Gogol, passionately, religiously and prophetically captured by the service of God through art, was overwhelmed by this excess of attachment to "this world". I tried to design with childish naivety in "Correspondence with friends"

Horrified by the depth of his immersion in the pathos of artistic creation, he repentantly rejected everything carnal and starved himself to death in the feat of spiritualism. From his youth, recklessly following the ultra-Nestorian path of serving the call of human nature, he, coming to his senses, became exhausted at the Orthodox crossroads, at the attempt to connect the human and the divine, and, having lost his balance, slipped into spiritualism, i.e. into the Monophysite heresy.

Archimandrite Theodore (Bukharev), professor of the Moscow Theological Academy and inspector of the Kazan Theological Academy, responded to Gogol's torments.

In other words, he sang a hymn to the Chalcedonian dogma. He did not convince either Gogol, with whom he corresponded, or the official censorship, which banned the publication of his works. Ardent and rebellious, he resigned his dignity and continued his preaching until his death. The rehabilitation of Theodore Bukharev's Orthodoxy and the objective criticism of his constructions await a benevolent researcher who will probably calmly prove that Fr. Bukharev, while justifying the bright sides of cultural construction in Christ, was alien to the Nestorian deviation, i.e. the worship of culture as an intrinsic value, but subordinated and subjugated it to Christ in an irrational synthesis. The Chalcedonian yardstick justified Fr. Bukharev in the main and in the main, and not the official censorship, which rejected such theology in the name of Monophysite disregard for human truth. Dostoevsky also theologizes with his artistic images. Having completely given his heart and will to the obedience of the Orthodox Church, he, however, from the depths of his conscience protests against the Church's Monophysite indifference to earthly truth, even "most respectfully returns to it a ticket to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," secretly thinks that the Most Holy Mother of God includes "Mother-damp-Earth" and sanctifies her, and in the elder Zosima he pours out the dreams of his heart about the revelation in Orthodoxy of an optimistic life-loving path of salvation. All this does not go beyond the framework of the scheme of the Chalcedonian dogma, but within its boundaries it strongly emphasizes the correctness of the nature of the cosmos and man. Konstantin Leontiev would soon call it "pink Christianity" and oppose it with genuine Athonite Orthodoxy, harsh to the verge of practical Monophysitism.

In the 70s, the gigantic figure of Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov rises for this issue. A philosopher by vocation, a brilliant publicist, a preacher of the Christian-ecclesiastical worldview, for three decades he persistently and emphatically called upon the theological thought of the Russian Church to reveal concretely, in its application to our historical epoch, the directive of the Chalcedonian Creed on the unification of the two natures in the process of the creative work of Christian humanity in the spirit and power of theocracy. Solovyov rushed impatiently and searched for ready-made forms of this theocracy. He made an instructive experiment of accepting the theocracy of the Roman Church. For this purpose, boldly, single-handedly in his heart, he united the churches. But not in these extremes, which he himself has lived out for — alas! — his very short life, his merit and enormous influence on the entire generation of Russian religious philosophers up to the present day and, probably, for a long time to come. Solovyov's talent and merit, after a quick victory over his youthful worship of the idol of materialism, fashionable in the 1960s, consists in the heroic paving of the way to the ideal of "integral knowledge," in the all-embracing synthesis of philosophy and Christian dogma, in the creation of a theocratic church historiosophy in the light and on the basis of the dogma of God-manhood. Solovyov's system for Orthodox theology is a brilliant illustration of the modern revelation of the undying vitality and salvific nature of the Chalcedonian dogma. Quite consciously and directly, relying on the definition of faith of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, Solovyov ascribes the divine-human nature and the divine-human meaning to the process of the earthly history of mankind, included on the same basis in the framework of general cosmic life.

As a fighter against a one-sided, ahistorical deviation in theology, Solovyov is an example of an orthodox theologian, a Chalcedonian theologian. But his ideas and constructions within the Orthodox framework of the Chalcedonian oros are a new, free addition of the philosopher. While welcoming the orthodox framework adopted by Solovyov as the precept of Chalcedon, we are critical of his theological constructions within this framework.

But the feasible feat of the mind in clarifying the infinite horizon of mysteries, of course, lies on the holy path of serving the truth of Christ. Solovyov, on this, so to speak, inner front of dogma, within the Chalcedonian barriers, erected two philosophical landmarks: "all-unity" and "sophiology." "All-unity" is for him, as for any philosopher, a seductively universal, all-embracing, all-crowning focus, in which the entire composition of relative being is crossed and by which is connected, and together with... Absolute! It is this salto mortale from the finite to the Infinite that no philosophical ecstasy obliges us to admit. This is one of the swamp lights that lead philosophers into a silent failure at the heights of their latest achievements. Another winged horse, not only rational, but also mystical, on which Solovyov flies over the terrible yawn of the abyss between God and the world, is the long-abandoned and half-forgotten Sophia.

Without arguing about the legitimate boundaries of the Sophian mythologeme, we only want to point out the fundamental logical depravity of the very idea to find in the fog of "all-unity" and on the wings of the "Sophian aeon" something intermediate between One and zero, between Being and nothing, Absolute and relative, between God and everything conceivable outside of God. There is a qualitative, quantitatively unfillable antinomy between plus and minus, between yes and no. No gradualness, no bridges from the aeons can cover up the ontological tension between the two polarities.

The reverse procedure is equally absurd. In fact, each stage or each moment of such a procedure is simply a moment of the abolition of the existence of one category by another, and not of their combination, unification. The multiplicity of such procedures is the purest logical illusion, philosophical self-deception. All the impotent fantasy of Gnosticism, its aeonomania, is built on it. But it is completely useless in comprehending the paralogical mystery of the relationship between the Creator and creation. This secret is an indisputable fact. It is given. It cannot be understood, but you just need to accept it, without deceiving our weak mind. "Neither an intercessor, nor an angel, but the Lord Himself was incarnate, and Thou didst save all of me, man." Mediators in essence, in being, ontological mediators are excluded here. No crescendo-diminuendo from creation to God et vice versa can create a continuous continuity, and into any of the millimeter slits the entire structure falls, as into an abyss. If, even in the world of relative things, we are compelled to operate with antinomies, how can we not bow down before the antinomy of antinomies, and cease to encroach upon the comprehension of the incomprehensible by reason? And the idea of "all-unity," i.e., its illegitimate claim to the merging of the Absolute with the relative, must be thrown into the ontological boundaries of the created cosmos. Yes, cosmic existence is all-one, and not in itself, but by the will of the Creator and "Almighty," who "contains," "life-giving," but does not content it in any way.

The philosophical work of V. S. Solovyov was highly valued by orthodox theological circles as an apologetic service among the non-religious majority of Russian society. For the sake of this exclusive, as it were, prophetic service, V. Solovyov was forgiven his hesitations, and his change of views on certain issues, and even his obvious enthusiasm for Catholicism. We were waiting for it to cool down and... Waited.

A temperamental and sharp opponent of V. S. Solovyov was K. Leontiev, a bold, outspoken hater of the ideal and spirit of Western culture, humanism, progressivism, secularism. In contrast and in polemics with Solovyov, he did not admit any peaceful synthesis of these principles with Christianity. Being a passionate aesthete himself, he struggled within himself with this, as it seemed to him, diabolical temptation and ended this struggle with a secret, in fact - half-obvious, tonsure before death. In comparison with the free-thinking but Chalcedonian Solovyov, the ultra-Orthodox Leontiev actually turned out to be a zealot of Monophysite theology.

The original contemporary of these two antagonists, Solovyov and Leontiev, who exerted a significant influence on the former, Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, was a type of thinker and theologian who fell into the Nestorian heresy.

In terms of the degree of paradoxical concepts and the nature of the Nestorian deviation, V. V. Rozanov can be mentioned next to Fedorov. In solidarity with Leontiev, dissociating himself from Solovyov's Westernist sympathies, Rozanov, in contrast to Leontiev, was carried away by polemics against the asceticism of the church to the point of apostasy from the New Testament and even in favor of paganism. Caricaturing the mysticism of the Church as a "religion of death," he called for a "religion of birth and sex." Being a heretical mind, V. V. Rozanov never parted with the Orthodox Church in his heart.

The literary and philosophical constructions of D.S. Merezhkovsky should also be attributed to the Nestorian deviation. Like Rozanov, he exaggerates the pessimistic and anti-cosmic aspects of church piety and, repeating V. Solovyov, elevates the assessment of the historical construction of culture by the yardstick of God-manhood. But, transgressing the boundaries of the Chalcedonian oros, he demands from the church the recognition of the primacy of culture and the Eros that drives it, playing with the ambiguous term "holy flesh".