Nation and humanity

The principle of nationality must be raised from empirical factuality to the foundations of anthropology: namely, it is rooted in the tripartite structure of man. Man is an embodied spirit and, as such, consists of spirit and soul and body - animate corporeality. It has a personal and tribal principle, masculine and feminine. The spirit is the divine principle in man, which has life in itself and is revealed in God. The human personality is a personal spirit in the image of Christ and in this ontological sense it participates in Christ, His universal universe. In Christ, as in the human spirit, “there is Greek and Jew, barbarian and Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all and in all.” The members of the body of Christ are thereby citizens of the world, members of the universal brotherhood, not an international, but a supranational, spiritual association. Since the spirit is turned to Christ, it is extra- or supra-national. Anyone who follows Christ, in this sense, denies himself and his soul-body: “Whoever comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and indeed his own life, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). The image of the same renunciation in B 3 is Abraham, to whom it was said: “Get out of your land, from your kindred and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12: 1), and in N 3 - the Apostle Paul, in whom Saul, the servant of the synagogue, died, “of the Jews”, but the Apostle of the Gentiles was born, and for him in Christ Jesus no longer has any power circumcision, nor uncircumcision" (Gal. 5:6). And to the same thing, the Apostle Peter was brought - not without resistance - to whom, sent to Cornelius, it was revealed that “God is no respecter of persons, but in every nation whoever fears Him and does what is right is acceptable to Him” (Acts 10:34-35). The so-called spiritual life goes, to a certain extent, beyond the power of empiricism, with its formation, spatiality and temporality. It is not only super-national, but also super-historical. In it the spirit looks into itself and sees itself in God. The treasures of spiritual life are revealed to the extent of spiritual containment; they have eternal value, being illuminated not from below, not from the side, but from above. This is the eternal life that Christ teaches about. In the monuments of Christian spiritual writing, we do not so much notice the time, place, nationality in their origin, as we are struck by the similarity and identity of their content. And the Eternal Book, the Holy Gospel, like the entire New Testament, written by Jews (and not in the best Greek language, sometimes, like the Apocalypse, almost in slang), are completely unaware of Greek nationality, place and time. From here it is one step to the conclusion that the spirit is not national at all, even alien, hostile to nationality, surpasses it, dissolves it, abolishes it, for true spirituality not only crosses its boundaries, but also the measure of this overcoming is the measure of spirituality. However, we have to say that this is true, but it is also not true, and if we understand spirituality as the negation of nationality, then it is not at all true. Let's return to the original ideas of anthropology. Man is not an incorporeal spirit, but an incarnate one, and this is his difference from the angels, as free from flesh, but also not having their own world, deprived of direct participation in it and having it only through man, by virtue of their co-humanity. Of course, disembodied spirits, just like the human spirit in itself, regardless of its specific incarnation, are individually qualified. Each spiritual, angelic and human self represents a special ray in the pleroma of the Divine, being naturally identical, but hypostatically different. Angels do not know kinship, but only hierarchy; they are not a gens, but a council, and therefore have no nationality. However, due to this individual quality, they are the geniuses of places and eras, churches and peoples - the angels of peoples are the intelligible basis of their existence. Man, as an embodied spirit, is united with soul and body, that is, with animate flesh, and in this and through this he has a generic basis of existence, roots immersed in his native land, the darkness of the night illuminated by the spirit. Man is the unity of light and darkness, day and night, personality and clan, of which he is a link, son or daughter, father or mother, brother and sister, husband and wife, son of his land and his people. His life and work are spiritual and physical. The solar, courageous power of the spirit manifests itself in conjunction with the psyche, which is connected with the earth, the primary matter of the world. The beginning of tribal life connects man with the animal world, but spirituality distinguishes him from the latter. Animals, although they have individuality, do not know personality, which is inherent only in the spirit. The human spirit has a nature, which, however, exists only for the eternal spirit. Theosophical "races", "sub-races", "spiritual entities", of which the human personality is the intersecting and intersecting interaction, abolish this personality as such. But personality really exists only in connection with the whole, no matter what we call it: nature, soul, world, earth, race, etc.; man is a generic being, and genus is a general predicate for an indefinite number of subjects. This predicate, in turn, represents a complex and diverse articulation, starting from the family and going back to the more extensive multi-unities of tribal life - and among them there is nationality. If in the spiritual world the individual spirit has for itself an original reality emanating from God, which is realized and develops throughout one’s personal life, then the natural-tribal principle is completely immersed in formation. In particular, nations arise, mix, die, amalgamate, and in general the idea of ​​a pure nation is one of the utopias, the false values ​​that seduce humanity. But this does not deprive national amalgams of their own concrete existence, even with universal fusion. In becoming, the original, Sophian idea of ​​being is realized. And nationality is not only a fact and in this sense a historical accident, a bubble on the sea of ​​being, but also an intelligent essence, an intelligible principle, which therefore corresponds to its special bearer in the angelic world. The generic principle, the psyche, is for a person an immutable fact of his own nature, from which he ontologically cannot, and axiologically should not, free himself, for this would mean disincarnation, ceasing to be in his own human rank. This Luciferic rebellion against the Creator, in the utopian unrealizable desire to cease being oneself, is an abomination before the Lord. However, all factual worship is unworthy of a person, and the fact must be accepted as a value and justified as an idea, from facticity to become a must, and, of course, this formative principle is the spirit. Man is a complex and therefore difficult being for himself, but the God-man took upon himself this difficulty - in the incarnation of God. Harmony and balance are what we are looking for here, and any simplification in one direction or another distorts the ontological relationship in its antinomy. Cosmopolitanism under the pretext of imaginary spirituality is the same lie as zoological internationalism, which abolishes the holistic perception of the psyche for the sake of only one aspect of tribal existence, namely class and social solidarity. And the same lie is manifested by bestial nationalism, in which the hierarchy of values ​​is overturned and the priority is not of the Spirit over the psyche, but of the psyche over the spirit. Even K. Leontyev noted the connection between the decline of spirituality and the growth of offensive nationalism of small, artificially revived nationalities with their particularism. Balance is not easy to find here. However, to correctly pose the question and to maintain the hierarchy of values, it is necessary to establish basic postulates. And first of all, it is natural for a person, by virtue of his ontology, to love his psyche as his family and homeland, people and land, in the entire composition of this complex: language, character, gifts, creativity, history, and therefore he must love, it is sinful not to love, for it would be ontological ugliness, perversion, impoverishment. Only love gives sight and insight; without love one cannot know, and lack of love is both paternal and matricide, suicide. Of course, this is not the highest love of individuals among themselves, which corresponds to the trinitarian image of love in the Holy Trinity. This is a different image of love, namely, a person’s love for his property, which corresponds to God’s love for Sophia in His self-revelation. Such self-discovery of a person, as the creativity of oneself in one’s element, is impossible outside the fullness of life in nature, the psyche. There is not only natural love, but also a duty of love, and therefore loyalty to one’s homeland as to one’s psyche and one’s body. This love should not be self-affirming in its limitations, which would turn into hostility or contempt for other peoples, but it cannot but be exclusive. Vl. Soloviev, who developed the idea of ​​“national altruism,” put forward a completely false and utopian maxim: love other people’s rationalities as your own. This is similar to saying: you must love other people's wives and other people's children, other people's friends, as if you were your own. This idea is ontologically incorrect, for there are relationships whose very nature lies in their exclusivity. This includes love for one’s own and for one’s own - this property is precisely the object of love here. However, this type of love is especially difficult and is particularly dangerous. Namely, to the extent that personal love in general is sacrifice and genuine altruism, love for one’s own always threatens to become self-love. Love is characteristic only of the spirit, I, and love for the homeland is still the spiritual self-determination of I, and to that extent it requires sacrifice from him, however, without turning the object of love into an idol, into an imaginary deity. One’s own is not a subject or co-subject in love, but only a predicate, feminine-passive and feminine-ambiguous. Love for one’s own should be an activity of the spirit, but not at all its quenching. The sin against this love is betrayal or mimicry for the sake of personal gain and well-being. The weakness of this love, insurmountable to a certain extent, is oblivion and assimilation. The power of this love is spiritual creativity, the self-discovery of the spirit not only in itself, but also in its own, what can truly be called culture. The Motherland is for us a subject of cultural creativity; it is ourselves in our special gifts and talents. The homeland is our soul and our flesh as the container of our spirit. Therefore, its fullness in us is the maximum of our being and creativity, its inferiority is its fading, and denationalization is cultural death, even if greenhouse plants and painted paper flowers were placed on the grave. However, the concept of homeland and nation is historically relative. It can expand to the limits of a world empire with national syncretism and to a universal universal consciousness, for our body includes a connection with the whole world, and the family tree is connected in its roots with all humanity, the whole Adam. A nation in this form is an actual state, historically determined. It changes all the time, melts, expands, contracts, lives in us. On the one hand, there is a tendency to expand its boundaries, and yes? as if to overcome, there arises - and most of all under the influence of Christianity with its culture - genuine citizenship of the world. But at the same time, along with heightened national reflection, national boundaries are deepening and national differentiation is intensifying. A nation is the will to be, which can also become lack of will. Citizenship of the world, pan-humanity does not at all mean the abolition of a nation; on the contrary, it is its highest age. Humanity is growing into a pan-human Christian unity, not only in individuals, but also in nations, in all the concreteness of life. The depersonalizing leveling and abstract equalization of cosmopolitanism is emptiness, not universality, just as Volapyuk is a head invention, and not at all an overcoming of Babylonian multilingualism. The path of Lausanne, overcoming from within, and not from without, is the true Pentecost of languages, making them understandable to each other, each in their own language. “Are not these all Galileans who speak? How do we each hear our own dialect in which we were born? (Acts 2:1 – 8). Therefore, the maxim of a healthy national feeling or even national altruism, in contrast to Solovyov’s, says: based on your national feeling, do not wish evil and do not seek the destruction and forced dissolution (assimilation) of other peoples, but recognize their right to exist, as well as your own, live and let others live, combining your efforts in free competition. So, from what has been said it follows that a nation is a mental-physical principle in a person, not a spirit, but a soul and body. Therefore, the national feeling and its values ​​do not belong to an autonomous, self-sufficient existence; it must be subjugated by the spirit with its aspiration for God. God is above the nation, and unity in God is above national unity; spiritual conciliarity embraces all nations, and the universal church consists of different national churches. What does this supremacy of spirit mean here? It means, first of all, the vital consciousness that people, different nationally, are equal and identical spiritually - Christ in all and in all. For a Christian, self-consciousness in which nationality takes on primary significance is pagan and even animalistic. Therefore, spiritual asceticism must curb the violence of national passions, although this does not eliminate such concreteness of spiritual life, which receives material and content for itself in the nation as a special talent. The primacy of the spirit in the national consciousness further leads to the fact that the nation is perceived not only as a given or a fact, but as a creative task and duty. The national principle must always be in creative tension, like a spirit, and only in this way does it justify its existence and be creatively fruitful - it is not a fetish or an idol, but a living psyche. But a creative attitude towards one’s national culture does not allow for exclusivity; on the contrary, the principle is valid here: ab uno disce omnia. Perhaps in this we can find the answer to the fact that the great national and at the same time universal poet Pushkin possessed this wonderful gift of “reincarnation” in his work. In vain Dostoevsky, wanting to exalt this trait of genius, saw in this universality the national trait of the Russian poet and thereby belittled it, turning into a fact what is not a fact, but a creative principle. And, of course, this same trait, the ability to transform, is characteristic of human genius in general, to the extent of its creative gift: Shakespeare, Goethe. For active, creative love is free - know the truth, and the truth will set you free. On the basis of competition in creativity, mutual love, understanding and solidarity of peoples arises and deepens, which reaches its central focus in religious life, in the love of Christ and in the service of Christ. Christians of different nations must love and honor each other their Christian gifts, and they cannot and should not hate each other with national hatred. Therefore, such ungodly inventions as deutsches Christentum or, even worse, arisches Christentum (which have predecessors in our Union of the Russian People) are internally contradictory, because they introduce a primacy of the nation that is unacceptable for a Christian, divide Christ and want to expel non-Germans or non-Aryans from the church. This is also an abomination to the Lord. Of course, there is no need to fake it and hide in an idyll from the tragedy that world history represents. Nations may compete with each other and enter into a struggle for their very existence, and national self-defense and national struggle may turn out to be inevitable, and, according to circumstances, not only passive, but also active. Such cases are full of temptations, but the guiding principle here must remain the primacy of spirit and creativity, and not naked expansion. Conscience, which “is most needed in the world,” must testify to the permissibility and impermissibility of this or that manifestation of national feeling, and grief when it becomes darkened and passions overcome. So, the nation is a given and given. The paradox of national self-awareness is that for the latter, one’s own nation practically has the only and exclusive meaning, like one’s own self for a person, despite the fact that all humanity consists of self. But a person cannot speak about himself in the third person, because for himself he is a subject, not an object, and objectivity in love is a kind of hot ice, a contradictio in adjecto. However, this uniqueness is an illusion of transcendental consciousness. Since I, in its very clarity, presupposes certain co-nations or extra-self - you, he, we, you, they - to that extent, the nation, in its concrete peculiarity, presupposes other co-nations and is limited to them in relation to its egocentrism. And just as other people for the closed self open the gates of love, in the image of trinitarian Love, so these co-national selves open the doors to the solidarity of peoples, and only this openness constitutes the condition for a healthy national self-consciousness, not poisoned by the exclusivity of egocentrism and eliminating in advance the idea of ​​chosenness and uniqueness. Here we are faced with the problem of the chosen people, which is always claimed by an out-of-balance national feeling, and the paradox of this feeling leads to the fact that deliberately anti-Semitic nationalism parodies precisely the outlived Jewish self-awareness of chosenness. Old Testament Israel was the chosen people, with whom God himself, in the person of Abraham, entered into a covenant and honored him to be the true bearer of worship. What did this chosenness of God refer to and what was its significance? Of course, it could refer precisely to what in Israel had the character of a pan-human universality, and not a particular ethnic peculiarity. In the latter sense, Israel, and according to the Bible, seems to be only the offspring of an entire national group (Shem, Ham, Japheth) and, in turn, gives birth to offspring (Ishmael), and itself is, of course, only one of many - a small people that does not have its own special culture and political significance, moreover, “stiff-necked”, with an “uncircumcised heart”, in terms of natural properties less attractive to us than, for example, the Hellenes and their cultural ancestors Egyptians, etc. Chosenness has the meaning of overcoming national particularism, which was carried out in Adam before the Fall: integral, supranational or non-national all-man, Israel was called to serve the incarnation of God, the appearance of the New Adam, in which “all the tribes of the earth will be blessed” and “there will be no Hellenes and Jews.” Israel was called to become clay in the hands of the potter, and for the preparation of this clay, for the isolation and education of the “holy remnant” of the Old Testament Church, all grace-filled means were given so that the lily of paradise would bloom on the tree of Israel, and the Virgin Mary would appear in the world, who became the Mother of the Lord, and in the person of John the Apostle - of the entire human race. Of course, there is a mysterious and incomprehensible connection between the Jewish people and their generation - the New Adam, as between clay and a vessel, but clay is not a vessel, and it is not the actual belonging to the tribe that in itself gives this chosenness, as the apostle directly says. Paul: “Not all those Israelites who are from Israel, and not all those children of Abraham who are from the seed (his)... That is, not the children of the flesh are the children of God, but the children of the promise are recognized as the seed” (Rom. 9:7-8). And it must be said directly: the chosenness of the chosen people ended with the achievement of the goal of the incarnation, and after it there is and cannot be a chosen people, no matter who lays claim to it, for all are chosen and called (as the apostle Paul says about Israel itself: “the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable,” Rom. 2:29). Therefore, the idea of ​​the chosen people has only a Christological meaning, in connection with the Incarnation, and after the Incarnation took place, all humanity became the humanity of Christ. Therefore, Israel has lost its chosenness, and in general it is a blasphemous claim on the part of any people to consider only themselves as the chosen people, that is, the people of Christ. All nations are Christ's, but His word can be addressed to everyone in the Apocalypse to the Church of Ephesus: “I will soon come to you and remove your lamp from its place, unless you repent” (Rev. 2:5). The image of Christ himself gives us the ideal of a normal relationship between national and universal consciousness. The Lord perceived true humanity, which includes a specific national identity. He was the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1). He considered himself sent first of all to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, the children of God, in comparison with which the pagans were “dogs,” and did not deny when the Samaritan woman called Him a Jew (“the Jew”) (John 4:9). He wept for the holy city and His people, whom He wanted to gather around Him, as a kokosh gathers its chicks under its wings, and about its fate: “now your house is left desolate,” which He talks about so much in parables. And yet, with all the naturalness and responsibility of his national ministry, the Lord not only does not disparage either the Syrophoenician, the Samaritan woman, the Greeks, or the Romans, but to fulfill his ministry he sends the apostles to all languages, towards the Pentecost of nations. And, what is even more important, in the bright face of the Son of Abraham there are no traces of national limitations with which people usually associate their individuality, but, on the contrary, in the national face the universal, all-human shines. All national faces recognize and find their own face in the face of Christ; this is one of the silent miracles of the Gospel, with the miraculous image of Christ contained in it. And in this image, which imprints every human face, all national faces find unity: Hellenic and Jew, barbarian and Scythian, both male and female. In Christ all questions, in particular national ones, receive an answer. Nationality is in us a passion, a burden, a destiny, a duty,” a gift, a calling, and life. Loyalty must be shown to her, love must be preserved for her, but she needs education, enlightenment, transformation. The cosmopolitan homunculus of the Voltairean and communist model does not exist in life, except as a dialectical moment in the paths of history. The Church is made up of national churches, just as humanity is made up of nations. And for us, Russians, Orthodox culture stands as our Russian creative contribution to the universal cause. Only the national is also universal, and only in the universal does the national exist. The Spirit is one and simple, but the flesh, with its psyche, is many-part and diverse, “the manifold Wisdom of God” (Eph. 3:10).