Глава двадцать вторая. Выбор сюжетов 1844–1846

Nowadays the tomb of Metropolitan Philaret is located in Moscow. Its eastern façade faces Prechistenskaya Embankment, its western façade faces Volkhonka, its northern façade faces Vsekhsvyatsky Lane, and its southern façade faces Soymonovsky Proezd. Moscow Chrysostom has the largest tomb in the Mother See. It is the main cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church - the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The one who rests here worked a lot to create this majestic architectural monument. The rarest thing in all of world architecture. According to the plan of Konstantin Andreevich Ton, all the facades above the gates and windows, so that they could be easily viewed from below, were supposed to be decorated not only with reliefs, but also with high reliefs that were completely unusual for Russian church art, representing instructive scenes from biblical and Russian history. The choice of subjects was left to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow. In 1844, the Bishop fulfilled the order and made all the appointments - he gave a complete list of where and what high reliefs should be placed. He proposed decorating the western facade with the main entrance to the building as follows. At the top, at a height of thirteen fathoms (about 28 meters), in medallions there are images of Christ the Savior blessing those entering the church, as well as Alexander Nevsky and Nicholas the Wonderworker as heavenly patrons of the emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I, blessed Nicholas and righteous Elizabeth. Above the central gate, at a height of four and a half fathoms (about 10 meters), angels with outstretched wings hold a charter with the inscription: “The Lord Almighty is with us.” Above the arches of the side portals: on the right are angels with the banners of the Moscow militia, on the left are angels with the banners of 1812. On the sides of the window arches of the portal are the archangels Jehudiel with a crown in his hand, Barachi with a flower, Gabriel with a lily and Uriel with a flame. To the right of the portal on the western facade, Filaret proposed to depict the Old Testament King David, handing over the drawings of the Jerusalem Temple to his heir Solomon. On the left is the anointing of Solomon as king. This emphasized the continuity of Tsar Nicholas to his elder brother Alexander, under whom the idea was born to create the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, and Nicholas embodies this idea. Let's move to the south side. At the top in the medallions is the Mother of God of Smolensk, whose miraculous image was among the troops in 1812. On the eve of the Battle of Borodino, Kutuzov ordered all regiments to be surrounded by this icon. On the sides of Smolenskaya there are saints, on the days of whose memory the most important battles of 1812 took place: Roman Ryazansky - the battle of Klyastitsy on July 19, the Apostle Thomas - the battle of Polotsk and Tarutin on October 6, John the Baptist - the battle of Maloyaroslavets on October 12, Jonah of Novgorod - the battle of Krasnoye on November 5. Below on the sides of the arches of the three porches of the southern facade are high reliefs depicting the events of the Old Testament: the appearance of the Archangel Michael to Joshua before he won the battle with an enemy significantly superior to him, Moses, who freed his people from Egyptian captivity, his sister Mariam, with a tympanum in her hands, chanting: “Sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted, horse and threw his rider into the sea!”, the prophetess Deborah and Barak, to whom she predicted victory over the armies of the pagans. All of them, according to Philaret’s plan, represented the truth that a true believer will not perish, for he will be saved by God. In memory of the battles of 1812 on the southern facade: Varlaam Khutynsky - the second day of the battle of Krasnoye, November 6, the blessed Prince Gabriel of Pskov - the defense of Pskov and Saints Anthony and Theodosius of Pechersk - the defense of Kyiv. Here, on the southern façade, Filaret outlined two Old Testament high-relief paintings dedicated to the triumphant return of Emperor Alexander from the Foreign Campaign: David, carrying the head of the defeated Goliath to his people, and Abraham, met by the high priest Melchizedek after the victory over the pagan leaders. We go further, to the eastern side. It is located behind the altar. In the center at the top in the medallion is the Vladimir Mother of God. The holiday of this icon is August 26, the day of the Battle of Borodino. Other medallions include Queen Alexandra, Mary Magdalene, Anna the Prophetess and the Great Martyr Catherine. Below, according to the assignments, painted by Philaret, are high reliefs depicting the first Moscow metropolitans - Peter and Alexei. Peter holds a charter with an image of the Assumption Cathedral, Alexei blesses the Church of the Archangel Michael in the Chudov Monastery. On either side of them are St. Stephen of Perm with the charter of the Zyryan language script he invented, St. Sergius of Radonezh, Moscow metropolitans Jonah and Philip, St. Nikon of Radonezh and Joseph of Volotsk, Chernigov saints - the blessed prince Mikhail and boyar Theodore. On the northern façade, Philaret proposed in the upper medallions to place images of Our Lady of Iveron, as well as saints, on whose days the most important events of the Foreign Campaign took place: Martyr Laurus - Battle of Kulm on August 18, 1813, Martyr Sergius - Battle of Leipzig on October 7, 1813, Gregory Dvoeslov - Battle of Paris on March 12 and Martyr Chrysanthos - Capture of Paris on 19 March 1814. In the lower high-relief row, according to Philaret’s painting, images of Queen Helena and her son - the Byzantine Emperor Constantine, Princess Olga and her grandson - Grand Duke Vladimir the Red Sun were supposed to be placed. Constantine and Helena made Byzantium a Christian country, and Vladimir and Olga baptized Rus'. Near the window arches of the northern facade are the Apostle Andrew, from whose lips the Christian sermon was first heard on Russian soil, St. George the Victorious, depicted on the coat of arms of Moscow, Daniil of Moscow - the son of Alexander Nevsky, under whom Moscow began to grow, and Savva Storozhevsky - the founder of the famous monastery in the Moscow region, near Zvenigorod. On the blank side parts of the northern facade, Filaret proposed two most important plots of Russian history related to the decisive battles of our people: Sergius of Radonezh blesses Dmitry Donskoy for the Battle of Kulikovo and Archimandrite of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra Dionysius blesses Minin and Pozharsky for the liberation of Moscow from the Poles. In total, according to the inspired plan of Filaret, it was planned to create eight multi-figure high-relief compositions, forty figures, twelve icons in the zakomaras and in the upper part of the facades. The order of the Moscow Metropolitan was carried out in subsequent years by the magnificent Russian sculptors Alexander Vasilyevich Loganovsky, Nikolai Alexandrovich Ramazanov and Pyotr Karlovich Klodt. Loganovsky created all the multi-figure compositions and most of the figures, Ramazanov made the medallions, and the famous author of the horses on the Anichkov Bridge in St. Petersburg made the statues of Russian saints of the eastern facade. The choice of subjects for the sculptural images of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior became for Filaret a triumph of Orthodox justice after, without asking his advice, the Triumphal Gates were erected in Moscow, crowned with a pagan goddess and therefore left without the sovereign’s blessing. The Cathedral of Christ the Savior was called upon to become a truly Russian church. Filaret removed from everywhere the images of the “All-Seeing Eye” triangle that had appeared in previous projects – both by Vitberg and by Ton. Actually, there is nothing reprehensible in the triangle that personifies the Trinity, and it can be seen on many Orthodox churches, especially those built in the 18th and 19th centuries. But the same symbolism has always been and is readily used by the Masons, and Saint Philaret reasoned: we can do without it. Talking with many people about the construction of the church, the saint thought a lot about the need to constantly remind them that Christianity does not live by external churchliness alone. Conciliar, common work, observance of the rules of church life must be combined with spiritual work, the soul must be filled with the highest truth, and observance of the rules must be an expression of this fulfillment. In 1844, he held an important conversation with parishioners “On the new birth from above.” Filaret considered the birth of a person, “followed by fleeing life and inevitable death,” as the first step towards true birth, which, following the Gospel text, he called “birth from above.” We are accustomed to using the term “revival” to describe the phenomenon of departure from Christian dogmas and a return to the ideals of pagan Greece, which took place in Italy in the 13th-15th centuries and became the beginning of a pan-European crisis of Christianity. Filaret put a completely different meaning into the word “revival”. Just as baptism follows the birth, so after the physical birth there must be a spiritual rebirth - the rebirth of man. “What is rebirth? What kind of thought is it to produce a person again during his existence, when he, without a doubt, should remain the same person? Why this exquisite sophistication, this incomprehensible mystery? Isn't it enough to just be good Christians? Don’t such words, against deep Christian teaching, burst out from some like stones thrown at random, without realizing that they want to hit them? Know, then, that this is not a matter of arbitrarily ascending wisdom, since with the apostle, and I desire everyone who is in you not to philosophize any more than it is fitting to philosophize (Rom. 12:3); not about addiction to dark mystery, which, however, I don’t know who would want to prefer clarity to the possible: not about deviation from simplicity, about which I am with the apostle, and I am concerned, lest your minds become corrupted from simplicity, even about Christ (2 Cor. 11: 3): but the point is to either gain or lose the kingdom of God. Rebirth is required not in order to become a sage or a mystic, but in order to acquire the kingdom of God. If you remove the thought of rebirth from yourself, then you remove from yourself the opportunity to see the kingdom of God. Unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God, says the Lord. So I repeat: blessed is he who can celebrate his birth from above.” Speaking about baptism, and here Filaret separated the external rite from the internal truth. Yes, the sacrament of baptism is sacred: “If it were only baptism with water, it would hardly differ from the simple cleansing washings used during the times of the Old Testament; it would be a rite and would not deserve the name of sacrament, which the Church specifically gives it; the sovereign name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit would appear strangely ineffective in baptism; to assert that we were baptized in the name of the Holy Spirit, but were not baptized in the spirit, would be an irreconcilable contradiction in itself.” But baptism is only a step towards a future spiritual rebirth, and it will not happen by itself if you do not go through life, improving spiritually! “Some people think: is it possible to determine all the steps to the kingdom of heaven? Maybe we will be saved somehow. “It’s as if someone, noticing the difficulty and unknown hope of agriculture, said: maybe bread will be born without cultivating and without sowing.” “Some, on the contrary, will say: good; I will certainly sow to the spirit and become regenerate. - No, beloved! And this is not a reliable way. Neither careless: perhaps, nor arrogant: certainly, are not suitable in matters of the spirit. Anyone who, as if to order, thinks of becoming reborn, will most likely become a dreamer. A baby cannot be born when and how he wants: the mother must give birth to him, according to the order of nature. In the same way, a person cannot be reborn when and how he wants: he must be reborn by the Spirit of God, according to the order of grace. Between the extremes of careless inactivity and arrogant enterprise lies the modest but active path of the spirit, which the Apostle indicates in the following words: work out your salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). Work for salvation, and do not think that it will happen by itself, but work with fear and trembling, not relying on what you do yourself, and constantly being careful not to resist God’s work in you.” Moscow Chrysostom continued the theme of spiritual creation in the conversation “On prayer with proper preparation.” He began it with a poetic comparison: “How pleasant is the sight of a field covered with ears of grain, which the quiet wind sways, and the fullness of the fruit bends down: so pleasant is the sight of a Church filled with those praying...” But then he started talking about the fact that not all those who pray have spiritual filling in their souls. Most of the parishioners are in spiritual infancy, and recalling the previous conversation, we can say that they have not yet achieved regeneration. Most people do not realize that they need to prepare for prayer. “If you want to fight victoriously, prepare yourself by adequately arming yourself and learning to wield weapons skillfully. If you want to swim across a river, prepare to take off your clothes, which would bind you, weigh you down and plunge you into the depths. Likewise, if you want to pray with benefit and success, before you even pray, prepare for yourself.” Philaret called preparation for prayer the comprehension of God as the creator of the universe and our constant shepherd, comprehension of the insignificance of man in comparison with the greatness of God, mental standing before God, forgiveness of one’s enemies and reconciliation with neighbors, the desire to get rid of all sins. “Whoever, without first preparing himself with such dispositions, begins to pray, who asks from God for mercies and good deeds, without thinking about how not to offend Him tomorrow with the sins of which he is guilty before Him today: he truly, as the wise one explained, is like a man who tempts the Lord.” Filaret compared prayer without preliminary preparation to lighting a lamp into which they forgot to pour oil first. “Fill the lamp with oil so that it burns clearly and long. Fill your heart with peace so that your prayer is bright and constant.” The third most important conversation of 1844 is “On the Fear of God.” In it, Filaret solemnly established a person in his life as fearless before anything in the world, in the event that a person fears only God. There are no happier people on earth who have learned this great truth. To fear God means to turn away from sin, from everything that is ugly and shameful, and it means that having the fear of God is not ugly or shameful. “To dwell on the degree of fear of punishments alone, without a doubt, would be low for a Christian: he must strive to purify his fear, and ascend from servile to filial.” Here a very important indication is given of what human life is if it is placed in the service of God: it is the desire to enter from the state of a servant of God into the state of a son of God. “Who brought to earth and bestowed upon men the Divine sonhood? Is it not the only begotten Son of God, who for this purpose was incarnate, and with His blood wrote for us liberation from the slavery of sin, aggravated by the fear of death, into the freedom of the children of God?” Three conversations delivered by Moscow Chrysostom in 1844 became for Orthodox Christians a short and clear, vivid and imaginative guide to life. In the same year, Saint Philaret transported his elderly mother from Kolomna. For her, he bought a small house next to the Trinity Compound, settled her in it, and assigned reliable people. Evdokia Nikitichna was constantly ill, sometimes she was near death, and one could often see the excited metropolitan rushing from his cell to his mother’s house. In 1844, Chaadaev turned fifty. Eight years ago, a scandal broke out over the printing of his first philosophical letter. Much has changed since then. Pyotr Yakovlevich, no longer that curly-haired friend of the curly-haired Pushkin, but rather bald, lived in his house on Basmannaya Street in Moscow under supervision - from time to time a police official and a psychiatrist came to him for examination. But over the years, he also received more favorable supervision - from St. Philaret. Chaadaev could not help but know that Filaret responded to him after the publication of his first philosophical letter, and could not help but become interested in the personality of his opponent. He read his sermons, first published separately and in lists, then collected in a publication financed by Lobkov. He began to visit the Trinity Metochion, met and became friends with its main inhabitant, and began to find great pleasure in conversations with the Metropolitan. And obvious spiritual changes began to occur in Chaadaev. If there was madness in him before, it was not the kind that psychiatrists treat. A believer, Chaadaev, at the age of thirty, was blinded by the European “progressive” idea that the path to Christ should pass by the church. Now he was more and more healed of this blindness. Now from his pen came lines in which he viewed the Orthodox Church differently: “Her role was to demonstrate the power of Christianity, left solely to its own strength; she fulfilled this high calling to perfection. Born under the breath of the desert, then transported to another desert, where, living in the solitude created for her by the barbarity that surrounded her, she naturally became ascetic and contemplative. Her very origin cut off her path to any kind of ambition. And she, it must be confessed, took submission to the extreme; she tried in every possible way to humiliate herself: to kneel before all sovereigns, whatever they were, faithful or unfaithful, Orthodox or schismatics, Mongols or Seljuks; when the oppression became unbearable or when a foreign yoke fell on her, she rarely knew how to resort to any other means than to flood the church porch with tears, or, having thrown herself into the dust, call on heavenly help in quiet prayer. All this is absolutely true, but it is also true that she could not do anything else, that she would have betrayed her calling if she had tried to put on other clothes. Was it only in the glorious days of the Russian patriarchate that she dared to be ambitious, and we know what the retribution was for this attempt at unnatural pride. Be that as it may, our country owes not only the most beautiful pages of its history, but also its preservation to this Church, so humble, so submissive, so resigned. This is the lesson which it was intended to show to the world: a great nation formed entirely under the influence of the religion of Christ is an instructive spectacle which we present for the consideration of serious minds.” This is no longer the worldview with which Filaret should have entered into battle. From now on, Chaadaev linked socialist ideas only with the Church: “Another moment, and a person will leave the sphere of abstraction forever, becoming a truly social being; individual societies will abandon their loneliness and voluntarily join the great family of nations; the natural order, in which peoples still live in opposition to each other, will give way to a universal order; finally, humanity, the very idea of ​​which was previously barely comprehensible, will create itself alive, concrete, real and will become perfect humanity, whose true name will be the Church of the Lord. In the same way, the world mind, realizing itself in Beauty, in Truth, in Goodness, will establish itself as an organic whole and establish itself in Perfection.” Once at the English Club, Chaadaev dropped the phrase: “There is only one way to be a Christian, and that is to be one completely.” Such Christian maximalism was close to Filaret, who never tired of repeating that it is impossible to serve both God and mammon at the same time. But this same maximalism could scare people away from Christianity: if I cannot completely renounce the world, therefore, I must renounce Christ. Only a few righteous people, holy people, can renounce the world. What then should the rest do? The magnificent statement of Pyotr Yakovlevich needed clarification: if you want to become a fully Christian, you must first become, at least not completely, but gradually improving yourself, strive for the desired fullness of Christianity in yourself. Pyotr Yakovlevich began to look at Russian history completely differently, in which, in his youth, he saw only some kind of ominous lesson for all other peoples. Now, under the influence of communication with Filaret, he wrote: “On the one hand, there is the chaotic movement of European society towards its unknown fate, in the West the shaking of the soil, ready to collapse under the feet of an innovative genius; on the other, the majestic stillness of our homeland and the perfect calm of its peoples, observing with clear and calm eyes the terrible storm raging at our threshold; This is the majestic spectacle presented these days by the two halves of human society - an instructive spectacle that you can’t get enough of..." In 1844, Chaadaev translated Filaret’s sermon, delivered at the consecration of a church in a Moscow transit prison, into French and sent it to France. There, excerpts from this sermon were published by the magazine Le Semeur. Since the author of the translation was Chaadaev, the French added flattering statements about Filaret to the publication, and called the sermon reformist. To this, Pyotr Yakovlevich responded in a letter to Count Sirkur: “I just received that issue of Semeur, where an excerpt from our Metropolitan’s sermon was printed... It would be better if the sermon were printed in its entirety and without the strange commentary of the editors. Fortunately, the bishop did not pay much attention to him... And as for seeing a reformer in our holy ruler, one cannot help but laugh out loud. He himself laughs with all his heart at this..." Every year Chaadaev’s friendship with Filaret became stronger and more useful for Pyotr Yakovlevich. On February 15, 1845, in a letter to Alexander Ivanovich Turgenev, Chaadaev wrote: “The Metropolitan bows to you. He is as sweet, holy and interesting as ever.” Turgenev was two years younger than Filaret. They have known each other for a long time - from the time of the Bible Society. When the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Education was formed in 1817, Turgenev headed one of its two departments - the Department of Spiritual Affairs. From the mid-1820s, Alexander Ivanovich lived a lot abroad, where he collected information on the ancient and modern history of Russia. In 1841–1842, the materials he collected were published under the title “Historiae Russiae Monumenta ex antiquis exterarum gentium archivis et bibliothecis deprompta ab A. I. Turgenevio. Saint Philaret had a completely different attitude towards Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov, poet, historian, theologian, one of the founders of the Slavophile trend in Russian philosophy. Since the mid-1830s, Alexei Stepanovich has become a regular guest of the Trinity Metochion. Conversations with Filaret prompted him to think about creating a succinct but laconic essay on the need for every believer to be a parishioner of the Church. It was often possible then in Rus' to see a sad picture of half-empty, or even completely empty, churches, especially in St. Petersburg. The ideas flowing from the West that God is within us and the Church is not at all obligatory, consoled many who were unstable in the faith. The thoughts of the German liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, mainly expressed in his book “The Christian Faith,” became especially widespread. The main thing in his theories was the affirmation of individualism - a person is able to know God only in his own religious experience, in his innermost feeling, and church life takes him away from such knowledge, turning him into a part of social existence. Christ, in Schleiermacher's understanding, is not the redeemer of the sins of mankind, but only an unsurpassed teacher of morality. This fit perfectly within the Protestant framework, which facilitated Christianity, cutting off from it both sacrifice, and the thought of resurrection, and the fear of the second coming, and therefore, the existence of the life of the future century affirmed in the Creed. Influenced by such ideas, the young Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin wrote in 1836: “The goal of life is God, but not the God to whom they pray in churches, but the one who lives in humanity, who rises with the rise of man.” Filaret at this time became the supreme church guardian, speaking in defense of the Church in his magnificent sermons. Under the influence of them and conversations with the saint in the late 1830s, Khomyakov, starting to write his main work, “Notes on World History,” wrote the article “The Church is One.” Here are some key takeaways from this work: “The visible and earthly Church lives in perfect communion and unity with the entire body of the Church, the head of which is Christ.” “All the signs of the Church, both internal and external, are known only by itself and by those whom grace calls to be its members. For strangers and the uncalled they are incomprehensible, for an external change in the rite appears to the uncalled as a change in the Spirit itself, glorified in the rite.” “He does not know the Church and is alien to it who would say that there could be such a depletion of the spirit of Christ in it.” “Private rebellion against false teaching, with the preservation or acceptance of other false teachings, is not and could not be the work of the Church: for in it, in its essence, there should always have been preachers, and teachers, and martyrs, professing not private truth with an admixture of lies, but complete and unalloyed truth.” “In the Church, that is, in its members, false teachings arise, but then the infected members fall away, constituting a heresy or schism and no longer desecrating the holiness of the Church.” “However, every Christian community, without arrogating to itself the right of dogmatic interpretation or teaching, has the full right to change its rituals, introduce new ones, without tempting other communities; on the contrary, retreating from one’s own opinion and submitting to theirs, so that what is innocent and even praiseworthy in one does not seem guilty to another, and so that a brother does not lead his brother into the sin of doubt and discord.” “Every Christian should cherish the unity of church rites, for in it the unity of spirit and teaching is visibly manifested, even for the uninitiated; for the enlightened there is a source of living and Christian joy.” “Love is the crown and glory of the Church. Anyone who seeks evidence of church truth, thereby either shows his doubt and excludes himself from the Church, or gives himself the appearance of doubting, and at the same time retains the hope of proving the truth and reaching it with his own power of reason; but the powers of reason do not reach the truth of God, and human powerlessness becomes obvious in the powerlessness of evidence.” “Do not ask the Church: which Scripture is true, or which Tradition is true, which council is true, which work is pleasing to God, for the Lord Jesus Christ knows His property, and the Church in which He lives knows with inner knowledge and cannot help but know its manifestations. The Holy Church confesses its faith with its entire life: through the teachings that are inspired by the Holy Spirit, the sacraments in which the Holy Spirit acts, and the rituals that He controls.” “The Symbol of Niceno-Constantinople (or simply the Symbol of Faith) is primarily called a confession of faith.” “By confessing her faith in the Trinitarian God, the Church confesses her faith in herself, because she recognizes herself as an instrument and vessel of divine grace, and recognizes her deeds as the deeds of God, and not as the deeds of the individuals who apparently constitute her.” “Believing in the promise of the word of God, which called all the followers of Christ’s teaching friends of Christ and His brothers and adopted by God in Him, the Holy Church confesses the ways in which it pleased God to bring fallen and dead humanity to reunification in the spirit of grace and life.” “The Holy Church teaches about the sacrament of the Eucharist that in it the transmutation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is truly accomplished. She does not reject the word “transubstantiation,” but she does not attribute to it the material meaning that the teachers of the fallen churches attributed to it.” “The transmutation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ takes place in the Church and for the Church.” “...The Church is called Orthodox, or Eastern, or Greco-Russian. But all these names are temporary. The Church should not be accused of pride when it calls itself Orthodox, for it also calls itself Holy. When false teachings disappear, the name of Orthodoxy will become unnecessary, for there will be no false Christianity.” Filaret welcomed the movement of people who do not belong to the clergy to comprehend the Christian religion, and at the same time he feared that many errors would be revealed in their reasoning. I carefully followed what they wrote and did not advise them to rush into publication. The end of 1844 was marked by the death of Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn, who meant a lot to Filaret in the first half of his life. There was a lot of bad from him, but a lot of good. The collapsed hopes for the publication of a complete translation of the Bible were associated with him. He was once a man of passions, a liberal; other chief prosecutors were distinguished by severity, but often tyranny. But it was possible to somehow get along with Golitsyn, but nothing worked out for Filaret with Meshchersky and Nechaev, and especially with Protasov. And the matter of translating the Holy Scriptures has stood still for twenty years without moving. In 1845, the future great Emperor Alexander III was born. His reign will be the only one in history when Russia will not fight with anyone, for which this sovereign will receive the nickname Peacemaker. And the year of his birth turned out to be unusually peaceful and calm in our fatherland. Even in the Caucasian theater of military operations, having failed in the Dargin expedition, Commander-in-Chief Mikhail Semenovich Vorontsov moved on to the construction of defensive lines, Cossack villages, roads, and the development of trade. Metropolitan Philaret continued to publish his sermons and patronize the improvement of the Gethsemane monastery; he read powerful sermons about the prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, about the miracle on Mount Tabor, about the words addressed by Jesus to the Virgin Mary from the cross on Calvary; he substantiated the need to use the Masoretic text when translating the Bible into Russian and composed the word “On the dogmatic dignity and protective use of the Greek LXX interpreters and Slavic translations of the Holy Scriptures.” The governor of Moscow was still Dmitry Vladimirovich Golitsyn, a man who had done an enormous amount for the Mother See. As a true Christian, he never stopped caring for poor people. Under him, an eye hospital appeared for them, under the care of the Moscow government. It was located on the corner of Tverskaya Street and Mamonovsky Lane. The director and chief physician was the prominent ophthalmologist Pyotr Fedorovich Brosse, who greatly advanced the eye branch of medicine. In 1845, Metropolitan Philaret consecrated the Church of Christ the Savior, Who Opens the Eyes of the Blind, at this hospital, and read a sermon that is worth quoting because many of us, when we see the poor, think about whether we should give to them, whether it is worth providing help, for there are many swindlers among them. People probably thought the same way then, in the 19th century. Filaret, using the example of the Gospel event, explained that the Lord will sort it out, and the alms we make, in any case, makes us better. – It is not visible that the blind man called upon Him or asked for healing. There seemed to be no reason to stop; there was no need to act. But the Lord Jesus stops and says: It is fitting for me to do. Why is this so? Because goodness motivates; because philanthropy demands; because there is an opportunity to do a good deed; because a good deed that can be done on this day and at this hour should not be postponed until another; because an opportunity for good can pass, and with the lost opportunity the good that it favored would be lost. Is it necessary to remind you, Christians, that, in the image of Christ, you should not pass by a beggar or otherwise unfortunate person without helping him if you can, and that you should not wait for cries and tears when the very sight of misfortune without words reminds you of help? Or, even without me, on occasion, will your heart remind you of this?.. When they saw the man born blind, the disciples asked the Lord: “Have this man sinned or his parents and been born blind!” But the Lord with a few words rejected human guesses: neither this one sinned nor his parents; and with even more intense brevity he pointed out the path of God: that the works of God may be revealed in him... Sometimes, at the sight of a beggar, a searching thought says to us: Have you not sinned? Is it not because of his sin that he is poor? Is it because of idleness? Is it not from intemperance? Isn't he pretending to be a beggar? Whoever easily indulges in such thoughts exposes himself to the danger of condemning the innocent, and, moreover, the unfortunate, missing opportunities for charity, and finally losing his disposition for charity. How to protect yourself from this danger? – We must remember that in relation to the needy, duty and benefit do not consist in testing and judging, but in doing good: it is proper to do. Better a good-natured deed than a delicate test. Better is a blind contribution to a beggar from the heart than a discerning coldness of heart. As befits a Christian shepherd, Filaret never tired of repeating the main Christian socialist commandment that wealth is given to the rich in order to remember the poor. “Let the rich not exalt himself over the poor,” he cried in another speech of that year, “but let him descend with his help to strengthen these humble supports of his own well-being.” There is a time when the gratitude of the poor is better for the rich than wealth. Let him who, hereditarily or conditionally, own the labor or the product of the labor of his subjects, not be inattentive to these humble ones of the earth. A person is not a thing that can be used and not owe anything to it. And state, and moral, and especially Christian law with the right of power connects the duty to the subject. If they give you half of their work time: give them some of your free time. If they give you excess; you provide them with what they need: a comfortable life, protection, the means of education they need, guidance and protection of morals and faith. Know how to gain from them not only benefits, but also gratitude and love. Another winter pleased the saint because he did not have to go to St. Petersburg, and when he was not sick, Filaret willingly traveled around Moscow and the Moscow region. Consecrating the Temple of the Jerusalem Icon of the Mother of God in Bronnitsy, he said that one can and should pray both in church and in solitude. – Follow the apostolic teaching: pray in every place. Especially when you wake up from sleep in the morning: think that God is giving you a day that you could not give to yourself, and set aside the first hour, or at least the first quarter of an hour of the day given to you, and offer it as a sacrifice to God, in grateful and benevolent prayer. The more diligently you do this, the more you will sanctify your day, the more firmly you will protect yourself from the temptations that you encounter every day. Likewise, when you go to sleep: think that God gives you rest from your labors, and take away the firstfruits from the time of your rest, and dedicate it to God with pure and humble prayer. Its fragrance will bring an Angel closer to you, to protect your peace... In addition to home and solitary prayer, the immutable word of God and our very salvation require from us church prayer, in a church according to the God-given rite, consecrated in secret... In the same sermon, he did not fail to say a few words about the Old Believers. This topic continued to worry the Church, since many schismatics remained. - Those who move away from the shrine of the Church say that they do this according to the old faith. It's amazing how people can distort the truth if they so desire. Where did they find the old faith without a hierarchy and without consecrated churches? This belief is very new; Two hundred years have not yet passed since it arose. The truly old faith from the beginning of Christianity had and has a continuous hierarchy and consecrated churches... The words they speak are apparently good: but in reality they seduce and lead away from the truth... Hold to the ancient, or, better to say, eternal Orthodox dogmas of the faith, which are equally preached in both old and new books: and at the same time adhere to the hierarchy established by God and the church consecrated by God. Moscow Chrysostom again had the opportunity to preach a lot, engage in his own theology, and excite the hearts of his listeners with the beautiful word of truth. And at the same time, a new revolutionary thought was born and raised its head, permeated with materialism and rejecting everything on which the world of the Christian understanding of life stood. Thirty-year-old Belinsky, Stankevich, Bakunin, Herzen, Ogarev rushed astride this thought to the complete denial of first the Orthodox Church, then Christianity, then the immortality of the soul, and ultimately God himself. Their revolutionary atheistic views turned out to be, of course, much more “progressive” than the views of the Decembrists. What seemed terrifying fifteen years ago now, in comparison with these innovations, looked almost innocent. It all started in the late 1830s in the circle of Stankevich and Belinsky. Stankevich died in 1840; Belinsky continued his work more decisively. In 1845, “Letters on the Study of Nature” began to be published in “Domestic Notes” by Herzen, who boldly wrote under the pseudonym “Iskander” about the primacy of man over everything, including nature and history: “Neither nature nor history lead anywhere and therefore are ready to go wherever they are told, if possible.” How much this contradicted Philaret’s worldview, based on an understanding of the Providence of God in the development of nature, history, and man! Simultaneously with the publication of Herzen’s seditious articles, collections of sermons of Moscow Chrysostom continued to be published, about which Prince M. A. Obolensky wrote to V. A. Polenov: “Here is good news for the holiday for all Muscovites: this is a new edition of the edifying words and speeches of our archpastor, His Eminence Metropolitan Philaret, scattered across various publications and mostly published separate books. Who among us has not heard his sermons and who has not been carried away by his edifying conversations! There is no doubt that literature itself has made a significant acquisition in them.” Russian society was split into two camps. Europe was preparing for a new great war with Russia, which would break out in the 1850s, and if the camp led by those like Filaret strengthened Russia in its moral and spiritual readiness for the coming new difficult trials, then the camp led by people like Herzen inevitably became an assistant to Europe in its immoral and unspiritual readiness for battle with the Russian autocracy and Russian Christianity. For the first time, this second camp of accomplices of Europe began to justify its very existence in Europe. Bakunin moved to the West already in 1840. In 1847, Iskander and his dear friend Ogarev also followed there. A foreign lodge of Russian revolutionaries was formed. Europe once again personified the anti-Christian revolution. A little time will pass, and the peals of new upheavals will break out there, accompanied by the publication of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” of Marx and Engels, and the senior censor at the special office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, poet and diplomat Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, categorically prohibited the printing of this bomb in our Fatherland. In response to the European revolution of the late 1840s, he would write his great work “Russia and the Revolution,” which he would publish in Paris in French in the spring of 1849. From it, readers learn that “to understand the essence of the enormous upheaval that is now sweeping Europe, this is what one should tell oneself. For a long time now, there have been only two real forces in Europe: the Revolution and Russia. These two forces today stand against each other, and tomorrow, perhaps, they will fight each other. No agreements or treaties are possible between them. The life of one of them means the death of the other. On the outcome of the struggle between them, the greatest struggle the world has ever seen, the entire political and religious future of mankind depends for centuries.”