Беседа о том, что для плодоносного покаяния необходимо отвержение самомнения

“Create fruits worthy of repentance. And do not begin to say within yourself: Father and Imam Abraham” (Luke 3:8; Matt. 3:9). These words belong to Saint John the Baptist of the Lord, the greatest of the prophets. John concluded the Old Testament and began the New, thus serving as the connection of both Testaments. The ministry of John was foreshadowed by the Old Testament prophets; The acts and preaching of John are described by the apostles in the Gospel. “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is dedicated to the story of John. As it is written in the prophets, behold, I send My angel before You to prepare Your way before You. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths right. John baptized in the desert, and preached a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins" (Mark 1:1-4). John’s ministry was to prepare the way for the Lord who would soon appear, clothed in humanity, to straighten the paths for Him. What is this path? What are these paths? This is the way of human thoughts; These are the heartfelt feelings and aspirations of people. In order to accept the Lord, one must have a capable, well-organized way of thinking; In order to accept the Lord, you must have a heartfelt will to do so, you must have humble feelings. This is how the Archangel Gabriel explained to the righteous Zechariah, the father of the Forerunner, the ministry of the Forerunner when he announced his conception and birth. “He (the Forerunner), said the archangel, will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to return the hearts of the fathers to the children, and to the disobedient to the way of thinking of the righteous, to present to the Lord a people ready” (Luke 1:16–17). Repent, the holy Forerunner proclaimed to humanity, realize that you are sinners, that you are fallen and lost beings, that you are in the jaws of eternal death and are in need of salvation. “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is drawing near” (Matthew 4:17), i.e. the blessed time has come, and God Himself will immediately appear among you; He will appear, although in the humble form of a man, but with the omnipotent power of God. He will crush the dominion of death, remove those people from the perilous abyss and grant eternal bliss to those people who direct their minds and hearts to accept Him, who prepare themselves for such acceptance by rejecting a sinful life, by the consciousness of their destruction, by the consciousness of the need for salvation and a Savior, by the determination to follow and obey the God-man. He who is not aware of his sinfulness, his fall, his destruction, cannot accept Christ, cannot believe in Christ, cannot be a Christian. What is Christ for someone who is both reasonable and virtuous, who is satisfied with himself, who recognizes himself as worthy of all earthly and heavenly rewards? What is Christ for someone who, not having the proper concepts about God and man, does not want to think about eternity, but is completely immersed in earthly cares and pleasures, as if eternal on earth? John chose the desert to preach. Far from ordinary activities, from perishable objects of affection and passion, people more easily ascend in thought to God, to eternity, and more comfortably listen to the spiritual teaching about godly virtues, the entrance to which is true repentance. The desert mysteriously depicted the moral state of humanity, abandoned to vanity, having lost essential wealth and dignity. Having come to the desert for my salvation, to the inhabitants of the desert, who settled in it for the same purpose, I do not find other words more suitable for my first word, I do not find another admonition more suitable for me and for my new brothers, like the words and admonitions uttered by the holy Forerunner. Having come to the desert for repentance, for which salvation is granted by God, let us create fruits worthy of repentance (Matthew 3:8). It is not enough to choose a place to live that is convenient for repentance; It is not enough to leave property, relatives and friends, to renounce close and frequent relations with the world, this is not enough. These are only auxiliary means to repentance; these are acts that must precede repentance. Repentance is the village in which the spiritual treasure of salvation is hidden; To buy a village, you need to sell all your property (Matthew 13:44). Having sold the property, that is, leaving the substance and breaking ties with the world, one must “create fruits worthy of repentance” so that repentance is valid and achieves its goal. For repentance to be valid and bring us salvation and eternal bliss, we must acquire repentance in ourselves, in our souls; it is necessary for our very spirit to be crushed and humbled by the God-loving sadness that is born from the consciousness and feeling of our sinfulness; we must throw out conceit in whatever form it may be present in us. With conceit, repentance is impossible. One wrong thought about oneself can enter the soul, nourish, support and strengthen self-conceit in it, making it incapable of repentance. Conceit is pride, so abominable before God! Conceit is that stupid, blind and destructive passion that cast down a bright angel from heaven, turning a bright angel into a dark demon! Conceit is that deadly poison that the ancient serpent poured into human nature. Conceit is an illness of our spirit, not noticed by those who do not pay attention to their salvation, but the illness is so strong and important that it puts a person, according to his soul, among the rejected spirits, hostile to God. One infected with self-conceit is unable to assimilate himself to God. For such assimilation, a complete rejection of conceit is required. Archangel Gabriel very correctly defined the ministry of the equal-angelic Forerunner. He, as stated above, said that the holy Forerunner “will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God.” This means: the holy Forerunner of many Israelites who have forgotten God will lead to the remembrance of God; many of the Israelites, who had become strangers to God, will be accepted by God. Further, the archangel says that the holy Forerunner will “return hearts,” that is, heartfelt feelings, heartfelt pledges, fathers to children and the disobedient way of thinking of the righteous. Who are these fathers, who are these righteous people? The ancestor of the Israelites Abraham and all their holy ancestors, holy judges, kings and prophets are called fathers. The name righteous should mean all those who pleased God in the Old Testament; of these, some do not belong to the people of Israel. What were the heartfelt feelings, heartfelt pledges; What was the mindset of the Old Testament saints of God? Their heart pledge was humility, and their way of thinking was humility corresponding to their heart pledge. The Holy Patriarch Abraham, pouring out his heart in prayer, said: “I am earth and ashes” (Gen. 18:27). And when did he say this? When he stood before God face to face, when he heard the revelation of terrible secrets, when he received the greatest promises, when God called him His faithful servant, worthy of divine revelations. The righteous, long-suffering Job called himself earth and ashes, having been honored with the vision of God; he humiliated himself so much, he felt his insignificance so strongly that from this feeling he seemed to melt away, as if he diminished to infinity, as if he ceased to exist 252. The famous king, the famous warrior and commander, the divinely inspired prophet David, was devoid of conceit; in his numerous holy hymns he did not indicate any of his dignity and advantage. Everywhere he spoke of himself with the greatest humility; he attributed his rise and all successes solely to the grace of God. He openly declared that humility was the reason for his salvation (Ps. 114:6). Who would not be touched by David’s deeply humble words, by his sincere confession of sins, by his confession of the extraordinary greatness and mercy of God? The holy inspired singer faithfully and picturesquely depicted both the private sinfulness of man and the general sinfulness of mankind, the depth of his fall, the grave captivity under the yoke of the ruler of the world - the fallen angel. He seems to be measuring the abyss of the fall, weighing the weight of the chains. “Have mercy on me, O God,” cries David, “according to Your great mercy!” ( Ps. 50:3 ) “Lord, have mercy on me, for I am weak; heal me, Lord, for my bones are crumpled and my soul is greatly troubled. Turn, Lord, deliver my soul, save me for the sake of Thy mercy” (Ps. 6:3-5). David asks for mercy, admits that he is lost: he seeks the reason for mercy only in the mercy of God and in his distressed state, in his weakness, inability to help himself. He does not give himself an advantage over any other person! On the contrary, he recognizes himself as unworthy of the name of man, the most sinful of men: “I am a worm, and not a man,” he says, “the reproach of men and the humiliation of people” (Ps. 21:7). “I was conceived in iniquities, and my mother gave birth to me in sins” (Ps. 50:7), David confesses, recognizing his participation in the fall common to all mankind, and he expresses his own state of mind as follows: “water came down into my soul. The coal miner is in the dark of the depths, and there is no constancy: I came to the depths of the sea and the storm drowned me” (Ps. 69:2-3). “My iniquities have exceeded my head, for a heavy burden is heavy upon me. My wounds have grown stale and rotten because of my madness” (Ps. 37:5–6). Mourning his enslavement to demons and begging God for deliverance from this enslavement, David says: “Have mercy on me, O God, as man has trampled on me: I have struggled with the cold all day long. Beg and attack me all day long. All day long I abhor my words: all their thoughts of evil are upon me” (Ps. 56:1-2, 6). “The colds have multiplied! many rise up against me, many say to my soul: there is no salvation for him in his God. Arise, O Lord, save me, my God” (Ps. 3:1–3, 8). The holy prophet Isaiah, having been vouchsafed to see the Lord sitting on a high and exalted throne, surrounded by the faces of the heavenly powers, exclaimed: “O accursed me, for I am moved, as a man of unclean lips, among men who have unclean lips, I live: and I have seen the King of the Lord of Hosts before my eyes” (Is. 6:5). The Prophet, having seen God, recognized himself as unworthy of God both because of his own sinfulness and because of the sinfulness of all humanity, in which every person certainly participates, being conceived and born in it. Such was the spiritual mood of the Old Testament righteous, the fathers of the Old Testament Israel in the flesh, the fathers of the New Testament Israel - the Christian tribe - in the spirit. Through this mood, they became able to accept by faith the promised Messiah over several centuries and fell asleep in the hope of receiving salvation through Him, “not receiving the promise, but having seen it from afar and kissed it” (Heb. 11:13). Such a mood was required from people contemporary with the God-man in order to accept the God-man; the same mood is required today in order to accept Christ, to become assimilated to Christ. It is necessary, it is necessary to reject self-conceit, we need the consciousness of our sinfulness, our fall, our destruction - we need repentance, that is, repentance for the sins we have committed, abandonment of a sinful life in order to enter into the true knowledge of God and worship. The Holy Forerunner, who had the goal of returning the Israelis of his time to the way of thinking and to the feelings of their blessed forefathers, among whom was Abraham, taught the listeners the following instruction as a particularly important one: “Do not begin to say within yourself: father of the imams Abraham” (Luke 3:8). What does it mean? The Great John wants his listeners to inherit the way of thinking and feeling of Abraham, and at the same time demands from them: “do not begin to say in yourself: father of the imams of Abraham.” These words of the preacher of repentance contain the sad meaning that the descendants of Abraham, having neither his way of thinking, nor his feelings, nor his righteous deeds, were extremely preoccupied with their descent in the flesh from Abraham; They were proud of this origin, and other peoples despised it. In this respect the Israelites followed the general custom of a world hostile to God. The founder of the Babylonian kingdom was the leader of a gang of robbers, Nimrod; the founder of the Roman state was another robber chieftain, Romulus; the ancestors of other peoples, the founders of other states were persons whose virtues were most similar to Nimrod and Romulus. On the contrary, the ancestor of the Israelites was a holy man, called the friend of God, Abraham; their legislator was another holy man, a wondrous miracle worker - Moses; many other holy men arose from among them; The Messiah himself, the God-man himself, had to be born into the family of the Israeli people. Unfortunately, most of the Israelis, descendants of Abraham and the prophets in the flesh, were not at all similar to these forefathers in behavior and character; In moral terms, the Israelites were more like those of their forefathers who stained their hands in the blood of the prophets and stoned the messengers of God (Matthew 23:37). The pompous opinion about oneself regarding descent from Abraham infected the entire people with pride, making them incapable of accepting repentance, turning them to God, and accepting the promised Messiah. Insightfully, the great John the Baptist directed the first words of his sermon against the main people's illness, against destructive self-conceit. “Do not begin to say within yourself,” reject the secret thought deeply rooted in your hearts, “Father Imam Abraham!” Reject your stupidest carnal wisdom, which is hostile to God, does not and cannot submit to God! Reject your carnal wisdom, which is already eternal death for you, which will seal eternal death in you if you continue in it! (Rom. 8:6) Know that Abraham pleased God through faith (Rom. 4:3), that Abraham served God in spirit and in truth, and therefore the descendants of Abraham are spiritual, made up of all people who have acquired true faith in God, without any carnal participation of the civil nation, “as if he (Abraham) were the father (father) of all those who believe in uncircumcision, and the father of circumcision, not being exactly circumcised, but also walking in the footsteps of the faith of our father Abraham" ( Rom. 4:11–12). It is in vain that you, intoxicated by conceit and pride, intoxicated by carnal wisdom emanating from a fallen angel, despise and humiliate other nations! If they are so alien to the true concepts of God and so dead in heart that they can unmistakably be called stones, then “I tell you that from this stone God is able to raise up a child for Abraham!” (Matthew 3:9). “Do not begin to say in yourself: the father of the imams of Abraham,” because with such a pompous opinion of yourself you destroy all spiritual kinship; few! every rapprochement and relationship between you and Abraham. John’s striving against conceit, born of a way of thinking according to the elements of the world, according to the elements of the old man, was correct; it was fair to use the strongest expressions against conceit: the most sorrowful event justified the words of John’s sermon. The Jews, due to their conceit, rejected the Messiah; by deicide they completed the crimes of their fathers, who beat and stoned the prophets and messengers of God. Acting against the Messiah, they constantly had Abraham and Moses, the true servants of the Messiah, in their mouths. “We are disciples of Moses” (John 9:28), they said, trying to justify their rejection of the God-Man with cunning. “We know that Moses said God is God, but this Lord Jesus Christ is not known from where he is” (John 9:29). They said this while a blind man from birth, healed by the Lord, stood before their cathedral, when they, so to speak, felt the miracle of the Lord, while they knew about the ancient miracles of Moses only from the narration of the Holy Scriptures. The Lord exhorted the Jews who came to Him to accept His teaching and through this inherit spiritual freedom from sin, or salvation and eternal bliss. Pride and conceit did not allow the Jews to accept the divine admonition. They sharply answered the Lord: “We are the seed of Abraham, and have no one to work with” (John 8:33). The unfortunate ones lie, blinded by pride and conceit; They do not see their disastrous state, their enslavement not only in spiritual terms, but also in civil terms. The Jews at different times were slaves of the Egyptians, and of many Canaanite peoples, and the Babylonians, and the Syrians. At the time in which they so shamelessly proclaimed their freedom, they were completely enslaved by the Romans. The indignation of the Jews against these powerful rulers of the universe, resulting from blindness by conceit and arrogance, was the cause of the final civil death of the Jewish people. The Holy Evangelist Luke narrates that the great John the Baptist, exhorting the Israelites to reject conceit and unfortunate pomposity of descent according to the flesh from Abraham, called the entire people brood of vipers (Luke 3:7). The Holy Evangelist Matthew says that John called the Sadducees and Pharisees brood of vipers (Matthew 3:7). The Savior of the world himself called the scribes and Pharisees snakes, brood of vipers, who cannot avoid condemnation into the fire of Gehenna (Matthew 23:33). This means: the name “brood of vipers” was by no means just a strong expression: it is a definition of the judgment of God, spoken by the Son Himself and the Word of God, spoken through John by the Holy Spirit of God. The fallen angel, Satan, is called a serpent and a viper. Those infected with conceit, who called themselves the children and tribe of Abraham, are called the children and tribe of Satan, named and recognized as such by God Himself. “You are of your father the devil,” the Lord announced to the Jews when, raging with pride, they dared to call themselves, standing before the face of the Lord, not only the children of Abraham, but also the children of God; “You do the works of your father, and you want to do the lusts of your father” (John 8:14, 44). You have acquired both the activity and the mood of Satan; and your will agrees with the will of Satan; and your way of thinking is completely borrowed from him! Being children of Abraham in the flesh, dreaming of yourself that you are children of God, you became in your spirit and mood the children of the devil, his angels, his joint heirs. Why are the Pharisees, being ranked by the Lord in the category of serpents, that is, rejected spirits, called the offspring of vipers, which constitute a special breed of snakes? Echidna is a very small, barely noticeable snake, blind, but armed with a powerful, deadly poison. Likewise, pride is a barely noticeable ailment of the soul, often appearing to people as the deepest humility, often recognized by people as holiness and dispassion, but killing the soul, making it incapable of any virtues. The echidna is blind: so is pride. He who is darkened by it does not see and does not know God, and is deprived of a correct view of himself and of humanity. The very door to virtues - repentance - is closed, firmly sealed with pride. “Publicans and fornicators,” whose sins are so obvious and gross, turned out to be more capable of accepting repentance and using them to capture the Kingdom of Heaven than the Jewish bishops and priests infected with conceit (Matthew 21:31). For what reason did John the Baptist call the entire Jewish people brood of vipers, especially the Sadducees and Pharisees? For the reason that the Sadducees and Pharisees were predominantly infected with the disease of carnal wisdom and self-conceit, they were predominantly called their descent from Abraham, their kinship with the prophets; They communicated their illness to the people as leaders and teachers of the people. The Sadducees 253 were few in number: they consisted of most of the noblest laymen; however, the noblest and richest of the clergy also belonged to them (Acts 5:17). They did not believe in the future life and did not think about it, as usually happens with people who are satiated with the abundance of earthly goods: they did not study the faith, drowning in earthly cares and pleasures, as the rich man described in the Gospel (Luke 16:19), who, they believe, belongs to the Sadducees, drowned in them. The majority of the clergy (John 1:19, 24) and those laity who studied the Law of God with special care, like the holy Apostle Paul, belonged to the Pharisees. But the Pharisees engaged in the knowledge of God without self-sacrifice; they did it not for Heaven, but for their earthly position, in order to obtain earthly benefits; for this reason, from the very study of the Law of God, its letter, which kills the soul with eternal death, from the study of the Law of God for human glory, for the organization of their material position in human society, they fell into the abyss and darkness of carnal wisdom, hostile to God 254. Thus, the Pharisees came to the same spiritual mood as the Sadducees, to a mood incapable of accepting the Messiah, incapable of bearing the fruits of repentance. Some, not studying the Law of God and not knowing it because of devotion to the world, others, carefully studying the Law of God and knowing it by the letter, but with the goal of love of peace, equally became carnal people, enemies of God, children of the devil. Infuriated by the pride of their father, they boasted of their rejection of the Messiah; “Who is the food, the prince or the Pharisee, who believes in Him?” (John 7:48) they said. Having uttered these terrible words about God incarnate, they supplemented them with equally terrible words about their neighbors, words that expressed their heartfelt pledge, their hellish pride, their contempt and hatred for humanity, formed from an incorrect study and understanding of theology: “This people,” they said, “who do not know the law, are cursed!” (John 7:48–49). Exactly! This way of thinking, this mood of the heart makes people brood of vipers, children of the devil and devils. They are incapable of repentance, incapable of becoming assimilated to God, incapable of inheriting the salvation and bliss that the all-merciful God bestows upon people who are aware of their sinfulness and heal it with true repentance. The lot of the unfortunate proud people, filled with conceit and carnal wisdom, is eternal death, the death of the soul, which consists in a decisive alienation from God, in the assimilation of hatred for God and humanity, the hatred with which Satan has infected himself and which he communicates to everyone who enters into communication with him. The lot of the unfortunate upon their separation from the body and then upon union with the resurrected body is eternal imprisonment in the dungeons of hell, eternal languor in hellish torment. “Serpent, brood of vipers,” the Lord announced to them, “how can you avoid condemnation to Gehenna?” (Matthew 23:33) This means: there is no way for those who are conceited, who have exalted their self in themselves, to avoid condemnation at the Last Judgment of God if they do not take care to heal themselves of self-conceit through repentance and self-sacrifice. The Holy Apostle Paul, although he belonged by origin to the people of Israel, to the tribe of Benjamin, although he was a Jew from the Jews, according to the study of the Law - a Pharisee, although he was blameless according to the modern Jewish understanding of the Law, he rejected all these carnal and temporary advantages for the sake of the superior advantage provided by Christ, the advantage of the spiritual, eternal, essential, divine. St. Paul rejected the advantages of the flesh as obstacles to the acquisition of Christ: they are certainly the greatest obstacle. “Even though I counted my gain,” says the apostle, “I counted it as loss for Christ’s sake. But I count all the futility of existence for the surpassing knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:7-8). This is the true fulfillment of the instruction taught by the great John the Baptist, and especially by the Holy Spirit, at the head of the sermon on repentance. Paul, rejecting carnal wisdom and self-conceit, recognizing them as a spiritual disaster, the cause of the inability to true knowledge of God and worship, brought the most abundant fruit of repentance: from a Pharisee and persecutor of the Church of God, he became a true servant of God and His apostle. All who paid due attention to the preaching of the great John the Baptist, to the voice of God that thundered from his lips, submitted to the good yoke of repentance. Among his disciples, that is, those who accepted his teaching, were many people from the lower class (John 1:35); many persons of depraved behavior left a sinful life (Matthew 21:32) and became able to believe in the Savior and follow Him. But the Sadducees and Pharisees rejected the preaching of repentance, then they rejected the Savior (Matthew 21:32). Very few of them, such as Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, Gamaliel, followed to some extent the selflessness of the great Paul and became followers of Christ, first secret, and then open. Even now the voice of one crying in the wilderness, calling everyone to repentance, has not been silenced. John's lips are closed by martyrdom, but he does not stop crying out from the Gospel. In order to hear it, you need good will: without good will, people “seeing do not see, and hearing do not hear, nor understand” (Matthew 13:13), “but those who hear the word with a good and good heart, hold it, and produce fruit with patience” (Luke 8:15). Let us accept with good will the sermon on repentance. Having accepted, we will not consign it to oblivion due to absent-mindedness or being carried away by passions; let us keep in our memory, in our hearts, “let us create fruits worthy of repentance.” First, let us reject conceit and carnal wisdom, which convince us to be proud of our noble origin from a boyar or priestly family, our noble and rich kinship, our own nobility and wealth that we had while living in the world, our various mental and physical abilities, our learning and erudition. All these virtues given to a person for a time mean nothing compared to the dignity granted forever. Our eternal, essential, spiritual dignity lies in the fact that we are Christians. The price at which this dignity was acquired for us is priceless. “Carry yours,” the apostle tells us, “for they were purchased at a price that was above all price: with the dearest blood of Christ. Glorify therefore God in your body and in your souls, which are the essence of God” (1 Cor. 6:19–20). Just as one price is given for each of us, the spiritual dignity of each of us is equal. “There is neither Greek nor Jew, barbarian and Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11). “Great am I,” said the Hieromartyr Peter of Damascus, “as a Christian and a monk called you, as you said, Lord, to one of your servants, how great you are, because you are called My name. Greater is this than all the kingdoms of earth and heaven, so that I may not be excommunicated from the naming of Thy sweetest Name” 255. This dignity requires that we reverence it, that because of it we reverence ourselves, as vessels in which an invaluable and priceless treasure is kept, as churches of the Divine. We must carefully protect ourselves from all evil, as from a defilement that is humiliating for us, and despise all carnal advantages, as insignificant in comparison with our spiritual dignity and unusual for it. Such should be the holy pride of a renewed nature, as the Monk Isaiah the Hermit said 256: let it protect this nature from moral humiliation. The beautiful, sublime natural quality of contempt for sin turned in fallen nature into contempt for neighbors, into vicious conceit, pride and pride. Before ending the conversation, let us return again to John’s sermon, let us renew its content in our memory, so that we may be not only hearers of it, but also doers, in order to “create fruit worthy of repentance.” The holy prophet Isaiah, foreshadowing the ministry of the Forerunner for seven centuries, set out the content of his sermon as follows: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make right the paths of our God. Every wilderness will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be humbled, and all the rough will be right, and the sharp will be smooth in its path, and the Glory of the Lord will appear, and all flesh will see the salvation of God. Behold your God, behold the Lord: the Lord comes with might, and His arm with power” (Isa. 40:3–5, 10; Luke 3:4–6). We have already seen that the Holy Scripture calls the way of the Lord and His paths into human souls the corresponding way of thinking and heartfelt feelings. In order to acquire them, it is necessary to fill all the wilds, that is, in all low-lying, impassable places, embankments must be made for a convenient procession for the Lord: we must abandon drunkenness, gluttony, fornication, carnal pleasures, so-called innocent games and amusements - in a word, everything that constitutes a carnal and sinful life, reducing a person to the dignity of senseless cattle and beasts. We must replace them with the opposite virtues: abstinence, sobriety, chastity. Sinful and carnal life blocks the Lord's path into the human heart. Next: it is necessary to humble or level every mountain and hill, that is, to erase from the soul conceit and pride in all their forms, both in the supposedly significant and in the most petty. Finally, we must reject all incorrect and self-willed concepts of faith, these obstinate and sharp paths, completely submitting to the teachings of God, preserved in integrity by the one Orthodox Eastern Church. Then all the crookedness will be straightened, all the unevenness will be smoothed out: the path for the Lord will become completely free; every person will conveniently receive salvation. Salvation enters the soul together with the Lord who has entered it. Amen. Written upon arrival at the Nikolaev Babaevsky Monastery in 1861. ( Job 42:6 ). That the saints of God reach such a state, see St. Isaac of Syria, words 48 and 49 Bergier. Dictionnaire Theologique, Saduceens Saint Tikhon of Voronezh. Volume 15, letter 32 Peter of Damascus. How to acquire true faith. 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