After the patristic era, the epoch associated with the sad fact of the division of the Churches began. As such, it took place in 1054, however, the process of separation was longer - communion between the Churches did not break off immediately after this date. It can be said that this division took place with a gradual increase and ended only in the twelfth century, during the Crusades, when the Churches met and saw each other in an unfavorable light. After the final separation of the Eastern and Western Churches, the so-called Byzantine period of theology began. Byzantine theology is known primarily as polemical theology, directed specifically against the Western Church, against the so-called "Latins." Some questions that now seem central to us were not raised at all. Early theology (e.g., Irenaeus of Lyons) was also polemical, but here the Church defended the facts; in Byzantine theology, however, small ritual problems are often given more space than, say, the problems of the Filioque, which arose in the dispute of Michael Cerullarius. In general, Byzantine theology, as far as it is widely known, is nourished mainly by hatred of Rome. But this opinion of wide circles is based mainly on Western assessments. No one knows the true Byzantine theology, and there are whole deposits of manuscripts by Mark of Ephesus and Gregory Palamas (even here in Paris, in the National Library), which have not yet been translated into modern languages (although some of the works of St. Gregory Palamas have recently been translated into Russian by Archimandrite Cyprian Kern). The main value of this theology is the melting down of the dogmatic theology of the Fathers into liturgical language, the language of prayer. A reflection of this creativity is our liturgical books. The two volumes of the Octoechos, for example, which embrace the 8 tones and serve as the basis of our service, are dogmatic through and through, and the so-called "dogmatics" of the 8 tones are real dogmatic formulas, quotations from the Holy Fathers. On the basis of the Sunday canons, one can write a whole treatise on the Resurrection. The Turkish yoke interrupted Byzantine theology until the nineteenth century, and young Greeks, thirsty for knowledge, went to study in the West, in foreign universities, and the living tradition of the Orthodox Church was interrupted. But, having been interrupted in Greece, at the end of the seventeenth century it is being revived in Russia, and in our days in other Orthodox countries as well. In order to understand how the patristic traditions were revived in the Russian Church, it is necessary to trace the history of the development of Western theology, for this revival did not take place in our country without Western influence and not without Western methods. The West took a completely different path from the East, and this path was imposed on it. With the barbarian invasions, the Imperium Romanum split into two parts: the Western Empire broke away from the Eastern Empire. And if the latter continued to develop as a Greek Orthodox state, then the western part of the Empire sank in the barbarian sea. From the 5th to the 9th centuries, the so-called "dark ages of theology" dragged on here: underground processes took place, the result of which was the erection of a harmonious edifice of Western Christianity, different from the one that was erected in the East. If the symbol of Eastern theology can be the Church of St. In the West, as a result of a different spiritual experience, the Chartres Cathedral appeared, bypassing which, one can clearly see the picture of the development of Catholic theology. Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of the paths of this or that theology, the tragic acuteness of the very question of the division of the Churches remains. And here, on the Western path, a certain answer to this question is the image of the one who is considered the father of Western theology. He lived in the nights of the "dark ages" with the glow of fires illuminating the invasion of barbarians, in a small town in North Africa. Immersed in theology, he tried not to notice how hordes of Vandals crossed Gibraltar and how his homeland, flourishing Africa, at that time a brilliant hotbed of Roman culture, was being destroyed. The name of this man is Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. It is impossible to understand anything in Western theological creativity if one does not know the so-called Augustinianism. Blessed Augustine had the same influence in the West as Origen had in the East. He created a bright and complete system that left a seal on all subsequent Western theology and, at the same time, gave rise to a rift that led to a break between Western and Eastern Christianity. And the founder of the Western heresies, the spiritual father of Luther and Calvin, was Thomas Aquinas, whose entire theological system came out of the theology of Blessed Augustine. The second source of Western theology, after Augustinism, is the school tradition of Rome. There were two cycles in this tradition: the lower and the higher. The method consisted of questions and answers. Arguments were given first from reason, then from the Holy Scriptures. This was the so-called scholastic method, in which intellectual juggling was a serious danger, and which Thomas Aquinas brought to the highest point of development. His Summa Theologica, in the extraordinary harmony of its proofs, is the highest achievement of scholasticism. In that era, everything was permeated with this method, including architecture. If, as I have already said, you go around Chartres Cathedral, you can find in it the whole "sum" of Western scholasticism, down to the devils on the gutters. But when something is in its highest flowering, there are signs of disintegration. In scholasticism, this was the victory of external formalism over internal content. The last period of the Middle Ages (before the Renaissance) is already an epoch of decline in this respect. The Renaissance is an acute attack, an explosion of neo-paganism. This is the source of all the diseases that we are sick with now. The consequence of the Renaissance was the Reformation and the appearance of Martin Luther, when the straw that was already catching fire broke out. The Roman Church responded to the reform with a counter-reform (the Council of Trent in 1545). Since then, the path of Western theology has been bifurcated: Catholicism and Protestantism, the two twins of Augustinism, have been engaged in an endless dispute with each other. The new Western theology is characterized, first of all, by an increased interest in history. In view of the fact that Luther's whole pathos consisted in the desire to return to pure Christianity, it was necessary for Protestants to prove that it was taking place among them. The Catholics insisted on the opposite. From this polemic were born the "Magdeburg Centuries", in which Protestant theologians wrote that Catholicism with each century (hence the name "centuries") was moving away more and more from early Christianity. Cardinal Baronius replied to them on behalf of Rome with his "Annals" (i.e. "Chronicle of Events"). Such was the beginning of scientific historicism in the new Western theology. The second distinguishing feature of this theology is the study of Holy Scripture in a new way. Luther proclaimed the dogmatism of Scripture as the only source of theology. From this arose all the so-called "biblical science" with its ramifications. But as soon as the reformers rejected the Holy Scriptures. Traditions, the Holy Spirit itself. The Scriptures began to disintegrate in their hands. In our days, the beginning of a certain return to Tradition is noticeable even in Protestantism. But in those days everything was unstable, everything was given over to critical analysis, as a result of which Protestantism degenerated partly into liberalism, partly into sugary pietism, which is a kind of adogmatic Christianity, a form of cheap sentimental agitation. An infinite number of sects appeared, etc. Such was the difficult path of Western theology, as a result of which its entire current structure was determined. When, after the end of the Turkish (in Greece) and Tatar (in Russia) yoke, the Eastern Church began to return to theology, this structure was inculcated in it through the Kiev Academy, which was then under the influence of the Jesuits.

School of Russian Theology.

We have reached the point where Western theology is coming to Russia. I have already said that as a result of the medieval drama and all the misfortunes that befell the Orthodox Church in the East, theology, as a living cultural and school tradition, was interrupted. Golubinsky even says that the Old Russian theologians were only literate, but this is not true. Before the Tatar invasion in Russia, its own original tradition began to emerge. Professor Fedotov in his book "The Russian Religious Mind" proves that it is Kievan, and not Muscovite Rus, that is the golden age of Russian Orthodox culture. It can be defined as shoots of Byzantinism, grafted on Russian soil. The same is said by Archpriest. G. Florovsky in "The Ways of Russian Theology". Just as the Russian language, or rather the Slavonic, was a fragment of the Greek, so the Russian soul was, as Prof. Weidle put it, as it were, shaped by Byzantine culture, thanks to the most significant cultural act of Cyril and Methodius, who compiled the Slavonic alphabet and translated Greek books into Slavonic languages. Such words as "good humor" and "good manners," which have no equivalent in Western languages, are words translated from Greek and are a reflection of the Greek element and the Greek way of thinking. And if in the pre-Mongol period Russia did not have time to create its own theological system, then in any case it was close to it. There is much evidence of what remarkable shoots the baptism of the Russian people gave in Orthodox culture. The presence of one such work, "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", already shows how high the Russian soul was capable of rising at that time. Historical events made Russia a military guard chain, which, by the will of fate, protected Europe from the invasion of Asian hordes. This turned Russia into a totalitarian state with serfdom and all its consequences, behind which Western Europe could continue to develop complacently. In Russia, however, any independent development of thought was interrupted. The living faith and piety of the Russian people remained, as evidenced both by the host of Russian ascetics who left us their experience of knowing God, and by the Russian icon, which shows that the experience of the Church continued to nourish Russian souls from within, despite the lack of school experience. The result of this was a religious collapse, marked in the XVII century by the Old Believers. The Old Belief was precisely the product of our lack of theological science, of theological reflection. Now the debate about how to write "Jesus" or "Jesus" may seem ridiculous. In fact, the Old Believers had a complete system that could not be touched without it being destroyed and losing its value. In this way, a special Russian culture was created, in which there is no school theology, but there is a beautiful, complete divine service, a canon of icons, and a consecrated way of life. But it could not last so long (as the Old Believers showed), and long before Peter the Great began to meet with the West, the rapprochement with which Peter had only completed. Already under Alexei Mikhailovich, Russia was flooded with a mass of Europeans and a crisis of culture was brewing, marked by such a violent change. And then, on its threshold, a theological encounter with Western Christianity took place. This meeting took place in Kiev. Western Russian Christianity was placed in different conditions than those that existed in Moscow, withstanding the pressure of the militant theology of Catholics and Protestants, a product of the recent Reformation. Poland was flooded with Jesuits, in connection with which in Little Russia the need to fight for their Orthodoxy was felt very early. Theological schools began to be forged, because it was necessary to fight with the Jesuits, who stood on a great theological height, with the same weapons. An important role in this struggle was played by the Kiev Academy, associated, in turn, with the name of Petro Mohyla. He created his own school, which became known as "Mohyla theology". The nobleman Mohyla studied with the Jesuits for many years and was imbued with this system and even the manner of thinking, theology was taught in Latin at the Kiev Academy. As a result, Petro Mohyla introduced a Western manner in his defense of Orthodoxy. But, despite this, Orthodoxy in Kiev was purified and protected from the heresy of Roman Catholicism. In the XVII century, many Kiev scientists came to Moscow. Among them, the most outstanding can be considered Simeon of Polotsk and Vishnevetsky, the products of the Polonized nobility, who were the founders of the first theological school opened in Moscow. Soon an academy was opened there, which was called "Slovene-Greek-Latin"; Teaching in it, as well as in Kiev, was conducted in Latin. Its emergence marked the beginning of a whole network of theological academies, seminaries and schools, which covered the whole of Russia. The system of teaching in them was entirely adopted from the West; a hundred years ago, until the middle of the nineteenth century, our village priests studied Latin. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow taught all his "theology," as they said at the time, in this language. A lot depends on the language. Therefore, as Fr. G. Florovsky said, people "prayed in Slavonic, but thought and theologized in Latin." The language of the Church became not the language of the school, and the language of the school was not the language of the Church, as a result of which a division arose between them, and they learned to look for school in the West. Even the surnames of students who entered theological seminaries were remade in the Latin way (for example, Benevolensky, Benediktov, Benefacts); This is where both the "priest" surnames and the special "priest" language came from. The very word "seminary" was taken from the West. From there was also taken the entire special world of the theological school, and there was a gap between it and the life of the Church. The theology that has developed as a result of these influences can be characterized by two features. First, it is a specifically school science without a hint of any other role than the development of the mind, which is a purely Western influence. For the Holy Fathers, theology is not only a science, but something else. In the seminaries of that time, the goal was simply to acquire a certain stock of knowledge. All the old school theological textbooks and catechisms were written under the influence of the Western tradition. It is felt in this area to this day, beginning with the system of questions and answers in our catechisms: "What is the Law of God?" the question is asked to the child. Secondly, the content of Western theology also penetrated into this school theology. The essence of Samarin's famous dissertation devoted to Theophan Prokopovich and Stefan Yavorsky boils down to the fact that Yavorsky the Catholic and Theophan the Protestant crushed each other, one with Catholic and the other with Protestant arguments, and thought about Orthodoxy from a Protestant-Catholic point of view. Even such a figure as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk used the books of Western theology, for example, "The Imitation of Christ" by Thomas Kempis or the works of Arndt. And if Tikhon of Zadonsk was able to digest these Western influences, it was only thanks to what his heart beat with as an inwardly Orthodox person. Archbishop Dimitry of Rostov also suffered the influence of Western theology. And yet, once on Russian Orthodox soil, the methods of Western theology remained alien to the spirit of Orthodoxy, even if they were perceived by the mind. The mind itself, however, was shaped both by the way in which theological questions were posed and by the answers given to them. Take, for example, the dogma of redemption, one of the central tenets of our faith. To whom was Christ's sacrifice offered? - asks Western theology. The Fathers of the Church would not have posed the question in this way. But such a formulation of the question can still be inherent in the Orthodox consciousness, as exemplified by the book on the topic of Redemption, recently written by Metr. Anthony Khrapovitsky. The same can be said about other issues of our faith. What are the attributes of God? What are the characteristics of God's justice? In other words, this kind of scholastic formulation of questions distorted what had been cultivated by Orthodoxy and gradually removed Russian theologians from the sources of Orthodox theology. True Orthodoxy remained to live in everyday life. Until the Council of 1917, it had not occurred to anyone that divine services in themselves (the Liturgy or the All-Night Vigil) could be the source of theology, so accustomed was the mind to looking for it only in textbooks. But we must do justice to the generation of the Benefactovs and Tuberozovs, who are now ridiculed - if its representatives, carried away by "fashionable" theology, had forgotten what was preserved by their ancestors, perhaps all the valuable things that we have now would not have reached us. For, despite Western influences, this generation preserved for us, through everyday life and worship, something primordially Orthodox, which formed the basis of our school theology, even though it was clothed at that time in Latin garb. In addition to the Latin channels through which school theology penetrated to us, there was also a second stream of school theology, which can be called secular theology. The gradual separation of the priesthood into a special caste was a natural consequence of the distribution of the entire Russian population among the estates (a fact sealed even by state law). The unity of culture and the Church, which existed in Muscovite Russia, was broken. Russian culture, after the notorious window to Europe, cut by Peter, was put on a different track. What remained of the Church was rather its everyday side, and no one connected it with any cultural problems. In the middle of the 19th century, in connection with the philosophical awakening in Germany, under the influence of Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, the awakening of philosophical interests also began in Russia. In the 1940s, it was not the Sarov hermitage that attracted the Russian intelligentsia and was its spiritual center, but the University of Berlin, where the chair of philosophy was occupied by representatives of the idealist trend in German philosophy. The very problems of idealist philosophy are posed in such a way that they give rise to questions of a historiosophical nature: about the meaning of the historical process, about the tasks of individual countries and peoples (see Chizhevsky's Hegel in Russia). And the young Russian students who surrounded the departments of German professors began to think about the fate of Russia and its mystery. Slavophiles and Westernizers appeared, trying, each in his own way, to give answers to the questions that worried modern Russian minds. The Slavophiles (A.S. Khomyakov and others) believed that the fate of Russia was inseparable from Orthodoxy; Westernizers (V.G. Belinsky and others) thought that the fate of Russia should be merged with the fate of Western countries. In this way, German philosophy fertilized Russian thought in a completely new way. This path was taken first by the older, and then by the younger Slavophiles. The Russian intelligentsia became interested in the Church, and, beginning with A. S. Khomyakov, secular theology appeared in our country (Vladimir Solovyov and already in our days - N. Berdyaev, Fr. S. Bulgakov). Thus, those who like to oppose A.S. Khomyakov and others to the "rotten West" are wrong, for they forget that Slavophilism itself grew out of Western philosophy. One of the exciting facts that took place before our eyes was the meeting of paths that had been separated for so long: the path of the Church and the path of culture. This happened in the apocalyptic years of the Russian Revolution, and today we see the combination of the priesthood and the professors in one person (for example, Fr. V. Zenkovsky), as a kind of symbol of the participation of Russian cultural forces in the life of the Church. Theology is not something once and for all ready and outlined, as if it had fallen from heaven. It is the product of a continuous creative process, which can be characterized as "created modernity". Theology will always depend both on our spiritual needs and on the degree to which it merges with the Orthodox Church and penetrates the Truth that the Church carries with her.

Conclusion.

What does theological science consist of? The basis of all theology is the Holy Scriptures, and the main themes of theological reflection (each of which is posed in a new way in our days) are the theme of the Word of God, the theme of the Church, the theme of History. I will conclude the cycle "Introduction to Theology" with a few words about method, since this question, the most complex and difficult, is such especially for the theologian. Theology is increasingly turning into an exact science, striving to be one of the sciences. On the one hand, the theologian is required to do the same thing that is required of every scientist. On the other hand, we also have a special calling to serve God with our Logos. Now the human mind is discredited, people say: "The human heart is better and higher than the mind." Therefore, the mind must be rehabilitated not according to human reason (ratio), but according to the Logos, through which the likeness of God is incarnated in man. The mind must first be churched, and for this purpose it must assimilate the values of the simple scientific method, which are now despised. Any science that deserves this name is distinguished primarily by honesty and requires an intellectual critical approach. We are usually frightened by criticism and think that it is contrary to Christian morality. But in so far as it was determined by a sober view of things, and before it became destructive, criticism was the fundamental virtue of the monk and ascetic, for its main point is reasoning, sobriety. Sobriety is what a scholar and a monk have in common, for every monk is called upon to cleanse his heart, the sheaf of his mind from that which pollutes it. An honest scientist should do the same. In Christianity, we are given an extraordinary art of this purification, even its stages are indicated. And sobriety is one of the first steps on the path of Christian theology. This sobriety consists in criticizing oneself, in checking emotions, the sphere of the soul. In ancient times, a theologian was usually a monk and vice versa: a monk became a theologian. Who gave us those valuable manuscripts that now serve as the basis of our theology? Monks. Their labor, the slow labor of the bee, sober and gradual labor, is the basis of every Christian podvig. We often hear hostile attacks on Christianity by scientists and reproaches that there is much dishonest and counterfeit in Christianity. Indeed, Christians have made mistakes, we must admit this. And it is necessary to throw off those multi-colored pieces of paper that were hung on Christianity, because Christianity does not need false protection. Usually Christianity is opposed to science. However, there is no fundamental contradiction between them. And the path of science is the best proof of this. We, Christians, have something to repent for before people of science: the Church burned people because they claimed that the Earth rotates. And if science departed from the Church, it was not because fallen people were its representatives. This happened because the Church wanted to possess these people unchallenged, because there were too many non-Christian motives in her pressure on the world, because too often a lie was recognized as truth. As a result, there was that tragic rupture as a result of which we now write treatises on the subject of "Christianity and Science" without realizing that both sides are to blame. For the world is the same for both of them. Respect for the truth, the Truth itself was brought by Christ ("I am the Truth" - John 14:6)), therefore respect for one's work and in laic science was born in Christianity, because Christ taught to be truthful to the end and in everything. There is some misunderstanding in the division of science into just science and higher science. "Simply science" is pseudoscience, vulgarized by the philosophy of the nineteenth century, and has nothing to do with the true scientific height. Now is the time to show in every action that we are witnesses of Christ, and to live as if today were the last day of our lives. Christianity obliges us to treat everything in a Christian way. Hippolytus of Rome said that a Christian should be the best in every way. We think little of the Words of God, "For Thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory." The Lord is the King, and to Him belongs both Power and Glory. This must not be forgotten. It is necessary not only to return to the Christian hierarchy of values, forgotten in our laicized world, but also to restore the primacy of the Truth in Jesus Christ, remembering that there will be no true theology if there is no thirst for His truth. This is the first part of the theological method and its foundation. The second methodological principle is the biblicism of Orthodox theology, i.e. a living attitude to the Word of God, which is completely drying up in our society. Biblical ism is not Protestantism, as is often claimed. The Gospel lies on our throne as the Word of God, we burn incense before it, and before each reading of it we hear the words: "And we are vouchsafed to hear" it. Origen says that there are two ways of communing with Christ: through His Word and through the Sacraments. But how can we use the Word of God? Here is a question of method. The problem of the utilization of the Word of God arose at a certain moment in history in the Roman Church; many theologians left the Church because of questions of understanding the Word of God and in the era of modernization of knowledge. This has not yet happened in our country, because theology is given complete freedom of a critical approach to the Holy Scriptures (sometimes simply because of indifference to the Logos Himself). But the question is still painful, although it is so vulgarized that it falls into a completely false perspective. The problem is this: What is the Word of God, are all the facts contained in it true or not? What is the role of Isaiah, Luke, Paul, and others, for each of them has his own individual "coefficient" that is part of God's plan. The Word of God did not fall from heaven, but passed through history, through the brains of certain people. There may be some disagreements in the understanding of Scripture, but in both the Old and New Testaments, Christ must always be placed at the center of it - this is the real method. Many refer to the Holy Scriptures and justify their personal conclusions with them; Any text in it finds any application. But we must seek Christ at the center of everything. Only because we have preserved the Old Testament and read its stories with love, that the entire Old Testament history is illumined by Christ, that the entire Old Testament speaks of the salvation of people. A true theologian never removes the Bible from his desk, he is nourished by the Word of God, which is contained in it, but he is nourished by it in the Church, i.e. in the Orthodox spirit. And this is the next - historical - point of methodology. We have already quoted the definition of Tradition given by Vincent of Lérins as that which is "always, by all, and everywhere accepted." It was clear to Vincent of Lérins: everything that he understood as "always and everywhere accepted," for example, the veneration of the Mother of God, which arose in history, or the liturgical service on the antimension, did not always exist in the Church. But is it correct to believe that it can be thrown away, as extreme Protestants think? And then his words take on their meaning. Yes, everything contained in the Tradition of the Orthodox Church has always and everywhere been accepted, but it has been accepted implicitly. Thus, we may or may not have known that the Virgin gave flesh to the Son of God, but this fact remains a fact and nourishes us, consciously or unconsciously, for us. Thus, theology is not an organic development of the facts themselves, for they have always existed, but the cognition of them. Therefore, the theologian is obliged, first of all, to know the facts, which leads us to the need to recognize the historical method in theology. Usually, history is disliked, saying that history can destroy faith, that it is better to choose the bright sides in the history of the Church than to relive all the scandals and misunderstandings, that since the history of Christianity is more a history of failures than victories, the study of it can only lead to temptation. But we must remember that the history of the Church is not an arsenal of facts, but an organic path traveled, that the main thing in it is not individual facts and dates, but her very existence, which lies in the field of our knowledge and which affects everything else (as someone said: "La culture c'est ce qui reste, quand tout le reste est oublie"). And we ourselves, since we are not extreme Protestants, for whom there is only I and GOD, we ourselves are included in the common history of mankind. What distinguishes us from animals is the inherent human memory of history. And in this respect, Christianity is historical from beginning to end, which binds us together by one historical tradition. Where do we find Tradition? Only in history. Tradition is that which is transmitted from generation to generation, and in the Church this transmission is not simply the transmission of tradition. In the Church, Christ Himself, the Truth Himself, is transmitted. What is the transmission of grace if not the transmission of Christ? And apostolic succession and the transmission of theological truths are the same as the transmission of Christ. The history of the Church is so important because it is the history of these programs. Outside of this empirical church history there is no Christianity. The miracle of Christianity is not that it gave birth to these saints, but that the grace that lives in it remains unchanged in it. And this is not a story about the past, but a kind of miraculous mystery that every person in this Church encounters if he is a member of the body of Christ. Therefore, it is not the props of the historical building of the Church that are important, but what stands behind these props. The system of theology is the teaching of the holy and great Fathers of the Church and other theologians, right down to our days; every single teaching here conceals truth and never expresses it in its entirety. Christianity has not become a systematic fragment of history, it is in constant formation. And we grasp the truth not in its torn, separate parts, but in its entirety ("pleroma" - wholeness, fullness - Greek), as a kind of organic whole. The preaching of Christianity about the Kingdom of God is also given to us in the historical aspect. The symbol of the Kingdom is always something that can grow, develop, something organic, and not some abstract system of concepts. Such symbols are, for example, a seed that grows, a tree under which birds can hide. Such is the mystery of the growth of the kingdom of heaven. To treat history honestly and truthfully does not mean to measure the past of modern church life, to love or dislike it because of its past (this approach is typical of a conservative or activist). We must love what is true in it, love Christ in it, Who is the same yesterday, today, forever, Who was pleased to create His Body in history. Thus, the third foundation of theology is history. The fourth foundation and method of theology is the liturgical experience of the Church. By this is meant not the knowledge of the liturgical books, but the liturgy itself, as the main part of Church tradition, as the very fact that the Church exists, first of all. The Church is praying. Without this moment, it is impossible to imagine the Church as "one, catholic and apostolic." The tree of theology - lex credendi - is always nourished by lex orandi; this is the law of nutrition of the Church. We are living in an era of liturgical revival, and Christians around the world are increasingly beginning to understand that the Church is fundamentally catholic and apostolic. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov liked to say that he drew his theology from the Eucharistic Chalice. These words testify to the fact that the theologian draws his true inspiration from the church, from prayer. Theology is only the revelation of what God reveals to man in spiritual experience. But this revelation is always catholic, like the whole Church, and our life in it must be catholic. On this is based our faith in the "catholic" Church. This word is of Greek origin (katholon) and means integrity, harmony in general. A later understanding of this word obscured the meaning of the former. The whole always precedes the part, and the part lives in so far as it agrees with the whole. At present, everyone chooses for himself in the Church what seems most important to him. Meanwhile, the very word "choice" means "heresy" in Greek. If the Church is Christ Himself, then the whole purpose of Christianity is to make us conform to Christ. And justifying myself by saying that I am "such a person and have such a character" is pure psychology that needs to be fought. If the seed, i.e. my Self, which has fallen into the ground, does not die, then it will remain alone. But if I die, I am reborn in harmony with the whole, as a reflection of agreement with Christ who lives in the Church. In every Christian the entire experience of the Church is reflected, and this is the foundation of Christianity. The experience of each individual can be expanded to the limits of conciliar consciousness, and this is the basis of our path. Every Christian needs to conform his life to Christ, to crucify his Self. But this is especially necessary for the theologian, for theology is the reflection and witness of the entire truth of the Church. Christianity in the deepest sense is not provincial, not individualistic, and therefore, before rejecting anything in the Church, one must be convinced that it does not coincide with the truth of the Church, and not with our tastes and desires. The path of the theologian is not a serene work outside the world with its joys and excitements. There should be no gap between theology and the world. A theologian should not be confined to his personal life, because his path is difficult and responsible. If we are called to take risks in life, then this risk is especially necessary in theology, and every fact, every conflict must be verified by the Church. This inner wholeness, or catholicity, is achieved through a prayerful life, together with ascetic podvig and life in church. All are called to the honor of the highest calling, and there is no greater service than the service of the Word ("The Word which I have spoken, it shall judge him at the last day" - John 12:48). But this service does not lead the theologian to a feeling of pride, since pride consists only in heresy. This is the end of the course of introduction to theology. But most important of all that I wanted to say is the thought of the deepest oneness of all things with all. Theology is not only an occupation, an exercise for intellectually inclined people, just as monasticism is not only a vocation for voluntarists. Theology is the path of the regeneration of the whole person in accordance with Christ. Both the "Sower" and the "Reaper" of the fruits of theology are the same Christ.