Confessor. I don't prove it. I only object to the proposition: "We recognize everything as existing only to the extent that we can comprehend it with reason." I want you, in affirming unbelief, not to expand your rights in comparison with those who affirm faith. And what you demand faith from the reason of people, demand also from the reason of people who deny faith. If, in your opinion, the believing mind must recognize only the "knowable" as really existing, then let the unbelieving reason recognize only the knowable as really existing. And if you recognize the right of the unbelieving mind to recognize the "infinity" incomprehensible to reason, on what grounds do you deprive the believing mind of the right to recognize the incomprehensible God?

Unknown. But by denying infinity, we arrive at absurdity.

Confessor. In my opinion, when we deny God, we come to the same conclusion.

Unknown. Yes, perhaps your analogy is correct. But will you show me the absurdity of denying God?

Confessor. Certainly. In the right place.

Unknown. Well done. Can I go on now?

Confessor. Go on.

Unknown. My faith is hindered by the obviously fabulous nature of your revelations. These fairy tales, I agree, are beautiful in their own way. But still, these are fairy tales. And you can't seriously believe in them just because they are beautiful. Imagine an adult who remembers what he was told as a child. How nice it would be if there were invisibility hats, flying carpets, tablecloths. As a child, it seemed that all this was "really". But an adult is persuaded to continue to believe in all these fabulous miracles only because "it is very good". Of course, it's good. But what can you do if reality is not a fairy tale. Your stories about God, about salvation, about eternal life, about the soul are good, but this is an invisibility cap. I can't deceive myself and still claim that I believe in all this. I can't bring myself to believe that there is a God with a big gray beard, that He has a Son, Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, and that this all-powerful old man created the world in six days. On the last day, he took a piece of earth, blew and turned out to be a man. Then he made a wife for him from the rib of this man. Then he put them in Paradise, where Adam and Eve ate some forbidden fruit, and after that all sorts of misfortunes began, and so on and so forth. I want to ask, how do you understand these fables? Do you really take it at face value? Or is it some kind of "allegory", but why would God resort to such a strange form for revelation? Was it really impossible to say simply, without any flying carpets?

Confessor. No, the biblical stories are not allegory, and therefore they cannot be retold in one's own way, but they are not a simple description of events, as in history or the natural sciences, and therefore they cannot be understood in a crudely material sense. The Bible is a Divine revelation given to man in the conditions of his earthly life, within the framework of his concepts, language and moral development. When you read about the creation of the world, you should not approach what you read as a natural-scientific description. The Lord revealed to His Prophet in a vision the mystery of the creation of the world. Moses saw before him, as it were, one after another, the stages of the creation of the universe. And no matter how long these separate stages are claimed to last, Divine revelation will still affirm that these were days. And there will be right, and there will be no significant disagreement with science in this. Divine revelation will affirm this, not because arithmetical calculus is so important—nothing changes from it: the same power of God has been at work for vast periods and for "days"—but because in revelation it was revealed in days. You are confused by the form, but not struck by the meaning. And it would seem much more striking to the unbelieving mind that the revelations essentially agree with the most recent scientific data, of which Moses himself, of course, could not have had any idea. The sequence in the days of creation coincides with the scientific data. And the creation of light before the heavenly bodies, which is completely incomprehensible in the Bible, turned out to be not an obvious incongruity, as many thought, but the last word of science, according to which the "light ether" existed in the universe before the formation of the stars. It is impossible to think as an allegory and a creation of man. The creation of man really was as revealed does. But what is said there cannot be taken as crudely materialistic as the preparation of a figure from the earth and then its transformation into a living man. And here it is necessary to enter into the biblical story in spirit in order to comprehend the divine mystery of revelation in prophetic visions. Man is really dust, the same as the entire material world, which lives according to the laws of causality. This is what was created in it when the earth was already created. But the Lord took this dust, this material basis, and breathed into it the breath of life, that is, He gave it His Divine spirit and, above all, His Divine principle of freedom. And man appeared - the image and likeness of God.

Unknown. When you speak in this way, everything acquires a semblance of probability, because you are creating some abstract picture, something outside of time and space. But as soon as you descend from the clouds of this abstraction into a concrete situation and ask: but how did God "blow" into this "dust" and what this material basis was when it was not yet "man", it will immediately turn out that everything in these stories is not revelations at all, but just entertaining fairy tales.

Confessor. You call abstraction that state when we rise somewhat above the sense-perceptions that obscure the essence of things from us, and begin to see something beyond the limits of visible phenomena. Take the natural origin of life. What do you know about her? You know the biological processes that accompany and condition this generation. But what life is and what happens at the moment of the birth of a new being, not from the point of view of the external description of the biological process, but from the point of view of the very essence - as it was, and remains a mystery. The contact between the material and the otherworldly is always "beyond time and space", and therefore, no matter how much you observe and study the external during the creation of life, the border where the inanimate passes into the living will elude you as an "abstraction" that is imperceptible to you. Therefore, it is absurd to speak "concretely" in your sense about the creation of man by God and to ask how God "blew" into the "dust". This could only be shown in revelation, where what was invisible becomes visible and what was intangible becomes tangible. "Concretely" the dust from which man was created could be seen by everyone, and the Spirit of God touching it could not be seen by anyone. He illuminated this finger with human consciousness. And this consciousness gave man the opportunity to see God. The revelation shows this moment, invisible in "concrete conditions". Yes, there is a great mystery here. But the whole world around us is also a great mystery, and in it the visible is always united with the invisible, and the tangible with the intangible. And if this could be shown to us, we would certainly see it in the same forms in which the biblical revelations are given to us. "Fabulousness"

Unknown. But, in the end, if we admit that there really is some mysterious content behind these fairy tales, then you still simply believe in it, you do not prove it.

Confessor. I do not prove it logically. But I feel their truth not only with my immediate feeling, but also with my mind, because these stories explain to me the inexplicable and bring all the chaos into a harmonious and perfect world view.