Христианства нет без Церкви
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The war, including on the theological front, continued, and in 1915 a work was published, the title of which sounds like the motto of Bishop Hilarion’s entire life: “There is no Christianity without the Church.” Here he concentrated the main thoughts about the Church expressed in his previous works.
The Holy Spirit unites the faithful with love in the body of Christ in the image of the unity of the Most Holy Trinity 226. The Church is a single divine-human organism. You can either belong to it, being its organic part, or be alien to it, although very similar to it. The author confirms this teaching, as usual, with many patristic statements, showing that the Church has always looked at itself this way. If the modern world thinks differently, then the truth remains unshakable, but the world is reaping the bitter fruits of its errors, since, whatever the reason for the retreat from the Church, the result is the same - death.
In the most condensed form, Archimandrite Hilarion finds this truth in St. John Chrysostom in his interpretation of the teaching on the Church of the Apostle Paul, set out in the Epistle to the Ephesians: “In fact, if the hand happened to be separated from the body, the spirit flowing from the brain, seeking continuation and not finding it there, does not break away from the body and does not transfer to the taken away hand, but if it does not find it there, then it is not communicated to her. The same thing happens here if we are not connected by love. So, if we want to receive the Spirit from the Head, let us be in union with each other. There are two kinds of separation from the Church: one when we grow cold in love, and the other when we dare to do something unworthy in relation to this body of the Church. In this and other cases we are separated from the whole” 227.
On this, see also the works of Archimandrite Hilarion “The Trinity of Divinity and the Unity of Humanity” (1912), “The Church as a Union of Love” (1914).
Hilarion (Troitsky), archimandrite. There is no Christianity without the Church. P. 25.