Проповедь о естественных и богословских, нравственных и практических вопросах

This world is not eternal, it has a beginning. Nature teaches us this, and we find confirmation of this in history. This truth is most clearly confirmed to us both by the invention of arts and crafts, and by the sequence of the emergence of civilizations and states. For the most part, we know who exactly stood at the origins of this or that art, or at the birth of this or that craft or invention, we know who exactly established this or that law, who stood at the head of this or that state. In addition, we, for the most part, knowing where and from whom the writers who thought about everything in the world were born, do not see that at least one of them was able to explain the problem of the emergence of the world and time, as the prophet Moses did in the Old Testament. After all, the holy prophet, having described the beginning of the existence of the world and bringing us indisputable evidence of what he described, convinced almost the entire human race of the truth of his words and helped people to reject with contempt those who cunningly invent the opposite. The nature of this world, in order to act according to established laws, needs power from God, and without this power it cannot exist in any way. The prophecies of all the spiritualized men of the Old Testament, as well as the God of all Himself - Jesus Christ - teach us that this world has not only a beginning, but also an end. For nature, in its various parts, continually dies, without stopping for a moment in this partial death. The knowledge that God gives us is immutable and irrefutable. It is necessary that not only the pious, but also the ungodly believe in Him, since today the immutability of what the prophets predicted is obvious. The only rational soul is the human soul. She is not heavenly, but supracelestial, for her nature is an intelligent essence. The fact that from the temporary and tangible in the soul are born irreplaceable beauty or shame, wealth or poverty, glory or infamy, intelligent light containing eternal life, or mental hellish torment and darkness is also worthy of admiration and attention. Through sensation and imagination, we collect a wide variety of knowledge in our minds. This is knowledge about the moon, about the sun, about combinations and variants of the arrangement of planets in the sky, about the scale and variety of spatial forms available in the Universe. Also with our minds we collect the laws of nature, all the variety of crafts and arts, and in general any kind of knowledge of subjects. And despite all this, absolutely none of the knowledge of this world could be called spiritual knowledge, since this is natural knowledge that does not contain the spiritual. Where did we learn about God? How did we learn about the whole world? How did we finally learn about ourselves - and did we learn exactly what we are sure of and what is impossible to doubt? Is it not from the teaching of the Spirit? There is no doubt: it was the teaching of the Spirit (and nothing and no one else) that taught us that God exists and exists. Because He, God, is the Existing One, the Eternally Existing One, and the Immutably Existing One. The fact that He did not perceive His existence from the non-existent, and the fact that He will never cease to exist. God is Trinitarian and Omnipotent. With His Word, He brought out the existing from the non-existent. As Moses says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). So, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Thus, He put to shame all those who say that matter supposedly pre-existed even before heaven and earth came into being. Then God distributed the creatures in his order into six days. He did this in order to complement the world, in order to harmoniously connect the parts one to another in such a way that they fit together. God placed the earth in the center. Thus, wisely connecting and connecting with each other everything that exists in the ever-moving sky, He determined that the world should remain at the same time motionless and movable. A most skillful Artist, He determined its place for each body, placing everything in its place with splendor and giving the world movement. Since then, the heavenly bodies have not ceased to glide uniformly across the highest limits of the Universe so that the Universe, in the literal sense of the word, can be called “cosmos,” that is, “ordered.” After the whole world was created, man was created. The man was awarded great honor by God and surrounded by extraordinary care. Before creating man, God created the whole world, and He created this world specifically for man. And the Kingdom of Heaven was also created for man before the creation of the world. God wanted to create man with His own hand and in His image for his own sake. Man received his existence not only from matter, like other animals. Together with his body, he - through an ineffable inspiration - received a soul from God Himself. Therefore, a person, if he takes upon himself the feat and accepts Divine grace, is able to unite with God. In the words that I tell you there is true wisdom and saving knowledge that leads a person to eternal bliss. Which of the Euclids, Marians, Ptolemies could have this knowledge? What Empedocles and what Socrates, what Aristotle and Plato could comprehend this heavenly wisdom using the tools of logic and the proof of mathematics? What mind could touch the wisdom of God? So, this true and transcendental wisdom and teaching of the Spirit incomparably surpasses any other knowledge. The ability to know the true God is incomparably higher than Hellenic philosophy. Yes, just the understanding of what place a person occupies next to God surpasses any human wisdom. Indeed, of all earthly and heavenly creation, man alone was created in the image of the Creator, so as to be able to look at Him. Created to be able to love Him, created to be able to keep His secrets and worship Him. Believing in God and striving towards Him, a person retains his true beauty. The man of God considers everything else inferior and often useless. All those sages who followed the methods of the ancient Greek philosophers failed to understand this at all. On the contrary, they showed impiety towards God and worshiped the creation more than the Creator. They even came up with the idea that visible, but not tangible stars were endowed with intelligence and dignity: the larger the star, the more intelligence and dignity it supposedly had. They called these stars gods - large and small. Thus, before Christ, people were in poverty and darkness. But now we know that we are created in the image and likeness of God. And therefore, it is unacceptable to deify not only the sensory, but also the intelligible world. Nature explorers, stargazers and any other scientists who boasted about how know-it-all they were, failed to understand absolutely nothing, creating churches to idols, making sacrifices to them and subordinating themselves to these idols, remaining in damned arrogant boasting and moving themselves further and further from the saving truth. For us, Christians, it is possible not only to know God and ourselves, but also to realize our own weakness, leading to the desire to be healed with the help of God’s grace. And this is incomparably higher than any kind of knowledge and research. After all, a person who knows his weakness learns the ways that lead to God’s salvation, learns ways to approach the light of knowledge. He is able to accept true wisdom, which remains unclouded and unaffected by the corruption of the world. Each person has essence and life, as well as energy that animates the body. The intelligent nature of angels does not possess such energy, because the angels did not receive a body created from the earth, and their nature did not receive the life-giving power that the human body received. And animals, although they have a body, do not have Divine energy either. When animals die, their life ends, while the soul of any person lives in a living body, being endowed with essence and life-giving energy. That is why, when death decomposes the human body, the energy of God does not decompose along with it. After all, this energy is the breath of God, which has life regardless of anyone or anything. The essence of the rational human soul is life. However, at the same time, the soul is capable of perceiving both evil and good. She is either in evil or in good - in accordance with her disposition towards one and the other. When the human soul, having received freedom of self-determination from the Creator, turns to Him and begins to live in accordance with His will, it acquires goodness. God is Truth and Absolute Good, that is, He has goodness in Himself, being Himself the source of all good. There is life in Him because He Himself is Life. Any thought, any deed is human good to the extent that it agrees with God. In the nature of God there is wisdom, bliss, eternity and, in general, it contains everything good that you can imagine. All these benefits are combined in God one and extremely simply. God Himself is called and is One and True. Those who think with God's mind, those who theologize in spiritual language, feel this and speak about Him in exactly this way. The Creator and Ruler of all creation is Goodness in His essence. He is not capable of absorbing into Himself any kind of opposing force, since He Himself cannot be the opposite of any other entity. God cannot be described by our intellectual word, nor can it be comprehended by man. That is why the Son of God becomes a Man: so that through Him we would come to know the Truth of God and also experience communion with Him. Jesus Christ, having lived with us in the flesh, showed us the Father and the Holy Spirit: “The Spirit of Truth, which proceeds from the Father” (John 15:26). This is how we learned that from One Father comes not only the Word, but also the Spirit. The Three Persons of the Holy Trinity are linked together by love. We were taught by Christ to worship the One God in three Hypostases - the True and Perfect Hypostases. This Holy Trinity of the One God determines everything, extends beyond everything, and it is impossible for anything existing to exist outside of It. When the human soul, rejecting the slavish connection with passions and sin, cleaves with love to the Trinity God, submits to Him by deeds and various ways of realizing virtue, it receives enlightenment from Him. Then the soul truly becomes prettier and ennobled, sensitively responding to God’s advice and admonitions. Then she receives true and eternal life. If a person is not going to renounce either sin or his fall, then he is alienated from both God and true life. Since the soul is spiritual and endowed with intelligence, it needs to maintain its dignity. This is possible when she is obedient only to God, when she follows Him and submits to Him. She is convinced by Him, her gaze is directed only in His direction. Thus, the soul, with constant memory of God and constant contemplation of Him, with ardent and fiery love for Him, adorns itself and attracts to itself the mysterious and ineffable radiance of God. If this happens, then she is truly a soul in the image and likeness of God, then she becomes gracious, joyful, wise and divine. Living this way, a person is taught by God how to love God more than himself, and his neighbor as himself. There is nothing more unfair and destructive than the unwillingness to remember, feel and love the One who created you. The power of knowledge, truth and love is an innate human power. And the worst enemy of our soul is the angel of wickedness, who gradually tries to enslave each of us to the spirit of disobedience. Only he himself turned out to be lower and worse than everyone else, because he took it into his head - how proud it is! - to stand on a par with the One who created him. With this intention, he abandoned God, and as a result, God abandoned him. The result was that he became the opposite of God and His open enemy. For the Holy God is a living, life-giving Goodness. And the one who has become the devil is dead malice, which turns everything it touches into carrion. Remaining in his malice, he remains immortal, since God, before his fall, endowed him with freedom of will. In all creation there is nothing higher than man. Each of us is free to think freely, free to have our own opinion and to keep what he has learned from God and from our Savior Christ. Man stands in such a place that he is at the same time under the command of God and himself in charge of all earthly creation. The devil looks at this human power and authority with envy. He tries to do everything that depends on him so that a person loses this strength and power. He generously and slyly offers people self-justification for every taste, tries to mislead them or, better said, convince a person to despise the commandment of God as supposedly useless or impossible to fulfill. And he also fights for man to oppose God and do things that contradict His commandments. The evil one knows that if he succeeds in achieving this, then the person will become his co-apostate, a participant in the same darkness and carrion that are indispensable attributes of the devil. It often happens that the human soul is killed spiritually and deprives itself of the joy of its spiritual Bridegroom. If this has happened, then the only way remains is repentance. After all, if a soul that has fallen under spiritual mortification does not henceforth begin to live in self-restraint and sorrow, if it does not decide to return to God, having walked along a narrow and sorrowful path, but instead scatters throughout the world, squanders itself on pleasures, wastes its strength, then, remaining outwardly alive, it will die. Our forefathers, of their own free will, alienated themselves from the memory of God and His contemplation. They despised the commandment given to them and entered into agreement with the deadening spirit of Satan. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, despising the commandment of the Creator, they were naked from the bright robes and radiance of the Divine dawn. They also became dead in spirit. After all, Satan is not only dead in spirit himself, he also kills the spirit in those who touch him. God did not create death. He only gave people a special commandment of obedience and declared that deviating from this commandment would entail death. After all, God not only loves man, He also knows what is useful for each of the creatures, and can also arrange everything for this benefit. Therefore, a decision made with the help of our will, and made by us, endowed by God with the ability to make a choice, has corresponding consequences and results. Now each of us is called to take responsibility for this obedience or disobedience to God. Those who are not disposed to courageously resist sin go in the opposite direction, without taking into account the Divine commandments. Naturally, instead of God’s Law, they begin to live according to their own law, approaching closer and closer to the abyss of internal and eternal death. And if those who chose this path, with sincere repentance, do not restore from the depths of their souls the correct connection with God, then they will remain outside of God’s life. Let us assume that someone does not want to elevate himself to the contemplation of God and to communion with Him. I believe that even in this case it is not difficult to understand that there is no benefit to man from disobeying God. There is no doubt: temptation attracts a person, but the result of coping with it is pain and sorrow. In paradise there grew a tree, and on that tree there was a fruit, the sweetest of all the fruits that grew on all the trees of paradise. But we ourselves can often be convinced that the food that is most delicious for our senses is not always healthy for everyone. Therefore, I believe it is necessary to evaluate the choice we make by its result. And in order not to remain silent about the abundance of humanity and the depth of the wisdom of God, let us immerse ourselves in the fact of His love. Whatever our spiritual condition, He gives each of us a favorable opportunity for repentance, which consoles the soul from the sadness caused by spiritual death. So, now each of us stands before God’s commandment of repentance. Following our own will, we cut ourselves off from heaven and lost all hope of returning there. But God did not completely condemn man, on the contrary: out of an abundance of humanity and goodness, out of merciful love for everyone, He Himself descended to earth to meet us. Having become a Man just like us, but without sin, He was able to once again give man life and salvation. The first advice of Jesus Christ and at the same time His first commandment was repentance: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). Before the Incarnation of the Word of God, the Kingdom of Heaven was as far from us as Heaven is from earth. However, when Christ came to us, when He united with our nature, He brought us all closer to His Kingdom. Great is the condescension of God towards all of us. And therefore, let us not move away from this great gift, living without repentance. We need to realize what a pitiful state a person is in, living in the darkness of ignorance and in the shadow of death, and avoid this state by doing works of repentance. Humble wisdom, tenderness and spiritual sorrow, a heart filled with mercy and loving justice - this is what God expects from us. We must have a heart that strives for purity, a peaceful and peace-making heart, patient and self-controlled in sorrows, persecutions, reproaches, slander and suffering. Now the Kingdom of Heaven, or rather, not the Kingdom, but the Heavenly King Himself “is within us” (See Luke 17:21). By doing the work of repentance and patience, we, as far as possible for us, show our love for Him. Love for God is characterized by the absence of passions and an abundance of virtues. A negative disposition towards evil deeds gives us the opportunity for our passions to go away and the desire to acquire virtues to be born. A person who loves a virtuous life has in himself love for the Source of all good, that is, for God. Love is the best way to attract God into yourself. As the holy apostle and evangelist John the Theologian said, “he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). Love is born and multiplies from the multiplication of virtues. Our Lord says in the Gospel: “Whoever has My commandments and keeps them, he loves Me” (John 14:21). The act of preserving virtues in itself - that is, without love - is not worthy of praise and is not useful for its practitioners. In his Epistle to the Corinthians, the Holy Apostle Paul writes: “If I do everything, but do not have love, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3). God is Spirit, and therefore He is incorporeal. For this reason, He is not located at any specific point in space and He cannot be described in terms of human logic. As an incorporeal He is not in any place, but at the same time as God He is everywhere at the same time. One and the Same, He is both in Himself, and everywhere, and above everything, worshiped by people in His Own Spirit and His Own Truth. Angels and souls of people are also incorporeal and are not located at any specific point in space, but at the same time they do not reside everywhere, like God. After all, they do not contain everything within themselves and therefore they themselves have a need for Him who is the Almighty. Before breaking the commandment, Adam was a participant in the Divine light and radiance. He was adorned with glorious vestments. He was not naked. He was more beautiful than those who are dressed in the most precious clothes and adorned with precious stones. The holy Apostle Paul considers this radiance and grace to be the natural vestment and habitation of man. In his Epistle to the Corinthians he writes: “That is why we groan, desiring to be clothed with our heavenly habitation. Let us not, even though we are clothed, find ourselves naked” (2 Cor. 5:2–3). And Paul himself, when he walked from Jerusalem to Damascus, by supernatural, Divine intervention, received from God Himself the betrothal of this Light and the robe corresponding to this betrothal. The divine grace and energy of God warms, enlightens, gives life, and with its Light enlightens those in whom it finds the prerequisites necessary for its manifestation. Holy and Great Basil says: “What are the actions of the Spirit? They are indescribable in words because of their greatness and innumerable because of their multitude. And how can we logically comprehend these mysteries, which are timeless and above time? The powers and energies of the Holy Spirit are uncreated. There are enough of them for many, but at the same time they are not divided. They are given to those who, through their inner spiritual life, are worthy of entering into the deifying radiance. Saint John Chrysostom said: “A drop of grace fills everything with knowledge. By this grace miracles happened, by it the sins of the world were resolved and forgiven.” From here it becomes clear what the holy Apostle Paul meant when he said: “His invisible things, his eternal power and Godhead, have been visible from the creation of the world through the consideration of creation” (Rom. 1:20). Just as the light of the sun is inseparable from the sun's ray, so the energies of God are inseparable from His essence. The rays of the sun cannot be seen by those who do not have eyes to see. The miracle of deification was received by those who pleased God. Of course, God created us all in order to make us partakers of His Divinity. However, this miracle is realized in those who resolutely and honestly enter into the feat. These people are in God. They are deified by Him, become partakers of His Divine energies, and God abides in them. The pre-essential and pre-vital, pre-divine and pre-good nature of God can neither be described, nor comprehended, nor observed, since it does not resemble anything super-unknowable. It resides above the heavens and is inextricably linked with an elusive force, and it is impossible to understand or describe it. Theologians believe that the closest thing to a true definition of God would be “absolute incomprehensibility.” God is the cause of all things, and everything else is around Him, for He Himself exists before everything and everyone. If someone wanted to give a name to God, then he should use the following words of St. Gregory the Theologian about the Divine nature: “The giver of wealth is the nature of my God.” And Saint Dionysius the Areopagite says: “The nature of the good God is to produce and save.” And this property is inherent in God naturally. Even a small part of God's essence possesses all His powers. It is like a coal flying out of a fire: it has the characteristics of fire and burns all those who touch it. Any coal has all the properties of the fire from which it came. Or, for example, one drop of liquid: it has all the properties of the liquid from which it came. And we received from God the opportunity to partake of His energies, and when this happens, we become omnipotent. Let's imagine that someone lit many candles from one burning one - each of these candles will hypostatically burn with the same fire. The general power and energy of the Trinitarian Deity, divided in various and suitable ways everywhere among those who partake of this power and energy, is able to accommodate and rest in those who are able to receive this grace. The Trinity God is One. But at the same time He exists in Three Persons, in three Hypostases, which are interconnected and contained by each other completely, eternally, without confusion and without merging. These Divine Hypostases have one energy. Outside of God, it is impossible to see any such incomprehensible example. We confess that the Son of God is our Life, and He is the Life of all creation. He is the Life that animates us, He is the Reason by which all created things live, He preserves everything through His Divine energy. Theology that describes the incomprehensible God does so cataphatically, since God has nothing that corresponds to our image of understanding. God is the Beginning and Ruler of creation. It cannot be counted among what was created. He is the life of all that He created. The Lord said to His disciples: “There are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Kingdom of God come with power” (Mark 9:1). After six days, the Lord, taking Peter, James and John with Him, ascended Mount Tabor. There He shone like the sun, and His clothes became dazzling white like light. Unable to look at this miracle that blinded them, the disciples of the Lord fell on their faces. But at the same time they felt in this Divine and ineffable Light the radiance of the Kingdom of God. Saint Gregory the Theologian and Saint Basil the Great said about God this way: “Deity is the Light that appeared to the disciples on the mountain. This Light is also a speculative beauty, which only saints can admire through the power of the Holy Spirit. The saints will admire and enjoy this Divine Light in an endless century.”