About faith in Christ

(the thousand-year journey of the Russian Orthodox people with Christ) Contents Preface About the right of believers in God to live according to the law of their faith not only in personal but also in public life Only a religious worldview explains to a person his place in the world The Orthodox Symbol of Faith as an expression of the religious consciousness of the Orthodox Russian people Russian popular perception of Christianity and its reflection in Russian fiction The Russian people cannot renounce their Christian faith as the spiritual foundation of their entire life Our future should not to be a rejection of the religious past, which will forever remain the unshakable foundation of our life. The Orthodox faith of the Russian people as a necessary condition for peaceful, friendly cohabitation and cooperation of all peoples of the Russian land. The Christian meaning of the former Russian tsarist autocracy. Difficulties and sorrows of the religious path of Russian statehood. The essence of Petrine transformation of Russian life. Further penetration of Western influence into us and the opposition of the Russian folk spirit to it. The rise of spiritual life in Russian society and in the Russian people. in the 18th and 19th centuries Orthodox Christian life is not only an individual life, but also a collective life: family, parish, diocesan and national The correct organization of the religious life of the Russian people cannot be achieved without the efforts of the believing people themselves The Orthodox Russian people and the Bolshevik Party The critical moment in the life of the Russian people The Bolshevik question is first and foremost a religious question The unknown date of the general world catastrophe, although its signs have been indicated About the signs of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and their meaning The Millennial Kingdom of Christ Where will the salvation of the Russian land come from God's Protection over the Russian land Father Sergius Chetverikov My response How I became an Orthodox shepherd and about my shepherding in the Russian student Christian movement Biographical outline “Let not your heart be troubled: Believe in God, and believe in Me” (John 14:1) "I and the Father are One" (John 10:30) The general arshin cannot be measured: You can only believe in Russia. In the life of the Russian Orthodox people, a place should be given to both state, economic, technical, social life, and spiritual, religious, Orthodox life, for human nature is dual - material and spiritual, which everyone can easily verify by self-observation and experience. The mind, feeling and will are one thing, physical properties and needs are another thing. Fully accepting the Soviet economic and political system, we cannot ignore the spiritual needs, the properties of the human nature of the Russian person, the laws and needs of which are determined and regulated by the spiritual nature of man, the word of God and the Church. The distinction among the Russian people between these two elements of human nature - spiritual and physical - can in no way interfere with the fullness of life of the Russian person, and, on the contrary, ignoring one or another element will affect his life as an ugly one-sidedness, which, of course, must be avoided 1 . This is our sincere belief. About the right of believers in God to live according to the law of their faith not only in personal but also in public life At present, the question posed is the most significant and fundamental question of human life, including the life of the Russian people, believers and Orthodox, for never before have faith and Christianity been subjected to such mockery by non-believers as in our days, except for the early Christian era - the first centuries of the existence of Christianity. We do not understand, we do not see any reasonable basis for constraining people, hindering them and depriving them of the opportunity to satisfy their religious needs according to the rules of their religion. We don’t understand why Russian believers should be deprived of the right and opportunity to renovate and build churches, publish religious books, magazines and newspapers, teach their children prayers, church singing, sacred history, organize religious processions (for example, Epiphany water blessing or religious processions with miraculous icons - Kazan, Kursk, Gorbanovskaya and others) and gather believers for prayer by ringing bells? 2. It is not the business of the state authorities to interfere in the religious life of the people for party interests. From this, the religious feeling of the people can only take on an ugly character, either hypocritical piety or feigned godlessness. In both cases, religion becomes a painful burden for the people. The leadership of the religious life of believers should not belong to the state authorities, which may consist of people who are not believers or belong to another religion, but to the believers themselves and their church hierarchy, and be carried out according to the rules and customs of their own religious faith. If this natural order is violated, then the sad consequences of this violence inevitably arise: spiritual decay, devastation and savagery of the human person, and then the disintegration of the nation, state and, finally, the collapse of the state, which we see in numerous examples of ancient and modern peoples. Neither a people nor an individual can save themselves from this fate, preserve their spiritual appearance, defend their spiritual identity, except by preserving the very core of their being, their believing soul, realizing the threatening danger, perking up, feeling the strength and courage in themselves, firmly and consciously stand up for the defense of their age-old spiritual shrines, of course, not by force of arms (it is insignificant in this case), but by the force of believing feeling like the first Christians. When we talk about protecting our spiritual shrines, we do not at all mean armed defense of our faith. Did the first Christians defend their freedom of faith with weapons? – Not with weapons, but with martyrdom, despite the fact that even then they constituted a huge majority in the empire, and according to the testimony of a church writer of the 3rd century, already at that time Christians filled the Senate, the army and other state organizations. One must seek salvation not from the outside, nor in armed force 3 . Outside help is always self-serving. Salvation must be expected only from God, in the depths of your believing heart. This is how it was in the first centuries, when Christians, enduring three hundred years of persecution and torment at the hands of the pagans, ultimately, through the power of faith, prayer and patience, defended their religious and liturgical freedom. This was the case in the subsequent period of the Ecumenical Councils, when the Church, after many difficult trials and sacrifices, defended the purity of Orthodoxy from heretical inventions and formulated its Orthodox faith in the 12 members of its Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. In both cases, victory over paganism and heresies was achieved only by the patience and faith of the holy martyrs, martyrs and Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, their courage and steadfastness in confessing their faith. Let us at least remember the labors and trials of St. Athanasius the Great, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom. A similar thing, to a certain extent, can be said about the religious self-defense of Orthodox Christians in Southern and Western Russia during the era of union, southern Christians, and even about Russian Old Believers, who, by the power of the believing spirit, retained the rights to their church customs and their faith in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. There cannot be any other way of religious self-defense from the onslaught of atheism, unbelief and heresy that wield state power for Christian believers even today. “In your patience save your souls,” teaches the holy Apostle. And if this way out seemed possible and attractive with the help of one or another external force, then it would only be, as we have already said, self-deception - such protection would turn out to be illusory and would turn not in our favor, but in favor of the defenders. The salvation of the Russian people from godlessness can come not from the power of material weapons and not from the help of external defenders, but only from their own spiritual strength, from the strength of their own believing spirit. With this power, with the strengthening help of God, faith will win victory over unbelief. In saying all this, we do not at all deny or belittle reasonable interaction between the Church and the state and reasonable state influence on the religious life of the people. We only assert that the main significance in this area belongs to the spirit of the believing people, and not to the measures of state power. Let us recall, for example, the explosion of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, in the construction of which, as is known, political considerations did not play any role, but only the grateful feeling towards God of the great Russian Orthodox people. Why was this fanaticism and mockery of popular feeling needed? Only a religious worldview explains a person’s place in the world Based on the example and experience of the Russian people, we affirm with all certainty that only a religious worldview, and especially a Christian, strictly Orthodox worldview, creates a deep, healthy and unshakable foundation for the life of both an individual believer and an entire nation. And this is understandable. Only a religious worldview puts a person in a clear and definite connection with the universal principle of life and indicates to a person his place in life. Without a religious worldview, without realizing his connection with the highest universal principle of life, how can a person understand his place and purpose in the world and in life? Ask any materialist-atheist (I myself was one in the fifth grade of the gymnasium) what is a person? And why does it exist? You will not hear from him not only a comprehensive, but simply a clear, definite answer. He will talk about the origin of man through natural selection in the struggle for existence as a necessary condition for world progress, about the experiences of the fittest, etc.; will explain to you the organic and chemical composition of the human body. All this is very interesting and beautiful, but is this essentially an answer to the question about the meaning and purpose of human existence, about the purpose of man, about what the human soul is, what is its connection with the body, is its independent existence possible? Neither materialists, nor atheists, nor positivists will give you any definite answer to all these questions. They will give you instructions, they will say that you are interested in “nonsense”, “foggy philosophy”, that what is important is not what a person was created for, but how he came to be, etc., etc. Only religion gives a real, definite and reasonable answer about the meaning of human life, connecting human existence with eternity, with the eternal world principle of life and in it seeing the eternal, world, reasonable meaning of human existence. Whatever religion we take, they all strive to explain the eternal meaning of human existence, without understanding which a person cannot live rationally. Only by having faith in the eternal, universal beginning of life can one understand one’s purpose in the world, one’s place in it, and the meaning of everything that exists. This truth is confirmed by the history and experience of all people and all nations. One can, of course, argue about the truth of certain religious teachings, but one cannot help but admit that each of them strives to answer the most important and necessary question for every person about the meaning and purpose of his earthly existence. Remaining without this answer, atheists remain in emptiness, and if not in emptiness, then they are hiding the answer they have. When religious consciousness begins to waver or become eclipsed in individual people, in a particular nation, then a general disintegration of culture inevitably begins in them, followed by the collapse and destruction of their very statehood. The spirit of a single faith that held them together departs from the people, spiritual and then civil flabbiness, disunity, internal party struggle and the destruction of the whole begins. The historical experience of all peoples - Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and modern peoples confirms the truth of what has been said. The same fate is in store for the Russian people if they fail to stay on the firm foundation of their Orthodox faith. But another, more terrible outcome, predicted by the Apocalypse, is also possible for him. This is a transition from Christ to the side of His future enemy - the Antichrist. This possibility is associated with such terrible consequences that it is scary to even think about. And perhaps the Lord will have mercy and save our Motherland and our people from the terrible fate of being an instrument in the hands of the devil in his struggle with Christ and God! And our people will not renounce their Orthodox Christian faith and will firmly establish themselves in it! The Orthodox Creed as an expression of the religious consciousness of the Orthodox Russian people A thousand years ago, under the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir, the Russian people accepted the Christian faith. He accepted her mainly out of trust in the Grand Duke and his grandmother, St. Olga, but not only for that reason. He was attracted by the Christian faith itself, by Christ himself, the Mother of God, the holy martyrs, the Fathers of the Church, and ascetics. Preachers of the Christian faith have visited the Russian land since apostolic times. It was attended by the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Andrew the First-Called with their disciples and companions. Under Vladimir, the Christian faith became our national heritage, the basis of life not only for individual believers, but also the principle of life for the entire Russian people. The Russian land became the land of Svyatorusskaya. The Christian self-awareness of the Russian people found its expression in the Orthodox Creed. Together with the Gospel, with the Psalter, with the lives of saints, with the writings of the Fathers of the Church, with church hymns, the Symbol of Faith expressed and directed our Orthodox Christian thought, established our attitude towards God, towards people and towards life. If this was not a completely clear and distinctly realized and formulated worldview for everyone, in any case, it was the engine and inspirer of the conscience and behavior of the believing Russian people, living deeply in the recesses of the soul. Whether it was good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable, successful or unsuccessful - this was shown by the entire subsequent life of the Russian people, its thousand-year history and spiritual image, formed under the influence of the Orthodox Church and the examples of Orthodox saints. The Russian people created the only country in the world not only in size, but also in its moral character, maintaining good relations with all the numerous peoples that became part of its state; and he sought to maintain the same good relations with all other peoples around him. For the Russian people, imbued with the spirit of Christianity, there did not exist and do not exist people and tribes that are despised, hated, intolerant and persecuted. He stands on the broad foundation of Christian love. In every person he knows how to find and see the image of God. He has a wide, capacious heart. And this was given, this was taught to him not only by the nature given to him by God, but also by his holy Orthodox faith, Christianity in its purest expression without the admixture of human conjectures, changes and additions. We deeply and lovingly perceive the examples and testaments of the martyrs, the instructions of the holy fathers and ascetics of the Church, our own saints, Christ for the sake of holy fools and elders. We especially venerate the saints who are close to us in spirit - St. Nicholas, the holy great martyrs George and Panteleimon, the holy great martyrs Barbara and Catherine, the holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Nina, St. Alexei (man of God), St. Philaret the Merciful, St. the prophet Elijah, and from our Russians - St. Sergius of Radonezh, Rev. Anthony and Theodosius of Pechersk, Rev. For this reason, Savvaty Solovetsky, Rev. Sergius and Herman of Valaam, Saints Mitrofan of Voronezh, Tikhon of Zadonsk, Joseph of Belogorodsky and all other saints and ascetics, holy fools and wanderers, with their lives, instructions and conversations, illuminated, comprehended and showed the Russian people the image and path of Christian holiness, teaching them to repent and pray. Of course, the Russian people are not holy people. There is a lot of impurity and dirt in his life and in his soul. But he knows where he is and what true truth and holiness consists of. He will not be deceived by false feigned holiness. He will subtly distinguish truth from lies in every person. And at the same time, he is in no way insured against the fact that he will not prefer the devil’s path of evil to Christ’s path of goodness and truth. The examples of Razin and Pugachev and their comrades clearly show this. We cannot fail to note one more circumstance in the historical fate of the Russian people - its exceptional and remarkable geographical position between Europe, Asia and America, in the vast expanses of European Russia and North-East Asia. This position has placed the Russian people in a special relationship with all the peoples of the world, connecting it with people who are very diverse in their history and culture, on the one hand - simple and primitive in faith and concepts, on the other hand - preserving the remnants of the ancient great cultures and traditions of the Hindus, Chinese, Mongols, Japanese, Arabs, Jews, as well as with people of the most recent modern European culture. Such an international position of the Russian people in connection with the peculiarities of their own culture, on the one hand, makes all these culturally diverse peoples close and understandable to them, and on the other hand, dissociates them from them, obliges them to understand, love and cherish their own spiritual characteristics, their own spiritual image and their own special path in life. This determines the unusual, mysterious, but also extremely important purpose of the Russian people in the destinies and lives of European and Asian peoples, without losing their identity and their special path, to be a spiritual connecting knot and the center of world life in future unknown, mysterious destinies and circumstances of human history. Russian popular perception of Christianity and its reflection in Russian fiction Let us take a closer look at the spiritual appearance of the Russian people in the light of their religious self-awareness and its reflection in Russian fiction. The Russian people, we repeat this again, perceived Christianity not only as an external rite (although this, of course, was), not only as a set of abstract dogmas (which, of course, also could not help but exist), not as a rule of external moral behavior (although this undoubtedly existed), in a word, they accepted Christianity not as something external and formal. He accepted it as a living and integral image of Christ, which deeply shocked him and sank deeply into his soul, as an example of the highest holiness, as a source of holiness, i.e. supreme divine truth and beauty. He accepted Christ as a living, concrete shrine of the heart that captivated his soul; accepted Him with all my soul, with the greatest reverence, with the consciousness of my unworthiness and wretchedness, my greatest sinfulness and impurity; accepted Him as the embodiment of divine truth and integrity, goodness, mercy and the highest holiness. It was precisely this perception of the God-man that contained the essence of our Russian folk, Orthodox perception of Christianity. Whether it was right or wrong, but it was exactly so, as evidenced and confirmed by our fiction, our writers - Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Nikitin, Alexey Tolstoy, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Levitov, Zlatovratsky, Uspensky, Garshin, Korolenko, Shchedrin, L.N. Tolstoy and others. This perception of Christ by the Russian people was especially deeply and soulfully noted and conveyed by Dostoevsky, who in all his works returns to his favorite theme about Christ and says about himself that “Christ tormented him all his life.” Christ tormented L.N. Tolstoy all his life, perhaps even more than Dostoevsky, but he tormented him differently. Just like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy constantly thinks about Christ, constantly returns to Him not only in his large works, but also in small stories (“The Master and the Worker”), in stories for the people. After all his foolishness and atrocities, Tolstoy came to die in Optina Pustyn to his sister nun in Shamordino, and they turned out to be closer to him and closer in spirit to his closest students and followers. About the famous Russian writer, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, the author of the sensational novel “What is to be done” and a course on political economy, residents of Saratov, where Chernyshevsky was from, where he lived out his last years after exile, say that he, being an unbeliever in his youth, at the end of his life, living in Saratov, did not miss a single Sunday, so as not to come to church and give a message “about health” and "for your peace." There was nothing reprehensible in this, of course, but it shows how our self-awareness changes over the years and how our understanding of life deepens. All this also shows that the Russian people in all their classes, educated and uneducated, felt, saw and understood the highest truth in Christ, in the Gospel, in the Church, although they did not know how to remain invariably faithful to it. And our fiction noted this: Nekrasov in his “Knight for an Hour”, Lermontov - “I Go Out Alone on the Road”, Tolstoy - “The Master and the Worker” and others. This feeling of the mysterious presence of God in the world, so characteristic of the pure Russian soul, not drowned out by various literary rubbish, turned out in the first years of the revolution to be completely alien, incomprehensible and unnecessary to the leaders of our revolution, who mocked everything sacred, over churches, over icons, over liturgical books. And what kind of vulgarities on religious topics were not published in the first years of the revolution. I don’t even want to write titles that seemed witty to the authors at the time. Thank God this time has passed. In the name of what was all this done? In the name of freedom of speech? But does every word have the right to freedom? We don’t think, we won’t go into the details of these dark pages of our past. This time, fortunately, has passed and will not happen again. This whole crude history of blasphemous mockery of the religious feelings and shrines of the Russian people at first deafened and crushed the believing souls. But now the Russian believer has already understood his new situation. Disputes on certain religious topics and issues have lost their severity and significance. Everyone went their own way. The main place now should be occupied by believers in the firm and consistent implementation of Christian life according to the teachings of the Holy Gospel, according to the rules of the Orthodox Church, according to the examples of the holy ascetics of the Church. In this correct organization of one’s Christian life, in overcoming a godless psychology, in calmly and firmly defending one’s right to faith, prayer and Christian life lies the very essence of the religious question in Russia at the present moment. It is impossible not to see that the religious question is again taking its rightful place in Russia. And not only in Russia, but also in Europe and throughout the world. The Christian world returns again to Christ, again bows before Him. All other issues - political, social, national, economic - for all their significance, are currently issues of secondary, derivative importance. If humanity manages to resolve the question of Christ, to become in the right attitude towards Christ, all other vital, so-called “damned” issues, social, national and others, will be correctly resolved by themselves. The whole difficulty of resolving them comes from the fact that they try to answer them without resolving the question about Christ in a positive sense, without recognizing Christ with all their hearts as their Lord and Teacher, forgetting the words He spoke: “Come to Me, all you who suffer and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” I will not only reassure you in the sense that I will caress and console you, but in the fact that only in Me, in my path, in my teaching, in unity with Me, will the opportunity and the path to the correct resolution of all your “cursed” questions be revealed to you, for without Me you cannot do anything truly good. In the examples, in the path of saints and ascetics, the Russian people, from the first days of their Christian life, found and took to heart touching and fascinating examples and features of Christian holiness, the correct attitude towards Christ, towards God and towards people, and Christian saints became for them the highest and most fascinating example of true human life. No other ideal of human life, neither wealth, nor fame, nor power could displace this Christian ideal - internal unity with Christ - from the heart of the Russian person. The ideal of evangelical holiness and unity with Christ became a real, vital ideal of Russian believers. Having perceived in his heart the image of Christ as an example of the true life of personal, family and social life, the Russian man lived with this ideal in his heart for a number of centuries, with it he built and built his state life, as evidenced by the examples of our main historical figures from St. Vladimir and St. Alexander Nevsky to the Tsar-Liberator Alexander II, to Suvorov, to Kutuzov. Let us say, to the main hero of the Great Patriotic War, J.V. Stalin, his assistants, valiant Russian generals and the entire Russian victorious army. And how many secret unknown righteous people there were in Rus' at all times, who lived in the same spirit of inner closeness to Christ, fidelity to Him, who lovingly kept the image of Christ in their hearts, who lived not only in monasteries, in forests and caves, but also in ordinary conditions of worldly life, the images of which were preserved for us by our writers and people's memory. Until the very last days, not excluding Bolshevik times, the Russian land did not and does not become scarce of God’s people, Christ’s righteous people. In prisons, in bitter labor, in pilgrimage, in the ranks of the victorious army, the bright face of Christ does not cease to shine even now on the Russian land, illuminating the path of life for people. The people faithful to Christ showed with their lives that Christianity is not an abstract theory and vague phrases, but is a real, practical, labor and martyr reality, filled at the same time with heavenly light, joy, love, works of mercy and selflessness. Does this Christian psychology of the Russian people have the right to continue to exist? We see no reason to deny this or doubt it. Did this psychology hinder the Russian people in their state-building efforts? Wasn't she, on the contrary, his creative force? And even now, during the years of a difficult war, wasn’t it not national and religious inspiration that gave the Russian people the strength to drive the powerful enemy out of their native land and pursue him on his own land? Therefore, isn’t every anti-religious and anti-Christian movement contrary to the spirit and traditions of the Russian Orthodox people, disastrous for their spiritual structure, and therefore harmful and dangerous for their state well-being and prosperity, subject to complete cessation? The only benefit of atheism is that with it the truth of faith and Christian life appears even more clearly. The Russian people cannot renounce their Christian faith as the spiritual foundation of their entire lives With the strength of their Christian faith and Christian inspiration, the Russian people overcame all the difficult trials that befell them - the strife of princes, the raids of nomads, the two hundred and fifty-year Tatar yoke; defended his culture from foreigners and people of other faiths, did not allow the Swedes and German knights into his land, drove the Poles away from Moscow and again drove the Swedes out, survived the invasion of the French, endured the heavy burden of serfdom; created under the spiritual guidance of his great archpastors and ascetics, under the control of princes, kings and emperors, that Great Russian Empire from the Black and Baltic Seas to the Arctic Ocean, to the Great Eastern Ocean, to the “walls of motionless China”, to the borders of mysterious India, an empire that he now handed over to his new rulers, expecting that they would be able to understand and appreciate the works of their predecessors in collecting and organizing Russian land, they will be able to preserve and protect the collected property. And we must give justice to the current rulers of the Russian land - they managed to preserve intact and even increase the immense heritage they accepted. Their enormous and selfless work and feat in the last war is especially great and amazing. But it is also necessary that they be able to understand, appreciate and preserve the very soul of the Russian people, their Christian, Orthodox faith, stop its senseless oppression and themselves consciously stand on its solid foundation. So, does the Russian people have the right to turn away from the great spiritual heritage of the Orthodox faith and experience left to them by previous generations, as if they were unnecessary, worn-out rags? Can we really now (as some put it) just “spit” on this entire historical spiritual path we have traveled, on all of our great and holy, spiritual historical past, on all its workers, ascetics, holy martyrs, on all historical shrines, churches, monasteries, miraculous icons and relics of the holy saints of God and begin to build some kind of new, groundless, fantastic culture. For us, the religious past, the entire spiritual experience of faith, prayer, repentant tears, heavenly revelations and insights of our ancestors, must remain forever a dear, holy and inviolable treasure. We do not have the right and should not renounce the holy traditions and covenants of our past, from its holy achievements, from the builders and workers of our national home, who shed blood, sweat and tears for the holy Orthodox Russian land, who gave their lives for it. But from this, of course, the opposite does not follow - that we must reject all technical, economic, state, social and other achievements of modern state power. Just as at one time the Russian people accepted, albeit with bewilderment, the innovations of Peter the Great, so now they need to accept Soviet social and cultural innovations, emanating from the same love for the people and care for them. Our future should not be a rejection of the religious past, which will forever remain the unshakable foundation of our lives We do not reject new tasks of our state life, which open up before us depending on its further development and growth, but these tasks should not necessarily be associated with the denial and destruction of our past. Just as a tree grows without losing the connection of its branches with the trunk and root, so should public life grow, without abandoning the experience gained and the achievements acquired. New state construction should be connected with previous achievements, with grateful memory of those who previously worked on the improvement of the state and created its culture. Our Russian past does not deserve to be desecrated and spat upon by people who do not understand it and are alien to it. Wasn’t the explosion of the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior, erected with popular donations in memory of the great and selfless Patriotic War of 1812, a disgrace for the Russian land, not an insult to its glorious past? What was shameful and unacceptable in this majestic monument to the great national struggle for the Motherland? There was such a case. When in 1917 or 1918 of this century, Russian volunteers took one of the small district towns of Southern Russia from the Reds, and Russian soldiers entered the city, one soldier attacked a Jew walking along the street and began to beat him with the butt of his gun. The Jew fell. At this time, a Russian priest was passing along the street. He stopped the soldier, shamed him, and the Jew, taking advantage of the moment, slipped through the neighboring gate. Several months have passed. The same priest was walking along the street of the same city, suddenly a Jew walking towards him throws himself on his knees in front of him and begins to warmly thank him for saving his life. "How? When?" - “When a Russian soldier beat me with the butt of his gun and would have killed me if you had not stopped him.” The priest was very touched by this manifestation of grateful feeling, kissed the Jew and said: “Well, go with God. If it weren’t me, someone else would have stood up for you.” It was not by external violence, but by the force of internal growth that the Russian kingdom spread and existed for a thousand years. And only with the internal spiritual unity of the Russian people, created by their single Orthodox worldview and spirit, did it not disintegrate into its constituent elements, was not exhausted in the fruitless and disastrous struggle of nationalities. It was possible for the existence of political unity in it with all the multilingual and diverse composition of the Russian land. The spirit of Orthodoxy was the connecting principle of all the diverse elements of the Russian land. For this is the essential feature of Orthodoxy, that it, constituting the basis of the life of the Orthodox Russian people, does not prevent heterodox and heterodox elements of a single state family from preserving their own religious physiognomy, living according to the law and rules of their own religious confessions, and at the same time forming one single state whole. Historical experience has clearly shown the broad religious tolerance of the Russian Orthodox people, who know how not to constrain anyone in their religious concepts and feelings, laws and customs; who knows how to respect and delicately deal with religious customs and habits - both Christians of other confessions, and Jews, and Mohammedans, and Buddhists, and pagans of different persuasions. He remains so now. The Russian people can continue to fulfill this historical, spiritual, state and pedagogical task only on the condition that they remain invariably faithful and devoted to the spirit of their Orthodox Christian confession, which fostered in them this broad nationality and religious tolerance. Intolerance is sometimes considered to be exclusively a matter of religious belief and references are made to past examples of religious persecution. But it must be said that the socialists, who consider themselves free-thinking, in fact turned out to be more intolerant of the religious beliefs and customs of the Russian people than anyone else, and only covered up this intolerance with the supposed superiority of their higher culture. When we say this, we mean the first years of Bolshevism. We will not definitely state what his attitude to the religious issue is now, but, apparently, the appearance of the Bolshevik state is changing. The last war largely changed the face of Bolshevism, giving it a more national character and clearing it of the extremes of socialist ideology and intolerance. The unity of the Russian land, freely uniting around the Russian people, is hated by all enemies of the united, great, mighty, allied Russia. They strived, strive and will strive with all their might to, under the pretext of caring for individual nationalities, destroy this unity of the Russian land, divide Russia into separate small states, pit these states against one another, set them against each other and ensure that in mutual distrust, hostility and struggle they exhaust, weaken and destroy each other. This danger is felt, and the USSR is skillfully and successfully fighting it. The state independence of individual nationalities of the Russian land is being persistently asserted in their own internal life. Without diminishing the legal rights and freedoms of individual nationalities, they are all bound by the Soviet central government into one common and close invincible state Union of the USSR. Christian meaning of the former Russian Tsarist autocracy Should we talk about this issue? - But why not talk if the Russian people grew under the tsarist autocracy into a huge and powerful state, occupying, as they say, a sixth of the globe? It all depends on what to say and how to say it. Only to scold the tsarist autocracy is unfair, but to be touched by it is also unfair. We will try to indicate what its creative strength was, and what its weakness was, from which it died, like many other monarchies. It seems to me that we should not be afraid at all and avoid an impartial, sober and benevolent assessment of all phenomena of our state life, and especially those that have had a centuries-old and enormous influence on our national life and on our international position. There is no need to return to the old forms of state life - they have served their purpose. Let us try to formulate the precise and clear Christian meaning and significance of the thousand-year stage of state life experienced by our people and establish the correct attitude towards it without partiality in one direction or another, positive or negative, but also with a grateful feeling for all the good, for all the work that it brought into our lives. Russian tsarist autocracy was one of the manifestations of Russian Orthodox self-awareness. Without this premise it will remain essentially incomprehensible. This feature of our national identity came to us not from the West, but from the Orthodox East, from Byzantium. The meaning of the Russian tsarist autocracy was exclusively religious and moral, and not administrative. In the minds of the Russian people, the Tsar was the bearer and exponent of the Russian people's Christian conscience, Christian truth. Therefore, Russian autocracy cannot be considered only as a phenomenon of the political or national life of the Russian people. First of all, it is a manifestation of the religious and moral conscience of the Russian people and has its roots not only in the Byzantine royal autocracy, but also deeper - in the Old Testament royal power of the Jewish people. When the Jews, following the example of the neighboring pagan peoples, wished to have a king, God, as is known, did not approve of this desire and warned the Jews that the king would burden them with taxes necessary for the maintenance of his court and army, and with various labor duties, and that it was better for them to remain in the old order, when the Lord, in difficult moments of people's life, sent them judges to save them from the enemies who were oppressing them and to establish order. The people continued to insist on their own: they saw only the external, brilliant side of royal power and did not understand its inner meaning and their responsibilities to it. He did not realize that in order to realize the ideal meaning of royal power, a huge spiritual uplift was required not only on the part of the king, but also on the part of the people. If the tsar is the bearer and exponent of the spirit and conscience of his people and must stand at the full height of the religious demands of the people's spirit and people's conscience, then the people must stand at the full height of their religious and national self-awareness. You cannot make demands on the king and not fulfill them yourself. Only under this condition will the meaning of royal power be realized - to be the bearer and exponent of the religious and moral self-awareness of its people, to be their conscience. Without this condition, the high spiritual unity of the king and the people is lost, and royal power turns into a simple higher administrative institution, and this can be, with greater convenience and with less difficulty, an ordinary council of ministers and a meeting of people's representatives. With the loss of the main idea of ​​tsarist power as the guardian and expresser of the voice of the people's conscience and God's truth, it is easier, more convenient and cheaper for the people to have, instead of high tsarist power, simple clerks and executors of people's orders in the person of parliaments and responsible ministers. The Jewish people did not understand the exceptional, high nature of the significance of royal power and, captivated by its external splendor, like a child, they continued to achieve the fulfillment of their desires. And the Lord gave him a king, who turned out to be a heavy burden for the people. The Russian people, according to the tradition of the Orthodox Greeks or according to their own religious feeling and consciousness, have always seen the religious and moral meaning of the tsarist autocracy as the bearer, guardian and preserver of the demands of the Christian conscience. The Russian intelligentsia, brought up on Western ideology, did not understand and did not have this feeling at all. She looked at the king with Western European eyes, as at a responsible official. The Russian people did not trust officials and ministers, they were always ready to suspect them of selfish plans, but they did not doubt the tsar’s heart. This was an amazing feature of Russian folk psychology. “The heart of a king is in the hand of God,” he said in the words of Holy Scripture, which the Russian intelligentsia did not understand. And the tsar felt this attitude of the people towards him, and the people were closer to him, more understandable and dearer to the intelligentsia. The Russian Tsar lived with the same ideology as the common people. The tsar did not and could not have a common language with the intelligentsia, and this is understandable, since the intelligentsia lived in denial of the tsar, and not in a common life and common work with him. And it took many years of revolutionary propaganda, many years of mockery of the tsar’s title and position, a change in the people’s spirit, so that the naive, simple church faith in the tsar, in the instinct and infallibility of the tsar’s heart, would be shaken in the people’s soul. From this religious, mystical, in-depth point of view of royal power, neither the king’s age, nor intelligence, nor knowledge, nor talents were important in the eyes of the people. Only the purity and sensitivity of his royal heart were important. Having such a heart, the king was an indispensable guardian of the truth. The stories of Pushkin, Leskov and other writers clearly confirm this to us. Having a pure and sensitive heart, the king was an indispensable guardian of the truth, a regulator of the work of ministers and officials, as well as decisions of national representation. This was the meaning of royal service. All the authorities mentioned above could have made mistakes, consciously or unconsciously. The royal heart will feel the truth and restore it, sometimes in a completely unexpected and original way. Let us recall, for example, the act of Emperor Nicholas I with the French hairdresser. And there were many such cases in our Russian history. And Russian literature (Pushkin, Leskov, etc.) noted this. This was the truth, and this was the meaning of the Russian tsarist autocracy. The Russian intelligentsia, who grew up reading Western literature, did not see or understand this. When, through many years of propaganda, slander, and partly through the fault of the autocrats themselves, trust in the tsarist power was undermined, and the tsarist power lost its religious and moral aura in the eyes of the people, its further existence became impossible. It was impossible to preserve by any external means what had lost its internal value. Tsarist power had no meaning as an external decoration and it collapsed. This was both our misfortune and our common guilt. Difficulties and sorrows of the religious path of Russian statehood We do not have the opportunity to review this topic in any exhaustive volume, and therefore we will focus our attention only on some moments of our state life. We have already said that Russian church-state life in its centuries-old past has highlighted a numerous number of people, Russian saints, extraordinary in the height and beauty of their spiritual structure, starting from the holy martyrs Boris and Gleb and ending with Ven. Seraphim of Sarov and Saint Joasaph of Belogorodsky, recently canonized by the Russian Church. The height and beauty of their life lies in the fact that they stubbornly and persistently renounced the desires and attractions of their sinful will and were completely imbued with submission to the holy will of God, which is the dominant and guiding principle in them. They become dead to their sinful desires and begin to live a heavenly life, fulfilling the words of the Lord: “Whoever wants to come after Me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.” This is not easy, but it is possible for one who has decided to die to himself and live for God, acting according to God’s commandments. We will not give examples from the lives of saints - they are well known, but we will focus our attention on people whose lives were a continuous and difficult struggle with themselves, represented the goal of falls and uprisings, and consider the lives of three, in different respects, outstanding and remarkable Russian people, well known to everyone, namely: Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich the Terrible, His Holiness Patriarch Nikon and the Great Emperor Peter I. The first of them lived in the 16th century, the second - in the 17th century, and the third - in the 18th century. Thus, we illustrate our theme with examples from three centuries of Russian church-state life. There was also a great emperor in the 19th century - Alexander II Nikolaevich, who marked his reign with great deeds and died a martyr, but for our purpose the three persons we named above are sufficient. All of them were people, deeply and sincerely believers, but they all could not renounce their own “I” in the name of unconditional obedience to the truth of God, and this is the whole secret of Christian holiness, the secret that the venerables knew and were saved by. Sergius, and Rev. Seraphim and other saints. Neither Ivan the Terrible, nor Patriarch Nikon, nor Emperor Peter had such determination to completely renounce their “I”. The life of Ivan the Terrible was a vivid example of a whole life of grave religious drama, grave sinful falls and countless crimes, along with a constant consciousness of his wrongness and guilt. He caused a lot of grief and evil to the Orthodox Church, the Russian people, the people around him, and himself. But being the greatest sinner, Tsar Ivan was not an atheist - he repented and cried, never took on the role of a church reformer, never used the Church as an instrument for the implementation of his state plans, never tried to remake the church system for more convenient use in the interests of implementing his own state plans. He was a martyr of his passions and his own conscience. Conscious of himself as a great sinner and atheist, Ivan the Terrible prayed and repented, forced others to pray for himself, submitted to the penances imposed on him, but could not, and, most importantly, did not want to change. This example clearly shows that Christianity is not at all as simple a thing as some people think, that it is not at all a simple collection of dogmatic or liturgical definitions, not a simple series of moral instructions about which one can argue or agree and the whole essence of practicing Christianity can be reduced to this. The people understood the nature of Tsar Ivan, pitied him, maybe even loved him, and tolerated his outrages. He did not see evil will in him, but rather saw demonic possession or mental perversion. Many, speaking and reasoning about Christianity, do not take into account its practical nature and treat questions of Christianity in the same way as questions of algebra and geometry, which provide interesting work for the mind and nothing more. This attitude towards Christianity is deeply erroneous. It reveals his complete misunderstanding. Christianity is not such an elementary thing, not a matter of reason alone, logic alone - it requires difficult life practice, work, demolition and new construction. The people understood the nature of Tsar Ivan, pitied him, tolerated his outrages, because within themselves they felt the same victorious force and power of sin and the devil. And Ivan the Terrible himself clearly understood that the righteous judgment of God awaited him, he humbled himself, repented and cried, humbly endured the penances and excommunications imposed on him, sent monetary deposits to the monasteries with the names of the people he tortured, and asked to remember them and him. Ivan the Terrible did not know how, and did not want to remake himself; he hoped for the compliance of his spiritual fathers and found justification for himself in it. Ivan the Terrible did not have a genuine appeal to Christ, a genuine feeling of repentance - his “I” with his whims came first. But at the same time he had neither the thought nor the desire to alter the Church in any way - he sincerely and reverently bowed to it, it was an inviolable shrine for him, although he did not hesitate to dispose of its servants and act at his own discretion or even according to his whim. From Tsar Ivan we move on to another religious type - also very interesting - to His Holiness Patriarch Nikon. The spiritual dispensation of His Holiness Patriarch Nikon was the direct opposite of the spiritual dispensation of Tsar Ivan. Tsar Ivan was a slave of sensuality and passion. Patriarch Nikon was a slave to duty, and a high one at that – church duty. He was the same richly gifted nature as Tsar Ivan, but he was not a weak-willed nature. He knew how, by force of will and spirit, to devote his exceptional talents entirely to the service of God and the Church. If in John his talents were enslaved to his passions, then in His Holiness Patriarch Nikon they were completely given over to the service of God, although not without a disdainful attitude towards their opponents. We will not say that the grace of God poured out through him in his actions (with the exception, of course, of priestly service), as it was, for example, in the words and actions of St. Sergius or Rev. Seraphim. Therefore, probably, the Church did not number him among the clique of saints, although some archpastors wanted this, bowing before his great talents and enormous services to the Church. God did not allow his glorification, obviously because it would be more a matter of church politics than of God's truth. The attitude of His Holiness the Patriarch towards the Church has always been impeccable. She has always been an inviolable shrine for him. He deeply revered the sacred hierarchical rank. If Ivan the Terrible treated the Church like a spoiled son with a weak mother, and Peter the Great was ready to use the Church as an instrument for the implementation of his state plans, then for His Holiness Patriarch Nikon the Church was always the subject of deep, reverent, unquestioning filial obedience, although on occasion he could cruelly dispose of it. With his mischievous character, Peter I did not always know how to reconcile his own respect for the Church with the crazy whims of his unbridled temper. His Holiness Patriarch Nikon, who rose from a wretched peasant hut to the royal and patriarchal chambers, amazes us with his extraordinary talents, strength of spirit and nobility of character. While still an archimandrite in Moscow, he attracted the attention of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich and became his closest friend and interlocutor, a mediator between the Tsar and the Moscow poor. He weekly conveyed to the king the requests of the disadvantaged and unjustly convicted, and was their protector and savior. His behavior in Novgorod, where he was already an archbishop, is striking. During a popular uprising caused by hunger, he did not hesitate to hide the Novgorod governor in his house from the raging crowd, organized religious processions in the most dangerous places of the city, was beaten by a maddened crowd, and the next day he again went with icons and crosses to the same place in the city, performed the liturgy, spoke a sermon, shamed the rioters and, finally, was not afraid to enter the room where it was happening a meeting of the leaders of the riot, persuading them to stop the riot. This indestructible energy, courage and fidelity to archpastoral duty rightly attracted to him the deep gratitude of Tsar Alexei and nominated him for the patriarchal throne of all Russia after the death of the former patriarch. It is completely unfair that His Holiness Patriarch Nikon is accused of causing a schism in the Old Believers in our country. The schism arose long before Nikon, from the very beginning of the correction of liturgical books and rituals. Even then, in the first years of the 17th century, there were people who condemned and did not accept church corrections. This was the beginning of the split. And this initial correction of books and rituals took place under the Patriarchs Job and Hermogenes. This work continued under the subsequent patriarchs - Philaret and Joseph, enjoyed the approval and blessing of the Eastern patriarchs, was discussed at church councils in Moscow and in the East, was carefully prepared by collecting and studying printed and handwritten sources, and all corrections and changes were approved and approved by church councils. Nikon was only the last executor of the work done before him - and in this position, he could, of course, sin with a certain perseverance and exactingness characteristic of his character. In any case, there is no reason to attribute the entire work of correction, which lasted for centuries, to Nikon alone and to call this work Nikonianism. Severe measures against Old Believers were not used by Nikon alone; they existed before Nikon and were not invented by him. Under him they were used even to a lesser extent and with greater caution than under some other patriarchs. We do not justify these measures, although they were in the spirit of the times, but one cannot help but take into account the fact that the actions of the Old Believers against church corrections were often also outrageous. There was a lot of passion on both sides. Patriarch Nikon was one of the most reasonable and fair opponents of the schism. His bright mind and sense of truth, as well as his very peasant origin, clearly painted him a picture of what was happening and kept him from going to extremes. His struggle with the boyars, admirers of Western innovations, was more severe and persistent. In this passion for Western innovations, the Patriarch rightly saw the loss of its originality coming to the Russian land. And he really sometimes acted quite harshly with these admirers of Western novelty, for which they also paid him with considerable hatred and offensive antics. This did not stop Nikon from continuing to do as he considered necessary. The essence of Peter's transformation of Russian life A fatal moment in the history of Russian culture was approaching, somewhat similar to what we are experiencing now. The work of Great Peter was not limited to borrowing technical advances from the West, which would have been possible if the old Russian culture was preserved, as both Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov wanted. In reality, a much more profound, complex and radical change in the nature of the very foundation of Russian state and cultural life took place. Peter the Great transferred Russian culture from its former Byzantine, ancient Christian, Orthodox Church foundation to a pan-European and secular foundation. From an Orthodox kingdom, Russia turned into a secular European state. The very idea, the very foundation, the very meaning of our state existence has changed. The Bolsheviks went even further in this direction. But is that just how it seems? The Bolsheviks did not go in the direction of the Russian unbelieving Socialist Revolutionary and Social Democratic intelligentsia. They went in their own popular-worker direction, but not at all negative towards religion. The mask of godlessness is falling off from them more and more, because they have no basis for it among the people, and they strive to be pochvenniks, populists. With the coming of the Bolsheviks to power, a much more profound change in Russian statehood took place than what the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries dreamed of, and they cannot forgive the Bolsheviks for this. On the one hand, the Bolsheviks were indeed the heirs of all the revolutionary movements that had come before them in the Russian people and Russian society. But on the other hand, they do not want to break away from the Russian folk roots. And this is where their favorable attitude towards religion in general and Orthodoxy in particular arises. The Bolsheviks have an understanding of Orthodoxy, which our other revolutionary parties, from the Cadets to the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats, do not have. True, the Bolsheviks freed the Russian people from any obligatory relationship to the Church. If under Peter the Great, loyalty to the Church turned from a national obligation into a personal matter for individual citizens, and under the Bolsheviks it ceased to be a personal matter, their personal responsibility, this does not mean that it lost its significance in the eyes of the state. Peter the Great, instead of serving the truth of God, set the Russian state another task - to search for and use for; the needs of the state, the natural people's strength and wealth existing on Russian soil. The task put forward was correct and necessary, but it was set one-sidedly, to the detriment of the spiritual life of the Russian people. The current rulers of the Russian land still hold this position. But not quite on this one. There is already a stirring of a deeper, more truthful spirit. Nothing essentially interfered and is not interfering with the joint implementation of the material and spiritual tasks of the Russian land, as we see, for example, in our monasteries, especially on Valaam and in other northern monasteries. The ancient Russian rulers understood this. Both Ivan the Terrible and Boris Godunov thought about this. Peter the Great went too far in one direction. It was possible, without abandoning one’s age-old treasure and one’s ancient age-old spiritual task, to supplement the national task with a new matter of development and use of the immense treasures of the earth. Russia failed to stand firmly on its historical position. From an Orthodox kingdom, firmly and consciously preserving Orthodox traditions, it turned into a secular secular state modeled on Western European states. This is the fundamental mistake and untruth of the Petrine reform and those who were carried away by it and continued it. From the work of God, our state life has turned into a matter of simple earthly improvement, into a matter that in the West has reached all the horrors of German Hitlerism and from which the Lord saved us. We repeat again - the Russian state is not an exclusively military, industrial or agricultural state, etc., but without ignoring all these aspects of people's life, it is at the same time the keeper of a great spiritual treasure - the purity and truth of Christ, purity, both in the theory of national consciousness, and in practice, in life, in human relations. This is how Russia has always shown itself, both in life and in history; She must always remember this mission of hers and always remain faithful to it. If she forgets her or renounces her, she will not justify herself in any way either before people or before God. Let the builders and leaders of Russian state life remember and take this into account. The Russian people cannot live without Christ. Peter the Great in vain connected the new tasks of the Russian Empire with church reform, apparently fearing opposition to his plans from the patriarchs. The church reform he carried out killed the canonical initiative of the Church and turned the Russian national Church into a state-owned Department of Orthodox Confession, a bureaucratic institution. Peter the Great abolished all conciliar initiative, all vitality, and gave the Russian Church a bureaucratic character completely unusual for either it or the Russian people. From the first centuries of Christianity, the Orthodox Church consisted of independent Christian communities led by the apostles. These communities, uniting, formed church dioceses governed by bishops, metropolitans and patriarchs. Before Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was such an independent patriarchate, living its own conciliar life, governed by its own church canons, dating back to the first centuries of Christianity, from ecumenical and local councils. This is how it should have been left, and not remade in the German way. By its nature, by the nature of Orthodoxy, by the character of the Russian people, by the rules of the Church, the Russian Orthodox Church could not and would never become an opponent of state power, just as the ancient Christian Church for centuries was not an opponent of the state power of the pagan and Christian Roman Empire. Peter the Great did not take into account this character of the Orthodox Church, and, apparently, was not aware of it. In any case, he found it necessary to destroy the independent structure of the Russian Church and subordinated it to state power; as one of the departments of this power, he abolished the patriarchal power, introduced the church into the number of state institutions and subordinated it to the supervision and control of a special government official, the “Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod.” The Holy Synod - a collegial highest church government, consisting of bishops and members of the white clergy by choice and appointment of the government, replaced the power of the Patriarch, elected by the All-Russian Church Council. All activities of this new highest church institution took place under the control of the chief prosecutor. Thus, the Russian Church lost its centuries-old historical character, which came from the first centuries of Christianity - the conciliar leadership of the Russian Orthodox believing people, and turned into a bureaucratic institution, responsible mainly for the appointment and movement of church hierarchs and the economic interests of its department. Conciliar life in parishes and dioceses ceased to exist and was reduced exclusively to the individual charity of Orthodox Christians as individual members of the Orthodox Church. The ideal of the cathedral construction of Orthodox Christian life ceased to inspire church parishes. Each parishioner began to care only about his own personal piety. As a result of this arrangement of church life in parishes, the guiding ideological significance in Russian spiritual life moved away from church parishes, moved to other areas of Russian society: to secular literature, to university departments, to journalism, etc., and was only partially retained in monasteries, in the hands of monastic elders. The ideological influence of the Church on the life of the believing secular society and people has weakened, and the ability to fight against its unhealthy phenomena and trends, including the unhealthy influence of the West, which has increasingly flowed into the life and worldview of Russian educated society and people, has weakened. Further penetration of Western influence into us and the resistance of the Russian folk spirit to it The change in the character of Russian culture, which began under Alexei Mikhailovich and intensified under Peter the Great and his successors, could not but meet with opposition from the centuries-old spiritual traditions of the Russian people. Under Alexei Mikhailovich, His Holiness Patriarch Nikon fought against the evil of blind imitation of the West. But before the Peter the Great era it did not have the same dimensions as it acquired under Peter and after Peter in the 18th and 19th centuries. Both the upper and lower classes of society continue to live by a common ideology and a common psychology, by the common ideals of Holy Rus', by the examples of martyrs and ascetics. These ideals came from ancient times, from Byzantium, Athos, from the hagiographic and patristic writings, from the holy martyrs, from Christ. Of course, practical matters, economic matters, government affairs, and other everyday practical issues and interests were not ignored then. But over all these questions and interests the Christian ideal of the human person, bequeathed by the apostles, martyrs and ascetics of the Christian East, Mount Athos and our own Russian ascetics, prevailed and dominated. With the beginning of the Petrine era, the common people, part of the upper classes of society and monasteries continued to remain faithful to this pre-Petrine ideology. Another part of Russian society, captivated and carried away by the reform, having visited the West, received an education there, captivated by the way of life and ideals there, sharply turned its face to the West and began to borrow its ideals, its culture, its ways of life from there. An ideological and everyday divergence appeared between the lower and higher classes of Russian society, a difference in understanding the purpose and meaning of life, as well as in its external way of life. The cultural classes became more and more immersed in the study and assimilation of Western culture and dreamed of the time when the Russian peasant, in the poet’s words, “would bring Shakespeare and Byron from the market, not my foolish lord.” At the same time, they forgot that the Russian peasant did not find “my lord stupid” in the East, but received him from the same West, from where they received their literature and the upper classes of Russian society; the genuine, hereditary, beloved and revered literature of the Russian people were: the lives of St. Alexei, the man of God; Holy Great Martyr Barbara; Venerable Mary of Egypt; Saint Philaret the Merciful and others who came to us from the Greek East. Having begun its imitation of the West with external secular “courtesy and politeness,” Russian society moved on to the study of the works and ideas of Western philosophers and saints of the 18th and 19th centuries. We are not saying that we did not need to get acquainted with all these Western trends of thought and life. Why not get acquainted? – But at the same time it was necessary to preserve the independence of one’s own thought and look at all this Western literature from the height of one’s own Orthodox ideology. After all, Peter the Great, borrowing its technical culture from the West, remained a sincere Orthodox Christian until the end of his life and died as an Orthodox Christian. His desire was to arm us with technical means and achievements of the West, and not at all to turn us into Europeans in worldview. In its rapprochement with the West, our cultural class was unable to stand at the height of our spiritual identity and remains the same to this day, which is our fatal national flaw, our weakness and softness, our threeness before the Motherland and before the Church. But still, we must say that the movement that rushed to us from the West did not meet us with a completely empty place and an indifferent attitude towards it. A broad and persistent opposition arose against him in all classes of Russian society, which continued in the 18th and 19th centuries. The rise of spiritual life in Russian society and among the Russian people in the 18th and 19th centuries Simultaneously with the widespread spread in the highest educated classes of Western secularism and godlessness, as well as unhealthy Western European mysticism (where did healthy mysticism come from there?), in contrast to them, a healthy current of spiritual life is strengthening in us, both in the upper and lower strata of Russian society, which has its roots in the Orthodox traditions of Russian religious life, dating back to the traditions of the Slavic countries, Athos and Byzantium. These two currents enter into a struggle with each other, and victory turns out to be on one side or the other. This reflects the instinctive protest of the healthy Russian religious spirit against the unhealthy infatuation with Western European rationalism and materialism, as well as mysticism. The shrine of Orthodoxy has not ceased to dominate in the consciousness and spirit of the indigenous mass of the Russian Orthodox people. In many places, manifestations of Russian Orthodox feeling have not ceased to appear. With love, solemnly, numerous and crowded religious processions were carried out with especially revered miraculous holy icons of the Mother of God - Kazan, Vladimir, Tikhvin, Kaluga, Gorbanev, Smolensk, Korennaya-Kursk, etc. The monasteries were not lacking in wise elders and zealous prayer-books, ascetics and ascetics, as the Venerables were. Seraphim of Sarov, Parthenius of Kiev, Ambrose of Optina, Saint Joasaph of Belogorod, Tikhon of Zadonsk, Theodosius of Chernigov, Mitrofan of Voronezh and others. Hundreds and thousands of laymen - men and women - came to them, asking for blessings and prayers, guidance and consolation, confessing their sins to them. Of course, all these were manifestations of an individual, individual, religious feeling and spirit, but they embraced the souls of thousands of people. The Church as a single whole lost the opportunity and freedom of a conciliar voice and remained silent, unable to authoritatively express its guiding word, condemn the dark phenomena of life and bless the bright and joyful ones. As one of the special remarkable phenomena of the religious life of the Russian people in the 18th and then in the 19th centuries, one cannot help but point out the spiritual movement in Russian monasteries and in the Russian people (in all its layers), created by the famous Moldavian elder, a native of Poltava, abbot of the Nyametsky monastery in Moldova, Archimandrite Paisius Velichkovsky. The son of a Poltava archpriest, rector of the Poltava Cathedral, a graduate of the Kyiv Theological Academy, he left the Academy and his homeland in his early youth, devoted himself to wandering first in Ukrainian monasteries, then in Moldavian monasteries and hermitages, and finally went to Athos, where he laid the foundation for his own brotherhood. With this brotherhood, he later moved to Moldova, where he finally established himself in the ancient Nyametsky Ascension Monastery of the 15th century. In monasticism, he was especially attracted to the inner side, the internal feat of spiritual activity, the feat of prayer and struggle with thoughts. Getting acquainted with this inner feat of “smart doing,” he re-read ancient Christian ascetic literature, translated it into a common language and began to teach his students “smart doing.” He considered completing it under the guidance of an experienced mentor as a necessary condition for the success of this feat. Having walked the “path” of such work through many years of feat, testing and guiding himself with the guidance of experienced mentors, Paisius, standing at the head of the famous Nyamets Lavra, having around him up to a thousand devoted students, including many immigrants from Russia, the elder began translating into Russian from Greek the works of ancient Greek ascetics, the so-called “Philokalia”. Old, sick, weak, but cheerful in spirit, he completed his work lying in bed, covered with grammars, dictionaries and works of the translated author. His works in handwritten copies became widespread in Russian monasteries, where they were studied and copied. A large set of his translations ended up in one of the monasteries of the Kaluga diocese - the later famous Optina Pustyn. The archimandrite himself died in 1796 and was buried in the main Ascension Church of the Nyametsky Monastery, in Moldova. From Elder Paisius, from his literary works and from his spiritual feat, a broad spiritual movement began in many Russian monasteries and in the Russian Orthodox people of all classes, both higher and lower, both educated and uneducated. The Paisian movement of the 18th and 19th centuries was a protest of the Russian believing soul against the religious devastation coming to us from the West under the charming guise of enlightenment, led by the big names of Voltaire, Rousseau and other Western enlighteners. And although this protest of the Russian Orthodox believing soul did not take any organized form of a nationwide church struggle against unbelief (and could not accept it due to our lack of organized church conciliarity) and was carried out without a definite plan through the efforts of not the Church, but individuals, it did not remain fruitless and did not lose its significance for Russian society and the people, both in the 18th and even more so in the 19th centuries, when the translations of Elder Paisius were published by Optina Pustyn. Paisius's literature and his entire movement were a protest not only against the rationalistic atheism, known in our country at that time under the name of Voltairianism, but also against the unhealthy false mystical and pietistic, Khlyst and skopsky movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which in those years attracted many to itself as a counterbalance to the atheistic emptiness of Voltairianism. The Paisian movement was more significant and all the more valuable because it had its roots in the Athonite and Byzantine traditions of St. Nil Sorsky, Rev. Maxim the Greek and their students. Prominent hierarchs of the Church and Russian scientists took an active part in the publication of the works of Elder Paisius and the ancient Orthodox ascetics, undertaken by Optina Pustyn. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow even looked through the printed text himself and made corrections. The Metropolitan of Kyiv lovingly monitored the publication and gave guidance. Professors of the Moscow Theological Academy, Rev. Golubinsky, professor at Moscow University Shevyrev, as well as famous literary figures - the Kireevsky brothers, whose estate was located next to Optina Pustyn. It was in their village house that the publishing house began: Elder Hieroschemamonk Macarius came to them from Optina Pustyn and, after praying in their house, wrote a preface to the book of the Venerable. Isaac the Syrian. With the beginning of this publishing house in the 40s of the 19th century and with the development of “Starchestvo” in Optina Pustyn, according to the legend and behests of the elder, Archimandrite. Paisiya, with the appearance in Optina Pustyn of its three famous elders - Hieroschemamonk Leo (Leonid), Hieroschemamonk Macarius, Hieroschemamonk Ambrose (depicted by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov under the name of Elder Zosima), the famous Optina abbots, Archimandrites Moses and Isaac, Optina Pustyn itself received a wide fame. From all sides, people of different social status reached out to her, from simple peasants and peasant women to famous writers and scientists who wanted to see the elders, receive their blessing and hear their wise word, dissolved in affection and jokes. Optina Pustyn became the focus of a broad Orthodox spiritual movement for decades. And this had enormous educational significance in the matter of churching our educated classes and bringing them closer to the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. Professors from higher educational institutions, as well as our most famous writers, philosophers and publicists - N.V. Gogol, the Kireevsky brothers, prof. Shevyrev, Aksakovs, gr. Alexey Tolstoy, gr. L. N. Tolstoy, V. S. Solovyov, F. M. Dostoevsky, lead. book Konstantin Konstantinovich, V.V. Rozanov, Metropolitan Ioannikiy and many other famous spiritual and secular writers, ordinary people. Under the influence of the Optina elders, it revived, took on a new character, and the life and activities of women’s monasteries led by the elders developed widely. Elder Macarius, like Leonid, was the confessor of many women's monasteries. Under the leadership of Elder Ambrose, the famous Shamorda Kazan convent arose and grew, in which he died in 1891. The organizer and first abbess of the monastery was Schema-nun Sophia (from the famous Bolotov family), known for her works and exploits, whose brother Father Daniel was the hieromonk of Optina Pustyn. He was known as an icon painter. Under Abbess Sophia, an orphanage and a school for girls, a hospital and an almshouse for the elderly, sick and weak, an icon-painting workshop, a goldenrod and a printing house for printing leaflets and books of spiritual content, which was in charge and under the leadership of one of the sisters with a university education, arose in Shamordina. Around the same years, the famous Lesna convent arose in the western region under the direction of Abbess Catherine (Countess Efimovskaya) with the same prayerful and educational character as Shamordino, and in Moscow the monastery of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna arose. Hegumen German, the confessor of the Gethsemane skete of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, was very famous in Moscow among the university intelligentsia, and among the Lavra pilgrims, the confessor of the Chernigov skete, Elder Barnabas, whose character resembled the Optina Elder Ambrose. In Moscow, Archpriest Father Valentin Amfitheatrov was widely known; in the opinion of many, he was the second Father John of Kronstadt. But what can we say about Father John himself, whose fame as a prayer book and miracle worker penetrated even beyond the borders of the Russian land. But what can we say about Father John, when the hieroschemamonks of Optina Pustyn, Father Ambrose, corresponded with non-Orthodox people on various issues of spiritual life that concerned them. We could tell a lot about Father John of Kronstadt himself from our personal memories, but there is hardly any need for this, he is so well known to everyone even without our memories, although I owe him both the blessing for marriage and the blessing for the priesthood. This is how the spiritual Christian life of our Motherland flourished and expanded at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Here, by the way, it would be appropriate to talk about the remarkable experience of the Orthodox Labor Brotherhood of the Exaltation of the Cross, founded by the landowner of the Chernigov province, Glukhov district Nikolai Nikolaevich Neplyuev on his estate, not far from the town of Yanpol, on the Vozdvizhensky farm. This experience is so interesting, and I myself, the author of these lines, stood so close to it that I cannot help but talk about it in more detail. Nikolai Nikolaevich Neplyuev was the only son of a wealthy landowner and provincial leader of the nobility of the Chernigov province, Nikolai Ivanovich Neplyuev. His father intended him to have a diplomatic career. But fate decided the issue differently. After graduating from university, N.N. Neplyuev served for some time in one of our small embassies in Germany. Social life and a diplomatic career did not attract him. One day, returning home from a court ball in a particularly depressed state of mind, Neplyuev fell into a heavy sleep. And so, he dreams that he is in his Chernigov estate, from which he was taken away as a six-month-old child and has not returned to it since then; sits in a peasant hut, in a crowd of peasant boys, and reads the Gospel to them. Through the window he sees the local parish church and the priest walking from the church to his hut. This dream put him in a bright, joyful mood and was repeated exactly the same for three nights in a row 4. Neplyuev understood this dream as God’s indication of his future destiny and activities, he decided to quit the diplomatic service, move to live in the village and, following the example of S. A. Rachinsky, engage in the Christian education of peasant children. The father did not oppose his intention. Neplyuev came to the Chernigov estate, Yanpol, where he had his own manor house, hired a peasant hut in the village, began to gather peasant boys there and tell them the gospel story, deeds, parables and miracles of the Lord. He gathered the guys in his manor house, entertained them with music and talked about his life abroad, about his travels, as well as about Russia. He immediately gave his evangelical conversations with children a practical character: these were not simple retellings of the gospel story, but lessons in practical Christian life. All conversations were directed towards the main goal - what a Christian should be and what his Christian life should be. Of those boys who understood him and were ready to live according to the Gospel commandments, he formed two circles - the younger and the older: the younger ones were distributed among the older ones, who became Neplyuev’s closest assistants in raising the younger ones, while educating themselves. The senior had his own group of juniors assigned to him, with whom he worked under the supervision and guidance of Neplyuev. Neplyuev himself conducted separate conversations with the younger ones and separate conversations with the older ones, as well as general conversations with both of them, not only of a religious nature, but also of a general educational nature. He told them a lot about his travels to different places in Europe and about its attractions, occupied the boys with music, taught them to love and understand it, and introduced them to Russian and foreign poetry and prose. Together with the boys, Neplyuev, in his garden on the Vozdvizhensky farm, poured an earthen hill in memory of his beloved poet A. S. Khomyakov, many of whose poems he set to music, and they were sung by one of his sisters, who received a special musical education. From the more or less noisy Yanpol, Neplyuev moved to the secluded Vozdvizhensky farm, where he founded two special agricultural schools - for boys and for girls. The teachers at the school were first specialists invited from outside, and then their own students who passed special exams in state schools. One of his sisters moved to live with Nikolai Nikolaevich permanently, and she took over the management of the girls’ school. At the same time, a church was built on the farm in the name of the Exaltation of the Precious Cross of the Lord, and I, the author of these lines, had to be the first rector and teacher of the law of both schools, where I was sent, after I graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy, by the rector, Archimandrite Anthony Khrapovitsky. When, at the end of the course, I came to Chernigov to take the priesthood, some old priests, having learned where I was being appointed, shook their heads and sighed, saying: “My God, my God,” but I did not attach any significance to these sighs. Over time, both teaching positions in schools and economic positions in the farmstead began to be filled by students graduating from school, of whom the officially approved Labor Brotherhood of the Exaltation of the Cross was formed, the charter of which was approved by the relevant authorities, both spiritual and civil. The Brotherhood was accepted under the Highest patronage of the Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. At the head of the Brotherhood was the Duma, headed by Neplyuev. Members of the Duma on ceremonial occasions wore small silver crosses on silver chains, and Neplyuev himself wore a gold cross with a diamond star in the center. There was talk that all the land of the Krestovozdvizhensky farm (which was about 6,000 acres) would become property Labor brotherhood. Neplyuev’s idea and its implementation became widely known in Russian society and abroad and attracted the interest of many; people came from everywhere to learn about his experience. Various reviews about him appeared in the press, both favorable and negative. Famous youth writer prof. N.P. Wagner published an enthusiastic review about it, if I’m not mistaken in the Week magazine, under the title “Oasis in the Desert.” An employee of Novoye Vremya, Menshikov, on the contrary, gave an extremely sharp negative review of him in his newspaper. Sectarians were also interested in Neplyuev’s case, but they were repulsed by its ecclesiastical character. On some issues there was a difference between us, and I chose to go to an ordinary church parish, and then, due to poor health, to teach law at a secondary school. The Brotherhood survived the revolution, and its representatives participated in the All-Russian Church Council of 1917. With the Soviets coming to power, the Brotherhood was closed by the government as unnecessary, due to its inconsistency with the ideology of Bolshevism. We talked about Neplyuev’s experience as an interesting attempt to Christianize the Russian public in the bosom of Orthodoxy, as a practical solution to the question of the Orthodox Christian public. To N.N. Neplyuev himself, as a sincere and selfless Christian worker in the bosom of the Orthodox Church, may there be eternal grateful memory. All of the above was written by us on the basis of personal acquaintance with N. N. Neplyuev and direct participation in his work. In the second half of the 19th century, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra undertook extensive publishing activities in the person of its energetic treasurer, Archimandrite Nikon, who distributed his famous “Trinity Leaves” and larger publications in millions of copies throughout Russia. His example was followed on a smaller scale by other publishing houses, for example, the Tuzov company, the editorial office of the Russian Pilgrim, the editorial office of Soulful Reading, the editorial office of The Helmsman, etc. The publishing activity (scientific and theological) of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Novosel and his friends attracted attention. Magazines “Russian Pilgrim”, “Helmsman”, “Soulful Reading”, academic journals, Kharkov magazine “Faith and Reason”, “Christian’s Rest” and so on. had their own circle of readers. But all this literary and educational work of Russian monasteries, theological academies and seminaries, individuals and private firms was only a manifestation of private initiative, and this was, of course, very valuable, but it was not the authoritative voice of the All-Russian Church, in its conciliar manifestation. The All-Russian Church as a single whole did not manifest itself and did not have the opportunity to manifest itself due to the absence of church councils, and therefore could not influence Russian public life with sufficient authority, strength and success and fight the dark phenomena and trends of Russian church and public life. And we had a lot of them in life, in literature, and in shows. The Russian Church seemed to be afraid, timid, and did not dare to rise to its full height and speak on behalf of the entire Russian believing people and its age-old church traditions according to the covenants and traditions of the holy apostles and martyrs, the Holy Ecumenical Councils and the Russian church past, although the Synod, as the successor of His Holiness the All-Russian Patriarch, had the full and indisputable right to do so; had the power to authoritatively condemn all the dark sides and phenomena of Russian church and public life. The Synod showed sad cowardice in this case. The given examples of amateur church activities show that in the popular consciousness in the 19th century, a conscious attitude towards their Christian life, towards its conscious and correct organization, was already beginning to awaken more and more. The very growth of sectarianism, although an ugly phenomenon, testified to the same thing. The same was evidenced by such church celebrations, which attracted tens and hundreds of thousands of participants from all over Orthodox Russia, such as the opening of Holy relics and the glorification of the memory of St. Theodosius of Chernigov, Ven. Seraphim of Sarov, St. Joasaph of Belogorod, 500th anniversary of the memory of St. Sergius of Radonezh, which attracted pilgrims from all over the Russian land. These celebrations naturally awakened in the minds and hearts of their participants the consciousness of what our Christian church life should be. It is not enough just to bow before the holiness of the righteous and ask for their prayers and help, but we ourselves, following their example and covenant, must ennoble both our personal and our public life, expel from it everything ugly - drunkenness, pornographic shows and similar literature. If in this matter the voice of individual hierarchs of the Church or even the Holy Synod itself turned out to be powerless, then it was necessary to resort to the voice and authority of the All-Russian Church Council as an exponent of the All-Russian Orthodox consciousness. It was not the police who had to monitor the beauty of our literature and our spectacles, but our own popular Christian self-awareness and feeling. All this became especially clear when the All-Russian Church Council of 1917 opened. He felt that healthy and powerful moral force of the people, which could heal and cleanse our social atmosphere of moral filth and corruption. And it became especially sad and pitiful that for decades and centuries we neglected and did not use this spiritual power that morally improves our society. Only through such councils on an all-Russian scale could it be possible to recognize and overcome every spiritual and social evil that arose on our land. Obviously, we had to go through the trials ahead of us. If All-Russian Church Councils, as the body of our all-Russian Christian self-awareness, were held in our country constantly (as they should be according to the rules of the Church, and not at the discretion of state authorities), then the picture of the Russian public would take a different form: all the dark spots of the Russian public would be before our eyes, and it would be possible to organize on an all-Russian scale a systematic struggle against the dark phenomena of our life by means and forces of the believing society itself. Both the task and this work remained unexamined and unfulfilled. Orthodox Christian life is not only an individual life, but also a collective life: family, parish, diocesan and national Orthodox Christian life is not only an individual life, although, first of all, it is realized in the soul and in the life of an individual person, in his thoughts, feelings and actions. But this alone is not enough. The purpose and meaning of Christian life lies not only in individual salvation. Christ came to bind into one both the Christian family and the Christian community (church parish), uniting around its parish church and its rector; a church diocese, uniting around its bishop, and, finally, a local Church (in our case, the All-Russian Church), uniting around its common head, the metropolitan or patriarch. Orthodox Christian life must have the right to exist in an Orthodox family, and in an Orthodox church parish, and in Orthodox dioceses, and in the entire Russian local Church, completely independent of its connection with the state, which may exist in one form or another, or may not exist. No one has the right to infringe on the freedom of faith of an Orthodox Christian, not only in its individual manifestations, in prayer, in visiting the church of God, in reading the word of God, in works of mercy, but also in its collective, conciliar implementation in a church parish, in a diocese, etc. It is wrong to limit the very concept of “church” to the boundaries of the church, i.e. buildings for prayer meetings, or “church hierarchy,” highlighting and isolating the hierarchy from the entire mass of the believing people. All Orthodox believers, clergy and laity, together constitute one, holy, catholic and apostolic Orthodox Church, inextricably linked with the Heavenly Church. To understand the Church exclusively as a composition of the clergy, i.e. in the clerical sense, constitutes a deep and harmful error. The Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarchs also warn us against this mistake when they assert that not only the church hierarchy, but the entire church people are the custodians of the Orthodox faith and Christian life. Therefore, the entire Russian Orthodox people, and not just the clergy, bears responsibility for the healthy course of church life, for its fidelity to the apostolic and paternal tradition, the examples and covenants of the martyrs and the resolutions of the Ecumenical Councils. To consider the Church as consisting only of the clergy would mean not to understand its very essence, as the Body of Christ. Just as in the human body each part has its own place and purpose, so in the Church of Christ each member has its own place and purpose, and each of them bears responsibility and concern for the correct flow of church life. Concerned about being a faithful follower of Christ and a fulfiller of His commandments in his own personal life, an Orthodox person must extend this concern to his own family, which, according to the Apostle, is the small church of Christ. In the apostolic epistles he will find all the necessary instructions on what the life of a Christian family should be like, the relationship between husband and wife, between parents and children, so that the family is truly a small Church of Christ, and so that the Lord lives in it. After the family, the next larger unit of church life is the church parish, grouped around its parish church. All members of a church parish also constitute one spiritual body. All of them are closely connected by common prayer, church, worship, the reception of the Holy Sacraments and should feel like members of one family, one body, in which, according to the words of the Apostle, “there are many members, but one body. The eye cannot tell the hand: I don’t need you; or also head to feet: I don’t need you. On the contrary, the members of the body that seem weakest are much more necessary, and those that seem to us to be less noble in the body, we take more care of, and our unseemly ones are more plausibly covered, while our good-looking ones have no need for it. Therefore, if one member suffers, all members suffer with it; if one member is glorified, all members rejoice with it. And you are the body of Christ, and separately members” (1 Cor. XII 20-24). With these words the Apostle speaks about the Corinthian Church, but the Corinthian Church of that time is the same as our current church parish, so the words of the Apostle are quite applicable to any of our church parishes and show what its inner life and the mutual relations of its members should be. All parishioners have the same responsibility - to take care, together with their pastors, about preserving the purity and integrity of the ancient apostolic and patristic Orthodox tradition and Christian life. From the union of church parishes, in our time, the highest church unit is formed - a diocese, headed not by a priest, but by a bishop. In dioceses, the same task - preserving the faith and Christian life - is carried out and supported not by the priest, but by the bishop, with the assistance of the diocesan congresses of clergy and laity. Throughout the Russian Church, issues of public Russian life are considered and resolved by the All-Russian Church Council, similar to the Moscow Council of 1917. Such an all-Russian Church Council would have to meet every three or four years, and, if necessary, more often. At all these diocesan congresses and all-Russian councils, the main subject of discussion and attention should be the concern for preserving the purity of the Orthodox Christian identity, concern for the purity of the Christian faith and life in accordance with the covenants of Christ the Savior and His Apostles. If we define our Orthodox church task in this way (and without this, can we bear the name of Orthodox Christians?) and connect it with the examples, covenants and experience of Orthodox antiquity, then we will create an indestructible church stronghold of our national Christian life, around which all our personal, social and state life, as well as the life of all other nationalities, and all other religious confessions existing within the Russian state; and Christ will shine in our lives, illuminate and warm it, like our common Sun. This is the task that has always stood and now faces the Russian Orthodox people and their spiritual leaders, especially now that the first thousand years have passed since their meeting with Christ (988–1988). There is no need to be embarrassed by the length of the deadlines and waver in the confidence in the feasibility of the task facing us; this task is not a task of time - centuries or millennia, it is an eternal, unchanging task of Christian humanity - to preserve Christ in our hearts, and, consequently, in our lives. We must live by it and be saved by it. It contains the meaning, purpose, and joy of life for all believers in Christ and His Gospel. The correct organization of the religious life of the Russian people cannot be achieved without the efforts of the believing people themselves We received the Church Council only when all of Russia was already engulfed in the flames of revolution and its general collapse had begun. We lived for several centuries without a Church Council. No Council could even then take control of the situation, and it itself was carried away by the revolutionary movement. And yet, the All-Russian Church Council was not convened in vain and did a lot. He found out the mistakes of the past and pointed out what should have been done earlier. He restored the patriarchate as the center of the spiritual life of the Russian Orthodox people and as an exponent of Russian Orthodox self-awareness. Many important resolutions of the Council (for example, the division of the patriarchate into metropolitan districts) due to the circumstances of the revolutionary period were not put into practice. The very daily life of the Church in its most elementary manifestations, for example, teaching children the Law of God, correct daily worship, was disrupted. Before the Orthodox people, whose religious self-awareness was revived under the influence of the Council, a number of important fundamental issues of religious and church life arose that were not resolved due to lack of time and favorable conditions. We not only do not condemn, but from the bottom of our hearts we welcome the colossal state, social and economic work of the Soviet government, which ensured the Russian people their glorious victory over the predator and devastator who burst into Russian soil. All this work was necessary and timely in the interests of the national life of the Russian people, and we warmly welcome it with all our hearts and believe that the moment will come for the correct organization of the spiritual life of the Russian people, but everything has its time and turn. The Soviet government fulfilled with great success the state, social and economic tasks set before it by the peoples constituting a single Russian state. And now we must expect that the moment will soon come when the Russian Orthodox people will be given the freedom to organize their church life in accordance with the conciliar rules of the Orthodox Church. When we said that the religious question of the Orthodox Russian people can only be resolved by the believing people themselves, we, of course, did not mean any violent actions on the part of the believers. The ancient Christians did not leave us such an example. We only affirm that the believing Orthodox people cannot look at themselves as a disorderly, unorganized crowd of individual believers. The Russian Orthodox believing people constitute a harmonious church organism, which traces its origins back to the first centuries of Christianity, from the apostles and martyrs, from Christ the Savior himself, and has its own age-old church laws and rules. It is so important to understand the Russian Church and the Russian state, regardless of the religious views of the rulers of the state themselves. This is freedom of conscience, so that believers can freely live according to the rules of their faith, and not at the discretion of the rulers of the state. The Orthodox Russian people and their shepherds have a common responsible duty to cherish and preserve their Orthodox faith in Christ, their Orthodox church organization with its teaching and worship, with its shrines, sacraments and churches; to defend and defend one’s shrine in all worthy ways, following the example of ancient Christians, apostles and martyrs, both in individual church parishes and in entire dioceses, throughout the entire scope of the All-Russian Church, without resorting to any violence, enduring, if necessary, all troubles and obstacles, enmity, anger, scoffers, mockery, violence and persecution from opponents of the faith and its persecutors. This suffering path of defending one’s religious freedom will not be news for the Orthodox Church - it has been inherent in it since the first centuries of Christianity. She had to follow this path under the pagans, and under the heretics, and under the Mohammedans, and now – under the atheists. We will have to follow the same martyrdom path in subsequent times, under the Antichrist and other enemies and persecutors of the faith. “You will be in a world of sorrow,” the Lord said to his disciples. “But dare: I have conquered the world.” The first Christians, without resorting to weapons, defended their right to believe in Christ and live according to their faith for three hundred years and, in the end, received freedom of faith. The Russian people are still fighting for their faith and for 30 years 5 have not yet mastered the techniques and methods of defending their right to it. The Lord will help him. Someone will say that we are saying things that are well known and primitive. We don't argue. But what else can be said? Time is ticking. Russian youth grow up in godlessness, 6 and lose the habit of praying and attending church services; grows up with false concepts about the world, about life, gets used to it, cannot rise to the height of a Christian understanding of the world and life; begins to consider unbelief, alienation from Christ, from the church, from the sacraments, from prayer as a normal, habitual, natural phenomenon. Is this acceptable for Christian youth? What will these young people become later? Who will the entire Orthodox Russian people become along with them? Servants of Christ or supporters of the Antichrist? And the whole Russian land - what will it appear in the future? One may not see evil in the change in the political system of the Russian land. There is a time and place for everything. The Tsarist autocracy fulfilled its historical task - it gathered and united the vast Russian land. The war of 1914–1917 clearly showed his internal weakness. The current war, on the contrary, has revealed the internal, victorious strength of the new Russia. It faces a further task - to establish the age-old and historical Orthodox self-determination - its spiritual core and center, and to base its future state life on it. It is necessary to continue the Church Council of 1917, which will affirm and implement, with freedom of faith, the freedom of church congresses and councils, the conciliar Christian construction of life, the freedom of Christian education of children and youth, the freedom of religious printed word, the freedom of church congresses, the freedom of religious preaching. The faith of Christ is not affirmed by force of arms, not by conspiracies and uprisings, not by coups d'etat, but by its fearless confession. One should not be discouraged if efforts in this direction are unsuccessful. At another time, under other circumstances, they will succeed. They will say that by giving freedom to one religion, it is necessary to provide it to others. Without a doubt. But freedom of confession does not yet mean freedom of propaganda. While granting believers freedom of religion, it is possible not to give them freedom of missionary work. It is not by force of arms, nor by government measures, that faith is affirmed and spread—it is affirmed by its fearless confession. This is the only true way to protect and spread one’s faith, carried out by the first Christians, and remains correct for our time. A Christian must always be himself - and this will be the best and most faithful path of missionary work. One martyr in the first centuries of Christianity, who was required to at least pretend to renounce Christ, pointed to an earthenware vessel with water standing on the table and said: “Can you change the shape of this earthenware vessel without breaking it? “So while I’m alive, I cannot be anything else but a Christian.” Every Christian, and especially the Orthodox of our time, should be like this. And even more so, of course, the shepherds and archpastors themselves. Orthodox Russian people and the Bolshevik Party Many people have a completely natural and understandable question - how could the Orthodox Russian people, who lived for 1000 years with Christ, accept the image of Christ deeply into their souls as the greatest shrine (and this is not a rhetorical phrase, but a true reality, confirmed by the lives of such people as Anthony and Theodosius of Pechersk, John the Long-Suffering, Sergius of Radonezh, Stefan of Perm, Zasima and Savvaty Solovetsky, Tryphon of Pechenga, Ambrose of Optina, Parthenius of Kiev, Seraphim of Sarov), who raised thousands and millions of true righteous people in worldly life (see, for example, “Biographies of Russian Ascetics” collected by Bishop Nikodim of Belogorodsky, or artistic images given to us by Leskov, L. N. Tolstoy (“Master and Worker”), Turgenev (“Living”) relics"), Dostoevsky ("Elder Zosima", "Alyosha Karamazov"), Garshin ("Signal"), etc.), who created so many glorious and famous monastic monasteries, so devoted to his Orthodox holidays and customs. How could this people get along with the godless government, which set its first task to eradicate from the Russian people everything that reminds of God, of Christ, of the future life, and patiently endure all the mockery of Orthodox shrines, the relics of saints, the destruction of churches and monasteries, the destruction of sacred church books and icons, the deification of youth, etc.? How can we explain such passivity of the believing Orthodox Russian people, who so recently gathered in such huge numbers from all over Russia to the opening of the Holy Relics of St. Seraphim of Sarov or St. Joasaph of Belogorod? Was all his centuries-old Orthodoxy really something forced, feigned, feigned? We don’t think so... In general, the Russian people cannot stand anything feigned, ostentatious, or feigned. He is ready to endure a lot for fear of discovering false feelings. And he is even ready to hide his real feelings so that they are not considered fake. But at the same time, the Russian soul is very complex, many things coexist in it: good with evil, holiness with depravity, as Dostoevsky and others testify to this. While not sympathizing with the Bolsheviks in one respect, the people sympathized with them in another, for example, in their hostility towards the “masters”, as well as in their concerns for the working classes; may not have wanted the return of the old government, and not even so much the “tsar” as the “gentlemen” who stood between the tsar and the people - landowners and officials. It would also be unfair to assert that the Russian people accepted Soviet power completely passively. He saw its wrongness in many respects and, in particular, its religious wrongness, fought against the Bolsheviks for three years, supporting the volunteer movement and considering it more legitimate than Bolshevism, and perhaps not hoping for its final success. Without popular sympathy and support, the volunteers would not have had such significant success. After all, all of Southern Russia and a significant part of Central, the West and Siberia were in the hands of volunteers. In the North, General Miller successfully fought the Bolsheviks. The turnaround occurred mainly through the fault of the volunteers themselves, who failed to maintain good relations with the people and abused their power. Thanks to their mistakes, the Bolsheviks managed to cope with the difficult situation and launch a counteroffensive. But let's leave the past and move on to the present. We notice a strange and interesting phenomenon. Under the influence of the terrible world war, the Bolsheviks began to lose their internationalism: the nationalization of Bolshevism began. The psychology of the Bolsheviks began to change towards nationalism. This became noticeable back in 1938–1939. It was impossible not to see this as a gratifying phenomenon. The Bolsheviks began, apparently, to realize that their international position did not coincide with popular psychology and was alien and incomprehensible to Russian national feeling. We do not accuse them of insincerity. But their psychology began to change. They felt, or perhaps stopped hiding, that their internationalism, brought from the West, was alien to the Russian people, was not accepted by the Russian soul, and gradually they themselves began to move onto the soil of Russian healthy nationalism. Already in the 30s, the Bolsheviks began to glorify Russian folk heroes - Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov... It was impossible to tear out from the Russian soul the feelings nurtured in it by history. Speeches began about love for the Motherland, about defending the Motherland, and the slogans of internationalism began to be hushed up, contrary to what we heard back in the 20s. Speeches were heard about love for the Motherland, about the defense of the Motherland, and more and more glorification and exaltation of Russian national heroes began. Behind the names of Suvorov and Kutuzov the names of Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Minin and Pozharsky, Nakhimov and Kornilov were heard. The difficult war with the German invaders especially contributed to the change in Bolshevik psychology. The foreign element in the Bolshevik leadership somehow disappeared on its own. Stalin? But what kind of foreigner is he? He is Georgian. Georgia is five hundred years more Orthodox than Russia. He studied at an Orthodox seminary; his mother was Orthodox and enjoyed general love and respect. He grew up in an Orthodox atmosphere. When the Great Patriotic War began, Russian surnames of commanders began to be heard more and more (this was not the case in 1917–1918). The Order named after Suvorov appeared, but Suvorov - what kind of internationalist is he? All this happened in front of everyone and was obvious. Russian land is clearly being nationalized. International slogans faded away. And the national anthem is no longer the same. The homeland comes more and more into first place. The Russian people are no longer fighting for the triumph of internationalism, but for their native land, which they do not want to give up to invaders. The war awakened and intensified the process of restoration of Russian national identity. Does this mean that the Bolsheviks are changing, that the current Soviet government has ceased to be international, but has turned into a Russian, people's national government? Let's leave it to those who are closer to her to judge this. We rejoice at all this - communism, apparently, is retreating before the Russian national consciousness, and not even before the Russian, but before the all-Russian and national state consciousness, created from the totality of individual national consciousnesses. This is the enormous national significance of the last war for the Russian people and the Russian state. The Russian people managed to defend their national heritage and drove the uninvited guest out of their state. It is not for nothing that the Bolsheviks themselves call the real war patriotic - it is such - it united all the peoples of the Russian land with a single feeling of common love for the great fatherland. A critical moment in the life of the Russian people We affirm once again that the Orthodox faith has the right to exist in the Russian state, no matter what power governs this state. It is not the state power that has the right to choose a religious or godless path for the people. If a thousand years ago this issue could be decided for the people by the then state power, now it is a different time - the people themselves can decide whether to be a believer or an unbeliever and how to live according to their faith. The rulers of the state cannot always correctly discern and show the people the path to their spiritual life. And where organized religious societies already exist, proper mutual relations must be established between them and the state. But what kind of agreement, what common actions and common spiritual life can exist between the Church, which believes in the Most Holy Trinity and in Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer and Savior of the human race, and between the State, which rejects this faith as an empty, stupid and harmful superstition 7? Of course, there can be no agreement, but there can only be one continuous struggle, as was the case in the ancient Roman Empire, until the power that believed in the One God and in Christ was established at the head of the empire. It cannot be otherwise in the Russian state. Either the godless government must become Christian, or the Orthodox Russian people must renounce their Orthodox faith. Can a godless government provide a believing people with freedom of religious life according to the laws and customs of their faith? - Of course not. – Can a believing people stop believing in Christ, in God and live according to the teachings and rules of their faith? - Of course not either. Hence, for the believing Russian people, the only path of life remains - the path of martyrdom and suffering for the faith, the path that the first Christians followed for three hundred years. There is no other way out: either with Christ or against Christ. The current selfless feat of the Russian people in their great and difficult struggle for the Motherland has shown that the Russian people have not lost either love for the Motherland, or courage, or readiness to sacrificially serve their Fatherland and die for it. Hasn’t he earned by this feat the right to freely believe in God and Christ, to live according to the rules and customs of his faith and to raise his children in these rules? State power has no reasonable basis to restrict the religious freedom of the Russian people. And the Russian people, as a believing people, must, of course, resolutely and firmly declare their right to religious freedom, without resorting to violence following the example of the ancient Christians, who, according to the testimony of the then Christian writer Tertullian, already in the 3rd century the majority in the Senate, and even in the army patiently endured all the violence of state power. If our ancestors, the Old Believers, under the tsars were ready to go to suffering and death, to exile and to the fire, for one letter of the liturgical books, then how can the Orthodox Russian people not accept all sorts of difficulties when it comes to preserving the Christian, Orthodox faith itself. After all, maybe now the fateful hour is already coming to openly confess your Orthodox faith in God and in Christ, about the inevitable onset of which the Lord Jesus Christ warned his apostles, and with them all of us, Orthodox Christians? The Bolshevik question is first and foremost a religious question. The Bolshevik question, in its essence, in its depth, is primarily a question of religion, that is, determining the position of man in the Universe. The Bolsheviks have their own faith. Their faith lies in godlessness, in atheism. They believe that there is no God. The particular disagreement between the Bolsheviks and the believing Russian people is how to live - according to the commandments of God, or according to human discretion? Is it according to the rules of the Church or for human reasons? With Christ or without Christ? In the Church or without the Church? Having recognized God, one cannot help but recognize Christ as His son and Messenger. Having recognized Christ, one cannot but recognize the Church as His institution. “I will build My Church, and I will not overcome the gates of hell.” God without Christ is an abstraction. And Christ without the Church is also an abstraction. God, Christ and the Church are inseparable, inseparable. Faith in God, in Christ and in the Church helped the Russian people create a great state. Faith in God, in Christ and in the Church helped the Russian people to withstand the last terrible war. Holding on to the Russian people, to the Motherland, the Bolsheviks, in essence, are holding to God, to Christ, to the Church. The Russian people, despite all the incredible difficulties and burdens of the last war, did not lose heart and endured it victoriously, because they internally relied on God, on Christ, on the Church. This was his spiritual strength. In 1717, he fled from the front, which many now expected; but the Russian people, sacrificing millions of their children, suffering enormous material losses, persistently and successfully, overcoming the enemy, pushed him out of their native land, 8 although this enemy had no equal in the world in its tenacity and provision of the army. This change in Russian psychology compared to 17 shows that over the past 25 years the Russian people have managed to change deeply and feel like responsible masters of the Russian land. If he has such a sense of responsibility for his land, then he needs to feel the same responsibility for the inviolability of his religious beliefs, for his Orthodoxy, not to be left with emptiness in his soul and to defend his thousand-year-old faith with the same consciousness and firmness with which he defends his land. He must resolve the issue of his life in its entirety, and not just in its material, economic part. He must solve it in the spiritual realm, i.e. religious. There should be no room for postponing this decision, and especially for an indifferent attitude towards the matter of faith, as well as towards the question of saving the Motherland. The Russian people must definitely and firmly decide how they want to live - with God or without God, with Christ or without Christ, with saints or without saints, with prayer or without prayer? There is no way to postpone this issue. This question now faces not only the Russian people, it faces all of humanity and is becoming more and more acute. The dates indicated by the Word of God are approaching when all humanity will have to determine both before their conscience and before God whether they want to live with Christ, or without Christ, or against Christ - with the Antichrist, with the devil. The deadlines are approaching. You can't close your eyes to the future. The time is coming to decide the final fate of the world and man, predicted by Christ and the apostles, and even earlier by the prophets. The world is heading towards its destined end. The first, antediluvian world was destroyed by water. The present world is predicted to be destroyed by fire. And isn’t this prediction already being fulfilled? Isn't the world already burning? Aren't they preparing means and methods for its even greater burning? The end of the world must be preceded by the division of humanity into two camps - and haven’t these two camps already been identified: the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of Antichrist? The devil gathers all his strength, strains all his mind for the upcoming decisive struggle with God. Do you doubt the existence of the devil - does it seem to you a remnant of medieval prejudices? But do you really know all the mysterious depths of the universe? After all, you know only the most insignificant, superficial corner of the world, and even that - very vaguely. Do not be frivolous in your judgments and conclusions about the secrets and depths of world life. The struggle will not come from God, of course. Why would God fight with His creation, which He might not have created? God can, of course, destroy the devil, but did he really give him life and freedom in order to destroy him? God expects repentance and humility from the devil. Both are in the hands of the devil. The death of the devil depends not on God, but on the devil himself, on his persistence in evil. All this is deeply mysterious and terrible. The fight will come from the devil, who in the mad blindness of pride has risen up against his Creator, not for the sake of victory, which, he knows very well, cannot be, but for the sake of pride and narcissism in the fight against his Creator. His supporters will also find their satisfaction in this: this is who we are - look at us. Both people and angels, carried away by the devil, will clearly realize the futility of their struggle with God, but will no longer want to move away from the devil out of pride. A terrible situation is being created. Instead of the simple, clear and joyful truth of Christ, so easily and clearly realized, people will strive for an imaginary, fantastic, imaginary truth, through the deception of the devil, leading to melancholy and torment. So, let's not close our eyes: the main question of life is the question of the right attitude towards God and Christ. All other issues of modern life, social, national, political, etc. receive correct illumination and resolution only on the basis of a correct attitude towards Christ, i.e. whether they are decided with Christ or without Him. So, with whom will the Russian people connect themselves in the future resolution of all the issues facing them - will they resolve them with Christ in their hearts or without Christ? According to their traditions, according to the precepts of their great righteous men and prayer books, it would seem clear that the Russian people should have followed them along the same path - following Christ. But the soul of the Russian person is dark, mysterious and full of internal contradictions, as Dostoevsky noted. A Russian person can, on some whim, reject a beloved and valued good, and, on a whim, prefer a hated evil to a beloved and valued good. Isn’t that what Razin and Pugachev were like in their time? It is not out of hostility to good that a Russian person will choose evil over it, but out of some painful whim in order not to appear righteous in the eyes of people. Loving Christ, believing in God, a Russian person will not follow them, but in spite of himself - after the devil and the Antichrist according to some strange, painful, difficult, but inevitable whim of a painful will, in spite of himself, in spite of everything good and bright, in order to torment himself, to show the independence of his character, his will, his actions. All this painful Russian psychology was deeply understood and depicted by Dostoevsky. Woe, woe to us from these painful fractures of our soul, which does not know how to firmly and consistently follow Christ and God with its beloved goodness and truth, always dreaming of portraying something special and unprecedented, always living between two abysses - the abyss of heaven and the abyss of hell. The Bolsheviks themselves will prefer, of course, to go with the Antichrist, who will captivate them with his scientific and technical authority, in whom they will see their great leader, a representative of a new, enlightened, advanced humanity. (Let us remember, for example, the Antichrist depicted in “Three Conversations” by V.S. Solovyov, who is only a pitiful semblance of the future Antichrist). Godless life, destroying everything in it that reminds us of Christ, that disposes us to love Him, to honor Him, to follow Him; mocking Christianity and Orthodoxy as relics of a dark, stupid, outdated era, as remnants of former ignorance and superstition, exposing from the human heart a reverent feeling for God, for Christ, for the holy martyrs and ascetics, striving to turn the Russian people into a herd of civilized animals, the Bolsheviks are undoubtedly already, consciously or unconsciously, preparing a springboard on Russian soil for action and actions of the Antichrist, with all his multimillion-dollar employees for the upcoming final victory over Christ. The devil cannot help but know the outcome of the struggle, but pride will never allow him to admit his mistake, humble himself before God, or give in. This “giving in” is the whole essence of the struggle that comes from pride. If he did this, he would destroy the entire imaginary reason for his existence. Nothing can change the current state of affairs and save the Russian land from the impending fate. The terrible and stunning events of the future, which the Apocalypse speaks of, covering all of humanity, cannot find a more suitable place on earth for themselves, like the endless expanses of the Russian land, which stands in the center of all the peoples inhabiting the earth, and can accommodate them all on its territory. In other places on the globe it is crowded and inconvenient for the latest events of the world drama to play out, and there is no historically prepared ground there - everything there is already crowded with other historical events. European and Asian Russia, together, is the only place on the globe that can accommodate in a single continuous space all of humanity, all the peoples of the earth, with all their diverse culture, civilization and traditions. Russia is the hub of the world. And Europe is only a part of this knot, one of its curls. In the vast Russian expanse - both physical and spiritual - there will be a place for everyone and everything in those future and, perhaps, relatively near times, so vividly, figuratively, mysteriously and stunningly depicted in the revelation of St. John the Theologian. Those who consider what is written in the Apocalypse to be the fruit of a morbid fantasy are mistaken. Are not the words of revelation about locusts with iron wings and human heads spewing fire and brimstone onto the earth from their tails already being realized in our days? Or are other words that people will seek refuge and salvation from death underground, hide in caves and hidden places, not fulfilled? And the horrors of atomic bombs?! We treat with amazing carelessness all these phenomena and predictions, all the future horrors, seeing - we don’t see and hearing - we don’t hear. But this blindness and deafness of ours had also already been predicted. The unknown date of the general world catastrophe, although its signs are indicated By many signs, we are already approaching apocalyptic times, perhaps we have even already entered them. But although we are approaching them, none of us is given the ability to know the time of the end of world history, for this end depends entirely on the will of God: it depends on God to bring closer and further away the times and dates of future events. We have no reason to think that there will be no end of the world, except for the simple habit of continuous existence. If we recognize the beginning of the world, then why do we doubt that its end can come? “Everything great and earthly scatters like smoke: today the lot fell to Three, tomorrow it will fall to others.” And the time will come, the lot will fall for the entire Universe 9. There are no obstacles to this from any direction. And although we do not know the date of the global catastrophe, the signs of its approach are still indicated to us and they are being fulfilled. And if the signs of approaching death are fulfilled, then there is no reason to doubt that death itself will come. When it will come is another question, and we cannot know that. It depends on God’s discretion to bring the world catastrophe closer or further. Events in world life are maturing and taking place slowly, with stops, with delays, with delays. It cannot be otherwise. Life is too complex a thing to be drawn into one straight thread, into a series of definite and consistent events. This complexity of life depends on many circumstances: on the complexity of the human soul, unstable in its plans and decisions, restless here and there; from the complexity of human relationships and from the unknown of God’s will, from the variability of God’s decision. In the end, it depends on the will of God to bring forward or delay the dates of future events, and sometimes even to cancel events already decided by God, as the biblical story tells, for example, the well-known story about God’s cancellation of the already appointed destruction of Nineveh. “And Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Nineveh was a great city of God, three days' walk away. And Jonah began to walk through the city, as far as he could walk in one day, and preached, saying: “Another hundred days and Nineveh will be destroyed." And the Ninevites believed God, and declared a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. This word reached the king of Nineveh, and he rose from his throne, and took off his royal vestments, and put on sackcloth, and sat down on ashes. And ordered to proclaim and say in the name of the king and his nobles, that neither people, nor cattle, nor oxen, nor sheep should eat anything, go to pasture, or drink water. And that people and cattle should be covered in sackcloth, and cry out loudly to God, and that everyone should turn from their evil ways and from the violence of their hands. Who knows, maybe God will still have mercy and turn away his burning anger from us, and we will not. we will perish. And God saw their deeds, that they turned from their evil way, and God regretted the disaster that he said he would bring on them and did not bring" (book prophet Jonah III). The same thing happened with Sodom and Gomorrah, which God promised to have mercy and not destroy if at least ten righteous people were found there. In the prophet Ezekiel, God said to the people of Israel: “When I tell the righteous man that he will live, and he trusts in his own righteousness and commits unrighteousness, then all his righteous deeds will not be remembered, and he will die from the unrighteousness that he has done. - And when I tell the wicked, you will die, and he will turn from his sins and will do justice and righteousness, if this wicked returns the deposit, pays for what was stolen, walks according to the laws of life, without doing anything bad, then he will live and will not die. Not one of his sins that he committed will be remembered to him: he began to do justice and righteousness, he will live” (Ezek. XXXIII 13-16). From these words of the prophet Ezekiel it is clear that God does not have any immutable, irrevocably made decisions. God's decisions change according to changes in people's behavior. Therefore, people can bring the last world judgment closer and further away, further away - by peace, closer - by persistence in their evil deeds. From this it is clear that the timing of the Last Judgment of God is conditional. That is why the Lord said: “No one knows about that day and hour, not even the Son, but only my heavenly Father knows.” This distinguishes not the omniscience of the Son, but the dependence of the final decision on the Father. About the signs of the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and their meaning Denying with ridicule and mockery the believers' expectation of the end of the world, non-believers say: “Christians have been expecting the end of the world since the times of the apostles, 10 but it still does not come, the world has stood and continues to stand to this day.” This remark cannot be taken seriously. From the fact that one of us has lived safely, say, 60 years, it does not at all follow that he will live safely in his 61st year. Signs of the end of the world were indicated not only in apostolic times, but also by the Lord Jesus Christ himself. But no one indicated the time of death. By the signs of death we can judge the inevitability of death, but not its timing. The significance of the signs is not to determine the date of death, but to be confident in its inevitability. The date of death depends on the will of God and can be brought closer or delayed. Signs of the end of the world are given to us so that we do not doubt its occurrence. As the signs of death are fulfilled, so the fulfillment of death itself will come, but they are not mechanically connected with each other, as can be seen from the example of the Ninevites or Sodom and Gomorrah. An indefinite period of time may pass between the appearance of a sign of death and the onset of death itself, depending on the discretion of God and the state of humanity, as was the case with the Ninevites. They repented, and the execution scheduled for them was canceled. The signs of the end of the world are indicated by God so that the confidence in its inevitability lives and does not fade away in people. There were signs of death both in the time of the apostles and in the time of the Lord Jesus Christ himself. “You will not have time to go around the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” But in what sense will it come? And wasn’t the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple of Jerusalem, even during the earthly life of the apostles, an indication of the collapse of the world, which would come as inevitably as the collapse of the temple of Jerusalem. The Jewish War turned Judea into a desert, and hundreds of thousands of Jews died and were sold into slavery. Wasn’t this the beginning of God’s judgment not only on Judaism, but also on humanity? “Unless you repent, you will all also perish.” According to the word of the Savior, the judgment of humanity began with the house of God. No one can know the moment when the fullness of God’s patience will be fulfilled and when the limit of His mercy will end. But one cannot conclude from this that this limit will not exist. Over the centuries, revelations and other signs of the coming of Christ have not ceased to be. The Gospel is spreading wider and wider across the earth, but no one can ever say that the signs of the second coming have been exhausted, and especially since the end of God’s mercy has come, that there will be no further postponement of God’s world judgment. The example of the Ninevites should always remind us of the infinity of God’s mercy. It is not for us to judge the times and periods that the Lord will set in His power. We must always remember the words of God: “Therefore be always ready, for at what hour you know not, the Son of Man will come.” Millennial Kingdom of Christ The Millennial Kingdom of Christ, about which the Revelation of St. speaks. John, there is not only the Kingdom of Christ, but the kingdom of Christians (Rev. XX. 4) was and is attributed to different moments in the history of Christian humanity, each of which, indeed, covers a thousand years. There are three such periods in the history of Christian humanity, not counting the last one, which is described in the Apocalypse. The first such period is the time from the Apostolic Council (54 AD) until the separation of the Western Church in 1054. During this 1000th anniversary, the entire Christian Church, from Spain to Greece, constituted a single indivisible Kingdom of Christ, gathered at general ecumenical councils, clarified and established on them all the main dogmas of the Christian faith, compiled the Orthodox Creed, and established its Orthodox dogmatic self-awareness. This period of time, in all fairness, deserves the name “1000-year Kingdom of Christ.” And although the Church in these years was subjected to especially severe persecution by pagans and was torn apart by heresies, it remained united and unshakable in its Orthodox Christian identity, which it established at its seven Ecumenical Councils. There is another period in the history of the Orthodox Church, less defined, but worthy of the name “1000-year Kingdom of Christ on earth.” This is the era of the Byzantine Empire from Constantine the Great, the founder of Byzantium in 325 until the conquest of Constantinople by Mohammed II in 1453. This time period exceeds 1000 years by approximately 120 years. Finally, the third 1000-year Kingdom of Christ on earth, from the baptism of the Russian people (988) to the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. It missed reaching 1000 years by almost 70 years. During all these periods of time, the name of Christ illuminated and led the ideology and life of entire Christian nations. The Lord fulfilled the apocalyptic prophecy on earth three times, as if thereby confirming the inviolability of God’s definitions. It cannot be said, however, that Christians pay due attention to these warnings. However, the old Russian scribes understood them, remembered them and said: “The First Rome is the Old Rome; second Rome - Byzantium; the third Rome is Moscow, and the fourth will never happen.” And so it happened. At present, with the fall of the Russian Orthodox Empire, there is not a single huge, self-conscious collective of Orthodoxy left on earth, such as the three previous ones. True, there are now Orthodox peoples and states - Greece, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, but not one of them considers itself, and cannot consider itself due to its insignificance, as an exponent of the pan-Church Orthodox self-consciousness, none of them claims such a significance and purpose. No one in the world will take their voices into account, no one will reckon with them. The same groups whose voice is taken into account will not talk about Christ. Now we will not hear about Christ and Christ’s truth either from England or from America. If they all have their own words, then in any case they are not the words of Christ’s truth. The earth has lost not only its Orthodox, but also its simply Christian face. The most holy patriarchs and metropolitans remain silent. One cannot help but think that humanity has entered the hopeless darkness of the coming kingdom of the Antichrist. The bright and holy face of Christ, which shone in the world like the banner of eternal truth, faded in the consciousness of mankind. People began to live by different ideals. Humanity has entered the hopeless darkness of the coming kingdom of the Antichrist. It becomes creepy and scary to live on earth among this modern hell of anger, hatred, violence and mutual extermination of the so-called “cultural humanity.” May the Lord reward him according to his deeds. Where will the salvation of the Russian land come from? The question we are posing is not political, national, or social. These are not the questions that attract our attention. We provide them to more competent people. We pose a religious question - we pose it in a positive form, in the form of a positive answer. Who are we with? With God or with the devil? With Christ or with the Antichrist? Or neither? We single out this particular question from all other questions of modern life, since we consider it the main one, on the resolution of which, right or wrong, depends one or another resolution of all other questions that concern modern humanity and the people. Without a correct life attitude towards God and Christ, it is impossible to resolve any of all the important issues of human life. This is the main misconception of modern humanity, that it is trying to do without Christ, trying to resolve the secondary issues of life, passing by in silence, ignoring and even neglecting the main question of life - can I live without having the right attitude towards Christ, towards God and the Holy Spirit, and then towards the Mother of God and the saints. The Russian intelligentsia, having embarked on the path of Western culture, never stood on this issue on the solid basis of Russian national, traditional, Orthodox culture. It would be better to say that she was not interested in the question of the connection between Russian culture and church culture, with the traditions of the Orthodox Church. In her mind, ideas coming from the West were always intertwined and confused about Western thought - politics, philosophy, social theory with her own party ideas and guesses. Given such a confused, sometimes even chaotic state of their thoughts and concepts, alienated from Russian roots and Russian tradition, could the Russian intelligentsia of the 18th and 19th centuries, unable to come to unity within itself, divided into currents and groups arguing among themselves, indicate a single path and, moreover, the path of Christ’s truth to the Russian people, especially since this path was closer and better known to the people themselves than to the educated intelligentsia? Oh, if only the Russian intelligentsia in those days burned with the spirit of the Christian faith, the spirit of Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, the spirit of St. Seraphim and Tikhon of Zadonsk, with the spirit of Suvorov and Kutuzov, which now inspires the Soviet Army, she would lead the Russian people. But this was not the case. She had other ideals and other teachers. Was it not she, the Russian intelligentsia, in the person of her professors, writers and publicists, who in the 18th and 19th centuries introduced systematic disintegration into the self-awareness of Russian society, university youth, the Russian people and Russian workers, and thereby prepared the chaos of concepts about which she later began to complain? And, of course, it was not the Russian intelligentsia, decrepit in its fruitless speculations and party feuds, that was able to complete the most difficult task - to spiritually lead the Russian people. Her song turned out to be sung, and she had to seek salvation abroad, in foreign countries, and there finish singing her songs, for which there were no longer listeners in Russia. What it has not accomplished will be fulfilled by another, who will enter and is already emerging from the depths of the people themselves, who follows in the footsteps of Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov: Russian, popular, believing, Soviet intelligentsia. We have already seen it in the army, it exists. She is among the soldiers, among young military girls. The old Russian intelligentsia, the intelligentsia of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Mikhailovsky, is being replaced by the believing, Russian, Soviet intelligentsia, the intelligentsia of Nakhimov and Kornilov, strong in faith and love for the Motherland, and not in international ideals; that intelligentsia who, together with the believing people, saved the Motherland from the German invasion. She emerges from the depths of the people's spirit, from the depths of the people's bowels and is preparing to create a new, believing, full of ardent love for the Motherland, strong in spirit, powerful, invincible native land. In saying this, we do not condemn the old Russian intelligentsia either - they did their job in their time. How can we forget Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Dobrolyubov; populists - Zlatovratsky, Levitov; Gleb Uspensky, Reshetnikov, Garshin, Mikhailovsky and others? Of course, we cannot, we cannot help but remember and love. And yet, the Russian future does not belong to this old intelligentsia, not to its make-up, not to its type. It does not have the main thing - a strong spiritual core, there is no Orthodox foundation of Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Nakhimov, what was in Sergius of Radonezh, in Patriarch Hermogenes - fiery love for the Motherland and for the Orthodox faith. This is the peculiarity of the historical moment; this determines the future path of the Russian land. Godlessness will lose its halo of imaginary scientificity. Pasteur and Pirogov will remove this mask from him. From different ends of the vast Russian land, from the depths of the Siberian and Pechora forests, from the wilds of the Caucasus, from the Northern Dvina and Lake Ladoga, from the mouths of the Yenisei and Ob, Russian Soviet people will come, strong in spirit and faith, will live and work for the benefit and glory of their native Russian land. The Orthodox faith will not interfere with anything good on Russian soil. It is incredible if the Russian people, who have lived a thousand years with Christ, who have so many great workers of Christ in all corners of the earth, would suddenly throw Christ out of their lives and from their hearts, and would be satisfied with empty and dead materialism. This will never happen. This is contrary to all common sense. Neither mother, nor wife, nor sister will allow this. Not by external force, not by the assistance of foreign bayonets (the insignificance of which is well known to the Russian people), but by the internal strength of their believing spirit, the Russian people will defend and preserve their right to believe in Christ, in the Mother of God, in St. Nicholas, in St. Sergius and all the saints, pray to them and live according to the holy commandments of the Gospel, as required by conscience. It is not from the benevolence of the state authorities, but from the will and firmness of the believing people that their Christian faith and the right to live according to its law will be preserved. Faith is not a cover that is put on and taken off at the request and discretion of the authorities, but an internal burning of the spirit that is born in a person from God and is supported and preserved by Him. God's Protection over the Russian Land Now we often hear the words that the ended war is the second patriotic war of the Russian people, and the first was supposedly the war of 1812 with Napoleon. This is not true at all. We began to wage domestic wars in the 13th century, and all of them were successful for us. This was primarily the case in the 13th century in the struggle of Alexander Nevsky with the Swedes and Germans for the inviolability of the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea, which was marked by the victories of Russian weapons in Estonia and at the mouth of the Neva River. This is how the struggle was fought in the 14th century. book Dmitry Donskoy with the Tatars, which ended with the defeat of Mamaev’s hordes on the Kulikovo field. In the 15th century, by the grace of the Mother of God, the Russian land was miraculously saved from the terrible invasion of Tamerlane. Muscovites met the holy icon of the Mother of God on their knees, cried and prayed: “Most Holy Mother of God, save the Russian Land.” Tamerlane, for an unknown reason, turned his front and went back to Asia. In the same 15th century, under Tsar Ivan III, Russia was again threatened by Tatar ruin from the South. The armed forces stood one against the other on the banks of the Ugra River. The matter ended with complete liberation from the Tatar yoke without bloodshed. In the 16th century, under Ivan the Terrible, the last Tatar kingdoms were conquered - Kazan, Astrakhan and Siberian; The Russian land was finally freed from the enemy who had been threatening it from the East for 300 years. Since the 17th century, pressure from the West began again. In times of troubles, the Poles captured Moscow and fortified themselves in it. Salvation came again from an ardent prayerful upsurge of spirit - from the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Inspired by her appeals and the appeals of His Holiness Patriarch Hermogenes, who was sitting in close confinement in the Kremlin, the Russian people cleared the Kremlin, Moscow and Russia of enemies who came from the West. At the beginning of the 18th century, under Peter the Great, the Swedes captured Ukraine and reached Poltava. And again, by the grace of God and the Protection of the Mother of God, the enemy was driven out of the Russian land in disgrace. In wonderful verses, our great poet A.S. Pushkin described the famous Battle of Poltava. Finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, Napoleon, at the head of all armed Europe, reached the very heart of the Russian land and settled in the Moscow Kremlin, but by the grace of God he was forced to flee from there with great shame. This moment in history is described by our other great poet M. Yu. Lermontov. All these were victories not only of the Russian people, of Russian weapons. We have nothing to boast about. These were great deeds of God’s help, which was noted on the medals issued on this occasion with the words from Holy Scripture: “Not to us, not to us, but to Your name we will give praise.” And now. The most terrible enemy, who surged from the West with the goal of robbing and ruining us, was expelled with the greatest shame for him. How can one not say: “Glory to God, who has had mercy on us once again." All these amazing events of history cannot but tell us about the existence of a special providence of God over our Russian land. The Lord sends her difficult trials, but the Lord also sends her salvation, so that she does not forget God, who protects her. Apparently, the Lord is keeping her for some great purpose and great future, which will be revealed in due time. Everything happens according to a certain plan and order. There is nothing accidental in the history of our land. She follows a certain path outlined for her, the meaning of which will be revealed in due time. And this meaning can be both positive and negative. The future will tell. Bolshevism itself, which has established itself on our land, can serve both. What our intellectuals were pursuing came to them in the person of the Bolsheviks, from whom they fled abroad saying: “We did not expect this.” Yes, we did not expect this, but the Lord arranges everything as it should. Obviously, the Russian people also need to go through Bolshevism in order to return to God together in a new way and with a new consciousness. Our entire past clearly shows what a saving power the Christian Orthodox faith, our life with Christ in the Church, has always been for us. And this significance of the Church was reflected not only in churches and sermons, not only in monasteries, but also in everyday everyday life. Let's give an example. In the 14th century, when the Monk Sergius of Radonezh lived, one of the Polotsk princes asked the Tver Bishop Simeon: “Where will the Tiuns, our judges, be in the next world?” The bishop answered: “In the same place as the princes.” “How is it,” the prince was surprised, “the tiun judges wrongly, takes bribes, does evil, and what am I doing?” The bishop answered: “If the prince is kind, shows mercy to the people, and therefore chooses a good, God-fearing, intelligent and truth-loving leader, then the prince will be in heaven and the king will be with him. If the prince lives without the fear of God, does not have mercy on Christians, installs an evil, unreasonable ruler, as long as he gets him kun (money), lets him go like a hungry dog ​​to carrion, and destroys people, then the prince will be in hell and his tyun will be there.” This conversation between the prince and the bishop, despite all its routineness and apparent insignificance, is full of deep content and meaning. Such short, casual conversations cultivated the people's conscience. Such conversations are a phenomenon similar to the all-Russian feat of the Rev. Sergius. What the Rev. Sergius, who was visited by hundreds and thousands of people, was performed on a national scale, here it is performed in the scope of an insignificant home conversation. But such home conversations among the Orthodox Russian people, in all its corners and layers, from the prince to the peasant, and in the world and in monasteries, and in churches and at home, took place in tens and hundreds of thousands at every intimate meeting between the shepherd and his flock. Did this really happen without leaving a trace? Of course not. This is how the Christian enlightenment of the Russian folk spirit was accomplished. And thus, regardless of church sermons, Rev. Sergius, among ordinary priests, among Orthodox bishops, in simple home or church conversations, one common work of God was accomplished - the will of the people, in the person of each individual Orthodox Christian; was directed towards one common goal - knowledge of God's will, readiness to fulfill it, and coordination of personal individual will and life with the truth of God. This is how the Christian spirit of the Russian people was brought up and created. A single incident, a single conversation may seem like a matter of chance and insignificant, passing, but several conversations in all parts of the Russian land, over the course of tens and hundreds of years, imperceptibly cultivated Christian self-awareness in the Russian people, which was reflected in them at the most decisive moments of Russian history, in their relations with foreigners and people of other faiths. This was not a simple or unfriendly pushing away from them. This was their perception in the spirit of Christ’s truth, in the spirit of Christ’s teaching. From here the spiritual educational significance of the Orthodox faith for the Russian people becomes clear. And we wonder where the Russian people display the traits of a God-bearing people that Dostoevsky speaks of. They are revealed from the spiritual treasure that he carries in his chest, and the sign of which is the holy cross. They are revealed from his orthodoxy. This is also the enormous spiritual and educational significance of Russian monasteries - there the Russian people constantly listen during divine services to readings about the works and exploits of Orthodox saints: St. Alexis, the man of God, the Holy Great Martyr George, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, St. Mary of Egypt, Saint Nina of Georgia. All this sinks into the soul of the people, touches them, touches them, educates them. And a difficult historical moment will come, and a great national power will be revealed, about which Nekrasov wrote so well and truthfully, which was brought up in the Russian people by the everyday, quiet, unnoticed work of the Orthodox Church. From this, the enormous importance of Russian monasteries becomes clear, in which the Russian people daily listen during divine services to readings about the works and exploits of Orthodox saints, hear excerpts and selected passages from the books of Orthodox ascetics - John Climacus, Ephraim the Syrian, Isaac the Syrian, John Chrysostom and others. All this could not and cannot pass fruitlessly and without a trace for the listeners, leaving a deep trace in their hearts, although not always clearly recognized. The Russian people know how to listen and remember. Such is that theological school, that people's university, in which the Russian Orthodox spirit was cultivated for centuries. This school has not and will not remain without a trace for the people. It nurtured his Orthodox spirit, which Western Christian Europe does not have. If the Bolsheviks, by their upbringing, by their isolation from the Orthodox Church, by the traditions of foreign mentors and leaders, do not understand, do not recognize and reject religion, this is not surprising - they went through a different school. Just as Karl Marx is alien to the Russian people, so Abba Dorothea and Joanna Climacus are alien to socialists. It's natural. Dostoevsky understood all this perfectly and felt it when he wrote his wonderful words that “the monk will defeat the atheist in Russia.” Dostoevsky went through both the experience of the Bolsheviks and the experience of the believing people. And you can rely on his words. All this gives us firm reason to think that the Russian people will not want to completely “become godless” and remain in a spiritual desert - without God, without Christ, without Christ’s Orthodox Church, without the church of God, without the Holy Sacraments, without the communion of the Holy Body and Blood of Christ, without funeral prayer. Knowing this, we too will spiritually arm ourselves and grow stronger in inextricable unity with the mother Orthodox Church, which will be for us a source of spiritual strength and strength, patience and endurance in the coming, even more terrible times predicted by Christ the Savior. May the Lord strengthen us and help us, having been properly prepared, with dignity, courage, in complete unity of spirit, with faith, hope and love in the heart, with unshakable devotion to Christ, God and the Church, to enter these future, difficult times of the last terrible world events, the onset of which, according to the word of God, is inevitable and which will shake the Universe with unprecedented trials. Archpriest Sergius Chetverikov. On April 29, Father Sergius Chetverikov left his earthly home. In the emigration, rich in outstanding clergy, there was and is no priest equal to Father Sergius in spiritual authority, in the love of his spiritual children for him, and in those countless connections that connected him with both youth and adults seeking his guidance and advice. But he was also a huge authority for the clergy; in this sense, it is fair to call him the elder of elders. Father Sergius traveled a long path to the priesthood, which to everyone who knew him personally seems clear and cloudless, like a quiet June evening. There was a deep simplicity and clarity in him, and once, having embarked on the path of the priesthood (having overcome for this purpose “Sturm und Drung” 11 - a spiritual storm about which he himself writes, but which is difficult for us to imagine in him), he walked along it calmly, evenly, embodying the captivating image of a Russian shepherd, a Russian elder. In an amazing way, he combined regulations with freedom, severity with kindness, asceticism with love for people, nature, and culture. He had his own tastes and beliefs, but he had no prejudices, so his judgments were almost always unexpected and new: it was impossible to foresee or predict what he would say and what he would do. We know him as the prayerful soul of the Christian Student Movement. He became close to him in 1926, being the rector of a church in Bratislava, helping the circle that arose there, visiting congresses, and participating in the Movement’s magazine. In the “Bulletin of the RSHD” (No. 3 for 1926, lithographed edition) a wonderful “Letter to Russian students, participants in the Christian movement” appeared, in which Fr. Sergius expressed his opinion about the tasks and goals of the Movement and the dangers standing in its way. The letter contains a number of autobiographical data and captivates with its sincerity, simplicity and clarity. It was followed by the articles “Why do we rejoice on the day of Holy Easter” (No. 6, 1926), “Christianity as the birth of a new life in the soul and as labor in the name of Christ” (No. 2, 1928), “Tasks of the Movement” (No. 5, 1928), etc. The movement very quickly realized who it was dealing with and asked Vladyka Eulogius to give them Father Sergius. The Bishop, of course, agreed to this. But surprisingly and typical of Fr. Sergius was how he himself accepted this invitation to work in an institution of a new type, which does not fit into any canonical forms and is suspected by so many. This is what he wrote in his first letter to the Movement, published in No. 9 of the Vestnik for 1928: “... Metropolitan Evlogy entrusted me with the pastoral leadership of the Russian Christian student movement. I am aware of the importance and responsibility of this assignment, I am also aware of the weakness of my strength, but since I love the Movement, consider it a very important phenomenon of Russian life, I expect a lot from it for the Orthodox Church and for Russia, I am willingly ready to devote the rest of my life to it, hoping for God’s help and the prayers of all those to whom the work accomplished by the Movement is near and dear...." About how successful Fr. Sergius’ fulfillment of his task is evidenced by the ardent love that accompanied him on all his trips through the Movement. And where has he not been? And everywhere he formed strong connections, which entailed a huge correspondence beyond imagination. If they say about Cure d'Ars that he was a “martyr of the confessional,” then about Fr. Sergius can be said to be a “martyr of the desk.” In Paris, on the wall near the table, he pinned all the photographs of congresses and circles of members of the Movement. And a photograph with hundreds of eyes looking at Fr. sitting in front of the table. Sergius, is a symbol of the Movement, both the prayer brotherhood and the small church: ecclesia in episcopo, episcopus in ecclesia. U o. Sergius had a special gift that can be called “revealed conciliarity.” He himself was aware of this, but accepted this gift as his duty - first of all - prayer. Shortly before his death, he wrote to Paris, addressing members of the Movement: “Parting with all of you, both adults and young, with love and prayer I call on you the blessing of God, who gave me the strength to carry you in my heart, as he once gave strength Moses carried the people of Israel in his heart...." This carrying in the hearts of others was also reflected liturgically: in the church Fr. All the homeless priests found shelter in Sergius; Bishop Eulogius invariably assigned to the Church of the Movement those who found themselves without parishes. Therefore, there were such services: to serve Fr. Lev Liperovsky, on the choir sings and reads about. Victor Yuryev, and Fr. serves and serves the censer. Sergius. This unction of the clergy in the Movement Church has become a tradition: they serve in it so often, and so many! "Conciliarity" Fr. Sergius, visible and felt in the altar and the church and spreading throughout the entire Movement, was not limited to it. In his speeches and articles there is always a prayerful memory of the Russian people, a living connection with Russian saints. And when he left us, he bequeathed to everyone to constantly read that prayer where the Council of Saints - Ecumenical and Russian - is commemorated, so that the very memory of the Motherland would be for us the path to entering the Council of Saints. We cannot talk in detail about the work of Fr. Sergius in the Movement, much less about his entire life. It is enough to pick up the “Vestnik” and review those 28 articles about. Sergius, which are printed in it, in order to get an impression of the significance, depth of his work and his influence. And to the articles we must also add Holiday letters - sermons (there are 31 of them in my collection of Movement 31 documents). It is enough to look through the photographic albums of the Movement to see Fr. Sergius, surrounded by Parisians, Prague residents, Riga residents, Revel residents, Vyborg residents, etc. Truly he was the archpriest of all Europe, as Metropolitan Eulogius called him. After traveling to Valaam (1930), Fr. Sergius loved the silence of this monastery and went there several times for literary and spiritual work. And in 1939, having gone there, he was no longer able to return to Western Europe. On Christmas Eve 1940, Fr. Sergius, together with the brethren of the monastery, was evacuated to Finland and first lived in temporary premises of the monastery, and then, in order not to burden the brethren, he moved to Helsingfors, from where he moved to Bratislava to live with his son Feodosius Sergeevich. There about. Sergius spent the last years of his life, very burdened by the fact that he had to live three kilometers from the church, which, due to extreme weakness, he could not attend. Shortly before his death, he wrote a long letter to his friends and co-pastors, which we print below, because better than any biography it creates eternal memory of the dear deceased. How I became an Orthodox shepherd and about my shepherding in the Russian Student Christian Movement (On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of my priesthood) Having learned that my brothers-co-pastors, my spiritual friends and children want to organize a meeting on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of my priesthood, they want to gather for a common prayer about my unworthiness and about each other, I was very happy and I want, albeit in absentia, to respond to this prayer meeting and, together with my friends and those who love me, experience this memorable anniversary for me. Only now am I beginning to understand that surviving 50 years of priesthood is no joke. Until now I did not understand this and did not think about it. Only now I feel that I have climbed to the top of some huge mountain, the ascent of which happened completely unnoticed for me, like an ordinary everyday thing, in fact, far from it. And now I feel like that commander who, having climbed to the top of an impregnable fortress, said to his friends and comrades: “Look, brothers, where we have climbed! To the very throne of God! How did we do this! What heights, what strongholds we have overcome!” And how everything seemed to happen unnoticed! I went to classes, served mass and all-night vigils, and suddenly found myself before the throne of God and had to look God in the eyes! “It’s scary to fall into the hands of God Zhivago”! How much have I thought about this?! What shall we say now? What report will we give? After all, we have reached the very throne of God! What shall we say? Lord, forgive me? Lord have mercy? But is this not enough? But they walked day after day, as if on level ground, not noticing anything... Day after day, day after day... Was this enough?! Lord, forgive and have mercy. “It’s scary to fall into the hands of God Zhivago.” Forgive us, Lord! Don't judge. Do not judge us for all our weaknesses, for all our licentiousness, for all our indifference! For all our laziness. And, especially, for all this damned indifference of ours, for the lack of passion, for sloppiness, for not understanding where we are going, for not understanding the height and responsibility of our position, for living “carelessly”! Oh, Lord, my head is spinning before the height of Your majesty! Let me at least in these last days of my life feel at what height I stand, and what responsibility lies on me, and what the saints and righteous, angels and archangels, and the Lord Almighty in all the glory of the Holy Trinity await me. And I, cold, empty and indifferent, enter the region of this inexpressible glory that I have reached, without noticing it myself, without appreciating it, where I am going, what I am approaching, to whom I will give account for my deeds. Only now do I see that I have survived 50 years of priesthood. But while experiencing them, I didn’t feel it. Brothers and co-shepherds! Do you have a clear, conscious awareness of your situation? Where do you stand? In front of whom? What are you doing? What awaits you? I'm happy if you give. But I, a sinner, do not give it away. “It is terrible to fall into the hands of the Living God,” said even the great Apostle of Languages. But I never told myself this. He may have spoken the words, but he did not experience them as he should. And now, from the height of 50 years of my priesthood, the entire path of my priesthood is revealed to me. And not only the path of the priesthood, but also the path by which I came to the priesthood, not belonging to the clergy by origin. I come from a poor and deeply religious merchant family of a small provincial town. And then I remember an indelible picture. My mother lies in a coffin in our small thatched house of three small rooms. Her coffin stands in the holy corner under the icons and is surrounded by a crowd of weeping women. I, a two-year-old child, in the arms of some woman, see the figure of my mother lying in a coffin and understand that this is a mother, but I don’t understand why she is lying on the table in a coffin. I remember another moment in the same small house. Lots of fun guests. A young, beautiful, well-dressed lady enters the room from the yard, comes up to me and with a friendly smile hands me a large, beautiful apple. I turn away from her and hide behind the chest. Since then, the image of my deceased mother has been forever associated for me with the image of the Mother of God, and the image of Jesus Christ with the image of my younger brother, from whose birth my mother died, who himself soon died. The beautiful lady who gave me the apple turned out to be my stepmother, with whom we were later very friendly, on whose lap I fell asleep at the tea table, who took care of me in my frequent illnesses and became almost my own mother. My father taught me to pray, to love church and church singing. Thanks to my father, church and holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, occupied a central place in our home life and were its main content and educational element. Every Saturday I went with my father to the all-night vigil and fell in love with church singing. Without instructions and teachings, the church took possession of my soul. My older sister taught me to read and write. The old landlady, with whom we later lived in an apartment, taught me to read to her and love Ushinsky’s “Native Word”. Christmastide and Easter were joyful and fun. Christoslavs were received with love and hospitality, were rewarded generously and were the favorite and only Christmas entertainment. At the age of seven I was sent to school with an old Nikolaev soldier, Pavel Danilovich. At nine years old, they sent me to the preparatory class of the Theological School, not because they wanted to make me a priest, but because there was no other school in our city at that time. When three years later we opened a pro-gymnasium, I was accepted into the 2nd grade without an exam. The preparatory class teacher will forever remain in my memory as my favorite teacher. He devoted himself entirely to working with us. He had a well-stocked classroom library and guided our reading. His oddity was that he smoked in class. The outbreak of the Russian-Turkish war captured all our attention. We were all great patriots and Slavophiles. Emperor Alexander II was our idol. Generals Gurko, Skobelev and others delighted us. We accompanied parties of soldiers leaving our city to the front, carried gifts to the wounded - tobacco pouches and cigarettes, looked at the captured Turks, whom our market traders compassionately fed with bread and watermelons. The progymnasium accepted me into the 2nd grade without an exam. I left the school without regret, but I kept in touch with some of the teachers for the rest of my life, and they came to visit me when I was already an archpriest. After the bursa, studying at the pro-gymnasium seemed easy and fun to me. We are especially lucky to have mathematics teachers who are interesting and talented. The terrible year of 1981 has arrived. I was in 3rd grade. On Sunday, March 1, at 4 o'clock the school guard comes. Crying. What's happened? - The Tsar was killed in St. Petersburg. - What, the Tsar, the liberator of peasants and Slavs? I ran to the cathedral, which was next to our apartment. The cathedral is crowded with people. They're crying. The archpriest speaks a sermon and cries himself. It became creepy. The high school students stand in their place. That same autumn there was a literary evening at the gymnasium dedicated to the Tsar-Liberator. I was assigned to read, in front of the emperor’s portrait, an introductory poem from some newspaper dedicated to the murdered emperor. This event cast a heavy color on the whole year. In the summer we caught butterflies, on the wings of which there were distinct numbers on the underside: on one wing - 18, on the other - 81. The butterflies were of different species, but the numbers were the same and completely distinct. The following year I graduated from high school. At the act, I was given the collected works of Lermontov. The first student was given the collected works of Pushkin. I fell in love with Lermontov very much and became closely related to him. But he brought me more harm than good, which especially affected me already in the senior classes of the gymnasium: 6th, 7th, 8th. I've always read a lot. Until the age of 10, I loved reading the lives of saints. Then I fell in love with the works of Fenimore Cooper, Gustav Aimard, Main-Read, and others. In high school I had less free time and read less. Among foreign writers I loved Dickens, Spielhagen, Hugo; from the Russians - I re-read all the classics - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and minor ones - Lazhechnikov, Mordovtsev, Ostrovsky, etc. I loved reading the populists - Gleb Uspensky, Zasodimsky, Zlatovratsky, Levitov, Pomyalovsky, etc. I read magazines - “Domestic Notes”, “Delo”, etc. And you can’t remember everything. I loved Lermontov very much, but he also brought me a lot of evil. He corrupted my soul. And I had a hard time getting rid of what he put into it. In Taganrog I experienced the most difficult years of my life, my faith faded away, my mental and physical purity was lost. There was no support from anywhere. I began to come to life and be reborn only from the 7th grade of the gymnasium, when my summer trips to Crimea began to visit my married sister. Two young girls, teachers, with whom I met and became very friendly, also came there. With their purity and friendship they warmed and cleansed my soul. There was nothing romantic between us. We rode a boat, walked around the outskirts of Sevastopol, walked along the highway along the southern coast to Yalta... This pure friendship, which lasted for several years, revived, cleansed, warmed and resurrected my soul. The Taganrog experiences were forgotten, died, and a new, pure, bright, spiritual life began. Tolstoy passed by my soul without touching it, although I re-read all his forbidden things. His psychology did not correspond to my spiritual makeup. I was inclined not to the life of reason, but to the life of feeling and spirit. When, after our trip to Kyiv and the Crimea, we returned to Moscow, I felt that I needed to take some decisive step, otherwise I would reach the Khitrov market, the refuge of the Moscow gluttony, among which there were many “fellow students”, bitter drunkards... And I decided to go to the Sergius Lavra to consult with the young, new rector of the Theological Academy, Archimandrite Anthony, whose fame was already resounding in Moscow, and whose articles about Tolstoy and Solovyov were already known to me. He immediately captivated me with his warmth, simplicity and bright, shining face. Our conversation lasted two hours. He advised me to go to the Academy and continue my education, but not to go “into life”; supplied me with books and ordered me to come next year in August for the entrance exam to the Academy. I worked hard all winter and summer. In August, 80 people came to take the exam, the best graduates of the seminary, perfectly prepared, and I also came with my home preparation. Of the 80 people, only the first 30 who passed the exam could count on government support. I passed the exam 30th on the list and was accepted for a scholarship by the teacher. Sergius. There were four such Lavra scholarships at the Academy, one for each year. He graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy as a scholarship student. Sergius. That year, at the Academic Act, I read my famous speech about St. Sergius, professor at the Academy and University V. O. Klyuchevsky. I listened to this amazing speech, and it showed me the program for my new life. With admission to the Theological Academy, the period of my wanderings ended. I found my way and calmed down. Listening to lectures by professors, I at the same time spent all my time among a crowd of pilgrims from all over Russia - in the Trinity Cathedral at the relics of St. Sergius and Rev. Nikon, in the chapel on the site of the monk’s cell, where the Mother of God appeared to him and where every Friday at two o’clock in the morning, in memory of this prayer, a prayer service to the Mother of God was served with an akathist while the full choir of Lavra singers sang; in the Gethsemane monastery with the confessor Elder Herman; in the monastery of the Chernigov Icon of the Mother of God with the confessor of Elder Barnabas, who was also my confessor. I entered a new life, joyful and peaceful, full of scientific theological work, which completely captured my soul and completely satisfied me. The feelings and freshness of my childhood returned to me. Four years later I completed a course at the Academy and immediately became a priest in the Holy Cross Labor Brotherhood, which arose at agricultural schools, male and female, founded by the Chernigov landowner N. N. Neplyuev. The next place of my pastorate was the famous Pyatnitskaya Church of the 12th century in Chernigov, and then my teaching began in the Saratov Second Gymnasium, in the Saratov Diocesan School and in the Poltava Petrovsky Cadet Corps, where it lasted 12 years until the evacuation from Russia along with the Corps in 1919. In exile, I was still a teacher of the law in the Corps for some time, but due to a nervous breakdown I left teaching the law and moved to the Serbian rural parish, and then to Bratislava, where I laid the foundation of the Bratislava Parish of the Exaltation of the Cross. After 4 years, he was moved by Metropolitan Evlogii to Paris as a priest of the Russian Student Christian Movement and founded the Movement Church there in the name of the Entry into the Church of the Mother of God. The best years of my emigrant pastorate began and they lasted ten years. They cannot be discussed briefly. To such an extent they were full of deep content, they gave me so many deep and touching experiences both in Paris and at summer conventions in all parts of Europe - from France to Finland, in the South and in the North. I formed enormous spiritual connections with both youth and adult members of the Movement, a huge correspondence. The coming ten years were the best years not only of my emigrant life, but also of my entire 50-year pastoral life. The center of this life and activity was Paris, its organs were congresses and partly camps. Along the way there is a huge correspondence. I don’t understand why everything turned out this way, but this means it was the will of God. A special and main place in all these connections, meetings and communication belonged to prayer, confession, communion of the Holy Mysteries and then correspondence. It felt like we all carried each other in prayer in our hearts. And there was nothing artificial, feigned, or feigned about it. There was a natural, spiritual, prayerful common life with Christ, completely sincere, with the absence of any pretense and hypocrisy, at least that’s how I perceived it. This 10-year prayer life of ours in Christ was God’s true mercy to us, at least that’s how I perceived it. And God gave me the strength to endure it. Thank God for everything. Parting with all of you, both adults and young, with love and prayer I call on you the blessing of God, who gave me the strength to carry you in my heart, as He once gave the strength to Moses to carry the people of Israel in his heart. Of course, I do not claim the merits of Moses, but a piece of the Mosaic spirit was also in me, strengthened and strengthened by unity and prayer with other workers of the Russian Student Christian Movement. I don't blame myself for not being able to work with you anymore. I thank God for what He allowed me to experience with you, and I thank those who called me to this work and blessed me for it. Eternal memory to the blessedly deceased, unforgettable Metropolitan Eulogius, who lovingly blessed our work and meetings and took an active part in them. Eternal memory to the members of our Movement who reposed in the Lord, young and old, equally burning with love for our holy cause. The center, the focus of all our fraternal prayer life has been and may it be the prayerful memory of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Most Pure Mother of God and the Ever-Virgin Mary, and all the faithful participants in our fraternal prayer life. May this memory live in our hearts, warm and inspire them until the very moment of our joyful meeting in another world at the feet of our Savior and His Most Pure Mother! Let's pray for each other! And for our departed brothers and sisters! Archpriest Sergius Chetverikov. 1946 10 23 XII. Bratislava. Czechoslovakia. Sergei Ivanovich Chetverikov was born on June 12, 1867. Graduated from the Moscow Theological Academy in 1896. Ordained deacon by Bishop Anthony - July 14, 1896 Ordained priest by Bishop Anthony on July 21, 1896. Appointed rector of the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross of the Labor Orthodox Brotherhood (Neplyuevsky) in the Glukhov district of the Chernigov province in 1898. Appointed rector of the Paraskevtevskaya Church in Chernigov in 1898. Teacher of the law at a model school at the women's diocesan school. 1898–1900 Law teacher of the Saratov 2nd gymnasium - 1901 Law teacher of the Petrovsky Poltava Corps - 1907 Chairman of the Brotherhood of Teachers of the Law – 1911 Comrade of the Chairman of the All-Russian Congress of Clergy and Laity in Moscow - in 1917. Evacuation with the Poltava Corps (via Vladikavkaz, Kutaisi, Borjomi, Batumi, Crimea to Constantinople) - in 1920. Rector of the parish in the Serbian village of Lika (between Bosnia and Croatia) from 1920–1923. Rector of the parish in Bratislava – 1923–1928. Priest of the RSHD - since 1928 Death (in Bratislava) - April 29, 1947 Shortly before his death, Fr. Sergius accepted the schema. List of the most important works of Fr. Sergius Biography of Elder Ambrose of Optina. Biography of Elder Paisius (Velichkovsky). Full text in Romanian. Abridged translation in Russian. Optina Pustyn (historical sketch and personal memories). Paris. P. 185. Collection of the Jesus Prayer. Great Lent. Paris. 1926. P. 63. The path of purity (from conversations of the shepherd and teacher of the law). Paris. 1920. P. 39. From the history of Russian eldership (Paisiy Velichkovsky) // Path. 1925. No. 1. The path of smart doing and spiritual sobriety (Paisiy Velichkovsky) // The Path. 1926. No. 3. From the history of Russian eldership, about mental prayer // Path. 1927. No. 7. The Eucharist as the focus of Christian life // The Path. 1930. No. 22. About the difficulties of religious life in childhood and youth // The Path. 1932. No. 34. An open letter to N.A. Berdyaev regarding his book “The Fate of Man in the Modern World” // Path. 1935. No. 46. About world evil and the saving Church (regarding the article by N. A. Berdyaev) // Path. 1935. No. 48. Open letter to N.A. Berdyaev // Path. 1936. No. 50. About internal obstacles on the path to the Gospel // Bulletin of the RSHD. No. 1,2,3,5.1927. Theosophy and Christianity // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1927. No. 10. Christianity as the birth of a new life // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1928. No. 2. Two anniversaries (L. Tolstoy and Father John of Kronstadt // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1928. No. 10. Thoughts and life of Russian elders // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1929. No. 1–2. Christ is Risen // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1929. No. 5. Saint Dmitry of Rostov // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1929. No. 6. New Year and the Church // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1930. No. 1. On the place of the Old Testament in Christianity // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1930. No. 5. Ecumenism and the unity of the Church // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1930. No. 7. Above the Gospel // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1930. No. II, 12. 1931. No. 1, 2. Orthodox pastor and Russian youth // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1931. No. 8. Easter in Sarov // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1933. No. 2. A few words about Metropolitan Anthony’s note “When will this end” // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1934. No. 2. Religious-Christian worldview as the basis of human life and culture // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1935. No. 1, 2. In the days of youth // Bulletin of the RSHD. 1935. No. 8–11. Articles about the RSHD magazine, published in the “Bulletin of the RSHD” Letter to Russian students, participants of the Christian movement. 1926. No. 3. After the congress. 1927. No. II. RSHD and Russia. 1927. No. 12. Objectives of the Movement. 1928. No. 5. The work of the Movement as service to the Church and the Motherland. 1928. No. 11. Commonwealth in Movement. 1929. No. 11. Paths of the Commonwealth in Movement. 1929. No. 12. What is the Commonwealth and what does it want to be. 1930. No. 10. What is churchliness and is the Movement churchly? 1932. No. 6–7. A few more words about the mission of the RSHD in the Orthodox Church. 1933. No. 1. A few words about my appointment as a priest of the RSHD. 1928. No. 9. From Bulgarian impressions. 1929. No. 1–2. Our shortcomings. 1929. No. 4. Notes on the Movement. 1929. No. 8–9. Holiday of Movement. 1930. No. 12. After the congress. 1932. No. 8–9. RSHD in its past and present. Report to the III Diocesan Congress of Clergy and Laity of the Western European Orthodox Russian Diocese. (Lithographer, edition, p. 22). On the issue of religious education and education of Russian youth abroad. (Ed. by Archpriest Chetverikov). Paris. 1928. P. 59. On the religious needs of children and adolescents // Questions of religious education and education. Paris. 1927. Issue. 1 About the Christian family // Issues of religious education and education. Paris. 1928. Issue. 3. The urgent task of the Russian Church abroad // Bulletin. rel.-teacher office. No. 1. Church-parish unions of parents // Bulletin. rel.-teacher office. No. 2. Pedagogical work with girls and young women in Romania // Bull. rel.-teacher office. No. 3. Regarding the article “On the Movement” // Bulletin. rel.-teacher office. No. 13. This manuscript was written in defense of Orthodoxy as the unchanging foundation of the spiritual life of the Russian Orthodox people, regardless of the form of state and social structure of their life This was written in the 20s. Written during the years of the German onslaught We heard this story from N.N. himself. Neplyuev directly Our meetings with Russian military youth during the Second World War and conversations with them force us to change this opinion The experience of the last war showed, however, that they can exist - the Orthodox Church and the godless state were able to jointly take care of both the people and buildings affected by the war, and the means of defense and self-defense. They were connected by a common love for the Motherland, a common struggle against invaders. On this basis, further growth of mutual unity and cooperation is possible Those who read our manuscript pointed out to us that three further chapters are not directly related to the main content and could be omitted without prejudice. I could not agree with this opinion, because I think that both the way we think and the way we live cannot but depend on how we imagine the end of our life and our future, posthumous existence. And perhaps in our days, more than ever, it is useful to pay attention to our future destiny, which revelation reveals to us This is completely fair. You might be interested in: