Глава вторая. София Тварная

“God created the world out of nothing” (ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων). What is the relation of this act of creation to God's own life or to His eternity? “God is an all-satisfied and all-blessed being.” This means that in the eternity of God the entire fullness of His life is contained, both through the revelation of His hypostatic existence (in trinity) and the natural Divinity in the Divine Sophia. God is absolute in His own divine life, and for His own sake does not need the world. The creation or non-creation of the world is not for Him a matter of hypostatic or natural necessity of self-replenishment, for the three-hypostasis completely exhausts hypostatic self-determination, and its circle closes, and the nature of God is completeness, containing everything. Consequently, the necessity of creation does not follow from the Divine’s own life and His self-position; there is no place for it in the Divinity itself. And in this sense, the creation of the world can only be the Divine’s own work, not in His hypostatic nature, but in His creative freedom. In relation to the life of the Divine himself, the world might not exist. However, this freedom in the sense of the absence of natural or hypostatic necessity does not at all mean randomness or arbitrariness in the existence of the world. One cannot think that the world was actually created according to some whim of omnipotence, without any basis or meaning for the Creator Himself, simply as a manifestation of His power. Such a concept is blasphemous and corresponds only to the atheistic philosophy of Schopenhauer, according to which the Divine Will, by chance or by a senseless whim, brought about the emergence of the world. The freedom of God in the creation of the world means only the absence of a necessity defined for it, such as the need for self-development or self-replenishment of God (a concept not alien to the pantheism of Schelling or Hegel). But this does not mean at all that the world is not needed by God in any sense other than self-fulfillment, and that God might not have created the world - a derogatory idea for the majesty of God. God needs the world, and it could not remain uncreated, but God needs it not for Himself, but for the world itself. God is love, and it is the nature of love to love and to expand in love. And divine love tends to be realized not only within the Divine, but to expand beyond these limits. Otherwise, absoluteness itself becomes a boundary for the Absolute, placing for it the line of selfishness or self-affirmation, and this would be evidence of the limitations of its omnipotence, as if His powerlessness outside of Himself. The ocean of Divine love tends to overflow beyond its limits; in the fullness of the life of the Divine, it tends to spread beyond its own boundaries. And if it is at all possible for the omnipotence of God to create the world, then it would be uncharacteristic of God’s love not to realize this possibility, for it is natural for love to love, exhausting to the end all the possibilities of love. Therefore, we have one of two things: either the creation of the world would be an impossibility for God, and in this case this impossibility would set a limit for Him, would make Him limited; or if such a possibility existed, God’s love could not fail to realize it through the creation of the world. Consequently, the creation of the world is necessary for God-Love to love, not only in His own life, but also outside of Himself, in creation. In the insatiability of love, which is divinely satisfied in God Himself, in His own life, God proceeds from Himself to creation in order to love outside Himself, not-Himself. This extra-divine existence is the world, creation. God created the world not for Himself, but for the world, driven by a love that is unlimited even by the Divine itself, pouring out outside of Him. And in this sense, the world could not not have been created, it is necessary for God, however, not by natural necessity, for the sake of its own completion, and not by necessity imposed from without (for for God there is no external one), but by the necessity of love, which cannot help but love, and in itself reveals and realizes the identity and indistinguishability of freedom and necessity. For love is free by its nature, but it is not arbitrary in its freedom, determined by inner hunger, the “law” of love. Therefore, the presence of creation and the relationship to it are included in the fullness of the very concept of God; it cannot be eliminated from it, as accidental, “insignificant,” which may or may not exist. It cannot not exist. The Absolute, God in Himself, outside of relation to creation, as He is understood in theology, is an abstraction, a conditional abstraction in which the being of God is considered. Specifically, it simply does not exist, because the relationship to the world and being for the world belongs to the image of God’s being, inseparable from Him. The Absolute is God - It exists and can be understood only in relation to the world. There is God the Creator, and not a closed, icy Absolute within himself. God is a relative concept, which already includes a relationship to the world. 262 For the Majesty of God it is not enough to be Absolute, self-closed and all-exclusive, at least for the sake of absolute life in Himself; it is characteristic of him to be God, that is, Absolutely-relative, that revealing Mystery, which in the language of logic can only be expressed by antinomy. The world is zero, οὐκ ὄν, in the sense of its originality in the face of the Divine, but this zero is included in God’s eternity, and God cannot be comprehended apart from his relationship to the world. This inseparability of God and the world should not be understood pantheistically, as pantheism, or the removal of ontological boundaries between God and the world. The line between the Creator and creation must be maintained inviolably, but the presence of this line does not destroy the relationship or connection between God and the world, outside of which the fullness of God’s life does not exist. The world cannot overcome the abyss between the Creator and creation, but the Mog himself overcomes it. If God were without the world, remaining in Himself, He would be that Absolute, which would not exist for anything outside of itself (in the absence of this outside), and, therefore, would not exist at all, since to exist means to be for another. But God is not the Absolute; this is only His first self-position. He is God, i.e. The Absolute, existing for another, is precisely for the world, the Other of the Divine is also included in the depths of divine life (pan-en-theism, everything is in God or for God, in contrast to and in contrast to pantheism, i.e., all-theism and therefore atheism). By belittling the significance of the world for God, reducing it only to an accident that is not internally connected with God, we, wanting to exalt the Divine at the expense of the world, actually belittle Him, for we impoverish Him, turn it into an abstraction and even blaspheme Divine love. For for love there is nothing essential or accidental. If Divine love is poured out outside the Divine, then here too it has all the nature and power of this love. Love is many-sided and diverse in God himself, we already know this, but all these faces and types of divine love are equally divine in their source, and God loves the world with the same divine love with which He loves His Divinity. Why is this wondrous equation of Divine love possible: God loved the world so much that he did not spare the Son for its sake! What other assurance about the inseparability of God and the world is still required after these words of revelation? So, God is the Absolute - in Himself, but Absolute-Relative for the world, existing in Himself, but also outside of Himself. 263 To come out of Oneself into One’s other, to place Oneself in extra-divine existence and, as it were, to repeat Oneself, to reflect oneself outside of Oneself, is a matter of Divine absoluteness, as omnipotence. This procession of God outside of Himself, into extra-divinity, is creation, as the eternal act of God’s creativity, no longer self-revelation, which is intra-divine life, but revelation outside of Himself. The act of creation is as immanent for Him as His Divinity. The non-triple Absolute, non-love (if only we can conceive of this being the product of mystical dreams and philosophical fantasy), can remain alone, enjoying itself in the vastness of its egoism (which is, rather, the image of Lucifer). He can - not for the sake of love, but in his omnipotence to amuse his despotic arbitrariness - create toys of creation for himself, if only in order to destroy them. But this nightmarish image, full of contradictions, arises only in a sick imagination. The Trinity God-Love in His Wisdom is therefore Himself the Creator. And He did not begin to be so at some specific point in time when the creation of the world “began.” For God and in His God-creation, it is as eternal as His existence, as the Holy Trinity itself in His Wisdom. The creation of the world begins only for the world, but it does not begin for God. It exists for God in God's eternity, and in this sense is equal with God. But what is eternal in God for creation is revealed only in time, and here a translation from one language to another is really necessary. Creation, as God's creativity, being temporary for itself, is eternal for God. God in His eternity creates the world for time, and therefore in time. Here there is a genuine transcensus from creativity to creation, from act to fact, from eternity to time (and vice versa): coincidentia oppositorum, the identity of the different and the opposite. The temporary world, existing in time, like time itself, can only be understood in connection with eternity as its basis, and vice versa, eternity in time has its own image, as its reflection. The temporary world was created by the eternal God, it is His creation. This is the original and ultimate intuition of the creature about itself, about the givenness of its existence. 264 This givenness or creatureliness is a metaphysical fact on which our consciousness and our being rests. It consists in the fact that our existence in us and for us is not posited by us. We, knowing self-positing in our personal existence, are thereby able to recognize its border, beyond which givenness or creation begins for us. In this sense of contradiction and limitation, the creature carries within itself the metaphysical memory of its creation, by Him Who can create, by God. But the act itself, like the fact of the creation of the world by God, is further incomprehensible to us; it is the boundary separating us from the Absolute. It exists for us only in its indecomposable facticity, which is for us a boundary concept (“Grenzbegriff”). Creation is therefore recognized not by thought, but by faith: “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that what is visible was made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3). Such is the very nature of creation that one can only believe in its creation (or not), with the same faith with which we believe in God, for the origin of the world, i.e. oneself cannot be known at all. The physical origin of the world in individual parts and eras can be explained in a thousand ways by knowledge, brought to the possible limit, but its metaphysical origin, its very emergence is beyond knowledge and for thought is closed by the fiery sword of “physical antinomy” (Kant), from which in vain we will run away into bad infinity by pushing the causes further and further, into an imaginary eternity. However, bearing the image of God, we also know the creative act in our experience. To the extent that the ray of genuine creativity sparkles in him and for us, it is inexplicable and miraculous, like the creation of a new, not former one. It is incomprehensible to us both in act and fact, in its how and what, and only by dealing with an accomplished fact do we explain it causally, bringing the creation into a causal connection with its creator. But in themselves, creative acts are flashes of another light in the created darkness. Therefore, even in created creativity there is evidence of its inexplicability and miraculousness. However, created creativity, although it bears the stamp of the divine prototype, is always limited by the given: it is the creativity of the creature in creation. It, being absolute in type, is always relative in fact. In the absolute sense, it is not even creativity, as the creation of a new thing, not from the given, but from nothing, that is, something that has not been done. Creativity takes place in the world, for the world and from the world, which is for it the existing already created meon, containing in itself all the possibilities of creativity, from it. Human creativity only carves its treasures from this rock of the world. The very existence of this rock is not the subject of created creativity, but its condition. So, the creation of the world by God is the Creator’s own Work and in this sense an absolute Miracle, which we metaphysically postulate in its incomprehensibility, but only ascertain by faith. However, without being able to further decompose this original and fundamental fact, we can reveal to ourselves its content, conditions and consequences, guided by Revelation. Divine creativity is absolute creativity, which has nothing outside itself: the world was created in this sense “out of nothing.” However, does nothingness exist? 265 It is impossible to imagine the relationship between God and this nothing in such a way that it turns out to be the boundary of the Absolute, of God himself, as if some kind of emptiness, a spatial container for the existence of God. This idea is, of course, absurd (although it is often tacitly implied). Nothing exists for God as something completely extra-divine. It is not even emptiness, because emptiness is a container, i.e. limited concrete existence. There is only God, and outside of God, and besides God,” and there is nothing, just as there is no “outside” and “besides.” Therefore, in order to be, it must arise, having been laid down by God, who, according to the word of Dionysius the Areopagite, is the creator and nothingness itself. In other words, nothing is a relative concept, it is relative to what, i.e. with an already arisen, but not yet complete, non-absolute being in itself, in the pores of which it is possible to find a place for nothingness for oneself. Thus, “nothing” is not being, but a state of being corresponding to its incompleteness, becoming. Nothing finds a place for itself in a becoming being; it is this becoming itself, as Plato has attested to for all times. Having created the world as a becoming being, God thereby gave place to the being of nothing. Creation from nothing is nothing more than an appeal to the life of an emerging temporary being. Therefore, nothing is created by God as temporality and formation, to which therefore the definitions of time are applied: beginning, and continuation, and end. “Nothing” from which “the world was created” is mythologically thought of as a kind of material of creation, similar to “Tiamat” and other religious and philosophical images of primordial matter. But the biblical idea of ​​creation lies precisely in the fact that there is no primary matter: 266 God did not create the world from anything, for there is no such thing (at least as nothing). But still, what did God create the world from? What constitutes him, what, as the basis of his being? Mythological thinking here is close to the idea that God poured into a hollow bag of “nothing” various things, types of being, which the “manifold wisdom of God” deliberately invented for this purpose, etc. it turned out to be peace. In this image, close to Plato’s Timaeus, the idea of ​​this bag, which is also the primary matter for the realization of creatures, is equally impious and absurd, as is the idea of ​​God, who carries out deliberate inventions in it. In this mythological representation, God is depicted as sitting before “nothing” and contemplating what forms of being can be created from it. This idea of ​​creation as a new deliberate invention, no matter how unctuous expressions it may be clothed in, should be rejected as blasphemous. It contains - no more, no less - a denial of the eternity of God, the absoluteness, the immutability of the Divinity itself. According to him, it turns out that God “before” the creation of the world was alien to the thought of its content, and it arose for the first time not only for the world, but also for God himself - only with the creation of the world. Thus, God, as the Creator, is, as it were, different from God himself, in the sense that one exists for God initially, and the other arises in Him along with the world. But neither biblical teaching nor church tradition contains such impossibilities. The Word of God speaks of creation as having come into existence through the Word: “all that was, and without it nothing could have come to be,” or the same thing in the Old Testament language, as being accomplished through the Wisdom of God: “The Lord had me as the beginning of His ways, before His creatures, from time immemorial” (Prov. Sol. 8:22), she “was with him an artist” (30). 267 Also, the Fathers of the Church speak about the pre-eternal prototypes of creation in God, 268 confirming the idea that the content of the world is determined by God’s own thought, and one and the same Everything is pre-eternally spoken by the Logos in the bosom of God, as in creation. In other words, everything in the Divine and created world, in the Divine and created Sophia, is one and identical in its content (although not in being). The One Sophia is revealed both in God and in creation. Therefore, if the negative definition that “God created the world out of nothing” eliminates the thought of any non-divine and extra-divine principle of creation, then its positive content can only be such that God created the world by Himself, from His nature. And the idea that the content of the world was ad hoc invented by God during the creation of the world must be rejected on principle. The positive content of world existence is as divine as its foundation in God, for there is no other beginning for it. But that which is pre-eternally existing in God, in His self-revelation, in the world, exists only in becoming, as a becoming deity. And the creation of the world metaphysically consists essentially in the fact that God created His own divine world not as existing eternally, but as becoming. In this sense, He dissolved it into nothingness, plunging it into becoming, as a different image of being of the same divine world. The latter is the basis, content, purpose and meaning of the created world. Divine Sophia also became created Sophia. God, so to speak, repeated Himself in creation, reflected Himself in non-existence. Creation is the Divine “ecstasy” of love, which is the creative “let there be”, turned outward, to the emerging extra-divine being. The face of this being in its emergence and formation naturally received a multiple, multi-stage image, the All-Unity became the All-Multiple of separate being, and this was accomplished by the wisdom of the Creator in the Sixth Day, who established the hierarchy of being in its plurality and completeness. And only having completely exhausted the fullness of the divine world in the created world, as far as the latter could contain it, did God rest from His works. However, this very placement of divine seeds in the world at its creation was naturally only initial, incomplete and incomplete. A seed is just a seed, not a plant. The emerging world must, in its formation, go through a long path of world existence in order to reflect in itself the face of the Divine Sophia. The latter, being the basis of world existence, its entelechy, is only in potentiality, which the world itself must actualize. This potentialization by God of his own Divine world into extra-divine existence is creation from nothing. Becoming is being immersed in non-being, transposed by it in all its pores, but freed from it. The chastity of the All-Unity is realized in the All-Multitude, binding it and internally overcoming it. “Nothing”, understood as the potentiality of becoming, in this sense is, indeed, the intelligible place of world existence, Plato’s ἐκμαγεῖον, pre-existential and extra-existent darkness, about which it is said: “and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it” (John 1, 2). It is the reason for the plurality of the world and its principles, and in this sense even “primary matter” of the world, in which (although not from which) it was created” The state of original and universal potentiality is the earth created by God even before the separate acts (“days”) of creation: this is the potency of world existence, which, however, already contains all its elements. The earth “was formless and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Gen. 1:2). However, this formless and empty primal substance of the world, the very original fusion of the divine world with nothingness, already has for itself a revealed plan in heaven, outlined in the angelic world: “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Holy angels are the hypostatic plan of creation, its ideas. 269 The creation of heaven and earth, as an act of God’s love, pouring out beyond the boundaries of one’s own divine life into the world, in relation to the Divinity itself is a free self-deprecation, metaphysical kenosis: God posits, next to His absolute existence, a relative existence, to which He Himself becomes related, being for it God and Creator. The creative “let it be,” which is the command of God’s omnipotence, expresses, at the same time, the sacrifice of Divine love, the love of God for the world, the Absolute for the relative, by the power of which the Absolute itself becomes Absolute-Relative. Conscious of itself as relatively-absolute, the creature reflects in itself that Absolute-Relative, from the relation of Which (“let it be”) and to Which (“By Him we live and move and are”) its being is determined. God is not diminished by this in His Divine immanence, for He goes beyond its limits into the world. In the self-positing of God, this fact is not primary, but secondary in the sense that the love of God in the Holy Trinity, the existence of God in Himself, is the basis for the love of God outside itself, creative kenosis. Therefore, the creation of the world is not an internal self-positing of the deity, which is God in the Holy Trinity, but a certain work of God, consisting of a series of works, as creative acts, after the completion of which God “rested from all His works, which God created and created” (Gen. 2:3). God's own existence belongs to eternity, where there is no beginning and end, where the relevance of God's self-positing is never exhausted, and therefore the categories of time are completely inapplicable here. But the world, as becoming, belongs to time, which is becoming. Therefore, the act of creation of the world, although it, since it is God’s self-determination, belongs to eternity, but, turned to the world, it takes on its temporary face, is accomplished in time, in “six days” (no matter how we understand them, it has a beginning and an end, it exhausts itself. In a word, here we have a transition from eternity to time, from the real estate of the Absolute to the formation of the relative. This act, as a deliberate work of God, contains the inspiration of love, the self-inspiration of God, which in God is connected with the Third Hypostasis and is the Holy Spirit: “and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters” (Gen. 1, 2), at the very beginning of creation, even “before” the six days. The world was created by God in the Holy Trinity, and each hypostasis is revealed in the creation of the world according to its special property. The Father is the beginning here, the first will. He creates the world by His will. According to the personal property of the Father’s Hypostasis, ecstatic love, He manifests it here not as the Father who gives birth, but as the Creator of “heaven and earth, visible to all and invisible.” It is from Him that the will comes from Himself into creation through the creative. He is the Creator in the proper sense (as he is called in the symbol). The kenosis of the Father in creation consists in this coming out of Himself, in which He becomes God for the world, enters into a relationship with it as Absolute-Relative. Transcensus to the world is a sacrifice of the Father’s love; it is analogous to the birth of the Son in the intra-Trinitarian life, when the Father, emptying Himself, gives birth to the Son. The Father creates the world with the Word. “And God said: Let it be,” - this is how the six days of creation are completed, the six words of the Word spoken by the Father. For the Father, the Son is the content of creation, all its images and forms. He, as the Word of God, comes from the Divine depths into creation in order in a certain sense to identify with it, to become for it the Word about Everything and in Everything. And already here, in the creation of the world, the Son does the will of the Father, He is sent into the world, however, not yet hypostatically, but only as the Word about the world, the words of the Word in it. But this procession of the Word from the bosom of the Fathers, His introduction into the world, is already a special kenosis of the Son, his pre-eternal exinanitio or humiliation in the creation of the world. The Son, the Lamb of God, is pre-eternally “slain” already in the creation of the world, as a deliberately cosmic hypostasis, a demiurge in the Divine. Here, in this image of the Son as a Lamb, a new image of the Father’s sacrificial love, revealed in the creation of the world, is revealed, for it is not only the Father’s own descent into the world, but also the message of the Son, the beginning of the offering of Sacrifice. The participation of the Third Hypostasis in the creation of the world is “perfect”, She gives existence to the Father, She “perfects heaven and earth and all their armies” (Gen. 2:1), and the realized thought of God, His Word that became reality, God the Father “sees how great it is” in the beauty of the accomplishment. The third Hypostasis is cosmourgic, investing with beauty the order and harmony of creation. The subject of God’s creativity, the world, is not only a universe, a universe, but also a work of art, a cosmos, about which the Artist rejoices. The Holy Spirit, as the overthrow of creation, is the Joy of the Creator about His creation: for the Father about the revealed Word, and for the Son about the revelation of the Father in the world. The Holy Spirit is the inspiration of God's creativity in the creation of the world. However, the Holy Spirit also has His kenosis in creation. Resting entirely on the Son in eternity, as the hypostatic love of the Father and the Son, here He proceeds outward, as the love of the Father for the Son in creation, and thereby proceeds into his becoming and the Holy Spirit himself. He rests on the Son, who is the Logos of the world, insofar as the world in its becoming can receive Him. He himself, as it were, becomes the becoming of the world, the realization of its content, just as the Son is its being at its very basis. He is sent as he is received, from measure to measure, from the first hovering over the waters to the last accomplishment: “God will be all in all.” The very life of the world is the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life; the very joy and beauty of the world is the Comforter. But the world does not accommodate, in the process of its formation, either the fullness of life or the fullness of transformation, and this transition from incompleteness to completeness is the work of the Holy Spirit, His kenosis in the world. Thus, the creation of the world is the work of God, the revelation of the fullness of God, omnipotence, wisdom and inspiration. But it is also a revelation of God’s Love, which seeks to extend itself to the non-existent, beyond the limits of the Absolute itself. And this is not free, irresponsible love, which it cannot be by its very nature, but it is love manifested in all seriousness, responsibility and sacrifice, and therefore tragedy, sacrificing in its implementation everything that it has. The absolute descends from the throne of its absoluteness to the relative, God creates the world through love. Understanding in this way the act of creation as a work and revelation of divine love, we thereby eliminate any chance in the existence of the world, due to which it, being external to God, non-God, could be and not be, or, which is the same, God himself could be and not be the Creator of the world. On the contrary, we most closely and inextricably unite in God the Creator and the Absolute. If God is the Creator, like love, and therefore cannot be a non-Creator by the power of love, then its object, the world, exists for God precisely by the inner power of love. Consequently, we cannot imagine God without the world, and the existence of the world thereby enters into the very concept of God. The idea of ​​God as not only a super-worldly, but also a worldless being, living in Himself with all the fullness of His love, does not correspond to the concept of God-Love. God is love, and, therefore, there is also a Creator. Thus, the light of God's eternity falls on the world. Being in itself created and non-eternal, the world in its relationship to the Creator is co-eternal with God. “All things were created by Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist” (Col. 1:16–17). Becoming is temporality entering into eternity and having a foundation for itself in it. Temporality is to the same extent opposed to eternity, as it is supposed to be. Without it and outside of it, temporality cannot exist as a coherent process without breaking into separate atoms. Time in its flow is not only separate and atomistic, so that each of its moments is replaced, pushed out, destroyed by another, but it is also connected, so that its individual moments belong to a single general complex or content, mosaically reflecting the face of eternity. The world still remains one, and being temporary. It does not disintegrate into an infinite number of temporary atoms of its existence, and its unity is objectively strengthened by the fact that it is the unity of not only temporal succession, but also of causal connection. Contrary to the rule of methodological research: post hoc non propter hoc, applicable in distinguishing particular series of causality, for all world causality as a whole the principle is firm and inviolable: post hoc est propter hoc. Time contains the pattern of the logos of things; nothing can fit in or happen in time that would not be included in this logos. The world is lawful in time by a law that determines time itself and therefore stands above it. Real time in each of its atoms belongs to the incompleteness of world existence; it is pushed out by another atom, but is also included in a single connection of the whole, which reigns over time, defines it as an image of becoming, exists before it. In a word, time is not only a flow, but also a formation, the realization of a certain content - both as a basis and as a task, a purpose, an entelechy. Time has its own plan and its own synthesis within itself, it is meaningful (a thought that is unconsciously expressed in the idea of ​​world evolution that is meaningless in itself from an empty place, contrary to the axiom of world existence ex nihilo nil fit: “evolution” precisely presupposes the emergence of an image of supertemporal existence in the temporal). Therefore, world causality is also expediency, or purposeful causality, in world existence. And this content of the created world, as well as its foundation, is the Divine world, Eternal Sophia. But the single, chaste image of the All-Unity in time multiplies and scatters in the faces of temporary existence, which time collects and unites with its regularity. Thus, eternity is the depth, reality, basis and content of time, it is relative to it, without it it does not exist, it is the image of its created, becoming existence. Time and eternity are the created and Divine Sophia. From this it follows that time is not empty, is not the “vanity of vanities” of Ecclesiastes, but is full of eternity, endlessly approaching it, more and more fully restoring its face, and, however, modally, in the way of being, not identifying with it. This appearance of the face of eternity in time is in this sense the end of time, which in its meaning must also have a beginning. The angel of the Apocalypse swears about this by the Creator of all things, who lives forever and ever (10:6), that “there will be no more time,” for “the mystery of God has been accomplished.” Nevertheless, even for accomplished time, which has revealed eternity in itself, there remains a difference between eternal eternity, groundless, as having its own basis in itself, and created, temporary eternity, which has a basis for itself in divine eternity, is the revealed image of the Prototype (aeternitas and aeviternitas). It follows from this that it is impossible, because of the fluidity of time, to diminish its reality: time is real with the reality of its content, which is the divine Sophia, as its eternal entelechy, foundation, content and limit. God, creating the world, created time and temporality - this is precisely what is contained in the concept of created. Time is the most general form of created being, as the formation of eternal being. The multiplicity of all-unity in creation appears in the multiplicity of time, as in a fragmented mirror. The latter multiplies, repeats and distorts the images of true existence, which in created limitations is united with non-existence. 270 A question arises that is essential for all theology; How is time and eternity related, not in creation, which is embraced by time by virtue of its formation, but in the eternal God himself? Is there time for eternity and what is their relationship? The simplest and most widespread (although usually not fully thought out opinion) is that time simply does not exist for God, because by His eternity time is completely transparent and dissolved. It exists only for creation, as a kind of illusion due to its limitations, but not for God, for whom there is only eternity. However, such a point of view, carried out consistently, leads to great difficulties. And first of all, the entire Bible, as a divine story about God’s relationship to man, about God’s economy, represents its complete negation. The revelation of God to men and all the works of God in the world are here depicted as occurring in time, the same for both God and man. To recognize this as just an inevitable anthropomorphism, to deprive it of reality, means to shake the entire content of our faith and turn the living, merciful and saving God, the Creator and Almighty, into the motionless absolute of Hinduism, in which all concrete being is extinguished, and the whole world turns into an illusion. And, of course, the most difficult thing to understand and accept is the incarnation of God, with all the events of the Savior’s earthly life associated with it, as well as His Resurrection and Ascension. The entire Christian religion, for its truth, presupposes the reality of time, not only for the world, but also for God, and each one conditions the other. To this we must also add that both in the biblical image and in the Christian belief based on it, God lives in the world and in relationship with the world. He not only acts in the world, but he himself is determined by the world: He “repents” (of creating the world), is angry, rejoices, etc., and to reduce all this only to anthropomorphism means to close our eyes to divine reality and replace the fiery verbs of the Word of God with seminary scholasticism. 271 God in Himself is eternal by Divine eternity, which is Divine Sophia, the fullness of His life, immutability and all-bliss. God in Himself is eternal with Divine eternity in His trinity, which is the eternal act of love of the Three in its reciprocity. But God is also the Creator, creating life outside of Himself and living in it outside of Himself. The reality of this world is established by God, and therefore the reality of the time of this world has power for God, for it is His own work and at the same time His own self-position. Proceeding from Himself in the creation of the world, the love of God in its kenosis posits time for God and makes God himself living and in time, in this sense becoming for the world along with the world: His history is the history of the incarnation, and nothing other than the becoming of God as everything in everything for the world is depicted by the apostle. Paul in 1 Cor. 15, 24–28. The idea of ​​God becoming God, not for Himself, but for the world, together with the formation of the world, necessarily stems from the undiminished acceptance of the fullness of Christian revelation. This is by no means a pantheistic teaching that identifies God with the world as different states of a single, immanently developing absolute principle: such is the early Schelling (for whom the full development of God is identical with the end of the world process), or Hegel (for whom “logic” is God before the “creation” of the world, concretely revealing himself with the world), or J. Boehme with the development of God from Urgottheit and other similar teachings. A distinctive feature of pantheism is that for it God is only the highest stage of development of the world, and the world is the initial beginning in the development of God. Between God and the world there is no transcensus here, a break in the continuity of development of being from the world to God, and the world is only an underdeveloped God, and God is a developed and self-realized world; here the very idea of ​​creation, which establishes the line between the Creator and the world, is eliminated. All this is significantly different from Christian teaching, which, precisely by the act of creation, posits the ontological line between the Creator and the creature, the Prototype and the image. The world for him is not the self-development of God, but a creation, a work of God, arising not from the metaphysical necessity of one’s own self-discovery, but from the creative inspiration of love in its freedom. However, in the distinction and opposition of God and the world, for fear of the ghosts of pantheism, one cannot go so far as to destroy the very reality of the world for God and turn it into some kind of ontological illusion, falling into docetic Hinduism. The world is the reality of God, and not only for itself, but also for God, for whom it exists as an object of God’s love. Therefore, we must recognize the reality for God and the time of this world, without which becoming does not exist. From this it follows that in the world and with the world God himself lives in time, being timeless and eternal in himself. This unity, and therefore the identity of time and eternity, is an eternal mystery for human thought, for it is the mystery of God, as incomprehensible to creation as the creation of itself. However, not being able to comprehend the mystery, we can and must outline its outer edges. The relationship between God's eternity and temporality stems from the general attitude of the Creator to the world. Between eternity and time there is a mutually exclusive opposition, if we reason formally logically and, so to speak, statically: time is extinguished by eternity, and eternity is abolished by time, here we have a kind of yes and no. Eternity belongs to the Absolute, time is associated with the relativity of becoming, and the absolute cannot be equated with the relative. However, this, so to speak, flat image does not correspond to the essence of the matter, if we take this relationship dynamically and ontologically. Then eternity turns out to be not a negation, but the foundation, the depth of time, and the fullness of eternity is actually revealed in temporality, and the latter has the power of being only from eternity. God, as the Creator, correlated with time, does not cease to be the eternal God; on the contrary, it is His pre-eternal Divinity that is the basis for His creation. Without being the Absolute in Himself, God would not be the Creator, just as vice versa - being the Absolute, God reveals himself in the relative, that is, he creates the world. Eternity and temporality are correlative, without mutually interfering with each other. Temporality in no way and in no sense can diminish or limit eternity, because it belongs to a different ontological plane. We can say that eternity is the noumenon of time, and time is a phenomenon of eternity. They are interconnected by the relation of foundation and being, but cannot be mixed or mutually limited. Therefore, the seal of God's eternity lies on all creation, for it is its revelation. Time is the moving face of eternity. But each face of time has its own depth in eternity, is nourished by it and is permeated by it. Only by observing this principle of the inseparability and correlation of eternity and time can one reasonably accept the simultaneous affirmation of both the unchangeable eternity of God and the temporality of all His works in the world, His many-part and diverse revelation, without falling into a series of flat and hopeless contradictions. The secret of this combination of time and eternity is carried within man as the image of God.” Eternity is not for him only a particularly qualitative time that will come after temporary life, as an event in time. Eternity for him is the depth of his own being, known in time and constantly opening, his rootedness in God, and this eternal life begins and is accomplished in time. “And this is eternal life, that they may know thee the true God, and him whom thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” (John 17:3). The Divine World is human, it is the heavenly God-manhood of the heavenly God-man Logos. Humanity here means the image and type of being of multiple principles, or ideas, or spiritual essences in unity, as the self-disclosure of the Logos, and in this sense it is His spiritual “body”. Rev. The Trinity is addressed to Sophia or the Divine world directly by the Logos, which in this sense is Sophia, as her personal center, the demiurgic hypostasis, which is accomplished, however, through the Third Hypostasis, the cosmourgic. The created world, like the created Sophia, exists in accordance with the heavenly prototype and is therefore also a human world, centered around man and by him. Man is a “contracted world” (microcosm), and his stamp therefore lies on the whole world (macrocosm). The world has its fullness and peak in man, who is the logos of the world and, speaking fundamentally, there is and cannot be anything in the world that is not human, to which man cannot extend his knowledge, feeling and will. Man was created to “possess the earth” and “have dominion over all creation” (Gen. 1, 28), and the whole world is a potential and peripheral body for man. 272 The world was created for man, and the six-day story is a story about the preparation of the world for man, as well as about its gradual and gradual creation, in general about the creation of the world, as the humanity of man. The relationship of man to nature essentially reproduces the relationship of the Logos to Sophia, but in a created way, in the sense that Everything that exists in Sophia in Chastity, here appears in multiplicity, created hierarchy, formation, although it is brought to man - both the inorganic world, together with the plant (in paradise), and the animal, in this initial hour of the existence of the world, in order to become humanized from it, and become human in it, and thereby realize its purpose. At the same time, created humanity is expressed in many stages of the inorganic, and then both plant and animal, generally pre-human world, in contrast to its eternal Prototype, where everything exists in the fullness and unity of Divine life, without isolating into special life centers in multi-stages. The natural world is connected to man through his body in its entirety. Firstly, the human body was created “from the dust of the earth” (Gen. 2:7), that is, from the earth, that first matter in which all created things are contained. Secondly, man was created together with the entire plant and animal world, as an all-plant and all-animal, in his biological ladder, and he knows the animal world from the inside and names it. The bodily unity of a person with the world is secured by eating food (which is deliberately established by God: Gen. 1, 29–30; 9, 3). Thirdly, man is connected with the entire created world by the animal principle of life, the animal soul, which is in the blood (“you shall not eat flesh with its soul, with its blood” - Gen. 9:4, “the soul of the body is in the blood” - Lev. 17:11, Deut. 12:33), - both man and animals. The animal soul belongs entirely to the created world, it is its own created life. But it precisely forms the beginning that gives the place and opportunity for the awakening and development of spiritual life, and it must be obedient to the spirit and in this particularity of its own. The animal soul, which is “in the blood” of both humans and animals, is diverse and has many levels. It has many faces within different species of the animal world, where there is also room for animal individuality. But, being alien to the spiritual principle, it is spiritually blind and has no personality (although it knows individuality with its characteristics). Even about a person, when he is immersed in the carnal life and forgets about the soul, the wrath of God says: “for they are flesh” (Gen. 6:3). The animal soul is created, like all creation, and therefore personal immortality does not belong to it, for it is impersonal. But man differs from the entire created world, of which he is therefore the master, in that he (like the angels) has in himself an uncreated principle, a spark of the Divine spirit: “and (the Lord God) breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7). If these words are compared with God’s eternal advice about the creation of man “in our image and after our likeness” in chapter 1, 26–27, then the clear meaning of this is that the human spirit (“soul”) has an uncreated, but divine origin: man, according to this principle, is a created god. There is no need now to consider the question of the trichotomous and dichotomous structure of man, especially since this opposition itself is largely based on a misunderstanding. 273 The important thing is that ontologically man is truly two-part, having within himself an uncreated, divine principle, a spirit (soul), and a created body, inspired by souls, the flesh. The oncological composition of a person is therefore complex, it is more complex than that of angels, who do not have flesh, like the entire animal world, which is alien to the spirit. All created nature, created Sophia, belongs to the human spirit as its hypostatic center. Man, in the image of his creation, in this complexity of his, is already a God-man. The First Adam was created in the image of the Second Adam, he conceals within himself the image of Christ, he is God-man in his original structure. It has already been created in such a way that Christ can be incarnated in it, and not only according to the body of Adam, in which, according to Tertullian, God had already foreseen the future body of Christ, but also according to its complex structure. Man in nature, as the spiritual hypostasis of the world, has the image of the Heavenly God-Man, the Logos in Sophia. The Prototype and the Image, despite the insurmountability of the distance between the Creator and the creation, are united by a certain identity that establishes a positive relationship between them and announces the coming incarnation of God. The human hypostatic spirit, despite its divine origin, does not belong to the triple hypostasis of God, in which the divine hypostasis is exhausted and closed, in the Holy Spirit. Trinity. He was created, called into existence by an act of God’s creative love, incomprehensible to creation. God multiplied and repeated His hypostatic faces in the angelic and human world, and these hypostases, by this very origin, are involved in the divine nature, which is the ontological basis for the deification of man (“you are gods and sons of the Most High” Ps. 81:6, cf. John 10:34). This cannot mean that the sons of God have the nature of God as God, i.e. an eternal personal act, but this means that by their very origin they can be involved in the Divine nature, have within themselves the opportunity to “be born of God,” that is, to become actual sons of God, participating in the Divine life. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). For St. For angels, this participation in the nature of God is life. 274 For man there is his own, natural, created life, and life of grace, by participation in the nature of God. But the important thing here is that, by its divine origin, the human spirit carries within itself participation in the life of God, at least as a possibility, and the potentiality here is already an otological reality. At the same time, it is also embedded in the created nature of man, who is thus already a God-man in destiny, as having a single hypostasis and participating in two natures; divine and created. In other words, the first Adam,” as the God-man,” is already the image of Christ, awaiting its full disclosure and fulfillment. Man is created in the image of God, but this precisely means that he is created in the image of Christ, and Christ for man is the revelation and perfection of this image. Not only in the body, which is the image of the Sophia world, and not only in the spirit, which in a certain sense is sent from heaven, but also in the structure of man, in the unity of two natures (spiritual and soul-body) in one hypostasis lies in the primordial man the image of the coming Christ. It is possible to speak about the creation of the human spirit only in relation to the Pleroma of the Divine, which does not include created spirits that are outside of divine existence: they are created. However, in their nature, as emanating from the Divine and participating in Him, they cannot be considered only as created, for their divine nature is co-eternal with God. They are also not created in time (according to creationist teaching in its naive form: God, as soon as he sees a natural conception taking place, immediately creates and sends a new soul into it). The human spirit was created not in time, but in the eternity of God, “before time,” 275 precisely on the very edge of it,” although it is intended for temporary existence, which it enters at its appointed time. The fullness of the human, as well as the angelic order, is pre-eternal in the Divinity and is only revealed - in the creation of angels at the same time, and in the human world in the succession of time. However, in Adam the entire fullness of humanity is already contained and pre-created, which is realized in reproduction. But this pre-eternal existence in God does not mean some other, previous life of created spirits, which was replaced by earthly life and represents, as it were, a segment of it. The human world does not have a previous existence “in heaven”, as in another world, but it finds in it a sufficient foundation for itself: it is naturally founded in the prototypes of the Divine world, while its hypostases are rooted in divine life. Created hypostases are images of uncreated Divine hypostases. As monohypostasis, these images in their individuality do not reflect the trinity of God; they can only reflect its individual hypostases. But can the Father’s Hypostasis be a prototype for created hypostases, when She herself is revealed in Sophia, in the Divine world, not in Her own face, but through the Son and the Holy Spirit? If regarding St. angels and it is possible (to assume the existence of angels of the Father's hypostasis, always immersed in the Divine, as Mystery and Silence, then in relation to man, the image of his hypostasis can only be from the hypostases that reveal the Father, both in his own divine world and in the created one. Such a hypostasis is, first of all, the hypostasis of the Logos, which is the prototype of created human hypostases, as His rays: “there was the true light, which enlightens every person who comes into the world” (John 1:9). Human spiritual faces are images of the Logos, the Heavenly Man. Since the Logos, like Christ, gathers them into His Body, into the Church, it is said about them that (Gal. 3:28) in Christ Jesus “there is neither male nor female.” The prototype for human hypostases, together with the Logos, is the Third Hypostasis, as resting on the Son, together with Him revealing the Father in Heavenly Humanity (in the incarnation corresponding to the Mother of God expressed in the Virgin Mary Spirit-Bearer). In other words, human hypostases have for themselves a double Prototype, which equally belongs to Heavenly Humanity in its two faces: Logos and the Holy Spirit. This also corresponds to the fact that man, created in the image of God, was created as husband and wife, and the context of Gen. 1:26–27 makes us see precisely in this dual unity the fullness of God’s image. In man, a certain difference is established between them, and this is expressed in the creation of a wife from the rib of her husband, and not directly from the dust of the earth, and in general in the dominant role of the husband, as having the image of the demiurgic hypostasis of the Logos. Husband and wife, distinguished as two different images of man, in their unity carry within themselves the fullness of humanity and the fullness of the image of God in him: they are sealed by the Duo of the Son and the Holy Spirit, revealing the Father. In their power of reproduction they contain the image of multi-unity, which is inscribed in the human race as a whole. So, man is an uncreated, divine-cosmic being, already from the beginning in his constitution a divine-human being, a living image of the Trinitarian God in His Wisdom. Man has within himself the image of God as the ontological basis of his being, and this image is not limited to any one aspect of him or property, but penetrates his entire life. Man has the image of God both in his spirit and in his nature and in his attitude towards the world. The Image is not the same as the Prototype. He, having a certain identity with him, necessarily has a difference, he also has a different way. Freedom is inherent in the spirit as an inalienable property. Freedom, as self-awareness and self-determination, is inherent in general and in all living things. Life is, first of all, spontaneous movement, as a kind of initial self-position, and this spontaneousness has various stages. This spontaneity also carries within itself a certain expediency, like the internal law of its existence, “instinct.” It also has the ability to feel, its organic needs and respond to impressions. Animal consciousness can rise to certain manifestations of rationality and intelligence, and animal emotionality contains within itself the ability of feelings, attachment and affects: motherhood, anger, gaiety and sadness, fear, self-defense and, finally, attachment to man, a trait that in this state, although not universal, nevertheless clearly indicates even now that man is the master of the animal world in his own way. creation. 276 The “soul of animals” contains within itself the diverse possibilities of life, i.e. spontaneous reaction to the external world, which is a given, immutable fact for her. The animal soul is limited by this reality; it has no creative relationship with it, nor does it exist in the mutual relations of the animal world. One should not be surprised at the extraordinary manifestations of expediency in the life of the animal world, which represent something that seems to exceed even the human mind - the mysterious wisdom of instinct. This is Sophian wisdom, embedded in them as an internal law, but not the work of their mind, which in this sense the animal soul does not have. And therefore one should not be surprised at the extraordinary practical wisdom shown by the work of bees, and beavers, and ants, for this is the wisdom of a kind, an instinct that does not develop, but only invariably repeats itself. Animals are given to themselves and are given to man, who comprehends this wisdom with his mind, as the wisdom of all creation. Therefore, animals exist “according to their kind” (Gen. 1, 20, 21, 24, 5), repeating themselves, but they do not have a history, which is characteristic only of the spiritual being of man. The spontaneity of life created by God is not yet in itself a rational freedom, but this animal freedom in the broad sense of the word, that is, spiritual life is also included in human life, connecting with the spiritual freedom of man. Freedom of the spirit is the ability for creative self-determination, by which it has its life from itself and for itself, as its self-position. Such absolute freedom is characteristic only of the absolute, divine spirit, whose life does not have any givenness for itself, but is entirely its self-position, which is its nature. Nature and freedom are identified here; nature is spiritual and therefore free. In the absolute spirit there is no place for the very distinction or opposition between freedom, as self-position, and givenness, as necessity (or nature). Freedom and necessity are adequately covered in that beginning of the existence of the divine, i.e., the trinitarian spirit, which is love. Love is a free necessity, necessity as freedom. God, free as Spirit, in His self-position is higher than the relationship between freedom and natural necessity. However, freedom can be found not only in the life of the spirit, as the relationship between personality and nature, self-positing and givenness, but also in personal self-consciousness as such, in pure clarity. The I also contains the self-position of the I, and this is a pure act of freedom, carried out pre-naturally and extra-naturally. The self-position of the self already includes freedom, there is a free act. Therefore, personal self-consciousness carries within itself the breath of freedom; it contains freedom as the main theme of the life of the spirit. I, as I am, freely, that is, spontaneously. We can apply this freedom to the absolute, divine Self, as pure self-positing, but also to the created self as the image of the divine Self. However, that pure self-positing, which is characteristic only of the absolute Self, obviously cannot be attributed to the created. The created self is nevertheless created, that is, awakened by God into existence. However, this awakening not only contains the divine act of creation, but also includes, as it were, a divine question to the created, whether it posits itself, for God himself cannot posit the personal self with one creative act above it, without himself. This is not a limitation of the omnipotence of God, which is fully manifested in this awakening to the existence of created self-consciousness (moreover, this creative act of creating a created self is the most amazing in the actions of divine omnipotence manifested in the creation of the world), but omnipotence is not arbitrariness acting in contradiction with the meaning of what is created. The spirit is not a thing, and cannot be created as a thing, that is, like the entire natural world, through the creative. I, as I, can only be a self-positing, and therefore, during the creation, let the imperative creative I be addressed in an interrogative form to the created, but also self-positing, I. Therefore, although the created self is posited by God, in this creation it is also posited by Him. Strictly speaking, the creative act creates only the possibility of self-position, which is carried out by the I myself, saying my yes. 277 This freedom of the self-positing self already contains the image of God in the created spirit, man and angel. The entire animal world, created in the “living soul,” is created by a direct act of God’s omnipotence, so to speak, materially, precisely through God’s command to the earth: “let the earth produce living souls according to its kind” Gen. 1, 24, and accordingly: “let the water produce living creatures and living creatures” (1, 20). The earth is the primary matter, and is also the mother of all earthly things. However, this direct creation does not apply to man, but God’s advice about him takes place: “Let us make man in Our image—and God created man in His image” (26–7). Creation in the image of God is different from the entire created world; it includes created self-position, the same for both the angelic and the human self. In this, in a certain sense, uncreatedness of the created self already contains for him the possibility of a deviation towards self-divinity. To the extent that a person sees God as his Prototype, he is also aware of his creation, i.e. metaphysical non-originality, he knows himself as a reflection in a drop of existence of the Divine sun. At the same time, in this free recognition of oneself only as the image of the Other, the Prototype, love for this Other, that is, for God, is also manifested, as the seal of the Logos, Sonship of God: the Son loves the Father, and man, loving God, sees himself only as the image of his Creator, having existence from Him. He freely posits himself as an image, performs an act of kenosis of love. But as soon as he turns away from this Sun and rejects kenosis, he remains alone with himself, in the consciousness of his own Luciferic self-position. He then only knows within himself his own source and prototype, as God himself, and thereby transforms his created self into a pseudo-divine self. This is the path of Satan, who has extinguished love and fallen into a lonely selfishness, and in general the path of self-deity, ontologically open to man precisely in the character of the self-positing self. So, the image of God, and precisely the image of the Son, in the personal self-consciousness of the created self consists in the fact that with free love he recognizes himself as the image of the Prototype, that is, he has his personality as not his own, giving it to God. Sonship of God in this sense is immanent to the human self, as an ontological predetermination, and at the same time a given for his freedom. In the human, the self is given to man, and he is called upon to comprehend that Divine Self, which for him is both the Divine You, and his created self prayerfully looks into the absolute Self. 278 The image of God in man is further expressed in man's relationship to the natural world, which is also his own nature. Man has a nature that belongs to him as his own human world, with which he is connected through a soul, akin to the entire animal world, and a body, which makes him a citizen of the material world. This connection between man and the world contains the image of God in His nature, in the Divine Sophia. The world is created Sophia, created humanity, which has the heavenly Sophia as its basis. This world was given to man for dominion over it and for cultivating the garden of God in it. Being potentially human, belonging to man, he must be humanized to the end by him, become transparent to man. Possession of the created world makes the image of God in man more fully revealed than in the disembodied orders of angels, who do not have their own world, their own nature, but “serve” man and the human world. Man is the logos of the world, and he is also its creator, like a cosmourg, its artist. However, the relationship of man to the world, as a created god, is only the image of God in Sophia, which, having a basis for itself in the Prototype, in its existence is significantly different from it. Firstly, Divine Sophia, as the self-revelation of the true God, is completely hypostasized and completely transparent, like God’s own life. Therefore, there is no givenness or potentiality in it; it is the absolute life of God, it is God (Θεός). Meanwhile, the natural world in man and outside man is a given for man, moreover, as a compulsory necessity that possesses him, and not he it. For his spiritual freedom, it appears as prison shackles (not only in Plato’s Phaedo, but also in Apostle Paul: “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this mortal body”). (Rom. 7:24). Of course, this refers to the state of the world and the fallen and existing under the curse for the sins of man. But even before the fall, nature was a given for man and a forced necessity, from which, within certain limits, he was deliberately freed by the power of God: it was “God planted paradise in Eden in the east and placed man there” (Gen. 2:8), but outside paradise there remained the entire unenlightened world, into which the first parents were expelled for sin. Man had not yet been brought into possession of the world, and the world, being sophic in its being, did not open up in its sophia for man; on the contrary, it rather closed in it after expulsion from paradise, which revealed to man a kind of preliminary image of the world in its sophia. Adam could not yet take possession of the world in its sophia, because this world was not given to one person in his monohypostasis, even to the forefather Adam, but only to the entire human race in its multihypostasis and in its conciliarity in the image of the Holy Trinity. So, the world, which appeared before man as a fact and a given, was given to him as a task (“project”) or the potential of paradise, in order for man to dwell in it and to reveal his humanity. Further, man’s own relationship to nature was not stable for him, as a created spirit, in his self-determination in relation to his nature. The nature of God, the Divine Sophia, is spiritual by the spirituality of God. God is Spirit both in His hypostasis and in His nature, which is His life. But the nature of the world in itself is not spiritual, but only soul-physical, it is “flesh,” that is, a living and living nature, organized at its different levels. She can (and should) become spiritual, communing with the dictates of the spirit and becoming spiritualized in it, losing her “carnal” self-legitimacy. But in its soulfulness, nature is introduced into the life of the spirit, since man is an embodied spirit, and a stable balance between spirit and flesh can only be found by himself, by his actuality. Adam, in relation to this self-determination, was like a newborn who needed to test and exercise his spiritual powers (for which God gave him the commandment, symbolizing this call to his relevance). Although man was given full strength and grace-filled help at his creation, even with all this he still had to show his share of participation in his own creation through free self-determination. Having in himself, as it were, two centers of being, spiritual and creaturely, man made his choice, deviating towards the flesh, subordinating his spirit to its calls, and not mastering them spiritually. This is the ontological event that is symbolized in the Bible as the violation of a commandment or the fall. Adam, as a potential God-man, in the depths of his spirit had the opportunity to partake of divine life, to live by divine nature, and from this to draw strength for the sophization of the world, for the revelation of the created Sophia in it. Instead, he closed this path to divine life within himself, died spiritually and in fact ceased to be a potential god-man, but became a natural man. And nature appeared before him not as Sophia, but as a created face, “fallen or dark Sophia,” an image of non-existence, i.e. materiality, in an improper and abnormal, perverted state, like the earth, cursed for man along with all creation, sighing with those who conquered it. And a different life began for man in the land of exile. Christ, who was foreshadowed in the image of man, the image of God, the image of Christ, was eclipsed in him. Man took an undue step towards the natural, animal world, placing the eating of the flesh (forbidden fruit) above the food given to him - to do the will of the Father and do His work, as taught by the example of the New Adam - Christ (John 4:34). Instead of the food of the tree of life, which already prefigured the heavenly food, the bread of life (6, 51), man ate from the food of the earthly knowledge of good and evil, and thereby entered the path of the magical, i.e. natural, not spiritual, not Christ’s mastery of the world” and through this, instead of the innocent feeling of his body, man was taken possession of by the evil sensuality of the flesh, opposing the spirit, which in itself already carries its own condemnation - shame: before the fall of man, the first parents, being naked, were not ashamed of their nakedness, but after the fall they saw it with lustful eyes and themselves felt shame. Man, not being an animal, became involved in the animal world, and thus fell below it, because in the animal world there remains animal innocence, corresponding to the animal soul. Animals do not know depravity and are alien to depravity, which is accessible only to man: the greater the height, the deeper the fall, and what is natural for the animal, as its norm, that is, humiliation for man, his fall. Instead of dominating the animal world and elevating it to the measure of spirituality accessible to him, bringing it to God, being the king, prophet and priest of the animal world, man humiliated himself by approaching it, and through this weakened his spiritual strength and power over the world. The image of God given to man at his creation is inextricably linked with his likeness: “Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Image and likeness relate to each other as a given, invested by God - the sophic image of man, and given, man's own work, with which he has to realize his own image in creative freedom, in the sophization of himself and all creation. The image of God is an ontological, integral basis, that original power that is invested in a person for his life and creativity. It can increase and decrease in him, shine and darken, depending on his freedom. Similarity is an image of Divine creativity and the eternal actuality of the spirit. The likeness of God in man is the free realization by man of his image. According to the thought of God, man was created by God for creative work in himself and in the world, as the God-man himself testifies to this, in whom image and likeness are identified: “My Father works hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17). The path of doing, as becoming like God, for a person is a difficult path, full of temptations and requiring effort with an unstable balance in all directions, but, at the same time, it is a royal, god-like path, as the path of freedom. Man belongs to himself, but he still finds himself in the world, which belongs to him, just as he belongs to the world. Moreover, he himself is not explored, and the world for him is an as yet untested field, and at the same time the breadth and depth of his own life. To what extent was there room for temptation here? It was possible, as immanently inherent in the very nature of creation and in its freedom. Creature, in its untested and unconquered state, is ontologically unstable and in this sense carries with it a certain risk of failure, which in its sacrificial kenosis the love of God takes upon itself. Firstly, the life of a creature begins with adolescence and even, as it were, with a newborn, that is, inexperience, inexperience and ignorance of oneself, and childhood, although innocent, is defenseless from temptations. God, while preserving freedom, leaves man left to his own devices (which is what the serpent took advantage of to tempt him). Secondly, created freedom in its limitations is an area of different possibilities and choice between them (which does not exist for divine freedom); it must still go through the path of liberation from this bad freedom of immaturity before establishing itself in only one and natural possibility for itself, which corresponds to the internal primordial norm of being. Thirdly, the metaphysical nature of creation, which has as its basis nothingness, emptiness, abyss, is fraught with the danger that this nothingness is potentialized through human freedom, and the abyss will open. Nothing is a layer, like pores: the internal limitation of being, like becoming. And until the formation is completed, and the image is not identified with the likeness, this limitation can be a source of undue self-affirmation, creaturely egoism (which is already imprinted in spatial mutual impenetrability), as a force of decay and “sleepless” chaos that “stirs” in it. Fourthly, (and ontologically firstly), the created spirit is fraught with the satanic temptation of its self-identity, of recognizing itself as a prototype. According to all this, image and likeness relate to each other as the basis and goal, given and given, alpha and omega, beginning and end, and therefore the world, after the creation of which God could rest from His works, was created only at its foundation, while the fullness of the accomplishment can only be achieved with man, with his participation (just as the creation of the created self is not only his position by God, but also his own self-position). The creation of the world is carried out by man, and this is a long, difficult path of freedom, which, speaking abstractly, in itself conceals the danger that the world will not succeed, will collapse into nothingness, or, at least, will be completely spoiled, becoming the kingdom of the prince of this world, reigning together with his angels over the rabid humanity. However, this first danger of destruction and annihilation of the world, turning it into nothing and the complete failure of its creation is eliminated by the fact that the world, created as created Sophia, containing within itself the divine ideas of being, and, moreover, including uncreated sparks of the Divine - angelic and human spirits, cannot again turn into nothing, metaphysically collapse. It is indestructible both in the image of its creation and in its content. Further, he is providentially contained in the hand of God and preserved by it. This idea of ​​the destruction of the world, as an ontological paradox, should be completely rejected. 279 The suicide of the world, which, in the image of Buddhist nirvana, is imagined by some pessimistic philosophers Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the Kantian Renouvier, is ontologically impossible, because the world contains indestructible elements. And, in addition, spiritually conscious, personal existence is possible only in the presence of a metaphysical will to life, which does not allow metaphysical suicide. Therefore, Satan, being the bearer of a personal principle, is so far from committing suicide, and, on the contrary, strives to establish his kingdom in this world. The world is indestructible, and the ways of God are inscrutable in accomplishing the works of God. This long and difficult path of God’s ongoing fulfillment of the world together with man is called the Providence of God, “economy,” and at the center of this path lies the incarnation. Based on all that has been said, the question naturally arises: where should we see the final cause of the fall of man? In temptation, whether of the serpent, without which temptation would not have occurred, or in the very nature of Adam? Obviously the latter. The commandment of God was addressed to him, Adam himself, to his freedom. It contained a question to which a different answer was possible: yes or no. And he depended on the man himself. There is no reason to assert that man himself - in one or another stage of his development, in Adam or in the Adamites - could not fall or reject God, even apart from the suggestion of the serpent, which only realized this possibility in man. Adam’s own guilt, which has its basis precisely in his freedom, and, therefore, responsibility, is confirmed by the fact that God (Gen. 2:1) first asks Adam himself if he ate the forbidden fruit, and only then Eve, who had direct dealings with the serpent, and condemns them as fully responsible for their act. However, at the same time, the central position of man in the world does not change as a result of the Fall and expulsion from paradise: if it is said about paradise that man was settled in it in order to “cultivate it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15), then man is expelled from paradise “to cultivate the ground from which he was taken” (3:23). Here, of course, of course, not only the earth as arable land, the source of human nutrition, but in general the first earth from which God created the human body. However, in fact, the fall of man occurred through temptation that came from the spiritual world in which the fall had previously taken place. This is not, of course, an accident for man, because the connection with the spiritual world is part of the fullness of his humanity and stems from the co-humanity of the angels. 280 Therefore, to block a person’s access to the spiritual world, for the sake of the danger of temptation from Satan, would mean to diminish his humanity, and would contradict the structure of the world at its core, as “heaven and earth.” What is Satan's temptation? He does not follow the open satanic path in which he seduced his angels to direct rebellion against God, to anti-God in the name of his own self-deity, through a direct refusal to realize the image of God in created likeness. Although in the spiritual being of man there is the possibility of such a temptation of Satan, Satan does not tempt man with it, perhaps leaving this for the future “man of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:3-10) and the “beast” with his false prophet (Rev. 13). Therefore, original sin is not satanic, but human, and man is involved in it through deception (for “Satan is a liar and the father of lies” John 8:44). The temptation of Satan starts from determining the place of man in nature, turns to him as a natural being, who has his own sophia as an immanent norm in the basis of his relationship to the world. This internal norm for a minor person appears as a commandment of God: a person must be determined to the world in the name of God, and not by self-rule, actually submitting to the flesh. And Satan deceived the naivety of Eve, and through her Adam, by confusing, darkening their self-awareness, instilling in them the idea that they were called to become gods in this world not through obedience to God and, therefore, not through spiritual achievement, but through eating the fruits of this world, as a magical means to power over the world, through which in fact the world receives magical power over man. God does not have “knowledge of good and evil,” for God does not “know” evil that He did not create. But the knowledge of good and evil becomes inherent in the created being in its relativity and limitation, since he is immersed in this relativity, in his selfhood or self-godliness, and becomes not a god by grace, but “a god who knows good and evil” in created self-will. Nevertheless, even in the temptation itself, the first parents did not want evil and did not rebel against God, although they turned away from Him through disobedience. But they, having fallen into a misunderstanding about themselves and about their relationship to the world, in fact, without wanting it themselves, turned away from God to the world, and through this the weakness of their created nature was immediately revealed in them precisely in its relationship to the world. God's judgment over man, dooming him to dependence on nature, to illness, poverty, labor and mortality, is only a revelation of what happened in man when he himself violated the norm of his being, and because of this it became itself abnormal. Further revelation of the power of sin in man goes in both directions, both spiritual and carnal. On the one hand, humanity becomes “flesh” in the sense that nature dominates the spirit in man. On the other hand, in practical atheism, the satanic ideology of struggle with God, even with the very idea of ​​Him, develops, so to speak. A man driven mad wants to destroy the image of God in himself, completely abolishing the very thought of God. The image of God in man is indestructible, but, being obscured and distorted, it must be restored and revealed. This restoration is the work of God’s economy, the “salvation” of the world, which was promised by God during the expulsion of our first parents from paradise, If man were not a generic being, realizing himself as the human race in time and therefore having a history, the fall of man would seem irreparable in humanity itself, as it turned out, in a certain sense, irreparable in Satan within the spiritual world. But man still had a future for himself, and in the prophetic knowledge of this future, Adam named his wife Eve, that is, Life, immediately after expulsion from paradise, and a promise was already given about the seed of the Woman in the sentence of God, as the First Gospel. The disease of sin in the history of the human race not only spread and deepened, but also was overcome, until it was overcome to such an extent that this new seed came from the Virgin Woman - the Son of Man. The fall of man had a decisive significance not only for himself, but also for nature. He is called upon to be its master, to humanize nature, becoming its spiritual center. For nature itself (“the soul of the world”) is not spiritual, but only soulful, insofar as it is a living essence, and through this life of its own in man; and through a person it can partake of the life of the spirit, becoming already a “spiritual” body (in contrast to the “spiritual” body, which is inherent in itself). Having within itself the seeds of the Heavenly Sophia as a natural foundation, reflecting and realizing it in created existence, nature has within itself its own persuasiveness and authenticity, its own thought and beauty. However, hierarchically, spiritual being is a lower and insufficient type of being, which must be enlightened by the spirit and thus not at all abolished, but raised to a higher state and higher purposiveness. Nature must be liberated from itself, from its spiritual naturalness, and man, to whom it must belong, is called upon to be its liberator. And if a person did not rise to the height of his calling and himself submitted to it, instead of becoming its conqueror and liberator, then through this “the whole creation groans and suffers together until now” (Rom. 8:20,22), becoming a land of damnation, instead of being the paradise of God, the body and dwelling of a deified man. However, it conceals within itself the hope for “apocatastasis,” “that the creation itself will be freed from the slavery of corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (21), for its transformation, which will take place at the end of the world, when there will be “a new heaven and a new earth,” and this restoration of nature in its dignity is at the same time the restoration of man, according to the Apostle: “and not only she, but we also groan within ourselves, awaiting adoption, the redemption of our body” (Rom. 8, 23). The creation submitted to vanity, i.e. her life became empty and devoid of supreme purposefulness, remaining in the realm of boundless, meaningless formation - this is how her divinely inspired witness, the ancient Ecclesiastes, lived out the vanity of the life of the world. Vanity is emptiness, and dehumanized nature, cut off from its highest meaning, devoid of spirit, is precisely emptiness, however, suffering from itself in the thirst for its filling, bringing to the spirit. Nature is preserved, but by the thoughts of God, by the angels of the natural world, but by St. angels act on the natural world as if from the outside, as disembodied spirits, without having access to it from the inside. Only man is the soul of the world, which connects him through himself internally and with the angelic world, just as, on the contrary, by his fall he alienated nature from it. Nature is ontologically connected with man, it is destined for humanization through transparency by the spirit, but if the human spirit, weakened by sin, itself submits to it, reducing itself, as it were, to non-being, then nature also submits to vanity, i.e. is left to the share of its own emptiness: “what was, that will be; and what has been done is what will be done” (Eccl. 1:9), - “indifferent” nature, the face of which sometimes chills the human soul. In the Fall, an unnatural rupture between nature and man occurred, after which the latter became a slave and captive of nature, bearing the curse for his sin. The natural relationship between man and nature has changed into the opposite: it is not man who owns nature, leading it to God, being its high priest, but she owns man, leads him away from God, intimidating him with her power, bewitching him with her charms, conquering him with her wealth. She makes him “flesh” and enslaves him by dependence on her to maintain life: the chained Prometheus is Orpheus, who has forgotten the path to the resurrection of Eurydice. The fall of man was also the fall of nature. It has lost its meaning. It has become only a being in itself, a fact, the connection of which is a causal necessity. This many-sided necessity is the pattern of the world, which has become not a cosmos, but a mechanism. Man in his fall did not destroy the image of God in himself, but only darkened and weakened it. In a similar way, nature, having become detached from man, did not lose its sophic foundation or content, although it darkened its face. The world remains God’s creation, and the eternal “let it be,” the word about creation, always sounds in the world. Therefore, even after the fall of the world, the Divine Sophia shines in the world as a revelation of God, and “the heavens will tell the glory of God, the firmament will proclaim the work of His hands. Day imparts speech to day, and night reveals knowledge to night. There is no language and no speech where their voice is not heard” (Ps. 18:2-4). The divinely inspired singer here testifies to the “glory of God,” that is, the Divine Sophia, which is still revealed in nature, and who among people does not hear this revelation! And not only believers, for whom nature is the unwritten book of Genesis, but also unbelievers, who, in the blindness of their hearts, not knowing God, still love “nature” in its greatness and glory. And the apostle also testifies to this same abiding sophia of the world: “its invisible things, the eternal power and Divinity, have been visible from the creation of the world through the consideration of creation” (Rom. 1:20). Divinity, - θεότις, here is equivalent to “glory” and designates the Divine Sophia as revealed in nature (Cf. Job 12:7-9 and especially 28:23-27). And this Wisdom of God, revealed in the world, is an inexhaustible source of inspiration for life with nature, elevating, purifying, strengthening and saving the fallen man himself. This is the daily experience of all humanity. And this sophia of the world is the basis for the fact that nature also has its own, albeit impersonal, life: “hypostasis,” which does not know its hypostasis, but is capable of being hypostasized and living its life for man, for the angels, for God. This life - stone, minerals, water, plants - is only vaguely realized by man, although the life of the animal world remains accessible to him to some extent. This life of nature, being the Glory of God in creation, itself sings this glory to the Creator, and heaven truly confesses it. (This is evidenced by the wondrous song of the three youths - non-canonical chapter 3 of Dan., in which they appeal to all creation with a call to praise the Lord). This is the bright face of created Sophia, facing the sky. However, nature also has another, nocturnal, “dark face” of the fallen Sophia (in the words of V.V. Zenkovsky). Sophia in its positive foundation and content, in the fall of man and nature, received an improper existence. Being extradivine, as a creation arising from non-existence, nature is destined for deification in man and through man, but when the latter; fell, nature was doomed to the undue independence of extra-divine existence, it became a godless, self-sufficient world, a “great lord” with a powerful fullness of life within itself. The world, having become the fallen Sophia, separated in the image of its existence, although, of course, not in its foundation, from the Divine Sophia. And in its decomposed, chaotic existence, nature retains all its completeness as a total unity, but this multi-unity is the external mechanical coherence of natural law, is clothed with its bark, and the animal world, deprived of human leadership, is doomed in its life to a struggle for existence, mutual self-destruction. The life of nature in individual manifestations undergoes degeneration and degeneration. Parasitic forms of animals and plants appear, as if the creation of evil in the riot of nature. In its disobedience to man, nature acquires its own power over him, like inhuman magic. The forces of nature in their elemental life become the abode of demons who identify themselves with natural spirits. The life of nature receives its mysticism, which amazes man’s imagination and enslaves his will in pagan religions and especially in orgiastic cults. Nature appears before man as a goddess who demands divine worship from him. It is not nature that is humanized, but man that is dehumanized, becoming a natural being. Nature turns out to be stronger than an exhausted person. Man is called upon to become the “soul of nature,” being its spiritual tsenur. He has to organize and spiritualize the life of nature. But in his fall, man actually ceased to be the soul of nature, although he retained its potency within himself. Nature finds its soul outside of man, like some false center, which nevertheless receives its reality in the absence of a true center. This soul of nature, the living connection of the world, not belonging to man, becomes demonic, a kind of false and anti-Sophia, Achamoth. Not completely belonging to the demons, like Sophia’s creature, she becomes their abode and tool. Having lost its orbit and its spiritual center, the soul of the world becomes ambiguous, blind, ignorant of goodness and strength, deceptive and deceitful. It is dangerous for the human spirit to limitlessly merge with nature, to entrust itself to its royal dominance. He must, loving nature, resist it, ascetically affirming his spirituality. For man is of high nature, he is not a mollusk, or a plant, or an animal, and if he lives only a natural, that is, animal life, this is a fall for him. Therefore, man’s relationship to nature acquires, in a certain sense, a tragic character. For him she is the revelation of the Glory of God, Wisdom and Beauty, but, ceasing to be an other being of the human spirit, she becomes dual and false, beckons a person to become lower than himself, to abandon himself. This tragedy is most aggravated in the area where merging with nature is most intimate: in beauty and in art, as a creative service to beauty. Nature, as reason, as a pattern, is revealed to man, to the logos of the world, and in knowledge in itself there is no hidden poison - knowledge of nature receives inappropriate use only depending on man’s freedom from the sinfulness of his will. But beauty, which directly conquers, can conceal poison in itself, be deceptive, for the beauty of nature or natural beauty is autonomous from the Spirit, indifferent to good and evil, to which a person cannot and should not be indifferent. The charms of Achamoth, the cunning of the fallen Sophia, are most dangerous under the guise of beauty. And, however, beauty in nature is actually not just a mask. This is the breath of the Holy Spirit over the world; beauty is immanent in the creation that it invests. She is a paradise in nature, traces of which are stored in her memory like a reflection of heaven, although beauty in a fallen world is separated from holiness. This natural beauty is revealed to man, who is called to perceive its revelation not only naturally, but also spiritually, in the fullness of his spiritual being, turned to God. Therefore, for him, beauty is inseparable from holiness, it is “smart”, and not just natural beauty. Beauty is self-legal, it is free from morality, as a norm or law, but it is not internally autonomous from the integral human spirit. “Smart beauty” is not a special type of it, or a place other than the world. On the contrary, intelligent beauty is spiritual eyes that see the spiritual content of beauty and judge beauty. There is no external criterion here, but only an internal one: for spiritual, intelligent beauty, beauty and sin are incompatible, the sinful perception of beauty or the perception of sin clothed in natural beauty (in general, abstract aestheticism, which sometimes found a place for itself in Orthodoxy, for example, in Leontyev), is a contradiction. Evil, clothed in natural beauty, is not beautiful, but ugly, and not all beauty is beauty, 281 The most powerful and dangerous spells of nature for man are hidden in beauty. To reject beauty, to blaspheme it, means to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, from whom beauty comes. To be blind to beauty means to close your soul to His spirit in nature. To surrender blindly to beauty, abolishing one’s spirituality for its sake, means chasing a ghost, because true beauty is spiritual, although it is revealed in nature. This is the tragedy - not of art, but of the artist, who is called upon in his work to follow the flinty path of ascent between two abysses - aestheticism and demonism. So, nature, like the fallen Sophia, is for man a formidable force with its power, seductive with its beauty and powerful with its life, a force that stuns him, conquers him, captivates him - makes him a pagan, that is, a natural, and not a spiritual being. Man lives with nature, he is connected with it by creation, and at the same time he is in a state of spiritual self-defense in relation to it. Nature attacks man and defeats him. In the Old Testament, the chosen people remained a small island among the pagan sea, they were chosen by the grace of God to fight nature in the name of the supernatural, true God. With the coming of Christ, nature, as the “great master,” was abolished in its depths, because the New Adam defeated nature and subjugated it to man. The incarnation of God in relation to the natural spirits of the “great lord” was an exorcism. The great master died, and nature turned out to be “empty and weak elements.” However, just as demons return to a swept room even more evil than they were, so in Christian history nature turned out to be the place where Christ fights the Antichrist. The prince of this world is driven out and his power is broken, but his action in the world continues. Nature, as a self-lawful being, or Pan, has already died, but its dead mechanism appeared before man, which man wants to master, turning himself into a mechanism (“rationalization”). A new, special type of “spirituality” appears, as opposed to spirituality, when a person sees himself only as a phenomenon of nature, a link in it. In essence, this is the already religiously outlived temptation of naturalness, which is held on only by the force of inertia and religious emptiness. The new paganism is infinitely poorer than the ancient one, the great Pan is trying to find refuge by inhabiting a person. However, Christ dwells in him, and this attempt at indwelling is only the last spasm of cosmism. Man has great cosmourgic tasks in nature and for himself. The broken connection between spirit and nature must be restored. Wed. my Never-Evening Light: chapter on apophatic and cataphatic theology (there are also corresponding judgments of the Holy Fathers). This antinomy of the Divine is expressed in his dogmatic language by St. Gregory Palamas, when he talks about the distinction in God between what is incomprehensible to creation and what is hidden - God’s own existence, His οὐσία and His being accessible to creation, His being revealed ἐνέργεια. Leaving aside the question of the felicity of these very terms, we see that we are talking here specifically about God’s relationship to the world. God exists practically only as energy, but God in Himself, Deus absconditus, simply does not “exist”; He is the darkness of the Absolute, to which even being is inapplicable. But in the energy of God His power is also known; it begins to exist only in relation. Therefore, Palamas’s main scheme is the idea of ​​God as Absolute-Relative, the inclusion of relation (although, of course, not relativity) in the very definition of God. See my Never-Evening Light, chapter about the creature. See the chapter “Created Nothingness” in the Unevening Light (especially the distinction between ukon and meon). Therefore, the biblical story about the creation of the world is simply silent about any kind of primordial matter (and this feature of it is even more emphasized when comparing it with the outwardly similar story of the Babylonian epic with its Tiamat as primordial matter). The only expression ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων (in the non-canonical book of Macc. 6:18) also contains the denial of any primary matter. This same thought about the Wisdom of God, as the true beginning of creation, is secretly expressed in Genesis 1:1: “in the beginning God created heaven and earth” and in John 1:1: “in the beginning was the Word.” Of course, neither the first nor the second text talks about the beginning in time, but about the Beginning as the Divine world, Sophia. Of the Church Fathers, the most consistent in expounding the doctrine of the divine “logoi” of created existence is St. Maximus the Confessor, "logology", which is essentially sophiology. For a presentation in Russian, see S. L. Epifanovich. Rev. Maximus the Confessor and Byzantine theology, Kyiv 1915. St. G. Florovsky. Byzantine fathers V-VIII. Paris. 1933, ch. VII. I will not present angelology here, directly referring to the “Ladder of Jacob” (about angels). An analogy with time is represented by space. Spatiality is a property of the world, limited in the integrity of its existence by the fragmented multiplicity of its images, and their reality is expressed in externality or mutual pushing out of a given place, from where spatiality generally arises. There is no place for it in the chaste Divine world, where everything is permeated by everything and is filled with it in the integrity of being. The created world in its formation is characterized by a fragmented multiplicity of being, that is, spatiality, which is expressed in the reality of space. The latter gives place not only to the multiplicity of its points or atoms, but also to their unity” or coherence. It not only divides, but also connects, and by the power of this connection, space, static in separation, can be dynamically overcome, realized as unity. The spatial image of being, like the temporal one, has its basis in superspatial spiritual existence, which is the true content of the spatial world. Space is not just a bag for atoms (however, even the image of a bag already presupposes a certain totality). The spatial image of the world is a static section of world causality in the sense that all spatial existence is mutually conditioned or causally connected - not in sequence, but in coexistence, testifying to world unity. As a form of created existence, spatiality is less general than temporality, since the first relates only to the natural, sensory world, and the second also embraces the phenomena of the spiritual world. N. A. Berdyaev (On the Purpose of Man) pays due attention to this humanity of God in the depiction of the Bible. Wed. my Philosophy of Economics. M. 1910. See Jacob's Ladder (about angels). This does not at all mean Origen’s pre-existence of souls within the limits of world time, before or after the creation of the earthly world. Here we have not a comparison of two times, before and after, but eternity and time. Wed. Unburnt Grain - about original sin. By the way, the ability to tame animals (“domestic”) in humans is clear evidence of this original relationship. Now a person cannot tame all the animals that have gone wild, but they all have the inclination to do so. Examples of this come from the lives of saints, on the one hand, and animal tamers, on the other. Wed. Burning Bush - chapter on original sin. This idea about the antinomy of the created self, which is both a creature and a self-positing self, is the image of the Prototype and at the same time belongs to itself, can be brought into parallel (and to a certain extent, in connection) with the “second antinomy” of personal self-consciousness, which N. Hartmann (Die Ethik) and B. P. Vysheslavtsev teach about. Ethics of transformed eros, ch. 7, § 2. Wed. God’s covenant with Noah (Gen. 8:21–2; 9:1–17) that “henceforth, all the days of the earth, sowing and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will not cease” (8, 22). See Jacob's Ladder (about Angels). If the “demon” of Vrubel (or Lermontov) can enchant us with beauty, then here we have either religious substitution and self-deception, which has its source in the artist’s spiritual limitations or even blindness, or (which is more likely), the special nature of the talent, allowing him to see beauty in the fall, in a kind of chiaroscuro.