Церковь и идолы

By the fourth year of the academy, we find Vladimir Alekseevich’s ecclesiological views already fully formed. In the Church he sees the meaning, purpose and justification of life. Departure from the Church cannot go unpunished and is itself a punishment. Worship and service to the true God in Christ is possible only in the Church, and those who leave it leave God along with it. But “a holy place is never empty,” and in the place of God there is already some understanding of God, a concept that is always false, which, strictly speaking, is an idol: “Life is full of idols; At every step we meet both idols and idolaters. True, you will not see stone, gold or silver idols. But subtle, often unconscious, idolatry, hiding behind the name of serving the true God, such, even more dangerous, idolatry again spread across the face of the earth like a dirty wave.”85 Churchliness, which sanctifies life and gives it meaning, is replaced by religiosity, which becomes only a separate part of life, very insignificant and serving mainly practical needs: “Now you can only hear talk about “satisfying religious needs” or about “carrying out religious duties,” and both needs and responsibilities turn out to be surprisingly few, compared with all other needs and duties” 86. The understanding of the conciliarity of church life is lost. Idols of non-church forms of “Christianity” are rushing to take the place of the Church. “Idols are increasingly crowding out Christ from human life... Nowadays, Christianity manifests itself only as personal, hidden piety, but Christian life has become completely impoverished. Christian life is possible only in the Church; only the Church lives the life of Christ” 87. The opinions, methods and way of thinking of Western theology, which have penetrated into the fence of Orthodox educational institutions, leading minds and hearts into the area of ​​sterile reasoning and dreamy ideas that separate faith and life, theology and piety, dogma and morality, did not go unappreciated by the young student of the academy. The Apostle James, mentioning spiritual, demonic wisdom (see James 3:15), “gives us the opportunity to think and say that even doing theology is not yet serving the one God; You can be a theologian and still worship other gods, serve soulless ideals. The lack of devotion to the one God, together with the desire to combine the worship of God and idols, has created in our time, mainly among Western heretics, a view of theology as purely external knowledge... Knowledge of God is an experimental science. Only the pure in heart will see God, and therefore true theology must be piety and only then will it bear fruit according to its kind” 88 . The last few quotations from the words of Vladimir Alekseevich Troitsky, spoken in 1909 at the celebration of the 95th anniversary of the MDA and published in the magazine “Theological Bulletin” under the title “Let there be no gods for you,” are given here in such detail for the reason that in this word there is a connection with both the childhood aspirations and the entire life feat of the archbishop Hilarion. His childhood love for the Church, skills of pious life and thirst for knowledge were united in his chosen field of serving the Church as a theologian and shepherd of the Church, not only professing and preaching faith in Christ and the Church, but also living the life of the Church, both external and internal, immersed in the flow of this full-flowing church life and feeling himself an inseparable part of the Church. The twenty-three-year-old young man became convinced of the truths that would now become the constant guiding star of his life: without the Church there is no life, no salvation, no knowledge of God, that is, theology, which is inseparable from piety, in accordance with the Tradition of the Church and, above all, with the writings of the holy fathers, these “spirit-bearing theologians” 89. By the word “Church” (with a capital C), the future ruler always means the Orthodox Church. Naturally, this position could not evoke an enthusiastic reaction from his contemporaries, who were carried away by the idols of humanism and “free-thinking.” Vladimir Troitsky, despite his youth, by 1909 it became clear not only the main misfortune of Russia, which soon led to a catastrophe, but also the only way out of this misfortune: “Waterless clouds flew onto our Russian plain from all sides, carried by the wind, which preserves the darkness of darkness for centuries (Jude 1:13). Their lips utter inflated words... The gates of hell gathered all their strength and rushed towards St. Church... We believe, we believe unshakably - no winds, no storms can sink the ship of Jesus!.. To impute all the empty and soulless idols of the vain world, to consider everything as rubbish and to serve only one God and His Holy Church - there is nothing higher than this and nothing can be!” 90 Hilarion, (Archbishop of Vereisky), schmch. Without the Church there is no salvation. P. 119.