About the believing mind

The Word, like the transparent body of the spirit, must correspond to all its movements. Therefore, it must constantly change its color, in accordance with the constantly changing cohesion and resolution of thoughts. In its iridescent sense, every breath of the mind should tremble and respond. It must breathe the freedom of inner life. Therefore, a word, ossified in school formulas, cannot express the spirit, just as a corpse does not express life. However, while changing in its shades, it should not change in its internal composition. For abstract thinking alone, the essential is generally inaccessible. Only materiality can touch the essential. Abstract thinking deals only with the boundaries and relationships of concepts. The laws of mind and matter that make up its content do not in themselves have significance, but are only a set of relations. For what is essential in the world is only a rationally free person. She alone has an original meaning. Everything else is only relative. But for rational thinking, a living personality decomposes into abstract laws of self-development or is a product of extraneous principles, and in both cases loses its real meaning. Therefore, abstract thinking, touching on objects of faith, in appearance can be very similar to its teaching; but in essence it has a completely different meaning, precisely because it lacks the sense of essentiality, which arises from the internal development of the sense of the integral personality. In very many systems of rational philosophy we see that dogmas about the unity of the Divine, about His omnipotence, about His wisdom, about His spirituality and omnipresence, even about His trinity, are possible and accessible to the mind of an unbeliever. He can even admit and explain all miracles accepted by faith, bringing them under some special formula. But all this has no religious significance, only because rational thinking cannot accommodate the consciousness of the living personality of the Divine and Her living relationship to the personality of man. Consciousness about the relationship of the living Divine personality to the human personality serves as the basis for faith, or, more correctly, faith is that very consciousness, more or less clear, more or less immediate. It does not constitute purely human knowledge, does not constitute a special concept in the mind or heart, does not fit into any one cognitive ability, does not relate to the logical mind alone, or the feeling of the heart, or the inspiration of conscience; but it embraces the entire integrity of a person and appears only in moments of this integrity and in proportion to its fullness. Therefore, the main character of believing thinking is the desire to gather all the individual parts of the soul into one force, to find that inner center of being, where reason, and will, and feeling, and conscience, and the beautiful, and the true, and the amazing, and the desirable, and the just, and the merciful, and the entire volume of the mind merges into one living unity, and thus the essential personality of man is restored in its primordial indivisibility. It is not the form of thought that comes before the mind that produces this concentration of forces in it; but from mental integrity comes the meaning that gives real understanding of thought. This striving for mental integrity, as a necessary condition for understanding the highest truth, has always been an integral part of Christian philosophy. From the time of the Apostles to our times, it has been his exclusive property. But since the fall of the Western Church it has remained predominantly in the Orthodox Church. Other Christian confessions, although they do not reject its legality, do not consider it a necessary condition for understanding Divine truth. According to Roman theologians and philosophers, it seems that it was enough that the authority of Divine truths was once recognized so that further understanding and development of these truths could already be accomplished through abstract logical thinking. Perhaps, due to their special predilection for Aristotle, their theological works have the character of a logical presentation. The very process of thinking was accomplished by the external concatenation of concepts. They sought to provide a logical justification for the dogma of faith. In this logical presentation, from the abstract rational understanding of dogmas, also as an abstract conclusion, moral demands were born. A strange birth of the living from the dead! A wise demand for power in the name of a thought that itself does not have it! Separated from other cognitive forces, logical thinking constitutes the natural character of a mind that has fallen away from its integrity. The entire order of things that has arisen as a result of this divided state of man automatically draws his thinking towards this logical separation. That is why faith exceeds natural reason, because it has fallen below its primary natural level. Theological studies are not possible for everyone, not necessary for everyone; The pursuit of philosophy is not accessible to everyone; It is not possible for everyone to constantly and specially exercise that inner attention which purifies and gathers the mind to a higher unity; but for everyone it is possible and necessary to connect the direction of his life with his fundamental conviction of faith, to agree with it the main occupation and each special task, so that every action is an expression of one aspiration, every thought seeks one foundation, every step leads to one goal. Without this, a person’s life will not have any meaning, his mind will be a calculating machine, his heart will be a collection of soulless strings in which a random wind whistles; no action will have a moral character, and there will actually be no person. For a man is his faith. And there is no such undeveloped consciousness that would not be able to penetrate the basic conviction of the Christian faith. For there is no mind so dull that it cannot understand its own insignificance and the need for a higher revelation; There is no heart so limited that it cannot understand the possibility of another love, higher than that which earthly objects arouse in it; there is no conscience that does not feel the invisible existence of a higher moral order; There is no such weak will that could not decide on complete self-sacrifice for the highest love of his heart. And faith is made up of such forces. It is a living need for redemption and unconditional gratitude for it. This is his whole essence. From here all subsequent development of the believing mind and life receives its light and meaning. You might be interested in: