Rationalism and Orthodoxy

In the second half of this century, our life, both social and family, suffered a severe collapse. New ideas about the church, the state, the family and the school knocked her off her previous foundations. It was felt that the very foundations of life were shaking, faith was being eliminated, and things were heading toward outright godlessness. All these new ideas rushed to us from the West, but there they arose and developed more or less consistently, and this somewhat weakened their harmful influence. In our country, for some time, the spread of these new ideas was delayed: in the 60s, under the rapid pressure of them, the doors finally opened, and a terrible cycle began, giving rise to an immeasurable multitude of mental illnesses, which prematurely also claimed an immeasurable number of lives and, among various terrible disasters, prematurely and with such cruel violence, took away the most precious life of the noblest and greatest of the kings, until Finally, this last terrible blow did not pose before us the fatal question: where are we going? “Society excommunicates itself from the Church,” St. Nikanor said eleven years ago (1882) ago, shortly after the terrible catastrophe of the regicide, with his usual frankness, “some abandoning the sacraments, rituals and all church discipline, others, eliminating themselves from the sacraments and going to church, and still others outright falling away from the church.” “Is it clear,” he asked, “where we are going, have we even arrived already?...” And he continues: “According to the Old and New Testament prophecies, the river of times is washing away the shore on which to this day stands the majestic, extremely durable and architecturally artistic, divinely beautiful church of Christianity, in which the name of the true God, the highest God is still glorified, the wrong rock, it will not be crushed, on which the universal The Church of Christ, but those foundations on which the Church of Christ rested among us, among our people, and which, apparently, are being shaken and rotting. How many people look with fear at whether the lamp of Christ is moving from its place away from us somewhere, to other places, for example, to Japan? “As long as the matter consisted only in the wild chatter of the blind leaders of the blind, although imagining themselves seeing, crowd,” he says in the same word, “she knew that she was having fun. And when the thunder and lightning of the terrible deeds flashed, everyone was frightened at first, and then they waved their hand: whatever happens, if only it passes us by, there will be a flood after us. They all turn out to be powerless to turn back, they even push each other forward along the slope of history, albeit into the abyss of destruction... Do I myself think that we can turn history back? Help God” “With God all things are possible” 1 . Now, by the grace of God, under the shade of our wise Sovereign, we are experiencing a significant time of enlightenment of thoughts, correction of mistakes made, restoration of former paths bequeathed to us by the thousand-year history of Russia. What kind of enemy is this that has attacked the thousand-year-old heritage of Russia and our most precious heritage from our fathers and ancestors? This enemy has already clearly and clearly emerged. Its name is rationalism. The name of rationalism is captivating especially for young minds. It comes from the Latin word ratio, which means reason. By this he wants to say that both in all things and in matters of religion, everything should be reasonable. What then? Is the Christian faith at odds with reason? On the contrary: it is the only one of all existing faiths that agrees with him. Come and see (John 1:46), this is her motto. Look, delve into it, make sure, you will undoubtedly see and be convinced that this is the truth. Reason in the matter of faith is given a wide area: it both certifies the authenticity of the sources of faith in Scripture and Tradition, and reveals and clarifies revealed truths. The dogmas of faith have already gone through a long and complex process of rational consciousness and understanding, they have their own history, and there is still a boundless field for new and new research of the mind. Hardly any other science represents such a deep, soul-grabbing interest as Christian dogmatics. Witnesses to this are those known to us by name, secular people who, once interested in deep theological questions, are no longer able to tear themselves away from them, and with joy and enthusiasm fill their leisure time with research. But reason must know its boundaries, which are determined by its own laws. You cannot invent something that does not exist or has not yet been discovered. If something is given from above or happened in reality, then one must understand how it was given or happened. These are the basic laws of logic. Reason holds them in all sciences: both in history and in natural science, and must also be held in theology. Keep the tradition, says the Apostle, that is, the talent of the universal faith, one church teacher explains these words, keep it intact and undamaged. What has been entrusted to you, then let it remain with you, then you pass it on. You received gold, give gold back. I don’t want you to give me something else instead of one; I don’t want you to blatantly and through deception substitute lead or copper instead of gold, I don’t want gold by appearance, give it in kind 2 . The integrity of dogmas, with their comprehensive and deep, unceasingly continuing disclosure and clarification, is strictly and inviolably guarded by the mind of the universal Church: this, mainly, consists of the essence and strength of Orthodoxy 3. But from the first centuries of Christianity there have been attempts on the part of the human mind to mix their own inventions with the truth of Christian teaching, to give a composition instead of the gold of Revelation of their base work. And it must be admitted that the East especially suffered from this, and in these mental sins of the East, the inquisitive Greek thought, accustomed to philosophical twists and tricks, took the greatest share. The West was relatively calm. There was no such violent agitation of heresies. This relative calm of the West in comparison with the storms of the East was even boasted by the popes to the patriarchs. But all these heresies that arose in the East - the Aryan, and the Macedonian, and the Nestorian, and the Monophysite, and the Monothelite, and the iconoclastic, and others - were nothing more than as soon as the attempts of reason put erroneous human reasoning in the place of the Divinely revealed universal truth, to give its work lead or copper instead of gold Revelation, private attempts, mostly personal, victorious, although not without a difficult, sometimes even bloody, struggle, reflected and then serving to clarify the revealed truths. These heresies either disappeared without a trace, like the Arian and Macedonian heresies, or remained as something frozen in a dead formula, which is given a different meaning by those who repeat it, adhering to one letter, in some churches of the East that have broken away from the unity of the universal church - Jacobite, Maronite, Coptic, and in other respects these churches remain faithful to the ancient Church and even keep her venerable features, in others somewhat altered and even lost. The rationalism of recent centuries is not at all like that. This is not a single thought, not a particular delusion, but a whole direction formed in all areas of life. His desire is to completely crowd out faith from consciousness, to blot out, if this were possible, the very name of the Christian God. It was already placed in the most frivolous of all Western countries, although the most gifted of them all, in a church dedicated to the name of the Most High God, and for some time the shameful figure of the Goddess of Reason stood there... What an idea of ​​rationalism! Where did rationalism in its current form originate? The homeland of rationalism is the West, which is calm and complacent in relation to the heresies of the East, from where it was brought to us. The beginnings of the rationalism that nestled there can be traced back to the earliest history of the West. Having somewhat formed, he first looked into the light of God in the Pelagian heresy, against which Blessed Augustine fought with such strength and energy. Pelagianism is like a model of a future building, like the outline of a giant that will appear later: in it rationalism was immediately outlined in all its qualities and aspirations. According to the false teaching of Pelagius, Adam’s sin has no meaning of heredity and contagion in relation to his offspring. All people are now born as innocent and immaculate as their first parents were before their fall. You just need to teach a person how he should behave, strengthen his will in this direction, and the person will be kind and holy. These three false ideas constitute the essence of rationalism. Each person is conceived of on his own, completely detached from historical connections, and his personality is detached from all the authorities standing before him: this is the first and main feature of rationalism - abstractism. There is no general corruption of human nature, which means there is no need for redemption, and there is no need for the grace of rebirth and other sacraments. This is the second feature of rationalism - false optimism and rejection of everything that bears the stamp of higher help: there is no need for it, without it everything can be fine. The exaltation of knowledge, teachings in which an all-healing remedy for the evils and troubles of mankind is presented, or so-called intellectualism, constitutes the third main feature of rationalism, from which its very name comes 4. Although the heresy of Pelagius was rejected at many councils of the West and finally at the Third Ecumenical Council, it did not disappear, and in all religious movements of the West it constantly appears again, sometimes in direct form, more often in a somewhat moderate, so-called semi-Pelagianism. With each of its appearances, Pelagianism constantly revealed a desire to seize the entire area of ​​​​faith and morality and rebuild them in its own way. How rationalism was formed from the seeds thrown by Pelagius is difficult to depict: for this it is necessary to trace the entire history of the West for 13 or more centuries, because Pelagianism itself, as noted above, had its reasons in the early history of the West. The main difficulty of the matter is that in the world movement, which was preparing the last terrible attack on faith and the church from the side of rationalism, the situation changed: a seemingly good movement, through the action of the enemy, turned into evil of the church, and vice versa, from the most extreme evil, through the action of Providence, good consequences are extracted. And finally, it would take us too far. Therefore, we will limit ourselves to only indicating the main stages along which the evil of rationalism proceeded to its discovery and completion. Such stages represent: 1) the separation of the Western Church from the unity of the Universal Church, 2) the emergence of Protestantism, 3) the emergence of a new philosophy on the ruins of medieval scholasticism. Catholicism in the West represents, as it were, a counterbalance to Protestant freethinking, but Catholicism, at its core, is one of the daring attempts with which future rationalism declared itself in the face of the Church. The private church dared to oppose its unfounded judgment to the universal truth, directly and clearly revealed in Scripture and also directly and clearly defined by the Church at the Ecumenical Council. At the same time, one of the five patriarchs, completely equal to them in degree and power, taking advantage of external favorable circumstances, willfully went beyond the boundaries of his position determined by the ecumenical canons and tried to anticipate the power over the entire Church belonging to the one eternal head of the Church, the Lord Jesus Christ. Catholicism, on the other hand, contributed to the formation of rationalism with fabrications and forgeries in favor of papal claims and measures inconsistent with the faith against opponents such as the Inquisition and the like. The great sin of Catholicism is that it connected the outer brilliant side of religion with the licentiousness of the courts, for example, the French, and the upper classes in this and other countries, and that it interfered in matters not subject to spiritual authority and became entangled in politics, just as now, before our eyes, it is playing an extremely dangerous game with democracy and socialism. In all this, combustible materials accumulated: arrows and the caustic mockery of the rationalists, from which the conscience of those weak in faith were so confused, were directed. But if Catholicism, with its aspirations and errors, represented an environment favorable for the development of rationalism, then Protestantism was already its breadwinner. It proclaimed the right of one’s own (subjective) conviction in matters of faith. This principle of subjectivity immediately, after the emergence of Protestantism, declared itself in the West in all areas, both religious, moral, political and social. Luther saw where things were going, and in his last years he tried to stop the spread of freethinking, but in vain. The plug jumped out of the vessel filled with gases, and there was no longer any possibility of collecting these gases back into the vessel. Even a whole movement was formed against freethinking in Protestantism - the so-called Pietism, but with its feigned piety and hypocrisy it only contributed to the development of rationalism and accelerated its emergence. In the Socinian sect we see a kind of natural transition from Protestantism to rationalism: Socinianism already directly and clearly declares all the principles of rationalism, although it still strengthens its adherence to religious grounds. The emergence of a new philosophy on the ruins of medieval scholasticism was a natural and legitimate and, in many respects, favorable even for faith, movement of great minds that overthrew the heavy bonds imposed on human thought by papacy and Latinism, and opened up high spheres and wide spaces for it. The names of René-Descartes, Bacon of Verulam, the founders of the new philosophy are venerable and great names: these are world geniuses, inventors of new paths in both science and art. Their great works provide the basis for those brilliant discoveries for which our time is so famous. Their great ideas are also valuable for theological science. How closely the free flight of their thoughts came into contact with the region of the highest Revelation! Oh, if only this flight of philosophical thought would remain in the direction that these great thinkers, who revered the mysteries of faith, planned for it! To the great misfortune of mankind, by the time of this movement of the new philosophy, the reprisals of Catholicism and the willfulness of Protestantism had already suppressed faith in the West, the foundations on which the Western Church had once stood so majestically were shaken and weakened, and the mind, thanks to the works and successes of these great thinkers and the halo of glory surrounding their names, was too glorified and exalted. Therefore, he no longer restrained himself within the proper limits and declared his claim to be a leader of faith. It takes a lot of strength and intelligence and will in order to think freely in one’s philosophical sphere, to have sincere reverence for the highest revelation and in one’s thoughts to constantly have that boundary that separates the area of ​​faith and reason, and in order to be faithful to the former, another important condition is required - one must be pure in heart, for they have been given the promise to see God. The great thinkers themselves did not always meet these conditions: their followers, lacking their intelligence, suffering from pride and other weaknesses, crossed this border. With more and more audacity, philosophical principles: “de omnibus disputandum est”, “cogito, ergo sum” and others began to be applied to questions of faith, and everything that exceeds reason in it, revealed from above, mysterious, was attributed to objects subject to doubt. And the ancient Pelagianism was already revealed in the form of a giant: this is rationalism. Hence, half of it XVII century and its spread and dominance in the Christian world begins. But from these very times the transformations of rationalism began. It turns out that reason itself cannot stand firmly without the solid supports of revealed faith. Life constantly protested against his conclusions and laws, and he himself could not help but be aware of the mistakes he had made and the misconceptions he had committed. Different philosophical systems arise, each with its own special view of questions and matters of faith. At the beginning of its emergence, each of these philosophical teachings tries, apparently, very conscientiously to correct the shortcomings and hobbies of previous teachings, promises to give peace to troubled minds, but then goes to the opposite extreme, into new hobbies and errors, and the lining of rationalism remains the same, according to the Russian proverb, the same old horns are heard in a slightly different way, etc. endlessly, or rather, until sad end to which rationalism is now coming. The first form in which philosophy was expressed as a teacher of faith was the so-called deism, which undertook to cleanse Christianity from the unnecessary, as it seemed to many, and in the West it was partly true, and distorted shells of positive church teaching and worship and to free the essential truth from underneath them. Deism arose in Britain, the homeland of the first rationalist Pelagius, and at the beginning it was distinguished by its seriousness, as if it really wanted to do something good, but soon descended into a frivolous and mocking attitude towards everything that related to faith and the church and, finally, reached the point where the entire content of Revelation, not only Tradition, but also Scripture itself, began to be declared a deliberate fabrication: everything was invented by the priests, through their own misunderstanding, and often with the intention of his own aggrandizement and enrichment. The English, due to the practicality inherent in this people, soon came to their senses, and the first instigators in the matter of unbelief now guard their confession with special vigilance. But the direction hostile to Christianity was taken up by the frivolous French; here Voltaire found a convenient and wide field for his mockery of religion, here the touched debauchee Rousseau turned up, and such a fire broke out in this country, which, despite the terrible shocks it experienced, burns there even now. The Germans raised the ideas of deism into a certain system in which it stands as a philosophical and religious teaching. According to the teachings of deists, there is a God, but He is somewhere behind the clouds, without any vital connection with the world. Thanks to the great discoveries of Newton, who explained the movement of the worlds, and Kant, who defined the moral imperative in the human soul, the laws by which the material and spiritual worlds operate have been comprehended. Why else is it necessary to introduce a special influence on the world of the Divine? God created the world, gave it the first impetus, and the machine of the world began to work, like a well-constructed clock. “Two things,” Kant concludes his critique of practical reason, “fill my soul with ever new and growing amazement and awe, the more often and more persistently my thinking engages with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” What apparently beautiful words, but wait a moment to admire, delve deeper into these words, and the deistic view with its narrow horizons will appear before you. So, according to the teachings of the deists, there is no Providence, no revelation, no redemption and no miracle. We have everything we need in nature and conscience. Who is Jesus Christ? This is the sage of Galilee, a pious rabbi, he, more than other ancient sages, comprehended the truth, taught people goodness and sealed fidelity to his conviction with his death. Those great words that He spoke were exaggerated by Eastern rhetoric, so it is necessary to bring them to the standard of reason; the miracles that are told about him should be explained naturally. Therefore, the main essence in Christianity consists of those instructions in wisdom and virtue, which, first of all, we owe to Jesus of Nazareth, and, besides him, to other sages of antiquity, and what is called the Church is an institution for precisely this edification and teaching and nothing more. There are no special means of grace and there cannot be: the teaching about the sacraments and other means of grace is mysticism dangerous for morality. The whole point of the matter is only in training. We focused on deism with special attention, because it was it that removed faith from the throne in the West and placed reason on this throne. Deism is usually identified with rationalism, but it is more correct to consider deism only the first form of rationalism, followed by others, which caused each other to be one-sided and extreme in their views. Deism recognizes God, but deprives him of life and activity. What kind of dead creature is this? And so philosophy introduces this distant and deathly god into the world and allows him to manifest here in various ways the inexhaustible wealth of the life hidden in him. There is no God as a separate and personal being from the world, but the world itself is God. Pantheism appears, Spinoza, Hegel, Schelling and others dominate the minds. We vividly remember the fascination that magic words had on young minds during our studies: God in himself is something possessing great powers, but not formed and indefinite, God outside himself, i.e., variously expressed in numerous types of nature, God for himself, i.e., coming to his consciousness in man. If deism pushed minds away from Christianity, then pantheism led them to paganism: everything is divine, both a stone rising in a cliff, and a blade of grass growing out of the ground, and an animal, and especially a person. And our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the teachings of pantheists, is great because for the first time he recognized and proclaimed himself God. This nonsense is still proclaimed here by Count Tolstoy, who has lost his way. From the extremes of pantheism, materialism degenerated, the same pantheism, only turned to the other side. Ideas about God in himself, outside himself and for himself, about deus implicitus and deus explicitus and others - materialism declared an empty and idle fantasy. There are no ideas, but in everything and everywhere one substance moves and diversifies. Thinking is either a chemical process or simple physical movement of things. There is no God, no angel, no spirit, no immortality: all this, according to the teachings of materialists, is empty words. This was the time of the dominance of Feuerbach, Vocht, Moleschott, Darwin, Comte and other thinkers, the reading of which was enjoyed by the generation that followed us. But there are some conditions under which the same substance appears here in this and there in another form. These conditions do not seem to be random, but bear the stamp of certainty, expediency and some kind of rationality inherent in the substance. The explanation for this is the philosophy of the unconscious. Schopenhauer, Hartmann and other thinkers appear. According to their teaching, there is some kind of blind attraction of existence, according to which everything is done in the world. The world is the product of this blind attraction and gravitation towards being. This blind attraction of existence is called the will of the world, from which laws are derived and the living conditions of the world are determined. This is a teaching of recent times, which even now dominates many minds. Always, before the eyes of all these thinkers, there was the question of evil. The history of the Fall and the doctrine of hereditary sin was rejected by rationalism: where does evil come from in the world? Deists looked for the cause of evil in man in wrong upbringing, influence from bad examples, and explained various disorders in nature from random causes, and these disorders in nature, for example. the Lisbon flood, etc., were presented as proof of the indifference of the Divine to the world. Pantheism denies the very existence of evil in the world: evil that seems to us is nothing more than a lack of goodness, it is a shadow cast by light, it is even a necessary condition for life movement and progress. Materialism and especially the latest philosophy of the unconscious have established the norm of life for evil. There is no point in indulging in illusions. Evil, disorder, disasters are an inevitable part of the world, an image of its existence. The happiest of us has no better moment in life than the moment of falling asleep, and the most unhappy of us has nothing worse than the moment of waking up. Not a single good satisfies a person: after every pleasure there is a feeling of oppressive melancholy. Sorrow and suffering in general are piled up in gigantic masses in the world. Wouldn't it be better if such a world had never arisen? Yes, the philosophy of recent times firmly and persistently answers, non-existence is better than being. The only advantage of man over animals is that at any moment he can end his life with a bullet, a noose, or poison. The best thing would be to find such an explosive that the whole world could be blown up and all existence could be destroyed. But pessimism cannot rest on this dream either. Who can guarantee, he sighs, that the blind will of existence will not play its evil joke on us again and will not push us again into the world to suffer. Therefore, isn’t it better to extract from this world turmoil some kind of temporary, even just for one day, joy of grief? And so, a pessimist by conviction, becomes an optimist by tastes and habits: he yearns for the world's sorrow and at the same time rushes to be satisfied with the pleasures that he can. But the life of sybarites, apparently completely satisfied with life, often ends either with a bullet or with strychnine. This is done very simply: he sat, talked, was, apparently, so calm, cheerful: he went into another room, a shot and the end of everything. It is amazing how Asian Buddhism with its attractions to nirvana approached this game with world sorrow. And in Paris, where the pulse of world life beats so vigorously, this ancient paganism is already spreading, bonzes and mahatmas have been sent there, altars are created to Buddha, and incense is raised, and serious men and noble ladies bow their knees before the idol. Very cleverly, the history of the Fall is applied to this whole disastrous movement of rationalism, especially the hateful one. Did God really say? - this is the motto of the first form of rationalism - deism. Attached to everything is the question: is this really from God? and then both one, and the other, and the third are denied - both revelation and providence: only one name of God remains... “You yourselves will be like gods” - this is the motto of pantheism. “And the woman saw that it would be good to eat of the tree, and she ate” is a symbol of materialism. Fear, embarrassment, an attempt to hide, lies, etc., etc. - all this can be attributed to the grief and despair of pessimism. One may ask: after all, this is philosophy and famous philosophical schools, great scientists work in the silence of their offices, read lectures from their departments to a select number of listeners, their books are so large, sophisticated, the language is incomprehensible, heavy: how do they spread? It is impossible to keep philosophical ideas in offices or classrooms. Through the upper layers - scientists, rulers, through students, through magazines and newspapers, through various popular publications, they quickly spread and greatly influence life. All philosophical movements of recent times have already been clearly reflected in the position of the church and in the structure of states, and in politics, and in trade, in all sectors of life. And the crowd, uninvolved in learning, eagerly listens to the conclusions of philosophical teachings that are contrary to faith and the law of God and uses them to unbridle their passions. There have been attempts to protect philosophical ideas from their popularization, but it turned out that in our time nothing can be hidden. The spirit of the time, hostile to faith, penetrates through all walls and obstacles in thousands of invisible ways and worries and destroys life, as it declares with facts that are too loud and sad. It is impossible to depict, it is difficult even to list all the disorders that the rationalism of recent centuries has produced. The most disastrous thing, of course, is the rejection of faith, the church, and therefore the rejection, one after another, of all the foundations on which human life rests, which has already been said enough above. But unbelief, as has long been noted, is a disease not so much of the mind as of the will. Judgments like the following: “I don’t understand this”, “I don’t recognize this”, mean not so much any deepening of thought into the question to be judged, but rather a movement of evil will. “I don’t like this”, “this interferes with so and so” - this is the hidden lining of most of the declared doubts and bewilderments. From these impulses of self-will, obedience to elders is violated, authorities are despised, the first of the authorities in its origin - parental and even the highest in its significance - the royal one is rejected, marital ties are severed, illegal cohabitations openly exist and are brazenly declared, and so on and so forth, to the poisoning of children, to parricides, to suicides in couples and entire families in the most cynical conditions. Rationalism produced the same revolution, or rather, commotion, in the concepts of public administration, social relations, and relationships. Constitutional government is still a certain reconciliation between the demands of rationalism and the historically given powers of the state, and, as a compromise, it itself is in constant flux and inevitably, with all the provisions, shakes the life of peoples. But the favorite forms of government of rationalism are a republic, democracy and, if only it were possible, complete anarchy. The motto of rationalism is complete freedom in everything, “leave it, let everyone do what they want.” And so, under the terrible oppression of self-will, one after another, all the barriers that kept people’s social relations within the limits of law and order began to crumble, and the doors to passions and all sorts of debauchery were thrown open: the passion for profit developed to terrifying proportions; moneylenders, mostly Jews, took terrible capital into their hands; taverns and drinking establishments, vulgar small theaters, establishments for dancing entertainment, various “variety shows” and “renaissances” multiplied; Drunkenness among the people increased to the extreme, and the percentage of crimes increased to a terrifying figure. Art itself was vulgarized to the extreme; to suit the unbridled taste of the public, seductive paintings, like the famous “Nana,” were painted in the hope of profit. The maxim was proclaimed that property is theft, and all sorts of thefts and terrible criminal offenses were justified. And rationalism itself stole high truths from the treasury of Revelation, passed them off as its own, as if only through it they appeared to the world, and reinterpreted them in its own way. What terrible abuses rationalism has made of the Christian concepts of freedom, equality, fraternity are shown by the horrors of the French revolutions and the commune. In general, there is no area in human life where rationalism does not leave its terrible, harmful influence. But there is one nerve in church, state and public life that is especially tender and sensitive to all the revolutions of philosophy since it became a teacher of faith - this is the school, not only the higher and middle, but also the lower and even, strange as it may seem, this latter predominately. Knowing the sensitivity of the school to the progressive ideas of the century and the great importance in particular of primary upbringing and education for the masses, the very conductors and disseminators of these new ideas tried to influence society through the school. For example, Rousseau ignited the fire of revolution in France with his famous pedagogical novel “Emile.” Basedow, Pestalozzi, Dinter, Diesterweg - all these leaders of our school in the West, so familiar to our school - stood in close and even direct connection with the philosophical movements of their time and were their guides to school and society. It must be said even more: there is not a single outstanding thinker or poet who would not influence the school in one way or another. Expand the history of pedagogy in recent times: in it you will see all the famous intellectual celebrities of our time, and since they all more or less taught and acted in the spirit of rationalism, this spirit has penetrated deeply and from all sides into schools, including our poor rural school. Let's take each of the three main ideas of rationalism and see how they affected the school. The first idea of ​​rationalism is abstractism, that is, the freedom and independence of each individual from all historical connections and all authorities. This desire for abstraction was expressed in the efforts of teachers to remove all outside influence from children. The ideal of education, according to Rousseau, is to keep a child and youth healthy and strong until the age of 12 in such immediacy that he cannot distinguish his right hand from his left. Then, according to Rousseau, he will soon, under the guidance of an intelligent mentor, become reasonable. “If only he would make him strong, and then soon he will be reasonable.” For 15 years, Emil does not know if he has a soul. It’s too early for him to know about this even at 18. She finds out - what good things have happened before, she will never know well about her. But since such isolation of a child, a youth, a youth is possible only in a novel, and not in reality, then, according to the conviction of rationalist educators, we should at least try in every possible way to isolate the school from outside influences. The school, according to rationalists, is an independent entity, standing separately and independently from the family, the church, and even the state. No one dare meddle in her affairs. In particular, it must be independent of the church. Down with the priests. Secular people can teach you what you need. The reasons why the church in the West distanced itself from schools are curious. “The school has always been the daughter of the church,” said the priests and pastors. “That was and is past,” rationalist teachers objected to them. Now the school has reached adulthood and has every right to move on its own, life goes its own way. The mother herself, that is, the church, must take care that her daughter’s school gets on its own feet.” “The Church raised and nurtured the school; it must have connections with it,” they objected. “Yes,” the rationalist educators answered them, “the old scholastic school was cherished by the Church, but it turned out to be worthless. The current Swiss and German school grew out of universal public education, acquired by the people's own labor. That's why she doesn't care about the church. The church is only a particle of the social structure (the remark, I must say, is fair and very caustic in relation to Protestantism and even Catholicism itself), it is impossible to link a school to it: it is a common property.” “Church departments look at the school as an outside matter. They, that is, the ministers of the church, have no leisure, no funds, no sufficient education, no pedagogical experience, no skill, no tact to conduct school affairs and especially manage them.” “Without a solid religious and moral education, neither obedience to the law nor civil order are possible,” said the defenders of the church. “So it turns out,” school rights defenders objected to this, “why do we need the supervision of priests - these are spies, these are informers on teachers.” The dispute went beyond the limits of the question and another question was posed: should the school be dependent on the state? They say: “No, you shouldn’t. A teacher is not an official; he cannot “fake politics” and trick people’s minds in different ways.” Disterweg advised each of his pupils, the Prussian Schulmeister, “may he be swept away by the rushing stream of the era,” “may he master the courage of freethinking.” The autocephaly of the school was recognized for some time by state authorities, for example. in Prussia, until the same state power took it into its own hands for use as a weapon in the well-known cultural struggle. What a terrible thing Prince Bismarck was, but for some time he also curried favor with the village teachers and wrote to them: “you are my comrades in the fight against the enemy,” this enemy is the church. All this struggle for the autocracy of the school echoed here too, and our rural teachers had particular courage to counteract at least the influence of the clergy on the school... It was not in vain that the priests shunned the school. They could not bear the teachers' clearly hostile attitude towards them. Who doesn’t know that the question of secular teachers of the Law of God was also raised in our country and was almost resolved in the affirmative? The optimism of rationalism was reflected in the school by the exaltation of nature in general and humankind in particular. Rousseau begins his Emile with the words: “everything comes out beautifully from the hands of the creator; everything spoils in the hands of people.” At the same time, however, the sinful depravity of people, which is so sharply revealed even in the earliest childhood, is completely ignored, and only the wonderful properties of children’s nature are seen. A certain Sulzer, having received public education in Silesia in his charge, in a report to King Frederick the Great, extended praises of the natural kindness of people, which was increasingly revealed to him in the performance of the work entrusted to him. Dear Sulzer, Frederick the Great answers him, “you do not know this worthless breed.” This sober word from an intelligent man, however, had no effect on the enthusiastic teachers. Human nature was recognized as perfection, and in pedagogy the principle of “development in accordance with nature”, “free and unconstrained development of nature” was affirmed. This principle of development in accordance with nature is known as anthropological, which is presented by the school in contrast to the church, in general Christian. The root of evil, according to the teaching of the word of God, is in selfishness and pride, but on the contrary, it was precisely these sinful inclinations that were put forward by the new school as the root and source of all noble movements of the heart. “Isn’t it natural self-love (i.e., in our words, selfish pride) that makes us love someone who wishes us good? exclaims the Savoyard vicar, a deist by conviction, in Emile. Having brought pride to the fore, the school aims to prepare for self-help, so as not to be dependent on anyone and not to need anyone or anything. Why is the practically useful considered the main thing in teaching: everything not related to everyday life is neglected by the school as a transcendental subject: hence the narrow utilitarianism of the newest school. All these principles were so inconsistent with the teachings of the Christian religion that she could not get along with them at school. And so the persecution of Christianity, dogma, statutes, and rituals begins in school. First of all, there is a persecution against the catechism. Why this dryness, this set of some incomprehensible formulas and texts? “If I had to,” says Rousseau, “symbolically depict stupidity, I would imagine a pedant teaching children the catechism.” And we had a kind of not only a persecution of the catechism, but an ignorance of it: the catechism, in its entirety, was removed from the school curriculum. The Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Commandments are classified as prayers; there, among others, an explanation is given for them, and that's enough. Then they began to cut down the sacred history. Persecution is rising especially against the Old Testament sacred history. Exclamations are heard: “Why the Old Testament? We are New Testament people. There is a spirit of fear, here is love.” And with us - having said a few words about the creation of the world and the Fall - we walked straight towards the history of the New Testament. Deeply educational, indispensable for children's initial education, stories from sacred history, for example. the story of Joseph is put aside. “Why, they also said among us, read the Psalter and Book of Hours? Isn't it better to read the Gospel? Why in Slavic? Better in Russian." Sometimes the words were beautiful, but their meaning was poor. Then the Old Testament and New Testament history began to be cut into small pieces, these pieces were mixed with excerpts from the explanation of prayers, from the teaching about Divine services, and all this confusion was presented to the school in the form of a so-called joint, or, as they loudly proclaimed then, a concentric system. All this could be summed up with quotations: this is taken from Basedow, this is from Pestalozzi, this is from Dinper and Disterweg, and all this was presented in an exaggerated and distorted form. And all this was done, apparently, with a good goal - to make it easier for children, to make it clear to them in every possible way, through various approaches, incomprehensible even with a high mind, without suspecting that where these borrowings came from, the goal of all desires and thoughts was one thing - in every possible way to curtail, humiliate, depersonalize, deaden the teaching of the Law of God in the destructive forms of rationalism. While all these wonders were being introduced here, everything that bore the stamp of faith and church had long been excluded from schools abroad. “The matter of teaching,” Bazedov also said, is not Catholic, not Lutheran, not Reformed: we are philanthropists and cosmopolitans. Natural religion and moral teaching are the subject of instruction in schools.” In his Dessaut school, Bazedov himself taught the Law of God and boasted that in his school everyone was equal, Jews, Mohammedans, and deists (not a word about Christians). He even started his own special school worship service at school. A special chapel room was decorated. The main color on the walls was interspersed with black strokes to represent the preponderance of good over evil. The middle of the floor represented a kind of coffin to remind of death. The main shrine of this makeshift church was the ark, in which the book of the laws and covenant of the Lord was kept. The lid of the ark is mirrored: test yourself according to the law of the Lord. On the sides of the ark there are two candles: they meant two ways of teaching - outside teaching and one’s own teaching. There are 4 statues above the ark: symbols of prudence, moderation, justice and charity. – The famous philosopher Herder, for the narrowness and one-sidedness of this system, which reduced everything to one abstract morality and prosaic prudence, gave the following review about it: “under this system I would not allow even calves to be raised, and not just children.” The matter, however, went further and ends with the removal of icons from schools and the prohibition of pronouncing the name of God in them. The intellectualism of the school was expressed in the fact that in elementary school the main thing was considered not to be a religious mood, not moral education, but to impart the greatest amount of knowledge. “The immediate task of the public school, say the wise teachers of the new school, is to provide a certain measure of scientific and practical knowledge, and the needs of the present time determine this measure not low.” And so that wide field, which was previously allocated in school to church and religious education in general, was filled with various subjects that had nothing to do with elementary school. According to the school curriculum of one of the districts of Germany, eleven-year-old girls, daughters of simple and poor people, studied the history of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, and became acquainted with the Song of the Nibelungs; in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, zoology, mineralogy, chemistry, and physics were taught in one-class public schools and in the most insignificant villages. That our schools did not avoid this extreme is evidenced by those anthologies and reading books that appeared in our country in the 60s and 70s and, without a doubt, meant to respond to the needs of the time: what is not stuffed into them! It is quite natural that as the number of subjects increases, the most necessary reading and writing (not to mention the Law of God) suffers greatly and becomes insufficient, and more than once, not only here, but also abroad, complaints have been heard that recently the school has fallen behind in the simplest subjects - namely in writing, reading and arithmetic. But the main evil from this multi-subjectivity is the superficiality, conceit, arrogance and contempt that developed in the younger generation. Here are the worst dangers to society. Some thought to prevent evil by introducing elements of state law and national economy into schools in order to create in this way in the student generation some kind of bulwark against social democracy. But this led to a new accumulation of subjects and did not help matters at all; on the contrary, it also gave the school a political connotation. Rural teachers began to imagine themselves even more as the engines of not only science, but also politics itself. It was said above how the famous Bismarck himself looked after them until he bent them under his iron hand. Who doesn’t know that in our country, the school for seditious people was one of the means and, moreover, the most effective one among the people, and what the various Nechaevs and Solovyovs would not say to the children there within the four walls of the school, where the tender, trusting and impressionable children’s hearts, as soft as wax, are open to them and where no one outside hears them... if they were given the freedom that rationalism requires for the school. From the presented brief and cursory sketch of rationalism, it is revealed that this is a terrible enemy of faith and the church, far leaving behind all the heresies and false teachings that existed in it, preparing for 17 centuries and setting the task of abolishing the Christian faith and church and returning peoples to the past times of paganism, and if it turned out to be possible, then to antediluvian unbelief and complete immersion in sensuality. Superhuman strength is visible in the detection, preparation, advance, and actions of this enemy. What do we, weak people, even the great among us, mean in that world struggle, which since the beginning of time has been waged by the ancient serpent, the murderer from time immemorial, with the Lamb of God, slain for the sins of the world. There are chariots and horses, as was revealed to the seer, the friend of the Lord. The onslaught of this enemy was especially swift and dangerous in our country. Like a stormy wind, he suddenly burst through the doors of our house. Having suffered a serious illness and endured some cruel test, we look back with horror and imagine what terrible danger we were in, and at the time we seemed not to notice it. The same thing seems to be true now, when we look back at these terrible sixties and seventies, and at that time it was as if we did not feel any particular dangers. It seemed to us: this was the time, this was how it had to be, nothing could be done. Little by little, step by step, we went further and further into the depths of the abyss, agreed to various concessions, were afraid to say anything against, especially to the younger generation, fathers servilely before their children, mothers cried silently at the terrible, previously unheard of, insolence of their sons and daughters, bosses gave up their power, the most serious crimes were brazenly declared before the court of the unwashed truth and then justified crimes. It’s so easy to get used to looking at everything. Well, they paid, and with what terrible sacrifices they paid. What part of society, what institution, what home, what family can consider themselves completely unscathed by the hurricane? If Russia is saved, it is only by the grace of God. At no time in its existence have there been so many, a table of obvious, table of astounding miracles. It was impossible not to see the right hand of the Lord. “I live,” the Lord told us at a time when from all sides we heard and read, both through the lines and clearly, about the universe, about the absolute, about the omnipotent nothing. Poetry is a living expression of the thoughts and feelings of the people. Let us remember the inspired words of the poet about the most amazing, greatest of the miracles revealed in our time. These words at one time made such a strong impression on everyone. Here they are raised, here they are outraged Hearts of the people of all Russia Before her, before the entire hundred million, Strives, surrounded by glory, A host of God's angels from heaven, And amidst the collapse of the iron masses, And the Lord himself, from the heights above the stars, He stretched out his hand over them. And we see from the cold midnight Yes! Among the oblivions of faith, among the hobbies of the Baals and Astartes of our time, there was a new truth, as if it had just been revealed from above, that there is a living God, omnipotent, and that He, an unimaginable “nothing,” rules the world. Lately, rationalism has apparently already resolved itself into nothingness. This resolution began from the time when, following idealistic pantheism, materialism began to spread. He has appeared in the world more than once and has always been a sign of decay. Deism and pantheism have thrown off the bonds of God's law from people and unbridled sensuality, and what the heart desires, the mind strengthens to justify. Theoretical materialism is a consequence of practical materialism. But he is already the end of philosophy, death for everything ideal. If there is nothing else beyond the visible, then philosophy naturally stops: physics, chemistry, whatever you want, is possible, but not philosophy. But even those struck by death experience convulsive twitches. There was an attempt to give materialism itself the appearance of a transcendental science in so-called positivism, and that was not the end of it - the philosophy of the unconscious appeared. The fight is far from over. The danger is real, and many more are dying. In the church every day a prayer is proclaimed: “bring reason to those who have gone astray, put Thy divine fear in them, direct them to the path of truth.” Times of some calm are the most dangerous in the world struggle. Who knows: the enemy of faith and the church may already be forging a new weapon against them! Which of our fathers and ancestors could have expected that in the 2nd half of the 19th century the Lord Savior would be opposed to the Indian Buddha, that Christian poets would decorate him with flowers plucked from the Gospel, and that he would be worshiped in the very center of the civilized world? The all-powerful “nothing” still dominates many minds. Poetry here too is the herald and interpreter of life. In the April book of the Russian Bulletin of this year, a poem by another of our venerable poet Polonsky was published, and was immediately noted by everyone as a living and vivid picture of the modern trend of minds. Omnipotent nothingness - soulless darkness, grave Bottomless of everything that moves - what was And there is and will be - the death of deaths! Neither think about you nor about the fate of people, Clinging to the whirlwind of the universe, To the ground, for a moment, to be a playground of passions, Crazy orgies, or suffering. But if sometimes my insignificance Tells me that I am not eternal, Nothing! - Am I really made human by you? Have you really given me both hearing and eyes? So that I, like God, out of nothing Created minutes, days and nights And fill them with yourself, With trembling hearts and trembling consciousness, Either denial or hostility, Either ugliness or wondrous beauty An endless chain of existences has become May darkness or emptiness cut it off! And may she disappear forever! Oh Lord! earthly creators Creator! I can't see, I can't see where the end is The one where you started everything! What the omnipotent nothing can conquer - And faith, and love, and truth, and kindness... Give me back Your image, return Your likeness! We are still far from freed from the madness of our age. Faith, love, truth, and kindness are also objects of desire and prayer. Immersed in sensuality, recognizing their foremother in the gorilla, people forgot about their Prototype, forgot about their Creator. “Return to me Your image, return Your likeness!” What to do? Will they turn away with anger and indignation from everything developed by science and art of recent times? Burn books in which one way or another the enemy of faith, godless philosophy has expressed itself? Rebuild your entire life, family, social, and state, in the manner of the 16th and 17th centuries? But, firstly, this is impossible, and secondly, it is not required by the spirit of Orthodoxy. It was not in vain, but for the highest purposes of Providence, that this dominance of rationalism was allowed; otherwise it would be necessary for us to doubt the great truth that there is a God, that He, and not “nothing,” rules the world. And finally, we have suffered so much, suffered such terrible losses, and it would not be reasonable to gain anything from this terrible struggle. In these last two centuries, amid the lies that dominated the minds, a lot of good things were said, written, and done. There is not a single false teaching where a few grains of truth cannot be found. There is a lot of good in the most religious writings. Some pages from the same soul-destroying Emil, for example. about the attention with which mothers - mothers themselves directly, and not through nannies and wet nurses - should pay to the initial upbringing of their children, so good that they could be reprinted in their entirety in our spiritual magazines. The teaching of many subjects at school through the works of the new pedagogy, although operating in the spirit of rationalism, was simplified, facilitated, clarified, and improved. It would be a sin not to take advantage of what has been done to make it easier for children to learn. The same is true in other areas of life. Moreover, not all writers and general figures of the past two centuries were equally infected with rationalism. Throughout the history of these two centuries, we see two currents at the same time: on the one hand, the false thinking of rationalism is spreading in a wide band and, as it were, dominantly, on the other hand, sober voices are heard against its hobbies and extremes from the same thinkers, rulers of the people, servants of the faith, breathing the deep truth of life and sincere conviction in the truth. Collecting these testimonies of truth and using them would be for the purpose of good education, the improvement of family and society. Keep everything that tempts you (1 Thessalonians 5–21), this is the rule of Orthodoxy. History sometimes repeats itself in the lives of nations. The current situation of rationalism and Orthodoxy is in many ways reminiscent of the state of the human race before the coming of the Savior. And then philosophy, which undertook to be the leader of peoples, came to its decline. There was the same disbelief, immersion in sensuality and debauchery. But in the works of the great thinkers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others, a rich treasury was presented to the world. The light of the Christian faith has shone, and in the schools of Alexandria, Antioch and Constantinople, and in the West itself, the ongoing process of assimilation and processing of the ideas bequeathed by ancient philosophy, according to the great truths of being and life proclaimed in Revelation, is taking place for several centuries. A similar rich treasury of thoughts, views, and ideals now lies before Christian Orthodox wisdom, and a great work of thought has already begun, as shown by the special revival of theological and philosophical science in our country in recent times. The same should be in other areas of science, in art, in pedagogy, in life. In this assimilation of philosophical ideas and scientific discoveries, by all means we must preserve, like the most precious treasure, like the apple of our eye, the shrine of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is a gift entrusted to us from above for safekeeping, in it is our strength, in it is the guarantee of the success of Russia and all its successes in the future destinies of the world, I will conclude my reading with the words of the God-wise teacher of our century. “New Israel, blessed people of God, do not cease to keep the holy seed within you: and it will not cease to keep you. The seed of the word of God in the mind, the seed of faith in Christ and love for Him in the heart, let it be nourished by prayer, let it grow by feat, let it show its strength in life and good deeds; and Christ, who dwells by faith in the hearts, building His Church in each and everyone, will be for you a stronghold of unshakable standing, a fence of security, your light and peace within, your victorious weapon against any external attack of hostile forces, visible and invisible!” 5 Teachings and conversations T. I, p. 52. Vikenty Larinsky in commonit. 1, n. XXII. Patrolog. curs. compl. t. 1 col. 669. The Most Reverend Sylvester O. P. D. Theology, Dept. 1, page 36. More details in my article “about Orthodoxy in general and in particular in relation to the Slavic peoples, etc. Page 13 et seq. The relationship of ancient Pelagianism to the rationalism of recent centuries is explained in detail in the apologetic readings of Luthard - Reading XXXIII and subsequent ones. We also used the data on rationalism collected in these readings when compiling this essay. Apology of Christianity - translation by A.P. Lopukhin, pp. 543 et seq., St. Petersburg. 1892, published by I. L. Tuzov. Words and Speeches of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, vol. V p. 10. You might be interested in: