Письмо II. Кубикуларию 167 Иоанну о любви

That you, God-protected ones, by grace nourish holy love for God and neighbor, with proper care for it, I learned from my own experience, both being present and no less absent, if not more, but to let one experience this is what is called the property of Divine love; This means that you also have that immeasurable and boundless divine virtue that not only benefits those present, but also encourages those who are absent, even if they have moved away in space at a great distance - and that your love is ever increasing, I learn from everyone who arrives here, and also from your precious letters, as if in a mirror reflecting the beauty of God’s grace shining upon you; why I rejoice and am glad not without reason, and, giving thanks for you to God, the giver of good things, I continually proclaim with the holy Apostle: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3); and I know with complete confidence that in the holy spirit your soul is inseparably bound by love with my pitiful soul and united with it by a friendly bond according to the law of grace, by which you invisibly attract me to yourself and delight me with your joy, eclipsing the shame of my sins with the proximity of your own virtues. After all, there is truly nothing more God-like than Divine love, nothing is more mysterious, and nothing so elevates people to deification, because it combines in itself all the blessings that the word of truth counts in virtues, and is far removed from everything that is considered vice, being “the fulfillment of the law” (Rom. 13:10) and the prophets (1) - after all, they inherit the mystery of Divine love, turning us from people into gods and shortening individual commandments to one all-encompassing word, in which they are all uniformly [220] contained by good will and from which they emanate in various ways according to their dispensation. For what good does love not possess? Is it really faith, the first foundation of piety, that more firmly certifies the believer in the existence of God and the Divine than the eye, which perceives the appearance of sensory objects and communicates to those who see the impression of them? Is it really a hope that creates for itself a truly existing good and contains more than a hand that grasps the thickest tangible thing? Doesn’t love allow us to enjoy what we believe in and hope for, because thanks to it the future is already, as it were, present in the soul? Doesn’t love have humility, the fundamental principle of virtues, in which we recognize ourselves and become able to cut off the vain tumor of arrogance? Is it really meekness, which treats both blame and praise with equal disdain, 168 and makes these two opposing evils harmless - glory and disgrace? Is it really kindness, which, even when we suffer, does not allow us to change in relation to the offenders and to have a hostile disposition towards them? Is it really compassion, due to which we readily share the misfortunes of others and cannot help but see in them our own brothers? Is it really abstinence, or perseverance, or patience, or kindness, or peace and joy, thanks to which we easily pacify anger and greedy desire, burning the soul with a seething flame? Simply put, the completion of all spiritual blessings is love, which faithfully, strictly and steadfastly leads those who walk its path to God, the highest of blessings and the source of all good. Faith is the foundation of those who follow it, that is, hope and love, and unshakably establishes the truth. Hope is the power of the other two, that is, love and faith, showing what is worthy of faith and what needs to be loved, and teaching us to move towards this through it. And love is the fulfillment of both, [221] completely embracing the final goal and stopping faith and hope in moving towards it: what faith believes in and what hope hopes for, love makes it possible to enjoy in the present. Only she alone, in truth, shows that man is created in the image of the Creator, wisely subordinating our will to the mind, and not inclining the mind to it, and exhorts the will 169 to follow nature, without rebelling against it in the least - this is how we can find with God and other people one will and one desire, as we already have one nature, and not have any separation with God and each other, if we choose for ourselves the law of grace, according to which we consciously renew in ourselves law of nature. It is impossible for people who were not previously united in the same mind with God to agree on their aspirations. After all, the devil, who deceived man, seduced him through selfishness and pleasure with malicious cunning, first separated his will from God and from other people and, by perverting straightforwardness, dismembered and dissected nature into many opinions and fantasies, and over time he made the search and discovery of all kinds of evil into law, directing our forces to this; and for the constancy of evil, he gave it support in the disagreement of the aspirations of all people, after which he immediately inclined man to reverse the natural movement and rush instead of what is permitted to what is not allowed; he insidiously lured him into the three main initial types of evil, which, simply put, give rise to all vices, namely ignorance, selfishness and love of power, linked with each other and mutually supporting each other. For out of ignorance of God arises selfishness, from it comes the desire for power over relatives (there