Глава 4: двоица слова и Духа

The first part of this work 271 sets forth the doctrine of the Divine Sophia as the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity - the Father in the Son by the Holy Spirit, but mainly in relation to the Second Hypostasis, the Lamb of God. Now we have to focus on the same thing in relation to the Third Person, the Holy Spirit. When it is said about the Divine Two, the Second and Third Hypostases in their dyadic union, this does not mean in any way that the trinity of the Holy Trinity is being diminished in any way or that division or dissection is being introduced into It. 272 On the contrary, the Holy Trinity in Its internal structure includes not only the individual hypostases in their trinity, but also their dual relationships. The Trinity character of the Two is fully established through the principle of monarchy, which is established in the dyadic self-revelation of the Father as the “Principal,” the Divine Subject. But His Predicate or self-revelation, the Divine Sophia, is realized as a dual unity of two hypostases: the Word spoken by the Father, on which the Holy Spirit emanating from the Father rests. This dual unity, this intradivine And or ΔIA, about which Eastern and Western theologians argue, is the Divine Sophia, as the self-revelation of the one Father. It coordinates the personal revelations of the Second and Third hypostases. In the depths of the consubstantial and indivisible Trinity, in Her Trinity, the First can be distinguished on one side, as the Revealing Hypostasis, and on the other, the Two Others, the Duo of the Son and the Spirit, as Her pre-eternal hypostatic self-revelation. This truth should first be expressed in a negative form, namely by showing that for the completeness of self-revelation, any one hypostasis, the Son or the Holy Spirit, is not enough; the Divine Sophia is not only the Son, just as she is not only the Holy Spirit, but the dual unity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, as a single self-revelation of the Father. The true definition of the Divine Sophia is established by her identical relationship to the self-revelation of both, in their dyadic interpenetration. All misunderstandings about the relationship of the Divine Sophia herself to the hypostases of the Word and the Spirit, as well as regarding their connection in the “procession” of the Holy Spirit. from or through the Son, are rooted in insufficient attention to the true character of this intra-trinitarian Dyad, which does exist, but is usually seen in the wrong place where it should be looked for. If in this negative characteristic it must be established that the Two cannot be converted into only one, nor divided into two, then in its positive definition this means that both hypostases are united through the self-revelation of the Father in the Divine Sophia inseparably and unmerged. They cannot even open one without the other, just as they cannot unite until complete merging or identification. The inseparability and non-fusion of the hypostases of the Duo means at the same time the indestructible concreteness of their relationship, in which there can be no rearrangement or replacement: the first cannot take the place of the second, and the second cannot take the place of the first. Of course, such specificity should not have a hint of subordinationism. It does not detract from equal divinity, combined with separate hypostasis, but refers to the equal necessity and indispensability of hypostases in the divine self-revelation of the Father. This can be shown on the basis of the personal properties of the hypostases: it is the Second Hypostasis that tends to be the Word of all words and the ideal-objective content of self-revelation, and not the Third, which is not the Word, although it does not exist without the Word. Likewise, the Word does not possess that power of life-giving and accomplishment, which is characteristic only of the Third Hypostasis. And in this sense, the Holy Spirit rests on the Son, who accepts this rest, but not vice versa. In the relationship between these two hypostases there is not and cannot be reversibility, which would mean the abolition of their personal properties, that is, it would introduce hypostatic indifference, along with the actual denial of the inseparability and non-fusion of the Second and Third hypostases. In patristic literature, as we know, to characterize the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit, a comparison was used of the Second Hypostasis with the mouth, and the Third - with the breath of the mouth, or with the word and the air in the sound of the word. No matter how meager and insignificant this natural comparison may be for understanding the hypostatic character of the Word and the Spirit, it nevertheless quite correctly establishes this feature of their dyadic connection, in an inseparable and unmerged, and, moreover, concrete, definite union. Indeed, this dyadic connection is necessary for the very feasibility of self-revelation: the word unspoken does not sound, although it retains its ideological content; a sound that does not contain a verbal idea is not a word, but only a vibration of air. So in the depths of the Trinitarian self-revelation, the Divine Sophia, as an all-ideal or all-verbal all-reality, the Divine world, entitas entium, cannot be realized through the Word alone or through the Spirit alone. We can say, deliberately coarsening the expressions, that there is no word in the Word for itself, for it is spoken not by the Son, but only by the Father, it is the Father’s Word. But he is absent not only for the Son, who keeps him silent, leaving him to speak to the Father, but also for the Father. For the Father Himself also does not speak it Himself, leaving it to the begotten Son to do it. In mutually sacrificial love, both are silent, and the Word itself falls silent in this sacrificial silence between the hypostases of the Father and the Son. The word, born and born, kenotically seems to freeze, does not speak itself. In this sense, it does not seem to exist, it does not exist - if one can say so, again deliberately coarsening the expressions (however, in human language there are no non-rough, adequate words for this) - before the self-revelation of the Spirit and outside of It. The Father and the Son alike, although each in his own way, as if yearning, are looking for the begotten and begotten and, however, hidden in silence kenosis - the Word; the duality of the Father and the Son seems to be exhausted in this birth of the Word, which, as it were, cannot be realized (which is why, by the way, this first duality - the Father-Son - cannot be the complete self-revelation of the Father). But the self-revelation of the Holy Trinity is not limited to the Second Hypostasis, which alone, by itself, cannot realize it. It is completed in another way by the self-revelation of the Father, namely by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit onto the Son. The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, is the triumphant love of accomplished sacrificial self-revelation. In the Third Hypostasis, in Her self-revelation, the Word sounds and is spoken. The Father recognizes Him, as if resurrected from the sacrifice of silence, as being born and begotten, and the Son recognizes Himself as the Word of the Father. The Holy Spirit is Life triumphant over kenotic sacrifice, resurrection from kenotic dying, triumph of life-giving Love. We spoke above about the First Dyad, so to speak, before the Holy Spirit, and now we are talking about It after His entry into the Holy Trinity. Of course, for eternity there is neither before nor after, for there are both before and after, but before is the basis or prius for after. In the Second Duality of the Son and the Spirit, both the kenosis of birth and the victorious triumph of procession are united by a single pre-eternal trinity act. The procession of the Holy Spirit does not occur without reference, as if due to some metaphysical necessity or divine fate; it is a hypostatic movement of Love. The Holy Spirit comes upon the Son in order to rest on Him, and the presence of the Son is a necessary condition for this procession. And in this sense, as we see, the Holy Spirit is precisely the Third Hypostasis, which cannot be thought of as the Second (and certainly not the First). In fact, the doctrine of causal origins - both Eastern and Western - knows two second hypostases, to the extent that it dissects the Holy Trinity into two unrelated Duos: Father - Son and Father (or in the Catholic doctrine Father-Son) and the Holy Spirit. But the Holy Spirit is not the Second, but precisely the Third Hypostasis in the Holy Trinity, which rests on the Son, fulfills the word for the Father and the Son, gives life to the Son, and to that extent the Father is the existence of God in God himself, and therefore if God is spirit, then she bears the primary name of God of the spirit as the Holy Spirit. Trinitarian self-revelation in the Divine life, or Sophia, contains two inextricably linked acts: self-exhaustion - kenosis in birth, and self-inspiration - glory in procession: dying and resurrection, self-exhausting ideality and self-fulfilling reality. Two images of Love: sacrifice and its triumph - “perfect joy”: the Father, exhausted in birth, and the Son, cast into ideality, exhausted in fertility, and in this and above this the life-giving Spirit, the breath of Divine love in its fullness, in its triumph. By the Holy Spirit the Father loves the Son, no longer as a begotten, but as a begotten one. The first movement of the Holy Spirit emanating from the Father is towards the Son, towards the Son, in relation to the Son, as the hypostatic love of the Father. And the reverse movement of the Holy Spirit is from the Son, through the Son to the Father, as the hypostatic love of the Son to the Father, completing the circular movement of the Spirit from the Father through the Son (ἐμμέσως), or, to put it differently, from the Father and the Son. But in this circular movement of the Holy Spirit, in addition to the hypostatic direction - to the Son from the Father and to the Father from the Son - in addition to the love of the Father (to the Son) and the Son (to the Father), there is the very movement of love, which is the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit. The latter is completely dissolved in trinitarian love. For not only the Son, but also the Holy Spirit is loved by the Father, with enthusiastic and ecstatic love of “procession”, and not only the Father, but also the Holy Spirit is loved by the Son with triumphant, tempered love (“I and the Father are one”). The Father loves Himself in the Son, and the Son loves Himself in the Father, but Both love hypostatic Love itself, and the Father “emanates” into It, and the Son “rests” in It, embracing It and accepting it as His own being in the Father. And She, this hypostatic Love, herself loves the Father and the Son, of whom She is the hypostatic unity, the hypostasis of Love. Human understanding is given the ability to recognize all these moments in the self-existence of the Spirit only discursively, consistently moving from one definition to another, for it knows love only as a state or belonging to a hypostasis, but not a self-hypostasis. This transcendence of Love, as a hypostatic principle, expresses the special mystery of the Third Hypostasis, Its inaccessibility and unrevealedness for us. Love in us is the complete overcoming of selfhood, with which hypostatic existence itself is connected for us. Therefore, love seems to us to be hypostatic, only a state of hypostasis or, more precisely, hypostases (at least two, if not more). But the Third Hypostasis is hypostatic Love, but at the same time devoid of any selfhood. She, like the first two hypostases, in Her own hypostatic life has Her own kenosis, which consists precisely in hypostatic, as it were, self-annihilation: in Her procession from the Father to the Son, She loses Herself, as it were, there is only a ligament, a living bridge of love between the Father and the Son, a hypostatic Between. But in this kenosis, the Third Hypostasis finds Itself as the Life of other hypostases, and as the Love of others, and as the Consolation of Others, which thereby becomes for Itself its own Consolation, self-consolation. In a word, just as birth has a passive and active side, so procession is a passive and active act - derivation and procession, hypostatic exhaustion and self-discovery, kenosis and glorification. The character of the Third hypostasis - Love is expressed in this existence “between”, with the inclusion of the hypostases of the Loving - Beloved. Therefore, Her hypostasis is, as it were, hypostasis, complete transparency for other hypostases, selflessness. In this sense, Love is Humility before this peculiar “impersonality” of the Third hypostasis, the first two hypostases are, as it were, independent personalities - subject and object or subject and predicate, to which She is only a link, as if devoid of Her own content. Of course, one cannot talk about “selfhood” in a createdly limited sense when applied to the Divine hypostases, since each of Them has its own kenosis of love. However, one can distinguish different images of this love and, in particular, see that in the Third Hypostasis kenosis is expressed in a kind of self-abolition of the personality. 273 Which, as it were, hides itself, becoming completely transparent to others, but in this acquiring for itself the perfection of Divine life - Glory. From this hypostatic character of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity comes an important consequence regarding His inseparability and non-fusion with the Second Hypostasis in the Duo of God’s self-revelation. It stems primarily from the hypostatic existence of the Second and Third Persons of the Holy Trinity. The hypostases do not merge, for they are “separately personal,” like personal centers. The non-confluence of the Second and Third hypostases in the Duality of the revelation of the Father also follows from the fact that each hypostasis reveals the Father in its own way: the Second as the Word or Idea of ​​ideas, content, and the Third as the realized reality of this content, as beauty. In the Third Hypostasis, God not only knows Himself as the absolute Truth or the Word of everything and about everything, but also lives in it, feels it, and the reality of the felt Truth is beauty. The latter is not its own special content of the Third Hypostasis, which is already given for it in the Word, but its being or accomplishment, not what, but how. Here there is an absolute adequacy of interpenetration, which, however, does not become the identity of both images of revelation, logical in the illogical, ideality in reality. And yet, ideality is real, and reality is ideal and meaningful. Reality has nothing to say about itself except the ideality that exists in it, but the latter cannot itself include in its content exactly what makes it reality. The non-fusion of both hypostases of Divine self-determination is correlated with their inseparability. This latter corresponds to their mutual transparency or permeation of one another. Without this mutual fulfillment, each of them is not a self-revelation of the Divine in its entirety. Of course, since each of the hypostases is equally divine, it is already God in its own being: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. However, insofar as the Divinity in His self-revelation, or in Sophia, is an intra-Trinitarian trinitarian act, it is accomplished by the consonant action of all three hypostases, which mutually presuppose each other and, revealing, realize. Each hypostasis lives and reveals itself not only in itself, but also outside itself, in other hypostases, and in its own individual existence alone it would be one-sided and incomplete (of course, it is impossible even for a moment to allow this blasphemous assumption). This reciprocity is expressed in the depths of the Holy Trinity in the fact that there is a Revealing Hypostasis - the Father is the Duo of Revealing Hypostases, the begotten Son and the outgoing Holy Spirit. Their inseparability is justified not only by the fact that both of these hypostases have a single “beginning” in the Father, but also by the fact that they both together reveal Him in the Divine Sophia, in a single concrete act determined by their mutual relationship. This relationship is expressed in a certain structure or order, taxis, and the Son is the Second Hypostasis, and the Holy Spirit is the Third Hypostasis, not vice versa. The third hypostasis is ontologically (of course, not chronologically) after the Son, presupposing His existence for itself. The Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father to the Son, through the Son, rests on the Son, and is related to Him in a certain, concrete way. The Holy Spirit cannot even be conceived apart from its relation to the Son, as well as, of course, to the Father, for all hypostatic relations are threefold. And therefore the Son cannot be conceived without a relationship to the Holy Spirit resting on Him, and outside of this relationship with Him it is not revealed. When we say Son, we silently think: and Spirit, as well as vice versa. This “and” connects two hypostases in a single revelation of the Divine Sophia. Sophia is one, but there are two Sophia hypostases, revealing one thing, but in two ways: single-dual, inseparable and unmerged. One hypostasis does not repeat the other, but reveals: the Word is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit gives life to the Word. The Divinity contains the Word, has Him, but the Spirit tests Him: “for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God” (Rom. 2:10). By the Spirit, the Father Himself is self-inspired by Himself in His word, and this self-inspiration is Divine life, is Beauty. Inspiration is not pointless and empty: it creatively “tests” and reveals the “depths of God.” Divine life is an act of Divine self-inspiration, in this sense a cognitive-creative act, in the Word through the Holy Spirit. Of course, here it is necessary to eliminate the created understanding of creativity as associated with incompleteness, limitation, formation, incompleteness. In God everything is actual and actualized in the Holy Spirit. But inspiration and creativity have a theme for themselves, and this divine theme is God’s own Word, accomplished by the Holy Spirit, so to speak, inspiring God Himself to creative self-positing: the Father “exhausts” the Holy Spirit. on the Son, that is, he is inspired by his own Divine theme. The Son Himself becomes both for Himself and for the Father a revelation of the Divine, while the Holy Spirit is this very inspiration. This pre-eternal relationship in the immanent Trinity becomes accessible to us in the economic Trinity, that is, Christologically, the Holy Spirit itself is not Truth, but the “Spirit of Truth”, the “Spirit of Wisdom”. “He will guide you into all truth, for He will not speak from Himself, but He will speak what He hears, and He will tell you the future” (John 16:13), “He will glorify Me, and He will take from Me and tell you” (14). The same meaning has the apparent self-identification of Christ with the “Another Comforter” in the farewell conversation: “soon you will not see Me and soon you will see Me” (16, 17,19). This dyadism of the Son and the Holy Spirit is indicated with particular clarity in the non-canonical Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, where the “Spirit of Wisdom” and Wisdom itself are, as it were, identified. 274 This results in the main difficulty in the doctrine of the Divine Sophia, which remains insurmountable for many: precisely how is it simultaneously affirmed about Sophia that She is the revelation of both the Son and the Holy Spirit, or, more precisely, the Son and the Holy Spirit. it is said that the Wisdom of God, as the self-revelation of the Father, is the dyadic unity of the revelation of the Two revealing hypostases. Sometimes this idea of ​​dyadic unity receives a fused, undisclosed expression, in which the true relationship of the hypostases is not immediately understood. It is the Holy Spirit that is spoken of in the symbol: “who spoke the prophets.” In many places in the Old and New Testaments, prophecy, as the proclamation of truth, appears to be a deliberate action of the Spirit of God (“all Scripture is inspired by God” (2 Tim. 3:16), and prophecy “was spoken by holy men of God, being moved by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21). One gets the impression that it is by the Holy Spirit that the word of truth is proclaimed, and thus dyadic self-revelation and divine inspiration are depicted as the work of the Third Hypostasis alone. However, this combined expression must be understood in the revealed and full sense: it is not the Holy Spirit who is the word of truth, which is the Son of God, Christ the Truth, but the Holy Spirit inspires with this word, reveals it, generally reveals Christ. Therefore, the expression “who spoke the prophets,” which appears in the 8th member of the symbol, after the revealed teaching about the Son, must be understood in its entire context: the Holy Spirit, according to the farewell conversation, will proclaim “not from His own,” but what He heard, and He inspires precisely to hear this inner word, without which “prophecy” is impossible, just as without inspiration by the Holy Spirit it is impossible to hear words. Therefore, “he who spoke the prophets” must be understood in the sense of the accomplished action of the Third Hypostasis, inspiring the prophets, but not in relation to the content of the word itself, which is from the Word. And therefore, one cannot understand the inspiration of the holy books as a mechanical dictation of the words of truth, which the prophet passively wrote down. This is the inspiration of the prophet himself by the word of truth, which he acquired in the depths of his human being through the action of the Third Hypostasis. Sometimes this unity in expressing the doctrine of the dyad of Word and Spirit leads to even greater closedness of thought. This applies especially to the narrative of the creation of the world, in which we have the action of all three hypostases: the original - the Father and the perfect - the Son and the Spirit. The external emphasis here lies on the action of the Holy Spirit, as the perfect “let it be.” However, to this “let there be” is added each time the word that “let there be,” and, therefore, in the creative “let there be” we have a consecrated monogram of the dyadic revelation of the Holy Trinity in creation. Sophia the Divine is pre-eternal Humanity, the heavenly prototype of created humanity. Consequently, in this sense, this humanity is two-in-one on the basis of the inseparability and non-fusion of both Divine hypostases, and both unity and duality are equally true. Divine Humanity is comprehended by us from the created, which bears its image. And this image of created humanity - one, just as the created first man Adam is one - is as dual as the unity of the principles of male and female: “in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). This masculine and feminine principle, in which the image of the Divine Sophia, the prototype of humanity, is imprinted, is the distinction and unity of the Logos and the Holy Spirit in Sophia expressed in the language of created being. From the image here we ascend to the Prototype and understand it. Of course, here we must completely eliminate the quality of the masculine and feminine principles in which they exist in the created world in the image of the male and female sexes, and we must take them as images of the same spiritual principle, Sophia, in the fullness of its self-disclosure, in the image of the Second and Third Hypostases. The Holy Spirit rests on the Logos, and the Logos abides in His womb. The Holy Spirit is life, and love, and the reality of the Word, just as Logos is for Him the determining content, word, thought and feeling, Truth and being in Truth - like the Beauty of revealed Truth. All these relationships find their parallel (no more and no less than a parallel) in the dual unity of the human spirit, in which the masculine, solar, principle of thought, logos is united with the feminine principle of acceptance, creative accomplishment, and being clothed in beauty. The Sophia spirit of a person is a masculine and feminine androgyne, although in fact every single person, individual, is only masculine or feminine, i.e. with all the androgyny of his spirit, he is turned to being by only one principle, in relation to which the second principle is additional. And this androgyny is the completeness of the image of God in man (as well as vice versa, a man in whom one side would decisively predominate to the virtual absence of the other would be a spiritual monster, in fact, no longer a man. 275 We already know that in the Incarnation this distinction, which is parallel to the male and female principles, corresponds to the incarnation of Christ in the image of a man and the most perfect manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the image of the Spirit-Bearing Ever-Virgin Mary, so that the image of perfect God-manhood in its fullness - in heaven and on earth - is not only the Son, but the Son and the Virgin, the eternal Child in the womb of the Mother of God. This indicates the heavenly dual unity of the Son and the Holy Spirit. 276 And this polarization and at the same time the mutual connectedness of both principles, which both correspond to the life of the Spirit, male and female, and in the teaching about the Church are symbolized as the marriage of Christ and the Church - the Holy Spirit, finds its new expression in the inseparability and non-fusion of both revealing hypostases in the Divine Sophia. Each of these hypostases in its personal property conditions, reveals and realizes the other, but cannot be absorbed or abolished by it in fusion. Here this absolute correlation of both hypostases of revelation is established. The Father is revealed by both of them: the hypostasis of birth, the Word, and the hypostasis of procession, the Holy Spirit, in their unity in the Father. Both hypostases are mutually transparent and mutually permeable in their being, and at the same time, each of them has an impenetrable hypostatic core in itself, a separate personal Self. This separate personality of the hypostatic divine Selves is overcome and, as it were, removed in the Trinitarian act of self-denying love, in which these personal centers are self-identified in the single Trinitarian Self of the Holy One. The Trinity, although it does not extinguish its separate personality. This latter is necessarily preserved in the reciprocity of two-hypostatic revelation; both hypostases are mutually permeable not in their hypostasis as such, but precisely in the images of their personal revelation, or, if one can put it this way, not in their subjectivity, but in their predicativeness. The Word is transparent to the Spirit, and the Spirit embraces the Word resting in His bosom, and both the Word and the Spirit are not hypostatic in His revelation, but persons in themselves. And, however, there is also a difference in their hypostatic interexistence. The hypostasis of the Word is expressed in Himself through His begottenness from the Father. She is the subject or subject of the Word - the predicate. She has Her predicate in Herself—the word, and through this Her hypostasis is, as it were, self-evident. But the same cannot be said about the Third Hypostasis, since She is the Spirit of the Second Hypostasis (“Spirit of Truth”). In its content it is correlated with the Word. It becomes transparent for the Word, becoming, as it were, only an image of His existence, or a connective connecting the subject and the predicate. The hypostasis of the Spirit itself is hidden in this transparency for the Word, as if identified with it. The hypostasis of the Spirit does not seem to have its own face, but there is only the face of the Son in His Glory. But this eternal kenosis of Her is at the same time glorification. Glory, which is not only the glorification of the Son, but also Glory itself in Itself. However, in the light of this Glory we can discern the glorified face of the Logos-Christ, but not the own face of the Glory itself, which remains invisible - neither in its kenotic self-denial, nor even in the glory of its glorification. We see the sun in light, as a source of light, but at the same time we do not see the light itself, in which and through which the sun can only be visible to us, along with the sun and, in a certain sense, besides the sun. The third hypostasis is a hypostatic revelation not about itself. At the same time, she is not the transcendental hypostasis of the Father, which itself remains outside of Revelation, as being revealed, as its subject. The third hypostasis is contained within the Father's revelation, as its kind of sacred secret, it is the Mystery of Itself. It is revealed in other hypostases by its action, as the spirit of God, but not by itself, as the hypostatic Spirit of the Holy One. Hypostatic Love itself is immersed in love and shows itself, testifying not about itself, but about the Other: “He (the Spirit) will glorify me, even if he takes from what is mine and declares it to you” (John 16:14). Therefore, the Son, speaking about the sending down of the Comforter, at the same time says about the same thing: “in a little while you will not see Me, and again soon you will see Me” (16, 17), i.e. Me in the Holy Spirit, Who reveals not Himself, but the Son and the Father in the Son (“everything that the Father has is Mine, therefore I said that He will take of Mine and declare it to you,” 16, 15). The Spirit itself does not have anything that He can call “Mine,” so that it is as if He himself does not exist, although in this seemingly non-existence it is precisely in this kind of non-existence that the image of His existence is manifested - in the inseparability and non-fusion of Him with the Son. From here comes the inevitable practical “filioquism” of the theology of the Holy Spirit in His relation to the Son. If we do not reduce it to the rationalistic doctrine of “origin,” then it is inevitable to understand it dyadicly: the theology of St. The Spirit is simply impossible to realize in abstraction from the Son, for the Spirit is His very existence as the Son. The Son is the Son by the Holy Spirit, and the proper “is” of the Holy Spirit is the being of the Son: indivisible and unmerged. The Spirit is the transparency of revelation, while the Son is what is in this transparency, its content. The Spirit is Life, the Son is the One who lives by it. Logos turns into an abstract idea if it does not receive real concreteness in the Spirit, but this concreteness without the meaningful Word would be an emptiness of ugliness. Sophia is the revelation of the Son and the Holy Spirit, inseparable and unmerged. The created world was put into existence by God in the “Beginning”, i.e. in the Divine Sophia, as her created image or created Sophia (see “Lamb of God”). There is nothing in creation that does not belong to Sophia, except nothingness itself, which is its only beginning (see “Non-Evening Light”). Through creation it arises, is posited by God as its own, extra-divine being: οὐκ ὃν becomes μὴ ὂν, potentialized into being. The world came into existence and exists by the will of God: “you created everything as you please” (Ps. 113:117, cf. Rev. 4:11). The book of the Genesis of the world testifies to this with majestic archaic lapidary: “in the Beginning God will create heaven and earth” (1:1). Let us not complicate the discussion now by discussing heaven (see “Jacob’s Ladder” about this). The creation of the angelic council, which is of course here, is the only and beginning-time act of God’s creation, which is complete and self-sufficient in itself. These are the essence of the hypostasized ideas of creation, its, so to speak, heavenly “project”, understandable only in relation to the world, or “earth”. The latter has its own creation story, which is absent for the angelic world. The creation of the world is invariably understood in Christian dogma as the action of the trinitarian, existing God in the Holy Trinity, in which the action of each of the hypostases - the Father, as the original cause - should be distinguished. The Son - as a constructive one, and the Holy Spirit, as a complete one (St. Basil V.). These and other expressions in patristic writing characteristically express the participation of all three persons of the Holy Trinity in creation. This idea is one of the particular applications of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, however, it must be further clarified in relation to the manner of participation of Her individual hypostases. Of course, there can be no doubt that the image of the three-hypostatic God lies on all creation. In particular, it is said about the Word that God (the Father) had, that “all that was, and without it nothing would have come to be,” as well as about the Holy Spirit: “By the Spirit of His mouth all the power of them (the heavens) is established” (Ps. 32:6, cf. 103:30). One cannot help but notice that Genesis simply speaks of God as the Creator (Gen. 1). Although pluralis maiestatis e lohim is used, however, with the predicate in the singular, and the plural pronoun appears only in 1, 26: “Let us create man.” In general, from a comparison of different texts about creation, one gets the impression that God (the Father) creates with His Word and Spirit, so that both of these hypostases receive a kind of instrumental meaning, acting in creation as means at the disposal of the Father, in patristic expression, as His hands. Actually, the Father is the Creator, the will to Creation belongs to Him, and He Himself is the First Will in it. He is the beginning (ἀρχή) not only in the Holy Trinity, revealed in It, but He is also the beginning in creation, in which He is also revealed through the Word in the Spirit. He is the Will of Love 277 and in this sense is the Father in creation (“Our Father” in the Lord’s Prayer; “You alone are our Father,” Isa. 63:16). Actually, He is the hypostatic Creator of the world, that divine Self, which is addressed to the world with the creative word: let everything be done. 278 However, how can we understand the participation of the Second and Third hypostases in the creation if we consider that hypostatically They do not participate in the creation of the world, which is the work of the Father, inseparable and consubstantial with Them? Both of them participate in creation sophia, through Their self-revelation in Sophia, which is also the self-revelation of the Father in the Holy Trinity, the divine world. Sophia is not a hypostasis, although, belonging to the hypostases, she is pre-eternally hypostasized. However, in itself it is the objective principle of divine existence, by which and in which God the Father not only reveals himself in divine existence, but also creates the world in creation. Sophia is the revelation of the Second and Third Hypostases, through which the self-revelation of the Father takes place. Therefore, both of them, through this revelation, become involved in the creation of the world, however, not in direct hypostatic appeal to it, but by their revelation in Sophia. They are the divine foundation of the world, which has for itself a hypostatic Creator, the Beginning, in the Father. This principle - the creation of the world by the Father in Sophia and through Sophia - is completely clear and expressed in the 1st chapter. Genesis. Here all acts of creation are performed by God the Father, who commands, as if from the transcendental outside, from the height of His Divinity, with His Sophian word: let there be this or that image of creation. “Let it be” (fiat) is repeated 8 times, about each of the works of creation (1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26), and it is accompanied by “and it was so”, repeated 7 times in connection with all the works of creation, except the sixth (v. (3), 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, 30, 20), and each of the acts “let it be” and “became” correspond to the word specifically about this creation. This is the essence of the words of the Word, which are contained in the divine Sophia and are here called to creation in the created Sophia, in the world. These are the words of the Word about everything, which “everything has become,” but these words are not spoken here by the hypostatic Word itself, which, although it speaks Itself in the eternal Sophia, is here, in the creation of the world, itself, as it were, silent. They are spoken by the creative hypostasis of the Father, as if repeating here the words of the Word already spoken from eternity in Sophia. God the Father, who pre-eternally gives birth to the Son, is himself pre-eternally silent, for He speaks Himself only in the Son. But God the Father, as the Creator, in creation himself speaks these words pre-eternally spoken in the Son, transmitting them to creation as a command. And in this very sense, the Word acts in the world not as a peace-making hypostasis, but as a word about the world and spoken in the world by the Father. “All that was, and without Him nothing came to be.” It is not said here that the Word itself is the creator, but only the basis and content of creation, called into being by the Father. The hypostatic Word in creation remains His hypostasis, as it were, outside the world or above the world, although by its content it is precisely this that determines its existence, its all-manyness, as all things are unity. He is the logos and logic of the world, hypostatically remaining transcendent to it. It connects with the world only in Sofia, i.e. not as the hypostatic Word, but as the spoken word—everything. In short, the world is directly created according to the will of the Father by the Word in Sophia, this idea is revealed in Gen. I in a series of creative sayings of God, corresponding to the six days of creation: “let there be light, a firmament in the midst of the water... let the water be gathered and dry land appear... let the earth grow green... let there be lights in the firmament of the sky... let the water bring forth creeping things... let the earth bring forth living souls.” All this is an abbreviated monogram of the completeness of the entire created world up to man. And only with the creation of man do we have an act of not only Sophian creation, which determines his place in the cosmos, but also a hypostatically divine one, which is expressed in the advice of God (of course, in the Holy Trinity): “Let us create man in Our image, in Our likeness” (1, 26). The hypostasis of man, pre-eternally created, uncreated, is created with the participation of only three hypostatic persons of the Holy Trinity. However, his nature, created humanity, according to the general order of all creation, is created by the Father: “God created man”... (27). But if we recognize the participation of the Logos in creation only as the action of the Logos, His revelation in Sophia, then we define the participation of the Holy Spirit in the same way: He participates in the creation of the world not hypostatically, but through His action, not as the Holy Spirit, but as the spirit of God hovering over the waters. His action in creation corresponds to His revelation in Sophia. In it it is, first of all, reality, life, beauty or glory. And the first action of the Holy Spirit. in creation there is that in the emptiness of nothing reality arises (in “ukon” - “meon”), as a kind of preliminary reality: namely the earth, as the ontological place of future creation, and then different types of being. This action of the Holy Spirit as a hypostasis of reality is expressed in the words “let it be... and it became so,” which reappears in the story about the days of creation. One can see the deliberate action of the Spirit in the implementation of the productive power of earth and water as the mother’s womb, that primal reality in which the words of the Word are seeded, the ideas of creation accomplished by the life-giving force. This includes the sayings: “let the earth produce greenery... - and the earth did” (11, 12); “let the water produce... the water produced” (20, 21); “let the earth produce living souls” (24). And the revelation of the Holy Spirit in beauty is also spoken of in the final refrain about every day of creation: “and God saw that it (the light) was good” (4), “and God saw that it was good” (10), etc. This is repeated on all days except the second (4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). 279 To the deliberate action of St. The spirit that invests creation with beauty and glory should also be included in the first, preliminary appearance on earth of the glory of creation, the land of transfiguration, in the planting of paradise. This is said briefly, in an anthropomorphic, mythological image: “and God planted every tree in the east out of the ground and placed there the man whom he had created” (2, 8). Eden with its tree of life is brought into direct parallel with the coming city of God on the transformed earth and with the “tree of life” in it (Rev. 22:2). Ego is the initial transformation of the world, given by God, but intended to be extended to all creation through man, who was settled in the Garden of Eden to “cultivate and keep it” (2, 15). But after man himself, in his fall, lost the glory of God (Rom. 3:23), the rays of heavenly light that shone over creation in Eden also went out on earth before the time and timing of its transfiguration. The most important and characteristic passage regarding the action of the Holy Spirit in creation is undoubtedly 1, 2: “the earth was formless and empty (gogu-va-bogu), and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.” What is characteristic here, first of all, is the place given here to the action of the Holy Spirit (likened to a bird sitting on a nest) - before individual acts of creation. The latter reveal from the chaos, the formless and ugly mixture of the “earth”, individual images of creation. We have here, in other words, the relationship of the Second and Third Hypostases in reverse: first the action of the Spirit and then only the Word. The primal reality of being, the primal matter, the earth, is the action of the Spirit, so that in it, in this primal reality, all the Sophia seeds of being embedded in it will germinate. Here, on the very brink of the creation of the world, a deliberate attitude of the Holy Spirit is manifested towards that which is usually considered to be the opposite of Him - to matter. Here a peculiar theme of the life of matter as a reality is already outlined, as having become permeated with the Holy Spirit and in this sense spiritual, i.e. achieve your transformation as a “new earth” (together with a “new sky”), overcoming tohu-va-bohu, chaotic formlessness and emptiness. The hypostasis of the Spirit, as if resting maternally on the Word, in the revelation of Sophia at the creation of the world reveals Its motherhood, as a maternal womb in which the images of this world are born. Here we already have that mysterious cryptogram of the Mother of God, in which the God-man is born as the highest task and goal of the entire created world. In this spiritual chaos, togu-va-bogu, we have the image of created Sophia, taken not from the side of her verbal or ideal content, but from her reality, life, being. How, however, should we more closely understand here this bearing of the Spirit over the abyss and darkness: is it the Holy Spirit or the spirit of God, the Third Hypostasis, or only Her action in Sophia’s revelation? The general idea about the rushing Spirit is expressed with archaic naturalism, in anthropomorphic-mythological language and is difficult to interpret in the sense that the Third Hypostasis itself, in Her hypostatic descent, arranged the tohu-vabohu, forming the cosmos out of chaos in some supermundane Pentecost. On the contrary, this dispensation was already inherent in chaos itself as its life-giving force, consistent with the Sophian prototype of the world. And therefore, there is no need to think that chaos could really be the “place” of the hypostatic presence of the Holy Spirit himself, and not just His power acting in creation. And in this sense, we have once again in relation to St. Spirit, confirmation of the general idea that in the creation of the world the supermundane, world-transcendent hypostasis of the Father is active, which, as it were, introduces the Son and the Spirit into the world during its creation, however, not in Their hypostatic revelation, but only by their action, which is pre-eternally given in the Divine Sophia. Sophia is not a hypostasis, but a “hypostasis.” Therefore, we come again to the conclusion that the world is created by the Father’s hypostasis through the Divine Sophia, and only in her and through her by the action of both hypostases that reveal Her. This idea requires explanation. We say that God the Father creates the world through Sophia and in Sophia, which itself is not a hypostasis, but a hypostasis, the objective principle of divine self-revelation and life. At the same time, we must remember that Sophia does not exist separately from the hypostases, being pre-eternally hypostasized by them. Therefore, if it is said that it is the Father who creates the world through Sophia, then this cannot mean that both the Son and the Holy Spirit hypostatically do not participate at all in creation, giving it only their Sophia revelation. Such a separation of hypostasis from hypostasis in Sophia is unthinkable and unacceptable. However, it is quite conceivable and necessary for such a distinction to be made in the self-revelation of the Divine that it is made primarily in relation to either hypostasis or hypostasis, i.e. its Sophia definition, and according to this we have either a hypostatic (more precisely, hypostatic-Sophian) or Sophian (more precisely, Sophia-hypostasis) revelation, with a predominant emphasis on one side or the other, hypostasis or hypostasis. In the creation of the world we have the following relationship: as a hypostasis of creation, its Beginning or Subject, the Father appears here, who creates the world in the Holy Trinity, i.e. in inseparability with the Second and Third Hypostasis, the triple act in the Divine Sophia. This does not mean that Sophia, as the objective beginning of creation, separated from the hypostases and became extra-hypostatic. But the hypostases do not appear here in their separate personalities, kenotically, as it were, hiding in the hypostasis of the Father. The Divine Subject, the Self, which creates the world, as a Person, is precisely the Father’s hypostasis, with which two other divine Selves are indistinguishably united here. This Father’s Self acts and commands in the creation of the world, while the other Selves are included in It, not being abolished, but not revealing either. They participate in the creation of the world not by themselves, but by their own, i.e. in Divine Sophia. The three hypostatic flames here are, as it were, placed in one perpendicular row and therefore are seen as one, and this one is the Father’s Self. It seems to obscure the divine Selves of the Second and Third Hypostases, kenotically hidden in Him, which are not hypostatically actualized in creation. The same applies to God’s providence for the world. In the Old Testament, where God is revealed in general as one hypostasis, this single hypostasis, in which the Divine trinity, merging to the eye, is hidden, is the hypostasis of the Father, and in this sense it is sometimes said that the Old Testament is “the revelation of the First Hypostasis.” In the New Testament, the Second Hypostasis is already revealed, which opens the Father (“he who sees Me in the form of the Father,” John 14:9), but at the same time closes It with Himself to a certain extent. The Father's hypostasis becomes accessible only through the Son's hypostasis, and in this sense it can be said that the New Testament is primarily a “revelation of the Second Hypostasis.” Nevertheless, in the Second Testament, where the hypostasis of the Father, transcendent to the world, is the divine subject of all revelations of God, she becomes involved in the creation only through the mediation of the hypostases of the Son and the Holy Spirit that reveal Her. They act, hiding in the Father, as if from His face, hypostatically remaining unknown to the creation. In this sense, it can and should be said that Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, who appears to man, speaks to him and reveals His Name to him, is the Divine Logos, which, however, kenotically abolishes Himself, hides His Face in the light of the Father’s hypostasis, speaks as if in Her voice and on Her behalf, 280 appears in theophanies and doxophany (phenomena of Glory). The latter are the actual manifestations of the Divine Sophia - sophiephanies, correlated with the divine Person, who is the Son hiding in the Father, or the Father speaking in the Son, a kind of hypostatic unity of the Son-Father. In the New Testament, the Son is already sent into the world by the Father in his own hypostasis. “Coming down from heaven,” He carries out kenosis no longer in relation to His hypostasis, which, on the contrary, is now separated from the Father, takes on independence and appears by itself, as such, but in relation to His divine life and glory. In the same way, the Father acts in creation and in the providence of the world in relation to the Holy Spirit, in various manifestations and actions of the Third Hypostasis. In this sense, the Father sends Him into the world even before Pentecost (just as in a similar sense the Logos is present in the world, sent by the Father, in theophanies before His hypostatic incarnation). This action of the “Spirit of God” in the communication of His various gifts takes place in the Old Testament, so to speak, only in the Sophian revelation of the hypostatic manifestation of the Holy Spirit. However, in reality, of course, they necessarily presuppose His hypostatic participation, since the action of the Third Hypostasis is inseparable from the Actor himself. Therefore, we can say without any limitation that where God (= the Father) sends His Spirit into the O.Z., He acts through the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit and with Her personal participation, for no gift of the Spirit can be considered extra-hypostatic, separated from the hypostasis of the Spirit, also in the Divine Sophia. Therefore, all these private and small Pentecosts, which are to be united into a single hypostatic Pentecost of the Holy Spirit, cannot be conceived of as being remote from Him. Consequently, everywhere and in the Old Testament the hypostatic Spirit of the Holy Spirit is revealed in its gifts, but it is not revealed hypostatically. His own hypostasis (like the hypostasis of the Son) is kenotically hidden in the hypostasis of the Father, by which the Holy Trinity in the Old Testament is turned to the world, and in Her the sun becomes invisible, indistinguishable and practically seems non-existent. This, however, does not interfere with the fact that in the Old Testament the works of the Holy Spirit are performed by the will of the Father by the hypostatic Holy Spirit, and the spirit of God never acts or exists outside or apart from the hypostatic Holy Spirit. This is the general relationship of the three persons of the Trinity Divinity in the creation of the world and the providence about it, with the primacy of the hypostasis of the Father, but with the irreducible participation of the hypostases of the Revealers. Now let us return again to the question of the actions of the Holy Spirit in creation. In the creation of the world, we have a twofold definition of it: on the one hand, completeness and completeness, and on the other, development and incompleteness. Regarding the first, we must remember that creative words, God’s definitions about the world, are not only spoken to the world once, as God’s creative command: let this and that be done, but they always sound in the world and are spoken in it as a world-setting basis. To this we must also add that in the original plan of creation, as the totality of the logoi of his being, the words of the Word, its fullness was also realized: “all things became, and without Him nothing that became was made” (John 1:2), or the same thought, differently expressed: “and God finished His works and rested on the seventh day from all His works that He had done” (2:2), “he rested from all His works, which God created and created” (3). 281 Here, in an anthropomorphic form, the idea is undoubtedly expressed that the creation already belongs to fullness, to which nothing can be added, which is why God rested from His works. But, on the other hand, the world, created in fullness, is called to become in the process, and these tasks of the formation of the world are included in the very acts of creation, where both earth and water are given the command: let it produce, let it increase (of course, not a single but long-lasting act), “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,” etc. The world was created for time and in time, it in itself, and especially in man, has a history, is being accomplished and is not yet perfect. Thus, the world has simultaneously the statics of its completeness and the dynamics of its accomplishment, and, obviously, one mutually determines the other. This dual basis of the world also corresponds to the dyadic character of God's self-revelation in the Divine Sophia, which is the basis of created Sophia. The world in its creation contains the fullness of the verbal seeds of existence, everything is said about it and in it. The theme of peace is completely given and only requires its disclosure. The world in the fullness of its being and in its coherence, as a multi-unity, is the image of the Logos, in which there cannot be more or less and nothing can be added or subtracted. All worldly meanings are kindled in it, although not yet revealed. This courageous element of meaning and Meaning corresponds to the revelation of the Logos as the Sophian Word. However, this static immobility of completeness does not yet determine the existence of the Logos in created Sophia. The Logos is accomplished, receiving the vital force of being from the Holy Spirit resting on Him. However, this accomplishment in the Divine Sophia is a single eternal act, in which there is no place for more and less, no place for becoming. In created Sophia there is a place for such an accomplishment, which is both becoming and knows for itself more and less. In the entelechy nature of the world, there is always a distinction between the given and the given, the accomplished and the not-yet-fulfilled, as well as the transition from one to the other—becoming. This dynamics of the life of the world corresponds to the realm of the Holy Spirit in created Sophia, His life-giving power. He is to the extent that he is a cosmourgic hypostasis, about which it is written: “in Him (the Word) was Life, and Life was the light of men” (John 1:4), for only in the life of the world, in its formation, does the light of its meanings—the Word—shine. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the “giver of life,” life is given to the world. Moreover, in this sense, the very existence of the world, the creative womb, the first mother, who identified herself in the creation of the world with the first matter, depends on Him. 282 The Power of the Spirit is that earth from which everything comes into being, from a blade of grass to a person. It is a kind of silent being, in which, however, the words of the Word are spoken and heard. This is not the absolute, transcendent Silence (Σιγή) of the Father, Who is revealed only outside Himself, in other forms, and Who Himself in this sense is not in the world, for He is above the world. This is not His non-existence and voicelessness in the world, as if absent from it. No, the Spirit in created Sophia is a hearing and perceiving silence, in which the pre-eternally born Word, as it were, is born again for creation, He is its sound, breath, fulfillment, life. This is natura naturans, which, through the word embedded in it, gives birth to naturanaturata or becomes it. This is being, which contains everything in itself, although of itself it does not add anything to this all. This is the world in its extra-divine originality. This is the maeonic darkness of existence in its pre-dawn, the invisible and empty earth, as if even before the Word, lighting up in it, all-changing in it, and this is the fullness of the accomplishment of the transfigured world. This is the natural energy of life, which can never fade or be stopped in the world, but always carries within itself the beginning of the growth of creativity. This is the mother of cheese, the earth, from which everything grows and into which everything returns for a new life. This is the life of the plant and animal world “according to its kind.” This is the life of the human race in the image of God and in the likeness of God. This is the life-giving principle that pious paganism, without knowing it, revered as the “Great Pan,” the Mother of the gods, Isis and Gaia. This is what the wicked paganism of our days professes as living and life-giving matter in the blindness of its “hylozoism,” or tries to capture in a retort as “vital force.” This is the world itself in all its existence - on the paths from chaos to space... But isn’t this pantheism with an unholy deification of the world, turning into some kind of religious materialism? Yes, this is pantheism, but only a completely pious one, or, more precisely, as I always prefer to put it in order to avoid ambiguity, panentheism. Yes, it is impossible to profess pantheism as the only, exhaustive beginning of the worldview, for that would be a truly pagan worldview, veneration of the creature instead of and as the Creator. However, it is even less possible to completely reject it, since it is a dialectically irreducible moment in sophiological cosmology. The world, and we in it, in God “we live and move and are” (DA 17:28). “If you take away your spirit, they die and return to their dust; you send your spirit, and they are created, and you renew the face of the earth” (Ps. 103:29-30). 283 And what other power than the divine gives life to the universe? Do not critics, in their fear of pantheism, introduce an independent, extra-divine and non-divine principle of the world that exists next to the Divinity: “Nature was created together by the Belbog and the gloomy Chernobog” - is this not introducing Manichaeism or dualism? The lie of pantheism lies not in the fact that it recognizes the divine power acting in God’s creation and constituting its positive basis, but only in the fact that this power of God in the world is equated with God himself, whose action or energy it is. God is a personal being, the world is impersonal. God has in Himself His own super-worldly life, which only reveals itself in the world, but is not exhausted by it. Finally, the world is characterized by a created originality given by God, due to which it is equally impossible to identify the Creator and the creation, nor to separate it from Him. All this misunderstanding, leading to original contradictions from the point of view of abstract Sophiebor theism, is fully explained in the light of sophiology. The divine basis of the world (its “pantheism”) is determined not by the fact that the personal God himself is present as His Person in the world, identifying with it, but by the sophistic nature of its basis; God creates the world by Sophia and in Sophia, and in the sense of its Sophia basis, the world is divine, although at the same time it is extradivine in its created originality. In the same Sophian basis, one should distinguish between his logoi, or images of being, and being itself, which is so successfully expressed by the Latin word natum (feminine participle of the future tense from the verb nasci: having to give birth to everything contained in it). And we define this existential basis of the world, corresponding to the action of the Third Hypostasis in the Divine Sophia, as the effective presence of the Holy Spirit in the world, its, so to speak, natural grace. This is precisely the spirit of God, which is sent or taken away by God and is the life of the creature, according to Ps. 103. This life-giving force is present in all creation and is, so to speak, the grace of creation: with it plants grow, animals live, minerals have a dormant existence, human life is maintained primarily as a natural process of birth and reproduction. The life-giving principle of life in the world is also formative. Ideal seeds, logoi of being, which are from the Logos, are realized in creation by the Holy Spirit as images, forms. In this capacity, they are clothed with beauty, which is the realized idea, transparent in its design. All images of being that clothe its meanings, being creations in beauty, are the art of the Holy Spirit, who is the world’s Artist, the Origin of Form, the Form of Forms... For us, the form and design of the ideal beginning of existence is something that seems to be self-evident and given, but nothing in the world is self-evident, without a creative beginning. In the primary matter of the world, the chaotic meon, tohu-va-bohu, however, filled with all the seeds of being, an organism of forms is formed; he is, as it were, being hatched (“hatched”), clothed in Beauty. The beauty of the world is the action of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Beauty, and Beauty is Joy - the joy of being... Of course, this action of the natural grace of creation, the breath of the Holy Spirit in creation, as if abiding and always continuing, “hovering” of the Holy Spirit over the “waters” of creation, is the positive force of being. It manifests itself in overcoming its negative potential, the created “nothing,” which also receives its power of being through the creative act of God. 284 This maeon rages like spontaneity, like “moving chaos,” Achamoth, “the dark face of Sophia.” The latter, in its lack of enlightenment, can also become resistance to the light - actualizing darkness, anti-Sophia, “minus of being.” Therefore, the life of creation is not only an idyll of the flowering of existence, but also a struggle, a “struggle for existence,” a struggle between life and death. Nothing is conquered, but not convinced by life, the element is curbed, but not tamed, and “contradiction” (Heraclitus) or “war” (he) is the law of existence not only in the life of people and nations, but also in the impersonal or pre-personal element. The creature receives its own life as “nature”. She is natura, i.e. it is still being accomplished and has to be accomplished, but has not been accomplished, in the struggle of light and darkness, cosmos and chaos. She is waiting for her humanization, which can come through a spirit-bearing person. However, even before this humanization, on the way to it, she also has her own spirituality. “The heavens will tell the Glory of God, and the firmament will proclaim His handiwork” (Ps. 18:2). Nature, being spirit-bearing, in this sense is also God-bearing. And not only with its endless content, but also with that beauty that cannot be expressed in words and is incomprehensible to reason, which pleases, nourishes, refreshes and fills the soul. Life with nature, the joy of nature is something that is accessible to the soul of every person, even an unbeliever, but accessible to the spirit. This mystery of love for nature and its effect on the soul, the joy of nature is, of course, evidence of its spirituality, the grace of the Holy Spirit inherent in it. Nature exists through the sophistic action of the Holy Spirit, and it is natural that the hypostasis of Beauty invests it with beauty, which is already a preliminary image of the enthronement of God by the Holy Spirit: “The Lord reigned, clothed in beauty.” The beauty of nature is a self-evident fact, and it is the same for everyone, both believers and non-believers. Nature is beautiful in all its forms, and it does not know ugliness - formlessness, which is ugliness. Even tohu-va-bohu, the raging and unbridled power of being, the element is clothed with the beauty of power, potential content: it is “invisible and empty” not in the sense of the absence of form and forms, but only their unidentifiedness. Mahon already looks at the idea and conceives it within himself. Nature is the totality and completeness of realized images, but every manifestation of an idea - a form in being - is already beauty, which is nothing more than a realized form. Beauty in this sense is the outward protruding, “clothing” of a creature with its sophia, a reflection of the eternal intelligent light of the Divine Sophia. The beauty of nature is objective. This means that it is not at all identified with human emotionality, with the subjective state, its experience. The beauty of nature is a spiritual force, testifying to the human spirit, although it is revealed in non-spiritual, “material” nature, and yet – spirit-bearing. There may be different psychological theories of beauty. But they have only a particular meaning, since they explore different empirical manifestations of the basic super-empirical fact of Beauty. Everything is beautiful in nature: the elements of water and fire, air and sky, mountains and seas, plants and flowers. Everything lives, and nourishes, and inspires the human spirit, “soulless” nature reveals itself to be spirit-bearing, for it testifies to the Spirit, it is His revelation. This beauty of nature has its own strength, as well as its own limitations. The power of natural beauty lies in its spontaneity, subconscious spontaneity, and irresistibility. Being inhuman, or rather subhuman, and, therefore, being on the other side of the freedom of the choosing and self-determining spirit, nature and the beauty that envelops it are also revealed on the other side of good and evil, therefore, outside the moral. The criterion of morality is not applicable here, to the extent that it is conditioned by human freedom and its value judgments in the sphere of good and evil, and then sin and temptation. There is no moral criterion for the beauty of nature at all, and it is simply deaf to it. However, revealing itself to man and to a certain extent mastering him, the beauty of nature enters the realm of value judgments of good and evil. It may not be on its own, but in a person and for a person it can become seductive and seductive, intoxicating and enchanting. God Himself planted paradise and grew all sorts of trees in it, including the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was beautiful and unblemished for the innocent eyes of man. But then Eve looked at this creation of God with eyes already clouded by sin, “and the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes and desirable, for it gives knowledge” (Gen. 3:6). She was seduced by him, and the beauty that clothed creation became for Eve a temptation to sin. From this one example it can be seen that the beauty of God “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16) is attached to the “world”, which “lies in evil” (5:19). The beauty of nature from created freedom receives for itself a counter moral coefficient of good and evil. It does not refer to the beauty of nature, which nevertheless comes from the Holy Spirit and is sophic at its core, but to its, so to speak, application. A person can corrupt beauty, however, without destroying it. For man, as a spiritual being, the aesthetic criterion of life alone is not enough. It takes him out of the fullness of humanity into a pre-human state, he degrades as a spiritually free being who cannot and should not become only elemental. Where this spontaneity becomes a person’s own free self-determination, its spontaneity is lost, and therefore true spontaneity is lost, imitation, stylization and pose sets in. And this leads to spiritual decay, vulgarization and crushing of man. Lust, although aesthetic, accepted as the guiding principle of life, also destroys beauty, for beauty exists not for lust, but for the spirit, as the action of the Spirit, and also art, since it is inspired by lust, becomes objectless and empty - soulless. But in addition to vulgar, snobbish aestheticism, there is also aesthetic tragedy stemming from the disharmony of fallen man with nature. The fact is that the beauty of nature includes the beauty of the human body. The latter, belonging to the natural world with its unspirituality and therefore immorality, has power over man. The beauty of the human body affects a person, conquering him, like any natural beauty, but also seductive, just like human beauty. All the beauty of nature, although it exists for man, is still inhuman and therefore cannot conquer a person in the same way as human beauty. The latter, although it is only natural, takes possession of man and in his freedom, conquers him. In this sense, “beauty is a terrible thing” (Dostoevsky). Here we get a paradoxical relationship: beauty, as the manifestation of the Spirit in nature, which itself does not know the spirit, affects the human spirit with its captivating power, simultaneously conquering and inspiring. However, natural beauty alone is not enough for a person; spiritual beauty is also available to him. For him, there is not only the endowment of beauty in indifference to what is clothed with it: Venus or Madonna, paradise crins or poisonous “flowers of evil” - but also spiritual enlightenment. Spiritual beauty is no longer only exposure to beauty from the outside, but enlightenment by it from within - as an embodied spirit, and not a soulless body. However, such beauty in its manifestation remains beyond the limits of the fallen world, in which man has a spiritual and non-spiritual body (1 Cor. 15:44). Of course, every human body, as a form, reveals the spirit, but it does this incompletely, opaquely in relation to it, due to which an evil spirit can hide in a beautiful body and, conversely, a good one in an ugly one. Spiritual corporeality is transparent to the spirit, and good spirits have beautiful bodies (“the righteous will be enlightened like the sun”), and evil ones have ugly forms (this relationship is thought between the images of angels and demons). But as long as this disharmonious relationship is not harmonized, as long as it remains possible that the same person can be “beautiful, like a heavenly angel” and “like a demon, treacherous and evil,” as long as, due to this opacity of the body for the spirit, individual beauty is to a certain extent a random lot, it can become the cause of a tragedy in which “God fights with the devil, and the battlefield is the hearts of people” (Dostoevsky). In other words, she can become an instrument of evil, a network of the devil (which is why the Manichaean ascetic calls a woman “a vessel of Satan”). Of course, the true source of tragedy is not in beauty, but in sin, in the universal corruption from original sin. An unclean, passionate gaze unduly opens its eyes to the nakedness of the body (Gen. 3:7), but for the pure everything is pure and beautiful. 285 But to a darkened view, beauty can act as an evil hypnosis and the power of hell, subjecting the human spirit to tragic struggles, and, however, the very love of beauty is rooted in the primordial depths of his spirit. This tragedy of beauty is a symptom of the undue state of man and with him all creation as a result of original sin. Of course, the question may arise: how can beauty, which is the robe of the Divine, the existential radiance of the Holy Spirit, become a means of temptation? But this question has already been answered in the story about the temptation of the ancestors, where the serpent tempted not only spiritually, but also sensually and aesthetically, with the beauty of the fruits and their desirability (Gen. 3:6). The world created by God in all its richness and beauty is not deprived of the power of being due to the fact that the evil inherent in created freedom parasitically inhabits it and uses it for its own purposes. Beauty abides, and not only in Eden, but also in Sodom, although in the latter there is already a perverted and non-spiritual experience of it. Beauty really is on the other side of good and evil, and, consequently, it is neutral in relation to the freedom of the spirit, which, however, is capable of experiencing it in the fullness of its self-determination, i.e. in the complex of all spiritual values. Beauty becomes good or evil for human freedom, but it itself does not depend on them for its existence. Therefore, beauty is also characteristic of the Sophia prototype of creation, but it also exists in the fallen world, darkened by the fall. Together with other forces of the world, it also holds beauty. Of course, this beauty receives, so to speak, a negative coefficient; it is limited and conditional; it cannot be enlightened in the general spiritual transformation of creation, in which it will fade. But until then it still remains the flowering of the creature. Sin and illness cannot abolish the image of God in man himself, which constitutes his existential basis. But they equally cannot abolish the beauty in nature. And if it exists by divine power invested in creation, then this latter turns out to be compatible with the power of evil that has crept into it. The crafty serpent, an instrument of Satan, also crawled into the Garden of Eden, planted by God, and, however, he was “wiser than all the beasts of the field that God created” (Gen. 3:1) and, of course, bewitched with the fatal beauty of his green eyes. Neither the radiant beauty of Eden, nor the pristine innocence of the first parents, nor even the proximity of God, “walking in paradise in the cool of the day” (8), eliminated the possibility of the presence of the serpent, which did not abolish paradise. And this in general is a symbol of divine tolerance and patience in relation to evil, which God’s creation has before itself and for itself as an arena of action. Nature is characterized by the power of inertia, as a result of which it needs guidance and the dominant attitude of man towards it. But as a result of the fall of man, with his enslavement to the elements of the world, creation itself submitted to “vanity”, groans and suffers as if in the pangs of birth, in an effort to achieve its own fullness “into the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). The indicated force of inertia increases, the creature has become difficult to receptive to its own internal calls, contrasts and failures, intrusions of non-existence and “vanity” have become possible in it. In addition, the forces of nature, which are under the supervision of holy angels, can become a refuge for demons, and the “birthplace chaos” stirring under the crust of existence can also become demonic. And this chaotic nature and demonism of nature can distort its face with both under-revealing and the grimace of “ancient horror.” The exorcism of nature from within was already accomplished in the death of Christ, “the great master died,” the demonic possession of nature was abolished, the prince of this world was cast out. Nevertheless, nature still remains incomplete, in need of “transformation.” However, this, although incomplete, Sophia image comes from the Holy Spirit. And in this we again comprehend the kenosis of the Spirit. It consists not only in the overshadowing of the creature in general, but also in the acceptance of the measure of this creature, its difficult receptivity to the revelation of the Spirit. The incompleteness of this perception and even resistance to it do not force the Spirit to leave the creature in the lot of its original insignificance; He abides in it, containing it in being. The Lord said about pre-flood humanity: “My Spirit will not forever be despised by men” (Gen. 6:3) - and condemned them to the flood, for here the measure of God’s long-suffering was fulfilled. However, after the flood, God made a new covenant with man about the non-extermination of creation (8, 21–22; 9, 9–16). And this long-suffering of God, by virtue of which the entire circle of earthly life and its phenomena “will not cease,” is the kenosis of God for the sake of creation, namely the kenosis of the Holy Spirit. The power of being and life, which is also the power of beauty, will not cease in the world, despite passive and active resistance, and inertia, and outright evil. Let creativity resound in the world, and let goodness shine brightly in it. The Heavenly Father, who reveals himself to the world in His Spirit, “commands His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). So, the life of nature is dual: under the cover of light lies the darkness of the night. Nature knows its horrors and abysses. Because of this, she was able to follow man in his fall, lingering in the imperfect state in which she was outside Eden, and further strengthening and deepening this state. She became orphaned without man, who fell away from her due to his falling away from God, and became an abode of demons, a playground for her own natural forces (“elementary spirits”), the “soul of nature.” However, the saints did not retreat from her. angels watching over her, and the indelible image of God, imprinted in nature, although not yet regenerated, but born, naturae. Despite all the cracks of existence, the Holy Spirit is its vital force, which is invincible by forces hostile to existence. Nature is indestructible and in this sense immortal, just as man is immortal, although death has entered into it, along with death that has entered into man. Nature is natura, i.e. having to become itself or becoming. Development is synonymous with life. Blind and unbelieving science, calling it “evolution,” understands it in the sense of random and planless change, occasionalism, in which out of nothing or anything can come out of anything or anything, in the order of absolute chance. Contrary to the own principle of determinism: ex nihilo nil fit, the opposite principle is silently proclaimed here: everything comes from nothing. At least, this should be the consistent theory of evolution from the void if it wanted and knew how to be true to itself. But this sequence would also contain a devastating criticism of the idea itself, revealing the inconsistency of its basic principle. However, supporters of such an understanding of the evolution of the sequence never maintain, but include in their scheme a target, teleological principle (for example, the origin of “higher” species), ensuring a certain outcome of the evolutionary process; in general, they introduce some teleology that imparts content and meaning to the entire process. “Development” receives a kind of mythological interpretation, as a certain force, thanks to which a successful outcome of the world process is ensured and the emptiness of formlessness, characteristic of consistent nihilism, is avoided. And the entire structure rests happily on the basis of blind faith: in the creative forces of matter, living or dead, in the creative forces of the evolutionary process itself, évolution creatrice, etc. However, despite all the helplessness and unsatisfactoriness of evolutionary philosophy in its various forms, the basic intuition of development is completely correct, just as the very fact of development is completely indisputable. The opinion that this evolution starts out of nowhere is incorrect and absurd. It is only due to the inconsistency of thought that the evolutionary doctrine does not rest on the void, which it is “afraid” of, which not only nature, but also thinking cannot tolerate. In fact, nature is not empty, but full. It is full of logos, existential seeds, which contain everything of world existence. These seeds germinate - at different speeds, as well as with different energies, but they are the ones who grow. Therefore, development is not a sentence without a subject and without a predicate, with only one connective of universal fluidity, which in its non-objectivity cannot even be seen in thought. It has its own theme, and subject, and predicate, what develops and where, or towards what it develops. Evolution generally makes sense only if it has its own internal teleology. The teleology of the world is given, of course, by its ontology, posited by the action of the Second Hypostasis: “all that was, and without it nothing would have happened.” Therefore, there is something and to what to develop - development has both a given and a given in the image of the Divine Sophia, imprinted in created Sophia, in those παραδείγματα or προορισμοί being that determine the existence of the world. However, these “seed logoi” (according to the expression of the Stoics, which is different for this case) are initially invested in creation only as seeds, which first rest in a sleep similar to death in the “waterless and empty land”, and then awaken to the creative life of let there be and let it produce (earth or water), and - life begins. But in this life that has begun, which is the action of the Holy Spirit in the world, the presence of His power, its realization, development, formation takes place, the transition from givenness to givenness, from potency to the dynamic revelation of entelechy principles. This dynamism of life, its fullness and strength, by which “everything” lives, realizing itself, cannot be explained by any particular laws of “evolution,” because life itself is evolution in itself, absolute evolution. This power of life and development is the power of the Holy Spirit in nature, the natural grace of life: “When you follow Your spirit, they are created”... “If you take away their spirit, they die...” (Ps. 103.30, 29). Everything that exists develops and changes, everything that lives grows, and the secret of this life and this growth is the power of the Holy Spirit, which entered the world at its creation and remains in it by providence. It is necessary to understand and accept this natural grace of creation in all its inseparability with the natural world, without being shocked by imaginary “paganism” or pantheism, which is actually opposed to the empty and deathly deism that separates the Creator from the creature. Where will the natural world get the strength to become itself, if not from what exists in its depths, i.e. let it become what it already is in its meaning? But in creation “out of nothing,” this created combination of plus and minus, life and development are carried out with delays, destruction, and generally in the struggle against forces hostile to life. This development occurs immanently, not by mechanical pressure from the outside, but by vital attraction from within. Every positive image of being is opposed, as it were, by a counter-image, a grimace of being, the phantasm of Achamoth, and every effort of life is counteracted by powerlessness, and every achievement of being corresponds to a special tension, not only in the spiritual world, but in its own way in the natural world. In a certain sense, we can say that nature also works and creatively participates in self-creation, in accordance with its primordial tasks and meanings. But this effort also needs inspiration for the victory of day over night, space over chaos, fullness over emptiness and ugliness, life over unlife, which becomes death. This inspiration of life is given by the Holy Spirit; there is His grace in creation, even pre-human and not yet inhuman, although coming towards a person who is able in his spirit to perceive this inspiration of the Spirit. The gifts of the Spirit are varied, and it is His nature to bestow them upon creation. For if it is worthy of the Spirit in its emergence, then it has it in its very being. The name of the blessed creation is Eden, and the unblessed creation is the whole world, in which, in addition to the general action of natural grace, the bright points of church sanctification light up - the consecration of the elements, water, bread, etc. It may seem doubtful how the action of the Holy Spirit here relates to “soulless” nature: can it, being alien to the hypostatic spirit, become a recipient of the Divine Spirit? However, here we do not speak about the hypostatic manifestation of the hypostatic Holy Spirit, but about Sophia’s acceptance of it. Divine Sophia is the foundation of created Sophia. In the latter, not only the word of creation is realized, but also its life. But what other source of life can there be other than the Life-giving Spirit? Let them point it out. We must not forget that the giving of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is as infinitely diverse as their acceptance. And this natural acceptance of them is, of course, a unique and, in a certain sense, lower level (as far as one can distinguish between higher and lower). In general, the giving of the Spirit is not a one-sided mechanical act performed on an object, but a kind of mutual acceptance. And even natural grace is accepted or not accepted by the created element, “earth,” which is capable of providing this acceptance not only with its assistance, but also with resistance. The important thing is that the world, like created Sophia, is never left to its own fate, the emptiness of created non-existence, but is involved in the fullness of the divine being. This “providence” about creation is accomplished through the medium of the angelic world, which is in some way the hypostases of created being, its spirits. It is impossible to identify the acceptance of grace, which is given to spiritual hypostatic beings or to the natural world, and, however, both are grace, for the gifts are different, but the same Spirit. The creature can become spirit-bearing and will be so in the Transfiguration of the world, under the new heaven and on the new earth, and this calling of the creature to spirituality is recognized in the sanctification of various natural elements. Sanctification, i.e. communicating to them the grace of the Holy Spirit is possible only due to the general acceptance of spirit, which is evidenced by the initial wearing of the Holy Spirit. Spirit over the waters, and it does not cease in the further existence of the world. The Holy Spirit is given to the world in created Sophia, through Divine Sophia. Here we have the action of the Holy Spirit, His power, in addition to His hypostatic revelation. The power of the Holy Spirit acts here as if impersonally, however, like the action of the Logos, which posits all creatures. In creation as such, which belongs to itself and is addressed to itself, there are λόγοι - logoi, images of being, which are all from the hypostatic Word, and, however. It itself does not reveal itself in His hypostasis in them, so that the Logos also acts impersonally in the being of the creature. Created Sophia in her originality exists as the word of the world and the soul of the world, as the verbal and living world. In relation to the divine basis of existence, creation is the divine world, and in its originality and self-referral it is the natural world, i.e. still striving, but not having become the complete revelation of Sophia. The fall of man, and with him the whole world, caused even greater difficulty in this formation, so that “the whole creation is tormented and groaning to this day” (Rom. 8:22), subdued to vanity, although not voluntarily, but “by the will of him who subdued her” (20). However, this did not abolish the foundations of life in the cosmos. So, it is necessary to accept the action of natural grace, acting in creation by the power of the original creative act, as well as the creative word existing in it, and both this word and this grace are nothing other than the sophia of the creature. It is incorrect to say that this is the Divine Logos itself and the hypostatic Holy Spirit, but this is the word from the Word and the spirit of God from the Holy Spirit. And this forms the essential content and life-giving energy inherent in the creature, its truth and its inspiration. The creature has its own depth and strength. One can even say that there is a created soul of the world, which includes everything that exists in it, and its life, and life’s self-inspiration. The Spirit of God, hovering over creation, with its power reveals the images of existence hidden in it, just as the spring earth under the rays of the sun gives life to the seeds and plants stored in it. There is a “vital force” that scientific natural science is now discovering (in vitalism), and this is the spirit of God. And there are primordial species that are realized in the “development of species,” Sophian logoi of being. Theology (in particular, sophiology) here meets natural science, which should become the theology of nature. But nature is impersonal, and therefore Sophia’s revelations act in it as immanent forces, as if blind potentialities of being (although behind them and under them there are hypostatic forces - the angelic world). However, this lack of subjectivity is overcome in man, who is a super-created principle in the world, as having within himself a spirit emanating from God and, although created, but in the image of God, a hypostasis. In this sense, he is the hypostasis of the created Sophia, multiple in the hypostases of the human race. In its quality as a created and at the same time divine at the source of its spirit, it is open at the same time to divine life, by participation in it by virtue of deification, but it is also open to created Sophia, it is her own hypostasis. In this sense, he was created as a created god in nature, a god by grace. His acceptance of the divine life is the action of the image of God in him. It is natural for him by creation, and there is no need to obscure this naturalness with an unnecessary distinction between status naturalis and gratia supranaturalis, as if it exceeds the limits of one’s own human nature. Of course, gratia is supranaturalis, since it gives a person participation in God, but this latter precisely corresponds to natural human nature, which was created to be a container of grace. And in this sense, the primordial Adam, before his fall, was already the king of the world, the high priest and prophet by the power of God acting in him, and in this sense, becoming a god-man. The fall of Adam interrupted the reality of this communion with God, and man was left with only its possibility, as an ontological postulate of his being. The latter was irremovable, but also unfulfillable by human forces, without the “descent from heaven” of God the Word himself. His central position in the world was also shaken, since this was associated with the confusion of the ontological center and the enslavement of the king of the world himself, man, to nature. However, the very basis of the ontological image of man, namely the image of God in him, could not be destroyed, and man remained what he was at his creation: a hypostatic subject of the created world, which he contains in his hypostatic being (albeit only potentially). Man is the logos of the world, for whom all of its private logos are accessible, as well as their mutual connection, and he is also the soul of the world, in which the world becomes obsolete. A person, in the depths of his thoughts, cognizes the world and, through the power of his life, effectively realizes himself in the world, humanizes it. And knowledge is not just a passive mirror image of the images of the world in a person, but their creative acquisition. In knowledge, a person not only contains within himself what is known, but also comes out of himself into the world and is identified with it (hence the expression knowledge is also applied to the marriage union: “Adam knew Eve his wife,” Gen. 4:1). It is in this sense the identification of the inner human logos, the eye of the world, with the logos of the world, both of which shine in the world from the Divine Logos. But knowledge is at the same time both self-knowledge and knowledge from itself, which is not feasible without self-inspiration. This self-inspiration in the creative act is the seal of the spirit of God, which pours out from the Holy Spirit. The created spirit, as bearing the image of God, is necessarily characterized by creativity, which does not exist without inspiration. Their own human depths are revealed to them (as in the Holy Trinity the Spirit experiences the depths of God). With it, a person experiences and implements his inherent capabilities or tasks, the hidden and dormant word. The ability of inspiration, as well as effective knowledge, belongs to the image of God in man. This means that there is also a natural grace of inspiration in a person, his self-inspiration by the world and by himself. The person in it awakens from the maeonic state to life. The objective basis and content of this inspiration is determined by its involvement in the created Sophia. Consequently, it cannot be said that all human inspiration was directly from the Holy Spirit and in this sense divinely inspired. This is not true. But it is true that in created Sophia, in created being itself, the Holy Spirit has invested the power of life and inspiration, as its Sophia foundation. And inspiration in a person is real, because he has something to discover and something to awaken to. In his creative insight, both the depth and height of the world are accessible to man. He feels in unity with the soul of the world, a “cosmic feeling” of world connection awakens in him, and he feels like a natural prophet and (albeit a created) creator in this world. And they were filled with noise and ringing: And I heard the sky tremble, And the reptile of the earth's underground passage, And the vegetation below the vine... There is no limit to inspiration, just as the existing human world is limitless in the image of God, and inspiration is a natural grace in man, just as life force is a natural grace of the pre-human world. Paganism knew this power of natural inspiration as a muse, that is, the highest self in man, and it sought to break through to it through ecstasy, exit from oneself, expansion of oneself, ascent to higher spheres, which, in this case, are limited to the region of the world soul, the Sophian unity of the world. These mystical touches were realized, perhaps, in the Pythian frenzy, in the ecstatic experiences of the mysteries, in the ineffable contemplations of light among the mystics (Plotinus), in the living feeling of cosmic unity in the soul of the world (in Brahmanism), etc. Paganism is full of these experiences. The latter is, in the authenticity of its religious experience, the religion of the soul of the world, the various aspects of which are recognized - in the distorting mirror of the spirit of fallen man with its perversions - in the image of "gods". There is absolutely no need to question the authenticity of these mystical experiences, although they do not contain true revelation about God. And in this sense the essence of false revelations. But paganism also has a natural, albeit perverted and clouded, revelation. Pagan religions are not empty. But, being confined within the confines of the natural world, feeding only on its inspirations, they are powerless to know the true Divinity in purity and unparalleledness. The fall of man, the power of sin in him most of all is reflected precisely in the nature of his inspiration, so it can be subject to ambiguity and mutability, it can be light and dark, good and evil. It can even become demonic or Luciferian, since evil spirits operate in the world and are able to influence a person. It also manifests itself in his religious destinies, in particular in pagan religions with their perversions. All this is true, but it remains true that the very ability of inspiration in a person is the stamp of his sophia, given to him by the spirit of God, is his natural grace. Without this ability in a person, without this inspiration of his, true inspiration of God would remain inaccessible to him. So, what is this muse in which paganism believed, 286 a muse that is not unknown even now, as a special state of inspiration, which has the character of involuntary and, as it were, influx on a person? It is possible that this state of inspiration is especially associated with the spiritual influence of one specific personality on another person. Is it possible to simply equate the “muse” (or “Muse”) with the gracious action of the spirit of God (or the Holy Spirit)? This question is not so easy to answer, and only in one specific sense. Of course, it is completely impossible to assert that all human inspiration comes from the Holy Spirit. This can only be said regarding the prophets of God and their inspired writings. One must beware of this when applied to inspirations of relatively minor importance, for example, patristic or liturgical writing. However, there may be such an anointing with the Holy Spirit here, in which there may be more or less genuine inspiration of God, and therefore one cannot limit oneself to a simple yes or no. But what can be said about Sophia’s revelation, carried out through human inspiration? Is there room for the action of the spirit of God in it, despite the possibility of attacks and perversions? We think that it is, after all, yes, since in the revelation of the created Sophia in the world we confess the action of the Holy Spirit. But this inspiration remains only naturally spirit-bearing, does not enter the divine realm, and belongs to natural grace entrusted to the possession of man. But it also comes from the spirit of God - “Every soul is alive by the Holy Spirit,” and this is not only in a spiritually grace-filled manner, but also in a spiritually natural manner. Therefore, one cannot belittle and one must honor both human inspiration and creativity. For “muse” or “Apollo” is not, of course, a kind of mask or pseudonym for the spirit of God itself, but it is its power acting in creation, it is a spirit, although not the Holy Spirit. Life worthy of its name is always inspiration, and vice versa, without inspiration, no matter what it is and no matter where it is directed, there is no life. Even the most detractors of inspiration, who blaspheme the world of God in its naturalness, also do this in a state of peculiar inspiration, although perhaps not light. Inspiration and inspiration are so essential for life that in a certain sense they can be identified with it, as well as vice versa: without inspiration there is no path for us to the Divine, and even prayer itself is inspiration. This identity of life and inspiration at its lower levels is revealed in the elementary spontaneity of movement, and at the highest it is expressed in freedom of self-determination, action from oneself and from oneself, from one’s own individually qualified existence. This from oneself is creative self-inspiration. It follows from this that the entire creativity of life, that is, the entire human history to which God has called the human race (including the genealogy of Christ as the heart of this history), is accomplished by the power of this creative inspiration in all its diversity and many-sidedness. But we know that the paths of history are painstaking and mutually experienced; history is not an idyll, but a tragedy. Inspirations in history can be not only diverse, but also contradictory, as are their fruits. This distinction and assessment of them can only be accomplished at the end of history (no matter how we understand it), in the “last” judgment. But what can be judged is not forced, but free, creative movements of the soul, i.e., precisely inspiration, while passive, mechanical acceptance of fate cannot be judged, except for the lack of inspiration. “You are neither cold nor hot. Oh, that you were cold or hot. But because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:14-16), the Spirit said to the angel of the Laodicean church. “Therefore be zealous and repent” (19). But there is no jealousy without love and inspiration, which is the flame of life and the driving force of history. Inspiration, given over to the possession of the created spirit, in its autocratic state shares the fate of all creation; it is precisely found in a state of ambiguity and confusion and always needs some kind of blessed exorcism. That is why the indifferent use of the expression divine inspiration is completely inappropriate and unacceptable here. But nevertheless, inspiration and inspiration in itself are from the spirit, and the ability for it is invested in a person from the source of all inspiration, the Holy Spirit. And what is especially important is that this inspiration, being Sophia in its source, can also contain a Sophia revelation about God in the world, although this is not a direct Revelation of God himself. From here it becomes clear the possibility of the highest insights of humanity, which are given to him in natural religions, in philosophy, art, and creativity in general. Despite their mixed nature and clouded by sinful creatureliness, they are genuine inspirations, revelations of the spirit living in man, of his sophia. And more than that: this human inspiration, the manifestation of the spirit, is not the opposite of divine inspiration, but rather its precondition: only in inspiration is divine inspiration realized, only in revelation is Revelation given, and in the spirit is the Spirit. Divine inspiration gilds the heights of natural inspiration, and it is not mechanical violence over man, deiux ex machina, as it were, dictation, but a real meeting of the human spirit with the Divine Spirit, for the former is permeable to the latter. Created Sophia not only has a basis in Divine Sophia, but is also imbued with it and adheres to it. And this united sophia is precisely the basis of divine inspiration. There is a complete analogy here with the incarnation of God. The basis of the incarnation of God, through the union of two natures, created Sophia and Divine Sophia, human and Divine, is their common sophia. Likewise, the basis of divine inspiration is the union of two inspirations, divine and created, in a single theanthropic spirit. This union also takes place inseparably and unmerged, just like the union of two natures and two wills in the God-Man. The human spirit and the Divine Spirit, so to speak, are congruent or akin to each other in their sophistry, and therefore, by analogy with the incarnation, divine inspiration is also possible, which is the meeting and union of the spirit and the Spirit in a single human hypostasis. The Spirit of God does not come to an empty place, but meets the human spirit. We have an image of this divine inspiration in the “prophets,” but its highest, ultimate realization is in Christ, as the Anointed One, anointed with the Spirit, the Spirit-Bearer. The incarnate Son of God, the God-man, is also Christ, the Spirit-Bearer. Inspiration in general, and in particular as a precondition for divine inspiration, belongs to human creativity and is not given without creative tension, which is the opposite of “quenching the spirit.” 287 Creativity is an effort to surpass the limited givenness and accommodate the boundless givenness into it - to “outgrow oneself.” It is an impulse from itself, for itself, above itself, and in this impulse it either comprehends its own depth, or rises to meet the spirit descending from above. But even apart from this meeting, which does not depend on man, the creative spirit, rushing above itself, can truly rise and look from above. This is Sophia's comprehension of one's own Sophia. Returning to the original topic - about the dyadic revelation of the Son and the Holy Spirit, about Their Sophian Duality, it must be said that the content of created inspiration, as well as created life and being itself, are the words of the Word, everything existent, the seeds of being. The Word is the what of creation, and the spirit is its how. Created inspiration allows a creature to surpass itself in each of its given states and through this to grow in itself, but it is always inspiration that is not objectless, but has a theme, and in itself it is not capable of introducing anything ontologically new into existence, of enriching being with new themes. This does not mean that it is connected or limited by a given theme of existence, for potentially it contains “everything” - and in this sense is so limitless that it cannot be a boundary. All this, being immensity for the creature, and practically for creativity itself is always new. This novelty is a sign of creativity, which cannot only be a repetition of what is already given. The field of creativity lies not in the sphere of the given and already achieved, but in the sphere of the given with its possibilities. These unrealized but realized possibilities form the source of the new in creation, although this newness is, so to speak, modal. Created creativity, of course, is not capable of producing something new in theme and being, so as to thereby enrich God himself in His creativity. However, God himself provided man with his, human, share of participation in the creation of the world, creating the world only in its potential completeness. Man is given the ability to creatively realize in himself and in creation his own theme or givenness as a given, creating himself creatively, and, consequently, for himself in a new way. And this novelty, although modal, forms an inexhaustible source for the creativity of the creature, with its eternal novelty. This eternity is not divine eternity - aeternitas, in which there is no formation and time and there is no place for newness, for everything pre-eternally exists in the completeness of a single self-determining act. The new in general has a place only in creation, in which eternity is realized in endless becoming - however, only created eternity aevitemitas. In relation to creation, in the language of created formation, God says: “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5, cf. 2 Cor. 5:17), for creation is always renewed. Since the creation by God himself includes the self-creativity of the creature, the latter is new even in the face of God himself, as the Creator, although not in His eternity. From time immemorial, the ontological boundaries of created existence with its self-creativity have been pre-established. They are given by the Sophia Duo of the Word and the Holy Spirit, which inseparably and inextricably lays the Sophia foundations of created existence, as its theme, destiny and the highest ultimate predetermination, never unattainable, but always achieved. But man is not God and can never become either his own creator or the creator of the world. Claims to this are either tasteless self-deception, or metaphysical theft, i.e. namely “repetition”. Such is Lucifer, “the prince of this world,” a thief and a liar, and such is Luciferianism of all kinds. "Lamb of God", ch. 1, 4, pp. 130, 140. Pre-Nicene triadology and logology approached this merging of the dyad or the identification of both revealing hypostases, which actually established not a trinitarian, but a binary image of the Holy Trinity. This was a consequence of the undeveloped doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which was actually considered an attribute of the Second Hypostasis. In general, insufficient recognition of the dyad in the proper place leads to an inappropriate dyadic, instead of a triadic, understanding of the Holy Trinity. In the created world, this self-annihilation has an analogy in the self-determination of the Mother of God the Spirit-Bearer: “Behold the servant of the Lord, let Me be according to Thy word.” Wed. comparisons in the biblical excursion: “The Burning Bush.” On the contrary, in the angelic world of pure spirits, the image of God is expressed in each spirit in discrimination: and not in completeness, as in the human race, where the male and female principles are united, but in separateness (see my “Ladder of Jacob”), although it is overcome by their conciliarity, love. In the world of fallen spirits, where it is love that has died out, we see an image of fruitless one-sidedness: Lucifer is an image of bad masculinity, and Lilith - “Babylon” - a harlot, is an image of bad sacrifice. In church writing, here and there the image of the Spirit appears as a female hypostasis. In particular, for example, in the teachings of the 4th century Syrian writer Aphraates. Semitic languages ​​do not have a neuter gender, and ruach, the word for wind or spirit, is feminine; therefore, in older Semitic literature, before the influence of Greek theology became perceptible, the Holy Spirit is also spoken of in the feminine gender. In the ancient Syriac translation of John. 14:26 we actually read: “The Holy Spirit, the Comforter, She taught us all things,” (In the Peshitta she (or it) is replaced by the word he. Another place where leaving the feminine gender seemed completely wrong is Luke 12:12. (But even in the Peshitta the feminine gender is retained in many places, for example, Luke 4:1; John 7:39.) T. Oh, in agreement with the more ancient usage, Aphraates writes in the doxology: “glory and honor to both His Son and His Spirit, the life-giving and holy,” where “life-giving” and “holy” in the older manuscript are in the feminine gender. But for Aphraates this is not only a matter of grammatical accuracy. In his discussion “On virginity against the Jews,” he says: “We have heard from the law: a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh; truly this is a great and wonderful prophecy. What father and what mother does a man leave when he takes a wife? Here is the meaning: while a person has not yet married, he loves and honors God, his Father, and the Holy Spirit. His mother, and he has no other love. But when a man takes a wife, he leaves the Father and the Mother, and his thoughts are with this world... and his love for his wife is different from his love for the Father and Mother" (Burkitt. ​​Essays on the History of Christianity in Syria, Lecture III. Translation in Christ. Readings 1914, VII-VIII, pp. 1010–11), It is known that in the ancient Gospel of the Hebrews, quoted by Bl. Jerome and Origen, the Lord speaks of the Holy Spirit as His Mother. Wed. comparisons in Leisegang. Pneuma Hagion. Der Ursprung des Geistesbegriffs Evangelien aus der griechischen Mystik. Leipzig, 1922. Kap. I. In Catholic theology, starting from Bl. Augustine there is an incorrect identification of will and love, voluntas sive amor, precisely in relation to the character of the Third Hypostasis: of course, will and love are not identical and do not cover each other. However, in God-Love, which is the entire Holy Trinity, in the characters of individual hypostases one can also discern the First Principle of Will, which is precisely characteristic of the hypostasis of the Father. See the final chapter about this: Father. The last time in a generalized form: “and God saw everything that He had created, and it was very good” (31). It is in this sense that what is said in “Lamb of God,” page 216 should be understood. This does not apply to God’s providence for the world, as it is said: “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). “The Mother of God is the mother of the damp earth,” it is appropriate here to recall once again Dostoevsky’s insight. This whole majestic psalm can, if desired, be reproached with pantheism. See the story in “The Ladder” of St. John about St. None. The posing of this question in our theology is the merit of G. P. Fedotov. Doesn’t the New Testament exhortation also relate to this: “Do not quench the Spirit. Do not disparage prophecies"? (1 Thess. 5, 19, 20). One is connected to the other.