Intelligentsia and religion

On the inconsistency of the modern irreligious worldview (Speech at a meeting of students and female students organized by the St. Petersburg Christian student circle in Solyanoy Gorodok on January 27, 1908 1 Invited by the St. Petersburg group of the International Student Christian Association to speak at its solemn annual meeting in order to share with the audience my thoughts and feelings about modern times, I hesitated for a long time before accepting this invitation. All the difficulties, both external and internal, were all too clear to me in a quick and casual reading to touch on the great and painful questions of the life of the modern soul, and if, after struggling with myself, I overcame this confusion and this hesitation, it was because I considered it my special duty to respond to this call, as coming directly from among the students, for the spiritual impact on our students and ideological contact with them was and remains for me a constant concern and a bright dream: more I don’t know of any fruitful, albeit more difficult, work now. And if my speech is random in its context, then it is not so in its content, for in it will find expression slowly and difficultly formed convictions, what I consider to be the truth as a result of feasible scientific work, philosophical reflection and life experience, “a mind of cold observations and a heart of sorrowful observations.” Some of you, perhaps, are not unaware of the spiritual turning point I experienced from my scientific and literary works, as a result of which from an atheistic worldview, based on well-known scientific and philosophical premises, testing them with my mind and heart, science and life, retreating step by step, I returned consciously to the faith of my childhood days, faith in the crucified God and His Gospel, as the complete, highest and deepest truth about man and his life. The method of assimilating the Gospel teaching and the path to it historically and individually can be extremely different: the sons of our century have to overcome especially many obstacles, mental and moral, in order to assimilate for themselves what is revealed to a childish or simple, but pure heart as a gift and, perhaps, more fully and purer than to us. Christianity is not the religion of only scientists or philosophers, or only of women, children and the ignorant mob, as the half-educated crowd of our time thinks, its pan-humanity and universality of the whole people is revealed most of all in the fact that it is accessible, to the extent of faith, personal achievement and heartfelt aspiration, equally to the deepest philosopher and child, Augustine and the shepherd, Kant or Gladstone and the Russian peasant. Under the crust of the outer man, external activity and vanity, everyone keeps a piece of their childhood, the original divine purity, about which Chekhov’s heroine cries in his last play (“Oh, my childhood, oh, my purity!”). And this feeling is deeper and therefore more powerful than all empirical and historical differences, for it is created from the mystical roots of the soul. As an experience, it is given in the religious experience of everyone who is not alien to it, and he does not need to be told about it. But at the same time, thanks to the lack of religious life, for our intelligentsia this seems so alien, incomprehensible, abstract. Perhaps the powerful word and confession of a poet, moreover a typical poet-intellectual, with a sick soul, corroded by life’s contradictions, of our dear Nekrasov, whose 30-year funeral we celebrated the other day, will be clearer here. Not everyone, perhaps, remembers these wonderful lines. The poet describes his return to his homeland and his native impressions. I will find out, he writes: The severity of rivers, always ready Withstand the war with a thunderstorm, And the smooth sound of pine forests, The Church of God on the mountain flashed And a childishly pure sense of faith There is no denial, no doubt. Enter with an open head! It’s not for her to fix our grief, Unlock Russian sadness! Church of sighing, church of sorrow - Neither the Roman Peter, nor the Colosseum! Here are the people you love, Come in! Christ will lay on hands From the soul there are shackles, from the heart there is torment And ulcers from a sick conscience”... I listened... I was touched like a child... To forgive, to intercede, God of the oppressed, God of the mourners, God of the generations to come Before this meager altar! This is the fusion of the intelligentsia with the people, which cannot be more complete and deeper. But how many of the intellectuals, readers and admirers of Nekrasov bowed before “this meager altar,” uniting with the people in their faith and their prayer? No, not many. I'll tell you straight: only a few. The masses, almost all of our intelligentsia, turned away from the common people’s “peasant” faith, and a spiritual alienation was created between them and the people. On this occasion, I remember one random picture from the life of the second State Duma. On one of the spring sunny days, when during the Duma meeting deputies and journalists were walking in the Tauride Garden, my attention was attracted by the assembled group of smart St. Petersburg public from deputies and newspaper employees, listening to something and from time to time rolling with laughter: in the middle of the crowd was a Volyn peasant who had wandered there, an old man, with a wonderful and mournful face, with a characteristic head with which one could sculpt a statue of the apostle or paint an icon. After listening, I realized that the old man was talking about some vision he had, in which God sent him to announce His will to the people’s representatives. His speech was chaotic, but every time he returned to his mission and spoke about God, his words were covered with friendly laughter, and he meekly and patiently, grieving for the laughing gentlemen, began his story again. It was inexpressibly sad and painful for me to watch this scene, in which the spiritual tragedy of the new Russia was so clearly reflected, and I walked away with bitterness and only from a distance saw the noble head of the old man for a long time, trying to explain something and convince the laughing crowd of curious people. However, perhaps I am not reproducing this scene quite accurately, but that is how I perceived it then. “Aren’t we building the Tower of Babel,” a Catholic priest-deputy who was also here quietly told me. I am not deceiving myself now, and I also feel partly in the position of the old man in the Duma. Anyone who today, before the Russian intelligentsia, risks speaking not about current, mainly political affairs, but about the general goals of life and its religious meaning, and who, like me, sees it only in the Christian religion, must in advance have against himself an impersonal, but powerful and extremely real opponent in the spirit of the time. An atmosphere of irreligion generally characterizes modern times, especially the end of the 18th and 19th centuries. The distinctive features of our era in this regard are conveyed with inimitable strength and conciseness by our poet-philosopher Tyutchev in the poem “Our Century”. It is not the flesh, but the spirit that is corrupted in our days, And the person is desperately sad. He is rushing towards the light from the shadows of the night And, having found the light, he grumbles and rebels. We burn with unbelief and are dried up Today he endures the unbearable... And he realizes his death, And he longs for faith... but doesn’t ask for it. A century will not say with prayer and tears No matter how he grieves in front of a closed door: “Let me in! I believe, my God! Come to the aid of my unbelief!” Of course, with a general description of the era, one cannot help but make distinctions between different countries of European culture; one cannot help but note, for example, the religiosity of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has survived to this day, and it was transferred by the Anglo-Saxons overseas, both to New Zealand and to the United States. Even in very recent times England experienced a strong religious movement, known as the Welsh Revival, among the Welsh miners, who constituted one of the strongest labor organizations. Newspapers brought news of the singing of hymns and services underground with extraordinary religious excitement among the population, so that one involuntarily recalls the painfully passionate words of Mitenka Karamazov about the hymn from underground. “And then we, the underground people, will sing from the bowels of the earth a tragic hymn to God, Who has joy! Long live God and His joy!” The most remarkable thing about this Anglo-Saxon religiosity is that it is not only popular, which is predominantly our Russian piety, and is not considered by the English intelligentsia as “religious prejudices.” Prof. Schulze-Gevernitz says in his newest work 2 that “religion is still the nerve of Anglo-Saxon culture.” “External facts,” continues the German economist, “confirm this to the continental tourist at every step. To this day, Sunday still puts its stamp on the whole country. Along with the clergy, secular preachers speak everywhere: doctors, lawyers, workers’ leaders, not only in closed chapels, but also mainly in the open air, for example, in the parks of large cities, in which carriages or pedestals are used as pulpits. Here a missionary carriage travels across the country, covered with sayings from the Bible and giving shelter to itinerant preachers, there sisters of mercy penetrate wine shops and dens of criminals, being the bearers of “aggressive Christianity”. The pavements are swarming with Salvation Army soldiers, etc. etc. The leading minds of the nation, its spiritual leaders, share to a greater or lesser extent this national religiosity. Famous English statesmen Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) and Gladstone were devout Christians and daily readers of the Bible. Gladstone, who wrote the book “The Immutable Rock of Holy Scripture”, is known to have loved to preach at Hawarden, and generally expressed the following conviction (in letters to his wife): “I am convinced that the welfare of mankind does not now depend on politics, the real struggle is in the field of thought in which there is a murderous attack against the greatest treasure of mankind, faith in God and the Gospel of Christ.” And the recent Prime Minister of England, Arthur Balfour, also wrote a book in defense of Christian teaching entitled “The Fundamentals of Faith.” I need only recall further the names of Ruskin and Carlyle, from whom nothing can be understood without taking into account their exceptional religiosity, the so-called Christian socialists: Kingsley, Ludlow, Maurice, etc., right down to the present Bishop of London Ingram, etc. etc. Of course, it cannot be said that England remained alien to the destructive movement that appeared in modern times. In the forge of English thought and science, perhaps the worst and most powerful arguments against religion were forged. Hobb and Hume, Bentham and, in their own way, Darwin and Bacon, together with other thinkers, exerted their influence, but perhaps more on the continent than at home. Nevertheless, in England, the spirit of the times that I spoke about is beginning to be felt more and more strongly, but it manifested itself even more strongly on the European continent, especially in some countries and in certain eras, for example, in France during the great French Revolution, and to a large extent even now in the Protestant part of Germany, etc. But it can still be said that in no other country in Europe does the intelligentsia know such widespread mass indifference to religion as ours. In the history of Russian thought, two currents have long emerged and are still fighting: one has a few representatives on its side (of course, among the intelligentsia), but among this number is the color of our national mind and genius, the subject of our national glory and pride. These are those who remained spiritually with the people in their peasant church, and in any case did not separate from them in their beliefs in the living God. Among these few we consider: Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Tyutchev, in a certain sense Lermontov, Gogol, Khomyakov, Kireevsky, Chaadaev, Aksakov, V. Solovyov, Dostoevsky, Pirogov, A. Tolstoy and Leo Tolstoy, as far as he generally stands on religious grounds. The anti-religious ideological movement, which counts among its ranks the majority of progressive publicists and public figures from Belinsky to the present day, has adopted a rationalistic-atheistic worldview, which has spread in a wide wave and constitutes the dominant faith of the Russian intelligentsia. I didn’t say anything: this disbelief is really faith, faith in science, in rationalism, in disbelief. The mass of our intelligentsia with extraordinary ease in the earliest period of development of the mind, in adolescence or youth, accepts the dogma of atheism, assimilating to it the predicate of scientificity. It has been noted more than once that prejudice is further removed from the truth than complete ignorance. Regarding religion, we have a hereditary prejudice that there is not even a question here, because science and philosophy exclude religion. Such an opinion can only be explained by complete unfamiliarity with the scientific and philosophical work that has been boiling and boiling to this day on issues of the history and philosophy of religion, its dogma, cult with endless and essentially, of course, endless disputes about these issues. I repeat, our Russian disbelief usually remains at the level of blind, naive faith. This feature of Russian spiritual development, which has its own historical and everyday reasons, was pointed out with his usual insight by Dostoevsky, who made Russian and world atheism as if his specialty. Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of Prince Myshkin (in “The Idiot”), his alter ego, the following characteristic of him: “it’s so easy for a Russian person to become an atheist, easier than for everyone else in the whole world. And our people not only become atheists, but will certainly believe in atheism, as if in a new faith, without noticing in any way that they have believed in zero,” and, Dostoevsky adds, this “does not all come from bad, vain feelings alone, but from spiritual pain, from spiritual thirst, from longing for a higher cause, for a strong shore.” Many times, thinking about the dual and hitherto unsolved and undefined appearance of the Russian intelligentsia, I turned my thoughts to this thesis about its religious melancholy, about the thirst for a strong shore, a righteous life, a new heaven and a new earth. And if it was sometimes impossible not to doubt the correctness of this characteristic, then it is impossible to refuse it. And in the second State Duma, in the heated atmosphere of political passions, listening and looking closely around me and trying to unravel the true nature of the Russian intelligentsia, sometimes I clearly saw how, in essence, far from politics in the proper sense, i.e. the everyday prosaic work of repairing and lubricating the state mechanism, these people defend. This is not the psychology of politicians, calculating realists and gradualists, this is the impatient exaltation of people waiting for the implementation of the Kingdom of God on earth, the New Jerusalem, almost tomorrow. One involuntarily recalls the Anabaptists and many other communist sectarians of the Middle Ages, apocalyptics and chiliasts, who waited for the imminent onset of the thousand-year kingdom of Christ and cleared the way for it with the sword, popular uprising, communist experiments, peasant wars; I remember John of Leiden with his retinue of prophets and the rest of those besieged in Munster... Of course, this similarity concerns only psychology, not ideas. In the ideological sphere, whether it is good or bad, happiness or misfortune for us, but Russia reflects the ideas and moods of the century more decisively and straightforwardly than even the West, reflects in itself that world spiritual drama of fighting against God and apostasy, which constitutes the nerve of new history, before which all the great political and social interests, raising waves and ripples on the chest of the historical sea, pale and recede into the background. What is the struggle here and why is this drama? The spiritual struggle, which constitutes the main theme and main content of modern history, starting from the Renaissance and especially clearly from the 18th century, is determined by the efforts of cultural humanity to “settle without God forever and finally,” as Dostoevsky put it, or “to kill God,” as one of the most furious God-killers Nietzsche put it even more boldly, to reduce life exclusively to the immanent without any connection with the transcendent, in the language of philosophy, to deprive the earth of heaven, not the Copernican, cold, astronomical sky, but the Mosaic, biblical or at least Kantian sky, the throne of God. In thoughts, in feelings, in intimate life, in its external structure, in science, in philosophy, this struggle is going on, so clearly indicated in the Gospel and the Apocalypse, and the greatest efforts are being used, have been used and will be used both to undermine and to justify the rights of religious faith. In this sense, our historical era has no equal in history, for there have always been individual anti-religious movements and phenomena of religious decline, but there has not been such a conscious and convinced, such a fanatical and irreconcilable desire to bring man to earth and devastate heaven. If it were necessary to express the spiritual essence of our era in an artistic image, in a picture or a tragic mystery, then this picture or mystery should be called: “The Funeral of God,” or human suicide. And in these images it would be necessary to show with all force and clarity what humanity is encroaching on, and what it is doing to itself, what each of us is losing, what we are turning into. No matter how the figures are placed on this fantastic canvas, one thing is certain, that its general content is not an idyll or a pastoral, in which in the end all obstacles are overcome, and the matter ends with a cheerful wedding of the groom-humanity with the bride-state or the society of the future, but a serious, painful tragedy. Why is this such a tragedy, why does this funeral of God inevitably turn into the funeral of the funeral workers themselves? Yes, because, burying God in their consciousness, they are forced to bury the divine in their soul, and the divine is the actual, real nature of the human soul. You can think about yourself any way you like, consider yourself an ape, a reflex of economic relations, an automatic machine, a piece of matter endowed with consciousness by mechanical necessity - all this is and has been said about man - but from these opinions he does not cease to be what he is, what the “hands that created and created him” made him and endowed him with the demands and properties of a higher spiritual nature. You can convince a hungry person that he is full, and even overwhelm him so much with the logic of arguments that he considers himself obliged to try to believe it, but he will suffer from hunger and experience anxiety; You can assure yourself and others that the wild horns on which the prodigal son fed in a foreign land are no worse, but better, than the calf prepared for him by his father, but this will not calm, will not give peace to the soul, will not reconcile it either with itself or with life. For “tu nos fecisti ad te, cor nostrum inguietum est, donee reguiescat in te”, 3 as blessed Augustine exclaims in his “Confession”. Man is born for eternity and hears the voice of eternity in himself, he hears it with the subtle ear of his greatest thinkers, scientists and poets, his pure-hearted righteous, the creative genius of his artists. To live in time for eternity, to experience in the relative absolute and to strive beyond any given, beyond any given content of consciousness, excelsior, always excelsior, a person is called to this, and this striving excelsior itself speaks of the One who lives in excelsis, is a living revelation of God in us. For himself, man cannot become absolute, self-sufficient, because he will never be satisfied with himself, with his given state, unless he descends into base animality and actually becomes like an unreflective creature. But at the same time, man is aware of this power and this will to contain absolute content, to grow and expand, becoming a living image of the absolute, the image and likeness of God. This unquenchable thirst for the highest content of life gave birth and gives birth to religious faith. “Much on earth is hidden from us (says Zosima in Dostoevsky), but in return we have been given a secret, intimate feeling of our living connection with another world, with the heavenly and higher world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them here on earth and grew his garden, but what was grown is alive and lives only by the feelings of its contact with the mysterious other worlds; if this feeling weakens or is destroyed in you, then the one nurtured in you dies. Then you will become indifferent to life, you will hate it.” So Byron's Lucifer, having enriched Cain with a lot of unnecessary and dead knowledge, but turning him away from his former faith with subtle slander, only leads him to the realization that he is nothing. And he confirms: All human knowledge is the limit All the wisdom available to you: That you are nothing with your mortal nature. You bequeath this science to your children. His sister, his wife Ada, tells him when she hears Lucifer’s judgment from him: “Jehovah does not tell us that.” Our era is characterized by an extremely high assessment of its mental conquests; many of our contemporaries imagine that the real life of humanity is only beginning now, and that all previous history is a prologue or darkness of savagery and barbarism. This peculiar historical cannibalism, as Herzen once put it, has no basis at all in our eyes. About our time, one cannot help but repeat the dialogue between Lucifer and Cain, when the latter asks Lucifer: “Are you happy?” - No, we are powerful. - Are you happy? - No. And our age is more powerful than happy. Presenting unprecedented wealth in the benefits of external, mainly material, but also spiritual culture, in the most essential - in spiritual strength, freshness and faith, not richer, but poorer than the previous ones, and this poverty stands out in relief precisely against the background of this deafening progress. Having abolished the religion of God, humanity is trying to invent a new religion, and is looking for deities for it in itself and around itself, inside and outside; tried in turn: the religion of reason (the cult of reason during the great French Revolution), the religion of humanity of Comte and Feuerbach, the religion of socialism, the religion of pure humanity, the religion of the superman in modern times with the prospect of the religion of the superman, etc. In the soul of humanity, losing God, a terrible emptiness must certainly form, for it can accept this or that doctrine, but cannot drown out the voice of eternity, the thirst for the absolute content of life. And, having extinguished the sun, it strives to retain light and warmth, makes convulsive efforts to save and retain the divine and fill the void with new gods, but the shaky soil collapses under its feet, and the spiritual atmosphere becomes more and more tense and heavier. This struggle of humanity for its spiritual existence and the painful efforts to look for solid ground here and there are extremely touching. In the Acts of the Apostles there is a memorable story about the preaching of St. Paul in Athens, this Paris of the ancient world, the center of sciences and arts, philosophers, scientists and artists. This city was full of idols, like our culture, so that the great apostle was “troubled in spirit” at the sight of them; however, he saw among these altars an altar with the inscription “to the unknown God,” which served as the external theme of his sermon. One should look, following the example of the apostle, for such an altar in modern Athens, and, of course, one can find it here too and, under the cover of negative words and destructive ideas, one can discern a smoldering spark of faith and a pious altar. If you ask yourself how modern man lives, what he believes in instead of God, well, although if you ask the average Russian student or an adult high school student from the “conscious”, then, of course, he will immediately answer: I want to benefit humanity, then, after thinking, he will add: develop a scientific worldview for yourself. Faith in progress, in science, in the possibility of resolving all vital contradictions in the historical development of science and humanity constitutes a simple catechism for modern man. This is the general, and then the particulars begin, the differences, usually expressed by the letters of the Latin alphabet in well-known paired combinations. It is based on the dogma of faith in reason and the omnipotence of science. However, is this belief in reason compatible with the general doctrine of man as a two-legged animal, which, due to chance, the play of material atoms and the struggle for existence, has reached its present state, and has the potential to achieve even greater things in the future? Where does this “plucked rooster,” as the philosophical nihilist-cynic Diogenes defined man, get reason and science, and what is such faith in them based on? What is the truth that science wants to know? This Pilatean question, addressed to the One who said about Himself: “I am the way, the truth and the life,” to the Divine Logos himself, sounds throughout the entire history of mankind and does not find an answer other than in connection with religious faith. How is science and knowledge of the laws of the world possible? This is the question posed to humanity by critical philosophy in the person of Kant. How and why can a lump of matter, although organized in a certain way, cognize the universe, reproducing it ideally within itself? What is this mysterious power of perfect reproduction? Sometimes these questions are dismissed with reference to the achievements of science: doesn’t modern technology testify to the power of the mind and knowledge! But to answer in this way means to confirm the unknown with the unknown, only to push back the problem, and in this case, doesn’t this very fact already require an explanation? The organ of cognition - the brain with the nervous system and the function of cognition - are so incommensurable and inconsistent with each other that to talk about the knowledge of the world and its laws by the brain and nerves means falling not only into mystical, but downright mythological nonsense, or asserting a thunderous miracle, which representatives of modern science do not allow at all. One of two things: either man really is such a nonentity, a lump of dirt, as materialist philosophy portrays him, but then these claims to reason and science are incomprehensible; or man is a god-like being, the son of eternity, the bearer of the divine spirit, and the possibility of any knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is explained precisely by this human nature. In other words, this means that the dignity of science and its rights are not limited, but only affirmed by the religious teaching about man, and with the elimination of the latter, the former is also undermined. Science is fundamentally based on religion, and does not contradict it, as is strangely the case in modern ideas. Considering the mind and the spider as a product and instrument of the struggle for existence, in the light of a uniquely understood Darwinism, we must finally debunk them. If the power and significance of scientific truth lies only in usefulness, as Darwinists say in biology, and in modern times in epistemology, then where did they get the idea that truth is always useful and that sometimes, and perhaps always, delusion is not more useful? This doubt, expressed by Nietzsche and repeated in some works on the theory of knowledge, cannot be weakened by anything. “There is nothing more unhealthy than thinking,” O burst out. Wilde; Following the Greek sophists, he, along with other modernists, considers it possible to “prove everything”, not considering anything to be true, laughing at the ponderous pious attitude towards the spider. A knife, sharpened by it, is being put to science’s throat, a crisis of scientific and philosophical consciousness is approaching, similar to the crisis experienced by the ancient world, and won’t science still have to seek support from the religion it is now persecuting? The looming crisis of science, Sophistic-Pilatean skepticism, will perhaps more clearly establish the real relationship between religion and science, which was always recognized by great scientists and thinkers, but was not understood by semi-science. Science itself is based on faith in reason, in the unity of the rational principle in microcosm and macrocosm, on religious and pious recognition of the value of truth and love for it. In modern times, voices are often heard about the crisis and even the bankruptcy of science, and sometimes these statements are presented in defense of faith. For both a scientific worker and a religious philosopher, I consider these complaints to be unmotivated and see in them a kind of misunderstanding. Science is alive and well, and, of course, will be alive and well. Our greetings to her: Vivat, crescat, floreat! By the crisis of science we usually mean the loss of a competence that does not belong to it at all, of those universalistic claims that are attributed to it only by those who wanted to replace religious faith with science. The tasks and significance of science are completely relative and limited: it deals with a certain (logically or philosophically) range of problems of experimental (in the Kantian sense) knowledge, and it is capable of endless progress by its very idea; the horizon constantly recedes before her, new knowledge expands the area of ignorance wider, but the island of knowledge is still surrounded by a sea of mystery and eternity, in the words of the poet: As the ocean envelops the globe, Earthly life is surrounded by dreams, Night will come, and with sonorous waves The element hits its shore. That is her voice: he forces us and asks. Already in the pier the magical boat came to life. The tide is rising and sweeping us away quickly Into the immeasurability of dark waves. The vault of heaven, burning with the glory of the stars, Looks mysteriously from the depths, And we float, a burning abyss A strict spider feels like such a canoe, surrounded by a “burning abyss”, rushing through the elements of mystery, and this feeling feeds the religious faith of great scientists. Before the final questions of life and death, good and evil, the purpose of the world, critical science, self-understanding science, stands unanswered now, as it will always stand. Another fact that deserves attention is that science, as a concrete whole, exists only in the form of a set of sciences, continuously growing scientific specialties. It is a machine made up of a great many wheels or parts. The whole knowledge, the world mind or the book of nature is revealed to humanity only in its history, and specifically each individual, no matter how great his mental power, reads only pages or lines in this book. Therefore, the assumption that science really resolves all questions can be based practically only on the total faith in the power of science in general, in the scientific method, in the scientific mind, but this faith does not allow for experimental verification: if you live not one, but 10 or 100 human lives, devoting all your time only to the passive assimilation of what the science has accumulated, and then you will not assimilate everything. Consequently, it is impossible to talk or think about building a holistic scientific worldview from which faith would be completely excluded. So, science is not able to replace or abolish religious faith, nor can it even defend its own existence against the attacks of reckless skepticism without tacit or open recognition of religious premises, namely faith in objective reason. With what has been said, I wanted to define only the most fundamental and most essential relations between science and religion, as relations of solidarity and subordination. In particular, individual teachings of science relating to issues, one or another solution of which is not indifferent to religion, of course, may enter into a temporary conflict with one or another religious teaching. The development of science provides an infinite number of such examples, although it also provides many examples of clarification or elimination of these conflicts with the further development of science... Working to clarify these issues is already the work of religious thought, which therefore does not at all represent a dogmatic and restful pillow under the head, but must be in constant tension, and, obviously, no matter how non-stop the development of science, apological thought must work just as tirelessly, protecting the treasury of faith. This is the general relationship between science and religion. But if even science with its heavy artillery remains defenseless against the poisonous sting of skepticism, then the more defenseless are modern surrogates of religion, in which the role of deity is assigned to humanity, and whose main dogma is the doctrine of progress. I personally have already had to talk and write a lot on this topic, 4 and therefore I will be brief. Here we find ourselves in a whole labyrinth of contradictions and difficulties. It is easier to reveal them if we compare them with the main features of the Christian teaching about man. According to the Christian faith, a person has the moral freedom to will good and evil, and moral life consists of inclining the will from evil to good. Through this struggle and its feat, asceticism, the revival of the individual is accomplished with help from above. Man faces the absolute ideal of self-improvement: “be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” and “God is love.” The Christian feat is therefore a feat of love and continuous self-sacrifice. A person can neither think nor feel himself in rupture or isolation with his neighbor: humanity, saved in Christ and by Christ, is for him a living unity, of whose body he is a member. That is why love for God and love for neighbor are in such an inextricable connection with each other in Christianity. This task does not exceed what is available to a regenerated man, for he bears the image of God, the seal of divine love. “I am the ineffable image of Your glory, even if I bear the burden of sins,” as it is sung in majestic funeral hymns in the face of an open coffin and a corpse decomposing in it: death can only temporarily distort this image, but cannot destroy it forever. I have already noted in print 5 how close, albeit timidly, the basic scientific idea of ​​our age of evolution and progress approaches the Christian faith in the general resurrection, but now I will not dwell on this. I will only point out that as a solution to the world drama, Christianity promises the actual preservation of all values ​​and the restoration of humanity for a new, eternal life. Man, therefore, here is not a self-proclaimed man-god, but a truly deified creature, God by grace. Is it possible to exalt a person more? It is not for nothing that censing has been introduced into the rite of Orthodox worship not only for icons, but also for those praying, who are equated with icons. And indeed, if a person is honored by the image of God, no matter how he distorts it in himself, is he not a living icon, a living image? The modern worldview has rejected the entire religious basis of this teaching, eradicated divine faith everywhere, but retained those aspects of it that directly relate to man: it retained love for one’s neighbor, calling it altruism, faith in the divinity of man, making him a man-god, faith in the salvation of humanity, insisting on the doctrine of progress. It would seem that only religious superstitions have been removed, but everything that is essential, at least for modern times, remains; Feuerbach, who had enormous, decisive significance (together with Kant) on the worldview of wide circles of European society in the 19th century, carried out this operation especially zealously, carefully and consistently. But doesn’t the building collapse without a foundation, doesn’t the soil creep from under the yogas of modern humanity, doesn’t this humanity slip out of our hands like a pale ghost, like the spirit of the earth that appeared to Faust, when we want to embrace it? There are many signs that this is so, and many reasons why it cannot be otherwise. A person is inspired that he is the highest in the world, that he is autonomous, that he is beautiful, that he is reasonable, self-sufficient, that he is God, if not in his individuality and isolation, then in his wholeness, together with others. But life is characteristic of God, and this god is a decaying corpse, his days and years are a gradual dying, approaching the grave, in which, as we know, “and the skull of a genius is the legacy of worms.” When Plato buried his Socrates, the divine husband who was for him the light of life, what a cemetery this world became for him, and does it not become such a cemetery for each of us sooner or later. Now, when so many lives are given up for the sake of correctly or incorrectly understood ideas, doesn’t this contradiction become especially burning and painful! You can, after all, suppress these feelings within yourself with the power of a tempered will or with the habit of discipline to stay in line when your loved ones and loved ones are falling all around you, but overcoming the pain by exerting your will, clenching your jaws, does not mean defeating it. Death brings such dissonance into the world that even the deaf cannot help but hear; hence the constant struggle with the fear of death, either by Metchnikoff’s inoculation, or by weak consolations à la Feuerbach, and therefore the preaching of Christian faith and joy is, first of all, the good news of the resurrection and eternal life. So, God is mortal individually, and mortal as a whole, generation after generation slowly drags themselves to the grave, abandoning all business and all worries. And they want to assure us that serving these causes and these concerns for its own sake can not only fill, but also make life meaningful. This religion of humanity is a kind of cemetery philosophy; it is not surprising that it increasingly loses credit, giving way to the cult of the proud, isolated self, which in turn splits into separate experiences, and, in the end, to the cult of these experiences! Why should I look for some kind of idol outside of myself in another, in someone the same as me, or worse than me, in general in the crowd, in many (Viel zu Viele), when I am self-sufficient and can worship myself, when I am “the only one” (der Einzige)? Why a shrine, why good and evil, when you can become higher - or rather, beyond this development. Let's leave morality to priests and philistines, stop being caps, and become free individuals. The independent lives in the freedom of absolute emptiness, the imperative self-will of the moment. Why is consistency necessary, why even the internal unity of personality, the logic of moods, when there are only separate, disconnected experiences! Know how to pave your way, know how to get settled, and woe to those who are perishing! This decadence of the individual, the consumption of the modern era, is best reflected in fiction and popular philosophical literature. Nihilistic individualism, to which our culture, like the ancient one, leads, constitutes the most serious phenomenon of the spiritual life of our time. In the fight against individualism, social activists are straining all their efforts in order to somehow unite the crumbling, atomizing humanity under the rule of a united majority, and to curb anarchic individualism with socialist drill. But what tools are available for this unity that will defeat the corrupting poison of individualism? From the time the religious sanction of morality, God's commandment as a moral norm, was rejected, the question of good and evil, morality and duty as its basis arose before consciousness. Since philosophy, in the person of Kant and his school, has made and is making desperate efforts to save the morality of duty, over which German idealism is currently sharpening its logic, it comes to religion as a necessary prerequisite for morality. In Kant's system, practical reason leads to the postulates of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul as a religious support. On the contrary, in those worldviews that are devoid of any religious overtones, the problem of morality takes on a completely hopeless character: morality comes to self-abolition, rejecting the idea of ​​duty and replacing it with the idea of ​​interest, personal or group, with the instinct of bestial self-preservation. Just as in medicine the development of literature about a well-known disease is the best evidence of its prevalence and seriousness, so the crisis of morality in modern times, as in the era of ancient decadence, causes an extraordinary development of moral philosophy and corresponding literature: everyone invents his own morality, proving it in his own way. This crisis is most acutely expressed in Nietzsche’s amoralism, which was predicted by Dostoevsky in his brief but impeccable formula: “if there is no immortality, then everything is permitted.” In an acute and radical, irreconcilable form, personal self-will, the complete sovereignty of each self, extreme individualism were defended by Stirner in the 40s, later Bakunin also approached him, Stirner shattered the altruistic idyll of Feuerbach, who, while destroying Christianity, retained love for one’s neighbor, that desire to “be useful,” which, as I already mentioned, every good student has. Stirner pointed out that Feuerbach (like Comte) borrowed this from the very Christianity that he was destroying, called it a “pious priest” and in general completely undeniably showed all the inconsistency of Feuerbach, as well as his present and future supporters. 6 But next to the morality of love and sympathy, which was unlucky, the doctrine of interest appeared very early, i.e. about personal self-interest as the basis of behavior, and it was proven that it requires the well-being of others and does not hesitate to make sacrifices for it, even to the point of sacrificing life. The founder of utilitarian morality, as we know, was Bentham, and Bentham’s ideas, in their suspended form, still have great force in Marxism (although Marx scolds Bentham). A lot can be connected verbally, and as long as humanity understands serving one’s neighbor by personal interest, it means that it has not yet squandered its entire Christian inheritance; however, one can doubt that future generations, fed on the milk of personal interest, will be able to transform it into the hot blood of sympathy for their neighbor. J. St. Mill, one of the most sincere exponents of utilitarianism, is known to relate in his autobiography how one fine morning he asked himself whether it would really matter to him if all human happiness were realized in the quantities required by the doctrine, and he had the honesty and courage to answer this question in the negative, and then he began to have the mental crisis he describes, which almost led him to suicide. If the humanistic altruism of Comte and Feuerbach tries to save humanity as a whole, as a unity, still retaining that concept of it that only Christianity gives, then utilitarianism of all kinds crushes this body into atoms, atomizes humanity. I and my interest, with which the interests of my neighbors, who represent only means for me, may not coincide or coincide, are the edge of the knife on which human morality is placed here. It is no better when this individual Benthamism is replaced by social or class Benthamism. Only partial substitutions are made into the general algebraic formula. It is established that in certain cases the interest of a significant number of persons placed in the same position turns out to be identical. Therefore, the pursuit of group or class interests, as long as this community of interests of persons in a given group exists, turns out to be the most rational, profitable and desirable. Humanity is being cut up and down into several layers, and the consciousness of universal human unity, the attitude towards man simply as an individual, and not as a representative of a class and party, is increasingly lost. Despite numerous external alliances and connections, people are becoming more and more strangers to each other. The coldness of mutual isolation reigns, that “loneliness” from which Maupassant uttered a passionate cry, and this cry resounds loudly in literature and life. For through interest one can separate, but one cannot unite, humanity; it is united only by common faith and common love, by the consciousness not of its differences, but of its essential kinship, its equality and brotherhood in God. Of course, everyday struggle and disagreement remain an inevitable companion of our lives, but the mood with which they are experienced is of great importance; the difference between whether brothers or natural enemies are fighting remains indestructible. Meanwhile, an atmosphere of severe misanthropy, in which all sorts of methods of struggle are permissible, has settled over our humane and humanistic era. But we are assured that this will not last long, that the golden age of not only freedom and equality, but also fraternity is approaching; What are these bright hopes based on: a spiritual revolution, a revival of personality, a new faith? No, they tell us, this will happen due to historical, primarily economic, necessity. Economics speaks about this, sociology predicts this. Let me, for my part, note that science, while remaining science and possessing its inherent caution and modesty, does not predict such things at all; faith, not science, speaks about this. Firstly, the very ability of social science to make predictions in general is disputed by many, including myself, not without reason, and it is precisely the latest logical research on the nature of social science (I’ll name Rickert) that leads precisely to this assessment; secondly, and this is the most important thing, if economic science can still provide something about the nature of the economic system in the coming era, then this still does not say anything about what the spiritual life of this era will be like, what the human personality will be? After all, to believe that economic reform is necessary and spiritual revival is possible only by first accepting such a teaching about man, according to which he “is only what he eats,” is a complete reflex of the economic situation, or is entirely a product of his class position. And even with the acceptance of all these unacceptable positions, the question still remains of what kind of changes in psychology, in feelings, in self-esteem will be caused by a change in the economic situation, and whether this change will be exactly like this and whether it will take place in the direction that is imagined now. It is permissible to think that the human personality, although it depends on food, the economic situation, and in general the conditions of its material life, is, first of all, what it believes in, what it lives by, what it wants, what it honors; Based on this understanding, it is more correct to conclude that in the new system a person may turn out to be just as devastated and morally decaying as he is now. Therefore, no matter how highly we place concern for the material needs of the disadvantaged classes, we must not forget about the spiritual needs of man. In modern humanity, not only here, but also in the West, there has been some kind of withdrawal from oneself into the outside, the abolition of the inner man, the predominance in the life of the individual of external impressions and external events, mainly political and social life. Hence the need for vanity and external impressions. Modern man strives to live like a man who is never at home, alone with himself: his consciousness is full, but it is enough to pause this kaleidoscope of external impressions, and one can see how poor or empty his life is in its own content. History has preserved for us an image of dazzling brightness and deep meaning, symbolizing our current spiritual timelessness, instructing and warning. One of the largest representatives of early humanism, who already carried within himself the contradictions of our current era of late humanism, Petrarch, tells in the description of one of his travels how he, having climbed a high mountain from which a wonderful view opened, opened for good luck the Confession of Augustine, which he always had with him, and read the following words in it: “and so people go and look in surprise at the high mountains and distant seas, at the stormy streams and the ocean and the heavenly luminaries, but at this time they forget about themselves.” Petrarch plunged into deep thought. Decadent eras, accompanied by a high level of cultural development, are generally distinguished by the dominance of the philosophy of Epicureanism, the enjoyment of life in its refined, aesthetically ennobled forms. This cult of pleasures was developed by ancient paganism in the era of its decline, and modern neo-paganism is entering the same rut. Do you want to know how modern people imagine the goal and meaning of economic progress, which has cost and is costing so many victims for so many generations? Here's how Prof. talks about it. Sombart, a brilliant economist of our time. Having disparaged the previous era, the age of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer, Heine and Goethe, as an era of ascetics and purists who knew no sense in beauty, Sombart makes the following prediction for the future: “I foresee that the coming generation, after long centuries” of deprivation, will finally again lead a life that will be imbued with beauty and contentment. A generation will appear which, from the fullness of wealth flowing to it with extravagance, will create a whole world of desires and beautiful forms, a generation of people for whom pleasure, the joy of life will become a self-evident companion of earthly wanderings, people with refined feelings, with an aesthetic worldview. This means that the quantitative need for the elegant will take such forms that we now cannot even form the slightest idea about, it will increase immeasurably to such colossality! and splendor, in comparison with which the “luxury” of imperial Rome, the splendor of Venice, the extravagance of Versailles will turn into nothing.” “Business and commercial life is already saturated with beauty” (of course, here the decoration of hotels, shops, offices, salons, etc.). Of course, no one can guarantee that this whole life of beauty will not go to hell from some yellow-faced or dark-faced enemies, or even from a few “individualists” well acquainted with the technology of explosives in modern taste. This possibility was foreseen by Dostoevsky back in 1846, when his man “from the underground” put into the mouth such speeches about this “future state”: “after all, I would not be at all surprised if suddenly, for no reason, for no reason, among the general future prudence, some gentleman with an ignoble, or better to say, retrograde and mocking physiognomy appeared, did not put his hands on his hips and say to all of us: well, gentlemen, shouldn’t we knock all this prudence into dust with one foot, so that we can live according to our own stupid will!” And what will people who have only the ideal of an aesthetic hairdresser say to the rebellious underground, how can they curse the beast in man, when they themselves cultivated him, not foreseeing that the beast, although tamed, remains wild by nature. So, has humanity achieved, is it beginning to achieve happiness and joy, harmony and peace? Is it getting closer to him? Hardly anyone, observing the symptoms of the spiritual life of European humanity, will dare to say this. On the contrary, wrinkles of intense anxiety, painful melancholy, a hushed, but nevertheless formidable, for invincible, fear of death lay on his brow. “Despondency of the nations and bewilderment”, these gospel words can characterize the mood of the age. Or as it is said in the Apocalypse: “The angel poured out his cup on the throne of the beast: and his kingdom became dark, and they bit their tongues in pain.” A chilling pessimism and some kind of fear of life, mixed with the fear of death, creeps into the soul, those of little faith easily become superstitious, the feeling of mystery living in the soul is resolved in the search for the mysterious, the need for religion seeks to be expressed in pointless religiosity, to be quenched by the music of religious feeling, mysticism without religion will be created, demonism without faith in God. The torment of the modern soul, the longing of the modern heart for God, is most clearly reflected, of course, in art, which cannot lie, cannot pretend. Nowadays, Andreev’s simple but characteristic play “The Life of a Man” is widely read. Here is the exact philosophy of human life as found in the modern worldview. Judge, what is more natural, imbued with the mood that dominates this play: to create crystal palaces for the future or to shoot a bullet in the forehead? And indeed, suicides, with or without reason, simply from melancholy and aimlessness of life, are becoming more and more frequent, especially among our nervous, out-of-touch youth; Of course, external events also influence, but they only aggravate the crisis. Already Dostoevsky, with his usual insight, noted the symptomatic significance of this phenomenon, now so intensified, and connected it with the loss of religious faith. The era of the decline of the Roman Empire, saturated with disbelief and pessimism, was characterized by an epidemic of suicides. The Cyrene philosopher Hegesius even received the nickname of the orator of death, and was expelled from Alexandria for the success of his preaching of suicide. “Against the misfortunes of life there is the benefit of death,” taught Seneca, in whom we find a real hymn to voluntary death. For some, death was introduced into the system of the Epicurean use of life, for others it was an outlet for despair. And then Epicureanism turned out to be just as deadly as it is now. But the star of Bethlehem was already rising in the sky, and learned and unlearned, wise men and shepherds, looked at it, and great joy was born in the world, joy forever. “Let My joy be in you, and let your joy be complete.” Now twilight is again approaching over humanity, retreating into a suffocating dungeon and exhausted there from the yoke of life, but the Star of Bethlehem shines even now and sheds its gentle ray, and with this ray a quiet call is brought to every opening heart: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Pessimism, once it has appeared, cannot be defeated except by religious faith, for it is fueled by doubt about the meaning of the world and the possibility of world harmony. Evil in the world and disharmony are so invincible by external means that pessimism is hopeless unless a healing spring of faith and hope opens in the soul, which will make the “yoke” of life “good and easy,” although it will not cease to be a yoke. Religion does not promise a painless holiday, which the earthly organizers of humanity so vainly dream of; on the contrary, it promises a difficult feat, a cross, but it also gives the strength to bear it, indicating its highest meaning and purpose, and filling sorrow and labor with joy, that pure joy that is lost by humanity. What a striking comparison emerges if we compare the spiritual state of ancient society in the 1st century AD with its culture, but also with its corruption and pessimism, and the spiritual state of the first Christian communities described in the Acts of the Apostles! With what heavenly light this story is illuminated, one cannot read it without joyful excitement! I think that never in history have people lived more joyfully than these poor communities, consisting of fishermen, slaves, shepherds and only a few scientists. They did not have those cultural blessings with which ancient society eked out its days, but in their souls beat a living key of joy and faith - the grace-filled life of the children of God! However, it seems to me that this modern pessimism is a healthy and even noble reaction to an attempt to debunk a person, deprive him of faith in the highest good and force him to be satisfied with himself. For this self-satisfaction, complacency and balance in a position in which it is impossible for a person to be in balance, is already a perversion by man of his nature, extinguishing the spirit, the sale of birthrights for lentil stew. This is the philistinism from which our Herzen was so choked, for life, even life in beauty à la Sombart, corrupts the soul more powerfully than any poison. Man is unable to endure earthly well-being, he is given only struggle, only the cross, and when he turns the earth of damnation, which is so deeply saturated with sweat and blood, into a comfortable bed and a peaceful pillow, forgetting about all the contradictions of his existence, he sinks and sends. No, pessimism is a guarantee that man was created for eternity and for God, and, having lost this, he suffers and yearns the more intensely, the higher he himself is. This is why the “kingdom of the beast”, i.e. a civilization built without God and against God must inevitably be gloomy, and people will begin to bite their tongues in pain. And no matter how scientists and philosophers rack their brains, no matter what surrogates they come up with, they will not give a person the peace and confidence that faith in the One who promises: “come to Me, and you will find rest for your souls.” That in unbelieving humanity the religious strings of the soul did not die, but only froze, is proven, in my eyes, by the importance that aesthetic interest, feeling and service to beauty receives in such eras. Beauty is divine, God clothed the world with it when creating it, and the divine in beauty acts on the soul directly or, as Soloviev aptly put it, magically, in addition to the reflective mind. In the perception of beauty, a person breathes the divine, even if he denies it with his head. And in art, with its special world, the modern soul is offered the only opportunity, so to speak, of religious nutrition, which it is deprived of directly through prayer and religious deed. Due to such an exceptional importance of art, it is natural to expect that in unbelieving eras people especially value aesthetics, they so greedily seek beauty, so zealously devote themselves to serving it. I mean “not a life in beauty,” which Sombart tells us: at the same time, beauty is corrupted, the goddess is given over to the maids of rich people, no, I mean that genuine and very intense thirst for beauty, thanks to which our age unselfishly seeks beauty, values ​​​​it, bows before it. The sense of the beauty of nature is extremely developed in our century, almost more than ever before: the music of the celestial spheres, the heights of the mountains, the abyss of the sea, the beauty of organic forms, colors, all this intimately connects with the soul of modern man, seeking the rays of divine love in the world: And looking for them separately greedily, We catch a glimpse of eternal beauty: The forest sounds joyful to us with news about her, About her the stream thunders like a cold stream, And they say, swayed, flowers. Goethe's mood of aesthetic pantheism is generally very similar to modernity. This sense of nature, hiddenly religious, saves the modern soul from the dryness and deadness of its rationalism, as well as great works of art. “Every soul is alive by the Holy Spirit” is sung in church hymns, and beauty is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Spirit and anchor of salvation for spiritually impoverished humanity. When I think about this life-giving effect of beauty, I remember the sick, suffering soul of Ch. Uspensky, who, like Garshin and some others, undoubtedly suffered from the inconsistency of his intellectual worldview with the religious needs of his soul. Uspensky tells how in the village, in the dead of winter, his hero (that is, himself) remembered the impressions of the Venus de Milo, which he saw in Paris, and how this memory “straightened” his soul (the essay is called “Straightened”). These are touching confessions of an intelligent soul, yearning for God and not realizing the real nature of its longing. “From the first moment I saw the statue, I felt that great joy had happened to me. Until now I was like (I suddenly felt) like this glove crumpled in my hand. Does it look like a human hand? No, it's just some kind of leather lump. But then I blew into it, and it became like a human hand. Something that I couldn’t understand blew into the depths of my crumpled, crippled, exhausted being and straightened me up, it ran through the goosebumps of a reviving body where there seemed to be no sensitivity, made everything crunch just like when a person grows, made me also wake up vigorously, without feeling any signs of recent sleep, and filled my expanded chest, my entire grown body with freshness and light... Where and what is the secret of this a firm, calm, joyful state of my entire being, flowing into it unknown how? I absolutely could not answer a single question for myself; I felt that there was no word in the human language that could define the life-giving mystery of this stone creature. Smash it! - he continues, “but it’s the same as depriving the world of the sun, then it’s not worth living if you can’t feel this at least once in your life.” Art conquers itself even in such feelings and moods that do not at all correspond to the modern worldview. A modern person can, together with Belkin, see a nymph in a damp grotto and naiads in the sea waves, he can admire the Sistine Madonna and all the art of rebirth in prayerful ecstasy, the gloomy mystical majesty of a Gothic church is accessible to him, he can praise the Creator along with Beethoven, lighting up with a fiery hymn of joy and love for the Creator in the ninth symphony. Much of what modern man does not allow himself logically and due to his personal responsibility, he can accommodate aesthetically; thanks to beauty, wings grow in him, he feels not like a lump of matter or a two-legged monkey, but an infinite spirit, feeding on the absolute and divine. However, this translation of religious life into exclusively aesthetic language expresses the limitations of our era, its one-sidedness and poverty. Aesthetic emotions do not yet create a regenerating faith, aestheticism is encyclopedic, it is likened to a bee flying from flower to flower, it can combine completely incompatible things. For purely aesthetic perception - this is precisely modern aestheticism - after all, in essence, there remains only a beautiful pose, the beauty of the position, but not the spiritual content. In addition, aesthetic perceptions are passive: they do not require feat, intense will, they are given for free, and what is given for free can corrupt. Nowadays, aesthetics and its criteria are often proclaimed to be higher than ethics; Thanks to the dominance of aestheticism, one gets the impression that our era, like highly cultural eras in general, is exclusively artistic, while this is explained by its one-sidedness, the destruction of the remaining foundations of the human spirit, and even in a purely artistic sense the question is whether the internally rotting era of decadence is capable of creating its own greatness in art, or whether it predominantly collects and registers the old. Some people hold precisely this latter opinion. In any case, when assessing modern aestheticism, one should keep in mind these two sides: its hypertrophy, the development of aesthetics due to the courageous and active properties of the soul, marks the decadent and unfaithful nature of our era, but at the same time, the eternal element of the human soul, its need to live, touching the robe of the Divine, if not with a prayerful hand, then at least with a sense of beauty in it - incorruptibility and eternity - makes its way through the sands and debris. Dostoevsky’s prophetic word that “beauty will save the world” has many meanings; Leaving aside its apocalyptic meaning, we can say that even now beauty saves the world from despair, from rationalism, from self-righteous philistinism, and now it gives water to the thirsty patient and, perhaps, maintains his strength until recovery. In fact, has the above-described trend of minds in cultural humanity already been so decisively and finally established, or is it just a phase, a mood that can pass away as something outlived? After all, it became clearly visible from the 18th century, and especially sharply in the 2nd half of the 19th century, and within this direction several waves had already changed: the so-called “Enlightenment” of the 18th century with its straightforward rationalism and simplified denial can be considered already experienced and outlived. The age of Mephistopheles gave way to the age of Faust, the triumph of German speculative idealism, which began with Kant, and he, whatever he was, cannot be considered an era only destructive. This was followed by a brief triumph of superficial materialism and positivism with its denial of all philosophy. But materialism and positivism are now outlived. Religious idealism is being revived again, philosophical and religious interest is being aroused, which is currently receiving such abundant food also from historical research on the history of Christianity and other religions. At the center of these scientific studies of a religious, philosophical and historical nature is the study of everything related to the personality of the Savior. “You can say,” says the German scientist prof. Weinel, “that never before has a single century been so intensively engaged with Jesus and asked about his significance as the past one” 7 and, let us add to this, this interest at the beginning of the 20th century does not weaken, but increases. It is enough to look at the indexes of literature published in the West to be convinced of this. Voices are heard that religious death is coming to an end. Of these numerous pieces of evidence, I will give you as an example only the authoritative opinion of the venerable philosopher Prof. Rud. Eiken, who, by the way, occupies a chair at the University of Jena next to Haeckel. Here's what he says in his new book: 8 “Signs are multiplying that a new mood and new aspirations, more favorable to religion, are intensifying. True, the external flow of life is directed predominantly against religion, but it is becoming increasingly clear that this flow does not embrace all human life, that it is counteracted by a lower current of a completely different kind. In man's basic attitude to the world and in his basic sense of life, molecular changes are taking place, undermining the present soil and preparing for fundamental changes as a whole. The experience of the 19th century made us feel the opposition to life, the confusion of human life, as well as the internal contradictions of our being, more strongly than in the previous era... We freed man from all tutelage from without and from within, we thought to give him unheard-of greatness, but liberation was expressed in detachment from all internal connections of reality, and left to himself, man showed, with external growth, so much inner pettiness, we feel such a blatant discrepancy between the great problems of the era and the ability of individuals to solve them, that many minds are seized by a strong desire for the inner elevation of man. We struggle and strive tirelessly to preserve our life, but is this life worth so much work and worries! We are confused about the whole of our lives, we feel more than ever the problematic nature of our existence. With all the external splendor of culture, on these questions of life and essence we remain in deplorable infidelity... and cannot prevent the fact that inner poverty shines through all this splendor. Thus, this is not only a crisis of religion, it is a crisis of all life in general with which we are now dealing. For the struggle for religion, this creates a very favorable situation. For nothing was more dangerous for religion than the opinion that cultural life, full of spirituality, of ideal conviction, is possible without its help, even in spite of it. Now we see that the shock to religion is only the most outstanding point of the shock to all spiritual life, and we can hope that if a new strengthening of life occurs, it will be to the benefit of both religion and new development.” This is how a thoughtful observer of our days judges the state of affairs in Europe. The crisis of personality and worldview characterized by Aiken is nowhere experienced with such tragic pain and fatal force as in our country, although perhaps it is still weakly recognized. This is explained, in part, by the general properties of the Russian soul and the special fervor with which it relates to issues of religious (in the broad sense) consciousness, then by the specific features of intelligentsia psychology with its weakness of traditions and historical connections, its theoreticalism and doctrinalism. But what had a particularly aggravating significance here was the historical shock and crisis that we have experienced in recent years and are experiencing now. If spiritual anemia was latent or chronic in normal times, then it becomes aggravated in exceptional eras. I will not allow myself to describe or characterize what we experienced: it is too close and fresh for everyone, and the time has not yet come for an objective, dispassionate attitude towards it. At present, Russian society, at least that part of it that is capable of reflecting and learning, is in deep thought and is trying to draw historical lessons from what it has experienced, in the political, economic, and cultural fields, ready to gain new strength for creative work. Among these results, the least conspicuous and least recognized is the spiritual crisis that I spoke about. Did the spiritual personality of the new person withstand the fiery test, and is everything all right in it? There is no doubt that the political and social movement of recent years has been entirely intellectual - not in its participants, who also became the masses of the people with their diverse social interests, but in its ideas, ideals, and in general in its entire ideology. The power of ideas and ideological sentiments in history was revealed here with elemental power. It became clear that the intelligentsia in Russia is now a historical force, the importance of which can only increase in further historical development, that it is a growing Force of the future. And such an assessment of the historical role of the intelligentsia and the significance of ideas in history in general makes us consider the ideas and sentiments of the intelligentsia to be of particular historical importance, and its position is especially responsible. I believe that the historical future of Russia, its prosperity or decay, growth or decay, is in the hands and responsibility of the intelligentsia, precisely as the growing force of the future. Based on such an assessment, with all the more caution and with all the more anxiety do you ask yourself: is everything all right in the soul of the intelligentsia, is the intelligentsia’s soul not moved from its foundations and is it not sick? Most of all, I would not like my judgments to be accepted as a condemnation or a desire to blame anyone and shift responsibility for the horrors of which we are all, collectively, guilty. I’m trying, like everyone else, to understand the reasons for the caustic bitterness that has crept into my soul in recent years, to look around in the darkness that has enveloped us. Many sincere people and members of the intelligentsia, who do not bind their judgments to doctrine or program, admit that they too have a residue of bitterness and heavy bewilderment in their souls. The boundary between good and evil, permissible and impermissible, party discipline and universal morality was too often lost and too easily crossed during this time so that it could not but leave an impression, not instill doubts and anxiety in the soul. The excesses of partisanship and the tense atmosphere of political civil strife cast doubt on the very possibility of mutual understanding and agreement necessary for the purpose of practical creative work for the common national cause, and threatened to make any creative work impossible at all. Such fears painfully oppressed me personally in the Second State Duma under the influence of direct impressions from Duma life and Duma work. To what extent our historical failures of recent years are caused by inevitable historical circumstances and dark historical forces, and to what extent by the indicated features of our intellectual mood cannot be taken into account exactly. But there is no doubt that the share of participation of the latter is significant. And it was not so much the individual programmatic provisions of these or those parties that made disagreements and bitter enemies of all against all, but precisely their moral character, and their common worldview, shared by everyone and stimulating a mood not of reconciliation, but of strife and discord, which created an atmosphere of political passions, not dissolved by anything reconciling. There was no person, there were only members of different parties or representatives of different interests, who could only distinguish themselves from each other. But society cannot develop and live without a certain ethical minimum of solidarity and mutual understanding, no matter how complex and diverse it is in its composition, otherwise it breaks up into several warring bodies, and eventually becomes atomized. And because what Dostoevsky described in “Demons” and “Crime and Punishment” only as an opportunity, as a warning, even seemed to many as a political libel, all this has come into use among us. The fact that we have experienced and are experiencing the bitter, morally negative in our intelligentsia is, in my eyes, an experimental verification of the weakness of the widespread anti-religious worldview and proof by contradiction in favor of the religious. Lack of spiritual health is reflected in all manifestations of life, in all its tone. In general, in modern times the historical significance of the moral personality and its health is diminished; I am inclined, on the contrary, to consider it one of the determining factors of historical life, and the self-determination of a person necessarily includes what she thinks about herself, what she believes in, her entire creed. It is impossible to even imagine how our whole life would change, how differently past events would have developed and flowed, how the dark present would have been illuminated if we ourselves had become different. In this sense, the philosophical and religious credo of the Russian intelligentsia, which unites the majority of its young and old representatives without distinction of political shades, namely its atheistic nihilism, I recognize as one of the most important factors in Russian history and one of the main reasons that determined the course of events in recent years in Russia. This situation may seem less paradoxical to those who do not share our common point of view if we focus on one more feature of our time. Until the nineteen hundred years, the worldview and mood of the intelligentsia remained closed or circle-like, and one could think that the people's soul was inaccessible and impenetrable to the intelligentsia's preaching. The last decade, especially the last three years, has shown something else, namely, that the people, especially the younger generation of the countryside and urban workers, are becoming susceptible to the influence of the intelligentsia and are gradually becoming intelligent, or, as it is called, becoming “conscious.” I leave completely aside certain political or economic provisions of the various programs presented to the people, because they are not what interests us and they are not of paramount importance in my eyes, and it is not they who really revolutionize consciousness and make a deep revolution in the people’s soul. No, any such introduction of the people to “consciousness”, or their becoming intelligent, begins indifferently in all intellectual parties and in all their programs with the destruction of religious faith and the inoculation of the dogmas of materialism and philosophical nihilism. Of course, the uneducated commoner is completely powerless to be critical and unarmed, like a child, before the influx of new teachings. And with the same ease with which his enlighteners once believed in unbelief, he also accepts the joyless, deadening faith in unbelief. Of course, there is no need to exaggerate the consciousness and strength of his old faith, which sometimes decays at the first touch. Of course, this is a childish, naive faith, but still it gave him the difference between good and evil, taught him to live in truth, in duty, in a divine way. She nurtured that wondrous beauty of the people's soul, which is captured in Russian literature and art. Thanks to her, the people bore and bear on their shoulders the cross of their historical existence, and the Tatars, and the Moscow statehood, and the St. Petersburg period, and expressed their ideal, their idea of ​​righteous life, giving themselves the name “Holy Rus'”, i.e. of course, not considering himself a saint, but in holiness seeing the ideal of life. Was the heart-reader and lover of the people Dostoevsky, who studied the people’s soul not only in health, but also in illness, not only in his native village, but also in hard labor, mistaken when he wrote: “Even though there is atrocity and sin in our people, this is what is undeniable about them: this is precisely the fact that they, in their entirety at least (and not in the ideal only, but in the most real reality), never accept, will not accept and will not want to accept their sin as the truth! He will sin, but he will always say, sooner or later: I did a lie. If the sinner does not speak, then someone else will speak for him, and righteousness will be completed. Sin is a stench, and the stench will pass when the sun fully shines. Sin is a transitory matter, but Christ is an eternal matter. The people sin and commit dirty tricks every minute, but in their best moments, in Christ’s moments, they will never be mistaken in the truth. That is precisely what is important is what the people believe in as their truth, what they believe in it, how they imagine it, what they set as their desire, what they love, what they ask from God, what they cry for in prayer. And the ideal of the people is Christ. And with Christ, of course, enlightenment, and in their highest, fatal moments, our people decide and have always decided every matter in a Christian way.” This old faith and the spiritual system associated with it are collapsing, and a completely new inoculation is being given to the wild animal of the people's soul. Such strength, such exceptional importance of the inoculation that our intelligentsia is now giving to the people, neither Moscow, nor the Tatars, nor St. Petersburg did and could not give them; only Vladimir the Holy accomplished a deed of equal significance by baptizing Rus', which the intelligentsia is now gradually baptizing. The history of Russia began with the baptism of Rus'; the Christian seed fell here on completely virgin soil, on uncultivated virgin soil; With the debaptism a completely new era of history begins. What is replacing the old faith, what rules of life, what norms? We know what the intellectual catechism says about this: Bentham, Marx, Kant and Feuerbach (in the Russian adaptation of Lavrov or Mikhailovsky), Stirner: the pursuit of one’s interests separately or the pursuit of the same interests together with others, as class or group, or the freedom of a self-affirming individual, the anarchic “everything is permitted.” But for the intelligentsia, all these concepts of interest are pure ideology, a pseudonym for ethical and even religious sentiments; She takes not her own, but someone else’s interest, the interest of the oppressed classes. In addition, the most destructive conclusions of the most destructive doctrines do not always and do not completely translate into action here, but are paralyzed by inhibitory centers, the influence of the environment and public opinion, cultural skills, and in general the habit of handling theories and accepting various terrible words and formulas inactively and fearlessly. True, in recent years the intelligentsia has lost its balance, but there is no comparison with the impression that the code of atheistic dogma should make on the people's soul. To people who are sick and suffering, and already, by virtue of their class position, prone to hostility towards the privileged minority, people who have neither mental training nor civilized skills, generally standing in the most unfavorable cultural conditions, are imparted as dogmas for the guidance of life - provisions that were in any case the product of a long philosophical and cultural development, which grew on a culturally rich and saturated soil. In general, Russian history is rich in extremes, but one can hardly imagine an extreme greater than this message to an illiterate, poor peasant who did not leave his village or outside his factory, the results of the work of thought of Hume and Voltaire, encyclopedists and educators, Feuerbach and Nietzsche, etc. etc. There is something truly dizzying about this. I will not undertake to take into account how fruitful this replacement of enlightenment with agitation turned out to be, even politically and socially, but the moral, psychological and universal significance of this can still be taken into account. We now have this result - the disintegration of the individual, the deep paralysis of the will and moral sense - in a mournful and endless epic of quasi ideological crimes, which all intellectual groups and all trends disavow with horror. And, of course, they are right, since, indeed, no one wanted all this, and this was the unintended result of those upheavals in the people’s soul, those devastations in the treasury of their faith that the doctrine of atheism brought about in connection with the difficult events and trials of our time. I am absolutely convinced that the extraordinary development of crime, and, moreover, in a pathological environment of a peculiar ideology, is a symptom of a disease of the people's soul, an acute reaction of the spiritual organism to the unhealthy food that was introduced into it in the form of new teachings, united by the denial of religious values ​​and absolute morality. And despite the entire historical totality of circumstances, this sowing could not produce other shoots in the Russian field. I in no way, of course, forget either the horrors among which I had to live in recent years, or the political situation and economic need, which in themselves knocked me out of spiritual balance and aggravated them, as, in turn, they were aggravated by the spiritual crisis I indicated. It also had another, albeit secondary, but very important consequence: it created and aggravated civil strife, giving it a shade of religious fanaticism, making it a struggle not only of different political opinions, but also of different faiths. This circumstance explains many of the features of the regrettable and tragic events of the autumn of 1905, whatever their reasons in all their complexity. This religious civil strife even now extremely clouds Russian horizons and complicates our position. Our people need knowledge, they need enlightenment, but one that would not make them poorer spiritually than they were and would not corrupt their moral personality. Christian enlightenment, developing and educating the individual, and not the random assimilation of scraps of knowledge as a means of agitation, this is what our people need. The historical future of Russia, the revival and restoration of the power of our homeland or the final decomposition, perhaps political death, are, in my opinion, dependent on whether we resolve this cultural and pedagogical task: to enlighten the people without corrupting their moral personality. And history entrusts these destinies into the hands of the intelligentsia. The experience of recent years has shown that she finds access to the soul of the people, and at the same time she has always had a passionate, uncontrollable, sacrificial desire to serve the people in the form as she understands them. This understanding is the whole point, and this is why the worldview of the intelligentsia itself acquires such exceptional importance as the state of the nerves and brain of the entire country. In the heart and head of the Russian intelligentsia there is a struggle between good and evil, life-giving and death, constructive and destructive principles in Russia, and since what is happening in our country undoubtedly has global significance, then this struggle is global. But this understanding of one’s historical mission and one’s significance should increase tenfold the sense of responsibility for one’s actions. After all, nowhere else is there such a situation: a great people, helpless, defenseless spiritually, like a child at a level of enlightenment almost from the era of St. Vladimir, and the intelligentsia, which brings the enlightenment of the West, mainly with various latest words, changing with the speed of fashion, and which, no matter how it is restrained or pushed aside, finds and, of course, will find its way to this child. Two electricity: when they unite, what will they give - beneficial light and warmth or destructive and incinerating lightning? If the worldview of the intelligentsia itself, which it brings to the people, remains the same as now, then its influence on the people will retain the same character; only without changing qualitatively, it will grow quantitatively. But it is impossible, of course, to think that the intelligentsia, at least in the foreseeable future, will be able to convert the entire mass of the people to their faith; part of it, in any case, will remain faithful to religion. And on the basis of this diversity of faith, an internal religious war must inevitably arise, the like of which should be sought only in the wars of the reformation. At the same time, the spiritual and state power of the people will melt, and the viability of the state organism will decrease until the first blow from the outside. The events we have experienced sufficiently warn us against this path. But is it really in vain that the heavenly thunders thundered over us? Will we really, having rested a little and recovered from what we experienced, live again in the old way, with old feelings, old thoughts, old frivolity, as if nothing had happened, nothing had been revealed, nothing had been acquired? It just fell apart and that’s all, it might not have failed if there had been a little more strength; We must try not to let it go wrong another time. The Russian intellectual is prone to such careless laziness of soul, and now such a calming, pre-liberation mood is already beginning to take shape both in the press and in circles, as if we had not seen the head of the Gorgon, as if we had simply miscalculated, and all that remains is to retreat a few steps back, return to our old positions. No, it is impossible to return to the old spiritual positions, we are separated by an abyss full of the dead, we have grown up and historically aged, it is useless and unworthy for us to be young. We need to start something new, take into account historical experience, recognize ourselves and our mistakes in it, because otherwise, if we see them only in others, on the opposite side, then we will remain hypnotized by our enmity towards it and will not learn anything. There is a need for self-deepening, self-exploration, the accumulation of spiritual strength, and cultural creativity. This self-renewal should touch different sides, but if you go down to the very bottom, into the depths of the soul, then this creation of a new personality and a new life should begin with religious self-deepening, a new and more conscious religious self-determination. A new person, a new type of public figure can only be born on the basis of this self-deepening; it will be that new thing in Russian life that Dostoevsky, dying, dreamed of in his last novel, that new thing that was not in Russian life in recent years and that, perhaps, ruined the last social movement and doomed it to impotence. Russia, in contrast to England, with a few exceptions, has not yet seen a Christian intelligentsia that would put the fervor of its soul, the thirst for its service to people and the feat of the cross into the Christian feat of active love and would defeat that heavy atmosphere of hostility and misanthropy in which we are suffocating, and in which nothing but destruction can contend. There is so much potential religious energy in our intelligentsia, they so persistently make sacrifices on their altar to the “unknown god” - is this ignorance really forever? I know how far from reality, how ridiculous this dream of a Christian intelligentsia and an end to the gap between the intelligentsia and the people, which is now supported by religious diversity, may seem. But this dream is too beautiful to be parted with, and its realization is too necessary for life, a new sowing is needed, new moisture pouring out onto the parched and cracked earth. In this spiritual emptiness of our era, in this hopelessness lies our greatest hope; spiritual death may turn out to be the eve of spiritual resurrection, as it was the 19th centuries ago, as it happened many times later in history, when the Christian flame flared up with renewed vigor from a barely smoldering fire. With the development of historical events, the religious meaning of Russian drama is revealed more and more clearly, which, expressed in a political and social crisis, is rooted in the spiritual decay and internal discord of the Russian people. And despite so many sacrifices and trials, it was not resolved. The disease was driven inward, from acute it only turned into chronic. We have learned from experience that it is impossible to break the commandments with impunity: “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all other things will be added to you.” We cared exclusively about this other stuff, leaving the spiritual world of man, this true creative force of history, neglected. And we lost our spiritual balance and scattered in different directions in pursuit of this “other”, which became increasingly fragmented and separated people. And this is the real reason for our historical impotence, the weakness of creativity given such energy of destruction. Only a renewed person is capable of the task of arranging a disordered life, but this renewal is not created by a revision of programs or tactics, or a new political combination (no matter how important these latter may be in themselves). The birth of a new man, which is discussed in the conversation with Nicodemus, can only occur in the depths of the human soul, in the recesses of a self-determining personality. The feat of historical creativity cannot be separated from the spiritual feat of the rebirth of the human personality, which does not occur against our will. Gladstone was right: it is not in parliaments or people's assemblies that the most decisive clash of good and evil now takes place, but in the souls of people, and the historical destinies of Russia are now being decided in that invisible internal struggle that takes place in the Russian soul. The formidable word of Moses, the dying testament of the prophetic leader of Israel to his people, which predetermined his earthly destinies, is quite applicable to her, to this struggle, and to us, in which it is taking place: “I call heaven and earth as witnesses: I have laid down for you life and death, curse and blessing. Choose life, so that you and your seed may live!” Repeated in Moscow, in the Historical Museum, March 12, 1908. G.v.Schulze-Güvernitz: “Britischer Imperialismus und englischer Freihandel zu Beginn des swanzigsten Jahrhunderts.” Leipzig, 1906. “You have created a pass for Yourself; our heart remains restless until it rests in You.” Wed. collection of articles: “From Marxism to Idealism”, then “The Religion of Man-Deity in L. Feuerbach”. 1906 Ed. "Free Conscience". “K. Marx as a religious type." 1907 Ed. D. E. Zhukovsky and others. "The Resurrection of Christ and Modern Consciousness" (in Century magazine, 1907). This famous episode in the history of thought was narrated by me in the aforementioned study about Feuerbach (“T. Feuerbach and the Religion of Humanity”). Heinrich Weinel: “Jesus im neucnzchntem Jahrhundcrt. Tbbingcn und Leipzig.” 1904, p. 3. Rudolf Eucken: “Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie der Gegenwart.” Berlin, 1907. Pp. 113 et seq.