is nothing to object to this), moreover, a person creates these vices in himself through the abuse of his own powers - the mind, passionate desire and rage; but with reason, instead of ignorance, we must strive solely for God in search of will; desire - having purified oneself from the passion of selfishness, hasten with desire to [222] God alone; with rage, separated from the desire to rule, to fight for the sake of achieving God alone; and thus create for yourself Divine and blessed love, which comes from all this and realizes all this, which unites the God-loving person with God and makes him a god. Once, by man’s own desire and by the devil’s deception, such evil happened to man (2), God, who created our nature and wisely heals it if it suffers from vice, out of His love for us “made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7) and without change united our nature with Himself in hypostasis, becoming so completely for our sake one of us and like a man to us that even God is an unbeliever. did not seem, although he remained so much God that he taught the faithful the secret word of piety and truth in order to destroy the works of the devil, and returned untouched powers to nature, renewing the power of love and the union of people with Himself and with each other, this opponent of self-love, which is the mother of both the first sin, and the first creation of the devil, and the passions arising from it, and is known as such; whoever, having made himself worthy of God, destroyed it with love, together with it destroyed the entire variety of sins, which apart from it had no other basis or reason for being. After all, such a person does not know exaltation, a complex and strange vice, testifying to godly complacency, he does not know the love of unstable glory, which carries away those who boast of it in their fall, while voluntary benevolence and sympathy for relatives exhausts envy, which first rightly exhausts those who indulge in it, and anger, bloodthirstiness, malicious irritability, deceit, pretense, mockery, malice and greed - and all the vices by which a single person is divided into parts - he eradicated in himself. After all, with the removal of selfishness - the beginning, as I said, and the mother, all the vices that are born from it and follow it are usually removed; and since it does not exist, then no kind of vice, or even a trace of it, can exist, and instead of them there are all types of virtue, constituting the power of love, which [223] unites what is divided and recreates man in the unity of meaning and way of being, equalizing and smoothing out in all people every inequality and difference introduced by the will, and duly leading to that commendable inequality in which everyone kindly attracts his neighbor to himself and values him above himself to the same extent that he previously pushed him away and sought to rise himself, and voluntarily separates himself from himself by disunion with those logos and properties that are arbitrarily thought of as separate in him, and leads to a single simplicity 170 and sameness, in which no one is in any way in any way separated from the general, but each to each, and all to all, and more to God than to each other, are one, and the same nature shines for all and by will the cause of their existence and in it the conceivable God; to contemplate together with Him and to be raised to Him as the culprit and creator is the logos of the existence of things, which we must carefully observe unharmed and unclouded, and cleanse us of the passions that rise up against us by conscious zeal in the virtues and the burdens associated with them. Probably, this is exactly what the great Abraham did, returning himself to the natural logos of being, or the logos to himself, and, thus surrendering to God and accepting God (let it be said both this way and that way, since the truth is seen in both those words), he was honored to see God, being a man (Gen. 18: 1), and simply accept Him with himself, thanks to the natural logos of being, perfect in love for mankind, to which he elevated himself, rejecting the property of being divided and divisible and no longer considering any person to be different and different from himself, but recognizing everyone in one and one in all; in this, of course, he followed not the logos of free will, which is accompanied by divergence and division until it agrees with nature, but only the logos of nature, which is accompanied by immutability; It is through this logos that we recognize the existence of God in general, and in it [224] God reveals His goodness, accepting into His kinship those created by Him - because creation cannot know Him directly, as He is. Yes, and it was impossible, of course, to unite with the whole and self-identical for one who himself has not become self-identical and whole, but is divided by his own will in relation to nature into many parts - unless he first, through his love of humanity, agreed his will with nature, and showed in both a peaceful and submissive logos, in no way moving by his own impulse towards anything other than God; in accordance with such a logos, nature remains undivided and undivided in those people who have received this gift, and is not cut by many discords of will. For they do not divide nature, becoming now one or the other in relation to one or the other, but always remain the same and see the same people in front of them, looking not at what is peculiar to each individual by choice, by which what is divided is divided, but at what is common to all by nature and indivisible, in which the divided is collected and nothing separate is allowed; Through this common indivisible God appears to have reached it through His love for mankind, taking an image corresponding to the property of everyone’s virtue, and allowing Himself to be called by it. After all, the most perfect work of love and the limit of action based on love is to make sure that, by habitual reciprocity, everything connected with it decently communicates its properties and names to one another, so that man becomes god, and God is called and appears as man, according to the single and unchangeable voluntary intention and aspiration of both, as we find in Abraham and other saints. And, probably, this is what is said on behalf of God, “in the hands of the prophets he became like” (Hos. 12:10): God, out of great love for mankind, takes on the image of virtue for everyone, which became characteristic of him through work. After all, the hand of every righteous person is his work according to virtue, in which and through which God takes on the likeness of people. Great, therefore, good is love, and the first of the good, and the chosen good; around the one who has it, it unites God and people [225], and allows a person to seem like the Creator of people thanks to as complete as possible for a person, the likeness in goodness of the deified to God, which, as I believe, is achieved by loving the Lord God with all your heart, soul, and strength, and loving your neighbor as yourself (Deut. 6 and Luke 10:27). And this means (I will, as it were, cover the definition) a comprehensive internal attachment to the first good through complete care for the entire natural race, above which there is nowhere to rise for a God-loving person who has already passed through all the degrees of piety; This is what we know as love, both in name and in essence; and we feed it to God and our neighbor, not devoting from it this or that part, but all the same in its entirety, as a debt to God and as a mutual connector of people. After all, the action and clear manifestation of perfect love for God is a sincere disposition towards one’s neighbor by the will of goodwill. “For he who does not love his brother whom he sees,” says the divine Apostle John, “cannot love God, whom he does not see” (1 John 4:20). Love is the path of truth (John 14:6), as the Word of God called itself, and He presents those who walk along it to God and the Father as pure from all passions. Love is a door (John 10:9), whoever enters it finds himself in the Holy of Holies and is rewarded with the sight of the unapproachable splendor of the Holy Royal Trinity. Love is the true vine (John 15:1), into which whoever is firmly rooted will be considered worthy of participation in Divinity. It is for the sake of love that the teaching of the law, and the prophets, and the Gospel is proclaimed, so that those who desire unspeakable blessings may certify by their disposition the sincerity and strength of desire, to the extent that they honor the statue for the sake of the desired Sculptor, to the extent that it is close to the Sculptor and to the extent that it is required by the natural logos, which elevates equality of honor into law, cutting off any inequality of nature that is falsely perceived in every person by prejudice, and containing all in the power of one identity. For the sake of love, the Creator of nature Himself is a terrible thing, which is scary to even hear about! - puts on our nature, without changing [226] uniting with it in hypostasis, in order to stop its stormy movement and unite to Himself a whole-hearted will that has no disagreement in the aspiration either with God or with itself, and to make convenient the all-glorious path of love, truly divine and deifying and leading to God (let’s say that it is God (1 John 4:8)), which was first hidden by the thorns of selfishness, and to grant it to everyone free from obstacles, for our sake depicting the passions 171 in Himself and scattering through His disciples the stones that were on this path, as He Himself predicted through the mouth of the prophets, saying: “And you will mark out the stones from the path” (Is. 62:10); and to convince us that we must have the same love for Him and for each other as He Himself first showed, enduring suffering for our sake. For the sake of love, all the saints resisted sin to the last, not acting in the least according to the logos of real life, and endured various types of martyrdom in order to gather into a whole with themselves and with God, having separated from the world, and to unite in themselves what was torn apart. Love is the true and unblemished wisdom of the faithful, the completion of which is good and truth, if in fact love of mankind is good, and love of God by faith is truth; they are two signs of love, which unites people with God and with each other (3) and therefore has an indestructible and eternal abundance of all goods. Having most sincerely loved this divine and blissful path, you, blessed ones, strive to bring the good struggle to completion, firmly holding on to what comes to the limit of the process, that is, philanthropy, brotherly love, hospitality, love of poverty, compassion, mercy, humility, meekness, gentleness, steadfastness, kindness, patience, kindness, goodwill, peace towards everyone; and love created from these virtues and through their implementation leads to God, who deifies the person who creates them. “Love,” said the Divine Apostle, or rather, Christ who spoke through his lips, “is long-suffering, merciful, love does not envy, love does not exalt itself, is not proud, does not act rudely, does not seek its own, is not irritated, does not think evil, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; [227] covers everything, believes everything, hopes everything, endures everything. Love never fails” (1 Cor. 13:4-8), for it has God, in whom alone there is no decay or change, and makes the person who lives according to it such that He can say about him, as about you, through the prophet Jeremiah: “I say to you: this is the way of my commandments and the law that endures forever. All who hold on to it will enter into life, but those who leave it will die. Hold on to him, my child, and go to the radiance of his light. Do not give your glory to another, nor what is useful to you - to a foreign people. Happy are you that you know what is pleasing to God” (Bar.4:1-4), and that you “knew where there is wisdom, where there is strength, where there is longevity and life; where there is light of eyes and peace” (Bar.3:14), and went out on the path, and “I appeared to you from afar” (Jer.31:3). Therefore, “I will love you with everlasting love, and pity you with pity, and I will build you, and you will be built, and you will go out with the congregation of those who rejoice” (Jer. 31:34), “for you stood on the paths, and considered, and asked about the paths of the eternal Lord; and you saw where the good way was, and you followed it, and your soul found cleansing” (Jer. 6:16). And also through the mouth of Isaiah: “I am the Lord your God; I have shown you the path you will follow; and you obeyed My commandments. Therefore your peace is like a river, and your righteousness is like a wave of the sea” (Isaiah 48:17-18). I also dare, rejoicing in your virtues, to say together with God, borrowing words from the great Isaiah: happy are you, “because you have put off the garment of the sorrow of your bitterness” (Bar.5:1), that is, “the old man, which is corrupted by the deceitful lusts” (Eph.4:22), “and have put on the splendor of glory from God forever” (Bar.5:1), then there is “in the new man, created in the spirit after Christ in the image of the Creator” (Eph. 4:24), and “in the robe of righteousness from God, and placed on his head the crown of glory of the Eternal” (Bar. 5:2), adorning himself with the assimilation of virtues and the unstumbling mind of wisdom. Therefore, “God will show your glory to all under heaven and will call your name Peace of righteousness and glory of godliness” (Bar.5:3-4). After these words, I have nothing more to show the invisible disposition of my soul [228]; After all, I am not able to offer God and you anything worthy of your virtues; I can only, as much as I have the strength, admire you and your achievements, and rejoice with you that you please God with good deeds, and praise the virtue in you, and praise God in the virtue that united you with God. It seems to me that it is one and the same action, and an equivalent action - to praise you, to glorify God, who has given you the glory of virtue, and to admire virtue, which by grace deifies you to God by taking away the attributes of a man, and by condescension humanizes God by assimilating to man, as far as possible, Divine properties. 1. Because love is given instead of the law and the prophets; and because from it are derived all the commandments which it uniformly embraces. 2. Understand, a movement according to reason and nature, from which man first turned away at the instigation of the devil. 3. The accomplishment of blissful love is to inexplicably unite God and all mortals into one, around the one who acquired it. “Cubicular” is a high court rank (from the Latin cubiculum “bedroom”). French and English dictionaries translate cubicularius as chambellan and chamberlain, which, in turn, should (according to the table of ranks) be translated into Russian as “chamberlain”. However, stylistically this is not very good, so it was decided to leave the word “cubicular” as is. Another possible Russian equivalent is "bed". It’s funny that although, as a designation of rank, this word should be placed in Russian before the name (as, indeed, in French), in real usage it has become something like a nickname or surname: in Russian and French they write “John Cubicularius”. It’s the same as writing: “Colonel Petrov” instead of: “Colonel Petrov.” – Approx. lane τοὺς ψόγους τε καὶ τοὺς ἐπαίνους ῥαπίζομεν - literally: “we hit (in the face) both blame and praise.” It is somewhat strange that such violent behavior is attributed precisely to meekness. – Approx. lane γνώμην The exact translation of this famous term, it seems to me, is “the conscious aspiration of free will,” and all four words are almost equally important. However, using such a long phrase in translation would be unthinkable for stylistic reasons. – Approx. lane That is, simplicity, non-composition, integrity. – Approx. lane καὶ τοῖς ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν παθήμασιν ἐν ἑαυτῷ προτυπώσας - the meaning is approximately this: in order to fully become a man, the Lord in some sense takes into Himself and passions characteristic of people, but since He is impassive, in Him they are only “designated” or “depicted.” – Approx. lane The text of Scripture at this point does not speak of “the way,” but of “the book.” – Approx. lane You might be interested in: