God's Providence in Human History

The experience of philosophical and historical substantiation of the views of the blessed one. Augustine and Bossuet (Read at the solemn act of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy on February 24, 1892) Among the eternal questions of human thought, there is one subject that, in our opinion, most of all needs, if not new research (and for it, of course, the framework of a public speech before a mixed meeting cannot be considered sufficient), then at least a new refreshment of it in consciousness. This is precisely the question of God’s Providence in history. This question has been worked out many times in historical science and has a whole literature in which many famous names appear, serving as the centers of entire historical schools, so to set out to say anything new on this subject would mean undertaking too risky a business, and it is not at all included in our task; but we believe that refreshing this question into the mind is now more necessary and useful than ever. This task is caused by the most urgent need of the time. Everyone who has retained sufficient sensitivity in observing the signs of the times, the ability to eavesdrop on the mysterious beating of the pulse of the historical life of mankind, cannot help but admit that towards the end of the century we are living through, a deeply significant and highly interesting process is beginning to take place, which should obviously develop what should become the distinctive feature of this century, in contrast to all others. In literature, an attempt has been made more than once to find this distinctive feature of our century and quite a few nicknames have been tried, which, however, turned out to be either insufficiently accurate or insufficiently complete. And this failure is simply explained by the fact that our age is too complex in its flow, there are too many different layers to be able to bring them under one comprehensive principle. In fact, there is hardly a worldview that has not been put forward in one way or another during this century and has come forward with a proud claim to have the last word in response to the fatal question about the meaning and purpose of existence. Starting with mystical pietism, which constituted a strong reaction against the rationalism of the last century, he moved on to idealism, which, in the person of Hegel, wanted to reduce all being to a pure idea, erasing any opposition between idea and reality, spirit and matter, Creator and creation. But this all-consuming idealism soon turned out to be too inconsistent with the real demands of thought and life and therefore had to give way to another worldview, which, one might say, more than any other, left its stamp on the physiognomy of our century, namely the materialist one. There was a time when materialism threatened to become the main symbol of faith of the civilized world and, having found a temporary ally in natural science, which has received unprecedented development in our century, it decisively acted as the last exponent of all the aspirations of the human spirit. Indulging in the sensual side of human nature and being accessible to the most direct thinking, materialism ran in a wide wave through the spiritual life of Europe, capturing areas of it that usually stand aside from mental movements - the simple, popular masses. It was under his influence that the highest ideal aspirations were most undermined among the masses of modern times and the dominance of the crudest interests was established in life, forcing all the best people to seriously fear for the future. This dominance of materialism continues to this day, although more in its practical results than in theory. As a theory, it very noticeably begins to lose its charm and increasingly reveals its inability to satisfy the highest demands of reason and life. Until so recently, under his influence, everything mysterious and supernatural was denied that it even becomes incredible to what extent the thirst for mystery is now noticeable everywhere. Modern cultured people listen with a kind of painful sensitivity to strange voices in gloomy sessions of spiritualism, reverently listen to the mysterious tappings and movements of a soulless table, are carried away by the mysterious trick of guessing other people's thoughts, and even people of positive science are not averse to believing in the possibility of an unknown fourth dimension 1 . Not satisfying the demands of the mind, materialism then ceased to satisfy the demands of life. The sensual side of man turned out to be not the only one that needs satisfaction. Even with the complete satisfaction of all the needs of this sensual side, it turned out that in man there is still a being that hungers the more the body becomes fatter, and since to immediately recognize the rights of this inner being would be too steep a transition from its complete denial, it was necessary to go through another stage, which also leaves its own special imprint on the same already mottled physiognomy of our century. This stage is pessimism, which even as a theory has recently become very widespread and whose heralds are Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the most popular philosophers of our time. If pessimism were able to retain its dominance over the minds of our time, then this would be the most striking proof of the complete failure of those principles by which our century lived - it would be the saddest bankruptcy - like the one that has been repeated more than once in history, and precisely at the end of major historical eras, which came after the brilliant flowering of culture to the bleak consciousness of the complete failure of its very foundations. But this is an obvious impossibility, and until humanity has completely exhausted its vital forces, it can never be satisfied with pessimism as a comprehensive worldview, and its widest dissemination will only serve as a transitional step to another, more gratifying worldview, which is able to satisfy the highest spiritual and moral needs and aspirations that never die in man. And it can hardly be denied that a turn in this regard is already clearly taking place: the former idols, who until recently enjoyed almost universal worship, are overthrown, representatives of materialism and pessimism are relegated to the background, and in their place are representatives of a different, religious and moral worldview, whose works are extremely widespread. In this regard, it is enough to point to the famous writings and conversations of Drummond 2, which have spread all over the world and, in our opinion, constitute striking proof of how mature the need is in modern cultural humanity to free itself from the yoke of crude materialism and pessimism and to find satisfaction for its thirsty soul in the principles of a different, more sublime worldview. Along with a turn in principle, a turn in particulars is also clearly noticeable. If recently, under the influence of a well-known theory, man with some kind of gloating debunked himself as the highest representative of spiritual life on earth and brought him down to the same level with the rest of the animal world and mainly with his closest ancestors - from the four-armed breed, now just the opposite movement is noticeable: the debunked man is again restored to his rights and those great representatives of humanity in whom the idea of \u200b\u200blikeness to God was expressed with the greatest force are again brought to the fore. person. And this desire is reflected with particular force in the amazing fact that in the time we are experiencing, a special thirst has awakened for a closer study of the One who was and is a perfect God and a perfect man, which alone can explain the unprecedented success that the lives of Christ enjoy in our time. But these symptoms are only the beginning of a beneficial reaction, and much remains to be done to completely restore normal life. Under the influence of the experienced change of several heterogeneous worldviews, a whole series of sediments remained in the man of our century, which undermined the integrity of his being, created extreme discord in him and obscured the simplest truths in his consciousness. From here such strange phenomena have become possible that in persons who can be considered typical representatives of our century, even with a good desire to understand the life of mankind for themselves and for others, some monstrous thoughtlessness in understanding the most basic truths, which until then were considered not to go beyond the limits of elementary catechetical knowledge, is revealed. And it must be said that this discord is inherent not only to individuals, but to all modern cultural humanity. It is all permeated with such strange contradictions that clearly show how shaken in it the very foundations of a reasonable, logically coherent view of the world and its life. In fact, it is enough to note a few of the most tangible facts to be convinced of this. Undoubtedly, the highest object of ambition of our century was the desire to substantiate humanism or humanity with its best manifestations on purely natural principles, and in the minds of the leading heralds of this natural humanism the ideal of eternal peace between people and entire nations was already clearly depicted, so that the famous historian of civilization in England (Buckle) from this point of view could boldly declare the (Crimean) war that happened during his time as the last remnant of obsolete barbarism. And yet, in a strange contradiction with this ideal stands the undoubted fact that hardly in any other century has so much human blood been shed and so many human lives perished from violent coups as in our century, and instead of beginning to establish peace on earth and goodwill in people with the help of humane people, our cultural age ended with the establishment of terrible militarism, which absorbs the best forces of peoples and calls upon the highest ingenuity to serve itself in order to strengthen the already hellish destructiveness of their weapons. For socio-economic life, cultural progress, with the help of many extremely important discoveries that made it possible to use such great forces as steam and electricity, could promise unprecedented prosperity and liberation of the masses from hard, backbreaking labor; but in reality, this progress has only led to an even greater contrast between the higher and lower classes of peoples and has only contributed to the fact that the benefits of culture are concentrated in an increasingly limited circle, outside of which the need is increasingly intensifying, reaching in the main centers of civilization to a terrifying misery, before which you involuntarily stop in extreme bewilderment, and democracy, fueled by this misery, boldly challenges civilization itself, denying it as untenable in its very essence. basis. The level of general education in our century has risen very high, and modern cultured people have a lot of knowledge that our not-so-distant predecessors had no idea about; and yet, side by side with this high enlightenment, the most blatant moral squalor coexists, and in moral and social life such savagery constantly appears that it would be difficult to even imagine if it were not confirmed by present reality. Finally, in order not to lengthen this parallel of contradictions, let us also point out that the comforts of life, thanks to the successes of civilization, have undoubtedly increased enormously, and modern man has the opportunity to enjoy many of the most exquisite pleasures; and yet, in striking contradiction to this, there is the fact that true cheerfulness has not increased at all, but, on the contrary, has weakened, and every year the ever-increasing number of suicides clearly shows that all the successes of civilization not only could not transform the earth from a vale of tears into a paradise of sweetness, but, on the contrary, even more intensified the sorrow of earthly existence, the number of those who work and are burdened has increased to a monstrous degree, and all of them, despairing of the possibility to receive relief from civilization and no longer having sufficient courage to nurture faith in the possibility of a higher deliverance, they perceive with gloomy despair the terrible preaching of pessimism, which says that non-existence is better than being and that the world itself is something that should not exist at all. And in view of these and many other contradictions, which appear all the stronger and sharper the more civilization has sought to smooth them out, the mass of modern humanity is decisively losing the thread of a reasonable understanding of the phenomena of present and historical life, and in view of the obvious discrepancy between the results and aspirations, the question involuntarily arises: is not this whole kaleidoscope of contradictory phenomena a game of unreasonable accidents? Isn’t the entire history of mankind an endless series of similar accidents in which individual people and entire nations, appearing on earth, are restless on it without any meaning or purpose, strive for something, never achieving what they want, struggle, suffer, strain all their efforts to create something that, however, from some stupid accident immediately collapses, and disappear from the historical stage, leaving behind only vague memories? One of the noted contradictions of our century undoubtedly includes the fact that despite all the successes of scientific knowledge in our time, which strives to bring all phenomena under general definite laws, among the mass of modern humanity the view of history as a concatenation of accidents clearly prevails, and that is why extreme confusion is everywhere noticed in the face of certain political or social phenomena, which amaze everyone with their unexpectedness and seemingly causelessness and confuse even those who are feignedly scientific Seriousness in everything they want to see the dominance of inexorable necessity, acting according to unchanging general laws 5 . But such a view, which places the historical life of mankind under the rule of chance or necessity (which, since it does not have a definite goal, is the same chance as any causeless phenomenon), which makes a person in all forms of his life a toy of some blind, aimless forces, does not at all have in itself anything that would instill in a person faith in the possibility of achieving a better future, would maintain cheerfulness in him when enduring all sorts of adversities and disasters, and on the contrary It can only take away all energy and dull all moral initiative, establishing complete indifference to happiness and unhappiness, to good and to evil. And such a mood is tantamount to the denial of all progress, and if this view managed to triumph over all others, then this would pronounce a death sentence over the entire modern civilization and over the entire future of humanity. But both in relation to the extreme conclusions of pessimism, and in relation to this bleak view of history, it must be said that it finds an irreconcilable opponent in the moral self-consciousness of humanity, which instinctively feels that its historical life cannot but contain some meaning, that it is not a plaything of chance or blind necessity, but on the contrary moves in a certain direction and strives towards a certain goal, which under certain conditions can be achievable. And this consciousness has found active support in that general turn to the religious worldview, which is noted above, and many are beginning to increasingly understand the meaning of historical destinies, or at least there is a living need to understand them from the highest point of view of the moral world - the only point of view that can satisfy a person as a morally free, self-aware, rational being 6. And we have a sacred duty to satisfy this need to the best of our ability, and if not to act as guides of social thought ourselves (which would be a task too great and bold), then at least to point to those lights that have previously dispelled the darkness of human thoughtlessness regarding the historical destinies of the world, directing thought to a true understanding of them and leading our contemporaries onto the path of a clear understanding of the majestic plan of the divine economy in the destinies of mankind. Among the many lights who in one way or another illuminated the plan of the world-historical movement with their genius, two stand out in particular, which, speaking in two different, distant eras, but each of which in its own way had the significance of a turning point in history and therefore was capable of producing extraordinary confusion in the minds, - with brilliant insight, indicated those very principles with the help of which thought alone can understand the complex course of world history and in its most apparently accidental, to catch a continuous thread of harmonious, purposeful development in disparate and contradictory phenomena. We mean bl. Augustine and Bossuet. The works of these famous men still constitute the richest source of Christian philosophical thought, and many of the newest thinkers have turned to them more than once in order to draw from them illumination for their thought during periods of darkness and reinforcement for their moral being in case of its weakening under the influence of unfavorable conditions of our time. And it is especially beneficial to study them in a time like ours, when everything old has been subjected to merciless criticism, but nothing new has yet been created and the public consciousness is in vain searching for more or less stable principles. These great men themselves lived in similar eras, and especially Bl. Augustine, before whose eyes the terrible collapse of the worldwide power of Rome took place - a collapse that produced extraordinary confusion among the people, since with the decline of Rome the entire ancient world fell and a new world was born through unimaginable torment, which had not yet promised anything definite and only aroused vague fears and weak hopes. Only the greatest genius could understand the turmoil of such an era, and such a genius was Bl. Augustine, who in his great work “On the City of God” gave his contemporaries not only a reassuring explanation of the historical upheavals they experienced, but also general principles for understanding the ways of God’s economy in history 7 . Therefore, one cannot help but rejoice that in our time, a lively interest in the study of this great representative of Christian thought has again awakened, and not only in the West, but also in our country, and this interest is not limited to the narrow limits of learned circles, but also embraces wide circles of a generally educated society, for which new translations of the works of the bl. Augustine, accompanied by a number of scientific and popular studies and presentations 8. As for Bossuet, he also stood at a deeply important boundary that separated the medieval period from the modern period, when the great historical revolution accomplished by the Reformation produced extreme confusion in the minds and forced them to look for more stable principles in history. These principles were indicated by Bossuet in his famous “Discourse on World History” 9, where he, having for himself a great leader in the bl. Augustine, made a brilliant application of the same principles to the needs of his time, thereby showing that these principles in their essence have universal significance, and no matter how diverse the times are, no matter what revolutions occur in history, thought can always find in these principles sufficient peace and satisfaction for itself in the face of the demands of reality, which is depressing with its vicissitudes. That is why we, in turn, turned to the study of these two great representatives of Christian historical thought, and in this essay we present the results of this study, although not so much in letter as in spirit, in accordance with the well-known saying: the letter kills, the spirit gives life. From this point of view, we will try to present several data that can understand the scheme that determines the essence of the historical process according to the view of the greatest geniuses of the Christian historical worldview. Chapter I. Historical foundations. The world of historical phenomena is incomparably more complex, and therefore more interesting, than the world of natural phenomena surrounding humans. In nature, despite all the diversity of its phenomena, everything bears the stamp of a certain correctness and conformity to laws, introducing the concept of a harmonious mechanism even into what at first glance may seem random. The randomness itself here obviously has only a conditional, subjective character and means that the phenomena called random are such only because, in a given state of knowledge, we cannot find a sufficient reason for them, the existence of which is nevertheless allowed as an indispensable requirement of reason. The most elusive, hitherto impenetrable to any definite schemes seem to be, for example. meteorological phenomena - and, however, the very fact that in their totality they are repeated with invariable correctness, gives thought the opportunity to assume the existence of certain laws to which these phenomena also obey 10. Historical phenomena are of a completely different nature. Here we encounter a whole series of phenomena that, both from immediate consciousness and from a philosophical view, represent something that is qualitatively different from natural phenomena and represents a completely special world with only its inherent properties. Among these phenomena, in the foreground stands the personality, which represents the highest form of being and has a property that decisively distinguishes it from the phenomena of nature and makes it not subject to the laws to which everything that exists is subject. This property is freedom, which gives the movements of the individual a certain independence and randomness, introducing uncertainty into all calculations regarding its possible actions. Of course, each person comes from a certain people, lives in the conditions of a certain time; but precisely what makes her a person, precisely her individual originality, cannot be explained from these general conditions and always in its essence represents something new, original. Each individual, having taken advantage of all the property that belongs to a certain people, does not limit itself to slavish assimilation of it, but processes it in accordance with its individual characteristics and creates for itself a special world in which it lives and moves and for which it works, even if in its goals it deviates somewhat or even very sharply from the goals of everyone else, thereby introducing a new element into the general life and not allowing it to stagnate in the same position. When a person turns out to be especially gifted with this originality, then with his self-created world and with his individual goals he invades the very course of world history and makes revolutions in it. A great genius, which is the term used to designate such a person, creatively influences the surrounding life, like lightning falls into the dead, motionless mass of others who have not sufficiently developed the initiative of individuals, and ignites it, inspiring it to achieve the goals it has set. Then an extraordinary movement takes place among peoples, and the greatest events take place, which would not have happened without such a random influence of genius - at least at the moment. The appearance and action of such individuals is random - in a different sense of the word than, for example. a lightning strike on a dry tree and the resulting fire, and the essential difference between these cases is that the latter accident always implies a certain, necessary law (although perhaps not yet discovered, but only assumed), while the first is reduced to the person himself with his consciousness of his self-determination in essence and therefore the element of responsibility for the committed act, completely alien to natural actions, is necessarily associated with it. Even more random in this sense than personality is man’s relationship to nature, which, although it lies outside his being, nevertheless has an extremely important influence on him. A known embryo grows successfully or abnormally, completely or one-sidedly, depending on the circumstances under which it had to develop. Also, the conditions of the surrounding nature can have the most profound influence on a person, so that each person in one way or another adapts to these conditions and may turn out to be unadapted to the conditions of another nature. Particularly important in this regard are geographical conditions in their total volume, the shape of the earth's surface and the distribution of peoples on it, precisely for their mutual relations, for the nature of their lives and for their entire fate, so that it was not even without some basis that the opinion arose that even before the appearance of the human race, the very shape of the earth's surface predetermined the entire course of its history. Thus, each individual, as an original phenomenon, accidentally encounters conditions that in one way or another can direct its development, regardless of internal self-determination. But such accidents, as phenomena inexplicable by any immutable laws, have even greater scope in the wide range of possibilities that unforeseenly materialize due to the random coincidence of external conditions and circumstances with the goals and affairs of people. Each of these circumstances, taken separately, may have completely sufficient, understandable grounds; - but their randomness is revealed precisely in their unexpectedness, so that if the same circumstance had happened at another time, it would not have any significance, but if it happened at this particular moment, it produces enormous consequences. In fact, the death of a person is the most common and necessary phenomenon, and if Alexander the Great had died at 70 or 80 years of age, his death, of course, would have been noted in history, but it probably would not have had the consequences that were entailed by the accident that he died only 32 years of age, as a result of which the entire worldwide monarchy he had created with such difficulty immediately collapsed. Storms on the seas are also a common occurrence, but when such a storm coincided with the departure of the great armada to suppress Protestantism and scattered it, the consequences of this accident were of enormous significance in the history of Europe. Severe winters in Russia are often repeated and do not amount to anything special, but when one of the particularly harsh winters coincided with the campaign of Napoleon I in Russia and caused the greatest disaster to the hitherto invincible army of the military genius, this accident again entailed enormous consequences. The bullet was aimed at the chest of the great emperor, who entered the desperate battle of Poltava, which was supposed to decide who would control the fate of the north of Europe. Had she leaned half an inch to the right or to the left, the great king would have fallen lifeless and all his gigantic efforts would have been destroyed by this accident. But the bullet maintained its direction and struck precisely at the point on the chest where the cross hung, and having encountered this impenetrable obstacle, it bounced off, and the fate of northern Europe was decided in favor of the Russian Tsar. The annals of history are filled with such accidents. Throughout its entire length, we continually see how some elusive kaleidoscope of inexplicable accidents and the strangest coincidences takes place in it. From some very insignificant phenomenon in itself, the greatest events occur; some accident that occurs precisely at a given moment and not at another moment creates or destroys the happiness of individuals or entire nations. A person resorts to some terrible efforts, strains all the powers of his mind to achieve this or that goal, and suddenly, by some strange accident, all these efforts crumble into dust or lead to exactly the opposite goal; or vice versa - from the most insignificant phenomena events develop that amaze with their unexpected importance. “The thread on which the whole world of events seems to hang is often broken at the most decisive moment, and thus many events do not take place which otherwise would certainly have taken place; on the other hand, the thread, which, apparently, is ready to break at any moment, is miraculously preserved, even if only the most insignificant tension would be enough for it to break and, as a result, the entire further course of history would take a completely different direction. Finally, from the most distant regions, the most heterogeneous things, completely alien to each other, accidentally collide with each other and through this produce events that make an entire era in history” 11. This diversity of elusive and inexplicable accidents represents the most characteristic feature of history, the feature that first and most of all appears to direct observation. But from this very fact it is clear that this is only one side of the historical world and, moreover, the most external one. Anyone who is not able to discover another side in him cannot at all be called a deep historian, as such cannot be called, for example. Voltaire, who believed that the Crusades, which entailed enormous sacrifices of people and produced a whole moral and social revolution in Europe, occurred as a result of the preaching of some crazy Peter of Amiens, so that if the Turks had killed this strange pilgrim in time, they, and the European peoples, would have been freed from all the disasters that accompanied these campaigns for them 12; or that the Reformation occurred as a result of an accidental quarrel between the monks, so that if it were not for this quarrel between the Augustinians and Dominicans over the right to conduct a profitable trade in indulgences, the Reformation would not have happened 13; or that the reformation that had already taken place found sympathy in northern Europe and was not successful in the south because the northern peoples were poorer than the southern ones, and, not being able to buy indulgences at a high price, out of annoyance they decided to completely reject the papacy and adopt a cheaper religion. Anyone, we say, who would limit his consideration of the fate of history to such observations and explanations would not receive the title of a deep historian. Therefore, every more or less serious thought does not stop at the motley play of external accidents, but tries to look inside them, at the common basis on which this external play takes place; and when she really penetrates deeper, she sees a completely different picture before her. “If on the surface the observer is presented with an infinitely rich and varied spectacle of phenomena, which in their extreme fragmentation everywhere elude any attempt to connect and comprehend them; then, on the other hand, underneath them a serious thinker notices a motionless unity that strives to bind all this living, constantly moving diversity into solid forms and again absorb it in the depths of universal principles; but neither of these sides ever succeeds in completely defeating the other and thereby completely achieving its goal. The principles underlying both of these sides, there chance and individual freedom, here necessity, constitute a huge opposition, which reason tries in vain to understand and smooth out: their coexistence and interaction is the deepest mystery of being, as a result of which their common result - history, the motley fabric of which they produce, is so mysterious in its process. We clearly see how, as a result of this confusion of influences colliding with each other, development, although perhaps with deviations that are nevertheless smoothed out in general, continues its quiet measured course, how chance itself often miraculously contributes to it, how fragmentation and disunity again return to unity, and freedom, as if restrained by invisible bonds, can never deviate too far from it, so that even in apparently the most random and capricious manifestations of humanity life – the law shines through in a striking way” 14. It is precisely this two-way process that represents the world of historical phenomena for every thinking observer. For clarity, it can be compared to the ocean. On its surface, under the influence of various accidents, movements occur that do not obey any specific laws, so that every sailing ship is completely at the mercy of the capricious elements; but if we look deeper, we will see absolutely regular movements of waters, in certain directions and according to certain laws, obviously due to natural necessity, so that these currents can be the subject of precise study and even depiction on geographical maps. And both of these sides coexist in the same process. History represents the same thing. And this two-sidedness of it was already noticed in the most ancient times, and then thought began to make attempts to reconcile these two, apparently inconsistent, sides of the historical process and to find such a common basis on which they could find reconciliation in a general synthesis. But it is remarkable that in these attempts, as soon as thought tried to find some general principle that could serve as a comprehensive beginning, it rarely maintained a balance between these two sides and always gave preference to one of them - either sacrificing conformity to the law, or, conversely, sacrificing chance to the sacrifice of conformity to the law. Since the latter presents more opportunities for scientific contemplation, captivating with the stability of its movement, which is so necessary for bringing phenomena under certain laws, it is not surprising that this particular aspect, according to which history appears as a world of necessity, was the favorite theme of the scientific historical worldview. As elsewhere, a certain limitation of the human mind is also reflected here, which is not able to embrace the truth in its entirety and almost always perceives it only from one side. That is why all the most important attempts to comprehend the historical process from the point of view of a higher principle come down, both in ancient and modern times, to the fact that in the sense of this principle, necessity in one form or another is put forward and historical movement is thought of as movement according to unchangeable laws, absorbing all particular, so-called random phenomena. Freedom of human action from this point of view is only a deceptive ghost, a deception of well-being, dissipating under the strict analysis of scientific research, and it cannot be understood otherwise than the freedom or randomness of meteorological phenomena, which seem random only because we do not yet have the opportunity to trace their connection with the necessity that governs them. To prove this, many various considerations were cited and, by the way, a particularly large use was made of the testimony of statistics, which makes it possible to observe the amazing regularity in the recurrence in certain periods of even such phenomena that, at an ordinary glance, seem the most random and arbitrary, such as. the number of crimes committed annually and even cases of letters being dropped into mailboxes without an address 15 . In particular, this view has varied greatly. Looking for the main starting point, thinkers of this direction went through almost everything that has any noticeable influence on the fate of a person, and pointed out, for example. on the climate, on the climate and soil together, on all nature in general, on the composition of the blood, etc.; but its main tendency was to reduce the historical process to the ground of unconditional necessity, to bring it under those unchangeable, fatal laws that govern the rest of the world - in its entirety. This view, which was given a special systematization by Auguste Comte, has found its most consistent exponent in modern times in the person of one of the most popular philosophizing thinkers of our time, namely Spencer, who made a wide application to the history and sociology of what is known as evolution. The whole world, according to this theory, is under the unconditional domination of general inexorable laws, which have a fatal tendency to produce movement in one direction or another, and this movement is development or evolution, which for this very reason occurs with unconditional necessity. No extraneous or random influences are able to stop, slow down or intensify this development: it occurs with the same fatal necessity as a river rolls its waters along an inclined plane to the sea. Man with his actions and undertakings is only one of the manifestations of this evolution, in which all his freedom is drowned, and the world of social life and historical phenomena moves by itself without any participation on his part in this regard. To give a certain plausibility to this theory, it fully puts forward the idea of ​​an organism living and developing according to its own unchanging laws - but this statement does not in the least save the personality of man, which is completely lost in the organic process and history itself ceases to be an area of ​​free movement towards a specific, consciously set goal, but turns into a fatal process in which there can be no talk even of progress or improvement - in the proper sense of the word 16. In fact, if a person is so insignificant that he is not even taken into account by this process, then there is no guarantee that this process is precisely progressive, and on the contrary, quite a few conditions can be pointed out that make it decisively regressive, if only because the power of sunlight, which produces and supports organic life on earth, for astronomical reasons, weakens from year to year, drawing a very unpleasant prospect of a state when the earth, due to lack of light and heat, will have to turn into a dead planet. But even beyond this perspective, this theory, which sacrifices personality to necessity, thereby undermines any meaning in the historical process. We can think about history (as Prof. Kareev), only assuming the existence of personality as a special principle, different from organic life, capable of influencing it and having the ability to create something that no organic process can create, the ability to create a special world - a supra-organic one, the fate of which constitutes the main content of history. Once the independent significance of personality is rejected, history will lose all meaning, and only sociology will remain, in which the same laws apply as in zoology. The result is obviously very disappointing. It is not surprising that he could not satisfy even the supporters of evolution themselves, and for example. prof. Kareev, in general adhering to the theory of evolution, nevertheless found it necessary to evade its strict development, and in his philosophical and historical works he set the task of giving some significance to the individual in history. Without personality, as an independent principle, in his opinion, history itself cannot be conceivable, since personality is precisely that real being for whom all socio-historical forms exist and apart from which they lose all meaning 17 . But once the personality is recognized as an original being, capable of creating something non-existent apart from itself, evolution as an organic process turns out to be completely inapplicable to history, and if we try to hold back evolution, we will come to a strange contradiction: the personality, as a necessary product of general development, nevertheless has within itself the ability to influence this development, set self-conscious goals and develop certain forms that contribute to their achievement. To avoid this contradiction, the theory must imagine the personality as nothing more than a certain medium through which a certain process passes and thanks to which something new is formed only in form and not in essence - just as a plant imagines just such a medium, through which known inorganic or organic elements receive a new form, but essentially remain the same. In this case, the protection of the individual turns out to be completely illusory, the fact of its undoubted significance in history remains as before unexplained, and the very process of history is incomprehensible and aimless. The main thing is aimless; because to prove that the essence of the historical process is progress, as prof. Kareev, means to assert something that does not have sufficient grounds for itself in the very meaning of the so-understood personality. This doubt about the stability of such a view involuntarily resulted in the fact that the same philosophizing historian found it impossible to construct any general plan for the history of mankind and even denies it in principle 18. Instead of constructing such a plan, he devotes himself to very painstaking and tedious work, trying to show how, in what ways, from what, under the influence of what general tendency, individuals carry out that centuries-old work that is known as history, and the result is the most insignificant: the somewhat rough, so to speak, side of the historical process becomes clear, but the fundamental question remains completely aside: for what higher purpose is all this work being carried out, causing so much joy and sorrow, requiring such colossal efforts and such heroism, who is the chief director of this work and, therefore, the originator of its plan, and who will reward for the successful execution of it? In a word, the highest teleology, evoked by the very concept of conscious labor of conscious figures in the field of history, does not find any satisfaction here. Such a student of history is likened, in the comparison of one American writer, to a man who, having first seen the majestic cathedral in Cologne, and having studied its composition, the very material from which it is made, the very process of working on it, all the technical details of its construction, would imagine that he has a complete understanding of this subject. But of course, if he had stopped at this research only, and had not resolved the main question of why this majestic building was actually created, then his concept of it would have been far from complete and, in fact, completely unclear 19. Thus, the world of historical phenomena from the considered point of view turns out to be completely incomprehensible. This is some kind of mystery for which there is not the slightest data leading to its solution. And especially incomprehensible are those phenomena of history that constitute its most characteristic feature, namely phenomena in which the personal element with its conscious goals and aspirations comes into conflict with the hostile forces overwhelming it, in which the terrible efforts of conscious beings collapse from soulless chance and the terrible grief of sentient beings does not find the slightest echo or sympathy anywhere, in which prematurely perishing individuals and entire peoples find themselves a victim of some insensitive evolution. No, such a theory cannot satisfy either reason or feelings, leaving behind only a sad consciousness of the helplessness and purposelessness of existence itself. Fortunately, there is another theory, which, although it does not explain all the phenomena of the historical process (and what theory, given the limitations of human knowledge, can lay claim to a complete comprehension of it?), however, in many respects it represents a huge advantage over the one presented and all related to it, and precisely because it introduces a new factor into history, expands the historical horizon to infinity and there finds a principle capable of embracing everything that cannot fit under any other theories. This theory is providential, putting forward the idea of ​​Providence as a unifying principle for both sides of the historical process, and it was this idea that found its brilliant development in the works of Bl. Augustine and Bossuet. Chapter II The idea of ​​Providence in its historical development. The idea of ​​fishing as applied to history is not new. On the contrary, it is rooted, as it were, in the instinctive feeling of man, who involuntarily feels his dependence as a rational being on the same, but higher Being, is the most ancient of the theories put forward to explain the meaning of the historical process. Already the ancient pagan mind assumed that the world of historical phenomena, representing such a wonderful variety of apparently random, eternally colliding with each other, but not self-destroying, struggling, but not self-destructing facts, and, on the contrary, from all its disorderly movement, heading towards achieving certain goals, cannot be assumed without the existence of an all-governing higher Reason. This idea was first expressed by Anaxagoras and found a sympathetic echo among subsequent poets and historians, although it received very little development. The mind of ancient man, still under the overwhelming influence of external forces of nature, acting as personified beings, was not able to quickly come to a clear understanding of the Supreme Reason in all the properties of its infinite perfection, and Anaxagoras apparently limited its action to an indefinite region of the universe, without touching on its special participation in human affairs. This idea was more clearly applied to the fate of the peoples by Aeschylus, who in his tragedy The Persians, having posed the question of why this powerful people was defeated by the weak Greeks, came to the answer that this reason was not at all in the comparative strengths of the peoples themselves, but lies above them, precisely in the all-limiting and equalizing hand of the gods. The Persians were defeated for their excessive pride, with which they upset the balance established by the gods, and for this they suffered due punishment. Here the idea of ​​a higher Reason clearly appears, not only arranging everything in accordance with the requirements of its rationality, but also directly intervening in the affairs of people in order to prevent them from violating this harmonious structure or balance. This idea appears even more broadly in the sense of concrete application to historical phenomena in Herodotus, the father of history. Throughout all his famous historical books there runs that universally noticeable and deliberately put forward idea that the course of the historical destinies of mankind is not a concatenation of completely disorderly phenomena, that, on the contrary, they are based on a general law, which cannot be violated without violating justice, as the basic principle of all life, and that any such violation certainly causes the intervention of Nemesis, who menacingly punishes those who violate the existing balance. God, as the personification of this law, established a certain order in the world, and it also determines the longevity of kingdoms, adapts punishments to the degree of crime and humbles the proud. He reveals his will in oracles, sometimes in dreams, and sometimes in his personal representatives on earth - especially gifted people, and most of all in such formidable phenomena as earthquakes, extraordinary signs, unforeseen accidents, which serve for cities and kingdoms as silent signs of threatening death or terrible disasters 20 . From here it is clear that in historical life the influence of a higher being is allowed, who oversees the preservation of the established order and, in the name of justice, punishes its violators. But this justice is still very conditional, and it barely rises above the level of a simple mechanical equalizer, which does not allow the predominance of some things over others - for fear that this predominance will not lead to the destruction of everything. There is no moral attitude towards man, no love that would rejoice at his well-being; on the contrary, as a soulless equalizing force, it is even capable of envying him, and happiness achieved through one’s own efforts brings upon a person the same vengeance as a violation of any balance in general. The lucky Polycrates, in order to eliminate this envious glance of Nemesis, had to at least artificially make himself unhappy by throwing his precious ring into the sea 21. Here it is obvious that the thought, admitting the existence of a world-preserving force that maintains order in the world, has not yet risen to the point of admitting the existence of a Being capable of rising above this dead mechanism of once established relationships and recognizing itself as wise enough to allow a person to deviate from the existing norm, to be able to guide him in these deviations to achieve an order that is higher than the existing one. Herodotus’s thought obviously does not imply the possibility that through the totality of freely rational efforts one could achieve the highest perfection; on the contrary, his deity is afraid of any deviation from the existing order, fearing that as a result of such deviation everything will go upside down. Such a view fundamentally undermines the basic principle of life - the desire for improvement, which is precisely produced by the fact that constant changes are made in the current state of things, directed for the better. And in this case, the very world of historical phenomena is not a world of progress, but a world of constant repetition of once established forms, and as a result of this, the very question of the plan of history and its meaning becomes superfluous. There is no meaning in it, just as there is no meaning in a swamp, for the inhabitants of which the main threat is represented by the heron, guarding on the shore in order to devour any such inhabitant who carelessly moves out of his dirty element more than he should. This ancient view obviously reflected the general worldview of ancient man, who felt the irresistible pressure of the surrounding world. Man could not free himself from such a view until the idea appeared in him that in the nature of the human being there is, in addition to the external, an internal essence that is independent of the accidents of external existence, that this essence lives according to its own special laws and has its own independent value, that this essence is moral and therefore needs moral relations. As a moral being, a person needs not only equalizing justice, which is unfavorable to any independent effort of will, but also love, which would sympathize with good efforts and, with its wisdom, support and encourage them. He does not need a blind force that would invariably repeat its actions under the same conditions, but that would lead a person and the whole world to one specific goal, and this goal is to achieve a better state than the one in which the present reality is located. And such a need finds its only satisfaction in the Christian idea of ​​Providence, which presupposes precisely the existence of a Being not only infinitely just, but at the same time infinitely loving, with all the ensuing consequences. From the point of view of this particular idea, it is possible not only to understand the meaning of history, but also to form an idea of ​​the plan that underlies it and which explains, to a certain extent, all phenomena that cannot fit into any other historical view. If the view of evolutionism discussed above makes “the only factor of history (human) personality” 22, and the ancient view - Nemesis, as a result of which in both cases thought refuses the opportunity to draw up a reasonable plan for world-historical life, then on the other hand, the Christian view makes the main factor in the history of God, as an omnipotent, omnirighteous and all-loving Being, and the secondary factor is the human personality, as in its essence constituting the image of God, and through its activity striving to achieve likeness to Him. God, according to the expressive testimony of Bl. Augustine, there is the principle on which the whole world depends in its harmonious composition and movement. Having created man rational, giving order to everything, subordinating everything to measure, number and weight, establishing good harmony everywhere, “leaving not only heaven and earth, not only angel and man, but also the insides of the smallest and most despised animate, and the feather of a bird, and a flower of grass, and a leaf of a tree, without giving them a certain proportionality in their parts and in a kind of mutual agreement, God certainly could not leave outside the laws His providence for the kingdoms of men and their positions, dominant and subordinate." 23. In another place, directly affirming this position assumed here, he also says that "God, the author and giver of happiness, Himself distributes earthly kingdoms to both the good and the evil. And He does this not indiscriminately and as if by chance (since He is God, and not fortune), but in accordance with the order of things and time - an order that is hidden to us, but completely known to Him" ​​24 . Thus, instead of soulless fate or mechanical evolution, a higher personal principle is introduced, which, being comprehensive reason and perfect justice, embraces with its wisdom and love the whole world and all humanity in it, relating to it as a moral being to a moral one. This relationship takes on the character of Industry, in which everything is based on the highest moral principles and therefore everything becomes expedient. God, as the most perfect Being, having given existence to the world not out of any need in it, but solely out of His infinite goodness and love, in order to give creatures the enjoyment of these properties of His existence, thereby set the goal of life for all living things and especially for man, as capable of consciously participating in the blessings of existence, and this goal is the achievement of the highest good that can only be conceivable by a rational being, and namely staying in God as the highest focus of the highest good. A good increases in value when it is achieved through one's own efforts and self-determination. Therefore, God gave man freedom, as the ability to strive or not to strive for this good, to achieve or not to achieve it, the opportunity to bifurcate in his striving, so that through victory over this discord, on the one hand, increase the value of what has been achieved, and on the other, have a natural incentive for progressive moral movement and improvement. From here, already in the primitive state of man, a well-known historical process began in the sense of planned and purposeful development - but a normal process, in which the elements of spirit and flesh were in complete and perfect balance, centripetal movement in balance with centrifugal movement, and freedom, motivated by moral dependence on the omnipotent Creator, had a natural inclination to give advantage to the first, although retaining the ability to act in the opposite direction. The man, however, could not maintain this balance. Having abused his freedom, he committed a crime and fell. The previous harmony of being was destroyed, the innocent state belonging to that period, which in the proper sense can be called prehistoric, ended and a new period began, which is the period of real history. But this story is already a sinful story. The balance of forces in it has changed significantly, and the center of gravity in development has moved towards the world, that is, further from God. Man became a slave to sin and his passions, and the consciousness of his true good became so weakened and darkened in him that without higher help he would no longer be able to achieve it. Hence, if in the primitive state a person was completely legal and could well be left to his own self-determination in his development, now he, having lost this legal capacity, had to be subjected to strong external control, as a result of which history itself acquired the character of an educational process, which as such presupposes external guidance in the direction of a certain goal, with the help of various incentives and incentives 25. This is precisely the nature of actual history. But as a planned, educational process, depending in its movement on certain factors, history can only be conceivable under the assumption that its main object - man is a creature capable of preserving its basic type in the entire multitude of replacing and multiplying individuals representing it, that all these individuals are in an inextricable connection with their original ancestor, i.e., in other words, history presupposes the unity of the human race. This idea was only vaguely recognized in the ancient pre-Christian world, which put forward the idea of ​​​​the originality or autochthony of individual peoples, and was more than once subjected to strong attacks from modern science, which assumed several centers of human origin, until this last theory found a striking refutation in another, the most widespread theory of evolution, which allows not only the unity of the human race, but even the unity of the entire organic world in general 26. Such a leap in positive science serves as the most eloquent confirmation of biblical truth - the unity of the human race, and this truth constitutes a necessary element of a sound understanding of the world-historical process. From this point of view, the fact of heredity, which reproduces in subsequent individuals the entire structure of the physical and moral existence of the ancestor and a certain correctness in the very forms of life, which are modified only under the influence of secondary causes, is fully explained. Since the ancestor committed an act that completely destroyed the original harmony of being, this discord, due to heredity, was transmitted to all of humanity, and his whole life became a sad expression of this discord. Throughout history, we see everywhere this very discord, which constitutes the most characteristic feature of the historical process, considered in its present, phenomenal reality, and makes this process predominantly sinful, and as a result, necessarily disastrous. Since the entire historical process is the result of factors tending towards a specific goal, it is therefore a progressive process. The idea of ​​progress is again one that the ancient world did not know and which finds its full justification only from the point of view of the idea of ​​Providence. In the ancient world, the idea of ​​regression, as a desire for gradual deterioration, decisively prevailed, and it is precisely that idea that is primarily given to direct perception and even follows from the natural thinking of the human mind. In vain Prof. N.I. Kareev, who bases his philosophical and historical view on the idea of ​​progress, says that “its psychological origin is very clear” 27 . Psychologically, on the contrary, the most understandable and natural idea is the idea of ​​regression, as a deterioration of a derivative in comparison with the producer, a parent with children, an ancestor with descendants, and this idea finds application even in generic psychology, according to which parents and especially grandfathers always idealize before their younger generation their “old” time, when, as the old people tell their grandchildren from their physiological observations, the sun itself shone and warmed better and there was an abundance now unknown in everything. If the successes of ingenuity and mechanical progress are empirically noticed, then this progress is only a pitiful replacement for general regression, a forced effort to compensate for the enormous results of general regression by finding artificial means of counteracting it. That is why all ancient worldviews represent a type of emanation, the outflow of all phenomena of world life from the deity, and the further this process of outflow goes from its starting point, the more it deteriorates in its composition. From this came the well-known theory of four centuries, each of which represents a deterioration in comparison with the previous one - the golden age gives way to the silver age and everything ends with the iron age, which is the age of present reality. This view also lies at the basis of the classical worldview, and it was precisely this, together with personal, psychologically understandable observation, that gave the great Roman poet Horace, despite all the signs of the undoubted cultural superiority of his era over all previous ones, a reason to complain that everything in the world is going from bad to worse and that if the current generation is already pitiful and worthless, then it will produce from itself a generation even more pitiful and worthless 28 . If regression for the natural mind is the essence of the historical and world process in general, then the very aspiration for a better future, put forward by the same researcher as the second source of the idea of progress 29 , is only a desire to return to that best, which is drawn not in front, but behind, and even if this best could ever be achieved and restored again, then for this it would be necessary to make a backward movement to the primary source of all being, therefore the movement is in any case regressive, as is the case with The newest representative of the ancient worldview, Rousseau, expressed amazing courage in declaring the entire modern civilization a great disastrous self-delusion and delusion and demanding a return back to nature. But in reality, even this backward movement is impossible, because the historical process, from the point of view of the natural mind, is a necessary process, occurring with the same absolutely fatal necessity in one definite direction, with which a river rolls its waters along an inclined plane towards its mouth. That’s why in the ancient world we see the predominance of some kind of languishing sadness in everything 30: people had no hope for a better future and indulged in the darkest despair, which reached its highest development precisely during periods of the highest culture (such as, for example, before the appearance of Christianity on earth). Thus, the idea of ​​progress can logically follow only from the idea of ​​Providence, according to which man has his ideal in the highest perfection embodied in God, and within himself has an irresistible urge to strive for this ideal. When, with the onset of the actual historical process, the above-mentioned discord occurred in man, then although the historical process itself took on a completely different character, and the center of man’s drives moved greatly, and precisely towards the world, nevertheless, the idea of ​​progress did not suffer any damage through this. Progress remained in full force; but just as discord occurred in man himself, so progress itself became bifurcated, whereby on the one hand man retained the desire for his highest ideal, which is the highest good, and on the other hand, all the properties of corrupt nature directed him in the opposite direction, where under the enchanting cover of the blessings of this world the evil principle was hidden. From here a double process began to take place in historical life, a positive process, i.e. the development of all remaining rudiments of good, with the goal of achieving the highest good, and the negative process, as the development of all the elements of evil that have invaded human nature with the goal of achieving the highest evil 31. In view of such a two-sided process, the question naturally arises: which of these two processes will be crowned with complete success - positive or negative? The triumph of the latter would be a direct contradiction to the main purpose of human existence itself. On the other hand, a complete cessation of this process would be tantamount to depriving a person of the ability of free self-determination granted to him, by virtue of which he could prefer good or evil at his own discretion. Obviously, triumph in history must belong to a positive process, as having as its goal the realization of the true purpose of man. But since this process could not rely on the own strengths of man, who by his corrupted nature was prone to negative phenomena, higher help turned out to be necessary, and it was given by the highest factor of history - God, who therefore took the entire historical process under his leadership or industry and as a result of this, the whole history of mankind becomes the history of one great city of God, which, despite the internal discord of its parts, is generally directed towards achieving the highest goal intended for it, namely the highest good 32. This assumption follows from the fact that God, out of His infinite love, did not want to leave humanity to complete destruction under the triumph of evil, but by His omnipotence He could direct it to achieve the true goal of its existence, and all history is precisely evidence of that wise leadership of God, according to which humanity is directed towards its highest good. But how is this guidance accomplished? Chapter III. Freedom and necessity in history. At this point, the idea of ​​Providence in its application to history encounters the strongest objection, which its various opponents do not cease to repeat in all sorts of ways. If, this objection says, the entire world-historical process in its entirety is under the unconditional guidance of Providence, which, despite the frequent deviations of individuals and entire nations from the final goal, in the end it all directs it precisely towards the achievement of this goal, then, obviously, there can no longer be a question about the free self-determination of man, and consequently the main vital nerve of history is undermined - it is the assumption of man’s amateur striving for a consciously set goal that undermines the very idea of progress, which turns into a mechanical, completely necessary process, and all responsibility for his good or evil is removed from a person. It is remarkable that this objection is sometimes recognized as insurmountable even in our theological literature 33 . But in reality it is based on one very significant misunderstanding. It proceeds from the assumption that the omnipotence of God, as unlimited, acts in achieving its goals with unconditional necessity, since otherwise it would not be omnipotence. At the same time, however, a very significant idea is lost sight of: that the omnipotence of God in the field of history is not physical, which acts with unconditional necessity, but moral omnipotence, which can limit itself without at all diminishing, but on the contrary, even more elevating the very idea of ​​omnipotence. The idea of ​​unconditional omnipotence presupposes the possibility of doing everything that the thought and will of an omnipotent being can do; but this idea rises even more when we think what omnipotence is, having the ability to do everything, but does not do this, therefore, extends its limiting action not only to everything that lies outside it and therefore infinitely lower and weaker than it, but also to itself, therefore, to what is equal to it. Such omnipotence is obviously even higher, and it is moral omnipotence. As such, it may well limit itself in order to provide, next to itself, sufficient space for amateur activity outside of it. Moral omnipotence can only be inherent in a personal being, and since it manifests itself in history in relation to man, also a personal moral being, then from this relationship of personal beings, although infinitely unequal to each other, a relationship is formed that contains the only satisfactory explanation for the historical process in all its elements and vicissitudes, which we will now try to explain. We do not need to essentially enter into consideration of the question of whether a person has free will or not. This is a question of psychology or philosophy; for history it does not exist, since it, recognizing man as an indispensable factor and content of it, presupposes him in advance as a free being, capable of directing his actions, and therefore responsible for them. It is only in this sense that history can retain its moral character, and world history can be a worldwide judgment on the affairs of individuals and peoples 34 . If here, too, the question of free will often arises, then simply due to a misunderstanding, they either confuse free will with arbitrariness, understanding by it the unconditional opportunity to do whatever one wants, or even without going to such an extreme, they lose sight of the truth that the free will of a person as a limited being not only does not imply the complete absence of limiting conditions, but, on the contrary, requires them, and is generally a relative concept. Being a relative concept, it can thereby maintain its relative independence alongside its dependence in the unconditional sense on an unconditional being. Let us explain this with a clear example. Feeling at ease, I board a ship that is heading west to America. Being on a ship, I am, of course, already less free than I was on land, because I am limited by the confines of the ship, which is taking me precisely to the west. But the freedom of personal self-determination itself remained in me, although in the limited conditions of my new position, so that I can dispose of myself in all other respects, except for the one in which I myself limited myself by boarding the ship. Even under the conditions of this situation, my self-determination can reach the possibility on my part of movement just opposite to the movement of the ship itself. In the space of its length, within 70 fathoms, I can, moving from bow to stern, make a movement to the east when the ship moves to the west. Although, of course, when I make 70 fathoms towards the east, the ship will carry me several miles to the west, nevertheless this does not in the least undermine my relative task - to reach a point that lies closer to the east than the bow of the ship. Of course, I am no longer able to do more than this, because the ship or the will that controls it, directing it to the west, subjugated me under the indicated conditions, so that even if I tried to go east within the ship, it would certainly carry me further and further to the west. But in turn, the very will that controls the ship is in certain respects subordinate to another even higher will, which carries it in precisely the opposite direction. Although the ship, in the imagination of the captain and all the passengers, is heading west, in reality it is heading east much faster at the same time, and, having made a few miles to the west, in reality at the same time makes several thousand miles towards the east, precisely because the entire globe, under the influence of another higher power, is moving to the east and, of course, carrying along with it the ship and its passengers, imagining that they are sailing to the west. But although the ship in this higher astronomical sense is really moving east, in a relative sense it is still heading to America, that is, to the west, and will certainly reach its goal. The whole question here lies in the point of view from which we will look. From an earthly, geographical point of view, the ship is heading west and therefore is completely free in its movement towards its goal; and from a higher, astronomical point of view, he moves to the east, because in this sense he is not free and subordinate to a higher will, which moves him along with the globe to the east. Logically, there is an antinomy here, a collision of two movements occurring at the same time in two opposite directions; but in reality there is no collision, and both movements are completely compatible with each other, so that the ship, in the astronomical sense, carried to the east, in the geographical sense, still arrives at its goal to the west. To assert the contrary would mean to fall into the tone of the famous ancient philosophical sophistry, according to which the fleet-footed Achilles will never catch up with the tortoise. The same misunderstanding occurs in history regarding individual freedom. Its freedom is denied by some historians because the highest historical point of view reveals a whole series of relations in which a person turns out to be unfree or even completely acting under the influence of necessity. Striving towards one specific goal, at least, if we take the same example, heading to the west, he is actually carried away to the east, or, if we take a more understandable example in the historical sense, trying to commit some evil, in reality (as it often turned out in history) he causes good, as we do, for example. We see in the story of Joseph, to whom his brothers, selling him to Ishmael merchants, of course wanted to do evil, but in reality they did the greatest good, giving the first impetus to the series of events that led to his elevation to the post of first minister of the most powerful and richest monarchy of the ancient world. If we look at this fact from a higher point of view, then of course we will have to come to the conclusion that the brothers in their evil act were not free: they thought that they were doing Joseph evil, while in reality they were doing him good - and from this point of view, the person turns out to be unfree in history and under the overwhelming influence of another higher force, directing everything regardless of the human will. This is exactly how determinists look at history. But looking from this one point of view, they thereby reveal their one-sidedness, which misleads them. One has only to look at the same fact from a different point of view, and the result will be completely different. If the brothers, in the absolute sense, did for Joseph what they did not want, and did good instead of evil, then this is only in the absolute sense. In fact, if we take this fact not in its final results, but in its immediate presence and precisely in its close limitation, then in any case the brothers achieved their goal: they wanted to harm Joseph and really did him a grave harm, which, as we can naturally assume, tore the heart of the poor young man and cost him terrible moral suffering and whole streams of tears when he, mercilessly sold into slavery, in his opinion, was torn away forever from his loving father, who was also suffering from the inexpressible grief of despair. And thus both views, apparently so opposed to each other, so that according to one the brothers were free, and according to the other they were unfree in the same action, each turns out to be true in its own sphere. This apparent antinomy is explained precisely by the fact that human freedom is a completely relative concept and finds its full realization only in the close circle of individual life, outside of which its limitations begin, gradually increasing more and more, so that the result of its activity, that is, history, turns out to be unfree. This consideration must be kept in mind in order to clearly understand the historical process and the significance of the individual in it, and failure to understand this simple truth leads to the idea that the idea of ​​God’s Providence is irreconcilable with the idea of ​​individual freedom. Meanwhile, in reality, it is not only completely reconcilable, but also reveals in history the great wisdom that Hegel called “the cunning of reason,” but which in fact is the Wisdom of God, reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable, freedom with necessity. Indeed, if we look at history precisely from the above point of view, we will see how in it these opposites are freely reconciled and, through a whole series of gradations, form a marvelous picture of a majestic unity in which everything retains its meaning and place. Taken in his personal or individual isolation, a person is completely free to dispose of himself in all respects that do not go beyond the limits of his natural limitations. Individual life is precisely the area in which a person turns out to be the most free, since, with the exception of the limitations of his own and the surrounding nature, he is not yet bound by any other bonds. But such an individual life is in itself limited to a very narrow circle of one’s own soul in its self-enclosed state. As soon as a person goes beyond the limits of this self-confinment, he is subjected to a whole series of restrictions that make him less and less free. A person gets married, and family relationships immediately impose a certain limitation on him, which forces him to give up part of his former freedom and sacrifice it for the benefit of his family, to take care not only of himself, but also of the family, to do not only what he would like according to his personal desire, but also what is required to satisfy the needs of the family. The next gradation of life is represented by society, which also subjects the individual to restrictions, forcing a person to do not only what he would like for himself and for his family, but also what the surrounding society requires of him, so that in his favor he must give up another part of his freedom. Finally, in order not to list many intermediate gradations, representing a great variety of social relations, a further gradation is represented by the state, which subjects the individual to even greater restrictions, forcing her to do not only what she would like for herself, for her family and society, but also what is required by the state; and the state sometimes extends its demands even to such an extent that an individual can be completely deprived of his freedom, deprived of the opportunity to do anything for himself, for his family and for society, since all of it in its entirety can be demanded to serve the state and can even be sacrificed to it, as for example. during the war. It is clear that this series of restrictions reduces individual freedom to its complete denial, placing it in conditions in which freedom is sacrificed to necessity. In the face of the state, the individual is already a known unit, completely subordinate to it even to the point of the possibility of its destruction. But to conclude from this that a person living in a state is no longer free would mean the same as concluding about a ship sailing to the west, but carried by the globe to the east, that it is not free in its movement and will never reach its goal. But just as this conclusion turns out to be incorrect when applied to a ship, so it turns out to be incorrect when applied to an individual in his relation to the state. Despite the indicated number of restrictions that bring the individual in the state to the point of the possibility of his complete destruction, the individual himself nevertheless remains free. All these restrictions actually constrain only the manifestation of freedom, but not freedom itself. Even in the face of the state, a person is not free only as a member of it, as a citizen who, as such, is absorbed by the state; but being a citizen, a person at the same time remains an individual, and as such he continues to be as free as without the restrictions of the state. This antinomy finds striking confirmation in the well-known fact that the same person for the same action, for example. murder, may be responsible or not responsible. When he commits murder as a citizen, that is, under the influence of the dictates of the state, e.g. in war, he is irresponsible because his will in this case was absorbed by the will of the state; but if he commits a murder not as a citizen, but as an individual, that is, with full control of his will, then he is responsible for it and is subject to punishment. It is obvious that here we have before us a new example of combining freedom with necessity, in which a person turns out to act both freely and by virtue of necessity, depending on the conditions under which we consider him and from what point of view we look at him. Of course, it is impossible to determine exactly when a person is completely free and under what conditions and to what extent he loses this freedom, but the very fact of combining freedom and necessity here cannot be doubted. And it is of great importance for resolving the issue of personal freedom and its significance in history. Personal freedom in history is denied with particular persistence by sociologists, who refer mainly to statistics showing the striking uniformity in quantitative terms of various social facts - not only such as birth and death, but even those that apparently follow from complete free will and could have happened or not, such as. marriage or crime. From this monotony in the number of social facts, the conclusion is drawn that the law of necessity is obviously at work here, completely excluding freedom. But this conclusion, from the point of view we have outlined, is completely unfounded, and from it statistics itself receives a completely different meaning, which does not at all affect the question of free will as an individual. Statistics from this point of view are only an indicator of the current state of a society or state, the sum of the moral or social forces operating in it, the degree of influence of the state or society on an individual, the conditions limiting his freedom - in a word, it deals with abstract or general data, within which a person is really not free as a social or political unit, but which by no means deprive him of the freedom of self-determination, and therefore responsibility as an individual. In fact, statistics show us that a certain state or society annually produces a certain number of criminals, and this number is so certain that the government is able to determine in advance the required number of prisons or correctional houses, and never during the normal course of life the number of criminals increases and cannot unexpectedly increase so much that there are double the number of prisons, for example. less against the need, or twice as much against the need, so that half of it can be used for other purposes, for example. for schools. It's the same with the question of marriage. The number of marriages from year to year in the normal course of life is repeated with amazing regularity, so that the clergy, who derive the greatest income from them (not determined by any taxes, but completely dependent on the personal generosity of those getting married), can always count on a certain income and draw up their household budget in advance, recording the figure of this income as completely secure 35. But in neither case does statistics provide any basis for denying human free will: in these cases it shows us the state of social facts, deals with social units, which as such, being under the limiting conditions of a social make-up, are of course not free and live in the realm of necessity; but these social units are not individuals, but abstract numbers; A person’s personal life is not affected at all by statistics and remains inaccessible to it. Therefore, statistics is limited precisely to general numbers, without entering into the consideration of particulars, and this is completely understandable, because in these particulars, that is, in individuals, it encounters the fact of personal free will, which is not subject to any regulation. Thus, predicting in advance that society will produce so many criminals in the coming year, statistics are only limited to this total number, but are never and in no case able to indicate who these criminals will be as individuals, whether these criminals will be Ivan, Vasily or Peter. Such a prediction is absolutely inaccessible to her, and precisely because here she no longer encounters social facts, but with a living personality who freely controls her actions. Of two individuals who are in completely identical external conditions, one can commit a crime, while the other remains innocent, and in order to understand this fact, it is necessary to look into the soul of these individuals, which is completely inaccessible to statistics, and only their soul will show why such a difference occurred between them. This is precisely what the court's attitude towards criminals is based on. As social units, that is, impersonal individuals, both criminals are equally victims of social ills and are therefore not responsible for their crimes. But the court is not limited to such an impersonal discussion of the fact: it discusses these units as individuals, looks into their souls, evaluates the motives that guided them in committing a crime, and then pronounces its fair verdict, according to which one criminal will be convicted, and the other may be acquitted, because the latter could really be to a certain extent a victim of a social illness, and the other fully acted as a free person, therefore as a person who took full responsibility for the act committed. But even an acquittal is not, in essence, unconditionally fair, unless it was dealing with a self-conscious person, and not with some morbid automaton. The social environment can mitigate guilt, but not erase it, and the subject acquitted in this case is a walking danger to society, the potential for repeating the same crime. Thus, statistics in no way prove the absence of free will in the individual, which is a factor in historical development, but only proves the absence of free will in social facts, which by their very essence cannot be free as non-persons. Statistics in its field establishes only the undoubted fact that in social life there is an amazing combination of freedom with necessity, again that wisdom, which is the wisdom of God, which knows how to combine free will with the laws of necessity, and as a result direct everything towards a specific goal, without encroaching on the freedom or self-determination of the individual. This combination of freedom with necessity is the highest guarantee of the correctness of social or state life. Without this combination, no government would be able to intelligently govern a known state: free individuals would not be subject to any regulation and would destroy any attempts at planning. But thanks to this wise combination, the government, giving the individual freedom of self-determination as an individual, can subsume social facts under certain categories, has at its disposal solid figures expressing the movement of vital forces in the state organism, knows in advance how much good and evil this organism will produce, what income it will generate and how much it will require expenses, and using these data, it can calmly direct the ship of the state to its intended goal, even if this goal does not always coincide with private goals individual individuals 36. If such a reconciliation between freedom and necessity is already possible in the natural relations between the individual and the state, between the individual will and the collective will, then all the more is it conceivable in a higher order, in the relations between individuals and Providence, and from this point of view, the hand of Providence, directing humanity to its intended goal, does not in the least become in conflict with the private goals of individuals, and not only individual, but also collective. As for individual personalities, this attitude is self-explanatory from the fact that Providence acts as a moral, self-limiting force, therefore allowing the freedom of a personal person to manifest itself in complete self-determination, even to the point of opposing Providence and completely denying it, as is shown by the frequently encountered facts of individuals who boldly and with impunity act with the denial of God and any moral world government. But collective individuals, like peoples, are already much more and more noticeably subject to the law of omnipotence, each of which has its own distinctive will, directed towards a specific goal, different from the goals of other peoples and finding limitation in them. Each individual people or state, while dominating the wills of its members, at the same time, in its collective will, submits to the supreme will of other states, on which the law of international politics is based. In its aspirations, each people must conform not only to what it wants itself, but also to what other peoples want, which thereby limit it and, so to speak, subordinate it to their higher will, although this does not undermine the principle of national self-determination. If peoples submit to the highest, so to speak, all-human will without renouncing their nationality in natural international relations, then all the more this relationship is conceivable between peoples and Providence. How much more people are subordinated to the governing will of Providence is clearly shown by the fact that the national will is no longer able to go so far as to deny Providence, and history does not know a people who, as a people, would deny the existence of God or a higher moral world government, although they may be mistaken in their understanding of it 37 . Finally, all humanity is already completely subordinated to the will of Providence, so that its will coincides with the will of God, which is where the well-known error came from, leading to the idolization of humanity 38 . From what has been stated in this way, it is clear what a wonderful chain of mutually subordinate goals humanity represents in its various divisions - from the individual to its entire organism. Each of its parts lives according to its own special laws, and, starting from the individual, there is a gradual restriction of free will until it coincides with the will of the Divine throughout all humanity. But this limitation is carried out precisely according to the pre-established order of Providence, and it is in it that the highest wisdom of Providence is manifested, miraculously reconciling private interests with general ones and directing everything towards one highest goal, which is the highest good for everyone. From this point of view, the difficulty presented by the question of predestination is conveniently explained. God predestined to save humanity through His Only Begotten Son, and this goal is fully achieved in relation to humanity as a whole. But predestination does not embrace all persons, as individual or collective wills, who, as such, could accept or not accept the gift of redemption, and since many of them, by their free will, actually did not accept it and the possibility of this was provided for by divine wisdom, then the fact of the need to condemn many, predestined to condemnation, arose precisely as a result of the provision of divine wisdom 39 . Chapter IV. Plan of the world historical process. The indicated order of relationships in which individuals, peoples and all of humanity stand with each other and with Providence determines the plan of world-historical development in all its details. This plan is precisely a harmonious chain of mutually subordinate goals that fully demonstrate the wisdom and goodness of God in history. Everything in this plan is pre-established in such a way that its infinitely diverse parts, apparently even going against the main idea of ​​the plan, actually contribute to its harmony and the wonderful implementation of it as a whole. Of course, it is impossible to fully comprehend this wondrous plan in its entirety given the current limitations of our knowledge, and it is insane to make a claim to this when our mind cannot fully comprehend even the physical world, in the study of which it constantly encounters the incomprehensible mysteries of existence, among which the first place is occupied by such basic objects as matter and force. If here the mind must grope among the mysteries that surround it at every step, then all the more is this natural in the world of history, where not only the laws of necessity operate, but where the mind also encounters the most mysterious of the mysteries of existence, which undoubtedly are the actions of personal beings acting freely in the world of necessity. But nevertheless, even with all the limitations of our knowledge, the plan of world-historical development is sufficiently defined in order to see in it the above-mentioned harmony of relations between manifestations of freedom and necessity, reconciled on the general idea of ​​Providence. World history provides a lot of examples confirming this theory of mutual subordination of goals as the essence of the historical process. We often see in history how individuals, setting private goals for themselves, use all their efforts to achieve them, thinking that they achieve them only for themselves, in order to enjoy egoistic self-gratification even to the detriment of others; and actually achieve these goals. But when a subsequent historian gets the opportunity to look at the same subject from the height of the past centuries, then he, having a broader historical horizon before his eyes, sees that these individuals themselves unconsciously acted under the influence of impulses external to them and, in achieving their goals, thereby only contributed to the achievement of other goals that have great historical significance for the day of an entire people or humanity. In fact, let’s take the already cited example of Joseph’s brothers. Personally, they were inspired by one goal - to get rid of their brother Joseph, the love for whom on the part of their elderly father aroused in them indomitable envy. And they really achieved their goal when they sold the poor young man to the Ishmaelites, who, of course, in turn sought to resell him at a higher price to other hands. The goal of both was completely achieved: the brothers got rid of their hated brother forever, who, as was natural to expect, would forever drown in the sea of ​​everyday abyss; in turn, the Ishmaelites profitably resold the young man they bought on the banks of the Nile and, therefore, also achieved their goal. Neither one nor the other was aware that by achieving their goals they were contributing to some higher goal, and in particular for the brothers this higher goal was even undesirable, even if they were aware of it. Having shown extreme inhumanity towards their brother, they most of all, of course, wanted to never meet him again, much less in such conditions under which they would be dependent on him. And yet that’s exactly what happened. By selling Joseph to the Ishmaelites, they unconsciously fulfilled the highest will of Providence, which sent its chosen race to Egypt, so that there, having been brought up in the depths of the most civilized people in the world (and without fear of merging with it, because the Egyptians were strongly alienated from all other peoples as unclean), it could grow into a whole people, in order to then take its world-historical position in humanity as a light for it. Of course, God, as the omnipotent controller of the destinies of individuals and peoples, could achieve this goal directly - he commanded, for example. Jacob to move to Egypt. But then the omnipotence of God would act in a directly suppressive manner and the historical process would be simply mechanical. Meanwhile, in reality, the event took place in such a way that in it private human goals, achieved by a person’s own self-determination, led to a higher goal completely freely, and therefore the historical process in this case takes on a moral character. And only such a process can be called completely historical, in contrast to a mechanical process - in an inanimate or animate, but unreasonable world. The superiority of the moral process over the mechanical process lies in the fact that it is precisely an educational system. After all, the essence and task of education is to give a person the opportunity to deviate from the highest goal, thereby providing him with the opportunity to experience the results of his actions, and in the end, leading a person to a certain goal, to give him the full opportunity to evaluate his previous actions from a higher moral point of view and thus subject them to the impartial judgment of both his own conscience and history. One can imagine what a great lesson Joseph’s brothers learned from all the vicissitudes of their meeting with their once sold brother, when he appeared before them as the great ruler of a powerful monarchy, how loudly their conscience spoke in them, reproducing before them the atrocity they had once committed: it was not for nothing that they feared afterward that Joseph might take it into his head to take revenge on them (Gen. L, 15) for the evil that had once been done to him. But Joseph, in his answer to them, solemnly expressed the principle of the historical process from the highest providential point of view when he said to them: “Do not be afraid; for I fear God. Behold, you have plotted evil against me; but God turned this evil into good to accomplish what it is now: to preserve the lives of a great number of people” (vv. 19, 20). The last expression has a particularly significant meaning: by selling Joseph, the brothers thereby committed something like killing him - at least for themselves and their father; and yet this bloodless murder ultimately led to the fact that through it, the lives of not only the brothers themselves were saved during the famine, but also the lives of an entire people in Egypt - during the famous seven-year famine. Of course, in order for this great result to be achieved, a whole series of intermediate events had to take place, which from a certain point of view seem completely random. In fact, it may seem coincidental that when the brothers were wondering how to get rid of Joseph, a caravan of Ishmael merchants appeared on the horizon, which gave the brothers the idea to take advantage of this opportunity. By accident, apparently, the Ishmaelites sold Joseph to the court dignitary Potiphar, in whose house he had to meet with a mistress of dubious morality, who, moreover, after a certain failure in achieving her goal, slandered an innocent young man and, of course, with the heartless malice of a woman deceived in her low calculations, insisted that Potiphar subject him to merciless punishment, depriving him of his freedom through imprisonment. All this is apparently accidental, and from a simple human point of view there is nothing providential about it. But, as Bossuet says, what in our eyes is an accident is in reality the intention of a higher Reason 40. And indeed, if we take this fact in its entirety, we will see how all these accidents formed an amazing chain of facts that necessarily led to the final goal that was in mind. After all, if the Ishmael caravan had not shown up on that very day, the brothers’ embitterment could have led directly to the murder of Joseph. Then, if the Ishmaelites had sold Joseph not to Potiphar, but to some ordinary Egyptian, the entire subsequent series of events would not have happened: Joseph would not have met the voluptuous mistress, would not have been thrown into a privileged prison, would not have met there with the disgraced dignitaries of Pharaoh, would not have interpreted their dreams, he would not have been brought to the attention of Pharaoh, he would not would have become the minister of Egypt, would not have made grain reserves during the harvests and would have died during the ensuing famine, and with him his brothers, his elderly father and the mass of the Egyptian people would have died. If all this happened just the opposite, then all these accidents clearly indicate that they were based on a higher Reasonable force, which was able to reconcile what at a simple glance seems to be an accident with what even at a simple glance already turns out to be a reasonable necessity. And this force, of course, is nothing more than the providential will of God, which directed everything towards a predetermined goal in a way that did not in any way affect the personal self-determination of the people acting in this complex event. To assert after this that a simple game of chance took place here (as any theory that does not recognize the idea of ​​Providence must assert) would mean to assert that from clay taken at random and thrown into the air some artistic sculptural work could someday “accidentally” be formed. Through exactly the same series of accidents, the liberation of the chosen people who grew up on the banks of the Nile took place from Egyptian slavery. In fact, the people who were intended to be the bearer of the great truth of redemption for its dissemination among humanity apparently perished in Egypt: the cruel despotism of the pharaohs invented more and more new burdens in order to undermine the strength of the young people, crush their vitality and turn them into their eternal free slave. There was even a bloodthirsty law issued about the death of all newborn boys, and of course only the hopeless despair of Amram and Jochebed prompted them with the idea - to put their newborn boy son in a basket and lower it into the river in a thicket of papyrus reeds - so that if he were to die, it would be better for him to die a death unknown to them than to be killed in front of his parents. And of course, this poor boy could have died from many deaths: he could have been drenched in water, suffocated in diapers, or finally devoured by the first crocodile that happened to be nearby; but none of this happened, but what happened was that the poor boy was found by the king’s daughter, who took pity on him, adopted him and gave him a brilliant education, “initiating him in all the wisdom of Egypt” (Acts VII, 22). And since this boy was none other than Moses, the great liberator and legislator of the people, who, in order to accomplish his great work, had to personally confront the Pharaoh and fight with the most learned priests and sages of Egypt, then this whole series of accidents clearly reveals the rational will underlying them, directing everything towards a certain reasonable goal. This rationality of the will is especially clearly revealed in the fact that the miraculous coincidence of these accidents did not occur in the life of anyone else, but namely Moses. And other parents probably resorted to all sorts of methods to save the lives of their newborn babies, but not one of them was adopted by the daughter of Pharaoh; and even if one of them were adopted or even somehow accepted at court, still, not possessing the indestructible originality of the genius nature of Moses, he would easily turn into an ambitious courtier, for whom personal interests would be above everything in the world, he would become ashamed of his origin from a pitiful and despised people, he would completely renounce him and, of course, he would become a court flatterer or a high-society zero, and not a great savior of the people and the wisest legislator in the world. If here, too, simple chance was at work, and not the all-wise Reason, which knows how to create a harmonious plan for world government from a random kaleidoscope of facts, to assume this means to assume that St. Isaac’s Cathedral could be accidentally formed from a random volcanic shaking of granite mountains... We take these examples from Biblical history, because this history more clearly depicts the ways of God's Providence in the destinies of man than the history of any other people. But parallel facts can be pointed out from the history of other nations. At the same time, first of all, it should be noted that the action of Providence is by no means limited only to the chosen people. It extends to all humanity, although not to the same extent. Just as the sun, illuminating the entire earth, pours out all its warming and illuminating power onto some countries, while allowing others to use only the reflection of weak and indirect rays, so the Providence of God does not extend its guiding action equally, but to the extent that a certain people stands closer to the center of spiritual truth, to the sun of religious truth, without leaving, however, without the highest help in achieving the highest good, not a single people in the history of mankind. Sound theological thought has never denied the position that the pagan peoples, who fell away from the true God and served idols in their blindness, were not completely abandoned by God, and Providence also led them, albeit in different ways, along the paths of error to the common goal of humanity. The difference between them and the chosen people was only that the pagan peoples, as those who had voluntarily fallen away from God, were left more to their own devices in order to fully discover what apostasy could lead to, in order to drink to the bottom the bitter cup of their sinful passions, to experience by experience all the helplessness of man in the state of his abandonment by God, and as a result of this, consciously and with a feeling of deep moral repentance, come again to searching with his own mind for that God who was once rejected by him. And the entire history of the ancient pagan world provides striking proof of this. The distinctive feature of this world was precisely that it was a world of purely human development. It consisted of peoples who rejected faith in the true God and, in their pride, decided to live without God, believing that their own human strength was quite sufficient to achieve the goals of earthly life. Since, as a result of this, they had to rely only on themselves and on their own initiative, it was from here that culture first began among them - in the sense of man’s struggle with nature and its forces. Typical representatives of such a cultural generation were Cain before the flood and Ham after it. As people who had renounced all the lofty ideals of life, they, and after them all the peoples descended from them, began to live only for themselves, for their earthly goals. Personal or national egoism became their god, which they served with all their hearts. The entire history of the ancient pagan world represents precisely the service of this personal or national egoism. We constantly see with what persistence the ancient pagan peoples strive to achieve their earthly goals, satisfy their earthly needs, fully develop their strengths and achieve what they recognized as their national purpose. The Egyptians with amazing persistence developed their purely material culture and did not spare millions of lives in order to create those grandiose monuments of human industriousness, which, under the name of pyramids, are still the subject of wonder to peoples. With the same persistence, the Assyrians waged merciless wars, subjugating the peoples of Western Asia by force of arms. The Phoenicians used all the power of their national genius to develop trade and made the calf out of gold, which was their main deity. The Greeks, distinguished from nature by their sense of beauty and the gift of speculation, developed this ideal of theirs, treating all other peoples with contempt, as barbarians unworthy of the name of people. The Romans saw the whole goal of life in conquest and spent all their national genius on its implementation, sparing no sacrifices. Each of them (as well as each of the other unlisted peoples) strived with all their might to satisfy only their national goals, believing that this satisfaction was the ultimate goal of their existence. That each people, in addition to its national goals, also had a universal mission, that each of them had to work for all of humanity, the ancient peoples had no idea about this, and the very idea was alien to them. Although some philosophers at times glimmered through the idea of ​​the brotherhood of peoples, it had no practical significance and was actually trampled upon by the philosophers themselves 41 . Thus, the entire history of these peoples, by its very nature, should present only a picture of disparate goals, constantly colliding with each other and mutually suppressed - in purely selfish calculations. The struggle for existence, the most merciless and often terrible, was the main driving motive of their lives, and brute force triumphed over all its best and loftiest goals. In view of this main motive, one might expect that the ancient world would present a bleak picture of the mutual devouring of peoples, and its entire history would end in mutual destruction, with the destruction of everything that could have been developed by more ideal, but powerless representatives of humanity. But in reality, this story does not represent such bleak chaos. On the contrary, we see that although individual peoples pursued exclusively their national interests, at the same time each of them unconsciously worked for another, higher goal. Some higher will invisibly guided them so that, according to their consciousness, they worked only for themselves and achieved only their goals, at the same time they worked for all of humanity and achieved its highest ideal goal. Now it can no longer be seriously disputed that the entire history of the ancient world represented a preparation for Christianity, and the efforts of peoples were unconsciously directed towards this very goal. The Assyrians, for example, while waging their bloodthirsty wars, of course only had in mind the satisfaction of their greed and predation; but at the same time, for the first time, by force of arms, they began to bring together and unite hitherto completely separated peoples, and in this regard they were already working in the interests of humanity. The Egyptians also developed material culture and developed their wisdom, of course, only for themselves, as a result of which they even avoided the entire world around them in every possible way. But this culture, however, became a universal property, since the surrounding peoples, out of greed or envy, sought to take advantage of its fruits; formidable warriors plundered Egypt and took with them huge masses of treasures, which formed the basis for the material development of their own countries. The Phoenicians traded out of their national interests, and meanwhile, serving as trade intermediaries between distant and alienated peoples, they paved the way for unity between them, brought them closer to each other, aroused competition in productivity and promoted general mental development. What enormous significance these greedy and, in general, extremely unscrupulous traders had for a universal human purpose (they enjoyed such a bad reputation among all ancient peoples) is shown by the fact that these very traders were the first to develop (from Egyptian or Babylonian signs, this is still an unresolved question in science) an alphabet that formed the basis of the alphabets of the entire civilized world. The rapprochement of peoples, begun by the conquerors and continued by the traders, needed a more solid basis, corresponding to the nobler aspirations of the peoples, and this basis was developed by the Greeks, who, possessing a high artistic sense and the power of philosophical thinking, developed an expressive, harmonious and precise language, capable of expressing the deepest shades of thought and feeling, and created the deepest philosophy, capable of embracing the most sublime truth. They developed their mental treasures only for themselves, seeing in them the pride and glory of their national genius and considering other peoples incapable of them. But this national egoism was destroyed by Alexander the Great, who, again guided by a purely national task - to take revenge on the Persians, undertook a great campaign in Asia, and this campaign was of enormous importance for the spread of Hellenism in all its forms among the peoples of this vast continent. The Greek language and Greek literature became fashionable throughout the educated world, and any thought embodied in Greek form could quickly become the property of all educated, reading humanity throughout the East. The West still remained on the sidelines, but it too was soon introduced into the universal family of nations. There the Roman people appeared and with miraculous speed developed extraordinary power - a people who valued the external legal order above all else in the world. And it was precisely this external legal order that was now most needed by the world, which had reached a high degree of culture, but had not developed universal human law and, divided into unequal political groups, was waging a terrible self-destructive war. And so the Roman eagle, flapping its mighty wings, set out to conquer the world, and after several centuries the den of robbers on the banks of the Tiber grew into the world capital. All peoples, both the civilized east and the still barbaric west, bowed before this eagle and submitted to the legal order he introduced everywhere, by virtue of which all mutually destructive wars ceased and peace was established everywhere. Having brought Greece within the boundaries of its conquest, subjugating it to its weapons, Rome itself was captivated by its culture and thus joined the universal culture. And in this exact way, the ancient world came to the point that it was all united both spiritually and politically: all the boundaries that had previously divided the world, which served as an obstacle to the mutual communication of peoples, were now eliminated; every word in Greek could be spread throughout the world and every preacher, using the rights of Roman citizenship, could travel freely throughout all countries, taking advantage of the excellent military roads on land and the regular voyages of ships at sea. It is clear that only a conscious will could, out of the chaos of international egoistic relations, create such wonderful conditions for the spread of truth, and when the lies of the pagan worldview itself were revealed by philosophers who undermined faith in the gods and created a spiritual void in the people, which they longed to fill with the truth, then it was in a remote corner of despised Judea that the One who was the truth and the light of the world was born, and prepared the nations bowed down before Him with reverence. Thus, we see how the purely national, egoistic goals of individual pagan peoples of antiquity served in the hands of a higher will as a means of preparing the ancient world for Christianity as a universal goal. To achieve this goal, of course, many different means were required, and these means always turned out to be extremely expedient, even in those cases when they apparently should have had just the opposite meaning. In fact, what apparently has in common between a war undertaken out of a purely national feeling of vengeance and the unification of peoples on the basis of a common highly developed culture? Meanwhile, this was exactly the result of the Greek hero’s campaign into the depths of Asia - against the Persians. The Romans, of course, were primarily guided in their aggressive activity by a thirst for power and greed - motives that were completely unsuitable for establishing peace on earth; Meanwhile, their conquests led to the unification of all peoples under one legal order, which truly brought peace to the earth. There are many such examples that could be cited, and they show how the highest will knows how to use even means that are completely contrary to it to achieve its goal. Then, in the very process of this enormous preparatory work, there are moments when the whole fate of the world, so to speak, hung in the balance, and if something had happened differently, the entire further course of history could, and according to human reasoning, should have taken a completely different direction. In fact, Alexander the Great’s campaign in Asia was decisive for the triumph of Greek culture in the world; and yet this campaign might not have been carried out if one insignificant accident had not happened, namely if in 337, during his wedding feast, Philip of Macedon had not slipped and fallen. During this feast, as is known, Philip, irritated with his then-grown son Alexander, rushed at him with a drawn sword and undoubtedly would have stabbed him, but from an impetuous movement he slipped and fell, and this incident saved the life of the greatest hero in the world 42. But if this insignificant accident saved the world from the greatest genius, which was so necessary for achieving a great world goal, then another accident prematurely took him away from history. This accident was a premature death, which, as we know, killed him at the age of 32, when he, having just completed his conquest of the world, began to build a plan for the founding of a world monarchy. His death was mourned more than once by both ancient and modern historians, who rightly pointed to this terrible enemy, who very often slays people with his scythe at the very moment when they, having achieved the goal of their life, are thinking of taking advantage of the fruits of their terrible efforts. If Alexander had not died at such an early age, he would certainly have completed the work he had undertaken, would have founded a powerful monarchy, which he would have handed over intact to his successor. The entire subsequent story could have taken a completely different direction. But death destroyed all possibilities with one blow - and if you look carefully at the course of historical events, then this was in all respects for the better for humanity. In fact, if Alexander had really founded a universal monarchy, then this monarchy, as consisting mainly of the countries of the East, would necessarily have become despotic - with its usual arbitrariness and lack of justice; even if the Greek element had triumphed in it, even then the Greek incapacity for political organization would have manifested itself in full force and an endless confusion of political passions, intrigues and rivalries between its separate areas would have begun. Finally, politically united Hellenism would necessarily meet with Rome, the East would collide with the West, and from this collision of two great conquerors the foundations of the world would be shaken and many cities and entire nations would perish during the gigantic struggle. All these disasters were eliminated by one accident - the death of Alexander, and as a result of this everything happened exactly as it should have happened according to the plan of the historical movement: the grandiose plan of the eastern world monarchy collapsed, Alexander's successors divided among themselves the great spoils of the brilliant conqueror, weakened themselves extremely, and feeling their political and military insignificance, they no longer set themselves any aggressive plans, but placed their honor in what was unconscious, but the main thing Alexander's task was to become passionate admirers and spreaders of Greek culture, which they introduced everywhere. When they thus completed the work of Hellenism, then Rome could, without any difficulty, often just by fear of its name, introduce them into the sphere of its world monarchy with its legal order, which was supposed to establish human justice on earth, as a preparation for the manifestation of divine truth. “At last there was another great moment in this trial, when the fate of the world hung in the balance. It was in 216 that a life and death struggle was taking place between Rome and Carthage. Carthage, in the person of its military genius Hannibal, apparently gained an advantage, and Rome stood on the brink of destruction. Had he taken one more step, Rome would have perished, and with it the entire Roman civilization would have perished; the civilizing people who established the principles of their rights throughout Western Europe, by which it largely lives to this day, would be swept away from the world-historical field; its semi-savage peoples would have become slaves of Carthage, which would have introduced into them the destructive poison of its commercial exploitation, its dishonest policies and its immoral, corrupting cult. In a word, the entire fate of the Western world would change radically. But this did not happen - and simply because the Carthaginians themselves, in their incomprehensible blindness, because of their party accounts, did not give adequate reinforcements to their victorious hero in time, and thereby saved the great Western civilizer, and dug a historical grave for themselves. Truly, one can say with Bossuet that “God from the heights of heaven holds in His hands the reins of all kingdoms,” and when He wants to overthrow a kingdom, He blinds human wisdom and confuses its advice, so that the peoples themselves uncontrollably strive for their destruction 43 . But if in the pagan world a higher will made itself felt with such obviousness, directing everything towards one specific goal, subordinating to it the private goals of individual peoples, then it becomes all the more understandable that this same will appears even more clearly in the history of the chosen people. The idea of ​​chosenness is completely incomprehensible from the point of view of natural reason, which tries to see in history only a process of natural forces and accidents, a simple necessary evolution. Meanwhile, history presents us with the actual fact of a chosen people, who, occupying a completely special position in the world and even among their own race, being a completely insignificant people from the ordinary worldly point of view, who did not create either their own culture or their own philosophy, nevertheless at the moment exercised on humanity such an influence, before which the influence of the greatest peoples of the pagan world pales. In fact, to the ordinary eye they are a completely strange people. He occupied the most insignificant corner of the globe, shunned all the surrounding peoples, was at enmity even with his fellow tribesmen who spoke the same language with him (like the Moabites, etc.), was the subject of contempt and reproach among the great cultural peoples, who looked at him only as an evil and misanthropic people, incapable of anything and devoted to the most absurd superstitions and abominations. Politically, he (with the exception of the short period of the first three kings) was so weak that he never played an independent role in international relations, and was always just a pathetic toy in the hands of the great surrounding monarchies - a buffer behind which the cunning pharaoh especially loved to hide in the fight against Assyro-Babylonia, bringing him under those formidable blows that were intended for Egypt itself. These were the people - like the stepson of history, beaten down by fate. The world's conquerors, treating his insignificance with contempt, did not even deign to honor him with their arrogant attention, and casually giving him a contemptuous push from one side or another, did not care at all about the arrangement of his fate, but on the contrary, when it turned out to be necessary to eliminate him completely, they took him captive in order to populate some uncultivated wastelands with him and drown him in a sea of ​​​​other nations. The Romans looked at the Jews as the scum of humanity, and not considering them suitable even to be useful as slaves, with contempt, for the most insignificant payment, they released those captives whom Pompey brought to Rome. In a word, a people whose very existence, from the everyday view, was a strange mistake of history, like the mistake that nature sometimes makes when it creates some useless and therefore superfluous species of living beings (like flies or mosquitoes). This is how the simple theory of evolutionism looks at it, and cannot look at it any other way, believing that the entire historical process is the result of blind necessity. And yet, one has only to look from a different, higher point of view - from that point of view from which not only is there nothing superfluous and aimless in history, but not even a hair from one’s head falls in vain, and what seemed strange and purposeless receives the deepest, amazingly purposeful meaning that illuminates the entire history of mankind. The idea of ​​chosenness from this point of view is a logically necessary phenomenon in history. After all, if humanity was to achieve its goal, namely the highest good in the sense of union with God, then in any case it had to have among itself an embryo from which a plan of salvation could logically develop. Pagan peoples, as those who had fallen away from God and forgotten Him, by the attraction of their passions and the guidance of their perverted minds, naturally tended to go further and further along the same path of alienation from God, and their minds were no longer able to recreate for themselves the lost positive ideal of the highest good, and could only lead to a consciousness of the need for it in a negative way. Therefore, it was necessary to give a counterbalance to this sinful development, and it was given precisely in the person of the chosen people, who, being placed in the midst of it and having a positive ideal in their revealed books, in their divine law, could always serve as a living exposure of pagan error and, so to speak, a shining beacon indicating the normal path of historical development. The chosen people, according to the successful comparison of the famous thinker-theologian, were the same in the history of mankind as conscience is in the life of each individual person - namely, a modest witness of truth among the errors of the pagan world 44. Just as the conscience inside a person constantly raises its voice against moral error, opposing it to the law as a norm of development, so the chosen people had to serve as a clear exposer of the darkness of pagan error, as a result of which they were the subject of contempt and hatred on the part of the proud pagans, who involuntarily felt in them a silent exposer of their untruth. As such, it was a necessary moment in the historical education of mankind, and its entire history is surprisingly adapted to this purpose. In fact, the very corner inhabited by this people was wonderfully adapted to its historical mission. Palestine, by its geographical position, occupied a central place among the ancient civilized world, almost literally representing the navel of the earth, and in its mountain gorges and valleys the people could live in alienation from the entire surrounding world, although at the same time, when the time came for communication with this world, it lay at hand: there were Egypt with its centuries-old wisdom, and Assyro-Babylonia with their magnificent culture, and Phenicia with its ships, ready to carry preachers of the true faith even to the ends of the earth, and Greece with its rich science and philosophy. And that’s why, when a historical movement towards mutual communication began among peoples, each of them, willy-nilly or not, in one way or another had to come into contact or encounter this people and, if necessary, become acquainted with its life and law, with its kings and its spiritual exponents - the prophets, who early began to spread their activities beyond the borders of Palestine. Elijah and Elisha had already visited the surrounding countries, and Jonah with his preaching shook the pride of even arrogant Nineveh, before which the world trembled. And when the pagan world had already so outlived its own beginnings that it began to feel spiritual emptiness, then the chosen people had to loudly proclaim before them the truth they preserved, and the most unexpected events led to this preaching to the world, apparently having no connection with the preaching mission. Of course, the great Assyro-Babylonian warriors, relocating the despicable people they had completely conquered, did not have in mind any higher goals other than the goals of their politics and greed; and the conquered people themselves saw in their political captivity only the wrath of God for their many sins. But in reality, everything was directed towards a higher goal and miraculously contributed to it. The time had come when the pagan peoples had to become more closely acquainted with the true religion, and just at that time the formidable warriors began with their mighty hand to scatter the chosen people across different countries, where they became an involuntary missionary of their faith. From the time of the Babylonian captivity, the chosen people literally became a worldwide people, spreading the network of their missionary work throughout the civilized world and having access to all spheres of life - from the poor hut of a villager and artisan to the proud palaces of kings and Caesars. And since the painful spiritual and moral emptiness that had formed as a result of the destruction of popular pagan beliefs by philosophy, merciless in its criticism, which exposed all the insignificance of the so-called gods, was already beginning to be felt everywhere, the peoples began to listen with superstitious fear to the preaching of a strange people who believed in some single, mysterious God. When the genius of Alexander the Great united the eastern peoples on the basis of the Greek language and culture, it thereby prepared the possibility that the Greek translation of the Bible could become accessible to all those who wished to become acquainted with the faith of the chosen people in its original source. And when they got acquainted, to their amazement they found in his faith exactly what their own souls longed for - the idea of ​​a personal, infinitely omnipotent, all-righteous and infinitely loving God, whose boundless heart is capable of embracing the whole world with its love. And even more than that. The ancient peoples, having lost faith in their gods, also lost faith in a better future. They languished under the languid weight of moral emptiness and worthlessness, and the darkest despair tormented the souls of even the greatest thinkers, who finally saw no salvation in anything from the misery and emptiness of earthly life except in suicide 45 . And it is clear that in the midst of this suicidal despondency, the idea preached by the chosen people sounded like a truly sweet gospel, that the world should not perish yet, that God himself should soon come to earth in order to free the nations from the yoke of sinfulness that weighs on them and bring them all into his kingdom, where there will no longer be either Jew or Greek, slave or free, but there will be one great brotherhood based on truth and love. That is why the rumor spread with miraculous speed throughout the Roman Empire, noted even by Roman historians and poets, that a great king would rise from insignificant Judea, before whom Caesar himself would fall into insignificance. And then, in response to the intense expectation of the peoples, Christ, the Savior of the world, really appeared, and His appearance was the completion of the entire history of ancient mankind. Thus ended the historical process of the ancient world, which, despite all the deviations from its intended goal, in the end, in both of its halves, striving for completely different goals and walking along completely different roads, came to the same goal, which was precisely the goal of humanity and the goal of God. The ways of God are so wondrous and inscrutable. Evolutionism, of course, can object to this that the entire process outlined is only a subjective construction of the mind, and not an objective plan, and that the ways of God are called inscrutable because they are inaccessible to the study of the finite human mind 46 . But this objection is based on a complete misunderstanding. Of course, the ways of God are inscrutable and no philosophy of history is able to comprehend the full depth of the wisdom of Providence, which often acts in history according to motives hidden from man. A striking example of this is the story of Job, who, despite all his righteousness, experienced a series of terrible trials and calamities that did not have any sufficient basis for themselves in the eyes of either himself or the people around him, so that the latter, lost in conjecture about the reason for them, came to the completely false conviction that Job deserved all this calamity by some grave secret sin. Meanwhile, it turned out that the reason for this plight of the righteous lay far beyond the logic of human events, in those higher spheres where eternal truth reigns, which made the righteous a means of the triumph of truth over primordial lies 47. And of course, if this secret had not been revealed, human logic would have been lost in groundless guesses. But the fact of the matter is that Providence, leading humanity towards a certain goal, but hides this guidance, but on the contrary - when dealing with rational, morally free beings, every now and then reveals its will to them, letting it be understood through the voice of conscience, through special great messengers or great people, through instructive tests of the life field. There has never been a people who consciously strived for evil or did not try to understand the higher will from the trials of their lives. Therefore, history for every people, as a book of experience, always serves as a source of practical edification and understanding of what is the highest good for the people and the highest goal of its purpose. Only on the basis of history, of course, did the Roman poet describe with such amazing accuracy the mission of the Roman people when he said that its purpose was to “rule nations” 48, and in this sense, history was a true revelation of the divine will for the Roman people, which was brilliantly confirmed in reality. With the same amazing accuracy, the prophets defined the mission of the chosen people - “to be a light for the nations” 49, and it also found justification in the actual fate of this people. If in this way a higher will is revealed in the history of each people, indicating the goal to which this or that people should strive, and, consequently, the plan of its historical movement is determined, then by simple logic it turns out that the history of all peoples taken together can and should serve as a manifestation or revelation of the highest will of Providence regarding the goal of the aspiration of all mankind, and the plan itself is determined in accordance with the goal. And this plan is so clear in its general outlines that it is not for nothing that it has become an axiom in historical science, so that even those minds who have a clear interest in reducing the entire world-historical process to the soil of a purely natural and, therefore, accidental development of mankind cannot free themselves from it in their historical concept 50 . If the plan that constitutes a logical conclusion from such tangible historical facts is a subjective construction, then in this case one can despair for any logic at all and at least for the possibility of distinguishing between what is subjective and what can be called objective. And in any case, evolutionism, even in its stripped-down form, in which it appears in the theory of Prof. N.I. Kareev, does not at all provide greater objectivity in his view of history, although he refuses the possibility of constructing any kind of historical plan and does not even recognize any historical laws 51. For every unprejudiced mind, the existence in history of an intelligent omnipotent will, directing everything towards a definite goal and everywhere manifesting a wonderful chain of adapted means to achieve the intended ends, has a much more real meaning and, therefore, is distinguished by a more objective character than the assumption of some half-conscious gravitation of all existence along the path of progress - towards the achievement of some unattainable balance of forces 52 . Chapter V. The paths of God's Providence in the destinies of modern humanity. The ancient world found its completion in the phenomenon of Christianity. What the pagan peoples unconsciously strived for, and the chosen people consciously strived for, has been fulfilled. The union of the Divine with humanity took place and in the person of the God-Man appeared both the Redeemer of the sinful human race from the yoke of death and the most perfect example of morality. At the same time, a new factor was introduced into history, which did not exist in ancient times - namely, saving grace, as a force that directly influences the will and puts a person on a straight path to the conscious achievement of a clearly stated goal - the achievement of the kingdom of God. This factor has shifted the center of gravity in human consciousness. If previously, under the pressure of the yoke of sinfulness, the human will had a greater inclination towards alienation from God, now the inclination towards union with Him began to predominate in it, as a result of which, if in ancient times the chosen people were weak and insignificant, lost almost among the vast masses of pagan peoples, now the Christian world, constituting a direct continuation of the chosen people, stands at the head of humanity, and the activities of its missionaries literally embrace the entire globe, sooner or later bow before the Cross. But although the center of gravity in the consciousness of the new world has shifted in favor of the more active striving of humanity for the highest good, this has not at all changed the general plan of moral world governance, and both before and now humanity is the subject of loving guidance and education on the part of Providence. A Christian, in comparison not only with a pagan, but also with a Jew, is a much more morally mature person, as a result of which the educational approach towards her should have changed significantly; but since traces of the former discord remain in this mature personality, the flesh still wars against the spirit and at every step temptations subject even sanctified and redeemed freedom to a severe test, then higher educational leadership is necessary even now, and it constitutes the same essence of the historical process as before. Looking over the past centuries of modern Christian history, we see that although this world is not yet finished and, therefore, without presenting the final results, at the same time it does not make it possible to more or less fully embrace the plan of its development, however, in what has already happened, one cannot help but see the amazing guidance of Providence, directing everything towards a specific goal. His ways in this regard are also inscrutable, and some phenomena obviously constitute the secret of the highest economy, which is impossible for the limited human mind to penetrate. Such a mystery, for example, is represented by the phenomenon that huge groups of peoples with a highly developed, unique culture, such as China and India, remained aloof from Christianity, that many already Christian peoples were cut off from the body of the church by the sword of a false prophet, whose banner proudly flies where the cross once stood, that the Christian world itself fell apart into communities hostile to each other, exhausting their strength through mutual rivalry, that the Orthodox Church itself a significant part of it has bore and still bears the yoke of the false prophet and is often torn apart by heresies and schisms, and many other similar phenomena. All this, in a certain respect, is the mystery of God’s economy, and no mind can penetrate the advice of Providence, just as it could not penetrate the mystery of the cause of the suffering of righteous Job, which surpassed any possibility of logical thinking about it. Over time, when we, freed from the sensory limitations of our nature, come face to face with the very source of truth, all the secrets of historical economy will of course be revealed to us in their entirety. But now our knowledge is limited, we know even tangible objects only as if through a mirror of fortune-telling, never being able to penetrate to the thing in itself; still less can the secrets of God’s Providence in the historical destinies of mankind be accessible to us in their entirety. But even with our current knowledge, we can still, with the help of historical contemplation, partly understand the expediency of even such phenomena that apparently stand in direct contradiction with the general plan of the historical movement. It is not our task to give a complete presentation of this plan, 53 and for us it will be completely sufficient to note only some of its outstanding features. And first of all, we can point to the self-evident fact that the modern Christian world, being more mature, enjoys in its life activity much greater freedom of self-determination than the ancient chosen people, who in essence were under the yoke of the law, which determined its entire life - down to the smallest detail. This is obviously the highest level of the educational process. In accordance with this stage of maturity, the person being brought up is given more opportunities to draw lessons for himself from his own everyday trials on his own, since it is precisely this upbringing that deeply captures the whole being of a person than external instructions and rules. And the whole of Christian history is precisely a continuous series of similar educational trials for mankind, which usually end in a deep and fruitful lesson for him. Thus, already from the first centuries of Christianity we are faced with the fact that, abusing freedom, the masses of Christians deviated from the truth of the Gospel and fell into all kinds of sectarian nonsense, inevitably accompanied by extreme licentiousness and a decline in morality. But this sad experience immediately caused a reaction, and its fruitful result was that the essence of Christian doctrine was precisely and in detail defined at the ecumenical councils. When, however, the ecumenical councils were not able to curb the ecclesiastical and speculative willfulness of the peoples who had not yet been sufficiently imbued with the spirit of the Gospel, and throughout the entire East the pernicious religious and moral ferment continued, manifested in the multitude of sects that arose and disappeared, which boldly tore apart the church and abused freedom, then a stronger measure turned out to be necessary. To cleanse the church from the sectarian and moral filth that had accumulated in it, a scourge was needed, which, in the person of the false prophet, accomplished its cleansing work. Just as a storm clears a stagnant atmosphere, so Islam, sweeping like a storm throughout the East, cleansed the Christian world of the miasma that had accumulated in it, absorbing into itself all the elements unsuitable for the church. At the same time, Islam, representing a new form of legal yoke, was, as it were, deliberately created in order to represent by its very existence the deepest contrast to Christianity, clearly demonstrating all its advantages as a kingdom of freedom 54. From this educational and providential point of view, the disintegration of Christianity into communities hostile to each other also becomes understandable. The origin of various religious forms is sufficiently explained partly by the inability of the human mind, in its alienation from the authority of faith, to embrace the truth of Christianity in its entirety and partly by the abuse of Christian freedom - in the preference of national and cultural interests to the interest of universal truth 55. From this side, dividing Christianity in this way is evil, or at least an expression of spiritual weakness. But from a higher point of view, it is not without deep meaning and is one of the essential elements in the education of Christian self-awareness. In each of the main faiths, one of the aspects of Christianity was especially expressed, and as a result could receive such a development that it could not have had in the absence of division. In fact, in Roman Catholicism, the external legal side of Christianity developed with extraordinary force to such an extent that the Roman Church, during the period of its highest development, could, by purely external authority, restrain and suppress the crudest passions of wild and civilized barbarians, and thereby undoubtedly rendered an enormous service to modern culture, unanimously recognized by historians. On the other hand, Protestantism, being a necessary counterbalance to the excessive development of the papacy, had its own special educational significance. The internal speculative side of Christianity especially developed in it, and in those periods when the Orthodox East froze in its mental life under the terrible oppression of Islam, and the Roman Catholic West under the increasingly overwhelming authority of the papacy, Christian speculation freely developed in the Protestant world and, although it deviated from the strict principles of universal Christianity, despite this it provided the richest food for spiritual Christian life and the fruits of Protestant theology Even Orthodox peoples have used and continue to use it, especially in the fight against Roman Catholicism. At the same time, both Western faiths, representing two extreme opposites in the understanding of Christianity and therefore two one-sidedness, must of necessity wage a constant struggle, and from this polemical struggle the one-sidedness of both of them is logically revealed, the need to find a comprehensive synthesis for them, and this synthesis for any serious and impartial mind turns out to be a view identical with Orthodoxy, as is reflected in many of the latest works and even entire movements like the Old Catholic 56. Hence, Western faiths, each on their part promoting the development of Christian self-awareness, constitute educational steps towards understanding the incomparable treasure of universal Orthodoxy, for which at the same time they often serve as motivations that stimulate life activity. And more than once it turned out from experience that the Orthodox themselves were only just beginning to understand and appreciate Orthodoxy when they became acquainted with Western faiths and had the opportunity for comparison. And among Orthodox peoples, the vital activity of Orthodox thought and life has always been especially elevated in those periods when they had to come into close contact with heterodox peoples and defend themselves from their attacks, either with weapons in their hands, or with pen and ink, in the field of spiritual competition. The division of the Christian world then reflected another most important aspect of the providential education of humanity. Although the entire Christian world is the chosen one, a light for the pagan world, however, just as in the ancient chosen people there were special chosen ones who were more consistent with the idea of ​​election than the rest of the people, for whom they served as an example and reproof, so among Christian peoples the very idea of ​​education requires a special chosen one who would serve as the light and embodiment of the universal truth of Christianity in all its fullness. The Western peoples, although they remained essentially Christian, nevertheless to a large extent allowed themselves to be carried away by their earthly ideals, to which they sacrificed universal truth. As a result, they began to succeed more in the material earthly culture and the image of Christ for them too often began to be obscured by the idol of national interests. The very plan of education required setting up a counterweight to them - in the person of a people who would value Christ most of all in the world, even if this temporarily placed them below other peoples in the successes of earthly culture. What kind of people they are, only history can answer. But, of course, this is a people who embodies not the one-sided, but the universal truth of Christianity, namely the Orthodox people. And it is good for the people who, in time, understand their highest purpose in history, and with their free initiative will contribute to the goals of their election, and not renounce the highest calling entrusted to them - in the name of vague cosmopolitanism. The present world is in the process of education, and no one can say what awaits it in the future. But one thing undoubtedly strikes the observer of historical destinies, namely, that if Orthodoxy is the light of the Christian world, then the people who bear it had and have to experience the rod of punishing love and truth most of all. In fact, the Orthodox East with its peoples experienced historical adversity most of all, and while the Western peoples could live and develop freely, the Orthodox peoples languished under the heavy yoke of the Asian barbarians, who fell upon them with all their weight as the foremost guardians of the Christian world. For centuries, Orthodox Russia languished under the Mongol yoke, and for centuries, Orthodox Greece languished, and even now, in its main part, it is under the Turkish yoke, which also weighed heavily on the Balkan Slavs. No human logic is able to fully explain this mystery of providential economy in its entirety, and in this regard, the ways of God are inscrutable. But we are not left in complete ignorance, and already now one edge of the mystery has clearly been raised by history. And here, first of all, the great truth is revealed that God punishes, but loves him. His chosen ones are always subjected to the most difficult trials in human eyes, which nevertheless constitute a benefit both for them and for the whole world. The same thing was reflected in this fact. The Orthodox Byzantine Empire was subjected to the heavy yoke of Mohammed, who raised the crescent on the most majestic churches of Christianity and imposed a heavy yoke on the Orthodox peoples for entire centuries. It was certainly a great disaster. But if you look closer, it was not without very good results. Thus, after the conquest of Constantinople, escaping the cruel yoke of the barbarians, masses of Greek Orthodox scholars moved to the west and there, with their Orthodox learning, they fertilized the dead scholasticism of Latinism and undoubtedly contributed to that great revival of the sciences and arts, which led to the impulse of the Western world to throw off the yoke of Latinism and restore a purer Christianity, closer to the universal truth. This was a net boon for the Western world. But the disaster was not without its good, and, moreover, deeply important side, even for the Orthodox East itself. Under a heavy yoke, he stopped his spiritual development and began to guard the treasures of Orthodoxy entrusted to him with greater devotion. Alienated from relations with the West, he remained aloof from its harmful influence in many respects, became inaccessible to the encroachments of the papacy, and in complete integrity, just as Egyptian antiquity in all its integrity was preserved in stone tombs, preserved ancient Orthodoxy until the present time, when it is destined to again enter the field of world-historical life. Along with Orthodoxy, the Orthodox peoples of the Greco-Slavic world also retained their historical vitality, and of course it is not by chance that the amazing phenomenon that those of the Slavic peoples who for entire centuries languished under the heavy Turkish yoke are now again appearing in the field of world-historical life - free both politically and spiritually, while their Western brothers, who were not under this yoke, are now in political and spiritual slavery, in every way In this case, they have neither political nor religious independence, having been absorbed by the heterodox West 57. Even more strikingly, the same side of providential education appears in the fate of the Orthodox Russian people. In many respects, this is a long-suffering people in the full sense, and the rod of highest love and truth has often punished them in history with extraordinary severity. In the very flowering of his youthful strength, when everything apparently promised him a great and bright future, he was crushed and crushed by a wild Asian horde, which imposed its heavy yoke on him for entire centuries. A cry of despair spread throughout the Russian land and its wisest sons were at a loss about the mystery of the inscrutable ways of Providence, and to this day many historians see in the Mongol yoke nothing but great evil, which continues to affect life even now. Meanwhile, one has only to look at this disaster from another higher point of view, and everything will appear in a different light: the grave disaster will turn out to be a loving punishment that has brought wonderfully good and great fruits. In fact, the Mongol invasion caught the Russian people at the very moment when Slavic strife had brought them to the most disastrous political disunity, when the principalities were exhausting each other in endless civil strife and when dangerous attempts had already begun to interfere with foreigners in their internal affairs. It's clear what this could lead to. The heterodox West would not fail to lay its treacherous hand on these principalities, weakened by mutual enmity, and this would inevitably be followed by spiritual slavery, to which the Western Slavs were subjected. Then, undoubtedly, it was much better to give one’s forehead into slavery in order to save the soul, and the Russian people were plunged into such and such material slavery by the Mongols. Of course, the suffering of the Orthodox Russian people was severe, and the cry of the chroniclers, mourning the smoking ruins of cities and villages, cannot help but touch the hearts even now. And yet, out of this great disaster came great good. Under severe testing, discord ceased, Rus' began to gather itself, found a stable center of gravity in Moscow, and more and more drawing its popular forces towards this center, it grew into a powerful state, before which the Western peoples stopped in amazement and Islam trembled. Russia has become exactly what it is now, i.e., a powerful guardian of the universal truth of Christianity, while the Russian people, being the bearer of universal truth in their church life, begins to reveal in the face of the world strength and power that arouse the involuntary surprise of the heterodox West, which is becoming obsolete in its one-sidedness. The above facts constitute only a few pages from the great book of history, which reveals to us the destinies of peoples and all mankind. But they are also enough to see that it is not the blind forces of necessity that govern history, which in this case would turn into a dead, soulless mechanism, aimlessly reproducing and mercilessly crushing the individuals and peoples that float to the surface. No, the Providence of God reigns in it, which with its truth and love embraces the whole world, for which not only kings and peoples are dear, but each individual person is the subject of His loving care, so that in the true sense of the word, not a hair from his head falls in vain. From this point of view, all of humanity, to use the term bl. Augustine, there is Civitas Dei, the city of God, in which, with a miraculous sequence that is only possible only in the relation of the personal Supreme Being to personal beings, everything represents a chain of mutually limiting goals, finally merging into a general synthesis, which is the agreement of the will of humanity with the will of God, there is an ideal that sets for man the goal of achieving divine perfection, i.e., perfect likeness to God, according to the word of Christ himself: “Be perfect as your Father is perfect heavenly" (Matt. V, 48). And towards this great goal, despite the contradictions of personal freedom, everything is directed with wonderful consistency. Even what at a superficial glance seems to be a contradiction to it, various unforeseen accidents, the disasters of war, plague or famine, which are often the source of so much grief and tears for the individuals or generations experiencing them, in the end serve the same ultimate goal, representing the blows of a lovingly nurturing rod. It is enough to point to the disaster experienced by one of our outskirts (in 1891) of crop failure to be convinced of this. In addition to its purely economic significance, it clearly brought to the light of God all the good and evil elements hidden in our society, revealed to everyone the shortcomings of our social system, hitherto hidden under the guise of liberal phrases, indicated who the enemies and who are the friends of our people and, of course, generally gave us a lesson that will not be forgotten by us for a long time 58. In this great process of economy, even forces that are clearly hostile to it, consciously going against it, actually work for the same purpose predetermined by Providence. Preachers of unbelief unconsciously strengthen their faith; the spreaders of heresies and schisms aimed at undermining the church actually strengthen it, stirring up vital activity in it; even robbers, carrying out robberies and murders, unconsciously serve to improve public welfare, encouraging them to take measures to protect the safety of their citizens. Of course, only unreason can credit them with this, and in reality they fully deserve a certain social punishment for their evil will. From the fact that evil often turns out to contribute to good, it does not follow at all that in its very essence it constitutes a useful and necessary moment in the historical process, but it only follows that it became such as a result of the fall of man, who arbitrarily disrupted the normal course of his development, and therefore, in essence, this fact is only striking evidence of the sinfulness of man, affecting his entire life. Just as in the life of an individual, his most natural processes are often accompanied by suffering, and the greatest of them is the very process of human birth (due to the curse: “you will give birth to children in illness”), so similar suffering has become inevitable in the historical life of peoples and humanity, and the main historical processes are often carried out with unimaginable pain, in which not only a few, but often entire cities and states perish. Due to sinfulness, this painful process has become inevitable, and hence even the very triumph of goodness is achieved through suffering. There is no such victorious army that could achieve victories without atonement for them with terrible suffering and even the death of individual members; so in the same way, humanity, achieving its highest good, due to the same sinfulness, must necessarily atone for it through the suffering and even the death of many of its members - both individuals and nations. And if, despite all this suffering, the highest goal is nevertheless achieved, which is facilitated by evil itself, then this fact only shows how wonderfully everything is arranged in the great city of God, how everything in it merges into one great goal, which is the highest good of humanity. From this point of view, the supreme significance of those wanderings of thought that have been and are still being experienced in our century finally becomes clear. If he, abusing freedom of thought, was carried away by every wind of teachings that went so far as to deny everything holy and great, trying to substantiate the most monstrous theories on the data of scientific and philosophical knowledge, then this was only a new great experience of educational permission for humanity, so that it would finally be convinced that even all the scientific genius of modern times, even all the great scientific discoveries of which our age is so proud, are in essence never able to satisfy the demands of the immortal spirit. Sooner or later, no matter how much he is fed with various self-invented ideas and thoughts, he will again thirst for the highest spiritual truth, and no theory, even the most brilliant one, will give him this truth in its entirety, and therefore he will again, with necessity and with increased thirst and love, turn to where the truth lives in its unfading light. And if this turn is already noticeable, if this spiritual thirst is kindled in millions of souls that were hitherto in slavery to soulless theories (and this is a fact that can no longer be doubted), then this will be an essential characteristic of our age. His final word will be that Christ is the only source of truth, life and light for the world. And in view of this marvelous harmony of the historical process, from the point of view of the idea of ​​Providence, the assertion of evolutionism becomes pitiful, which, confused in self-contradictions, finally comes to the bleak conviction that there is no plan in history and there cannot be any historical laws, since everything moves somewhere in an indefinite distance under the pressure of some fatal or semi-conscious craving 59 . No, in history there is not only a plan, but there is even a kind of divine art that develops according to special wondrous laws, traces of which we can clearly see in the process itself and especially in its results. And that’s why the bloke is right. Augustine, who, having surveyed the entire historical process from the height of his great genius, came to the conviction that the whole world and history is like “a most excellent verse, adorned with a kind of antithesis” 60, or like a picture in which light and shadows contribute to the beauty of the whole 61. Therefore, Bossuet is right when, concluding his famous “discourse on world history,” he says that God from above holds in his hands the destinies of kingdoms and peoples. “What in our opinion may seem to be an accident is a definite intention that took place in the highest council, that is, in that eternal council that brings all causes and all effects into the same order. And so everything comes down to the same goal, and only due to a lack of our understanding can we find chance or irregularity in particular contradictions” 62. Finally, the famous American historian Bancroft is right when he says: “The world order is a divine poem that has been developing from eternity and which cannot be disturbed by human intervention. Events unfold in it in a predetermined order, in majestic harmony, and just as a skillful artist extracts harmonic sounds from the strings of his harp, so history notes the divine chords sounding on the great lyre of times. But this harmony cannot be perceived at the very moment when events take place. Philosophy follows the trail of events to show causes and describe results... Events form a sequential chain. People, systems, nations, all of humanity - all of this obeys the divine will, and when part of the destinies of humanity is completed, we open the paths of Providence in them. Yes, under every page in the annals of the world you can write: God reigns. Events, as they occur, tell of His supreme plan, and when we listen carefully, we will hear how the centuries, moving away into the dark abysses of vanishing times, sing with their countless choirs a song of praise: Te Deum laudamus! We praise God for you!” 63. Wed. our public reading: “The Transoceanic West in Religious and Moral Relation”, first reading, p. 1. We mean his Supernatural law in the natural world, which was sold in countless publications in many languages (several articles from it were published by us in the magazine “Wanderer” in 1889 under the title “The Unity of the Laws of Existence”), as well as his conversations on various religious and moral topics (The Greatest thing in the world, Pax vobiscum, etc.), which were also sold in hundreds of thousands of copies in various European countries languages (also published in Russian, Moscow 1892). Among many other biographies of Christ, the famous works of Farrar “The Life of Jesus Christ” and Dido “Jesus Christ”, translated into almost all European languages, including Russian, became especially widespread. We mean the religious and philosophical works of Count L. Tolstoy “What is my faith”, “The Kreutzer Sonata”, etc. The dangerous spread of such views in society in Germany caused, among other things, the appearance of the work of Prof. Kneisel: Die Weltgeschichte ein Zufall? (Berlin 1891), which puts forward and proves the idea of ​​rational expediency in history. Proof of the deep need felt at the present time in understanding world life as a moral world government can be seen in the great success of such works as M s C o s h, Method of Divine government, which was published in 1887 in its 13th edition. The same meaning is given by the fact that the religious society in The Hague recently appointed a prize for the best essay on the topic of “Moral Government” with the aim of its scientific and philosophical justification The reason for compiling “De Civitate Dei” was the defeat of Rome by Alaric in 410, and the task of Bl. Augustine was determined to refute the complaints of the pagans that all the disasters that the Roman Empire had to experience at this time were due to the Christians, because of their anger the gods who created the greatness of Rome took away their protection from it. As a result, creation has a predominantly apologetic character. His XXII books appeared in parts in 413–426. In Min's edition it constitutes volume XLI of the Latin series. Of the new translations, in the foreground, of course, we need to put the Russian translation made at the Kyiv Theological Academy, in 4 editions from 1880 to 1887. Then you can point out Dods's new English translation, which is still excellent in all respects (in 2 volumes, Edinburgh 1888). Among many studies and articles, one can point out in Russian literature the famous work of Prof. Krasin “The work of St. Augustine De Civ. Dei as an apology for Christianity in its struggle against paganism” Kazan, 1873; two articles by Hieronym Gregory in the magazine “Faith and Reason” under the title: “The work of St. Augustine about the City of God, as an experience of Christian philosophy of history” (Nos. 15 and 17 for 1891) and several articles by Prince Trubetskoy in the journal “Questions of Philosophy and Psychology” (these articles were included in his essay, published under the title: “The religious and social ideal of Western Christianity in the 5th century. Part I. The worldview of St. Augustine.” Moscow 1892); in foreign: Reinkens, Gesehichtsphilosophie des h. Augustinus, I860; G. Seyrich, Die Deschichtsphilosophie Augustinus, Chemnitz 1891; lecture by Privat-Assoc. Laykhert in Deutscher Merkur, 1892 No. 5 et seq.; a number of articles by Boissier in Bevue des Deux Mondes for 1890, included in his work Fin de Paganisme (2nd). ed. 1894 Paris), etc. We had before us the complete collection of Bossuet's works Paris, ed. Didot, 1858; Discours sur l'histoire universelle placed. in volume 1. Kant's thought in his Idea of ​​Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, 1784. See Laurent, La Philosophie de l'Histoire, Paris. 1880, p. 96. Haug, Allgem. Geschichte, page 43. Several pages are devoted to the same subject in the essay of prof. N. I. Kareeva, Basic questions of the philosophy of history, vol. I, pp. 198–211. See his Essai sur les Moeurs, II, ch. LIV, p. 263 (XVIII, volume of the general collection of his works 1829 et seq.). Haug, Allgem. Geschichte, b. 44. Buckle dwelled on these facts with particular insistence in his “History of Civilization in England.” A detailed presentation of this theory was made in Kareev’s essay, “Basic Questions of the Philosophy of History” and in his “The Essence of the Historical Process” (St. Petersburg 1890), in various places Basic questions F.I. vol. I, pp. 401–2. Basic questions of F.I., vol. I, p. 205 et seq. McCosh, The Method of Divine Government, 13th ed. 1887, - True, and supporters of evolution, like Spencer and prof. Kareev, do not want to completely leave this question unanswered, and indicate the goal of progress in achieving the highest happiness, understanding by it the complete coincidence of aspirations with goals, and even paint an ideal picture of happiness that is completely feasible on earth. But in this they only repeat the backs of the ancient “ideal” republics or “utopias”, without at all introducing greater solidity into their argument, which is vague to the point of saccharineness, not to mention the fact that they completely leave aside the fundamental problem of evil as a principle opposing all good. See the presentation and criticism of this view in the lectures of P.S. Astafieva, The meaning of history (2 lectures). Fr. Rougement, Les deux cités, t. I.p. 216. Also Laurent, La Grece, in the department of historians and poets and in the introduction to Philosophie de L'histoire. Herod. III, 40, 41. Wed I, 34 – about the fate of Croesus. In his famous speech to Croesus, the Athenian sage Solon, warning him not to be too proud of his external happiness, directly told him “the deity is envious,” I, 32. N. I. Kareev, Main. questions F.I. vol. I, p. 155. On the City of God IV, 33. Also in Bossuet, in his “Discourse on World History”, French. ed. Oeuvres, t I, pp. 297 and 298: “God reigns over all nations,” etc. The idea of education is clearly put forward by Bl. Augustine for example in Civ. Dei X, 14. This fact reflects the amazing instability of the latest scientific theories. Making a monstrous leap from the denial of the unity of the human race to the affirmation of the unity of the entire organic world, modern science has personified a strange whim, as if speaking to the biblical worldview: if it is impossible to defend the non-unity of the human race, then I am perhaps ready to recognize unity, but only under the condition that it includes both the monkey and the entire organic world in it - so choose either, either the non-unity of people among themselves, or their unity with the monkey... History and philosophical significance of the idea of progress, Northern Bulletin, November 1891, p. 95. Let us understand the famous verses of Horace: ^Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit ^Nos nequiores, max daturos ^Progemem vitiosiorem Horac Od. III, 6 History and philosophical significance of the idea of progress, “North. Vest.”, November, p. 95 See eg. Pliny, N. N XXVIII, 2, Herodotus, I, 31, Luken Traditionen d. Menschengeschlechts, page 302. Lasaulz Uebei den Sinn dei Oedipussage 1841 page 10, etc. On this view rests the famous system of two cities - heavenly and earthly - by Bl. Augustine On the City of God, XIV, 28 Although bl. Augustine’s term “City of God” in a narrow sense refers to only one side of the historical process, namely the kingdom of good and holy people, in particular the chosen people, but in the course of his thought the whole world is also Civitas Dei, because it all constitutes the subject of God’s educational providence, although not to the same extent. See "Faith and Reason", No. 17, 1891, p. 309. in the article by Hierom. Gregory about “The Work of Bl. Augustine On the City of God. This article is generally replete with major errors and rash judgments. See eg. pp. 316, 317–19, where the concept of the highest good is mixed with the concept of relative good, on which confusion the unfounded criticism of the views of Bl. Augustine According to the famous saying: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Welt gericht. One respectable clergyman (a teacher of the law at one of the gymnasiums in St. Petersburg) told us an interesting fact in this regard from his practice. Being part of a parish church in the capital and, therefore, completely dependent on random conditions for its pilgrims, Fr. The teacher of the law, however, fully figured out his income from these pilgrims, not only in the total amount, but even in particulars, so that he can determine in advance with complete accuracy certain items of his income. For example, he is quite sure that for the blessing of Easter cakes and paskas on the first day of Easter he will certainly receive 14 rubles. with a cop., and distributes this small income in advance as holiday rewards to various servants around the house and in the establishment, and reality justifies his calculation with amazing accuracy: Easter cakes certainly give him 14 rubles. with cop. - no more or less from year to year. This law of the relationship between freedom and necessity serves as the only guarantee of the correctness of all social enterprises that are not based on coercion. Thanks to him, a merchant is able to count on a certain turnover in trade, railways on a certain number of passengers, newspaper offices on a certain number of readers, a post office on a certain number of letters and parcels, and so on. Without this relationship, no correct conduct of public affairs would be possible. Paganism, for example, is not a denial of God, but only an incorrect view of Him. The Jews’ rejection of Christ is also not a denial of the will of God, but a misunderstanding of it (“they don’t see what they are doing.”..) The famous “Cult of Humanity” in the system of Auguste Comte. Misunderstanding of this relationship between Providence and humanity often leads to an incorrect interpretation of the very meaning of predestination, as if it completely excludes the idea of ​​man's free cooperation in the matter of salvation. This shortcoming was not avoided by Prince Trubetskoy’s generally excellent article in the journal “Questions of Philosophy and Psychology” (book 10) under the title “Philosophy of Christian theocracy in the 5th century”, see, for example, pp. 142, 143, where the teaching of Bl. Augustine on predestination. A true understanding of the idea of ​​predestination could have been suggested to the author by his excerpt from the book. Augustine, where it is said that God foresaw (that is, predetermined) not our previous deeds, but his future deeds”; i.e. He predetermined the final goals, and not the freedom of individuals, just as social statistics predetermine a certain number of criminals, but not each of them personally. What the fuck Augustine does not deny human free will; this is proven in many places in his works. See, for example, On the City of God V, 9 and 10. If there are expressions in places that seem to contradict this, then when considering them one should not lose sight of the basic rule according to which, when considering ancient systems, in view of the lack of strict philosophical terminology in them, one must pay attention not only to what the ancient author actually says, but also mainly to what he wants to say. Oeuvres de Bossuet, t. I, page 297 This bifurcation is noticeable even in Socrates and Plato. See Laurent, La Grece (Histone du droit, t. II) about them. W. Smith History of Greece, p. 322 Oeuvres vol 1. p 297. Discours, part III, ch. VIII Martensen, Die christliche Dogmatik, Berlin, 1856, p. 213, § 121. Cp. our “Biblical History in the light of the new. research and discoveries" vol. II, p. 676. Pliny the Younger wrote: “Of all the blessings given to man by nature, there is none better than a timely death; and what’s even better is that everyone can inflict it on themselves” (idque in ea optimum, quod illam sibi quisque praestare poterit). Hist Nat. XXVIII, 2. This is precisely the objection to constructing a plan of history from the point of view of Providence that is put forward by Prof. Η. I. Kareev in his “Basic questions of the philosophy of history” vol. I, page 484 See our Biblical History in the Light of Recent Research and Discovery, vol. I, p. 139. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, Haec tibi erunt artes! ^(Remember, Roman, that to rule over nations is your art!) Virgil's saying. Eg. even Renan, in his Histoire du peuple Israel, in the historical concept of the role of the Israeli people comes very close to Bossuet, the great exponent of the idea of ​​providential economy in the history of mankind. See the introduction in Volume I. Basic issues, vol. 1, pp. 205 et seq. History and philosophical significance of the idea of ​​progress, article by prof. N. I. Kareeva, “Northern Bulletin”, December, 1891, p. 65. A popular experience in its construction was made by prof. Kneisel in his small book already mentioned above, Die Weltgeschichte ein Zufall? Berlin, 1891. From the same point of view, it is not difficult to understand the significance of the fact that such old cultural countries as China and India remained outside Christianity. In them, the Christian world, as it were, deliberately preserved a clear example of the spiritual and generally cultural state to which the pagan world could come on its own and beyond which it was unable to go, and this state, in comparison with the state of the Christian world, best shows what great significance Christianity has for humanity. For more information about this, see our public readings on “The Modern West in Religious and Moral Relation”, in the appendix to the Russian edition of Luthardt’s “Apologia for Christianity” (St. Petersburg, 1892), pp. 673 et seq. In view of this importance of Protestantism in the system of religious education of the Christian world, it becomes possible to explain the apparently accidental death of the invincible armada, which was supposed to suppress the Protestant peoples of the north, by the intervention of a higher will. In the minds of the Protestants themselves, this explanation is beyond any doubt Afflavit Deus et dissipavit eos! With this we would like to answer, at least indirectly, the reviewer of the “Bulletin of Europe”, who, considering Professor Kneisel’s book Die Weltgeschte em Zufall and finding in it an explanation of the good side of the Turkish yoke in that under its pressure, Greek scientists had a great contribution to the enlightenment of the West, ironically notes that “the author forgot only about the fate of the peoples who directly fell under the centuries-old Turkish yoke,” and what can we say about the benefit of Turkish rule for the spread of knowledge and culture in the West, in view of the flight of learned Greeks to other countries, means to be too lenient in assessing bloody historical catastrophes” (Aug. 1891, p. 863). The fact we indicated in the text shows that these peoples themselves received as a reward for their historical test an even greater benefit than the Western countries from the Greek scientists, and only an incomprehensible blindness could hide this fundamental historical fact from the author of the review (L.S.). For more information about this, see our “Reflections for the Birthday. Christ", "Church. Bulletin No. 51, 1891 According to the theory of Spencer, the main representative of evolutionism. About the City of God XI, 18 tanquam pulcherrimum carmen. “For just as a picture with the color black placed in its proper place, so the totality of things (in the world and history), if anyone can look at it, appears beautiful even with sinners, although their ugliness, when considered in themselves, makes them vile.” Ibid. XI, 23 (in Russian translation, part 4, p. 211) Oeuvres de Bossuet, r. 297, t. 1, ed. 1858 From Bancroft's discourse, read in 1856 at the Historical Society in New York. La libre Recherche, t II, p. 424 Reduced in Laurent, La Philosophie de l'histoire, Paris 1880 (2nd ed.) pp. 1 and 2. You might be interested in: