Eternal life as the highest good

Contents Introduction Virtue and eternal life Eternal life and true virtue is communion with God The moral state of man before the fall The moral purpose of created man; the need for salvation The most precise explanation of love for God as the content of eternal life love is a feeling Love is endlessly perfected Love and the trinity of the Divine Love for neighbors in relation to love for God What does this eternal life consist of? Chronological infinity is undoubtedly one of the characteristic features of eternal life, but this is not its strength. Eternal life is opposed not only to death, not only to the fleeting life of this world, but first and foremost to those eternal torments that await sinners in the next century. Eternal life, therefore, is not only an endless existence, but also a blessed existence, infinite, not only chronologically, but in its qualitative completeness, in its inner richness. The doctrine of salvation is the stumbling point at which the difference between modern social non-church thinking - no matter how broad, open and tolerant - and the consciousness of the Church is most clearly manifested. This “open” thinking is ready to accept—more out of indifference than from more honorable motives—the words that Christ is the Son of God, and the texts of the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel parables, and the statement about the Resurrection of Christ. But to take note does not mean to take it to heart; the second entails a change in the entire life of the recipient, while the first only increases his intellectual baggage. And, as a rule, any openness ends when it is necessary to agree that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became incarnate, took upon Himself the sins of the world, was crucified and risen, and became our Savior, and no salvation outside of Him is possible simply because outside of Him there is no salvation, and there is no good in the world that without Him would delight the soul, and besides, all the blessings of the world taken together are not worth even a moment of eternal life. This thesis most harshly contradicts the views that are so familiar to secular consciousness that they are not even recognized as views, but seem to belong to the axioms of human existence: “man himself is the creator of his own happiness,” “our future is in our hands.” In a consumer society aimed at personal success, personal achievements, prosperity and independence in acquiring it, the call of Christianity to surrender oneself into the hands of the Savior causes the same irritation as during the earthly life of Christ - the words My kingdom is not of this world. For a person who longs to independently achieve earthly blessings and does not want to think about the fact that these blessings are illusory and transitory, or even that around him there are literally millions of people like him, striving for success, but who have been wrecked (remember that the suffering of “deceived investors” does not stop others, those who, in their thirst for enrichment, join their ranks), soteriology literally knocks the ground out from under their feet. It requires a clear answer: either you agree to admit that you have lived and are living incorrectly, and you should change and change your whole life, your goals, views, opinions, assessments and desires - or you will live with a thorn in your heart. Someone is still capable of the first, but not the second, and just as a living organism rejects a splinter, surrounding it with purulent tissue and pushing it out along with the abscess, so a wounded consciousness resorts to aggressive rejection of an idea that threatens to destroy the stability of its illusions. It can be assumed that this is where some of the hostility surrounding the name of the Orthodox theologian Sergius (Stragorodsky) comes from. But the hostility is multiplied by the fact that this theologian-soteriologist, by the providence of God, was the Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, and then the Patriarch during the times of the most severe disasters that befell the Russian Orthodox Church, or rather, the most severe ones that have befallen in the entire two-thousand-year history of the Church, so rich in persecutions. If you look at this circumstance soberly and impartially, as befits Christians, you can see in it the undoubted action of the good will of God, His supermundane Wisdom: to preserve the Church, in which salvation fell to the one who explored salvation; besides, it can hardly be seriously denied that Patriarch Sergius fulfilled this purpose. But for some reason (maybe just because?) his life and work are judged again and again according to human understanding, and at the same time they condemn him with such a degree of ill will that it is impossible to hide, and even awkward to observe. This reflects both the world’s eternal rejection of the Church and that ancient sin with which the “foolish Galatians” so upset the holy Apostle Paul that he omitted the greetings in his Epistle to them, namely, disrespect for spiritual authority (see Gal. 1:1) 1, rooted in the unwillingness to distinguish between what is saving and what is pleasant, and the grave psychological consequences of cruel persecution, similar to that which at one time gave rise to the heresy of Donatism: the desire to establish yourself in the idea that it was you and your like-minded people who behaved absolutely correctly, while others behaved incorrectly and should be punished 2 ...These lines were written at the beginning of Great Lent, and will come to the reader on the days of Holy Easter, and we hope that the Lord, having led us along this saving path, will help us cleanse ourselves of ill will and bias. The task of Christian moral teaching should be not so much to give a person a detailed description of his duties, a description of his work, but rather to clarify to him, first of all, the concept of himself, to show the very essence of his life, in order to thus give him such a guiding principle, such a norm that would itself determine him in all cases of his life - to clarify to a person his purpose, the purpose of life - his summum bonum 3, to which he naturally should strive if he wants to live normally and if the existing the abnormality of his nature did not deceive him. Man in his present activity literally fulfills God’s sentence on himself for his fall into sin. You are earth and to earth you will return. If we begin to evaluate his cherished dreams, all the highest goals of his life, what he lives and wants to live by, if we want to know that “light” that illuminates his life’s path, and that inner “eye” that enlightens his entire being, we will see that this “eye itself is now dark,” that light is a will-o’-the-wisp, just a ghost of light, and that ideals, all imbued with the earth, with real life, “have turned to the earth.” The validity of this will be confirmed to everyone by his own consciousness, his internal and external experience. History teaches the same. The ideal to which natural humanity and the ordinary man aspired was only earthly happiness, only real pleasure. The difference between the teachings was only in methods, and not in principle. Unbridled Epicureanism essentially pursued the same goal: pleasure of the moment, real satisfaction, as stern, apparently diametrically opposed to it, Stoicism. The whole difference is that the first was short-sighted and optimistically dreamed of achieving complete pleasure by satisfying all human needs or by nurturing in him the needs most conducive to his well-being - while the second, deeper and more experienced, pessimistically rejected the possibility of such complete positive satisfaction and therefore wanted to find refuge in negative contentment, in the absence of any needs, in ataraxia (Greek: “equanimity, dispassion, peace of mind” - Ed.) or in the so-called balance of spirit. An empirical person asks little about where all this will lead, and even seems to consider it pointless and unreasonable to ask about this when a person has objects in front of him that urgently require his attention and are, as it were, more important. When we say this, we mean Confucius with all his Chinese culture and philosophy, which deliberately closed its eyes to the future, recognizing it as more important to determine its relationship to the present 4 . True, in the pagan world there are also attempts to penetrate more than the present and show man a goal above the world and earth. But these attempts were only a vague premonition of the true purpose of man, they came down to a negative experience, to the fact that the meaning of human life is not here, not in earthly life, than to a positive decision: what will happen to a person after leaving this life. Take Plato, whose philosophy, as Martensen puts it, “is characterized by an entirely pervasive supernatural tendency” and “occupies an exceptional position in this respect in the ancient world”; he also came to deny the present rather than to affirm the future. True, he speaks of entering a higher sphere of existence, of being like God, etc., but the center of gravity of his moral teaching lies only in the fact that the ideal world, which constitutes the prototype of the here, serves at the same time as a negation of the entire essence of the latter. Entering this ideal world, a person becomes free not only from the sorrows of life, but also from all its joys, because there he no longer desires them - therefore, “all true philosophy consists, according to him, in constant dying to this world; bodily death is only liberation from the deceptive appearance in which it now finds itself.” The other world is just the opposite of this, but nothing more. Buddhism said the same thing, only in an even more definite and complete form, in the East. Real life, according to him, is a complete vanity, a dream, starting from joys and sorrows, from the material world around a person and ending with the “I” that perceives impressions from this world and endures all these sorrows and joys. All this is unrealistic 5. The task of man, therefore, is to deny all this vanity and transition to nirvana. What kind of nirvana this is is difficult to say. In any case, this is not one negation, not pure non-existence. It is rather being, but only subordinated to other, special categories than those we have at our disposal. Nirvana is, in any case, bliss, but what kind of bliss? This is a question that remains completely open to man. One thing is clear that man’s bliss is not in this life and not even with its real definitions, which are completely different, even unimaginable in real life, but what it is, it is impossible to know. An empirical person cannot go further than this. Common sense tells him only the futility of life here, nothing more. – Strictly speaking, in the Old Testament the idea of ​​immortality was more likely just a conclusion from the mood of the Old Testament righteous people, it was only necessarily assumed by this mood of theirs, rather than being a clearly realized fact. The motive for activity and the benefit continued to be earthly contentment and happiness. The aspirations of the Old Testament man, if they unconsciously went beyond the realm of the present, then consciously continued to be attached, if not to personal or family, tribal well-being, then much, much to Jerusalem and the prosperity of the kingdom of Judah and the people. Only with the resurrection of Jesus Christ did we understand our dignity and ultimate calling, because only now has eternal life become close and understandable to us, only now has the kingdom of heaven become a completely clear, conscious object of our aspirations, the motive of our activity (it is now needed and its needs delight it); happiness, temporary contentment cannot satisfy a person and therefore the goal can only be bliss and only infinite bliss - and on the other hand, the very content of this bliss is specifically shown to a person. The ideal, which was previously in the abstract and in front of man, now finds itself behind and has become an objectively existing assumption of his created existence. That life which constitutes the light of men already exists from the beginning, in God, who is thus the real embodiment of the human ideal, and all moral life therefore receives the character and significance of religious life. It is clear from here why this ideal cannot be comprehended by an empirical person: only the Son of Man who descended from heaven and sits in heaven knows about heavenly things, that is, a true understanding of life is possible only through revelation. So, the purpose of the coming of the Son of God into the world and the whole Divine dispensation is that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:15). Preaching about this eternal life or about salvation or eternal destruction constitutes the main task of apostolic and church preaching. Now this was written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that ye may believe in His name (John 20:31). This eternal life is the ultimate goal of the aspirations of every true Christian, every Christian ascetic who strives for all his labors and exploits precisely because he knows their final result - eternal life. What does this eternal life consist of? Chronological infinity is undoubtedly one of the characteristic features of eternal life, but this is not its strength. Eternal life is opposed not only to death, not only to the fleeting life of this world, but first and foremost to those eternal torments that await sinners in the next century. Eternal life, therefore, is not only an endless existence, but also a blessed existence, infinite, not only chronologically, but in its qualitative completeness, in its inner richness. The infinity of this life speaks for the fact that it is life in its own sense, it fully corresponds to the concept of life - it is normal, true life: as such, eternal life is presented to the human consciousness as an imperative, obliging a person to strive for the assimilation of this life due to its obligation, duty. On the other hand, the fullness of bliss with which this life is endowed makes it desirable for the person himself, who, no longer due to obligation only, but also due to the natural desire for bliss, prefers this eternal life to all the blessings that this world can present to him. “Even if he gained the whole world,” and in this case he will not compensate in any way for the loss of eternal life, the destruction of his soul. Let him lose some temporary benefit, so as not to lose the eternal one. It is better for you, says Christ, to enter life without an arm or without a leg, than to be cast into eternal fire with two arms and two legs (Matthew 18:8). The second sign of eternal life, which is constantly attributed to it in the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition, is the transcendence of this life to our present state and this earthly world. According to the expression of Saint Ephraim the Syrian, “the life of the righteous will begin only after their death,” that is, when they emerge from their present certainty and from this-worldly conditions of existence. In the age to come, in the resurrection they neither marry nor commit violence, but as the angels of God are in heaven (Matthew 22:30). In the kingdom of heaven, man will see and hear things that cannot be expressed in human language. In general, eternal life is completely irreducible to the present and incomparable with it and can only be revealed after the final cessation of the present. “It would be incongruous to have a blessed life in a land of curses and to find eternal life in a transitory world,” says St. Ephraim. Thus, the goal of human aspirations is a state transcendental to his present existence. This transcendence of eternal life as the goal of human exploits and labors, on the one hand, served as the most convenient basis for that legal understanding of Christian teaching, which exists fundamentally in the Western Church, and practically often in our country - and on the other hand, this transcendence, when taken to the extreme, to the point of complete irreducibility, gives the moral worldview a far from high mercenary character, depriving virtue of moral significance. For a person in such a state, virtue does not exist, but there are only certain actions for which he is entitled to rewards, and the merits of these actions are not asked. Now there is no need to dwell much on the fact that such a mercenary, slavish attitude towards doing good is completely alien to a truly Christian moral understanding of life. Let us only point out here two or three patristic examples. Thus, according to St. Gregory the Theologian, “virtue must be selfless if it wants to be the kind of virtue that has only good in mind.” “If you are a slave, be afraid of beatings; if you are a mercenary, keep one thing in mind: to receive.” “Perfection,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “does not slavishly, not out of fear of punishment, withdraw from a vicious life, and not out of hope of rewards does good - trading in a virtuous life with some conditions and agreements - but (does good), losing sight of everything, even what is promised as a reward.” That is why Christian ascetics, whom many are inclined to consider as egoists, who have only allegedly transferred the goal of their selfish aspirations from this life to the afterlife, these ascetics inspired both themselves and others that the goal of doing good is not a reward, even an afterlife, “If it is possible for you, do good and not for the sake of future reward,” says St. Isaac the Syrian. Consequently, self-interest is the motive of Christian virtue in the most extreme ascetic form of the latter (which most seduces the newest lovers of altruism), only for a superficial observer. The essence of the matter will not allow such an understanding at all, and this will be clear to us if we carefully consider what eternal life consists of according to the teachings of Holy Scripture and Tradition. This is the eternal life, that they may know Thee the one true God, and Jesus Christ sent Him (John 17:3) - this is the essence and content of the afterlife bliss. “With nothing else, brethren,” says St. Basil the Great, “revere the kingdom of heaven as the true understanding of Being, which (that is, understanding) in the Holy Scriptures is called life and blessedness.” “The main beginning of the existence of the soul (beyond the grave) is,” according to St. Gregory of Nyssa, “not the assimilation of something dry, wet (that is, not the use of those selfish benefits that the unenlightened mind associates with the idea of ​​eternal life), but the understanding of the Divine nature.” What kind of knowledge is meant here? Of course, not theoretical, objectifying knowledge, which is never able to penetrate into the essence of an object, especially because this object is not a simple abstraction that fits freely within the framework of a formal definition, but a living, full-life subject, a person. Therefore, the knowledge of God, in order to correspond to its concept, must be an experience in oneself of the presence of God, which gives a person the opportunity to directly experience the Divine life and thus leads to a real, experienced comprehension of the Divine Being. A person will then truly, and not ghostly, know God when he feels Him directly, when God will not be for him an infinite greatness, absorbing a particular limited consciousness, as the ocean absorbs an insignificant drop of water, will not be the root cause of all causes, not the first premise of any metaphysics, but will pass inside man, will become the beginning that animates man and builds him according to Himself. Such knowledge, obviously, can well be called life, since it is not the work of the mind alone, but precisely the experience, the feeling of the Divine life in oneself. “In human bodily life,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “health is a certain good, but bliss is not only knowing what health is, but living in health. For if someone, praising health, takes in food that brings bad juices and harmful to health, then, oppressed by illnesses, what benefit will he receive from praising health? Therefore, let us understand the word proposed in this way, namely, that the Lord calls not knowing anything about God, but having God within oneself, bliss, for the blessed are pure in heart, for they will see God. But, it seems to me, God is not offered before the face of one who has purified the heart, like some kind of spectacle; on the contrary, the height of this saying perhaps represents to us the same thing that the Word expressed more openly when it said to others: The kingdom of God is within you (Lk. 17:21), so that we learn from this that he who has cleansed his heart from every creature and from a passionate disposition in his own beauty sees the image of God’s nature.” Thus, knowing God is seeing the life of God in oneself; from the disposition of his own soul, the righteous person learns what the Divine life consists of and what its essence is - he learns, so to speak, from experience - or, in other words, the knowledge of God, which constitutes the essence of eternal bliss, has the reverse side of becoming like God, achieving the possible complete reproduction in oneself of the image of God. Basil the Great indeed says that “becoming like God gives us unceasing life.” Having become similar to God in the disposition of his nature, man achieves through this an inalienable property of the Divine nature - immortality, endless life, that is, one that can only be called life. But that's not all. No matter how close a person is to God in the likeness of his nature, no matter how clearly he reproduces the image of God in himself, his life, even endless in time and quality, will not be the highest, all-covering good for which he strives. As a finite, non-original being, which (in the words of St. Macarius of Egypt) “does not have God’s light in itself,” a person cannot find eternal bliss in himself, in a self-enclosed life: as soon as there is a likeness, an image, he will always strive for his prototype and will always feel its deprivation; so that as a person becomes like God, he will feel more and more strongly the insufficiency of his life and, consequently, will not have complete satisfaction. “God is life,” says St. Basil the Great, “alienation and distance from God is an evil more intolerable than even future torments in Gehenna, the most grievous evil for a person, like the deprivation of light for the eye and the taking of life for an animal.” On the other hand, Godlikeness is unthinkable for a person if he remains alone, that is, if he goes to this Godlikeness through only subjective improvement, regardless of God. By himself and from himself, man cannot reproduce the image of God, although it is inherent in his nature. He can become like God only when God is with him, when this likeness is a gradual rapprochement between God and man, a living union and the closest mutual communication and interaction between them. “For a person,” says the Monk Macarius of Egypt, “it is necessary that not only he himself be in God (that is, not only subjectively experience God within himself, not only be like Him in the dispositions of his soul), but also God should be in him,” that is, that this subjective experience should have its support in the objective communication of God with him. God, therefore, for a Christian is not only a principle of activity, not only an ideal to follow, but also the goal of aspirations, is a living being for living, personal communication. And Saint Gregory the Theologian defines man as “a living being, through the desire for God, achieving deification.” Deification, thus, subjective likeness to God, the arrangement of oneself according to God, is conceivable only under the condition of striving for God, that is, striving for that actual communion with Him, striving to be not only homogeneous, but also one with God. Therefore, Jesus Christ, depicting the state of a perfect man, says: We (that is, the Most Holy Trinity) will come to him and make an abode with him (John 14:23). Godlikeness is not a complete state in itself; it will be complete when it turns into communion with God. Therefore, the bliss of a servant consists not only in the fact that he will be placed over many (in which one can see an indication of the subjective side of his bliss), but also in the fact that he will enter into the joy of his Lord. Therefore, if the word of God teaches us that eternal life is the knowledge of God, that eternal bliss consists in likeness to God, then we must understand that this subjective experience of God within ourselves necessarily presupposes objective communication with God, or, better said, inevitably goes in parallel with this latter. Those who have done good, according to the words of St. Gregory the Theologian, will inherit the ineffable light and contemplation of the Holy and Royal Trinity, which will then illuminate more clearly and purer and will be completely united with the complete mind, in which alone (that is, only in this complete union of the soul with the Royal Trinity) I especially establish the kingdom of heaven. It would be a big mistake to imagine this result as achievable once and for all and life itself as a state of frozen immobility. This idea is characteristic only of soulless pantheism, where perfection borders on annihilation, bliss on non-existence. The living God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, therefore eternal communion with Him can only be life, and as such, it will need to be accompanied by tireless activity (which it was accompanied in the primordial paradise 6) and never-ending development. This is understandable. Man can never achieve complete and perfect likeness to God, because God’s perfection is infinite. Man will therefore endlessly strive for God-likeness and endlessly progress in his moral perfection. Beloved! - says Saint John the Theologian (1 John 3:2), - we are now children of God; but it has not yet been revealed what we will be. We only know that when it is revealed, we will be like Him, because we will see Him as He is. Being in communication with God, contemplating His beauty, a person cannot help but strive to become more and more like her. “Whoever,” says St. Basil the Great, “attentively looks at the radiance and grace of this beauty (the Divine and Blessed Being), borrows something from it, as if from a dye solution directing some colored rays onto his own face.” Divine beauty will always attract a person, and more and more new aspects will always be revealed to a person in it, not yet assimilated and not reproduced in his own life. Contemplating this self-existent Beauty, a person will gradually discover new tasks for himself, and new and new needs within himself, the endless, never-ending replenishment of which will be for him the same Beauty he contemplates. This endless striving forward and forward will not, however, be accompanied by a feeling of dissatisfaction, because it will be rather a gradual receipt of more and more new goods, rather than a search for them, a pursuit of them as if they were non-existent: and this is because God, to whom man strives, will always be with him and will endlessly replenish what is “impoverishing” a person. Virtue and Eternal Life After all that has been said, the relationship between virtue and eternal life becomes clear to us. According to the ordinary idea (which is quite natural for us in our current state), virtue and eternal life are related to each other, like a feat and a reward for it. For the fact that a person worked in this life, fulfilled the commandments of God, in the afterlife God rewards him a hundredfold, makes him a participant in endless and unimaginable bliss from this earthly point of view. How can we explain this ratio? An empirical person is inclined to explain this occasionallyistically: this is how God wants it; – there is no internal consistency between these two phenomena. It must be said that this occasionalistic theory can find apparent confirmation both in the Holy Scriptures and in the Holy Tradition, where the idea of ​​future bliss as a reward for virtue is also strongly emphasized. But already from the concept of eternal life presented above, it is obvious that the legal understanding is only permissible in the form of an analogy, only ad hominem (lat. “according to human [understanding]” - Ed.), and cannot have unconditional, decisive significance. “Virtue is not outside of the Divine,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “therefore, he who walks the path of true virtue participates in nothing other than God Himself; because He is all-perfect virtue.” God is presented to the moral consciousness of a Christian not only as an unconditional Ruler, having the power and right to dispose of His creation as He pleases and to prescribe to it whatever He finds necessary. The will of God, first of all, is the holy will, which itself wants this and fulfills what it demands from people. “Be holy, says the Lord, but not because such is My will, but because I am Holy, because holiness is consistent with the essence of God, because God is holy, Whom you consider to be the only source of truth and life.” This naturally resolves the notorious question of why good is good; - is it because God wants it, or, conversely, because God wants it because it is good in itself? The very formulation of the question already suggests that the true Christian concept of God has moved away from the consciousness of the learned scholastics who asked such a question. The Christian concept of God is, first of all, a moral concept; – God for him is not the metaphysical foundation of the world and not the Lord of man, but first and foremost the Foundation and Bearer of the moral world order, unconditional good, the ideal of all perfection. It is inconceivable that the “One Good One” could want anything other than perfect good, and this is not because He submits to the ideal as something higher, standing above Him, but because good constitutes His nature, He cannot help but want it: otherwise He would come into contradiction with Himself, would come to self-denial, in other words, would cease to be self-existent life, which does not allow in itself the slightest possibility of death. So, we repeat again, virtue is not outside the Divine, but in Him, and those who strive for virtue strive in the essence of the matter to be like God. That is why the concepts of godlikeness and virtue are always put in place of one another in Holy Scripture and Tradition or derived from one another. To cleanse oneself from sinful filth, to achieve purity of heart means to discover the image of God in oneself, to prepare oneself for God-likeness and knowledge of God. “The more,” says Saint Tikhon of Adon, “a person puts off the old man with his deeds, the more he puts on the new (see Col. 3:9-10), the more he puts on the new, the purest his soul will be; the purest the soul is, the greater the goodness and beauty of the image of God will appear in it; just as the purest the water, the more clearly the appearance of the sun is depicted in it; or the purer the mirror, the more vividly it depicts the likeness of the face looking into it.” According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, “the pure in heart will not see in himself anything other than God,” therefore, “to avoid as much vice as possible in word, deed and thought, cleansing oneself from filth, is the imitation of the Divine perfection that surrounds the heavenly God.” Consequently, if we ask about eternal life, standing exclusively on the human moral point of view, then its essence, the source of eternal bliss, will lie in holiness. Man will be endlessly blissful in the afterlife because he will be holy and in communion with the all-holy God. The Kingdom of God, says the holy Apostle Paul, is not food and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17), that is, (if we renounce the private reason for which these words were spoken) the bliss and joy of the Kingdom of God will not flow from the satisfaction of the selfish aspirations and demands of man conceivable on earth, - joy will be in the Holy Spirit, Who is necessarily united with righteousness and peace; - a person entering the kingdom of heaven does not act in order to be blissful (if bliss is necessary and can be separated from virtue), but in order to be holy. The bliss and holiness of the righteous, thus, from a truly Christian point of view, are concepts completely inseparable from one another. For a Christian, triumph exists only in holiness, virtue and nowhere else; for him there is no good higher than holiness; - if there is holiness, then all other benefits, all rewards, lose all meaning for him - they become some kind of meaningless and non-containing pendants to the main good, which alone fills the soul of a person and absorbs all his attention. “Righteousness,” says St. John Chrysostom, “is incomparably greater than a reward, because it itself is a reward that contains many rewards.” If so, if the very essence of eternal bliss is that virtue to the fulfillment of which we are attracted by the word of God, then why does this bliss of a thing seem to be a reward for good deeds, that is, something beyond good deeds, something special, existing independently and apart from it? The reason for this disunity of bliss and virtue, and hence the apparent transcendence of eternal life to the earthly state of man, is not in the essence of all these concepts, but in the fact that, in the words of St. Ephraim the Syrian, “our mental eyes are too dark to see into the abode of joys” - the reason is only in the abnormal state of the person himself, who serves as the subject for them. Man is now imbued with sin and only in selfishness, in the satisfaction of his egoistic needs, does he find what he mistakenly calls contentment, bliss. A virtuous life for such a person is a feat that requires terrible mental effort - for him it is a result achievable only under the condition of renouncing all of his real certainty, under the condition, therefore, of effort on himself, donations, apparent losses, and torment. Therefore, an empirical person not only cannot identify virtue and happiness, but also has difficulty refraining from considering virtue as a heavy yoke that oppresses him and robs him of all the joys of life available to him. Can such a person understand that eternal life, with which he connects the idea of ​​unconditional bliss, is the same virtue with which, on the contrary, he connects the idea of ​​any torment, self-limitation, etc.? Will he understand that eternal life is an ideal, a response to his desire for good, and not a reward for this desire - that it is a direct conclusion from his good mood here on earth, and not something coming to him completely from the outside, something in spite of him and, in any case, not as a conclusion? For an empirical person, all these concepts, that is, on the one hand, bliss and eternal life, on the other, virtue, are completely separate, not reducible to one another. It is clear from this why the Holy Scriptures and the Holy Tradition, when they talk about eternal life and eternal bliss, apparently, at least in letter, quite strongly (if not always) emphasize their transcendence. After all, the main idea of ​​all Holy Scripture and all church life and teaching is that it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick, that Jesus Christ came to call not the righteous, but sinners to repentance, that is, listeners of the teachings of Christ, the object of the care of the Church were and remain all the same sinners who do not have eternal life in themselves and in their sinful certainty do not understand the bliss of holiness. That is why Holy Scripture often speaks of eternal life as an absolutely otherworldly phenomenon, of eternal bliss as a reward for hard work in a virtuous life. But this way of expression cannot be considered final, it cannot be understood literally: eternal life is not a reward, but rather a conclusion from doing good in this earthly life. This thought is certainly biblical and patristic. Not to mention its complete agreement and even necessity as part of Christian teaching, we can cite many directly literal confirmations from patristic literature. Leaving aside all other teachers of the Church, let us turn to Saint Gregory of Nyssa as the one who most clearly and consistently pursued this idea. Particularly characteristic in this regard are his conversations with Macrina “about the soul and resurrection” and his essay “about infants dying before baptism,” which (conversations and writings) are all built on this thought. But the rest of his works are not alien to it. Thus, in the “second word on prayer,” St. Gregory says: “The Lord, teaching you to call upon the Father in heaven, reminds you of the good fatherland, so that, having aroused the strongest desire for the beautiful, he will put you on the path that again leads to the fatherland. – The path that elevates human nature to heaven is nothing other than retreat and flight from earthly evils; and the means to avoid evil is nothing else, I think, than becoming like God; and to become like God means to become righteous, holy, good, and all the like. If anyone, as much as possible, clearly imprints in himself the features of these perfections, then, as if by natural order, without difficulty he will move from earthly life to the heavenly land, because the distance between the Divine and humanity is not local, so that we would need some kind of tool or invention to introduce this heavy, burdensome and earthly flesh into the way of heavenly and spiritual life. But according to the reasonable separation of virtue from vice, it depends on human will alone - to be a person where he is inclined by desire. Therefore, since there is no obstacle to choosing what is good, and election is followed by the acquisition of what has been chosen by someone, then it is possible for you to immediately be in heaven, having declared God in your mind. This same Holy Father also explains the reason for the apparent remoteness of eternal life. “For those who are now being elevated to a higher life,” he says in his essay “On the Writing of Psalms,” “the soul, unprepared by experience and not accustomed to such understanding, does not yet have sufficient strength to discern the good. And what is not known at all, even though it is most beautiful, our desire remains motionless; without a previous desire there will be no pleasure from such a thing for which one does not feel partiality; because the path to pleasure is addiction. Therefore, for those who have not yet tasted pure and divine pleasure, it is necessary to come up with something so that the lessons of virtue would also be accepted, being delighted with something that captivates the senses. This is what doctors usually do when they make some bitter and unpleasant-tasting healing composition palatable to the sick by seasoning it with the sweetness of honey.” So, virtue and blessedness for a true Christian, or, better to say, for a person in his intact state, are completely homogeneous and even unambiguous concepts. He is virtuous not because he will receive a reward for it, but because in virtue he finds his ultimate good. The thought is also presented to his mental gaze that this is the only way he can retain eternal, endless bliss, but everything else will inevitably lead him to torment. But this thought is not an impulse that would force him to strive for virtue (before this thought, he had already loved virtue and found his highest good in it) - this thought only strengthens his confidence that he was not mistaken in choosing this goal of life, that it is virtue, holiness that is precisely life, but the rest is all ghost, delusion and death. “Let us strive,” says St. Ephraim the Syrian, “to follow this path (that is, the sorrowful, narrow path of virtue), because the path itself is life, the only possible, unity, normal structure of man.” The essence of eternal life, or its source - bliss, its desirability for man - is holiness, the complete realization of the ideal of virtue. This is the internal (subjective) content of eternal life. But holiness, as stated above, is likeness to God, which, in turn, is inconceivable without objective communion with God. Thus, if we consider eternal life from the internal side, in this case we will come to the same conclusion as above; the meaning of eternal life and the reason why it is eternal, that is, it corresponds to the very concept of life; why it is the only true, righteous (normal) life - lies in the fact that this life is the life of God, that by living this life, a person becomes a participant in self-existent life, which in itself has justification and the source of its existence. “Let us strive,” says Saint Gregory of Nyssa, “to comprehend. What is comprehended? What honor? What crown? - What do you imagine of what you hope for? All this, it seems to me, is nothing other than the Lord Himself. For He Himself is both the champion of those who strive and the crown of those who overcome. He divides the lot; He is also a good lot. He is the good part; He also bestows the good part.” Just as in this life we ​​live, and move, and are God, so beyond the grave He will be our bliss and our life. And I saw (John, we read in Apocalypse 21:2-4), the holy city Jerusalem, new, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from heaven, saying: Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them; they will be His people, and God Himself with them will be their God. Thus, there will be no need for a church, or the sun, or the moon, or a lamp, or anything, because the Lord Himself will replace all this for the righteous. “The goal of our life,” says Theodore, Bishop of Edessa (by the Right Reverend Theophan in the “Inscription” pp. 34–35), “is bliss or, what is the same, the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, which consists not only in the fact that we will see the Royal Trinity, so to speak, but also in the fact that we will receive Divine influence and, as it were, accept deification and in this influence find the replenishment and completion of all shortcomings and imperfections This is what the food of the intelligent powers (celestial angels) consists of, that is, in the cultivation of shortcomings through the Divine influence.” Thus, eternal life, which constitutes the object of our aspirations, that highest good (summum bonum), which gives meaning to our good deeds, our earthly life, from the point of view of content, is a holy life, God-like and, as such, consists in real direct communication with the all-holy God. This is its limitless continuity and the inexhaustibility of its bliss. According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, “having clung to God with incorruptibility (thus entering into close life communion with Him through God-likeness, resp. holiness), man perceived in himself the whole kingdom of good.” Having God Himself in and around him, what other good can a person imagine in return for this? Moreover, this eternal blissful communion with God, which constitutes the highest imaginable good in itself, receives, in particular, for a person even more unconditional significance because it is the only good for him, and even his only truly natural (normal) state, so that with its deprivation for a person comes not only a state of dissatisfaction, but outright torment, death. This is because only in God, knowledge of Him and communication with Him does man find an answer to the demands of his nature, which is essentially God-like. According to the expression of St. Cyril of Alexandria, “by his very nature, man is destined to be near God,” - in this sub-existence Christ indicates the ultimate goal of man - bliss 7. Eternal life and true virtue are communion with God So, eternal life, in which we Christians see our highest good, is a holy, God-like life, a life in communion with God. Essentially speaking, this life is mainly an unknown state of the soul - or, (better to say), the source, the starting point of this or that character of this life lies in this or that mental state of a person. Therefore, in its essence, this life does not contain anything that would make it impossible to discover it here on earth; its remoteness is determined not by its being, but by the state of man (and then) and the world in which man lives. It is inaccessible on earth only to sinful man and the sinful world, and moreover because it is holy life, constituting a complete negation of sin. The first conclusion from this is that, setting eternal bliss as the goal of their lives and for the sake of it, namely, undertaking their labors and deeds of virtue, Christians are by no means guided by any selfish (heteronomic) motives alien to morality: virtue is precisely the bliss that they desire; bliss lies in virtue, in the ability to gradually do good and be free from sin. Good in itself is dear to a Christian, and sin in itself, regardless of the consequences, is evil, arousing the greatest disgust. Morally imperfect is not only the one who commits sin, but also the one who loves it, who is unable to renounce the thought of the pleasantness of sin, of one or another of its desirability, and the latter is more imperfect than the former. “That is why we especially deserve Gehenna,” says St. John Chrysostom (who, by the way, not without reason could apparently be considered a particularly zealous conductor of good deeds for the sake of reward), “because we fear it more than Christ.” That is why our sinfulness and unpreparedness for the Kingdom of God is revealed, because we still cannot understand the sweetness of holiness and the disgust of sin. It is necessary, therefore, to morally unite with goodness and in it, and not in selfish pleasure, to recognize one’s only good, the only meaning of one’s life, in order to be a member of the Kingdom of God. Since a person is so inclined, then for him God is not the Lord Who rules over man and Whom the latter cannot contradict simply because That Lord Almighty - for a saint, that is, who loves holiness, the Holy Lord is the natural end of all desires - not only an ideal to follow (which can be presented to consciousness and forcefully), but precisely the answer to the needs of human nature, is both an ally and a support - in a word, everything, in communication with which a person finds his bliss. It is clear that for such a person communion with God will not be an unbearable burden, as it was for Old Testament people and as communion with the righteous is for all of us; - for a saint, communion with God will be precisely the desired good, the goal of all his aspirations, for which he will sacrifice everything that can only seem dear from a human sinful point of view. “What do I have in heaven and what do I desire on earth from You? My heart and my flesh are gone, O God of my heart and my portion, O God, forever.” That is why the instruction of one modern teacher of piety is remarkable: while the Jewish people, who had just come out of Egypt and had not yet forgotten the Egyptian meats, were languishing in fear, standing at the foot of Sinai and feeling the nearness of God, Moses made seeing the face of God the edge of his desires. If I have found grace before You, show me Yourself, so that I can see You with understanding (Ex. 33:13), he prayed. In the same way, the holy prophet David longs for the springs of water, the holy prophet David describes his spiritual mood, “my soul longs for thee, O God” (Ps. 41:2), - my soul desires and dies in the courts of the Lord (and only he, next to God, finds his peace, like a bird’s nest, Ps. 83: 2-4), but it is good for me to cleave to God (Ps. 72:28). The commonality of moods, similarity to Him, on the one hand, makes communion with God possible for a person, and on the other, makes this communion with God an indispensable need for a person, which is constantly in his consciousness, such a need, the dissatisfaction of which would serve as a source of constant longing, spiritual thirst, torment; A holy person not only longs for communication with God, not only strives for Him as an object worthy of desires in general, but is also unhappy in his distance from God, because nothing for him can replace God, because only in Him Alone does he find true peace for his soul: outside of Him is not only dissatisfaction, but straight out suffering. This leads us to the second conclusion from the presentation of the doctrine of eternal life. If this is the content of eternal life, if it is inaccessible only to sin and sinful man, then its achievement, the achievement of communion with God, cannot be imagined exclusively eschatologically. One cannot think that a person achieves communion with God only at the very end, after all his labors and hardships - he receives as the final result, a conclusion from the moral perfection he has achieved, until a person has prepared for this communion with God, he will not find it, he is alien to life with God. Such a concept is characteristic only of deism, if not philosophical, then practical, that is, that sinful, godless state in which every sinner finds himself. For such a person the need to be in communion with God is not clear; and so he is looking for a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon, which can be explained by purely practical reasons, that communication with God is impossible for him now. Like Confucius, he will say that a person not only has no need to enter into personal relations with God, but also, as it were, has no right, he must first of all improve his nature and serve God, thus, through deeds, and then what will come out will come out; man has nothing to worry about about this final fate. We can hear the same thing from the people of our time and our countries. It seems very reasonable and highly moral that a person has no need to care what kind of God he serves and what Church he belongs to; - if only his behavior were moral. Or an even more practical position: you don’t need to pray to God, but you need to fulfill His commandments; in this way we will come closer to Him and, so to speak, fulfill His will more thoroughly. In essence, this also explains the fascination with free morality, to which many of us involuntarily succumb. Everyone, precisely, thinks that communication with God, which religion sets as its task, is not as necessary for a person as it imagines - that it is only the end of everything; this, in essence, naturally assumes that in real life a person can get along without God and even get along very well and not in an unmoral way. Christianity responds to such a deistic understanding of life by teaching about the image of God in man. “If a person,” says St. Gregory of Nyssa, “comes into existence in order to be a partaker of Divine blessings, then he is necessarily created in such a way that he is capable of participating in these blessings. Just as the eye, due to the ray naturally inherent in it, is in communication with light, attracting what is akin to it, in the same way it was necessary to interfere with human nature something akin to God in order for it to have a desire for what is akin to it. And in the nature of the dumb, those who have the lot of life in water or in the air are arranged according to the way of their life, so that to each, due to the location of the body, air is characteristic and akin to one, and water to another. Likewise, a person who received existence to enjoy Divine blessings must have had in his nature something akin to that of which he became a partaker. Because of this, he is adorned with life, and with words (that is, with reason), and with wisdom, and with all the good things befitting the Divine, so that for each of them he may have the desire characteristic of them.” That is, in other words, a person does not have to develop in himself the ability to communicate with God or receive it as the final conclusion from his independent life - he is determined to communicate with God by his very nature, because, in the words of St. Macarius of Egypt, “there is nowhere else such closeness and reciprocity as the soul has with God and God has with the soul,” because “God created the soul of man in such a way as to be His bride and accomplice and for Him to be with by one dissolution and one spirit.” “Created in the image and likeness of God, man,” says the Right Reverend Theophan, “by his very nature is in some way of the Divine race (cf. Acts 17:28–29). Being of the race of God, he cannot help but seek communion with God, not only as his beginning and prototype, but also as the supreme good.” Communion with God, therefore, is first of all possible for man; before any independent activity, man is already of God's kind, and, as a relative, can enter into communion with his kindred. As the image and likeness of God, further, man can live only in communion with God. The image and likeness in man is that man is endowed with god-like properties and endless aspirations. He is not satisfied with one appearance of phenomena, one ostentatious side of life, he seeks its foundations and, thus, reaches the final foundation. He is not satisfied with only the visible service relationships of nature and people towards Him, he wants to make these relationships eternally significant and unconditionally valuable, etc. But man cannot find the answer to these endless, truly divine questions of his nature in himself, and this is because he is only an image, only the finite reflection of an endless, self-existent and self-valuable life, and not this life itself. “The soul,” says the Monk Macarius of Egypt, “which does not have God’s light in itself (that is, self-existent life), but created in God’s image (for God so designed and pleased that it should have eternal life), not from its own nature, but from His Divinity, from His own Spirit, from His own Light, receives spiritual food and spiritual drink, and heavenly garments, which constitutes the true life of the soul." Therefore, a person left to himself is doomed to hopeless contradiction, to eternal thirst and, if an answer is impossible, to eternal suffering. A person can, of course, drown out these requests, so to speak, put his nature to sleep, forgetting himself among other concerns and other interests - but this will only be a dream, and the longer and deeper this sleep is, the more striking and bleak the awakening will be for a person. In the waking state, a person will inevitably come to the consciousness of the main contradiction in his nature and, having come to himself, he will inevitably suffer joylessly and helplessly and in destruction will put his highest good, there will be nothing left for him, because not in him, but in God, from Whom he has withdrawn, is the solution to all these contradictions. “The human soul, as a spirit created by God, cannot find anything else,” says Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, “pleasure, peace, consolation and joy, except in God, from Whom it was created in His image and likeness; and when she is separated from Him, she is forced to seek pleasure for herself in creatures and with various passions, how to feed herself with faces (the Saint here explains the parable of the prodigal son), but does not find proper peace and joy; So she should die from hunger. For the spirit needs to eat spiritual food.” Thus, moving away from God or not having God in oneself is not a sign only of human imperfection or does not constitute only a transitional stage in its gradual moral improvement; This godless state for a person is directly death, an evil that is worse than, in the words of St. Basil the Great, severe torment. If so, then communion with God cannot be relegated to the afterlife as the final goal of human aspirations; it must always be inherent in man by his very nature. “As soon as,” says the Eminence Theophan, “there is no communication with God, as soon as it is not felt, a person must admit that he is outside his goal and his purpose.” And therefore, “the state in which a person realizes that the true God is his God and he himself is God’s, that is, he says in his heart to God: My Lord and my God (John 20:28), like the Apostle Thomas, and to himself: I am God’s - I am God’s (see. Is.44:5), (that is, in other words, when a person feels himself in conscious and direct communication with God), - such a state is the only true state of a person, there is a single decisive sign of the presence in him of the beginning of a true moral and spiritual life” (Inscription, p. 36). So, in the absence of this sign, we must think not only that a person has not yet achieved perfection, but also that he has not even begun to move towards it, and even more, that he is completely alien to his calling, that he is morally dead. Therefore, the righteous David fears not that he will not achieve communion with God, but that he will not be without God, that he will not be rejected from the face of God and deprived of His Spirit. Those who separate themselves from You, he says, will perish. Therefore, on the other hand, the Savior not only told us about communion with God as a result of good deeds (we will come and make an abode with him), but also that communion with God is a condition for the very moral fruitfulness of a person (without Me you cannot do anything - John 15:5), that therefore the believer (that is, that person who has determined himself to eternal life) not only hopes to enter into communion with God beyond the grave, but also has this communion already now, he has already “passed from death to life”, he is already a child of God, and not a slave, he has Christ as his shepherd, “knows His voice and knows Him and is even more known by Him” - he has God as his Father and is loved by Him - in a word, he is already now in direct living communication with God and God with him. Communion with God, therefore, is necessary for a person not only in the afterlife, in the kingdom of glory, as the final result of his good deeds, but also during the journey to this kingdom as a necessary assumption of human nature - it must be the atmosphere constantly surrounding a person in which life is the only possible. From here we naturally come to the third conclusion from the stated doctrine of eternal life, namely, to the position that eternal life in communion with God for a normal person cannot in principle be set as a goal of aspirations in the proper sense, but must be given to a person at his very birth as the quality of the life environment with which a person begins his independent life. The Moral State of Man Before the Fall The Christian doctrine of the highest good as love of God is in close connection with the doctrine of creation and the primitive state of man. As a finite being, man does not create the world around him from himself and does not begin world life with himself - so that everything can be explained to him by his nature and from himself. A person comes into the world as only a separate, very insignificant moment, only an integral part, and as such, of necessity, takes a ready-made known place in the world, becomes in a certain relationship to other components of the world whole. The culprit of this is God, and a personal God, Who not only gives existence, but preserves it as a Provider, always inherent in His creation. This God, further, is love, and love not only attracts its object to itself, but sacrifices itself for it and itself goes to meet it. Therefore, God, who in His goodness created the world and man in it as a conscious participant in the Divine life and in the blessings of creation, could not endow man only with a thirst for communion with God, could not limit himself to the revelation of Himself as a holy ideal, as a bearer of eternal blissful life, and thereby eternally attract man to Himself; in both cases He would have condemned man to suffering. As Love, God necessarily had to enter into a closer relationship with man, had to directly place man in a living, personal, real union with Himself, so that man, appearing in the world, not only received tasks and strength to carry them out, but first of all met the living God, Who Himself strives for him and wants to dwell in him. Man’s task, therefore, should not be to develop his nature and thus make it worthy of God’s love and communion with Him, but first of all to undeservedly accept this love with which God rushes towards man even before the latter appears in the world, before the latter even thought of entering into any kind of relationship with God. Let us love Him, says the Apostle (1 John 4:19), because He first loved us. As the Good One and the source of goodness, God pours out goodness on the graceless and the evil, and rains on the righteous and unrighteous precisely because in this He is guided not by the dignity of creation, not by the fact that it comes to Him, but solely by His goodness, by the fact that pouring out mercy and bliss is the fundamental law of Divine life itself. This makes communion with God not only a possibility and necessity derived from human nature, but also a reality, an accomplished fact. Being good, God could not leave man alone with the desire to communicate with Him, but directly granted him this communication or, better yet, directly and created him in this communication. And the Lord God created man, we read in the book of Genesis, from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. And the Lord God planted a paradise in Eden in the east, and placed there the man whom he had created (Gen. 2:7–8). Here is a frank confirmation of the thought just expressed: man is directly created in paradise. Let us comment on the words of St. Gregory the Theologian: “The incorruptible Son did not provide man with his own freedom and did not bind him completely, but, putting the law into his nature and imprinting good inclinations on the heart (that is, endowing man with the ability and natural desire for holy, that is, eternal life), placed him in the midst of an ever-blooming paradise, although in such a balance between good and evil that he could, by his own choice, incline towards one or the other, however pure from sin and free from all duplicity. And paradise, in my opinion,” adds the Holy Father, “is heavenly life.” Thus, before any movement of his will, man was made a partaker of heavenly life, was placed in paradise, that is, in such a life environment in which everything spoke to him about God and about His love for him - and in which, most importantly, God Himself, in the words of John of Damascus, “was the house and bright robe” of man, that is, he was in the closest communion of love with man. The task of the newly created man was not as grandiose as the lovers of apriorism would have liked; communion with God was not to be created from man’s own strengths and depths, and his love did not reach the unconditionality of God’s love. A person had only to respond to the love already shown and undeservedly bestowed. But this is also natural for a finite being who does not begin world life with himself, as we noted above. Only when we turn a person into an unconditional being, into some kind of unconditional subject, or (which is closer to life) when we forget about a person’s past and those around him, will we take only what he is and what is in him, regardless of anything else; - only then will it seem possible and reasonable for us to demand within a person the beginning and explanation of the basic facts of his moral life. But man is a finite being and as such has not only consequences, but also causes, but also something that precedes him, which determines him. Therefore, there is nothing to be surprised if a person, in his striving for unconditional good, a striving embedded by the Creator in the very nature of man, has to not so much attract God’s love to himself as respond to it. This is the law of human life, the eternal seal of its finitude, conventions and the eternal source of humility. But this same non-originality of human love serves (or, at least, should have served in that original, heavenly time) as a guarantee, a guarantee that the communion with God that man strives for is not a fiction, but a real fact, a living, real union with a living Person. When a person, in his desire for good, for the ideal and for God, loses his temper, when he is the first to begin this mutual rapprochement, then he never achieves it. And this is understandable. In this case, a person does not strive for a living Person (he, it is assumed, has not yet experienced Her love and therefore cannot love Her; God, Whom he does not see, how can a person love?), a person strives only for an ideal, which in the end turns out to be only an abstractly deified human personality, that is, in other words, without a clear consciousness and feeling of Divine love, a person strives only for proud self-adoration, for himself. If a person’s consciousness is so clear and so broad that he sees all the fictitiousness of such a web woven from himself, if he does not forget about his finitude and his non-originality - if he clearly sees that his eternal life is in communion with God - then in this case this communion with God is only an abstract concept, and as such can only give a person the thought of merging with the impersonal infinite, only of pantheistic immersion in Brahman or about the return to the qualityless emptiness of the absolute self-thinking idea, or about dark will, or about something like that, but will in no way give a person the thought of communicating with a living Person who loves a person, and even more so will not lead a person to possess this communication with God, and will never lead a person beyond the boundaries of egoism, although disguised more or less successfully. Only when God ceases to be just a postulate of the moral nature of man, but becomes a living Person, and when this Person loves a person and shows him His love before he loves Her, only then will man’s desire for God, firstly, lose the character of egoism, and secondly, will turn from a fiction into a real fact. If I reach God only out of the consciousness of His necessity for me or only out of the consciousness of the complete absurdity in my finite existence of possessing infinite life and infinite bliss, then I seek God and strive for Him only for myself, and not for Him, my love for Him is not alien to egoism, whether in the sense of desire for one’s well-being or in the sense of self-adoration. If my love for God arises in response to His love for me, if the consciousness of this love arises in me before I have reached the point about the need for me to commune with God or the desirability of Him for me, then my love is closer to the unselfish, pure love of Divine, and since it distracts the center of my attention outward, transfers it from myself (where it is located in the self-striving for God) to another person (that is, God), then this love of mine contains within itself the full possibility, with further improvement and deepening of my knowledge and my moral nature, and to become completely like Divine love, as far as this is generally possible for finite being. Thus, Divine revelation, informing us about the blissful life of primordial man in paradise, namely that this life became the lot of man without any reason on the part of the latter, gives us the opportunity to partly imagine the no longer formal side of that heavenly, that is, eternal life to which man was called: this life was communion with God, and this communion with God was a living union of infinite and selfless love. “What,” asks St. Basil the Great, “was the primary good for the soul? Being with God and uniting with Him through love.” Just as God is Love, so the vocation of man and the content of eternal life is also love. That is why the holy Apostle Paul says that love alone endures forever, while faith and hope will cease, precisely because in this love lies the very essence of eternal life, while faith and hope serve only as paths into this eternal life, penetrate only to the door, and do not enter inside. That is why the Savior, in His farewell conversation with his disciples, points with special force to the commandment of love as the most characteristic sign of the coming kingdom. By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another. And in general, this explains the fact that the kingdom of God - Christ was the destruction of selfishness and opened to the preaching of all-forgiving love. From this it becomes clear how eternal life, from the subjective side, consists in communion with God. God is love and whoever is in His kingdom, that is, who is imbued with that selfless love to which He calls people, is therefore like Him. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. The moral purpose of created man; need for rescue If communion with God is given to man at his very creation, if that highest good, which should be the last goal of man’s entire life (and infinite in duration), turns out to be behind him, turns out to be given to man before any of his striving for it, then what is man’s task, what is his moral life in general? Wouldn't a person then be doomed to complete inaction and involuntary virtue? This is what I would like to do for everyone who objected to the first commandment of God and, in general, to the entire economy of God about man. It seemed to people that a person would be much happier if he did not have to take care of himself, if all the processes of his moral life were carried out as involuntarily and, therefore, correctly as his physical processes would have been carried out in a normal state. But the objectors forgot to think about what the bliss of a normal person consists of or, in other words, what kind of bliss God has called us to - is it eudaimonic, in which an empirical, sinful person sees his happiness? God called man to the bliss of holiness, to the bliss of doing good. And this last, of course, is unthinkable if it is involuntary. A person can be animally content without any effort of will, and even more likely to achieve contentment without it, but a person cannot be blessed in God without spontaneous effort. Even the highest degrees of contemplation, where a person experiences the height of bliss, are a completely passive state only among Buddhist ascetics (and even then rather pointless than passive, because the mind is actively restrained from thoughts), and not among Christian ascetics, for whom contemplation is always a prayer, that is, an elevation of the mind and heart to God, a spontaneous desire for the living God - passivity is only in the fact that without grace-filled help a person would not have ascended to the height to which he rises. Consequently, it is unthinkable to imagine Christian bliss as an involuntary and immobile state; this would deprive eternal life of that which makes it life. Man was brought into heaven in order to make and keep it. “(In paradise, that is, in heavenly life) God placed man so that he would be an unflagging doer of God’s words” (Gregory the Theologian. IV, 244). The task of the primordial, that is, normal person, was thus to endlessly improve the gift he had received undeservedly. Eternal life must consist in the endless moral progress of man along the path to Godlikeness. We say that eternal life is, firstly, knowledge of God, secondly, likeness to God, and thirdly, communion with God. To know God means to know that He is love, to know that He, without any reason on my part, loved me to the point that He - infinite and self-sufficient - appears as if in need of my communication with Him, as if thirsting for my love. But to know such a God - for a pure person it means to be inflamed with love for God, with love as perfect as possible, reaching to self-forgetfulness - this, formally speaking, means to become like God, to become identical with Him in mood. (God is love and man is made by love). And to love God means to enter into or - since this is given by itself, even beyond our desire - it means to voluntarily perceive that Communion with God to which He calls us. Moral progress after this will be in the gradual improvement of this love. At first, man’s task would, of course, be to raise his natural love for God, which spontaneously arose in him in response to God’s love for him - to bring this love to the level of voluntary achievement, to the level of sacrifice to God, because only in sacrifice is love; without sacrifice there is a lot, a lot of sympathy. So it really was, as the biblical story about the life of primordial man in paradise makes clear. What should have especially attracted Adam's attention were two trees: the tree of life in the middle of paradise and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life, which appeared only briefly at the beginning of the book of Genesis, then completely disappears from the history of mankind and returns to it only in the new Jerusalem, in the Kingdom of Heaven, where it will also be in the middle and will also be a source of endless life for people - its leaf for healing with the tongue. This identity of images confirms the idea that life in paradise is actually that eternal life to which we are again called by Christ. (Through the resurrection of Christ), says St. Cyril of Alexandria, “we have passed on to renewal, having received, as if in the form of a deposit, the Spirit of grace and the undoubted hope of incorruptible life, being transformed in blessedness and sanctification into the original state and, as if in our reverse procession, being conformed to the age to come” (Vol. III, 292). The same thought is expressed, for example, by Macarius of Egypt and many others. So, the tree of life was the source of life for primordial man. This tree was, of course, in the words of Metropolitan Philaret, only “a majestic formation (that is, an image) of grace-filled life in God” (Notes on Gen. T.I, 41). Man had many other means of maintaining life; the whole paradise, where his initiative was manifested, was placed at his complete disposal. But this tree in the middle of paradise taught man that no matter how rich his powers and means were, no matter how tempting and apparently strong his independent existence was, in himself and through his powers man would never find that eternal life to which God called him - that this life is only in God and in communion with Him. This, on the one hand, gave man constant assurance of the truth of his way of life, and on the other hand, elevated God’s Love even more in the eyes of man: from here he could comprehend that only Love and love alone could force God to pour out so many blessings on man, because it is not God who needs man, but man who needs God. The meaning of God's commandment about the second tree is even clearer. Bring food from every tree in paradise (Gen. 2:16) - as a bodily being, you need food, etc. for the body, in this you can find your relative happiness, but... Of the tree, which you understand is good and evil, you will not cut it down (Gen. 2:17); know that there is a limit to your concerns about yourself and your body, such a limit that if you cross it, you will doom yourself to death instead of life; This commandment, as we see, was rightly called by Tertullian the “rule of abstinence” (“Scorpiacus.” Works. Vol. IV, 213) 8 . She demanded that a person directly sacrifice his sensual needs (to a certain extent). What is this sacrifice for? Obviously for a soul that could not find bliss in nutrition and found it only in God. “Because, as I guess myself,” says St. Gregory the Theologian, “and as I hear from the wise, the soul is a kind of Divine stream, and either the whole, or the ruler and ruler of its mind comes to us from above: then it has one thing that is only natural to it: to soar through grief, to enter into communication with God, to constantly direct its gaze to what is related, enslaving as little as possible to the infirmities of the body; for the body itself strives for the earth, and the soul is drawn downwards, leading it into this pleasant (that is, charming) wandering through visible objects, into this darkness of feelings, in which the soul, not controlled by reason, gradually sinks, falls lower and lower” (T.V, 123. Poem about humility). Thus, only by obeying the soul and subordinating the body to it, a person achieves communion with God, which his soul longs for. So, what did God’s commandment require of man? It demanded sacrifices of the needs of the body in favor of communication with God: out of the desire to be with God, out of love for Him, a person forgot to sacrifice the body. Or: this commandment demanded that a person, in the words of Gregory the Theologian (ibid.), having passed (as unsatisfactory and insignificant) “all the veils, all the present shadows, all the fortune-telling here, all the reflections of beauty in the mirrors” - in a word, everything finite, transitory, every joy of his finite existence, strive “toward the unveiled good, as it is in itself,” and, “saturated with the light that (his soul) desired to be worthy of, and having prevailed there with the highest beauty,” above, and besides this, he would no longer desire anything, no special personal happiness, and at this point he would “stop his wanderings” for the good. In other words, the commandment required that man bring matter to the service of his spirit, and this is because the end of his aspirations, the center of being is not in himself, but in God, to whom his spirit strives - and therefore, he renounced his selfhood, his will in favor of the will of God. “Just as some generous gentleman,” says St. John Chrysostom, “entrusts his huge house to someone and, however, in order to retain the ownership of this house completely for himself, appoints to take a small amount of money from that person: so our humane Lord, having allowed Adam to use all the trees of paradise, commanded him to abstain from only one thing, so that he would know that he is under the Lord, Whom he must obey and fulfill. commands" (Gen. Bes. XIV. T.I. pp. 222–223), - that is, so that he understands that his true life is not in self-will and independence, but “under the Lord,” in communion with God, in the kingdom of God. Thus, both trees led man to the same thing: 1) to the recognition of his dependence on God, and hence 2) to the consciousness of God’s boundless love and 3) to the position of the center of his being not in himself, but in God; led to self-denial out of love for God. The difference is that the tree of life taught in a positive way and overthrew mainly pride (one type of egoism), while the second tree taught in a negative way and struck down sensuality. But in the first and second, the positive result is the same: a sacrifice to God of oneself, one’s selfhood. So, we repeat, moral growth in eternal life has as its subject the gradual improvement of man in love for God; its first step lies in sacrifice. It is necessary, however, to note here that this word for a normal person, who has not yet experienced egoism, who has not yet tried to live for himself - this word, we say, could not have the meaning that it now has for us. With this word we connect the idea of ​​some loss, some suffering, forcing oneself, etc. Hence, love, understood in the sense of sacrifice, can sometimes be presented to consciousness as only an external commandment or only a mental conclusion that compulsorily obliges the will. Nothing like this, of course, can be assumed in a normal person. Love for God was for him a completely natural element, an indispensable requirement of his nature as a finite being, which receives its justification only in union with the infinite. This love, to be more specific, was necessary for him, just as he needed the contemplation of eternal beauty, the possession of unconditional truth, the consciousness of eternal truth - his soul naturally strove for this and all this was in God. By his very nature, man could not help but love God. “Love for God,” teaches St. Basil the Great, “is not something acquired through teaching. For it was not from anyone else that we learned to admire the light, to be attached to life; not another who taught us to love our parents or educators. So, or even more, it is impossible to learn the love of God from the outside, but along with the structure of a living being, I mean man, there is implanted in us a certain innate desire, which itself contains an impulse for common love.” But this is not enough. Desired by Himself for man, God, above all this, came to meet man: He gave him existence, surrounded him with all the blessings of creation and, above all, gave him eternal, infinite good: His Love, communication with Himself. This gave the natural feeling of love for God as the ideal of all good things the character and appearance of love for a benefactor (such love does not directly presuppose life-to-life communication), close love, the more perfect and pure the purer and more perfect the primordial man was. Consequently, the sacrifice required of a person could not take on the form of an external, inevitable necessity associated with loss, pity, etc., but was a natural expression in action, in the will and mind of what the whole nature of man was already striving for, what his heart lived with. As a free person, under a certain influence, he could, of course, act contrary to this nature of his, as he actually did. But this was only a naked possibility, which did not yet have a basis within a person, a purely formal, external possibility - to refuse this opportunity could not, therefore, constitute labor or deprivation for a person. Therefore, God’s commandment about abstinence may seem like a certain temptation only for us, only for people already imbued with egoism: like any attempt on our independence, on our desires, this commandment itself causes in us a certain reaction, self-reliance, which is why the forbidden fruit seems especially sweet to us. But this is because our attention is turned to ourselves, and not to God. Consequently, such a reaction could not take place in a normal person who has not yet deviated from his calling into egoism. For him, the commandment of God was only a means, a tool with the help of which his natural love for God was supposed to rise to the level of conscious preference for God to everything that could surround and attract a person to himself - man, thus, only strengthened his natural desire and love for God as the highest good by denying everything that could in one way or another claim to be good. So, the sacrifice of oneself, of one’s finite being in favor of God, did not change things: man still strived for God from within, strived with his heart - he loved Him not only as his Master, to whom he was obliged to obey, but first of all as a Father, as the object of his most extreme desires, better and more precious than which man no longer found. The most accurate explanation of love for God as the content of eternal life, love is a feeling From what has been said, it is clear that love for God, which constituted the essence of the life of primordial man, and, consequently, the essence of eternal life, to which we strive, cannot only be a free act based on the consciousness of the necessity or duty of this love, but must certainly be a matter of the whole soul, must be a feeling. It is precisely as a feeling that love, at the highest levels of its intensity, has the ability to occupy a dominant position in the human soul, colors and brings to one level each of its most insignificant movements, can completely embrace the soul and carry it away with the force of an uncontrollable desire. This is exactly what is described in the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church. Love for God, says, for example, St. Isaac the Syrian, is naturally ardent, and when it attacks someone beyond measure, it makes that soul enthusiastic. The heart of the one who has felt this love cannot contain and bear it (“cannot,” that is, this love turns out to have no consequences for the internal and external structure of a person), but, as love has found itself in him, an extraordinary change is seen in him. And here are the tangible signs of this love: a person’s face becomes fiery and joyful, and his body warms up. Fear and shame recede from him, and he becomes, as it were, ecstatic. The power that gathers the mind together flees from him and he becomes as if amazed. He considers terrible death to be a joy; contemplation of his mind does not allow any suppression in thoughts about heavenly things. And in absence, not visible to anyone, he talks as if he were present. His natural awareness and vision pass away, and he does not sense in a sensual way the movement excited in him by objects; because although he does something, he does not feel it at all, since the mind floats in contemplation, and its thought always seems to be talking with someone else. “The Apostles and martyrs once reveled in this spiritual rapture. And some went around the whole world, toiling and enduring reproaches, while others poured out blood like water from their truncated members; in terrible suffering they were not faint-hearted, but endured them valiantly; and having been wise, they were found foolish. Others wandered in deserts, in mountains, in dens, in the abysses of the earth, and in disorder, they were the most comfortable.” From this description of love it is clear that this is not just a calculation - that a person prefers everything in the world to God, not because he is clearly aware of the need for such a preference or its benefits for himself, he wants to receive more in exchange for less. This love is a response to the Lover, it is a movement of the heart towards and in gratitude to the love of God. Neither death, nor life, nor Angels, nor Principalities, nor Powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8:38), and this is because all this is overcome by the power of Him who loved us (Rom. 8:37). The love of God, therefore, is not cold calculation and not a consciousness of duty, but the desire of the soul for union with God, a desire that comes from its very essence and is strengthened by the consciousness of the mutual and undeserved love of God. It is this property of true love that explains the comparison or comparison of love for God and communication with Him with the love of a mother for her children and vice versa, and especially with carnal love and communication, that is constantly found in the Holy Scriptures and paternal literature, and in the eyes of an old man, perhaps even somewhat tempting. “Blessed,” says St. John Climacus, “is he who has acquired the same love for God that an enthusiastic lover has for his beloved. He who truly loves constantly imagines the face of his beloved and embraces him internally with pleasure. Such a person cannot even calm down from his strong desire even in his sleep, but even at this time he is busy thinking about his beloved. This is what happens in bodily nature; This also happens in ethereal nature. Someone, wounded by love, said about himself (to which I am surprised): I sleep at the request of nature, but my heart is vigilant (Song. 5:2) according to the abundance of love […] Helen - the soul desires and dies (Ps. 83:2) with the fire of love for the Lord, as if struck by a poisonous arrow.” Let us recall the book of Song of Songs, the book of the prophet Hosea, etc., etc. - and all these are variations on the same theme: the love of God must achieve the strength and properties of carnal love. Just as this latter is not a requirement of circumstances and not a logical conclusion from the concept of this or that person, but an involuntary and even counter-willed attraction to this person that overcomes nature, an attraction that forces the lover to forget about himself, about his good, and think only about the beloved and his well-being - our love for God should be the same: it should be the same thirst for God, the same self-forgetfulness or rapture of the soul, as John of the Climacus calls it. Such love for God constitutes the essence of eternal life from the material side; It is in this love that man’s likeness to God, Who is Love in essence, lies. Love out of calculation, out of desire for one’s own benefit or out of a consciousness of duty, can never be called such a likeness simply because it is something imposed from the outside and not self-caused - only love as a feeling that arises inside a person, albeit in relation to the love of God, can be a true likeness of self-existent love. As long as we distinguish ourselves from God, as long as the commandment of love remains a commandment for us, and not an echo, not a formula of our heart’s desires, until then we are not yet involved in eternal life. Yes, this is understandable: we then still place our highest good in ourselves, and not in God - we still seek Communion with God for some special happiness of ours, for pleasure, which, as it seems to us, only accompanies Communion with God, and does not constitute only the other side of it. The bliss of Communion with God, therefore, as the bliss of love, is incomprehensible, and without this, eternal life is incomprehensible. That is why the Apostle Paul insisted on the need to have love, and not works of love, in order to receive eternal life. If,” he says, “I give away all my property and give my body to be burned (the highest degree of sacrifice), but do not have love, it will be of no benefit to me. Deeds of love, up to and including self-sacrifice, can, of course, be forced, performed with torment and violence against oneself - but you cannot force anyone to love, including yourself, as St. Basil the Great says: “it is impossible to learn the love of God from outside”; love, therefore, must necessarily be an involuntary feeling in order to achieve that perfection that makes it the basis and content of eternal life. By this, of course, we do not deny the fact that for an empirical person living in sin, in selfishness, love for God is something supernatural, almost unattainable and achieved only with the help of God’s grace and through the most painful efforts on oneself, the path of the cross. We are only talking about what is the perfection and true qualities of Christian love. Love improves endlessly So, in order to be the content and essence of eternal life, love for God must not be a commandment, but the rapture of the soul, it must be an inevitable desire for God that embraces the whole person, delight before Him to the point of self-forgetfulness. Understood in this sense, love will explain to us that endless moral progress, that eternal striving for the ideal, in which we place the bliss of eternal life. This moral progress, after all that has been said, will consist of the following. After a person, who naturally loves God, sacrifices everything else for the sake of God and thereby strengthens his love and raises it to the level of a conscious state, his further life will consist in the gradual improvement of this love, in elevating it and making it like Divine Love, unconditionally selfless and all-perfect, which served as the prototype of human love. After this, it is clear why love is called “eternal prosperity” by John Climacus, why, according to the Apostle, it never falls away (1 Cor. 13:8). Even our human carnal love does not know, as they say, satiety; Moreover, love for God can never find an end, because its very object is infinite, inexhaustible. The more a person approaches him, the more this latter will attract him, the more worthy of his love he will appear. Therefore, a person will always have the opportunity to rise even higher, to love God even more and through this become even closer to Him, from here to love Him again, etc., etc. to infinity. The growth of love knows no limits. “Love,” says St. John Climacus, “is a fiery source: to the extent that it flows out drink, to the same extent it inflames the thirsty.” But this constant striving forward and forward, without the possibility of ever fully comprehending ideas, will not be suffering, even more: in this very endless improvement of love lies eternal bliss. The eternal desire for the highest good would be accompanied by eternal dissatisfaction only when this good seemed to us eudaimonistic, when a person was looking for “his own si.” But our ideal is Love, which does not seek “its own”, which believes its bliss not in itself, but in the opportunity to be with a loved one and sacrifice oneself for him. Each step forward in this gradual improvement of love will reveal to man not the incomprehensibility of the ideal, but only the simple truth that he still loves God little, that He needs to be loved even more, and this, therefore, only opens up the possibility of being even more blissful than before. “God’s love,” says Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, “cannot exist without joy. And as many times a person feels the sweetness of God’s love in his heart, so many times he rejoices in God. Love, like a sweet virtue, cannot be felt without joy. Just as honey delights our throat when we taste it, so the love of God gladdens our heart when we taste and see that the Lord is good” (T.V. 216). We expressed this thought at one time, saying that endless moral progress will be accompanied by the perception of more and more new benefits. So, love for God as an all-pervading feeling, an ever-unquenchable thirst - this is the force that introduces a person to self-existent life, grants him immortality, while at the same time serving for him as a source of endless bliss in eternal life. Love and the Trinity of the Divine This could be the end of our discussion about the essence of eternal life, if this latter appeared in the world only with the appearance of man and was only the lot of one human personality. But God is love not only because He loved man and His entire creation, and not because He enters into a union of love with every rational and moral being - such love is too limited and too conditional and temporary to be a sign and basic property of an eternal and unconditional Being. The love of God cannot be conditioned by the existence of man and creatures, because otherwise it would be only an eternal potency, which would eternally seek its fulfillment and only find it with the appearance of finite being - and in this case, God would not be an unconditional Being. To be like this, He must be Love from eternity active, and not potential, Love from eternity active, and not only desiring to act, but for the time being not finding an object for itself. Therefore, God Himself within His Being is Love, because He loves Himself. But this love cannot be that motionless, egoistic self-sufficiency, delight in one’s own perfections, as it can and does appear in systems of “strict” monotheism (for example, in Mohammedanism, false Judaism, deism, etc.); the moral result of such religions is pharisaism, self-righteousness, while the metaphysical absurdity is the inability to explain the appearance of the world. The Love of God cannot be such self-sufficiency, because God is a Trinity, and therefore this Love is a real, living intercommunication of Three Persons, one in essence from eternity and independent from eternity, not reducible to one another. Each Person necessarily distinguishes Himself from the other two and at the same time necessarily recognizes Them as an inseparable part of His own being. Each of Them does not have Its own will, Its own glory, Its own power; for each of Them it is the will, glory and power of the other two Persons. I descended from heaven, not to do My will, but the will of the Father who sent Me, the Spirit of the Lord is upon Me. For his sake, for the anointing of Me, - My teaching is not Mine, but the One who sent Me, - The works that I do in the name (that is, by the power) of the Father, - by the Spirit of God I cast out demons, and so on. And on the other hand, My whole essence is Yours, and Yours is Mine, the Holy Spirit will receive from Mine 9, He is the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit of Christ. All this, of course, can be explained in relation to the humanity of Jesus Christ and His messianic ministry, but we think that the man Jesus could therefore speak about the will of the Father and the Holy Spirit as something external to Him, as something to which He voluntarily submits - because He, in His Divinity, recognized this will not as His personal will only, but as the will of the Father and the Holy Spirit, with With whom, although He was one in essence, He distinguished Himself from Whom as subordinate to Them, as fulfilling Their will, sacrificing Himself for Them. Just as He could call Himself the Son of the Father in humanity only because He stands in filial relations with Him in Divinity. Thus, God is Love, active from eternity, because in the very unity of the Trinity Being of God lies the law of self-sacrifice, self-denial of the Personality in favor of other similar, equal Personalities. That is why God is most often called the God of peace, that is, unanimity in diversity, unity in plurality. God, according to St. Gregory the Theologian, cannot be either one or two, but must certainly be a Trinity, “so as not to be meager,” because this “would show lack of inquisitiveness” (II, 180–181), a lack of Love. Love and Trinity, therefore, are completely inseparable concepts and explain each other. Love in God is incomprehensible if there is no Trinity, and on the other hand, Trinity is also incomprehensible if there is no love. God is Love because He is Trinity. Love for neighbors in relation to love for God But, being the Trinity, Triple Love, God could no longer present himself to the consciousness of man as only the object of his personal love, could not call man to communion, to a union of love only with Himself. God, Who is not seen, how can one love (1 John 4:20), but must show his love in relation to his brothers. As a finite being, man cannot be equal in union with God, therefore, human love cannot achieve the possible similarity to Divine Love, that is, love that not only contemplates and thanks, but also promotes, helps - and in this last property the true essence of Love is manifested with special brightness. Who will say to his needy brother or sister, “Go in peace, be warmed and nourished,” but will not give them what they need for the body: what good is it (James 2:16)? Hence, in order to be similar to Divine love, human love must choose as its object the same finite creatures as himself, and for their sake sacrifice himself and consider them an integral part of his being. No one has ever seen God, therefore, no one can sacrifice themselves in favor of Him, that is, helping Him. We can become like Him only by loving our brothers and sacrificing ourselves for them. If we love one another, then God abides in us, and His love is perfect in us (1 John 4:12). Therefore, the Savior, in response to the righteous, will say: truly I say to you: just as you did this (that is, deeds of love) to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did it to Me (Matthew 25:40), that is, by loving the brothers and sacrificing himself for them, a person expresses both the desire for God and the likeness with Him, which is expressed in his direct desire for God, in his thanking and contemplating love. That is why, next to the commandment of love for God in the Holy Scriptures and Tradition, the commandment of love for one’s neighbor is always placed, and so insistently that the absence of this last love serves mainly to the final condemnation of a person at the final judgment and a decisive sign of the absence in him of true love for God. Whoever says that he loves God but hates his brother is a liar, and there is no truth in him 10 . “Whoever says that he loves the Lord, but is angry with his brother, is like a man who dreams that he is running” (the words of St. John Climacus), that is, the speaker is fruitlessly fantasizing, deceiving himself and others. As a result of this same property of true love, due to the impossibility for a person to discover his love from all its sides and in all its strength in a single communion with God, God does not call a person to participate in eternal life alone. Countless numbers of individuals enter into this communion of love with God, based on likeness to Him, on holiness. Angels also strive for God and also love Him, and in this love they find their bliss. In the same way, God “created a helper” for man, that is, he determined for him to achieve the goal of his calling not alone, but in union and with the help of others. This reveals to us another sign of eternal life, as essential and necessary as Communion with God. We know, says Saint John the Theologian, that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers; He who does not love his brother remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him (1 John 3:14–15). The second sign of a person living eternal life, therefore, is that he loves his brothers, loves people like him. The relevance and necessity of this feature is self-explanatory. If we put in the foreground only the commonality of aspirations of the entire multitude of individuals, then in this case we will inevitably come to their, so to speak, metaphysical unity in eternal life. Living in communion with the One God, we must necessarily be in communion with each other - God is, as it were, a connecting element between us. But such communication will not yet be life and barely exceeds simply the unity of contemplation, by which mutual communication is not always and necessarily presupposed. This true common life is also not given by the sameness of all creatures striving for God and united with Him. This similarity, of course, constitutes one of the most essential factors of mutual communication, but this fact has no coercive force and therefore can only act as an auxiliary factor with another more effective one. Evidence of this is in the history of mankind, where the unity of nature, although it was constantly proclaimed, did not prevent people from forming separate unions, mutually hostile and mutually harmful, such as states, and in states - classes, associations, etc. The whole point is what this communion with God and these similarities are. And this communion with God, as we have seen, is love for God for His own sake, without any thought about oneself. You can love God only as your highest good, only as the end of your aspirations. Such love undoubtedly reduces all lovers to the unity and thus strengthens the two motives of love mentioned above, but it does not provide the necessary communication between lovers, because it is connected with the thought of oneself. Once my good has been achieved, this is where it all ends - I can love my like-minded people, but only because their communication in the same good with me does not deprive me of using it, does not reduce my bliss. Obviously, such love for brothers is not love, but not hatred, and the reason why there is no hatred is not in me and not in my mood, but only in the boundlessness, inexhaustibility of the good that we all enjoy, the reason, therefore, is only external and, from the point of view of my internal mood, completely random. It will not be the same if we love God as a Person, that is, we love Him not for ourselves, but for Himself, because such love is necessarily combined with self-sacrifice, with the denial of egoism. Such love will truly bind all people into a single union, into a single organism, because the criterion of my relationship to them is not my personality and not their attitude towards it, but their attitude towards the personality of God and Her towards them. Loving God with such love, I will love all those who love Him, and precisely for this one thing, that they love God, whom I love. Here the likeness receives its full meaning precisely because it is likeness, the unity of love for one God and the unity of contemplation. On the other hand, loving God because He is Love, admiring Him as Love, and finding my bliss in this, I cannot help but transfer my love to everything where Divine Love is directed. “Without doubt,” says Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, “God loves every person. If anyone truly loves the Loving God, he must also love the person whom He loves” (V, 217). And this is a necessary law because loving God as love, I necessarily become like Him, that is, as far as possible for me, I am imbued with the same selfless, alien to any egoism, serving my neighbor love, which I see in the Trinity. Beloved! - says Saint John the Theologian, - let us love each other, because love is from God (that is, it constitutes His natural element, it is an essential property of Divine life), and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God (that is, he becomes like God and through experience knows the sweetness of Divine life, experiences in himself the bliss to which we strive). He who does not love has not known God, because God is love. What kind of love is this? God's love for us was revealed in the fact that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we could receive life through Him. This is love, that we did not love God, but He (without any reason on our part, simply because He is Love, that this is the law of His Divine life) loved us to the point of self-sacrifice, because He sent His Son as an atonement for our sins. Hence the conclusion: Beloved! if God so loved us, then we should love one another (1 John 4:7–11). Admiring Divine Love, a person in this finds an incentive to love other people. This, of course, is because love in itself is desirable for him, that in it he finds his ultimate good. Thus, if the bliss of eternal life is love for God or the communion of love with Him, and if this love is a feeling arising within a person, selfless delight before God, then this bliss must have as a necessary sign, an obligatory ingredient, love for one’s neighbor, for every created conscious being to which the love of God extends, serving in this case as a prototype. There can be no difference here, because the basis of love is not this being itself, but God, Divine, selfless love itself. Loving God, becoming like Him in love and, most importantly, uniting with Him “into a single dissolution” (in the words of St. Macarius of Egypt), all rational and moral creatures necessarily and by themselves merge into a single union of love, necessarily living one common life. “For love,” says St. Ephraim the Syrian, “a single herd was made of angels and men” (Vol. III, 278). In this unity of many, which is achieved only through mutual self-sacrifice, when each serves for the benefit of others, out of love for them, lies the similarity of human love to Divine love. So, what is the essence of eternal life? Christ told us that this life is the knowledge of God, that is, the experimental comprehension of His being through likeness to Him. What does it now mean to “know God” in this sense? It means to cognize the One in many ways, it means to identify with oneself all people, all rational and moral creatures, to comprehend experimentally, to actually experience their inseparability from our being. This is possible only through the self-sacrifice of one for the benefit of many, and the result and external manifestation of this is that in the multitude of personalities there will be one heart and one soul, there will be one spiritualizing force and one law of being - love - all of them, therefore, will necessarily constitute a single, eternal kingdom of love in an indissoluble union with the Triune God. Thus, summing up everything that has been said about eternal life, we get the conclusion that eternal life is life in the Kingdom, that is, the union of love with God and all the saints who love God, and in this love lies all our bliss, our highest good. The views of one sect at the end of the 19th century are very instructive. on church and theological authority: all learned people submitted to the Antichrist already living in the world; You can visit Orthodox churches, you can even sing in the choir, confess and receive communion, but you cannot trust the priests, “because there is heresy in them” (Knyazev A. Serafimovtsy and Serafimovna, or chosen brothers and sisters // Spiritual Library. 1874. Nos. 34,35,36). Unfortunately, sometimes it seems that the “Seraphimites” successfully survived the natural collapse of their sect and continue to spread their views. See about this: Priest Peter Plank. Counseling and Orthodox faith in the diaspora // Alpha and Omega. 1999. No. 1(19). – P.160–169. Summum bonum (Latin) “highest good.” – Ed. To the students’ question about what God is and whether there is immortality, how ancestors live beyond the grave, Confucius answered either with silence or directly said that it is more important for a person to think about his behavior than about the afterlife. This is especially true in the Mahayana (“great vehicle”), that faction of Buddhist theology where Buddhism strives to become a metaphysical system. The Lord God took man, whom he created, and brought him into the paradise of sweetness, made it and preserved it (Gen. 2:15). Wherever I am, my servant will also be... I want them too to be where I am, so that they may see My glory... etc. Basil the Great. Conversation 1 about fasting. “This cannot be taken away is the legalization of fasting and abstinence.” T.IV,7. John 6:38; Luke 4:18; John 7:16; 10:25; Matthew 12:28; John 17:10; 16:15, etc. See 1 John 4:20 and 2:4. – Ed. You might be interested in: