The Christian problem and Russian religious thought

Contents Preface L. N. Tolstoy F. M. Dostoevsky Archimandrite Feodor Bukharev V. S. Solovyov Theory of Christian freedom V. V. Rozanov Christianity was revealed to the world as an absolute spiritual religion. The historical form of his gospel revelation is given as an antithesis to Judaic nationalism. Jewish religious nationalism represents the highest level of earthly, limited religion. Sublime monotheism and pure monolatry, to which even the modern crowd has not risen, in comparison with which even our liturgical symbolism in the popular understanding is a step back, had their only limit in the idea of ​​​​the people's chosenness of God. And so Christianity, as a personal-creative, spiritual-absolute, purely heavenly religion, representing in religious evolution the same moment as the birth of a winged butterfly from a crawling larva, marking that rise in spiritual development when, by the power of inspired creativity, a person pushed off from the earth, became above himself, above all interest, recognized himself as the son of the Heavenly Father - Evangelical Christianity has historically opened up as an antithesis, opposition, national limitations of the Jewish religion. Fetishism, idolatry, religious naturalism, anthropomorphism, Caesarism - all this had long been surpassed in the chosen religious-aristocratic soul of the Jewish people - now the last fetters that tied man to the earth, preventing him from ascending to heaven were thrown off - the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe people's chosenness of God was overthrown. The worm acquired wings, from a crawling one became a flying one - a person renounced everything that was his own, rose above everything human. “You have heard that it was said: Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who use you and persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven, for He makes His Sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you have? Don't publicans do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what special thing are you doing? Don't the pagans do the same? Therefore be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." A more sublime, more religiously heavenly word has never been spoken in the history of mankind. This evangelical idea can be compared with the scientific discovery when they first learned to obtain pure elements by decomposing the complex bodies of nature: the evangelical idea is the pure divine element discovered in the human soul and purified from all impurities. But despite this absoluteness of content, there is not a single saying in the Gospel that would express this content abstractly, irrespectively, with philosophical objectivity: in his words everything is relative, and it is they that convey the absolute religious content in relation to the national-legalistic limitations of the Jewish religion. The Gospel looks like this: it was forbidden to kill, but you don’t even need to be angry, it was forbidden to break oaths, but you don’t need to swear at all, adultery was forbidden, but you don’t even need to look at a woman with lust, a divorce was filed, but you don’t need to get a divorce at all, etc. If the gospel was not a philosophical system taught to students in the solitude and silence of an academic garden, if it thundered in the squares and streets, brought fire down from heaven and brought a sword to earth, divided father and children and brothers among themselves, shook up the entire Jewish people and shook up the entire world history, in short, it appeared as a historical force of extraordinary, unparalleled energy and tension, then it because it came out of history, was born in the depths of a living people, was a living moment of living creativity, was not a fictitious thought, but an organic experience, it was the degeneration of folk religious consciousness into personal-religious self-consciousness... However, this moment of deep historical power was a moment of exceptional significance in people's history. Just as there are rivers that hide underground and fall into the depths, so the history of a people in the Gospel moment passed from a historical perspective into the bottomless depths of a creative personality. With the birth of the Son of God, with the first word of the Gospel, the Jewish people ceased to be a historical people, they all went into this new dimension, they all lived out their last creative tension. The Gospel gnawed through the womb of its historical mother and its first triumphant cry drowned out her death rattle. The Gospel is all imbued with the consciousness of the last hour of history, the anticipation of its approaching end. The human soul, in its heavenly, divine flight, ascended above the world, and its historical distance seemed to it an insignificant magnitude. The end of the story is close, already at the door. This generation will not pass away until all these things have happened. The branches of history have already become soft and are putting out leaves, which means the summer of the Lord is already coming. Sell ​​your estates, for you will not have time to sell them before this hour comes. He who is in the field will not have time to go home to get his clothes, and those who grind at the millstones will not have time to finish their work... This is how the gospel was learned by the first Christians, who daily prayed to the Heavenly Father: παρελθέτω ὁ κόσμος ο ὗ τος (let this world pass away) and called on the coming Christ: ἔρχου (come)! We now know what the disciples of Christ did not know, who asked Him: “Is it not in this summer, Lord, that You will establish Your kingdom?”... We know that even with the departure of the Son of man to the Father, human history did not end... Apparently, the promise of the Lord was not fulfilled, as some of the apostolic contemporaries already thought. This opinion is the fruit of unfamiliarity or shallow acquaintance with the teachings of Christ. The Gospel has two lines of thoughts: along with a premonition of the near end of history, we find in it an unambiguous indication of future history. It is not your business, Christ told his disciples, to calculate times and dates. The Son himself does not know that day and hour. The gospel must be preached to the whole world; it, like leaven put into three measures of flour, must rebuild the world from within; from it, like from an invisible mustard seed, a tree should grow, under whose shade all nations will take refuge. In view of this second aspect, the first, eschatological, receives the meaning not of external arithmetic calculations, not of an external spatio-temporal end, not of the visible dead end of history, but expresses only the internal absoluteness of spiritual religion, the internal rise of man above the spatio-temporal and spiritual conventions of history. That is why the double surface aspect does not betray the slightest hesitation, does not cover up any deep-seated contradiction - on the contrary, there, in the depths of the Gospel idea, there is complete all-reconciling harmony. The inner absoluteness of the spirit, which lifts a person out of the mechanical chain of conditional causes and effects, elevates him to the height of religious contemplation, creatively embracing the whole world, does not depend on external ongoing history, which adds nothing to him and does not take anything away from him, just as new combinations of an element obtained in its pure form do not change anything in its nature. But if so, if internal religious absoluteness gains nothing and loses nothing in the coming centuries, then, of course, future history does not follow from the Gospel idea, is not required by it, is only an external accidental appendage to it. The Jewish Jehovah was the God of history, from Him came all good and all evil, His covenant with the Jews was a historical people's affair, grew and changed, that is, it was broken and restored in historical circumstances, the prophets of Jehovah on His behalf illuminated all history with a religious idea, predicted historical events, revealed His will conditionally. Nothing similar can be said about the Gospel Heavenly Father. If for Jehovah all nations were like an insignificant grain of sand on the scales, on the contrary, history revealed His glory, proclaimed His name, then for the Gospel Heavenly Father all nations are dear, every human soul is dear and history is completely unnecessary. The Heavenly Father is revealed in the human soul - no matter in the soul of the circumcised or uncircumcised, Hellenic or Scythian, French or Russian, and not in history. If it were possible to imagine that in one hour all people would accept the gospel, then at that very hour, from the gospel point of view, history could actually cease. For the gospel, future history exists only because in it, as in a shell, human souls dear to it are hidden - only because, in addition to life in the spirit, man also lives in society; in addition to spirit and society, there is also nature. The Heavenly Father, as it were, puts on that social-natural limitation that has fallen upon man and does not allow his divine spirit to have external omnipotent power. Pure elements do not occur in nature. Here is a knot in which the veil of sadness thrown over the gospel is strengthened, here is a kind of reticence in the gospel, a kind of recognition of its excessive loftiness, its insufficiency. The slaves willingly and obsequiously say: “Lord, do you want us to go, pick out the tares, and gather the wheat into the granary of the Heavenly Father?” But the Lord, for Whom it is easier to limit His power than His love, says to them: no, leave both to grow together - not only what was sown by Me, but also what was not sown by Me. The heavenly-spiritual gospel does not provide an explanation of future history, the gospel does not have the basis for determining its different aspects, does not tear out a channel along which it could be directed - for it, history is the object that limits it. In fact, in its heavenly purity, in its absolute aspiration, can the gospel indicate a calling to one or another of the peoples, who are all equal for it - can it enter into the historical interests of the people, speak in a language understandable to the people's feelings, capable of uniting and inspiring the nation? Can it give guidelines for organizing state life, for organizing class relations, being above legal formulas and economic demands, separating God from Caesar and neglecting concerns about tomorrow? Can it find an echo in that all-encompassing feeling that unites spouses? Will a mother who has lost her son fall at the foot of the cross from which the Crucified One said to His Mother: “Woman, do not call Me Son, for I am going to the Heavenly Father”? The word about hatred of wife and children, about the separation of Caesar's and God's, was not said for history. Therefore, the future history for the gospel is not the same from which it itself emerged - it is already a new history. For the gospel, history is a sea into which it throws mud to catch living souls from it, it is a field in which wheat is sown to choke out the chaff, it is a world that the gospel challenges and wants to conquer. From the completed, broken, like a shell, religious-theocratic history of the Jewish people, ruled by Jehovah, now revealed by the Heavenly Father, the gospel turned in the other direction, towards the pagan peoples. And with the first word of the apostolic sermon, in the face of the pagan world, a line lay between the gospel of Christ, with its absolute content, and the apostolic writings, imperceptibly moving on to the writings of the apostolic and patristic men - with content already consciously conditional, adapted to a historical perspective - a line lay between the fundamental gospel and the church-historical current. Usually the apostolic writings are combined with the gospel into one holy book, but there is no sufficient reason for this. We have one teacher, Christ, and only His gospel has an ahistorical, absolute character; The writings and activities of the apostles, with all the height of apostolic authority, already have a church-historical character, dating them back to the patristic period. This character was clearly expressed by the Apostle Paul, who said about himself: “Being free from everyone, I made myself a slave to everyone, in order to gain more. I became all things to everyone, so that I could save at least some” (x Cor. IX, 19.22). The apostle means that he was like one under the law to the Jews who were under the law, in order to win the Jews, and to those who were outside the law, he was like one outside the law, so that he could win the Gentiles. The entire church history, which began with the first word of the apostles after the departure of Christ to the Heavenly Father, was the vestment of the gospel in pagan-worldly forms with the goal of enslaving the world to the one Heavenly Father. The history of the church was born from the fact of the long existence of Christianity, and this fact was revealed immediately after the departure of Christ to the Father. In the Gospel, Christianity did not have support for long-term existence, did not have juices and colors for this, did not have shadows and movement. And if Evangelical Christianity was revealed by a great historical force, then this force was lightning flashing from east to west, a shudder, a wave, and not an even light, not a smooth movement - it was a force in history, but not for history. Christianity could only take juices and colors, shadows and regularity of movements from the world - it had to be embodied in the world, clothed in its forms in order to acquire peace. This is what we see in historical church reality. And first of all, what is apostolic-church teaching if not the revelation of the Gospel content in terms of pagan philosophy? Even in the gospel - in those parts of it that are written on behalf of the authors of the apostles, we already see this pagan vestment. The first word of the Gospel of John Ἐν ἀρχ ῇ ἦ ν ὁ Λόγος is an echo of pagan philosophy. The idea of ​​Logos arose in the history of Greek thought, was assimilated by Christianity, which poured new content into it and made it its lasting heritage. In the writings of the Apostle of Languages ​​we find even more traces of pagan philosophy. The terms of the most important Christological passages from his epistles πλήρωμα, κένωαις are borrowed from pagan Gnosticism. In general, these New Testament borrowings followed the path paved earlier, on which Greek philosophy was combined with Judaism and on which Philo of Alexandria became especially famous; Patristic thought, in its most important sections, in the doctrine of the three persons of God and the two natures in the person of Christ, worked in the same direction. ‘V πόστασις, φύσις, οὐσία - all these are terms of pagan philosophy, the trends of which were reflected in church-dogmatic disputes. Church-teacher parties corresponded to philosophical schools. Briefly put, without pagan philosophy there would be no school, scholastic theology. The driving motive of church-dogmatic activity was expressed in the words: τοῦτο ἐστὶν ἡμΐν - we Christians have the same concepts as you have in pagan philosophy. What constitutes dogmatism in this theology, so contrary to the evangelical spirit, as one-sided religious rationalism or Gnosticism, Christianity owes to the needs and tastes of classical Hellenic philosophy. It is true that in the patristic teaching about “Λόγος σπερματικός” the pagan testing mind itself is given sacred significance; it is true that the most acute later critical thought failed to prove the contradiction between church dogma and the gospel revelation; it can be accepted that the messianic self-consciousness of Christ can be formulated, with accessible adequacy, in philosophical language exactly as it is given in Christian dogmas - and for all that in dogmatism - in this increased attention to the Gnostic comprehension of Christian truth, in this hope to intelligently grasp and express logically the otherworldly religious truth, in this desire to create binding formulas and on their basis to unite the Christian people - in dogmatism one cannot help but see the interference in the spiritual Christian life of the spiritual, worldly, discursive, mind. Whoever looks at this dogmatism naively, who confuses dogmatic concepts with Christian life itself, should be disappointed by the idea, undeniable for modern religious consciousness, that between church dogma and the gospel truth, Christian personal life, there is the same difference as between a botanical book and a living growing tree. Life cannot be replaced by concepts, because life cannot be created from concepts. Let us next turn to the administrative and legal side of church life. And here we see undoubted traces of the pagan system. Partly already earlier, and completely from the time Christianity became the state religion, church life was arranged in an adaptive way to the state system, to pagan legal concepts. Ecumenical councils, as the highest authority in the church order, were church meetings constituted under the instructions and guidance of the emperors. The division of the church into metropolitan districts, into episcopal dioceses, the relationship of church officials, their elections - all this was carried out according to the legal forms of the pagan state. The canonical definition of marital life and church-social relations took place in direct dependence on state jurisprudence. The most important question of church canon - the relationship of the church to the state and the supreme state power - was resolved in the general sense of the relationship in which pagan power was located to pagan religion. Finally, let's look at the liturgical side of church history. The pagan basilica formed the basis for the architecture of Christian churches. There were often cases of conversion of pagan temples to Christian ones. Christian saints took the place of gods in the popular imagination - patrons of navigation, cattle breeding, and the art of medicine... Liturgical receptions - sacraments, initiation, singing, division into clergy and people - made it possible to see behind Christian worship what the pagans were accustomed to. Speaking about the influence of paganism on church-historical development, we must somewhat limit this position. As a factor in church-historical development, along with paganism, Judaism should also be mentioned. Already in the above saying of the Apostle Paul, next to the uncircumcised pagans, for whom he was uncircumcised for missionary purposes, the Jews are also named, for whom he was a Jew, in order to win them too. If Paul himself was primarily an apostle to the Gentiles, then Peter was an apostle to the Jews. In the apostolic writings, and above all in the epistles of the Apostle Paul himself, we see undoubted traces of Jewish theology. And to say again - here lies the line separating the gospel of Christ from the apostolic preaching. The Gospel of Christ was preached by Him in relation to the Jewish worldview, but precisely in antithesis to it, and nothing from Jewish theology was included in it as content. We see something else in the apostolic writings. Then the administrative-legal system of the primitive Christian church took shape under the undoubted influence of the orders of the Jewish community. Finally, in terms of liturgy, the Christian Church only gradually separated from the Jewish Church, and subsequently retained largely the Jewish tradition. In general, Jewish and pagan influences are often intertwined in Christian history. But even leaving aside the fact that over time the pagan influence predominated, here we must keep in mind mainly the fact that from the point of view of church-historical Judaism no longer had exceptional weight: the difference between ancient Jewry, with which the Christian Church associated itself, and modern Judaism for church-Christian self-consciousness became an indelible feeling. Therefore, in missionary adaptations to paganism and Judaism, the latter did not appear in exclusive significance, but only as a half that complemented the pagan world, so that God would be everything in the fullness of the world. And moreover, from a church-historical point of view, the most important thing was the contact of Christianity with the pagan world, which took the place of the broken off Jewish branches. The most characteristic feature of church-historical development was the attitude of Christianity towards paganism. I will refrain from providing documentary evidence of the summary characteristics I have given of the church-historical movement, because I would have to repeat what can be found in any of the best textbooks. Yes, for our purposes there is no need for this evidence, since we evaluate the fact of the church-historical vestment of Christianity in pagan-secular forms far from the way it is usually done. In the indication of this fact, which was first given by later critical science, both critical minds and orthodox writers are accustomed to seeing something humiliating to the church. The influence of paganism on the Christian church: this thought will seem terrible to many. Meanwhile, in this church-historical development one must discern a deep providential meaning. This was the only possible way for the victory of the Christian faith over the world, the victory of the one Heavenly Father over pagan polytheism, over the religious naturalism of the ancient world. Modern science gives us the opportunity to clearly imagine what the religious life of ancient peoples was like. They knew neither nature nor socio-historical necessity. We find the first clear hint of natural-historical laws in the Gospel teaching about the Heavenly Father, who sends rain and sunlight to the righteous and sinners. For ancient peoples, natural and social historical phenomena were indicators of the changeable will of the gods. In this respect there was no difference between the classical and Jewish peoples. Both there and here, all natural and historical phenomena were reduced to the direct will of God, all human life was brought under the point of view of retribution. The difference was that the Western classical peoples had not a monotheistic, but a polytheistic-naturalistic religion; they did not even know the physical boundary between the human and the divine: for them it was παντα θεια καὶ ανθρωπεινα παντα. True, in parallel to Eastern dualism, which placed the evil principle next to the good deity, the gloomy ἀνάγκη, tatum, fate appeared among the classical peoples. But ἀνάγκη is not the same as rational nature, acting according to laws: it is a bad necessity. She stood both above nature and above the light gods, on whose side were popular sympathies. For the Greek and Roman there was no natural-legal life that stood outside the sphere of religious views: for them, every step of personal, family and public life was a religious matter, every relationship in the public, state and family sphere was under the auspices of one or another god. Male-female love had its own patron goddess, the family hearth was dedicated to its penates, music, dancing, science, war, street, mountain, forest, river, sun, day and night, trade deal - everything was a touch to the gods, everything introduced a person into their atmosphere. Mostly the forms of national and state life were religious forms. Pagan religions were national-state religions, the relationship of peoples and especially wars were a clash of gods. This idea found its most vivid expression in the cult of the Caesars. This polytheistic naturalism, which filled all the corners and crossroads of human life, did not make any room for the one Heavenly Father, for whom there is no difference between Greek, Roman, rich and poor, man and woman, slave and free, king and freedman, who equalizes all in natural blessings and disasters. The clash between the Heavenly Father and the pagan gods was inevitable, and this struggle gave the most valuable content to the first period of church history. The marked path of church-historical development was the victorious march of the Christian God. When a pagan temple turned into a Christian one, when saints - servants of the Christian God stood on the pedestal of some local cult, then this was the triumph of spiritual religion over polytheistic naturalism: the Heavenly Father really displaced the pagan gods from the consciousness of the pagans. The apostles and, after them, the church fathers expressed the gospel content in the language of pagan philosophy, and at the same time the Greek language and Greek thought ceased to be the lot of the pagan gods and became the property of the one God. At the same time that the pagan emperor declared himself a Christian, the pagan gods lost their rights to the Greco-Roman state. The first hymn composed in honor of the Christian God in one of the dimensions of the Greek language, the first Greek drawing on a biblical subject, the first basilica dedicated to the Father of the only begotten Son, the first marriage consecrated by the presbyter of a Christian community, the first Christian diocese established in a pagan city, the first Christian school in one of the classical languages ​​- all this was the planting of the Christian banner in the various refuges of the pagan gods... Was the victory of the Christian faith over the pagan world complete? Yes, it was a complete and decisive victory. This was revealed towards the end of the first period of church history - in that historical movement called the Renaissance - the revival of classical paganism. It is well known what kind of revival this was. Like Jews for Egyptian meat, Europeans yearned for the classical gods, for their booming Homeric laughter, for their cheerful worldview. Excavations and searches began: beautiful statues of Greek goddesses were pulled out of the rubbish of the ruins, ancient manuscripts were found and their mellifluous sayings were read - and a world of beautiful forms, beautiful sounds and colors was resurrected... So, have the ancient gods been resurrected? No. They could no longer, absolutely could not, see gods and goddesses in these statues, in these paintings. They looked at Apollo, looked at Venus, at Hercules - and did not see gods and goddesses, they saw only a handsome husband, a beautiful woman, the personification of strength and courage. Something has changed in the very sensation, in the very feelings of man, the soul has been reborn: people have lost the sense of the divine in nature characteristic of the ancients... No, the gods, slain by the one Heavenly Father, have no longer been resurrected. So that one may rise as a ruler, The world of the gods is condemned to destruction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Like clockwork, sire is not animated, Slavish only to the law of gravity, However, it cannot be said that there was no revival: something was revived, and even something new was born. Humanism was born, a sense of nature was born. To better understand this new thing, let us return to the first period of church history. The Church - we said - has set itself the task of filling the entire sphere of life, all the fullness of its forms, all its paths and meanders with the dominion of the one Heavenly Father. It is clear what this work boiled down to where human concepts, ideas and feelings were concerned: pagan concepts and feelings were simply replaced by Christian ones, although they did not give way to the latter without a struggle. The creation of folk fantasy - pagan gods, all these Zeus, Pluto, Mars - gradually turned into idols and then completely disappeared... But what could the church do with the natural forms of natural and socio-historical life - and the most important of them - marriage and the state? What could she do with the entire breadth of natural human activity - science, art, trade, politics? After all, Christianity does not create its own, Christian, marriage: if a person exists as a man and a woman, and if a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, then this is not from Christ, but from “creation in the beginning,” from nature. Likewise, Christianity does not create its own state, its own science, its own art, its own trade... How could the church master this fullness of natural life? In relation to the natural forms of natural and socio-historical life and mainly to the most important of them - marriage and the state - the church resorted to the means of symbolic consecration. After all, her initial task was to expel the power of pagan gods from these areas, and she essentially had nothing to do with marriage itself, with the state itself. She needed to eradicate pagan ideas and feelings associated with marriage and the state - and nothing more. For this purpose, it was enough that marriage and the state, while remaining essentially the same, pagan, natural, were sanctified according to the church rite, with the blessing of the church, sanctified by the thought of Christ and the Heavenly Father. Marriage, while remaining the same in essence, was unclean if it was not sanctified by the church, and pure if it was sanctified by it. The sovereign, remaining the same as he was in the pagan state, was sanctified by chrismation. This is how a whole system of symbolic sanctification of natural life arose and was created. It embraced everything - birth, naming, striping, founding a house, the New Year, gathering fruit, appointing a ruler - every step of natural life was performed with Christian prayer, with a prayer service, with the blessing of water... And to what extent this symbolic system took possession of the thoughts and feelings of the Christian people! Marriage began to be considered not the actual banding, not the nature of marriage, but the church procedure of marriage consecration. If the laying of church crowns was not followed by the husband touching his wife, the marriage was still considered valid, and, conversely, if the reality of the banding was evidenced by childbirth, it was still not recognized as a marriage without prior church consecration. Likewise, his Orthodoxy was considered the most important thing in the sovereign. The Apostle’s word about “all authority from God” was forgotten, and only Orthodox, anointed authority was considered divinely established. The first period of church history was an amazing kingdom of symbols. All living concepts and feelings were reduced to conventional formulas, to symbolic actions, to traditional words and signs, to consistory paperwork, to verbal exercises. It was as if some kind of cover had been thrown over all living reality, as if some kind of veil had become between a person and his life. Under this cover the same natural pagan life trembled and fought with all its passions, with storms and gusts, with fire and heat. Only there was no old spontaneity of feeling and deed, some kind of constraint lay on all words and deeds - they lived the same way as the pagans lived before, but a new sense of sin distorted the natural channels of life... Symbolism and asceticism... Moral asceticism was a natural complement to religious symbolism. The church symbolically sanctified the natural forms of natural and socio-historical life - for the natural sphere of human activity, science, art, politics, it gave its content, and this created church asceticism. It is easy to see that Christian truth can be formulated in the language of philosophy, that Christian feelings can be revealed in art, that politics can be brought into the service of the church, but Christian content cannot fill all science, Christian art cannot occupy the entire circle of art, all politics cannot be reduced to the interests of the church, the entire economy - to the tasks of charity. Therefore, the desire of the church to impart Christian content to all broad human activity necessarily curtailed this activity, created a Procrustean bed for it, and ascetically reduced it. In addition, in order to understand all the motives of church asceticism, one should take into account the undoubted fact that pagan history by the time of Christianity was experiencing a terrible moral decline. The old times of bright youth, healthy cheerfulness, spontaneity of natural instincts, integrity of feelings were replaced by centuries of perverted instincts, nasty insatiable sensuality. By the time of Christianity, paganism was rotten and the foul saliva of this moral rot poisoned the historical air. Along with the disgusting conceit of Pharisaic Judaism stood the no less disgusting lewdness of pagan life. We know those dark, terrifying colors with which the ap. Paul - historically correct - depicts the moral state of the pagans. Another apostle in the famous words: “everything that is in the world - the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not from the Father, but from this world” makes only a historical characteristic of paganism. Since paganism was also imbued with the spirit of polytheism and its images, and its very vices were sanctified by the names of deities and committed at the altars of the gods of war and debauchery, then in the minds of Christians, religious polytheism and practical immorality were intertwined into one inextricable knot, so that polytheism was disgraced by immorality and immorality became doubly immoral from the filth of polytheism. For Christians who emerged from the trunk of chaste Jewish monotheism, the pagans were “by nature sinners” and the world was naturally vicious. From them the religion of the Heavenly Father demanded purity and immaculateness, and purity and immaculateness ascetically cut off the very fullness of natural life, which in historical reality was saturated with depravity. Since art served sensuality, politics was immoral, science served selfishness, the economic sphere was desecrated by the cult of Mammon, abstinence from art, science, trade, politics was the ideal, rudeness of morals, simplicity of faith, selflessness were the ideal. From here it was not difficult to reach abstinence from marriage itself, to seclusion from the state and society, since these very areas were dens of temptation, since the most natural relationships wove networks of sin. We find the beginning of church asceticism already in the apostolic writings - already here the spirit of gospel absoluteness, opposed to everything human, becomes a moral-ascetic spirit, the spirit of love and abstinence (Gal. V, 22.23; 2 Tim. I, 7), already here the gospel flesh, denoting everything human, becomes immoral flesh (Gal. V, 19), already here life according to the spirit is opposed to the lusts of the flesh (Gal. V, 16) and love for the Father requires hatred of the world (John II, 15), etc. Subsequently, church asceticism, both by the strength of its own development and under various outside influences, becomes a decisive flight from the world—desertism and seclusion. Strictly speaking, all church symbolism bears the stamp of asceticism, just as church asceticism has clear features of symbolism. But in view of the fact that church symbolism, covering all natural worldly life, did not change its essentially pagan, natural character, although it mixed with it a sense of sin, - in view of this, the ideal of church-ascetic perfection demanded decisive solitude from the world and, under this category of perfection, was already sharply different from the church-symbolic sanctification of worldly life. There was a strict separation between church-secular life and monastic salvation. And it does not require much effort of thought to understand the meaning of this division. Already church symbolism in itself conceals the consciousness of its powerlessness, because it does not reach the organic depth of life, it glides only on its surface. This powerlessness is even more pronounced in ascetic flight from the world: the world from which they flee cannot be called conquered, - the world from which the shrine is fenced off in the fortress of a monastic hermitage cannot be called sanctified... The humanistic direction of thought and life created the concept of purely human existence and natural socio-historical laws. New concepts of nature and history appeared, developing according to the unchanging laws of “holy necessity”, which stand above the differences between good and evil, a free philosophy appeared, knowing nothing but the laws of truth, a whole circle of natural sciences developed that study natural necessity, free art developed, which set pure beauty as its ideal, the state threw off the yoke of religion from its head, society consciously rushed towards earthly “goals.” In short, the world was illuminated by the brilliance of European culture, which put the name of nature on its banner, and of European civilization, which consciously recognized happiness and the free development of earthly life as its ideal. In this regard, the most characteristic phenomenon of this civilization must be called modern socialism, which proclaimed natural needs as the basis of socio-historical development and love for life, for earthly life, as the highest principle of knowledge and behavior. Modern culture, connected by invisible threads with Evangelical Christianity, has grown into an original factor in our life. Without the light and benefits of this culture, we can no longer imagine a perfect human life. In the face of this culture, church symbolism has become naively powerless and one-sided asceticism has become completely unnecessary. For modern consciousness, nature is sinless before any symbolic sanctification, sinless by its original laws, which are stronger and higher than any invented ideals and most clearly proclaim the will of God. Symbolism and asceticism have done their job, cleansed the world of pagan filth, prepared from nature a pure instrument of divine purposes - and they must recognize their role as finished. The world has grown from their cradle! The shadow of papism, which wants to establish ascetic symbolism forever, drags out a most miserable existence. Not only that. She, clinging to all sorts of old forms, to old forces, is inflamed with hostility towards the world, which is no longer justified by pagan filth, and thereby evokes returning hatred towards herself. The echo of this hatred falls on Christianity itself. We are the children of Christianity and European culture. We value both. Our worldview should embrace these two poles of our life. And on our shoulders lies the weight of a new task - to unite what in historical reality has diverged and in our days faces hostility. This, of course, is not the task of the philosophy of culture, this is the task of theology, because the highest unification is a religious question. Medieval ascetic symbolism, which gave satisfactory answers to its time, no longer satisfies us. Through its historical convention, we must reach the original evangelical Christianity, we must resolve the question of the relationship of the gospel - the evangelical absolute spiritual religion to modernity. We must find a formula that would not cut anything in Christianity, that would take the Christian religion not in its historical convention, but in its purely evangelical absoluteness, and that would not cut anything in our culture, but would accept all natural and socio-historical life in all the fullness and freedom of its natural laws. Christian historical life knows two paths: it goes either in a circle - around the center, or along a radius towards the center; it either focuses on conventional historical tasks, or gives predominance to essentially religious themes. For us, Christianity goes along a radius to the center - we want true Christianity, we want that religious, supra-historical absoluteness, the bearer of which is a creative religious personality - and for us the question of the relationship of Christianity to modernity is not a question of temporary programs, but a question of the essence of religious life. The antithesis that inspires us is exactly the same as that in which the gospel stands: just as the historical gospel contrasted the absoluteness of the Heavenly Father with the national limitations of the Jewish religion, so we contrast the church-historical convention with the unconditionality of the Gospel. Following the first church-historical period of the symbolic consecration of the pagan world and the second period of separation of religion and culture, our time is predominantly religious. And we, reaching the primary gospel, continue his work, solve the religious problem at our stage of historical development. Just as the gospel rejected Jewish limitations for the sake of pagan universality, so in our time the gospel of an absolute spiritual religion rejects church-historical conventions in the name of freedom of natural-historical laws. We deepen our understanding of the gospel and finalize its promises. In our consciousness, the Heavenly Father becomes not only the Father of all peoples, but also the Father of the whole world - like the Father of the whole world, He again becomes the Father of history, but no longer in the sense of the ancient arbitrary convention, but in the sense of its natural necessity. This is our task and this is the religious significance of our time. The question of Christianity from the literary-philological and historical-critical side has been superbly developed in Western theological literature, but the question of the essence of Christianity, the comprehension of its internal value, has somehow not taken root in the West. Something completely different needs to be said about Russian writing: our theological literature of the first direction is poor in quantity and insignificant in quality, and, on the contrary, we can be proud of the bottomlessly profound presentation of the question of living Christianity, of the meaning of the gospel for our heart. In this regard, we can name thinkers with whom no one parallels Western writers. The most glorious of our writers devoted their thoughts to this issue, bowed their heads over a small book of the gospel - L.N. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, V.S. Solovyov. And most of all, all three were interested in bringing Christianity into contact with modern reality, comparing the gospel with our deepest heartfelt needs, with the complex and bizarre conditions of our lives - they brought the gospel into the very hustle and bustle of our lives, illuminated the depths of the bottom and the endless windings of the alleys with its light. They asked: is there a place for the gospel in our lives and can our lives stand up to the gospel? In response, they created systems of religious thought of astonishing depth that surrounded their name with an aura of immortal glory. Their thought has some common features: boundless freedom of creativity, unshakable faith and solid logic, clear words. The solutions they gave to the religious problem are valuable because they did not cut off either one or the other half of their living experience: we see Christianity in their systems at a height not lowered either by frozen tradition, or by the fear of the Jews, or by politics; on the other hand, we encounter in their experiences spiritual movements of the greatest depth and earthly impulses in their extreme ease. The feeling of the sky, in all its holy sublimity, and the feeling of the earth, in all the richness and brightness of its colors, were equally accessible to them. Both souls that lived in their breasts were equally strong and beautiful, and that is why the logically formulated experiences they experienced of the highest synthesis, the final harmony, will forever remain monuments to the highest flowering of Russian religious philosophy. But at the same time, sharp individual differences mark their writings. Tolstoy captivates the reader with the sincerity of his thoughts, his quests. He does not want to know any little thing that would not be included in the system of life and thought, he adjusts everything to certain rules, he is given the ability to carry each principle to the last end. But his life experience has an epic, everyday, universal, synthetic character, and his Christian concepts, like stars, are barely visible in an ahistorical height, do not know a historical perspective, have no historical basis. His religious system does not give room for any compromise, it is a laboratory of pure elements, but he has not risen to that individual rise above the general rules of life and abstract religious concepts, which is necessary to create the final harmony. Everyone listened with surprise to the sincerity of his quest and with even greater bewilderment noticed the futility of his work. In the person of Tolstoy, in his life and in his religious mood, the religious problem is clearly and prominently posed, both the heavenly path of religion and the earthly path of life are revealed in all its grandeur, but the synthesis he outlines has the features of artificiality, since he resorts to the violence of the established rules of life and to the one-sidedness of the fictitious system. On the contrary, in the person of Dostoevsky we have a religious type of an extremely individual direction. His life experience can be called more pathological than normal; he approaches life not from the side of general everyday norms, but from the depths of degeneration; in the same way, his religion is all woven from premonitions, all eschatological. He does not have religious concepts, but religious experiences, as vivid and individual as the trials of underground life; there is no need to raise the question of the truth of his religion, the historical correctness of his religious concepts, because his religion itself is a living experience, a living historical fact; he has nothing of a system of theological thought, but he gives too much for the history of religion. In the depths of his experience, the idea of ​​the final reconciliation appears vaguely, but this is not so much a clear idea as an aesthetic image that runs away from us like fata morgana at the first attempt to formulate it logically. His refraction of rays is too individual, and we fear that he did not see the sun that everyone can see - we fear whether the perspectives in which he takes life are too broad, whether his bold experiences are turning into a ghost, into delirium, and whether his religion borders on atheism. The philosophical image of Solovyov appears to us in a completely different light. With the originality of his mystical mood, his mystical contemplations, with the brightness of his artistic creativity, Solovyov always in his philosophical constructions stands on the solid ground of an objective view, historical perspective and indestructible logic. He created a coherent system of religious philosophy. He did not seem to have a weakness that would create his strength, but his strength undoubtedly concealed the roots of his weakness. He was too dialectical. Where he did not lose sight of the shore, he had a victorious weapon in his dialectic; he was an invulnerable publicist. But when he plunged into the boundless ocean of metaphysics, his philosophy becomes a game of concepts, historical persons and events for him turn into simple symbols of ideas, and he does not so much listen to reality as pronounce laws for it. His goals are excessively distant, ignoring everything conventional and seeing the absolute in everything erases the colors from the horizon. He processed the logical formula of the highest synthesis brilliantly, but there is still doubt whether it is hanging in the air. In addition to the individuals mentioned above, many other thinkers have worked and are working on the same question about the relationship of Christianity to modernity. The Christian problem in the history of Russian religious thought provides one of the most interesting topics. We will start with L.N. Tolstoy, because his religious problem is more clearly posed. Tolstoy's literary activity falls into two periods, separated by his Confession. At the height of his Confession, Tolstoy burned what he had previously worshiped and worshiped what he had previously ridiculed. He worshiped the beauty of life, recognized only its strength, and ridiculed the abstract idea of ​​self-sacrifice, the theory of lifeless achievement. In his first literary works there are two series of thoughts, two series of images: dead thoughts, caricatured images, and living thoughts, rich images. Lifeless Christianity and triumphant life only shade each other, and it is the first that is an artistically necessary shadow on the bright picture of a lush life. Here before us is young Nekhlyudov. A clear thought came to him, filling his entire soul, which he grabbed with pleasure - the thought that love and goodness are truth and happiness, and the only truth and the only possible happiness in the world... “Love, self-sacrifice,” he said to himself, “this is the one true happiness, independent of chance”! At this thought he felt a feeling of joyful excitement and delight. “I must do good in order to be happy,” he thought, and his whole future, not abstractly, but in images, in the form of a landowner’s life, was vividly depicted before him. To rid his peasants of poverty, to give them contentment, to impart education to them, to correct their vices generated by ignorance and superstition, to develop their morality - this is the task he set for himself... A year of his charitable life in the village is depicted before us. He tries to fulfill all the tasks assigned to himself, and he does this in such a way that they laugh at him and neither a smart man nor a stupid one, nor a young guy, nor an old man can help but laugh. But more terrible than this laughter, more terrible than this futility, is internal dissatisfaction, one’s own duality. "Where are these dreams"? The ardent young man asks himself: “It’s been more than a year now that I’ve been looking for happiness on this road, and what have I found? True, sometimes I feel that I can be pleased with myself; but this is some kind of dry, reasonable contentment. Yes and no, I'm just unhappy with myself! I am dissatisfied because I don’t know happiness here, but I wish, I passionately wish for happiness. I did not experience pleasure, I had already cut off from myself everything that gave it. For what? for what? Who felt better because of this?.. The men didn’t feel any better, but it’s getting harder for me every day. I’m wasting my best years,” he thought. And he remembered that his neighbors called him a runt; that there was no money left in his office; that any day now we had to expect the arrival of the zemstvo court to take an inventory of the estate... Such was the bankruptcy of the charitable landowner. On his way, he reached a dead end from which there was no way out. For the last time, “Nekhlyudov listened to all the requests and complaints of the men and, having advised some, disassembled others and promised others, experiencing some kind of mixed feeling of fatigue, shame, powerlessness and repentance, he went to his room”... Nekhlyudov’s later charitable experiments, for one or another random reason, are presented in the same caricature: the ridiculous Nekhlyudov, who took part in a street singer in Lucerne, the ridiculous Delesov, who took Albert under his protection, the ridiculous Olenin in the Caucasus with his pathetic attempts at love and self-sacrifice. From the latter we hear the same, already beginning to bore us, pitiful words about inner perfection and self-satisfaction. “Happiness is this,” he told himself, “happiness is living for others. And this is clear... What desires can always be satisfied, despite external conditions? Which? Love, selflessness! To these already familiar thoughts is added the search for an opportunity for charity, which does not present itself for a long time. “He was so happy and excited when he discovered this, as it seemed to him, new truth that he jumped up and impatiently began looking for someone for whom he could quickly sacrifice himself, someone to do good to, someone to love.” In this naive search for an opportunity to reveal Christian perfection, in this desire to quickly apply one’s newly discovered principle to work, one hears something heady, invented, elementary, taken from copybooks, which has not reached the heart. I can’t help but remember a schoolboy who, on the first page of a learned book he opens, comes up with a tempting thought: “It would be nice to write such a book yourself.” Opportunities for such a benefactor will not present themselves, just as the first word is not given to a student who has sat down to a given topic. “Olenin was constantly looking for opportunities to sacrifice himself for others, but these opportunities never presented themselves. Sometimes he forgot this newly discovered recipe for happiness; but then he suddenly came to his senses and immediately grabbed the thought of conscious self-sacrifice, and on the basis of it, calmly and proudly looked at all people and at the happiness of others.” When there is no deep need for good, when the idea of good is bookish, inspired, fictitious, then relationships of a completely different, non-moral (and non-religious) nature are easily mistaken for cases of Christian charity, and this creates comic situations. This was the case with Olenin. He gave his friend, the Cossack Lukashka, a horse - a circumstance of everyday order, creating a relationship of kunaks, friends, exhausted in mutual service. But Olenin is a simple matter. It’s not without reason that he felt better in his soul than ever before in the world. He, like a boy, couldn’t help but tell Vanyusha (his servant) not only that he gave the horse to Luka, but also why he gave it, and this boyish theory cannot help but spoil the simple everyday relationships to which it is forcibly attached, stretches them to some measure that is essentially alien to them, and takes away from the friendly. giving natural friendliness and gives it a suspicious calmness and simplicity. Along with these boyish, caricatured attempts at the highest moral perfection, there appears the natural, truthful life of the simple peasants of the village of Nekhlyudov and the Grebensky Cossacks. The most vividly depicted is the image of Eroshka, the old hunter. This is a person of direct primitive impulses, simple needs, a lover of life and nature. - "Sin? Where is the sin? The old man spoke decisively to Olenin. - Is it a sin to look at a good girl? Is it a sin to take a walk with her? Is it a sin to love her? That's how it is with you. No, my father, this is not a sin, but salvation. God made you, God made the girl too. He, father, did everything. It's not a sin to look at a good girl like that. This is why it was made to be loved and to be rejoiced at. That’s how I judge, good man.” The distinction between good and evil, permitted and unlawful, all these “law upon law, commandment upon commandment”, all these are inventions of people, an invention of the “statutors”, alienating man from nature and dividing people among themselves. - “But in my opinion, everything is the same. God did everything for the joy of man. There is no sin in anything. At least take an example from the beast. He lives both in the Tatar reeds and in ours. Wherever he comes, there is home. What God gave is what he eats. And our people say that we will lick the frying pans for this. I think that everything is just false... All the charterers are making this up out of their own heads. You’ll die, grass will grow on the grave, that’s all.” Eroshka stands close to nature, feels his kinship with it, feels its beauty and strength, understands its language. - “What’s the point of sitting at home... It’s different, you go out at dawn, choose a place, press the reeds, sit down and sit, good fellow, waiting. You all know what’s going on in the forest. You look at the sky - the stars are moving, you look at them, see how much time there is. You look around - the forest is rustling, you keep waiting, it’s about to crackle, a boar will come to smear itself... Did you think he was a stupid animal? No, he is smarter than a man, even though he is called a pig. He knows everything... And even to say: you want to kill her, but she wants to walk through the forest alive. You have such a law, and she has such a law. She is a pig, and she is no worse than you; same creature of God... These are no longer abstract theories, not heady inventions, but living feelings possessing elemental power, this is living life, which has its own justification, a beautiful and strong life. Here nature thinks for man, and man lives according to nature, secundum naturam, according to her reason, according to her laws. It is easy to understand that when faced with this powerful reality, houses of cards of fictitious theories scatter like dust from a blow of wind, melt like wax from fire. Life is stronger than theories, more attractive than concepts and words. Nekhlyudov, who dreamed of devoting his whole life to saving men from the mire of superstition and ignorance, in order to raise them to his level, ends with an envious question: why isn’t he the village boy Ilyushka? Olenin, who at first looked at the Cossacks from the proud heights of his metropolitan concepts and also thought of benefiting them with his selflessness, bows before their wild life, whispers words of prayer to God Broshka - the God of animals and forests. - “All the nonsense that I used to think: love and selflessness. There is only one happiness: whoever is happy is right.” He is captivated by the strength of the laws by which these children of nature lived and in comparison with which his invented ideals had the strength of soap bubbles. – “People live as nature lives; they die, are born, copulate, are born again, fight, drink, eat, rejoice, and die again, and there are no conditions, except for those unchangeable ones that nature has laid down for the sun, grass, animals, trees - they have no other laws.” And because of this, these people, in comparison with himself, seemed to him beautiful, strong, free, and looking at them he felt ashamed and sad for himself. He seriously thought of giving up everything, joining the Cossacks, buying a hut and cattle, marrying a Cossack woman and living with Uncle Broshka, going hunting and fishing with him. But most of all, his heart was gripped by love for the Cossack Maryana - this living, sensual love played the role of the last drop that overflowed the spring of an irresistible attraction to living life, the last light, before which the vague mirages of his head ideals disappeared. – “Maybe I love nature in her, the personification of all that is beautiful in nature; but I don’t have my own will, and through me some elemental force loves it, the whole world of God, all nature presses this love into my soul and says: love. I love her not with my mind, not with my imagination, but with my whole being. Loving her, I feel like an inseparable part of God’s entire happy world.” Theoretical convictions could not resist the wave of this sensual attraction. “Love has come, and now they are gone, and there is no regret about them! Even to understand that I could value such a one-sided, cold, mental mood is difficult for me. Beauty came and scattered all the Egyptian inner work of life into dust. And there is no regret about the disappearance! Self-sacrifice is all nonsense, nonsense. This is all pride, a refuge from well-deserved misfortune, salvation from envy of other people's happiness. Live for others, do good! For what? When in my soul there is only love for myself and one desire - to love her and live with her, her life. It is not for others that I wish happiness now. I don't like these others now. Before, I would have told myself that this was bad. I would be tormented by questions: what will happen to her, to me, to Lukashka? Now I don't care. I do not live on my own, but there is something stronger than me, guiding me. I am tormented, but before I was dead, and now only I live." The highest principle that determines the direction of living life is the principle of life itself; head ideals can only create a semblance of life, a shadow of it; they can only create dead life. This principle is glorified in the two most important novels of L. Tolstoy, which wove him a wreath of immortal glory. “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina” are the apotheosis of life. They depict life as it is - “the real life of people with its essential interests of health, illness, work, rest, with the interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, passions.” Before the reader, as in a magical panorama, there pass pictures of a duel, hunting, ball and dance, wedding and family life, fasting and prayer, illness, Yule dressing, formidable battles and peaceful rural labors, children’s pranks and state meetings, finally pictures of birth, this “most solemn sacrament in the world,” and death... Even more important than these external pictures is the artistic exposure of all the psychic forces and passions that guide life, move a person, society and nations. We see the springs that underlie all the complex phenomena of life. These springs, usually covered in a hostel with a web of insincere words, are exposed to us in all their spontaneity, human predilections and passions are assessed from the only point of view of real strength. We observe what spirit inspires people, what God they worship not with their lips and hands, but with their hearts and truth. Prince Andrei Volkonsky prays to the God of human glory. “I,” he says to himself, or, better to say, he eavesdrops on his soul, he takes a closer look at its hiding places, “I want fame, I want to be known to people, I want to be loved by them,” and it’s not my fault that I want this, that this is the only thing I want, this is the only thing I live for. Yes, for this alone! I will never tell this to anyone, but, my God, what should I do if I love nothing but glory, human love! Death, wounds, loss of family - nothing scares me. And no matter how dear or dear many people are to me: father, sister, wife are the most dear people to me; but no matter how scary and unnatural it may seem, I will give them all now for a moment of glory, triumph over people, for the love of people whom I do not know and will not know.” The cult of Nikolai Rostov is an ancient pagan state cult, the cult of the Caesars. He was devoted to this cult to the point of self-forgetfulness, to the point of losing his personality. He idolized the sovereign - when he saw him, he “experienced a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of power and a terrible attraction to him, a feeling of tenderness and delight... He was in love with the Tsar, and with the glory of Russian weapons, and with the hope of the future triumph of the Russian army... He considered it happiness to die without saving a life (he did not dare to dream about this), but simply to die in the eyes of the sovereign.”... “We are not diplomatic officials,” said Rostov, “but we are soldiers and nothing more. They tell us to die - so die... Otherwise, if we began to judge and reason about everything, then there would be nothing sacred left. This way we will say that there is no God, there is nothing!.. Our job is to fulfill our duty and not think, that’s all!... This cult contains the whole religion of Rostov, this cult contains all its morality. To his close relative, Pierre, he said decisively: “You say that the oath is a conditional matter, and to this I will tell you: you are my best friend, you know this, but if you form a secret society, if you begin to oppose the government, whatever it may be, I know that it is my duty to obey it. And Arakcheev told me now to go at you with a squadron and cut down - I won’t think for a second and I’ll go.” Anna Karenina worships another god - she knows only one god - the god of carnal love, smokes incense only in front of his image, sacrifices all of herself on his altar. - “Right, right! - she said about her husband. - Of course, he is always right, he is a Christian, he is generous! Yes, a low, nasty man! And no one but me understands or will understand this. They say: religious, moral, honest, intelligent person; but they don't see what I saw. They don’t know how he stifled my life for eight years, strangled everything that was alive in me - that he never once thought that I was a living woman who needed love. They don’t know how he insulted me at every step and remained pleased with himself. Didn’t I try, tried with all my might, to find an excuse for my life? Didn’t I try to love him, to love my son, when it was no longer possible to love my husband? But the time has come, I realized that I can no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, that I am not to blame, that God made me this way, that I need to love and live." How different from the religion of Anna Karenina is Levin’s religion - the religion of ancestors and family hearth. “The big old house meant the whole world to Levin. This was the world in which his father and mother lived and died. They lived the life that for Levin seemed to be the ideal of all perfection and which he dreamed of resuming with his wife, with his family. Levin barely remembered his mother. The concept of her was a sacred memory for him, and his future wife was to be in his imagination a repetition of that lovely, holy ideal of a woman that his mother was. Not only could he not imagine loving a woman without marriage, but he first imagined a family, and then the woman who would give him a family. His concepts of marriage were therefore not similar to the concepts of most of his acquaintances, for whom marriage was one of many common affairs; for Levin this was the main matter of life, on which all her happiness depended." Even Stiva Oblonsky, who could not limit love to the boundaries of the family hearth, looked religiously at his love affairs. “You,” he said to Levin, “do not admit that it is possible to love rolls when there is a bulk ration, in your opinion this is a crime; and I do not recognize life without love. What can I do, this is how I was created... Even Anatol Kuragin “was instinctively, with his whole being, convinced that he could not live differently than the way he lived, and that he had never done anything bad in his life. He was convinced that just as a duck was created in such a way that it should always live in water, so he was created by God in such a way that he should live on an income of thirty thousand and always occupy the highest position in society." And these people, boldly exposing their souls to themselves, religiously self-confident in the correctness of their instincts, needs and passions, enter as living elements into a beautiful whole - into life as it is. They captivate us with their sincerity, they delight us with the beautiful forms of their life. Yes, this is a wonderful life, full of inner content, overflowing with an excess of happiness, freedom, ease - a life that has justification in itself, a life justified by its strength, before which nothing can resist. Young Nekhlyudov was fascinated by the simplicity of life of the Greben Cossacks - it was a youthful hobby. For us, life is given in the splendor of the culture to which historical development has reached - we can sincerely live only this cultural life, only at the height of those traditions that formed the basis of our existence, our happiness. “It was undoubtedly necessary for a family to live the way fathers and grandfathers were used to living, that is, in the same educational conditions, and raising children in the same conditions. (This is how Levin felt). It was as necessary as having lunch when you feel hungry; and for this, just as it was necessary to prepare dinner, it was necessary to drive the economic machine in Pokrovsky so that there would be income. Just as surely as a debt must be repaid, it was necessary to keep the family land in such a position that the son, having received it as an inheritance, would say thank you to his father, just as Levin said thank you to his grandfather for everything that he had set up and planted. And for this it was necessary not to lease the land, but to manage it yourself, keep livestock, manure the fields, plant forests.”... A certain way of life of the landowners was connected by a thousand ties with a certain system of social and state life - with firm state power, with the division into classes, with serfdom. And not one of these sides is passed over in silence in the Homeric-luxurious picture of Russian life depicted in Tolstoy’s novels - each of them complements the beauty of this life. In the love of Karenina and Vronsky, the beauty of which has no rivals in world literature, in this love it is impossible to separate its natural grain from the cultural environment in which it is inserted - from wealth, nobility, aristocratic grace of feelings and words. In Tolstoy’s novels the fullness of life is glorified, all its phenomena are illuminated by the light of religious consciousness, all its forms are justified by their own strength - and this, of course, is the motive for the passion with which he defends the foundations of family life in Anna Karenina. Life in itself has the highest justification and is itself the highest principle. “If we assume that human life can be controlled by reason, then the possibility of life will be destroyed.” The ideal personality in the novel “War and Peace” - Platon Karataev - “an incomprehensible, round and eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.” He did not live by personal reason, but “his every word and every action was a manifestation of an activity unknown to him, which was his life. His life, as he himself looked at it, had no meaning, as a separate life. It made sense only as a particle of the whole, which he constantly felt. His words and actions poured out of him as uniformly, necessarily and directly, as the smell is separated from a flower.” Not the mind with its ideas and ideals, but organic and social needs with the feelings that grow from them - these are the engines of human life. They are generalized in the pursuit of happiness. “I think,” said Levin, “that the engine of all our actions is personal happiness.” You can “assume upon yourself” this or that imaginary importance, take upon yourself this or that fictitious task, impose fictitious rules on yourself, but only the principle of happiness, which has “uterine roots,” can justify itself by its strength, consistency, and sincerity. “Understanding everything that is worth understanding in life” is given by the fullness of happiness. A person is good because of his happiness. Among these characters, self-confident and beautiful, wander a few pathetic shadows of virtues, or in the lives of these living persons there are dead moments when strong passions are replaced by sluggish ideas of Christian perfection. The low assessment of these shadows and these minutes does not allow even the slightest doubt. Undoubted irony highlights the period of mystical mood of Pierre Bezukhy. “Of the three purposes of Freemasonry, Pierre was aware that he did not fulfill the one that prescribed every Freemason to be an example of moral life, and of the seven virtues, he completely lacked two in himself: good morals and love of death. He consoled himself with the fact that he was fulfilling another purpose - the correction of the human race - and had other virtues - love for one’s neighbor and especially generosity.” Having taken upon himself the high vows of Freemasonry, Pierre continued to live his former drunken and depraved life, but he considered himself filled with love for his neighbors and the desire for the moral correction of the human race. For this, no change in one’s own life was needed - just idle talk was enough for this. Pierre tried to actually implement these virtues in relation to the peasants of his domains, but these experiments are a copy of Nekhlyudov’s caricatured charitable activities. When Pierre spoke in his lisping voice about these experiences to his friend, Andrei Bolkonsky, the latter did not have much difficulty ridiculing Pierre. “And I did it,” said Pierre, “even though it was bad, at least a little, but I did something for it,” and not only will you not dissuade me that what I did is good, but you will not dissuade me, so that you yourself do not think so. And the main thing I know, and I know correctly, is that the pleasure of doing good is the only true happiness in life.” “Yes, if you put the question like that, then that’s a different matter,” said Prince Andrei. - I build a house, plant a garden, and you are a hospital. Both can serve as a pastime. And what is fair, what is good - leave it to the one who knows everything, and not to us, to judge." And then Prince Andrei explains to his interlocutor what has long been clear to the reader - namely, that Pierre is deceiving himself. Feeling the same need for sacrifice and suffering with the awareness of general misfortune, Pierre imposes on himself a difficult feat during Napoleon’s stay in Moscow and cultivates in his soul strange dreams of the salvation of nations. That this feat did not lead to anything, that these dreams turned out to be a web, a soap bubble, is easy to see. For Pierre himself, the period of mystical mood was a school in which his true “understanding” of life was developed. “In captivity, Pierre learned not with his mind, but with his whole being, with his life, that man was created for happiness”... When the nightmare of family misfortunes, which pushed Pierre into mysticism, passed, and when the national calamity of the war, which gave Pierre’s dreams a bizarre form, passed, he seemed to move from the sphere of ghostly dreams into the realm of living reality, he replaced the suffocating atmosphere of world issues and ultimate goals with real living life. - “Oh, how good, how nice! - he said to himself when they brought him a cleanly set table with fragrant broth, or when he lay down on a soft, clean bed at night, or when he remembered that his wife and the French were no more. - Oh, how good, how nice! - And out of old habit, he asked himself the question: Well, then what? what will I do? - And immediately he answered himself: nothing. I will live. Oh, how nice! “The very thing that tormented him before, what he was constantly looking for, the purpose of life, now did not exist for him. It was no coincidence that this sought-after goal of life did not exist for him now, only at the present moment, but he felt that it did not and could not exist. And it was this absence of purpose that gave him that complete, joyful consciousness of freedom, which at that time constituted his happiness. “He could not have a goal, because he now had faith - not faith in some (Nekhludov’s) rules, or words, or thoughts, but faith in a living, always felt God. Previously, he sought Him for the purposes that he set for himself. This search for a goal was only a search for God; and suddenly he learned in his captivity, not with words, not with reasoning, but with a direct feeling, that God was here, here, everywhere. He experienced the feeling of a man who had found what he was looking for under his feet, while he strained his eyesight, looking far away from himself. All his life he had been looking somewhere there, over the heads of the people around him, but he should not have strained his eyes, but only looked in front of him. “Before, in everything close and understandable, he saw something limited, petty, everyday, meaningless. He armed himself with a mental telescope and looked into the distance. Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal and the infinite in everything, and therefore naturally, in order to see it, to enjoy its contemplation, he threw down the pipe into which he had hitherto looked through the heads of people, and joyfully contemplated the changing, eternally great, incomprehensible and endless life around him. And the closer he looked, the more calm and happy he was. Previously, the terrible question that destroyed all his mental structures was: why? – now did not exist for him. Now to this question: why? - a simple answer was always ready in his soul: because there is God, that God, without whose will a hair will not fall from a person’s head.” When he called on Natasha to share this new life with him, who had also experienced the collapse of her girlish dreams, but who wanted to bury all hopes under their ruins, he told her: “As long as there is life, there is happiness... It’s not my fault that I am alive and want to live; and you too."... Pierre Bezukhoy ended up where Ivan Karamazov began, a passionate lover of life, who had a thirst for life, who carried within himself an indestructible centripetal force. “I think,” Alyosha answered Ivan, “that everyone should, first of all, love life in the world. – To love life more than its meaning? - “It’s absolutely necessary to love before logic, as you say, to love before logic, and only then will I understand the meaning. This is what I have been imagining for a long time. Half of your work is done, Ivan, and acquired: you love to live." Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who so victoriously defeated Pierre's philanthropic undertakings, however, himself experienced the mood of Christian love. This happened to him when he was mortally wounded in the Battle of Borodino. Already on the same day, transferred to the tent, Prince Andrei, at the sight of the also mortally wounded Anatoly Kuragin, “could not resist any longer and began to cry tender, loving tears over people, over himself and over them and his delusions.” - “Compassion, love for brothers, for those who love, love for those who hate us, love for enemies - yes, that love that God preached on earth and which I did not understand - that’s why I felt sorry for life, that’s what was still left to me if I were alive.”... This mood gradually strengthened in him and did not leave him until his death. “His soul was not in a normal state,” the author warns readers. “Yes, a new happiness has been revealed to me, inalienable from man,” he thought, lying in a semi-dark quiet hut and looking forward with feverishly open, fixed eyes: “happiness that is outside of material forces, outside of material external influences on a person, the happiness of one soul, the happiness of love... Yes, love,” he thought with complete clarity, “but not the love that loves for something, for something, or for some reason, but the love that I experienced in the first time when, dying, I saw my enemy and still loved him. I experienced that feeling of love, which is the very essence of the soul and for which no object is needed. I still experience this blissful feeling... To love my neighbors, to love my enemies. To love everything - to love God in all manifestations. You can love a dear person with human love; but only an enemy can be loved with divine love... Divine love cannot change. Nothing, not death, nothing can destroy it. She is the essence of the soul." What wonderful thoughts, what lofty words! But we are given to know that the flow of these thoughts was interrupted by delirium, and we feel that these thoughts are the fruit of the same delirium. The softening and tenderness he experienced were “signs of death.” And therefore, as “this flower of love, eternal, free, independent of this life, blossomed in his soul,” he “experienced a consciousness of alienation from everything earthly and a joyful and strange lightness of being.” This love for everything, this softening and tenderness was “a moral struggle between life and death, in which death won.” And in this connection of thoughts we read an enthusiastic description of this dead, cold love - and we cannot help but see in this description a blasphemy unparalleled in world literature, a terrible mockery of the concept of Christian love. This name is called the smile of a dead man; evangelical delight is reduced to a nightmarish embrace of hands trembling in the death agony. “The more Prince Andrei, in those hours of suffering, solitude and semi-delirium that he spent after his wound, thought about the new beginning of eternal love that was open to him, the more he, without feeling it himself, renounced earthly life. Everything, to love everyone, to always sacrifice oneself for love, meant not loving anyone, meant not living this earthly life. And the more he was imbued with this principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he destroyed that terrible barrier that, without love, stands between life and death.” So, the Christian religion is a physiological fact of cooling blood, a weakening pulse, a sinking heart. We find nothing strange in the fact that birth and death are considered for “this ordinary life as if they were openings through which something higher is shown.” Both birth and death are undoubtedly facts of a religious order. But one cannot help but recognize as strange, downright monstrous, the idea that the delight of Christian love is based on the feeling of approaching death. This is a decidedly skeptical, decidedly atheistic interpretation of the Christian religion. No less caricatured are the Christian experiences of Prince Andrei's sister, Princess Maria, beaten down by the severity of her father. In her complex character, in her complex religious life, squeezed between the walls of slavish devotion to her father and the suffocating environment of wanderers, we will dwell only on the more important features. We hear a decisive statement that “in her thoughts about marriage, Princess Marya dreamed of family happiness and children, but her main, strongest and secret dream was earthly love. The feeling was the stronger the more she tried to hide it from others and even from herself.” The arrival of the handsome Anatoly Kuragin as a groom brought this feeling to the highest tension. But Anatole had to refuse, his dreams collapsed. And the thoughts of the ugly downtrodden princess, who has lost hope of freeing herself from heavy parental oppression, take an unctuous direction. “My calling is different,” Princess Marya thought to herself: “my calling is to be happy with a different kind of happiness, the happiness of love and self-sacrifice.” Well, isn’t it justified by Olenin’s words that “self-sacrifice is nonsense, game, is all a refuge from well-deserved misfortune, salvation from envy of someone else’s happiness.” When, a little later, Princess Marya married Nikolai Rostov and began to live a happy family life, she no longer remembered her passion for the idea of ​​self-denial. Otherwise Sonya finished. We read that “the thought of self-sacrifice was her favorite thought.” And again: “sacrificing oneself for the happiness of others was Sonya’s habit.” However, this remark is sharply limited, firstly, by the indication that “she was ready to sacrifice everything for her benefactors - that her position in the house (the position of a warm orphan) was such that only on the path of sacrifice could she show her merits,” and secondly, by the fact that her readiness for self-sacrifice was far from unconditional. When they demanded that she give up Nikolai, who was destined for a rich bride, she did not make a voluntary sacrifice. “Before, in all acts of self-sacrifice, she joyfully realized that by sacrificing herself, she thereby raised her worth in the eyes of herself and others and became more worthy of Nicholas, whom she loved most in life; but now her sacrifice had to consist in giving up what for her constituted the entire reward of the sacrifice, the entire meaning of life. And for the first time in her life, she felt bitterness towards those people who had benefited her in order to torture her more painfully; I felt envy of Natasha, who had never experienced anything like this, who had never needed sacrifices, who forced others to sacrifice themselves and was still loved by everyone. And for the first time, Sonya felt how, out of her quiet, pure love for Nikolai, a passionate feeling suddenly began to grow, which stood above rules, virtue and religion.” The threat to Sonya was her rival, Princess Marya. The rapprochement of Marya's brother, Prince Andrei, with Nikolai's sister, Natasha, eliminated this threat. The rapprochement was disrupted, but it was restored again when Prince Andrei was already mortally wounded. And we read about Sonya: “now that she knew that on the occasion of the renewal of Natasha’s relationship with Prince Andrei, Nikolai could not marry Princess Marya, she joyfully felt the return of that mood of self-sacrifice in which she loved and was accustomed to living. And with tears in her eyes, and with the joy of the consciousness of committing a magnanimous act, she, interrupted several times by tears that clouded her velvet black eyes, wrote a touching letter to Nikolai. the beauty of your generosity. Thus, the highest of Christian virtues is shamelessly laid bare, all decent attire is stripped from it, and we look with disgust at its insolent, worldly frame. The Christian religion is relegated to the category of secondary forces that do not rise to the heights of creativity and initiative, but appear on the stage only as required by circumstances, to satisfy subjective demands, to fill the resulting voids. Sonya's hopes were completely crushed: Prince Andrei died, Nikolai married Princess Marya, and Natasha married Pierre. Sonya, with Nikolai's mother, moved to his new family, to the Bolkonskys' house, and here she finally switched to the role of a hanger-on. “She, like a cat, has taken root not with people, but with the house. She looked after the old countess, caressed and spoiled the children, and was always ready to provide those small services of which she was capable; but all this was accepted involuntarily, with too little gratitude." How is her role assessed now? Suppose she did not completely voluntarily give in to Nikolai, but if she had been more tenacious, she could have kept him; Let us suppose that she was now playing the role of a hanger-on, but, undoubtedly, she was not burdened by her role and willingly provided services to everyone... What was she in the eyes of the main characters? This is revealed to us in the significant dialogue between Countess Marya Rostova and Countess Natalya Bezukha. “One day Countess Marya talked with her friend Natasha about Sonya and her injustice towards her. (She could not blame Sonya for anything, she wanted to love her, but not only did she not love her, but often found evil feelings against her in her soul and could not overcome them). “You know what,” said Natasha: “you’ve read the Gospel a lot; there is one place directly about Sonya. - What? Countess Marya asked in surprise. “To those who have, it will be given, but from those who have not, it will be taken away,” remember? She is a poor person: for what? - Don't know; There may be no selfishness in her - I don’t know - but it will be taken away from her, and everything has been taken away. I feel terribly sorry for her sometimes; I terribly wished before that Nicolas would marry her, but I always seemed to have a presentiment that this would not happen. She is a barren flower, you know, like on a strawberry? Sometimes I feel sorry for her, and sometimes I think that she doesn’t feel it the way we would.” This is what Sonya is like with her usual mood of Christian self-sacrifice: she is an empty flower. The lack of egoism is not a virtue, but an actual shortcoming, the cause of sterility. A person is obliged to have selfishness, tenacity, he is obliged to take a certain place in the feast of life - and if he failed to do this, if he missed his moment, he is superfluous in life, an extra burden for others. It’s like Dostoevsky: “people were created for happiness, and whoever is completely happy is directly worthy to say about himself: I have fulfilled God’s covenant on this earth”... And whoever, on the contrary, failed to find his happiness, did not fulfill his purpose... Varenka is a copy of Sonya. Only her image is somehow, by elusive features, connected with the crudely caricatured image of Madame Stahl. “Varenka, lonely, without family, without friends, with sad disappointment, wanting nothing, regretting nothing, was the very perfection that Kitty only allowed herself to dream about. On Varenka, she realized that all she had to do was forget herself and love others, and she would be calm, happy and beautiful. And that’s what Kitty wanted to be.” But the prince, Kitty’s father, ridicules Madame Stahl and “the divine image of Madame Stahl, which Kitty carried in her soul for a month, disappeared irrevocably, like a figure made up of an abandoned dress, disappears when you realize how this dress lies.” Then Kitty's charitable experiments led to discord in the family of the sick artist Petrov. And Kitty spoke angrily to Varenka. “All this is pretense, because it is all made up and not from the heart. What did I care about a stranger? - and it turned out that I was the cause of the quarrel, and that I did what no one asked me to do. Because everything is pretense! pretense! pretense!.. - But what is the purpose of pretending? Varenka said quietly. – To appear better before people, before yourself, before God; deceive everyone. No, now I won’t give in to this anymore! To be bad, but at least not deceitful, not a deceiver... Yes, yes, I know that you are all perfection; but what can I do if I’m bad? So let me be who I am, but I won’t pretend... I can’t live otherwise than according to my heart, and you live according to the rules.”... Kitty said all this in a fit of rage. However, her judgment had deep roots in her. And long later, already Levin’s wife, Kitty, reflecting on her husband’s religious unbelief, thought: - “Well, unbeliever! It’s better that he always be like that than like Madame Stahl, or like I wanted to be then abroad. No, he won’t pretend anymore.” Not to pretend, to be sincere, to be true to oneself - this is the first duty of every decent person, this is a necessary condition for any worldview, any system of behavior. The apostle also commanded his disciples to act according to faith, in accordance with their convictions, without internal division. And in the name of this high principle, Kitty went her own way. In the story of Anna Karenina there is one scene of amazing moral height: the reconciliation of Alexei Alexandrovich and Vronsky at Anna’s sick bedside. True, the author did everything to reduce the significance of this scene, nevertheless, the result is a picture of irresistible power. The demotion is achieved by the fact that Anna, who took the initiative for reconciliation, was in childbirth fever: “all that day she had fever, delirium and unconsciousness.” The state of the faint-hearted Alexei Alexandrovich seems to be a pitiful “mental disorder.” And when we are told that “he suddenly felt that what he considered a mental disorder was, on the contrary, a blissful state of soul, which suddenly gave him a new, never experienced happiness - that a joyful feeling of love and forgiveness for his enemies filled his soul,” when we hear the words of Karenin himself: “I have forgiven. And the happiness of forgiveness revealed to me my duty. I have forgiven completely. I want to turn the other cheek, I want to give my shirt when they take my caftan,” when we see and hear this, we cannot help but feel a mixed feeling of pity and contempt for Alexei Alexandrovich. The moral height of this scene is, therefore, very relative. And yet the author could not forgive his heroes even such a moral upsurge. Because the recovered Anna again enters into contact with Vronsky - after this, she dies. Even before her death, she pays for the same moral uplift with a “painful feeling of physical disgust” for her husband: after delirious admiration for the moral greatness of Karenin, disgust for him reaches the strength of a physical sensation in her. And Karenin himself could not stay at this height: he soon fell morally. When he was subsequently reminded of his readiness for Christian self-sacrifice, he fell into uncontrollable anger... This is how insincere ascent up the steps of the Christian ideal takes revenge for itself. These positive and negative types clearly demonstrate the author's understanding of life. The highest principle of life activity is the principle of life itself, the “force of life” that unconsciously guides a person. Organized only according to this principle, human life can be sincere, integral, consistent, and joyful. The principle of Christian self-sacrifice, in contrast to the creativity of life, is a product of reason, it is a fictitious, artificial principle: it leads to alienation from people and life, it is appropriate only in a heart that grows cold from impending death, it serves as a refuge from well-deserved misfortune, it is the last consolation for those who have not been able to capture happiness in their hands. But there is still a question. Maybe this is just a subjective assessment, maybe otherwise it is necessary to evaluate the bearers of Christian self-denial from an objective point of view? The question is: which of the life activities is successful - selfish and joyful, or selfless? And the author gives the most decisive answer to this question. He reviews both major historical events and economic affairs. “While Russia was half conquered, the inhabitants of Moscow fled to distant provinces and militia after militia rose up to defend the fatherland, it involuntarily seems to us, who did not live at that time, that all Russian people, young and old, were busy only with sacrificing themselves, saving the fatherland or crying over its destruction. Stories and descriptions of that time, without exception, speak only of self-sacrifice, love for to the fatherland, despair, grief and heroism of the Russians. In reality this was not the case. It seems to us that this is only so because we see from the past one common historical interest of that time and do not see all those personal human interests that people had. Meanwhile, in reality, those personal interests of the present are so much more significant than general interests that because of them, a general interest is never felt (not even noticeable at all). Most people of that time did not pay any attention to the general course of affairs, but were guided only by the personal interests of the present. And these people were the most useful figures of that time. Those who tried to understand the general course of affairs and wanted to participate in it with self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society; they saw everything inside out, and everything they did for the benefit turned out to be useless nonsense, like the regiments of Pierre, Mamonov, plundering Russian villages, like lint plucked by the ladies and never reaching the wounded, etc. Even those who, loving to be clever and express their feelings, talked about the real situation in Russia, involuntarily bore in their speeches the imprint of either pretense and lies, or useless condemnation and anger at people accused of something that no one could be guilty of. In historical events, the most obvious is the prohibition of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and the person who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he tries to understand it, he is struck by its futility.” So it is in historical life, and in family economic life. The author's favorite, Nikolai Rostov, called the author in the framework of the just given reasoning about the war, as a true hero and useful figure, guided exclusively by selfish motives, is then recommended to us as an exemplary family man and owner. Countess Marya, with her sluggish dreams of self-sacrifice and goodness, tried to interpret the activities of her husband in the same terms. But he sincerely and stubbornly disavowed such an artificial assessment of his deeds. “When she, sometimes trying to understand him, told him about the merit that he does good to his subjects, he got angry and answered: “Not at all; it never even occurs to me; and for their benefit, this is what I won’t do... All this is poetry and women’s tales - all this is the good of our neighbor. I need our children not to go around the world, I need to arrange our condition while I’m alive, that’s all. And for this we need order, we need severity... That’s what,” he said, clenching his sanguine fist. “And justice, of course,” he added, “because if the peasant is naked and hungry, and he has only one horse, then he will not work for himself or for me.” And it must be - the author notes from himself - because Nikolai did not allow himself the thought that he was doing anything for others, for virtue - everything he did was fruitful: his fortune quickly increased; neighboring peasants came to ask him to buy them, and long after his death the people kept a devout memory of his management.” This is the complete opposite of Nekhlyudov’s sentimental licentiousness. Moreover, like Nikolai Rostov, Levin also came. “When Levin thought about what he was and why he lived, he could not find an answer and fell into despair, but when he stopped asking himself about it, he seemed to know what he was and why he lived, because he acted and lived firmly and definitely; even in these last times he lived much more firmly and definitely than before. Returning to the village in early June, he returned to his usual activities. Rural management, relationships with peasants and neighbors, housekeeping, the affairs of his sister and brother, who were on his hands, relationships with his wife, relatives, caring for the child, the new bee hunt, which he had become interested in since this spring, occupied all his time. These matters occupied him not because he justified them for himself with some general views, as he had done before; on the contrary, now, on the one hand, disappointed by the failure of previous enterprises for the common good, on the other hand, too busy with his thoughts and the sheer number of affairs that were piling on him from all sides, he completely abandoned all considerations about the common benefit, and these matters occupied him only because it seemed to him that he had to do what he was doing - that he could not do otherwise. Previously (this began almost from childhood and everything grew until full maturity), when he tried to do something that would do good for everyone, for humanity, for Russia, for the entire village, he noticed that the thoughts about it were pleasant, but the activity itself was always awkward, there was no complete confidence that the work was necessary, and the activity itself, which at first seemed so great, became smaller and smaller, came to naught; now, when, after his marriage, he began to limit himself more and more to life for himself, although he no longer experienced any joy at the thought of his activity, he felt confident that his work was necessary, saw that it was progressing much better than before, and that it was getting bigger and bigger. Now, as if against his will, he was cutting deeper and deeper into the ground, like a plow, so that he could no longer get out without turning away the furrow.” This is L. N. Tolstoy’s aesthetic understanding of life. In it we have the most brilliant, harmonious, fascinating revelation of the idea of ​​the beauty of life, its strength, its charm. The artist L.N. Tolstoy is an incomparable singer of life. And at the same time, he is the most decisive enemy of Christianity. He ridicules evangelical self-denial in the name of the beauty of life, its irresistible charm. In the life he glorifies there is no place for goodness and self-denial. And this is strange even from an aesthetic, from a worldly point of view. Goodness in Tolstoy’s aesthetic worldview has no place even as an adornment of life, as a condition for its completeness, its flourishing. In his novels, Christian goodness, selfless figures, moments of self-denial have the meaning of a shadow in the overall picture of life, but not its positive condition. Life is known, it is depicted better in this shade, but life itself, for its fullness, for its flourishing, has no need for good. The ideal life as depicted by Tolstoy is such to the extent of freedom from Christian dreams, from flights of goodness. He describes health and illness in the lives of his heroes, and he depicts the Christian mood as an illness into which people fall and from which they are either cured or perish. Kitty, Pierre and Levin were cured, Sonya and Varenka and Madame Stahl were hopelessly ill. You appreciate your health better when you remember your illness that has passed without a trace or see the infirmities of others, but physical strength and health are not better from illness. Healthier are those who have never been sick and are not suspicious; morally healthier are those who do not suffer from the Christian disease and do not suffer from general issues. Tolstoy understands well what Christianity is, what this mental disorder, this pre-death softening consists of, just as a healthy person can know well what a disease consists of; but internally he does not understand goodness, he does not understand the vital side of goodness, he does not understand its beauty and power. He understands Christianity, just as an intelligent person can understand someone else’s worldview, someone else’s mood, but he does not feel it as his own property, as belonging to life. So a living person can understand what death is, but he cannot feel death as one of the aspects of life, as a moment of life. Tolstoy does not have a living sense of goodness. This is strange because in reality, goodness and self-denial can enter into the very content of life, into its fullness - that without them life, although real, is not complete. Science, which knows no external guidance and draws its inspiration only from the depths of life, comes to recognize the high life significance of selflessness. “The highest intensity of life has as a necessary correlative its widest expansiveness. Physiologically, waste is not evil; it is one of the irreducible moments of life. This is the exhalation following the inhalation. The expenditure for others required by social life is not a loss for the individual; it is a desirable extension and even a necessity. Life is fertility, and vice versa, fertility is vibrant life, this is true existence. There is a certain self-sacrifice, inseparable from existence, without which you die spiritually, you wither away. It needs to bloom; morality, selflessness, this is the color of human life. Mercy has always been depicted in the image of a mother holding out her milk-filled breast to her children; and indeed, mercy is one with abundant fertility: it is like motherhood, too broad to stop at the family. The mother's breast needs greedy mouths to feed on it; So the heart of a truly human being feels the need to bring help and love to everyone: a benefactor feels within himself a call to those who suffer.” This is what L.N. Tolstoy absolutely cannot understand. There is an eye disease - color blindness (color blindness): the eye cannot perceive one or some colors, while correctly perceiving all other colors. Tolstoy is blind to goodness. He perceives life one-sidedly, only from the side of assimilation, capture, but not from the side of spending, giving. And if we look at the life he depicts in this regard, we will see its ugliness. The life he depicts is ugly, crude due to the absence of a higher element in it. His heroes belong to the aristocracy - princes, counts, high-born nobles, but this is not an aristocracy of spirit. Beneath their graceful appearance, beneath noble words and lofty feelings, hides a stout, bourgeois soul. The reader-lackey will be in complete delight before their plumpness, the luxury of their life, their impudence, but before the court of free souls nothing can disguise their baseness. The mere fact that they are imbued with aristocratic complacency exposes their class narrowness. This class complacency clearly reveals their inner emptiness. We are no longer talking about Steve Oblonsky, Betsy, Veslovsky, Lisa Merkalova, etc. We will focus only on the best characters. “Vronsky’s life was especially happy because he had a set of rules that undoubtedly defined everything that should and should not be done. These rules undoubtedly determined that you need to pay a sharper, but you don’t need to pay a tailor, that men don’t have to lie, but women can, that you can’t deceive anyone, but you can deceive your husband, that you can’t forgive an insult and you can insult,” etc. Isn't this the rules of a tabloid guy? But maybe in this characterization of Count Vronsky one can hear the author’s complacent irony? Well, in the following features the author is not ironic about everything. For Count Vronsky, “in his St. Petersburg world, all people were divided into two completely opposite varieties. One of the lowest grade: vulgar, stupid and, most importantly, ridiculous people who believe that one husband should live with one wife with whom he is married, that a girl should be innocent, a woman should be bashful, a man should be courageous, temperate and firm, that he should raise children, earn his bread, pay debts - and various similar nonsense. These were the type of people who were old-fashioned and funny. But there was a different kind of people, real ones, in which the main thing was to be elegant, generous, brave, cheerful, to surrender to every passion without blushing and to laugh at everything else.” At least Count L.N. Tolstoy is not ironic about the generosity of Count Vronsky, is he? We see an example of this generosity. A railway employee was crushed. ... “The station chief, who had caught up with him, approached Vronsky. – You gave my assistant two hundred rubles. Would you bother to indicate who you are assigning them to? “To the widow,” said Vronsky, shrugging his shoulders. – I don’t understand what to ask. - Did you give it? - Oblonsky shouted from behind, and, pressing his sister’s hand, he added: very nice, very nice! Isn’t that right, nice fellow? Vronsky received 45,000 a year. It is impossible to see this farcical game of generosity without a hint of shame. And this shrug of the shoulders, hinting at the Count’s modesty? After all, these are fairground Parsleys, for which it is a shame. Do you want to see the real Vronsky, behind the scenes, without theatrical embellishments? “Where it came to income, the sale of forests, bread, wool, the giving of land, Vronsky was strong as flint and knew how to maintain the price.” He could only be generous on the stage. Tolstoy’s positive types are all tight-fisted landowners, kulaks, serf owners, differing from Sobakevich only in their outward gloss. Such is Levin, such is Nikolai Rostov, and, moreover, not particularly elegant: let us remember the ring on his hand, broken on the head of a serf slave. Stinginess binds them with iron chains. Who has not admired the wonderful image of Natasha Rostova - Countess Bezukha? How much has been said and written enthusiastically about this wonderful “female type”. But Countess Bezukhaya is also the daughter of L.N. Tolstoy. “To all her shortcomings, according to the majority: sloppiness, neglect, or qualities, according to Pierre, Natasha also added stinginess.”... The author’s favorites, especially Nikolai Rostov and Levin, not only cannot rise to the heights of “every person,” they do not even reach the consciousness of national and social tasks. “There is no direct feeling for the oppression of the Slavs, and there cannot be,” said Levin. - “Well, what do I care about all this there, that Arakcheev is not good and that’s all, what do I care about this when I got married and I have so many debts that they put me in a hole, and a mother who cannot see and understand this?” - said Nikolai Rostov. And the prude Countess Marya echoes her husband: “Pierre says that everyone suffers, is tormented, is corrupted, and that it is our duty to help our neighbors. Of course, he is right, but he forgets that we have other responsibilities closer to us, which God himself showed us, and that we can risk ourselves, but not our children.” Tolstoy's family is a grossly egoistic family. This is a family that, for the sake of the luxury of its members, is ready to take the last piece from other people’s children. Tolstoy's heroes are dead souls. Possessing all the virtues of a lower culture, they do not have the spirit of God in them. They can only think and chat about goodness, they can only contain it in their minds, but it never passes from their minds into their hearts, into their being. If Tolstoy speaks about living people, then he speaks about those who are consciously alien to Christianity; if he speaks about Christian feelings, then the result inevitably turns out to be cartoonishly funny. This is so inevitable for Tolstoy that even in his later novel “Resurrection,” written to justify his Christian preaching, the resurrected Nekhlyudov appears in deathly caricatured features. Tolstoy's heroes can understand goodness with their minds, but their life is completely alien to goodness, petty-bourgeoisly limited, and grossly selfish. It is not enough to say that Rostov, Levin, Oblonsky, Vronsky, Natasha, Betsy are pagans; they are bad pagans, pitiful, limited. They do not have everything that free paganism can give. If it is said that “in every nation he who does good is pleasing to God,” that natural paganism also has a spirit, a divine content, and by nature approaches God, then Tolstoy’s heroes are the worst of nations. Religion, the divine content, does not dissolve in them, is not absorbed by them, but settles in their soul as some kind of hardened lump, an alien body. Levin found faith, but he sees that “this new feeling did not change him, did not make him happy, did not enlighten him,” that his life and feelings will continue as before, although faith “is firmly entrenched in his soul”... And this pagan one-sidedness of Tolstoy must be taken into account in order to understand his subsequent Christian one-sidedness. In the second period of his literary activity, the Christian preaching period, Tolstoy rejected life in the name of the gospel, just as he had previously rejected Christianity in the name of life. What previously constituted the senseless dreams of Nekhlyudov, the delirium of Prince Andrei, the funny thoughts of Pierre, Princess Marya, what was previously ridiculed in the person of Sonya and Varenka, now forms the only thought of L. N. Tolstoy. What was previously called the lifeless fruit of reason is now called the highest rational consciousness, the highest level of religion. “My life suddenly changed,” Tolstoy says about himself: I stopped wanting what I previously wanted. What before seemed good to me seemed bad, and what before seemed bad seemed good. The direction of my life – my desires have become different: both good and evil have changed places.” But the elements of the worldview remained the same and their relationship remained the same - lifeless Christianity and godless life. Before, Tolstoy thought: “The teaching of Christ is dreamy, because it is not characteristic of human nature. It is not in the nature of a person to turn the other cheek when he is hit on the other, it is not in the nature to give one’s own to someone else, it is not in the nature to work not for oneself, but for another. It is human nature to defend himself, his safety, the safety of his family, property, in other words, it is human nature to fight for his existence.” Now Tolstoy is confident that “the teaching of Christ has always embraced and embraces, denying them, all those human errors, those “togas” - empty idols, which we, calling them church, state, culture, science, art, civilization, think to isolate from a number of errors. But Christ speaks against them... Not only Christ, but also all the Jewish prophets, all the true sages of the world speak about this very church, this very state, this very culture, civilization, calling them evil and the destruction of people.” Tolstoy now calls Christianity the same as before - the teachings of love, humility, self-sacrifice, and by life he means the same thing as before - a crudely selfish life, completely alien to goodness, without any spark of divine content. And he now recognized this life as evil and destruction. And since he does not know any other life, he called all life evil and destruction. “Every person lives only to feel good, for his own good. A person feels life only in himself, in his personality, and therefore it seems to a person that the good that he desires is the good only of his personality... The whole life of the world is made up of interconnected personalities who want to destroy and destroy one another... All the knowledge that the poor man acquires is necessary for him only in order to improve the well-being of his personality. All the knowledge of science and art that a rich man acquires is needed only to overcome boredom and have a good time. The longer both live, the more and more the reigning gaze of the people of the world is absorbed into them. They marry, start a family, and the greed for acquiring the benefits of animal life is intensified by the justification of the family: the struggle with others becomes fierce and the habit of living only for the good of the individual is established.” It is necessary to note the incorrectness in Tolstoy’s judgments. Undoubtedly, he knows only a crudely selfish life, he knows only a greedy family, he knows only one law in life - the law of the struggle for existence. But in his life experience, and in his own, he has no reason to say that a person lives only for happiness, only according to the law of the struggle for existence. Life is wider and deeper than consciousness: before a person lives for happiness, he lives because he lives, because life is good, according to the law of life, according to the power of life. Exhausting life only with the good of the animal personality, Tolstoy now considers this life, all life, unreasonable, meaningless, because “this cannot be good for me, and no matter what I do, no matter what I achieve, it will all end in the same way: suffering and death, destruction.” If life itself is good, then, obviously, even a minute of life has justification in itself and is the fulfillment of God’s law - and, obviously, the highest good brightens life, complements it, but is not opposite to it. Tolstoy, taking life only as a striving for the good of the animal personality, as a striving that becomes meaningless in the face of suffering and death, contrasts life with rational consciousness. “One I, a personality, tells a person to live. And the other I, his mind, says: “you can’t live.” A person feels that he is split into two and this split painfully tears his soul apart.” The cause of this split is the awakening of rational consciousness, and the torment of the split ceases as soon as we recognize animal life as illusory. “Human life begins only with the manifestation of rational consciousness.” “The true life of man, manifested in the relation of his rational consciousness to his animal personality, begins only when the denial of the good of the animal personality begins. The denial of the good of the animal personality begins when rational consciousness awakens.” Tolstoy sings a hymn to reason, as before he sang a hymn to life. “We know reason more accurately and above all, so that everything we know in the world, we know only because what we know agrees with the laws of this reason, which are undoubtedly known to us. We know and we cannot help but know the mind. It is impossible because reason is the law by which inevitably rational beings - people - must live. Reason for a person is the law by which his life is carried out, the same law as the law for an animal by which it feeds and reproduces, as the law for a plant according to which grass and trees grow and bloom, as well as the law for the celestial body according to which the earth and stars move.” What is the content of rational consciousness? In love, in serving other people. “True love becomes possible only by renouncing the good of the animal personality. The possibility of true love begins only when a person understands that there is no good for him in his animal personality. It is not as a result of love for a father, for a son, for a wife, for friends, for kind and sweet people, as is usually thought, that people renounce personality, but only as a result of the awareness of the futility of the existence of the individual, the awareness of the impossibility of its good, and therefore, as a result of renunciation of the life of the individual, a person knows true love and can truly love his father, son, wife, children and friends. Forgetting the immediate interests of an individual in order to achieve the distant goals of the same individual, as happens with so-called love that has not grown on self-denial, is only a preference for some beings over others for one’s own personal good. True love, before becoming an active feeling, must be a known state. The beginning of love, its root, is not an impulse of feeling that darkens the mind, as is usually imagined, but is the most reasonable, bright, and therefore calm and joyful state, characteristic of children and reasonable people. True love is always based on renunciation of the good of the individual and the resulting benevolence towards all people. Only on this general goodwill can true love for famous people - one's own or others' - grow. And only such love gives the true benefit of life and resolves the apparent contradiction of rational consciousness. Love, according to the teachings of Christ, is life itself, but not an unreasonable, suffering and perishing life, but a blessed and endless life. Who among living people does not know that blissful feeling, experienced at least once and most often only in very early childhood, when the soul was not yet clogged with all the lies that drown out life in us, that blissful feeling of tenderness in which you want to love everyone: loved ones, and father, and mother, and brothers, and evil people, and enemies, and a dog, and a horse, and grass; I want one thing - for everyone to feel good, for everyone to be happy, and even more I want to make sure that everyone feels good, to give myself, my whole life, so that everyone always feels good and happy. This is what it is, and this alone is the love in which man’s life is.” This is the tenderness and mental disorder that Prince Andrei experienced before his death, when he simultaneously felt alienated from life and people. “Only the knowledge of both the illusory and deceitful nature of animal existence and the liberation within oneself of the only true life of love gives a person good.” From this point of view only external life with its suffering is understandable. “Evil in the form of death and suffering is visible to a person only when he accepts the law of his carnal animal existence as the law of his life. Only when he, being a man, descends to the level of an animal, only then does he see death and suffering. Death and suffering, like entanglements, come at him from all sides and drive him onto the one open path of human life, subject to its own law of reason and expressed in love.” Either through the necessity of these scarecrows or voluntarily, a person must take the path of goodness and self-denial. On the contrary, everything that is aimed at achieving the benefits of the animal personality, towards the prosperity of carnal life, all this is evil and destruction. For the sake of rational consciousness and love, Tolstoy does not recognize any positive meaning for animal-human life. This very life and birth are considered insignificant by them. “Why live?.. If there is a goal of life, then it is clear that life must stop when the goal is achieved... If the goal of humanity is good, kindness, love, then passions interfere with the achievement of this goal. Of the passions, the strongest, most evil and persistent is sexual, carnal love, and therefore if passions are destroyed, and the last, strongest of them, carnal love, then the goal of humanity will be achieved and there will be nothing for it to live for.” Tolstoy fiercely brands male-female relationships with the name of abomination, disgust, sin. Along with the law of reason, he does not recognize the laws of nature. With greater bitterness he attacks all human laws - church, public, state: he is the most consistent anarchist. Tolstoy admits that man is kind by nature, and that in reality only laws prevent him from being kind. Free a person from these laws, and he will necessarily be kind, and if he is good, he will be happy. Natural development does not constitute the necessary path to perfection, but serves as an obstacle to it. Rational consciousness is a completely self-sufficient force. “As soon as a person understands his life the way Christianity teaches us to understand it, as soon as a person understands that the purpose of his life is the fulfillment of the law of God so that this law, replacing all other laws for him and subordinating it to itself, would deprive in his eyes all human laws of their obligation and constraint.” All salvation is possible; come from a change in inner mood, and only from it. “It only takes one person to understand life the way Christianity teaches him to understand it, and to begin to live that way, and then for another, a third, or a hundredth to do the same, for that vicious circle of social life, from which there seemed to be no way out,” to be destroyed.” Tolstoy reduces the essential content of the gospel, in addition to the positive giving of meaning to life, to five negative commandments, which, in his understanding, lead to the destruction of property, family, patriotism, church and state. He strongly argues that through social reconstruction, changing laws and creating new laws, an improvement in life cannot be achieved. He asserts emphatically that Christian perfection has no positive relation to pagan morality. Even the highest level of pagan morality, family-social morality, is in conflict with Christian morality. “Christian ethics requires not only the sacrifice of the individual for the totality of personalities, but requires the renunciation of one’s personality and the totality of personalities for the service of God; pagan philosophy explores only the means of acquiring the greatest good of the individual or their totality, and therefore contradiction is inevitable.” Tolstoy understands Christian morality extremely highly and presents it in an inimitably fascinating way. But just as before he could not understand the place of Christianity in life, the meaning of goodness for the fullness and flourishing of life, so now he does not understand the positive meaning of life for Christianity. His Christianity is completely abstract and completely fruitless - and therefore it is just as funny as the Christianity of Nekhlyudov, Prince Andrey, Levin. Tolstoy is given a certain limit from which he cannot escape. The striking weakness of Tolstoy's Christianity is that for him it is the fruit of abstract thought and a need conditioned by a certain state of mind. Tolstoy adopted Christianity only with his mind, and not with his heart, and therefore it turned out to be completely fruitless and ineffective for his life. It manifested itself in such aspects of his life that are undeniably humorous in nature. This sewing of boots, plowing the land, not caused by real need, this renunciation of his enormous wealth in favor of his family, with whom he continues to live, surrounded by luxury, all this forms a funny background against which his Christian idle talk stands out. Too much has been said and written about this for it to be worth revealing and proving this weakness of Tolstoy’s Christianity. I remember only the words of our philosopher-publicist, V.S. Solovyov, who sincerely hated Tolstoyism. He wrote: “And in ancient times Christianity was incomprehensible to some and hated by some; but to make it disgusting and mortally boring - this has only now been achieved” - Tolstoy... Why does Tolstoy need this sterile, abstractly lifeless, but artistically beautiful preaching of evangelical love? He says in his Confession that he needed his former pagan worldview as a justification for his pagan life, as an addition to it, giving it a harmonious roundness. Doesn’t his latest, Christian worldview, also meet some kind of heartfelt need? Undoubtedly so. His life remained, as before, completely pagan, but the transition of life in the second half of his age, accompanied by a gradually increasing cooling of the blood, satiety with all the blessings of life and especially glory, likening him to Solomon, made him a need for a new worldview, fueling his energy as much in accordance with senile pessimism as in contrast with his position and the situation of pagan life. We read about these “tides of everything beautiful and lofty” that do not correct life, do not leave the sphere of dreams and come just enough to make a good sauce consisting of contrast and contradictions - we read about this in Dostoevsky in Notes from the Underground. Undoubtedly, the same sauce is Christian preaching in the artistically beautiful pagan life of Tolstoy. And it is also certain that, for all the humor of his fruitless Christianity, his personal fate is filled with the deepest tragedy. Isn’t it tragic that Tolstoy, having ridiculed the leading Christian ideals in the persons of Nekhlyudov, Olenin, Pierre, Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, Sonya, Varenka, at the end of his life himself finally settled on these leading ideals, on “this refuge” of cold blood? Isn’t it scary that Tolstoy, with his senile lips, drinks from the cup into which he spat all his life, swallows the poisoned moisture that now does not satiate him? Isn’t it scary that “this man, who so endlessly thirsted for the truth, so inexorably denounced himself and others like no one else ever, that he allowed such a blatant lie, such an ugly contradiction into his conscience”?... Tolstoy has not become and will not be our prophet, we will not follow his preaching, but will he not awaken us with the tragedy of his fate, will he not push us away with the horror of his situation? Will he not force us to think deeply about the question of what is the reason for the futility of his word, so sublime and artistically beautiful, and what tasks lie ahead of us? The reason for the futility of his preaching is that he tore life away from the high ideals of religion and Christianity from life. With the fate of Tolstoy, it became clearer to us than before that our lives can only be sanctified by high Christian ideals, and Christianity can only be effective if it is based on life. Tolstoy, both in his life and in his literary work, showed the external beauty of life and the abstract height of Christianity - in their disunity, as a result of which external beauty covers up internal ugliness and the height of Christianity turns out to be airy, dead. In Tolstoy we clearly see the significance of the task facing us - to synthesize these two sides of our life, the divine and the earthly. If in general Tolstoy’s sin is the gap between life and Christianity, then the immediate error in his understanding of Christianity is that for him Christianity is an abstract absoluteness, dry moralism, a dead set of rules. Just as in thought infinity and finitude mutually exclude one another, whereas in living reality the finite serves only as a symbol of the infinite and uncontrollably strives towards the infinite, so Christianity, as an abstract absoluteness, is hostile to life, while living Christianity is coiled in the depths of life itself. Tolstoy’s terrible sin before Christianity is that he knows the gospel as a rational word, and does not know, does not know Christ at all, but Christianity is not an abstract philosophical word, but the living work of the Son, Who has a Father in heaven, sending sunlight and life-giving rain on the good and the evil. Christianity, as an abstract absoluteness, is hostile to life, but Christianity, as the religion of the Son, is not hostile to the life of the Father: the solution to the Christian problem is hidden in the mystery of the relationship of the Son to the Father. Note. The two poles that emerged in the artistic work of L. N. Tolstoy raise the question of the possibility of their reconciliation and the conditions for the reality of this reconciliation, But before this question, an intermediate opportunity arises to recognize this polarity of our life as final, ideal, to transfer the polarity into the realm of the ideals themselves. This is the sermon of N. M. Minsky about the dual unity of the ideal (“Religion of the Future”). Tolstoy stands on one pole and denies the other, stands on the other and denies the first. Minsky says that both poles are sacred, that this very polarity is sacred and irreconcilable within the boundaries of our world. We are innate not one, but two instincts of truth, contradictory and equally obligatory, so that at any given moment conscience calls us not to one, but to two different paths of good. The soul is innate in two categorical imperatives, drawing it not only in different, but in opposite directions. There are no two paths - the path of good and the path of evil, there are two paths of good, two ideals of good, which remain warring elements throughout the entire course of our life and merge only in God and in the mystical knowledge of God, in the knowledge of His unity. Tolstoy calls for the path of renunciation, abstinence, non-resistance, self-sacrifice. Nietzsche calls for the path of struggle, power, exultation of strength, contempt for the weak. The question of which of them is right cannot be answered. When you read Tolstoy’s simple and refined, kind and stern words, you involuntarily fall under his influence and want to agree with him. But once you think that the truth of satisfaction, beauty and luxury that he rejects is just as inherently ours and just as dear to us as the truth of holiness, then you involuntarily classify him as a poisoner of wells. But Nietzsche also throws his poison into the springs of compassion and renunciation, into what he, for his own consolation, calls the morality of slaves and which is as inherently dear to us as the morality of masters. But it is surprising that these two writers delivered their sermons at the same time, as if they were living arguments of fate, which, wanting to refute the morality of instincts, resorted to a logical technique called reduction to the absurd. If society simultaneously absorbs the ideas of both writers, without seeing the abyss separating them, then this may be explained by the fact that a new morality is already in the air, not of volitional instincts, but of knowledge and freedom. Minsky calls the duality of our ideal the highest condition of spiritual freedom - otherwise we would become slaves of our own good, our holiness, our God... Here one cannot fail to note the striking weakness in Minsky’s argumentation, which is often found on the pages of his book. Typically, religious defenders of freedom pointed it out in the possibility of choosing between good and evil; Minsky sees it in the choice between two paths of good. But it is not difficult to notice that the ancient patristic method of ethical judgment is more successful than this new method: human freedom is rather ensured by the possibility of choosing between good and evil than by the possibility of choosing between two paths of good. Indeed, if the ethical results are the same whether I go to the right or to the left, if through continuous multiplication and through continuous fragmentation I equally come to infinity, then the choice between such two paths by the determinism of the outcome does not strengthen our freedom, but produces “twilight, indifference, dispassion.” Minsky does not deny the presence of evil in our lives, but he says that the same thing has now happened to spiritual darkness as to physical darkness. Modern science recognizes only the power of light, and darkness is understood by it as comparatively meager light. The same thing happened in the moral world. Evil and crime for us are nothing more than a lower degree of good in comparison with the higher ones. Just as a bright source of light causes shadows, so the very nature of good causes the necessity of evil. And whoever truly loves the goodness of life has inevitably already come to terms with its evil... We know that this theodicy is many centuries old, and it is strange that Minsky claims originality of thought. With too broad perspectives of contemplation, good and evil merge into one gray, indefinite mass, but everything must have its own definite point of view. “There is only one point from which to look at the picture; all the others lie too close or too far, too high or too low. In painting, this point is marked by perspective... There must be a certain point of support in the field of morality” (Pascal). The fact that at a certain distance all works of art and natural scenes disappear into a foggy uncertainty does not destroy the power of beauty; just as good has its own perspective, so good constitutes a region decisively different from evil, even if they merge at a too distant point of contemplation. The measure of good and evil is in man himself, and the difference between a good heart and an evil heart is one of the undoubted points of support. If the difference between good and evil is undeniable, then any theory of higher synthesis that wants to become outside of this difference is doomed in advance to complete collapse. The question can only be about the limits of evil, about what exactly is considered evil, and about the means of combating it, but that recognized evil must be overcome, this constitutes an inevitable condition for the achieved harmony, the final reconciliation. The Gospel revalued ethical values, it revealed lowlands where there seemed to be high ground, it called friends of God those who were considered outcasts, but it pointed out evil on a different principle, it made a new division. It is not enough to say that the task of the final equation of good and evil is impossible within the limits of human life, within the limits of our concepts; but the highest reconciliation does not require this equation. The poles of human life, which need to be brought to a harmonious combination, do not coincide entirely with the difference between good and evil, it is wider than this difference, and the possibility of a higher synthesis is based on this. Just as it would be a mistake to think that with the elimination of sin, synthesis is inevitably achieved, that sin is the only cause of disharmony, it is equally mistaken to consider as the final goal such a reconciliation, before which the difference between good and evil would disappear, which would cover even this struggle in our life. No, the struggle against evil and sin is inevitable, no synthesis can escape this struggle, and the final interest of achieving the highest synthesis is that it ensures the success of the struggle against evil, since it clarifies the limits of evil, since it sets the boundary between the sinful will and natural necessity. When opposites coincide, some conflict is inevitable and even desirable, namely conflict within the limits of sin; complete reconciliation cannot and should not happen. Remember the rebellion of Ivan Karamazov: he is outraged by the idea of ​​such a final harmony, before which all innocent suffering will remain unavenged - he was outraged by the mere thought that the time will come when man will become so clear about the final goals of existence that he will come to terms with unavenged suffering. And in this regard, however, Ivan Karamazov is on the side. Such knowledge, which would reconcile us with what we now consider the most outrageous, what we recognize as insulting the sanctity of our hearts, with violence, with innocent suffering, we hate such knowledge in advance, we do not want it. It is necessary, of course, to distinguish between the past and the future - and Ivan Karamazov may have sinned in not making this distinction - but still, reconciliation with the past cannot make the future indifferent for us - even if we find a justification for past innocent suffering, we still cannot indifferently endure and allow such suffering in the future. Sinlessness in the past does not make the future ethically indifferent. - “Lord, who sinned, he or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered: Neither he nor his parents sinned, but this was so that the works of God might be revealed in him. I must do the works of Him who sent Me.” And He healed the man born blind. According to Kirilov's theory, you need to love what is necessary, and everything that happens is good - all evil and all crimes. People need to know that they are good at everything and they will be happy. And then? “They need to know that they are good, and everyone will immediately become good.” And they will no longer commit vile violence. Without this “they won’t”, just “they will know” evokes hopeless horror. We do not need mere reconciliation with necessity without correcting evil. Such a combination of opposite poles, which does not require any erasure, is both unnecessary and unthinkable. We need their combination because it constitutes a necessary condition for the destruction of evil, since the obstacle to it is the imaginary irreconcilability of the poles along their entire length. Sanctifying your entire life with religion does not mean justifying debauchery in marriage, violence in the state, injustice in society - the question of higher harmony is a question of reconciling religious holiness not with debauchery, but with the family, not with violence, but with order, not with slavery, but with economic truth. And if we can achieve this reconciliation, then debauchery, violence and slavery will disappear. The elimination of evil alone does not solve the problem of harmony, since religious holiness strives for the ideal of absoluteness, and the truth of the family, society and state is a conditional, limited truth, but evil must be overcome - this is the practical value of harmony. Our soul, according to Minsky, is characterized by two ideals - the ideal of renunciation and the ideal of satisfaction. The peculiarity of our morality lies in the fact that both ideals - satisfaction and renunciation - seem to us to be equivalent, equal, equally desirable, while in previous centuries the worldly ideal was always considered subordinate to the ascetic and was sanctified only as a concession to human weakness. For our consciousness, satisfaction is the same feat as renunciation, and renunciation is the same good as satisfaction; our soul is subject to two equal forces, two equal ideals, just as a body, being on a circle, at the same time strives towards the center and strives from the center. For us, we are talking about a new form of asceticism, which would not exclude the shrine of worldly happiness, but would merge. together with it, it is a matter of merging two paths of good, which until now have walked separately and side by side. – These two paths have always existed in the church, which contained two ideals - the knight and the monk. The knight and the monk do not stand on the same path of morality, one ahead of the other, but stand on two different paths, mutually opposite, complementing each other and converging only in their negation. No matter how far you go along the path of the knightly ideal, you will not come to the monastic one and vice versa. In order to move from one path to another, a break with the past, renunciation, a spell was needed. But these ideals existed side by side with each other. The monk prayed for peace and its joys; the world worked for the monastery. What was accomplished in the church conciliarly, for our time constitutes an individual task. We can strive to realize this unity in no other way than consciously, that is, individually. To merge both desires - for possession and for purity - in a single will, to combine both bliss - satisfaction and renunciation - in one heart - this is the only problem of the new morality. Our task is to combine worldly fullness and monastic purity, to synthesize voluptuousness and chastity. Our new mental order must, over time, give rise to a new order of life. The plans of the old forms of community life - family, society, public service - were designed for a morality of duty and enslavement. Anyone who entered the family had to remain in it until death, and could only regain his freedom by resorting to catastrophe and breakdown. New forms of community life must be equipped with many exits leading to contemplation, to renunciation, to purity, to solitude. At all times, a person should be able to throw off all the burdens of worries and responsibilities and return to the shrine of his “I”. Renunciation, not as a vow, but as joy in itself - this is the bright dream of the future, this is the refrigerator in which the vapors of passions and disappointments will again turn into the pure moisture of life. Only after being washed with the dew of renunciation and purity will pleasures become desirable again and glow with a rainbow brilliance... The dreams of our philosopher do not extend further than this. His last hope is a rhythmic life, alternating between joyful light and blessed darkness. And the low flight of this dream involuntarily catches the eye. After all, this chastity has the meaning of accumulation and tension of passion, saving a person from the vulgarity of sluggish vegetation. This new morality is prudent living hygiene. Like hygiene, this morality is good and deserves approval, but it does not completely save one from vulgarity, but elevates a person above it only one step. This hygienic transition from the shrine of purity to the shrine of voluptuousness, as the last ideal, as the highest synthesis, does not escape the chains of vulgarity, from the kingdom of bourgeois complacency, occupying its upper layers. Not being able to wait for your time, to observe the measures of pleasure, to tear yourself away from the cup in time - this is even worse; but also the ability to alternate voluptuousness with chastity, to purify passions with abstinence and maintain them in a state of freshness, to be able to extend pleasures until late old age - isn’t this philistinism? This prudent hygiene of life is prevented from being the final synthesis by the mere prospect of transitions from one pole to another, the absence in it of a moment of absoluteness, an eternal fixed point, an eternal center. There is no final synthesis here yet, because the poles taken are not the most extreme, but too conditional and relative. The highest synthesis embraces only the extreme poles of our life, and one of the extreme poles is the absoluteness, the divinity of our life, as its eternal fixed point, its eternal center. The task of the highest synthesis is the task of reconciliation with the conditionality of our life of divine absoluteness, reconciliation of this universal polarity. Along with it, there are many conventional polarities, historical antitheses: Minsky took one of them, giving it an unusual primacy, while it cannot embrace all the other antitheses. Anna Karenina, like a body located on a circle and at the same time carried away by opposing forces - centrifugal and centripetal - is torn apart by the struggle of opposing attractions. One of them is natural passion, acting according to God-established laws. “It’s not my fault that God made me such that I need to love and live.” This attraction is opposed by another principle - a family one, which unfolds in her soul with considerable complexity, since at one end it rests on the equally natural attachment to her son, and at the other it rises to a Christian-religious attitude towards her husband. How can this struggle of Anna Karenina be brought under the synthesis of monastic purity and fullness of pleasure and how can it be pacified from the point of view of this synthesis? In the future family, arranged according to Minsky's project, there will be many exits, leading from the burden of family worries and responsibilities to contemplation, to renunciation, to purity - but will there be an exit to side love? I myself would not have offered a recipe for completely pacifying Anna Karenina’s stormy heart and confused relationships, and I would have been suspicious of any such recipe. But so that we are not depressed by this impossibility of providing immediate practical pacification of all everyday conflicts, I would consider it necessary to exclude from the problem of higher synthesis the task of reconciling conventional antitheses and, even more so, the practical pacification of all everyday conflicts. Stiva Oblonsky dreamed of “lying down and walking” at the same time. Of course, this is impossible, but this impossibility is not yet a sufficient basis for pessimism, for religious despair. And in the case of Anna Karenina, from the highest religious point of view, one must ignore the impossibility for her to reconcile her love for Vronsky with her love for Seryozha. The religious question, or the problem of higher synthesis, is the question of the reconciliation of Christian absoluteness with natural passion; in the Karenina case, the reconciliation of Christian love for her husband and passionate love for Vronsky. A similar clash of feelings was completely resolved in the family of the “Teenager”; a resolution was momentarily imagined in Karenina’s life. But, of course, different results should be given the husband’s suffering, and it is inevitable that the “new” marital happiness should be based on the “shame and tears” of the husband. In any case, it is necessary to admit the irreconcilability of the conventional antitheses. Also, in particular, monastic purity is irreconcilable with the fullness of pleasure. We should not be embarrassed by this irreconcilability, because monastic ideals in Christianity are not of the eternal Gospel, but of church-historical, conditional origin. Achieving a higher synthesis is undoubtedly our task, but we must be wary of premature, hasty synthesis, we must be wary of confusion instead of unification, double-mindedness and duplicity under the guise of dual unity. In order not to be mistaken for the final synthesis of a hasty mixture, the church-historical conventional antitheses should be raised to the extreme poles of the Gospel; in particular, asceticism should be raised to the absoluteness of Gospel love, and chivalry should be reduced to natural-social life, developing according to its own laws. Monasticism and chivalry are not connected in the conventional historical plane in which they lie; they need to be deepened, transferred to other, heterogeneous spheres, and then they will be reconciled in the unity of an integral life. Minsky completely overlooks the fact that medieval monasticism had too much of a chivalrous spirit, and chivalry had too much of a monastic spirit, that medieval monasticism was the vanguard of an externally organized and militant church, and chivalry was the most characteristic phenomenon of worldly life, suppressed under the external domination of the church. In order to reconcile these opposing ideals individually, consciously, they must first be separated to the extreme, their conditionally historical opposition must be expanded to the eternal and universal opposition of the divine-absolute and the natural-human. F. M. Dostoevsky is our only and inimitable writer-artist in many respects, and above all in the fact that only he took upon himself and brilliantly completed the task of drawing a living image of a holy man. There is nothing easier than writing the life of a saint in the Byzantine style: for this task there are hagiographic stencils, which are usually used by masters of writings of this kind. The task of these writings is facilitated to the last degree by the abstract ascetic ideal of Byzantine holiness. A Christian ascetic, saving his soul, directs all his attention and all his effort to seclude himself from life, break all the threads connecting him with living people, suppress all interests, all passionate movements, concentrate on one thought about God and the future blissful life. The saint of life is buried alive, and the path of his exploits is the path of gradual dying. An established tradition is to paint Christian saints in watercolors, not oil paints. In their lives everything is conditional, symbolic, everything is dominated by one idea, one thought, in them every touch of the flesh is erased by the heavenly heights of the spirit. But it is a completely different matter and extremely difficult to imagine a Christian ideal person in everyday life and in everyday encounters. The difficulty here lies not only on the subjective side, that is, so that the writer himself is able to rise to the heights of the Christian ideal, but also on the objective side, since the current life of society does not provide examples of Christian perfection. Here, “the task is not only for the artist-writer, to the extent of subjective receptivity, to grasp the features of a given reality and combine them in an aesthetic image, but also for him to go further than historical reality, to anticipate its future development - the task is not only artistic and epistemological, but also creative. In this case, artistic creativity becomes a religious matter. The writings of F. M. Dostoevsky have such religious significance. L.N. Tolstoy could not artistically grasp and reproduce the positive side of the Christian ideal; his Christian types appear before the reader only from a funny side; later he comprehended the height of the Christian ideal only mentally, verbally, and speaks about it in the form of sermons, mainly of an accusatory nature. This is not what we see in F. M. Dostoevsky: among his artistic types we find living images of Christian heights. These are Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (an idiot) and Alyosha Karamazov. Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin stands out from the society around him with his extraordinary “simplicity” and amazing “sincerity.” The Gospel law of spiritual life: “if you do not become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of God” is fulfilled here to the point of typicality. This is noted already in the first pages of the novel. The first time we meet him in the carriage of the St. Petersburg-Warsaw train, returning from abroad, dressed very lightly, out of season and not in Russian style. “In his hands dangled a skinny bundle made from an old, faded foulard, which seemed to contain all his travel property.” His “black-haired neighbor,” as it turned out, Rogozhin, strikes up a conversation with him with a question addressed to him “with that indelicate grin in which people’s pleasure at the failures of their neighbor is sometimes so unceremoniously and carelessly expressed: “Very,” he answered with extreme readiness, “and mind you, it’s still a thaw.” What if it was frosty? I didn't even think it was so cold here. Out of habit. The black-haired man whistled and laughed. A conversation ensued. The readiness of the blond young man in a Swiss cloak to answer all the questions of his dark-skinned neighbor was amazing and without any suspicion of complete negligence, inappropriateness and idleness of other questions. Answering, he announced, among other things, that he had indeed not been in Russia for a long time, too four years, that he had been sent abroad due to illness, some strange nervous illness, like epilepsy or Witt’s dance, some tremors and convulsions. Listening to him, the black man grinned several times; He laughed especially when, in response to the question: “Well, were they cured?” - the blond one replied that “no, they weren’t cured.” - Heh! They must have overpaid the money for nothing, but we trust them here,” the black man sarcastically remarked.” There followed explanations from the Swiss patient about the disinterestedness of the doctor who treated him, that Mr. Pavlishchev, who supported him, died two years ago, that he only had a distant relative, General Epanchin, who, however, did not answer his letter. - That is, where will I stay?.. I don’t know yet, really... so... - “And, I suppose, your whole essence lies in this bundle? asked the black man. It turned out that this was so: the blond young man immediately and with extraordinary haste admitted it.” When his interlocutors - Rogozhin and the official who got involved in the conversation - expressed doubt about the reality of his relationship with General Epanchina, he answered: - “Oh, you guessed it again, - after all, I’m really almost mistaken, that is, almost not a relative; so much so that I really wasn’t at all surprised then that they didn’t answer me there. That's what I was waiting for." When asked about his name, Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin “with complete and immediate readiness” identified himself. The official, thoughtfully, noted that “the Myshkin princes are nowhere to be found.” - “Oh, of course! The prince immediately answered: “There are no Myshkin princes at all now, except me; I think I'm the last one. As for our fathers and grandfathers, they were also our same palace owners. My father, however, was a second lieutenant in the army, one of the cadets." This is the first exit of Prince Myshkin. Completely alien to the impulses of talkativeness and obsession, he is equally completely unaware of isolation and guile. Without the slightest shadow of pride, in response to questions addressed to him, he reveals his whole soul, all the weaknesses of his condition and position. He reveals himself decisively as he really is, says what he thinks and feels. He does not show off at all, he does not show the slightest concern to win over his interlocutors, to impress them, his words and his appearance do not hide his soul and his state, he speaks directly, from heart to heart. He sees in himself only what can be seen in him from the outside, he looks at himself objectively, without the slightest bias - and this is precisely what attracts him to him, binds him. Everyone sees that the prince has nothing to fear, that he does not take care of himself at all. And this greatest Christian humility does not cost him any effort. For him, all this comes out by itself, unintentionally, without effort, without violence against himself. And with these traits of Christian character, Prince Myshkin remains before the reader all the time, with them he enters into all kinds of everyday conflicts and easily gets out of the most difficult, most confusing situations. Here are two examples of the most striking ones. ... “Ganya’s vision grew dim, and he, completely forgotten, swung at his sister with all his might. The blow would certainly hit her in the face. But suddenly another hand stopped Ganin’s hand in mid-flight. The prince stood between him and his sister. - Come on, that's enough! he said insistently, but also trembling all over, as if from an extremely strong shock. “Yes, forever, or something, you will cross my path,” Ganya roared, throwing Varya’s hand, and with his freed hand, in the last degree of rage, he slapped the prince in the face with all his might. - Oh, Kolya clasped his hands: - oh, my God! There were exclamations from all sides. The prince turned pale. With a strange and reproachful look, he looked directly into Gana’s eyes; his lips trembled and tried to say something; some strange and completely inappropriate smile twisted them. “Well, let me do it... but I still won’t give it to her!”.., he said quietly at last, but suddenly could not stand it, abandoned Ganya, covered his face with his hands, went into a corner, stood facing the wall and said in a broken voice: - Oh, how ashamed you will be of your action! Ganya, indeed, stood as if destroyed. Kolya rushed to hug and kiss the prince; Rogozhin, Varya, Ptitsyn, Nina Aleksandrovna, everyone, even old Ardalion Aleksandrovich crowded behind him. “Nothing, nothing!” the prince muttered in all directions, with the same inappropriate smile. - And you will repent! Rogozhin shouted: “You will be ashamed, Ganka, for insulting such a... sheep (he couldn’t find another word)!” Prince, my soul, leave them; spit on them, let's go! You will find out how much Rogozhin loves! Nastasya Filippovna was also very amazed by Ganya’s act and the prince’s answer.”... The prince not only was not ashamed to look into the eyes of everyone who saw his shame, but after that everyone loved him with the last love, reverent love: Christian humility appeared in an aura of charming heroism. The shame of a slap is the ultimate touchstone of Christian character. And Prince Myshkin passed this test without the slightest false note, without the slightest pretense or insincerity. Prince Myshkin also emerged from other trials, perhaps not so harsh, but more complicated, requiring more subtle manifestations of humility, deeper foundations of Christian character. The prince's wedding was expected with Nastasya Filippovna, who had a bad reputation. A huge crowd of scandal-hungry public awaited the spectacle. And a bigger scandal broke out than expected - the bride ran away when the prince was already in the church. ... "The prince left the church, apparently calm and cheerful; so, at least, many noticed and later told. It seemed that he really wanted to get to the house and be left alone as quickly as possible; but this was not given to him. Following him, some of the invitees entered the room... In addition, the whole house was literally besieged by an idle public. From the terrace the prince heard how Keller and Lebedev entered into a fierce argument with some, completely unknown, although apparently official people, who wanted to enter the terrace at any cost, the prince approached those arguing, inquired what was going on, and politely pushing aside Lebedev and Keller, delicately turned to one already gray-haired and stout gentleman, standing on the steps of the porch at the head of several other people, and invited him to honor him with his visit. The gentleman was embarrassed, but nevertheless followed him; another, third. From the entire crowd, about seven or eight visitors emerged and entered, trying to do it as casually as possible; but there were no more hunters, and soon, in the crowd, they began to condemn the upstarts. Those who entered were seated, a conversation began, tea began to be served - all this was extremely decent, modest, to some surprise of those who entered. There were, of course, several attempts to lighten the conversation and bring it to the “proper” topic; Several indiscreet questions were uttered, several “dashing” remarks were made. The prince answered everyone so simply and cordially, and at the same time with such dignity, with such trust in the integrity of his guests, that the indiscreet questions died down by themselves. Little by little the conversation began to become almost serious... Almost an hour passed, they drank tea, and after tea the guests finally became ashamed to sit even longer. The doctor and the gray-haired gentleman eagerly said goodbye to the prince; and everyone said goodbye with fervor and noise. Wishes and opinions were expressed, such as that “there is nothing to grieve and that, perhaps, it’s all for the better,” and so on. There were, however, attempts to ask for champagne, but the older guests stopped the younger ones. When everyone had dispersed, Keller leaned over to Lebedev and told him: “You and I would start a shouting match, fight, disgrace ourselves, and attract the police; and he, look, he’s made new friends!” Lebedev sighed and said: “I hid it from the wise and prudent and revealed it to babies”... In the face of the prince we see that humility is the greatest strength, sometimes irreplaceable. Along with his unpretentiousness, the prince possessed the qualities of extreme non-acquisitiveness and gullibility. He arrived in Russia with only a few small coins in his pocket. General Epanchin gives him twenty-five rubles - he distributes this money (to Ivolgin and Terentyeva) very soon... Fate soon sends him a significant inheritance, but he disposed of it “stupidly,” according to General Epanchin: “for example, the creditors of the late merchant appeared, according to the documents are controversial, insignificant, and others, having caught wind of the prince, were without documents at all, so what? The prince satisfied almost everyone, despite the ideas of his friends that all these little people and creditors had absolutely no rights; and therefore only satisfied that it really turned out that some of them actually suffered.” On the same basis, the prince encountered a fraudulent gang grouped near Burdovsky. He managed not only to uncover this fraud with extreme ease, but also to make his friends the members of this group, which others had joined out of ignorance. “I must tell you,” Aglaya said to Nastasya Filippovna, “that I have never met a single person in my life like him in noble simplicity and boundless gullibility. Anyone who wants can deceive him, and whoever deceives him will then forgive everyone." Prince Myshkin combined with Christian humility a strong love for everything weak and suffering, for children, the sick, the humiliated, the unfortunate. This was also revealed in him during his stay in a Swiss village in relation to the children of that village and to one unfortunate girl Marie. “The children above me,” the prince later said, “laughed, and then they even began to throw stones at me when they saw that I had kissed Marie.” Marie, a pathetic, weak, thin girl, the daughter of a poor mother, was seduced and abandoned by a passing French commie. She was covered in terrible shame: everyone looked at her like she was a reptile; the old people condemned and scolded, the young people laughed, the women scolded her, condemned her, looked with such contempt as if she were a spider, the children followed her in a crowd, teased her and threw dirt at her. After the death of her mother and the sermon of the priest, who named her as the culprit of this death, the situation of the sick, hungry, ragged girl became completely unbearable. “I wanted to do something for Marie; I really needed to give her money, but I never had a penny there. I had a small diamond pin, and I sold it to a reseller... I tried for a long time to meet Marie alone; Finally, we met outside the village, by a hedge, on a side path up the mountain, behind a tree. Then I gave her eight francs (all I got for the pin) and told her to take care of it, because I wouldn’t have any more, and then I kissed her and told her not to think that I had any bad intentions, and that I was kissing her not because I was in love with her, but because I was very sorry for her and that from the very beginning I did not consider her at all guilty, but only unfortunate. I really wanted to console her and assure her that she shouldn’t consider herself so low in front of everyone, but she didn’t seem to understand. I noticed this now, although she was almost silent all the time and stood in front of me with downcast eyes and terribly ashamed. When I finished, she kissed my hand, and I immediately took her hand and wanted to kiss it, but she quickly pulled it away. Suddenly, at this time, children, a whole crowd, spied on us; I later found out that they had been spying on me for a long time. They began to whistle, clap and laugh, and Marie began to run. I wanted to speak, but they started throwing stones at me. That same day everyone found out, the whole village; everything fell on Marie again: they began to dislike her even more. “I even heard that they wanted to sentence her to punishment, but, thank God, it turned out that way; That's why the children didn't give her permission, they teased her more than ever, they threw dirt at her; they are chasing her, she runs from them with her weak chest, suffocates, they follow her, screaming, cursing. Once I even rushed to fight with them. Then I started telling them, I talked to them every day as soon as I could. They stopped and listened, although they were still swearing. I told them how unhappy Marie was; They soon stopped cursing and began to walk away in silence. Little by little we began to talk, I did not hide anything from them; I told them everything. They listened very curiously and soon began to feel sorry for Marie... Soon everyone began to love her, and at the same time they suddenly began to love me.” The last days of the unfortunate girl - she soon died - were brightened by this love. When she died, “it was impossible to keep the children here: they filled her entire coffin with flowers and put a wreath on her head.” Prince Myshkin lives with the same love for all who suffer during his stay in Russia, which the author describes. He does not belong to himself at all; a sense of duty and attention to other people’s affairs completely own him. He goes where he is needed, where he considers his presence useful; he recognizes the deeds and sorrows of others as his own deeds and sorrows. And he sacrifices himself - he sacrifices not only his property, his peace of mind, forgets about necessary rest, sleep and food, he even sacrifices his interests, which are usually not considered possible to sacrifice. Even Swiss children understood his love for Marie as love for his bride. “I did not dissuade them that I did not love Marie at all, that is, I was not in love with her, that I only felt very sorry for her; I saw from everything that they wanted it more, as they themselves imagined and put it between themselves, and therefore I remained silent and pretended that they had guessed.”... What the children imagined about his relationship with Marie was reality later in his relationship with Nastasya Filippovna. This, also an unhappy girl, although not pathetic in appearance, desired her marriage to the prince, and he, already having Aglaya, whom he loved, as his bride, agreed to this. “He loved Nastasya Filippovna not with love, but with pity.” And this created a drama in the prince’s life, which he could not bear... Was Prince Myshkin funny? Apparently, he is placed in the most ridiculous, most impossible positions; but, in essence, he is never funny. They laugh and mock him a lot, but only those who “were unworthy to understand” his soul laugh. This laughter always fell on the heads of those laughing, like laughter at a shrine, and always branded low people, incapable of rising to the lofty and beautiful. And those who laughed and were indignant - almost all of them - shook off this laughter, this anger, and clung to the prince. And, in the end, everyone loved him extraordinarily and needed him; good souls rejoiced with him, bad souls became better in his presence; he carried with him a special atmosphere that involuntarily captured everyone, brought out the best in everyone, turned everyone into children, simple, sincere. Ganya, who at first hated the prince, then became frank with him and confessed to him: - You are the first of the noble people I came across... The scoundrel Keller, the main participant in Burdovsky’s fraudulent business, “came to tell the prince his whole life.” He revealed himself to him in all his baseness, “with extraordinary readiness he admitted to such matters that it was impossible to imagine how it was possible to talk about such matters.” “You,” he said to the prince, “you alone, and only in order to help your development!” No one else; I will die and take away my secret under the shroud!.. “Well, here you are,” Lebedev said to Prince, “I’ll tell you the truth only, because you penetrate a person... I wouldn’t tell anyone else - he’ll laugh or spit; but you, prince, judge humanly... The Epanchins - mother and daughters - loved the prince enthusiastically. Especially Aglaya. “With you,” she said to the prince, “I want to talk about everything, everything, even about the most important things, whenever I want... I want to talk about everything with at least one person as if I were talking to myself... Sometimes the prince did not bring any benefit, but “there are people whom for some reason it is pleasant to see next to you in other difficult moments.” And for all that, the prince was not a child in mind. It cannot be said about him that he did not know how to distinguish his right hand from his left, good from evil, he did not stand in the zone of Buddhist indifference. In its simplicity, it almost always turns out to be clairvoyant; he understands people's motives well; capable of forgiving almost everything, he is ashamed of the base lies of others, and sometimes becomes indignant. According to the author's intention, there is nothing funny about the prince. There is only something in him why he must suffer - his loneliness among people, his monasticism. He is not of this world. And this is expressed in his symbolic idiocy. And then - alone in the field is not a warrior: the idiot prince is powerless in the fight against circumstances, against human passions, against worldly evil - and he dies, falling into his former idiocy. The sick idiocy of the prince is the only thing that leaves the great task unfinished: the author completed it brilliantly, but still did not complete it. The prince’s idiocy forms his original natural incompleteness, abnormality, while a fully living holy man must be naturally normal. Such a naturally normal saint is Alyosha Karamazov. I will not talk about him, because I spoke about him in another place (Types of religious and moral life)... But I will note that in the person of Alyosha Karamazov the picture of living holiness is not completed, since Alyosha was left by the author only on the threshold of life. In addition to the indicated difference, Alyosha Karamazov is an exact copy of Prince Myshkin. In addition to these two types, Dostoevsky also identifies other saints. Elder Zosima and Makar Ivanovich are saints with an inclination towards asceticism and contemplation. Dostoevsky's heroes are most often good people. “We are all comically kind people,” says one of them. The “teenager” wants power and wealth solely in order to give all his millions to people. Raskolnikov kills the old pawnbroker in order to gain the opportunity to do good. “I only wanted to take the first step - to put myself in an independent position, to achieve the means, and then everything would be smoothed over by immeasurable, comparatively, benefits. I wanted good for people." Almost all of Dostoevsky’s heroes, no matter how low they stand ethically, no matter how deeply they fall, have in their hearts sparks of goodness, or Christian self-denial, or humanitarian heroism, or a thirst for truth and higher harmony. Just as the ancient Christian apologists noticed the seeds of the Logos in the history of the pagan world and called the pagan sages Christians before Christ, Dostoevsky, among criminals, social scum, behind the walls of a dead house in which he himself spent several years, listens to the beating of a good heart and a strong will. “And how many youths were buried in vain within these walls, how many great forces died here in vain! After all, everything must be said: after all, these people were an extraordinary people. After all, this, perhaps, is the most gifted, the most powerful people of all our people.” Next to the images of Christian holiness, love and humility, with the images of Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives an image of the deepest fall to which a person can reach, the last abysses of denial, all the power of passions and the uncontrollability of crimes. Tolstoy dwells with the greatest love on everyday pictures, on ordinary phenomena of family and social life, and with the greatest attention describes the normal development of these phenomena, their universal, historical side. Such pictures are almost absent in Dostoevsky’s art; he takes moments and cases, he describes what can only happen, what sometimes happens - under an unusual combination of conditions and circumstances, which even in other respects seems incredible. He needs these combinations of cases and circumstances, these unusual confluences and coincidences not in themselves, but as a canvas on which a person’s inner world is revealed, as a framework into which human characters are inserted. And again, the inner world of a person interests him not from its general mental side, not in the normal development of ordinary characters, but in the highest points to which this development sometimes reaches, in religious and philosophical enlightenments, in extreme revelations of the final truth, in those experiences that are rarer, the more curious. The extreme development of passions that cross ordinary boundaries and take on sophisticated logical forms in line with higher determinism, and the extreme development of bold and new ideas embodied in living and strong feelings are the beloved sphere of his genius. With intense attention he peers at the point where lies become truth and truth lies, where denial acquires positive force and affirmation reaches relaxing heights, where faith falls into unbelief and unbelief becomes faith, where love degenerates into hatred and love grows out of hatred. The emergence of the soul from ordinary facets, the transgression of ordinary laws, the individual revelation of mental power, the bizarre combination of mental forces, the extreme tension of passions, the bends of individual experience in one direction or another and, therefore, in the direction of fall - this is what Dostoevsky rivets the eyes of his readers. Spending a week among his heroes is like spending it in a psychiatric ward, or in a confessional. All these Raskolnikovs, Myshkins, Rogozhins, Karamazovs act in conditions of an already beginning illness, some kind of fever, nervous breakdown - in painful conditions that are valuable in that they throw off a person’s usual shackles of common life, the accepted restraint, that in them the soul opens up in its elemental-unconscious nature. “Listen,” Liza said to Alyosha Karamazov, “now your brother is being tried for killing his father, and everyone loves that he killed his father.” - They love it, everyone loves it! Everyone says it’s terrible, but secretly they love it terribly. I love you first. “There is some truth in your words about everyone,” Alyosha said quietly. And in all the heroes of Dostoevsky, in the idiocy of Myshkin, in Karamazovism, in the logic of Raskolnikov - in all there is some truth, in all human nature is revealed, usually covered by a thousand-year-old veil of cultural equalization, communal smoothing. Dostoevsky has almost no wooden figures, dead souls like the groom Luzhin, the image of which does not affect anything in the reader’s soul. The most extreme humiliation into which a person falls, the most extreme degree of moral decline to which he reaches - in Dostoevsky’s depiction does not erase his human face, does not break his kinship with the reader’s soul. It is precisely the fact that his heroes, at the very bottom of their moral fall, retain the features of the human heart, a spark of goodness, - this circumstance highlights the human nature of their moral death, makes this death understandable to readers, arouses intense sympathy for them - but at the same time highlights it from its most difficult side. The reader of Dostoevsky sees most clearly to what extent a person can fall, what baseness can be contained in his heart, to what abyss of denial and unbelief he can reach. Marmeladov, carrying in his heart “painful love for his wife and family,” drinks away the last crumbs of family supplies, takes away their last piece of bread. And what a piece of bread: his daughter Sonya sacrificed her body for the family, took upon herself the suffering of debauchery, and her drunken father takes money from her for drunkenness. “Today I was at Sonya’s, I went to ask for a hangover!.. This very half-shtof was bought with her money,” said Marmeladov, turning to Raskolnikov. “I took out thirty kopecks with my own hands, the last ones, I saw everything that was there... Svidrigailov, with his undoubted non-acquisitiveness and nobility, with the ability for a higher view of life and a feeling of world sorrow, “who never had great hatred for anyone and never even particularly wanted to take revenge,” amazes with the last depths of cynicism and depravity. - This is the most depraved and lost in vices of all people of this kind! Luzhin spoke about Svidrigailov. “I have significant reason to believe that Marfa Petrovna, who had the misfortune of falling in love with him so much and redeeming him from his debts eight years ago, served him in another respect: it was only through her efforts and sacrifices that, at the very beginning, a criminal case was extinguished, with an admixture of brutal and, so to speak, fantastic murder, for which he very, very could have gone to Siberia... Here she lived and now, it seems, lives, a certain Resslich, a foreigner and, moreover, a small pawnbroker, also involved in other matters. Mr. Svidrigailov had long been in some very close and mysterious relations with this Resslich. She had a distant relative, a niece, apparently deaf and dumb, a girl of fifteen or even fourteen years old, whom this Resslich hated infinitely and reproached with every morsel; I even beat her inhumanly. Once she was found hanged in the attic. It was ruled as suicide. After the usual procedures, the matter ended, but subsequently, however, a denunciation appeared that the child was... cruelly insulted by Svidrigailov... When Svidrigailov told Raskolnikov about his love for children and cited several cases from his relationships with girls, he could not help but feel disgust and a shudder of heart. - Leave, leave your vile, low jokes, depraved, low, voluptuous person! Nikolai Stavrogin, a man of enormous willpower, who suffered a slap in the face with the greatness of Prince Myshkin, who had the courage to disregard the opinion of society and challenged it with his marriage to the holy fool Lebyadkina, also harbored within himself an “extraordinary capacity for crime.” “Is it true that you,” Shatov told him angrily, “is it true that you belonged to a bestial, voluptuous secret society in St. Petersburg?” Is it true that the Marquis de Sade could learn from you? Is it true that you lured and corrupted children?.. Karamazovism, which gave us a beautiful, unparalleled in literature, image of the “early lover of humanity” Alyosha, showed at the same time the depth of moral decline and the abyss of religious negation. The father of this family is Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, “a depraved voluptuous man and a vile comedian.” This is how his own son Dmitry Fedorovich defines him. Fyodor Pavlovich opened his whole soul in a conversation with his youngest son “I, dear Alexey Fedorovich, intend to live as long as possible in the world, if only you knew this, and therefore I need every penny, and the longer I live, the more necessary it will be.” Now I’m still a man, fifty-five in total, but I want to be a man for another twenty years, because when I get old, I’ll become filthy, they won’t come to me with good will then, well, that’s where I’ll need money. So now I’m saving up more and more, and more, for myself alone, sir, my dear son Alexei Fedorovich, if only you knew, because I want to live in my filth to the end, if only you knew this. It’s sweeter in filth: everyone scolds it, but everyone lives in it, only everything is secret, but I openly. It was because of my innocence that all the bad guys attacked me. But I don’t want to go to your paradise, Alexey Fedorovich, you would know that, but for a decent person it would be indecent even to go to your paradise, even if there is one there. In my opinion, I fell asleep and didn’t wake up, and there’s nothing, remember me if you want, but if you don’t want to, then damn you. That's my philosophy. The corresponding rules of life also flowed from this philosophy. “For me,” he said to his children, “for me... Oh, you guys!” Children, you little pigs, for me... even in my entire life there has never been an ugly woman, that’s my rule!.. Smerdyakov, born from the ugly beggar Lizaveta Smerdyashchaya, was rumored to be the son of Fyodor Pavlovich. This Karamazovism lurks and operates in all of Fyodor Pavlovich’s children. All of them, with all the differences in their characters, are capable of high impulses and have a truly kind heart - not only Alyosha, a holy man, but also Dmitry, who spoke in his torn dream about crying village children, hungry, cold, blackened by black misfortune, and Ivan, who is busy with a peasant... And all of them, with their high impulses, they are all children of their father, Karamazov - not only the dissolute reveler Dmitry, burned with passion, trembling at the mere thought of the infernal curve, “which echoed even in the little finger on the left leg” of his beloved woman, not only Ivan, who, according to Smerdyakov, “of all the children came out most like Fyodor Pavlovich, with the same soul as him,” but also Alyosha. “I,” he confessed to Liza, “have already touched a lot, a lot... Oh, I’m Karamazov too!... Ivan Karamazov went further than his brothers in the area of ​​religious and ethical doubt. In relation to God, he proclaimed rebellion - and this rebellion is so firmly founded that it costs the reader enormous effort of thought and will to free himself from his nightmare. In the ethical field, he put forward the principle “everything is allowed,” which decisively turned the moral consciousness of the people of our generation upside down. In the person of the “teenager,” the author, in his own words (in the Writer’s Diary), “took a sinless soul, but already polluted by the terrible possibility of depravity.” Prince Sergei Sokolsky also “passionately respects nobility, but only in an ideal way. All his life he constantly curses himself and repents, but never corrects himself. He’s looking for greater achievement, but he’s doing dirty tricks over little things.” The height of ideals and the baseness of life - such is Prince Sokolsky... Let's go down from the main characters to the secondary ones, from the secondary ones to the tertiary ones - and in all of them we will find the same combination of high impulses and low actions. Keller confesses to Prince Myshkin with emotion: - Noble, noble, chivalrously noble! But you know, prince, everything is just in dreams and, so to speak, in courage, in reality it never works out... Lebedev tells the prince the same thing. - Well, here you are, I will tell you the truth only, because you discern a person: words, deeds, lies, and truth - I have everything together and completely sincerely... So, the types of Christian holiness derived from Dostoevsky are high and his heroes are immeasurably low in their moral decline, in their spiritual corruption. But there is no impassable gulf between the two: its saints are living people, and its sinners retain sparks of goodness in the very last stench of their moral corruption. Before the problem of the highest synthesis, the final harmony, is posed, the foundations for its solution have already been given in the very understanding of spiritual heights and carnal baseness. However, it is not difficult to see that these foundations are exclusively psychological in nature, but not fundamental. We see in the human soul layers of different experiences, just as in social life we ​​simultaneously see layers left over from different historical eras and overlapping one another. The result is a bizarre mixture, which in general weakens every aspect of human life, erases the various colors of impulses into one gray colorlessness), but in particular leads to many tragic conflicts. Evolutionary science speaks of disharmonies not only in the social and family instincts of man, but also in the structure and functions of his bodily organs. Adaptation of the body, both mental and physical, to changing conditions requires considerable time, hence temporary disharmonies are inevitable. These disharmonies constitute a fact of our life, which in itself does not provide any fundamental conclusions. There is no direct transition from what is available to what should be: this requires intermediate links. Disharmony needs to be comprehended, and for this it is necessary to raise it to some higher principle, standing outside of one and the other side - only in this case it becomes a fact of a higher order, united in a higher synthesis. Of course, the evolutionary theory does not want to know such a reconciliation and discards with contempt all higher ideas; its last hope is non-functioning rudimentary organs, and it looks equally at disharmonies, both physiological and social. Evolution will extinguish instincts that contradict new social conditions. Over time, a person will be naturally virtuous, completely social - serving society will not give him anything other than pleasure, and will be reduced to exclusively selfish motives. Virtue will be rational selfishness. Of course, all the excessively heavenly impulses generated in the days of the youth of the human race will also disappear; good will coincide with public benefit. But then the wild bloodthirsty instincts will disappear, and everything will be leveled out in everyday prudence. But the religious view of life cannot be content with these evolutionary aspirations. Firstly, religion wants to give every moment of historical life a non-random meaning, to record every era in the heavenly book of eternity. The human soul is not the same as a physiological function, and the pangs of mental disharmony cannot be sufficiently atoned for by the coming equation. The highest synthesis is required for every time. Secondly, some types of disharmony are made up of halves of which one does not want to sacrifice. It is easy to resolve the issue of the cecum, but it is difficult to say what is more valuable to us, the bubbling of earthly passions or the silence of heavenly peace, the torment of suffering and struggle or the bliss of nirvana. In any case, the ideal of “human benefits, calculated as an average from statistical figures and scientific-economic formulas” must be recognized as not satisfying a person, because this “register” does not include “the most profitable benefit that is dearest to a person” - the benefit of personal initiative, individual feelings, one’s will. Happiness is not “in happiness itself,” but in personal and unique efforts to achieve it. The colors of life, the bubbling of passions, self-will “can be more beneficial than all the benefits, even in this case, if it brings us obvious harm and contradicts the most sound conclusions of our reason about benefits - because, in any case, it preserves for us what is most important and dearest, that is, our personality and our individuality.” Another question is whether a person - in his highest contemplations and final dreams - will want to part with his passions-suffering, with the disharmony of light and darkness, whether he will want a universal equation and the final “hosanna”: after all, this “hosanna” would mean the end of life, the end of everything that gives the picture richness. – What would have happened after my “hosanna”? Everything in the world would immediately fade away and no incidents would happen... I know there is a secret here, but they never want to tell me the secret... But until the secret is revealed, for me there are two truths: one there, theirs, not yet known to me at all, and the other is mine. And it remains to be seen which will be purer.”...As long as we live, our religion lies in the reconciliation of both halves of disharmony, in the synthesis of both poles of life. The psychologically random compatibility of the two poles makes a higher synthesis possible, but only possible, constitutes its condition and only the condition. Essentially, synthesis presupposes a principle that lies outside the disharmonious sides, above them, above them. Dostoevsky points out this principle in life itself. He confesses it through the mouth of Ivan Karamazov. “I don’t believe in life, even if I lose faith in a dear woman, if I lose faith in the order of things, if I even become convinced that everything, on the contrary, is disordered, damned and, perhaps, demonic chaos, even if all the horrors of human disappointment strike me, I still want to live, and even as I fell for this cup, I won’t tear myself away from it until I overcome it all!.. My youth will conquer everything - every disappointment, any aversion to life. I asked myself many times: is there such despair in the world that this frenzied and perhaps indecent thirst for life would overcome in me, and I decided that, it seems, there is no such thing... Other consumptive brats-moralists often call this thirst for life vile, especially poets. It’s partly Karamazov’s trait, it’s true, this thirst for life, no matter what, but why is it vile? There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet. I want to live, and I live, even if against logic. I may not believe in the order of things, but dear to me are the sticky leaves that bloom in spring, dear to the blue sky, dear to me is another person whom you sometimes don’t know why you love, dear to another human feat in which you may have stopped believing long ago, but still, out of old memory, you honor him with your heart... Sticky spring leaves, blue sky, I love, that’s what! This is not intelligence, this is not logic, here you love with your gut, here with your womb, you love your first young strength... Do you understand anything in my nonsense, Alyoshka, or not? Ivan suddenly laughed. “I understand too much, Ivan: with your gut and belly you want to love,” you said it beautifully, and I’m terribly glad that you want to live like this, exclaimed Alyosha. “I think that everyone should, first of all, love life in the world.. “It’s absolutely necessary to love before logic, as you say, to love before logic, and only then will I understand the meaning.” This is what I have been imagining for a long time. Half of your work is done, Ivan, and acquired: you love to live... Dostoevsky said many new words. But perhaps his most precious new word is this word about life, about love for life more than for its meaning. Life is more important than any thoughts about life - the feeling of life is more important than any feelings that complicate life. Let life be beautiful, life meaningful is higher than just life, but life, life itself, is more significant than any definitions and any direction of life. Life itself is a mystery, and the consciousness of life, its sensation, is the first basis of religion: life in its very essence is mystical and religious. The first prayer of a person is reverence for life, solemn listening to it. Life as such is an inevitable and direct path to God. He who lives thereby already knows God and serves Him. On the contrary, lifeless holiness, the height of invented ideals, head ideas, is a fiction, fata morgana, a dream. It is true that life is born in blood and mud, and it develops in carnal passions - and all this is disgusting to the disgusting spirit: it seems that as life shortens, this mud is shaken off, this heat cools, and it becomes purer. But this is an empty dream: the soul of man is in living blood, and through living blood he ascends to God. “It’s terrible for a person to endure a lot on earth,” Dmitry said to Alyosha, “he’s afraid of a lot of troubles!” Brother, I almost only think about this, about this humiliated man, because I myself am such a person. I walk and don’t know whether I’ve landed in stink and shame or in light and joy. That’s where the trouble lies, because everything in the world is a mystery! And when I happened to plunge into the deepest, deepest shame of depravity (and that’s all that ever happened to me), I always read this poem. Did it fix me? Never! Because I am Karamazov. Because if I’m going to fly into the abyss, I’ll do it straight, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that it’s in this humiliating position that I fall and consider it beauty for myself. And in this very shame I suddenly begin the anthem. Let me be cursed, let me be low and vile, but let me kiss the hem of the robe in which my God is clothed; let me follow the devil at the same time, but I am still Your son, Lord, and I love You, and I feel joy, without which the world cannot stand and be... Later in prison, on suspicion of parricide, and awaiting hard labor, Dmitry Karamazov saves himself with the same love of life. - We will be in chains, and there will be no will, but then, in our great grief, we will rise again into joy, without which it is impossible for man to live, and for God to be, for God gives joy, this is His great privilege... Then we, underground people, will sing from the bowels of the earth a tragic hymn to God, who has joy! Long live God and His joy! I love Him!.. No, life is full, there is life underground!.. And what is suffering? I’m not afraid of it, even if it were countless... And it seems that there is so much of this power in me now that I will overcome everything, all suffering, just to say and tell myself every minute: I am! In a thousand torments - I am, in torture I writhe - but I am!... The thirst for life and its joy saves Dmitry Karamazov both in the shame of debauchery and in the agony of suffering. And Alyosha Karamazov, in the most difficult moment of his life, is saved by “union with the earth” - “he kissed her while crying, sobbing and pouring his tears, and frantically swore to love her, to love her forever and ever”... Such was the covenant of his holy elder - “to drench the earth with tears of joy.” And the holy fool Lebyadkina, Stavrogin’s wife, babbles that “God and nature are all one,” that “the Mother of God is the great mother of the damp earth,” that one must kiss the ground in prayer. Life itself, as the principle of thought and feeling, reconciles disharmonious sides, opposite poles - life itself constitutes the all-reconciling religious content. Good and evil, bliss and suffering, moral height and the shame of fall have something in common that stands above them and reconciles them: this is the flowering of life, the joy of being. Above abstract good, head ideals, living good, living man, but also in evil, in the stench of depravity, man also lives and sings a hymn to God. Evil is absolutely disgusting when it becomes an abstract principle, shortens human life, when “it is not a person who eats an idea, but an idea that eats a person”; but under this condition, goodness “smells like carrion.” Good is valuable because it makes a person alive, but the shame of falling, the pangs of suffering are not absolutely disgusting if they cover a living person, if they are permeated with a feeling of life, the joy of being. And this connection of poles in the sphere of life is so real and effective that a holy person, if he is alive, “touches” a lot, “understands” a lot - and the thirst for life already carries within himself a guarantee of good. “You,” Versilov said to the teenager, “you want to live so much and are so thirsty to live that, it seems, if you were given three lives, even those would not be enough for you; Well, these people are mostly good-natured. He who loves life cannot help but be kind in the last defilement of the fall, at the very bottom of depravity. But, it goes without saying, it is not these sparks of goodness, preserved at the bottom of the fall, that provide the highest solution to all-reconciling harmony, for this would mean that goodness is highest and that the separation of the poles is irremovable. No, it is not goodness, abundant at one pole and meager at the other, that provides the final reconciliation, but religion, life as a religious principle. The joy of life, which turns the heart to God, can be as strong in a sinner as in a righteous person; the faith of the prodigal son warmed his heart more strongly than the cold legalistic complacency of the eldest son, his soul burned with fiery love for the all-forgiving Father, not in the least weakened by his depraved life, but rather strengthened by this consciousness of his baseness. It is not good deeds that save a person, atone for his sins, but religious faith. - And he will judge and forgive everyone, both the good and the evil, both the wise and the humble... And when he has finished with everyone, then he will say to us: “Come out,” he will say, you too! Come out drunk, come out weak, come out drunk!” And we will all go out without shame and stand. And he will say: “You pigs! The image of the beast and its seal; but come too!” And the wise will say, the wise will say: “Lord! Why do you accept these people?” And he will say: “That is why I accept them, the wise ones, because I accept them, the wise ones, because not one of these himself considered himself worthy of this”... And he will stretch out His hands to us, and we will fall down... and cry... and we will understand everything! Then we will understand everything!.., and everyone will understand... Hak judged Marmeladov with his drunken tongue. And the holy elder Zosima taught: - Brothers, do not be afraid of the sin of people, love a person even in his sin, for this similarity to divine love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God's creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God. Love animals, love plants, love everything. You will love every thing and you will comprehend the mystery of God in things... Divine love for people, for the righteous and sinners, is the same love as love for every thing - love that transcends the differences between good and evil. Religious joy of life gives the highest harmony that lies beyond the boundaries of ethical poles. But the principle of life does only half the job. - Half of your work is done, Ivan, and acquired: you love to live. Now you need to try for your other half, and you are saved. The principle of life is half the battle, because nevertheless it does not destroy the internal difference between good and evil, moral height and moral lowness, yet from within the disharmony remains unreconciled. This remainder is reconciled, apparently, according to the principle of beauty: in both poles there can be the same beauty. – Beauty is a terrible and terrible thing! Terrible because it is indefinable, but it is impossible to determine, because God gave only riddles. Here the shores meet, here all the contradictions live together... Another person, even higher in heart and with a lofty mind, begins with the ideal of the Madonna, and ends with the ideal of Sodom. It is even more terrible for someone who, already with the ideal of Sodom in his soul, does not deny the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart burns from it, and in truth, in truth, burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, the man is wide, too wide, I would narrow it down. The devil knows what it even is, that's what! What seems disgraceful to the mind is pure beauty to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe that in Sodom it sits for the vast majority of people... The terrible thing is that beauty is not only a terrible, but also a mysterious thing. Here the devil fights with God, and the battlefield is the hearts of people... The beauty of both poles is not the same as the psychologically random combination of disharmonious sides noted above - “touching everything” of holy souls and sparks of goodness preserved in the stench of the fall. Now we are talking about a fundamental reconciliation of the poles, about their coincidence in their last points. That combination, for example, means that the criminal, despite his crime, retains something good in his soul, some good feelings, good thoughts, love for someone, and this fundamental reconciliation means that the crime itself can be committed in the name of good, for the sake of some higher motives, that sublime love for humanity, boldly brought to the final conclusions, leads to the transgression of obstacles, that the crime is resolved “by conscience,” with its sanction, with religious sanctification. Criminals who carry in their souls some kind of love for good, despite their fall, have long been known, and the idea of ​​resolving a crime according to conscience “for the first time” came to Raskolnikov. “Then I came up with one idea that no one had ever thought of before me... So, it is in this fundamental sense that Dostoevsky uses the idea of beauty to reconcile different poles. Good, in addition to the sense of duty by which it is determined, also contains beauty, but evil, in its conscious and extreme manifestations, contains the same beauty. The most sacred book says: “You are neither cold nor hot; Oh, that you were cold or hot! But because you are warm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.” Lukewarmness, sluggish service to goodness, when a person does not dare to bring the poisoned cup of evil to his lips, but cannot fully cleave to goodness - this lukewarmness has something absolutely disgusting in it. On the contrary, in resolute coldness, in resolute service to the earth, in resolute worship of evil, there is something aesthetically great, soul-grabbing, fascinating. The embodiment of this all-reconciling beauty in the soul of man, in the soul of chosen people, some “special” people who feel the same beauty in both poles and, as it were, prophesying the coming world reconciliation of good and evil, most of all attracted Dostoevsky’s attention. About Raskolnikov, Razumikhin says: - It’s as if two opposite characters alternately replace him. Prince Myshkin loves Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya at the same time “with two different loves,” that is, he loves Nastasya Filippovna with pity, and out of pity he wants to marry her - “it’s just so easy to marry,” and at the same time he loves Aglaya with husband-woman love. – I love Nastasya Filippovna with all my soul! - And at the same time they assured Aglaya Ivanovna of their love? - How? So you want to love both? Versilov is the same type. He says about himself: – I am infinitely strong by the direct power of getting along with anything. Nothing can destroy me, nothing can destroy me, and nothing can surprise me. I can comfortably feel two opposite feelings at the same time. Mostly Versilov feels this “contact of opposites” in the field of love: he also has two loves - one for Sofya Andreevna, the mother of the “teenager” (“more, so to speak, humane and universal love than simple love”) and the other for other women, for example, for Katerina Nikolaevna (simple, passionate love). During one of the transitions from one love to another, he said to Sofya Andreevna: - Goodbye, Sonya, I’m going on a journey again, as I’ve already left you several times... Well, of course, someday I’ll come to you again - in this sense, you are inevitable. And this is how he depicts his internal state at the same time: “You know, it seems to me that I’m completely split into two, I’m mentally split into two and I’m terribly afraid of it.” Your double is standing exactly next to you; You yourself are smart and reasonable, but he certainly wants to do some nonsense, and sometimes a funny thing, next to you; and suddenly you notice that you yourself want to do this fun thing, and God knows why, that is, you somehow reluctantly want to, resisting with all your might. I once knew a doctor who, at his father’s funeral in church, suddenly whistled... Versilov took the image in his hands and hit it with all his might against the corner of the stove: the image split into exactly two pieces. Also with Versilov in other respects: “worldwide pain for everyone” and the most undisguised egoism, the height of impulses, the power of faith, chains - and the bubbling of passions, atheism... The simultaneous feeling of two abysses is all of nature and Dmitry Karamazov. The psychologist-prosecutor, discussing the character of Dmitry Karamazov, his ability for noble impulses and disgusting actions, finds this ability to be the most revealing of the depths of his soul. – It usually happens in life that when there are two opposites, the truth must be sought in the middle; in the present case this is literally not the case. Most likely, in the first case he was sincerely noble, and in the second case he was also sincerely low. Why? But precisely because we are broad, Karamazov-like natures, capable of containing all sorts of opposites and contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, the abyss of the highest ideals, and the abyss below us, the abyss of the lowest and most fetid fall... The feeling of the baseness of the fall is just as necessary for these unbridled, unbridled natures, as is the feeling of the highest nobility... It is they who need this unnatural mixture constantly and incessantly. Two abysses at the same moment - without this we are unhappy and dissatisfied, our existence is not complete. We are wide, wide like all of our Mother Russia, we can accommodate everything and get along with everything! Nikolai Stavrogin is the same type and, at the same time, the brightest, most prominently expressed. The soul of his soul is a “thirst for contrasts.” He was capable of the most sublime generosity, and at the same time, anger lurked in his soul, cold, calm and reasonable, therefore, the most disgusting, the most terrible that could be. At the same time, he plants God and his homeland in Shatov’s heart, preaches to him the fanatical idea of ​​a God-bearing people, and at the same time, on the same days, he poisons Kirilov’s heart with the poison of decisive atheism. He did not know the difference in beauty between some voluptuous, brutal thing and any feat, even a sacrifice of life for humanity - in both poles he found a coincidence of beauty, the sameness of pleasure. On the eve of his death, his suicide, he confessed to his beloved girl: “I tried my strength everywhere.” You advised me this “to get to know yourself.” At tests for herself and for the show, she turned out to be limitless. Before your eyes, I suffered a slap in the face from your brother; I confessed my marriage (to Lebyadkina) publicly... I can wish to do a good deed and I feel pleasure from it; next to me I wish for evil and I also feel pleasure. The idea of ​​the all-reconciling power of beauty, the aesthetic coincidence of poles, the sameness of pleasure in good and evil is one of the most daring ideas that could ever have arisen in Dostoevsky’s soul. And what - do we have in this idea the final reconciliation of opposites, does it give the final harmony, can the highest synthesis be considered achieved? We have no reason to answer this question in the affirmative. Beauty does not provide a real synthesis of opposites. We can undoubtedly establish this in all of Dostoevsky’s “extraordinary people”, in whom a coincidence of opposites is revealed. All “extraordinary people”, bearers of the same pleasure in both poles, can be divided into three categories. In the first two categories, the disharmonious sides are presented unequally, not with equal reality, but in such a way that either good acts only in the form of head ideals, in the form of empty abstract dreams, while evil manifests itself in rich colors, in deep passions, or, on the contrary, earthly feelings and evil thoughts stir in the soul too weakly, theoretically colorless, abstractly, while love for good completely and firmly controls the soul. Only in the third category of “extraordinary people” do we observe equal strength of both poles. So, the first category is people with a real inclination towards the earth and abstract dreams of the sublime and beautiful; the second category - people with a real aspiration to heaven and with a weak sense of earth, with an abstract thought about evil; third category - people with an equal inclination towards good and evil. The first type is the hero of the “underground” and Dmitry Karamazov. Here is the first confession. – My streak of debauchery was ending and I felt terribly sick... But I had a way out that reconciled everything, this was to escape into “everything beautiful and lofty”, of course in dreams. I dreamed terribly, I dreamed for three months in a row... I suddenly became a hero... Dreams came to me especially sweeter and stronger after debauchery, they came with repentance and tears, with curses and delight. There were moments of such positive rapture, such happiness that even the slightest ridicule was not felt inside me, by God. There was faith, hope, love. I blindly believed then that by some miracle, by some external circumstance, all this would suddenly move apart, expand - and then I would suddenly appear in the light of God, almost on a white horse and not in a laurel wreath. I couldn’t even understand the secondary role, and that’s precisely why, in fact, I occupied the latter very calmly. Either a hero or dirt, there was no middle ground. This is what ruined me, because in the mud I consoled myself with the fact that at other times I was a hero, but the hero covered up the mud. It is remarkable that these tides of “everything beautiful and lofty” came to me even during debauchery, and precisely when I was already at the very bottom, they came in separate flashes, as if reminding me of themselves, but did not, however, destroy debauchery with their appearance; on the contrary, it was as if they were enlivening it with contrast... But how much love, Lord, how much love I experienced in these dreams of mine, in these “salvation into everything beautiful and lofty”; although it was a fantastic love, although it had never actually been applied to anything human, there was so much of it, this love, that later, in fact, there was no need to even apply it... So is Dmitry Karamazov. All his life, “with a Diogenes lantern,” he seeks nobility and at the same time lives a careless, ugly, drunken, dirty life. He speaks about himself, about his life to Alyosha: “I loved debauchery, I loved the shame of debauchery, I loved cruelty: am I not a bug, am I not an evil insect? It’s said – Karamazov!” Dmitry Fedorovich is a voluptuous and evil insect. The ideal of Madonna, which he carries in his soul along with this Sodomite ideal, is deeply hidden in his heart, peeking out from there timidly and inactively. “When I happened to plunge into the deepest, deepest shame of depravity (and that’s all that ever happened to me), I always read a poem about Ceres. Did it fix me? Never! Because I am Karamazov. Because if I’m going to fly into the abyss, I’ll do it straight, head down and heels up.”... That’s how I really lived. Dmitry Fedorovich. However, in those days, which are described in the novel, he experiences something new under the thunder of special circumstances - he experiences a rebirth, a resurrection. “Brother,” he says to Alyosha, while in prison, “in these last two months I felt a new person in myself. A new person has risen in me! Was imprisoned within me, but would never have appeared if not for this thunder.” From Dmitry Karamazov, who simultaneously felt two abysses, through the hero of the underground, through Prince Sokolsky, we gradually descend to Marmeladov, Keller, Lebedev, who did not know any abysses, but lived simply in. dirt, retaining a vague memory of the kingdom of God, which could not rise to the height of their sparks, to the height of their good moments, solely from moral weakness, from powerlessness before the demands of the social environment. These Marmeladovs simply lack culture; for them, all their salvation, a small, philistine salvation, will come from social evolution, from the development of economic and social conditions. It is not the gods who burn the bricks, and it is not religion that is needed to cure a person of alcoholism, rowdyism, usury, and fraud. It's easy to see; but it is noteworthy that the transition from the extraordinary people of the double poles to these weak and drunken ones occurs with amazing gradualness - there is absolutely no way to indicate the boundaries between them. And the breadth of Dmitry Karamazov has too many spontaneous and uncultured elements in it; it is entirely due to his moral weakness, his spiritual depravity. Personal good inclinations and the savagery of the environment, the height of abstract ideals and the strength of social disorder - these are the springs of his inner tragedy. Obviously, the first category of extraordinary people does not take us one step beyond the limits of the elemental-psychic compatibility of different mental strata, and does not move us one inch towards the height of the fundamental reconciliation of the poles. Dmitry Karamazov is all from the spontaneous past, and there is nothing fundamentally future in him... The same must be said about the other two categories. The second category is people with a real aspiration to heaven and with a weak sense of earth, with an abstract thought about evil. These are Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Kirilov. Explaining to Evgeny Pavlovich about his “two loves” for Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya and instructing him to talk about something with Aglaya, to explain to her that by marrying Nastasya Filippovna, he does not in the least contradict his love for Aglaya, the prince at the same time expresses an involuntary feeling of some kind of guilt. “Oh, yes, I’m guilty!” Most likely it's all my fault! I still don’t know what exactly, but I’m to blame... There’s something here that I can’t explain to you, Evgeny Pavlovich, and I don’t have the words, but... Aglaya Ivanovna will understand! Oh, I always believed that she would understand. - No, prince, he won’t understand! Aglaya Ivanovna loved like a woman, like a person, and not like... an abstract spirit. Do you know what, my poor prince: most likely, you never loved either one! The prince loved Nastasya Filippovna with love and pity, but with simple love the prince did not love either Nastasya Filippovna or Aglaya. And this was his fault, and hence his “two loves,” which he could not figure out. “Are you, prince, a big hunter of the female gender?” - I n-n-no! I... You may not know, because due to my congenital illness I don’t even know women at all. This is where the prince's guilt comes from. A living saint in all respects, the prince in one respect turned out to be a dead mummy - in the respect in which he split into two, split into two poles, in relation to a woman. The combination of two poles, “two loves” in one heart in this case serves as undoubted evidence of natural weakness and abnormality. As for Prince Myshkin, the same should be said about Alyosha Karamazov. In him we see essentially one thing heavenly, spiritual. If he tells Lisa about himself that “he has touched a lot,” that he understands the terrible malice of people, then these are words, only words that are not confirmed by a single line in the course of the novel. Likewise, his love for Liza Khokhlakova, despite the kiss, is some kind of childish, bloodless love. The unchildish Lisa simply tells him one day: “You are not fit to be a husband. I will marry you, and suddenly I will give a note to take to the one I love after you (for example, Ivan Fedorovich). You will take it and certainly carry it back, and you will also bring an answer.” Such bloodless, jealousy-free love does not satisfy Lisa... We see the same infirmity that Prince Myshkin has in a completely different attitude, in relation to crime, in Raskolnikov. Of course, this weakness, the weakness to crime, is one of those in which the power of God is accomplished, but for aesthetics there is no ethical point of view, it only knows two poles and the sameness of pleasure in them - and it is enough for us in this place to note only the pallor of one of the poles. Raskolnikov is a deep lover of humanity. Love for people permeates him to the marrow of his bones. On the contrary, his capacity for crime is purely theoretical - “bookish dreams, a theoretically irritated heart.” Therefore, it is no coincidence that Raskolnikov cannot stand crime. His crime for good purposes is the hasty confusion of a good heart with a head theory. Kirilov's head, fictitious (inspired by Stavrogin) atheism is combined with the most good-natured, good-heartedness. This atheist, who decided to kill himself, solely to prove his willfulness (the first atheistic-theoretical suicide, like Raskolnikov’s first theoretical crime), and at the same time lighting a lamp because “the old woman loves,” amusing the child with a ball and rejoicing at the birth of the Shatovs’ baby, this atheist, who was “slain by the idea,” is the heaviest, most pitiful creation of artistic creativity. Now let us turn to the third category of extraordinary people. These are Versilov, Ivan Karamazov, Svidrigailov and especially Stavrogin. They have equal inclination towards both poles. But this “most convenient” adaptation to all circumstances cannot be recognized as the pinnacle of human development. The sameness of pleasure in both poles, upon closer observation, turns out to be not an ideal combination, but a spontaneously chaotic mixture, which can only be approved by vulgar everyday prudence. This is not an ideal peak, it is a pitiful, vulgar middle ground that does not dare to stick to either shore. The hero of the underground insightfully discusses this disgusting trait of our “romantics.” Among us, “suprastellar natures” are not found “in their pure state.” Our romantics know how to manage their affairs perfectly, they will give in to everything politically, they will bypass everything, they know how to combine superstar dreams with government apartments, pensions, ranks; their main concern is to preserve themselves, to “save their soul,” like some piece of jewelry. This is what this “capacity for the most contradictory sensations” means; This is why our “broad” natures, even at the very last fall, never lose their ideal. Versilov fits this standard quite well. He himself admits his prudence. – I am infinitely strong due to the immediate power of getting along with anything, so characteristic of all smart Russian people (“smart romantics”) of our generation. You can’t destroy me with anything, you can’t offend me with anything and you can’t surprise me with anything. I am as resilient as a yard dog. I can conveniently feel two opposite feelings at the same time - and, of course, not of my own free will. But, nevertheless, I know that this is dishonest, most importantly because it is too prudent... The “teenager”, in love with Versilov and thoughtfully observing him, comes to the conclusion that “Versilov cannot be capable of any feeling other than boundless self-love.” But one can see that placing oneself at the center of the universe with inappropriate actual strength, impressing weak and soft-hearted souls, plunging them into rapturous awe, should seem ridiculous to more original observers. This middle mixture of extremes is ridiculous, this prudent accommodatingness, so inconsistent with high claims. “I always thought there was something funny about you.” Katerina Nikolaevna says this to Versilov. Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov, Kirilov, Dmitry Karamazov are not funny, 1 but Versilov, Ivan Karamazov, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin are funny and funny: laughter follows them on their heels, like a mirror reflecting their average vulgarity. What is Ivan Karamazov, with all the audacity of his religious doubt, with all the courage of his ethical denial, who inspires enthusiastic awe in exalted women and slavish devotion to the fanatical lackeys Smerdyakov? This lackey Smerdyakov, related to Ivan Karamazov in spirit (and in flesh), defines the character of his “idol” this way: -You are very smart, sir. You love money, you love honor too, because you are very proud, you love women’s charms excessively, and most of all, to live in calm contentment and not to bow to anyone - this is most of all, sir. Love of peace and pride are two main traits in the character of Ivan Karamazov, both of which speak of his average vulgarity. These characters cannot help but be proud and vain. With even greater brightness than in the lackey Smerdyakov, Ivan’s character is reflected in his nightmare-devil, this “embodiment of his thoughts and feelings, only the most disgusting and stupid.” This is precisely the “vulgar devil”, disgusting in his bourgeois meanness, in his lackeyness. “I’ve never been such a lackey!” Why could my soul give birth to such a lackey? Yes, the fact of the matter is that Ivan has always been such a lackey. His proud mind, wandering from one pole to the other, since everything is allowed to him, as the chosen one, - his proud mind serves only as a background against which his lackey vulgarity emerges. At the most important moment of his life, when Smerdyakov, hypnotizing him, agreed with him to kill his father, “he (Ivan Fedorovich) suddenly, to Smerdyakov’s surprise, laughed and quickly went out the gate, continuing to laugh.” The next morning, leaving for Chermashnya, as Smerdyakov wished, he said goodbye to him “with some kind of nervous laugh”... Svidrigailov, a man of “aesthetics and comfort,” came to the conclusion through his own experience: “the trouble is to be broad without special genius.” The trouble is breadth that exceeds the measure of actual strength, and this can happen with any degree of strength, because any degree of strength can be surpassed by an even greater degree of breadth, pretension, and pride. The last days and last hours in which we find Svidrigailov amaze and depress the reader’s soul with hopeless grayness, an impenetrable fog of fine continuous rain: everything is possible, everything has been tested, but nothing reaches the last depths of the soul, everything slides on its surface, the taste for everything is lost. And this was his whole life: he never hated anything, did not even want to take revenge, but did not experience all-encompassing love; I didn’t like to argue either, I didn’t get excited... Gray and colorless! But this lackey vulgarity emerges especially clearly in the face of Nikolai Stavrogin. His strength in testing - for himself and for show - turned out to be limitless. But this infinity is not natural, but artificial, rational and, mainly, ostentatious. Apparently, he endured the slap with the same greatness as Prince Myshkin, but from the inside they were two completely different phenomena. For Prince Myshkin it was immediate and natural, but for Stavrogin it was artificial, deliberate, “retort” (as an underground hero would say). The prince had absolutely no pride, as Aglaya noted, and Stavrogin was excessively proud, petty-vain, a self-satisfied aristocrat above the average order, a bourgeois aristocrat, a lackey-aristocrat. “You are an atheist,” Shatov told Stavrogin, “because you are a nobleman.” You have lost the distinction between evil and good because you stopped recognizing your people... I am also a barich, the son of your serf lackey Pashka... Not to believe in God out of pride, to deny the difference between good and evil out of aristocratic complacency - but could there be anything more vulgar than this! “I don’t believe in God, in whom the common people believe, I don’t recognize a universally obligatory duty, because my trousers are cut better than others!” Only a lackey, a Smerdyakov soul can reason like this, only a lackey can not understand that the difference of any measure is insignificant before infinity. – You don’t insult anyone, and everyone hates you; You look like everyone else, and everyone is afraid of you. No one will come up to you to pat you on the shoulder. You are a terrible aristocrat. This is what Peter Verkhovensky said to Stavrogin in the delight of idolatry, not even suspecting that he had a disgusting idol before him. Stavrogin is afraid, more than anything else, of seeming funny: the complete opposite of Prince Myshkin. And his marriage to Lebyadkina is also not from nature, but from proud thoughts, from anguish. He announces his marriage to Lebyadkina “with boundless arrogance.” Prince Myshkin would have felt and acted completely differently. And with all his contempt for society, Stavrogin wishes the death of his wife: he played a role and needs to get rid of someone else's clothes. He knows other women, accepting their caresses with the indifference of a spoiled little bark, or perhaps with the impotence of an exhausted libertine... And everything that Stavrogin does, every magnificent feat of his has a farcical basis, turns out to be the clowning of a bad actor. In a duel with Mavriky Nikolaevich, he behaves like a hero: he withstands the enemy’s shot and shoots to the side. Kirilov, his second, effortlessly manages to show him that he behaved like a farcical Petrushka and that he should be ashamed. “If for me,” Kirilov said, the burden is easy, because it is by nature, then perhaps the burden is more difficult for you, because it is such a nature. There is very little to be ashamed of, just a little... You are not a strong person. Despite his apparent strength, despite his ostentatious strength, Stavrogin is not a strong person on the inside. He is precisely “wandering from the edge,” contrary to Shatov’s contrary opinion; he wanders from one shore to another. “I am an insignificant character,” he admits to Kirilov. He speaks out even more frankly in a letter to Daria Pavlovna. – I can wish to do a good deed and feel pleasure from it; next to me I wish for evil and I also feel pleasure. But both feelings are always too small, and they never happen very much. My desires are too weak: they cannot lead. You can cross a river on a log, but not on a piece of wood... Stavrogin’s trouble, like Svidrigailov’s, is his breadth of nature with internal impotence; his demon, like Ivan Karamazov’s devil, is a demon of average vulgarity: “he’s just a small, nasty, scrofulous imp with a runny nose, one of the failed ones.” His trouble is that he, having an internally powerless nature, nevertheless climbed into strong people, although he did not admit this to Kirilov. Let’s say again, it’s not at all a matter of the degree of strength or powerlessness - he was still a very strong man - but the fact that his claims exceeded his strength, that he artificially, with strain, built his life. He lived not according to nature, but according to retort recipes, rationally mixing different parts. And therefore he did not have the spontaneity of feeling, did not give himself entirely to either one direction or the other. Kirilov said about him: – Stavrogin, if he believes, then does not believe that he believes. If he does not believe, then he does not believe that he does not believe. (The same can be said about Ivan Karamazov). Stavrogin has his demon and his “halucinations”; He also has his own lackey, his “monkey” - Pyotr Verkhovensky, like Ivan Karamazov - Smerdyakov. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is absolutely capable of anything: for him, killing a person is the same as slaughtering a chicken. He is capable of anything because of his terrible spiritual emptiness, his wooden insensibility, his terrible vile frivolity. Pyotr Stepanovich is connected with Stavrogin just as inextricably and commits crimes for him as Smerdyakov did for Ivan Karamazov. “I’m a buffoon,” Verkhovensky told Stavrogin, but you are my main half. - You are a “boat”, you are an old, leaky, wood-burning barge for scrapping! – You are a trashy, lascivious, broken little bark! External, ostentatious strength did not correspond to Stavrogin’s internal powerlessness. He had enormous physical strength and was a handsome man, but his face resembled a mask. “Speak in a human voice at least once in your life,” Shatov begged Stavrogin. Fracturedness, inconsistency between internal and external, lasciviousness - such is the character of Stavrogin. And he himself, from the inside, knows his weak, funny side better than anyone. “I really want to laugh, keep laughing, continuously, for a long time, a lot.” I'm definitely filled with laughter... And this laughter from Stavrogin is transmitted to all the people close to him, to all who, deceived by him, by his appearance, revered him, adored him, bowed to him, prayed for him. The scene when Marya Timofeevna, Stavrogin’s pitiful wife, admits that she considered him a prince (for example, Prince Myshkin), and now sees his imposture, explains to him in her delusional, frenzied, but deeply soulful language that a real prince, a falcon, would not be ashamed of his wife in front of the world, that he cannot bear the weight lifted upon himself, that he is not a falcon, but an eagle owl, a blind owl, Grishka Otrepiev - this scene is filled with extraordinary tragedy. “I must confess to you,” Lisa told Stavrogin, “the idea has strengthened in me that there is something terrible, dirty and bloody in your soul, and... and at the same time, something that makes you look terribly funny.” Be careful not to tell me if it’s true: I’ll laugh at you. I will laugh at you all your life. Only Dasha does not laugh at Stavrogin, who has doomed herself in advance to the role of a nurse, humiliating and humiliating for Stavrogin. We see that all the “extraordinary people” who rise to the all-reconciling power of beauty, to the sameness of pleasure in both poles, all of them, of all ranks, in fact do not reach the heights to which they “climb”, do not reach ideal harmony - they are all mental types and have nothing fundamentally prophetic in themselves, they are all a product of complex cultural conditions, and not forerunners of the future, they all relate to the past, and not to to the future. “I marveled a thousand times,” says the “teenager,” “at this ability of a person (and, it seems, a Russian person par excellence) to cherish in his soul the highest ideal next to the greatest meanness, and all completely sincerely.” Is it a special broadness in a Russian person that will take him far, or just meanness - that is the question. Maybe neither. This is how V.S. Solovyov answers this question. – “Russia is the great outskirts of Europe towards Asia. Given its marginal position, our fatherland naturally experiences the influence of the Asian element much more than other European countries, which is where our entire supposed originality lies. With us from the beginning, and especially since the time of Batu, the Asian element entered into nature and became a second soul, so that the Germans could say about us with a sigh: Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in ihrer Brust, Die eine will sich top der andern trennen. It is impossible for us to completely get rid of our second soul, and it is not necessary - we also owe something to it, but in order not to be torn apart in such a collision, it is necessary for one soul to decisively prevail and prevail, and, of course, the best one. The principle of beauty, the same at both poles, does not lead a person out of that mental compatibility of opposites, from that natural “broadness” that can serve as a natural basis for solving a religious problem, but does not yet constitute the solution itself. Aesthetic reconciliation is only a ghost, a phantom, a phenomenon of a historical-cultural, or even pathological order, like those strange seconds that precede attacks of epilepsy. “In the epileptic state of Prince Myshkin there was one degree almost before the seizure (if only the seizure came in reality), when suddenly, amid sadness, spiritual darkness, pressure, for moments his brain seemed to ignite, and with an extraordinary impulse all his vital forces were strained at once. The feeling of life, self-awareness almost increased tenfold in these moments, which lasted like lightning. The mind and heart were illuminated with extraordinary light; all his worries, all his doubts, all his worries seemed to be pacified at once, resolved into some kind of supreme calm, full of clear, harmonious joy and hope, full of reason and final reason. But these moments, these glimpses were still only a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) from which the attack itself began. This second was, of course, unbearable. Thinking about this moment later, already in a healthy state, he often said to himself: that after all, all these lightning and glimpses of higher self-awareness and self-awareness, and, therefore, “higher being,” are nothing more than a disease, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this is not a higher being at all, but, on the contrary, should be ranked among the lowest. And yet, he still came to an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “What’s wrong with the fact that this is a disease?” he decided, “what does it matter that this tension is abnormal, if the very result, if a minute of sensation, recalled and considered already in a healthy state, turns out to be extremely harmony, beauty, gives an unheard-of and hitherto unknown feeling of completeness, measure, reconciliation and alarmed prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?” That this is truly “beauty and prayer”, that this is truly the “highest synthesis of life”, he could not doubt that... If at the very last conscious moment before the attack he happened to have time to clearly and consciously say to himself: “yes, for this moment you can give your whole life!” then, of course, this moment in itself was worth the whole life.” The “reality of sensation” cannot be doubted. But all the power is not in the phenomenon, but in its interpretation. Meanwhile, “there was, without a doubt, a mistake in assessing this moment.” Indeed. No matter how blissful this moment was for Prince Myshkin, “dullness, spiritual darkness, idiocy stood before him as a vivid consequence of these highest moments.” Is it possible to recognize these “highest moments” as the final synthesis if they were followed by such gloomy consequences? What kind of supreme reconciliation is this if it is so powerless in the face of gloomy reality? What kind of beauty is in this “stupidity and idiocy”?... It is very important here that beauty, as the second synthetic principle, comes to the denial of the first, most basic principle of life. If “you can give your whole life for this moment,” then, in any case, it will not be a sacrifice of life for the sake of the highest form of life, for the sake of its highest fullness, for the sake of “life in abundance,” as is the case with the self-sacrifice of love, - it will be a sacrifice of life for the sake of what is the most decisive denial of life and what entails the most terrible darkness of “dullness and idiocy.” Kirilov, who also experienced similar moments and gave them a prophetic meaning of foretelling a time when “there will be no time,” expected that the person would “change physically.” But as long as these physical changes do not exist, as long as beauty is powerless in the face of nature, the “highest synthesis” is only painful self-deception. And yet, it is not this natural isolation, subjectivity, that constitutes the final weakness of beauty: its most final downfall is that the poles have an ethical character and therefore aesthetic indifference lies on a completely different plane. The same temperature of two bodies of different masses does not make them identical in weight and does not destroy this difference in weight. The sameness of pleasure in both poles can be fully recognized, but the difference between the poles in its ethical side is not weakened by this. And when aesthetics takes its place, it does not collide with ethics; beauty and goodness can coexist peacefully, like two sides of a multifaceted life. But when beauty pretends to play the highest role of an all-reconciling principle, dares to overcome goodness in its specific features, to erase its characteristic colors, then goodness becomes defensive, powerfully and furiously repelling the attacks of beauty. Dostoevsky decisively and clearly raises the question of the comparative power of good and beauty, and solves this question in the sense of the predominant power of good. In this regard, Raskolnikov’s experience is decisive, which leads to the final conclusion: for a person, goodness is above all. In the sphere of relations between man and man, the aesthetic coincidence of opposites is not only naturally powerless, but simply a theoretical invention, a fantastic nonsense. Actually, the human absolute is good. Dostoevsky's language comes closest to the language and philosophy of the categorical imperative. And the fact that Dostoevsky, who so deeply and originally penetrated into the mystery of the aesthetic coincidence of both poles, the sameness of pleasure, did not stop at aesthetic reconciliation, was not seduced by precocious harmony - in this one must see his extraordinary moral power and outstanding sense of truth, brilliantly bold love for the truth. So, in Dostoevsky’s worldview we have two basic concepts - real life and the highest good - and the synthetic problem comes down to the reconciliation of life and good. If love for life is half the matter, half in the matter of saving a person, then the other half must be recognized as good, and in the combination of these halves whole perfection is given. The problem of goodness in Dostoevsky has an original formulation precisely from this combination of goodness with life. This new formulation of the ethical problem breaks down into two tasks. First, you need to indicate the meaning of goodness for life, the vital meaning of the highest ideal. Dostoevsky solves this problem with sufficient certainty. “The whole law of human existence,” said Stepan Trofimovich, “is that a person can always bow before the immeasurably great. If you deprive people of immeasurably great things, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite are as necessary for man as the small planet on which he lives." Elder Zosima says the same thing. “Much on earth is hidden from us, but in return we have been given a secret, intimate feeling of our living connection with another world, with the heavenly and higher world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here, but in other worlds. God took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth and grew His garden, and everything that could sprout came up, but what grew up lives and is alive only by the feeling of its contact with the mysterious other worlds; if this feeling weakens or is destroyed in you, then the one nurtured in you also dies. Then you will become indifferent to life and even hate it.” So, the second half - the highest principle of life - is as necessary for a person as life itself; only this highest principle provides the final justification for life itself. Secondly. If the highest principle is precisely good, and if it justifies, or sanctifies, life, if it must be inserted into the framework of a full real life, if it is not an ascetic-self-sufficient principle (which is the originality of Dostoevsky’s thought), then in its essence it must be understood as a principle that is heterogeneous along with the natural-historical side of life. Beauty, in its elemental character, does not separate man from nature, but equates him with nature - it awakens the natural-elemental basis in him. On the contrary, good is a specifically human principle, not natural-divine, or elementally divine, but divine-human. The infinite will prevail over the finite, By faith in our sacred meaning We will stir up a counter current To understand the good flow as a natural flow means to eliminate the very problem of higher synthesis. But at the same time, it is impossible to stop at one confrontation, because this would make synthesis absolutely impossible. All this involuntarily pushes us towards the recognition of the heterogeneity of spheres - natural-historical and moral-human. But Dostoevsky, having approached this truth, did not cross its threshold - and it forms the limit of his forward movement. He stopped at the confrontation and could not step over it. In the philosophy of the “underground” and in the thought of Ivan Karamazov, the presence of disharmony between the laws of natural-historical life and the moral-human principle is recognized: “God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic, when I don’t like these laws and two and two are four.” Man is “disgusted to come to terms” with this natural-historical necessity. Dostoevsky, as if enchanted, could not take his eyes off this abyss - and did not have the faith to rise above it. Ippolit expresses Dostoevsky's feelings about the painting in Rogozhin's house. ... "This picture depicts Christ, who has just been taken down from the cross. Painters usually get into the habit of depicting Christ both on the cross and taken down from the cross, still with a touch of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for Him even in the most terrible torment. In Rogozhin’s picture there is not a word about beauty; this is in full form the corpse of a man who endured endless torment even before the cross, a wound, torture, beating from the guards, beating from the people, when He carried the cross on himself and fell under the cross, and, finally, the torment of the cross for six hours... here is one nature, and truly this is what the corpse of a person should be, no matter who he was, after such torment. I know that the Christian Church established in the first centuries that Christ suffered not figuratively, but in reality, and that his body, therefore, was completely and completely subordinated to the law of nature on the cross. this face is terribly broken by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes are open, the pupils are squinted; the large, open whites of the eyes shine with some deathly, glassy glow... Here the concept involuntarily comes that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature are so strong, then how can one overcome them? How to overcome them, when even the One who conquered nature during his lifetime did not defeat them now? When looking at this picture, nature seems to be in the form of some huge, inexorable and dumb beast, or in the form of some huge machine of the latest design, which senselessly captured, crushed and absorbed into itself, dully and insensitively, a great and priceless Being - such a Being that alone was worth all of nature and all its laws, the entire earth, which was created, perhaps, solely for the appearance this Creature! This picture seems to precisely express this concept - a dark, arrogant and meaninglessly eternal force to which everything is subordinated.” Kirilov repeated the same words and the same feelings were experienced by Alyosha Karamazov at the grave of his beloved elder, regarding his prematurely revealed corruption... The horror of the infinite power that embraces man from everywhere, of this dark, deaf and dumb nature, of this huge and disgusting tarantula - Dostoevsky knew this horror. And no matter what he understood with his enormous mind, he could not bear this horror in his heart. He did not accept the truth of natural necessity in his heart. “God makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” Dostoevsky could not accommodate this gospel truth. He also did not understand, could not accommodate in his heart, the natural laws of history that led him to the rebellion of Ivan Karamazov. “Do you think that the Galileans, whose blood Pilate mixed with their sacrifices, were more sinful than all the Galileans, that they suffered so much? No, I'm telling you... But Ivan Karamazov did not know this gospel truth, and he could not endure unjust suffering, for the sake of it he did not accept history. “I don’t want harmony, I don’t want it out of love for humanity. I want to remain better with unavenged suffering. It would be better for me to remain with my unavenged suffering and my unsatisfied indignation, even if I was wrong. They valued harmony too dearly; we can’t afford to pay that much for admission. That’s why I’m in a hurry to return my entry ticket. I don’t accept God, I just respectfully return the ticket to Him. Nature does not know our differences between good and evil, between the righteous and sinners; it has a completely different dimension. Health and illness, strength and weakness, heat and cold, storms and earthquakes are distributed in decisive independence from the standards of truth and sin. One cannot seek moral satisfaction in nature; Nor can moral indignation be applied to her. In the same way, history takes place according to its own independent laws: they capture a person and he can interfere with its course, good and evil can be historical forces, but there can never be a complete coincidence here; essentially these two areas are different. Both in knowledge and in activity: not accepting the laws of nature and history, Dostoevsky, for the same reasons, in the name of the highest love for man, did not accept legalism, did not accept the natural social structure of human happiness. Dostoevsky's negative attitude towards the economic liberation movement - for the sake of the atheistic or nihilistic worldview associated with this movement - is a highly remarkable fact. After all, it is obvious that the highest love for man and the social structure of human happiness, the structure of the “crystal palace”, Western culture do not exclude one another, although they do not completely coincide. And this discrepancy in what goes deep into the human soul forced Dostoevsky to go against what he should have stood for according to the properties of his heart. Isn't this an instructive fact? But Dostoevsky could not be consistent in this denial: one only needs to compare, on the one hand, his “Demons”, the theory of Pyotr Verkhovensky, who dreamed of giving the whole world to the pope or spreading rumors about an impostor, generally forcibly organizing humanity, Shigalev’s theory of artificially lowering the mental level of humanity, and on the other hand, the Grand Inquisitor, in order to see that “this idea has not yet been decided in the heart” of Dostoevsky and that he, as “martyr”, “loved to amuse himself with his despair.” I point out a fact that among Dostoevsky’s critics is completely well known and has a variety of interpretations: for my part, I point out the reason for this fact solely in the confusion of heterogeneous spheres - personal faith with its absoluteness, boundlessness, immensity, and conditionally social regularity. Without accepting the truth of the Gospel, Dostoevsky also discussed the religious significance of the people in a non-evangelical manner. Not knowing the reasons for his tragedy, he was looking for “soil” for himself and thought to find it in folk religion, considering the social movement he hated to be a superficial matter. He overestimated the religious significance of the people. He considered religion to be a people's matter. He believed that religion is only a majestic and deep movement if it takes place in the depths of the people's life - at the same time, he believed that the people's soul finds its deepest expression in nothing other than religion. “The goal of the entire national movement, in every nation and in every period of its existence, is only the search for God, one’s own God, certainly one’s own, and faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the entire people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened before that all or many peoples had one common God, but each one always had a special one. A sign of the destruction of nationalities, when the gods begin to become common. When the gods become common, then the gods and faith in them die, along with the peoples themselves. The stronger the people, the more special their god." We cannot call these views on religion deep enough and, most importantly, evangelical. Folk religion, it’s true, is one of the stages in religious evolution. Religion has gone through three phases - naturalistic, popular and personal. But folk religion is only one of the phases in religious evolution - not eternal and not supreme. In the age of Christ, all religions, both Jewish and pagan-classical, stood at the level of the folk, but it is the gospel that marks the degeneration of the folk (Jewish) religion into a personal religion. The Gospel Heavenly Father is “my Father”, “your Father”; but this is not the Father of this or that people. And now the religions of some peoples have remained at the naturalistic level, others at the folk level, but our religion is a personal religion, we can no longer return to lower religious levels. One can fully agree with the idea that generalized gods, united, eclectic, testify to the decline of folk religious life, but our God is not such a generalization, he is the God of man, as a person, and therefore precisely a God who does not know national and state borders. Overestimating the religious significance of nationality, Dostoevsky considered Orthodoxy to be the folk religion of Russia, the religion of the Russian people. He said everything about the Orthodoxy of the Russian people that can be said about the ancient Jewish religion. Just as a Jew could not be imagined without his national religion, just as the purpose of the Jewish people was to lead all peoples to the religion of Jehovah and through that bring dominion to God’s chosen people, so Dostoevsky argued that “a non-Orthodox cannot be Russian”, that “everything, everything that the Russian people are looking for, lies for them in Orthodoxy - in Orthodoxy alone there is truth and the salvation of the Russian people” and that “the most important pre-elected purpose of the Russian people is in the destinies of all humanity and consists in the fact that the divine face of Christ, preserved in Orthodoxy, when the time comes, should be revealed to the whole world, which has lost its ways.” It should be noted that Dostoevsky “understood” “Orthodoxy” in a very sublime and “spiritual” way. Everything that he says about the slave form of Christ, as primarily beloved by the Russian people, about the suffering of the Russian people and their humility, about his ideal of “worldwide pain”, “worldwide unification”, “moral resolution” of all the issues that now concern Europe - both political, social and economic - all this is deeply imbued with the biblical spirit. We can safely say that Dostoevsky, in understanding the Orthodoxy of the Russian people, stands at the height of the ancient Jewish prophets, who intended the Jewish people a great mission - to preach peace, truth and salvation to the whole world... But the height of the Jewish prophets is a relative height, immeasurably surpassed in the Gospel. And the Jewish prophets could not rise above the limitations that were essentially contained in the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe people's chosenness of God. For them, this limitation was in the inextricable connection between the cause of Jehovah and the cause of the people - in the fact that the service of the Jewish people to the cause of Jehovah indissolubly coincided with Jehovah's service to the glory of the Jewish people. And this is the only reason why Christ was rejected by the Jews. And Dostoevsky stands at the height of the Jewish prophets, and not at the height of the gospel. And for him, the Christian-Orthodox idea, the moral resolution of all issues, is the same as the Slavic idea, the Russian resolution of issues. And he fell religiously even to the point that he spoke of his “blood disgust to the point of hatred” for Europe, preached about the Russian seizure of Constantinople in the name of higher Christian considerations (as in our days, for the same reasons, they talked about the Russian seizure of Manchuria), - preached about the inextricable union of Orthodoxy with a certain form of government, etc. There is a deep idea in the fact that Dostoevsky called Orthodoxy the national-Russian form of Christianity. But he, like Kirilov (let us repeat these words once again), was driven by the idea, and not he was driven by the idea. This historical phenomenon, the historical form of Christianity, seemed to him to be an ideal manifestation of the Christian spirit, its ideal form; he failed to appreciate it from the height of the eternal gospel idea. It is easy to see what consequence this national limitation entailed in the essential solution of the Christian problem. "The Jews are looking for a sign." Both naturalistic and social-folk religion cannot exist without a miracle. At these stages of religious consciousness there is still no place for the recognition of special spheres of natural and historical necessity; it requires the continuous intervention of Providence in the course of nature and in the course of history. Natural necessity and socio-historical regularity can be religiously sanctified only at the highest level of religious consciousness, at the height of spiritual and personal religion. Spiritual-personal absoluteness gives, along with itself, a place of natural necessity and socio-historical convention. Only in this case is religious holiness embodied in the fullness of natural life and in the conventionality of social activity - only in this case could Prince Myshkin be freed from his natural morbidity and Alyosha Karamazov could enter the manhood of family and social life. We find an interesting interpretation of the artistic concepts of F. M. Dostoevsky in the book by D. S. Merezhkovsky The Religion of L. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The author wants to understand the Christian religion as a denial of morality, a crime of its laws. “Christianity is not a moral phenomenon, but a religious, super-moral one, transgressing all the limits and barriers of the moral law, a manifestation of the greatest freedom on the other side of good and evil.” At the same time, he sees religiosity precisely in this freedom of the subject, in the self-will of the person, in antitheism, in anti-Christianity, in man-divinity. “Rebellion against humanity (i.e., denial of morality), against God, against Christ - these are the ascending steps of this new moral evolution. · Unlimited freedom, limitless Self, deified Self, I am God - this is the last word of this religion.” So, morality is not as the autonomy of reason, but as unlimited freedom, and religion is not as faith, but as self-divinity. The author we are talking about sees brilliant representatives of the new religion - historical in Napoleon, literary in Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky). Napoleon - “immeasurable in everything, but even stranger, not only crosses all lines, but also goes beyond all limits; with his temperament, his instincts, his abilities, his imagination, his passions, his morality, he seems cast in a special mold, from a different metal than his fellow citizens and contemporaries. – He looks at a human being as a circumstance or a thing, but not as his own kind. He has neither love nor hatred for people: he is alone - everything is for himself - other creatures are just numbers. “Involuntarily he looks at himself as a creature, the only one in the world created to rule. “I have the right to object to all your complaints with the eternal I,” he once answered the well-deserved reproaches of one person close to him and then added: “I am not like anyone else, I do not accept anyone’s conditions... I, he said, am not a person like everyone else, and the laws of morality and social conditions cannot have meaning for me.” To put it briefly, Napoleon is a brilliant bearer of extreme self-will, boundless freedom, and not in words, but in deeds, in action. Raskolnikov says about him: “a real ruler, to whom everything is permitted, destroys Toulon, carries out a massacre in Paris, forgets the army in Egypt, spends half a million on the Moscow campaign and gets away with a pun in Vilna - everything is permitted to him.” Merezhkovsky looks at this self-will, at this freedom, religiously, sacredly: Napoleon created a religion. He only lacked awareness of his religious significance, lacked religious consciousness: the ability to act in him outweighed the ability to contemplate. He “he himself did not know what he was doing, he himself did not know what spirit he was.” But “with his life, his example, the greatness of his happiness and the greatness of his death, he shook, as no one had ever shaken, the deepest foundations of all Christian and pre-Christian morality; against his will, against his will, he began to re-evaluate all prices, aroused unprecedented doubts in the earliest revelations of human conscience.” Raskolnikov is Napoleon's double. “I wanted to become Napoleon, that’s why I killed... Then I came up with one idea that no one had ever thought up before me.” Raskolnikov's crime is completely special, unique. “We must understand to the end all the real novelty and unprecedentedness of this idea: all previous atrocities were committed, regardless of calculation or out of passion, but for some purpose; if the criminal had renounced his goal, freed himself from passion, he might not have done what he did; Raskolnikov, the first of people, invents and commits a truly unprecedented, unknown in the world, a new crime, one that no one has ever committed before, a crime of a new order of moral dimensions - a crime for a crime - without calculation, without a goal, without passion, at least without the passion of the heart, only with the cold, abstract passion of the mind, knowledge, curiosity, experience. He wants to learn through experience, to try the last essence of what people call “evil” and “good”, he wants to know the last limits of human freedom. And he recognized them." What did he learn? When answering this question, Dostoevsky and Merezhkovsky differ. According to Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov could not bear his crime, and this is how it should be, and this is reasonable. True, Dostoevsky does not present the matter as simply as it is for the arithmetic-legal mind - you have sinned before the law, you will suffer according to the law. In front of people, Raskolnikov does not admit guilt; He is also indignant at the legal punishment of suffering from people. He sinned against himself, “killed the principle”; and his suffering is internal, his own, “internal curse.” But behind this complexity lies the direct idea that Raskolnikov could not bear his crime, remained defeated, could not bear the internal curse. “I was in penal servitude, writes Dostoevsky in his Diary, and saw criminals, “decided” criminals. It was a long school. Not one of them ceased to consider himself a criminal. In appearance, they were a terrible and cruel people. However, only the stupid ones, the new ones, “showed off,” and they laughed at them. For the most part, the people were gloomy, thoughtful. No one talked about their crimes. I never heard any murmur. You couldn’t even talk about your crimes out loud. It happened that someone’s word would be heard with a challenge and a twist, and “the whole hard labor,” as one person, would stop the upstart. It was not customary to talk about this. But, I say correctly, maybe not one of them escaped the long mental suffering within themselves, which was the most cleansing and strengthening.” Merezhkovsky looks at Raskolnikov’s Crime and Punishment differently. He corrects Dostoevsky: “everything that follows (in the novel, i.e., Raskolnikov’s repentance and resurrection) is so artificially and unskillfully attached, stuck on, that it falls off by itself, like a mask from a living face.” Shestov also speaks of the “superman” in Nietzsche’s system, and both of them reject Tolstoy’s Christianity as an outgrowth of his paganism. This “correction” is already the consciousness of powerlessness to understand and embrace. Merezhkovsky does not understand all of Tolstoy, and he does not understand all of Dostoevsky; he explains them one-sidedly, tendentiously. According to Merezhkovsky, the value of the experience of Raskolnikov’s new crime is completely different. “The conclusions of the experience exceeded his expectations: he thought that man was free; but he still did not think that man was free to such an extent. It was this boundlessness of freedom that he could not bear: it crushed him more than the entire weight of the punitive law.” The Romans saw only bare white walls in the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple. “Raskolnikov, with the same fearless, cynical gaze as the Roman legionnaires, looked into where no one had looked before - into the holy of holies of the human conscience. And he saw, or it seems to him that he saw, “nothing,” an empty place, empty air, white bare walls. He did not expect this to such an extent: when he went to try, he still doubted - otherwise there would have been no reason to try - and not only doubted, but, perhaps, hoped, even directly wished, of course, without suspecting it, that it was not so “simply,” as it seems to him, “to take everything by the tail and shake it to hell.” And so he learned, probably, that from the outside it is indeed very difficult and dangerous, but inside - and inside is the most important thing for him, the only important thing - it is even much simpler than he expected. It was this simplicity that made him scared: he became scared because there was nothing scary at all. A horror took possession of him, greater than which there is nothing in the world, and from which all nature flees - the horror of emptiness, the horror of nothing.” We must recognize these conclusions of Merezhkovsky as inconsistent with Raskolnikov’s actual mood. “And really,” said Raskolnikov, do you think, Sonya, that I didn’t know, for example, that even if I began to ask and interrogate myself whether I have the right and the power to have, then, therefore, I don’t have the right to have the power. Or what if I ask the question: is a person a louse? then, therefore, a person is no longer a louse for me, but a louse for someone who doesn’t even think about it, and who goes straight without asking questions... If I suffered for so many days, would Napoleon go or not? so I clearly felt that I was not Napoleon... I had a presentiment in advance that I would tell myself this after I killed him! How can anything compare with such horror? Oh, vulgarity! Oh, vulgarity! The horror of emptiness, the horror of incredible lightness, airiness, limitlessness - this is not an observation of Raskolnikov on the part of Merezhkovsky, but fantasy. Merezhkovsky sees his weakness in the fact that Raskolnikov could not bear freedom. “Raskolnikov’s tragedy lies not in the fact that, imagining himself bronze, he turned out to be earthy, but only in the fact that his body is really not all made of bronze, and his soul is not all bronze, and his mistake is not that he tried a new word, but only that he tried a new action, while he was born only for a new word. However, this contradiction, this gap between contemplation and action is not at all Raskolnikov’s personal weakness, but the weakness of all people of the new European culture in general. Napoleon is weaker in contemplation than in action. Raskolnikov is the opposite." Merezhkovsky regrets Raskolnikov's weakness. Still, he values ​​his experience highly. He calls this experience religious. “The struggle that is taking place in Raskolnikov is immeasurably deeper than politics, deeper than morality: it is a struggle between the two most primordial religious elements of the human spirit... He was not afraid of the reproaches of his conscience, but of the silence of his conscience, not of the overwhelming consciousness of his guilt, but of the immeasurably more overwhelming consciousness of his innocence, not of threatened punishment, but of inevitable impunity... This is our horror, our tragedy, never before committed in the world, new the tragedy of freedom, opposite to the old tragedy of conscience, a new, discovered by us, as it were, a fourth, tragic dimension of the world and spirit. This is our horror, and if we die from it, then we have the right to be proud before all centuries of the greatness of this horror.” On the contrary, according to Dostoevsky, Raskolnikov’s weakness is his salvation. The more Raskolnikov is indignant at the violent punishment from people (“that’s why the external punishment of the law is terrible, because it takes away from the criminal any possibility of internal voluntary redemption”), the more he despises his weakness, his vulgarity, the more he suffers from the consciousness: “a man is not a louse for me, but I myself am more vile and nastier than a killed louse”; the more surely he, in the eyes of Dostoevsky, follows the path of salvation. Until the last line of the novel, Raskolnikov does not know the salvation of his suffering, does not suspect it, and this is his tragedy; but Dostoevsky leads his hero unmistakably. In the brazenly frank Porfiry with his cruel words about Raskolnikov: “let him walk for now, let him, because I already know that he is my victim,” the image of the author is visible. The assessment of Raskolnikov's experience from the point of view of Dostoevsky himself is helped by the remarkable parallelism of his crime with Sonya's crime. “Didn’t you do the same thing? Raskolnikov tells her. You also stepped over... were able to step over. You committed suicide, you ruined your life... Yours (it’s all the same!). You could live in spirit and mind, but you will end up on Sennaya... We are cursed together, together we will go - along the same road! " In the person of Sonya one can least of all see a priestess of free love, riotous fun, her crime least of all was moral emptiness, airiness, limitlessness; she is a victim of the social system, of social need, she is thrown by society into the jaws of depravity. She is a “great sinner,” but her crime is not externally illegal, not externally legal, but internal, against her personality, and her internal curse is that she began to live a life “without spirit and reason.” The same is the crime and the curse of Raskolnikov: he “killed the principle.” Legally legalistic innocence, innocence before people, and internal damnation - this is the burden of Raskolnikov, which Merezhkovsky tendentiously overlooked. In the person of Raskolnikov we must see, scientifically speaking, a denier of utilitarian, legalistic morality, and a bearer of autonomous morality. The clash of one and the other morality, the transition from social-legalistic, social-utilitarian morality to rational-autonomous morality - this is the main theme of the novel Crime and Punishment. And this theme is revealed by Dostoevsky with such subtlety, which you admire the more the more you study Raskolnikov’s crime. This subtlety is striking given the complexity and intricacy in which these two moralities appear, both in reality and in the novel. Apparently, one imperceptibly passes into the other, and this provides the opportunity for temptation, which Raskolnikov could not resist. Light touches in the novel highlight Raskolnikov's warmth and love. It would be a grave mistake on the part of critics to be seduced by this ease and recognize Raskolnikov’s cordiality as a secondary trait. This lightness screams and attracts special attention; like a hissing whistle on the noise of the market. Here are the pearls of Raskolnikov’s love: he loves his mother and sister, gives money to the Marmeladovs on his first visit - “he grabbed as much copper money as he had to” (given his extreme poverty), stands up for a drunken girl - 20 kopecks to a policeman, cries in his sleep over a nag, gives a nickel to a street singer, three nickels to Duklida, gives the last money sent to him by his mother for Marmeladov’s funeral, gives “the remaining nickel” a beggar - and this at a time when his soul was torn from torment. Raskolnikov’s love for his former bride is also extremely remarkable. “She was such a sick girl,” Raskolnikov himself recalls, “she was completely ill; She loved to give to the poor and kept dreaming about a monastery, and once she burst into tears when she started talking to me about it... She's such an ugly girl. I really don’t know why I became attached to her then, it seems, because she was always sick... If she were still lame or hunchbacked, I think I would have loved her even more.” Already during the trial, “former student Ruzumikhin dug up information from somewhere and presented evidence that the criminal Raskolnikov, while at the university, used his last means to help one of his poor and consumptive university friends and almost supported him for six months. When he died, he looked after the surviving, old and weakened father of his deceased comrade (who supported and fed his father with his labors), finally placed this old man in the hospital, and when he also died, he buried him... The former mistress of Raskolnikov herself, the mother of his deceased bride, the widow of Zarnitsyn, also testified that when they were still living in another house, near Five Corners, Raskolnikov, during a fire, at night, pulled out two small children from one apartment, which had already caught fire, and was burned in the process. This fact has been thoroughly investigated and quite well attested by many witnesses.” Raskolnikov is a knight of pity and Christian love. His crime is the crime of a man with a loving heart. “A man is not a louse for me,” says Raskolnikov (emphasized by Dostoevsky). “But how are you,” Sonya says to Raskolnikov, “you, such... (Dostoevsky’s italics) could decide on this?.. But what is this!” True, Raskolnikov’s cruelty is also noted. Razumikhin speaks of him: “Generous and kind. Sometimes, however, he is cold and insensitive to the point of inhumanity, as if two opposing characters are replacing in him.” Merezhkovsky grasps this “contact of opposites” with greed. He sees in Raskolnikov the same “coincidence of beauty in both poles” as in Svidrigailov and Stavrogin. He attaches primary importance in Raskolnikov’s character to his Napoleonic cruelty, considering his cordiality to be the “weak remnant” of humanity. But this is an extremely tendentious, false portrayal of Raskolnikov’s character. Merezhkovsky overlooks the fact that, apart from the only crime - the murder of the old woman and her sister, which he “could not bear”, in the entire novel not a single fact of Raskolnikov’s cruelty is indicated (just as there is no hint of voluptuousness at all), on the contrary, it is noted with emphasis that the kindness in him was heartfelt, and the cruelty was mental, abstract. “He was young, distracted and, therefore, cruel.” His dreams about Napoleon, about the inhumanity of heroes are abstract dreams. In particular, his crime has the same dual character. On the one hand, it is heartily connected with his kindness. “One evil and a hundred good deeds,” in the words of Svidrigailov. By committing a crime, in Raskolnikov’s own words, he “only wanted to put himself in an independent position, to take the first step, to achieve the means, and then everything would be smoothed over with comparatively immeasurable benefits.” On the other hand, the basis of his crime was the idea of ​​​​heroism, that everything is allowed to the prophet. This duality in the nature of the crime should be kept in mind, and special attention must be paid to the fact that the kindness in him was heartfelt, and the dreams of Napoleon were abstract. This duality is precisely assessed by Raskolnikov himself. After the crime, he calls his dreams of Napoleon in a “direct” speech with Sonya nonsense: “This is all nonsense, almost just chatter.” The main thing is taking care of my mother and sister. “I wanted good for people.” But even then, he approves of these dreams, as a thought: “this whole thought was not so stupid at all.” Due to the abstraction of the dream of Napoleon, Raskolnikov’s crime was the fruit of theory. “The playful sharpness of the mind and abstract arguments of reason tempt you,” Porfiry tells him. According to the clairvoyance of this seer, Raskolnikov, with his abstract calculations, was mistaken in his “reality and nature.” “Here,” he says about Raskolnikov’s crime, “bookish dreams, sir, here is a theoretically irritated heart; here you can see the determination to take the first step, but a special kind of determination - he decided, but it was like he fell from a mountain, or flew off a bell tower, and it was as if he had come to commit a crime not with his own feet.” He “invented a theory.” And Svidrigailov said to Dunya: “here is a kind of theory... Its own theory; so-so theory." But besides this abstract dream, in Raskolnikov, in his crime, there is a living moral principle. In it, morality struggles with casuistry, which is “sharpened like a razor.” What is important to him, first of all, is the “moral resolution of the issue.” The theoretical nature of the crime is its highest consciousness; But for the idea of ​​the novel, what is essential is not theoretical consciousness itself, which leads to airlessness, to a white wall, but the moral coloring of consciousness. Raskolnikov wanted not just to step over, but “to allow his conscience to step over other obstacles, and only if the fulfillment of an idea (sometimes saving, perhaps for all of humanity) requires it.” Not airless consciousness, but the consciousness of crime in the light of conscience - that is Raskolnikov’s only originality. “What is truly original (Dostoevsky’s italics) in all this,” Razumikhin told Raskolnikov, “and really belongs to you alone, to my horror, is that you still authorize blood according to your conscience... After all, this permission to blood according to your conscience is... this, in my opinion, is more terrible than the official permission to shed blood, legal.” The ethical point of view played a primary role in Crime and Punishment. “I wanted to become Napoleon, that’s why I killed him. – I once asked myself this question: what if, for example, Napoleon had happened in my place, and he had no Toulon, no Egypt, no crossing of Mont Blanc to start his career, but instead of all these beautiful and monumental things, there would have been, quite simply, some funny old woman receptionist, who, in addition, had to be killed in order to steal money from her chest, well, would he have decided what if there was no other way out? Wouldn’t you cringe because this is too unmonumental and sinful?”... You need to delve into these words. The more insignificant this old woman, the registrar, the moneylender, the stronger Raskolnikov’s love for man emerges. “A man is not a louse to me.” This is the main tone of the entire novel. Aesthetics hides morality; The splendor of war, the thunder of guns, require a huge crowd, but completely hide the person. You need to give up aesthetics to get to the person, to ethics. “I absolutely don’t understand: why hitting people with bombs in a proper siege is a more respectable form? Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of powerlessness!” Raskolnikov abandoned aesthetics, he set his sights on a pitiful old woman, and he became stronger than Napoleon. “I finally guessed that not only would it not have bothered him, but it would not have even occurred to him that this was not monumental... and he would not even have understood at all why there was any need to be upset.” But this apparent strength of the great Napoleon is his real powerlessness, and Raskolnikov’s weakness is his strength. Napoleon would not have noticed the non-monumental nature of this crime, because he did not know the value of a person. For him, a person was a thing. Therefore, for Napoleon, the transition from Toulon and Egypt to the old woman would have been a transition from the great to the ridiculous. But for Raskolnikov this is a transition from aesthetically majestic to morally great. He noticed the old woman's insignificance because he saw a person in her. The holiness of man for man in this non-monumental form appeared to Raskolnikov with the force of a categorical imperative. Merezhkovsky did not pay attention to this and thus turned out to be incomparably lower than Dostoevsky, lower than his thought. “Before Napoleon,” writes Merezhkovsky, Raskolnikov even has some advantage; he sees not only external, but also internal obstacles, delays that he must overcome in order to have the right. Napoleon doesn't see them at all. Perhaps, however, this blindness was partly the source of his strength.”... Some? partly? only? No, all the greatness of Napoleon is in his blindness and all the advantage of Raskolnikov is in the clarity of his consciousness. Napoleon went against the social and moral law with full consciousness, but he did not have an internally rational consciousness of the holiness of the human person. Raskolnikov's problem could never arise before him. On the contrary, for Raskolnikov the most fatal question is the holiness of man for man. The question of Crime and Punishment is the question of whether it is possible to combine the freedom of Napoleon with the consciousness of Raskolnikov. Previously, in Eternal Companions, Merezhkovsky understood this better, although not completely. “There is something truly terrifying and almost inhuman in such fanatics of the idea as Robespierre and Calvin. Sending thousands of innocents to the stake for God or to the guillotine for freedom, shedding blood like a river, they sincerely consider themselves benefactors of the human race and great righteous people... Corsairs Julien are constantly portrayed as if they were playing a role, naively believing in their rightness and strength. And Dostoevsky’s hero already doubts whether he is right. They die irreconcilable, but for him this state of proud loneliness and break with people is only a temporary crisis, a transition to a different worldview.” But even then Merezhkovsky did not see this transition for what it really consisted of. “Raskolnikov, through fierce protest, reached the point of denying moral laws, to the point where he finally cast aside all the obligations of duty as an unnecessary burden, as a prejudice. At this icy theoretical height, in this loneliness, all life ends. And Raskolnikov would inevitably have died if another principle had not been hidden in his soul. Dostoevsky brought him to the moment when a suppressed, but not killed, religious feeling awakens in him.” So, the other principle seems to awaken only at the end, and during the crime it is suppressed. But this is too sluggish for Raskolnikov. Another principle is actually already operating in him during the crime, causing him deep suffering and not allowing him to reach icy heights. “True heroes, great criminals of the law do not cry and are not moved. Calvin, Robespierre, Torquemada did not feel the suffering of others - this is their strength, their integrity; they seem to be carved from one block of granite; and in Dostoevsky’s hero there is already an eternal source of weakness - duality, split will... Woe to the great criminals of the law if in their soul, burned by the passion of an idea, at least something human remains! Woe to the people of bronze if even one corner of their heart remains alive! A weak cry of conscience is enough for them to wake up, understand and perish.” This is what the new worldview has been reduced to - to a weak remnant of conscience, to the original duality! This is too weak for Dostoevsky! No, the difference between Raskolnikov and Napoleon is not in weak remnants of the past, but in a completely new principle. “Fanaticism of ideas is only one side of his character. It contains tenderness, love, pity for people, and tears of tenderness. This is his weakness, this is what destroys him.” But in this weakness is Raskolnikov’s new strength, which does not destroy him, but saves him, which elevates him above Napoleon. The point is precisely that his pity for people is not just a weak echo of nature, a remnant of the past, but it is a new principle, conscious of its absoluteness. To understand Raskolnikov you don’t need to go below Napoleon, but you need to go further: Raskolnikov is all Napoleon, but he is more than Napoleon. "Crime? says Raskolnikov... What crime?... The fact that I killed a nasty, malicious louse, an old pawnbroker, whose killing forty sins is forgiven, who sucked the juice out of the poor - and this is a crime? Yes, a crime; Even such a person is not a louse for a person, even to kill such a person means to kill the principle. This is not an echo of natural pity, this is love raised to the height of an absolute principle. Ethics with the character of autonomous absoluteness, at the height of the religious principle - this is the essence of Raskolnikov, this is the force before which Napoleon’s self-will yields. Genius and aesthetics must fade into insignificance before the non-monumental absoluteness of autonomous ethics. It’s unaesthetic and therefore difficult, that’s the tragedy. But these are the pangs of a new birth, the pangs of Napoleon’s rebirth into Alyosha Karamazov, “Truly, truly, I say to you: you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will be sad, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman gives birth, she suffers sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to a baby, she no longer remembers the sorrow for joy, because a man was born into the world.” Instead of the evil louse, the old pawnbroker, a man was born in the soul of Raskolnikov, who could not bear the crime, because for him man is not a louse. In place of the monumental aesthetics of great self-will, there is a new beauty of inner strength, autonomous reason. “Everything is allowed to me, but not everything” I want. In place of boundless self-will there is boundless and free self-restraint. Napoleon, Torquemada, Robespierre are images of the past, this is the grain that must rot in Raskolnikov’s heart for Alyosha Karamazov to be born. They are justified in Raskolnikov’s heart, but justification of the past does not give self-will for the future; Justified as a natural, aesthetic phenomenon of the past, these images disappear in the moral force of the future. To understand Raskolnikov as a type weaker than Napoleon means returning to the Nero and Robespierres. You need to understand him as the inner-strongest type. “Everything is fine,” said Kirilov (“Demons”). - A person is unhappy because he does not know that he is happy, only because. Whoever dies of hunger and who offends and dishonors a girl is good.” And whoever crushes his head for a child, that’s good; and whoever doesn’t crush it, that’s good... One must not only endure, but also love what is necessary.” But this is only in relation to the past, only contemplation of the past, only the dead point of the present - for action in the future, for life, something else is needed. “They are not good,” Kirilov said further, “because they don’t know that they are good. When they find out, they will not rape the girl. They need to know that they are good, and they will all immediately become good, every single one of them.” So for Kirilov, fate is in the past, goodness is in the future. And this is something else, equal to the fate of the past, just as absolute and indestructible, although... the inner, the tender, the weak, is human autonomy. This is not “something human”, this is “human, too human”, this is human at the level of the absolute, divine, this is moral at the height of the religious. This is precisely what a person has, to the point of absoluteness, to divinity, to the point of inalienability. “Raskolnikov, according to Merezhkovsky, experienced something similar to what a person who would suddenly lose the feeling of the weight and density of his body should experience: no barriers, no delays; everywhere there is emptiness, airiness, infinity; neither above nor below; no point of support." This, we said, is Merezhkovsky’s fantasy. Raskolnikov did not reach such a state, because another principle was already operating in him during the crime. Of course, that state, if he “endured” the crime, is assumed, only assumed - but this is not a state of airiness, groundlessness, but a state of soullessness, meaninglessness, as if a person spiritually “killed himself”, called upon himself madness, tore out his own heart, desecrated his shrine, “killed his principle”, remained “without reason and spirit.” To be aware of the approach of madness is the greatest suffering, but it is impossible to rationally desire madness. And Raskolnikov killed only with his hands, but “could not bear” the crime, so in fact he did not kill his principle, just as Sonya was not dead, “living: in the dirt that she hated.” At the same time, one must also recognize Merezhkovsky’s reasoning about Raskolnikov’s loneliness as a pathetic fantasy: in his opinion, this is loneliness that has reached heights on the other side of good and evil. True, Raskolnikov, after the crime, cannot stand the company of his mother and sister, but for him it was “a hopeless and difficult solitude.” Yes, and this privacy was not unconditional, and this is the most important thing. While the thought of Duna and his mother filled him with panic, he sought the company of Sonya, who became “one of his own” for him. “I have only you now,” he told her... I came to you. We are cursed together, we will go together. No one will understand anything, among people, if you tell them, but I understood. I need you, that’s why I came to you... You also stepped over. But you can’t stand it, and if you’re left alone, you’ll go crazy, just like me. Therefore, we must go together, along the same road.” Well, is there even one hint of “power and solitude” here! Why Raskolnikov, seeking Sonya’s company, avoided his mother and sister, this was very clear to Sonya. “And to live,” she told him, “how will you live? What will you live with? Is this possible now? Well, how are you going to talk to your mother? (Oh, with them, with them, what will happen now!) What am I saying! After all, you already abandoned your mother and sister. Well, he’s already given up, he’s given up. Oh my God! she exclaimed. – After all, he already knows all this himself! Well, how, how can one live without a person! What will happen to you now! In these same feelings of Raskolnikov, in his attitude towards his mother and sister, and especially towards Sonya, in his nature, in his cordiality, lies the reason for his revival. From Dostoevsky’s point of view, Raskolnikov’s resurrection is most understandable, completely natural, completely artless. Raskolnikov suffers because his nature does not correspond to his abstract dreams, his thoughts - he despises himself according to his theory. Then, he suffers from those he loves. “Walking to Sonya, he felt that all his hope and all the outcome lay in her; he thought to lay down at least part of his torment, and suddenly now, when her whole heart turned to him, he suddenly felt and realized that he had become unparalleledly more unhappy than he was before.” Equally, he failed to alienate himself from his mother and sister. Temporary hatred for them was apparent; underneath it lay love, which soon floated to the top again. “Oh,” he exclaimed, “if I were alone, and no one loved me, and I myself would never love anyone! All this wouldn’t exist,” i.e. suffering that forced him to open up. Raskolnikov does not realize that that (internal) suffering and this suffering were one and the same: love, which weighed heavily on his abstract thought - love made his relationship with Sonya and his family suffering. He also did not understand that in the increase of these sufferings, when he became even more unhappy from mutual love, especially from love for Sonya, there was his resurrection. He was resurrected when his love reached absoluteness, infinity. How deeply truthful this is, how deeply Christian. Raskolnikov, on the surface of his consciousness, in his thoughts, completely despises his cowardice, and at the same time, in the depths of his soul, his love grows. And unnoticed by him, resurrection approached. “He himself didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly something seemed to pick him up and seem to throw him at her (Sonya’s) feet. He cried and hugged her knees. At the first moment she was terribly frightened, and her whole face turned pale. She jumped up from her seat and, trembling, looked at him. But immediately, in that very moment, she understood everything. Infinite happiness shone in her eyes; she understood, and there was no longer any doubt for her that he loved her, loved her endlessly, and that this moment had finally come.” This word loves and explains the resurrection. It was not in his thoughts that a change occurred, not one theory defeated another, but “life came instead of dialectics.” And how artless it is in Dostoevsky: on the same pages he shows us the last echoes of Raskolnikov’s inner drama, his theoretical contempt for his cowardice and this resurrecting power of love. The critic needs to become a slave to his idea in order to see Dostoevsky’s “unskillful prefix” here! The bright human divine is, first of all, the opposite of the elemental-unconscious, majestic-aesthetic. But it also has another opposite – social-utilitarian. Napoleons and Robespierres, sending thousands to the stake, violating social and moral laws, could consider themselves benefactors of humanity, because for them both denial and affirmation belonged to the same area: some were slaughtered so that others would feel good. Both are comparable. It’s a different matter with a new dimension, when the dignity of the individual rises to religious heights. Here the personality is already incommensurable with the social-utilitarian. Meanwhile, apparently, boundaries cannot be drawn here. This is the temptation. “I only wanted to take the first step - to put myself in an independent position, to achieve the means, and there everything would be smoothed over with immeasurable, comparatively, benefits. I wanted good for people." For the good of people, for the benefit of society, to kill one vile old woman: isn’t that tempting? And so, despite the apparent seductiveness, it turns out that it is impossible: killing the old woman turns out to be killing the principle. Man is above society; the old woman, as a person, is above public benefit; love for a person is higher than love for people, for society. Only in man is the absolute, but not in the social-utilitarian. This is religion. It is a personal religion, a spiritual one, not a religion of the crowd. That it was precisely in this simultaneous denial of utilitarian ethics and the affirmation of the sanctity of the individual that religion was for Dostoevsky, this can be seen from the following words of his Pushkin speech. “What kind of happiness can there be (both for the individual and for society) if it is based on someone else’s misfortune? Let me imagine that you yourself are erecting the building of human destiny with the goal of ultimately making people happy, finally giving them peace and quiet. And now, imagine, too, that for this it is necessary and inevitably necessary to torture just one human being, moreover, even if it is not so worthy, funny even at another glance, not some kind of Shakespeare... And now we just need to disgrace, dishonor and torture him and build our building on (his) tears! Would you agree to be the architect of such a building on this condition? And can you even admit for a moment the idea that the people for whom this building was built would agree to accept such happiness from you, if its foundation is based on the suffering of, say, an insignificant creature, but mercilessly and unfairly tortured, and, having accepted this happiness, remain happy forever? Here... you can’t go beyond the limit.” Thus Dostoevsky elevates goodness from utilitarian baseness to the religious heights of personal shrine. For him, absolute value is in the human person, in human life, it doesn’t matter - in someone else’s or his own; here the only crime is the death of life, no matter your own or someone else’s. Raskolnikov killed someone else's life; Sonya “killed and betrayed herself” for the sake of others: she killed because she lost “life in spirit and mind,” and therefore she killed herself in vain, sacrificing her personality for public benefit. She is a great sinner and her curse is the same as Raskolnikov’s curse. The holiness of the individual is the limit of sacrifice. Sacrifice for another should be physically limitless, love - to the point of death, but not to the point of destroying someone else’s life, not to the point of losing one’s spiritual personality. With true sacrifice, the spiritual personality grows to absoluteness. “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” This love for a person is higher than the social-utilitarian law. Likewise, the suffering from a crime against this love is deeper than legal punishment. That is why Raskolnikov does not plead guilty before people, guilty from a social-legalistic point of view. Archimandrite Feodor Bukharev In the history of Russian religious thought - in the history not of school theology, repeating other people's words, but of living religious thought, a living solution to the Christian problem, a solution to the question of the relationship of the Christian spirit to worldly culture - the name of A. M. Bukharev - Archimandrite Theodore - cannot fail to be mentioned. In his youth, having taken monasticism “out of love for the truth of Christ” in order to “serve in clarifying Orthodoxy - in its relation to modernity - in order to devote himself entirely to this service,” he was persecuted by the zealots of this Orthodoxy in its historical immobility and took off monasticism for the sake of the free preaching of his harmonious Christian worldview. Leaving monasticism and entering into marriage corresponded to his views in essence, but was accompanied by intensified persecution from his enemies. He died a martyr to his idea and already through the burden of his fate proved how deeply his religious thought was rooted in his heart. The Christian views of A. M. Bukharev are simple, harmonious and consistent. His central idea is that the spirit of Christ must be embodied in the life of a Christian, that his whole life must belong to Christ. “Thoughts about acquiring Christ, whether through thought or external practice - these thoughts are carried out and revealed in all my writings, sometimes as foundations, sometimes as conclusions and results, and in general as the inner strength and beginning of my entire way of thinking.” It is more interesting for us to find out not for what practical conclusions and particular applications this central thought serves as the basis, but on what grounds it itself is affirmed, by what method it is organized. We must decisively declare that in the person of Archimandrite Theodore the reader is dealing with a teacher of “dogmatic theology”, and that dogmatic coverage of the subjects of religious thought is predominant in his writings. The main core of his religious worldview has support of an exclusively dogmatic nature. We do not find in him a historical perspective, an understanding of the historical appearance that Evangelical Christianity itself had, and of the historical process in which the Gospel truth grew into a church-dogmatic system; We also do not find in him sufficient justification for the autocratic value of ethical work, the good of life and all kinds of cultural acquisitions. His worldview can be called completely church-dogmatic; His method of thinking also turns out to be dogmatic. The main dogmatic points in the substantiation of his religious system are the following three: the incarnation of Christ, His resurrection and the redemption of human life completed by Him. In the person of Christ, God Himself, namely God the Word, consubstantial with His Father, took into His very personality (in the unity of His “I”) the true and complete human nature, - He accepted our human nature with the human mind, and with the heart and will and imagination, and with the very human body, and this His humanity, in His life on earth, entered into our earthly order of things, under the conditions of life physical, family, civil, national and church, entered into such a connection with external nature and the world in which man is inextricably found. Archim. Theodore enters into the closest assessment of the church dogma about the face of Christ, about the union in Him of full divinity and perfect humanity, and indicates the deepest meaning contained in the church struggle with Arianism, Nestorianism and Eutychianism. The real and indissoluble connection, in the unity of the person of complete human nature with the perfect deity, the belonging of all human life to God Himself, is the basis of the entire Christian worldview and all Christian hopes. An equally essential point in the system of Christian thought is the doctrine of the atonement of sin, which entered human life and penetrated into all its forms. Christ God became man for every man and took upon Himself the sins of all sinners. He, the Most High, not only humbled Himself, descending for the sake of us earthly beings from His heavenly heights into our earthly order of things, taking upon Himself full human nature, but moreover, as if Himself guilty of all human sins and errors, He deigned to endure suffering, to an inexplicable degree of the feeling of abandonment by His Consubstantial Father Himself, and finally, the shameful death on the cross. For the sake of His Divinity, for the sake of the Father’s love, which eternally rests in Him with all the fullness of its fullness, all the guilt of the sins of our world, borne by the love of Christ until death on the cross, to the state of some unsearchable abandonment by the Father, was blotted out by Him in abundance, and for the sake of His humanity, naturally akin and shared with us, all the fullness of God in Christ, His truth, truth, love, in general, everything about Christ wise, good and beautiful, all this is accessible and easily communicated to us humans, if only we ourselves want and strive to perceive these treasures by faith. The Lord retains His meaning as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the whole world, for all eternity, revealing through this for us sinners the fullness of the Father’s love. God the Word is the Lamb of God, slain in the predestination of the Father from the foundation of the world, and is the foundation of all destinies and the entire composition of the world, such a foundation that, by virtue of it, truth and goodness are victorious even in oppression and crucifixion, and lies and evil are put to shame and overthrown in their very dominance and triumph, that in Him life emerges from death itself, and life through His cross goes to success and the highest to the world Taken in Him, the smallest and apparently empty no longer ceases to be so, the poisonous and deadly does not harm, lies and bewilderment do not confuse, so long as everyone in his own business does not move from his own and universal foundation, no matter what the darkness or darkness of this or that environment. The real theological point of view is to look at everything on the basis and in the spirit of Christ God the Word, Who created and bears all things by His power, became man for the salvation of all mankind from errors and sins, the guilt of which He took upon Himself and bore until death on the cross, Who, thus, shines on everyone and everything with His love, abolishing evil and bringing life out of death. But Christ not only through His incarnation entered into all conditions of human nature and human life and with His suffering and death atoned for our sins, He also glorified our nature, as in His earthly life, for example. in the transfiguration on the mountain, and especially in His resurrection. Christ accepted flesh, akin to our physicality; The materiality of the hands and the whole body, which is natural to us, was retained by Him and in the glory of His resurrection. With His humanity, perceived for our sake, He ascended into heaven and thereby elevated this His humanity, representing and spiritually concentrating us all, into open enjoyment of the fullness of the Father’s love, resting essentially and eternally in His Divinity. This is so that the entire multi-syllabic area of ​​the earthly, material, in which man labors and is burdened in various ways, is not outside of Christ’s grace and truth; so that a Christian, whether engaged in earthly things in thought or in life, clings to Christ as the head of everything - both earthly and heavenly, and is overshadowed in Him, even among his worldly activities, by the love of his heavenly Father; so that a Christian, striving for Christ with renunciation of everything worldly, does this without prejudice to the material and carnal, to which he belongs and for which, so to speak, Christ’s very flesh, accessible even after the resurrection to the touch, stands up. From these principles, Archim. Theodore brings out his central idea about life according to the spirit of Christ. Just as in Christ divinity and humanity were united, on the one hand, inseparably and unchangeably, and on the other, inseparably and inseparably, so the spirit of Christ must be embodied in our lives, and we must inseparably and inseparably unite our heavenly aspirations with earthly conditions and needs, we must combine Orthodoxy with modernity. One-sided asceticism, first of all, sins against this principle. “Let us, they say, give up our weak human mind, imagination, especially this mortal physicality; we will trample and destroy our moral personality; let us ascend in spirit to the heavenly and divine.” Fine; but we must not forget that in Christ humanity, both with the rational soul and with the physicality, was not absorbed by the Divinity, but for the sake of us humans, for the sake of the salvation of our mind and our other spiritual powers, as well as our physicality, remained whole, like His Divinity, in His one person; and this for the preservation and elevation of our personality in its true dignity. To suppress the human mind or other spiritual forces with a spiritual direction, instead of their versatile revelation in Christ, to remove our very physicality from any participation in grace-filled spirituality, would mean to put up with the spirit of Eutychianism, which recognized in Christ, our Savior and prototype, the absorption of the human by the Divine, and with the Monothelites not to recognize in Christ, along with the Divine, both human will and activity. No, the spirituality of our life and activity does not consist in hovering - those who do not want to know human reality, while in the environment and under the conditions of this reality - under conditions not only directly spiritual and church, but also family, national, civil - the consubstantial Son of God descended to us, having received and preserved in the unity of His person, in union with His Divinity, and human nature with human will and human action, which means - and with human thoughts, desires, feelings, memories, imagination, and - all this for the sake of us humans... The gracious spirit, which elevates us above carnal sinfulness and above worldly corruption, consists in the fact that everything relating to the spirit - to every action of all its power, and to the body - even to eating food and to sleep, everything in our personality should be according to Christ and with Christ and, therefore, under the good will of His Heavenly Father and in the communion of His Holy Spirit. And moreover, since Christ came into the world in the meaning and disposition of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, and this love, which took upon itself all responsibility for human sins, is the spirit of His entire earthly life, all His states and actions; then it is precisely in His spirit that the spirituality of all of us should be, both internal dispositions and thoughts, and external relationships and actions. One can present direct experimental evidence of the ancient spirit bearers about the truth of such a concept regarding spirituality, arising from the very essence of the dogmas of Orthodoxy they approved. One spirit-bearing elder suggested that in the event that a young monk, with his youthful soaring, began to rise above the earth towards the sky, to hold him by the legs and put him on the ground. Another of the strict ascetics, having learned about the iniquities of someone, only sighed with sorrow, not purified from the condemnation of the lawless one, and the Lord himself, in a night vision, appeared to the ascetic with condemnation of himself and with the readiness to accept the second crucifixion for the sinner internally condemned by him. This is how false spirituality is, revealing itself not in the image and spirit of the Lamb of God! So, if we, being zealous for God and the Church, do not heed, or pay little attention to, Christ himself in the various difficulties and needs of His lesser brethren - whether in the outwardly civil and popular environment, or in the realm of thought and feeling: our spirituality, which does not quite rise to heaven according to Christ, should be placed on earth, which Christ loved so much and which in Christ already becomes a heavenly residence. If we begin to look at the revelation of human thought, heart, fantasy in the sciences and arts with the spirit of condemning human infidelity here to Christ, and not in the spirit of His love, taking upon ourselves responsibility before His Father in our infidelity: then the Lord Himself will show Himself to have accepted human thought, heart, fantasy and, in general, all human nature with human will and action, moreover, taking upon Himself the guilt of all human sins in all these relationships or human powers... When everything related to the body and even to the secondary forces of the soul - the imagination, external feeling and even the lower ideality of reason, with all their manifestations and the fruits of their actions in the world, is recognized as an area almost rejected, at least to nothing heavenly, which has to be revealed in the future life, completely unsuitable and unnecessary; then in this case, Christian spirituality is made into some kind of monster, of which all those who labor and are burdened with various earthly human needs and interests are afraid and run away. And Christianity seems to be given not for the earth and earth-born, so that the will of the Heavenly Father may be on earth as it is in heaven. But no less destructive is the opposite direction - life, worldly or secular, placed completely outside of Christ, independent of Him, arranged not according to His principles, but according to the principles of reason, personal or universal. The falsity of this direction is revealed from two sides. On the one hand, no success is possible for worldly life placed outside of Christ, as this was revealed especially clearly before the time of the coming of Christ, when paganism internally disintegrated and collapsed, and the spiritual state of the majority of the Israelis was even more bleak than the state of the pagans. And in our time, to tear away any aspect of human life from the principles of Christ means immediately condemning it to complete hopelessness. Outside of Christ and His Holy Spirit there can be nothing true, pure or beautiful; Outside of Christ there cannot even be human dignity, but a person, having become detached from Christ, necessarily falls from the height of human dignity to what is lower than Christ, to spiritual bestiality or bestiality. Let him have in mind and defend human rights, let him reason and try to elevate human dignity, the human mind and heart, but not according to Christ - the Son of God - his beginning will still be a beast, albeit with human eyes. Even if this man, who does not want to know Christ the Son of God, is distinguished by the eagle’s flight of thought, the powerful power of the word, the beginning of his activity and direction is still not true humanity, but fallen to the image of a beast, although this beast has lion-royal lips and eagle wings. Let him refine and satisfy his senses with fine arts or aesthetic pleasures, without, however, caring about their true ennoblement by fidelity to Christ - this is again not a truly human principle, this is a beast whose nose is like a bear and which, according to the prophecy, devours a lot of flesh - everything sinful and sensual. Even if this man, who does not value conformity to the Son of God, would be distinguished by his many-sided education, would be the same in our time as the Hellenes were before the barbarians in the ancient world, in his beginnings there is still no man visible, but only the image of a lynx or an attractive-looking leopard, according to the vision of the prophet. On the other hand, just as a person cannot live outside of Christ, so a Christian must in all aspects of his life - family, social, scientific, artistic, even physical - live according to the spirit of Christ, Who in His incarnation took upon Himself all the conditions of human life, in His suffering atoned for all human sins, and in His resurrection raised all human nature to the Heavenly Father. Not only cannot a person live outside of Christ, but Christ cannot be excluded from the composition of humanity, which in its entirety belongs to Him and constitutes His eternal and inalienable property. Even if a person renounced Christ, Christ still cannot renounce His human nature. In “God the Word made flesh” all human nature - soul, body, and in the soul and body all their natural powers and the free action of these forces belong to His own person, so we must stand for all aspects of humanity, as for the property of Christ - for thought, will, imagination, heart, for the body itself and the satisfaction of its needs in Christ. Suppression, oppression, especially condemnation and rejection of anything truly human (except for sin, which already constitutes a perversion of humanity), is already an encroachment on grace itself, on the spirit and meaning of the work of Christ - and this is exactly the same as standing for something human not in Christ means already taking away from Christ the property of His grace and casting this human thing out of the realm of salvation into inevitable destruction and corruption. And M. Bukharev wanted that there was not a single area in human life that could proceed outside the light of Christ - he wanted unconditionally all aspects of our life to develop in the spirit of Christ - science, art, family, state, nationality, citizenship... The tirelessness with which he applied the Orthodox point of view to all, without exception, questions and difficulties that arose in his contemporary social life is amazing. He breathed Orthodoxy and did not forget it for a single minute, whether he was talking about Ivanov’s painting, about the works of Gogol, about schismatics and missionaries, about Western science, about women and the family, about Jews, about power and subjects - he considered everything from the point of view of Orthodoxy. In particular, he looked at family, national, and civil life this way. In the Old Testament, all this constituted an environment that raised the believer to view from afar the coming grace of Christ. And now we, who already know and have in Christ the very essence of grace and truth, can and must directly and quite consciously create and develop our own, family, national and civil, well-being - on the basis of Christ’s truth and grace. Thus, in the Old Testament, in patriarchal family life, marriage and children gave believers a foretaste of the promised divine descendant of Christ and His union with the church; now in the New Testament, the divine union of Christ and the church is graciously reflected in every marriage, and all that remains for faith is not to accept this grace in vain, but, on the contrary, to always heed it and through this always bring it into living motion. In the Old Testament, the chosen people and the Promised Land retained their spiritual significance, precisely as the people of God, as God’s land - in the new Testament it is already fully known that God the Word himself in the flesh lived under the conditions of national and civil life on earth, and this is for all mankind for all times; and thus our faith in our views and life, regarding citizenship and nationality, is only supposed to hold on to them and carry on further and further in their area this great grace, making our earthly life heavenly. Otherwise, Orthodox Christians, with all the height of their New Testament calling, will be in family and civil life the same carnal people as the other sons of Adam and Eve, supplemented only by naturally weak forces and walking along naturally broken paths. In the life of Christians and in their views, in this case, there is inconsistency, duality, contradiction between the heavenly treasure of Christ's faith buried, as if buried in the ground, and worldly life, paganly wandering in its own unauthorized ways... Likewise, public life itself should not be separated from Christianity. The essential “interest of Christianity” is that everything and everyone in humanity should be brought under the blessing of grace and into the communion of the love of the Heavenly Father, extended to men in His only begotten Son. Separate what belongs to Caesar from what belongs to God, arrange and discuss everything civil in complete separation from the spiritual and the church, then you will alienate this area from the love of the Father, which all rests in the Son, then in this area there will be nothing truly good, useful and beautiful, then it will come to early or late destruction. Not only family, society and the state, not only science and art must develop according to the spirit of Christ, but even bodily life, every private relationship, every work - everything must be according to Christ. It is not according to Christ that we should go through any earthly field, starting from one where almost physical strength alone is required, to one where thought, feeling, and word work; to organize and arrange our own, public or private, business not according to Christ means for Christians to degrade their civil life incomparably lower than the citizenship status of carnal Israel. The most menial work - what prevents you from doing it, as it were, under the direct supervision of the universal Master, who was pleased to live in the house of a simple carpenter until he was thirty years old? Interpreting and caring about the goods related to temporary needs, benefits and pleasures themselves, is it not possible, first of all, to see with our faith in these goods the gifts of love of the Heavenly Father, Who will give us everything richly for enjoyment through His only begotten Son, Christ? The most apparently empty conversations and readings that are fruitless for the spirit can be listened to only by following with your inner thoughts the Lamb of God, who was not ashamed to take upon Himself the guilt of all our emptiness. Whether to eat food or to rejoice - everything must be done in the presence of Christ. Every work we do must be a continuous presence before the eyes of God’s love. We should not have spiritual backyards where we stand next to those who do not know Christ or even the dumb. The true and living spirit of Christianity is not the spirit of condemnation of the world, but of salvation, not the spirit of slavish oppression, but of filial-free and independent truth, the lamb’s spirit of meek condescension and humility, but not cruel exaltation or downtrodden spiritual humiliation. Someday such a blessed time will come, - such was the last hope of A. M. Bukharev, - when for the consciousness and life of mankind the full light and power of Christ's church primacy will be revealed by faith, extending to everything, not only heavenly, but also earthly, and when the luminous spirit and power of truth of the procession of the Holy Spirit only from the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ will shine into every environment, not only the direct church, but also the family, civil, into all the connections of society, into history, into all the logical movements of our thought... In any case, this worldview of A. M. Bukharev cannot be denied remarkable harmony and consistency. And in essence, his central idea about the harmonious combination of Christian spirituality with worldly, or secular, life has all the signs of living truth and deeply rooted in the world soul and in the historical organism. Connected with his personal feat, it creates for him a well-deserved glory, the radiance of which falls on the Russian theological school. This is one of those ideas that make a valuable contribution to the universal treasury and occupy a strong place in the ideological history of mankind... But the grounds on which A. M. Bukharev affirms his idea, and the method by which he develops it, cannot be called given. He was well aware of the task ahead of us of achieving a higher synthesis, but he did not provide a solution to this task. It has already been noted that it comes from exclusively dogmatic grounds. The exclusive use of the dogmatic point of view has its drawbacks. But he does not even stand at the height of Christian dogma. He confines himself only to the formulas of Christological dogmas and reveals unfamiliarity with their philosophy, with those thoughts that lay behind them and constituted their inner content in the theological system of each of the outstanding teachers of the church. In him we often find references to condescension and humility, which constitute the inner side of the divine-human face, but his information about kenosis is limited to the elementary data of textbooks. He often resorts to the church formula about the inseparable and inseparable union in Christ of the divine and human natures, but we do not find in him even a remote hint of the patristic teaching that Christ’s self-abasement reached His submission to the laws of human nature. “The self-abasement of the Son of God, in the form of freely granting human nature the ability to bear His divinity, extended to submission to the laws of human nature that possessed Him. The relationship of natures was determined by freedom, but freedom gave place to the dominance of the laws of human nature. Therefore, the union of natures was not accompanied by a sporadic and arbitrary intervention of divine nature in the area of human nature, but the mutual communication of properties, bestowed on human nature by God, was determined by the laws of human development... The wise evangelist, beginning the story of the Logos who became flesh, shows that the Word, for the purpose of economic development, allowed its own flesh to develop according to the laws inherent in the nature of the flesh,” etc. (See Fundamentals of Christianity, vol. I, pp. 95.) If, according to the meaning of this truth, we understand the relationship of Christian spirituality to our worldly life, then this will mean that life according to the spirit of Christ does not in the least violate those laws that determine this life in its own spheres, natural and social, that the spirit of Christ is embodied in the personality of man and only through the personality is revealed in the natural and social spheres. Another truth of patristic philosophy, which lies at the root of church Christological formulas, is the doctrine of the unity of the divine-human life of Christ despite the heterogeneity of the divine and human natures. “Relating to each other as the external to the internal, the properties of human nature and the properties of divine nature were not two homogeneous parts of one whole, but were heterogeneous and dissimilar, they were two sides of a single life or being. It is easy to understand what consequence follows from this for the question of the unity of the divine-human life, or being. Divinity and humanity in Christ, precisely because they are heterogeneous, were united into the unity of theanthropic life, into natural unity - this was the single nature of God the Word incarnate. Two human bodies, no matter how different or how similar they may be, even if they have the same head, cannot form one body, but are two bodies; on the contrary, clothing does not increase the number of one body, but a clothed body is one body. Also, the soul in union with the body is not two souls, not two bodies, not two people, but one rational flesh; word and thought, idea and picture – not two, but one. Unity, not composition or mixture, occurs when parts are heterogeneous. According to the teachings of Cyril of Alexandria, there truly is one nature of the Word incarnate. For if there is one Son, by nature and truly originating from God the Father, the Logos, ineffably begotten, and if He, having taken on flesh, not soulless, but animated by a rational soul, became a man, descended from a woman, then He should not be divided as a result of this perception into two persons or a son, but remained one, only no longer incorporeal and not outside the body, but having adopted it by virtue inseparable connection. But whoever says this does not at all affirm confusion or merging, or anything like that; such a consequence does not necessarily follow from the preceding premises... because divinity and humanity (in Christ) abide and are understood each in the peculiarities of its nature,” etc. (Ibid p. 100). When applied to our question, this will have the meaning that personal spirituality and natural-social life, which follows its own laws, are not mechanically mixed, but are heterogeneous, since personal spirituality follows absolute norms, and natural-social life follows the path of conditional development, and therefore they can be united in the highest harmony. Christian spirituality, or absoluteness, limited to the sphere of the individual, can be harmoniously combined with the natural and social aspects of life precisely because it does not interfere with their conventional forms, allowing them to develop according to their own laws. A. M. Bukharev did not even have a premonition of this heterogeneity of spheres of life, and in solving the religious problem of life he uses bare Christological formulas, which inevitably should have led him to a mechanical view of the relationship of spirituality to worldly life. Bukharev did not use the patristic teachings, but because he limited himself only to the dogmatic point of view and did not reach the evangelical one, the shortcomings of his worldview increase. The apostolic-patristic teaching in this respect differs from the evangelical point of view in that in the first, in contrast to the pure evangelical teaching, conditional content is given, in it the pure evangelical teaching enters into a historical perspective and is adapted to the historical task. Such a task was the expulsion from all areas of pagan natural-social life of the polytheistic spirit, which penetrated all forms of this life among the pagans. It was necessary to sanctify with Christianity not only science and art, not only state and family life, but even such functions as nutrition. Hence the apostolic commandment: “Whether you eat or drink, do everything for the glory of God.” On the contrary, in pure, ahistorical, evangelical teaching, we are instilled with the idea that both natural and socio-historical life is carried out according to laws that are alien to moral goals. God sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. That is why the Gospel teaching expresses personal spiritual absoluteness, softened in the apostolic and patristic teaching. And in order to solve the religious problem in relation to our time, we need to return to the purity of the Gospel teaching. A. M. Bukharev does not know either the heterogeneity of the spheres of our life, or personal-spiritual absoluteness. In accordance with this, he does not know natural, natural and socio-historical life. For him, all life is divided into two opposite parts - “based on Christ” and “sinful human”; for him, every side of life outside of Christ is inevitably sinful, the entire scope of life activity comes down to salvation and the only value life has is from Christ. He has no love for life before knowing its meaning; he does not know the natural value of life. Therefore, the task he took upon himself turned out to be beyond his strength. Christ is the founder of absolute spiritual life, but from the work He accomplished, neither the nature nor the history already presupposed by Him is explained. It is impossible to take the whole life out of soul salvation; Along with inner-spiritual life, this heterogeneous natural-historical life is necessary. An exclusively Christian point of view on life is inevitably an ascetic point of view. And the religious system of Archimandrite Theodore, in spite of everything, is an ascetic system. What is important here is that his idea about the relationship of Orthodoxy to modernity developed at a time when he was a sincere monk, “was naively devoted to monastic vows,” and, of course, he later left monasticism, essentially by accident. He did not have the conscious rejection of monastic vows that Luther had. He got married and this corresponded to his views, but he did not leave monasticism in order to get married. However, we will not insist that there is a secret of his soul. In any case, his views, even after leaving monasticism, were and remained ascetic. The question of the relationship of Orthodoxy to modernity was for him entirely a question of the possibility of a worldly life, firstly, more or less sinless and, secondly, built according to the thought of Christ. But this is precisely the ascetic principle, which cannot embrace the fullness of life. In words Archim. Theodore resisted such asceticism, 2 but in essence he was unarmed before it. “With our minds and hearts,” he writes, “we recognize and solemnly confess only Christ God the Word as the beginning and goal of all that exists, the supreme condition of the very possibilities, the beginning and goal, the ruler and judge, and the light of man with his mind, with all his powers and internal laws; outside of Christ, everything for us is nothing more than insignificance and negligence. Barometers, steamships, all the fruits of civilization that have come to us from the West, inventions and successes of the human mind - all of this henceforth constitutes for us the gifts of God the Word, which hitherto were only vainly stolen from Him by the human mind, which forgot that it itself is His property, and neglected its heavenly glory - to be in conformity and communion with God the Word; In all this, we renounce only everything that cannot be subordinated to the spirit of Christ, that goes out of conformity with it and, therefore, falls to bestiality and bestiality. And henceforth the beginning and goal of all sciences and art, the alpha and omega of everything for us will be one Christ.”... Archim. Theodore wants to express the idea that a Christian can assimilate the entire culture, freeing it from sin, that “with faith it is possible to transfer all the treasures of Egypt and Babylon to the promised land.” But in order for this transfer not to be the same theft that the Jews committed when leaving Egypt, it is necessary to place culture in a significant connection with Christ. However, how to do this? After all, to assert that “barometers and steamships were stolen by reason from Christ” means going against the evidence. When Askochensky (a rude champion of Orthodox asceticism) objected to Archimandrite. Theodore that “Christ has absolutely no need for barometers and steamships,” the latter was powerless against this argument. Christ really does not need barometers and steamships, and evangelical, that is, pure, Christianity was entirely imbued with the expectation of the imminent arrival of the last hour - and it is even less possible to produce culture and history from Christ. And we cannot but agree with the words of one deep thinker that “the (possible) victory of Archimandrite. Theodora and the defeat of Askochensky lie outside the field of polemics between them, and in the next upper floor, where, however, not only Askochensky, but also Archimandrite. Theodore did not enter; and in the battlefield where they fought, except for his kind heart at the archimandrite. Theodore had no other arguments, no intellectual and, finally, even just smart arguments.” Archim. Theodore stood on the same ascetic point of view as Askochensky - and the imaginary reconciliation of Christ with the world was his self-deception. In fact, if we look at everything from the point of view of the Incarnation, if “the Lamb of God is the beginning and goal of all sciences and arts, the alpha and omega of everything,” then all science, with the bold implementation of this principle, should turn into theology, all art should shut itself up in the church, the state should turn into a theocracy, or submit to the church. This conclusion cannot be avoided. And a decisive inclination towards him is noticeable on all the pages of A. M. Bukharev. Of Gogol, whom he tirelessly calls the Orthodox Russian poet, he places above all his correspondence with friends, about which he says that the fragrance of Orthodoxy is wonderfully diffused in it. Following Gogol, he repeats that the poet must be brought up with the highest Christian education. He demands that the poet take as his highest leadership the Bible, which outlines the prototype for everything and for everyone, so that from it he can gain that spiritual mood, which, for example, is revealed in the prophets. The mystery of Christ, according to Arch. Theodora, lies at the foundation of poetry. And wasn’t he the one who spoke about church supremacy over everything 3?... We willingly agree that in words Archimandrite. Theodore constantly struggled with these conclusions, closing his eyes to them, but they naturally flow from his principle - and this is most confirmed by his severe pessimism. “Believing in the inviolability and inviolable holiness of everything churchly, it is scary to think about the immutable truth that in general everything that is done not according to Christ’s beginning and with a purpose not in Christ - all of this is already decisively out of the favor of the Heavenly Father, which rests in all its fullness in Christ the only begotten Word of God, and only in Him extends to creatures. Everything that is not from the Father in Christ belongs in its spirit to the realm of the prince of this world, to the realm of lies and sin. Think, then, that the inventions and fruits of European civilization, which came to us from the West, were invented there by the human mind for its own glory, for the purposes of this world, and not for the glory of Christ and human salvation. Consider that most of the sciences and arts of the Western-educated world, transferred to us, are also not based in Christ. Consequently, all this is outside the favor of the Heavenly Father; and every garden that the Father did not plant will be uprooted... Think about the terrible danger that almost the entire new worldly order of things is in.” Isn't this still pessimism? But this is a curse to the entire modern world, a curse to the entire culture and civilization. Is it possible, in this case, to transfer the treasures of Egypt and Babylon to the Promised Land?... No. There is only one opportunity to overcome this hopeless pessimism, to lift the curse from the world and humanity, this is to recognize the heterogeneity of the spheres of life, to recognize, along with Christ’s spirituality, the natural life, natural and socio-historical, developing according to its own laws, in these laws beloved by the Heavenly Father. That this natural life should be purged of this is one of the three principles of the "Guild of St. Matthew" - one of the types of clerical socialism... its sins, that a Christian cannot approve of all the fruits that have blossomed on its root, that he cannot assimilate some of its manifestations, it is easy to agree with this. But the question is, does this purification exhaust the Christian’s entire relationship to the world? Eg. Does eliminating depravity mean solving the whole question of a Christian’s attitude towards married life? Exactly no. Personally, spiritual life and natural life can be compared to two different geometric figures, which, when superimposed, partially coincide, such as a circle and a triangle. To stand exclusively on the Orthodox point of view, to reduce the entire religious question to the cleansing of the world from sin, is the same as demanding that the circle and the triangle coincide entirely, or cutting off the divergent parts. There must be some coincidence; a Christian can only accept worldly life cleansed of sins - conquests, field trials, capital punishment, debauchery, slavery of conscience and body - are absolutely unacceptable to him. But after subtracting this homogeneously coinciding part, a non-coinciding part remains - this is natural life, moving according to its own laws. Man eats, grows, reproduces and ages according to his own laws, science develops according to his own laws, and society naturally moves from one economic and political form to another. The attitude of a Christian to this natural necessity is the true Christian question. We must agree that in all this, in this natural necessity, there is no Christianity, that it, along with it, is a heterogeneous area. Family love, scientific, economic interests, the development of society - all this is not sinful and not sacred; all this does not directly contribute to Christian salvation and does not require Christianity for its development. To stand exclusively on the Church-Orthodox point of view means to demand the application of Christianity to the very forms of natural life; in this case, an ascetic-pessimistic attitude towards the entirety of worldly life is inevitable. But one has only to recognize the heterogeneity of the spheres of life, Christian and natural, one has only to demarcate the realm of personality for Christian spirituality, and for the sphere of forms of natural life to demand freedom of natural development, according to its own laws, and we will be at the threshold of the highest harmony. The mistake of A. M. Bukharev was that he wanted to apply Christianity not only to the solution of internal moral issues, but also to external forms - he set the church a task not only moral, but also political - he wanted the Russian people to be Orthodox, the Russian kingdom to be Orthodox. “The power and significance of the fact that the Lord, full of grace and truth, appeared openly as a king in the visible capital city of the famous people of God, will spiritually be revealed to us, obviously, in no other way than unless all areas of our life, the nationality and citizenship of the Orthodox kingdom, not only in their directly moral aspects, but also in relation to their external expressions and accessories, will be illuminated for our faith by the one truth of Christ and grace." But this is, to put it simply, clerical policy, and it is not at all new, coming, but has long been carried out in church history, especially brightly by the Roman Catholic Church. And it’s not in vain that A. M. Bukharev constantly repeats: “If only it’s not like dad’s.” The shadow of papism haunts him because, in essence, he is on the same path. This is exactly what has always happened in the history of the church and what should not happen in the future. The church's attitude towards the external forms of natural life is truly and inevitably clericalism, papism. Where the spiritual realm and the natural realm, when superimposed, coincide, where the matter concerns the cleansing of natural life from sins, the church sanctification of natural life is appropriate; But to the rest of natural and socio-historical life, which does not coincide with Christianity in the essence of its natural development, the necessary change of forms, Christianity should not relate to the church, on a homogeneous scale, but only from the inside, only through the mediation of Christian-minded individuals. Otherwise, that is, by applying Christianity directly to the external relations of life, to its external forms, one will have to take the pathetic path of mechanical play with words. This is what happened to A. M. Bukharev. Listen to what lessons he draws for our time from the Gospel story of the Nativity of Christ in the Bethlehem Cave. In this event of gospel history, the following circumstances were revealed: 1) the taxable state of Joseph and Mary, 2) their high family, 3) the government order (on the national census) and 4) the ecclesiastical significance of the event, since the Newborn Infant of God is the Head of the Church. “Contemporary circumstances help faith to take full advantage” of the lessons of this event. These are four lessons: 1) In the pre-arranged improvement of people's taxable condition (written in 1859) - see with your faith the essence of the whole matter in showing this mercy to Christ, who was born for people in a similar condition, to show Him this benefit precisely in His lesser brothers. 2) Sharing concerns about this with other people of a higher kind, strive by faith to ensure that you, together with them, perceive and retain in your dispositions the spirit of the Divine Descendant of the Kings. 3) In the government and the King, notice the influence of the grace of the Most High King. 4) Finally, in St. See the Church as a true mother, invisibly supporting and maintaining such grace in her Orthodox people and state in her grace-filled ways. In this purely scholastic way, archimandrite. Theodore derives moral teaching for modern times from all the events of gospel history, from all holidays, etc. But this is not enough. It comes to such violent conclusions and curious comparisons that cause irresistible amazement. Demanding a combination of what belongs to God with what we owe to Caesar, Bukharev knows that in this matter he has against himself the clear words of the Gospel: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God’s to God. But he does not stop at this difficulty; he resorts to artificial interpretation in order to eliminate the direct meaning of the Gospel words. He even claims that “God the Word in the flesh was from the cradle to the grave the most faithful subject of Caesar” and this is for our teaching. This faithful allegiance to God the Word, it seems, constitutes God in relation to the civil. Therefore, we would not begin to render God's things to God if we decided to render Caesar's things to Caesar separately from what is due to God. By rendering the things that are Caesar's to Caesar separately from what is due to God, we Christians would not rise above the pagans and unbelievers, who can render the things that are Caesar's to Caesar, apart from what is God's, no worse than Christians... As if the author of these pitiful words did not know that the pagan religion was completely state and the Greco-Roman state was completely polytheistic. His idea that only Christianity first taught us to observe God in relation to Caesar’s, that is, to see a divine commandment in faithful submission, is downright monstrous. It’s like Dostoevsky: “If there is no God, then what kind of captain am I after that?” But one cannot be a man without God, and captaincy can exist without God, and loyalty is a purely human matter. The transition from one social or state form to another takes place according to those laws that were given by God to the world “from the beginning” and which have no direct relation to the gospel. In order to understand the applicability of Christianity to absolutely all circumstances of human life, for this it is necessary to take it out of the sphere of forms into a completely different plane - into the moral depth of a free personality. Essentially and radically, Christianity can enter the world only in the underground depths of personal beliefs and feelings, personal achievement. And its objects are also not forms, but personalities. He has nothing to do with social forms and their changes, but he cares about individuals, their sufferings and joys, their freedom and happiness. Since the flow and change of forms affect the feelings of people, Christianity enters into the very core of worldly life and is interested in it. And already in this depth of the heart there is no forbidden area for him, here it already enters into all sorts of combinations and with a sharp sword cuts into the relationship of the government to the people, and the master to slaves, and parents to children... The philosophical system of V. S. Solovyov is a remarkable experience of comprehensive synthesis. First of all, his philosophical synthesis included, as building material, almost all significant philosophical and religious trends. Then, his philosophical system embraces all parts of philosophical thinking, solves all philosophical questions: in it we find epistemology, ontology, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history, aesthetics, moral philosophy, and his philosophical thought was deepened by mystical contemplation, animated by poetic creativity and excited by ardent journalistic attention to the issues of current life. Finally, from the side of content, by its very essence, his philosophy strived for the highest reconciliation of the opposites of human existence. “Man, according to Solovyov, combines all kinds of opposites, which all boil down to one great opposition between the unconditional and the conditional, between the absolute and eternal essence and a transitory phenomenon or appearance. Man is both a deity and a nonentity” 4. The solution to this opposition, which lies at the very root of our being, constitutes the main driving nerve of his philosophical thinking. Therefore, his philosophy is essentially included in the line of the movement of Russian thought that we are exploring - and forms in this movement the most clear, solid and, perhaps, valuable step. At the same time, Soloviev, which is very important for us, consciously gravitates toward a religious-Christian point of view. To the direct question: “what does Vladimir Solovyov teach?” - he, with good reason, briefly and definitely answered: “I don’t have my own teaching; but in view of the spread of harmful counterfeits of Christianity, I consider it my duty from different sides, in different forms and on different occasions to clarify the basic idea of ​​Christianity - the idea of ​​​​the kingdom of God, as the fullness of human life, not only individual, but also social and political, reunited through Christ with the fullness of the Divine.” Being interested in the problem of higher synthesis itself, I will not present the philosophy of V. S. Solovyov in the entirety of its constituent parts. I will not touch upon his epistemology and ontology at all. Regarding the epistemology of V.S. Solovyov, it can be said that it, fully consistent with the content of his philosophical thought, serves only as a general and broad basis for its idealistic direction and has no fatal connection with the specific content of his philosophical constructions. This is so certain that Soloviev began the last mature revision of his system not with theoretical, but with moral philosophy, declaring its decisive independence from theoretical philosophy in general and, in particular, from that part of it that considers the rights and boundaries of our cognitive abilities. “Creating a moral philosophy (to which Solovyov indicated the task of establishing in an unconditional moral principle an internal and comprehensive connection between true religion and sound politics), reason only develops, on the basis of experience, the idea of good inherent in it from the very beginning and to that extent does not go beyond the limits of its internal domain, or, in school language, its use here is immanent and, therefore, not determined by one or another solution to the question of (transcendental) knowledge things in themselves." Only at the end of his moral philosophy does the author make the “transition to theoretical philosophy.” In the same way, we can leave Solovyov’s metaphysical concepts aside without any prejudice to the religious question. For this, the following indication of repetition in Solovyov’s philosophical judgments would be a completely sufficient basis. But in addition, we mean a significant difference between religious thinking and philosophical thinking, or in other words, religious-philosophical thinking from metaphysical-philosophical thinking. The latter is developed by two methods: mystical-gnostic or metaphysical-logical (rationalistic); of these, the first is based on the conviction that mystical intercourse with the other world, or faith, gives our mind positive (positive) and definite knowledge, and the second assumes the possibility of logical knowledge of the other world 5. On the contrary, the essence of religion is a mystery surrounded by positive reality, shrouded in positive appearance. To stretch this mystery into the very visibility, permeating the latter with a network of miracles and predictions, or, what is the same, to plunge positive logical thought into the depths of the mystery is equally contrary to disinterested religious thinking. The religious mystery lies in the failure of the positive plane into the bottomless depths. To look at a fact religiously means to look at it with a Double gaze: one sees in it what simple positive knowledge sees, and the other sees the higher reality behind this shell. “Everything is a mystery,” says the believer, “in everything is the mystery of God.” In every tree, in every blade of grass, this very secret is contained. Whether a small bird is singing, or the stars are shining in the sky in a whole host in the night - it’s all one mystery, the same... And this secret will remain forever, despite all the successes of biology, geology, astronomy... Moreover, it is not difficult to believe. - And since it’s a mystery, it’s even better: it’s terrifying to the heart and wondrous; and this fear brings joy to the heart... It is even more beautiful because it is a mystery... Mystery is to religion what water is to fish. The ability to not know in religion is the same as chastity in love. Only selfish interest in magical practice or frivolous passion for abstract gnosis makes one forget about the joy of religious mystery and eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge. To dwell on positive reality is just as irreligious as to eliminate mystery with gnosis. It is irreligious, for example, to consider Christ a simple man or to construct the idea of ​​a heavenly Logos outside the historical Christ; religiously to know the Son of God in the man Jesus. The religious view of life knows neither a detached supermundane existence, nor a detached past and future. Religious knowledge of God is knowledge of Him in nature, history and personal experience. To know the beginning of the world religiously means to recognize one’s origin from God. The religious history of sin and salvation lies entirely in man and, in particular, the beginning of world sin cannot be understood apart from human sin... A religious mystery is not a dead, abstract mystery; it is revealed in human experience, and religious knowledge is based on experience. Religious philosophy, as the highest religious knowledge, is a theoretical organization, or systematization, of religious experience. However, in religious philosophy, positive knowledge has as its subject only religious experience, and it is not gnosis, direct knowledge of the other world; therefore, religious knowledge does not eliminate mystery. Religious knowledge is based on critical philosophy, which is of irreplaceable importance in the matter of expelling all Gnostic superstitions from the field of religious thinking; but philosophy has no positive meaning in religious thinking; it does not contribute anything to its content. Religious creativity and knowledge, like artistic creativity and knowledge, forms a completely autocratic area, which is compatible with real-positive knowledge, but cannot be replaced by philosophical gnosis. I will not substantiate the thesis expressed. I will limit myself to only pointing out the nature of the evangelical religion, which does not contain Gnostic elements. But in this case, I can refer to the remarkable article by Solovyov himself, “The Concept of God.” He explains here that our concept of God is established in two ways: 1) theoretically - through the consistent and unconditional denial of all definitions from God and 2) in a positive way - experimentally. “In contrast to theoretical discussions about religious subjects, in any real religion the Divinity, that is, the highest object of reverence or religious feeling, is certainly recognized as given in experience. This is the first sign of this concept, which does not risk encountering any instantia contraria.” Let me note from myself that this is exactly the case in Christianity, where the highest religious knowledge that “God is love” is entirely based on the experience of love, and where, on the contrary, all humanoid and spatio-temporal ideas are rejected as applied to the other world. The new revelation of the gospel is given not in the form of new theoretical knowledge, but in the form of a new experience of the divinely filial experiences of Christ, which are assimilated by believers. All Christian knowledge develops only from this experience and has absolutely no mystical-gnostic or rationalistic character. The Son himself does not know about the time of the revelation of the kingdom of God. The other world cannot be imagined in terms of earthly thinking. The mystery perceived by faith is that God exists, and that He is, that is, knowledge of Him, is given exclusively by experience, experiences and demands of religious life. We know that God is a rewarder, that He is omniscient, omnipresent, because we ourselves live continuously and everywhere in the consciousness of God and His truth; but this knowledge is in no way theoretical knowledge about the image of divine omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. So Soloviev writes that “the Divinity should not be conceived as impersonal, weak-willed, unconscious and aimlessly acting,” but at the same time we cannot “recognize Him as a person” in a certain, anthropomorphic sense of the word. “If we exclude from the concept of personality all the empirical content that does not belong to the Deity of monotheists, then no specific positive signs will remain in the concept of person, and only logical positivity will result through a series of double negatives: the Deity is not impersonal, not unconscious, not weak-willed; and if it is impossible to associate any data of introspection and psychological analysis with this definition, all these double negatives can be replaced by the position of not personal, but supra-personal existence. The most positively religious person, alien to any philosophical pantheism, will immediately understand and agree with us if we tell him that although the Divine thinks, it is not at all like us, that although it has consciousness and will, it is not at all like ours” 6, etc. d Similarly, in another place Solovyov drops the phrase: “We don’t know anything reliable about the nature of the afterlife; and therefore we won’t talk about it.”... This anti-Gnosticism must be called religiously evangelical. But Soloviev cannot stand on its solid ground and plunges without a rudder or compass into the boundless ocean of metaphysics. When constructing his worldview, Soloviev proceeds from the principle that “the eternal or divine world is not a riddle for the mind, - not the eternal divine world, but on the contrary, our nature, in fact, the real world given to us is a riddle for the mind” 7 . For him, the eternal world is clearer than reality, because he creates the idea of ​​the other world, like a web, from himself, from his mind. It’s whatever you want, just not religion, not a religious view of the world. From a religious-evangelical point of view, the philosophical concepts that fill the Readings on God-Humanity and other similar (La Russie et l’église universelle) works of Solovyov, we can call virtuoso in execution and insignificant in religious significance. The eternal pre-natural world with its divisions, the world soul, το απειρον, μητηρ της ζωης, the relation to the world soul of the eternal Logos, the divine humanity of Christ, or Sophia, the transfer of the root of evil and suffering to the area of pre-worldly existence, the recognition of the actual existence of the natural world as improper, or abnormal - all these are bizarre images of philosophical fantasy, testifying to the decisive predominance of abstract thought over religious creativity. About one of these Gnostics, Irenaeus of Lyons said approximately the following: “he talks about divine creations, as if he were God’s obstetrician.” It is easy to assume that everything in this fantasy is extremely arbitrary and full of sharp contradictions. But the most important thing here is that this game of metaphysical concepts does not in the least affect the Christian-evangelical content. This is a specific area of ​​pagan Gnosticism. True, the church-dogmatic movement clothed the gospel truth in the forms of pagan philosophy; but this was precisely the expression of Christian truth in the language of existing pagan philosophy, and not spontaneous philosophical creativity - this was a matter of historical tasks that weighed heavily on Christian thought, and not its ideal flight. We need to break through this historical convention to the pure gospel idea, and not obscure the gospel content with historical form. The fact that Solovyov was a philosopher constituted the most fatal weakness in his theology 8 . It never occurred to him that the real content of the gospel was far from coinciding with these forms of thought - and he, with amazing complacency, operated on these forms, on abstract concepts, almost without touching on evangelical Christianity 9 . Whether we read his “History and Future of Theocracy,” or look at his entire religious and philosophical system, we will find in him, in place of the Gospel, a brazenly sparkling hole, a disgusting emptiness. It’s scary to think that Soloviev, who wrote so much about Christianity, did not reveal the feeling of Christ in a single word. Playing with the words “Logos”, “God-man”, “Sophia” with the dexterity of a virtuoso, he did not sense the mystery of the historical Christ. The Logos-God-Man was for him an abstract concept, and not an object of living contemplation. In the person of Christ, the Son of God was born, in Him a filial relationship with God was revealed, making God truly the Father of humanity: Solovyov reduced the great mystery of this historical fact to precise logical formulas, in which the greatness of the mystery completely evaporated. Religiously, for us, the Son of God is entirely contained in the man Jesus, and with His birth God became our Father, His visible life ushered in a change in God’s relationship to the world and introduced a new beginning into human nature and history: for Solovyov there was no visible, tangible, natural-historical mystery here, because his thought began with logical operations and Christ seemed to him a simple and clear logical conclusion from the data of the world. He did not stop before the amazing individuality of this historical phenomenon, because for him everything was covered up by the formula of God-manhood, the combination of the Logos with the world soul - he saw in the “positive religion” of O. Comte, in his idea of ​​​​humanity, the main side of God-manhood and proposed to place the philosopher of positivism in the Christian calendar, although Comte himself did not give Christ a place in his calendar. For Solovyov, the Bible and “sound logic” have the same content, and he most often speaks of “universal Christian concepts” 10. Finally, we must pay attention to the fact that one thing would be a sufficient reason for us to leave Solovyov’s metaphysics aside, namely, that the metaphysical solution to the problems of life turns out to be completely useless in Solovyov’s system itself, and therefore the solution to these questions is repeated in his application to real life. The fall of the world soul and its saving combination with the Logos does not replace or explain the facts of human fall and salvation. To see evil in the material isolation of earthly creatures, and the first steps of victory over evil are already in the forces of gravity, chemical affinity 11, doesn’t this mean waving a cardboard sword and taking the aim too high? In such an abstract sphere it is easy to achieve complete harmony, which, however, will in no way reconcile the opposites of our life, will not comprehend our real suffering. Not a single individual evil, no matter how insignificant it may be, not a single real tear can be calmed by this transmundane synthesis. And Soloviev himself finds himself forced to repeat the explanation as applied to real life. That a person carries within himself the opposition between the unconditional and the conditional, Solovyov first asserts about the “eternal, ideal person”, and then applies the same to a real person. “Perceiving and carrying in his consciousness the eternal divine idea and at the same time, by his actual origin and existence, inextricably linked with the nature of the external world, man is a natural mediator between God and material existence... This role, which initially belonged to the world soul, as eternal humanity, in natural man, that is, who occurred in the world process, receives the first opportunity for actual implementation in the order of nature” 12, etc. e. The pre-worldly fall and salvation is repeated: man “falls away or is separated from God in his consciousness, just as the world soul initially separated from Him in its entire existence” 13 and so on. However, it cannot be said that Solovyov’s metaphysical concepts represent only a useless superstructure over his explanation of real life - his passion for metaphysics also has an unfavorable effect in the methods of his interpretation of actual life. Soloviev is one of those philosophers who cannot and do not know how to listen to historical reality and, instead of studying the laws of history, are inclined to prescribe laws for it. The extent to which historical perspectives elude Solovyov and he tramples on the most elementary demands of historical criticism is loudly stated in his “History and Future of Theocracy.” Eg. Solovyov thoughtfully explains the double story of the first chapters of the Bible about the creation of man with the highest philosophical considerations. “The duality of the story expresses the very truth of the matter.” Anyone who knows that there are many such double stories in the Bible and that this is explained by the history of the biblical text cannot help but smile at the sight of this profundity... If in Solovyov’s philosophy history is rolled up like a scroll, then life itself fades in it. This is an ascetic-pessimistic philosophy. Solovyov has the asceticism of an abstract view of life, the asceticism of an idea put into the explanation of the world, the asceticism of autocratic thought, which does not know any secret, wrapping all sorts of colors of life in its webs. It is enough to mention Solovyov’s asceticism and refer to his article “On the Meaning of Love” and to his discussion of shame in “The Justification of Good.” “The carnal condition of reproduction for man is evil; it expresses the preponderance of the meaningless material process over the self-control of the spirit, this is a matter contrary to the dignity of man, the death of human love and life; Our moral attitude towards this fact must be decidedly negative.” Such vivid asceticism is not often seen. He once again testifies that Solovyov’s thought moves in the sphere of extra-Christian opposition of flesh and spirit, and not in the field of evangelical absoluteness and Christian freedom. His mysticism is entirely abstract, cerebral, not connected with the real facts of life, and therefore it is significantly inclined towards asceticism. Too busy thinking about the eternal origin of life and the final destinies of man, he did not feel the mystery of life itself, of each given moment. Solovyov’s pessimism is equally pronounced. Assessing the entire historical reality not from the point of view of Christian freedom and natural-historical necessity, he pronounces a harsh verdict on Christian history: “In reality, all universal human affairs - politics, science, art, social economy, being outside the Christian principle, instead of uniting people, separate and divide them, for all these affairs are governed by selfishness and private gain, competition and struggle, and give rise to oppression and violence. This is the reality, this is the fact" 14... So, leaving aside the metaphysical superstructure, we turn to that part of Solovyov’s philosophical system, which can be called the philosophy of real life, in which he establishes a synthesis of real antinomies. Soloviev finds the same duality that characterizes the world soul in every real person. Every living person carries within himself two principles - the absolute and the conditional, with his final goal being the reconciliation of this duality. Thus, from the first words of Solovyov’s philosophy of life, it is clear that he poses the religious question with complete certainty. It is equally certain that the last formula of his synthesis, in its general content, leaves nothing to be desired: he does not sacrifice, apparently, any of the fundamental principles of human life, he wants a comprehensive synthesis, universal reconciliation. Soloviev shows with equal persistence that the absolute principle is essential for conditionally positive reality, giving it the highest sanctification, and conditionally positive reality constitutes the necessary environment in which spiritual absoluteness is realized. Solovyov's entire life philosophy represents a steady and consistent substantiation and revelation of the highest religious synthesis. A clear consciousness in posing and solving the religious problem of life gives Solovyov’s philosophical and journalistic works high value and unfading interest. The poles of the main opposition that breaks up our lives fall apart in Solovyov’s broad view into many polar pairs, along which he tirelessly pursues his unifying principle. Absolute and relative, perfect and conditional, personality and society, morality and law, religion and progress, Christianity and society, church and state - these are the various sides from which he reveals the highest synthesis. Perfection, or the fullness of goodness, is expressed in three types: 1) unconditionally existing, eternally valid perfection - in God; 2) potential perfection in human consciousness, which contains the absolute fullness of being as an idea, and in human will, which sets it as an ideal and norm for itself; finally 3) in the actual implementation of perfection or in the historical process of perfection. From the side of abstract moralism, the question is posed (and predetermined): why is this third type needed - perfection, actively realized, why is historical activity with its political and cultural tasks needed? If we have the light of truth and pure will, then what else should we worry about? Solovyov answers this question with a decisive statement that the goal of historical making is precisely the final justification of the good given in our true consciousness and better will; the entire historical process develops real conditions under which good can become a truly common property and without which it cannot be realized. All historical development - and not only of humanity, but also of the physical world - is a necessary path to perfection. Just as the human spirit in nature, in order to really manifest itself, necessarily requires the most perfect of physical organisms, so the Spirit of God in humanity, or the Kingdom of God, for its actual manifestation requires the most perfect social organization, which is developed by world history. Just as the simplest element of this historical process - an individual person - is more capable of conscious and free action than the simplest element of a biological process - an organic cell, so the very creation of a collective universal body has a more conscious and volitional character in comparison with the organic processes that determined the origin of our bodily being, although there is no absolute opposition here. If for the realization of perfect life, or the Kingdom of God, only two principles were needed: God and the human soul, which (potentially) perceives Him, then the Kingdom of God could be established with the appearance of the first man. Why were all these long centuries and millennia of human history needed? And if this process was necessary, because the Kingdom of God can just as little open up among wild cannibals as among wild animals, if it was necessary for humanity to evolve from an animal, formless and scattered state to a certain organization and unity, then it is clearer than day that this process has not yet ended and that just as historical work was necessary yesterday, so it is necessary today and will be necessary tomorrow, until all the conditions for real and perfect implementation are created The Kingdom of God... From here Solovyov establishes the most important moral rule: take the fullest possible part in the work of your own and the general improvement for the sake of the final revelation of the Kingdom of God in the world 15. Based on the same principle, our philosopher defines the mutual relationship of the human personality, as a special form of infinite content, and society, as the environment of historical progress. Society is an augmented or expanded personality, and personality is a compressed or concentrated society. Armed against the extremes of individualism and collectivism, moral subjectivism and social realism, Solovyov puts beyond doubt the truth that just as the dignity of human society is determined by the internal value of individuals, so the infinite content of personality can truly be realized only through society, through its historical development 16 . The truth of moral subjectivism is that a perfect or absolute moral state must be internally fully experienced, felt and assimilated by an individual person, must become his own state, the content of his life. But another question is: how is this moral perfection achieved by individuals - is it solely through the internal work of each on himself and the proclamation of its results, or with the help of a certain social process that operates not only personally, but also collectively? Undoubtedly the latter. To think that the mere virtue of a few of the best people is enough to regenerate everyone else morally means moving into that region where babies are born from rose bushes and where beggars, for lack of bread, eat sweet pies. The insufficiency of subjective good and the need for its collective embodiment is proven by the entire course of human history. Subjective good must be replenished by the social organization of morality. Experience clearly shows that when the social environment is not organized morally, then the subjective demands of good from oneself and from others inevitably decrease. Therefore, the real question is not about subjective, not about personal or social morality, but only about weak or strong morality, realized or unrealized. The moral will must be determined to act exclusively through itself; any of its subordination to any order or command coming from outside violates its self-legitimacy - this is the true beginning of moral autonomy, but when it comes to organizing the social environment according to the beginning of unconditional good, then such an organization is not a limitation, but the execution of personal moral will. But if moral subjectivism is wrong, depriving the moral will of real ways of its implementation in general life, then social realism is also wrong, according to which these social institutions and interests are of decisive importance for life in themselves, so that the highest moral principles turn out to be, at best, only means or instruments for protecting these interests. But in fact, not only a certain form of society, but also the public as such is not the highest and unconditional definition of a person. If he were defined essentially as a social animal and nothing else, then the content of the concept “man” would be extremely narrowed, and at the same time the scope of this concept would be significantly expanded: humanity would have to include some animals for which sociality, as such, is an essential feature no less than for man. And if, however, we do not want to recognize their equality with ourselves, then it means that a person has another essential feature, independent of society, but, on the contrary, determining the distinctive character of human society. This sign is that every person, as such, is a moral being, or a person who, regardless of his social usefulness, has unconditional dignity and an unconditional right to existence and to the free development of his positive powers. From this it directly follows that no person, under any conditions and for any reason, can be considered as a mere means for any extraneous ends, even for the so-called common good. The right of a person is essentially unconditional, while the rights of society to a person, on the contrary, are conditioned by the recognition of personal right. No public group or institution has the right to forcibly retain anyone among its members. The degree of subordination of a person to society must correspond to the degree of subordination of society itself to moral good. Individual individuals, more gifted or more developed than others, can be carriers of a higher social consciousness, which then strives to be embodied in new forms and orders of life corresponding to it. The independence of a person is the basis of the strength of a social union. The principle of human dignity, or the unconditional importance of each person, due to which society is defined as the internal, free consent of all - this is the only moral norm 17. Corresponding to the indicated extremes, the extremes in the economic field are economic anarchism, which denies all ethical principles and all organization in the field of economic relations, and socialism, which allows more or less complete confusion between the economic and moral areas. The reconciliation of these extremes in the subordination of the economic field to moral ideals. To recognize in a person only an economic figure - a producer, owner and consumer of material goods - is a false and immoral point of view; in the same way, the subordination of material interests and relations in human society to some special, self-acting economic laws is only a fiction of bad metaphysics, which has not even a shadow of a basis in reality. Therefore, the general demand of reason and conscience remains in force, so that the economic area is subordinate to a higher moral principle, so that in its economic life society is an organized implementation of good. For a true solution to the so-called social question, first of all, it should be recognized that the norm of economic relations does not lie in them themselves, but that they are subject to a general moral norm, as a special area of ​​its application. If the subordination of the economic area to a moral norm is necessary for a true solution to the social question, then, conversely, moral consciousness can be fully realized only through the moral organization of economic relations. An elementary moral feeling of pity demands from us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty and warm the chilly - and this demand, of course, does not lose its force when these hungry and chilly people are counted in millions, and not just a few. And if I alone cannot help these millions, and, therefore, am not obliged, then I can and am obliged to help them together with others, my personal responsibility turns into a collective one - not into someone else’s, but into my own, broader responsibility, as a participant in the collective whole and its common task 18. The issue of the mutual relationship between morality and law is also being addressed. This is, in essence, a question about the connection between ideal moral consciousness and real life; The vitality and fruitfulness of moral consciousness itself depends on a positive understanding of this connection. Between ideal good and evil reality there is an intermediate area of ​​law and law, serving to embody good, limit and correct evil. Law and its embodiment - the state - determine the actual organization of moral life in all of humanity, and with a negative attitude towards law as such, moral preaching, devoid of objective means and supports in a real environment alien to it, would remain, at best, only innocent idle talk, and law itself, on the other hand, with the complete separation of its formal concepts and institutions from their moral principles and goals, would lose its unconditional basis and, in essence, would be nothing anymore would no longer differ from arbitrariness. In particular, the importance of law for morality can be shown in the following train of thought: the moral principle requires that people freely improve themselves; but for this the existence of society is necessary; but society cannot exist if everyone who wants to is given the freedom to kill his neighbors; Consequently, a compulsory law, which really does not allow evil will to such extreme manifestations that destroy society, is a necessary condition for moral improvement and, as such, is required by the moral principle itself, although it is not its direct expression 19. Determined by the highest moral principle, the state is a collectively organized pity. Therefore, it is necessary to call the view according to which the state is rejected in the name of higher morality extremely erroneous. If we recognize pity in principle, then it is logically necessary to admit that historical organization of social forces and affairs, which brings pity out of the state of a powerless or tightly limited feeling, gives it reality, widespread application and development. If I take the point of view of pity, then I cannot deny the institution, thanks to which one can actually feel sorry, that is, to give help and protection instead of tens and at most hundreds of units - to tens and hundreds of millions of people 20. Christianity as the “gospel of the kingdom” has an unconditionally high ideal, with a requirement of absolute morality. But Christianity is not only an absolute requirement. True Christianity is the perfect unity of three inextricably linked foundations: 1) an absolute event - the revelation of the perfect personality of the God-man Christ; 2) an absolute promise - consistent with the perfect personality of society, or the kingdom of God, and 3) the absolute task is to contribute to the fulfillment of this promise through the regeneration of our entire personal and social environment in the spirit of Christ. With the oblivion or neglect of one of these three foundations, the whole thing is paralyzed and perverted, which is why, although Christianity is the unconditional and final revelation of truth, the moral development of mankind, as well as its external history, did not cease after the appearance of Christ. What has come true and what is promised stand firmly within the bounds of eternity and do not depend on us. But the task of the present is in our hands; we ourselves must act for the moral regeneration of our lives. Connected with this general task is the special task of moral philosophy: it has to determine and clarify, in the conditions of historical reality, the proper relationship between all the basic elements and areas of the personal-social whole according to its final form 21 . From here it logically follows that development is essentially included in the concept of the church. The true concept of the church is guided by the general rule of religious reasoning: to distinguish in unity, evenly avoiding confusion and division. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish, but not separate, the divine and human principles in the church. We do not know in the church any human personal or popular forces naked from the Divine. Such forces can operate anywhere they want - in worldly politics, in the market, in the theater - but they have no place in the church. On the other hand, divine forces, acting in the church, have always been and are combined with nature and human will, and have always been and are clothed in human elements. In the church there is neither a detached Divinity nor a detached humanity, but only their inseparable and unfused union, which also forms the special theanthropic being of the church, equally abiding, but manifested differently in these two sides of its existence. Hence the general law of life for the church. If the Divinity itself is absolutely unchangeable, if humanity itself is subject to random changes, then God-Humanity develops correctly, that is, while maintaining its essence and its basic forms unchanged, it grows not only in external volume, but also in the internal completeness and perfection of its manifestations in all spheres of its existence 22. Christianity, as the embodiment of an absolute moral ideal, is as universal as the moral principle itself. The universality of Christianity is expressed in the absence of external, national, confessional and other barriers, but even more so in freedom from internal limitations: to be truly universal, religion should not be separated from mental enlightenment, from science, from social and political progress. A religion that is afraid of all this obviously does not even believe in its own strengths; it is internally imbued with disbelief and, with its claim to the monopoly of a moral norm for society, it lacks the most elementary moral condition - sincerity 23. Demons believe and remain demons because they do not trust in God and do not hope for their salvation and reunification with the kingdom of God. Many people have a similar faith, believing that between the kingdom of God and our human world there is an infinite distance and an impassable abyss, claiming that divine life and our human life run parallel to each other and can never meet. On such faith, demonic in its hopelessness, all the lies and all the contradictions of this century are based, such as: the division between religion and life, between church and state, between spiritual and secular science, in a word, the separation of everything that should only be distinguished in unity 24. Since the advent of the kingdom of God is not like a Deus ex machina, but is conditioned by a world-historical theanthropic process in which God acts only in conjunction with man and through man, we must recognize as a gross counterfeit of Christianity such a view according to which man has only a purely passive role in the work of God. But in fact, Christianity consists only in this: that the work of God has become at the same time a completely human work. This divine-human solidarity is the kingdom of God, and it comes only to the extent that it is realized... Only the Christian idea of ​​the kingdom of God, consistently revealed in the life of humanity, gives the meaning of history and defines the true concept of progress. Christianity gives humanity not only the ideal of absolute perfection, but also the path to achieving this ideal; therefore, it is essentially progressive. On the basis of the Christian religion, neither the preservation nor the destruction of any worldly order in itself can interest us. If we care about the cause of the kingdom of God, then we must accept that which serves this cause worthily, and reject that which is contrary to it; we must care not about preserving and strengthening at all costs these social groups and forms in worldly humanity, but, on the contrary, about their rebirth and transformation in the Christian spirit, about their true introduction into the sphere of the kingdom of God. The idea of ​​the kingdom of God necessarily leads a conscious and sincere Christian to the obligation to act - within the limits of his calling - for the realization of Christian principles in the collective life of humanity, for the transformation in the spirit of the highest truth of all our social forms and relations - that is, it leads us to Christian politics. From the fact that the kingdom of Christ is not of this world, it does not in any way follow that it cannot act in the world, take possession and rule the world - on the contrary, precisely from the fact that the kingdom of Christ is not from the world, but from above, it follows that it has the right to rule and rule the world. One of two things: either societies that call themselves Christians must renounce this name, or they must recognize their obligation to coordinate all their political and social relations with Christian principles, that is, to bring them into the sphere of the kingdom of God - and this is what real Christian politics consists of. If all political and social forms were alien or even contrary to Christianity, then it would directly follow that true Christians must live outside of all political and social forms. But this is clearly absurd. And if, on the one hand, it is impossible to abolish social and political forms of life (which would be tantamount to the abolition of man himself, as a social and political being), and, on the other hand, it is undoubtedly that these forms in their given reality are far from corresponding to Christian principles, are far from being introduced into the kingdom of God, then the task of Christian politics directly follows from this: to improve, elevate these forms, to transform them into the kingdom of God 25. The shortcoming of the medieval worldview, which put it in direct contradiction with the very foundation of Christianity, was its one-sided spiritualism 26. On the contrary, a true understanding of Christianity requires the existence of a Christian family, a Christian society, a Christian people, a Christian state, a Christian army, etc. Solovyov’s main conviction was to apply the principles of true religion to all social and international relations, to solve all significant issues of social and political life in a Christian way 27 . In particular, he acted on this conviction in his widely staged and unusually brilliant and victorious polemics on the national issue. Here, as on other issues, he reflected two extremes - cosmopolitanism and nationalism (adopted by Slavophilism) - he contrasted both with national service to the Christian idea. Both for a Christian person and for a Christian people, he makes humble and selfless service to other peoples a direct and indispensable duty. For Solovyov, all questions about the relationship of the true, i.e., Christian religion, as expressing an absolute moral principle, to the conditional social principle are crowned with the question of the relationship of the church to the state: it is in this last question that the most specific and responsible task for a Christian and the Christian people appears. The general connection between law and morality makes it possible to talk about a Christian state. But in fact, the state becomes Christian not from the mere fact that it is an organized pity, but from the fact that from a Christian point of view, the state, as a part in the organization of collective humanity, is determined by another, higher, part - the church, from which it receives its sanctification and final purpose - to serve indirectly in its worldly area and with its own means the absolute goal that the church directly sets - the preparation of humanity and the whole earth for the kingdom of God. Soloviev is strongly against the separation of church and state. The church has the highest spiritual authority, denoting the general direction of the good will of mankind and its final goal, and the state has the full power to coordinate worldly interests with this will. Without a connection with the state, the church would not have a real weapon for acting on the world, and without a connection with the church, the state would not have the highest justifying goals 29. The question of the relationship of the church to the state in Solovyov’s worldview is related to his favorite idea of ​​the triple ministry - priestly, royal and prophetic. This is, in its fundamental part, Solovyov’s philosophy of life. It contains a lot of undoubted truth along with amazingly weak thoughts generated by the spirit of an abstract system. We must note the point from which the turn from living truth to the one-sidedness of abstract thought begins in this philosophy. Let's start with the upper floors of this grandiose construction project. With the first entry into these floors we encounter the most undeniable sign that not everything is going well here. On the question of the relationship between the state and the church, between state power and church power - a question that is the most concrete and living, where we would rightly expect a strict formula, programmatic precision - Solovyov’s views contain contradictory ideas. He gives three answers to this question, each of which excludes one of the other two. Firstly, he expresses the idea that from a Christian point of view, “supreme state power is only a delegation of the truly absolute divine-human power of Christ 30 . It follows that secular power must be subordinated to the church: “If there is on earth a special successive union of the servants of God par excellence, if there is a special power on earth, which has been given extraordinary powers from above and has been promised extraordinary help for the leadership and management of Christian humanity, then, without any doubt, all other powers and principles in the world and all the forces of society must be subordinated to this sacred and directly divine power... If the church is truly the emerging kingdom of God on earth, then all other social forces and authorities must be its instruments”... However, it does not in any way follow from this that “special representatives of spiritual interests also take upon themselves worldly affairs, so that spiritual power takes upon itself state functions,” just as from the duty of subordinating the physical life of a person to his rational will it does not follow that our rational will itself can produce physiological processes: in addition to the general guidance of the mind, these processes obey their own special laws and engines, beyond the jurisdiction of the mind... The highest authority in any matter and the material management of this matter are two things completely various" 31. Secondly, Soloviev holds the view that “the essence of true Christianity is the rebirth of humanity and the world in the spirit of Christ, the transformation of the worldly kingdom into the kingdom of God” 32. What he said elsewhere that “secular politics must be subordinated to church politics, but not through the assimilation of the church to the state, but through the gradual assimilation of the state to the church,” would be better expressed this way: state power should be subordinated to church power with the goal that the state gradually becomes like the church. In any case, “worldly reality must be recreated in the image of the church” 33. Thirdly, we encounter the idea of ​​​​the heterogeneity of the areas of church and state. “Since the highest spiritual and highest secular power are essentially heterogeneous and have their own special areas, their coexistence in no way violates their independence and does not create dual power. There is no fundamental legal basis for the clash and confrontation between these two authorities” 34. Between the second idea of ​​​​the transformation of the worldly kingdom into the kingdom of God, of the assimilation of the state to the church, and the third idea of ​​​​the heterogeneity of the areas of church and state, there is a radical and striking contradiction. In the first idea of ​​the subordination of state life to church authority there are elements of both the second idea, according to which state power is only an instrument of the church, and the third idea of ​​the heterogeneity of spheres, but this is explained by the fact that here, on the one hand, the well-known church thought about the grace-filled rebirth of the worldly kingdom and natural life in their essence, a thought that no longer gives room for an analogy between the church-grace-filled action and the attitude of the mind to physiological processes, on the other hand, it is not sustained here the idea of ​​the heterogeneity of the areas of reason and physiological. Strictly speaking, in mental-physical life, either the dominance of the mind over the body is manifested, in which it is necessary to understand only the external relations of the body, but not physiological life, which is subject to its own laws, since it depends on the mind whether we praise God with the tongue or curse people, whether we kill with our hands or do good, but physiology is not affected by this dominance of the mind, - or the unity of mental-physical life is revealed with significant heterogeneity in the areas of mental and physiological, but in this case One can no longer talk about the dominance of reason; one cannot call physiology an instrument of the spirit. To talk about the subordination of state life to church authority in the name of likening the state to the church and pointing to the analogy of the relationship of the mind to physiology, which is subject to its own laws, is at least strange. To put it differently, Solovyov’s first idea contradicts both the second (by analogy used) and the third. Such a blatant contradiction in the words of a philosopher, who usually delights readers with the crystalline clarity of his thoughts, is quite eloquent. The third view fully adheres to the gospel point of view on God’s attitude towards Caesar’s; the second corresponds to the church-dogmatic concept of the ascetic and grace-filled rebirth of the world; the first presentation is the most superficial, feuilleton - ecclesiastical and political. Solovyov drops the second and third ideas en passant, but his soul clings to the first. Soloviev says about himself that he was a metaphysician and publicist 35. Both metaphysics and journalism are not conducive to a religious attitude towards the phenomena of life: the first is too abstract for this, the second is too superficial. Soloviev was the most magnificent of publicists, but still with the shortcomings of a publicist. For a religious attitude to life, superficial clashes between the authorities of the church and the state are completely unimportant, because it occurs in the subterranean depths - for a religious thinker, issues of church politics are not interesting, but for a publicist these are issues of essential importance. It will naturally occur to many that, apparently, the foundations of the kingdom of God and theocracy, from which Solovyov proceeds, are the essence of the gospel. In fact, in Solovyov’s views, the concept of the kingdom of God is not at all an evangelical concept, but a philosophical and humanistic one: for him, the bearer of the kingdom of God is all of humanity, 36 and therefore the path of cultural unification of all peoples, from his point of view, is a direct path to the realization of the kingdom of God. This idea is closer to the philosophy of Auguste Comte than to the gospel. I must limit myself to this simple indication, assuming this presentation of the Gospel teaching, but for anyone familiar with the Gospel my words are quite understandable. On the other hand, the idea of ​​theocracy is an idea, true, religious, but pre-Christian, Jewish, rejected by the gospel. The Jewish theocratic idea is essentially religiously limited, as inextricably linked with the concept of the people's chosenness of God. Of course, in the preaching of the Jewish prophets there is an undeniable tendency towards universalism, fully realized in the gospel, but this potential Jewish universalism is related to Jewish theocratism as an embryo is to a shell: when the embryo matures, the shell necessarily bursts. Soloviev retains the idea of ​​theocracy, but wants to fill it with humanistic-universal content: an enterprise that is fundamentally doomed to complete failure and throws our philosopher, like a pendulum, from the extreme of humanistic universalism to the extreme of religiously limited theocratism. As a philosopher and religious publicist, both extremes are equally dear to him, equally distracting him from the gospel idea of ​​heterogeneous spheres. The limitations of Solovyov’s theocratic idea are too well known to dwell on it for a long time: he said that the church “is not at all indifferent to this or that form of government - it values the principle of the Christian king”, that “a true Christian prophet, just like a Jewish one, does not rebel against the royal power, but sticks to it”, he spoke about the state advantages of the ruling church, he spoke about the independence of the Orthodox autocratic tsar from godless elements of modern society 37 , he was timid in his judgments about the liberation movement 38 , denied the peculiarity and independence of the economic sphere of relations 39 etc. Admirers of Solovyov, explaining and excusing in many different ways the “weakness” of his philosophy in these points, insist on the absence of an organic connection between them and his general teaching. I do not think that such an attitude towards the memory of a philosopher is a matter of serious thinking. Amiens Plato, sed magis arnica veritas. We will call objects by their proper names. It is only necessary to properly evaluate this “weakness” and indicate its roots. The idea of ​​theocracy, one of the main ones in Solovyov’s worldview, limited in its essence, required this sacrifice. It should be emphasized once again that Solovyov precisely could not withstand the idea of ​​worldly life, inspired by the analogy of physiological processes, obeying its own special laws and engines. We will avoid the need for this useless sacrifice, however, only if we recognize this idea, if we recognize that from a religious point of view there is no independent value of one or another form of government, but there are laws in different areas of worldly life. If the limited idea of ​​theocracy was the real reason for the “weakness” of Solovyov’s political views, then his humanistic universalism served as a weak cover for his pseudo-Christian coverage of issues of life. Soloviev tirelessly repeats that the family, society, people, and state must serve Christian goals, that the highest leadership of religious and moral ideas is the only determining principle of international relations, state policy, and family-social economic tasks. How family, society, people and the state could serve Christianity is a question of fascinating interest, but one that absolutely does not admit of a positive answer. If Solovyov answers him positively and, moreover, with hasty self-confidence, then he could do this only because he replaced Christian goals with general cultural tasks. I have already mentioned that his idea of ​​the kingdom of God is not specifically evangelical, but humanistic and universal. This idea can now be developed and confirmed. “Recognizing the final goal of history,” Soloviev writes, “is the complete realization of the Christian ideal in the life of all humanity, the realization of truth and love, or the free solidarity of all positive forces and elements of the universe, we understand the comprehensive development of culture as a general and necessary means for this goal, for this culture in its gradual progress destroys all hostile partitions and exclusive separations between different parts of humanity and the world and strives to unite all natural and social groups into one infinitely diverse in composition, but morally solidary family. We do not oppose humane enlightenment to religious faith, but we believe that such enlightenment is necessary for faith itself. The immediate goal of the historical process and our social activity is the complete development and spread of humane culture, which constitutes a necessary element of Christianity itself, as a divine-human religion. We can and should work together on this immediate and urgent task, despite any differences in personal views on the further and final goal of history. From the moral side, such cultural work is nothing more than the most expediently organized help to our neighbors, taken together, and such help, according to the general moral law, is obligatory for everyone, whether he is a Christian by faith, or simply a humanist, as long as he recognizes moral obligations to humanity. In the sense of the tasks and results of historical work, there is only one universal human culture for all peoples, as one truth for all, one justice, one Divinity 40 - a universal Christian culture 41. In the field of moral precepts or norms of activity, no specifically Orthodox principle exists. By the will of God, one truth is prescribed to all confessions and all peoples, truth in its two degrees - as a law of justice and as a commandment of perfection. The second presupposes the first, and only the first, i.e. the law of justice is unconditionally obligatory - always, everywhere and in everything. Therefore, he is the only one and can be a moral guide for the state, the area of ​​which does not go beyond the bounds of the obligatory” 42. So, when Solovyov says that “Russia’s task is a Christian task, and Russian politics must be Christian politics” 43, this means nothing more than that Russia must follow the path of universal human culture 44. The service of the family, society, people, and state to Christian goals coincides with the own benefit of the family, society, people, and state. “The moral bankruptcy of nationalism (rudely thinking only about the material benefits of its people) is exposed by history, which loudly testifies that peoples prospered and exalted themselves only when they served not themselves as an end in themselves, but the highest and universal ideal goods... The history of all peoples - ancient and new - that had a direct influence on the destinies of mankind, tells us the same thing. All of them, in the eras of their heyday and greatness, believed their significance, affirmed their nationality not in itself, taken in the abstract, but in something universal, super-national, in which they believed, which they served and which they realized in their creativity - national in source and methods of expression, but completely universal in content or objective results... If the people themselves, with their true creativity and self-awareness, affirm themselves in the universal - in the fact that matters to everyone, or in which he is in solidarity with everyone, then how can a true patriot, for the sake of the supposed “good” of his people, break off solidarity with others, hate or despise foreigners? If the people themselves see their real good in the good of everyone, then how can patriotism place the good of its people as something separate and opposite to everything else? 45 It is extremely clear what Solovyov is talking about, and it is extremely certain that the truth is on his side, unless we arbitrarily put into his words a meaning alien to them. He speaks of universal human ideals, and he sees true love for family, people and state in leading each of these groups onto the broad road of unification with other groups and movement along the path of universal human progress. Before this position of the philosopher, Slavophilism and any patriotic chauvinism turn out to be completely powerless. But it must be borne in mind that this path of cultural unification does not have a single feature of specifically Christian service and self-denial. And in order to trample on patriotic chauvinism, there is absolutely no need to resort to the gospel. “Inhumanity in international and social relations, the policy of cannibalism” 46 - all this is dangerous not only for the highest morality, but is directly harmful to the well-being and cultural success of a given social group. And all this is expelled from family, folk and state morals not by the special preaching of Christianity, but by the natural course of development, just as the appearance of Shakespeare, Byron, Lessing, Kant is due to the super-volitional creativity of the people's spirit, but not to conscious principles and efforts. To call these ideals of universal human culture, this matter of natural benefit, this super-volitional creativity, by the name of Christian self-denial means confusing completely different things. Soloviev writes: “Personal self-sacrifice, victory over egoism is not the destruction of the ego itself, the personality itself, but, on the contrary, is the elevation of this ego to the highest level of existence. The same thing applies to the people: by rejecting exclusive nationalism, they not only do not lose their independent life, but only here they receive their real life task” 48. But these are precisely two things that are completely different. When the gospel speaks of the fact that a person who has lost his soul (life) in self-sacrifice will preserve it, then, of course, the preservation of the individual soul into eternal life is, of course, to put it simply, the salvation of man for the kingdom of heaven. It is in no way possible to apply the same idea to family, national and state groups, since there is no reason to think about the preservation of these unions in the heavenly kingdom (cf. Matt. XXII, 30) and the reward for collective exploits can be promised only in the form of earthly prosperity and prosperity 49. To put it differently, the benefits of absolute spiritual life are accessible exclusively to personal, inner sensation - and here lies an impassable abyss that separates the individual from the family and the people in religious terms. Whatever Solovyov says about the natural and historical connection of the individual with society, all this is valid only against the extremes of abstract philosophical individualism or naive subjectivism, but does not go against the highest spiritual and personal religious and moral creativity: he himself insightfully reveals the idea that a moral person, due to his desire for unconditional good, outgrows this limited form of moral content embodied in society and begins to relate negatively to it 50 . The natural and historical inextricable connection between the individual and society is fully reconciled with their decisive opposition from the point of view of absolute life. The bearer of absolute content or eternal life, filling the Gospel formula of the kingdom of God, can only be a person. And the subject of specifically Christian self-denial can only be an individual, but not a family, or a people, or a state. Only a person (at a certain height of self-awareness) can, in the self-denial of Christian love, decisively forget himself, live only for others, sacrifice his very life - and at the same time not lose his inner value, “find” himself for eternal life. Such self-denial for the family, the people and the state is certainly impossible, because the inner essence of these unions is a certain selfishness and only this selfishness can inspire these groups to exploits, keep them at the height of dignity and well-being. Eg. family: for anyone who does not hover in the realms of transcendental fantasy and does not set unimaginable goals for marriage, it is obvious that all the warmth in which children are born and grow up - this very holy of holies in our world - all the warmth of the family is selfish. And note - from the point of view of the individual, with a certain vocation, family egoism can be called limited in the reprehensible sense of the word; but from the point of view of the mutual relationship of families, there is nothing unfair or reprehensible in family egoism: every family recognizes the right to warm itself with its own warmth. The real meaning of speeches about family self-denial can only be in the destruction of the family, in common wives and common children - whether this will be better for the world is another question. As long as the family exists, it exists and develops only through its egoism, before the force of which speeches about self-denial will turn out to be a web of dreams. In the same way, the people and the state are strong only in their self-awareness and pride. And in relation to them this dilemma matters: either selfishness or destruction (of course, more possible and even desirable in the question of the state than in the question of the family). And those examples of national and state self-denial that are indicated do not go beyond the limits of egoism: they only prove that egoism can be unreasonable, self-consciousness can be pretentious, and egoism can be reasonable, but it remains undoubted that, inspiring heroic deeds, the power of the family, nation, and state is essentially selfish. And from a universal human point of view, this force is beneficial. And the family and people can serve Christianity only in their own way, only on their own path, only by pursuing their own, rationally understood, interests, only in moving towards universal human ideals. The Christian personality should not disappear either in the state, or in the people, or in the family, but Christianity needs only a selfish family (and the people and the state). Personal Christianity and family-national-state culture are heterogeneous spheres. It is not my task at this moment to reveal the positively evangelical idea of ​​diverse spheres of life. I just want to show that neglect of this idea entails forced concessions that cast a suspicious shadow over the entire worldview. In fact, properly evaluate this statement by Solovyov that there is no specifically Christian principle for national, state and family life, that the immediate cultural tasks are the same for a believing Christian and a simple humanist. I personally agree with this, of course, this is exactly my idea, and I am glad that I find support in Solovyov’s words. But it is beyond any doubt that Soloviev expresses this truth against his will, not fully realizing and evaluating his words. Indeed, between these two thoughts that, on the one hand, all family, social, national and state issues need to be resolved in a Christian way, from a religious point of view, and that, on the other hand, there is no specifically Christian solution to these issues, that the area of ​​these issues is a universal, cultural, humanistic area - between these two thoughts there is an impenetrable abyss. After all, this is the most decisive dilemma: either one Christian point of view is possible, both on personal life and on family-national-state forms, or the personal-religious and cultural-humanistic (family-national-state) spheres are heterogeneous spheres... However, this point is the most tempting for worldly, humanistic thinking. Many will think: what’s the matter? What's the harm in recognizing the Christian and general cultural areas as coinciding? From a worldly, humanistic point of view, there is no harm in this, but the absorption of the Christian-religious worldview into a world-cultural worldview certainly cannot be called an indifferent matter from a religious-Christian point of view. After all, this, in any case, would mean that Christianity is smoothed out, equalized with the universal world, melts into it, but what possibility remains in this case to talk about a religious-Christian worldview? And what position does Solovyov’s philosophy find itself in, which from the very beginning has made Christian thought its distinctive feature? The essence of the matter is that it is possible to save both the religious-Christian principle and the socio-cultural principle only by recognizing the heterogeneity of the personal sphere, as religious-Christian, and the family-national-state sphere, as cultural-humanistic. Otherwise, a smoothing of the Christian principle and a confusion of different principles, fluctuations between them, are inevitable. For me now the most important thing is to note this inevitability for Solovyov’s philosophy. This is how Solovyov smoothes out and humanizes the gospel, proving again and again that his thought moves on a philosophical-humanistic basis, and not on a religious-Christian one. He talks about the gospel commandment about hating one’s own. “By prescribing to love everyone, even our enemies, the gospel, of course, cannot exclude our neighbors and family from this true love. However, it is directly said: “unless anyone hates.” This means that there is a kind of hatred that does not contradict true love, but, on the contrary, is required by it. This means that there is also such apparent love that contradicts true love; You need to renounce this false love; in this sense, you need to hate not only yourself, but also your family, and all your loved ones and your people. This is true hatred, abolishing false love, false and blind attachment to one’s loved one - it is that self-denial - not only personal, but also family, tribal, and national, which is proclaimed in the New Testament. Gospel “hatred” does not contradict true love, but is its necessary manifestation. By renouncing our exclusive attachments in order to follow Christ, to participate in His work - the work of universal salvation, we thereby contribute to the true good of both our family and our people” 51, etc. These reasonings of Solovyov must be called downright pathetic. Christ demanded from His disciples to renounce not only blind and false attachment to their own, but also from all natural love - and He demanded this hatred of others not for the sake of the true good of the family and people, but solely for the sake of the gospel, for His own sake. “I have come to divide a man with his father, and a daughter with her mother, and a daughter-in-law with her mother-in-law. And a man's enemies are those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me... He who loses his soul for My sake will save it” (Matthew X, 35-39). There is not a single word here about the good of the family or the people, as well as about the self-denial of the family or the people; the whole conversation is only about a person’s relationship to Christ, and it is required of him that for the sake of Christ he “renounces all” of himself (Luke XIV, 33). Undoubtedly, there is false love for one’s own and true love - and for those who have not moved from false love to true love, the Christian question has not yet arisen, just as the moral question does not yet arise before those who have not learned to fulfill legal duties. The explanation of these fundamental truths of universal, philosophical morality, against which false Christianity also sins in the form of blind attachment to its own religion, to the religion of its people, constitutes Solovyov’s invaluable merit. But replacing false love with true love does not solve the Christian question—it is only then that it rises. For the sake of Christ, one must sacrifice not only lies, but also the very truth of natural love, the very good of national and family life; one must sacrifice love for one’s own, not because it is false, but because for the sake of Christ one must sacrifice every earthly good, everything dear. One can call this self-sacrifice the greatest absurdity, a deed completely useless for human life, but Christianity is only in this self-sacrifice, only in it does it have its distinctive feature, only in it is the sacrifice on the cross of the only begotten Son of God justified. And if the whole religious question was in the cultural unification of families and peoples, in the difference between nationalism and nationality, then the philosophy of the Moscow publicist would be enough to save the world... By cutting back Christianity at its evangelical root, in the main question of the personal sacrifice of love, Solovyov can no longer escape the shackles of earthly conventions and human predilections in national matters. Masterfully drawing the line between blind nationalism and rational patriotism, he cannot realize his claims to a Christian attitude towards nationality. He writes: “having overcome senseless and ignorant national enmity with moral will, we begin to know and appreciate foreign nationalities, we begin to like them. But this “love of approval” cannot be identical with that which we feel for our people, just as the most sincere love for neighbors (according to the Gospel commandment), ethically equal to love for oneself, can never be psychologically the same with it. For oneself, as well as for one’s people, the invariable primacy of the starting point remains” 52. Thus, the liberal employee of the “Bulletin of Europe” leaves a loophole in his broadly humanitarian Christianity to cover up patriotism: a Christian, equal in everything to a humanist, will not sacrifice either his family, or the people, or the state. And that this “primacy of the starting point” is not empty words is shown by Solovyov’s reasoning about war: justifying war in the past with solid historical considerations, he is “not indifferent” to victory in future wars 53... All this is absolutely true from a cultural-historical point of view, but what does Christianity have to do with it? After all, if Christianity is involved in these questions about marriage, about war, if we talk about Christian marriage, about Christian war, then where is the limit of the amazing absurdities that can be reached? After all, you will have to argue with Solovyov that firing long-range cannons is not contrary to the Christian conscience, since the enemy is invisible from a distance, but in cases of hand-to-hand combat, a question of conscience arises for Christian soldiers 54 . It turns out that Christian troops can only use long-range rifles and are unsuitable for hand-to-hand combat. Corresponding distinctions should probably be assumed in the field of male-female relations, in accordance with Solovyov’s article “On the Meaning of Love”... No, if you approve of family, patriotism, war, then you need to give room to all the heat of family love that creates peaceful heroes, all the fire of patriotic and abusive inspiration, and not preach that lukewarm hypocrisy, which is too much in our lives. We need to repeat Christ’s words “about division” again and again, to use His cutting sword again. And the fault of medieval Christianity was not at all in the division between God and Caesar, - on the contrary, in the constant confusion of these areas, and the legacy of this confusion continues in the church-state politics of our days. It is our sacred task to carry out this separation to the end in order to achieve a true union, a true reconciliation of personal absoluteness and social convention. Hasty mixing of disparate spheres of life has fatal consequences for life and thought. These consequences for Solovyov’s philosophy are not yet exhausted by these consequences. Covering all aspects of life, not only personal creativity, but also conditional social development, with Christian light forces Solovyov not only to generally adjust Christianity to world-cultural ideals, to smooth out its specific features, but also to call Christian those aspects of worldly life that either in fact or in the minds of public figures go against Christianity. I have already said that the past history of Christianity, both Western Catholic and Byzantine, followed the path of mixing the ecclesiastical and civil spheres, contrary to the opposite opinion of Solovyov. Confusion was generally expressed in the symbolic sanctification of all aspects of social life, which, without changing in their essence, were already considered Christian. This symbolic consecration was of great significance in the sense of the struggle of Christianity against pagan religion, but over time this significance evaporated. And as this negative meaning evaporated, social life found itself stripped of past pagan ideals, which, however, could not be replaced by Christian ones, since Christianity does not provide its own special social ideals. Subsequently, simply cultural ideals emerged, but on the eve of this cultural revival, a time when only the church symbol was operative was conceivable. For Solovyov's philosophy, this moment of social life should seem the highest, but in reality it turned out to be terrible. For Russia, for example, such a time was the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Soloviev writes: “From Ivan the Terrible, the truest and most complete formula of the Christian monarchical idea has come to us: the earth is ruled by God’s mercy and the Most Pure Mother of God by the mercy and of all the saints by the prayers and blessings of our parents and by following us, their sovereigns, and not judges and governors, and hedgehogs and strategists. This formula, Soloviev notes, is impeccable; the Christian view of the earthly kingdom cannot be better expressed.”55 But what a terrible reality! Soloviev explains it by saying that Grozny was lower than his ideal and professed it hypocritically. However, this view does not exhaust the deepest tragedy of this reign. After all, understand that this reign, the most perfect according to the Christian formula, was not only the worst of the Christian reigns, but it was the worst in comparison with the bad pagan reigns. This was clear even to Grozny’s contemporaries. Philip’s words addressed to him are known: “Oh, Sovereign! Here we make sacrifices to God, and innocent Christian blood is shed behind the altar. Since the sun has been shining in the sky, it has not been seen or heard of pious kings disturbing their own power so terribly. In the most unfaithful pagan kingdoms there is law and truth, there is mercy for people, but in Russia there is none. The property and lives of citizens are not protected. There are robberies everywhere, murders everywhere - and they are committed in the name of the king.” This is the terrible tragedy of the Christian kingdom; only the tragedy of a Christian family can compare with it. The forms of natural life, determined only by Christianity, remain in the essence of the matter without any ideal guidance and inevitably fall below pagan reality. Progressive phenomena of social life, highly valuable culturally, but anti-Christian in the minds of public figures, present the same difficulty for Solovyov’s philosophy. These are the case of Peter the Great, February 19 and the later liberation movement in our history. About the first, Soloviev writes: “Contrary to all appearances, the reform of Peter the Great had in essence a deeply Christian character, for it was based on a moral and religious act of national self-condemnation” 56 . The same goes for the second: “The great act of February 19 was a true Christian feat, despite the fact that no one stuck this label on it, and that official representatives of the church did not take any active part in it” 57. Finally, about the later liberation movement and about humanitarian progress in general, Solovyov says: “The majority of people who have made and have made this progress do not recognize themselves as Christians. But if Christians in name betrayed the cause of Christ and almost destroyed it, then why cannot Christians in name, who renounce Christ in words, serve the cause of Christ? In the gospel we read about two sons; one said: I will go - and did not go, the other said: I will not go - and went. Which of the two, Christ asks, did the will of the Father? It is impossible to deny the fact that the social progress of recent centuries has been accomplished in the spirit of philanthropy and justice, that is, in the spirit of Christ. The abolition of torture and cruel executions, the cessation, at least in the West, of all persecutions of non-believers and heretics, the abolition of feudal and serf slavery - if all these Christian transformations were made by non-believers, then so much the worse for believers” 58... The high assessment of the progressive movement cannot be honestly disputed. But what is the basis for calling it Christian if its representatives and supporters themselves do not call themselves Christians, if in recent days its non-religious character is becoming more and more clear, if it becomes directly hostile to official church Christianity? You can’t play with words, calling white black and black white. It is necessary to recognize the fact that conscious service to Christianity in the sphere of social forms leads to anti-Christian results, and, conversely, the free development of these forms turns out to coincide with the latest Christian goals. This cannot be said about personal Christianity, excluding, of course, its hypocritical bearers: here the consciously free effort corresponds to the degree of achieved benefits and perfection. But it’s different in the area of ​​family-national-state relations: these relations go the more in the direction of Christian ideals, the more freely they are revealed, the more they follow the natural laws of development. The family, the people, the state serve Christ in their own way, following their interests, their laws: in order to serve Christ, the family should have no other immediate goal than the birth and upbringing of healthy and beautiful children, other than gathering family warmth; the people should have no other immediate goal other than free progress in unity with all peoples, fair relations between the groups within it and general welfare, except the pursuit of their reasonably understood interests... However, we need to clarify one point that can easily mislead our thoughts. This point is the personal attitude of a Christian to social tasks, to social progress. The essence of Christianity - everyone agrees on this - is love, the subject of which, of course, is the person, the Christian. But an inextricable connection can be established between love and culture. Soloviev does this. “True love,” he says, “is necessarily expressed in active help to others and, therefore, uses all the necessary means for this help. But culture is precisely the totality of all historically developed means and instruments for the sustainable provision and comprehensive improvement of human life, that is, the life of all people. If the beginning of moral activity is love, and its goal is the good of all, then culture is a system of necessary means for the full manifestation of love as a moral principle and for the full achievement of the common good as a moral goal. Culture, like everything in general, can be abused and its means used for purposes that are foreign to its true purpose or even directly opposed to it. But because of a false culture, to deny culture in general and to oppose any external realization of love to love itself, as an internal subjective principle, is unfounded” 59. Thus, Soloviev brings a Christian basis to the ethical rule: take as full a part as possible in the matter of general improvement. He tramples into the mud the theory of exclusively personal morality, which places all hope on the achievement of personal holiness by everyone and does not allow for an active social struggle against social evil. He calls this ideal of personal holiness the universal Pharisaic ideal - he explains that the true ideal of Christian love is necessarily the ideal of social truth and progress, that is, the practical implementation of Christianity in the world 60. These speeches by Solovyov are filled with the deepest truth. The theory of exclusively personal holiness, which preaches decisive abstinence from social activities, non-resistance to evil, must be considered completely buried after Solovyov’s polemics - and this polemic alone would be enough to make the name of our philosopher immortal. But the Christian problem is not exhausted by the victory of this polemic. The deepest essence of the matter lies in the difference between personal participation in public affairs, personal Christian illumination of the latest goals of culture, and the nature of social development, the nature of the very forms of social relations. It is possible to fully accept personal Christian participation in social affairs, but at the same time define the nature of social development differently: either to grant freedom to social development, or to impose a Christian character on the very forms of social relations, in other words, or to recognize the freedom of social development according to natural historical laws, or to preach a Christian family, a Christian state. I personally have a negative attitude only towards the latter, and in this I disagree with Solovyov: what was said above about the failure of the consciously Christian direction of social forms and the success of their free-natural development confirms my opinion, and not Solovyov’s opinion. The matter of personal Christian service to social progress remains our common basis, and I think that this basis is more likely to be maintained with my opinion about the freedom of social development. It is in favor of my view that the circumstance recognized by Solovyov, that there is no specifically Christian culture, that the immediate tasks of family, national and state life are the same for a Christian and for a humanist, that these tasks can unite people of different (cultural) religions and different worldviews. This general cultural area of ​​family-national-state relations in no way constrains my Christian convictions, my ultimate Christian aspirations, just as my personal religious-Christian view of the world and history does not at all require that social development formally stand under the banner of Christianity, that special Christian forms of family and state life be created. A Christian looks at the world and history completely differently than a socialist - a supporter of historical materialism, but they can adhere to the same practical program - one for altruistic motives of love for one’s neighbor, for the disadvantaged, and the other for selfish attachment to earthly goods and the subjective idea of ​​justice. My personal religious-Christian view, embracing all people and the latest goals of world history, like an invisible person permeates the sphere of cultural relations, common to people of all worldviews and following its own laws of development, and is completely reconciled with the self-legitimacy of this sphere. After all, if a Christian, in the name of the commandment of Christ, in the name of Christian love, feeds the hungry, it would not occur to him to wish that this feeding was free from the laws of physiology, that it was some kind of special “spiritual” nutrition: the spirituality of his love coexists peacefully with the natural necessity of organic life, subject to its own laws. Likewise, the participation of a Christian in cultural and social activities does not encroach, for the sake of his unique motives, on its natural-historical pattern. This heterogeneity of personal absoluteness and social convention cannot be explained by superficial reasons alone, which could be eliminated by a certain evolution of moral consciousness - it lies in the very property of the social organism, which is determined by its natural-historical laws of development, and does not represent only the resultant of colliding individual consciousnesses. However, even superficial reasons - the mere fact that society does not consist only of conscious and sincere Christians - is sufficient to establish the difference between the laws of social life and the freedom of personal religious consciousness. In this case, as in many others, we will find support for ourselves in the words of Solovyov. He writes: “The principle of human dignity, or the unconditional significance of each person, by virtue of which society is defined as the internal, free consent of all, is the only moral norm... If we see in Christianity the true basis and norm of all good in the world, it is only because Christianity, as a perfect religion, also contains an unconditional moral principle. And with any separation of the Christian community from the demands of moral perfection, the unconditional significance of Christianity immediately disappears, which then turns into a historical accident” 61. But the only moral norm obligatory both for personal practice and for the public presupposes that society consists of homogeneous perfect units. Is this really true? Soloviev himself gives a negative answer to this. In his words: “In the current existence of mankind, it is also impossible for the people and for the individual that any satisfaction of material needs and requirements of self-defense directly follows from the dictates of moral duty. And for the people there are matters of the current moment, the evil of the historical day, without a direct connection with its highest moral tasks” 62. And one more thing: “at the basis of the entire economic field lies something simple and fatal, which in itself does not follow from a moral principle - the need for labor to maintain one’s existence” 63 . Let us also recall his words already quoted above: “In addition to the general guidance of the mind, physiological processes obey their own special laws and engines, beyond the jurisdiction of the mind. (So) spiritual power, by its very nature, cannot assume state functions” 64. From these confessions, apparently, it irresistibly follows that there can no longer be any talk of a single moral norm that embraces both personal ethical activity and the public, that there can be no talk of a Christian state, of Christian politics, of Christian economics. However, Soloviev not only does not make these conclusions, but also directly rejects them, and we are especially interested in listening to his argumentation. “Just as the free play of chemical processes can occur only in a corpse, and in a living body these processes are connected and determined by organic goals, so the free play of economic factors and laws is possible only in a dead and decaying society, and in a living and having a future, economic elements are connected and determined by moral goals, and to proclaim laissez faire, laissez passer here means to say to society: die and decay... Since Christianity did not abolish the law, it could not abolish the law either. states. But from this reasonable and necessary fact - not the abolition of the state as an external force, it does not at all follow that the internal attitude of people towards this force, and through this the very nature of its activity - in general and in particular - remains without any change. The chemical substance has not been abolished in the bodies of plants and animals, but has acquired new characteristics in them, and it is not for nothing that the whole science of “organic chemistry” exists. There is a similar basis for Christian politics. The Christian state, unless it remains an empty name, must have certain differences from the pagan state, although both of them, as states, have the same basis and common task” 65. It must be admitted that the analogy of organic chemistry used by Solovyov has a significance for the moral teaching of society that must be taken into account. At the same time, we can recall that in modern sociological science the concept of a social organism as applied to society is considered more or less established. However, the same sociologists who use this concept warn against limitless assimilation of the social organism and the biological organism: one of the most important differences between one and the other is the greater freedom and originality of the elements of the social organism - individuals, than can be said about organic cells. Soloviev also knows about this freedom of the individual from each given social union, as we saw above. Forgetting this truth and misusing the analogy between biological and social organisms leads to significant errors, primarily in ethical terms. It is in this case that a historical-social theory of morality naturally arises, which reduces morality to the level of a product of social development. Let us not deviate to the side, let us not enter into a discussion of this theory. In any case, Soloviev, deriving from this analogy the idea of ​​Christian politics, i.e., moral illumination of social issues, makes a gross logical mistake. After all, from the fact that the personal elements of a social organism are connected and determined by social goals, just as chemical processes in a living body are connected and determined by organic goals, it necessarily follows that the moral consciousness of the personal elements must be subordinated to social historical laws, and Solovyov draws the opposite conclusion. There is some truth in this submission, since the Son, the bearer of absolute morality, religious love, will submit to the Father of life (I Cor. XV, 28), but so that this subordination does not come to the detriment of a person’s moral identity, it is necessary that it falls on a foreign area of ​​family-social relations, and that this subordination of a person, in his external relations, to socio-historical laws is parallel to the personal religious and moral illumination of all social life. The highest goals come not from society, which is subject to conditional development, which also includes the elements of society, but from man, and for these goals to have real force, it is necessary that this force be heterogeneous with socio-historical forces. Even the threat of “the free play of chemical processes” is not terrible in view of the fact that “but” can remain in its place under different schools of thought: one can say that “the chemical substance has not been abolished in the bodies of plants and animals, but has acquired different characteristics in them,” and one can say that “the chemical substance in the bodies is subordinated to an organic purpose, but has not lost its special laws.” And there is no doubt that just as physiological processes obey their own special laws, beyond the jurisdiction of reason, so, along with the moral duty and moral goals of individuals, socio-historical laws operate, beyond the jurisdiction of moral goals. It remains for me to accurately indicate the point where I disagree with Solovyov. This point is the central idea of Solovyov, that rational-ideological moral law cannot be reduced to psychological necessity, just as, in turn, psychological necessity cannot be reduced to mechanical determinism, that different kingdoms - natural, human and divine - are mutually conditioned, the higher kingdom to the lower, but not reducible to one another, the higher to the lower, so it cannot be said that evolution creates higher forms entirely from lower ones, and, in particular, the kingdom of God cannot be understood as a consequence of continuous natural-human development, but can be called in a certain sense a new creation 66. This idea of the heterogeneity of kingdoms, the natural-human and the divine-absolute, so brilliantly expressed by Solovyov, but not sustained in the system, I decisively accept and disagree with him where he deviates from this idea... Christian Liberty Theory I proceed from the fact that Christianity in its evangelical essence, as a religion of unconditional faith and absolute aspirations, is the most deeply internal, intimate, personal religion. The bearer of such faith, such aspirations can only be the human spirit, the human personality, and not any social union - a family, a people, a state. The Heavenly Father is “my” Father, “your” Father, or “our” Father - ours, meaning the unity of believers, the unity of all who have “their” Heavenly Father, but this is not the Father of the family, people, state. A Christian, accepting Christ the Son of God into his heart, does not know any mediation between himself and the Heavenly Father, he is directly turned to the Heavenly Father: the believer does not look at himself as one of many, socially, popularly, conventionally, but he puts himself in the only intimate relationship with God, before which the whole world and all other people are only the object of his faith and his love. A Christian feels himself at the center of the whole world - God acts not through nature on him, but through him on nature - he feels himself at the center of humanity, he certainly feels like the savior of humanity (a continuator of the work of Christ), he sees his calling in doing something of God for all people, sacrificing himself to them. This global and universal centrality of the Christian is the most characteristic thing in Christianity. A Christian, who has the Father in himself, necessarily sets himself in opposition to all nature and all people. Sonship of God is a religious feeling that is significantly different from the pagan feeling of God in nature: Christianity is precisely not a naturalistic religion, but a human, divine-human one. To a Christian, nature does not say anything religiously; on the contrary, he and his Heavenly Father enter into nature, which all, in the fullness of its creatures, awaits its deliverance through him, through the revelation of divine glory in him. In the same way, humanity in its real groups, family, national, state - for him constitutes only the external object of his faith and his love: his task is formulated before him solely in the form of the question of what he can do for the good of the family, the state, the people. In the eyes of a Christian, every human gathering, every social group is not a bearer of internal religious content, but a bearer of external needs. Religiously, God acts in nature and in history only through him: only through his central faith does he move towards divine goals and through his central love does he actively contribute to the achievement of these goals, which for nature and history remain external, objective. The believer himself and only he relates to the final goals from within, they are realized for him and through him, and nature and history serve these goals in their own ways, willy-nilly, good or evil. This centrality of the Christian is strengthened in his relation to nature and history by the fact that his faith is not at all conditioned by a miracle, does not require a miracle, but is easily reconciled with the natural and historical pattern: the sun shines on the good and the evil indifferently - this means that his Heavenly Father, in His goodness, sends sunlight to everyone, both good and evil; in historical destinies, both evil and good perish, this, firstly, so that everyone is awake and always ready to repent and, secondly, so that believers do the works of God for the good of people, fight against evil and suffering and bring them good. Then, the centrality of the Christian, the intimacy of Christianity is affirmed by the fact that Christianity does not speak anything in the public language, does not pose any special tasks to the family, people, state, does not create any social forms, simply does not have any social appearance, permeates social forms of life without affecting them. A Christian, with his religious view of the world, with his hidden last aspirations, walks among the social movement as if with a “closed door”, not touching social forms, being indifferent to the laws of their development. The intimacy of Christianity finds its polar counterpart in the conventionally external, objectively natural nature of the forms of social life - family, national and state. Each social group acts precisely as a group, regardless of the intimate mood of its members: although each of them can interfere in the direction of social development, this development nevertheless moves by its own interests, according to its own laws. A group association is not just the sum of individual characters, but in such an association people necessarily enter into action not from the intimate, but from the external side: through organic social life they create their own special interests and evoke special feelings. Thus, a family, a living and prosperous family, does not develop in the direction of the resultant intimate characters of one and the other spouse, but awakens in them unique feelings that equally captivate them, and is driven by its own special interests. These interests can unite spouses of different religious sentiments: each of them can highlight the final goals of life in their own way, but immediate family tasks will be common to them. The same applies to larger groups, the people's and the state. Intimately religious, internally absolute life and conditionally social life, divine and earthly, these are two heterogeneous forms of life, and in this very heterogeneity lies the final foundation of their highest Harmony. This can be most clearly illustrated by the example of the modern economic liberation movement. It sets itself the goal of such an economic and social system, which at the same time is also the immediate external goal of Christianity: this is a system in which there would be no classes of the oppressed and disadvantaged and classes of the idle and privileged, which would implement the principles of justice and equality. And at the same time, from the inside, the economic liberation movement finds itself in decisive confrontation with the religious-Christian worldview and mood. The confrontation is generated, on the one hand, by the fact that the socialist movement is based on economically materialist theoretical foundations that are decisively irreconcilable with Christianity: there is no place for Christianity where everything comes down to economic reasons, where earthly happiness is placed above all else. On the other hand, the desire of the disadvantaged and oppressed to win equality with other classes, to achieve economic freedom and security from within has nothing in common with the internal motives of Christian love, giving and sacrificing: the desire of some to achieve and receive and the desire of others to share and sacrifice, coinciding in external immediate results, radically diverge from each other in their inner essence. And when these two spheres are mixed, they inevitably come either to the denial of one of them - some reject Christianity in the name of socialist ideals, others reject the economic liberation cause in the name of Christian ideals - or they come to a compromise, to the development of Christian socialism, which is equally disgusting both to socialists, since it interferes with the freedom of the liberation movement, and to Christians, since it cools the absoluteness of Christian love with the lukewarmness of the social form. And in essence, the same is the dual attitude of Christianity to the family, the nation, the state, to science, art, and the same is the compromise in these areas, which marks the entire past path of church history. But one has only to recognize the heterogeneity of these spheres, personal-religious and social-conventional, in order to eliminate the essential need for conflict between them and bring them to complete harmony: the sphere of personal religious-absolute attitude to the world and the sphere of the material structure of earthly life are heterogeneous spheres, emanating from completely different internal sources, but coinciding in the immediate external results. Dostoevsky more than once expresses the idea that, with the loss of faith in God, with the loss of afterlife aspirations, people will direct all their conscious efforts to the organization of earthly life, earthly happiness, community life, and will achieve enormous results in this area. But for this there is no need to lose faith in God - for this it is enough to be convinced that the area of earthly interests is entirely the area of earthly means, that the arrangement of one’s happiness is entirely left to man himself, limited in this regard only by nature and other people, that people can consciously organize their life, their earthly happiness according to the principle of earthly interest, that the desire for earthly happiness and the natural socio-historical development of forms of life should be revealed in complete freedom from external religious instructions. And conversely, this matter of earthly dispensation should not have its own, economic-materialistic, religion and its own, evolutionary-egoistic, ethics: it should be entirely an external economic matter. In this case, the economic and political structure cannot come into significant conflict with spiritual religion. There is no need to cover up an earthly cause with any transcendental goals; let it appear in all its truth. On the other hand, Christianity does not declare any ready-made forms of economic-social affairs, does not declare a Christian system of state and family, does not have any points of contact with the unique natural development of economic and social relations, although from the inside, from the side of ultimate goals, from the side of attitude towards people, their sorrows and joys, it is included in all earthly interests. A Christian has a completely different attitude towards the external forms of a social movement and its internal interests; his attitudes towards public affairs are different - externally conditional and internally cordial. Economic-political language is the language of external relations, common to people of different religious beliefs, uniting them regardless of their religion and not expressing Christian content. But personally, a Christian is interested from within in the change of social forms, in their development: without religiously interfering with the freedom of their historical development, he is not indifferent to how man and society live at one or another stage of historical development. From the side of his heart, he closely accepts every social form, every historical stage, because behind every form and at every stage he sees the suffering and joy of his neighbor, for whom he is ready to lay down his soul - because he looks at every form of social life and every stage of social historical movement as a means of realizing his personal Christian ideals. These ideals are personal in their original origin, but they are social in their objective results. As far as social forms, in their externally objective aspect, are far from Christianity, a Christian is personally close from the inside to the social cause, from the inside is interested in historical progress. He speaks in different languages ​​when he speaks as a member of the party to which he adheres, and when he speaks to himself or in the company of two or three gathered in the name of Christ. The first is the language of conditional goals, temporary programs, the second is the language of an absolute attitude towards the world, the latest world goals. The first language he has in common with all those who are thirsty and hungry, the downtrodden and powerless; in the second language he speaks only with the Heavenly Father, in prayer, shutting himself up in his room. Only with this view is it possible to avoid violence on both sides, both the external violence of religion over social development, over various forms of community life, and social-state violence over a person’s religious conscience. It is necessary for social and legal consciousness to develop completely free from transcendental instructions, according to its own laws, in accordance only with its conditional tasks, and for a person’s personal religious self-consciousness to stand outside of any external, public control. Just as sectarian fragmentation of society, breaking it into hostile alliances, is undesirable, the principle of personal religious freedom stands just as high and firmly. Sectarianism is undesirable as a stop halfway, as a vague indication of religious freedom - the true bearer of religious absoluteness can only be an individual and, as for the intimate side of religion, its real experiences, which cannot be the subject of either teaching or regulation, the ideal is as many religions as there are believing individuals. We thus arrive at the formula: freedom in religion, solidarity in public affairs and necessity in natural-historical life. Of course, social life is progressing and every step in historical progress is an attempt to realize the highest ideal in social life. However, the absoluteness of the ideal certainly cannot move from within the individual into the realm of social forms: the implementation of the ideal is inevitably conditional. Life always turns towards the ideal, and this is the condition for the possibility of personal and religious participation in public life, but as soon as the direction of life towards the ideal is fixed in the social system, it immediately turns out that the personal ideal of social life again rises above its direction. For example, the modern socialist movement strives for the decisive elimination of class inequalities and class struggle, but we are already being warned that the class struggle is being replaced by a new struggle of professional groups. Absolute striving for the ideal is possible only in personal will, while the social realization of the ideal is necessarily conditional. Religion is an eternal perpendicular to the direction of social life and, no matter how this direction goes, it will have its own perpendicular. The polarity of personal absoluteness and social convention will never disappear from our lives. I see my theological and literary vocation in drawing the dividing sword of Christ along the modern strip of life: I consciously draw the boundary between evangelically pure, spiritually absolute personal religion and conditional social life, developing according to its natural and historical laws - I draw this boundary in order to make possible the highest harmony between them, just as glass demarcates the elements. serves as a condition for the electrical activity of the battery. To introduce religion into the very depths of life, to reconcile its ideals with the very conventionality of family-national-state relations, to reach a complete and final synthesis that opens up the broadest prospects for the fight against evil and victory over it, is possible only on the basis of the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe heterogeneity of the personal-religious and social-conventional spheres of life. My first task was to reveal the pure evangelical, spiritual-absolute character of Christianity, to cleanse it of all historical deposits and to clarify its heterogeneity in relation to the earthly tasks of social development - I mainly established the glass separating the elements, in the full hope that the necessary combination of them would follow by itself. I see in historical reality a natural tendency to unite the poles, and I see the task of the philosophy of religion to be to introduce a dividing line so that this connection does not become a premature confusion. Personal effort must be directed towards separation between elements, because the tendency towards union is always given in living reality. Whatever they say about the historical past of the church, no matter how Byzantine is characterized, the entire past of the church seems to me to be a continuous history of the symbolic sanctification of life: in this symbolism, which is only complemented by asceticism, is the very essence of the church, the church’s relationship to the world, both in the past and in the present. And when I hear the speeches of modern publicist-preachers, trashing the centuries-old church isolation from life, calling for the sanctification of all aspects of life with Christian light, pointing out in the gospel itself the foundations for love of life, for bright joy, I cannot help but say to myself: this preaching speech, since the time of the Apostle, who called on Christians even to drink and eat for the glory of God, has been heard in the church for nineteen centuries, essentially remaining unchanged - and I am surprised at the injustice in relation to the past church centuries of our publicist-speakers, who unreasonably claim originality. They break into the open door. What is new in their preaching speeches is a certain frivolity, which allows them to see in the gospel itself the foundations for the joys of life and makes the path of higher synthesis extremely easy for them. There is no ennobling tragedy in their words, there is no depth in their understanding of the Gospel truth, their attitude towards the polarity of life is too superficial: they are ready to say that it was in vain that Christ spoke about the cross and self-denial, that the whole history of the church was a complete misunderstanding, that everything is resolved in their superficial knowledge. On the question of the immediate goals of church policy, they are quite right, and if all religion were exhausted by this policy, their word would be sufficient, but they do not even come to the essence of the religious question, the Christian problem. So that their practical program is not the program of one of the political parties, completely divorced from religious foundations, it is necessary to breathe religious tragedy into their words, it is necessary to spiritualize their speeches with the dividing sword of Christ. I see the roots of the Christian problem in the depths of the Gospel, the entire church-historical path seems to me an inevitable path to achieving religious synthesis - I do not consider the task of reconciling absolute religion with free life to be a purely theoretical task of the individual mind, but for me this is a question of some rebirth, about some transitional moment in the history of Christianity itself, therefore the theoretical pre-solution of the Christian problem turns out to be a religious matter. In the closest way, this is the degeneration of the symbolic-ascetic sanctification of life into a free combination of the religious spirit and earthly life with its joys and sorrows, earthly forces and natural-historical laws - the degeneration of the church’s attitude to natural-historical life, inevitably symbolically ascetic, according to the very concept of the church, into a personally religious attitude. From this side, the very establishment of pure gospel truth is important, in its removal from the conventional church-historical vestment. But the roots of the Christian problem go even deeper, it reaches to the very depths of the gospel, to the mystery of the relationship of the Son to the Father. The work of Christ, which flowed from His divinely-filial self-consciousness, even from a real-historical point of view, has world-religious significance. Christ filled religious life with love alone - in its two forms - love for God the Father and love for people. His heart was warmed by all-encompassing, boundless, absolute love, and He instilled this love in all of humanity that he had reborn. And now our heart beats in a burst of this same Christian love: pity for man, an all-encompassing thought about the human race, about all people - have become our second nature. Let this Christian principle bear far from equal fruit in different hearts, for many it is drowned out by the weeds of base interests, for others it opens only by chance, in moments of uplift, for others it barely glimmers, so be it, but there is no doubt that it has taken root in our hearts, that it is ineradicable in us, that our attitude towards man, in spite of everything, is completely different from what it was in the pagan world - and this change in the nature of our soul began with Christ. We are now so accustomed to this new character of spiritual life for the pagan world that we often forget about its connection with Christ, it seems to us primordial, natural, worldly, it flutters on the banner of fighters for human rights who have consciously broken away from religious Christian foundations, but this does not in the least shake the historical fact that this new life of the human soul began with Christ, that He is the “master and finisher” of the new spiritual life of the Christian humanity. And this world-historical work of Christ is a strictly religious work: just as He accomplished it in God’s filial self-consciousness, so God became His Father and the Father of man. Christ revolutionized religion; He revealed God as the Father of people. Beginning with Christ, the Son of God, pre-Christian naturalistic and folk religion was reborn into a divine-human religion - and this, again, let’s say, is a real historical fact that cannot be disputed. The religious work of establishing new relations between God and man, the work of theanthropic love, the work of saving the world, penetrated to such depths into the soul of Christ, the Son of God, delighted Him to such heavenly heights, captivated Him with such strength that He was saturated with it, lived only with it, rose above all the natural, everyday surroundings of life, barely touched the earth with His feet. He recognized Himself as being sent into the world to accomplish a specific work of God; alien to the world and its interests, His soul yearned towards heaven, towards the Heavenly Father. He was all prayer, all sacrifice of love. The first society of His disciples was inspired by the same divine spirit: they eagerly awaited the revelation of the day of the Lord, they ardently desired to renounce the world and go to God and Christ, they walked the earth with their eyes constantly directed towards heaven, alien to the earth, like temporary guests on it, who accidentally lingered more than they expected. They were intoxicated by the spirit of God, the spirit of divine all-encompassing love, the thirst for self-denial and sacrifice, the hope of being perfect, as the Heavenly Father is perfect, of living a pure divine life. And long later, when the fact of the long existence of Christianity was already revealed and the Christian religion symbolically sanctified worldly life, the absolute heavenly character of the Christian spirit was reflected in asceticism, which covered up and even distorted the truth of the Gospel. And even today, preachers like Tolstoy, who have internalized Christianity with one mind and have not felt it with their pagan hearts, repeat in abstract, dead words about the unearthly heights of Christianity, and their belated words, like a distant echo, reflect the truth of Christ and His closest disciples. And in order to understand this truth of Christ and His disciples, we only need to imagine all the novelty of the truth of God’s Fatherhood revealed by Him, all the decisiveness of the revolution that Christianity has brought about in humanity. According to the power of his new birth, the new birth, a person had to live for some time with only a new spirit. Just as Christ Himself, as soon as He was named the Son of God in baptism, was immediately carried away by the spirit into the desert and spent forty days there, tasting nothing, so the reborn humanity, blinded by the brilliance of the new truth of sonship with God, carried away by the prospect of divine perfection, lived these centuries as if in a religious desert, far from life. These were centuries when regenerated humanity lived under the one indivisible power of Christ - the Son of God, when God exalted Christ and gave Him the name that is above every name, so that before His name every knee would bow, in heaven, on earth and under the earth, when everything was put under His feet. But in the same word of God it is foretold that the exclusive kingdom of the Son of God will have an end when “He gives up the kingdom to God and the Father. For He must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet... When God the Father has put all things in subjection to Him, then the Son Himself will submit to Him who put all things under Him, so that God may be all in all” (I Cor. XV, 24-28). And we see that the prophecy of Scripture about the kingdom of the Son has already been fulfilled in these Christian centuries, because these were the centuries of the unlimited and undivided power of the Son of man over humanity, the dominance of His spirit - the spirit of love and heavenly aspiration. But has not now come the time for the Son Himself to submit to His Father? Isn’t it time for Christianity to emerge from the desert of “pure” heavenly impulses and place its feet on the solid soil of the earth? Hasn't the time come when Christianity, defined in its heavenly purity, must “serve the earth,” be combined with life, and sanctify not symbolically, but from within and effectively the entire course of natural-historical life? That this has become necessary for our time is obvious to anyone who does not deliberately close their eyes: for, behold, the exclusive kingdom of spirit and love has reached the point that their confession, the most ardent and artistic, takes on noticeable features of “idle talk.” That this confession is sincere, that our nature has been reborn according to this spirit, that pity decisively prevents us from being bold admirers of our egoism, from crushing and destroying everyone, this is so; but everything is limited to one dead and deadening emotion, and the trembling of the heart does not give the strength to actively serve the good. It has now become clear to observers of Christian life that “whoever speaks of his abstract love for humanity almost always loves himself alone.” And this will not happen when the Christian love deeply rooted in our hearts enters the system of living life, when the gospel salt becomes the seasoning of history, when the Son, the bearer of love, submits to the Father of life, the Ancient of Days. This submission will not be a return to paganism, an abolition of the entire work of Christ: Christ will submit to the Father as the beloved Son. And in the new kingdom of the Father of life, the religion of love will occupy the most honorable place of the religion of the Beloved Son, but spiritual love will no longer hover over life, fearing touching it, it will be the adornment of life, its need, its flourishing... This coming synthesis will not be a simple equation, a flat indifference, a similarity of forms; no, with the internal unity of the Father and the Son, a certain tragedy of filial obedience will always retain its place: “not my will, but yours be done,” - the duality of currents will always remain - the naturally necessary and freely rational, the kingdom of filial love and absolute aspirations will never dissolve in the natural kingdom. This tragedy must be recognized as lying in the very essence of human life. However, this tragedy only says that the work of the Son has universal significance, that it introduces a “countercurrent” into world life itself. A person’s calling is not to show childish obedience to established rules, but to solve some kind of world problem, to bring something new into the kingdom of the Father. The most important thing is that this tragedy does not represent an impassable abyss, an insurmountable division, but, relying on the heterogeneity of the spheres of the father and son, it leaves the possibility of their harmonious combination. Here, of course, the matter cannot do without filial obedience: the Father of life is greater than the Son. Nevertheless, this is not slavish obedience: the life of the Father will take into itself the work of the Son as its most precious adornment. The love of the Son must be for life, the spirit for the earth, but life becomes good only from filial love, the earth is justified by the spirit... Before my eyes are two volumes of V. V. Rozanov’s last major work, Near the Church Walls (1906). The book is of exciting and irresistible interest, and this is not only due to the well-known bright talent of the author, but also due to the diversity and vitality of the church and religious issues that are discussed in it. What is also striking is the, so to speak, lively biographical or autobiographical nature of the discussions. These are not abstract dissertations on logically distributed issues; but the author’s speech constantly introduces either a description of a specific case about which a question arises, or the answer of some “friend,” or an objection, or the confession of some suffering soul. These “confessions of the heart” are especially curious: on issues of the Christian cult - the confession of a Jesus-Protestant-Stundist; on the negative and sorrowful attitude of the clergy towards the world and its pleasures - the confession of a priest; on the motives for the complete rejection of any religion at all - the confession of an unbeliever; letters from two Catholics about Catholicism. In general, there is enough for everyone here to think about: these words of the author about his book are fully justified by its content. And most importantly - not just for thought, but everywhere here “languorous bewilderment about the entire expanse of our faith, which cannot but present itself to everyone who has long and thoughtfully wandered and is wandering through the pastures of this faith.” Here, stone-hard answers to ancient questions are not given - these formulas are already too boring for everyone, they set the teeth on edge, and, like peas from a wall, they bounce off our hearts. Here questions are posed, as life itself now poses them, an ardent heart, a searching mind. And you can agree or disagree with the answers, but these languid perplexities can only be alien to those whose hearts have turned to stone... I will not convey the contents of these books. I will say only a few words about the religious direction of V.V. Rozanov, which would help the reader navigate the material of these books. V.V. Rozanov is a deeply religious person, but his religion is not in concepts, not in teaching, but in feeling - living, moist, juicy, his religion is “twisted in physiology”, has its roots in it, is deeply immersed in the bosom of nature, embraces everything living, green, joyful, growing - bright stars in the sky and cheerful flowers on the earth, the smile of a child and the mystery of life under the heart of a mother. He has no interest in abstract dogma, but he prays on the green lawn that surrounds the church - he, like Alyosha Karamazov, loves sticky leaves and kisses the wet earth. “He doesn’t stop on the porch (of the church), but goes down. His soul, full of delight, longs for freedom, space, and breadth. Above him, the heavenly dome, full of quiet shining stars, overturned widely and immeasurably. From the zenith to the horizon, the still unclear Milky Way appears in two. The night, fresh and quiet to the point of stillness, hugs the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the cathedral sparkle in the yacht sky. Luxurious flowers in the flower beds near the house fell asleep until the morning. The silence of the earth seems to merge with the heavenly, the mystery of the earth comes into contact with the star... He stands, looks, and suddenly, as if knocked down, he falls to the ground. He doesn’t know why he hugs her, he doesn’t give himself an account of why he so uncontrollably wants to kiss her, kiss her all, but he kisses her crying, sobbing and pouring his tears, and ecstatically swears to love her, to love her forever and ever.” “her blood”, in her fragrance, in her joy and flowers - he understands nothing, nothing about religion. Rozanov’s religion and theology are two different planes; but it is close and understandable to children, pregnant mothers, and family people. The serving priest, dressed in “iconostasis” vestments, is his opponent by necessity, but the same priest, as a family man, is inevitably his friend, and all of them together - children, mother, family - with their joys and sorrows, defenseless, but safe in this defenselessness - are indignant at the dead, eunuch monasticism, indignant at the “dry, skinny, ugly eunuchs”... V.V. Rozanov sleeps during the “theological reading”, is bored in the church, but “near the church walls”, in the temple of nature, he prays enthusiastically - and he calls here everyone who loves life, to whom joy is dear, and here everyone can come to terms with him, be they Christians or pagans, for everyone there will be a common natural-religious thing. “I am a free Christian and there is room for me everywhere.” V.V. Rozanov is as free a Christian as he is a free pagan. And this middle ground between Christianity and paganism, pagan or universal in Christianity - this is most understandable to him. It is on this basis that his love for the church develops, which has complemented and continues to complement the gospel with its lights at Easter, Trinity birches, a white shirt at baptism, and his hostility to church-historical monasticism, which “wants to strangle all joy and life.” All the author’s arguments from this point of view about holidays are deeply poetic and religious. To bring nature into the holiday, thus creating everyday joy for children and for mothers of families who do not run around on visits and do not sit in taverns, and to keep the fathers themselves with their families and make their joys purer - such is his call... But in speeches about holidays, he has to express pia desideria more, complain more than rejoice at reality. However, most of all he complains and is indignant at the lack of religion in the phenomena of conception and birth - in these phenomena, mainly religious, because here most of all man continues the creative work of God, the work of nature 67. And it must be said that Rozanov’s entire religious metaphysics revolves around “sex” and its mystery; the joy of marriage, the protection of the family. from church and state cruelty is the main subject of his journalistic activity. These include his essays “The Family Question in Russia”, “In a World of Unclear and Unresolved”, “Religion and Culture” and a number of articles in the journal. "New Path" and "Questions of Life". Here are the main thoughts from these books and articles: “The birthing depths of man have a transcendental, mystical, religious nature... Religion in almost all its existing fullness flows from the floor: these are the prayers of fathers for children, of mothers for them; prayers of children repeating words after the nanny. Here and there are prayers of the floor, that is. having sex in their hidden depths. Are they cold? are they pretending? There are no deepest, no most passionate prayers!.. There is no higher beauty of religion than the religion of the family. But then the family, i.e. in its blood, in its carnality, in its obvious bodily dependence and connectedness, is it not also, mutually and in return, religion? That is, if religion so obviously flows from carnal relationships, then vice versa - isn’t there religiosity in the most carnal relationships? in their invoice? All this is silently and imperceptibly expressed for everyone in the very institution of “marriage: it is the theitization of sex... If “marriage” is or can be “religious”, then, of course, because and only on the condition that “religion” has something “sexual” in itself... The remarkable sinlessness of the baby follows from here. In essence, around an infant, every adult (civil) virtue is diminished and limited, and the further a person moves from the moment of birth, the darker he becomes. In the radiance of the baby there is a noumenal, other-worldly holiness, like the moisture of an other-worldly light that has not yet escaped from his eyelashes. A house without children is dark (morally), with children it is bright; Looking at or communicating with a baby for a long time, we correct ourselves, return to kindness and truth... The family is the “I Am” of each of us; “holy land” on which human feet have stood since ancient times. This is a whole tangle of mysteries; a knot from where the threads begin that connect us, limiting our arbitrariness, but in such a way that only here we joyfully submit to such a limitation: i.e. the beginning of religion, the religious connections of man with the world. This is our real spiritual fatherland, without which each of us is a spiritual loser. Family must be understood as work, as tireless care for each other, as the only object for which work is not difficult and care does not tire; a way of such connectedness of people, where they already love each other without “Moral Theology”, shed sweat for each other and are ready to shed, and sometimes shed, blood... Birth and everything around birth is religious; it resurrects, and even resurrects from such desolation of denial as our nihilism. Nihilists are all young men, i.e. those who have not yet given birth; nihilism is all outside the family and without the family. And where the family begins, nihilism ends”... It is difficult to resist continuing these wonderful thoughts, skillfully revealed in the above-mentioned books and mainly “In the World of the Unclear and Undecided”... Some of us have made noise that Rozanov says immoral things, that he “profanes religion”, “corrupts theology”... In such cries, perhaps, there is less hypocrisy than a simple lack of religious feeling. Rarely is anyone as chaste in his words as Rozanov is in his speeches. “To take a priest onto a ship instead of serving a parting prayer service,” to sanctify all nature with religion, to sanctify the very passions, and through this to revive religion, to make it a real force, to transfer it from the sphere of concepts and words to the sphere of life, experiences - this is what he wants. Isn't this chastity? However, this is not the whole of V.V. Rozanov - and anyone who thinks that all of Rozanov is here, and surrenders to his religious call without any conditions, without any delays, may find himself in a truly tragic situation. The matter of Mr. Rozanov’s attitude to Christianity in its essence is the main subject of the books mentioned above. The fact is that Rozanov is fundamentally hostile to Christianity, and hostile not only to historical Christianity, but also to every ideally heavenly impulse; he wants physiology to be the only basis of religion and ethics. His religion coincides with the church-everyday surface of Christianity, and here, on this surface, he speaks “to the heart” of the Christian family. But his religion goes deep into his religious metaphysics and in this depth rebels with all determination against Christianity. We are accustomed to encountering disdain for the church cult, for the everyday side of Christianity, and respect for the moral side of Christianity, with which the entire moral character of European history is undoubtedly connected. But Rozanov accepts the Trinity birch trees, lamps and incense, and with all decisiveness rejects the evangelical essence of Christianity, Christian morality. Rozanov’s paganism is not a joke, it is not just about everyday joy, which others seem easy to combine with Christianity, for the gospel also speaks of the beauty of the lilies of the field (oh, how naive that is! Painfully naive!), it is deeper and more serious, it reaches the point of subterranean tragedy, it is fundamentally irreconcilable with the evangelical psyche. This does not weaken our interest in Rozanov; it only increases. But in the book we are talking about, this element of Rozanov barely appears, as if deliberately covered up, hidden. Here or there, the glimpse of this deepest religious essence he has dropped may elude the inattentive reader. “Sometimes it is thought that there are two religions and there are and should be two cults, two categories of worship: black or dark - as a response to grief and the metaphysics of grief, and light, white - as a continuation, decoration and further development of the joys, delights, raptures, and happiness that are also innate to us. The first one already exists: this is our Church. No one even has a thought about a second Church. For a youth, for a young man, for a warrior-husband, for a bride-girl, what do we have except eternally dirge-like choruses, besides icons with the yellow-parchment faces of elders? Nothing – except fright, frightening!”... “Sometimes I think” - what a distraction, what a softening of tone, throwing a shadow, as if covering a wolf’s pit. And suddenly we have “nothing but fear, frightening”: think about all the horror of these words, all the hatred that is heard in them. And here’s another dropped word. “Humble patience... passive beauty, touching Tolstoy, touching me for a long time - but now I fear it, like my death, the people’s, the world’s! This is the beautiful form of Moloch (Spirit of Nothingness and Destruction), poison in a golden vial, “native” fingers taking you by the throat... This means: I fear Christianity as I fear death! Listen and delve into this, you who naively dream of easily reconciling pagan joy with the gospel spirit. For V.V. Rozanov, religion is light and joy. In the book under review, he approaches Christianity from this side. In this case, he lovingly (and repeatedly) dwells on one priest of our days, a very famous preacher and publicist, who “points out and proves by references that the gospel does not condemn the reasonable, appropriate enjoyment of the blessings of nature.” Apparently, such an interpretation of the Gospel represents the most practical solution to the religious problem, and it really has value in the sense of combating historical asceticism, modern scribes and Pharisaism. But in an essentially religious sense, in the sense of solving the Christian problem essentially, it is frivolous. This is precisely utilitarian preaching, and not philosophy, journalism, and not religious thought... I want to say: Mr. Rozanov accepts this interpretation of Christianity for the purpose of promoting his idea and is completely out of interest in the essence of Christianity. He has his own religion - and all he would like from Christianity is for it to cease being a religion of sacrifice and become a religion of joy and “prosperity”, not caring in the least that in this case Christianity will simply perish, and even wanting exactly this. To interpret Christianity only as a rational enjoyment of the blessings of nature simply means to deny Christianity, to pass by Calvary with a joke, and not to think about the deepest mystery of the Gospel, about the innermost needs of the human heart. It is a good thing to enjoy the blessings of nature rationally, but man does not live by bread alone, his heart wants, besides the rational enjoyment of bread, and heavenly achievement. The Gospel speaks only of heavenly life. This was ascetically and one-sidedly explained in such a way that man lives only a heavenly life. Such one-sided (historical) asceticism must be fought, but for this there is no need and no possibility of frivolously reinterpreting the gospel. His words must be accepted in all their depth and severity, and it is precisely for such a gospel that we must look for places in our lives. This is a new task of our time, our religious-historical task - and it cannot be solved without some kind of religious turning point. And there is no need to gloss over this turning point, it is necessary - as V.V. Rozanov says elsewhere - “it is better to look the danger straight in the eye.” V.V. Rozanov himself, only in these articles, in journalistic form, accepts a superficial interpretation of the Gospel, concealing within himself his explanation of this “historical” phenomenon. How the Gospel, next to such a struggle, with the denunciation of bigots, opened a deepening into the “primordial” truth of religion, into the eternal revelation of God in the nature of man and his heart; Likewise, the religious reform of our days should not stop at the easy victory for our time over scribes and Pharisaism, but should deepen the historical surface of Christianity into the depths of nature and the heart, bring and introduce the “spiritual” gospel life into the bosom of broad real life... This is our religious problem. In the excellent article “Askochensky and Archimandrite. Feodor Bukharev" on the topic "about the combination of reality with the ideal of religious holiness" several letters from Anna Sergeevna Bukhareva to V.V. Rozanov are given. In one of these letters, A. S. Bukhareva complains to V. V. Rozanov: “By the way, I want to tell you how outraged I was by Prof.’s article. Tareev “On the moral significance of Christ’s Resurrection” 68, where he decisively rebels against the belief in the Resurrection of Christ in the flesh. Mainly I was outraged by his spiritualism, with which he wants to obscure the broad horizons that are about to open with the development of the doctrine of the Incarnation... How our bright Holiday would have dimmed if our Orthodox idea of the resurrection of Christ corresponded to the spiritualistic idea of Tareev. (Mr. Rozanov instructs me, recalling his years as a teacher at the gymnasium) Our soul does not die... Why does the professor need this teaching? It elevates the spirit at the expense of the body, i.e. by humiliating him (monastic tendency): and Anna Sergeevna, merging her personal feat and the truth of her husband (break with monasticism), rebels for the rights of the body." In Europe, some are still convinced that in Russian cities bears walk the streets... Similarly, some of our secular writers think that all academy professors are monks. That in the resurrection of Christ there was the resurrection of His soul - I not only did not say this, but this is precisely what I denied, considering “an elementary position in biblical theology the truth that the spirit is not the second (spirit and body) or third (spirit, soul and body) part of human nature, but the spirit is the divine principle of human life, the divine principle in man”... I will not talk at all about the monasticism of the academy professors and about their own monastic tendencies, as well as about the bears on the streets of Moscow. That's not the point. The fact is that Bukhareva complains about me (the most convinced Christian) to Rozanov (the most convinced pagan) on the issue of the Incarnation - and they seem to understand each other. “Yes,” says Rozanov, the resurrection of the body... and further, the recognition of birth, family, marriage is good... Also in another place, Rozanov praised the monasteries: “monasteries are good... like our proverbs and fairy tales”... And the Incarnation is a sweet fairy tale for him. The monk will not throw himself on V.V. Rozanov’s neck for this “fairy tale,” Anna Sergeevna Bukhareva’s complaint is also comical. After all, you need to understand Rozanov’s tactics and his psyche. Here are his words, which essentially express his attitude towards Christianity: “Today, our day in faith, is simply ours and only our day.” We celebrate christenings. The sacrament is over, the font is brought out, an abundance of food is placed on a large table covered with a white tablecloth, the joyful father seats the unmasked priest and the gathered relatives and friends... Enter V.V. Rozanov. “Oh, how good it is for you... The font has already been taken out: this, of course, is naivety. The sacrament of baptism is a sweet fairy tale... But look how much fun you have. White shirt... on the table everything is delicious. This is the most important thing - to be happy. This is what you and I have in common. We are brothers."... - But, excuse me, Vasily Vasilyevich! How are you talking about baptism? And why are you doing this?... If you had simply congratulated me on my newborn and sat down to a meal, how glad I would have been. - But you are talking about baptism... You confused us... Do you understand that we cannot take this so lightly? “The Resurrection of Christ? says Vasily Vasilievich. These are, of course, fairy tales... But look - the resurrection of the flesh: what a cute idea! This means birth, family and marriage are also “there”... - Oh, Mr. Rozanov, this is... serious with us... And A.S. Bukhareva: how is she so quick and... and so frivolous with you... I cannot so easily accept Rozanov’s joy, precisely because I am a convinced Christian. For me, the joy of family, a white children's shirt, and a green birch tree are just as precious as they are for Rozanov. But the gospel is also dear to me... And therefore, for me, the whole religious problem comes down to the question of reconciling “real reality with religious holiness,” of reconciling the gospel with cultural progress and worldly joys. All my theological writings revolve around this problem. The same issue was resolved by Archimandrite. Feodor Bukharev. But he resolved the issue of the relationship of “Orthodoxy to modernity” dogmatically, based on the idea of ​​​​incarnation... On the dogmatic path, Arch. Theodore cannot be justified in free paganism - this is the true path of symbolic asceticism. In fact, if we are waiting for the resurrection of the flesh, glorified in Christ, then the whole task of our life is to prepare our flesh for the resurrection, and we can prepare it only by fasting, prayer and vigil, that is, by “while still in the flesh living the life of the disembodied.” This is the actual principle of one-sided asceticism - the general archimandrite. Theodora with Askochensky. In order to make this deviation towards symbolism impossible, I start from the Gospel idea of ​​​​divine spiritual life and define the relation of the Gospel to the world and the flesh according to the principle of complete freedom. My idea is that there is no external or formal relationship between the Christian (religious) spirit and pagan flesh: these are two incommensurable areas that touch only in the depths of the human soul. The Gospel cannot determine either the carnal life of a person or the social life of society - these areas are subject only to natural laws and humanitarian ethics. The religious (divine) spirit fits into the depth of the individual mood, and here also receives complete freedom. Thus, I recognize the simultaneous existence of intimately personal religious creativity and external natural-social necessity. And so, in order to master this principle, I elevate church dogmatism to evangelical absolutism, to the idea of ​​pure spirituality, religious absoluteness. This is the method of the gospel itself. Christ told the Jews: “You follow the law. The law says, “You shall not commit adultery.” But if you do this for God, then you should not even look at a woman with lust. The law defines the form of divorce - do not divorce at all. The law forbids killing - don’t even get angry.” Thus, the law is raised to absoluteness, in which it is itself destroyed and replaced by freedom. Following this method, I say to the Askochenskys: “Christ does not need barometers and steamships. You are right about this. But he doesn't need all the flesh either. He needs only the pure spirituality of the divine life. But pure spirituality, as a free and personal matter, gives complete freedom to the flesh. I value pure spirituality, pure gospel, because in this way the spirit (divinity) and the flesh (nature) are reconciled. By restoring the purity of the gospel, I, as it were, decompose its “water” into its constituent elements in order to make possible their living union with the composition of our nature. The Gospel in the church-historical wafer of symbolic asceticism allows only an externally formal relationship to the world (church and state, etc.) - and only the pure Gospel is united in the depths of individual life with the natural necessity of carnal life. That's why I need pure spirituality. This is not at all the same as symbolic asceticism. However, now it’s not about me, it’s about Mr. Rozanov’s book, which I reproach for being unclear and unclear. I am talking about this in order to present the religious problem more clearly. In the same article, under the special subtitle “Division of Life,” V.V. Rozanov cites a letter from Archpriest. A. Ustinsky on the issue of family Christian life, warning readers that “Fr. A. Ustinsky writes more firmly and clearly than I (i.e. V.V.R.), on many topics common to both of us.” The letter is remarkable in the sense of posing the question - indicating that our family life is not sanctified by Christianity, which is exactly what the author wants. He expresses the final result of his thoughts about the family in the words of Pressanse (“Christian Family”): “What does it mean to serve God in the family? To serve Him in the family is to strive to glorify Him in all these sweet, dear relationships before thinking about our own personal happiness - to give the family a noble, sublime goal that is outside of us - to teach it that it, like an individual, should not live for itself, that its end and purpose is in God. This way Fr. Ustinsky thinks “to make family life one indivisible moon of the light of Christ.” I believe that this way does not solve the religious problem of the family at all and that from the point of view of V.V. Rozanov, these words of Pressanse are naive babble - which, to put it differently, again V.V. Rozanov does not finish in his book. From an ascetic point of view, the most difficult thing is to reconcile the filth of the male-female union with Christianity. For the evangelical point of view, this difficulty does not exist at all, since in the gospel there is not even the remotest hint of natural defilement. The Evangelical Heavenly Father created at the beginning “husband and wife”... The ascetic view of marriage is the fruit of pagan dualism 69. But the family, according to the Gospel teaching, can become an obstacle to eternal (absolutely divine) life in another respect - namely from the side of family egoism, the most obvious form of which can be called family property. To understand the full difficulty of this clash, one must appreciate, on the one hand, the entire height of the absolute gospel ideal and, on the other, the entire depth of family egoism. “Leave father and mother, wife and children, give away all your property”: this is the gospel requirement. Family egoism, on the other hand, is portrayed as follows by V.V. Rozanov: “Property is labor, and the question of its necessity is a question of the necessity of labor: that is, this is complete and precisely immoral idle talk, hiding behind the highest morality. The feeling of property will not only be alive, but also ardent in anyone in whom the feeling of family, the feeling of home is alive and ardent: you can be poor - and understand it, unselfish - and preach it; there is gambling, that is, vile property; but there is property, like quietly flowing and tireless work for neighbors (i.e. family) - and this is holy property. In general, the denial of unnecessary asceticism constitutes Rozanov’s obvious task... In the future, family egoism leads to nationalism, to popular exclusivity. For Rozanov, Jews are the ideal people-bearers of the family principle, and not a single people has cultivated such disgusting hatred and contempt for other peoples, for which they were deservedly hated and despised by all peoples. But Rozanov sweeps away like rubbish the disgustingness of this hatred of everyone and the suffering of this hatred from everyone: he sees in this nationalism God’s work... With love for the family and his people, with sacred property, he connects all culture, everything dear to man - and at this point he diverges from the gospel to the point of pain, to groans. Remembering the Gospel words about family division and enmity between households, he exclaims: “Why such terrible sacrifices? And who, isn’t it God the Provider, has comforted our existence with children, and family, and finally Pushkin, and even the sonorous songs of Hellas? Where is Providence? Who is God?.. The idea of ​​the Father and Provider, the universal Guardian of the world, was cut by the idea of ​​sin and redemption. If it is a sin, then a sacrifice is needed. Not only Pushkin and Hellas, but also these children and victim wives... And mentally I suffered. This is a global issue... There is no externally formal point of contact between the gospel and family (and national) egoism, and by moralizing the family it is in no way possible to reconcile it with the gospel: the ideals of Pressanse-Ustinsky are hypocritical from the evangelical point of view and ridiculous from the Rozanov-pagan point of view. Rozanov, a representative of a religious family, consistently and from the bottom of his heart hates the evangelical spirit, as the spirit of destruction and non-existence. The family can only be sanctified by religion if religion takes under its protection family egoism, which was the case in Judaism and paganism and what Rozanov wants. On the contrary, there cannot be a Christian-holy family, a Christian state, a Christian people, because Christianity lies precisely in the destruction of the borders of the family, state, and people. It goes without saying that family selfishness is not necessarily debauchery and despotism. They not only put up with him, but they require family purity, nobility of relationships, and the beauty of raising children. The entire culture of the family grows solely from family egoism... But the whole point is in a certain pass: until the family moral culture has crossed this pass, it remains the fruit of family egoism, it is completely resolved in it, and as soon as it has crossed to another slope - the slope of the Christian spirit, the separation of the family begins. When God calls a family man to some Godly work, and he blesses his family, entrusts it to God and good people, and he himself goes to heroic work, torture and death, and lays down his soul for God’s truth” for love for people, then only he will show himself to be a Christian 70. If this call does not yet exist, then a Christian family is no different and should not be different from a good pagan family. A family man is a Christian only in the sense that he carries within himself this ability to respond to the call of God, but this difference from a materialistically minded person cannot in any case be seen or appreciated from the outside. From this side it is better not to judge people. Only God knows His own. It can be decisively argued that the application of the gospel directly to the forms of worldly life - to the structure of the family and the state - must inevitably give disastrous results: a family organized only according to the gospel (of course, imaginary) will inevitably be worse than a pagan one, 71 and a state (imaginary) organized only according to the gospel gives rise to despotism with all its cultural consequences. For the prosperity of a family, a freely developing natural (pagan) warmth is inevitably needed, and for the prosperity of a state, a freely developing correlation of its constituent forces. At the same time, again, it goes without saying that pure evangelical Christianity can only be carried in the soul, and in order to apply it to forms of life, family and social, it is necessary to put it in a symbolic form - “crowning”, “anointing for the kingdom”. It is this formalism, sufficient to weaken the pagan instincts of a healthy life, but insufficient to make life inspired, that creates what V.V. Rozanov calls “watery” Christianity. “Is there, he says, realism, reality, a realistic moment in Christianity itself? Take the picture. The same pattern can be drawn with pencil, ink, watercolor, or oil paints. I think Christianity is the truth drawn in pencil, and at most in watercolor, and in no case with oil paint. Bloodless and bloodless - that’s what our religious concepts are. It’s even wild to say: “concepts.” Why should religion be a concept and not a fact? The book of “Genesis”, and not the book of “discourses” - this is how the old theology began. “In the beginning was the Word” - this is how new theology began. The Word diverged from being, “the word” was with the clergy, and being was with society.” V.V. Rozanov raises this discrepancy to the “metaphysics of Christianity” in its difference especially from Judaism. “The metaphysics of Christianity lies in the tomb, death and monasticism. Death is horror... Death is as metaphysical as conception. This is the other pole of the world, black, opposite the white pole - circumcision. Jews bury their dead disgustingly... Christianity transformed death into a coffin. The coffin is poetry, not naked horror... The monastery is the long robe of the coffin... Just as the "coffin" is the transformation of death into "poetry", so the monastery is the transformation of the coffin into an entire civilization - poetically sad, melancholy sublime... The monastery is the whole soul and all the poetry of Christianity, its real metaphysics... Where there is no monastic spirit and monastery, there is no Christianity; where it is - Christianity is visible and effective 72... The New Testament is to the Old as death is to conception, a funeral is to birth, a monastery is to a family, a harem (in David and Solomon) and a square (bazaar).” These are the most powerful words in V.V. Rozanov’s book, hidden however in the invisible last article, under an unattractive title and printed in small font. In order to fight the church and Christianity, this is the most destructive and irresistible thing that has been said over the centuries 73... If the church and Christianity are nothing more than a religion of death, then it is a temporal-historical phenomenon, artificially grafted onto European humanity and already experienced by it. Monastic religion is now met only with hatred and contempt. But... the characterization given by Rozanov refers to Asian Buddhism, and not to Christianity. Is there any difference between Buddhism and Christianity? Buddhism is the religion of non-existence and annihilation, the bliss of nirvana, and Christianity is the religion of divine love and eternal life. Love and life are the words that fill the entire gospel. A presentation of Christianity in which, like V.V. Rozanov, does not contain the words “love and life” is a decisive lie. This is from the verbal side. And in essence, universal love, the impulse to embrace all of humanity, to break the bourgeois shackles of one’s egoism, personal, family and national, the thirst for heroic achievement is a fact of our life, ineradicable and ineradicable from the nature of the homo sapiens type. Connected with this fact is everything noble, superhuman, divine, which alone makes the animal homo sapiens a man. Christianity is this impulse, this universal love elevated to religion. Next to love, death is also indelibly written in the gospel. But it is called here only as a condition for the absolute nature of love, as “death for people.” The poetry of death is decisively absent from the gospel, and Christ shuddered before death to the point of bloody sweat, as no pagan sage, starting with Socrates, shuddered. But evangelical love is love unto death—and this alone is its divinity. Because of this absoluteness, the gospel comes into too close contact with dead asceticism. There is no need to be embarrassed by this: everything great has its own caricature. Dead asceticism is a caricature of evangelical Christianity 74. Draw a straight line. Then draw another straight line from the same starting point in the same direction, but with a slight slope: the two straight lines will diverge to infinity. This is how the religion of death diverges from Christianity. In evangelical Christianity, love does not stop before death; in asceticism, dying itself, mortification is an ideal: there are only differences! But these days the infinity of difference has been revealed. Now, on the one hand, the abomination of cowardly vegetation, bourgeois complacency, and the beauty of free exploits and selfless love for people have been revealed in the consciousness of mankind - now the “bliss, the like of which the earth has not yet created, is realized and comprehended - to work for people and die for them.” On the other hand, now asceticism, with amazing frankness, almost impudence, has declared that it does not care about love, that it is not of the gospel nature. This needs to be assessed and understood. Our time is a laboratory in which pure Christianity is being revealed, freeing itself from the historical vestment of symbols... If the symbolic shell leads to the formal application of Christianity and is necessary for such application, then, on the contrary, there is no place for pure elements in nature, and won’t “pure” Christianity turn out to be essentially lifeless? Freeing Christianity from the historical shell of symbols, restoring its purity, we must see this as only half the task, albeit an important one. It is then necessary to find a new point of support for Christianity instead of symbolic forms, new “combinations.” And this is a colossal task of modern ethics. She must introduce pure Christianity into the system of real life, connect it with the earth, nourish it with “blood and juices,” make it strong with natural strength. The task of modern ethics is to understand Christianity as the truth of life in the most empirical, living sense of the word. The highest ethical principle, like the highest good, is life. The instinct of life is the only moral force; the joy of life is an immanent moral reward. This life is, first of all, animal, physiological, with its irresistible strength and its indestructible truth. Its laws contain the “original” word of God, His original will. Then human life is social life with its historical laws that educate people and form them into a universal brotherhood. But physiology and public life do not exhaust the life of the “new” humanity: it is, finally, a spiritual and creative life, a life of superhuman feat in the name of the highest divine freedom. A person needs feat for the sake of the fullness of his life, for the sake of its final joy, its highest blossoming... In this way, the divine, “Christian” principle is woven into the organism of earthly life with its juices and highest delights. Life reconciles everything within itself - it is multifaceted, it gives everything human a place within itself. About life in abundance (ἐγ ὼ ἦ λθον ἵ να ζωὴν ἔχωσι καὶ περισςὸν ἔχωσιν), about life by more than bread alone (ο ὔ κ ἐπ ’ ἄρτ ῳ μόν ῳ ζήσεται ἄνθρωπος), as exactly the New Testament principle, the gospel teaches. But until now we have accepted the gospel only as a historical phenomenon; our attention was absorbed by the historical fact in the form of which spiritual life was revealed to humanity. Meanwhile, the free life of the spirit, born in the Calvary tragedy, has long become the natural heritage of the new humanity, although it is not yet clear to our consciousness. To understand the divine spirit as a natural part of real life, full and free, is the latest task of moral philosophy. The first (theological) part of it is to bring pure evangelical Christianity to the sources of life, to its roots. The second part of moral philosophy is the revelation of the beauty of life itself in its sources, in its rich fragrance, in its original and eternal moisture, in its continuous reproduction and inexhaustible joy... This “half of the matter” was accomplished with brilliant talent and artistic perfection by V. V. Rozanov. And those who value the “gospel in life” will gladly extend their hand to this “lover of life,” hating the symbols that separate the divine spirit from life. But let the “lovers of life” expand the boundaries of life and, along with physiology, give place in it not only to the social principle, but also to the highest spiritual feat... Let them understand that just as life is needed for an idea to be embodied, and flesh is needed for the spirit to be realized, and paganism is needed for Christianity to be alive, so carnal paganism needs a Christian spirit so that it is not vile flesh... The one-sided culture of the spirit, which Christianity was hitherto and which replaced the divine spirit (the power of life) with spiritual incorporeality, has brought the bitter fruits of false asceticism. But this was not a religious aberration, it was a necessary historical “day” of Christianity, in agreement with the plans of Providence, which revealed its pure idea and carried it through the ruins of ancient paganism. Now the era of the divine spirit is opening not outside of life, but for life... V.V. Rozanov calls us “back, back as soon as possible” from Christianity to paganism, but “history knows no returns” and “there is no path to the irrevocable.” The sun of flesh has darkened for us forever - “paganism is dead and cannot be resurrected after Christ: all Aphrodites and Dionysuses are unspeakable nonsense.” We feel a beautiful body, begin to feel, see or begin to see God’s creation in it, but we cannot worship it religiously, we have lost the feeling of the religious fragrance of the flesh, physiology cannot transfer us to the transcendental world - a beautiful body and its physiology is nature for us and nothing more. A new sun has risen for us and we have a new religion, we know heavenly delights inaccessible to the ancients, we know new paths to the kingdom of God. Not back from Christianity, but forward with Christianity: this is our path. Our religious thought must begin with Christianity, from the heights of the Gospel. To reach the flesh and life through Christ is our task. The divine spirit as a spirit for life, for its sanctification - this is our salvation. Only the flesh is paganism; only the spirit is historical Christianity; spirit for life is our future. Whatever you say, ancient paganism perished, collapsed due to internal necessity (“the weakened flesh blossomed in the last vices, saliva and pus were drained from the dying”), and its resurrection is an empty dream. We can sanctify our flesh not in the ancient pagan way, but only in the new Christian way - not by the religion of the flesh, but by introducing absolute value into life - and this is the value of the individual. We need to understand, and we already understand, the divine feat and sacredness of the individual as a requirement and flowering of life itself, without which life seems vulgar and bourgeois to us. And this introduction of the divine spirit into the depths of life itself should sanctify all its layers, and should also sanctify carnal life. Raising the family - this highest shrine of carnal life - in the ancient pagan way, through the religion of the flesh, circumcision, is beyond our strength and taste, but we can raise it through the path of a holy person - the absolute value of a wife and child. We need God's nature, pure flesh, in the freedom of its passions from all false shame, as the living basis of life; but our rise, our religion, is not of the flesh, but of the spirit. “This is your sister in Christ, so do not defile her with carnal union”: this is what Tolstoy said, like the last echo of the ascetic past. “This is your sister in Christ, so let your union with her be holy, sanctify this naturally sweet union with the thought of a child”: this is what the future prophets will say. The holiness of the individual has its own absolute. Depicting (in an unclear and inarticulate world) Jewry “as a religious sexual partnership, a blood tribe not of imaginary (we), but of true brothers, sisters, brides, grooms, fathers, mothers,” V. V. Rozanov explains from here why a Jew cannot rape a Jewish woman (“she is ours, one of us”), will not go to a bad home (“he would offend all of Israel”), and further writes about Christianity: “With us, when I rape, I force nothing, nothing; and by going to a brothel, I defile myself, and not the Russian tribe.”... Against this, one can say: for a man of the evangelical spirit there cannot be an empty woman; for him, every person is holy – and this is absolutely, not as a word, but as a real feeling... Of course, this feeling does not capture the lackey, although he is recorded in the register books, but this only means what I say - Christianity does not create a culture, a nationality, it must be free from all formulas and give complete freedom of culture, while it remains undeniable that the holiness of the individual is our only path to the religion of marriage and family. Here is my first thought: to understand the divine impulse towards universal love, alien to the ancient boundaries of family and nation, alien to the boundaries of philistine complacency - to understand this impulse, not as an external commandment and a heavy sacrifice, not as a path of death, but as the flowering of life itself, this means to sanctify all life with the divine spirit. To carry this divine possibility within oneself means to sanctify both social relations and physiological connections. My second thought: heterogeneity of vital elements - physiology, society and spirit - is necessary for their harmonious combination. That “dissimilar elements (like soul and body) are united into unity, while homogeneous ones are mixed” is an ancient word. Therefore, for us there are no two religions - the religion of the flesh and the Christian religion, there are no “two paths” of absoluteness - carnal and spiritual; There is only one religion - the religion of the spirit, one absoluteness - spiritual. Heterogeneous elements - natural physiology, human society and the divine spirit - precisely because they are heterogeneous, combine harmoniously according to the law of complete mutual freedom and incomprehensible internal relationships. Our God is the God of life, and our highest principle is the principle of life. As life is dear and high, birth is the beginning of life. But rational human life is revealed only in society. And this is not enough. It happens that a person can live only under the condition of the highest freedom both from the shackles of the social environment and from the boundaries of family and nation. What can be said against this divine impulse and highest love, as long as it is for life, for its highest flourishing and beauty? But the flesh and family are always “what it is, and not what we think about it.” The difference between ancient paganism and the newest philosophy of V.V. Rozanov is that there was spontaneity and simplicity of feeling, while he had a word, albeit a brilliant one, “extensively developed philosophy.” Therefore, there, until the time was fulfilled, protection from the abominations of the flesh was in life itself; and now the artificially (in words) religion (absoluteness) of the flesh is in no way protected from the “abyss” of the flesh, in which the holy family melts 75. The holy “many-reading” flesh is silent,... For us, this holy silence of the flesh is lost, the spontaneity of natural feeling is irretrievable - and the only condition for the “theitization of sex” for us is that a person in his spirit can be above sex, that he is not all in physiology. This does not mean that physiology (and society) can be built based on the pure foundations of the spirit - natural power is always given in its inexhaustibility and requires only freedom and sanctification from the other elements of life. This does not mean that in the sphere of nature one can be without religion, without God. But there must be a continuous descent and ascent, 76 as in the vision of Jacob and the contemplation of Christ; the church must have a courtyard, a sanctuary and a holy of holies (nature, society and personality). This is the completeness of religion... The courtyard (and the sanctuary) is not like a backyard where rubbish is dumped, but as an enclosure or encirclement of herds and a garden, an absolutely necessary condition for the internal “holy of holies”, which turns into an empty place when exposed, into an empty sound. And it is necessary to insist both on the fact that only enclosure makes the inner shrine a real force, gives it a fulcrum, imbues it with juices and blood, and that the sanctifying light comes only from within, that only here is the absolute. This equally goes against one-sided asceticism and against the religion of the flesh: there can only be one natural type of life (long-term) - marriage, but marriage is sacred only because it gives life to a person - gives life to a child, “saves” his wife and makes him “alive”. With a good family, the only “convergence” is that giving and sacrificing love is limited to a circle of objects, and this creates a fresh psyche of modest deeds and gentle joy; when either a family (for example, an overly well-fed, self-satisfied, self-absorbed one) begins (even without any disorder or “resentment” in marital relations itself) to vulgarize a person, to destroy him, or some “extra-family” matter becomes an internal need for him, he has the right to break the family, because the highest thing is that “the person lives.” And it seems that this possibility, sometimes turning into necessity, of breaking up one or another family (not because of natural oppression, or from people, or adultery, but for the sake of the kingdom of God, for the sake of human life) will not humiliate the family at all, but will elevate and sanctify. Although Dmitry Karamazov himself “bursts” with “unexpected” and uncontrollable laughter, it is some kind of wild, tragic laughter, and astute observers saw in him not funny features. Although he directly and insistently speaks, as if it were self-explanatory, “about the attraction and calling to evade the world”... A small analogy “To promote the study of social and political issues in the light of the Incarnation.” Both of these methods are used by Solovyov, who turns out to be as much a mystic as a rationalist. However, in this place and below, I avoid quoting from the first two volumes of V. S. Solovyov and for the reason, among other things, that here every thought he expressed would have to be accompanied by indications either of the sharp evolution of his views, or of the internal contradictions in his philosophical system. And if this is the “green tree” of Solovyov’s brilliant philosophy, then what can we say about the pitiful seminary philosophy, about the unfortunate scholastic reasoning, which completely drowns out religious Christian thought in our theology! In addition, Soloviev was absolutely not familiar with, or at least, resolutely did not take into account the conclusions of critical theology. Likewise, the ideas of immortality and the kingdom of God, which share first place in Solovyov’s religious-philosophical system with the idea of ​​God-manhood, have a philosophical-pagan and universal appearance for him, and not a specifically Christian one. III, 138 cf. La Russie et l'église universelle, 2 ed., p. 256–257. VII, 211 ff. 260 words 273 words V, 11 and in general this volume is passim. III, 15. 369 ff. IV, 566 ff. V, 513. Cf. II, 158. IV, 81 ff. Cp. II, 178; La Russie et l'église universelle, 2 ed. 317. IV, 148. 151 156; V, 505, etc. VII, 344 ff. His ascetic and pessimistic tendencies also adjoin here, receiving here a church-religious basis. As noted in Solovyov V, 13. “The nine months of pregnancy lay the foundation for the soul of the future newborn; and, in the end, among the entire population - they lay, form and somewhat educate the soul of an entire people. “As goes to the cradle, goes to the grave” - this was decided by a 1000-year observation. Are these not months of special mood for expectant mothers? And couldn’t we, couldn’t religion, yielding at least to my words, impart to them at this intensely important time an intensely elevated mood? Further, if we have (in St. Petersburg) a “Cathedral of All Guards”, “Cathedral of All Artillery”, with banners hanging on the walls, with cannons near the porch, with prayers for “military” and “victories”: then why not have a separate church and some special prayers, with their own chants, with the contemplation of special wall paintings (biblical paintings) for mothers, for pregnant women, for beginners?! where everything that is ascetic would be completely excluded and everything that is life-creative, family-domestic would be expanded and expressed! A completely permissible thought, which the already famous Bishop Porfiry Uspensky dreamed of while traveling to Athos. It is easy to guess that the soul of a person, so inseparable from his physiology, from the mysterious special composition of his body, being woven into one ball with religion in physiology itself, would generally become more sensitive and impressionable to everything that is not here, to everything beyond the grave, to everything above-worldly. For what is the “song of the Angel”, which man “heard and half-forgot, but did not completely forget” before his birth?! Of course, these are “only the mother’s moods, which are especially transmitted to the child! The child, even from his dark grave, sees the mother’s soul from such a special side that is not open to anyone, and she herself does not know everything about herself. Everything that we call “innate ideas”, pre-temporal premonitions - God, the afterlife, the final judgment, sin and truth, the ideals of patience and achievement - everything “innate” is simply the experiences of the mother, her thoughts and songs, songs and prayers, and the fear of the possibility of death (in childbirth), which were peculiarly reflected on the fetus in her womb, pushing it, caressing it, warming it... Religion, through appropriate reading, rituals, services, music, painting, and finally, through appropriate legends and memories, could create motives wonderful in height and tenderness for the spiritual life of pregnant and expectant mothers! And instead of later becoming (upbringing, court) noble - instead of being accustomed to nobility - people (babies) would already be born noble, with a natural (innate) inclination towards good and aversion to evil... It seems to me that this is already instinctively sought now; mothers at this time avoid bad impressions; Relatives, neighbors, friends are afraid to frighten or upset the pregnant woman. But why doesn’t religion powerfully come to their aid, to meet them?... There is only one answer to this: yes, the Church has never thought about the family and has never cared about it, for it is virginal, monastic, ascetic, scopal, anti-marital and anti-family!” ... I have never seen anything more deeply heartfelt and religious about these lines in all the literature of our days! You need to think about these lines for years and you can be moved for years.” Chapter from my Philosophies of Gospel History. V.V. Rozanov repeatedly speaks about this in his book “In the World of the Unclear and Undecided.” He writes: “The beginning of the actual flesh and carnal man’s “cleaving” to man is not only not hostile to Christ, but one can say that Christ entered into this human blindness as if into his shadow, taking man everywhere, not in the radiance of his clothes, not in the decorations of the coffin, but in the joy of the family hearth, at the cradle. Against this general coloring of the Gospels and the Face of Christ, fleeting and perhaps apocryphal pendants, such as “it’s better not to marry”, “if you give a virgin in marriage, she does well, and if she doesn’t give, she does better”, are completely powerless... The Mystery of the Incarnation: “The Word became flesh and dwelt in us.” Thus, the fundamental outline of Christianity is not only not without-“holo”, as some think, not without-“solidly”: but it is precisely this religion, with the “incarnation” at the center, that is the true worship of the divine flesh that has become... It is not that Christianity lies only in “torture and death”, only in the separation of the family, but they clearly express the characteristic aspiration of Christianity. If a complete life is in the rhythm of ebb and flow, then “pure Christianity” is one ebb, it is only a moment in the totality of life. Read books by V.V. Rozanov: In a world of the unclear and unresolved and The Family Question in Russia. Special attention to A. S. Bukhareva and Archpriest A. Ustinsky. The books of V.V. Rozanov contain many internal contradictions: articles from different periods have not been brought into agreement. By the way, we find the same thing in the question of the attitude of Christians to death. Proving that all Christianity is in the cult of death, all the poetry of Christianity is the poetry of the grave, and that this is the difference between Christianity and paganism and Jewry, V. V. Rozanov (in the article “Our Beloved Departed”) reveals the idea that “the poetry and religion of one’s grave corner is eternally inherent in a mortal. From eternity we will love the deceased. This love, respect for the ashes is one of the cornerstones of the beauty of the human image. Only Christians look at the dead as dogs: “Should we burn them?” “put it in the ground?” “at home” “in a foreign land?” - “Eh, it doesn’t matter, somewhere”... I say that Christians have no respect for the dust, or at least less than the ancients and modern pagans”... This inconsistency in the book of newspaper articles from different times weakens the impression of the book and shakes the author’s main conclusions. One cannot help but recall the following words of V.V. Rozanov in Art. “Missionary work and missionaries”: “What does the gospel say about death and burial? The only thing: “leave the dead to bury the dead.” Nothing more. Who, if not the Church, invented, and, moreover, invented again, on its own initiative, and not on the basis of the Gospel, the two-night reading of the Psalter over the deceased, the washing of his body, as if anointing him and preparing him for the transition into something pure; and, finally, funeral chants, marvelous in depth and sound, which no one can hear indifferently. Did this develop from the words: “leave the dead to bury the dead?” Of course not, of course, with a silent bypass of these words! above is a note from the book “In a World of Unclear and Undecided” about the general flavor of the Gospels and the Face of Christ... There are even such thoughts there: asceticism “began long after Christ: Christ did not condemn the Jewish family anywhere.” These are not empty words, and Mr. Rozanov will not dispute them. However, it is difficult to say where is “higher” and “lower”.