The path of beauty and the path of a calm mind

WHAT IS A DECEPTION OR SPIRITUAL DECEPTION? HOW TO RECOGNIZE IT AND AVOID IT? HOW TO FIGHT AGAINST IT AND GET RID OF IT? The Slavic word «prelest» etymologically consists of the root «lest», i.e. lie, deception and delusion, and the prefix «pre-», which enhances and increases the effect or feature. So, a charm is a particularly dangerous, particularly terrible spiritual delusion or deception, which comes to man from demons. Prelest is the loss of correct spiritual landmarks. Prelest is a repetition of the sin of Adam and Satan, when a person wants to reach spiritual heights outside of proper spiritual development, outside of asceticism and the teachings of the Orthodox Church about salvation; when he wants to be equal to God without conforming to God through living according to the Gospel commandments and fighting against sin. Of course, many people in the rapture will deny that they want to be equal with God; however, in their subconscious there is a pernicious idea of ​​their own spiritual significance, a thought of the height of their own inner life. How is beauty born? How does it manifest itself? Prelest starts from disobedience to the Church, from searching for some special ways of salvation and perfection, that is, from some arbitrary spiritual experimentation. The beginning of presto is always overconfidence. For example, trusting your subjective experiences and cultivating them; as a result, certain visual and auditory images can appear in a person. Such people often perceive the images of their fantasy and demonic appearances as Divine revelation or a visit from an Angel. The basis of lust, like the basis of every sin, is pride and arrogance. And pride itself has several aspects, several forms. Pride before men - worldly pride - is what we call arrogance. Another form of pride is spiritual pride, pride before God, when it seems to a person that he has the fullness of virtues and everything he needs for salvation, that he does not need anyone or anything. A proud man in prelust is convinced that he does not even need the power of God's grace, but that he can achieve everything by himself, with his mind and the feat of his personal will. Here begins the shift of the center of spiritual life from God to oneself, here begins spiritual egocentrism. Man wants to draw spiritual strength from himself, from his mystical experiences and his personal revelations. Like attracts like, that's the law of spiritual sympathy. That is why pride brings a person into a relationship, that is, into a special closeness with the spirit of pride - Satan. The soul of the proud begins to receive information from demons, information from the world of fallen, rejected, dark spirits; information in the form of brilliant ideas, which he perceives as spiritual revelations and believes that no ascetic has ever had such knowledge as he has achieved. In the area of ​​feelings and emotions, Satan gives him some strange ecstasies. They appear to him as the grace of the Holy Spirit, as the highest spiritual state, the paradise of his soul. And in fact, these ecstasies are only the cunning effects of passion, born and transformed by demonic power. Therefore, he perceives similar nervous excitement, excitement of flesh and blood as spiritual, God-given states. However, it should be said that these satanic inspirations and ecstasies in the depths of his soul he still feels as something terrible and alien. 3 God of that is with the spiritually deceived, i.e. the influx of "joy" is replaced by a drop in mood and despair in the bewitched people. Almost all deluded people periodically experience states of hellish anguish when they want to end their lives by suicide. A bewitched person receives information on the emotional level as well. He can have some strange visions that resemble the visions of drug addicts: sometimes they are chaotic images, and sometimes - whole scenes that the demon shows in front of him. And during prayer, he also often imagines on a visual level what he is praying for, imagines images of heaven and hell. (Fantasy and visual representations during prayer are already a pathology of prayer, and often, although not always – one of the symptoms of pre-love). Sometimes he hears voices which he perceives as the voices of Guardian Angels or as Cherubim chanting. And in the end, he comes to the conclusion that he no longer needs anyone: neither a teacher, nor books, nor the experience of the Church, that God has chosen him as a prophet, as His interlocutor, and that he receives all his suggestions and thoughts directly from Him. Then this man completely stops accepting what others tell him. If they assure him that he is contradicting the Holy Fathers, this is not an argument for him, because deep down he believes that the Holy Fathers may have reached a certain height, but that he has risen above them and sees more than they do. If they convince him that it is from a demon, he believes that they are talking to unenlightened people, who simply do not understand his spiritual height, because they speak from the position of their ignorance and nothingness. Because of this, the bewitched in his heart deeply despises those who try to open his eyes and lead him out of this pernicious state. People who made rapid progress in spiritual life and then "enjoyed" themselves often fell into temptation. This condition usually does not occur immediately; it starts, as a rule, from contradiction, and then - disobedience to those persons who are placed above us; for a layman it is the church hierarchy, for a monk it is an abbot and spiritual father. Then disobedience turns into complete contempt for all advice and hatred for the one who disfigures a person. Man himself becomes his own idol, he cannot truly pray to God, even if he prayed for a very long time. Because true prayer implies a feeling of one's own helplessness, and when he turns to God, he subconsciously believes that he already has everything he needs for salvation. And God becomes redundant and unnecessary for him. A bewitched man in prayer is constantly looking for new "stunning" revelations, "powerful" spiritual feelings. He seems to become a gourmet of his own passions, which the devil shows him in the form of high spiritual feelings. The dark spirits go to meet his soul, which is open to them, they go to his inner calling, and it seems to man that he experiences here on earth the same as the Angels in heaven; here on earth he knows and sees what the choirs of Saints contemplate in heaven. This kind of man gradually idolizes himself, gradually begins to feel that he is some kind of center of the whole world. He cannot love other people, because he loves only himself and that and you as he loves himself. He loves himself with a kind of religious awe and is therefore annoyed by those who do not treat him in the same way. Often a man who is in prelest seems to be at enmity and war with all other men; he can admit only one who believes in his imagined virtues and his supposed sanctity. These people degrade both mentally and spiritually; for the environment, they often become an object of laughter. With them, sometimes during prayer, in nervous, passionate excitement, convulsions, convulsions begin, foam drips from their mouths; they interrupt the prayer with some foreign exclamations and cries. However, regardless of such a difficult situation, they still do not sober up. It seems to them that the world is unfair to them, persecutes and torments them like all prophets. In the lives of the Saints, we read about cases of apparitions, about visions that spiritually deceived, appalled people considered to be the appearance of the Savior, the Mother of God and Angels; about demanding the environment to respect them. Usually those who fall into a trap, like those who fall into a wolf's trap, remain in it, they cannot get out; only the special grace of God can save a man from temptation. Only a strong and terrible earthquake can restore a person's lost humility and restore the direction of his soul towards God. This is precisely why, if cases of healing do occur, it takes place through great suffering, long-term illnesses or some obvious influence of the Divine Power. That is why pride is the greatest danger on the spiritual path. Yes, all sins distance man from God, every sin is a secret alliance with a demon, but pride is the most terrible of all. She makes man her own among the fallen spirits; makes him one spirit with Satan. Delusion - it means to deviate from the right path, to go astray - is deceiving and deceiving others and personal delusion or self-delusion. The cause of various damage and destruction is - a false thought! By means of lies, the devil defeated the human race with eternal death at its very root, in the first parents. Originally, charm acts on the way of thinking: when it is received and when it perverts the way of thinking, it immediately gives itself to the heart, perverts the feelings of the heart; having mastered the human being, it spills over his entire activity, poisons the body itself, which is connected to the soul by an unbreakable link from the Creator. The state of death is a state of spiritual ruin or eternal death. We can divide the sources of preforest state into two types: - subjective, which have their beginning and feed on the fallen nature of man himself, and - objective, which depend on the action of demons. Every beauty flatters our conceit, our love of glory, our pride. Devils are nearby and surround the novice and self-willed, setting traps of thoughts and pernicious imaginations, preparing the pits of doom. The effects of grace are clear, the demon cannot give them: he cannot give meekness, nor silence, nor humility, nor freedom from this world, he does not tame pleasures and self-love as grace does. Its effect is puffiness - arrogance, artificiality, high-mindedness, fear - in a word, all forms of malice. The condition of every grown man, in general terms, is beautiful. For anyone who has not cleansed himself of passion, it can be said that he is to a certain extent in delusion, that is, he does not receive some things as he should, he receives subtle influences and actions of the enemy as beneficial revelations. For example, easy nervousness and excitement after and during more intense prayer, looking for transparency and miracles in people we respect, dreams - predictions, noticing in oneself the ability to talk about spiritual things and to understand them, persistence in defending one's opinion, delight and delight in other people's feats (elders) with complete carelessness and lack of desire to fulfill what they are talking about (elders, e.g. prev .) learn (although such people constantly talk about elders and ask them for countless advices), interest in what is beyond beginner's understanding, asking about how spiritual people feel and think, and teaching the same to others as if it were our own, the desire to infuse everything with our love, striving to teach others the spiritual path and enlighten the fallen and misguided, etc. acquire as calm a feeling and spiritual experience as possible and to wash away his own impurity with tears of repentance, but he considers himself worthy of those states - the beginning of the transition. These qualities mentioned above are especially characteristic of women who surround various "brothers" and "elders". I testify to them that they have zeal for God, but not according to reason (Rom.10:2). Daydreaming is a type of hallucination that occurs as a result of the inappropriate activity of the imagination during prayer. That dangerous irregular way of praying consists in the fact that when the one who prays by the power of his imagination creates fantasies or images, apparently borrowing them from the Holy Scriptures, but essentially from his own condition, from his fallenness, from his sinfulness, from his self-deception - with these images he flatters his conceit, his love of glory, his arrogance, his pride, deceiving himself. It is obvious that everything created by the imagination of our fallen depraved nature does not exist in the thing itself - it is a fabrication and a lie, so characteristic, so dear to the fallen angel. The dreamer, from the first step on the path of prayer, leaves the realm of truth, enters the realm of lies, the realm of Satan, voluntarily submitting to Satan's influence. If a person looks at the sky during prayer, with all that he awakens his soul to the Divine desire and love, sometimes he sheds tears and cries, little by little his heart swells, without understanding this with his mind; rather, he thinks that what he does is the fruit of God's grace for his comfort, and he prays to God to make him worthy to always remain in such action. A carnal man cannot in any way, in any way, even imagine spiritual flocks to himself, he cannot have any concept of gracious weeping, that is, grieving for sins, for his sinfulness, his fall, his ruin. Knowledge of these conditions is acquired only through experience. All the Holy Fathers who described the feat of mental prayer forbid not only building arbitrary fantasies, but also paying attention with will and compassion to fantasies and illusions, which, independently of our will, can suddenly appear to us. It is known that visions are given to the true Saints of God only by God's favor and by God's action, and not by man's will and his own effort - they are given unexpectedly, very rarely, in cases of extreme necessity, by God's wonderful deliberation, and not just like that. A distinction must be made when it comes to Roman Catholic mysticism, because there are many well-known cases of abnormality in the organization of the so-called Roman Catholics. "saints". The behavior of Latin ascetics, overwhelmed by beauty, was always ecstatic, the cause of which was unusual physical, passionate inflamation. Hindu mysticism is also widespread, and not very little. With Hindu yogis (especially taught by Rajayoga), everything consists in developing imagination and fantasy. Opinion is another form of serious pretense. Its basis is the perverted upbringing of the heart. Just as improper action with the mind leads to self-deception and delusion, so does improper action with the heart. Full of unreasonable pride is the desire and striving to perceive spiritual visions with the mind, not cleansed of passion, with the unrenewed and untransplanted right hand of the Holy Spirit: the desire and striving of the heart to delight in holy, spiritual, divine feelings, when it is still incapable of such delight, is filled with such pride and foolishness. Just as the impure mind, which wants to see Divine visions and does not have the opportunity to see them, creates such visions for itself from itself, or is deceived and deceived, so the heart, forcing itself to taste the Divine sweetness and other Divine feelings and not finding them in itself, creates them from itself, flatters itself with them, deceives, deceives, kills itself, entering the realm of lies, in communion with demons, submitting to their influence, enslaving itself them. The main passion with which she (prelest), born of pride, feeds, is fornication, which begins with barely perceptible to man, subtle sexual and generally sensual excitement, and which ends with perverted forms of voluptuousness. Embracing their fornication in its subtle effect, carnal people come to the rapture of pleasure, of intoxication, which are obtained effortlessly, without self-sacrifice, without crucifying the flesh with passions and lusts. They, led by their blindness and pride, joyfully pass from the bed of animal Love to the bed of love even more transgressive, which rules in the whorehouse of rejected spirits. In this way, the effect of the natural blood flow and sensibility ignited here is easily accepted for the beneficial effects of the Holy Spirit. According to the Holy Fathers, this state is called an opinion, because "the one who is overcome by that charm imagines (mni) about himself that he has many virtues and abounds in spiritual gifts" (Bishop Ignatius Bryančaninov). Infected with a variety of opinions are very often encountered. Infected with conceit about their dignity, especially about their sanctity, they are ready for all meanness, all hypocrisy, cunning and deception, all crimes. With irreconcilable enmity, they burn against the servants of the truth, with maddened hatred they rush against them when they do not recognize the conditions that opinion attributes to them, putting them in the face of a blinded world. Terrible pride, similar to demonic pride, is the main characteristic of those who have adopted one or another charm. - Pride, deluded by the first sight of beauty, leads to a state of obvious mental disorder. - In those who are deceived by the other sight, it, producing an injury to the mind, which is called corruption of the mind in the Scriptures, is less noticeable, it is masked by the appearance of humility, piety, wisdom - it is known by its bitter fruits. Here we could also point out a few traits from the life of one of the most famous ascetics of the West, precisely Francis of Assisi. In him, two extremes were united - unbridled glory and self-conceit, on the one hand, and monstrous imagination and inflamed fantasy on the other. (By the way, it should be hedged and said that in reality both of these types of enchantment are very often mixed, and in asceticism they are separated for the sake of easier description and easier monitoring of oneself. As for the demonic traps themselves, who can place them in certain places and force them to act this way and not that way?) Francis of Assisi, first of all, started his feat falsely and too easily, precisely out of pride and self-love. He said: "Do you know that the day will come when the whole world will bow down to me?" The further, these passions flared up in him more and more. After approximately five years from entering the path of self-glorification, already on September 14, 1224, at dawn, Francisco addressed Christ in the vicinity of his cell as follows: "...I am only asking You for two graces: the first is that I may be able to survive with my soul and body all the sufferings that You suffered, and the second is that I may feel with my being that limitless love with which You, Son of God, burned..." If this prayer is a fairy tale, and it is, it would be a real miracle if it didn't come true. Because, just like in fairy tales, all human desires are fulfilled in the state of enchantment, since both here and there are governed by the same demons, who are at the service of pleasing man's passions and fantasies. We have already seen that Francisco, as it seemed to him, got what he prayed for... As for the activity of his imagination, Francisco in this sense surpassed all his predecessors in the path of transmigration; he could, with the free power of his imagination, focused on the Saviour's crucifixion, separate the blood according to the appropriate directions, that is, according to the places of the Wounds of the Lord: hands, feet, right side of the chest; this led to blood breaking through the skin, and scars were formed, which were named stigmata. By imagining with his mind (in a purely external way) events from the life of Christ, it led to the fact that Francisco even in his daily life started to copy them. It is, of course, a presumptuous, blasphemous and arrogant act. Finally, in an act of grandeur mania, he died with the words: "I fulfilled what I had to fulfill. I return to God, may He have mercy on you"... And apparently, he did not need God to be merciful to him? Venerable Grigorije Sinait says: "Don't accept anything if you see something with your sensory eyes or mind, outside or inside yourself - be it the image of Christ, or an Angel, or some Saint, or if a light appears to you... Be careful and considerate!" The beginner must pay attention to one action of the heart, and consider that action alone to be inauspicious - not to accept anything else until entering the dispassion. God will not be angry; on the contrary, such a one will be praised by God for his good sense. And so the actions of the heart - that is, the feeling of repentance, tears, contrition for one's sins, self-reproach, remembrance of death, fear of God, humility - this is an infallible path to obtaining salvation and true prayer, and, if it pleases the Lord, the gift of sight. May the awareness of one's sins and considering oneself lower than any creature, including demons, grow into our heart. Only then can we hope that temptation and demons will not destroy us, but that the grace of God will adopt us. (From the book: Asceticism - the art of consciousness, translation from Russian: Vladimir Dimitrijević) Prelest can be external and internal The apprehension of being overwhelmed is quite right... Beauty can be mental - it is self-consciousness, and it can be external - by it we mean light, voices, characters that appear... Do not pay attention to any of this, because it is the work of the devil. Thus, the demon appeared to an ascetic and began to shout: "Christ is coming, Christ is coming!", and the latter replied: "Go away, you cunning seducer! Christ would not come to me, because I am a sinful man". And the demon disappeared at the same time. Student: Explain exactly and in detail the concept of beauty. What is beauty? Old man: Prelest is the injury of nature by human lies. Prelest is the condition of all people, without exception, caused by the fall of our forefathers. We are all in the beauty (Beginning of the Third Sermon of Venerable Simeon the New Theologian. Edition of the Optinski Monastery, 1852.). Knowing this is the best prevention against falling prey. The greatest temptation is to consider yourself free from temptation. We are all deceived, we are all deluded, we are all in a state of delusion, and we need liberation through the truth. The truth is our Lord Jesus Christ (John 8:32; 14:6). Let us accept this Truth by faith in It; let us cry out in prayer to that Truth, and it will bring us out of the abyss of self-delight and demon-delight. It is a sad state of ours! It is a dungeon from which we pray that our soul may be delivered, that the name of the Lord may be glorified (Ps. 44, 7). That state of beauty is that dark land into which the enemy, envying us and starting to pursue us, has thrown our life into ruin (Ps. 143, 3). It is "carnal wisdom" (Rom.8:6) and "falsely called knowledge" (1Tim.6:20), and the whole world is infected with it, which does not acknowledge its illness, but declares it to be a loss of health. It is "flesh and blood", which "cannot inherit the Kingdom of God" (1 Cor. 15, 50). It is eternal death, which the Lord Jesus heals and destroys, "resurrection and life" (John 11:25). Such is our situation. Seeing him is a new reason for crying. Let's cry out with tears to the Lord Jesus to lead us out of prison, out of the abyss of the earth, out of the jaws of death. "Our Lord Jesus Christ", says Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, came down to us precisely because he wanted to "wrest us from captivity and from the worst predestination" (Beginning of the Third Sermon). Student: This interpretation is insufficiently accessible to my ideas: I need a simpler explanation, closer to my understanding. Old man: As a means to lead the human race to destruction, the fallen angel used a lie (Byt. 3, 13). For this reason, the Lord called the devil a lie, the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). The Lord closely connected the idea of ​​lying with the idea of ​​murder, because the latter is an inevitable consequence of the former. The word "from the beginning" indicates that from the very beginning the lie served the devil as a tool for murder, and it constantly serves him as a tool for murder, for the destruction of man. The beginning of all evil is a false thought! The source of self-deception and demonic deception is false thought! By means of a lie, the devil defeated humanity in its very roots, in its ancestors, with eternal death. Our forefathers deceived themselves, that is, they admitted a lie for the truth, injured themselves incurably with a deadly sin, which our foremother testified to. "The snake tricked me", he said, "I ate you" (Byt. 3, 13). Since then, our nature, poisoned by the poison of evil, both willingly and unwillingly strives towards evil, which is presented as good to the depraved will, to the depraved reason, and to the depraved feeling of the heart. Voluntarily - because in us there is still a remnant of freedom in the choice of good and evil. Involuntarily - for the reason that this remnant of freedom does not act as complete freedom; he acts under the inalienable influence of being wounded by sin. We are born as such; we cannot help but be like that; and that is why all of us, without any exception, are in a state of self-enchantment and demonic enchantment. From this view of the state of people in relation to good and evil, to the state that is inevitably characteristic of every human being, the following definition of delusion arises, which explains it in a completely satisfactory way: delusion is the adoption of a lie accepted as truth. Prelest first acts in the way of thinking; when it is accepted and when it perverts the way of thinking, it is immediately transferred to the heart and perverts the heart's feelings; when it takes control of a person's essence, it spills over his entire activity, leaving his poison on the body itself, which the Creator inextricably connected with the soul. The state of death is the state of perdition or eternal death. From the time of the fall of man, the devil has gained constant free access to him (quotation from the Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, in the Letter of Nicephorus the Monk, Benevolence, part 2. - Venerable Macarius the Great, Letter 7, ch. 2). The devil has the right to that approach: to his authority, namely, by obeying him, man willingly submitted, rejecting obedience to God. God redeemed man. Redeemed man was given the freedom to obey either God or the devil, and in order to exercise this freedom without coercion, the devil was given access to man. It is very natural that the devil makes every effort to keep man in his previous relationship with himself, or even to bring him to even greater slavery. For this he uses his former and everyday weapon - a lie. He seeks to deceive us and deceive us, relying on our state of self-deception; he stirs up our passions, those sick aspirations; his pernicious demands he clothes in an attractive exterior, taking care to entice us to indulge our passions. The one who is faithful to the Word of God does not allow himself such indulgence, but restrains his passions, repels the attacks of the enemy (James 4:7); acting under the guidance of the Gospel against his own self-delusion, taming his passions and thereby gradually canceling the influence of fallen spirits on him, he slowly emerges from the state of delusion into the realm of truth and freedom (John 8:32), the fullness of which is obtained by the shadowing of God's grace. The one who is not faithful to the teaching of Christ, who follows his own will and reason, submits to the enemy, loses the rest of his freedom and becomes completely subject to the devil. The state of people in demonic enchantment is very diverse, according to the passion with which a person is enchanted and enslaved, and in accordance with the degree to which a person is a slave of passion. But all those who have fallen into demonic delusion, i.e. who through the progress of their own self-delusion entered into communion with the devil and into his slavery, reside in delusion and as such are churches and instruments of demons, victims of eternal death, living in the dungeons of hell. About mental and spiritual zeal A monk should be very careful of physical and mental zeal, which outwardly appears as pious, but in essence is thoughtless and soul-destroying. Worldly people and many monastics, in their ignorance, highly praise such zeal, not realizing that its sources are self-conceit (arrogance) and pride. They glorify that zeal as zeal for faith, for blessing, for the church, for God. It consists in more or less harsh condemnation and distortion of fellow human beings because of their moral (moral) mistakes and mistakes against the church order and the rules of service or performance of rituals. Deluded by a false idea of ​​zeal, unreasonable zealots think that by devoting themselves to it, they are imitating the Holy Fathers and Martyrs, forgetting for themselves that they themselves, those zealots, are therefore not saints but sinners. If the Saints shaped the sinful and dishonorable, they did so by the command of God, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and not under the influence of their passions and demons. Whoever chooses to discredit or rebuke his brother at his own will clearly demonstrates and proves that he considers himself to be more reasonable and full of virtue than the one he portrays, that he acts under the pressure of passion and under the influence of being seduced by demonic thoughts. We should be reminded of the Savior's commandment: "Why do you see the mote in your brother's eye, but do not feel the log in your own eye? Or, how will you say to your brother: stop, let me take the mote out of your eye; and there is a log in your eye? Hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see how to take the mote out of your brother's eye" (Mt. 7, 3-5). What is a log? It is a carnal wisdom, bulky like a log, which takes away all the ability and correctness of the clairvoyant power, which the Creator gave to the mind and heart. A man who is guided by bodily wisdom is by no means capable of correctly judging either his inner state or the state of his fellow man. He judges himself and others in the way he imagines himself, and in the way he imagines others from the outside, from his carnal wisdom, wrongly: and that is why the Word of God very accurately called him a hypocrite. A Christian, after being healed by the Word of God and the Spirit of God, gains a correct view of his mental constitution and the mental constitution of his neighbors. Carnal wisdom, which strikes a neighbor prone to sin, always disturbs him, often ruins him, never brings or can bring benefits, and has no effect on sin. In contrast, spiritual wisdom acts exclusively on the spiritual weakness of the neighbor, caressing, healing and saving him. It should be noted that, after spiritual reason is acquired, the shortcomings and mistakes of the neighbor begin to seem completely unimportant, as redeemed by the Savior and easily cured by repentance - and those same mistakes and shortcomings that seemed immeasurably great and important to the carnal reason. It is obvious that the wisdom of the body, being like a log, gave them so much importance. Bodily wisdom sees in the neighbor those sins that are not there at all: for this reason, those who were carried away by unreasonable zeal often fell into slandering their neighbor and became the tool and plaything of fallen spirits. Venerable Pimen the Great narrates how a certain monk, having been carried away by zeal, fell into this temptation: he saw another monk lying on top of a woman. That monk struggled for a long time with the thought that encouraged him to stop the sinners, and in the end, defeated by it, he pushed them with his foot, exclaiming: Stop! Then it turned out that they were two bundles (Alphavitni paterik). Venerable Abba Dorotheus tells how, while he was in Abba Serida's family, a brother slandered another brother, carried away by unreasonable zeal, which is always associated with suspicion and suspicion and is very prone to fabrication: he blamed him, namely, for stealing figs from the orchard early in the morning and eating them. After the abbot conducted an investigation, it turned out that the slandered person was not in the monastery that morning, but in a nearby settlement, where he was sent by the treasurer, and that he returned to the monastery only when the Holy Liturgy was coming to an end (Ninth Lesson of Venerable Abba Dorotheus). If you want to be a faithful, zealous son of the Orthodox Church, achieve it by fulfilling the commandments of the Gospels about treating your neighbor. Don't you dare expose it to shaping! Don't you dare teach him! Don't you dare judge and rebuke him! It is not a work of faith, but of unreasonable zeal, self-conceit, pride. They asked Pimen the Great: what is faith? And the Great answered: "Faith consists in remaining in humility and doing mercy" (Alphavitni Paterik), that is, in calming down in front of our neighbors and forgiving everything with which they have grieved and offended us, all their sins. And since unreasonable zealots cite faith as the initial cause of their zeal, let them know that true faith (here we mean active faith, not dogmatic faith; on their distinction see Benevolence, part 2. Inochus Callisto and Ignatius ch. 16), and accordingly true zeal, must be expressed in humility before neighbors and mercy towards them. Let us leave the judging of people and the disfigurement of people to those who are charged with the duty of judging their brothers and governing them. "He who has false zeal," says Saint Isaac of Syria, "suffers from great weakness." Oh, man, you who think that you turn your zeal against other people's weaknesses, know that you have renounced the health of your soul! Make every effort to take care of the health of your soul. If you want to heal the weak, know that the sick need care for them more than cruel treatment. However, by not helping others, you are pushing yourself into a difficult and painful pain. That zeal in people is not considered one of the forms of wisdom, but it is counted among the weaknesses of the soul, as a sign of the scarcity of (spiritual) reason, a sign of extreme ignorance. The beginning of God's wisdom is gentleness and meekness, which are characteristic of a broad and strong soul, a very fundamental way of thinking, and which are borne by human weaknesses. "You who are strong bear the infirmities of the weak", says the Scripture (Rom.15:1), and: "He who falls into any sin, correct him in the spirit of meekness" (Gal.6:1). The Apostle counts peace and patience among the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Sermon 89). In the second sermon, Venerable Isaac says: "Do not hate the sinner, because we are all sinners." If for God's sake you rise up against a sinner, shed tears for him. And why would you hate him anyway? Hate his sins, and pray for him, and thus you will resemble Christ, Who did not resent sinners, but prayed for them. Did you not see how He wept over Jerusalem? And we in many cases serve the devil for scorn. Why do we hate the one who is mocked by the devil, when we ourselves are the object of his mockery? Why, O man, do you hate the sinner? Is it because he is not as righteous as you are? Where is your justice, when there is no love in you? Why didn't you cry for him, but drive him away? Some, who think for themselves that they are soundly judging the actions of sinners, and (on that occasion) are angry with them, do so because of their ignorance" (Slovo 90). It is a great trouble to overdo it! It is a great trouble to reject humility! A great trouble is the kind of mental constitution and state in which a monk, not being called or asked, begins to teach, to shape, to rebuke his neighbors, based on his own awareness of his worthiness! Being questioned, either withdraw to give advice and express your opinion, as one who knows nothing, or, in extreme necessity, say it with the greatest caution and modesty, so as not to injure yourself with vanity and pride, and your neighbor with a harsh and thoughtless word. When, for your work in the fortress of His commandments, God deigns you to feel the zeal of God in your soul, then you will clearly see that this zeal will encourage you to be silent and calm before your neighbors, to love them, mercy and compassion, as Saint Isaac of Syria said (Writing 38). Divine zeal is a fire, but a fire that does not inflame the blood! He extinguishes the inflammation in her and brings her to a state of tranquility (Benevolence, part 1. Conversation of Venerable Maximus Kapsokalivit with Venerable Grigori Sinaitos). The zeal of bodily wisdom is always connected with inflaming the blood, with the invasion of numerous thoughts and fantasies. The consequences of blind and untutored zeal, if a neighbor opposes it, are usually resentment, bad memory, vindictiveness in various forms, and if he obeys - vain self-satisfaction, encouragement and multiplication of our high-mindedness and arrogance. On caution when reading the fathers' books on monastic life The books of the Holy Fathers on monastic life should be read with great caution. It was noted that the novice monk is by no means capable of applying the books to his position, but that he inevitably gets carried away by the basic direction of the book. If the book offers advice on silence and shows the abundance of spiritual fruits that are gathered in the depths of the desert, the novice will inevitably have a very strong desire to withdraw into solitude, into the deserted desert. If the book talks about unconditional obedience under the guidance of a spiritual father, the desire for the strictest living in complete obedience to the elder will inevitably arise in the novice. God has not given one or the other of these ways of living to our age. But the books of the Holy Fathers, written about those ways of living, can have such a powerful effect on a beginner that, due to his inexperience and ignorance, he easily decides to leave his place of life, where he has all the conditions to be saved and to grow up spiritually by fulfilling the Gospel commandments, for the sake of the unrealizable fantasy of a perfect life, which vividly and beautifully took shape in his imagination. In the Word about silence, St. Jovan Lestvičnik says: "At the end of the table of good brotherhood, there is always a dog who tries to steal the bread, that is, the soul; then he runs away, holding him in his jaws, and devours him in a lonely place" (Slovo 27.). In a letter about obedience, this teacher of monks says: "Those who live in obedience, the devil instills a desire for impossible virtues." In the same way, he advises those who live in silence to perform feats that are not theirs. Penetrate the way of thinking of inexperienced novices, and you will find there a show born of self-enchantment: you will find a desire for the strictest silence and fasting, for prayer devoid of all wandering, for the complete absence of vanity, for the constant remembrance of death, for daily caressing, for all-perfect angerlessness, for profound silence, for extraordinary purity. Having lost themselves, such people made a huge leap in vain (passed from the fraternal community into deep solitude), not having the mentioned virtues in them from their initiation by God's special deliberation: it is their enemy scientifically to rush towards those virtues before their time, so that they would not acquire them even when the time comes. The seducer (devil) praises the foreignness of the novices before the speechless, their service, fraternal love, communality, care for the sick, in order to make the latter, as well as the former, impatient" (Letter 4). The fallen angel tries to deceive the monks and drag them into perdition, offering them not only sin in its various forms, but also presenting them with the most sublime virtues that are not characteristic of them. Don't, brothers, believe your thoughts, ideas, fantasies, aspirations, even if they seemed the best to you, and even if they showed you the brightest picture of a holy monastic life! If the family you live in gives you the opportunity to live your life according to the commandments of the Gospels, if the temptations do not lead you into mortal sins, do not leave your family. Generously bear both its spiritual and artistic shortcomings, and do not think in vain that you are looking for such a scene of exploits that God has not gifted to our age. God wants and asks that all people be saved. He always saves everyone who has the will and intention to save themselves from drowning in the sea of ​​life and sin, but He does not always save in a ship or in a convenient, well-organized pier. He promised salvation to the Holy Apostle Paul and all his companions; He granted that salvation, but the Apostle and his companions did not save themselves in the ship, which ran aground, but with great effort: some by swimming, others on planks and remnants of the ship (Acts 27, 21-44). About keeping oneself from the good that belongs to the fallen human nature If a good thought occurs to you, stop; by no means rush to turn it into a hasty, thoughtless act. If you feel a good aspiration in your heart, stop; don't you dare get carried away with her. Look in the Gospel. Judge: are your good thoughts and the good desire of your heart in agreement with the all-holy teachings of the Lord? You will soon see that there is no agreement between the good of the Gospel and the good of fallen human nature. The good of our fallen nature is mixed with evil, and therefore that good itself has become evil, just as delicious and wholesome food becomes poisonous when mixed with poison. Beware of doing good to fallen nature! By doing this well, you will discover your downfall, you will develop self-esteem and pride, and you will reach the closest resemblance to demons. On the contrary, by doing evangelical good, as a true and faithful disciple of the God-man, you will become similar to the God-man. "He who loves his life", says the Lord, "will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will save it for eternal life" (John 12:25). "Whoever wants to follow Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow Me. Because whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for the sake of Me and the Gospel will save it" (Mk. 8, 34-35). The Lord commands the complete rejection of the fallen nature, the hatred of its incentives, not only to those who are unequivocally evil, but to all without exception, and to those who show themselves to be good. It is a great trouble to follow the truth of the fallen nature: with it is connected the rejection of the Gospel, the rejection of the Redeemer, the rejection of salvation. Whoever does not hate his life cannot be My disciple (Lk.14:26), said the Lord. Explaining the mentioned words of the Lord, Varsanufius the Great states: "How does a person renounce himself? - Only by leaving natural desires and following the Lord. Therefore, the Lord is speaking here precisely about the natural, and not about the unnatural; because if someone leaves only what is not of nature, he has not yet left anything of his own, for God's sake, because what is not natural does not belong to him. And the one who left the natural always cries out with the apostle Peter: "Here we left everything and followed You; So what will happen to us?» (Mt. 19, 27-29), and hears the blessed voice of the Lord with the promise that he will inherit eternal life (Mt. 19, 27-29). What did Peter leave behind, since he was not rich, and what did he brag about, if not by abandoning his natural desires? Because if a man does not die to the body, living in the spirit, he cannot be resurrected in the soul. Just as a dead person has no natural desires at all, so there are none in one who has spiritually died to the body. If you have died to the body, how can natural desires live in you? If you have not reached the spiritual level, but you are still a child in mind, calm down before the teacher - to beat you with grace (Ps. 141, 5), and do nothing without advice (Sirach. 32, 21), even if something seemed good to you from its visible side; because the light of demons later turns into darkness» (Answer 59). The same must be said for the light of man's fallen nature. Pursuing that light and developing it within oneself in the soul produces complete darkness and completely alienates it from Christ. He who is alien to Christianity is alien to God; anyone who rejects the Son for the sake of father and mother is ungodly. In our century, proud of its progress, the majority of people, who consider themselves Christians and great benefactors, have followed the fulfillment of the justice of the fallen nature, rejecting the justice of the Gospel with contempt. Let that majority hear the judgment spoken by the Lord: "This people draws near to Me with their mouths; and he honors Me with his lips; and their heart is far from Me. But they honor Me in vain, teaching the teachings and commandments of men" (Mt. 15, 8-9). The one who creates human justice is full of doubt, high-mindedness, self-deception; he preaches, blows the trumpet in front of him, proclaims his works, not paying any attention to the prohibition pronounced by the Lord (Mt. 6, 1-18); with hatred and revenge he pays those who dare to open their mouths to oppose his justice with the greatest possible justification and benevolence; such a person considers himself worthy and worthy of all earthly and heavenly rewards. On the contrary, the one who does the commandments of the Gospel is always immersed in humility: comparing his fulfillment of the holy commandments with their exaltation and purity, he constantly realizes that this fulfillment is extremely insufficient and unworthy of God; he sees himself as someone who deserved temporary and eternal torment for his sins, for unbroken communion with Satan, for the common fall of all men, for his own abode in fallenness, and finally, for completely insufficient and often distorted execution of the commandments. In front of every suffering that is sent to him by the providence of God, he humbly bows his head, knowing that during this earthly sojourn, God teaches and shapes those who serve Him through suffering. Such a man is merciful towards his enemies and prays for them as for brothers carried away by demons, as for members of the same body, sick in spirit, as for his benefactors, as for instruments of God's providence. In order to whirl and injure the souls of men, demons resort to dreams; in the same way, inexperienced monks themselves, paying attention to their dreams, cause harm to themselves, and for this reason it is necessary to offer here a definition of the meaning of dreaming for a person whose nature has not yet been renewed by the Holy Spirit. During sleep, the state of the sleeping man was arranged by God so that the whole man is in complete rest. This rest is so complete that during sleep a person loses awareness of his existence, reaches a state of self-forgetfulness. During sleep, any work-related activity that is carried out voluntarily, under the direction of reason and will, is interrupted: only that activity that is necessary for existence remains and cannot be separated from it. In the body, the blood continues its movement, the stomach digests food, the lungs carry out the breathing process, the skin lets in vapors; thoughts, fantasies and feelings continue to multiply in the soul, but not depending on reason and will, but on the unconscious action of nature. Such fantasies, accompanied by the thoughts and feelings inherent in them, constitute dreaming. It is often strange, since it does not belong to the system of willful and deliberate imaginations and thoughts of man, but appears according to the laws and requirements of nature, according to one's own will and nature. Sometimes dreaming bears the unbound stamp of voluntary thoughts and imaginations, and sometimes it is a consequence of a moral disposition. In this way, dreaming, by itself, cannot and must not have any meaning. It is ridiculous and completely illogical the desire of individuals to see in the frenzy of their dreams a prediction of their own future or the future of others, or any meaning. How can it be that which has no reason for its existence? Demons, having access to our souls while we are awake, have access to them while we are sleeping. And during sleep they tempt us with sin, entangling their fantasies in ours. Also, if they notice that we pay attention to our dreams, they try to make our dreams more interesting, and to cause us to pay more attention to those nonsense, to gradually build our trust in them. Such trust is always associated with self-conceit, and self-conceit makes our mental view of ourselves false, due to which our entire activity becomes devoid of correctness: and this is exactly what demons need! To those who have advanced in self-conceit, demons begin to appear in the form of angels of light, in the form of martyrs and saints, and even in the form of the Mother of God and Christ Himself, praising their life, promising them heavenly crowns and thus raising them to the height of self-conceit and pride. Such a height is also a fatal precipice. We must know well that in the state in which we find ourselves, which has not yet been restored by grace, we are incapable of seeing other dreams except those produced by the frenzy of the soul and the attacks of demons. Just as during the waking state thoughts and fantasies from the fallen nature constantly appear in us, or they are brought by demons, so during sleep we only see fantasies due to the action of the fallen nature and the action of demons. Just as our comfort during wakefulness consists of compassion that is born from the knowledge of our sins, the memory of death and the judgment of God - only that these thoughts appear in us from the grace of God that dwells in us, which was implanted in our being by holy baptism, and are brought by the Angels of God, in accordance with our penitent state, so also in a dream, very rarely, in the last resort, the Angels of God present to us either the end of our life, or the torment of hell, or the terrible judgment on death and after death. From such dreams we come to the fear of God, to pity, to weeping over ourselves. But such dreams are given to an ascetic, and even an obvious, great sinner, very rarely, according to a particular unknowable providence of God; and they are given very rarely, not because of the stinginess of Divine grace towards us - no!, but for the reason that everything that happens to us outside of the usual order leads us to self-delusion and shakes our humility, which is so necessary for our salvation. The will of God, in the fulfillment of which man's salvation is, is set forth in the Holy Scriptures so clearly, so strongly, in such detail, that any support for human salvation by disrupting the general order becomes completely superfluous and unnecessary. The dead man who begged to be resurrected and sent to the brothers to guide them to cross from the broad to the narrow path was told: "They have Moses and the prophets: let them listen to them." When the petitioner objected: "No, Father Abraham, but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent", he received the answer: "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, if someone rises from the dead, they will not be convinced" (Lk. 16, 27, 31). Experience has shown that many who were worthy of seeing publicans, the terrible judgment and other horrors of the afterlife in a dream were shaken by that vision for a short time, and then succumbed to distraction, forgot about what they saw and spent their lives in negligence; on the contrary, those who did not have any visions, but were diligently instructed in the law of God, gradually came to the fear of God, reached spiritual progress and in the joy, which is born from the testimony of salvation, passed from this earthly valley of suffering to a blessed eternity. St. Jovan Lestvičnik thinks about the participation of demons in monastic dreams as follows: "When, having left our home and our relatives for the sake of God, out of love for God we commit ourselves to alienation, then the demons, being holy for this, try to trouble us with dreams, showing us our relatives crying, or dying, or suffering in captivity and suffering temptations because of us. He who believes in dreams is like a man who runs after his shadow and tries to catch it. Demons of vanity in dreams turn into prophets, predicting the future by their cunning, and making it known to us, so that, after the visions come true, we would reach a state of doubt and be taken over by thought, as if we were already close to the gift of prediction. For those who believe in him, the demon is often a prophet, and for those who do not value him, he is always a lie. As a spirit, he sees what is going on in the expanses of the air, and, realizing that someone is dying, he makes it known to a light-hearted man in a dream. Demons do not know anything about what will happen in the future according to the prediction, otherwise even the sorcerers could predict our death. Demons take the form of angels of light, often the figure of martyrs, and in dreams they show us our communion with them, and when we wake up they cause us joy and exaltation. Let this be an indication of prelesta (demonic deception). The Holy Angels show us torment, judgment, death, which is why, when we wake up, we are filled with trembling and sorrow. If we start obeying the demons in our dreams, they will start mocking us in the waking state as well. He who believes in dreams is completely inexperienced, and he who does not believe in any dream is truly wise. Believe only in those dreams that inform you of torment and judgment; if, however, despair begins to disturb you because of them, know that those dreams are also from demons" (St. Jovan Lestvičnik, Addendum to Letter 3). - Venerable Cassian the Roman tells about a certain monk, a native of Mesopotamia, who lived a very lonely and ascetic life, but fell because he was fascinated by demonic dreams. Namely, seeing that that monk paid little attention to his spiritual development, instead he focused all his attention on the physical feat, giving it, and accordingly to himself, a great value, the demons began to show him such dreams which, due to the evil cunning of the demon, came true in action. When the monk established his faith in dreams and trust in himself, the devil showed him in a beautiful dream the Judeans enjoying heavenly bliss and the Christians suffering in the torments of hell. At the same time, the demon, of course, in the guise of an angel or some kind of Old Testament righteous person, advised the monk to accept the Jewish faith in order to get the opportunity to be a participant in the blessings of the Jews, which he did without any hesitation (Word of Reasoning. Benevolence, part 6). - What has been said is enough to explain to our beloved brothers, today's monks, how unreasonable it is to pay attention to dreams, and especially to believe in them, and how terrible damage can result from believing in them. Paying attention to dreams inevitably leads to belief in them, and that is why such attention is strictly prohibited. Nature, renewed by the Holy Spirit, is governed by completely different laws than nature that has fallen and is sinking ever deeper in its fall. The ruler in the renewed man is the Holy Spirit. "On such, the grace of the Divine Spirit shined", said Venerable Macarius the Great, "and settled in the depth of their mind: so the Lord is like a soul to them" (Letter 7, ch. 12). Both in the waking state and in sleep, they dwell in the Lord, beyond sin, beyond earthly and carnal thoughts and fantasies. Their thoughts and imaginations, which during sleep are beyond the control of human reason and will, and which act in other people without the participation of consciousness, according to the demands of nature, in such people act according to the guidance of the Spirit, and the dreams of such people have a spiritual meaning. Thus the righteous Joseph was taught the secret of the incarnation of God the Logos in a dream; in a dream he was commanded to flee to Egypt and to return from it (Mt. 1 and Mt. 2). The dreams that God sends have an indisputable persuasiveness. This persuasiveness is comprehensible to the Saints of God and unfathomable to those who are still struggling with the passions. In the previous chapter, we called the spiritual life that was given to our age by the Providence of God as grains. It is based on the guidance of the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Holy Fathers in the work of salvation, along with advice and lessons taken from fathers and brothers who are our contemporaries. In the essential sense, it is obedience to the ancient monks, but in a different form, adapted to our weakness, primarily mental. To the ancient novices, their spiritual teachers announced the will of God without hesitation or hesitation: now the monks are obliged to search for the will of God themselves in the Scriptures, and because of this they often and for a long time remain in doubt and make mistakes. Then progress was rapid in its nature of action; now it is sluggish, again in the nature of action. Such is God's favor towards us: we are obliged to obey him, and to worship him tremblingly with gratitude. Our today's monastic life according to the Scriptures and the advice of the Fathers and brothers is sanctified by the example of the head of monasticism, Venerable Anthony the Great. He was not in obedience to the old man, but as a novice he lived separately, and took lessons from the Scriptures and from various Fathers and brothers: from one he learned self-restraint, from another - meekness, patience, humility, from another strict watch over himself, more silent, trying to accept for himself the virtue of every virtuous monk, being obedient to everyone as much as possible, being calm in front of everyone and constantly praying to God (Chetji Mineji, January 17). If you are a novice, do the same! To the abbot and others from the monastery's administration, show non-hypocritical and inhumane obedience, obedience free from flattery and reticence, obedience for the sake of God. Be obedient to all these and the brothers in what they command you, if it is not contrary to the Law of God, the type and order in the monastery accepted and the decisions of the monastery administration. But by no means be obedient to evil, even if it happened to you that because of your unwillingness to please people and because of your firmness you suffer some grief. Consult with virtuous and sensible fathers and brothers, but take their advice with extreme caution and prudence. Don't get carried away with advice based on its initial effect on you! Because of your passion and blindness, some passionate and harmful advice can only be appealing to you because of your ignorance and inexperience, or because it pleases some hidden passion that resides in you without you knowing it. With tears and sighs of the heart, pray to God that He will not allow you to move away from His all-holy will in order to follow the fallen human will, yours or your neighbor's, who advises you. As with your thoughts, so also with the thoughts of your neighbor, with his advice, take counsel with the Gospel. Vanity and self-consciousness love to teach and instruct. They don't care about the value of their advice! They don't think that they can inflict an incurable wound on their loved ones with some kind of ugly advice that an inexperienced novice will accept with absolute trust, burning with flesh and blood! They need success, regardless of its quality, regardless of its foundation! It is necessary for them to make an impression on the newcomers and to subordinate them morally! They need human praise! They need to be known as holy, reasonable, transparent elders, teachers! They need to feed their insatiable vanity, their pride. The Prophet's prayer has always been true, and especially now: "Help, Lord; because the Holy One has disappeared, because there are few more faithful among the sons of men. They speak lies to one another, with lying lips they speak from the heart of hypocrisy" (Ps. 12, 1-2). The word lying and duplicitous cannot but be evil and harmful. It is necessary to take precautionary measures against such an attitude. "Study the Holy Scriptures," says Simeon the New Theologian, "and the writings of the Holy Fathers, especially the active ones, so that, by comparing the teaching and behavior of your teacher and the elder with them, you can see them (that teaching and behavior) as in a mirror and understand them, and so that you can adopt and keep in mind what is in agreement with the Scriptures, and what you know and reject as false and evil, so that you will not be deceived. Know that many deceivers and false teachers have appeared in our days" (Chap. 33, Benevolence, part 1.). Venerable Simeon lived in the tenth century after the birth of Christ, nine centuries before our era; that's when the voice of the righteous in the holy Church of Christ was already heard about the lack of true, spiritual leaders, about the multitude of false teachers. As a result, there were fewer and fewer satisfactory teachers of monks. Then the Holy Fathers began to increasingly suggest the guidance of the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers. Venerable Neil Sorsky, referring to the Fathers who wrote before him, says: "It is no small feat, they said, to find an unfazed teacher for this miraculous work (a true monastic prayer of the heart and mind). They called the unenlightened the one who possesses the action and reasoning attested by the Holy Scriptures and who has acquired spiritual discernment. And the Holy Fathers also said that even then it was hardly possible to find an unfazed teacher in such matters; now, however, when there are very few of them left, you should look for them with great care. If such a person is not found, the Holy Fathers commanded that the Lord Himself be obeyed, Who says: Search the Scriptures, and in them you will find eternal life (John 5:39). Because whatever was written earlier in the Holy Scriptures was written for our instruction (Rom.15:4)" (Preface to the Constitution or Tradition). Venerable Nile lived in the 15th century; he founded a hermitage not far from White Lake, where he engaged in prayer in complete seclusion. It is also useful to listen to the sayings of the elders of recent times, with what humility and self-denial Venerable Neil speaks about the lessons he bequeathed to his brothers: "No one must hide the word of God due to his own negligence, but must admit his weakness and at the same time not hide the truth of God, so that we do not become guilty of transgressing God's commandments. Let's not keep the word of God in secret, let's make it known. The books of Saint Piem and the words of the Holy Fathers are as numerous as the sand of the sea: researching them with fervor, we pass them on to those who come to us and need them (those who seek and ask). More precisely: we do not transmit them, because we are not worthy of it, but the blessed Holy Fathers transmit them from the Holy Scriptures» (Tradition of Venerable Nilo Sorski). It will not be out of place to note here that Venerable Nilus Sorski, although he had the grace of God, did not dare to interpret the Scriptures arbitrarily, but followed the explanations of the Fathers. The path of calmness is the only correct path to salvation. Here is an outstanding template for modern teaching! It is completely soul-beneficial for the one who leads spiritually and the one who is being led, it is the correct expression and reflection of moderate progress, it is connected with the rejection of self-conceit, foolish recklessness and impudence, into which those who outwardly imitate Varsanufius the Great and other notable Fathers, without the grace of the Father, fall into. What in the Fathers was an expression of the overabundant presence of the Holy Spirit in them, is in the case of unreasonable and hypocritical epigones an expression of enormous ignorance, self-deception, pride, and insolence. Beloved fathers! We will speak the word of God to our brothers with all humility and trembling, being aware that we are not up to this kind of service and guarding ourselves from vanity, which greatly annoys people filled with passions, when such people teach their brothers. Think that we are obliged to give an answer for every empty word (Mt. 12, 36), so the answer is all the more difficult for the word of God spoken with vanity and encouraged by vanity. "The Lord will destroy all lying mouths, proud tongues, people who say: we are strong with our tongue, our mouth is in us, who is the master over us?" (Ps. 12, 3-4). The Lord will exterminate those who seek their own glory, not God's. Let's be afraid of the threat of God! Let's say the word of edification in case of essential necessity, not as teachers, but as those who themselves need instruction and who strive to become partakers of the instruction that God provides in His all-holy word. "Each of you has received a gift of grace", says Saint Peter the Apostle, "serve one another with it, as good stewards of God's manifold grace." If anyone speaks, let him speak as the words of God; if one serves, let him serve as according to the power that God gives; that in everything God is glorified through Jesus Christ" (1 Pet. 4, 10-11). He who works from himself, works for vanity's sake, and offers both himself and those who listen to him as a sacrifice to Satan; whoever works for the Lord, works for the glory of the Lord, perfects his salvation and the salvation of his neighbors through the Lord, the only Savior of people. Let's be afraid not to give the novice some kind of thoughtless instruction, which is not based on the word of God and on the spiritual understanding of the word of God. It is better to admit ignorance than to express soul-destroying knowledge. Let's save ourselves from great trouble - to turn a gullible novice from a servant of God into a servant of people (1 Cor. 7, 23), encouraging him to do the fallen will of man instead of the all-holy will of God (here we are not talking about the external obedience of the monastery, about the labors and tasks of the monastery determined by the management of the family, but about the natural, hidden obedience, which is perfected in the soul). The advice does not imply a condition that it must be carried out; it can be acted upon or not acted upon. The adviser has no responsibility for the advice, if he gave it with the fear of God and a calm mind, not of his own volition, but after being asked and prompted. Also, he who has received advice is not constrained by it; according to his will and judgment, it remains for him to fulfill or not fulfill the advice received. It is obvious that the path of advice and following the Holy Scriptures is appropriate for our weak time. We will notice that the Fathers forbid giving advice to one's neighbor out of one's own motives, without asking the neighbor; arbitrarily giving advice shows that we consider ourselves to possess spiritual knowledge and spiritual worthiness - which is open pride and self-admiration (opinion of the Holy Martyr Peter, Metropolitan of Damascus, and other Fathers. Benevolence, part 3.). This does not apply to supervisors and managers, who are obliged to teach the brotherhood entrusted to them at all times, with every need that is encountered, and without question (2 Tim. 4:2). However, when visiting other monasteries, they are obliged to follow the advice of the Venerable Makarios of Alexandria to the Venerable Pachomius the Great. Pachomius, in fact, asked Macarius about teaching the brothers and judging them. Abba Makarije answered: "Teach those who are subordinate to you and judge them, and do not judge anyone from outside" (Alphabetni paterik and Praise worthy of telling about Abba Makarije Gradski, ch. 2). All aspirants who want to please God followed and follow this rule. Let it not be hidden from the beloved brothers that the most sublime forms of monastic life, specifically - anchorite asceticism in the depths of the desert or silence in prison, as well as living with a spiritual old man with unconditional obedience to him, are not arranged by mere chance, not by human will and reason, but by a special forethought, determination, calling and revelation of God. Anthony the Great, the leader of the monasticism, the founder of hermitage, went away into the desert when he had already clothed himself with power from on high, and in no other way than at the call of God. And although it is not clearly stated in his life, the later events of his life clearly confirm it. The fact that he was directed to the most hidden (inner) desert for perfect silence by the voice of God and His command is told in the life of the ascetic (Life of Venerable Anthony the Great. Chetji Minei for January 17 and Vitae Ratrum Patrologiae, T. LHHVI). A Cherub appeared to Venerable Macarius the Great, a contemporary of Venerable Antony, a little younger than him, showed him a barren wasteland - later the famous Egyptian hermitage, commanded him to settle there and promised that the desolate plain would be filled with multitudes of hermits (Alphabetni paterik). Arsenius the Great, being in the imperial palaces, prayed to God to show him the way of salvation and heard a voice: "Arsenius! Run away from people and you will be saved!» Arsenius went away to the aforementioned Skit, there he prayed again and again to God to guide him to salvation, and again he heard a voice: "Arsenius! Run away (from people), be silent, keep quiet: these are the roots of sinlessness» (Alphavitni Paterik and Memories worth telling). Venerable Mary the Egyptian was called to hermitage in the Transjordan desert by God's command (Thursday Minei for April 1). God, calling His chosen ones to silence and asceticism, gave them such help and means for such a life, which man cannot have by himself. Even in the heyday of monasticism, when there were many spiritual leaders, there were few who were capable of silence, and especially of asceticism. "True, reasonable silence," says St. Jovan Lestvičnik, "can only be performed by a few, and only those who have acquired Divine comfort, which strengthens them in their exploits and helps them in battles" (Letter 4, ch. 120). "Silence destroys the inexperienced" (Slovo 27, ch. 5). Prisoners and hermits often endured the greatest mental troubles; hardships were suffered by those among them who entered prison of their own free will, without receiving a summons from God. In the Prologue we read the following story: in Palestine there was a monastery at the foot of a large and high rock, and in the rock above the monastery there was a cave. The monks of that monastery narrated: "Some time ago, one (monk) from our brotherhood wanted to live in a cave, which is in a hill, and begged the abbot to allow him. The abbot had the gift of reasoning. He said to his brother: "My son, how do you want to live alone in a cave, when you have not yet mastered the passionate thoughts of the body and soul? He who wishes to be silent must be under the guidance of a teacher, and must not govern himself. And you, although you have not in the least reached the required measure, beg my poverty to allow you to live alone in the cave; I don't think you understand all kinds of diabolical networks. It is far better for you to serve your fathers, to obtain help from God through their prayers, to praise and sing praises to the Ruler of all with us at certain times, than to fight alone with dishonorable and malicious (insidious) thoughts. Haven't you heard what the God-speaking Father Jovan, the writer of the Ladder, says: » Woe to the one who lives alone, because if he falls into laziness or laziness, there is no one to lift him up! And where two or three are gathered in My name, there I am among them, said the Lord". That's what the abbot told him, but he was unable to dissuade him from his soul-destroying thoughts. Seeing the great desire of the brother and his unyielding prayer, the abbot finally allowed him to live in the cave. Followed by the abbot's prayer, he climbed into the cave. One of the monastery's brothers brought him food, during the hours of taking it, and the prisoner had a cart on a rope, which he lowered and thus took the food. When he spends some time in the cave, the devil, who is always at war with those who want to live pleasing to God, begins to trouble him with evil thoughts day and night; after a few days passed, transforming into a light-bearing angel, he appeared to him and said: "Let it be known to you that the Lord has sent me to serve you for the sake of your purity and living a virtuous life." And the monk will say: "What good did I do that the angels would serve me?" The devil retorted: "Everything you have done is great and sublime." You left the beauties of the world and became a monk, you strive in fasting, prayers and vigil; again, leaving the monastery, you chose to live here: so how could the angels not serve your shrine?» With those words, the soul-destroying snake drove him to arrogance, to pride, and began to appear to him constantly. On one occasion, a man, who had been robbed by thieves, went to a monk. The impure demon, who appeared to him in the form of an angel, looking at him, said to him: "Thieves stole that man; the stolen things are hidden in such and such a place: tell him to go there and take what is his». Having reached the cave, the man bowed, and the monk from above said to him: "It is good, brother, that you have come! I know: trouble befell you, because robbers were with you, and they stole this and that from you. Don't be sad! They left everything they stole in such and such a place: go there and you will find it all, and pray for me." The man was surprised, listened to him and found the stolen item. He celebrated the monk throughout that country, saying that the monk who lives in the cave is a prophet. Many people began to flock to him: listening to him, they were wild about the teaching that he was proclaiming under the influence of the devil. He predicted what would happen, and his predictions came true. And the unfortunate man spends a lot of time in such beauty. On the second day of the second week after the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, an unclean demon appeared to the monk and said: "Know, father, that because of your blameless and equally angelic life, other angels will come and take you in the body to heaven: there, with all the angels, you will enjoy seeing the indescribable beauty of the Lord." Saying this, the demon became invisible. But the philanthropic and merciful God, who does not want human destruction, put it in the heart of the monk to tell the abbot about what happened. When the prisoner's brother came to bring him food, he peeked out of the cave and said: "Brother! Go, tell the abbot to come here." The brother conveyed it to the abbot. The abbot hastened to come; climbed the ladder to the prisoner and asked him: "Why did you tell me to come here, my son?" He answered: "How would I repay you, holy father, for everything you did to my unworthiness!" The abbot said to that: "And what good have I done to you?" Monk: "Truly, father, through your intercession, I have become worthy of many and great goods." You clothed me in an angelic face; through your intercession I see the angels and I am worthy to communicate with them; through your mediation I received the gift of transparency and prophesy". - Hearing that, the abbot was amazed and said: "Unfortunate man! Can you see angels? Do you deserve the gift of transparency? Woe to you, coward! Didn't I tell you: don't go into the cave, lest you be overtaken by demons". While the abbot spoke to him like this, his brother opposed him: "Don't speak like that, venerable father! Because of your holy prayers I see angels: tomorrow they will take me to heaven with my body. Let it be known to your holiness that I want to pray to the Lord our God that the angels take you too, so that you too may dwell with me in heavenly glory". Hearing this, the abbot told him sternly: "You are haunted by demons, you coward! And yet, if I have already come here, I will not leave this place, I will stay for a while to see what will happen to you. I will not see the unclean demons, which you call angels, but when you see them come, tell me." The abbot ordered the ladder to be removed, and he remained in the cave with the bewitched, dwelling in fasting and continuous psalm singing. When the hour arrived in which the bewitched hoped to be taken to heaven, he saw the demons that came to him and said: "Here they are, father!" Then the abbot embraced him and cried: "Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, help Your servant who has fallen and do not allow impure demons to rule over him!". While the abbot was speaking, the demons grabbed and began to drag the bewitched, trying to tear him from the abbot's embrace. But the abbot threatened them, and they, taking off the mantle from the bewitched man, disappeared. It was seen how the mantle was raised in the air to a height and how it finally hid itself. After a long time passed, the mantle appeared again, this time flying down and falling to the ground. Then the old man said to the bewitched: "Fool and coward! Do you see how the demons have done with your mantle? They intended to treat you in the same way. They wanted to lift you up into the air, like Simon the Volhva (sorcerer), and throw you down, so that you would break down and ruin your poor soul." The abbot called the monks, ordered them to bring a ladder, lowered the bewitched man from the cave into the monastery and ordered him to serve in the bakery, in the kitchen and at other monastery hearings, so that his thoughts would calm down. In this way, he saves his brother" (Prologue, January 9th). Our compatriots, Venerable Isaakije (Paterik Pecherski and Chetji Mineji for February 14) and Nikita (Paterik Pecherski and Chetji Mineji for January 31) Pecherski, were also subjected to a difficult trial due to premature imprisonment. From the biography of Venerable Isaaki, a contemporary of Venerable Antony and Theodosius, it can be seen that he entered prison of his own free will. Namely, he was going through a very strenuous physical feat; the pursuit of an even more strenuous feat prompted him to shut himself up in one of the smallest caves of the Pechersk Monastery in Kiev. His food was prosphora, and his drink was water, and he took that very meager food every other day. In such a strenuous physical feat and in the absence of experiential knowledge about mental feat and spiritual struggle, it is not possible not to pay something for your feat. The temptation brought upon him by demons is usually based on the inner disposition of the ascetic. "If a person", says Venerable Macarius of Egypt, "by himself does not give Satan a reason to subject him to his influence, Satan will not be able to forcibly control him in any way" (Letter 4, ch. 12). The demons appeared to Isaac in the form of shining angels, one brighter than the other; they called him Christ and demanded that the ascetic bow to them. By bowing down, which should only be done to God, and which he offered to the devil, the ascetic submitted to the demons, who tormented him with violent body movements (playing) almost to death. Venerable Anthony, who served the prisoner, came to him with the usual food, but seeing that the prisoner did not make a sound and realizing that something strange had happened to him, with the help of other monks broke open the entrance to Isaac's cave, which was completely closed; they carried him out as a dead man and laid him in front of the cave, but when they noticed that he was alive, they carried him to the cell on the bed. Venerable Antonius and Theodosius followed him, one behind the other. Isaacius was weakened in mind and body by the ordeal: he could neither stand, nor sit, nor, lying down, turn from one side to the other; for two years he lay motionless, mute and deaf. In the third year he spoke, begging to be picked up and put on his feet. Then he started learning to walk, like a child, but he didn't want anything, he didn't even think of visiting church; they hardly persuaded him to do so, and he started going to the church of God little by little. After that, he started going to the dining room, and gradually learned to eat; during those two years, while he lay motionless, he tasted neither bread nor water. In the end, he is completely freed from the terrible and strange impression caused by the manifestation and action of the demon in him. Later, Venerable Isaakije reached a high degree of sanctity. Venerable Nikita was younger than Venerable Isaaki, but he was his contemporary. Driven by zeal, he asked the abbot to give him a blessing for asceticism in prison. The abbot (and at that time it was Venerable Nikon) defended him, saying: "My son! It is not useful for you, the future youth, to dwell in vanity. It is better for you to live with your brothers: by serving them, you will not lose your salary. You yourself know how Isaac the caveman was haunted by demons in prison; and he would have perished, had it not been for the special grace of God, which, through the prayers of our Venerable Fathers Antony and Theodosius, saved him". Nikita answered and said: "I will by no means delight in anything like that; my desire, on the contrary, is to stand firmly against the traps of the demons and I ask the human-loving God to grant me the gift of miracle-working, like Isaac the prisoner, who even to this day performs many miracles". The abbot said again: "Your desire exceeds your powers; be careful not to crush yourself when you get too high. I, on the other hand, command you to serve your brothers, so you will receive a crown from God for your obedience". Nikita, carried away by a very strong zeal for prison life, did not want to pay any attention to what the abbot was telling him. He fulfilled his plan: he locked himself up and stayed in prison, praying and never going out. After some time had passed, while he was praying, he heard a voice praying with him, and he smelled some kind of unusual smell. Confused, he said to himself: "If it wasn't an angel, you wouldn't pray with me, and you wouldn't feel the peace of the Holy Spirit." Then Nikita began to pray fervently, saying: "Lord, appear to me alone, that I may see You." And I heard a voice: "You are young, I will not contact you, so that you do not become exalted and then fall." The prisoner answered with tears: "Lord! I won't be charmed by any means, because the abbot taught me not to pay attention to demonic charms; but I will do whatever you command me." Then the soul-destroying snake, having gained power over him, said: "It is not possible for a man, while he is in the body, to see me." But behold, I am sending my angel to dwell with you: fulfill his will". With those words, a demon in the form of an angel appeared before the prisoner. Nikita fell at his feet, bowing to him like an angel. The demon said: "From now on, don't pray anymore, just read books; by doing so, you will enter into constant communion with God and you will gain the opportunity to convey a soul-beneficial word to those who come to you, and I will constantly pray to the Creator of all for your salvation. Believing those words, the prisoner was even more moved: he stopped praying and started reading; he saw the demon praying without ceasing, and he rejoiced, thinking that it was an angel praying for him. Then he began to talk a lot with those who came to him about the Scriptures and to preach like a prisoner of Palestine. He became famous among the laity and at the court of the grand duke. He didn't actually prophesy, but told the visitors where the stolen things were hidden, where something happened far from his place, and all this was reported to him by the demon who lived with him. In our time in Moscow, in a home for the insane, there lived a similar prophet, who was flocked by many curious people. That prophet's name was Ivan Yakovlevich. Some Muscovites visited a monk in a small remote monastery and began to praise their prophet in front of him. They said that they were convinced of his gift of clairvoyance from their own experience, when they asked him about a relative of theirs who was imprisoned in Nerčinsk. Ivan Jakovljevic did not answer for almost an hour. When they started begging him to hurry, he asked them: "Is that Nerchinsk far from here?" They answered him: "More than six thousand species." - "So how can I run so fast there!" - protested the prophet. The answer he then gave was that the prisoner's legs were in wounds. After some time, those who inquired received a letter from a relative from Nerčinsk, in which he described the gravity of his position and mentioned that the bukagies made bloody wounds on his legs. "Imagine how transparent Ivan Jakovljevic is!" - these Muscovites ended their story with such an exclamation. The monk answered them: "There is no such transparency; it is an obvious communication with fallen souls. The Holy Spirit does not need time: He reveals earthly and heavenly secrets in an instant. Ivan Yakovlevich sent the demon who lived with him from Moscow to Nerchinsk, and he delivered unimportant, artificial information, which satisfied the prophet's vanity and the curiosity of carnal people who turned to him with a question. The Holy Spirit always makes known something spiritual, soul-saving, daily necessary, and the fallen spirit - something physical, because after the fall it wallows in sinful passions and artificiality". As an example of the action and character of God-given transparency, we will cite an extraordinary event from church history. Saint Athanasius the Great, Archbishop of Alexandria, telling Bishop Ammonius about his escape from Emperor Julian the Apostate (Apostate), states: "At that time I saw great men of God, Theodore, the abbot of the Tavenisiot monks, and Pamon, the abbot of the monks who lived in the vicinity of Antinoia. Intending to hide myself with Theodore, I entered his boat, which was concealed on all sides; Pamon went along with us guided by a sense of respect. The wind was not favorable; I prayed with anguish in my heart; Theodore's monks, having come ashore, pulled the boat. Ava Pamon, seeing my sadness, comforted me. I told him: believe me that there is not as much courage in my heart in times of peace as in times of persecution; for, suffering for Christ and being strengthened by His grace, I hope to obtain great mercy from Him there, even if they kill me. I didn't have time to finish, and Theodore looked at Abba Pamon and smiled; Pamon also looked back and a smile appeared on his face. Kazah: "Why do you laugh at my words, so that you don't think that I am afraid?" Theodore, turning to Pamon, said: "Tell the Patriarch what is the reason for our laughter." Pamon answered: "It's up to you to do it." Then Theodore said: "At this time, Julian was killed in Persia, as God foretold for him: "As wine deceives, so is a man proud, nor does he stay in the house; because he spreads out his spirit like a grave, and it is like death, which cannot be satisfied" (Avv. 2:5). A Christian emperor will rise, a virtuous but short-lived husband. So don't go to Tivaida, don't make an effort, but go secretly to meet the new emperor: you will meet him on the way, he will receive you very kindly, and you will return to your Church, and God will soon take him from this life. Everything happened like that" (Sancti Athanasii opera omnia, torn. 2:979-982). ...So he informed Grand Duke Izyaslav about the murder of Novgorod Prince Gleb, and advised him to send the Grand Duke's son to Novgorod to the throne. This was enough for the lay people to declare the prisoner a prophet. It has been noticed that the laity, and even the monks themselves, who have no spiritual reasoning, are almost always carried away by deceivers, hypocrites, those who dwell in demonic beauty, respecting them as holy and benevolent. No one could compare with Nikita in terms of knowledge of the Old Testament; but he did not tolerate the New Testament, he never based his sermons on the Gospel and the Apostolic Epistles, nor would he allow any of his visitors to remind him of something from the New Testament. By this strange orientation of his teachings, the fathers from the Pechersky Monastery in Kiev understood that it was about being possessed by a demon. At that time there were many holy monks in the monastery, decorated with grace gifts; with their prayer they drove the demon away from Nikita, and Nikita stopped seeing him. The fathers brought Nikita out of prison and asked him to tell them anything from the Old Testament; but he insisted, under oath, that he had never even read those books which he had previously learned by heart. It turned out that because of the impression made on him by the demon's charm, he forgot even to read, and they barely taught him to read again, with great effort. Having come to himself through the prayers of the Holy Fathers, he knows and confesses his sin, weeps over it with bitter tears, reaches a high degree of holiness and acquires the gift of miracle-working by living calmly among the brothers. Later, Saint Nikita will be ordained as the bishop of Novgorod. More recent experiences also confirm what experiences from earlier times clearly prove. Even today, delusion - and this is what the monastic language calls self-deception combined with demonic deception - is an inevitable consequence of premature removal into deep seclusion or a special feat in the seclusion of a cell. At the time when the author of these ascetic advices, still as a young man, in 1824-25. year, went to the Lavra of St. Alexander Nevsky in order to consult with the monk Ioanniki, otherwise a student of the elders Theodore and Leonid, about their thoughts, many lay people who led an ascetic life flocked to that monk for spiritual advice (the monk Ioanniki was Teodorov's nephew; after Theodore's death, he did not stop communicating with Leonid and later, in order to live with him, he moved to the Optina monastery). Private Pavel from the Pavlovsk regiment, a recent convert from the schism, also came to him; he was literate, and had previously been a teacher of schismatics. Pavlov's face shone with joy. However, due to the very strong zeal that was kindled in him, he gave himself to an immoderate physical feat, inconsistent with his calling, not having a valid and sufficient idea of ​​a mental feat. One night, Pavel stood praying. Suddenly, a kind of light like sunlight appeared near the icons, and in the middle of that light, a bright white dove. A voice came to him from the pigeon: "Take me! I am the Holy Spirit; I went to make you my abode". Pavel happily agreed. The pigeon entered him through his mouth, and Pavle, exhausted from fasting and vigil, suddenly felt in him an insatiable lustful passion. He left the prayer and hurried to the house of fornication. His hungry passion made him unable to quench it. All the brothels and all the harlots he could approach became his permanent refuge. In the end he came to his senses. He explained his bewitchment by demonic apparitions and the defilement due to the consequences of the bewitchment in a letter to Jeroshimonk Leonid, who was then living in the monastery of Prep. Alexander Svirski. The letter reflected the previous, high spiritual state of this fallen order. The mentioned young man was then a chaplain of Jeroshimonah Leonidas (1827-28), and with the blessing of the Elder, he read Paul's letter. In the spring of 1828, Jeroshimonak Leonid moved from the Prep Monastery. Aleksandra, first to Ploščanski, and then to Optin Monastery. He was accompanied by his chaplain, who on that occasion also visited some monasteries in the Kaluga and Oryol dioceses. He also stayed in the famous Belobreš monastery, where the Rasoforian monk Serapion became famous for his ascetic life, who was honored to see an angel while practicing his cell rule. Not only the laity, but also the monks glorified Serapion and cited him as an example of monastic life, because here in Russia the most important thing is the physical feat, and the idea of ​​the mental is almost lost. In 1829, due to a mental disorder, Serapion was transferred to the Optina Monastery, in order to be guided by the advice of Jeroshimonak Leonidas. In one conversation with an old man, Serapion happens to pull out a large part of his beard. Due to the appreciation of his ascetic fame, he was placed in the hermitage of the Optina Monastery. One night, Serapion came to the head of the skete, hieromonk Antony, announcing that John the Forerunner had just appeared to him and ordered to slaughter him - Antony, jeroshimonak Leonid, jeroshimonak Gavril and the spachius of Željabovski, who was then staying in the skete as a guest. "And where is your knife?" - asked the perceptive and fearless Antony. "I don't have it," answered the delighted. "So you're coming to slaughter without a knife?", said Antonius, and removed the bewitched man to the cell; he had to be committed to an insane asylum, where he died. We know that before his death, Serapion called to himself and left with the hope of salvation. It should be noted that the burning spirit, wanting to control the Christ's uplifter, does not act violently, but tries to obtain the consent of the person to receive the offered charm, and when he receives this consent, he controls the one who expressed it. Describing the attack of the fallen angel on man, Saint David expressed himself very precisely, saying: «He sits in ambush to catch the poor; he catches the poor, drawing him into his net" (Ps. 10, 9). The Holy Spirit acts autonomously, as God; He comes at a moment when a man who has filled himself with humility and who has humbled himself does not expect His coming at all, and suddenly changes his mind and heart. By His action, He takes over the entire will and overall abilities of man, who does not have the opportunity to think about the action that is perfected in him. Dwelling in someone, grace does not show anything common or sensible, but secretly teaches a person what he has never seen or imagined before. Then the mind is secretly taught sublime and hidden secrets, which, according to St. Paul, the human eye cannot see, nor is the mind known by itself... The human mind, by itself, not being united with the Lord, judges by its own power; when he unites with the fire of the Divinity and with the Holy Spirit, he is completely engulfed by the Divine Light, he becomes all light, burns in the flame of the All-Holy Spirit, is filled with Divine reason, and in the flame of the Divinity it is not even possible for him to think about his own, and about what he would like". This is how Venerable Maxim Kapsokalivitus spoke to Venerable Grigori Sinaitus (Benevolence, part 1). Conversely, during a demonic apparition, a person is always given the freedom to judge about that apparition, to accept or reject it. It stems from the demon's attempt to encroach on the Holy of God. Jedared, when Venerable Pachomius the Great was living in seclusion far from the everyday life of the monastery, the devil appeared to him in a great light, saying: "Rejoice, Pachomius! I am Christ, and behold, I have come to you as my friend". The saint, thinking to himself, thought: "Christ's visit must be accompanied by joy, far from fear." At that moment, all human thoughts disappear: then the mind immerses itself in seeing what is presented to it. But I am filled with confusion and fear as I look at this one who appeared to me. It is not Christ, but Satan". After thinking like this, the Venerable boldly said to the apparition: "Get away from me, devil! Cursed are you, and your vision, and the insidiousness of your cunning ideas". The devil disappeared instantly, filling the cell with stench (Chetji Mineji, May 15). A man who is still in the realm of carnal wisdom, who has not yet acquired a spiritual view of fallen human nature, cannot but exalt his actions and recognize a certain value and importance to himself, no matter how calm the man utters and how calm he may appear from the outside. True humility is not characteristic of carnal wisdom and is not possible for it: humility is a property of spiritual reason. Venerable Marko Podvnžnik says: "Those who do not consider themselves to be indebted to every commandment of Christ only physically obey the Law of God, not understanding what they are saying, nor what they are based on: that is why they think to fulfill it with "works" (The Word on the Spiritual Law, ch. 34). It follows from the words of the Venerable Father that he who thinks he has done any good deed is in a state of self-deception. That state of self-delusion serves as the basis for demonic delusion: in the false, proud representations of the Christian, the fallen angel finds a haven for himself, he easily grafts his deception onto that representation, and through the deception he subjugates man to his power, forcing him into the so-called demonic delusion. From the aforementioned experiences, it can be seen that none of the bewitched considered himself unworthy of seeing the Angel, therefore, he believed that he possessed some value. Physical and spiritual man cannot judge himself differently. It is precisely because of this that the Holy Fathers speak in general about all ascetics who are not sufficiently trained in spiritual activity and shadowed by God's grace to destroy them silently. The rule of the Venerable Varsanufy the Great and his fellow ascetic John the Prophet, who were prisoners in Abba Serid's common house, is instructive in terms of imprisonment and silence. All the brothers of that monastery, or at least the greater part of the brothers, were guided by the teachings of those great pleasers of God, filled with the Spirit of God; Abbot Serid himself, whom Varsanufius the Great called his son, was governed by their teachings. Serid served the holy old man, who lived in the cell without going out, receiving only Serid and through him giving advice to the rest of the brotherhood in written form. The brothers of that monastery, guided by the teachings of divinely inspired husbands, showed rapid and abundant spiritual growth. Some of them became able to live in prison, for which they were called by God, who provided that ability for them. That is how Varsanufius the Great predicted to John of Mirosavski that God had predestined him to be silent, and, having previously prepared that monk by living according to the commandments of the Gospel in the monastic community, in the fire of obedience, at the time indicated by God, he led him into prison (Answers 1-54). From the correspondence of Varsanufi the Great with Jovan Mirosavski, it can be seen that even after entering prison, Jovan was swirling with passionate thoughts. Other monks, to whom imprisonment was permitted, were even more troubled by passions, but imprisonment was not forbidden to them. In contrast, Venerable Abba Dorotheus, who was distinguished by both worldly and spiritual wisdom, the ability to spiritually guide other monks, and who proved this gift in action, the spiritual elders forbade imprisonment, regardless of how much he wanted it. "Bezmolvije", they told him, "gives a man a reason for high-mindedness if he does not succeed in acquiring himself before that, that is, in becoming blameless." A truly silent man only acquires if he succeeds in carrying his cross. Therefore, if you sympathize with your neighbors, you will receive help; if you remove yourself from the crowd, wanting to gain what exceeds your measure, know that you will also lose what you have. Do not turn inwards or outwards, but stick to the middle, understanding what the Lord's will is, "because the days are evil" (Eph. 5, 16)" (Answer 311). These words of mine mean: don't dare to be silent, but also don't be careless about yourself when you are surrounded by worries: that's the middle way, safe from falling. In silence, one should have calmness, and when surrounded by worries, watch over oneself and rein in one's thoughts. All this is not limited to a specific time. Everyone is obliged to bear with gratitude what befalls him by necessity. The more a person descends into humility, the more he progresses. Staying in a cell does not make you experienced, because you obviously live in it without suffering, because you do not reach into a fight with demons, which leads the one who is imprisoned in a cell to such severe suffering and struggle that a monk who is in a common life does not know about (see the life of Venerable Anthony the Great, Onuphrius the Great and other hermits and prisoners). And through the fact that you will leave all worries before the time, the enemy will prepare you for even more confusion, not tranquility, so that he will force you to say in the end: "It would be better if I had never been born" (Answers 312, 313). Venerable Dorotheus, who is recognized as a Saint by the Universal Church, one of the best, unsurpassed authors in the field of asceticism, lived in a dormitory among the brothers, and after the introduction of his spiritual teachers, he founded his own monastery and was its abbot. Saint Jovan Lestvičnik observes that those who are prone to high-mindedness and other spiritual passions must by no means choose for themselves a solitary life, but rather they should dwell among the brethren and save themselves by doing the commandments (Letter 8, ch. 10, 18, 21, 25. - Letter 27, ch. 13:36); because every life, regardless of whether it is in the desert or in a communal life, when it is in accordance with the will of God and when its goal is to please God, is blessed (chapter 88 of Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, Benevolence, part 1). From premature imprisonment, a demonic charm blossoms, not only the obvious one, but also the one that is not visible from the outside: thought, temperamental, incomparably more dangerous than the first one, because it is very difficult to heal, and is often incurable. This kind of charm, which rests on a high mind, the Holy Fathers call "opinion" (St. Gregory of Sinai, ch. 128, 131, 132. Benevolence, part 1.), and it consists in the fact that the ascetic, having adopted false ideas about spiritual things and about himself, begins to consider them to be true. False representations and contemplations, due to the natural participation and cooperation of the mind with the heart and the heart with the mind, are inevitably accompanied by luscious, sweet heart feelings: they are nothing but the effect of perfidious voluptuousness and vanity. Those who became infected with this charm became preachers of false ascetic teachings, and sometimes heretics, eternally killing themselves and their neighbors. Saint Isaac of Syria mentions in the 55th letter how a certain Malpas led a very strict ascetic life in hermitage with the aim of reaching a high spiritual state; he fell into high-mindedness and obvious demonic charm, and became the founder and leader of the Euctite heresy. As an example of an ascetic book written in such a state of ecstasy, which is called opinion, the writing of Thomas Kempius entitled "On the Imitation of Christ" can be mentioned. He exudes perfidious voluptuousness and high-mindedness, which causes pleasure in people blinded and filled with passions, which they consider to be a test of God's grace. Those unhappy and darkened people do not understand that, having smelled the perfidious stench of passion that lives in them, they delight in it, and in their blindness consider it to be the peace of grace! They do not understand that only the Holy One of God is capable of spiritual pleasure, that spiritual pleasure must be preceded by repentance and purification from passion, that the sinner is not capable of spiritual pleasure, that he must be aware that he is unworthy of pleasure, reject it, if it begins to appear to him, as something that is not his own, as an obvious and destructive self-enchantment, as a perfidious movement of vanity, high-mindedness and voluptuousness. Similar to Malpas, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius Loyola and other ascetics of Roman Catholicism (after the separation of the Western and Eastern Churches), who are considered Saints in his fold, reached a strong demonic attraction in hermitage. "When Francis was taken to heaven", his hagiographer narrates, "God the Father, seeing him, was in doubt as to whom He would give priority: whether to His Son by nature, or to the son by grace, Francis". What could be more terrible, more monstrous than that blasphemy, more sad than that beauty! Today, in our homeland, it can be categorically stated that asceticism in the desolate wasteland is unachievable, and that imprisonment is very difficult to achieve, as more dangerous and incompatible than ever. In that, you should see God's will and obey it. If you want to be a silent person pleasing to God, love silence and get used to it with all your heart. Do not allow yourself idle talk neither in the church, nor in the refectory, nor in the cell; do not allow yourself to leave the monastery except in cases of extreme need and for a very short time; do not allow yourself acquaintances, especially close ones, neither outside the monastery nor inside it; do not allow yourself free association and pernicious pastimes; behave like a stranger and a sojourner both in the monastery and in earthly life itself, and you will become a God-beloved mute, a hermit, a recluse. If God sees that you are fit for desert or imprisonment, He will, in His unspeakable ways, grant you to live in a desert or dwell in silence, as He granted it to the blessed Seraphim of Sarovsk, or He will deign to imprison you, as was the case with the blessed George, the prisoner of the Zadon monastery. Student: What are the types of demonic charms caused by the improper practice of prayer? Old man: All forms of demonic temptation, to which the ascetic of prayer is exposed, come from the fact that repentance is not the foundation of prayer, that repentance has not become the source, the soul, the goal of prayer. "If someone", says Venerable Grigorije Sinait in the aforementioned writing, "with self-reliance, based on self-esteem (in the original it says: "If one who fantasizes to reach heights with opinion"; here a clarifying term is used, in order to more precisely show the meaning of the word opinion) fantasizes to reach high prayer states, and if he has acquired satanic, and not true, zeal, then the devil easily catches him in his nets as his servant". Anyone who wants to enter the wedding of the Son of God in clothes that are not clean and bright, and which are acquired through repentance, but in their rags, like an old man, in a state of sinfulness and self-deception, is thrown out, into the ultimate darkness: into demonic deception. "I advise you to buy from Me gold heated by fire, to become rich; and white clothes, so that you can dress, and that the shame of your nakedness will not be shown; and anoint your eyes to see. I chastise and correct those whom I love; therefore be zealous and repent" (Rev. 3, 18-19), says the Lord to those called to the mysterious priesthood. Repentance and everything that makes it up - contrition or pain of the spirit, crying of the heart, tears, self-condemnation, the memory of death and the premonition of death, the judgment of God and eternal torment, the feeling of the presence of God, the fear of God - are gifts of God, priceless gifts, the first and basic gifts, which are a pledge of the highest and eternal gifts. Without first obtaining these gifts, it is impossible to give the latter. "No matter how lofty our exploits are", says St. John of the Ladder, "but if we have not gained a heart filled with pain, these exploits are both false and in vain" (Ladder, Letter 7). Repentance, contrition of spirit, weeping are signs and evidence of the correctness of the prayer feat; their absence is an indication of deviating from a false path, an indication of self-indulgence, infatuation or barrenness. One or the other, i.e. impotence or infertility, is an inevitable consequence of improper practice of prayer, and improper application of prayer is inseparable from self-implantation. The most dangerous of the incorrect ways of prayer is the one in which fantasies or representations are created by force of imagination, borrowed, one would say, from the outside, from the Holy Scriptures, but essentially from the state of the one who prays, from his sinfulness, from his self-delusion; with these representations he flatters his self-esteem, his vanity, his high-mindedness, his pride, deceiving himself. It is obvious that all that is the fruit of our fanciful fallen nature, a nature corrupted by the fall, does not exist in the thing itself, but is a fabrication and a lie, so characteristic and so beloved of the fallen angel. A man prone to fantasies from his first step on the path of prayer leaves the sphere of truth, enters the sphere of lies, into the sphere of Satan, willingly submits to Satan's influence. Saint Simeon the New Theologian describes the prayer of a man prone to fantasies and its fruits as follows: "He raises his hands, eyes and mind to heaven in his mind", similar to Klopštok and Milton, "he imagines unity with God, heavenly goods, the ranks of the Holy Angels, the abode of the Saints, in short, he collects in his imagination everything he heard in the Holy Scriptures, he considers it in prayer, he looks at the sky, thereby awakening his soul to a desire for God and love for God To him, sometimes he sheds tears and cries. Thus gradually his heart swells, without his mind realizing it; he thinks that what he does is the fruit of God's grace, for his consolation, and he prays to God to make him worthy to always abide in such action. It's a sign of love. Such a person, even if he were to remain silent in perfect silence, cannot but expose himself to the exaltation of the mind and madness. If this does not happen to him, however, it is never possible for him to reach the spiritual calling of reason and virtue or dispassion. So, therefore, those who saw the light and the brilliance with these bodily eyes, who felt the miomir with the sense of smell, heard the voices with their ears, were enchanted. Some of them became mad, and being wounded in mind, they moved from one place to another; others accepted the demon who was transformed into a holy Angel, were transfixed and remained uncorrected until the end, not accepting the advice of any of the brothers; some among them, instructed by the devil, killed themselves: some threw themselves into precipices, others drowned. And who can count all kinds of demonic charms, with which the enemy is charmed, and which are unfathomable! After all, from what we have stated, every reasonable person can draw a lesson about the harm caused by this way of praying. If someone who applies this method does not expose himself to any of the described troubles, because he lives with fellow believers, since such troubles are suffered the most by hermits, who live alone, nevertheless, he spends his whole life like that without success" (On the first way of paying attention to prayer, Benevolence, part 1.). All the Holy Fathers who described the feat of mental prayer forbid not only the willful provoking of fantasies, but also the willing and compassionate worship of fantasies and apparitions that can appear to us unexpectedly, independently of our will. And that happens during a prayer feat, especially in silence. "Do not accept under any circumstances", says St. Gregory the Sinaite, "if you see anything with your sensory eyes or mind, outside or inside your being, regardless of whether it is the image of Christ, or the image of an Angel, or some Holy God, or if a light appears to you... Be attentive and careful! Do not allow yourself to believe anything, do not show sympathy and agreement, do not rashly give your trust to that vision, even if it is true and good; be cold towards him and others, constantly guarding your mind without sight, so that it does not create any representation of itself and does not bear the stamp of any representation. He who has received something in his mind or in a sensory way, even if it was from God, and who hastily accepts it, easily falls into charm, or at least shows his affection and ability to be charmed, like someone who accepts visions quickly and lightly. The novice must pay all attention only to the heart action, and to consider only that action unattractive; everything else he must not accept before the time comes when he will enter dispassion. God is not angry with him who, fearing to fall, watching himself with extreme caution, does not even receive something sent to him from God, because he did not carefully consider what was sent to him; on the contrary, God praises such a person for his prudence" (On the first way of paying attention to prayer, Benevolence, part 1.). Saint Amphilochius, who entered monasticism at a young age, in his mature years deigned to lead an ascetic life in the desert. Closing himself in a cave, he practiced silently, and achieved great progress. When forty years of his anchorite life were completed, one night an Angel appeared to him, saying: Amphilochius! Go to the city and feed the spiritual sheep. Amphilochius, however, remained on guard over himself, and did not heed the command of the Angel. The next night the Angel appeared again, and repeated the command, adding that he was sent by God. And again, Amfilochius did not submit to the Angel, fearing that he would be deceived and remembering the words of the Apostle that Satan also turns into an Angel of light (2 Cor. 11, 14). On the third night, the Angel appeared again and, giving a credible testimony about himself by glorifying God, Whom rejected spirits cannot endure, took the old man by the hand, led him out of the cell and led him to the church that was nearby. The church door opened by itself. The church would be illuminated by heavenly light; a multitude of holy men in white robes with faces shining like the sun had gathered in it; they ordained Amphilochius as bishop of the city of Iconium (Thursday Minei, November 23). - By behaving in the complete opposite way, Venerable Isaakije and Nikita Pecherski, as new and inexperienced in anchorite living, suffered terrible troubles, as they too quickly believed the apparition. First, a multitude of demons appeared in a great light: one demon took the form of Christ, and the others - the form of holy angels. The second one was overtaken by the demon first with a miomir and a voice that resembled God's, and then he appeared before him in the form of an Angel (Pechersk paterik). Monks experienced in the monastic life, who have reached true sanctity, are much more afraid of falling and do not trust themselves much more than beginners, especially those among the novices who are overcome by a fiery desire for a feat. Venerable Grigorije Sinait warns with heartfelt love about the beauty of the speechless to whom he dedicated his book. "I want you to have a concrete idea of ​​beauty; I want this for the reason that you can protect yourself from being deceived, so that you do not cause great harm to yourself when striving that is not illuminated by valid vision, so that you do not ruin your soul. Man's free will is easily inclined to communicate with our opponents, especially the will of those who have no experience, who are new to the feat, like those who are still in the power of demons" (Pečerski paterik). How true that is! Our free will inclines and strives to delight; because every beauty flatters our self-esteem, our vanity, our pride. "Demons are near, and they surround the novices and those prone to self-will, spreading webs of thoughts and pernicious fantasies, setting up abysses of fall. The city of beginners (the whole being of each of them) is still under the rule of the barbarians... Therefore, do not be quick to believe what is shown to you in your rashness, but remain immovable, retaining what is good with great caution and rejecting evil... Know that the effects of grace are clear; the demon is not able to convey them: he cannot give meekness, nor gentleness, nor humility, nor hatred towards the world; he does not tame passions and voluptuousness, as grace does». The actions of demons are: arrogance, pride, high-mindedness, bearing, in a word, all kinds of malice. By the effect, you will be able to know what kind of light that has shone in your soul: whether it is from God or from Satan" (Goodwill, part 1.: About beauty and the rest). It should be kept in mind that this kind of questioning is characteristic only of advanced monks, and by no means for beginners. Venerable Sinait, it is true, is talking to a beginner, but a beginner in silence, who was an old man both by staying in monasticism and by physical age, as can be seen from the book. Disciple: Have you had the opportunity to see someone who has fallen into a demonic spell because of giving free rein to fantasies while practicing prayer? Old man: I had. An official who lived in Petrograd practiced an increased feat of prayer, and because of this he got into an unusual state. He told the archpriest of the Church of the Shroud of the Mother of God in Kolomna about his feat and its consequences. That archpriest, when he visited a monastery in the Petrograd diocese, asked a monk to speak with an official. "This unusual state, in which the clerk came from the feat, will be easier to interpret by those who live in the monastery, because they know better the details and circumstances of the ascetic feat", said the archpriest, with full right. And the monk agreed. After some time, that official came to the monastery. I was also present at his conversation with the monk. The official immediately began to talk about his visions - that during prayer he always sees light from the icons, that he feels peace, there is an unusual sweetness in his mouth, and so on. After listening to the clerk's story, the monk asked him: "Didn't the thought of killing yourself come to you?" - "Why not!" - answered the official. "I had already thrown myself into Fontanka, but they pulled me out." It turned out that the clerk resorted to the method of prayer described by Saint Simeon, that he inflamed his imagination and blood, thereby becoming very capable of increased fasting and vigil. To the willingly chosen state of self-delusion, the devil added his effect, appropriate to that state, and human self-delusion passed into obvious demonic delusion. The clerk saw the light with his bodily eyes; the peace and pleasure he felt were also of a sensual nature. In contrast, the visions of the Saints and their supernatural states are entirely spiritual in nature (St. Isaac the Syrian, Letter 55); the ascetic does not become capable of them until, by the grace of God, the eyes of his soul are opened, and the other senses of the soul are revived, which had previously been inactive (Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, Letter on Faith; Benevolence, part 1); the bodily senses of the Saints also participate in the blessed vision, but only when the body passes from a passionate to a passionless state. The monk began to persuade the official to abandon the way of prayer he was resorting to, explaining both its incorrectness and the incorrectness of the condition that this method causes. The clerk resentfully objected to that advice: "How can I give up such an obvious favor!", he said. As I listened to the clerk's story about himself, I felt an inexplicable pity for him, but at the same time he seemed somehow funny. For example, he asked the monk the following question: "When the saliva in my mouth increases due to the excessive sweetness, it begins to drip on the floor: isn't that sinful?" And indeed: those who find themselves in demonic enchantment cause pity as people who are not themselves and who, in mind and heart, are slaves to a cunning, rejected spirit. They are also a funny sight: and they are exposed to ridicule by the cunning spirit that rules them, which has brought them to a state of humiliation, overshadowing them with vanity and high-mindedness. Deluded people do not understand their enslavement or the strangeness of their behavior, no matter how obvious that enslavement and strangeness may be. Winter 1828–1829. I spent my time in the Ploščan Monastery (Orlov Diocese). At that time there lived an old man who was in a state of ecstasy: he cut off his own hand, thinking that in this way he was fulfilling the commandment of the Gospel, and he told everyone who wanted to listen to him how holy relics were created from his severed hand, how it is kept and venerated in Simon's monastery in Moscow, and how he, although he is in the Ploščansk monastery, five hundred species from Simon's, felt when the archimandrite of Simon's monastery and the brothers they kiss his hand. The old man would begin to tremble, at which point he would stop and hiss loudly - and he considered this to be the fruit of prayer; but observers saw in it only degradation, worthy of pity and laughter. The children who lived in the monastery as orphans had fun at this and imitated the old man's behavior before his eyes; the old man would get angry, throw himself at one boy, then another, pull them by the hair... None of the respected monks of that family managed to convince the bewitched old man that he was in a false state, in a mental disorder. When the official left, I asked the monk: how did the idea of ​​asking him about the suicide attempt come to him in the first place? The monk answered: "Just as in the middle of crying for God, there are moments of unusual peace of conscience, which is the consolation of those who cry, so also in the midst of false pleasure, which is caused by demonic delight, there are moments in which it is as if the delight takes shape and provides the opportunity to taste it as it is. Those moments are horrible! The anguish and despair it causes is unbearable! And it is precisely on the basis of this state that the transition brings a person to that it is easiest to recognize it and take measures for the healing of one's being. But alas! The beginning and the root of beauty is pride, just as the fruit is its overabundant pride. The one who is deluded thinks that he is a vessel of God's grace and despises the saving warnings of his neighbors, such as Saint Simeon is noticeable. But, in the meantime, the attacks of despair become stronger and stronger: in the end, despair turns into complete frenzy and ends in suicide. At the beginning of this century in the monastery of St. In Sophronia (Kur eparchy), the monk Theodosius lived as a monk, who had gained the respect of both the brotherhood and the laity by his strict and lofty lifestyle. Once he was shown how he was taken up to heaven. When the vision ended, he went to the abbot, narrated the miracle in great detail and added that he was sorry that he saw only himself in Paradise and none of the brothers. The abbot, however, did not pay attention to that detail: he called the brothers together and, with a contrite spirit, conveyed the Shimonah's vision to them, encouraging them to live a more earnest and God-pleasing life. As some time passed, strange things began to manifest in the shimonah's behavior. And it all ended with him being found drowned in his cell". A case like this happened to me, worthy of special attention. On one occasion, I was visited by a Jeroshimonk from Mount Athos, who came to Russia to collect donations. We sat down in my reception cell, and he said to me: "Pray for me, father: I sleep a lot and eat a lot." While he was telling me this, I felt a kind of heat emanating from him, which is why I retorted: "You don't eat and you don't sleep much; but don't you notice something unusual in you?». I asked him to enter my inner cell. Going in front of him and opening the door of the cell, I prayed in my mind to the Lord to grant benefit to my hungry soul from the meeting with the Jeroshimonk from Athos, if he is a true servant of God. And really: I noticed something unusual in him. We sat down to talk again in the inner cell, and I began to beg him: "Have mercy, teach me to pray." You live in the first monastic place on earth, surrounded by thousands of monks: in such a place and in such a numerous gathering of monks, great prayer men must inevitably be found, who know the mystery of prayer and pass it on to their neighbors, imitating Grigori Sinaitus and Palamas and many other luminaries of Svetogorski". Jeroshimonah agreed without hesitation to be my teacher, and—oh, the horror! - with the greatest enthusiasm he began to explain to me the already mentioned method of exalted prayer accompanied by fantasies. I see: he got really fired up! His blood and imagination were fired up. He was in a state of self-sufficiency, self-delight, self-delight, delight! Allowing him to express his opinion, I began to present to him the teaching of the Holy Fathers about prayer, pointing him to Kindness, and asking him to explain this teaching to me. Svetogorac came into complete confusion. I see: he is not at all familiar with the teaching of the Fathers about prayer! While we were talking like that, I said to him: «Watch out, old man! If you live in Petrograd, do not take a room on the first floor, but be sure to stay on the ground floor." "And why?" - asked the old man. "That's why", I said, "what if the Angels, after they suddenly come for you, want to take you from Petrograd to Athos, then carry you up from the first floor and drop you, you will kill yourself: and if they take you from the ground floor and drop you, you will only collapse." "Just imagine", replied the Saint, "how many times, while standing at prayer, I had the vivid thought that the angels would lift me up and take me to Athos!" It turned out that the jeroshimonah wears chains, hardly sleeps at all, eats little and feels such warmth in his body that he does not need warm clothes in winter. At the end of the conversation, it occurred to me to do the following: I began to ask the Holy Mountaineer to, as a fasting and ascetic, try on himself the method left to us by the Holy Fathers, which consists in keeping the mind completely free from any fantasy during prayer, that it sinks completely into the meaning of the words of the prayer, that it closes and places itself, as St. John the Ladder says, in the words of the prayer (Lestvica, Letter 28, ch. 17). In doing so, the heart usually cooperates with the mind with a soul-saving feeling of sorrow for sin, as Venerable Marko the Ascetic says: "A mind that prays without wandering comforts the heart: a contrite and humble heart God will not reject (Ps. 51, 19)" (Goodwill, part 1, ch. 34). "When you try it on yourself", I said to Svetogorac, "tell me what the fruits of such an experience are; and such an experience is inaccessible to me because of the disorder of my life". Svetogorac gladly accepted my proposal. After a few days, he comes to me and complains: "What have you done to me?" - "And what?" - "As soon as I tried to pray with attention, closing my mind in the words of prayer, all my visions disappeared, and I am no longer able to return to them." And later in the conversation with Svetogorec, I did not see that self-confidence and that insolence that were very noticeable in him during the first meeting, and which are usually seen in people who live in self-delusion, people who think they are holy or that they have advanced spiritually. Svetogorac even expressed his desire to hear my poor advice. When I advised him not to differentiate himself from other monks in his outward living, because such a distinction leads to high-mindedness (Ladder, Letter 4, ch. 82, 83. Venerable Varsanufius the Great, answer 275. Lives and teachings of Venerable Apollos, Alphabetical Paterik), he took off his chains and handed them to me. After a month, he came to me again and said that the heat from his body had disappeared, that he needed warm clothes, and that he was sleeping much longer than before. At the same time, he said that on the Holy Mount Athos, many, even among those who enjoy the glory of holiness, apply the method of prayer that he once used, teaching him and others. And that's not unusual at all! St. Simeon the New Theologian, who lived eight centuries ago, says that only a few engage in attentive prayer (On the third way of prayer. Benevolence, part 1.). Venerable Grigorije Sinait, who lived in the 14th century after the Nativity of Christ, came to the Holy Mountain and found that its numerous monks had no idea about mental prayer, but practiced only physical feats, performing prayers only verbally and aloud (Life of Venerable Grigorije Sinait, Benevolence, part 1). Venerable Nile of Sorsky, who lived at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, and who also visited the Holy Mount of Athos, testifies that in his time the number of attentive prayer men was extremely reduced (Preface to the Scythian Tradition or Constitution). Elder Archimandrite Paisius Veličkovski moved to Mount Athos from Moldavia in 1747. He briefly got acquainted with all the monasteries and skits, he talked with many old men, who were generally recognized on Athos as very experienced and holy monks. When he began to question those monks about the books of the Holy Fathers related to mental prayer, it turned out that not only did they not know of the existence of such writings, but they did not even know the names of the holy writers; at that time Dobrotoublja was not yet printed in Greek (Excerpt from the letter of the elder Paisius to the elder Theodosius. Writings of Paisius Veličkovski, edition of the Optina monastery). Careful prayer requires self-denial, and few choose to take that step. The one who is attentively closed in on himself, who dwells in a state of doubt due to seeing his sinfulness, who is not capable of verbiage and in general of affect and acting to those who do not know his mysterious feat, seems somehow strange, enigmatic, insufficient in every way. And is it easy to part with the opinion of the world! And again - how can the world know the ascetic of true prayer, when that feat itself is not known to the world at all? It is completely different with the one who dwells in self-deception: he does not eat, does not drink, does not sleep, walks only in the race in winter, wears chains, has visions, teaches and shapes everything with insolent recklessness, without any correctness, without reason and without sense, with inflaming of blood, artifice, passion, and for the reason of that sad and disastrous inflamation. But, it is a saint, period! It has long been noticed that people have affection for such people, that they are attracted to such people: "Bear with it", writes the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, "if someone enslaves you, if someone devours you, if someone takes from you, if he puffs himself up, if he beats you on the face" (2 Cor. 11, 20). Further, the Holy Apostle narrates how, while he was in Corinth, he could not rule arrogantly and recklessly: his rule bore the stamp of the modesty, meekness and gentleness of Christ (2 Cor. 10, 1). A large part of the ascetics of the Western Church, proclaimed in it as the greatest saints - after its apostasy from the Eastern Church and after the departure of the Holy Spirit from it - prayed and gained visions, of course, false, using the method I mentioned. Those so-called saints were in a creepy demonic state. Prelest is already born naturally from the blasphemy with which heretics have perverted dogmatic faith. The behavior of the ascetics of Roman Catholicism, overwhelmed by the beauty, was always exalted due to an unusual artificial and passionate incitement. Ignacio Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, was in such a state. His imagination was inflamed and developed to such an extent that, according to his own admission, it was enough for him to wish and put in a little effort, so that hell or heaven appeared before his eyes, according to his desire. The appearance of paradise and hell was not perfected only by the action of human imagination; the operation of the imagination is not enough to achieve this. This manifestation was perfected by the action of demons, who extended their abundant action to the insufficient human action, uniting one action with another, complementing each other on the basis of the free will of the human, which chose and opted for the false path. It is known that visions are given to the true Saints of God exclusively by the favor of God and His action, and not by the will of man and his own efforts; they are given unexpectedly, very rarely, in circumstances of special need, according to the miraculous Providence of God, and not by chance (St. Isaac of Syria, Letter 36). The heightened exploits of those who dwell in lust usually stand side by side with great debauchery. Debauchery serves as a measure of the evaluation of the fire with which they were enkindled. This is confirmed by historical accounts and the testimonies of the Fathers. "He who has seen the spirit of beauty in the revelations he offers to man very often suffers rage and anger," says Venerable Maxim Kapsokalivit and adds: "The peace of humility or prayer, or true tears, has no place in it. On the contrary: such a person constantly boasts of his virtues, indulges in vanity and evil passions without fear and forever» (Conversation of Venerable Maximus with Venerable Grigori Sinaitos). Disciple: The irregularity of that way of prayer and its association with self-deception and pretense are clear; warn me about other forms of improper prayer and the false state associated with them. Elder: Just as the improper operation of the mind leads to self-deception and delusion, so does the improper operation of the heart. Unreasonable pride is filled with the desire and striving to receive spiritual visions with a mind that has not been cleansed of passions, that has not been renewed and born again by the right hand of the Holy Spirit; the same pride and unreasonableness are filled with the heart's desire and striving to enjoy holy, spiritual, divine feelings, when it is not yet capable of such pleasures. Just as the impure mind, wanting to see divine visions, but not being able to see them, creates for itself visions from itself, deceives and seduces itself with them, so also the heart, striving to taste divine sweetness and to know other divine feelings, and not finding them in itself, creates these feelings from itself, is seduced, deceived, ruined by them, entering the sphere of lies, into communion with demons, submitting to their influence and coming under their rule. In invisible worship, only one of all the feelings of the heart in its fallen state can be used - sorrow for sins, for sinfulness, for fallenness, for one's own destruction, which is called weeping, repentance, contrition of spirit. This is also confirmed in the Holy Scriptures. "Because you will not sacrifice: I would offer it; You do not care about burnt offerings" (Ps. 51, 16); and every heart's feeling for itself, and all together, are not pleasing to Thee, because they are defiled by sin and perverted by the fall. "Sacrifice to God is a contrite spirit: a contrite and humble heart will not be rejected by God" (Ps. 51, 17). That sacrifice is a renunciation; the offering of that sacrifice naturally cancels the offering of other sacrifices: during repentance all other feelings die down. In order for the sacrifices of other feelings to become pleasing to God, it is necessary that God's favor be poured out on our Zion, it is necessary that the walls of our destroyed Jerusalem be rebuilt. The Lord is just, all-holy: and only just, pure sacrifices, for which human nature is capable only after its restoration, are favorable to the just and all-holy City. He does not care about defiled sacrifices and burnt offerings. Let's make sure to cleanse ourselves by repenting! "Then the sacrifices of justice, offerings and burnt offerings will be pleasing to You; then they will throw on Your altar" (Ps. 51, 19) - the newborn feelings of a person renewed by the Holy Spirit. The first command that the Savior of the world gave to all mankind, without exception, is the command to repent: "Jesus began to preach and say: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand" (Mt. 4, 17). That commandment includes, contains, unites in itself all other commandments. To people who did not understand the importance and power of repentance, the Savior said more than once: "Go and learn what it means: I want mercy, not a sacrificial offering" (Mt. 9, 13). And this means: The Lord, taking pity on the fallen and perishing people, gave everyone repentance as the only means of salvation, because they were all overwhelmed by the fall and perishing. He does not ask, he does not even want from them sacrifices for which they are not capable, but he wants them to feel sorry for themselves, to become aware of their misery, to free themselves from it through repentance. With the mentioned words, the Lord added terrible words: "I did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." Who are called righteous? Those unfortunate, blinded sinners, who, being deluded by self-conceit, do not find that they have an urgent need for repentance, and therefore either reject it, or are careless towards it. Oh, what misfortunes! That is why the Savior renounces such people, and they lose the treasure of salvation. "Woe to that soul," says Venerable Macarius the Great, "which, due to great, immeasurable injury by malice, does not feel its wounds, and which thinks for itself that any injury by malice is completely foreign to it." Such a soul is not visited and healed by the good Physician, because she willfully left her wounds unattended, thinking that she was healthy and blameless. "Healers do not need a physician, but the sick" (Mt. 9:12)" (Sixth Letter on Love, ch. 16). Terrible cruelty to oneself is the rejection of repentance! Terrible is the coldness and self-loving neglect of repentance. He who is cruel to himself cannot but be cruel to his neighbors. Whoever has mercy on himself by accepting repentance becomes merciful to his neighbors at the same time. From this one can see all the perniciousness of the mistake of taking away from the heart what is commanded by God Himself, the feelings of repentance that are essentially and logically necessary for it, and the effort to develop in the heart - contrary to the order, contrary to God's command - those feelings that must appear in it by themselves after purification by repentance, but which are of a completely different character (St. Isaac of Syria, Letter 55). A carnal man cannot have any idea about this spiritual character, because the idea of ​​a feeling is always based on feelings already known to the heart, while spiritual feelings are completely foreign to the heart, which only knows physical and mental feelings. Such a heart does not even know of the existence of spiritual feelings. Everyone knows what kind of mental distress arose for the Jewish scribes and Pharisees because of their irregular mental attitude; they not only became strangers to God, but also became His bitterest enemies, murderers of God. A similar affliction is suffered by ascetics of prayer who have excluded repentance from their asceticism, who strive to inflame love for God in their hearts, to feel delight, delight; they are constantly deepening their fall, pretending to be someone else's God, entering into communion with Satan, filling themselves with hatred for the Holy Spirit. That kind of beauty is terrible; it is as soul-destroying as the first, but less obvious; it rarely ends in madness, suicide, but it certainly perverts both the mind and the heart. According to the state of mind it produces, the Fathers called it opinion (Venerable Gregory of Sinai, ch. 108, 128. Benevolence, part 1.; St. John of Carpathia, ch. 49. Benevolence, part 4.). The Holy Apostle Paul also points to this type of pretense, saying: "Let no one deceive you with pretended humility and serving angels, engaging in what he has not seen, and vainly puffing up his carnal mind" (Col. 2:18). The one who is in the power of this beautiful thought for himself, creates for himself the "opinion" that he possesses many virtues and values, and even that he abounds in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Opinion arises from false ideas and false sensations; in that capacity it belongs entirely to the sphere of the devil as the father and representative of lies. The one who prays, striving to develop the feelings of a new man in his heart, and not having any opportunities for this, replaces them with feelings that he has invented, forgeries, which are joined without hesitation by the influence of fallen spirits. And since he accepts those incorrect feelings, his own and demonic, as true and beneficial, he also acquires ideas corresponding to these feelings. These feelings, being constantly received by the heart and strengthening in it, nourish and multiply false representations; it is natural that self-deception and demonic charm - "opinion" - form from such an incorrect feat. "An opinion cannot be presumptuous" (Letter 4, at the end also Letter 3), said Saint Simeon the New Theologian. He who thinks himself passionless will never be cleansed of passion; he who thinks he is filled with grace will never obtain grace; whoever thinks he is holy will never reach holiness. In the simplest terms: whoever ascribes to himself spiritual deeds, virtues, values, gifts of grace, who flatters himself and makes himself happy with his "opinion", with that "opinion" blocks the entry into his being of spiritual deeds, and Christian virtues, and the grace of God, opening wide the door to sinful infection and demons. Those who are infected with "opinion" no longer have any capacity for spiritual growth: they have destroyed that capacity, offering on the altar of lies the very foundations of man's activity and his salvation - the idea of ​​truth. An unusual artificiality is present in those who suffer from this delusion: they seem to be intoxicated with themselves, with their state of self-delusion, seeing in it a state of grace. They are imbued and filled with high-mindedness and pride, whereby to many who judge by the face, and who are not capable of judging by the fruits, as the Savior commanded (Mt. 7, 16; 12, 33), and all the more according to the spiritual sense mentioned by the Apostle (Heb. 5, 14), they appear humble. The prophet Isaiah vividly presented the effect of "opinion" in the fallen archangel, the effect that overshadowed and led that archangel to his death. "You said", the Prophet addresses Satan, "in your heart: I will go up into the sky, many stars of God, I will raise my throne, and I will sit on the mountain of assembly on the north side." I will go up high above the clouds, I will be equal to the highest. And you are thrown into hell, into the depths of the grave" (Is. 14, 13-15). The Lord describes the person infected with "opinion" as follows: "You say: I am rich, and I have become rich, and I do not need anything; and you do not know that you are unhappy, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked" (Rev. 3, 17). The Lord advises the deceived to repent; what is necessary, and what repentance consists of, He proposes to buy from Himself (Rev. 3, 18). And that purchase is urgently needed: without it there is no salvation. There is no salvation without repentance, and repentance from God is received only by those who, in order to obtain it, sell all their possessions, that is, renounce everything they falsely accepted through "opinion". Student: Have you had the opportunity to meet those who are infected with the described form of prelestes? Old man: Those infected with the charm of "opinion" are very often encountered. Anyone who does not have a repentant spirit, anyone who ascribes to himself any virtues and merits, anyone who does not strictly adhere to the teachings of the Orthodox Church, but arbitrarily, at his own discretion, or according to some non-Islamic teaching, reason about any dogma or tradition, is in that beauty. The degree of deviation is determined on the basis of the degree of deviation and persistence in that deviation. He is a weak man! "Opinion" inevitably sneaks into us in any form, and, permeating our self, takes God's grace away from us. Just as, according to the observation of St. Macarius the Great, there is no man who would be completely free from pride, so there is no man who would be completely free from the effect on him of the perfidious charm called "opinion". It snared even the apostle Paul, and was treated with the difficult permission of God. "Brothers, we do not want you to not know about our trouble that happened to us in Asia, that we were burdened too much, beyond our power, so that we were in doubt even about life; even in ourselves we experienced the condemnation to death, so that we would not trust in ourselves but in God Who raises the dead" (2 Cor. 1, 8-9). For this reason, it is necessary to keep a watchful eye on ourselves, so that we do not attribute to ourselves some good deed, some commendable trait or special natural ability, or even a state of grace, if a person is elevated to it, in a word, so that we do not think that we ourselves possess any value. "What do you have", says the Holy Apostle, "that you did not receive" (1 Cor. 4, 7) from God? From God we have beings, and new life (csl. pakibitie), and all natural properties, all abilities, both spiritual and physical. We are indebted to God! Our debt cannot be paid! From this self-view, a state of our spirit that is contrary to "opinion" is formed by itself, a state that the Lord called poverty of spirit, which he commanded us to have and which he called blessed (Mt. 5, 3). It is a great trouble to move away from the dogmatic and moral teaching of the Church, from the teaching of the Holy Spirit by any means! It is arrogance, which is against the reason of God. Such thinking should be overthrown and submitted to obedience to Christ (2 Cor. 10, 4-5). Student: Is there any connection between the charm of the first type and that of the second type? Old man: There is definitely a connection between those two types of beauty. The first type of prelesti is always combined with the second type of prelesti, with "opinion". The one who imagines beautiful images through the natural ability of imagination, who by means of imagination (fantasy) assembles these images into an enchanting picture, who submits his whole being to the strong enchanting influence of that "art", inevitably, by unfortunate necessity, believes that this "art" is created by the action of God's grace, and that the heartfelt feelings that are stimulated by those images are beneficial. The second type of enchantment - "opinion" in the true sense - works without creating enchanting images: it is content to create forgeries of gracious feelings and states, from which a false, deceptive idea of ​​the entire spiritual feat in general is born. The one who finds himself in the delusion of "opinion" acquires a false point of view on everything that surrounds him. He is deceived both internally and externally. Imagination works strongly in those who are enchanted by "opinion", but exclusively in the area of ​​the abstract. She either does not engage at all, or rarely engages in "painting" in imagining paradise, higher families and chambers, heavenly light and miomir, Christ, Angels and Saints; she constantly invents supposedly spiritual states - close friendship with Jesus ("On the Imitation of Christ" by Thomas Kempius, book 2, ch. 8), inner conversation with him (ibid., book 3, ch. 1), mysterious revelations (ibid., book 3, ch. 3), voices, delights, on them she bases a false idea of herself and of the Christian feat, creates a generally false way of thinking and falsely disposed hearts, bringing the hour into self-intoxication, now into excitement and euphoria. These various sensations arise from the action of perfidious vanity and voluptuousness: from this action the blood is moved in a sinful, lustful manner, which is presented as a gracious delight. Vanity and voluptuousness are fueled by high-mindedness, that inseparable companion of "opinion". Terrible pride, similar to demonic pride, is the dominant characteristic of those who have taken on both charms. Those who are deluded by the first type of prettiness pride brings into a state of obvious mental madness; in those who are deceived by the other type, it is less noticeable, it is covered with a mask of humility, piety, wisdom, but it is known by its bitter fruits. Those who are infected with an "opinion" about their own virtues, especially about their sanctity, are capable and ready for all intrigues, for all hypocrisy, cunning and deception, for all evil deeds. Such people exude irreconcilable enmity against the ministers of truth, rising up against them with frantic hatred when the deluded do not want to acknowledge the condition that their own "opinion" attributes to the deluded and which "opinion" presents to the blinded world, to its shame. Disciple: There are, however, also spiritual states that produce the grace of God, such as the state in which one experiences spiritual delight and joy, the state in which the secrets of Christianity are revealed, the state in which the presence of the Holy Spirit is felt in the heart, the state in which the ascetic of Christ is honored with spiritual visions. Elder: Certainly, they exist, but only in those Christians who have reached Christian perfection, who have previously been cleansed and prepared by repentance. The gradual action of repentance in general, which is expressed by all forms of humility, especially by prayer offered from poverty of spirit, from weeping, gradually weakens the action of sin in man. It takes considerable time. And it is given to true, benevolent ascetics according to the providence of God, who sleeplessly watches over us. The struggle with the passions is of unusual benefit: it, above all, leads to poverty of spirit. For the sake of our essential benefit, the Judge and our God suffers us for a long time and is not quick to glorify our rival (Lk.18:7) - sin. When the passions become very weak - and this mostly happens towards the end of life (Life of Theophilus, Pimen the Sick, John the Suffering; Paterik Pecherski), then, little by little, spiritual states begin to appear, which are infinitely different from the states that are the product of "opinions". First, a gracious cry enters the chambers of the soul, washes and whitens it in order to receive the gifts that will follow the cry, as established by the spiritual law. Carnal man cannot in any way, in any way, even imagine spiritual states, nor can he have any idea of ​​a grace cry: the knowledge of these states is obtained in no other way than by experience (St. Isaac of Syria, Letter 55). Spiritual gifts are given with the wisdom of the Divine, which takes care that the spiritual vessel, which should receive the gift, is able to bear the power of that gift without harming itself. The new wine breaks through the old wineskins (Mt. 9, 17)! It is noticeable that nowadays spiritual gifts are given out with the greatest moderation, corresponding to the weakness with which Christianity as a whole has been seized. These gifts satisfy only the daily needs of salvation. In contrast, "opinion" spreads its gifts in immeasurable abundance and with great haste. The general characteristic of spiritual states is a deep humility and a calm mind, combined with giving priority to all neighbors over oneself, with good mood, with evangelical love for all neighbors, with an aspiration to the unknown, to moving away from the world. "Opinion" has little place here: because humility consists in renouncing all one's own values ​​and virtues, in essentially confessing the Redeemer, in finding in Him all trust and support, while "opinion" consists in appropriating for oneself those values ​​that have been given by God, and in inventing one's non-existent virtues. It is united with self-confidence, with a cold, superficial confession of the Redeemer. God is glorified for His own glorification, the way the Pharisee glorified Him (Luke 18:11). Those who are enslaved by "opinion" generally indulge in voluptuousness, although they attribute to themselves very high spiritual states, unparalleled in proper Orthodox asceticism; few of them abstain from the gross service of voluptuousness, and that only because the sin of sins prevails in them - pride. Student: Can some tangible, visible, unfortunate consequences be born from the delusion called "opinion"? Old man: From this type of delusion arose fatal heresies, schisms, impiety, blasphemy. The most unfortunate visible consequence of it is its incorrect and harmful activity, both for oneself and for one's neighbors - an evil that, regardless of its clarity and large scale, is poorly perceived and difficult to understand. Accidents that are obvious to everyone, but rare, happen to prayer workers infected with "opinion", because "opinion", although it leads the mind into a terrible delusion, does not cause insanity, as is the case with distracted imagination. On the Valaam ost, in a remote and secluded hut, lived the monk Porfirius, whom I had the opportunity to see. He practiced the feat of prayer. What kind of feat that was - I don't know exactly. His incorrectness, however, can be guessed by the favorite reading of that Shimonah: he highly valued the book of the Western writer Tom Kempijski "On Imitation of Christ" and was guided by it. That book was written in a state of "opinion". One autumn evening, Porphyry visited the elders in a hermitage near his hut. When he was saying goodbye to them, they warned him, saying: "Don't think of crossing the ice; the ice has just taken hold and is very thin." Porphyry's hut was far from the skete by a deep bay of Lake Ladoga, which had to be visited. Shimonah answered in a thin voice, with outward modesty: "I have already become light." And he left. After some time, a desperate cry was heard: the Scythian elders ran outside in excitement. It was dark; it took them a long time to find the place where the accident happened, and they almost didn't even manage to find the drowned person: they pulled out a body from which the soul had already departed. Student: You say about the book "On Imitation of Christ" that it was written in a state of self-deception; but she found many readers even among the children of the Orthodox Church! Old Man: Those readers are delighted with its value, and pronounce their judgment on that value, not understanding this. In the preface of the Russian translator to the book "On the Imitation of Christ" (edition from 1834, printed in Moscow) it is said: "A highly enlightened man, a Russian, an Orthodox, said: if my opinion was asked, I would boldly put Kempi's, On the Imitation of Jesus Christ, immediately after the Holy Scriptures" (p. 37). In this, such a categorical judgment, the non-Islamic writer is given priority over all the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, and his point of view is favored over the judgment of the entire Church, which at the Holy Councils declared the writings of the Holy Fathers to be divinely inspired and bequeathed their reading not only for the sake of spiritual instruction to all their children, but also as guidance when solving all church issues. In the writings of the Fathers, a great spiritual, Christian and ecclesiastical treasury is preserved: the dogmatic moral tradition of the Holy Church. It is obvious that the book "On the Imitation of Christ" brought the said husband to that state in which he dared to pronounce such a hasty, so wrong, such a sad judgment (by the way, when it appeared, the book "On the Imitation of Christ" was condemned even by the Roman Catholic Church and persecuted by the Inquisition. Later that persecution was stopped, and he passed into patronage when it was seen that the book served as a good tool of propaganda among people who had lost the true understanding of Christianity, preserving a superficial attitude towards him. By papal propaganda is meant the spread of the idea of the pope that the pope wants to impose on humanity, that is, the idea of the supreme, absolute, unlimited power of the pope over the world. Propaganda, which has this as its goal, pays little attention to the quality of the teachings it spreads: everything that contributes to the realization of its goal - and even faith in Christ without abandoning faith in idols. It's self-deception! It's a beauty! This book consists of false representations; the false notions are the product of improper feelings caused by that book. It lives in the book and exudes from the book the anointing of an evil spirit, which flatters the readers, drinks them with the poison of lies, sweetened with the fine spices of high-mindedness, vanity and voluptuousness. The book directly leads the reader into communion with God, without prior purification by repentance, which is why it causes special affection among passionate people, who are not familiar with the path of repentance and who have not been warned to guard against self-deception and pretense, nor directed to proper living by the teachings of the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church. The book has a strong effect on the blood and nerves, excites them, and that is why it especially appeals to people who are in the power of sensuality: it can be enjoyed without rejecting gross sensual pleasures. High-mindedness, perfidious voluptuousness and vanity are presented in the book as actions of God's grace. When they smell their fornication in its perfidious action, carnal people reach a state of ecstasy due to pleasure, due to intoxication that was achieved without effort, without self-denial, without repentance, without crucifying the body with passions and desires ( Gal. 5:24 ), with flattery of the fallen state. Guided by their blindness and pride, they joyfully pass from the bed of animal love to the bed of love that is even more transgressive, which reigns in the house of fornication of rejected spirits. One person, who according to her earthly position belonged to the highest and most educated class, and who was outwardly a member of the Orthodox Church, expressed herself in the following way about a deceased Protestant woman whom that person considered holy: "She loved God passionately; she thought only of God; she saw only God; she read only the Gospel and "On the Imitation of Christ", which is the second Gospel" (by the way, this ecstatic statement was uttered in French language, so suitable for the stage: "Elle aimait Dieu avec passion; elle ne pensait qu'a Dieu, elle ne voyait que Dieu; elle ne lisait que l'Evangile qui est un second Evengile"). Those words express exactly the state in which the readers and admirers of the work "On Imitation of Christ" reach. This sentence is essentially identical to the testimony of the famous French writer, Mrs. de Sevigny, about the famous French poet Racine the Elder. "He loves God as he used to love his concubines," Madame de Sevigny allowed herself to say ("Il aime Dieu, comme il aimait ses maitresses"). The well-known critic La Garpe, who was first an atheist and then converted to an incorrectly understood and perverted Christianity, approving the statement of Madame de Sevigny, said: "The heart that loves the Creator and the creature is one, although the consequences differ from each other as much as the objects themselves are different" ("C'est avec ie meme coeur, qu'on aime ie Createur, ou la creature, quoique les effest soient aussi differente, quo les objets"). Racine moved from debauchery to the delight called "opinion". That charm is clearly expressed in the poet's two last tragedies - "Jestiri" and "Godolija". Sublime Racine's Christian thoughts and feelings found a wide space in the temple of the Muses and Apollo (the Muses and Apollo are the deities of the ancient pagans, Greeks and Romans; to these demons the pagans attributed the patronage of the fine arts), gathering applause and ecstasy in the theater. "Godolie", a tragedy considered to be Racine's best work, was shown forty times in a row. The spirit of that tragedy is identical with the spirit of "Ugledanja". We believe that there is an animal lust in the heart of man, brought into him by the fall, which is related to the lust of fallen spirits; we believe that there is also a spiritual aspiration in the heart, with which we were created, with which we naturally and correctly love both God and neighbor, which is in harmony (in harmony, in agreement) with the aspiration of the Holy Angels. In order to love God and our neighbor in God, it is necessary to cleanse ourselves of animal lust. Purification is perfected by the Holy Spirit in a person who shows his will for purification with his life. In the moral sense, desire and other mental forces are actually called the heart, not the heart as a body part. Those forces are concentrated in this limb, so that in general usage the name has been transferred from the limb to the meeting point of forces. Unlike the feelings of carnal men, spiritual husbands, after smelling the stench of evil cloaked in the guise of good, immediately feel disgusted by a book that exudes such stench. Elder Isaiah, a monk who lived in silence in the Nikiforov monastery (Olonje or Petrozavodsk eparchy), having advanced in mental prayer and worthy of the shadow of God's grace, was once read a passage from "Ugledanje". The old man instantly saw the meaning of the book; he laughed and exclaimed: "Oh! This is written in a state of opinion. There is nothing true in it! Everything is false! Everything is invented! Thomas described spiritual states, which he did not know from experience, as they appeared and as he imagined them." Prelest, like misfortune, represents a sad scene; but as an absurdity she is a funny sight. Archimandrite of the Novojezersk monastery of St. Cyril (Novgorod eparchy), known for his austere way of life, who in the simplicity of his heart practiced almost exclusively physical feats, while he had a very modest idea of the spiritual, he first suggested to the persons who consulted with him and who were under his leadership to read "On the imitation of Christ", but a few years before his death he began to forbid its reading, saying with holy simplicity: I thought that book was useful for souls, but God revealed to me its harmfulness". Jeroshimonk Leonid, known for his active monastic experience, had the same opinion about "Ugledanje", who laid the foundation for moral well-being in the Optina Monastery (Kaluska Diocese). I personally knew all the mentioned ascetics. A certain Spakhia, brought up in the spirit of Orthodoxy, who had the opportunity to briefly see the so-called "big world", i.e. the highest layers of society, once noticed the book "On the Imitation of Christ" in the hands of his daughter. He forbade her to read that book, saying: "I don't want you to follow fashion and flirt before God." This is the most accurate assessment of this book. Student: Are there any other types of charms? Elder: All partial types of self-delusion and demon-infatuation fall into the two basic types mentioned above, and their origin is either in the improper functioning of the mind or in the improper functioning of the heart. The effect of "opinion" is especially wide. It is not without reason that the state of self-delusion and delusion also includes the state of mind of those monks who, having rejected the exercise of the Jesus prayer and mental activity in general, are content only with external prayer, i.e. not missing church services and the strict fulfillment of the kelic rule, which consists exclusively of psalm-singing and oral and loud prayers. They cannot avoid "opinion", as explained by the already mentioned elder Vasilije in the preface to the book of Saint Gregory the Sinaite, referring primarily to the writings of the Reverend Gregory and Simeon the New Theologian. The indicator of the hidden "opinion" in these ascetics is manifested when they think of themselves as leading a careful life, when they despise others because of pride, speak badly of them, consider themselves worthy, in their opinion, to be shepherds of sheep and their teachers, resembling a blind man who wants to show the way to other blind people (On another way of attention and prayer. Benevolence, part I). Verbal and loud prayer is fruitful when it is connected with attention, which is very rare, because we learn attention primarily when practicing the Jesus prayer (Foreword by Shimonach Vasilij). About true and false calmness "Let no one deceive you with pretended humility" (Col. 2:18), says the Holy Apostle Paul. Itin's humble mind consists in obeying and following Christ (Philippians 2:5-8). A true calm mind is a spiritual mind. It is a gift from God; it is the action of God's grace in the mind and heart of man. There is also a willful quiet mind: it is invented for itself by a vain soul, a soul charmed and deceived by false teaching, a soul that flatters itself, a soul that seeks flattery from the world, a soul that strives for earthly progress and earthly pleasures, a soul that has forgotten about eternity, about God. A willful meek mind, derived from one's own imagination, consists of many and various tricks that human pride uses to capture the glory of meekness from a blinded world, a world that loves its own, a world that glorifies vice when it is covered with a mask of virtue, a world that hates virtue when that virtue is shown to its eyes in its holy simplicity, in its holy and unwavering obedience to the Gospel. Nothing is so hostile to the humility of Christ as self-willed humility, which has rejected the yoke of obedience to Christ and which, under the guise of hypocritical service to God, serves Satan in sacrilege. If we constantly look at our sin, if we try to see it down to the smallest details, we will not find any virtues in ourselves, we will not even find a calm mind. True humility conceals true, holy virtue: so a chaste girl hides her beauty with a veil, so the Holy of Holies hides herself from the eyes of the people with a veil. A true calm mind is an evangelical character, an evangelical disposition, an evangelical way of thinking. True humility is the secret of God: it is inaccessible to the knowledge of human actions. As the highest wisdom, it appears to the carnal mind as folly. The Lord Jesus reveals the secret of humility to His faithful disciple who constantly sits at His feet and carefully follows His life-giving words. And when it is revealed, it remains hidden: it is unfathomable by words and earthly language. It is unknown to the physical reason: the unknown is known by the spiritual reason, and, being known, it remains as unknown. Tranquility is heavenly living on earth. A gracious, miraculous vision of God's majesty and God's innumerable benefactions to man, a gracious knowledge of the Redeemer, following Him with self-denial, seeing the abyss of destruction into which the human race has plunged - these are invisible signs of humility, these are the first chambers of this spiritual palace that the God-man created. Calm does not see itself as being calm. On the contrary: it sees a lot of pride in itself. It takes care to find all the branches of that pride; and looking for them, he sees that he still has a lot to look for. Venerable Macarius of Egypt, whom the Church called the Great because of the exceptionality of his virtues, and especially because of the deepest humility, the famous and spiritual Father, in his sublime, holy, mysterious sermons, said that even the purest and most perfect man has something proud in him (Sermon 7, ch. 4). That well-pleaser of God reached the highest degree of Christian perfection; he lived in times when there were many Saints, he had the opportunity to see the greatest among the holy monks, Anthony the Great, and he said that he had not seen a single man who could be called perfect in the full and true sense of the word (Sermon 8, ch. 5). False humility, on the other hand, sees itself as humble: in a funny and sad way, it consoles itself with that vision, which is deceptive and destructive to the soul. Satan takes upon himself the form of a luminous Angel; his apostles take the form of the Apostles of Christ (1 Cor. 9, 13-15); his teaching takes the form of Christ's teaching; the states produced by his delusions appear to be spiritual, grace states; His pride and vanity, and the self-delusion and delusion caused by them, are shown as the humility of Christ. Ah! Where do they hide from the unfortunate people absorbed in fantasies, sadly satisfied with themselves, their state of self-delusion, and filled with the thought that they will enjoy themselves and dwell in bliss, where do they hide from them the words of the Savior: "Blessed are you who are hungry now, blessed are you who weep now, and woe to you who are full now, woe to you who laugh now" (Lk. 6, 21-25). Look more carefully, look impartially at your soul, beloved brother! Isn't repentance more suitable for her than pleasure! Isn't it more appropriate for her to weep on the ground, in that valley of sorrow, whose indication is precisely weeping, than to invent for herself premature, flattering, absurd, disastrous pleasures! Repentance and weeping over sin provide eternal bliss: it is known, it is trustworthy, it is made known by the Lord. Then why should you not immerse yourself in those holy states, why should you not dwell in them, and not to invent pleasures for yourself, to satiate yourself with them, to satisfy yourself with them, to quench your blissful hunger and thirst for God's justice, blessed and saving sorrow for your sins and for sinfulness. Hunger and thirst for God's justice are witnesses of poverty of spirit; crying is an expression of humility, his voice. Incessant crying, self-satisfaction and delight in one's presumptuous spiritual state form the pride of the heart. Fear lest, because of vain and flattering pleasure, you inherit eternal sorrow, which God promised to those who are now oversaturated in their self-indulgence, contrary to the will of God. Vanity and its children - false spiritual pleasures, which work in a soul that is not imbued with repentance - create the illusion of humility. With this illusion, the soul replaces true humility. The illusion of truth, having filled the sacred chambers of the soul, blocks all the entrances to those chambers to the Truth itself. Alas, my soul, God-created church of truth! Having accepted the illusion of truth, bowing down to a lie instead of the Truth, you become a pagan temple! In that church stands an idol: the opinion of humility. Humility is the worst form of pride. Pride is difficult to expel even when a person is aware that it is pride; but how can he expel her when she is presented to him as humility? In that church reigns the mournful abomination of desolation! In that church, the incense of idolatry is felt, hymns are sung that rejoice the ad. There the thoughts and feelings of the soul taste forbidden food sacrificed to idols, drink wine mixed with deadly poison. The pagan temple, the abode of idols and all impurity, is inaccessible not only to the grace of God, to spiritual gifts, but also to any true virtue, any evangelical commandment. False humility makes a person blinded to such an extent that it forces him not only to think for himself and to give others hints that he is humble, but also to say it openly, to preach it loudly (On admiration, vol. 3, ch. 2). A lie mocks us cruelly when, being deceived by it, we take it for the truth. Gracious humility is invisible, just as the invisible giver is its God. It is hidden by silence, simplicity, sincerity, unforcedness, freedom. False humility is always accompanied by a contrived exterior: it is publicly displayed, False humility loves scenes: with it it deceives both others and itself. The humility of Christ is clothed in robes and robes ( John 19:24 ), the simplest of clothes: wrapped in these clothes, it remains unrecognized and unnoticed by people. Tranquility is a pledge in the heart, a sacred, nameless property of the heart, a divine habit that is imperceptibly born in the soul from the fulfillment of the commandments of the Gospels (Reverend Father Dorotheus, Lesson 2). The action of humility can be compared to the action of the passion of avarice. He who is infected with the weakness of faith and love for rotten goods, the more he acquires them, the more insatiable and greedy he becomes. The richer he gets, the poorer and more miserable he seems to himself. Likewise, the one who is guided by humility - the more he enriches himself with virtue and spiritual gifts, the more scarce and worthless he becomes in his own eyes. It's natural. When man has not yet tasted of the highest good, then his own good, defiled by sin, represents value for him. And when he becomes a partaker of divine, spiritual good, then his own good, united and mixed with evil, has no value for him. The poor man has a precious bag with copper coins that he collected for a long time with effort and effort. But when the rich man unexpectedly delivers a multitude of silver coins into his bosom, the latter will dismiss the bag with contempt as a burden that represents only a burden. The righteous, long-suffering Job, having endured angry temptations, was worthy of seeing God. Then, in an inspired prayer, he said to God: "I heard about You with my ears, and now my eyes see You". What kind of fruit has grown in the soul of a righteous man from seeing God? "That's why I deny," Job continues and ends his prayer, "and I repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42, 5-6). Do you want to find peace? Fulfill the commandments of the Gospel: with them, holy humility will settle in your heart and become its property, i.e. the properties of our Lord Jesus Christ. The beginning of humility is poverty of spirit; its middle is growing up in him, which surpasses every mind and knows the peace of Christ; its end and perfection is the love of Christ. Calmness never gets angry, never pleases people, never gives in to grief, never fears anything. Can he give himself up to grief who knew in advance that he was worthy of all suffering? Can trouble be feared by someone who has condemned himself to suffering in advance, who sees them as a means of his salvation? The pleasers of God fell in love with the words of the reasonable thief who was crucified next to the Lord. In their sufferings, they are used to saying: We receive according to our deeds as we deserve; remember us, Lord, when you come in your Kingdom (Lk. 33, 41-42; 27, 34). They welcome every suffering with the recognition that they deserve it (Reverend Abba Dorothei, Lesson 2). Sacred peace enters their hearts with words of humility! He offers a cup of spiritual consolation to the sick on the bier, to the slave in prison, to the one persecuted by men, and to the one persecuted by demons. The hand of humility also offers a cup of consolation to him who is crucified on the cross; the world can only bring him vinegar mixed with gall (Mt. 27, 34). A calm person is not capable of harboring malice and hatred: he has no enemies. If one of the people insults him, he sees in that person the weapon of righteous judgment, or God's plans. A man filled with peace fully surrenders to the will of God. He does not live by his own life, but by God. All self-confidence is foreign to a calm person, and therefore he constantly asks for God's help, constantly dwells in prayer. A fruitful branch bows to the ground under the weight of its multitude of fruits. The fruitless branch, on the other hand, grows upwards, multiplying its fruitless shoots. A soul rich in evangelical virtues sinks deeper and deeper into humility, and in the depths of that sea it finds pearls of great value - gifts of the Spirit. Pride is a sure sign of man's vanity, enslavement to passions, a sign of a soul in which the teaching of Christ has not found any access. Do not judge a man by his outward appearance; don't conclude that he is proud or calm. "Don't judge by appearance"; "by their fruits you will know them" (Jn. 7, 24; Mt. 7, 16). The Lord commanded that people be known by what they do, by their rule, by the consequences that result from what they do. "I know your pride and the malice of your heart" (1King. 17, 21), his neighbor said to David; but God testified about David: "I made David my servant, I anointed him with my holy oil" (Ps. 89, 21). Man does not look the way God looks: because man looks at the face, but God looks at the heart (1Kar. 16, 7). Blinded judges often consider the hypocrite and lowly people-pleaser humble: he is the abyss of vanity. On the contrary, those ignorant people who judge consider him proud who does not seek the praises and rewards of men, and who therefore does not grovel before men, while he is a true servant of God; he felt the glory of God, which is revealed only to the humble, he felt the stench of human glory, and turned away from it both his eyes and the sense of the fragrance of his soul. "What does it mean to believe?" - they asked a great pleaser of God. He answered and said: "To believe means to dwell in humility and grace" (Alphabetski paterik. About Abba Pimen the Great). Calmness trusts in God, does not place its hope in itself or in people, and that is why it is simple, direct, unwavering, magnificent in its rule. The blinded sons of the world call it pride. Calmness does not value earthly treasures, not deigning rot and desolation either attention or sight. The holy coldness towards corruption and desolation is called pride by the sons of corruption, the servants of desolation. There is a sacred bowing from humility, from respect for one's neighbor, from respect for the image of God, from respect for Christ in one's neighbor; and there is vicious, self-serving, human-pleasing and at the same time man-hating, anti-God and god-hating worship: Satan begged the God-man to give him this kind of worship, offering him all the kingdoms of this world and their glory for him (Lk.4:7). How many are there even today who offer this kind of gift in order to gain earthly possessions! Those to whom they bow like this praise their humility. Be careful and observe: does the one who bows to you do it out of respect for the person, out of feelings of love and humility, or does his bowing only feed your pride, extorting some kind of temporary benefit from you? Look, great man of the earth, how vanity, flattery, meanness creep before you! As soon as they reach their goal, they will mock you and betray you at the first opportunity. Never pour out your mercy on a vain person: because such a person, as low as he is in front of those who are above him, is so proud, insolent, inhumane towards those lower than himself (Ladder, Letter 22, ch. 22). You will know a vain man by his special ability to flatter, oblige, lie, readiness for everything that is vile and low. Pilate was offended by Christ's silence, which seemed to him proud. "Don't you answer to me? Don't you know that I have the power to crucify you and I have the power to let you go?" (John 19:10). The Lord explained his silence by revealing the will of God, of which Pilate was a blind instrument, although he thought that his actions were independent. Because of his own pride, Pilate was unable to understand that before him stood all perfect humility - God incarnate. A lofty soul, a soul filled with heavenly hope, contempt for the rotten goods of this world, is not capable of petty pleasing and worshiping people. You wrongly call such a soul proud, because it does not satisfy the demands of your passions. Aman, respect the blessed, God-pleasing pride of Mordecai! The fact that there is pride in your eyes is actually holy humility (Book of Esther, ch. 4-7). Haman, a Macedonian, was the favorite and first nobleman of Artaxerxes, the Persian emperor. Mordecai, a Jew, was one of the king's servants, but, being deeply imbued with piety, he did not allow himself to please people, so he did not cower before the one who only temporarily rules. Such behavior of Mordecai provoked Haman's anger, and he prepared a high gallows to execute on them the man he hated, who stood out from the general tribute. But due to the fickle nature of earthly circumstances, circumstances changed, and Haman was hanged on the gallows he had once prepared for Mordecai. Calmness is an evangelical teaching, an evangelical virtue, the mysterious power of Christ. God appeared to people by putting on humility, and whoever of the people puts on humility becomes like God (St. Isaac of Syria, Letter 33). "If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me" (Mt. 16, 24), declares holy Humility. It is not possible otherwise to be a disciple and follower of the One who calmed down to death, to death on the cross. He sat down at the right hand of the Father; He is the new Adam, the Progenitor of the holy tribe of the elect. Faith in Him enrolls among the elect; election is received with holy humility, and is sealed with holy love. Amen. What can be more beautiful and sweeter than love for your neighbor? To love is to have bliss; to hate is to dwell in torment. All the law and prophets rest on love for God and for neighbor (Mt. 22, 40). Love for one's neighbor is the path that leads to love for God: because Christ was pleased to clothe himself in a mysterious way in each of our neighbors, and in Christ God is (1 Jn.). Do not think, beloved brother, that the commandment to love one's neighbor is so close to our fallen heart: the commandment is spiritual, and our heart has been dominated by flesh and blood; the commandment is new, but our heart is old. Our natural love was wounded by the fall; it should be mortified - that is what Christ commands - and from the Gospel, love for one's neighbor, love in Christ, is drawn to the world. The new man must have all the new qualities; no old property suits him. There is no value in front of the Gospel, the love of the blood and the feelings of the flesh. And what value can it have, if, when a person's blood is on fire, he swears that he will lay down his life for the Lord, and after a few hours, when the blood cools down, he swears that he does not know Him (Mt. 16, 33, 35, 74)? The Gospel rejects love that depends on the stirring of the blood, on the feelings of the carnal heart. It says: "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to separate a man from his father and a daughter from her mother and a daughter-in-law from her mother-in-law. And a man's enemies will become his own household" (Mt. 10, 34-36). The fall subjected the heart to the rule of the blood, and, through the blood, to the rule of him who holds the world in his power. The Gospel frees the heart from that enslavement, from that violence, and brings it to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit teaches holy love for one's neighbor. Love ignited and sustained by the Holy Spirit is fire. With that fire, the fire of natural, carnal love, injured by the sinful fall, is extinguished (Ladder, Letter 15, ch. 3). "He who says that it is possible to possess both one and the other love is flattering himself," said St. Jovan Lestvičnik (Letter 3, ch. 16). In what depravity is our nature! The one who by nature is capable of loving his neighbor with warmth is obliged to force himself to do something unusual - to love him in the way the Gospel commands. Fiery natural love easily turns into abomination, into irreconcilable hatred (2 Sam. 13:15). Natural love also spoke with a dagger. What festering wounds our natural love is in! How heavy is the wound of prejudice on her! A heart ruled by bias is capable of any injustice, any iniquity, just to satisfy its sick love. "False measures are hateful to the Lord, but a true measure is pleasing to Him" ​​(Proverbs 11:1). Natural love gives the one it loves only earthly; he doesn't even think about heaven. It wars against Heaven and the Holy Spirit; for the Spirit requires the crucifixion of the flesh. It wars against Heaven and the Holy Spirit; because it is governed by a cunning spirit, an impure spirit and doomed to destruction. Let's approach the Gospel, beloved brother, let's look at ourselves in that mirror! Reflecting in him, we will throw away the old clothes, in which the fall has clothed us, we will adorn ourselves with new clothes, which the Lord has revealed to us. That new garment is Christ. "You who were baptized into Christ, put on Christ" (Gal. 11:27). The new clothes are the Holy Spirit. You will be clothed with power from on high (Lk.24:49), the Lord said about those clothes. Christians are clothed in the attributes of Christ by the action of the all-holy Spirit. It is possible for a Christian to acquire such clothing. "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not turn care for the body into lust" (Rom. 13:14), says the Apostle. First of all, guided by the Gospel, cut off enmity, bad memory, anger, judgment and everything that is directly opposed to love. The Gospel commands us to pray for our enemies, to bless those who curse us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive our neighbors for everything they have done against us. Make sure, you who want to imitate Christ, that you truly fulfill all these commandments. It is not enough just to read the commandments of the Gospel with pleasure and marvel at the high morality contained in them. Unfortunately, many are satisfied with just that. When you begin to fulfill the commandments of the Gospel, the rulers of your heart will fiercely oppose that fulfillment. These are the rulers: your own bodily state, in which you are subject to flesh and blood, and the fallen spirits, who rule the bodily state of man. Carnal wisdom, his justice and the justice of fallen spirits will require you not to lose your honor and other perishable possessions, to protect them. But you bravely endure the invisible struggle, being guided by the Gospel, being guided by the Lord Himself. Sacrifice everything for the fulfillment of the commandments of the Gospels. Without such a sacrifice, you will not be able to fulfill them. The Lord said to His disciples. "If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself" (Mt. 16, 24). When the Lord is with you, hope for victory: the Lord cannot but be victorious. Ask the Lord for victory for yourself, ask for it with constant prayer and crying. And an unexpected effect of grace will come to your heart: you will suddenly feel the sweet intoxication of spiritual love for your enemies. And you still have a fight ahead of you! You still have to be manly! Look at the objects of your love: do you like them very much? Is your heart very attached to them? Give them up! Such a renunciation is required of you by the Lord, the lawgiver of love, not to deprive you of love and those you love, but so that you, rejecting carnal love, defiled by the admixture of sin, would become capable of receiving spiritual, pure, holy love, which is supreme bliss. The one who felt spiritual love with hatred will look at carnal love as a monstrous perversion of love. How to give up those objects of love that seem to have grown to the heart? - Say for them to God: "They are Yours, Lord, and who am I? A powerless creation, which has no significance." "Today I am still a stranger on earth, I can do something useful to those I love; tomorrow I may disappear from her face, and for them I am - nothing!" "Whether I wanted it or not, death comes, various circumstances arise, they forcefully separate me from those I considered mine, and they are no longer mine. In fact, they were not mine; there was only some kind of relationship between me and them; deluding myself with that relationship, I called them mine, considered them mine. If they were really mine, they would have remained and belonged to me forever." "Creations belong only to the Creator: He is their God and Ruler. Yours, my Lord, I hand over to You: I appropriated them wrongly and in vain." It is safer for them to be God's. God is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, immeasurably good. To him who is His, He is the surest, most benevolent Helper and Patron. God gives man what is His: and people become His, temporarily in the flesh, forever in the spirit, when God is pleased to give that gift to man. True love for one's neighbor is based on faith in God: it is in God. "That they may all be one," said the Savior of the world to His Father, "as You, Father, who are in Me and I in You, may they also be one in Us" (John 17:21). Calming down and pleasing God kills carnal love. And that means: she lives with self-esteem and disbelief. To those you love, do everything that is beneficial to them and everything that the law allows you; but always entrust them to God, and blind, carnal, irrational love will gradually turn into spiritual, rational, holy love. But if your love is biased against the law, reject it as an abomination. When your heart is not free, it is a sign of partiality. When your heart is enslaved, it is a sign of mindless, sinful passion. Holy love is pure, free, all in God. It is the action of the Holy Spirit, who acts in the heart according to the measure of its purification. Rejecting enmity, relinquishing partiality, renouncing carnal love, acquire spiritual love; "stay away from evil and do good" (Ps. 34, 14). Give respect to your neighbors as an image of God - respect in your soul, invisible to others, visible only to your conscience. Let your activity be in a mysterious way consistent with your mental attitude. Show respect to your neighbors, regardless of age, sex, profession, and gradually holy love will begin to grow in your heart. The cause of this holy love is not flesh and blood, nor attraction of feelings, but God. Those who are deprived of Christian glory are not deprived of another glory, acquired at creation: they are the image of God. And if the image of God is thrown into the terrible fire of hell, I am obliged to respect him there as well. What do I have to do with fire, hell! There the image of God was thrown by the judgment of God; it is mine to preserve respect for the image of God, and thereby preserve myself from hell. Give respect to the blind, the leper, the poor in understanding, the infant, the criminal, and the heathen as the image of God. What do you care about their weaknesses and shortcomings! Watch over yourself, so that you don't lack love. As a Christian, pay respect to Christ, who said at our lesson, and will say again when deciding on our share in eternity: "As you did it to one of the least of these My brothers, you did it to Me" (Mt. 25, 40). In your dealings with your neighbors, keep in mind those words from the Gospel, and you will become a favorite of love for your neighbor. The beloved of neighborly love enters through her into love of God. But if you think you love God, and in your heart there is an unpleasant mood towards even one person, know that you are in a sad self-delusion. "If someone says: I love God, but hates my brother, it is a lie," says Saint John the Theologian. "We have this commandment from Him: He who loves God should also love his brother" (1 John 4, 20-21). Јављање духовне љубави према ближњем знак је обновљења душе Духом Светим. "We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers," says St. John the Theologian again, "because whoever does not love his brother remains in death" (1 John 3:14). The perfection of Christianity is in perfect love for one's neighbor. Perfect love for one's neighbor consists in perfect love for God, for which there is no perfection, for which there is no end in growing up. Growing up in love for God is infinite: because love is an infinite God (1 John 4:16). Love for one's neighbor is the foundation in the edifice of love. Beloved brother! Go to discover in yourself a spiritual love for your neighbor; entering it, you will enter the love of God, through the gate of resurrection, through the doors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen. Love God the way He commanded us to love Him, not the way self-deluded fantasists think they love Him. Do not invent for yourself delights, do not stir up your nerves, do not inflame yourself with the flame of artifice, the flame of your blood. A sacrifice acceptable to God is humility of heart, contrition of spirit. God turns away with anger from a sacrifice that is offered with confidence in oneself, with a proud opinion of oneself, even if it was a burnt offering. Pride stirs the nerves, inflames the blood, awakens a tendency to fantasy, revives the fallen; humility, on the other hand, calms the nerves, tames the boiling of the blood, destroys fantasies, mortifies the fallen, and revives life in Christ Jesus. “Послушност је пред Господом боља од жртве, и покорност је боља од претилине овнујске“, говорио је Пророк цару Израиљском који се био усудио да Богу принесе жртву криву ( 1Цар.15:22 ): желиш ли да Богу принесеш жртву љубави, немој то чинити својевољно, по непромишљеној тежњи својој, него са смирењем, у оно време и на оном месту када је и где је Господ заповедио. The spiritual place where it is only commanded to offer spiritual sacrifices is humility (Alphabetni paterik. Saying of Venerable Pimen the Great). The Lord has marked those who love Him and those who have no love for Him with sure and accurate signs. "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. He who does not love Me, does not keep My words" (Jn. 14, 23-24). Do you want to learn the love of God? Remove yourself from every act, every word, thought, feeling that the Gospel forbids. With your hatred for sin, so hateful to the All-Holy God, show and prove your love for God. The sins into which you happen to fall due to your weakness, heal without hesitation with repentance. But you better try not to allow yourself to commit such sins by strictly guarding yourself. Do you want to learn the love of God? Carefully study the Lord's commandments in the Gospel and try to fulfill them in action, try to turn the Gospel virtues into habits, into your own characteristics. It is characteristic of the one who loves that he perfectly fulfills the will of the one he loves. "I love Your commandments more than gold and precious stones. That's why I keep Your commandments faithful, I hate false ones every time" (Ps. 129, 127-128), says the Prophet. This type of government is necessary to maintain faithfulness to God. Fidelity is an indispensable condition of love. Without this condition, love breaks up. By constantly removing ourselves from evil and fulfilling evangelical virtues - which is what the entire evangelical moral teaching consists of - we reach the love of God. It is also the means by which we abide in love for God: "If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love" (John 15:10), said the Savior. The perfection of love consists in union with God; progress in love is linked to unfathomable spiritual comfort, delight and enlightenment. But at the beginning of the feat, the disciple of love is obliged to endure a fierce struggle with himself, with his deeply wounded nature: evil, which became innate to the self through the sinful fall, became for him a law, which wars and rebels against the Law of God, against the law of holy love. Love for God is based on love for neighbor. When your bad memory is erased, then you are close to love. When your heart is overshadowed by a holy, gracious peace towards all humanity, then you are at the very door of love. But only the Holy Spirit opens those doors. Love for God is a gift of God in man who has prepared himself to receive that gift by purity of heart, mind and body. The measure of that gift is commensurate with the degree of preparation: because God is also a just judge in His mercy. Love for God is completely spiritual: "That which is born of the Spirit is spirit" (John 3:6). "That which is born of the flesh is flesh" (John 3:9): carnal love, like that which is born of flesh and blood, has artificial, perishable properties. It is fickle, changeable: its fire depends entirely on skill. Hearing the words of Scripture that God is our fire (Heb. 12, 29), that love is fire, and feeling the fire of natural love in you, do not think that those two fires are the same. No! Those two fires are enemies of each other and are extinguished by each other (Scale. Letter 3 and Letter 15). "Let us serve God pleasantly with respect and fear. Because God is our consuming fire" (Heb. 12, 28-29). Natural love, fallen love, inflames a man's blood, stirs his nerves, awakens a tendency to fantasies; love that is holy cools the blood, calms both soul and body, drives the inner man to prayerful silence, plunges him into intoxication with humility and spiritual sweetness. Many ascetics, accepting natural love for spiritual love, ignited their blood and fanned fantasies. The state of excitement easily turns into a state of frenzy. Those in a state of passion and frenzy were considered by many to be full of grace and holiness, while they were the unfortunate victims of self-deception. There have been many such ascetics in the Western Church since the time when it fell into papism, in which divine attributes are blasphemously attributed to man and in which man is given the worship that belongs and befits the One God; those ascetics, in a state of passion, wrote many books in which they presented their frenzied self-adoration as divine love, and in which their distracted imaginations created many visions that pleased their self-love and pride. Son of the Church from the East! Get away from reading such books, get away from following the teachings of the self-admired! Guided by the Gospel and the Holy Fathers of the true Church, he humbly ascends to the spiritual height of God's love by doing the commandments of Christ. Know for sure that love for God is the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit, and only through purity and humility can a person prepare for receiving that great gift, which changes the mind, heart, and body. It is a futile effort, useless and harmful, when we seek to discover in ourselves before the time sublime spiritual gifts: the merciful Lord gives them in his time by steadfast, patient, calm fulfillment of the commandments of the Gospels. Amen. The nets of him who holds the world in his power Under the sign of the holy cross, I lead you, brothers, to reveal to you a spiritual vision. Let Antony, the desert-dweller of Egypt, guide us in this. On one occasion, under the influence of God's revelation, he saw the nets of the devil, spread all over the world in order to hunt people to death. Seeing the countless number of those nets, he asked the Lord with tears: "Lord! So who can pass these nets and gain salvation?" (Scythian crutch, Venerable Abba Dorotheus, Lesson 2). I plunge thoughtfully into the consideration of the nets of the devil. They are spread both outside man and inside his being. One network is close to another; in some places the nets are placed in several rows; in other places, there are wide openings, but through which you again reach numerous folds of nets, from which escape seems already impossible. Looking at those nets full of traps, I cry bitterly! And involuntarily the question of the blessed desert dweller repeats itself in me: "Lord! So who can be saved from those nets?" The nets for my mind are spread in various books which call themselves light, but which contain the teachings of darkness, and which are written under the overt or covert influence of the dark and malevolent ruler of this world; their source is reason injured by the Fall "by human deception, and cunning to lead astray" (Eph. 4, 14), according to the words of the Apostle, by writers who "puff themselves up in vain with their carnal mind" (Col. 2:18). My neighbor, in love for whom I am obliged to seek salvation, becomes for me a net that hunts me to death when his mind is caught in the nets of false and flattering teachings and wisdom. My own mind bears upon itself the stamp of fallenness, it is veiled with a veil of darkness, poisoned with the poison of lies: it itself, seduced by the rulers of this world, spreads nets for itself. Even in paradise, he unreasonably and imprudently strove to acquire knowledge that was disastrous and murderous for him. After the fall, he became even more unreasonable and rash: he brazenly gets drunk with the cup of poisonous knowledge, and thus finally destroys in himself the taste and desire for the divine cup of saving knowledge. How many nets are in front of my heart! I see coarse and fine webs; which one should I call more dangerous and scary? I am in doubt. The hunter is skilled; whoever manages to slip through the coarse nets will be caught in the thin ones. The end of the hunt, however, is the same in both cases: killed. And the networks are hidden in every possible way, very skillfully. Fall is clothed in all kinds of exultation; people-pleasing, hypocrisy, vanity - in all forms of virtue. Deception and dark charm are covered by the mask of the spiritual, the heavenly. Soulful, often vicious, love is masked by the exterior of holy love; false, imagined sweetness presents itself as spiritual delight. The ruler of the world tries by all means to keep man in his fallen nature: and without gross sinful falls, this is enough to make man a stranger to God. Gross sinful falls will be completely, according to the exact calculations of the hunter, replaced by the proud opinion of himself of the Christian who is satisfied with the virtues of the fallen nature and who has turned to self-deception, thereby alienating himself from Christ. How much net is just for the body! And what a network it is! How only they are used by the ruler of this world! Through the body, yielding to its humiliating affections and desires, we approach the likeness (opportunity) of speechless cattle. Oh, what precipices! What a distancing, what a fall from the height of God's presence! We fall into that deep abyss, terribly far from God, when we indulge in gross bodily pleasures, which, according to their sinful gravity, we call falls. But less gross carnal pleasures are not less pernicious. For their sake, care for the soul is abandoned, God, heaven, eternity, man's destiny are forgotten. The ruler of this world tries to keep us in constant negligence and darkness through carnal pleasures. Through the senses, those doors that lead into the soul, through which it communicates with the outside world, he constantly introduces into it sensual pleasure and from it inseparable sin and enslavement. At famous concerts, music that expresses and achieves the most diverse passions resounds thunderously; those passions are displayed on earthly stages, swirled on earthly joys; a man in every possible way is brought to enjoy the evil that killed him. In his intoxication with it, he forgets the divine good that saves him and the Blood of the God-Man by which we are redeemed. Here are the drawn sketches of the nets that the ruler of this world has spread to hunt Christians. The sketch has only just been painted, but it is unlikely that it did not rightly cause horror in you, brothers, and it is unlikely that the question did not arise in your souls: "Who then can escape such nets?" The gruesome picture, however, is not over yet. My little girl gets new and new inspirations for painting. What does the word of God say? She announces a prophecy that is being fulfilled before our eyes, a prophecy that in the last times, due to the multiplication of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold (Mt. 24, 12). The true word of God, stronger than heaven and earth, announces to us the multiplication in the last times of the devil's nets and the multiplication of the number of those who will perish in those nets. That's right! I observe this world and see: the nets of the devil have multiplied, compared to the times of the early Church of Christ, they have multiplied infinitely. Books containing false teachings multiplied; minds filled with false teachings have multiplied, who pass them on to others; the number of followers of the Holy Truth decreased to the limit; respect for natural virtues, accessible to both Jews and Gentiles, increased; an appreciation of purely pagan virtues appeared, contrary to nature itself, which looked at them as evil; ideas about Christian virtues have weakened, not to mention how much their fulfillment in action has weakened, even disappeared; artificial living is advanced; spiritual life disappears; he spends all his time on the pleasures and cares of the body; there is no time to even think about God. And all that turns into an obligation, into a law. The multiplication of iniquity will cool the love of many, and those who would remain in love for God if evil were not of such a universal character, if the nets of the devil would not multiply to such an innumerable extent. Blessed Antony's sorrow was established. The sadness of the Christian of today is all the more grounded when he sees the nets of the devil; the question was founded, accompanied by a wail: "Lord! Who among men can pass over these nets and be saved?" To the venerable hermit's question, the Lord answered: "A calm mind will pass those nets, and they cannot even touch him." A divine answer! How he removes all doubts from the heart, and in a few words shows a sure way of victory over our adversary, a way of breaking up and destroying his densely intertwined traps, which he has set up thanks to his long and many-evil experience. Let us guard our mind with humility, not allowing it to unreasonably, hastily pursue the acquisition of knowledge, no matter how much their novelty and the importance of their names attract our curiosity. Let's save him from the temptation of false teachings, hidden under the name and mask of Christian teachings. Let's calm him down to obedience to the Church, punishing every thought that rises against the reason of Christ (2 Cor. 10, 5), the reason of the Church. In the beginning, the narrow path of obedience to the Church is difficult for the mind; but he brings out into a wide field the freedom of the spiritual reason, before which all the supposed illogicalities that the physical and mental reason finds in precise obedience to the Church disappear. Let us not allow him to read about spiritual things other than books written by writers from the true Church, which the Church itself testified to be the organs of the Holy Spirit. He who reads the holy writers imperceptibly becomes a partaker of the Holy Spirit Who dwells in them and speaks through them; the reader of heretical writers, even if they were more heretical and were honored with the name of saints, become partakers of the cunning spirit of the beautiful (St. Petar Damaskin. Benevolence. On reasoning): because of disobedience to the Church, which is pride, he falls into the traps of the rulers of this world. How to deal with the heart? - let's graft onto that wild olive a branch from a fruitful olive tree, let's graft onto it the attributes of Christ, teach him the humility of the Gospel, force him to accept the will of the Gospel. Seeing his disagreement with the Gospel, constant contradiction, disobedience to the Gospel, let us see in that opposition, as in a mirror, our fall. Seeing our fallenness, let us weep for it before the Lord, our Creator and Redeemer, let us mourn with saving sorrow; let us dwell in that sorrow until we see our salvation. "God will not reject a contrite and humble heart" (Ps. 51, 19) by handing it over to the enemy to become his catch. God is our Creator and Bishop: He is able to restore our heart. A heart that unyieldingly cries out to Him with tears and prayers will turn from a sinful one into a God-loving and holy one. Let's take care of our bodily senses, not letting sin into the dungeon of our soul through them. Let us curb our curious eye and curious ear; let's put a tight rein on a small limb of our body, but which causes great tremors - on our tongue; let's calm the body's involuntary strivings with abstinence, vigilance, labor, frequent remembrance of death, attentive and constant prayer. Oh, how fleeting are the pleasures of the flesh! What a stench they end with! On the other hand, a body surrounded by restraint and protection of the senses, washed with tears of repentance, sanctified by frequent prayers, in a mysterious way in the temple of the Holy Spirit, Who thwarts all enemy attacks on man. "A calm mind will pass all the nets of the devil, and they cannot even touch it". Amen. That terrible time will come, that terrible hour will come when all my sins will appear in all their nakedness before God - the Judge, before His Angels, before all humanity. I am filled with horror, foreboding the state of my soul in that horrible hour. Under the impression of a vivid and strong premonition, with a trembling urge to immerse myself in self-reflection, an urge to check in the book of my conscience the sins I committed there, committed by deed, word, thought. Books that haven't been read in a long time, that have been sitting in closets for a long time, are getting dusty, eaten by moths. Whoever picks up such a book will encounter great difficulties while reading it. Such is my conscience. Since it had not been examined for a long time, I opened it with great difficulty. And since I did that, I don't find in it the expected satisfaction. Only major sins can be seen quite clearly in her; the small letters, of which there are a large number, have almost completely faded away, and now one cannot make out what they signified. God, only God can restore color to faded letters and cleanse a person of an evil conscience (Hebrews 10:22). Only God can grant man the vision of his sins and the vision of his sin - his fall, in which is the root, seed, germ, the totality of all human sins. Calling on the mercy and power of God, calling on them for help with the most fervent prayer, combined with reasonable fasting, with weeping and wailing of the heart, I open the book of conscience again, I look again at the quantity and quality of my sins; I want to see what are the fruits of the sins I have committed? I see: "My iniquities have come out from the top of my head, they have weighed me down like a heavy burden, there are more of them than the hairs on my head" (Ps. 39, 5; 40, 12). What is the consequence of this sinfulness? "My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I cannot look; my heart has left me" (Ps. 40, 12). The consequence of a sinful life is blindness of the mind, resentment, insensitivity of the heart. The mind of a hardened sinner sees neither good nor evil; his heart loses the capacity for spiritual feelings. If, after abandoning a sinful life, such a person turns to the path of virtuous deeds, his heart, as if it belongs to someone else, will not sympathize with his striving towards God. When the multitude of his sins are revealed to the ascetic through the effect of God's grace, then it is impossible for him not to reach a state of extreme doubt, to sink into the deepest sorrow. "My heart beats hard, my strength has left me, and the sight of my eyes is gone, because I am full of fire inside", that is, my activity is full of stumbling due to the habit of sin, which violently drags me into new sins; "My wounds festered and festered because of my foolishness", that is, sinful passions grew old with me and wounded me as a result of my careless living; "and there is no healthy place in my body", which means: there is no healing solely through my own efforts to my entire being, which is defeated and infected by sin (Ps. 38, 10; Ps. 7:5, 7). By being aware of my sins, repenting for them, confessing them, regretting them, I leave all their multitude to the open sea of ​​God's mercy. And in order to protect myself from sin in the future, I will stare, sinking into myself in solitude, how sin works against me, how it approaches me, what it says to me. He approaches me like a thief; his face is hidden; his words are milder than oil (Ps. 55, 21); he tells me a lie, offers iniquity. Poison is in his mouth; his tongue is a deadly sting. "Enjoy yourself!", he whispers to me quietly and flatteringly. "Why should you be forbidden to enjoy? Enjoy! What sin is there?" - and offers me, a criminal, to violate the commandments of the All-Holy Lord. No attention should be paid to his words; I know that he is a thief and a murderer. But some inconceivable weakness, weakness of will, overcomes me. I pay attention to the words of sin, I look at the forbidden fruit. My conscience warns me in vain that tasting that fruit is also tasting death. If there is no forbidden fruit before my eyes, it suddenly appears in my imagination, vividly, as if painted by the hand of enchantment. The feelings of the heart are attracted by a seductive image, like a harlot. Its exterior is enchanting; from it everything exudes the seductive; she is wrapped in expensive, luxurious clothes; its deadly effect is carefully concealed. Sin demands a sacrifice from the heart, when that sacrifice cannot be offered by the body, due to the absence of the object itself. Sin works in me with a sinful thought, a sinful feeling, a feeling of the heart and a feeling of the body; it works through the bodily senses, it works through the imagination. What conclusion does this kind of looking at myself lead me to? To the conclusion that in me, in my entire being, there lives a sinful injury, which sympathizes with the sin that attacks me from the outside and supports it. I am like a slave chained with heavy chains: anyone who is allowed to do so seizes that slave and drags him wherever he wants, because the slave, being chained, is not able to resist. Once upon a time, sin penetrated even to the highest heaven. There he offered my ancestors to taste the forbidden fruit. There he scanned them; there he executed those who were enraptured by eternal death. And to me, their descendant, he constantly repeats the same offer; and I, their descendant, is constantly trying to cross and kill me. Immediately after sinning, Adam and Eve were banished from paradise and cast into the land of sorrow (Byt. 3, 23-24); I was born in that land of crying and trouble! But that doesn't excuse me; Paradise was brought here by the Redeemer and planted in my heart. By sin, I banished paradise from my heart. Now there is a mixture of good and evil, there is an angry struggle between good and evil, there is a collision of countless passions, there is torment, a foretaste of the eternal torment of hell. I see in myself the proof that I am the son of Adam: I guard his inclination to evil, I agree to the proposals of the seducer, although I know for sure that I am being offered deception and that murder is being prepared for me. In vain I would blame my forefathers for the sin they passed on to me: the Redeemer freed me from the slavery of sin, and now I do not fall into sins by force, but willingly. Our forefathers in paradise once transgressed one commandment of God, and I, being in the lap of the Church of Christ, constantly violate all the divine commandments of Christ, my God and my Savior. It happened that my soul was swirling with anger and bad memory. In my imagination, the saber hangs over the enemy's head and the heart is intoxicated with a satisfied revenge, the image of which was created in the imagination. Or I imagine piles of gold scattered everywhere! Immediately after that, images of magnificent palaces, gardens, all objects of luxury, voluptuousness, and pride that are acquired with gold, and for the sake of which the sinful man bows down to that idol - the means of realizing all perishable desires - appear. Or am I flattered by honors and power! I get up and go after fantasies about governing people and countries, about providing them with perishable goods, and perishable glory for myself. Or, I imagine that, as if before my own eyes, I see tables with edibles that are smoked and smell so wonderful! Ridiculously and at the same time sadly, I enjoy the charms that are shown to me. Either I suddenly see myself as a righteous person, or, to be more precise, my heart is filled with hypocrisy, it insists on appropriating righteousness for itself, it flatters itself, it cares about people's praises, how to attract them to itself! Passions, competing with each other, fight for me, constantly snatching me away from each other, whirling me, disturbing me. And I don't see my sorry state! On my mind is an opaque curtain of darkness; there is a heavy stone of insensitivity on my heart. Will my mind come to its senses, will it want to be directed towards good? My heart, which is accustomed to sinful pleasures, opposes it, my body, which has acquired animal lust, opposes it. I even lost the idea that my body, since it was created for eternity, is capable of the desires and movements of the divine, that its animal aspirations were introduced into the body by the sinful fall. The various parts of my being - mind, heart and body - are cut, disunited, acting discordantly, opposing each other; in the current, anti-God agreement, they act only when they serve sin. Such is my condition! It is the death of the soul during the life of the body. But I am satisfied with my condition! I am satisfied - not because of humility, but because of my blindness, because of my resentment. The soul does not feel its numbness, just as the body does not feel it, separated from the soul by death. If I felt my numbness, I would dwell in constant repentance! If I could feel my numbness, I would care for the resurrection! I am all absorbed in the cares of this world, I am little concerned about the suffering of my soul. I strictly condemn even the smallest sins of my neighbors; and I myself am full of sin, I am blinded by it, turned into a petrified pillar like Lot's wife, I am not capable of any spiritual elevation. I have not inherited repentance, because I do not yet see my sin. I do not see my sin because I am still serving sin. The one who delights in sin, the one who allows himself to taste it, even if only with thoughts and compassion of the heart, cannot see his sin. Only he who has resolutely renounced all friendship with sin can see his sin, who cheerfully guards the gates of his home with the drawn sword of the word of God, who with that sword rejects and cuts every sin, in whatever form it approaches. Whoever accomplishes a great deed - establishes enmity towards sin, forcibly removing his mind, heart and body from it, God will give him a great gift - seeing his sin. Blessed is the soul that saw the sin nestling in it! Blessed is the soul that saw in itself the fall of the forefathers, the old age of Adam! Such a vision of one's sin is a spiritual vision, the vision of a mind healed from blindness by the grace of God. The Holy Church of the East teaches that with fasting and kneeling, one prays to God for the vision of one's sin. Blessed is the soul that is constantly taught in the Law of God! In him, she can see the image and beauty of the New Man, and through them see and correct her shortcomings. Blessed is the soul that has purchased the field of repentance by mortifying itself to sinful endeavors! In that field, he will find the priceless treasure of salvation. If you have acquired the field of repentance, cry like a child before God. Do not pray, if you can, do not pray to God; rejecting yourself, surrender to His will. Understand, feel that you are a creation, and God is the Creator. Cling to the Creator's will without thinking, offer Him only a child's cry, offer Him a heart filled with silence, ready to follow His will and bear the seal of His will. If, due to your inexperience, you are not able to sink into prayerful silence and cry before God, say a humble prayer before Him, a prayer for the forgiveness of sins and healing from the passions of sin, those terrible moral ailments that arise from willful sins that are repeated for a long time. Blessed is the soul that has realized that it is completely unworthy of God, that has condemned itself as omnivorous and sinful! She is on the way to salvation; there is no self-delight in her. On the contrary, the one who considers himself ready to receive grace, who considers himself worthy of God, who expects and prays for His mysterious coming, saying that he is ready to accept, hear and see the Lord, deceives himself and flatters himself; he has reached the high rock of pride, from which he falls into the dark abyss of perdition (St. Isaac the Syrian, Letter 55). All those who were proud of God are crushed there, all those who dare to shamelessly consider themselves worthy of God, and from that self-conceit and self-deception say to God: Speak, Lord, Your servant hears! The prophet Samuel, when he was still a child, heard the Lord calling him; not thinking that he was worthy of conversation with the Lord, he went to his over-aged teacher, asking him for lessons on how to govern himself. And a second time, Samuel heard the same voice calling him, and again he went to the teacher. And the teacher understood that the voice calling him was the voice of God, and commanded the child to, when he heard a similar call again, answer: "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening!" (1Kings 3, 1-9). The same thing dares to be said by a voluptuous and arrogant fantasizer, whom no one calls out, but is intoxicated with a vain opinion, and invents voices and consolations in himself, and with them he flatters his haughty heart, with them he deceives himself and his credulous followers. In the already mentioned work of the Western writer (Tom Kempijski), book three, chapter two (Moscow, 1834), inflamation, self-consciousness and self-enchantment are so impressively and vividly depicted that we think it would not be out of place to present the text itself to the readers' attention: "Speak, Lord, hear Your servant. I am Your servant; understand me and I will know Your revelations. Bring my heart to Your revelations; let The people of Israel once said to Moses: Let not God speak to us, O Lord; on the contrary, I beseech Thee, like the prophet Samuel, saying: Let not Moses, nor any other prophet, speak to me, O Lord, who is the light of all prophets. inspired. You alone, without them, can permeate my soul with Your truth; and without You they could do nothing. They can speak words, but they cannot give them spirit. Their speech is beautiful; but if You are silent, it will not warm the heart. They decompose; but You reveal the meaning. They explain the secret; but You break the seal that hides her. They declare Your commandments; but You help to make them happen. They show the way; but You give strength to walk on it. They act only externally; but You enlighten and teach hearts. They water; but You give fruitfulness. Their words ring in the ears; but You give us to understand what they say. Therefore, let not Moses speak to me, but You, Lord my God, eternal truth! Speak to me, for I fear lest I die, and listen in vain, if, informed only externally, I am not devout in soul; because I am afraid of finding my condemnation in Your word, if I hear it and do not do it, know it and not love it, believe it and not obey it. Speak, Lord, Your servant hears: You have words of eternal life". The audacity of this lavish eloquence and nonsense on the soul, brought up by the teachings of the Orthodox Church, causes horror and deep sadness. There is no repentance! No contrition of spirit! There is absolutely everything striving towards the closest and tightest possible union with God. This is generally the attitude of Western authors in the field of asceticism. One of them, expressing his incorrect understanding of the dignity of the Mother of God, ends his exalted crossword in the following way: "Let us therefore throw ourselves into the arms of the Mother of God!". This attitude is the opposite of the attitude that the holy Eastern Church transmits to its children. "If we didn't have Your holy prayer books," she says in one of her hymns, "and Your kindness that caresses us, how would we dare to sing to You, Savior, when the Angels constantly glorify You" (Tropar at Great Supper). In the second song she says. "Let us earnestly come now to the Mother of God, sinners and humble ones, and let us come to the Mother of God, crying out in repentance from the depths of our souls: Mistress, help, having pity on us; hurry, we are perishing from the multitude of sins; do not send Your servants away empty, because we have You as our only hope" (Prayer Canon to the Most Holy Mother of God). The state of self-enchantment and demonic enchantment is inconceivable to those who have not been brought up by a spiritual feat according to the tradition of the Orthodox Church: such people consider this sad state to be absolutely correct and beneficial. The one who took the effort to translate "On Emulation" from Latin into Russian, gave his lessons to the readers at the end of the book. Pointing to the 2nd chapter of the 3rd book, that vivid display of self-enchantment and self-delusion, he advises that before any reverent reading, the reader should be brought into the state depicted in that chapter. It is obvious that such an attitude provides the freedom to interpret the Holy Scriptures arbitrarily and abolishes the obligation to follow the interpretation given by the Holy Fathers and accepted by the Church. That is the dogma of Protestantism. Son of the Church from the East, the only holy and true! In his invisible feat, he is guided by the teachings of the Holy Fathers of your Church: they command us to turn away from every voice, from every vision outside and inside our being, before we are renewed by the obvious action of the Holy Spirit, as a sure reason for self-enjoyment (Venerable Gregory Sinait, On Enlightenment and the rest. Benevolence, part 1. Saint Callistus and Ignatius Xanthopuli, ch. 73. Benevolence, part 2). Keep your mind without seeing; he chases away all the fantasies and opinions that approach him, for which the fall has replaced the truth. Dressed in repentance, with fear and trembling stand before God Almighty, Who is able to cleanse your sins and renew you with His Holy Spirit. When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you into all truth (John 16:13). The feeling of weeping and repentance is the only thing needed by the soul that approached the Lord with the intention of obtaining from Him the forgiveness of its sins. That's the good part! If you chose him, don't let him be taken away from you! Don't replace that treasure with some desolate, false, violent, ostensibly beneficial feelings, don't drown yourself in self-flattering. "If some of the Fathers", says Venerable Isaac of Syria, "wrote that there is purity of soul, that there is health of the soul, dispassion, vision of the soul - they did not write it so that we would seek them ahead of time and with anticipation. In the Scriptures it is said: "The kingdom of God will not come in a visible way" (Lk.17:20). Those in whom there is a living expectation have gained pride and a fall... Seeking God's high gifts with expectation Church God has rejected it. It is not a sign of love for God; it is a debt of the soul" (St. Isaac of Syria, Verse 55). All the Saints considered themselves unworthy of God: thereby they manifested their worthiness, which consists in humility (Saint Isaac of Syria, Letter 36). All the self-adorned considered themselves worthy of God: thereby they manifested the pride that took over their souls and the demonic beauty. Some of them accepted the demons who appeared to them in the form of angels and followed them; to others, the demons appeared in their true form, pretending that they were defeated by their prayer, thereby introducing them to a higher mind; some inflamed their imaginations, stirred up their blood, caused their nerves to stir, accepted it as a blessed pleasure and fell into self-delusion, into complete blackout, joining their spirit among the rejected spirits. If you need to talk to yourself, don't offer yourself flattery, but self-reproach. In our fallen state, bitter medicines are useful to us. Those who flatter themselves have already received their reward on earth - their self-admiration, praise and love of the world, which is the enemy of God; and in eternity they have nothing to hope for except condemnation. "My sin is always before me" (Ps. 51, 5), Saint David says about himself: his sin was the object of his constant observation. "I confess my guilt, and I sue because of my sin" (Ps. 38, 18). St. David practiced self-condemnation, confessing his sin when his sin was already forgiven, and when the gift of the Holy Spirit was already returned to him. And that's not all: he shaped his sin, confessed it for the whole universe to hear (Ps. 51). With the Holy Fathers of the Eastern Church, especially the desert dwellers, when they reached the heights of spiritual exercises, all these exercises poured only into repentance. Repentance took over their entire life, their entire activity: it was a consequence of seeing their sin. They asked a great Father what the work of a solitary monk should consist of. He answered: "Your dead soul is before your eyes, and do you ask what your actions should be?" (Saint Isaac of Syria). Crying is the essential act of a true ascetic of Christ; crying is his act from the beginning of the feat to its completion. Seeing one's sin and the repentance it produces are actions that have no end on earth: seeing sin awakens repentance; repentance provides cleansing; the gradually purified eye of the mind begins to perceive such defects and injuries in the entire human being, which before, in its darkness, it did not even notice at all. Lord, grant us to see our sins, so that our mind, fully attracted to the careful examination of our own mistakes, will stop seeing the mistakes of our neighbors and thus see all our neighbors as good. Give our heart to abandon the destructive worries about the shortcomings of our neighbor, to unite all our cares in one care for the acquisition of purity and holiness, which You have commanded and established for us. Let us, who have defiled the stripes of the soul, make them white in dreams: for they have already been washed with the waters of baptism, and now, after being defiled, they need to be washed with the waters of tears. Grant us to see, in the light of Your grace, the many kinds of evil that live in us, destroying every spiritual upliftment in the heart and bringing into it the confusion of the blood and the whirling of the flesh, which are the enemies of the Kingdom of God. Give us the great gift of repentance, which is preceded and born by the great gift of seeing one's sins. Save us with those great gifts from the abyss of self-adoration, which is born in the soul from its unnoticed and misunderstood sinfulness; it is born from the effect of her unnoticed and misunderstood voluptuousness and vanity. Save us with those great gifts on our way to You, and grant us to reach You, Who calls sinners aware of their sinfulness and rejects those who think they are righteous, so that we may glorify You, the One True God, the Redeemer of the captives and the Savior of the fallen, eternally in eternal bliss. Amen. The teaching of the Holy Fathers on pre-love Prelest - spiritual self-deception that comes from pride You shouldn't be afraid of falling over... It happens to those who are proud of themselves... who begin to think that as soon as the warmth descends on the heart, they have already reached perfection. And that is just the beginning, and perhaps an uncertain one, because the warmth and calmness of the heart can also be completely natural, that is, the result of focusing attention. And it is necessary to try and try, wait and wait, until the natural is replaced by the grace. Certainly it is best of all if we never think that we have achieved anything and that we always consider ourselves as nothing, naked, blind and completely ugly. Creating the Jesus Prayer, as we are all used to creating it, is a good deed. In monasteries, it is required as a duty. And would it be ordered if it were dangerous? The artifice they invented and attributed to this prayer is dangerous. She throws someone into the ecstasy of fantasy, and someone, it's strange to say, into a constant state of lust. Such must therefore be held accountable (by her) and she must be forbidden to them. Everyone, however, should be advised, and everyone should be instructed, to invoke the sweetest Name of the Lord in purity of heart. If someone, who has no prayer, forces himself only to pray in order not to obtain the prayer of grace, and at the same time does not force himself to have a calm mind, love and observe the other commandments of the Lord, then sometimes, according to his prayer, a grace prayer is given to him, to some extent even in humility and joy, while his nature remains similar to what it was before: he has no meekness because he did not diligently search for it, nor did he prepare to be meek; he does not possess a calm mind, because he did not ask for it, nor did he force himself to it; he has no love for everything, because he did not take care of it, nor did he diligently ask for it in his prayers. Anyone who - even against the wishes of his heart - forces and compels himself to pray, it is necessary, as it is written, to force himself with joy to love, and to meekness, and to all patience and generosity; in this way, it is necessary to force yourself to be humble, to consider yourself worse and lower than everyone, not to talk about useless things, but to always be taught by the words of the Lord and pronounce them with your mouth and heart. It is also necessary to force yourself to not be angry, as it was said: Let all bitterness and anger and bitterness and shouting and blasphemy with all malice be far from you (Eph. 4:31), so that in this way the Lord, seeing man's good will, will grant him that without effort and coercion he can preserve everything that before, due to the sin that lives in him, he could hardly preserve and with forcing himself. All these beginnings of virtue seem in some way to become a part of his nature, because, finally, the Lord himself approaches him - he approaches and resides in him, and He creates His divine messages in him, without effort and filling him with spiritual fruits. If calm mind and love, simplicity and gentleness are not closely connected with prayer in us, then prayer itself, or, better to say, that mask of prayer, can bring us little benefit. We assert this not only for prayer, but also for any other feat and effort: virginity or fasting, vigils, psalm-singing, or service, or for any action undertaken for the sake of virtue. If we do not see in ourselves the fruits of love, peace, joy, meekness, and with all that, calmness, simplicity, sincerity, faith, and, if necessary, generosity and friendliness, then we will try in vain, because we accept the effort so that we can use the fruits. When the fruits of love are not shown in us, then, undoubtedly, our actions are also useless. That is why such people are in no way different from the five crazy girls, who, because they did not yet have spiritual oil in their hearts, i.e. of the spiritual action of the above-mentioned virtues, and were called madmen, and were sadly left outside the royal conjugal chamber, having no benefit from the feat of virginity. As with cultivating a vineyard, all effort is invested in the hope that there will be fruit; if it does not bear fruit, then all the effort was in vain; so too, if we do not notice in ourselves, through the action of the Spirit, the fruits of love: peace, joy and everything else that the Apostle listed (Gal. 5:22), and if we cannot undoubtedly recognize them in ourselves by spiritual feeling, then the feats of virginity, prayer, psalm singing, fasting or vigil will be superfluous, since these efforts and these feats, spiritual and physical, must, as we said, be exercised with the hope of spiritual fruits; the fruits of the virtues are the spiritual enjoyment of undefiled pleasure, which is created in the hearts of the faithful and humble by the ineffable action of the Spirit. That is why efforts and feats must be considered for what they really are, ie. for effort and exploits, while fruits - must be considered fruits. If, however, someone, due to the scarcity of knowledge, considers his actions and feats to be gifts of the Spirit, it turns out that he is clearly wrong, he is deceiving himself and, with such an opinion, he is depriving himself of the great and true fruits of the Spirit. The true beginning of prayer is the warmth in the sickle, which burns the passions, and with steadfast love dwells in the heart joy and happiness, and establishes it in faith without doubt. Everything that comes to the soul, say the Holy Fathers, whether it is sensual or spiritual, as soon as the heart doubts it and does not accept it - is not from God, but sent from the devil. When, in the same way, you see that your mind is outside yourself or that some unknown force is dragging it up, do not believe it and do not allow your mind to be dragged away, but at the same time force it to return to its work. What is from God, comes only from himself, says St. Isaac, you don't know when it will happen either. Although the devil would like to make what is in the thighs apparently spiritual, showing one instead of the other - instead of warmth overflowing with indecent inflammation, instead of joy inciting unreasonable joy and the sweetness of expiration, and succeeding in hiding himself from the inexperienced with these charms - time, experience and feeling usually expose him to those who are not unfamiliar with his evil deceptions. The throat tastes food, says St. Letter (Job. 34; 3). Likewise, spiritual taste clearly shows everything as it is, not subject to pretense. Here is the cause of the thoughts! You listened to empty words and you remembered them. The devil takes those threads of memory and weaves a web of them in front of your mind's eye to hold it back. Then descend into your heart, averting your eyes from the deceptive representations of the devil, and lean on the Lord. In order to progress in prayer and to avoid falling asleep, a self-sacrifice is necessary that has learned to seek only concentration in prayer. Then the feat of prayer will become simplified and easier, and the temptations, which, however, are companions of every feat, will also be eased. If someone tries to discover in himself the effects of heartfelt prayer ahead of time, this is what Prep says. Nil Sorski, like other St. Fathers, allow severe trials of demonic forces that exceed our strength. The basis of such striving is incomprehensible arrogance and arrogance, which is presented as earnestness. Many claim that after the practice of the Jesus Prayer there is always, or almost always, an enchantment and they strictly forbid engaging in that prayer. In accepting such a thought and in such a prohibition is contained a terrible blasphemy and an enchantment worthy of pity. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the only Source and the only Means of our salvation. His human name borrowed from His Godhead the boundless, all-holy power to save us; how then can this force, which works for salvation, this unique force which grants salvation, become perverted and work for our downfall? That is nonsense! It is a deplorable, blasphemous, soul-destroying delusion. To accept such a way of thinking is surely to be under demonic temptation and to be deceived by false reason that originated from Satan. Consider the entire Holy Scripture: you will see that in it in every place the Name of the Lord is glorified and praised and His power, saving for man, is exalted. Consider the writings of the Fathers: you will see that all of them, without exception, advise and enjoin the exercise of the Jesus Prayer, calling it a weapon than which there is none more powerful in heaven or on earth and a God-given, inalienable inheritance, one of the final and highest vows of the God-man, the sweetest and most loving consolation, a reliable pledge. Finally, turn to the legislation of the Orthodox Eastern Church and you will see that, for all its illiterate children - both monks and laymen - it has determined that psalm singing and prayer should be replaced by the Jesus Prayer as a rule of thumb. What then, before the unanimous testimony of the Holy Scriptures and all the Holy Fathers, before the legislation of the Universal Church on the Jesus Prayer, does the contradiction of some blind people, which were celebrated and celebrated by the same blind people, mean? Insanity due to the Jesus Prayer can only occur when those who make that prayer do not deviate from their sins and sinful habits, when their own conscience condemns them. At the same time, a deep split takes place inside (such a person) that chases all peace from the heart. Thus the reason can be clouded, and the thinking can become confused and confused. It is said that mental prayer saves, but mental prayer itself necessarily requires to be directed, as long as it is self-directed or acquired through effort. It is precisely in cases where the mental prayer is practiced without the guidance of an experienced hand that one deviates from the path. The charm, however, which is understandable to many by its obvious consequences, must be studied and understood at its very beginning: in the wrong thought that serves as the basis of every delusion and deplorable state of mind. In the wrong thought of the mind there already exists a whole edifice of beauty, just as in a grain there already exists that plant which must develop from it after it is planted in the ground. A powerful tool against the enemy is those who cry contritely during prayer so that they do not fall into arrogance because of the joy that prayer gives. No harm can be done to the one who preserves that joy-sorrow. The prayer that, together with the Jesus Prayer, sets fire to the ground of our heart and burns passions like a fire is real, and not a beautiful prayer. It overshadows the soul with joy and peace, and it does not come to it from the right or the left, or even from above, but flows from the heart, like a spring of water from the Life-giving Spirit. Only love her as such and strive to keep her in your heart; let your mind never indulge in daydreams. With such a prayer, do not be afraid of anything, because the One who said "Do not be afraid, I am with you, do not be afraid" is with us. He who has directed himself in this way, lives righteously and blamelessly, and he will be alien to people-pleasing and arrogance; it will do him no harm if even a legion of demons rise up against him and expose him to innumerable temptations. Those who are zealous for spiritual life, writes Sieranski, begin with "Lord, have mercy!", but for them, as for us, it soon ends. A fire that is once kindled burns by itself and no one knows what feeds it. That is the secret. You will find that "Lord, have mercy" again in your thoughts the moment you come to your senses. These are the words of that Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me!" or "Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me". The fire, which is spoken of, will not be kindled immediately, but after a noticeable effort, when the warmth in the heart is kindled, which steadily grows stronger and kindles during mental prayer. Deep prayer to the Lord arouses warmth. Experienced fathers make a strict distinction between ordinary, bodily warmth, which occurs when, by attention and effort, the forces are concentrated on the heart; physical, lustful warmth, which the devil himself sometimes supports and clings to, and spiritual, sober and pure warmth. There are two types of this (other) warmth: natural, which occurs due to the union of the mind with the heart, and gracious. Experience teaches us how to distinguish between them. That warmth is sweet, and it is desirable to support it, both for the sake of that sweetness itself, and because it does good to the whole inner being. The one, however, who forces himself to maintain that warmth only for the sake of sweetness, develops spiritual voluptuousness in himself. That's why the sober-minded try to neglect that sweetness and establish themselves only in standing before God, completely surrendering to Him and as if surrendering themselves into His hands; they do not rely, however, on the sweetness that comes from warmth, nor do they pay attention to it. It is also possible to pay attention to her and, lulling yourself there as if in a warm room or warm clothes, only support her, without directing your thoughts upwards. The non-Orthodox mystics did not go beyond that: they considered this state the most sublime; there they found a perfect absence of thought, immersed in a kind of desolation. Such is the contemplation of mystics. Do not be dazzled by internal sweets: without the cross, they are not permanent and are dangerous. Consider every man better than yourself. Without this thought, everyone, even if he created miracles, was far from God. You ask, where do the interjections come from during the Jesus prayer? They do not come from it, but from the way in which it is created, and precisely the one described in Dobrotoljublje. This method must be worked out with a teacher who knows him well, that is, (it is necessary to be) in front of the teacher's eyes. And whoever reaches for this work on his own, based only on how it is described, he is inevitably in for a treat. Only the external appearance of that work is described there, while what is obtained from the old man who watches over the fulfillment of the inner being cannot be seen. Embarking on such a work, without the presence of an experienced guide, remains, naturally, only external: what has been written about the position of the body, breathing and looking at the heart is strictly fulfilled. As actions of that kind can naturally lead to a certain degree of concentration of attention and warmth, then he, not having an experienced guide with him, who would show him the origin of the changes taking place in him, comes to the thought that this is exactly what he was looking for, i.e. that he was overshadowed by grace when it was still not there; and thinks that he has obtained grace, when, in fact, he does not possess it at all. That is the beauty that will change all subsequent courses of his inner life. That's why even today we see how elders advise us not to engage in such a procedure because of the danger that is hidden in it. By themselves, they cannot give anything beneficial, because the grace is not connected to something external, but comes down to the internal structure. An internal structure that has been worthy of this will attract the effect of grace even without them. This is the organization that, during the Jesus Prayer, walks in the presence of God, inflames feelings of piety and fear of God, does not indulge itself in anything, always and in everything listens to its conscience and keeps it pure and calm, and entrusts its entire life - both inner and outer - into the hands of God. From these spiritual movements that occur in due time, the grace of God, merging them into one, ignites a spiritual fire in the heart, which testifies to the presence of grace in the heart. It is difficult to become arrogant that way. Even then, however, it is better to have a teacher present, who would see the face and hear the voice, because these two reveal what is inside. The reader will learn from Dobrotoljublje, from the sermons of Simeon the New Theologian, about three types of prayer, and in the Sermon of St. Nicephorus the monk and in the writings of Xanthopulos - lessons on skillfully bringing the mind into the heart with the help of natural breathing, or, in other words, about the mechanism that makes it possible to reach mental prayer. That teaching of the Fathers was and is a difficulty for many readers, while there is nothing difficult about it. I advise my beloved brothers not to expect to discover that mechanism in themselves unless it is revealed to them by itself. Many, wanting to know him by experience, damaged their lungs without achieving anything. The essence is that the mind and heart unite during prayer, and that, in its own time determined by God, is carried out by God's grace. The above-mentioned mechanism is completely replaced by the slow pronunciation of the prayer, a short pause after each prayer, quiet and slow breathing, "locking" the mind in the words of the prayer. Through such possibilities, we can certainly achieve a certain degree of concentration. With the focus of the mind during prayer, the heart begins to sympathize very quickly. The participation of the heart in the mind gradually begins to pass into the union of mind and heart, and the mechanism proposed by the fathers appears by itself. All the mechanical means, artificial in their character, and which the fathers prescribe, serve only as a means for the easiest and fastest achievement of concentration during prayer, and not as something of essential importance. The essential, necessary property of prayer is concentration. Without concentration, there is no prayer. True, grace-centeredness occurs through the deadening of the heart to this world. Means always remain only means... The union of the mind with the heart is the union of the spiritual thoughts of the mind with the spiritual feelings of the heart. "Three things you should preserve more than anything else," says Simeon the New Theologian, "not caring for anything, even if it is blessed, and not only for what is unblessed and worthless." In other words, one should become numb to everything; a clear conscience in everything, so that she would not accuse you of anything, and impartiality, so that your thoughts would not be inclined to any worldly thing. Let your concentration be within yourself (not in your head, but in your heart)». At the same time, St. Samson points to some actions that seduce some and deter them from action, while in others they obscure the action itself. Since such actions, when there is no experienced teacher, can be followed by bad consequences, and they are nothing more than an external aid to the internal action and do not contribute to anything essential, we omit them here. The essence is to acquire the habit of standing with the mind in the heart and in the sensual heart, but not in a sensual way. It is necessary for the mind to descend from the head to the heart and take root there, or, as one of the elders said, for the mind to meet the heart. Seek and you shall find. It will be most easily achieved by walking before God and prayerful effort, and especially by coming to church. We should, however, remember that ours is only effort, while only that work, i.e. the meeting of the mind with the heart, a gift of grace, which is given then and as the Lord wants it. The best example is Maksim Kapsokalivit - Pogorelac. Do not pay attention to some external actions during the mental Prayer of Jesus. They are necessary for others, but not for you. Time is up. You must know the place of the heart that is spoken of there. Don't touch the rest. The work of God is simple - these are the words of a child addressed to the Father, without any formalities, the Lord has made you wise for salvation! For those who have not yet found the way within themselves, trips to holy places help them, but for those who have found it, they are disastrous: they lead outside from the center. Cultivate yourself now in abiding within, and leave what is external. He who has acquired and accepted an unfortunate prejudice against the Jesus Prayer is by no means familiar with it through its correct and long-term exercise, and it would be far more reasonable and far more harmless if he refrained from discussing it and was aware of his undeniable ignorance of that sacred feat, than to accept upon himself the obligation to preach against the practice of the Jesus Prayer, to declare that this all-holy prayer serves as the cause of demonic enchantment and soul perish. I think that, for the sake of precaution, it is necessary to tell them that blaspheming a prayer called the name of Jesus or attributing a harmful effect to that name is equal to the blasphemy with which the Pharisees welcomed the Lord's miracles... Ignorant blasphemous thinking against the Prayer of Jesus has the characteristics of a heretical thinking. You read Benevolence - that's good. Do not engage in the articles of Ignatius and Callistus, Gregory Sinaites and Nicephorus. Ask someone if there is a life of old Paisius the German. The prefaces to some parts of Dobrotoljublje, compiled by the elder Vasilije, were published there. These articles clarify in many ways the significance of the technique of the Jesus Prayer. They will also help you understand everything properly. I already mentioned that you don't need that technique. What she gives, you already possess the moment you are summoned. Do not get the mistaken belief that the work of your prayer is already finished. There is no end to growing up in prayer. If you stop this growing up, it means that you have stopped living. May the Lord save you and have mercy on you! One can get out of a desirable state, and then consider the memory of it to be that state itself. Save from that, Lord! If you feel distracted - beware! It is very dangerous. The demon wants to drive you into any hole and execute you there. Thoughts begin to wander due to the reduction of fear and the cooling of the heart. There are many causes for a cold heart. The most important are complacency and arrogance. They are very close to you. Be careful and make haste so that the fear of God appears again and warms the soul. All the writings of the Greek Fathers are worthy of deep appreciation for the abundance of grace and spiritual understanding that live in them and exude from them, but the works of the Russian Fathers are more accessible to us than the writings of the Greek Saints, due to their exceptional comprehensibility and simplicity of presentation, as well as their proximity in time. In particular, the writings of the elder Basil can and must be considered the first book to which those who want to successfully practice the Jesus Prayer in our time should refer. That is her goal. The old man called his writings road signs, prefaces or readings that serve as preparation for reading the Greek Fathers. It is not without reason that the state of those monks who, rejecting the exercise of the Jesus Prayer, as well as mental activity in general, are satisfied with external demands, are not without reason called self-deception and spiritual delusion. indispensable participation in church services and fulfilling the cell rule exclusively composed of psalm singing and prayer words uttered with the mouth and throat. They cannot avoid arrogance, as the mentioned elder Vasilije explains in the preface to the book of St. Gregory the Sinaite, referring primarily to the writings of the venerable Gregory himself and Simeon the New Theologian. The mark of hidden "arrogance" in ascetics is manifested by the fact that they think they lead a focused life and because of (their) pride they despise others... Praying with the mouth and voice is useful when it is connected with concentration, which is very rarely encountered, because concentration is primarily learned by practicing the Jesus Prayer. The reason for the beauty is self-confidence All people are in a certain state of beauty that stems from their confidence in themselves. We are very prone to it, because any self-deception flatters our self-esteem, pride and pride. The tempter relies on this state of self-delusion, tries to deceive us, tames our passions, inflames glory and greed and tries to move us to the satisfaction of all these. The charm acts first on our mind; accepted without opposition, it perverts the flow of our thoughts and the movements of the heart, takes the whole man under its control and spreads to all our activities. Prelest threatens everyone who tries to acquire virtues, especially when it comes to the highest among them - prayer. For the demon here uses every cunning to ensnare the zealots in his nets. Prelestes most often fall prey to those prayer seekers who, believing in themselves, yearn to reach the highest levels of prayer as soon as possible. Instead of standing in humility before God and striving to fulfill His commandments, they use external techniques and strive for spiritual experiences. However, only vigilant attention, heartfelt repentance and humility form the basis and goal of prayer. The most dangerous thing in prayer is to think highly of God What he fears the most is a high opinion of himself Deviations in the Jesus prayer depend on where the attention is. He who stands before God only in his head cannot gather himself; he has to constantly fight against the onslaught of thoughts and passionate impulses. Whoever, however, stands before Him in his heart, is out of danger; but it is even more secure, who in deep repentance of the heart strives for God and prays for protection from every temptation. You stand in prayer before God-the Seer of the Heart. Never allow yourself to tempt Him and to perform the Jesus prayer lightly, without trembling reverence, in doubt or unbelieving curiosity. He prays with attention, in awe and inner effort, like a lost man who, in danger of his life, cries out for the salvation that only God can give. Never rely solely on external rules or techniques of prayer. Those who are satisfied only with "fulfilling exactly" easily fall into complacency and become arrogant - similar to the Pharisee - in front of themselves and others. But, with that, his prayer loses all value before God. Be careful: the rules and technique of prayer are only necessary aids-scaffolding while between them the edifice (of prayer) is being built in the heart. Therefore pay all attention to your heart (St. Theophanes the Prisoner). Perform the Jesus prayer in peace and humility. Watch carefully over it and never be zealously and immoderately zealous in the performance of heartfelt prayer. It is impossible and dangerous if one wants to force spiritual prayer through overexertion of physical and mental forces. God gives true prayer in his time - and not to a proud physical and mental zealot, but to a spiritual feeling of the deepest humility and heartfelt repentance, and with moderate, constant and diligent prayer (elder Agapius of Valaam). If the prayer of Jesus is performed in humility, it takes up residence in us; but as soon as the mind falls into self-confidence, it leaves prayer or falls into rapture. Experienced prayer men draw strict attention to the dangerous last: why do you prematurely seek higher states of prayer, why do you zeal through the external mechanism of breathing, in order to obtain the effect of grace? This only reveals your pride, which deprives you of the true fruits of prayer (St. Ignatius Bryančaninov). Spiritual delight without pain and suffering is of little use to us. Perform your prayer and watch out above all for your faults and weaknesses, which are as numerous as the sand in the sea, and suffer for them. God's grace approaches only to the extent of one's humility (Rev. Makarije Optinski). It clearly follows that it is an extremely dangerous undertaking to prematurely seek the acquisition of God's grace; it goes against the order of prayer itself. It is just as inflated and pointless for a beginner to use the aids that experienced prayer teachers provide for those advanced on the path of mind-heart prayer. Stick to the order of prayer and progress from degree to degree. This is how you will overcome your passions, limit the influence of temptation and, with the help of God's grace, get out of the state of self-deception and lack of freedom into truth and freedom. Prelest is the downfall of man through lies. St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov All kinds of delusions arise from the wrong use of the mind. A prerequisite for beauty is pride. Human pride as self-enjoyment offers the devil a comfortable abode, and he only adds his tricks to this. Self-deception or delusion threatens every arrogant person who confidently strives for a supersensual, mystical experience. In prayer, a person should carefully and soberly watch over his spiritual life, give his consciousness and freedom to God, and stand before Him in repentance of the heart. All wishes of fantasy and daydreaming should be rejected, and all involuntary thoughts or visions that appear in a person's consciousness should be strictly cut off. Because thoughts and fantasies disturb the soul, stir up passions in it and defile prayer. Visions lead an immature man to delusion and obsession: before his renewal by the Holy Spirit, man is impure; in such a state he used to communicate with pure and bright spirits (Angels). He is still a prisoner in the realm of the spirits of darkness (demons)... If the demons notice that a man has a high opinion of himself, then they appear to him in the form of Holy Angels, even in the form of the Lord Himself, and ravish his soul (St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov). Therefore, the spiritual law requires that before the purification of the soul, everything supersensual, otherworldly is strictly avoided, because it necessarily leads to the realm of fallen spirits and to enchantment. The proud man pays no attention to this spiritual law and accepts deceptive fantasies and beautiful visions as truth. Out of a lack of awe and self-confidence, he considers himself, though unprepared, called to higher degrees of prayer, zealous in the external mechanism of prayer and thrusting his mind into the interior of the heart - although his mind is defiled by passions. Spiritually incapable of perceiving spiritual things, such an impure mind, instead of seeing the truth, imperceptibly spins self-indulgent illusions, deceives itself, and falls under the influence of lies and demons. The most common and most dangerous perversion of such prayer lies in the fact that during prayer any images from the Holy Scriptures are created that flatter one's own self-indulgence, vanity, supposed intelligence or pride. Whoever shapes such seductive apparitions with the help of imagination and accepts them, begins, enchanted, to consider them necessary for the effect of God's grace. He falls into a false rapture (ecstasy), and his representations become physically inflamed. He is deluded by illusions that arise from his impure nature and do not represent any reality. The devil takes advantage of this self-deception and inflames it, through flattering thoughts and apparitions, turning it into a diabolical charm. Foolish pride shows itself in action. A man is unshakably convinced of the truth of his thoughts and visions, full of smugness and blind self-confidence. He then considers himself blessed, chosen, extremely zealous, not to be taught, he wants to teach everyone - and with that he falls fearlessly into every vice. In the midst of the false pleasure that the devil's charms offer, come the hours of spiritual awakening. The bitterness and despair of such moments are terrible. They intensify over time and often lead a person to madness or end in suicide (St. Ignatius Bryančaninov). In order to avoid being dazzled and bewitched, reject all imaginings, images and apparitions, because dreams, fantasies and strong mental excitements interfere with prayer and confuse the soul. Only those who, with the help of the Holy Spirit, attain perfection of mind, can overcome them (Rev. Neil Sorsky) Whoever imagines that he is blessed will never receive grace An unhealthy mental life leads to self-deception or self-deception. The proud heart is filled with a mad lust for the enjoyment of holy, divine, spiritual feelings, for which it is completely incapable. Instead of striving through prayer for painstaking self-knowledge - and that is the only thing we need - the impure heart is eager to enjoy divine bliss. In an effort to produce the feelings of a "new man", for which it is completely incapable in its rage - the heart replaces them by inventing false feelings, which are joined by the influence of demons. Such a person has a high opinion of himself and believes that he has many virtues and that he possesses the gifts of the Holy Spirit. As a victim of temptation, he feels overjoyed, he is intoxicated by his state, he constantly invents pious spiritual states and immerses himself in them. It comes from greed united with selfishness, which excites the blood of man, creating a false state of grace and producing satanic arrogance. Although such people are most often subject to anger and sensuality, they, considering their pride, try hard to avoid gross sins and keep themselves outwardly of high morals. But he who imagines that he is passionless will never be cleansed of passion; he who imagines that he possesses grace will never obtain it. In short, whoever ascribes spiritual gifts to himself, flatters himself with it and enjoys that self-conceit, closes his access to the Holy Spirit. He destroys in himself any ability to live in the Holy Spirit, since he sacrificed the truth to error. This kind of delight is satisfied by the enjoyment of false pious and false feelings of grace. From this arise false ideas about all spiritual activities, false notions about everything internal as well as external. The Lord speaks to the bewitched: "You say, I am rich and I do not need anything; and you do not know that you are unhappy, unloved, blind and naked" (Rev. 3, 17). Beneficence - bestows calmness. Beauty feeds self-indulgence and pride The effect of grace is easy to distinguish from pretense. Prelest is never approached as a free force, but only as a seductress who asks for a man's consent, and only through her does she gain her power over him. A person can always reject the temptation. Her heart always meets with doubt; only when someone completely falls into her servitude, then he no longer doubts her. Beauty never reduces the boiling of the blood, it never leads to self-knowledge and repentance of the heart. On the contrary, it awakens dreamers, excites the blood, offers disgusting pleasures, flatters, inflates itself with self-confidence, sets up its own self as the idol of the soul (St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov). Beneficial thoughts, movements of the soul or visions, as well as heat, light - are clearly different from those that are beautiful. Beneficial mental movements - always fill a person with deep humility, painstaking self-knowledge and poverty of spirit. Beneficial visions are revealed in quiet light and give the soul deep peace. Preleste movements - on the contrary, they increase the high mind. Apparitions appear in "pink light", arouse curiosity, inflame and create restlessness and confusion. Often the inner warmth that accompanies prayer becomes an occasion for delight. There is a natural warmth as a consequence of inner composure in the heart; and then comes the beneficial warmth that fills a person with bliss and an inner good feeling. There is also a bodily heating produced through immoderate zeal in prayer. The charm lies in this, when someone accepts this warming, this natural heat, for that spiritual, beneficial heat, and thus submits to a high opinion of himself - as if everything has already been achieved and he stands at the peak of perfection. Bodily warmth is distinguished by its fruits from the spiritual warmth of grace. The fruits of bodily heating are conceit, excessive self-confidence, arrogance or pride. The fruits, on the other hand, of spiritual warmth towards God are heartfelt repentance, humility and painstaking self-knowledge (St. Ignatius Bryančaninov). He who seeks inner warmth only for its bliss develops spiritual voluptuousness. Those who pray soberly, strive to pass that sweetness quickly and to dwell before God only in heartfelt repentance. False mystics, on the contrary, attach all their attention to this heat, rest in it as in a warm veil, maintain its bliss and drown in it as in emptiness. Don't let your inner sweetness fool you. Without the cross, she is vacillating and dangerous. Just as pride is the cause of delusion and self-deception, so humility is - as the opposite virtue - the only safe shelter from it. Tranquility is the destruction of all passions (Venerable Jovan Lestvičnik). And where the passions are defeated, the charms also disappear. Because it comes from a passionate imagination. The devil retreats before the humble, because he cannot bear the humility of heartfelt repentance. (Venerable Gregory Sinait). If we call upon God, then we have nothing to fear or doubt. Whoever stands in humility and obedience before God and only seeks Him, and avoids self-indulgence and arrogance, not even the whole army of the devil can harm him. The self-confident and self-willed, who only build on themselves, necessarily fall into all kinds of beautiful blindness and self-deception. He who is not in the feat is in the beauty ...The third fetters of the spirit come from Satan and his spirits. They are invisible and mostly coincide with the narrowness of self-indulgence and the world, which Satan only strengthens with his influence and through them keeps the human mind in darkness. However, there is also something that directly originates from Satan. It is a matter of some vague fear and fearlessness, which disturbs the sinner's soul at all times, and especially when he is aiming for something good. It is almost the same as when the master starts to threaten the servant, as soon as he stops doing something against his will and plans. Various spiritual deceptions (deceptions) come from the devil. For some, it is an exaggerated and unfounded hope in God's mercy, which does not sober up, but sinks more and more into the love of sin. In others, on the contrary – despair. With this one - doubt and disbelief, with that one - self-confidence and self-justification. Yes, a lot, indeed a lot depends on Satan, but it is difficult to determine exactly. Nevertheless, everything sinful should be attributed to him as the source, because he is the king of the sinful world. One of his cunning tricks is that he hides, ie. he leads sinners to believe that he, the devil, does not even exist, as a result of which he rages so arbitrarily and furiously in the sinner's soul, transferring the sinful aspirations, which he instills in him, to nature and encouraging him to worship God, because He supposedly forbids him what comes from human nature and orders what he has no strength to achieve. Reasoning divine grace often wrenched sinners from the jaws of hell by shaming Satan. She exposed him to public shame and ridicule, exposing his weakness and stupidity and exposing his wiles. Thus the devil was put to shame in the face of the magus Simeon, Cyprian of Antioch and many others. All such cases were followed by the conversion and understanding of not a small number of the blinded. In the days of the Lord on earth, the angry - who are the source of doubt and unbelief - became preachers of faith. And the holy Martyrs, by the power of Almighty God, often forced both the father and the children of lies to speak the Truth through idols and idolatrous churches. Such exposure of the schemes of the cunning convinces the sinner that he is in wicked and hostile hands and that they, to his own detriment, are playing with him and deceitfully leading him down some dark path to destruction so that they would gladly rejoice in that destruction. This inevitably gives birth to a deep feeling of fear for one's own well-being, caution, suspicion and disgust towards both the trickster and his "inventions" - prophets and passions, and his entire previous life. From here to the transition to the east of truth, goodness and bliss - to God, there is not much left. These are the ways and means by which God's grace acts on the human spirit, tearing it from the grip of its uncharacteristic life and confronting it with another, better life, in which its joy and tranquility are found. But, it is obvious that all of them, by themselves, are somehow incomplete, as if they do not see things through to the end. For example man was born with a thirst for better - but where should he look for that better, and how to reach it? Or, someone was shaken by the fear of death and judgment, what should he do to get rid of evil? Likewise in all other cases. That is why the penitent who turned to God from the first moments of his new life inevitably enters the path of exploits, struggle, and effort, and begins to bear the burden, the yoke. This is so natural, that All Saints consider its painstaking and hard work to be the only correct path of virtue, while the opposite is the lightness that characterizes the false path: "The Kingdom of Heaven is taken with effort and the ascetics obtain it" (Mt. 11, 12). He who is not in battle, in feat, is in beauty. The Apostle also says: he who does not suffer is not a son (Hebrews 12:8). One who embarks on the path of spiritual life can be compared to a man who embarks on a journey in the ordinary, everyday sense. Since that path is unknown to us, it is necessary that someone accompany us. It would be too self-confident to stop at the thought that we can do it ourselves. No, neither the title nor the education helps. It is no less self-confident that someone without extreme necessity, having the possibility to find a spiritual teacher, does not seek such a teacher, thinking that God will guide him directly. And indeed, the ascension to perfection belongs to the Lord, Who accepted us, but under the guidance of a spiritual father. The priest does not raise us to the levels of perfection, but he contributes to being raised by God. In the usual order of things, God guides us through others, understanding us, purifying us and communicating His will to us. Whoever is left alone is in extreme danger, not to mention that such a person will wander in a place without any fruit. Knowing neither exploits, nor spiritual pursuits, nor the proper order in them, he will do many things in vain, since he did the work without the necessary skill. For this reason, many people often stop, cool down and lose their enthusiasm. But the greatest danger comes from internal disorganization and satanic temptation. In beginners, there is a fog in the soul, as if from stinking fumes, and it is created by passions, injustice, defiled forces. That fog, thinner or thicker, is characteristic of everyone, depending on the degree of corruption. How to distinguish objects clearly and reliably in that fog? To the one who is lost in the fog, the sparse vegetation often appears as a forest or a village; in the same way, a beginner in spiritual work sees a lot of things where in essence there is nothing. Only an experienced eye can discern and clarify what the matter is. Furthermore, such a man is sick, so how could he heal himself? He will kill and suffocate himself out of love for himself; and it is known that even doctors do not entrust the treatment of their own bodies to themselves. But the biggest danger in this part is from Satan. Since he himself is primarily self-willed, among people he loves those who are guided by their own mind the most, and it is precisely in this that he disturbs and ruins them the most. It could be said that this very property gives Satan access to us, that is, it gives him the opportunity to drag us to destruction. Who, on the other hand, does not trust his reason and heart, but, on the contrary, leaves everything that exists in his feelings and thoughts to the judgment of another, will not suffer, even if the devil sows something dangerous and destructive in his thoughts and feelings, since the experience and reason of another person will dispel the temptation and preserve it. That is why it is said: whoever has a spiritual teacher and trusts him, Satan will not approach him, so that he will not always be ashamed and so that all his traps will not be exposed. And vice versa: Satan does not depart from a man who believes exclusively in himself and who relies only on his reason in everything. Such a person, creating all kinds of beautiful scenes in his imagination, acting on his imagination, the enemy of the human race will lead him down various paths, until, finally, he leads him completely to destruction. For these reasons, which must certainly be respected, the beginner must agree with the necessity of having a spiritual director, and is therefore obliged to choose him and surrender to him. With him, he is safe, as under a roof or inside a fence, because the clergyman will be responsible both before God and before people for all his mistakes. It is wonderful and worthy of all praise that the one who sincerely asks inevitably obtains a true spiritual leader. And the spiritual leader, no matter who he is, always gives correct and reliable guidance, as soon as his spiritual child surrenders to him with all his soul and with sincere faith. The Lord himself will protect the one who has given himself so perfectly to his spiritual father. Pray, and the Lord will direct you to a spiritual director and show him; surrender to him, and the Lord will teach him how to guide you. The thought that it is possible to live as a Christian and adhere to this world and its norms is vain and beautiful. Whoever lives like this will only learn phariseeism and pretending, which means that he will be a Christian only in his imagination, and not in action. In the beginning, such a person will tear down with one hand what he built with the other, that is, what he gained by moving away from the world, he will waste again as soon as he approaches it again; and from there to conceit is not far. What has been lost from the heart may still linger in memory and imagination. Remembering and imagining how he was before, a person can think that he has remained like that in action, while, however, everything has long since healed and left only a trace in the memory. Such a person will think that he owns what he does not actually have. Here is his judgment: "And from him that hath not, and that which hath shall be taken from him" (Mt. 25, 29). From conceitedness to phariseeism is but one step. And deep-rooted Pharisaism is truly a terrible condition. The touch of the Lord's grace is sweeter than honey and sugar and more strengthening than all spiritual tonics. But it should be kept in mind that it is completely a gift from God, and that it depends on the Lord Himself when, to whom and how to give it. The Christian should accept him with the fear of God and joy, rejoicing if he is worthy of him; but one should not strive to make it happen, not invent possible ways to achieve it, not question whether it has happened and whether what is felt is really the touch of the Lord. We recommend this to avoid overdosing and to prevent overeating. There are thoughts, desires and passions that violently attack us in spurts, causing short-term confusion, but also permanent ones that last for days, months and years. The first ones are easier, but they should not be treated with disdain either, but they should be carefully observed and noticed in which order they appear. The enemy adheres to the rule that he does not launch an attack suddenly from passion, but from thought, and that he often repeats this thought. A thought which we repel with hatred the first time may be condescendingly accepted the second or third time; then desire and passion are born, and from there it is only one step to its acceptance and implementation. Lingering thoughts are heavy and murderous; these very thoughts are usually called tempting thoughts. Regarding them, it should be known that they are not of our nature, although they are related to it, but are always of the enemy. The Lord allows them with a special intention, for the sake of our purification, in order to test and establish our faithfulness, faith, steadfastness and our ability to build the inner man within us. That's why we are obliged to bear them graciously, even if they hurt our new, grace-filled heart too much, as happens with blasphemy, despair, unbelief. The most important thing is not to agree to such thoughts at any moment, not to keep them as your own and to keep your heart free from them, separating them from your being and from your free will with thought and faith. The thoughts we have to fight are not always bad; they are often seemingly good, and often neutral. One rule applies to bad people - drive them away immediately, while others should be judged and questioned. This includes the most praised art of distinguishing thoughts, that is, deciding which ones to reject and which ones to accept. We cannot give a certain rule for this: let everyone learn from their own experience, because people are not the same, and something that is good for another may not be appropriate for us. It is best to act like this: when you accept a certain order, stick to it, and everything that appears as new, no matter how good it seems (apparently good), drive away from you. If a thought does not represent anything bad either in itself or in its consequences, it is again better not to agree with it immediately, but to suffer for a while, but not to be hasty. Some have waited for five years, testing the idea. It is a basic law - do not trust your mind and heart, and entrust every thought to your spiritual leader. Violation of this rule has always been and is today the cause of great falls and falls. An evil thought tempts, while a clear-sighted (seemingly good) one seduces. We consider the one who is carried away by evil thoughts to be fallen, we say that he has sinned, while a man under the rule of good-looking thoughts is deluded. And is it possible to present all the charms with their features and properties? Their basic characteristic is that a person with certainty and conviction considers himself to be different than he actually is, for example, he is considered to be called to reason with others, capable of an unusual life, and the like. Their source is a fine, thin thought: I mean something, I am someone and something, and not just anyone. A worthless man imagines that he is someone and something. This hidden pride is used by the enemy of his salvation and traps him. In addition, every small evil thought that we do not notice keeps us in a trance, when we think that we are guided by good and virtuous thoughts. That's why we can claim that we don't live for a minute without being beautiful; our life flows in illusions, they enslave us sometimes in one, sometimes in another form. The reason for this is the fact that the evil is still hidden in our being, that it has not evaporated from it, while the good is on the surface: before our eyes is therefore something like a fog of vapors. The reason for falling asleep is pride, the cure for it is humility As far as I can understand her illness, or better, her difficult state of mind - she fell into the most difficult prelest, the impact of which is reflected on her. Arriving at the monastery, she surrendered herself to prayers and other feats in order to please God and thus she was deceived, because she did not care at all about humility, patience and self-reproach. I will write you something from the teachings of the Moldavian elder Vasilij, who was the elder of the elder Paisius. Writing about those who do benefactors sensibly, who knew how to be a benefactor, he says: "Some, however, who are overwhelmed by passions and are unreasonable... they became angry in fasting and labor, but not according to good sense and as it should be. The devil, who stalks like a hunting dog, inserts in them the seeds of pleasure from which the inner Pharisee grows. Such are overcome by complete pride; it is for her sake that God allows temptation by Satan." There are many such examples. Recently, a girl, still a laywoman, aged 19, took upon herself a very difficult feat: she prayed, fasted and so on, and after a year or two she became so distraught that her parents now do not know what to do with her: she grieves, is depressed, bored, cries, screams, can't do anything because of her weakness, much less listen to advice; it hurts if something is not her way. Such are the consequences of self-indulgent feats. I am writing to her about the reasons for her disarray: that she unreasonably started to be silent; I tell her my father's teaching about it; also, I show her that on the way to salvation communion with people is necessary as well as patience. In order to heal, she does not need to distance herself from the world, but to know her own impotence... Allure comes from self-deception Some say that from prayer comes charm. That is not true. Charm comes from self-deception, not from prayer. All the Saints prayed and advised everyone to do the same. Prayer is the best occupation of the soul. Prayer raises us to God; through prayer, one obtains calmness, patience and every good thing. Whoever speaks against prayer has clearly never felt how kind the Lord is and how much He loves us. Evil does not come from God. All the Saints prayed continuously; they were never without prayer for a moment. A soul that has lost humility has also lost grace and love for God; then the flame prayer is extinguished. But when the soul calms down from passion and acquires calmness, the Lord gives it His grace and then it prays for its enemies as for itself and for the whole world it prays with bitter tears. And if you think that your clergyman is inexperienced, conceited and that you will be guided by books alone, you are on a dangerous path and you are not far from falling Whoever wants to pray continuously should be brave and wise and ask his spiritual father about everything. And if I am a clergyman who does not have any experience in that area, he should still ask him. For his humility, the Lord will have mercy and save him from all trouble. And if you think that your clergyman is inexperienced, conceited and that you will be guided by books alone, you are on a dangerous path and you are not far from falling in love. I know many such people who were misled by their thoughts and failed to succeed in order to exalt themselves over the clergy. They forget that the grace of the Holy Spirit who saves us works through the Holy Mysteries. In this way, the devil deceives the ascetics only to prevent them from becoming men of prayer, while the Holy Spirit makes the soul wise when we listen to the advice of our shepherds. Keep your mind in hell and don't despair I fell in love twice. The first time, at the very beginning, because of my lack of experience, when I was still a young disciple, but then the Lord had mercy on me quickly. And the second time because of pride and then I struggled a lot before the Lord healed me through the prayers of my priest. It happened after one sighting. I told four priests about the vision and not one of them told me that it came from the devil, and yet vanity overcame me. Later I realized my mistake because the devils started calling me again, not only at night but also during the day. The spirit sees them, but is not afraid of them, because I felt the grace of God with me. So I suffered from them for many years; and if the Lord had not given me to know Him by the Holy Spirit and if the most holy and gentle Mistress had not helped me, I would have despaired of my salvation; but now my soul firmly trusts in the mercy of God, although I have deserved torment both on earth and in hell by my deeds. For a long time I could not understand what was happening to me. I thought: I don't judge anyone, I don't receive bad thoughts, I obey well, I eat moderately, I pray constantly, why then did the devils turn on me? I saw that I was wrong in something, but I didn't know what. I prayed and - the devils left for a while, and then they came again. And my soul was in that fight for a long time. I spoke about it to several elders, but they answered all this with silence. I was in great doubt. And once when I was sitting in my cell at night, the devils came and filled the room. I prayed fervently: "Lord, drive them away!" – but they kept coming. Then I stood up to pray in front of the icon, but the devils stood around me, and one in front, so that I could not bow to the icon, but it seemed as if I was bowing to it. Then I sat down again and said: - Lord, you see that I want to pray to You with a pure mind, but the devils won't let me. Tell me what should I do to get them to leave me? And the Lord's answer was heard in the soul: - The proud always suffer like this from the devil. - Lord, You are merciful and my soul knows You; tell me what should I do to gain calmness? - Keep your mind in hell and don't despair, was the answer. A person falls into temptation either out of ignorance or out of pride A person falls into temptation either out of ignorance or because of pride. If it is due to inexperience, the Lord will heal the person quickly, but if it is due to pride, he will have to suffer for a long time until he learns humility and only then will the Lord heal him. We fall into delusion when we think we are wiser and more experienced than others, even clergymen. That's what I thought out of my inexperience, and because of that I struggled, but I am very grateful to God that He calmed me down and made me wiser and did not take His grace away from me. Now I know that without confessing to one's priest, a person cannot be saved from temptation, because the Lord gave priests the power to bind and loose. If you have any vision - do not believe it, because a soul that has not experienced the Holy Spirit cannot distinguish where the vision comes from When a light appears to you, either inside you or outside around you, don't believe it, if with that light you don't feel affection and love for your neighbors; but do not be afraid but humble yourself and the light will disappear. If you have any kind of vision or dream, do not believe it, because if it is from God, the Lord will reveal it to you. A soul that has not experienced the Holy Spirit cannot distinguish where the vision comes from. The devil gives the soul some special pleasure, mixed with glory, by which it can be recognized and admired. The Holy Fathers say that during the transition the soul feels a kind of confusion. However, only a calm soul who does not consider himself worthy of seeing, feels confusion and fear during the devil's action, while a vain person feels neither fear, nor even confusion, because he wants to have visions and considers himself worthy of that gift, and that is why the devil easily deceives such people. The heavenly is known by the Holy Spirit, and the earthly by the mind; whoever wants to know God with the mind through science has already fallen into temptation, because God is known only by the Holy Spirit. If you see devils in your spirit, calm yourself down and try not to see them anymore, but as soon as possible go to a priest or an old man to whom you have surrendered. Tell everything to the priest and the Lord will have mercy on you and you will avoid suffering. And if you think that you have more knowledge in spiritual life than your clergyman and you stop trusting him, because of that pride, God will surely allow you to fall into delusion in order not to come to his senses. He defends himself against demons with humility He fights demons with humility. When you feel that another spirit is fighting with your spirit, calm down and the fight will stop... If you fall into temptation and wish to get rid of it, do not despair, because the Lord loves people and will let you get better and free yourself from the thoughts that the devil imposes on you. But in order for the soul to find peace from the demons, it is necessary to calm down and say: "I am worse than anyone; I am worse than beasts", and confess to the priest, and the evil spirits will leave. Just as people enter and leave the house, so do evil thoughts come and go and come back again, only if you accept them. If a thought whispers to you: "steal" or "be gluttonous", and you listen to it, you yourself have allowed the devil to defeat you. And so, if passions rule over you, you will become the abode of demons. But if you repent as you should, they will be afraid and will be forced to leave. Beautiful apparitions from the invisible world - Fatima, San Sebastian and Medjugorje On October 13, 1991, a program about the Fatima apparition was broadcast on 150 television and 350 radio stations; that show was made by the German charitable organization "Aid to the Church in Need". Undoubtedly, many have heard that the Mother of God has allegedly appeared to many people of the Roman Catholic faith in various places. But how to relate to these events - that remains unclear, also, to many. Some may draw the conclusion from everything that, if the Mother of God appeared to Roman Catholics, their church is true and beneficial. This belief is reinforced by the claim that miracles and healings took place in the places of these apparitions. A special interest among ordinary people was caused by the so-called "Miracle of Fatima". What did it tell the Russians? The apparition was a prophecy about the future fate of Russia in an openly anti-communist sense, which obscured its non-Orthodox essence. What must be our attitude towards similar phenomena and what criteria must we use in order to explain to ourselves the true essence of seeing things outside the Orthodox Church? We hope that what follows in our article will help in understanding such phenomena. The Holy Fathers, knowing that Satan can take the form of forces of light, advised to be very careful and suspicious of all appearances from the other world. Venerable Grigorije Sinait says: "You, on the other hand, if you keep quiet well, never receive, whether you see, sensuously or spiritually, inside or outside, even if it was the figure of Christ, or an Angel, or some Saint, or if a light appeared to you, imprinting itself on your mind. The mind itself has a natural power of imagination, and can easily create phantoms of what is desired in those who do not look carefully at this, and thereby injure themselves. God does not resent the one who watches carefully over himself, if he, in order to avoid being overwhelmed, decides not to receive what is from Him, without examination and due research". We can add to that that the Lord God, if it is His will, will give full testimony about the given revelation. If such prudence is needed, even within the Orthodox Church, how are we obliged to be careful when it comes to "visions" outside Orthodoxy? The only possible criterion that can be allowed for the purpose of evaluating and checking them is - how such visions and apparitions relate to Orthodoxy. If to any extent, when we evaluate such views, the purity of Orthodox teaching is not preserved, these "revelations" must be rejected, even if 99% are Orthodox, and 1% deviate from the teachings of the Church. The Lord cannot deny Himself or preach false teaching. In order to properly understand these events, let's familiarize ourselves with the case from Fatima, which is particularly interesting for the Russian people, because the vision prophesies about Russia and its role in the destiny of humanity. "Toward the end of the First World War, in Portugal, in Fatima, between May and October 1917, three shepherd children, two girls and a little boy, had a vision that they accepted as an apparition of the Mother of God... During the six months, when the apparitions took place, Lucia was told to make these visions known sooner or later. They mainly concerned the necessity of respecting the rosary (Roman Catholic rosaries) and the Immaculate Heart of the Madonna, and the necessity to change the life of humanity. If the change does not happen, the wrath of God will come...» (Studies in Comparative Religion, A Question Concerning the II Vatican Council" by Verak). In December 1940, begging for that special release, Sister Lucia, a Carmelite nun, the only one who remained alive of the three children, wrote a letter to the Pope: "In 1917, in her words, which we called "the secret", Prechista prophesied to us the end of the war that blackened Europe at that time, predicted the second war and said that we should once again strive to dedicate Russia to her pre-immaculate heart... In 1929, in a new apparition, she expressed her desire for Russia to devote herself to her pre-immaculate heart, promising to prevent the spread of false teachings throughout Russia and to help the conversion of Russia. Through various secret influences, the Lord does not stop striving for that desire, promising recently that if Your Holiness wills to consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with a special mention of Russia, He will shorten the days of trouble, for which it was convenient for Him to punish the nations for their wrongdoings" ("The Story of Fatima - the greatest miracle of our time", Brussels, 1962). It is necessary to note that by the "conversion of Russia" the Roman Catholics mean the conversion of Russia to Roman Catholicism (underlining ours, pr. trans.). Here is what the magazine "Fatima Crusader" (Fatima Crusader) no. 17 for the year 1985: "It is very possible that the conversion of a few Russians to the Roman Catholic faith is part of God's plan to prepare for the conversion of all of Russia, if the Pope and the bishops obey the pleas of the Mother of God of Fatima to consecrate Russia to her, as was foretold by the Lord". Sister Lucia writes in a letter dated May 18, 1936: "I secretly talked with the Lord about that subject and I asked Him - why He does not convert Russia without consecrating the holy father of the Pope." The Lord answered me: Because I want all my church to receive that consecration as a triumph of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary, and for that reason, that cult, spreading, would be united with the veneration of my sacred heart". A few words of explanation should be said about the non-Orthodox way of venerating the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary that are mentioned in these visions. The cult of the "sacred heart" is connected with the name of the papal nun Maria (Margarita) Alacok, who died in 1690. It is believed that she had a vision of Jesus Christ who showed her his heart melting with love, and commanded her to spread a special respect for him. Those "revelations" were originally recorded in her biography, which was written by the Jesuit bishop of Lange. They caused such a scandal that the entire circulation of resumes was destroyed. After the "visions" were explained, Pope Clement condemned them in 1772, and publicly. And yet, the cult continued to exist under the auspices of the Jesuits, and gradually entered Roman Catholic religious life ("Pastrian Theology", Archimandrite Constantine, Jordanovil 1961, p. 16). "Images of the "sacred heart" and respect for it have become the main part of contemporary Roman Catholic spirituality, and the popes who patronized that cult in their encyclicals promised indulgences for its observance. Other groups appeared, who did not want to be left behind, so they spoke of new apparitions of Mary, and emphasized the idea of worshiping the "immaculate heart of Mary". The heart of the Madonna is sometimes depicted together with the heart of Jesus; later, the depiction of the sad heart of Mary, with five or seven swords piercing him, became the most popular... It would be impossible to condemn Roman Catholicism for rejecting the Divine nature of Christ, but it obviously divides the unity of His natures, emphasizing His human nature as a special object of reverence, sometimes in a crude naturalistic form. This violates one of the main principles of the Ecumenical Councils which command that reverence refers to the Person of Christ, not to show reverence to His separate natures about individual parts of the body. The division of the completeness of the nature of the Son of God creates a tendency towards Nestorianism, that is, the parts of the Body of Christ must not be an object of respect, and must not be imaged for themselves, for example: heart in fire, in a crown of thorns, etc. The same rules must be followed when it comes to the veneration of the Virgin Mary" (Comparative Religion, "Roman Catholicism: Some Devotional Practices" by father George Mitchel). We have mentioned these forms of religiosity among papists to point out the chasm that exists between Orthodox and Roman Catholic spiritual experience. Let's stop at the "Miracle of Fatima" - the playing of the sun - which amazes with its strangeness. Here is what the Roman Catholics themselves write about the miracle that took place in Portugal on October 13, 1917 (according to the new calendar): "Suddenly the rain stopped and the thick clouds, which had been there since morning, suddenly dispersed. The sun shone above the heads, similar to a silver disc, which could be looked at without pain, without squinting. That disk was surrounded by a sparkling corona, so brilliant that the disk itself appeared dark (relative to it), as happens during a solar eclipse. Suddenly the sun trembled, began to circle like a wheel of fire, throwing in all directions beams of bright light, which changed color from time to time. The sky, the ground, trees, stairs, children, a huge mass of people - all of it was occasionally colored in different colors of the rainbow, yellow, green, red, blue, purple. This lasted for several minutes. People fell on their knees and prayed. Many cried. Some beat their breasts and repented, thinking that the last hour had come. The celestial light stopped and after a few moments started its play of light again. It stopped again, and once again the celestial fireworks flashed with unimaginable power. Suddenly, all the people who were looking at that heavenly sign clearly, as one man, saw that the sun had separated from the firmament and moving in a zigzag direction, it aimed at them, emitting a tremendous heat. "A miracle! A miracle!', cried one... However, the sun, suddenly stopping during its dizzying fall, zigzagged up again into the sky and, little by little, began to shine again with its ordinary light on the clear sky. The crowd knelt down, and everyone sang "Sgedo" (Latin for "Symbol of Faith") as one. All in all, the "playing of the sun" lasted about ten minutes" ("The Story of Fatima", Brussels, 1962, pp. 22-23). That was exactly the miracle that the apparition promised to do, "so that people would believe in it" (said during the apparition on July 13, 1917). Indeed, something startling happened that day, but how to evaluate the meaning of that miracle? Bishop Ignatius (Brjančaninov) will help us in this: "The Pharisees, dissatisfied with the miracles that the Lord created, demanded a special miracle from Him: a sign from heaven (Mk. 8:12). The people sometimes expressed their desire for a sign from heaven. Thus, after the miraculous multiplication of the five loaves and the saturating of the crowd with them, in which there were about 5,000 men, besides women and children, the eyewitnesses of that miracle, the participants of that meal, said to the Lord: » What kind of sign are You showing, so that we may see and believe You? Our fathers ate manna in the desert, as it is written: "He gave them bread from heaven to eat" (Jn. 6, 30-31). For them, the wonderful multiplication of loaves in the hands of the Savior was not enough: it took place in silence, with holy humility, which permeated all the actions of God-men, and for them it was necessary for the sky to be covered with thick clouds, for thunder to thunder and lightning to sow, for bread to fall from the air (from the sky)..." (Ep. Ignatius, "Collected Works", volume 4, p. 296–297). Demanding such a sign from the God-Man was a grave sin, because it came from carnal reason, which rejects any spiritual goal for the sake of an external effect. The Lord, hearing this insolent and blasphemous search for a sign, sighed deeply and said: "Why do the people ask for this sign? I tell you the truth: no sign will be given to this generation" (Mk. 8, 12, 13). That search for a sign from heaven was a search for a miracle, in the nature of a Satanic miracle (underlined by the author-editor). A sign from heaven could not have any particular credibility. Why, then, could only a sign from heaven testify that it was from God? From the Divine Scriptures it can be seen quite the opposite... The Holy Scriptures say that, due to the action of the devil, "fire came down from heaven and devoured the sheep and the shepherds" of righteous Job (Job 1:16). (see also "Evangelist" on Mt. 16, 1). It is obvious that this fire was formed in the air, where lightning is also formed. Simon the Magus amazed the blind people with miracles, who called the active power of Satan in them "the great power of God" (Ep. Ignatius, volume 4, pp. 299-300). What Christ refused to do - the antichrist will do: he will give signs from heaven, that is, signs in the air, where the lords of Satan have the upper hand (See - Rev. Ephrem of Syria, Sermon 106, part two; Eph. 2,2; 6, 12). St. John the Theologian says that the antichrist will create great signs, "making fire come down from heaven to the earth in front of people." (Rev. 13, 13). The Scripture points to that sign as the highest sign of the antichrist, and the place of that sign - the air, will be a magnificent and terrible sight. It will act "mostly on the sense of sight, bewitching and deceiving it" (Ep. Ignatius, vol. 4, p. 302). "People will not understand that his miracles will not have any good, reasonable goal, no definite meaning, that they are alien to the truth, full of lies, that they are a monstrous, all-malevolent, meaningless act, which seeks to amaze, confuse and self-forgetfulness, to deceive, to attract, with a spell of luxurious, desolate, stupid effect. ... Seeing these miracles, people, due to their blindness, due to the triumph of their carnal reason, will not by declaring the actions of Satan through them as the greatest manifestation of the power of God" (Ep. Ignatius, vol. 4, pp. 300, 302). From the above, it must be clear to the Orthodox reader that the "dance of the sun" in Fatima is a miracle devoid of truth, so trusting in the hallucination in question is something that entails great spiritual danger. In the mountain village of San Sebastian de Garabandal in Spain, from 1961 to 1965, there was another series of apparitions. The witnesses were four girls. Let us now consider those phenomena. "The Virgin often reminded us to visit the holy mysteries (it is about the Roman Catholic rite of veneration of the Holy Gifts). During her last apparition, the Virgin said to me: "Conchita, why don't you visit my Son more often in the almshouse"? When I saw the Virgin, I told her that there were some spies in the village, some kind of Protestants. She replied: "They are all my children". The angel appeared and said: "Many cardinals, bishops and priests are on the way to destruction, and they are taking many souls with them. They attach less and less importance to the mystery (sacrament) of the Eucharist". It is interesting to note that in 1967 Conchita had doubts about the authenticity of the vision: "Yes, in 1967, some time after the vision, I had doubts. It happened unexpectedly on August 15. I will never forget it. There were many people around me and I was overcome by the feeling that I had deceived those people and that I had to confess. I went to the priest and told him that it was an illusion, a fantasy or a charm, that I had never seen the Madonna, that I had been deceiving everyone, all that time... Those doubts and the denial of the appearance of the Virgin lasted for five or six days. Since that hour I have been in a state of mental turmoil and doubts" (Miracle de Garabandal, by Conchita Gonzales and Harry Daley, Doubleday and Co., New York 1983). We mentioned that case in order to show that even though the witness herself is not convinced of her vision, there are still people who undoubtedly believe in it. They are not even disturbed by the statement of one of the girls: "After that, since the reports started, we have not missed the day of Communion. When the pastor was not in town, an angel would usually appear to give us communion... Once, the pastor taught us to ask how and in what way the angels give us communion, when only the priest can bless the gifts. We asked, and Our Lady answered that the angel takes already consecrated gifts from the almshouses of other churches". We can imagine the confusion this would have caused in the church from which the Gifts would have been taken. Is it even possible for angels to take Gifts from churches? In the life of the Orthodox Saint Onuphrius, Angeo did bring Holy Communion, but it was not necessary for him to take it from an almshouse. The third "miraculous" event we want to mention took place in June 1981 in Yugoslavia, in Medjugorje. An apparition there claimed that his revelations would be the last true revelations in the world. In November 1982, an apparition claimed: "When these revelations stop, the world will receive only a few false revelations". That place began to attract more and more people from different parts of the world, although the local Roman Catholic bishop, responsible for Mostar and the surrounding area, Pavao Zanić, denying the truth of the sightings, declared on behalf of the Yugoslav Bishops' Conference that it is not allowed to make devotional trips motivated by the supernatural nature of phenomena that supposedly take place in Medjugorje. Already in 1981, witnesses of the apparition announced: "On the hill, where the apparition was, there will soon be, and everyone will see it, a permanently visible sign. Be patient and wait a little." And again: "The sign will appear on the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1981, then on Christmas, on New Year's Day"... There is no need to say that the sign did not appear. For the Orthodox reader, it is enough to hear some ecumenical statements accompanying the alleged apparitions of the Mother of God, to see that it is not about the Mother of God at all. Here are some: "Before God, all religions are equal. The Lord, as Emperor, rules over all these religions" ("Conuter-Reformation Catholic, 201 Eng. Ed. Cf. Fr. Blaise, 500 Messages a Vivre, p. 370, Montreal, 1986). "With God, neither division nor religion has any significance. You are the ones who created the division. The only mediator is Jesus Christ. Divisions exist because believers have separated from each other» (Apparition of the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje, Jan Urban in Czech., The Catholic Counter-Reformation in XX Century, Sept./Oct. 1987, Nov/Dec. 1985). For the inexperienced, similar views are a kind of scandal, because they are very similar to modern ecumenical-unitarian views on religion. But the Orthodox know that the assertion of the supposed equality of all religions before God is the same as denying Christ, the only incarnate Truth. Aren't these words His: "I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father except through Me" John 14:6). Without trying to deeply analyze the meaning of those revelations, it is enough for us to explain to ourselves that each of those apparitions that claimed to be the Mother of God - recognized the grace of the Roman Catholic sacraments. After the fall of the West from the Orthodox Church in the 11th century, there can be no doubt that the grace from the sacraments of the Roman Catholics is absent. Priest-martyr Hilarion (Trojicki) in his work "There is no Christianity without the Church" says: "This is what the rule of Saint Basil the Great teaches us." The Church is unique and one and only she has all the fullness of the grace gifts of the Holy Spirit. Whoever deviates from the Church and in whatever way - into heresy, into schism, into an arbitrary assembly, he loses the communion of God's grace. There is no Christianity, no Christ; no grace, no Truth; there is no life, there is no salvation - there is nothing without the Church, and all that is only in one single Church". Even the fact of a miraculous healing is not proof of the truth of the vision. Healing can be by God's will, by natural causes, or by God's permission from the devil. Sozomen wrote in his "Sacred History" (book 2, chapter 5): "The church of Aesculapius in Aegis, the church of Venus and Adonis were completely destroyed. D... the inhabitants respected these churches very much... because there they were cured of many diseases, since the demon appeared there at night and healed them". In the "Vita Patrum" of St. Gregory of Turkey, there is the life of St. Friardus the Prisoner. Here is what it says there: "At that time, while they were keeping vigil, the tempter appeared to the deacon Secundulus in the image of the Lord and said to him: "I am the Christ, to whom you pray every day. You are already a saint and your name is written in the Book of Life. Leave the island and start healing people. Having recovered, Secundelus left the island, and when he laid his hands on the sick in the name of Jesus Christ, they recovered." Of course, we do not deny the possibility of apparitions from the other world not only to non-Slavics, but also to heathens. Bishop Ignatius (Brjančaninov) in the third volume of his "Ascetic essays" says the following: "It used to happen that by a special plan of God, saints appeared to people of vicious life, and even to idolaters. The appearance of the Angel did not bring any benefits to those people, and it was not for their sake personally, and therefore it did not even serve as a sign of their dignity... Holy Angels and deceased righteous people often prevented barbarians and robbers by appearing to them in order to prevent them from attacking the abodes of God's favored people" (see, for example, the Life of Prep. Makarij Želtovodski, June 15). We do not rule out the possibility of a miraculous healing happening to a foreigner as well. For example, by the prayers of St. John of Kronstadt, even those who were outside the fold of the Church were healed. But when any teaching is offered on the basis of miraculous phenomena, it is necessary to consider its essence in detail. That's why we had a clear criterion for evaluating apparitions from the other side, and it is: Are these apparitions Orthodox in every sense? In the three visions we have considered, we have shown that they have clearly non-Orthodox elements in them, and that is why it is clear that these visions (Fatima, San Sebastian and Medjugorje, eg. trans.) are not from God. Here it is appropriate to quote the words of archpriest Boris Molchakhov: "It is very important to notice that little noticeable law according to which every false and hypocritical Christianity inevitably leads its followers to the recognition of the antichrist, or to the process that prepares the appearance of the antichrist. In every false teaching, as well as in the Pharisaic attitude towards the Truth, the seeds of eternal destruction are hidden. In vain, many do not attach enough meaning to dogmas. Bishop Ignatius (Brjančaninov) and His Beatitude Metropolitan Antonije (Hrapovicki) showed the close connection between the dogma of faith and ethical-practical activity and the feat of salvation. According to the teachings of the Church, there is nothing more important in the work of salvation than the confession of the God-revealed Truth. The Logos of God Himself testifies that God must be worshiped in spirit and in truth, and that only such worshipers the Father seeks for Himself (Jn. 4, 23-24). Truth is not such a trivial thing at all, with which we can behave as we like. In the truth, the Spirit of Truth, "Who proceeds from the Father", is also present. And in every lie, the father of lies - the devil - is also present, and that is why a person who confesses the truth also receives the Spirit of Truth, and whoever confesses a lie necessarily also adopts the spirit of lies, the spirit of the rejected. Outside of the one and only Orthodox Church, there are neither, nor will there be, any means for the true recognition of the antichrist, nor any grace-giving forces for staunch opposition to him and all temptations". We do not need foreign religious visions, even if they call us to repentance, prayer and fasting. Those views recognize the grace of the Roman Catholic sacraments, the primacy of the Pope, support non-Orthodox forms of devotion and false ecumenism. In our difficult time, the time of subtle temptations and hidden temptations, when the number of false miracles, visions and apparitions is increasing, we, Orthodox Christians, must walk the path of our salvation with fear and trembling, staunchly guarding our holy Orthodox faith, turning for advice and help only to the Holy Orthodox Church. ("Orthodox Russia" 23/1991 Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism in the experience of prayer In religion, thought is embodied in deeds, theory in practice, and theology makes a strong impression on anthropology. Man tends to conform gradually to what he sincerely believes. Therefore, religions fully consciously develop certain ways of acting on their members in order for man to harmonize his inner world with those norms that are accepted in the given tradition. Therefore, the difference between religions is not so much the difference between their theories, ie. orthodoxy and heresy, how many differences in spiritual practice, i.e. orthodoxy and foreign worship, orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The difference of spiritual traditions is first of all the difference of their prayer which ultimately leads to the creation of different anthropological types of religion. "Just as there is a properly placed voice, so there is also a properly placed soul," wrote Fr. A. Yelchaninov 1. It is preferable to place that soul in relation to the selected tuning fork. And what if the tuning fork is inaccurate, if what is habitually considered pure sound in one tradition is an intolerable cacophony from the point of view of another? True heresy, therefore, is not so much a foreign opinion as a foreign celebration. Since one does not learn to pray from a textbook, but from the experience of joint participation in the prayer of an already existing prayer community, the canonical prohibition of joint prayer with heretics is quite understandable. It is not connected with the fear that the Pentecostal, saying "Our Father", is addressing the devil, but rather with the undesirability of borrowing a non-Christian way of communion. There is truth in A's words. F. Loseva: "Praying with a stearin candle in your hands, pouring kerosene into a candle and smelling yourself with cologne, can only be done by someone who has deviated from the true faith." This is heresy in the true sense, and such self-willed people should be anathematized» 2 . And indeed it is heresy... If religion were reduced to dogmatics, a group of expert theologians could be forced to make an agreement that reconciles the interpretations of the Gospel texts. But the ways of prayer and the appearance of the "inner man" cannot be changed by accepting the consensus of experts. "Words can be opposed to words, but what can life be refuted?" - asked St. Grigorije Palama 3. 4 The life experience of various religions is so different that, after all, different "inner people" are born in them. This difference of hidden anthropological realities (I hope it is not necessary to explain that spiritual anthropology has nothing in common with medical and racial anthropology) manifests itself, even externally. The forms of religion are different. Against the background of today's inter-religious and inter-denominational discussions, it seems that there are minimal differences between the theology of Orthodoxy and baptism. But, let's look at the faces of two people, each of whom in his confession is considered a model of his own Christian service. Let them be, for example, Billy Graham and Fr. Amvrosije Optinski. It is already noticeable from their photos that the spiritual experience of these people has almost nothing in common. In one of them, the eyes are conspicuously clean and enlightened by repentance... In Orthodoxy, a properly placed soul gives birth to such an order in itself, which is called a strange expression - joyful sadness 5 . If there is only sadness, condemnation and humiliation of oneself - that is heresy. For such a man, his sense of his own weaknesses and sins overshadowed God and His love. But if there is only joy and no penitent sigh that is an integral part of almost every breath - that is also heresy. This means that a person has become so engrossed in studying advertising and evangelistic leaflets that he has lost the ability to self-knowledge. Some kind of, not particularly deep, "idea about God" overshadowed God himself for such a man, which means that the ray of Light could not illuminate the eclipse of his own soul. "Just as the sun's rays, penetrating through a crack in the house, illuminate everything in it, so that even the tiniest speck of dust flickering in the air can be seen, so also when the fear of the Lord enters the heart, it shows all sins" - we read in Prep. John Lsstvičnik's very traditional Orthodox metaphor 6. Billy Graham himself is convinced and convinces thousands of other people that "having believed, we no longer sin". Doctrine stifles man's conscience, and he loses the gift of repentance. However, the Protestants, who have extended the dogma of infallibility to all their co-religionists, should be reminded that the first Protestant, Martin Luther, quoted the very orthodox words of Bl. Jerome: "Repentance is the plank that we need to hold on to and on which we sail after the shipwreck towards the shore, when we come to Christianity" 7 . Repentance is joyful sorrow: sorrow, because it is the realization of one's sins, and joy, because it is bringing them before the Savior's Face. Another characteristic Orthodox word that speaks of the same ability to unite different experiences of the soul, experiences that seem to be mutually exclusive, is the word affection. S. Averintsev translated this Greek-Slavic word into Russian as "love with a crying face". Ladder explains the reason for the joy of the prayer: if the presence of the person we love visibly changes us all and makes us happy, joyful and carefree - all the more joyful is the presence of the Heavenly Bishop who descends invisibly into the soul. "Then the light of the soul emerges from his exterior" - he concludes 8 . 9 Many centuries before him, St. Ignatius Bogonosac writes to the Tralians: "I received and have a model of your love in your bishop, whose very appearance is very instructive (Tralians, 3). Understandably, this is not about the bishop's vestments (at that time, priest vestments were almost no different from ordinary vestments), nor about the length of his hair. Something inside was shining outside. Therefore, it is possible to preach not only with words and not only from the pulpit. A monk who walks silently through the city does no less for the preaching of the Gospel than the most active member of a Korean mission. And here is the testimony of the opposite constitution of the soul. "Look at Nietzsche. It is enough for a person to look at his face, and to say decisively that this person does not love the Savior" (priest Anatoly Zhurakovsky) 10 . Franjabiđ's painting evokes the same impression in Nikolay Gumilyov: His eyes are underground lakes, Marked with the sign of the greatest shame, He never talks about God. 11 Of course, this is an opinion about the eyes of an atheist. But, even in the Christian world, a different measure of the depth and truth of spiritual experience also leaves a very visible mark on people. Speaking about the paintings that decorate the western churches, St. Ignatius (Bryanchaninov) wrote: "It can be seen that the painters were completely carnal people, who did not have the slightest idea of ​​the spiritual, no feeling of the spiritual and therefore had no possibility to depict a person through spiritual painting." Having no idea of the position assumed by the features of the face of the Saint engrossed in his prayer, the position assumed by his eyes, his mouth, his hands, his whole body, they create in their ignorant fancy an arbitrary and ignorant fancy, according to that fancy they set up as a model a man or a woman, and the skilful little girl portrays on the canvas perfect nonsense, just as the most eloquent orator would necessarily have to utter the utterly unintelligible speech, if he were forced to speak on a subject that was completely unknown to him... The saint cannot be depicted in an artificial pose, with movements that show excitement, with a romantic and sentimental position of the face, mouth open, head thrown upwards or gaze strongly directed upwards. Also, holy women and girls cannot be depicted with downcast eyes: the girl begins to lower her gaze only when a sinful feeling arises in her; in her innocence she looks straight» 12 . The difference between a painting and an icon is not just a difference between two schools of art. It reflects the essential divergence of the prayer experience. According to L. Uspensky, we can pray in front of "realistic-sentimental" paintings not thanks to them, but only in spite of them... Let's remember how the Roman Catholic "external" was experienced by the man who was the founder of the Russian ecumenical movement - Fr. Sergey Bulgakov. At the time of his youthful atheism, he experienced a religious upheaval, observing the Sistine Madonna. A few decades after this, finding himself next to her again, now as an emigrant and no longer as a young nihilist, but a priest, he experienced a new shock: «Here is beauty, just marvelous human beauty, with its religious ambiguity, but also... gracelessness. Pray in front of this picture? - That is blasphemous and impossible! For some reason, those little angels and the perfumer Varvara in a sad pose with a flirtatious half-smile especially got on my nerves... Some kind of sacrilegious familiarity: is it possible to take such a tone after seeing the Mother of God? It's not an icon. It's a picture. A young mother with a prophetic child walks with a firm human step on thick, heavy clouds, as if on wet snow. There is no Virginity there, least of all Prisnovirginity, on the contrary, its renunciation prevails - femininity and woman, sex... I clearly understood that it was she, the radiant wisdom of the Orthodox icon, who disgusted Raphael, she opened my eyes to see the glaring discrepancy between means and tasks... The beauty of the Renaissance is not holiness, but that ambiguous, demonic principle that conceals desolation, and its smile plays on the lips of Leonardo's heroes...». Then Bulgakov remembers how Leo Tolstoy expressed himself even harsher about that picture: "So what - a girl gave birth to a child, and that's all - there is nothing special about it." At that time, this Tolstoy's opinion astonished Bulgakov, but - "now I understood and felt the immaturity of Raphael's painting, the voluptuousness of his kit and his blasphemous immodesty" 13 . The difference between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism is the different drawing of the boundary between the soul and the spiritual: with us it extends in different spheres. What in Orthodoxy is only a natural state, in Roman Catholic mysticism is perceived as already blessed. The western image and incorrect icon clearly show that difference. Losev sees the manifestation of these internal differences in how "the moving view of an iconic figure differs from the indecent touching and sensual observation of a statue" 14 . In theology, mysticism, and music, much of what the West portrays as "spiritual-benevolent", the East reticently evaluates it as "soulful", as something handmade-human. But that is the state of "imagination", of pretense. Not only does the strict ascetic St. Ignatius Brjančanin's taste shines in the highest manifestations of Western mysticism. And the aforementioned Losev writes about the "obvious and principled beauty of this (Roman Catholic) experience of creation" 15 . Textbooks of theology and theological studies usually compare religious paths according to their peripheries - by comparing dogmatic formulations. One catechism is taken and compared to another. There is almost no comparison to the spiritual experience, the experience of prayer. 16 In my opinion, the most important difference between Orthodoxy and Latinism is not in the horizon of disputes about the Filioque, or papal primacy, but in the practice of prayer. The spiritual authorities of the West persistently recommend that path of spiritual action that is categorically forbidden by the spiritual teachers of the East (even at the time of church unity). 17 It is about how a person should behave during prayer. How can a person protect himself from imperceptibly starting to pray... to himself. Long before Feuerbach and Freud, Christian thought knew that man is capable of creating objects of his religious worship. Man is able to project his fears and hopes "outside", to make them alienated from himself, to sublimate and raise them to the "heavens". A person can provoke such psychological states in himself that he will be inclined to observe as if they came to him from outside, as a revelation and as a visitation of grace. Man appears as the creator of his religious experience. There is nothing strange about religion in acknowledging this fact. Of course, religious activity is a human activity and, therefore, like any activity, it is subject to the laws of the human psyche (including the laws of the unconscious and the laws of social psychology). The problem lies in the second - can all spheres of man's religious life be fully explained solely by man's psyche? Human consciousness creates its own images of the other, those images are human. But does that mean that the other is by no means present in them, that all these human representations do not take a person out of the scope of subjectivity? Man talks about everything in human language - but does that mean that there is nothing in being but human words? Like science and almost every philosophy, theology believes that in human experience there is something that is not created by man himself, something that is external to him and that represents a self-contained reality. The question arises: how to perceive the presence of the non-human in human experience? Where is the criterion of "objectivity"? In order to answer this question, philosophy created a special discipline - gnoseology (theory of knowledge). There is no methodological discipline of this kind in Orthodox theology (perhaps it is not there yet). The Fathers certainly did not look like Kant and did not write the "Critique of the Pure Mind". But, on the other hand, for them the question of error was not a theoretical question at all. It was necessary to recognize deception and guard against error not for the sake of obtaining a doctorate, but for the sake of life and the salvation of the soul. And that is why, through experience, the Fathers came up with some concrete advice that helps to distinguish a purely human experience from that experience in which the human is presented as imbued with the divine. One of those tips is not to engage in self-arousal. Do not provoke any strong "religious" experiences in yourself. Do not look for visions and miracles. 18 To restrain imagination. And that is why during prayer one should strictly refrain from imagining any visible images. Incorrect Tradition allows, albeit with extreme caution, the creation of an image in one's mind - but by no means during prayer. "How to imagine the Lord? How is he sitting on the throne or crucified? - answers the question of St. Theophanes the Prisoner - When you think about the divine, then you can imagine the Lord as you should. But during the prayer, no pictures are allowed» 19 . "If you allow the creation of images, there is a danger that you will begin to pray with imaginations" 20 . In Orthodox prayer, not figures, not images, but meanings that the mind perceives and that the heart experiences, become the object of observation. "Imagine the truth and pray for it, or keep it in your mind during prayer, and compose your prayers from it. There will come a moment when this truth will enter the heart, and it will take over the entire being of the soul, feeding it and making it happy» 21 . In contrast to this, Roman Catholic meditation presupposes conjuring up in the mind and holding in memory some visible image. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order and a Roman Catholic saint 22 , suggests, for example, the following meditation: «Imagine huge flaming tongues and souls that seem to be enclosed in glowing bodies. Hear reproaches, cries and cries, cursing Jesus Christ and His Saints. Smell the smell of smoke, sulphur, decay and rot. To imagine touching that fire ourselves. To remember the souls who dwell in hell, to thank the Lord for not allowing me to end my life here» 23 ... 24 This exercise is recommended to be performed one hour before dinner. There are certainly other subjects of meditation. We can imagine ourselves smelling the fragrance of the Virgin Mary in paradise. We can imagine ourselves standing next to the Apostles on the Mount of Transfiguration. We can imagine ourselves walking the Via Dolorosa following Christ. The intellectual meditation of Orthodoxy is closer to the Jewish sources of Christianity (in the Bible, the word is more important, and not a visible image; in it the commandment and meaning are contemplated, not the image of the Commander; in it is understanding, not aesthetic vision). Roman Catholic meditation with a visible image is closer not so much to the biblical heritage as to the sculptural nature of Greek aesthetics. But it's not a matter of closeness to these or those cultural patterns. The thing is, what kind of fruits are obtained. Overly emotional Roman Catholic meditation leads to inserting into the religious cloud, religious in the true sense, human emotions that this meditation awakened and which have no place in religion at all (at least not in an untransformed form). The result becomes simply terrifying from the point of view of Orthodox paternal experience. And from the point of view of secular psychology - on the contrary, very understandable and known, quite unmythical, and even very secular... Let's look at the following example: Angela (died in 1309), called blessed in Roman Catholicism, especially strongly imagines the sufferings of Christ. "Once I was standing at prayer, and Christ showed Himself to me more clearly. And then He called me and told me to kiss the wound on His side. It seemed to me that I put my mouth and drank His blood flowing from His side, and thus I understood that He was cleansing me with it. And from that time I began to experience great joy, although I experienced sadness from observing His sufferings» 25 . "And His blood seemed so red to me when it flowed from the wounds, as if it had just begun to flow from the open wounds. Then one could see on the veins of the blessed body such disunity and tearing of all the limbs of the body that resulted from the ferocious and cruel stretching on the wood of the cross of the virgin limbs, that the veins and tendons between the bones seemed to be completely stretched and deviated from the proper harmony of the whole body. However, no violation of the unity of the body was observed on the skin. Observing the cruel tearing of the sinews of the body and the stretching of the limbs, which made all the veins seem distended and disjointed, and the bones could be counted, the pain began to pierce me even more strongly than the observation of the open wounds. And the sight of such a crucified body of the gentle and beloved Jesus really caused such pity, that not only my bowels, but also all my bones and tendons, as it seemed to me, felt new pain and caused new sobs and a terrible feeling of suffering in a tormented spirit and body" 26 . "Once I looked at the cross with the Crucified One on it, and while I was looking at the Crucified One with my bodily eyes, suddenly my soul was ignited with such a flame of love that even the limbs of my body felt it with great joy and delight. I saw and felt that Christ was embracing my soul with the hand that was nailed to the cross, and I rejoiced with the greatest joy... Sometimes from that firm embrace the soul seems to enter the side of Christ" 27 . The intensity of this kind of contemplation is such that, for example, the mystical Angel's interlocutor says to her: "I was with the Apostles and they saw Me with their bodily eyes, but they did not feel Me the way you feel Me" 28 . Angela alone, on the other hand, experiences the images of torment unfolding in front of her eyes so impressively that she is convinced that even the Virgin Mary, who stood by the Cross of her Son, could not tell about them in more detail than Angela 29 . The path of this kind of meditation and its result pravoslavyi mistik Prep. Simeon the New Theologian describes it as follows: "He raises his hands, eyes and mind to the sky, imagines in his mind divine words, heavenly treasures, ranks of holy Angels, settlements of Saints, in short, collects in his imagination everything he heard in the Divine Scriptures, considers it during prayer and with all this excites his soul for divine desire and love, sometimes sheds tears and cries. Thus, little by little, his heart becomes proud, and he imagines that everything that happens to him is a work of divine grace and for his joy, and he prays to God to always make him worthy to dwell in such actions. It is a sign of presplendence» 30 . This place is certainly not the only one. St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov interprets it in a completely straight line: the very method of such prayer is "prelest". But, St. Teofan the Prisoner often considered it necessary to enter into a polemic with St. Ignatius. And in this case, putting the translation (as always with Theophanes, it is rather a retelling) of the teachings of Prep. Simeon in the fifth volume of his "Dobrotoljublje", the Višensk Prisoner gives a milder final assessment. In parentheses, he claims: "It is (that is how some think about this type of prayer) a sign of grace". In this case, it turns out that Prep. Simeon does not see evil as such in such a spiritual feat. He only calls it a beauty to accept such a state as a blessing. It is not a demonic vision, it is a fruit of natural human psychology - but it is precisely as such a fruit that this condition must be understood and nothing more must be attributed to it. Prelest is precisely "imagining": a man, having caused himself some completely psychic experiences with his earnestness, gives them a benevolent-sublime origin and considers himself a seer of God. We find evidence of the artificial origin of the fruits of Loyola's meditations in a rather unexpected source. None other than V. S. Pecherin, one of the most famous Russian Roman Catholic thinkers (who went from being a professor at the Moscow Imperial University to a priest-monk of the Redemptionist order), says: "In the spiritual exercises of Ignatius (Loyola), the human mind resembles an ox or a bull that goes in a circle and thus turns a mill. It spins forever in the same circle, it does not move forward, there is nothing new, there is no progress. Those exercises are the best means of restraining the human mind» 31 . Are there false spiritual experiences and revelations? Obviously, yes - let's at least remember the revelation of the "White Brotherhood". Can they be expressed for a Christian by ordinary feelings, words and thoughts? Yes, it is enough to remember the "Theotokos Center". But, then, the strong repulsion of Orthodox people towards some manifestations of non-Slavic mysticism should not be considered as something "ignorant". One can debate the motives of that repulsion, but the very fact of that repulsion cannot be ignored. It is characteristic that in the experience of Roman Catholic mysticism by people of Orthodox upbringing, a completely determined constant has already formed. The visible and emotionally colored representation of the object of religious experience brings some Western ascetics into such states that they raise doubts about the all-wise purity of their experiences. In order to support this opinion, I will cite several texts that represent both the moments of the Western mystical experience that are offensive to the Orthodox understanding, as well as the reaction of the Orthodox to them. Here is a characteristic example of Teresa of Avila: «Often Christ tells me: From now on I am yours and you are Mine. These tendernesses of my God throw me into an inexpressible confusion. There is pain and pleasure in them at the same time. It's the sweetest wound... I saw a little angel. A long golden spear with an iron point and a small flame on it was in his hand, and he thrust it sometimes into my heart and bowels, and when he took it out of them, it seemed to me that he was taking out my bowels with the spear. The pain from this wound was so strong, that I sobbed, but the pleasure was also so strong, that I wanted the pain not to end. The deeper the spear went into my womb, the more my pain grew, and the sweeter it was» 32 . Citing these Teresa's revelations 33, Dmitry Mereshkovsky comments: "If a godless woman, but experienced in sexual love, saw Teresa at that moment, she would understand, or would seem to understand, what it all means, she would only wonder where Teresa's man is." If Teresa's experience is understood as religious - then it must be attributed to the state of "promiscuous delight" known to Orthodox mysticism. That's a harsh word. But Alexei Khomyakov still had to say: "Let our Western brothers not be offended by the cruelty of my expressions. I am not able to express myself differently» 34 . If, on the other hand, Teresa's testimony is viewed simply as a psychic document - then it will be credible and true, just like the credible and non-mystical confession of Tsvetaeva, who reveals the "secret of a woman": The secret of Eve made of wood - here it is: I am nothing more than an animal, Who was wounded in the stomach. Уосталом, Тереза је цео свој живот имала непрестане проблеме са својим духовницима – њено искуство их је збуњивало 35 . Сенке сумње имала је и сама Тереза, али их је врло вешто одбацивала: «Само се не збуњујте и не бојте – саветује она сестре – ако виђења и нису од Бога, у смирењу и доброј савести она вам неће нашкодити. Господ уме да извуче добро из зла, и на путу којим је ђаво хтео да вас погуби, ви ћете само добити. Мислећи да вас је Бог тако обдарио, постараћете се да Му угодите и непрестано Га се сећате. Један учен човек је говорио да је ђаво вешт уметник, и ако би му овај показао на јави лик Господа, он се не би ожалостио, јер би то изазвало у њему страхопоштовање и ђаво би био побеђен својим оружјем. Because no matter how evil the artist is, we still respect that character» 36 . Чак и данас је римокатолички богослов који безусловно брани истинитост Терезиног мистичног пута принуђен да призна да није баш тако тешко интерпретирати барем неке тренутке Терезиног душевног живота терминима другог, небогословског језика. «Екстатички доживљаји су понекад праћени појавама левитације, каталепсије, неосетљивости, који на телу стварају одразе богатства божанских дарова, датих души. Ови необични феномени могу довести у опасност живот, обично они погоршавају здравље, али понекад га, напротив, враћају. Pathological phenomena can be added to this. Teresa talks about tinnitus. Јасно је да се мистик не постаје услед неуропатије, већ истински мистични живот може бити спојен са неуропатским стањем» 37 . Therefore, Mereshkovski's comment is not accidental. This is how western mystical sentimentalism is generally perceived in the East: «Али, најупадљивија и најсаблажњивија је молитвена пракса римокатолицизма... – каже А. F. Лосев – блажена Анђела се налази у слаткој љубавној чежњи, не може да се скраси од љубавних мука, крст при том она замишља као брачну постељу... Шта може бити супротније византијско-московском строгом и целомудреном подвижништву од ових страсних посматрања Крста Христовог, Рана Христових и појединих удова Његовог Тела, то насилно изазивање крвавих белега на сопственом телу итд, итд... То свакако није молитва и није општење с Богом. These are very strong hallucinations on the ground of hysteria, i.e. прелест. And all the hysterical men she calls The Mother of God feeds them with her breasts 38 , all those hysterical women who, at the appearance of Christ, experience joyful shivers throughout their bodies and, among other things, spasms of the uterine musculature, all that chaos of erotomania, demonic pride and Satanism - can, of course, only be anathematized. (I underline that I did not mention the most obvious ones. Citing the most obvious examples is both blasphemous and disgusting). All the falsehood of Roman Catholicism is experientially experienced in prayer... Orthodox prayer resides in the upper part of the heart, not in the lower... Through prayer and ascetic experience, the East knew that the introduction of prayer into some other part of the organism is always the result of predilection. Roman Catholic erotomania is apparently associated with violent irritation and inflammation of the lower part of the heart. "He who endeavors to set in motion and inflame the lower part of the heart sets in motion the power of lust which, since the sexual organs are close to it, sets those parts of the body in motion. What a strange phenomenon! From the outside, it seems that the ascetic is engaged in prayer, and engaging in prayer creates lust that would have to be deadened by prayer" - says Losev in the conclusion of St. Ignatija Bryanchaninova 39. In order to make Losevl's harsh reaction more understandable, I will quote several places from Angela's revelations. The epithet "hysterusha" (and St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov called some western mystics of this direction simply "western madmen") Angela acquired, apparently, because of the description of her states like the following: "When she comes down (the communion host), she gives me a very joyful feeling. It is noticeable from the outside, on the body, because it forces me to tremble strongly, so that I can only take the glass with great effort» 40 . "And I shouted without any shame: "My love, I didn't know you yet! Why are you leaving me like that?" But I couldn't say more than that, I just wanted to say the words by shouting, but I couldn't: my voice and the cry choked my words. This cry and scream happened when I entered the vestibule of the church of Francis of Assisi, where after the departure of God I sat, suffering and shouting in front of the whole people, so that those who came with me and my acquaintances stood at a distance, blushing and thinking that there was another cause. And I cried out from His sweetness and from the sadness of His departure and wanted to die. And all the veins of my body were then separated» 41 . There is also a significant erotic undertone in Angela's visions, which really, from the point of view of the Eastern Christian experience, gives the impression of incomprehensibility. She saw the marriage bed in Krsto 42 . She wanted to see Christ in the flesh, and "she saw Christ lowering his head on my hands." And then he showed me His neck and hands. The beauty of His neck was so indescribable. He didn't show me anything except that most beautiful and sweetest neck» 43 . And again, now already in the church: "I also saw the body of Christ often in different figures. Sometimes I saw the neck of Christ, which was so bright and beautiful that the brightness that came out of it was greater than the brightness of the sun. Such beauty undoubtedly indicates to me that God is there; although at home I saw an even greater beauty on that throat or neck, such that I will not lose, as I believe, the joy of seeing that neck or throat forever» 44 . Christ himself gives Angela a declaration of love: "I really fell in love with you" 45 . Similar to Losev, B. has similar impressions about mystical anatomism. V. Višeslavcev, who on the whole is far more favorable to Roman Catholicism than Losev: "In these sweet images of a pierced heart, there is some religious baroque, some kind of sentimental poses, unacceptable to peoples with a different religious and aesthetic upbringing. Also unacceptable is the mystique of torture (not tragedy!), the mystique that turns into self-torture, so characteristic of Roman Catholicism and which is strikingly expressed in the liturgical patterns of the Sacre Coeur cult; but certainly the most unacceptable are those generous forgiveness of sins for a certain number of prayers said in front of the image of the Sacre Coeur... With Margarita-Maria Alacoq (whose visions became the basis of the veneration of the Sacre Coeur), the mysticism of the heart is very primitive: it is love suffering together with the Divine Bridegroom, erotic self-torture. Particularly characteristic are her poems, which represent real love sonnets and provide classic material for psychoanalysis. Sublimation is unsuccessful here» 46 . "Prelest is a failure in sublimation, the introduction of such images that do not sublimate, but 'profane'. And indeed, one can find a multitude of such failures in Roman Catholic asceticism and mysticism. Schjelderup cites countless examples in his book "Asceticism" 47 - the philosopher adds in his second work. Even Leo Karsavin, who devoted his entire life to the study of Western medieval religiosity, cannot remain silent about the "excesses of a sexual character" that occur in that "mystical love of God that is often accompanied by sexual affections" 48 . As he concludes, "Roman Catholicism is a human religion, all too human, and the mysticism of Roman Catholicism brings human beauty, earthly eroticism into the relationship with the divinity" 49 . He draws attention to the fact that after their visions Mathilde, Gertrude and Angelo are so convinced of their salvation that they believe that they do not even need a confession before death. Moreover, a man who is so intimately united with God becomes - in his own experience - incapable of any sin: "The God-man cannot sin. Man does not sin not because he does only good, but because there is no sin. Everything he does may be, from a human point of view, sinful, but it is actually, as an act of God, divine and holy» 50 . The Roman Catholic monk Pecherin, who was raised by John Chrysostom, during the 25 years spent in Roman Catholic monasteries, could not possibly become a true believer of Teresa of Avila. "Roman Catholic piety is often engulfed in the unbridled flame of earthly passion. The young girl faints before the image of the flaming, thorn-covered, spear-pierced heart of Jesus. In a bright vision, St. Teresa sees a beautiful boy with wings: he pierces her heart completely with a golden arrow... Well, that's a woman in the true sense of the word! Therefore, the centuries have passed in vain: the human heart has not changed, it is troubled by the same passions and calls the same gods to its aid, and the ancient pagan cupid in the same costume and with the same arrows appears in the cell of a Carmelite nun of the 16th century» 51 . Yes, of course, everyone tests himself, and the external image only contributes to the emergence of his own unlived impurity. But isn't the meaning of sacred art not to provoke, but on the contrary, to bear witness to a world that has already overcome lust? Trials and failures are everywhere - both in the East and in the West. The problem is in the second - where the fall is painfully acknowledged as a fall, and where is it canonized? The ascetic experiences and himself gives the original reflection of his experience. The final reception of his experience by the Church is done with the blessing of the hierarch. But between the experience of the mystic and the canonical thinking of the hierarch inevitably stands the interpreting and harmonizing effort of theologians. This is where the responsibility of theologians is greatest. And that's why a Christian cannot avoid Gabriel Marcel's not-so-sweet words: "Today we can no longer allow ourselves the Socratic search for truth, the free and casual wandering of metaphysical spaces. In the religious system, the so-called freedom of thought cannot be tolerated: too important issues are resolved there. A theologian's error can destroy the souls of thousands. The Christian appeal to grace is incompatible with the Socratic style of thinking". The divergence of traditions begins precisely at that point: some spiritual experience of an ascetic is accepted by his disciples, but rejected by the rest of the community. If the experience of such a spiritual leader is blessed, then the path of his prayer through which he reached his state is also approved. And if that ascetic was in a state of ecstasy, his disciples in that case too, if they seriously engage in the same prayer, expose themselves to the danger that sooner or later, rising to the same height, they will fall into the same abyss. Since when writing this book I am used to referring to V. Rozanova (what to do, when, despite his innumerable anti-church provocations, he still understood Orthodoxy much better than mitronous academics), I will quote his observation now: "The Russian Church is affected by many weaknesses and infirmities; but she deserves less reproach on her heights, on her ups and downs. Her suffering is her pits and ravines, while, for example, in Roman Catholicism, it is precisely the hills that are pathological» 52 . Citing a Roman Catholic text in which erotic terminology is used to describe spiritual experiences, Rozanov writes: "We don't know anything similar in the Orthodox Church; and she would not allow anything like that. This is no longer a matter of 'filioque', there is something that 'really' places a chasm between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. It is precisely such pebbles that need to be removed from the bottom of the Roman Catholic ocean in order to understand it to some extent. And all that 'filioque' and 'how to bake prosphora' is much less important" 53 . The Orthodox often speak of the spirit of pride that was reflected in the declaration of papal infallibility. But is this the only case of the penetration of a proud feeling into the world of Roman Catholic dogmatics and mysticism? By no means only the politicians and masters of the Western Church, but precisely the ascetics and prayer men are also beginning to feel like men of God. Let us remember Francis of Assisi, the favorite saint of the Russian (pro-Western) intelligentsia. According to the accurate observation of M. N. Lodiženski 54, humility comes to Francisk as in some sudden bursts of elation. Other times, he can calmly experience himself suffering together with Jesus for other people's sins, he can calmly say - "I don't know any sin of mine that I would not atone for through confession and repentance", and he can even imagine himself in a vision together with Christ in the form of two pillars of light. It was the teaching about merit that made it impossible for him to develop holy humility. On his deathbed, he does not say, like the fathers from Paterik - "I have not even begun to repent", he does not ask for forgiveness, but says - "I forgive all my brothers". His vision of light is really strange: "During my prayer, two great lights appeared in front of me - one in which I recognized the Creator, and the other in which I recognized myself." Orthodox theologian archbishop Jovan (Shahovskoy) observes that in a holy man there must be as much holiness as there is a lack of understanding of his holiness 55 . Leo Tolstoy's observation about the spiritual evolution of "Father Sergius" is quite correct. Father Sergius thought that he was a burning lighthouse, and the more he felt it, the more he felt the weakening, the extinguishing of the divine light of truth burning in him". Church life is active. What grew out of what - did the teaching of the "overwhelming merits of the saints" (and the indulgences associated with it) stem from Francis's sense of self-righteousness? Or does Francisco harbor this rather unusual feeling for a Christian because he adopted the appropriate theological theory from childhood? In any case, there is no doubt that in this attitude of Francis we meet something that is strange for Orthodox spirituality, but therefore acceptable for Roman Catholic spirituality. For example, Mathilda believed that «it was not necessary for her to pray for the forgiveness of her sins, nor to do good deeds. A fire of mystical ecstasy engulfed her. The ashes fell, and she stood before the Bridegroom, pure and shining like gold coming out of the fire. Christ himself did good works in her place. That's why Mathilda was ready to die even without confession: should the saint repent, should the shining gold be cleaned?" 56. A Russian emigrant who received the Roman Catholic priesthood before the war, Fr. Vsevolod Roško once noted that "purely Roman Catholic reading that is useful for the soul is not instructive for us, but rather disgusting, and that is why it is seductive." In the Flowers of Francis of Assisi, which are so dear to us in general, we read in chapter 44 that the degree of spiritual perfection depends on the degree of suffering that the righteous person experiences while thinking about the crucifixion. That's when one realizes that the way to Francisco is closed for us. There is a great danger for a Russian who finds himself among Roman Catholics: those rites, those thoughts with which Roman Catholics are fed, are not bad in themselves, but they are foreign to us. An unprepared soul falls into unanimity, into set, and then into indifference. Of the born Russians, apart from five or six among our Roman Catholic clergy, it is better not to mention the others: at best they have become neurosthenics. This is a massive fact that a person has to face... After 40 years of my association with Latin ascetics, their prayer path remained foreign to me» 57 . These letters of Fr. Vsevolod wrote about. Alexander Men. But, Fr. Alexander saw only a difference in national temperaments. In any case, in the booklet "Practical guidance for prayer", Father Aleksandar Menj believes that Western and Northern ascetics needed meditation and an effort of imagination during prayer, because their temperament was too cold, while in the East, meditation was thrown out of use, because the fiery Eastern imagination, on the contrary, needed to be reined in... But the spiritual teachings of the Egyptians and Syrians were later confirmed by Russian Orthodox ascetics. Can the monks of Solovetka or Troika be considered more temperamental than Teresa of Spain? And they also warned about the dangers of the meditative way of prayer. It would be too simplistic to explain the difference in the way of prayer with cultural conditions, characteristics of personal or national temperament. Today we can no longer hide behind lulling-ecumenical Russianism. We cannot cover ourselves with the "social contract theory" and say that these people pray that way, because "it is customary with them", and these people exactly like this because "it is customary with them". There are no more "national confessions" left in Christianity. There are Russian Roman Catholics and French Orthodox. And regardless of national temperaments, they accept those ways of prayer work that are recommended to them by their supranational, confessional traditions. After all, people who tend not to notice the difference between Teresa's and Angela's prayer experience, on the one hand, and Orthodoxy, on the other hand, are happy to refer to Prep. Simeon the New Theologian. He, they say, also uses erotic terminology when describing spiritual experience, and therefore, the description of the union of man with God very naturally takes on images of conjugal love. "And indeed a marriage takes place, unspeakable and divine. He makes a deal with each one individually, and each one, due to pleasure, unites with the Bishop" - writes Prep. Simeon the New Theologian 58. But Teresa's use of marriage symbolism is not strange in itself - the tradition of "mystical marriage" is consecrated by the Bible, it also exists in Orthodox mysticism. And yet, some striking, albeit difficult to express features do not allow us to say that the eroticism that pervades the mysticism of Roman Catholic ascetics has been completely and utterly transformed. "Love seems to me like a consciously shot arrow. If the arrow shoots forth with all its might, seeking God Himself, it without any doubt inflicts a wound in the breast of His Divine Majesty Himself. Having thus stuck in God, who is Love, it returns from him with enormous benefit» 59 . Such texts in Prep. I can't find Simeon, by the way, and the purity of communion for him is not connected with voluptuous torment. "It should be pointed out - writes the deepest researcher of the heritage of this church father - that in the visions of Prep. Simeon, despite all his personal character, Christ never appears with visible human features, but as light or fire in the heart, or, at most, as a figure without a figure or as an invisible vision» 60 . That is why the experience of Prep cannot be compared. Simeon with the mysticism of Western visionaries. The "Byzantine-Moscow wisdom" that Losev talks about can best be seen in the conversation between Prep. Seraphim of Sarovsky with Motovilov. How much wisdom, living experience and sobriety there is in the words of Prep. Seraphim: "By prayer, we deign to speak with Him Himself, God and our salvation." But even there we should pray only until God the Holy Spirit descends upon us in the measure of His grace known to Him. And when he deigns to visit us, then we should stop praying. Why should we then pray to Him: 'Come and live in us', when He has already come to us. I will explain it to you with an example: here, if you would invite me as a guest, I would come to your place at your invitation and I would like to talk with you. And you would start inviting me again: please, please, you say, come to me. Then I would involuntarily have to ask myself: what is it? That he didn't move his mind? I came to him, and he keeps calling me. During the descent of the Spirit, the soul should be in complete prayerlessness, to listen clearly and articulately to all the words of eternal life that He then deigns to communicate to her. It is necessary to be in complete sobriety of both soul and body and in all-wise purity of the flesh" 61 . As for Prep. Simeon, there really is a hymn with him, where he openly talks about the presence of gender in the communion of God. Let's list the "most daring" places from it to feel the difference. "We become members of Christ, and Christ becomes our members. And the hand of the unfortunate is in me and my foot is Christ. I am a wretch and the hand and foot of Christ. And in this way, all the members of each of us individually become the members of Christ, and He will make all the unbecoming members beautiful, decorating them with the beauty and glory of His Divinity. Having learned, then, that we are all like that, were you afraid or ashamed to admit that my finger is also Christ, and a degenerate limb, too? But God was not ashamed to make Himself like you, and you are ashamed to become like Him" ​​62 . Here, firstly, we are talking about the request for a logical reflection of the initial, dogmatic premises. Did Christ become a man? - He became. Did he take on everything human? - Everything, except sin. Is the division into men and women a sin? - It's not. Therefore, Christ was a man, with all those characteristics that determine the male gender 63 . And vice versa - does God, saving man, unite with him? - Yes. Do Christ's words "I came to heal the whole man" include our physicality in the composition of wholeness that needs to be transformed? - Yes. Therefore, not only the heart and not only the brain are covered by the divine light, but the whole person sees himself transformed and radiant. What is unwise in these testimonies of Prep. Simeon? Perhaps the cause of this is my lack of insight, confessional bias, or lack of experience - but I do not see in these words Prep. Simeon's testimony about experiences similar to Teresa's. Who has become different? St. Teofan the Prisoner and St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov, however, can be imagined in Tivaida; their books can be imagined as people gratefully read them in the library of the Studite Monastery... But Teresa would hardly have found a common language with mother Synclitikia... What would Prep. Seraphim of Sarovsky said about Francisco's mysticism - we don't know. But we have the opposite testimony about it. "Once there was a young woman who was sick, sitting in the garden and reading the life of Francis of Assisi. The garden was full of flowers. There was complete rural silence. Reading a book, she fell into a light sleep. "I don't even know how it happened - she told me later... - And look, there goes Francisco himself, and with him, a stooped, shining old man who looks like a patriarch" - she said, emphasizing his age and beauty. He was all in white. She got scared. And Francisco came very close to her and said: "My daughter, you are looking for the true Church, and she is where he is: She supports everything, and she does not ask for support from anyone." The white old man was silent and only smiled approvingly at Francisco's words. The apparition ended and she passed away. Then, for some reason, a thought whispered to her: "It is connected with the Russian Church." And peace again descended into her soul. After two months I was with them again: this time I learned the following from the woman herself who had the vision. They received a Russian worker. Visiting his apartment and wanting to know if he settled in well, she saw an icon with him and recognized on it the old man she saw in her light dream with Francisco. Surprised and scared, she asked who is that old man? "Venerable Seraphim, our Orthodox Saint" - the worker answered her. Then she understood the meaning of the word St. Francis that "Truth is in the Orthodox Church" 64 . The enthusiastic character of Roman Catholic mysticism became the parent concept of Roman Catholic piety. It seems that this trait could not but emerge in Roman Catholicism, after Western theology took the path of scholasticism. The rational deduction of categories has become an activity separate from spiritual endeavor in the true sense. After all, theological analysis remained unchecked by the heart, and the aspirations of the heart remained uncensored by reason. Therefore, on the one hand, "in the West, scholastic dogmatics often came into conflict with arbitrary and often excessive, false mysticism, because there both these directions of spiritual activity developed almost independently of each other. We have a devastating and honest confession of a Western scientist about this: "The corruption of dogma by mysticism and the break with it happened only in the West, where the conclusions of one caused the bold opposition of the other 65 . But, on the other hand, between scholasticism and exalted mysticism there was not only a rule of mutual rejection, but also a bond of mutual dialectical creation and complementation. As deeply noted by V. Ključevski, in the history of Roman Catholicism: "Living and active truth is alternately anatomized by scholasticism and galvanized by religious furor, and faith sinks into a sea of ​​forms and impressions that ignite the imagination and incite the passions of the heart" 66 . This "religious furor" has not subsided in Roman Catholicism even today (although Roman Catholic theology has long since left the era of scholasticism behind). Recently, the Moscow Roman Catholic publishing house published a booklet with the visions of the Greek Vassula from Alexandria, which the Orthodox refused to recognize, but which is why the Roman Catholics insistently recommend it 67 . This woman once discovered that the pen in her hand suddenly began to write on its own. The author of the astral message first introduced himself as a "guardian angel", and after some time as Christ. Then she asked her interlocutor to contact her in visible form. This one turned out to be cute (I'd say "devilishly attractive") and "dimpled when he smiled"... Roman Catholics have the right to spread whatever literature they want. And, of course, it would not be entirely correct on my part to compare the spiritual declines of Roman Catholicism with the heights of Orthodoxy. But that is the point of what I am saying, using books that the Roman Catholics themselves hastened to publish in Russian for Russia. Therefore, they themselves consider them to be the most representative of their tradition, and the most spiritual. Here is a booklet that was distributed for free in a Roman Catholic bookshop in Moscow. O. Luigi Orione, who was canonized by Pope John Paul II, preaches in it: «We need priests of an enlightened spirit, who have an irreconcilable character, loyal to the Pope. Priests of action, prayer, self-sacrifice! Souls and Souls! Priests who yearn for the salvation of souls, who surrender everything to Christ, souls and the Pope. A priest of this type... fights, he goes out into the firing line, holding high the Roman Catholic flag, and is ready to fall for the sacred rights of God's Blood and for the freedom of the Church. Enemies close their ranks and vow to tear down the stones of the Vatican, the last bulwark of civilization and faith. And us? Victors in the battle for Christ, we will gather around the throne that is most exposed to attacks, and we will fight to the last drop of blood! Victory will be ours! The triumph will be ours! God is with us! Self-sacrifice and victory! The victory of the pope and for the pope: it is our cry, it is our path, it is our triumph. Forward, always forward!". He writes this in July 1892. Will we continue to repeat together with Berdjaev that Orthodoxy is the cradle of Bolshevism? 68 I didn't take the Ignatius Loyola book from the Middle Ages section of the library. His "Spiritual Exercises" filled the entire issue of the Parisian magazine "Simbol", whose goal is to introduce the Orthodox to the Roman Catholic tradition. No matter how much depends on national conditions and temperament, "God is the same, and Job is the same, and Satan is the same" in all times and in all latitudes. And the laws of prayer, repentance and grace are the same everywhere... It is no coincidence that Ignatius Bryanchaninov says in his treatise on "Imitation of Christ" by Thomas of Kempius: "One cannot flirt with God" 69 . Roman Catholic prayer is, of course, not reduced to an experience of imaginative meditation. The world (even the Roman Catholic world) is wider than Rome, and Rome itself is wider than Teresa and Francis. Speaking about the stigmas of Roman Catholic mystics (starting with Francis, some Roman Catholic ascetics so vividly imagine themselves as spectators and participants of Christ's crucifixion that bleeding wounds appear on their bodies - stigmas), Archbishop Vasilije (Krivošein), considers it necessary to explain: "However, we by no means identify this phenomenon with the general spiritual aspect and theology of this church. For the Orthodox, the stigmatization is incomplete, one-sided and reduced, and such a fervent view of the Christian faith, as well as the resulting spiritual life, experience and prayer practices, are rejected by the great teachers of the Holy Father's spiritual work" 70 . Roman Catholic spiritual life is not reduced to exalted mysticism. Even the life of Francisco and Teresa, their experience, their words and their prayers do not consist only of those moments that cause repulsion in a man of the Orthodox Tradition. In the history and modern times of the Roman Catholic Church, you can meet people with a practically Orthodox experience of spiritual life. The natural endowment of people does not depend on the place of their birth and on which church their parents go to. Even in the West there are people who come into the world with 10 talents, including the mystical ones. Even among Protestants (and even more so among Roman Catholics) there are people who possess the spiritual tact of Orthodoxy in their inner life. Archbishop Jovan Šahovska once wrote an entire article on the topic "On Orthodox in Baptism and Baptists in Orthodoxy" 71 . Even earlier, St. Teofan Zatvornik noted the same: "There are Orthodox among the Protestants, but they are still Protestants." What are they? These are those who adhere to the opinion of the first Protestants. Today's Protestants have moved very far from the first and pure Protestants, ie. those who completely agree with the old ones are now almost gone... Those Protestants who try to stick to the old Protestants, they are also Orthodox, but they are still Protestants" 72 . Finally, since the time of the old Church, a voice has reached us that expresses this attitude towards people who are formally outside the Orthodox Church. St. Grigorije Bogoslov says that his father was not Orthodox by origin, and for a long time he belonged to the Judeo-Christian sect "Ipsistaria" (they connected the observance of fire with the observance of the Sabbath). But the Christians perceived him as their own: "Although he was not yet ours, he was already ours; because he belonged to us by his nature. Just as many of ours are not ours, so many of those who do not belong to us are ours, because by good deeds they acquire faith in advance, and possessing the thing itself, they have only a name» 73. As we can see, not every member of the heretical community develops a heretical spiritual experience. Not all Roman Catholics encounter the erotic mysticism of Angela's style on their spiritual journey. Even the meager heretical sun contributes to the emergence of purity and mystical sensitivity in them. But, nevertheless, the too influential, not to say dominant, school of Western mysticism is noticeably different from the experience of Orthodox asceticism. These distinctive traits of hers are confirmed by tradition, they permeate the theological theories and the sermon. And at the end of the day, those Western ascetics who come into contact with Orthodoxy in their personal experience, "come at odds with theology and find themselves outside the official doctrine of their church" 74 . 75 These differences in prayer do not disappear, although diplomats and theologians are silent about them. And without understanding them and, if possible, removing them, spiritual unity cannot be achieved. The legacy of the centuries has already created a "divergence of hearts" (see Rozanov 76). The pictorial meditativeness of Roman Catholic piety, foreign to the Christian East, "was also reflected in the establishment of a whole series of such strange "anatomical holidays" to the Orthodox taste - "the body of Christ", "the heart of Christ", the cult of the "five wounds" and the "heart of Mary", in the prayers of the "blood of Christ", etc. "We bow to you, precious Blood of Jesus Christ, we offer you our repentance and ask for forgiveness through the heart of Your Holy Mother" - is a characteristic example of this type of prayer from the brochure "Mystic Rose", by the way, the first Roman Catholic book that began to spread in Moscow at the beginning of "perestroika". Even today - with all our readiness to gratefully use the philosophical, historical and patrological literature of the West, it is precisely practical books and spiritual teachings that cause among the Orthodox the feeling of repulsion that Fr. Vsevolod Roshkov. 77 One picks up the books of Balthazar and De Liba and feels in them a true and deep Christian thought. But, as soon as he gets the diary of one Faustina Kovalska, again at the mere mention of "Roman Catholic spirituality" the man simply feels sick 78 . Dogmatic formulations can be reconciled. But can a Roman Catholic admit that he is threatened by the spiritual feats on which the generations of his spiritual ancestors were raised? The eventual unification with modern Roman Catholicism would be impossible without a critical reflection on its past, not the past of sinful politicians, of which there were many in the history of Orthodoxy, but the experiences of those who are considered saints. Because the eventual union with Roman Catholicism would not be a simple alliance with this or that sympathetic modern hierarch. It would not even be a simple alliance with that group of Roman Catholic theologians who want to bypass scholasticism and turn directly to the Eastern Fathers (well, we should not forget that such a group exists - let's remember Balthazar, Kongar, Danielu, De Liba... - and it enriched world theology with many things in the second half of the 20th century). It would be an alliance with a huge and very diverse community. It would be an alliance with huge deposits of history. During the eventual unification with Roman Catholicism, we would have to recognize as holy what they recognize as holy. We would have to accept Teresa and Angela, Methilda and Margarita Alacoq... Roman Catholics would never dare to distance themselves from the "doctor of the Church" – Teresa of Avila 79 . And the Orthodox will never be ready to agree with Western meditations - at least as long as they are still Orthodox and not just orthodox. Elchaninov Aleksandar, Records, Paris, 1962, p. 75. Losev A. F. , Philosophy, Mythology, Culture, M., 1991, p. 69. Horujil S. S., Silent Diptych. M. 1991, p. 45. This thought, after all, still belongs to St. To Gregory the Theologian: "Every word can be disputed with a word; but life, with what can it be disputed? - St. Gregory the Theologian, Misli, 3., Acts, T. 2, p. 22. St. Ignatius (Brjančaninov), On heresy and schism, M., 1996, p. 295. Benevolence, t. 2. M., 1895, p. 498. Luther M., Great Catechism, Lahti, 1996, p. 131. Rev. Jovan Lestvičnik, Lestvica, p. 262. This description of Prep. John's does not at all resemble the Orthodox-ascetic grief that is often diverted (by the way, it is characteristic of lay-neophytes, and by no means for monks). In a certain way, it is a heresy, consciously giving priority to one truth (the truth of rejecting the world and repentance) in relation to the entire symphony of the Truth, according to which there is room not only for "do not love the world" but also for "God so loved the world"... Such a "heretic" - "Reads the Book of Ecclesiastes, but does not read the Song of Songs" (Marina Tsvetayeva). Anatolij Zhurkovski, Materials for Life, p. 29. It is a painting by an artist from the beginning of the 16th century Franćabiđa. A photocopy of the portrait can be found in "Vesnik RHD", number 140. St. Ignatius (Brjančaninov), On heresy and schism, p. 294–295. Sergiy Bulgakov, Autobiographical observations. Moskovsky Vesnik, N. 5, p. 312–314. Losev A. F., Essays on ancient symbolism and mythology, M., 1930. p. 866. Losev A. F., Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology, p. 858. Again the impression of V. Pecherina: «The same false taste reigns in music. In the papal chapel in the Vatican, they still sing tolerably well. But, there is opera music everywhere and in all other places. All they need is to invite Strauss to play a waltz during the service. Kudos to the Greek Church, which preserved along with the ancient rites and the ancient magnificent and beautiful singing. It is completely lost in the West" (V.S. Pečerin, Apologia mojega života, p. 273). After all, it should be pointed out, first, that Pecherin's remark refers precisely to the Greek Orthodox Church, not to the Russian one; secondly, that there is a great interest in Gregorian music today in the West as well - the Western medieval analogue of Byzantine chant. The exception is the three-volume work of M. Lodižensky's "Mystic Trilogy" and the chapter "On Beauty" from "Ascetic Experiences" of St. Ignatius Bryanchaninov. In all likelihood, V. Rozanov tried to think about it: «All the content of Roman Catholicism is completely different from the content of Orthodoxy. This cannot be observed in Warsaw, in Vienna, and even less so in Petrograd. But to me, as a man of the cat who gets a general impression of the church, rather than going into its details, when I wandered the streets of Rome, an inner voice whispered: "No, it's not that! It's not that! It has nothing to do with the calm faith of Moscow, Kaluga, Zvenigorod, my native Kostroma". It's not a sect, it's not a teaching: it's completely different religions - Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism". (Rozanov V.V., Među usneticima, M., 1991. pp. 26–27). "What were the eastern ascetics looking for, and what were the western ones? What the Eastern Fathers strictly, resolutely, with threats and persuasion forbid, Western ascetics strive to achieve with all their strength and means" (abbot Nikon Vorovjov, We are left with repentance, M., 1997, p. 341). At the end of the Clerk (the book according to which the priest conducts divine service) there is an instructive section in which quite practical advice is given on what a priest should do in unusual circumstances. For example, when the wine suddenly freezes in the Chalice during the service. Or a fire occurs in the church during the Liturgy. Or, on the other hand, a fly or a spider gets into the Holy Chalice... When a miracle happens at the service... «If after the consecration of the bread or wine, a miracle appears, i.e. the appearance of bread in the form of a body or a child, and the wine, in turn, in the form of blood, and if this appearance does not change soon, i.e. if the appearance of bread or wine does not appear again, but it remains unchanged, the priest should by no means receive communion: because it is not the body and blood of Christ, but a miracle from God, revealed because of infidelity or other guilt..." As we can see, here the miracle is not a sign of some kind of spiritual perfection of the "visionary", but rather the unraveling of his guilt. St. Teofan Zatvornik, Letters, M., 1898, volume 1, p. 182. St. Teofan Zatvornik, Collected letters, volume 7, M., 1994, p. 25. St. Theophanes the Prisoner, Letters. M., 1898, volume 2. p. 159. After all, he composed his "Spiritual Exercises" before receiving monasticism, before receiving the priesthood, and even before studying at the University - on a hospital bed after the amputation of his legs. Ignacio Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Symbol, N. 26, p. 39. Let's note that Loyola is not the only one who finds a certain satisfaction in observing other people's suffering. The "angelic doctor" Thomas Aquinas also believed that "just as the opposite is explained by comparison, so the blessed in paradise will see the torments of the condemned in order to rejoice more in their bliss" (cited according to the remark of the editor of the edition: Fr. S. Zheludkov, Christianity and Atheism, Brussels, Life with God, 1982, p. 206). This opinion of Aquinas, among other things, forced Berdjaev to say a good word to Orthodoxy (which is not so common among him): "The words of Thomas Aquinas, who said that the righteous in Paradise will enjoy the torments of sinners in hell, could not be heard from the wings of Orthodoxy" (Berdjaev N. A., The Truth of Orthodoxy). Revelations of bl. Angel, translation by Prof. L. P. Karsavina. M., 1918. p. 75–76. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 140–141. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 150–151. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 96. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 135. Goodwill, T. 5, p. 329–330. Pecherin V. S., Funeral Records, Russian Society in the 1930s. People and ideas, Memoari savrennika, M., 1989. p. 398–399. Cit. Mereškovski D. S, Spanish Mystics, Brussels, 1988, p. 72–75. "Clergymen cannot see that" - that is the leitmotif of Teresa's lessons. V. for example: Teresa of Avila, Inner Castle, Brussels, 1992, p. 124. Khomyakov A. S., Works, p. 104. St. Teresa of Avila, Inner Castle, Brussels, 1992, p. 125. Renault E., St. Therese d'Avila et l'experience mystique, Paris, 1970, r. 114. I don't know which texts Losev had in mind, but Teresa also talked about "divine breasts". "When the super-rich Husband wants to enrich her and caresses her even more, He draws her into himself in such a way that, like a man who is deprived of consciousness from excessive pleasure and joy, she seems to feel carried on those divine arms, as if she clung to that sacred side and to those divine breasts" (Teresa of Avila, Thinking about "Songs of Songs", Simvol, Paris, 1985. No. 14, p. 154). Losev A. F.. Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology, p. 868–869. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 157. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 101. Revelations of bl. Angel. p. 118. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 137. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 159. Revelations of bl. Angel, p. 138. Višeslavtsev B. P., Heart in Christian and Indian mysticism, 1993, N. 4. p. 75. Višeslavtsev B. P., Ethics of transfigured eros. M., 1994, p. 73. Karsavin L. P., Basics of medieval religiosity, p. 231. Karsavin L. P.. Dostoyevsky and Roman Catholicism. Karsavin L. P. Dela, M., 1993, p. 132–133. Karsavin L. P., Basics of medieval religiosity, p. 233. Pecherin V. S., Grave records, p. 242. Rozanov V. V., Religion and culture, vol. 1. p. 346. Rozanov V. V., From the Roman Catholic world. M., 1995, p. 372. Lodzhenski M. V., Mystical Trilogy, T. 2. Pg., 1915, p. 112. Jovan (Shahovska), archbishop, Biography, Paris, 1977, p. 143. Karsavin L. P., Dela, Spb., 1994, p. 12–13. Roško Vsevolod, Letters of Fr. Alexander Menu, Vestnik RHD, Paris, 1992, No. 165. p. 45. Rev. Simeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, Sergiev Posad, 1917, p. 263. Tereza Ávilska, Thinking about "Songs of Songs". Symbol, N. 14, Paris, 1985, p. 162. Archbishop. Vasilije (Krivošein), Venerable Simeon the New Theologian, Brussels, 1980, p. 231. Acts of the Holy Synod (1903) after the celebration of Prep. Seraphim of Sarovsky. Sermon by Prep. Seraphim with N. A. Motovilov about the goal of the Christian life, "Father", compiled with the effort of ep. Ignatija (Brjančaninova), M., 1991. p. 13–14. Rev. Simeon the New Theologian, Hymns of Divine Love, p. 261–262. After all, it should be pointed out that this opinion of Prep. Simeon the New Theologian is not unconditionally shared by the entire patristic tradition. For example, St. Gregory of Nyssa believes that the division of humanity into sexes is precisely the result of the Fall and that is why, in the literal sense, "there is neither male nor female in Christ". The unusualness of the opinion of the bishop of Nysa logically stems from the principled methodological position of his anthropological system: while other theologians tried to create an idea of ​​God, starting from the knowledge of man ("the image of the Creator"), St. Gregory tried to develop the reverse course of thought: to understand man, starting from certain ideas about God. Since in the Trinity, undoubtedly, there can be no half - Gregory is forced to admit that there can be neither half nor physicality in man either. What cannot be assumed in God, in the opinion of St. Gregory, cannot assume that it is necessary even in the image of God. (For more details, see A. Brilliantov's research: "The influence of Eastern theology on the West in the works of John Scott Eriugena, Spb., 1898, p. 183). In doing so, however, Origen's Cappadocian student loses sight of the fact that the image is precisely the reflection of one nature in another nature that can carry that different reflection on itself, without ceasing to be its own. The story "Venerable Seraphim of Sarovski and Francisco Asisi" was printed in the magazine "Pravoslavie" (Paris, 1932, No. 1). Cheremukhin P. A., Teaching about the Homework of Salvation in Byzantine Theology, BT Br. 3. M., 1964, p. 151. The author has in mind the book: Gass. Die Mystik des Nikolaus Cabasilas von Leben in Christo, Lpz., 1899. Vorvede. V. 5. Ključevski V. O., Diary 1867–1877, March 30, 1868; Ključevski V. O., Aphorisms, Historical Portrait, Dnevnici, M., 1993, p. 316–317. Vasula, Life in God, Brussels, 1992. Among other things: in a thousand years, from 993 to 1992, the Roman Catholic Church canonized 3,501 people. Of these, about a third (1,164) were canonized in recent years by Pope John Paul II (see de Lobme. P., Vreme kraja vremena, M., 1995, pp. 130–131). St. Ignatius Bryančaninov, Ascetic experiences. M., 1993, T. 1. p. 255. Archbishop. Vasilije (Krivoshein), A few words on the issue of stigmata, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1986, No 4, p. 68. St. John, ep. San Franciscan, Orthodoxy and Sectarianism. Easter Day, 1994, N. 1 (6). St. Teofan Zatvornik, Collected letters, Vsp. 6. M., 1899, p. 98. St. Grigorije the Bogoslov, Acts, T. 1. SPb., b. g., p. 264. Uspensky L. A., Theology of Icons of the Orthodox Church, p. 398. The prayer composed by Fr. is completely in line with this sermon. Orione during the canonization. Her final plea reads: "Fix our path in true progress, freedom and peace." Amen". Rozanov V. V., Among the artists. M., 1994. p. 21. "If the papists were lost and bold in external church actions, can they have a correct idea about internal prayer, as Gregory Palamas taught?" - asked St. municipal elder Makarije. (Jerom. Makarije, Letters, M., 1862, p. 674). In the diary of this Polish Roman Catholic saint (Sister M. Faustina Kowalska, God's mercy in my soul, M., 1993) there are devastating pages, written with pure Jesuit exhaustiveness. The reader is presented with a graph. Sins and virtues are written in the vertical column. The weeks are marked with horizontal columns. Faustina diligently enters numbers in each column: during the first week of May, she defeated the sin of laziness so many times, she gave in to it - so many times. Delusional thoughts visited her so many times, she rejected them so many times. The sin of envy managed to win her so many times... And so week after week, month after month. The place where he announces that pride has won so many times is especially astonishing... And the list of victories won and carefully recorded grows from month to month, the numbers become more and more favorable... Pope Paul VI, rejecting the rigid interpretation of Paul's verse "A woman in the Church should be silent" (1 Cor. 14, 34), declared Teresa of Avila a "Doctor of the Church" on September 27, 1970.