not about the “invisible” Church, then about the invisible in the Church. However, this invisible is not the unknown, for man, in addition to bodily senses, also has a spiritual eye, with which he sees, comprehends, and knows. This organ is faith, which, according to the Apostle, is “the substance of things hoped for and the certainty of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1), which lifts us on its wings into the spiritual world and makes us citizens of the heavenly world. The life of the Church is the life of faith, through which the things of this world become transparent. And, of course, the “invisible” Church is visible to this spiritual eye. If it were truly invisible, completely incomprehensible, then it would simply mean that there is no Church, for the Church cannot exist in itself, outside of people with their help. It does not fit entirely into human experience, for the life of the Church is divine and inexhaustible, but a special quality of this life, a special experience of churchliness is given to everyone who approaches it. According to the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, the eternal life that Christ gives us and which consists in “that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3), begins here, in this temporary life, and this eternity in time is the touch of divine life in the Church. In this sense, everything in the Church is invisible and mysterious, everything flows into the edges of the visible world, but everything invisible is visible, becomes visible, can become it, and this visibility of the invisible is the very condition for the existence of the Church. In this sense, the Church in its very existence is an object of faith, known by faith: “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” And not only as a special quality or experience, the Church is recognized by faith, but also in quantity, as a kind of living multi-unity of a single integral life of many, conciliarity in the image of the Divine trinity. What is visible to us is only the multiple fragmentation of the human race, in which each individual leads his own separate, selfish life, and even being in causal dependence on his fellows, as social beings, the children of the one Adam do not “see” and are not aware of their multi-unity, which is revealed in love and through love and exists in the participation of the one divine life in the Church: “let us love one another, so that with one mind we confess the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” calls upon the Church at the liturgy before the celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist. This church unity is revealed to the eyes of love, not as an external union or gathering, which we have in every worldly society, but as the mysterious fundamental principle of human life. Humanity is one in Christ, all people are branches of one vine, members of one body. The life of each person infinitely expands into the life of others, “communio sanctorum,” and each person in the church lives the life of all churched humanity, there is humanity: homo sum et nihil humani a me alienum esse puto. And not only humanity in the person of the living, who stand with us together before the Lord in prayer and work, for the modern generation is nothing more than a page in the book of life, but in God and in His Church, where there is no distinction between the living and the dead, for in God everyone is alive, God is “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). (And those who are not born, but are about to be born, are already alive in the eternity of God). But church conciliarity is not limited even to the human race, for the Church includes not only the human race, but also the angelic council in its co-humanity. The very existence of the angelic world is inaccessible to bodily vision, it can only be verified by spiritual experience, be visible with the eyes of faith, and even more so our unity in the Church through the Son of God, who reunited the earthly and heavenly and removed the barrier between the worlds of angelic and human. But the entire creation, the nature of the world, is connected with the angelic council and the human race. She is entrusted to the care of angels and given over to the dominion of man, whose fate the creation shares: “the whole creation groans and suffers together until now; ... waiting for adoption as sons, the redemption of our body" (Rom. 8:22-23), our transformation into a "new creation" along with our resurrection. Thus, a person in the Church becomes a universal being, whose life in God unites him with the life of all creation by bonds of cosmic love 1 . “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem and ten thousand angels, to the triumphant council and the church of the firstborn who are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the New Testament” (Heb. 12:22-24). These are the limits of the Church. And as such, as the Church, uniting not only the living, but also the dead, the ranks of angels and all creation, the Church is invisible, although not unknown. The limits of the life of the Church go back to the creation of the world and man and are lost in eternity. Since the Church is the divine life bestowed on creation, in relation to this divine power, is it possible, is it even appropriate to talk about its emergence in time, about its creation? In God, in whom “there is no change or shadow of turning” (James 1:17), in the eternal plan of creation, in the Wisdom of God, which is “the beginning of His path” (Wis. 8:22) 2, there is no place for occurrences. We can say that the Church is the eternal goal and foundation of creation, for the sake of the Church God created the world, and in this sense, “she was created first of all and for her the world was created” 3. The Lord created man in His image, but this image, that is, man’s living likeness to God, already contains within itself both the task and the possibility of man’s churching, as well as the incarnation of God, for God could only accept the nature of such a being that is consistent with Him and contains His image. And in the living multi-unity of the human race there is already embedded church multi-unity in the image of the Holy Trinity. Therefore, regarding the existence of the Church in humanity, it is difficult to say when it did not exist, at least in the beginning: according to the teaching of the fathers, already in paradise, before the Fall, when the Lord came to talk with man and was in communion with him, we already have the primordial Church. After the Fall, together with the First Gospel about the “seed of the Woman” (Gen. 3:15), the Lord with this promise laid the foundation for the so-called Old Testament Church, which was a school and a city of communion with God. And even in the darkness of paganism, in its natural search for God, there exists a “pagan barren church” (in the words of church hymns). Of course, the Church reaches the fullness of its existence only with the incarnation of God, and in this sense the Church was founded by the Lord Jesus Christ (“I will build My Church” (Matthew 16:18)) and realized at Pentecost. But although this event laid the foundation, the fulfillment of the Church has not yet been completed. She still has to change from a militant Church to a triumphant Church, in which “God will be all in all.” So, it is impossible to determine the limits of the Church either in space, or in time, or in power. And to that extent the Church is, indeed, if not “invisible,” then unknown. Nevertheless, this lack of knowledge of it, the inexhaustibility and unexploration of its depths, does not make it invisible in the sense of its non-existence on earth in forms accessible to earthly experience, or its complete transcendence, which is practically equivalent to non-existence. No, the Church, even with its hidden existence, is visible on earth, is completely accessible to earthly experience, has boundaries, is limited both in space and in time. The invisible life of the Church, the life of faith, is inextricably linked with earthly, completely concrete forms of life. The “invisible” exists in the visible, is enclosed in it, fused with it into a concrete or symbol (σΰμβολον). “Symbol”, according to its exact meaning, is something that belongs to this world and, however, contains the premium content associated with it, the unity of the transcendental and the immanent, a bridge between heaven and earth, a divinely created, divinely human unity. And the life of the Church in this sense is symbolic, it is mysterious under a visible symbol. The contrast between the “invisible church” and visible human society, which, although it arises in connection with the internal Church and for its sake, is alien to the Church, destroys this symbol, and at the same time abolishes the Church itself as the unity of created and divine life, transcending the Church into the noumenal realm, and thereby emptying the phenomenal. But, if the Church, as life, is contained in the earthly Church, then it is given that this earthly Church, like everything earthly, has its own boundaries in space and time. Not being only a society, not fitting into it and not being exhausted by it, it exists, nevertheless, precisely as a church society, which has its own characteristics, its own laws and boundaries. It is for us and in us, in our earthly and temporary existence, and has its own history, since everything that exists in the world resides in history. Thus, the eternal, motionless divine existence of the Church in the life of this century appears as a historical revelation and accomplishment, and therefore has its own historical beginning. The Church was founded by the Lord Jesus Christ, who determined as the stone for the building of His Church the confession of faith of the Apostle Peter, expressed by him on behalf of all the apostles. The latter were sent by Him after the resurrection to preach to the Church, which received the New Testament being in the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles, after which the first apostolic call to the Church was heard through the mouth of the Apostle Peter: “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38), and on that day about 3000 souls joined (Acts 2:41 ), which laid the foundation of the New Testament Church. “Merciful heart” (Isa. Sir.). About the Wisdom of God as the beginning of creation, see my books “The Never-Evening Light”, “The Burning Bush”. Hermas, Pastor. Vis. II, 4, 1.