About the miracles of the Gospel

Contents From the compiler I. About the Miracle II. Miracles of Christ III. On human affairs IV. About the Resurrection of Christ The present essay, in its subject matter, is a chapter from Christology, and its content is fully revealed only in connection with an integral Christological construction. However, even if isolated from the whole, it can be considered independently. It deals with one of the most pressing issues of Christian self-awareness in our era - about human activity in relation to the works of Christ. In the patristic age, the works of Christ were considered primarily in relation to His Divinity. For us, the question of their relationship to His Humanity also acquires independent significance, since in the God-Humanity of Christ the entire fullness of the Divine nature was inexorably united with the entire fullness of humanity. Dogmatically, in our understanding of the miracles of Christ, we rely on the definitions of the IV and VI Ecumenical Councils about the two natures in Christ, manifested in the duality of both action and will, with their hypostatic unity. 13/26. III. 1923. Paris. Sergievskoye Compound. A miracle occupies a very important place in religious life; for a believing soul it is, as it were, proof of the existence of God, the action of God in the world. Isn’t every prayer asking for a miracle? And all life for a believer is a constant miracle, which is characterized by a certain religious self-evidence. However, it is not so easy to express this religious reality in the categories of religious philosophy. Already at the first attempt to do this, we encounter the polysemy, and therefore the ambiguity, of the concept of a miracle, under which, thanks to this, both dark superstition and cowardly unbelief are hidden with the search for signs condemned by the Lord, but at the same time it also contains a postulate of faith, and in a certain sense expresses a generally religious attitude towards the world. And, above all, what is the relation of a miracle to the world order? Doesn’t this particular order, the wonderfully harmonious mechanism of the world with its causality, represent the only and permanent miracle? And isn’t it even contradictory to think that the Great Artist himself abolishes His own creation in miracles, replenishing and correcting it with new creative acts, like a bad master forced to repair a mechanism? This is precisely how this question is posed in deism, which completely rejects the connection of God with the world after its creation, so to speak, as unnecessary. However, such a view follows from a meager understanding of God’s relationship to his creation, as well as from an insufficient, one-sided formal understanding of the category of causality. In dogmatics, in general, God’s dual relationship to the world is distinguished: as the Creator and as the Provider. God is the Creator of the world, who created it “out of nothing.” Creation is the immersion of the divine, Sophian principles of the world into nothingness, from which the existence of the world arises. This miraculous act of God’s omnipotence, wisdom and love, incomprehensible to creation and in the most genuine sense, establishes the realm of the extra-divine existence of these principles, and through this the world, creation receives its independence, a separate existence from God. The world is not God, for it is positioned outside of God, although it is divine, sophistic in its positive basis, without which it could not exist, since there is no being that does not have a basis in God. So, the world is the extra-divine being of the divine principle, created Sophia, identical with the Divine Sophia in foundation, but different in the way of existence. He is a created mirror, the image of the Absolute, the becoming Absolute (Vl. Solovyov). The creation of the world is the original act of God, which has all the power of divine eternity in the infinity of time: “You have set the earth on solid foundations, it will not be shaken forever and ever” (Ps. 103:5). This creative act includes completeness and perfection, and, consequently, the indestructibility of creation. The creative word of God, imprinted with the life-giving “let it be,” has sounded more than once in time as a vain human word, but creates the world forever, always sounding in the universe. Nevertheless, the world, although immutably established in its foundation, for its life needs divine protection and guidance, or the providence of God. God's attitude towards the world as a Provider differs significantly from His attitude towards the world as a Creator. The world has received originality, but it is established on nothingness, on the abyss of non-existence, which is only covered by Sophia’s existence, but always gapes, threatening, if not existence itself, then, in any case, its fullness. The world is subject to ontological danger in its instability. It is completely wrong to liken it to a mechanism, as deism does. The world is not at all a mechanism, the nature of which lies in the completeness and purposefulness of its composition and action. The world, which at creation received all the fullness and all the perfection in the existential foundation, is not at all complete in its state, it only has to become a true cosmos, created Sophia, due to its original sophia. God has invested in him everything that can be given, but he has not yet included it in being, has not realized this givenness, which remains a given for him. In a word, the world becomes, and becoming presupposes for itself, as the internal basis of the process, its final goal. The world is not a mechanism at all, but a living organism, which is a hierarchy of beings united among themselves and headed by man, as the bearer of spiritually free existence, and also includes the existence and service of angels. Freedom is included in the very foundation of the world, which is determined not only by its nature, but also by the freely creative self-determinations and actions of spiritual beings inseparably connected with the world. In the lowest, simplest states of being, where there is still no place for freedom, the mind of the world, the instinctive wisdom of being, the “soul of the world” speaks more clearly (although here there is no place for one mechanism). But where freedom is creatively manifested, there is the presence of different possibilities, better and worse. Created freedom makes a world already created by God in its foundations, and although, of course, it is the highest crown of the universe, it is fraught with the danger of catastrophe. And a double catastrophe of the world in its freedom had already taken place: the first took place in the world of disembodied spirits - the fall of Dennitsa and his angels, which already threatened the human world. The second consisted in the fall of man, deceived by the serpent. It changed the path of the entire world existence, for man submitted to the flesh, belittled his freedom and brought all creation into slavery to corruption, “according to the will of him who subjected it” (Rom. 8:22-29). In any case, the existence of the world is determined not only by its sophic givenness, but also by created freedom. Here there is not only natural determinism, but also spiritual causality through freedom with its inherent created creativity: through this connection of the world with spiritual existence, spirit and flesh, freedom and necessity, mechanism and creativity are inseparably connected. The world is not static, but dynamic; it is not only given the sophic determinacy of being, but it also seeks and realizes it, freely and creatively. But, due to the fact that this life of the world is fraught with various opportunities and dangers, he cannot be left to himself, left without the divine help that he needs. God does not rape the world in its originality, and does not abolish freedom in its reality, but He interacts with the world, helps the world: “My Father works until now, and I work.” This is God's Providence for the world. God relates to the world He created as an original, extra-divine being, no longer on the basis of creation from nothing, in which all activity is on the side of the Creator and all passivity on the side of creation, but on the basis of interaction. God helps the world become itself, without destroying His creation, but nevertheless influencing it. How can one think about this interaction of God with the world? Doesn't its very concept contain a disintegrating internal contradiction? God, the Creator, correlates and interacts with His creation - but isn’t every creation reduced to zero, to the original insignificance before the Creator, and therefore is it possible to talk about the interaction of actual infinity, the absolute omnipotence of God, with this nothingness, which only at the command of God became something? Obviously, such a ratio cannot be endured by the creature, which must be incinerated before its Creator in this confrontation: the world, like man, cannot see God the Creator face to face and not die. And, on the other hand, such interaction between the Creator and creation would essentially mean a new creation with the abolition of the old, an endless and continuous re-creation of the world anew and anew with an equally continuous destruction of what was created, which is clearly unworthy of the Divine. Therefore, the interaction of God with the world can be conceived not as a transcendental act of God into nothingness, or the creation of the world, but immanent to the world itself, as such an action from within the creation, which does not abolish its originality and does not shake its indestructibility. The possibility of such an immanent, providential action of God in the world is based on the fact that the world is characterized not only by the self-lawful causality of deterministic existence in its self-closure, but also by spiritual causality through freedom. The causality of the world is not the mechanical pre-establishment of everything by everything and in everything, but the creative realization of the forces and potentialities invested in it. The world is never closed in its givenness, but is always created, although no longer out of nothing (which befits only the original creative act of God). Therefore, spiritual action is included among the cosmic agents, even moreover, the spirit is called upon to ultimately take possession of the flesh of the world, making it obedient and transparent to itself, a “spiritual body.” But if the world is open to the influence of spiritual causality, then the spirit itself, human and angelic, living and acting in the world, is open to the influence of God, to receiving God’s grace, power and inspiration. The spiritual causality of the world is the way in which God’s providence for the world is accomplished. It is directly obvious to us that the spiritual influence in the world that occurs through man. But the world in its entire existence is protected and improved by the service of angels, thanks to which it is always and in all its composition open to spiritual influence, not closed in its material soullessness. Angels are obedient executors of God’s commands, although they also carry them out creatively, as living and free beings, and not as mechanical tools. Holy angels are the providential will of God, accomplished in the world and over the world. But the same can be said about man, who is also a spirit, although not incorporeal, but incarnate. Man, in his spiritual freedom, is the recipient of divine inspiration, and grace through him also becomes a cosmic agent who accomplishes the will of God in the world. Man is a created god, destined for deification, and through this leading the world to deification. This is the nature of the world pattern. The world, on the one hand, is determined in its being - in the basis and limit, given and given - in its created sophia, for Sophia is the determinacy of the world. But on the other hand, the world is not at all determined in the way of its formation, in its ways, for it is a creative, self-creative process that includes causality through freedom. It therefore contains an infinite number of different possibilities or options for its path, of which only one can become reality, and God’s providence, by influencing causality through freedom, leads to the fact that the best possibility is chosen. The paths and limits of spiritual causation, generally speaking, are still little known to man, just like natural law, however, we can say that this possibility is much wider and deeper than we now know. The words of the Lord that faith can move mountains express this general idea in tributary form, how spiritual causation can, within certain limits, command the creation, and the wind and waves can obey it. Moreover, there are two ways of action in the world: through cosmic agents or forces of nature, with man acting as the mind of the world, and directly spiritually through the subordination of nature to causality through freedom. The paths of this causality, as well as its limits, are unexplored, for it is not limited to the immediate reality of one person, but connects him with the entire spiritual world. Therefore, all the departed saints, like disembodied spirits, the entire “invisible church,” are included in this spiritual causality and bring down the power of God into the world. This is the prayer. In prayer, a person turns to God - directly or through His saints - with a request for one or another content related to the providential actions of God in the world, therefore, about spiritual causality in the natural world. Any such request of a person, due to the limitations of his knowledge, may not deserve satisfaction, but any sincere prayer is effective. In prayer, the human spirit opens itself to the influences of the power of God, and since there is no unanswered prayer, it accepts this power into itself. The action of this power can be accomplished in unknown ways, through the angels of God, as well as through the direct influence of the spirit on the world, all the limits of which we do not know. Prayer, in any case, belongs to the realm of spiritual influence on the world, to causality through freedom, and therefore it also has cosmic significance. But what is a miracle? Is it a partial negation and even abolition of world causality, and in this case, what does it mean? Is it a new creative act of God in the abolition and abolition of the “good” world created by God, its powers and laws? Is it the correction or replenishment of the universe? Both religiously and philosophically, it is equally impossible to accept such an understanding of a miracle: religiously because it does not correspond to the completeness and perfection of creation, philosophically because thought cannot allow a break in the causal connection, a break in the causal chain. Even if this took place, it could not be recognized by thought. Old Kant is right: in the causal connection of world existence, everything is given its place, and ex nihibo nil fit. Meanwhile, such an understanding of a miracle as a new creative act of God, a kind of divine violence over the life of the cosmos, is tantamount to the emergence of ex nihibo. And against such nihilism, which abolishes the power of world existence for the sake of the miraculous, logic imposes a ban with its protective principle of causality: causa aequat effectum or the same principle in a negative form sublata causa tollitur effectus. A miracle cannot be understood as something uncaused; it must take its place in the causal series, at least as a special case of causality 1. Causality is the logos of the world, the law of which is the logical connection of everything with everything in its continuity. In the causal series, or more precisely, in the infinite causal series expressing this universal connection, we have causes of various natures, including causality through freedom. However, all these various reasons are equally cosmic, fit into the life of the cosmos, and are understandable from it. Also, a miracle is cosmic and natural, like all natural phenomena. Its character does not consist at all in being causeless or supercosmic, but only in special causality, and ultimately, in relation to the cosmos, it should be recognized as natural, and not supernatural, and certainly not unnatural. In other words, a miracle does not relate to creation, but to God’s providence for the world. But God, as a Provider, acts in the world not by violence against it, correcting or changing the principles of its existence, but only by directing its natural, so to speak, mechanical causality through spiritual causality. In this combination of spiritual causality, through freedom, and mechanical, through necessity, lies the nature of world law. The world is not a mechanism, but rather an organism growing and living. This connection between spirit and nature, the spiritual-natural composition of the world, where the spirit can be subordinate and captive to the flesh, but the flesh can also obey the spirit, constitutes the permanent miracle of the world, the miracle of miracles, as the basis of all miraculousness. Here, in the realm of spiritual causation, we have two opposing possibilities: on one pole the corruption of humanity when it becomes “flesh” (Gen. 6:3), on the other – the spirit-bearing glorified flesh of Christ together with the spiritual body of resurrected humanity (I Cor. 15:44, 46), with the transfigured heaven and earth. Spiritual power in the world can have a different character, for the freedom of created spirits can be turned up and down, towards God and towards the world, from God and against God, both in the angelic and human worlds. Hence there are two inspirations: dark and light, and two orders of miracles (in the sense indicated), good and evil (true and false). But both of them take place in the world, taking its strengths and possibilities as their basis. It is said about the apocalyptic beast that he “does great signs, so that he brings down fire from heaven to earth before people. And with the miracles that it was given to him to perform before the beast, he deceives those who live on earth” (Apoc. 13:13-14). And the same thing is said by St. Paul about the lawless one: “whose coming will be according to the work of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders” (2 Thess. 2:9). True miracles, i.e. works of love and faith are accomplished by the power of the created spirit, assisted by God's grace. The difference between true and false miracles is that the former are manifestations of the spiritual mastery of the world through spiritual causation according to the will of God, and, ultimately, lead to the deification of the world through its participation in the God-man, by the power of Christ. False miracles mean the manifestation of human power in the world, without the help of God mastering it. This is natural magic, which is based on “knowledge” and volitional concentration in one’s self, on oneself and in oneself. This magic, which can be accessible to humans to varying degrees, is often equated with the miraculous. It cannot be said, of course, that magic, i.e. the inherent power of man over nature was absent from the miracle. On the contrary, spiritual causation is generally carried out by the force of man’s spiritual influence in the mechanism of the world. Therefore, one can distinguish between “white” magic, which creates true miracles, and black magic, which performs signs (a clear example in the Bible: the transformation of a rod into a serpent, performed by Moses in the name of God, is white magic, and the same thing, performed by the Magi, is already black magic). Magic has different ways of being, modern science is also magic, which sets as its task the regulation of the forces of nature. It is science in our time that is increasingly becoming both white and black magic. She performs true miracles, deeds of love and mercy, and she also serves human egoism, pride and passions. In itself, magic, i.e. Man's power over nature belongs to him by creation, is connected with his dominant position in the world and cannot be taken away from him, but its paths can be different 2. Man was created in order to become the created god of the world. Spiritual causation in the natural world, revealing this naturalness in it, can occur in various ways, direct and roundabout. Let's take an example. Someone heals a child dying of diphtheria with his spiritual power, prayer or concentration; this is a direct and immediate path of spiritual causation, which is usually only called a miracle (although in principle there is no more miraculousness in it than in any human action in the world). In another case, a doctor heals a sick child with anti-diphtheria serum. Should we classify this as a miracle? Undoubtedly, for someone who did not know medical possibilities, this cure was a miracle to the same extent as healing without vaccination. The result will be the same in both cases, but the path will be the same - spiritual causation, human influence on the forces of nature. The difference turns out to be only in the method of influence: one acts within nature itself, the other, as it were, from the outside, but in reality, the miracle worker, of course, does not perform a new creative act and does not even change the laws of nature, but gives them a different direction with his own power. His spiritual effort becomes like physical strength. However, this is only “as if”. Fundamentally, in both cases, we have the same influence of the spirit on the forces of nature, directing the action. In both cases we have an impact on man in the world through spiritual causation; both cases are a manifestation of man’s power in the world. The difference, perhaps, lies only in the fact that in one case the personal strength of one person is manifested, and in the other the common cause of all mankind, into which private human effort is also invested. We can say that the first case has only indicative significance, testifies to the calling of a person, showing the way to him, while the second shows the path of the entire human race, for man is a tribal being who has a common cause in the world. Both paths are possible and, abstractly speaking, compatible. However, historically, one path is increasingly at odds with the other. Humanity, having entered the age of miracles of technology and science, has less and less need for personal miracles as a way of power over the world, and accordingly, the very concept of a miracle is increasingly acquiring a moral or spiritual rather than a natural character. For us, the personality of the miracle worker himself is more miraculous than his miracles. The greatest miracle in the Gospel is Christ Himself, His image, His preaching, in general, the entire appearance of the God-man - more than individual miracles. The most stunning and indelible impression on us is made by the image of the suffering Christ, when He no longer works miracles, like the revelation of God - Love in man. The search for miracles as signs, in abolition or circumvention of the laws of nature that are already known to us and living in us, is superstitious and unhealthy, and it was condemned more than once by the Lord, who more than once answered those who sought signs from Him: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and a sign will not be given to them” (Matthew 12:39 cf. 16:4, Mark 8:2, Luke 11:29–32), and He specifically points to His preaching and His ministry (MF. 12:41–42). And yet, in the life of every person observing his spiritual life, miracles are constantly performed, although not in abolition of natural laws, but with their complete preservation. A miracle is a manifestation of divine purposefulness in the world. And our desire for a miracle boils down to ensuring that our lives are fulfilled according to the will of God. which would be revealed in our lives. And in this sense, truly, the life of every believer for himself is full of miracles, there is a constant miracle. Thinking about a miracle, we are naturally and inevitably led to the Gospel narrative about the miracles of Christ, for, just as in the true humanity of Christ we comprehend ourselves, so in the miracles of Christ we seek to comprehend the power given to us over the world. If the greatest miracle of Christ is He Himself, His image, then His appearance as a prophet and as a miracle worker was primarily in spiritual power and authority, which was revealed both in word and deed. “He taught as one having authority” (Mark 1:22), “and they marveled at His teaching, for His word was with authority” (Luke 4:32). “And many who heard it said in astonishment: Where did He get this from? What kind of wisdom was given to Him, and how are such miracles performed by His hands?” (Mark 6:2). Miracles in the Gospel represent, as it were, self-evident manifestations of this power. It is characteristic that the Gospels usually do not use the word miracle in relation to the acts of Christ: τέρας is used only as an exception; among the weather forecasters the most common word is δύναμις - power, and in John - σημεῖον - a sign. In addition, in the Gospel of John the Lord simply speaks of His works - ἔργα, which testify about Him (John 5:36; 10:25). These works, “such as no one else did” (John 15:24), were preaching, healing, and doing good. Before turning to the consideration of these miracles, let us first pose one general dogmatic question: what were the miracles in the ministry of Christ? Were they divine or human, did God or man perform these miracles in the God-man? Do we have here the creative acts of God's omnipotence, which created the world, or the manifestations of the power of a perfect Man? This question, precisely in this formulation, arose in dogmatic teaching, and received resolution in such a sense that Christ worked miracles by the power of God, like God, and, on the contrary, was exhausted by human exhaustion, like a man 3. We will not touch here in the general scope of this Christological opinion, which in a hidden form contains the Nestorian division of two natures in Christ. Christ, having two natures, two wills and two “energies,” nevertheless had a single divine-human life, and the division of lives, if it existed, would testify only to the Nestorian συνάφεια, and not the unity of His hypostasis. Therefore, it is necessary to eliminate the idea that Christ created some of His works, or even individual moments in them, as God, and others as Man - such a mosaic of two natures is unacceptable. Being the God-man, in the unity of His personality, He created and experienced everything with both divine and human nature, of course, according to the nature of each of them. Therefore, to exclude all participation of the divine nature in some manifestations of life (in particular, even in suffering), as well as the participation of human nature in other manifestations, means to divide Christ in a Nestorian way, and even instead of the moral unity of συνάφεια to arrange some kind of turn of two in one, as if a split personality, which should not happen. On the contrary, it is necessary to postulate the continuity of life, will and action of both natures in Christ; this is a self-evident postulate of the dogmas of the 4th and 6th Ecumenical Councils (about the inseparable and unfused union of two natures, two wills and energies in Christ). When applied to the miracles of Christ, it must be established that they were performed by the God-man in the hypostatic unity of His divine and human nature. Therefore, they, being “signs” of the Divine, were also human, and therefore cosmic, being a revelation of man in the world, and it is this human cosmic nature of the miracles of Christ that we must understand here. The humanity of Christ (contrary to Docetism) was genuine, although it contained the fullness of the Divinity bodily. She belonged to the world and carried its life within her. The miracles of Christ were the works of a Man who, having His hypostasis as the Logos, contained in His life the fullness of vision of God, knowledge of God, and living of God; united inseparably and unmerged with the Divinity, the humanity of Christ was deified, so that the Son of Man was also the Son of God, “the Only Begotten Son in whom He was well pleased.” But in all this, perfect humanity was only fully revealed, but was by no means abolished or dissolved. Christ is the Son of Man, and His actions, in particular, miracles, are human deeds, but performed in full agreement with the will of God. According to the power of the dogma of the VI Ecumenical Council, about two wills and two energies in Christ, Christ performed miracles both as God and as a man. The divine side of this accomplishment, of course, remains incomprehensible to a created being. However, we can ask the question, does it relate to the activity of God the Creator, calling a completely new creature out of non-existence, or God the Provider, providing for a world that has already been created and exists, complete and self-lawful in its natural existence? The Divine Logos is the One “with whom all things were and without him nothing came into being,” the Creator of the world, who called it out of non-existence and contains it in being. The same humanity that was perceived by Christ as His human nature was created by the Logos, and this very perception (“in the last days”) testifies that creation has already been completed and in its perfect form was perceived by the Logos: καὶ ὁ Λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο. The creation of the world, which in God occurs in the eternity of God, for the world was accomplished in a single, original, pre-temporal act, which begins time and, as it were, continues in it, filling all time. It follows that the incarnation of the Logos, as an event in the world and in its temporary existence, is not the creation of the world, it belongs to the realm not of creation, but of God’s providence about the world, the relationship of the Creator with creation, His interaction with it. Of course, it occupies a central place in God’s providential plan, and in relation to the world it has the meaning of a new creation, or rather the trans-creation of the world, creating it anew through the appearance of a perfect Man, together with the God-Man, but even this transformation presupposes an already completed creation. Therefore, the Logos in Christ is revealed not as the Creator of the world, who laid the foundation for it and maintains it with His arm, but as a Provider who is in a certain relationship with it (which is particularly expressed in the union of two natures, divine and human, unmerged and inseparable). Therefore, the nature of the divine participation of the Logos in the creation of the miracles of Christ should be understood as the providential action of God in the world, however, while preserving its originality. Consequently, miracles on the part of the divine are not a new creation, acts on the world, but the action of God within this world, only directing its life. And miracles cannot be understood as a new creation of the world, even in some smallest part or act, because this would already mean the creation of a new world through the introduction of new elements into its system and through the destruction of its previously existing connection. The creation of at least one new atom in the world already changes it entirely. And since the world finds itself in man, who is a “contracted world,” a new creation or change in the world introduces a change in man, humanity itself loses its stable certainty, it changes with every miracle, as a new existential impulse. It would follow from this that the humanity of Christ, taken by the Son of Man from the old Adam in all its fullness and authenticity, is also changed by miracles (see the genealogy of Christ in Luke 3), which is obviously unacceptable. That. The ontological stability and strength of the world turns out to be a condition, and at the same time a consequence of the incarnation itself. Therefore, the miracles of Christ, even in their divine aspect, cannot be understood as the creative acts of God over the world, or a new creation, but relate to the providential actions of God in the world, are immanent to it, performed within the limits of its capabilities or the forces invested in it. And it is precisely the providential nature of miracles, which corresponds to the fact that on the seventh day God rested from His works, having completed and exhausted creation, that makes clear the relationship between the divine and human nature in Jesus when performing miracles. If it is Christologically impossible to say that Christ performed miracles only by divine power, like God, apart from the participation of human nature (which would be rather Eutychianism, for it would testify to the absorption of humanity in Christ by His deity), then there is no theological necessity for this. If we begin to understand miracles as acts of new creation, then such, obviously, belong only to God, are the work of His omnipotence, and man cannot have any participation here. The human nature of Christ, itself a creation of the Logos, could remain, at most, only passive in the performance of a miracle in this sense. Her presence would have no significance for this creative action of the Logos, and even she herself would have to tremble ontologically from these creative acts, as if shocks into her own being. But since miracles are the providential actions of God in the world and over the world, to which Christ’s own humanity belongs, this opens up the full possibility and even necessity of participation in these miracles of human nature as belonging to this world, for they are not miracles in the sense of a new creation, but only manifestations of powers and signs in this world. This relationship between the divine and human nature in Christ in the performance of miracles is the same as in the entire life of the God-man: the Divinity, humbled before the incarnation and in this kenosis, concealing His greatness and omnipotence as if in potentiality, nevertheless inspires with Himself the entire human life of the God-man. Humanity, undiminished in its originality and freedom, preserving all human life (“will and energy”), is constantly inspired by the Divine, adored in its entirety (“for in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” Col. 2:9), so that every human act is also a divine-human, deified act, and nothing is accomplished outside of this mutual communication (communication idiomatum). Therefore, miracles were performed by the Son of Man and in His humanity, therefore, they are human, accessible to man, contained in the possibilities of this world, headed by man. This also means, further, that miracles are natural, and not unnatural or supernatural. They reveal the possibilities inherent in a person’s relationship to the world. They are the self-testimony of humanity, for man is called to “dominate” in the world, he is the king of creation, a created god. And this power of man over the world is evidenced in the perfect Man with amazing power, although - we must now add - miracle-working is not at all His exclusive property, but is generally characteristic of spirit-bearing men in the Old and New Testaments. From the fact that miracles are performed by Christ with the participation of His humanity, it follows that they are all human, i.e. accessible to man and possible for him. Their miraculousness lies only in the special, unusual for given conditions, way of their accomplishment: for example, the treatment of diseases is in the power of man, and miraculous healings differ not in purpose and essence, but only in the unusual ways of achieving them. And the fact that not all works related to miracles are already available to man does not speak against the possibility of this in the future: “the works that I do, you will do, and more than these you will do” - this is the general relationship that is established in the words of the Lord Himself. All miracles are fundamentally accessible to man, and all of them were already performed by the Old Testament prophets: Moses, Elijah and Elisha (also the resurrection). All of them are given by Christ into the power of the apostles when sending them to preach: “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons” (Matthew 10:8, Mark 3:14, Luke 9:2), and the disciples “cast out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them” (Mark 6:13). Of course, the Lord would not have given this commandment, which contains the fullness of His own miracle-working, to His apostles (and in their person and to the entire Church, as is clear from the words of the Lord after the resurrection: Mark 16, 17-18), if these deeds were not humane, accessible to man. We see these same miracles performed by the apostles after the Ascension (according to the book of Acts): numerous healings, and even resurrections. And this same gift of miracles continues in the Church at all times. All this confirms that the creation of Christ’s miracles should not be attributed only to His Divinity, but it also belongs to humanity, and, therefore, was accomplished humanly, through the revelation and implementation of human capabilities. This humanity of Christ’s miracles also finds indirect confirmation in the Gospel. The Lord testified that “this generation is driven out by prayer and fasting,” and He Himself prayed while performing miracles. This is directly attested only to individual acts: before walking on the waters, He remained overnight “to pray alone” (Matthew 14:23); when He fed the people, He “looked up to heaven and blessed” the loaves, i.e. prayed (Matthew 14:19, Mark 6:41, Luke 9:16). At the Transfiguration, “while He was praying, the appearance of His face changed” (Luke 9:29). And finally, during the performance of the most amazing miracle - the resurrection of Lazarus, the Lord prayed to the Father, as is clear from His words: “Father, I thank You that You heard Me, I knew that You would always hear Me” (John 11, 41-43). Even this miracle, which theologians usually attribute to only one Divinity (“like a man, Christ wept, like a God, He resurrected”), was accomplished by the power of prayer, of course, human, for prayer is characteristic of the God-man in His humanity 4 . And this power of prayer, as spiritual causality in the world, is generally expressed by the Lord in the words of the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask and it will be given to you... everyone who asks receives it... Your Heavenly Father will give good things to those who ask Him” (Matthew 7, 7, 8, 11), and, of course, in the Lord’s Prayer, this prayer of prayers... There is also a second feature in Christ’s miracle-working, which speaks of his humanity, both on the part of the subject and the object: this is participation in a miracle not only of the one who creates it, but also of the one who receives it. In the vast majority of miracles, the condition for their performance is faith, for the sake of which and according to which miracles are performed: the healing of a leper (Mark 1, 41–41, Matt. 8, 2–3, Luke 5, 12–13); resurrection of Jairus's daughter (Mr. 5, 22, 23, 36, Luke 8, 41, 50, Matt. 9, 18); healing of a demoniac (Mr. 9:23–24, Matt. 17:19–20); healing of the blind centurion Bartimaeus (Mark 10:52); healing of the centurion's servant in Capernaum (Mr. 8:8–10, Luke 7:6–9, Matt. 8:8–10); healing of the bleeding woman (Matthew 9:20–22, Mark 5:27, Luke 8:43–48); healing of two blind men (Matthew 9:27–30); healing of the daughter of a Canaanite wife (Matthew 15:22–28, Mark 7:25–29). If we compare the corresponding narratives, we will be convinced that in all these cases there is special evidence of faith as calling or accompanying the miracle. But even more expressive are the cases of the opposite nature, when the lack of faith is an obstacle to performing a miracle, or at least to accepting it. Such cases are directly attested in the Gospel: “and he could not perform any miracle there (οὐκ ἐκεῖ ποιῆσαι οὐδεμίαν δύναμιν) only laying hands on a few sick people and healing them; and marveled at their unbelief” (Matthew 6:5–6); “and he did not perform many miracles there because of their unbelief” (Matthew 13:58). These texts, in which skeptics see evidence that miracles were performed by the power of their own faith (self-hypnosis) of those being healed, but could not take place in its absence, in the action of the body are only confirmation of their essential humanity. Miracles are not violence against the world, but the revelation of its own powers and potentials, and both parties participate in this disclosure, not only the performer, but also the recipient. Miracles are performed, so to speak, not only ex opera operato, but also exopera operantis. It is remarkable that even in the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus we see the presence of this feature, namely the participation of faith, only, of course, not of the deceased himself, but of his sisters (like the father during the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter). “Martha said to Jesus: Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you” (John 11:21), and the first half of these words is literally repeated by Mary (11:32). Through faith they also become accomplices of the resurrection, as in other cases when miracles were performed through faith, and could not be performed without this condition. In a certain sense, we can say that miracles are the common cause of humanity, and not just the performer. One should, further, look carefully at the special features that accompany the performance of individual miracles. A huge number of miracles are performed simply by a word, by the direct action of the command of the Lord, by direct spiritual causation. The same applies to many prophetic and apostolic miracles in the Old and New Testaments. First of all, and most naturally, this is how healings of the possessed are carried out. But no matter how we understand this demonic possession, whether we see in it demonic possession or a neuropsychic illness, or both, the word here is a direct and effective tool both for commanding demons and for mental suggestion, which is used in the form of hypnosis by medicine even today. The word spoken with authority, in this case, is a natural way of influencing the unclean spirits, who from afar sensed the approach of the Holy One of Israel (“and they shouted from afar: what have you to do with us, Jesus, Son of God? You have come here before the time to torment us” (Matt. 8, 29), and on the mental and nervous organization of patients (through suggestion and self-hypnosis). But besides this, a huge number of gospel miracles are performed by the direct command of the Lord through the word - in some cases responding to faith and uniting with it, in others directly commanding: Simon's mother-in-law (Luke 4:39), the leper (Luke 5:12-13), the paralytic (Luke 5:24-5), the withered man (6:8-10), the healing of the centurion's servant Capernaum (7, 1–8), resurrection of the son of the Nain widow (7, 14–15), healing of ten lepers (17, 14), healing of the daughter of a Canaanite woman (Matthew 15, 28), healing of the paralytic at the font of Siloam (John 5, 8–9), healing of the son of the courtier of Capernaum (John 4, 50–53 ). This also includes miracles performed by a commanding word addressed to nature: the wind and the sea (Mark 4:39–41, Luke 8:22–25, Matt. 8:23–26), the fig tree (Mark 11:14, 20), during a miraculous fishing (Luke 5:4–7). An analogy in the Old Testament: the miracles of Moses during the exodus from Egypt and during the journey in the desert (Exodus), the miracles of the prophet. Elijah (3 Ts. 17, 18; 4 Ts. 2) and Elisha (4 Ts. 4, 5, 6). However, there are a number of miracles when the Lord does not limit himself to one word, but performs certain actions that are, as it were, a means for performing a miracle. Thus, during the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter, He, “taking her by the hand, says to her: talifah kumi” (Mark 5:41); when healing a tongue-tied man, Jesus, “taking him aside from the people, put His fingers into his ears, and spitting, touched his tongue, and looking up to heaven, sighed and said to him: “Ephphatha,” which is “open” (Mark 7:33-34). The healing of the blind man is described in the following terms: “He took the blind man, took him out of the village and, spitting on his eyes, laid his hands on him and asked him: does he see anything? He looked and said: I see people passing by, like trees. Then he again laid his hands on his eyes and told him to look. And he was healed and began to see clearly” (Mark 8:23–25). In other cases, miracles were performed by touch: the most expressive case was the healing of a bleeding woman, who, touching, “said: if I touch His clothes, I will be healed,” and “Jesus, feeling. that power came out of Him, He turned to the people and said, “Who touched My clothes?” (Mr. 5.29–30, Luke 8.44–46, Matt. 9.20–21). But “all the people sought to touch Him, because power came from Him and healed everyone” (Luke 6:19). “When the sun set, all those who were sick with various diseases brought them to Him, and He, laying His hands on each of them, healed them” (Luke 4:40). With a touch He healed Malchus’ ear (Luke 22:51). The healing of the man born blind, according to the Gospel of John, was accomplished as follows: “He spat on the ground, made clay from the spitting, and anointed the eyes of the blind man with clay, and said to him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam; he went, washed, and came seeing” (John 9:6-7). (For similar cases of healing through touch, see the Old and New Testaments, especially DA 5, 15–16, 9, 11–12). The peculiarity of these cases is that the Lord did not limit himself here to words or commands, but carried out certain actions that were a miraculous means for fulfilling His will. In a similar way, the miraculous feeding of 5,000 people with five loaves and 4,000 people with seven loaves was accomplished: namely, the Lord, “took five loaves and two fish, gave thanks, broke them and gave them to His disciples, and the disciples to the people” (Matt. 15:36, Mk. 8:6–7, cf. Mt. 14:19, Mk. 6:41, Luke 9.16, John 9.11) The Lord performed this miracle through prayer (“looking up to heaven”) and blessing. What does this difference mean in the way different miracles are performed? Should we see here only different manifestations of the omnipotence of God, which does not connect itself with any external means of influence, and, as if in evidence of this indifference, uses different ones? 5 We have already rejected the understanding of the miracle as a new creation, and these texts by no means contain any basis for confirming it. In the actions of the Lord when healing a man born blind, one should not at all see a new creation of an eye from the earth. Such an understanding of a miracle would rather destroy its meaning for a person, reducing it to a game of omnipotence, a kind of dues ex machine. These, by the way, are the miracles that are attributed to Christ in the “Childhood Gospels,” rightly rejected by the Church (for example, the revival of birds made by Him from clay). Wouldn’t it be more correct to admit that the Lord, when performing miracles, in certain cases considered the word alone insufficient or inappropriate, but also used some external actions that were a means for performing a miracle. These remedies were wonderful in that sense. that they remained incomprehensible, but the important thing is that they were included by the Lord Himself in the image of performing a miracle. In this we see confirmation of the general idea that the miracles of the Lord have a human, cosmic, natural character, remain in interaction with the world, and are immanent to it. Like miracles, they are manifestations of spiritual causality, the Providence of God. However, being natural and naturally possible, they also determine the method of their implementation by their naturalness. Therefore, it turns out that the appropriate way to perform a miracle is in some cases the word, and in others a touch or laying on of hands (i.e., a bodily influence), and in others the substance of the physical world is also used: earth, saliva, and finally, in other cases, the combined action of prayer and personal participation in the breaking and distribution of loaves. It is not these means themselves that are fundamentally important. they are all equally obedient instruments in the hands of the Lord, but the fact is that the Lord Himself gave them a place in His miracles, thereby showing their natural human character. Now let us turn to the very content of the miracles of Christ in order to establish what was and what was not in them. First of all, what is striking is the fact that of the total number of miracles of Christ with which the Gospels are full, the overwhelming majority are healings, and a significant number of these healings are listed separately, but even more are not stated separately, but are only noted as mass phenomena. The Lord is portrayed as a miraculous healer, surrounded by those who are sick in body and soul, the demoniac, the lepers, the paralytic, the blind, etc. Human grief and suffering appears before Him in all its helplessness and homelessness, and He “takes pity” on this human grief and suffering and helps this suffering humanity. The following picture is repeatedly repeated in the Gospel: “a great multitude came to Him, having with them the lame, the blind, the dumb, the maimed, and many others, and they cast them down at Jesus’ feet, and He healed them, so that the people marveled, seeing the dumb speaking, the maimed healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing: and they glorified the God of Israel” (Matthew 15:30-31). In the land of Gennesaret, “when they got out of the boat, immediately the inhabitants, recognizing him, ran around the entire surrounding area and began to bring the sick on their beds to where He was heard to be. And wherever He came, whether to villages, cities, or villages, they laid the sick in open places and asked Him to touch even the hem of His garment, and those who touched Him were healed” (Mark 6:54-56). “When the sun set, all those who were sick with various diseases brought them to Him, and He, laying His hands on each of them, healed them” (Luke 4:40). “But the rumor about Him spread even more, and a great multitude of people flocked to Him to listen and be healed of their illnesses by Him, but He went into desert places and prayed” (Luke 5:15-16). The general impression of the appearance of Jesus among the people is expressed in these words of the Gospel of Matthew: “And Jesus walked throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of infirmity among the people. And word of Him spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to Him all the weak, those possessed by various diseases and seizures, and the demon-possessed, and the lunatics, and the paralytic, and He healed them” (Matthew 4:23-24). Or the same idea is more briefly expressed in the speech of St. Peter to Cornelius: “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with Him” (Acts 10:38). The Lord showed compassion to suffering humanity, He took pity on them. Being Himself, by His immaculate and perfect humanity, free from these diseases and sufferings that came into the world as a consequence of original sin, the Son of Man accepted the suffering of others with compassionate love, as noted by the Evangelist (Matt. 8, 16–17): “When evening came, they brought many demon-possessed to Him, and He cast out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick, so that what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled, who says: “He took upon Himself our infirmities and bore our diseases” (Is. 53:4). Against the background of this general healing and beneficence, individual cases of healing, especially highlighted in the gospel, represent only isolated episodes, noted for certain features, but all these are works of human mercy and compassion, human deeds performed in accordance with the will of God. Compassion for human grief is an incentive to perform another category of miracles - the resurrection of the dead. This is directly said about the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain: “seeing her (the widow), the Lord took pity on her and said to her: “Do not cry” (Luke 7:13) and raised the boy. The resurrection of Jairus’s daughter was carried out in fulfillment of his request for the healing of his daughter: “My daughter is now dying, but come, lay Your hand, and she will live” (Matthew 9:18), and when the girl died, “everyone wept and mourned for her, but He said: Weep not” (Luke 8:52). It, too, of course, was a matter of compassionate mercy towards human sorrow. But the same must be said about the resurrection of Lazarus. True to his general character, Evangelist John, however, emphasizes the symbolic and solemn side of this miracle, as a “sign of victory” over death, as a manifestation of the glory of God (John 11, 4, 40-2), but this does not at all detract from the side of this miracle that it was an act of compassion for the grief of the sisters of the deceased, which was shared by his neighbors (11, 19, 31, 33) and by the Lord Himself (11, 35–36, 38), and this human grief of the Lord is expressed with particular force: “Jesus shed tears... then the Jews said: look how He loved him... Jesus again, grieving inwardly, comes to the tomb”). In this sense, the Gospel resurrections can be classified as part of a large group of miracles of healing and beneficence, driven by compassion and mercy, the desire to alleviate human sorrow, to make human life easier and more carefree, to help suffering humanity. And it is remarkable that in the Gospel narrative, in the vast majority of cases, no special reasons are indicated for performing miracles, or for choosing those on whom they are performed. There are, however, a number of cases when a miracle is requested or given in response to ardent faith, but, as a rule, healings are performed on all sufferers encountered on the path of Christ. Suffering as such already attracts His beneficence. The last miracle of the Lord, the healing of the ear of the servant Malchus (Luke 22:49–51), is no exception. “And they were all seized with fear, and they glorified God, saying: A great prophet has arisen among us, and God has visited His people” (Luke 7:16, cf. John 6:14) 6. The double feeding of the people in the desert has the same meaning of beneficence and compassion (in addition to its commemorative significance as a prototype of the Eucharist). The story of the feeding of 5,000 people with 5 loaves is told in Matt. (14, 14-21) in the following context: “And Jesus went out and saw a multitude of people and had compassion on them and healed their sick. When evening came, His disciples came to Him and said: This is a deserted place and the time is already late; let the people go so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves. But Jesus said to them: “They don’t need to go, you give them something to eat”... This context is even more expressive in Mr. 6, 33 words: “the people saw them leaving, and many recognized them, and they ran there on foot from all the cities, and warned them, and gathered to Him. Jesus went out and saw a multitude of people, and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and began to teach them a lot. And when much time had passed, His disciples came to Him, saying: “Here is a deserted place,” etc. We have the same thing regarding the feeding of 4000 people with 7 loaves: “Jesus called His disciples and said to them: I feel sorry for the people, because they have been with Me for three days now, and they have nothing to eat; I don’t want to let them go without eating, lest they become weak on the road,” etc. (Matthew 15:32). Same with Mr. 8:1–3: “In those days, when a very large crowd had gathered and they had nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples and said to them, “I have pity on the people, because they have been with Me for three days now and have nothing to eat; If I send them away without eating, they will become weak on the way, for some of them have come from afar,” etc. Thus, this miracle also has the meaning of charity, caring for human needs. 7 If we ignore the miraculous nature of this saturation, we can say that the Lord simply wanted to feed the hungry and poor and did not neglect the bodily needs of the people, but showed care and compassion here too, took pity on the people (and this human feeling for suffering humanity, as for Christ himself, will be asked of us at His Last Judgment). And the impression on the people from this miracle was similar to that from His healings: “then the people who saw the miracle performed by Jesus said: This is truly the Prophet coming into the world” (John 6:14). Among the miracles of charity performed for the sake of mercy for human suffering, one should also include a miracle performed out of sympathy for human joy, this is the transformation of water into wine, which is narrated in the Gospel of John as the first miracle, “the beginning of miracles” (John 2:11), and it is characteristic that the beginning of 8 is dedicated to human joy (although this whole story in John has, of course, a significant symbolic meaning). After deducting all these miracles of mercy and beneficence, works of the Lord’s love, out of the total number of gospel miracles, only five remain, which do not belong here, but occupy a very special place. This is precisely the walking on the waters, the taming of the storm, the incident with the didrachm, the miraculous fishing and the curse of the fig tree. All of them have this common feature that their goal is to enlighten students and influence their souls. The first miracle - the taming of the storm (Matthew 23-27, Mark 4, 35-41, Luke 8, 22-25) has a significant significance, as a test of the faith of the disciples, and at the same time the manifestation of Jesus’ power over the elements: “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?” (Matthew 4:41). The second miracle - walking on the waters (Matthew 14:21-23, Mark 6:45-52, John 6:17-21), as well as the miraculous fishing (Luke 5:6-19) - has a similar meaning. The command to find the stater in the caught fish also has a significant meaning, as if it were some kind of real symbol (Matthew 17:27). In these miracles, the Lord teaches His disciples not only in word, but also in action, putting His lessons into their hearts. However, these individual cases are drowned in the whole mass of the miracles of Christ, demonstrating works of love and mercy, and this feature determines the main character of the miracles of Christ, their deep humanity and love for mankind. 9 And in this sense, the Lord Himself solemnly defines His works twice: the first time in His first sermon in Nazareth, where He directly applies to Himself the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, for He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor, and He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord” (Isa. 61, 1–2, Luke 4, 18–19). And the second time in the answer to John the Baptist through his disciples (also in words from the prophet Isaiah): “Go, tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor are preached to the good news” (Matthew 11:4–5. Wed. Isaiah 29:18; 35:5–6). At ev. Luke (7, 21) the same story is introduced as follows: “And at this time He healed many from diseases and illnesses, and from evil spirits, and gave sight to many blind people.” The Lord demonstrated His powers in His miracles - δυνάμεις - and these phenomena were also signs - σημεῖα - but the Lord did not perform miracles in order to amaze, blind or conquer with them, depriving a person of his spiritual freedom. The Lord says reproachfully (to the courtier of Capernaum): “You will not believe unless you see signs and wonders” (John 4:48). It is worthy of attention that the miracles of Christ, while admonishing some, only embittered others, and this is shown with particular clarity throughout the Gospel of John, especially expressively in the most stunning miracle of Christ - the resurrection of Lazarus, after which the enemies “set out to kill Him” (John 11:53). This property distinguished the miracles of Christ from those false miracles that have the goal only of blinding and enslaving human freedom, in general the manifestation of power not in the name of love for God and man, but out of selfishness, for the sake of self-glorification. Expressive in this sense is the Lord’s reproach to the people: “You seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate bread and were filled” (John 6:27). Satan wanted to persuade Christ to such miracles in temptations in the desert, and the Pharisees repeatedly tried to persuade Him to the same miracles - “signs” (in the bad sense) (Matthew 12:38-39): “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said: Teacher! We would like to see a sign from You - σημεῖον. But He answered them: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, and no sign will be given to it except the prophet Jonah” (the same Matthew 16:1-4. Wed. Luke 11:29-31). It is even more expressive in the Evangelist Mark 8, 11–12: “The Pharisees came out and began to argue with Him, and demanded from Him a sign from heaven, tempting Him. And He, taking a deep breath, said: Why does this generation require a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation.” The Lord performed miracles not in order to instill superstitious fear and subdue them, or in general to make them an instrument of His power in the world and in His kingdom. In this regard, one should understand the striking fact that the greatest abundance of miracles, according to the Gospels, refers to the first part of Christ’s earthly ministry, but gradually decreases as His suffering approaches. And the first facet here is the event on the way to Caesarea Philippi and the confession of Peter, after which the Lord reveals to the disciples that He is coming to suffer. True, after this there was the Transfiguration, and after it the miracle of the healing of a demoniac, then a few individual miracles (the stater in the mouth of a fish, the healing of the blind man of Jericho and the last general healing in the church of “the lame and blind who came to Him” (Matthew 21:14) after the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem), but the miracles are noticeably replaced by sermons, parables and speeches. The only things that stand on the verge of suffering are the significant miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus and then the curse of the fig tree, and the last miracle - the healing of the slave's ear. During the passion, miracles stop. Right now they could be “signs” performed for the sake of His protection, but the Lord rejects this protection: “or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will present to Me more than twelve legions of Angels”? (Matthew 26:53). (Here the providential activity of God performed through the Angels is indicated.) And, on the contrary, it is now that the demand for the signs with which Satan tempted Christ is repeated by the Jews with particular insistence: “Let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe in Him; I trusted in God, let him deliver Him” (Matthew 27:42–43). But the Lord, the Lover of Mankind, who performed miracles in the name of love for mankind, here, for the sake of the same love of mankind, does not protect Himself from death on the cross. In this regard, a general question arises, which has always been raised in Christology in connection with Luke. 2, 40, 52, which speaks of the human growth and strengthening of Christ and advancement in wisdom and age. Some of the fathers, when interpreting this text, do not consider it possible to allow for the true human maturation and development of Christ according to His humanity, others - on the contrary. It seems to us that it is consistent with the truth of the Incarnation with the acceptance of human nature, subordinate to temporal development and generally entering into the temporality of being, to accept the human development of the Lord to fullness and fulfillment (as it is said about us: “until we all come into the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, into a perfect man, to the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). But in connection with this, the question of His fulfillment by human power should also be raised, i.e., the working of miracles (unless the latter is attributed, following some theologians, exclusively to the divine nature, which we have already rejected). teachers in the church with the manifestation of His mind indirectly only confirms this idea). Miracles appear at the beginning of the ministry, along with the sermon, as a manifestation of the achieved fullness of strength and maturity. We are not able to establish any change in the power of miracles (as well as preaching) depending on internal reasons, firstly, because there is no strict chronological frame in the Gospels at all, and, secondly, the actions of Christ are determined by the attitude of the people towards Him with the growth of the inevitable conflict. One cannot escape the impression, noted mainly by unbelieving historians, that there is a difference between the beginning and the end of the Lord’s ministry, although it does not violate its unity: the beginning of the service takes place in brighter and more joyful tones than its second part with the increase in tragedy, and, accordingly, the words of the Lord from kind and forgiving become harsh, inexorable and judgmental (the last conversations of Christ according to St. Matthew and Luke). Although we cannot establish differences in the miracle-working power of Christ, nevertheless, the thought involuntarily suggests itself that the miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus, in its solemnity and symbolism (“the general resurrection before His passion, assuring you, raised Lazarus from the dead, O Christ God,” sings the Church), represents in some way the pinnacle of miracle-working, and together its limit is within the boundaries of the Savior’s earthly life, before His saving Resurrection (when “all authority in heaven and on earth has already been given to Him”). And to this is added the impression that this miracle required special effort and human strength, and the will of the Savior, and in the lengthy story about the resurrection we seem to be present at this struggle. Already far from Lazarus, He says to the disciples: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going to wake him up” (John. 11, 11), thereby demonstrating the will for his resurrection, and at the same time testifying, as with the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter (“the girl is not dead, but sleeps”), that this is not permanent death, but still a swoon of life, which only seems to a person to be death, although it actually turns into it. And then he once again confirms this will of His, telling the disciples: “Lazarus is dead. And I rejoice for you that I was not there, but let us go to him” (11, 14-15). Thus, He is already coming to resurrect him. Next, Jesus’ own excitement and grief is described, and in exceptionally strong terms: “When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He Himself was grieved in spirit and indignant” (11, 33–34), and, further, “Jesus shed tears” (11, 35), and, finally, Jesus, “again grieving inwardly, comes to the tomb” (11, 38). We are present here with the tension and growth of human sorrow and the compassion of Jesus. What follows is the greatest prayerful tension, which ends with a feeling of authenticity of a heard and fulfilled prayer: “Jesus raised his eyes to heaven and said: Father, I thank You that You heard Me” (11:41), and after this a miracle occurs. It seems to us completely impossible to allow here the “Nestorian” division of natures and their alternation: as a person, he cried, and as God, he resurrected; how man promised the resurrection, and how God accomplished it. Everything was the work of the God-man in the unity of His hypostasis and in the duality of His natures. those. not only divinely providential, but also humanly perfect, and we are present at this miracle, which is a manifestation of the power of God revealed in human will. In the story of John. 11 we have an image of the miracle of the resurrection, shown not only from the outside, but also from the inside, as it was performed by Christ himself, and it becomes clear that this highest miracle is also the last miracle, the limit of human power on this side of the resurrection of Christ. In the Gospel of John, the Lord speaks generally about His works ἔργα in a general sense. And, above all, He testifies that by His deeds He does the will of the Father. “The Son cannot do anything of Himself unless he sees the Father doing, for whatever He does, the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows Him everything that He Himself does, and will show Him greater works than these” (John 5:19-20. Comp. 10:25,37-8). Here we speak, on the one hand, about the intra-Trinity relationship, according to which the Son reveals the Father and has nothing in Himself as His own, and not the Father’s; on the other hand, that the human will of Jesus is completely obedient to the divine will revealed in Him. “The works that the Father gave Me to do, these very works that I do, testify to Me that the Father sent Me” (John 5:36. Wed. 14:10-11), was the Lord’s answer to Philip. (Wed. 15, 23). The main idea developed here is that, due to the unity of the Father and the Son, the works of the Son are also the works of the Father: “if I had not done among them works that no one else did, they would not have had sin, but now they have seen and hated both Me and My Father” (15, 24). And turning to His disciples, the Lord says: “Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, and if not so, then believe Me by the very works. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me will do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do, because I am coming to My Father” (14:11-12). The works here, firstly, are a revelation of God the Father and the Son, Divine love for people, and secondly, they are an expression of the truth of the sonship of man and in the proper sense by works, i.e. accomplishments. God gives the power to become children of God to those who believe in the Name of Christ (John 1:12), and by the power of this sonship of God the sons of God receive the power to do works. “which I create” and greater than these, for Christ ascended to the Father. So, here the works are not only miracles, but the whole calling of man in the world, as the son of God, a created god. This thought marks the transition to the last and most important question about the miracles of Christ, about their meaning for man. III. About human affairs What do the miracles of Christ mean, why are they signs and why are they powers? They are signs of God’s love for man, for God so loved the world that he sent His Son into it, and they are manifestations of the power of God in man, the works of the Son of Man and the Son of God, the God-man. In their content, miracles are deeds of love and mercy; in their meaning, they are manifestations of human power in the world, strengthened and enlightened by the power of God. Being divine by inspiration and providential will, they are human deeds performed within the limits of the world and humanity. Healing a person from spiritual and physical illnesses up to the removal of death through partial victory over it - these are the deeds that are significantly contained in the miracles of Christ. These tasks are human tasks, and these affairs are human affairs, and all of them are available to man, given and assigned to him, as a natural being, placed at the same time by God as the master of creation and endowed with the gift of compassionate love of man for man and for all creation. If we ignore the special miraculous ways of performing them, all these tasks do not exceed our human doing, they are human affairs. True, not all of them are accessible to human accomplishment, they are feasible for him. Until now, man cannot by natural means remove death and awaken him from mortal fainting, although he is already approaching this, just as he cannot overcome hunger, although he is looking for this, but all this is within the limits of human power. The proof of this is that all the miracles of Christ, in their content, could have been performed by holy men of God, strengthened by the grace of God; therefore, they relate to human power, that dominion over the world that was given by God to man in his creation. Exorcism? But even if we ignore the story of Tobit in the Old Testament, the New Testament church, starting with the apostles, is so in possession of this power that it has special grace and the ministry of exorcists (which in the primal church knew special bearers, which is nominally still preserved in the Catholic Church); and if we mean here the treatment of mental illness in general, then from time immemorial medicine and psychiatry have been and are engaged in it. Healing diseases? But we also have it in the Old Testament (healing of the leper Neman from leprosy by the prophet Elisha, etc.), but the New Testament church is full of “healings,” so St. Paul names, among other gifts, “healings” (1 Cor. 12:9, 30): healing of the lame (DA 3:1–4), healing of the sick and demon-possessed from the shadow of the apostle. Peter (5. 15–16), from the laying of handkerchiefs by the ap. Paul (19, 11–12). Resurrection of the dead? But this is also given to man, for in the Old Testament the prophet Elijah resurrected the son of a widow in Zarephath of Sidon (3 Ts. 17, 17-24), Elisha - the son of a Shunammite woman (4 Ts. 4, 17-37), and even from touching his bones a buried dead man came to life (4 Ts. 13, 21); in the apostolic church the resurrection of Tabitha the ap. Peter (D.A. 9, 36–41) and the apostle. Paul Eutychos (20, 9–12). This should also include the miracles of saints, for example, the healing of the youth St. Sergius. Finally, the Lord himself gave the commandment to the apostles, and through them to the entire Church: “heal the sick, raise the dead.” Miraculous saturation with multiplication of loaves? No matter how we understand this event. those. Whether we see here the advantage of a natural miracle of the multiplication of loaves or a loving impulse of sharing among ourselves everything available with the blessing of Christ, we must in any case remember that this miracle also has a parallel in the Old Testament: the multiplication by the prophet Elijah of a widow in Sarepta of Sidon with a handful of flour and a small amount of oil. so she and her house were fed for some time (3 Ts. 17, 12-16), the multiplication of oil in the widow’s house through the prophet Elisha and especially the miraculous feeding of 100 people with 20 barley loaves, with the remainder being left (4 Ts. 4, 1-7, 42-44), and also the transformation of a poisonous stew into harmless by adding a handful of flour (4, 39–42). Power over the forces of nature, wind and sea? But even in the Old Testament we have, not to mention the Egyptian plagues, the passage through the Red Sea as if on dry land (Exodus 14:21–29), the miracles of Moses in the desert, the parting of the waters of the Jordan and the fall of the walls of Jericho from the sound of trumpets (Joshua 3–4,6), the prophet Elijah’s bringing down of fire from heaven onto the sacrifice (3 Ts. 18), the division of the waters of the Jordan by stress mantle by the prophets Elijah and Elisha (4 Ts. 2, 4. 14); miracles of Elisha: healing water with a handful of salt, punishing children by being torn to pieces by two bears (4, 19–26), removing an ax from water (6, 1–7). The New Testament church testifies to various miracles in the area of ​​human power over nature (in particular, the walking on the waters of the Jordan by St. Mary of Egypt); We must not forget that, after all, Peter walked on the water at the command of Christ and began to drown only from fear (Matthew 14:28-30). What does this comparison tell us? Does it mean to diminish the miracles of Christ in their uniqueness, which consists not in miracles, but in the Wonderworker himself, as the appearance of the Perfect Man? No, but it quite clearly shows the infidelity of the theological thought that the miracles of Christ were performed only by divine power, and as if apart from His humanity and its powers. All the miracles cited were performed by holy men, although, of course, with the help of God. This comparison once again shows the humanity of Christ’s miracles and makes us see in them the revelation of a perfect Man. They do not exceed the measure of a person in his original state and purpose. “A man is not an imam” (John 5:7), exclaims the paralytic in the face of that Man who will heal him. It is this humanity of Christ’s miracles that must now be revealed in its meaning. And, first of all, it is necessary to establish their naturalness in the sense that they all constitute not a violation or abolition of the foundations of the universe laid down in it at creation, but their disclosure and application. They are supernatural only in the sense of a special way of their implementation, through the direct application of spiritual causality, but not in the sense of their content and accomplishment. They are all accessible to man in the sense that they can and should constitute a task for him, regardless of the means of implementation: miraculously, i.e. direct spiritual causation, the spiritual power of man over nature, which, although weakened by original sin, still remains inherent to a certain extent in man (Yoga!), and through the use of natural forces of nature, cognizable by the human mind, i.e., also, ultimately, spiritual causation. This is the power of man over nature, used for the sake of philanthropy. In fact, cannot and is not a person obliged to heal diseases of all kinds, and does he not do this? And have all the possibilities for this been exhausted, or, on the contrary, are they increasingly expanding? Can, further, this healing, which is, of course, a fight against death, although it does not defeat it, but still distances it, stop so as not to snatch its premature victims from the clutches of death? Although this has not yet been done, humanity is on the way to this conquest of nature. Is it possible to saturate the people with all available means, just like multiplying the loaves, i.e. does not the increase in the total amount of goods needed and available to man constitute a constant human concern, crowned by growing achievements? Isn’t it, finally, that mastery of the forces of nature in the most general sense also constitutes the constant striving of humanity, fulfilling here the command of the Lord: “subdue (the earth)” (Gen. 1:28)? In a word, there are no “deeds” of Christ that could not be addressed to the human will, as an example and a call, or as (to use Fedorov’s language) a “project.” And this is the first and most direct meaning of the Lord’s words about His works: “the works that I do, you will do also.” Rationalistic prejudice denies the miracles of Christ because of their, so to speak, physical impossibility: these deeds are impossible for him because they contradict the laws of nature and the very belief in them (as well as the story about them in the Gospel) simply presupposes the absence of scientific knowledge of the laws of nature. And vice versa, for superstition in a miracle there are simply no laws of nature. It takes place outside of them and on top of them. Disregarding the presentation of each individual case with all its inaccuracy (for sacred writers of everyday life never set out to describe a miracle as a physical experiment), in relation to the first we have to say that they judge with self-confident limitations. It seems to them that the current state of knowledge has already penetrated into all the possibilities of nature and has exhausted them, whereas it only opens them, and the area of ​​the naturally possible is expanding to such an extent that it is no longer possible with scientific conscientiousness to assert the physical impossibility and unnaturalness of this or that miraculous event. On the contrary, a superstitious understanding of miracles sins with disrespect for God's creation and its laws, since for it everything is generally possible above the world, regardless of the world. Such anti-cosmism in the understanding of a miracle makes the latter alien to man, dehumanizing him, so to speak, despite the fact that the Lord the Wonderworker is God and Man with both wills and energies. At most, man here is only a passive instrument through which the power of God acts. Therefore, it is necessary to understand a miracle as a natural and human event, i.e. as a manifestation of a natural law operating through man. But what then is miraculousness in general? It consists in its expediency; in a miracle, its spiritual causality is transparent, emanating from the human spirit and its freedom. But spiritual causality is by no means unnatural, for it is included by the Creator in the very foundations of the natural world. Man is a natural agent who sees through and awakens nature’s intelligence and converts this natural intelligence for his own purposes—for the humanization of nature. In this sense of spiritual causality in nature through freedom, all human activity in general is a miracle. But there are different degrees of this human action in nature, and we highlight some due to their deliberate expediency, which consists both in the sublimity of goals and in the special energy of implementation, and we call them miracles. Man is an embodied spirit, which means that the unity of natural and supernatural being is realized in him. The latter is divine in origin (for God himself breathed into Adam the soul). The first is destined to be deified through the infusion of the grace of God, and in the humanity of Christ this deification was accomplished to an absolute degree, for His incarnate hypostasis is the Divine Logos itself, and the Holy Spirit itself descended onto His human nature in baptism. However, the action of the spirit in the world through man, spiritual causation is limited by the creatureliness of man, who does not create the world himself, but has it as a given with its regularity: this latter is a condition for human life and for his action in general, for the manifestation of spiritual causation in the world. The spiritual causation of man in the world, however, is limited precisely by the state of fallen man, who through sin weakened his spirituality and the power of his influence in the world in the sense of spiritual causation, lost dominion over the world, became not a master, but a chained slave, although called to freedom and action in the world through spiritual causation. The Lord, in His incarnation, by virtue of its truth and authenticity, accepted the inviolability of this world with its own regularity, which for Him, although freely accepted by Him, was still a given. As a perfect man, the Lord revealed in the world the fullness of human reality, unimpaired by sin, and in this he was truly Man: “ecce homo.” True, having entered the world damaged by the sin of Adam and taking on flesh, although sinless, but weakened along with its properties (hunger, thirst, fatigue, suffering, even death), the Lord realized this perfect humanity through the path of the cross of His earthly life, thereby ascending from strength to strength. He controlled nature to a unique and exclusive degree, precisely by the power of His perfect humanity. These were the miracles of Christ, δυνάμεις, - powers that were manifestations of the dominant position of man in the world, however, in accordance with his nature and laws. Gratia naturam non tollit, sed perficit (Thomas Aquinas). It cannot be said that the Lord, by the power of omnipotence, performed all sorts of miracles, realizing in them possibilities inaccessible to ordinary human powers. As is clear from the previous analysis of the Gospel miracles, they were, in essence, very limited in their scope and did not represent “signs” for the sake of the manifestation of omnipotence, in a word, they were not a violation of the life of the world. The Forerunner said (in an anthropomorphic image) that “God is able to raise up children for Abraham from these stones” (Luke 3:8). However, did the Lord make people from stones? Did He transform a woman into a man? horse into donkey? did you move mountains? did fire bring down from heaven? etc., did he actually perform miracles for the sake of miracles? It is enough just to dwell on this in order to once again see the greatest simplicity and limitations of the Gospel miracles. The Lord, by His miracles, indicates the possibility of man’s spiritual action on nature, but He does not even mean by His example to exhaust or limit the range of these possibilities. This is precisely what His words mean: “The works that I do you will do also, and greater works than these you will do.” He entrusted His work to His humanity, showing the way and opening possibilities, but not limiting them. And this is “more than this”, these possibilities include the possession of the world, or, in Fedorov’s language, the “regulation of nature”, on the path of which man has entered, and is, perhaps, at the beginning. Human ways of mastering the world are left to man himself to find in himself and through himself, because they were inherent in him at his creation, and all creation awaits man for his own formation. With His miracles, Christ shows man the path of power over the world through the humanization of nature, and not escape from the world of hatred towards him - how could they have not seen this until now! Only due to the fact that all the miracles of Christ were considered only as a manifestation of His Divinity 10, and it was possible not to see this image and not to hear this call. However, man's place in the world is not determined solely by his connection with nature and his appeal to its laws. Man is a natural phenomenon, a fact of natural life, like stone, wood, etc. It, like every thing, is subject to the laws of this world and is no different from other things in this regard. This is how materialism judges it. However, such a meager concept of a person is possible only if we look at him from the outside, as a thing, closing our eyes to his real life, which is determined by the presence of a living and creative spirit in him. Moreover, this spirit is ontologically inseparable from the body, and in it and through it with the world. Man is therefore a creative principle in the world, belonging to it and acting within its boundaries. However, at the same time, he introduces into life the principle of causality through freedom, i.e. creation. But at the same time, this creativity is not extra-worldly, it is cosmic and sophistic in its foundations, and at the same time it is partial, imperfect, aggravated by an admixture of non-existence, from which the world was created by God. Nevertheless, creativity, as such, introduces something new into the world, which therefore cannot be understood as a mechanism in its completeness; the world is also realized by man. But man does not create a new world, but only realizes the created, given and, in accordance with this givenness, given. Sophia’s foundations for this creativity are as limitless as his achievements, for the world bears the image of the divine Sophia. Man is called to be the master of the world, and to that extent its creator, according to the power of free creative causality in the world. The character of this free causality can be understood in two respects: as the relation of the human spirit to the natural world and to the spiritual world. The human spirit is immersed in natural existence and connected with it. This is the primary fact from which we have to proceed. This connection in itself is the mystery of God’s creation, in which the image of God is imprinted, the life of the hypostatic Divinity in the divine Sophia. In human life this connection is revealed in the history of man in the world. The human spirit is connected to the natural world through the soul, which is the beginning of human natural life. It differs from the animal soul in its conformity to the spirit; it is a ψυχὴ νοερά, a rational soul, in contrast to the “unreasonable” animal soul. The hierarchical relationship of these principles in man is such that the spirit dominates the soul, which manifests its vital force in the natural world (“in the body”). However, in man, perverted by original sin, this hierarchical relationship was violated in the sense that the spirit fell into dependence on the soul, and through it on the body, the sensory-animal being gained dominance over the spiritual, and the power of the spirit was accordingly diminished. In his soul, a person carries the entire world law, which now dominates him, but over which he himself is called to dominate. The human spirit, since it is in a normal hierarchical relationship to the soul, has through it direct power in the world, moreover, without violating its natural law, but in fulfillment of it. Such a normal hierarchical relationship is absent in the fallen Adam, but it was realized in the New Adam, in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was truly a perfect Man and therefore had power over the world due to the obedience of nature to human freedom and its purposes. But this gift of miracles, of course, to a limited extent, is characteristic, as we have seen, of both the Old Testament righteous and Christian saints. Fundamentally, this same image of man’s dominant relationship to the world through the expediency of free causality is also inherent in the “regulation of nature” generally carried out by man, i.e. includes both the natural conquest of the world and the conquest of matter. This is the gift of miracles, revealed in the generic, collective life of humanity. The difference between miracles and all the miracles of the regulation of nature in this regard is not qualitative, but rather quantitative. Where a miracle worker heals with a word or a direct command of the spirit, medicine carries out the same command in roundabout ways and means based on medical science. The type of human relationship to the world is miracle-working, i.e. human power over the world through free causality. The Logos in man becomes the Logos of the world 11. But the human spirit, according to its nature, is determined not only in relation to natural being, but also to the spiritual world, albeit created, and, finally, to the supermundane being, to the Divine Spirit. The human spirit, despite its embodiment and connection with the natural world, is not closed to the spiritual world; on the contrary, it is always open to its influence. As created, i.e. not an absolute, not a self-sufficient spirit, it is always inspired from the spiritual world. The inspiration emanating from one spiritual being to another, is a manifestation of their being for each other, belongs to the very nature of the spirit. Contrary to Leibniz, the spiritual monad has its windows open. In other words, the created spirit lives not only by its own nature, but also by the forces and inspirations of other spiritual beings, and the spiritual isolation of the creative spirit is an ontological non-sens. The human spirit cannot remain empty, belonging exclusively to itself; it is an intelligible meeting place and struggle between dark and light forces, each striving, each in its own way, to direct a person in their direction. This does not at all mean that the human spirit itself is an empty place that is looking for filling. No, he is an individually qualified spirit, having his own life, waging a spiritual struggle for his own identity, choosing influences, and not just passively and powerlessly submitting to them. Among these possible influences, the first place belongs, of course, to divine inspiration, to what in religious language is called grace. Man is created in the image of God, and, as such, is the deliberate receptacle of the divine life and its inspirations. A person destined for deification in the fullness of his spiritual existence becomes involved in the divine life, without losing his own personal existence. Such an extremely deified Man, in whom all the fullness of the Divinity dwelt bodily, is the Lord Jesus Christ. As God, He had the divine life naturally; as a Man, He was completely deified, so that between His Divine and human nature, will and energy, with all their natural differences, there was no vital separation or confrontation, they were united in the single life of the God-Man. Jesus was the Christ - the Anointed One through the hypostatic descent and resting of the Holy Spirit on Him in baptism, and He accepted this deification of His human nature through the feat of His life, suffering on the cross and death. The fullness of deification was manifested in the resurrection, ascension, sitting at the right hand of the Father 12. But grace, as the active force of deification, changes the human spirit. She makes him different from himself, stronger, more powerful, more dominant in the world. A person blessed with grace receives the power to become a natural god, the ruler of the universe. His ability to be the logos of the world through spiritual causality, his liberation from captivity to the elements increases along with his deification. And this power of the spirit, which he receives not through training his natural powers (Yogism, occultism), but through grace, when manifested in relation to the phenomena of natural life, is miracle-working. Therefore, the Lord, according to His gracious, deified humanity, was a miracle worker, and that is why He calls upon gracious, adoring humanity to do the works that He created, not in the sense of repeating them, but having in them an image and an ideal task. This is expressed in Christ’s commandment about works, which the Lord repeatedly gave to his disciples, and in his farewell conversation made it, as it were, His testament: this is a text of paramount theological importance already quoted here many times: “The works that I do, you will do also, and greater than these you will do, because I am coming to My Father” (John 14:12). The words “as I come to My Father” mean, without a doubt, the fullness of the accomplishment of the redemptive feat and the power of the incarnation: through passion to glory, through death to resurrection and heavenly glorification, and through glorification “all power has been given to Me in heaven and on earth” (Matthew 28:18). all this in relation to the world and man means the foundation of the Church as the Body of Christ, with Christ living in it, with the power given by Christ to humanity and the “works” entrusted to it. This means the inspiration of Christ into humanity, accomplished by the Holy Spirit. Christ's humanity in the world is called to become a cosmourg, doing the works of Christ, revealing His miracles. “Truly I also tell you that if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in My Name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:19–20) 13. The Church is a grace-filled life in which, first of all, a person is saved from sin, receiving remission of sins: therefore, the Lord, in His miracles, combined forgiveness of sins, spiritual healing, with physical healing (cf., for example, the healing of the paralytic Mark 2:5-11); but it is together with the restoration of man to his strength. The path of human salvation, the decay of the old Adam in the New, is the assimilation of the grace of salvation and life in this grace, i.e. in faith and in deeds. Here we come to the last, final question - about salvation in works: in what works, and in works or in work? Do deeds have the meaning only of ascetic exercises for the soul, or do they also have a certain content? Here we must keep in mind both the personal path of each individual person in his spiritual destinies (for “the human soul is more valuable than the whole world”), and of the human race as a whole, for man is a tribal being. The gracious inspiration of goodness in a person gives him spiritual strength, which is absent in him: “the power of God is made perfect in weaknesses.” This power manifests itself not only in the personal spiritual achievements of the person himself, but also outside of him, in the entire natural and human world. Man is given the gift of surpassing himself. He creates things in the world by the power of spiritual causality, which means that he performs miracles, no matter what they are. And since he acquires this strength and inspiration from the grace of God, received in prayer, it is said that through prayer, by the power of God, a person can perform miracles (“move mountains”). Even more than that, any sincere prayer already performs a miracle, i.e. there is an action of spiritual causality in the world, even if we do not see its manifestations outside. However, a person cannot and should not make his achievements an independent object, for then he turns into a sorcerer looking for signs 14 . In other words, there is also dark inspiration, which can also provide strength to perform false signs, just as the greatest spiritual power is possible, which, however, does not manifest itself outwardly as direct spiritual causality in the world: John the Baptist did not perform miracles (John 10:41), and the Mother of God also did not work miracles during her earthly journey (at least within the Gospel story). In any case, seeking signs is a sign of lack of faith and is condemned by the Lord. However, posing the question of miracles in connection only with the destinies of an individual person is not sufficient, because a person’s relationship to the world is not only personal, but also social, carried out in the historical process. This attitude towards the world, mastery of it through spiritual causality and expediency, is the calling of the human race, constituting for it an inevitable condition of its very existence. In relation to the world, humanity is a multifaceted cosmourg, a “master” who masters nature and subordinates it to his own, human expediency. This attitude is inherent in a person, and it must be understood and comprehended religiously. And, first of all, it is wrong to separate and contrast both paths of causality - personal miracles and cosmourgic mastery of nature, but, on the other hand, both of them equally do not violate the boundaries of natural possibilities, they are naturally natural. And one can even say that one and the same action, for example, healing a sick person, can equally be a matter of personal miracle-working and scientific medicine - moreover, the same action for one era and in one setting can be a miracle-working, and at another time an everyday natural act (for example, seeing and hearing at a distance). Both miracles and cosmourgy belong to the same area - the spiritual causality of man in nature. In this sense, they cannot be opposed or preferred to one another, because each of them is given its own place and time 15. But human cosmourgy belongs to spiritual self-determination, for it can differ in its meaning: it can be a miracle-working in the Name of Christ, in fulfillment of His commandments, or it can be a further immersion in the world with the spiritual captivity of its elements, serving the lust of the flesh and hair, or, finally, it can become a false, atheistic miracle-working with false signs. Cosmourgy is also characteristic of natural man as connected with the world, and therefore, although it reveals the powers of natural man in nature, its humanization and spiritualization, it inevitably takes on a different character depending on one or another human inspiration. And this latter can be different, and threefold: firstly, humanity can be a cosmourgist, like the Church, in the Name of Christ, performing deeds of love and charity, and then cosmourgy becomes a Christian miracle-working, not personal, but general, churchly, and through cosmourgy the ecclesiasticalization of the world is accomplished. Secondly, humanity can make its cosmourgic power an instrument of serving its natural nature, damaged by sin, i.e. passions and emptiness. On this path and in this area, significant possibilities for humanizing the world and, in its own way, natural miracle-working can be achieved, however, spiritually it remains empty and sinful. Finally, cosmourgy can also become the path of fighting against God, satanic enmity towards God and showing signs of human power, man-theism. And since the human spirit, with a certain awakening, cannot remain neutral, the realized strength and achieved power become the throne of the “kingdom of the beast,” i.e. Godlessness. In the cosmourgic process, all three images of man’s relationship to the world struggle and simultaneously coexist. That spiritual struggle by which the world is torn apart, that spiritual tragedy that constitutes the content of history, is revealed here too, in human cosmourgy. Cosmourgy also belongs to the church, like all human life. Natural cosmourgy must be made Christian miracle-working, through its subordination to the spirit of Christ. This is what the Gospel miracles mean for us, what they talk about, what they call for: an effective attitude towards the world, towards cosmourgy, in the Name of God. “And if you ask anything (from the Father) in My Name, I will do it” (John 14:14). Salvation was preached by the Lord “by witnessing from God with signs and wonders, and various powers, and the dispensing of the Holy Spirit according to His will. For God did not subject the future universe to angels” (Heb. 2:3–5), but to man. “When he had subdued everything to him, he left nothing unsubdued to him. Now we do not see that everything has been submitted to him” (2:8). You can stop here. Gospel miracles represent individual benefactions, responses to human sorrow and need, “healings and benefits.” And for the entire human cosmourgic path they provide an image of charity in the name of merciful love. And this is more than enough to sanctify and comprehend human activity. IV. About the Resurrection of Christ Miracles are the works of God that are given to man. However, the next and final question arises: can these matters in their fragmentation be attributed to some general and unified matter, which includes and subordinates everything? And is it not this common deed, which, as such, surpasses in its community all individual deeds, that the Lord indicates when He says: “Ye shall do My works, and greater works than these shall ye do”? What could be greater than what He created? Here, of course, the difference is not quantitative, but qualitative. It is connected, therefore, with that event which itself contains the basis for this greater thing. This is the resurrection of Christ. We must not forget that the “works” were performed by Him during the days of His earthly ministry, even before the resurrection, after which He “comes to the Father” and acquires from God all power on earth and in heaven, and He imparts this power, or rather, its service, to His Church. What is the resurrection of Christ, considered as a miraculous act among the miracles of Christ? Is it one of them, even the highest, or does it not stand among them, being a Miracle in its own, unique, ontological sense? Yes, the Resurrection of Christ is an ontological miracle that takes us beyond the limits of this world, although it takes place in it, it is supercosmic in space. In order to more fully understand its special nature, let us first of all turn to what we find about it in the New Testament. Here we repeatedly encounter evidence of the resurrection of Christ, primarily as a fact: Christ rose from the dead (Matthew 28:6, Luke 24:34, Rom. 8:34, I Cor. 15:34). Texts of this nature do not contain an explanation of the fact itself, and sometimes only practical applications are given (I Cor. 15, Rom. 6, etc.). Further, the words of the Lord Himself contain repeated foreshadowing of His suffering and resurrection: “From that time Jesus began to reveal to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day rise again” (Matthew 16:21, Mark 8:31, Luke 9:22; 24:4, Matthew 17, 9; Mk. 9, 9, Mt. 17, 22–23; Mk. 10, 34). In all these texts, suffering, death on the cross and resurrection are taken in one common connection, as a single act in which suffering is the path to resurrection, and this is the final accomplishment and task of the entire earthly work of the Savior (and the disciples did not understand these words: “And they kept this word, asking each other: what does it mean to rise from the dead”? Mark 9, 10). Resurrection is the final purpose of the Lord's coming to earth. How did it happen? Was it a deed performed at the command of Christ, like His other miracles: “see.” cleanse yourself, get up and walk, get out,” etc., or it happened differently. than they are, not by Christ himself, or at least not directly by Himself. in the New Testament we have a whole series of texts that have the same content, express the same thought: the resurrection of Christ took place in this way, one hundred “God raised Jesus the Nazarene ἀνέστησε, breaking the bonds of death, because it was impossible for it to hold Him” (DA 2, 24, 32). This was said by Ap. Peter in his first speech at Pentecost, and the same thing was repeated by him in his speech after healing the lame: “This one God raised from the dead ὁ Θεὸς ἤγειρεν ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν D.A. 3, 15, “God raised up His Son Jesus” 3, 26. The same is repeated in the speech of the apostles Peter and Paul before the high priests (DA 4, 10) and in the speech of the apostle. Peter in the Sanhedrin (5, 30), in the speech of St. Peter to Cornelius (10.40), in the speech of the apostle. Paul in Antioch of Pisidia (13, 30, 32, 34, 37) and in Athens (17, 31). In a word, this is a feature generally characteristic of apostolic preaching. The same thought is expressed many times by St. Paul in his epistles (Rom. 4:24; 10:9; Col. 2:12; 2 Cor. 4:14; Gall. 1:1; Eph. 1:20; 2:5–6; 1 Thess. 1:10; cf. 1 Peter 1:21). In particular, in Ap. Paul we also find the following thought: “If the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then the Risen Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through the Holy Spirit who lives in you” (Rom. 10:9), and again: “Christ is raised ἡγέρθη from the dead by the Glory of the Father” δια τῆς δοζης τοῦ Πατρός (Rom. 6:4). This also includes the text of Heb. 5, 7, where salvation from death (i.e. through the resurrection) is presented as the work of the Father in response to the prayer of the Son: “He in the days of His flesh, with strong crying and tears, offered prayers and supplications to him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard for his reverence” (Heb. 5, 7). The text of John also indirectly refers to this. 5:26: “As the Father has life in himself, so he gave to the Son to have life in himself.” The general idea that is expressed in these texts is that the resurrection of Christ was accomplished through the resurrection of Him by the Father, His will and glory (divinity), and that Christ was resurrected by the Life-giving Spirit. How can we understand this thought in relation to the two natures of Christ and His two wills and energies? How is their relationship determined here in the main work of Christ, in His resurrection? 16 How can we see in the resurrection the work of human nature, which could perform other miracles by human power, and could this human power in Christ accomplish its own resurrection, remaining within the limits of humanity? This is the ultimate question in the theological understanding of the resurrection, in connection with the general doctrine of the miracle. Here we must ascend in thought to the foundations of the Incarnation, according to which Christ accepted true humanity, except for sin. His human nature was the same as the primordial Adam, with all its possibilities, but also with all its boundaries. However, it even differed from the nature of the primordial Adam, since it carried within itself the natural consequences of his fall, which retained their strength even with the complete sinlessness of Christ: hunger, thirst, fatigue, etc. - and therefore the sinless flesh, received by Christ from fallen and weakened humanity, was even different in condition in comparison with what the flesh of Adam was before the Fall. However, this difference did not change the essence, because it did not erase the image of God in fallen man. What were the possibilities and limits for the human nature of Adam, in particular in relation to death? Man was created perfect, however, this perfection was not final in Adam. The spirituality of the flesh was given to him only as natural harmony by the power of the creative act of God, but it was not assimilated by him. Man still had to use his own freedom through spiritual causality to master his flesh, to spiritualize it, and for this purpose the commandment was given to him by God, which shows what he still needed to acquire through freedom. Primordial man, although he was not created mortal (as Catholic theology teaches), he was not immortal either. Death, as a possibility (posse mori et non mori), lay in his bodily nature, not yet spiritualized by man himself, and this possibility became a reality as soon as the spiritual balance in him was disrupted by the power of sin. If Adam had not fallen, he would have continued to live indefinitely, without being subject to death, but also without the power of immortality, which is not contained in human nature itself. (Of course, we cannot know the ways of God in which a positive victory over death would be achieved in him). This potentially mortal, although innocent of death, sinless flesh of Adam was accepted by the Lord. Natural death was not characteristic of her, just as it was not characteristic of Adam’s flesh, but the possibility of death was contained in her, just as in that one. But such a death could only be violent. Christ could only “be killed,” precisely because of His true humanity. This death, like any human death, was as natural as it was unnatural, due to the fact that everything that exists was created for life, but God did not create death. As an unnatural and, so to speak, ontologically negative act, death for every living being is a disease of illness and the suffering of suffering, which dissolves the ontological bonds of the being, the connection between soul and body. The spirit is immortal, and it does not die, but “returns to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7). (Why does the Lord cry out in groaning on the cross: “Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit” (Luke 23:46). Death separates the soul, which is animated by the spirit and animates the body, from the body, which becomes a corpse and dust, and this deprivation of the bodily attachment of the soul to the world, the transformation of energy into potency, by virtue of which a person from an embodied being becomes an incorporeal spirit - which is unusual for him - introduces an internal break in human life. It is very important to establish where exactly this division takes place? It passes not between the spirit, on the one hand, and the rational soul and body, on the other (this would mean disincarnation, that is, no longer death, but the destruction of a person), but between the soul and the body, and the connection between the spirit and soul remains unbroken in the afterlife. (Such a trichotomous understanding of death is expressed in the church song: “in the grave carnally, in hell with the soul, like God,” etc.). Based on what has been said, we can approach the question of what was the death of Christ in His divine-human being, and in connection with this, His resurrection? It is absolutely obvious, first of all, that death, like suffering, does not belong to His divine nature, which in His eternal life resides above time. The Divinity of Christ creatively contains and providentially allows these events to occur, without itself mixing with them, remaining generally above the temporal process. We can say that God in the God-man is not born, did not suffer, did not taste death. did not resurrect and did not ascend to heaven, for he always remains in the equanimity of eternity. But the hypostasis of the Logos, as a human hypostasis, becomes the subject of human life in all its fullness, and therefore of human death in all its power and horror of touching non-existence, from which man was called to life by the creative act of God. And one can even say that the death of Christ was the most terrible of all deaths, for it was violent and unnatural: a sinless person should not have died at all. If a sinful man dies from the day of his birth, for illnesses are the beginning of death, then the New Adam, a sinless man, did not know illnesses and was alien to this internal constant death, which was constantly anticipated, to a certain extent, before its onset. He knew the state of human “growth”, before the onset of perfect age, but without the reverse process of decline. The power of life and the ontological love of life were therefore greater in him than in all people. And therefore He could only experience the approach of death spiritually: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death” - ἕως θανάτου (Matthew 26:30). And the Gethsemane struggle is not only the redemptive sorrow of compassionate love for human sins, but also the resistance of a living human being to death, spiritual agony: “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me” - “however, not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). And we see this in the abandonment of God on the cross, which is dying, the feeling of encircling non-existence and immersion in it. This is the real gate of death, behind which a new life is already opening beyond the grave, but which are inevitable and constitute the actual horror of death: “about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice: Or, Or, Lima sabachthani, i.e. My God, my God, has forsaken me everywhere... And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and gave up the ghost” (27, 46, 50). Undoubtedly, here we have a terrible picture of genuine human dying with its horror, moreover, in extreme tension. Perhaps it will occur to someone that death is not always so painful, and there are quiet and peaceful deaths without agony, without horror (although a person is not allowed to see to the end here in order to judge what happened on the threshold of death). To this it must be said that in general there has not been and could not have been a human death more, so to speak, profound and terrible, more unnatural, than this death from all the undiminished fullness of life. In this death, a created possibility is realized, but there is no necessity: from the point of view of the human nature of Jesus, it might not have happened: “Therefore the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life in order to take it again; I have received this commandment from My Father” (John 10:17–18). However, the voluntariness of death in fulfillment of the will of the Father does not abolish either its unnaturalness or its reality. Christ's acceptance of true humanity, i.e. created nature, which arose from non-existence and ontologically participated in death, is not revealed in its truth in anything so much as in His death; but on the contrary, incarnation without the acceptance of death would turn out to be decorative, docetic. On the contrary, we can say that in His life Christ met Death in all its power, which did not stop before consuming this perfect, but still created Man in His humanity. She revealed her power over His creation, and if the New Adam in His humanity contained all human nature, then His death was an all-human death, of all Adam, Old and New: Heb. 2, 14–16. 17 This authenticity of death does not in the least contradict the fact that it was a free sacrifice, pre-eternally accepted in God’s council and in agreement with His human freedom. The shadow of death falls on His earthly life before it occurs. The Lord knew in His God-manhood, i.e. both according to divine knowledge, and according to human, prophetic insight that death awaits Him, and anticipates this both His disciples and the whole people, telling them repeatedly about the sign of the prophet Jonah and about His three-day stay in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40) and the three-day destruction and restoration of the church (John 2:19-22) (which was shown about Him false witnesses in court). But this foreknowledge by the Lord of His death in no way destroys its reality and power, just as the Lord’s sufferings did not become any less genuine because they were foreshadowed by Him. So, the death of the Lord, of course, not according to God, but according to His human nature, was a genuine human death, consisting in the dissolution of soul and body, and this was the death of His humanity, the subject or spirit of which was the Logos himself: in this quality of his human hypostasis, God himself died in man, the human death of human nature. The fullness of death is also manifested in its three-day period: it was not a mortal faint, but a real separation of the soul from the body, during which the soul had its own life in the afterlife, descended into hell with preaching to the dead. In triday (in triduo) there is some mysterious meaning of the fullness of death, its certain maturation, only after which comes resurrection. During the third day, the body of the Savior was dead in the same way as any human corpse, although it did not become a corpse, i.e. did not undergo corruption (DA 2, 31, 13, 37, Ps. 15, 10). This does not diminish the fullness of death, which consists in the separation of soul and body that has occurred here. The human spirit, although it is united with the body only through the soul, however, in this life it acquires a certain connection directly with its body, which can persist even after death: although this is not life, it is some imprinting of the earthly dust by the spirit. This anticipation of the resurrection, although in itself powerless to bring it about, is, one might say, the potential for resurrection. This connection, which is more incomprehensible, means that death for a person is still not disincarnation. The spirits of the dead, preserving the memory of their body, although in actual state they are similar to disembodied spirits, nevertheless differ from them precisely by this connection, as the potential of incarnation, carried out in a future resurrection, and in relation to the flesh it is expressed in a kind of imprinting or spiritualization of matter. In fact, a paradoxical relationship emerges: death destroys the connection between the soul and the body, i.e. stops the action of the principle that gives life to the body, but it does not abolish some connection between the spirit and the body, although this connection is not the life of the body. The spirit lives in the body only through the soul, the connection with which, although no longer able to realize life, the spirit does not break even after death. The spirit of the deceased, being inseparably united with the soul, also maintains a connection with the body. In this sense, the body of every person after his death, although in the corpse state it is no longer a body, is still a relic (as it is called in the Trebnik). The relics are the former body, which, having become a corpse, decomposes, returns its substance to the natural elements, but in some part of it (the grain, the primary atom) retains a connection with the spirit, and it is all the more real, the greater the power of the spirit over the body in life. Therefore, in holy relics this connection with the spirit of the deceased is felt more directly, on which their veneration is based. 18 The body of the Lord in the third day was also in the state of holy relics, being generally their prototype. The connection of the body with the divine spirit, acquired by the power of this spirit over the body and soul in the earthly life of the Savior, became so indestructible that the body of Christ, even being dead, as abandoned by the soul, did not become a corpse, i.e. did not “saw decay,” and in this sense (but only in this) was not dead, being, as it were, in a state of deep fainting, “sleeping,” as the church song says: “having fallen asleep in the flesh as if dead.” This incorruptibility of the Savior’s body is a twofold consequence of both the power of the Divine Spirit who dwelt in it and the special nature of the death of the New Adam, which, being unnatural for Him due to His sinlessness, was violent, and therefore could not go as deep in the sense of destroying the connections of the spirit with the body, as in every person. However, the difference between the death of Christ and any human death is limited only by this incorruptibility of the body of Christ. Therefore, the body of Christ was hidden from the face of the earth in the tomb, like that of a dead man. Now we return to the main question, what was the resurrection of Christ in relation to both of His natures? From the dominant point of view, no question exists here, so in patristic writing (even in the scholastic taxonomist St. John of Damascus) there is no special consideration of it, and in fact the indicated duality of texts about the resurrection remains unnoticed. It is accepted without much discussion that Christ was resurrected by His divine power, so that “the resurrection is a document of the true God” (Vl. Solovyov). But such an understanding is, of course, actual monophysitism, in which the participation of human nature is reduced to pure passivity, i.e. is simply missing. On the other hand, such a simplified opinion directly contradicts the texts that say that the Father raised Jesus by His Spirit, i.e. The resurrection of Christ is depicted not as an act of Jesus, although by divine nature, but as an act of the Father and with Him the Holy Trinity - in a certain sense, over Jesus. Both sides of the issue are organically connected. Let's start with the first one. We considered the miracles of Christ as the actions of His human nature, deified and anointed by the Spirit, within the limits of life and the laws of this world, although they expanded the boundaries hitherto accessible to man. Can these boundaries be pushed even further to make room for a human victory over death, which would not be simply a temporary resurrection of the dead about to be swallowed up again by death, but the achievement of a new, immortal life? Obviously they can't. Death is not something episodic in life that can be overcome (like diseases), but it is its dark foundation: life, called out of non-existence and therefore deprived of unconditional stability, once losing this balance, became essentially mortal life, and this is no longer an episodic state, but the main quality of life. It is no longer possible to overcome it from the inside, for here lies the metaphysical boundary of life. What is needed is an ontological change in the very quality of creation, which it cannot do on itself, i.e. a new creative act on creation is needed, such a new action of the Creator that would return the fallen creature to its original state, and even moreover, would give it the highest degree of spirituality, even absent in the latter. This transition from posse nonmori to non posse mori can only be a new creative act of the Creator over creation, which presupposes not only the providential activity of God in the world, supporting, preserving and directing it within its own limits, but the creative one, which takes the world beyond these limits. Thus, we have here an act of wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator, which appears in the creation of the world. However, there is a significant difference here. God creates the world from nothingness by His command, and nothing heeds this command and obediently fulfills it - the world arises. In this first creation, all activity belongs to the Creator, while creation is characterized by complete passivity, befitting non-being, which has nothing in itself and is only a metaphysical place, or, according to Plato, a container (ἐκμαγεῖον) of creatures. But with the new, second creation, which we have in the resurrection, in place of the emptiness of non-existence there is already a created world and man in it. And the Lord does not abolish His creation, endowing it with the power of His eternity, the stability of being, and therefore, with this new act of creation, the Creator no longer creates from nothing, but transforms, creating a new creature from the old creature, interacting with it without its destruction, i.e. ontological violence against her, but with her metaphysical superiority. We have the first act of a new creative action in the world already in the Incarnation, namely in the Annunciation and the Nativity of Christ: the Father sends the Son to be born of the Virgin by the Holy Spirit, and the Virgin on behalf of creation said: behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to Thy word, and the Annunciation and the Nativity of Christ were accomplished. In relation to the world, the latter is a new creative act of God, surpassing the world, and in this sense is an absolute miracle. And the second similar, connected with it and already final, absolute miracle is the Resurrection of Christ, which is also a creative act of God in the world and, as such, is performed by the entire Holy Spirit. Trinity. The Lord was resurrected by divine power, everyone agrees on this. However, this usually refers to the action of the divine nature in Christ, by virtue of which Christ himself raises himself from the dead, i.e. resurrects, but we do not resurrect. However, according to the testimony of the Word of God, He does not resurrect himself, but is resurrected by the Father through the Holy Spirit. This means that the resurrection was the work of the entire Holy Trinity, just like the creation of the world: the Father commands the Son and accomplishes it by the Holy Spirit. This is the action of the Holy Trinity. This does not mean, therefore, that the Son in the resurrection only had to fulfill the will of the Father without his own participation in it. This reveals the intrahypostatic life of the saint. The Trinity, in which the beginning, the will, belongs to the Father, the fulfillment to the Son, the accomplishment to the Holy Spirit (“for the Father loves the Son and shows Him everything that He does.” John 5:20). Like “the one and only St. Trinity,” and the Son resurrects Himself, however, as God the Creator, and not as a hypostasis of human nature by its power. In the Resurrection of Christ, divine power is imparted to man through a new creative act, which is expressed in the resurrection of Christ. Therefore, the future resurrection of all humanity, which was accomplished in Christ, is no longer carried out by a special creative act of the Father and the Holy One with Him. Trinity (although it is spoken of in application to man: cf. 1 Cor. 6:14; 2 Cor. 4.14; Rom. 8:4), but Christ in His providential activity: “For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so the Son also gives life to whomever He wants... the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and having heard it, they will live. For just as the Father has life in Himself, so He gave also to the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:21, 25-26). "I will raise him up on the last day." “And just as in Christ all die, so in Christ all will live, each in his own order: Christ the firstborn, then those who belong to Christ at His coming” (1 Cor. 15:22-23). New creative act of St. The Trinity, which is the resurrection from the dead, in contrast to the creation of the world from nothing, presupposes a certain interaction between the Creator and creation. What is the latter's participation? According to the testimony of Ap. Peter, “God raised Him up, breaking the bonds of death, because it was impossible for it to hold Him” (DA 2, 24). Why is this so? What is this necessity for the resurrection of Christ according to His humanity? Death turned out to be possible for the God-man not because it had a sufficient basis for itself in His personal existence, as it has power in relation to the entire Old Adam and in him every individual human personality. On the contrary, due to His personal sinlessness, He should be free from death, at least like the primordial Adam before the Fall. But since He accepted the nature of the Old Adam, already weakened by sin and becoming mortal, then along with its weakness He accepted death (Phil. 2:7-8). Thus, the death of Christ contained this contradiction: it was a manifestation of the life of the race contrary to the life of the Person, and this alone is the reason why “it was impossible for death to restrain Him”: the personal principle fights with the generic and overcomes it. There was nothing in the life of the holy soul of Christ that could weaken its power over the body and its life-giving power. She was worthy of immortality, for she was obedient to the Divine Spirit that revived her. The Lord walked His entire earthly path in complete obedience to the will of the Father, and His human will and action were completely in agreement with this will, despite the fact that this agreement was already as natural and painless as for the primordial Adam before the Fall, but was aggravated by all the weakness of damaged human nature. It was necessary to overcome and bend this will in a struggle even to the point of bloody sweat: “not as I want, but as You want.” And if during the entire earthly journey to Calvary He could say about Himself: “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work” (John. 4:34), then the end and completion of this path was the free acceptance of passion and death, which He was not worthy of, for they did not correspond to His sinless nature. And yet, in obedience to the will of the Father, He remained to the end in unshakable acceptance of Adam’s nature and without any desire to surpass, remove or diminish its weight with the power of the Divine (“or do you think that I cannot beg My Father, and He will present Me with more than 12 legions of angels? How will the Scriptures be fulfilled, that this must be so?” (Matthew 26, 53-54). And there was no other There is no limit to this obedience except death, by which it was completed and exhausted. In this obedience to the will of the Father, which became the own human will of the Son, Christ demonstrated the complete dominion of the spirit over the soul and body, and thereby realized the internal norm according to which Adam was created through the spirit and had to become a spiritual, immortal man. However, his acceptance of Adam’s nature doomed him to death and despite his personal one. victory over the flesh. Christ shared death with the entire human race, and this was the last tribute to the authenticity of the incarnation. And this death was more terrible and painful than that of any person, for at the same time the bonds of life were severed, which had not been broken by anything from the inside. Just as bodily suffering and wounds of the most pure body caused torment incomparable to any other human torment, and just as moral torment from human sin and malice was also more terrible for sinless, perfect holiness than for any person, so the death of Christ is the most tearing and terrible of all the deaths by which humanity dies. Nevertheless, just as in Adam’s nature there was no longer the power of immortality, so by nature it was not in the human nature of Christ. On the cross, the connection between soul and body was severed by death, and the soul of Christ remained united with the Logos without a body. She was worthy to have this power of immortality due to her holiness, agreement with the Divine Spirit, especially since immortality was originally destined for man if he had not lost it, for “God did not create death” (Wis. Sol. 1, 13). Christ deserved victory over death by His feat, for “He in the days of His flesh, with a strong cry and tears, offered prayers and supplications to him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard for (His) reverence” (Heb. 5:7), and He could pray for Himself: “I glorified You on earth, completed the work that You charged Me to do, and now glorify Me, You, Father.” (John 17:4-5). And the soul of Christ receives this power of resurrection from God: God resurrects Christ, and Christ is resurrected by the power of His soul over the body - resurrection is also resurrection. This communication of the power of immortality to the human soul, perceived into the hypostatic unity of the Logos, is the creative act of God over human nature, its deification, through the communication to it of the power of immortality in the body. It is thereby also his glorification: “now is the Son of Man glorified” (John 13:31). Ethereal spirits are immortal by nature, due to the simplicity and uncomplicated nature of their ontological composition. They do not die, because there is nothing to die in them, and there is no possibility of dying, even when spiritual dying occurs in them, and angels become demons. Man could become mortal precisely because of the complexity of his ontological composition and the instability of his ontological balance, for in this composition the spirit is connected through the soul with the body, through which it is connected with the whole world. And the power of immortality in man in this sense is different than that of angels, p.ch. stems not from the absence of flesh, but from mastering it, spiritualizing it. Therefore, the resurrected body is a spiritual body. This is not new flesh or a new world, but renewed, transformed, spiritualized, changed not in its substance, but in state. The human being of Christ was deified through a hypostatic union with the Logos, for “in him dwelt the fullness of the Divinity bodily” (Col. 2:9). From the side of the hypostatic union of the divine and human nature in Christ, of course, there is no difference in the degree of deification: the same Logos was the hypostasis of Christ in His birth, baptism, and death. But the same cannot be said regarding the degree of deification of human nature in the sense of the ability to accept the power of this deification. It is human nature to live in time, to grow and develop. Therefore, our Lord, as a Man, passed through different ages, which corresponded to different degrees of completeness in the revelation of human nature, different degrees of deification: one of such obvious facets is baptism, then, perhaps, transfiguration, and perhaps also glorification before suffering (at the appearance of the Hellenes, according to Evangel. John 12:20-33). It is remarkable that the approach of each of these facets is accompanied by the action of the entire saint. Trinity: the word of the Father and the explicit (or implicit) action of the Holy Spirit. The same facet, surpassing all others in its significance, is resurrection. This action would not have been realized if man had not been ready to accept it in his human maturity and his creaturely freedom. But when human nature in Christ became extremely mature, perfected and became worthy of this gift, it was given the fullness of divine life in deification. The human nature of Christ receives the power of resurrection. His soul, spiritualized by the Logos, received the power to return His body: “His soul was not left in hell, and His flesh did not see corruption” (DA 2, 31, Ps. 15, 10). In this body death is defeated, and the non-existence from which it was created is completely abolished by divine fullness. This is a new enlightened body, and although the Lord worked miracles during His earthly ministry, only now does He Himself testify to the accomplishment - after the resurrection: “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18, cf. in the speech of the Apostle Peter: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, Lord and Christ” D.A. 2:36). The Resurrection of Christ, accomplished by the power of God in a human being worthy and capable of receiving it, can be compared with the Annunciation and is, as it were, a new act in the incarnation itself, its completion, for the human being becomes completely transparent to divine life. And if man was created in order to be God by grace, then the perfect Man in Christ is God already by the immutable unity of His human life with the Divine life. The temporality of His human existence is abolished in the fullness of deification, and the aeviternitas of humanity is identified with the aeternitas of divinity, in the unity of created and uncreated eternity. This fullness of the deification of human nature in Christ, which is also his glorification, is indicated in the high priestly prayer of Christ as the highest goal of the incarnation: “Father! The hour has come: glorify Your Son, that Your Son also may glorify You, just as You gave Him power over all flesh. And now glorify Me, Father, with You, with the glory that I had with You before the world was” (John 17: 1-2, 5). The Lord remained in the tomb for three days, and this three days, so persistently predicted by Him, is the sacred period of completeness, both for His mysterious stay with His soul in hell, and for His resurrection. This triday was the time when His human soul, being separated from the body, but maintaining hypostatic unity with the Logos, received the power of resurrection. This three-day period, closed for us with a veil of impenetrable mystery, is a certain essential part of the time in the saving incarnation of God. We can glimpse in the fullness of this period a certain maturation of the soul towards its acceptance of the power of resurrection, which cannot be thought of only as an external act, deus ex machina, but as a creative revelation of the primordial powers of human nature under the life-giving rays of the vision of God by the soul, freed from the body that has not yet been transformed by the resurrection. And, like everything human, this accomplished act presupposes a certain period for itself, it is accomplished in time, which does not yet end for the God-man with death on the cross. This time does not end for Him even after the resurrection, although Christ’s humanity is already entering here into new conditions of existence in the resurrected glorified body. It is here that a new fulfillment of a period begins, a new time, these are those mysterious 40 days during which the Lord remains in His resurrection, if not on earth, then above the earth, if not with the disciples and not with people in general, then still appearing to them. He himself testifies to Mary Magdalene about the meaning of these days: “I have not yet ascended to My Father,” but “I am ascending to My Father and your Father” (John 20:17). And only after completing this 40-day ascent, the Ascension occurs, i.e., the time for Christ’s humanity already ends, and His life is immersed in the life of the Holy Trinity, however, we also have the last time of accomplishment, already in heaven, after the Ascension: this is the ten days before Pentecost, after which Christ, “begging the Father,” sends from Him the Holy Spirit to His disciples. After this, time in the humanity of Christ completely dissolves into eternity and flows into it. However, for us, for His earthly humanity, time remains, and times and deadlines remain. Christ has risen and in Christ all humanity has been resurrected, which, however, still lives the mortal life of the Old Adam. There is an ontological discontinuity (transcensus) between the risen, glorified humanity of Christ and our humanity, which cannot be filled by any movement from one to the other. But together there remains an internal connection, moreover, the indestructible unity of the Son of Man with the human race, according to the promise: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age,” according to His stay on earth for 40 days after the Resurrection, according to His presence in the Eucharistic body and blood and His presence in the world in the blood and water poured out from the rib. 19 Christ lives in the individual (Gal. 2:20) and in His humanity and acts in him, giving him new strength. And Christ leaves to His humanity, the Church, in a farewell conversation, in the person of His disciples, the following covenant and promise: raising His own affairs to the Father, He calls for faith in Him according to His very works. “And if you ask my Father anything, I will do it, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:11-14). “The Comforter Spirit, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My Name, will teach you all things and remind you of everything that I have said to you” (14:26). He “has guided you into all truth, for he will not speak from himself, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will tell you the future (τὰἐρχόμενα) (τὰἐρχόμενα) (τὰἐρχόμενα) will tell you” (16, 13). “And so I told you before it happened, so that you would believe when it comes to pass” (14, 29). The farewell conversation contains not only great promises, but it also calls for great works, the image of which the Savior gave (“if I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not have had sin” John 15:23). So, is there any relationship between the earthly life of mankind with its deeds and its future resurrection, which took place in the resurrection of Christ? We cannot affirm a direct connection, for here there is a transcendence, an absolute miracle, a new creative act of God, but we cannot completely eliminate such a connection, for it is not the new that is resurrected, but this same earthly humanity. However, we cannot realize this connection for ourselves with our thoughts, for here is a miracle that breaks our thought with its law of continuity, logical and natural. The resurrection cannot enter our consciousness as a goal, as one of the goals, albeit the last, but it cannot be eliminated from it, as a guiding idea, as an ideal of reason (Kant). It is unattainable and impracticable by human forces alone within the confines of the earthly world with its causality, which must also be transformed, become a new heaven and a new earth, for God, who raised Christ, transforms and resurrects, Christ resurrects us (John 5:20-30). But does this eliminate the connection between the life of this age and the resurrection? Is it possible to understand resurrection only as a unilateral act of God, saving divine violence over creation, due to some divine arbitrariness, outside of interaction with creation? Did not the very coming of Christ into the world take place in the fullness of time and timing, did it not presuppose for itself human accomplishments and achievements throughout all of humanity and in the Old Testament church? And, on the other hand, does the history of the church exist only to prepare the coming of the Antichrist with all corruption and unbelief, and in general does it ultimately come down not even to a pure zero of good, but to a minus? Of course not. Even if this result is the last division, then it is also the last accomplishment. And if so, then all human deeds to which Christ calls us and gives us an example in His miracles, they all have to do with the end, i.e. to the resurrection, from the human side they lead to it. This does not eliminate the action of the Father’s omnipotence over the world, but it is not an ontological rape of creation. Therefore, just as deeds have their integral in the Deed, so do miracles in the Miracle. We cannot determine their immediate relationship, not only because divine accomplishment is inaccessible to man, but also because here we are dealing with the creative tasks of man, where freedom and inspiration operate. What should be done, but may not be done by man, is not likely to be known in advance, for it is new in history. Here, foresight and prophecy naturally fall silent, and only the commandment of creativity and its supreme goal speaks. It is not given to a person to know in advance what humanity achieves or does not achieve on its path. Moreover, here we have the presence of different possibilities, and therefore the conditionality of prophecy. One can only say what he has been given to achieve. Human works serve life, which is the abiding miracle of God in this world, and must lead this temporary life to resurrection life, which is the Work of God over human works. The general resurrection is therefore the integral of all human history and all human affairs, realized by God. About the heavenly Jerusalem it is said: “The saved nations will walk in its net, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory and honor into it. And they will bring into it the glory and honor of the nations” (Apoc. 21, 24, 26). In fact, causality, in Kant’s formal understanding of it, where it is a simple succession of events, the fullness of time (post hoc - propter hoc), is not yet revealed from the side of the specific fullness of the causal series and is considered only as a fact or product, but not as an act or agent. Causality is not a mechanism of a number of physical causes (such as a solar eclipse, according to Kant). It is worth mentioning that the devil, during the temptations in the desert, tempted Christ with the power of false signs, i.e. black magic, promising Him the power to turn stones into bread and overcome the weight of his body, and the Lord rejected this as a temptation, because in terms of its purpose it would be black magic, false signs. But He Himself performed these very things as true miracles in the name of God, for He multiplied the loaves and walked on the waters. As stated in the message of Pope Leo the Great to Flavian: “one of them shines with miracles, the other is subjected to humiliation. Hungering, thirsting, getting tired and sleeping is obviously human nature. But to feed five thousand people with five loaves, but to give living water to a Samaritan woman, but to walk with feet that do not submerge on the surface of the sea... to forbid the storm, this is undoubtedly characteristic of God... It is not characteristic of the same nature to cry out of pity for a dead friend and with a powerful word to call him again from the four-day grave.” Therefore, it is impossible to accept the opinion of St. John of Damascus, who says (Accurate Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV, XVIII, p. 327): “Christ did other things for show: as, for example, he asked about Lazarus: where they laid him (John XI, 34), approached the fig tree (Matthew VIII, 59), prayed (John XI, 42)... He had no need of this and the like, neither as God nor as a man, but acted humanly, where need and benefit required, so, for example, He prayed to show that He was not an opponent of God, honoring the Father as His Cause.” In certain features, others see a direct similarity of individual miracles to the new creation of God, in particular the healing of a blind man through spitting and a man born blind through clay from the earth: God again creates the human body from the earth, in its certain damaged parts. The manifestation of the power of healing given to the apostles should also be included in this category of miracles, about which it is said: the disciples “cast out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them” (Mark 6:12). The Evangelist John here again uses this event to move from this prototype to the prototype, and in the 6th chapter he sets out the Eucharistic speech of Christ. From this, by the way, it follows that the Evangelist himself does not classify the Lord’s insight into the souls of the apostles – Peter (John 1:42) and especially Nathanael (1:48) as one of Christ’s miracles. In the Gospel of John, in accordance with its general theological character, and in the story of miracles, the divine nature of the Lord is indicated, as well as the special symbolic significance of “signs”, according to which almost every miracle is followed by a teaching about this miracle, its, so to speak, theology. This happened after the healing of the paralytic (John 5:17–47), the feeding of the people with five loaves (6:26–58), the healing of the man born blind (9:3–5, 39–41) and, of course, the resurrection of Lazarus (11:25–27). In the Gospel of John we also have the general teaching of Christ about His works. We have actual Monophysitism, turning into Apollinarism, in the following judgments of St. John of Damascus (Accurate exposition of the Orthodox faith, III, IV, p. 270): “The power of miracles was the action of His Divinity. The works of His hands and the fact that He wanted and said: I will, be cleansed (Matthew 8:3) was the action of His humanity. The breaking of the loaves and the fact that the leper heard what he wanted was the result of His human action, and the multiplication of the loaves and the cleansing of the leper was the result of the divine action.” In general, “miracles are the action of God” (272). “The result of the Lord’s human action was that He took the girl’s hand and raised it, but the divine action brought her back to life. These actions are different, although in the action of the God-man they are inseparable from each other” (273). “It is not human nature that resurrects Lazarus, and it is not divine power that sheds tears: tears are characteristic of humanity, life is characteristic of hypostatic life.” These Apollinistic arguments are supported by a comparison of the relationship between soul and body, also common in Apollinaris. Of course, it is applicable only to a single human being, consisting of two elements: soul and body, but it does not at all express the relationship of two wills and two natures in the single hypostasis of Christ. What turns out is some kind of alternation, a striped pattern of actions of both creatures, and not their inseparable and unmerged existence. This is the main idea of ​​my “Philosophy of Economics” (1910), to which I now return here from a completely different angle. In this sense we understand the words of Ap. Peter in a speech on the day of Pentecost (DA 2, 22-24): “Jesus of Nazareth, a man testified to you by God with powers and wonders and signs that God did through Him - as you yourselves know, this, by the definite advice and foreknowledge of God, you killed, betrayed, but God raised him up”... The underlined words do not have a meaning here that would cancel out what was said. about the humanity of Christ’s miracles. In the whole context, what is meant is only the thought of God's providential plan for human salvation. In particular, the words: “God created through Him” ἐποίησεν δι᾽ αὐτοῦ should be understood not so that Jesus in His humanity was only an instrument of the miracle-working power of God, but in the sense that the works of miracles were part of the revelation and accomplishment of God’s plan, just as the works of those who betrayed and killed Jesus. The speech of the same apostle has a similar meaning. Peter to Cornelius, where this thought is expressed more clearly: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with Him” (DA 10, 38) The idea that the miracles of the Lord Jesus Christ were evidence of the extraordinary grace of the Holy Spirit resting abundantly on Him is also confirmed by the context in which the unforgivable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is spoken of. This text is meant by all three weather forecasters. In short, but therefore more concisely, it is presented in Ev. Mark, 3 chapters, 21–30. “And when his neighbors heard Him, they went to take Him, for they said that He had lost his temper. And the scribes who came from Jerusalem said that He had Beelzebub in Himself and that He cast out demons by the power of the demonic prince. And calling them, he speaks to them in parables: How can Satan cast out Satan?... No one entering the house of a strong man can plunder his things unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house. Truly I say to you, all sins and blasphemies will be forgiven to the sons of men, no matter what they blaspheme; but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit will have no forgiveness forever, but they are subject to eternal condemnation. (He said this) because they said, “He has an unclean spirit.” This brings into direct connection the rebuke of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit with blasphemy against deeds and miracles performed by the power of the Holy Spirit and attributed by the scribes to the unclean spirit. The Evangelist Matthew describes the same or a similar case of the healing of a demon-possessed blind and dumb man in a similar way. Matt. 12, 23–32. “The Pharisees... said: He does not cast out demons except by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons. But Jesus, knowing their intentions, said to them: Every kingdom divided against itself will be desolate, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, then he will be divided with himself: how can his kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub, by whose power do your sons cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges. If I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then, of course, the Kingdom of God has reached you... Whoever is not with Me. he is against Me; and whoever does not gather with Me scatters. Therefore - δια τοῦτο - I say to you: every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven to men, but blasphemy - βλασφημία - against the Spirit will not be forgiven to men; if anyone speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; if anyone speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.” Here the obvious power of the Holy Spirit and its Bearer, Charismatics, is divided and contrasted: a word spoken - foolishly - against a Man will be forgiven, but resistance to the overwhelming power of the Spirit of God is spiritual suicide, destroying the spiritual framework of a person and therefore unforgivable either in this century or in the future. But in this case, the power of the Holy Spirit is manifested and evidenced precisely in the miracles of Christ, and therefore He himself here considers Himself as a Spirit-bearing Man. The context is least clear in ev. Luke. Here the saying of the Lord that interests us is part of the teaching told to the disciples about the leaven of the Pharisees, about the providence of God, about the confession of the Son of Man. Matt. 12 10-12: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven. But when they bring you to the synagogues, to the principalities and powers, do not worry how or what to answer, or what to say: for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that hour what you should say.” In addition to the immense significance of these texts about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the deliberate spirituality of the Lord Jesus Christ is definitely indicated here. The fundamental accessibility of miracles to man is also evidenced by the words of the Lord spoken by Him to the disciples who asked Him: “Why couldn’t we cast out the demon?” Jesus said to them: “Because of your unbelief; For truly I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed and say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (Matthew 17:19–20). This speaks simultaneously of the power of faith and the accessibility of this power to the works performed by the Lord. Wed. story by D.Ap. 8, 9–11 about Simon the Magus, who “sorcered and amazed the people of Samaria, posing as someone great. Everyone listened to him, from the smallest to the greatest, saying: This is the great power of God. And they listened to him because he amazed them with his magic for quite a long time.” A certain lover of God once said (referring to Rufinus) that the Thebaid desert-dwellers crossed the Nile on crocodiles and did not need steamships. If we only have in mind a comparison of these two methods of transportation, on crocodiles and on a steamboat, then, of course, each is good in its time, however, in our time it would be not only strange, but also sinful to strive for river communication on crocodiles, and the desert dwellers of our time would, of course, use only a steamboat for this. This example shows the relativity of a miracle in its external manifestation. Spiritual causation through cosmourgy therefore naturally pushes aside the sporadic, individual spiritual causation through miracles, or at least changes its scope, and the scope of physical miracles in our days is naturally reduced in favor of moral or spiritual ones. This question should perplex those theologians who consider all the miracles of Christ only as a manifestation of the divine power of Christ through man, i.e. like dues ex machina. Thus, they would naturally be forced to extend this thought to the resurrection of Christ and see in it His own miracle over Himself, while this is directly opposite to the Word of God. “And just as the children partake of body and blood, He also received them, so that through death He might destroy the one who had the power of death, i.e. the devil, and deliver those who, from the fear of death, were subject to slavery all their lives.” Cf. Heb. 10, 5–10. Wed. my essay about st. relics (handwritten). See our essay “The Holy Grail” (Path, 1932, II) and “Eucharistic Dogma” (ibid., 1930, I-II).