Of course, Fr. Arseny was not an experienced psychologist, psychoanalyst, or psychiatrist, but he simply had an all-encompassing love for man, combined with love for God, a great spiritual experience, and the gift given by the Lord to penetrate into the human soul with a clairvoyant eye. I was a professor, a doctor of medicine, a psychiatrist who had taken thousands of sick and healthy people, with vast experience, who had written dozens of scientific papers on psychiatry, and I was in front of him as a student who was just beginning to study a given course. If I, a psychiatrist, knew the psyche and spiritual world of a patient like Fr. Arseny, then I think most of my patients would have recovered long ago. But in order to become a person like Fr. Arseny, one needs constant prayer directed to God, and an all-consuming love for man; The union of these two principles creates an ascetic, a man of prayer, an elder.

Twice more we came with Dmitry to Fr. Arseny, and later he came without me. On my second visit, an extremely interesting conversation took place, which I recorded on my return to Moscow.

We arrived, there were already several people from Moscow, Voronezh and Vladimir in the house. We sat in the dining-room in the evening; Antonina Sergeevna, knowing that Dmitry Evgenievich was a psychiatrist, asked a question: Tell me, did the Lord heal the possessed, were they mentally ill?

Dmitry answered: A person can suffer from mental illness, but he can suffer from a spiritual illness, these are completely different diseases. People who are sick with spiritual illnesses are possessed; They are obsessed with a thirst for murder, an irresistible desire to do evil, to torture, to torture, to insult, their entire spiritual essence is saturated with evil, they can worship evil to demonic forces. Remember the two demoniac who lived in the tombs (Matt. 8:23), their possession. Remember the NKVD investigators who conducted interrogations with the use of horrific tortures, abuse of interrogators, their mockery of women that surpassed their understanding of humanity. These investigators were seriously spiritually ill, the forces of evil demonism seized their souls, but many of them did not suffer from mental illness at all, I met such spiritually seriously ill people more than once. Psychiatry cannot treat these people, it is an obsession.

Deliverance from spiritual illness can be accomplished by God's mercy only by a spiritual ascetic, completely immersed in prayer, love for God, for people, and not every pastor can cure such a sick person, which is confirmed by the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: This kind cannot come out except from prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:29).

Mental illnesses can be treated in psychiatric hospitals and at home with medications, physiotherapy, labor, and psychoanalysis. Many priests consider psychoanalysis sinful, asserting that the psychoanalyst forcibly invades the soul of a person, replacing confession, because only in confession can one reveal the innermost, but I, a psychiatrist, have seen more than once that the treatment carried out by an experienced psychoanalyst completely restored the sick. It happens that a person is simultaneously sick with spiritual and mental illness. It is extremely difficult to treat such patients, in my practice there have been no cures. In addition, seeing a spiritual illness, a modern doctor will not distinguish it from a mental one, and if he does, he cannot say: Go to the priest. It is necessary to note something else: a person who suffers from the spiritual illness of demonism will never want to be healed by a priest.

Those who were mentally ill at certain moments in their lives created works of genius (Vrubel, Garshin, etc.) or, coming to the Church, became deeply religious people, recovered, they were helped by spiritual guidance, prayer and the Orthodox spirit of the Church itself. At various times, the spiritual leaders of many communities sent their spiritual children to me for consultation or treatment, and many of them later became wonderful priests, monks, nuns, and artists. The disease was overcome by faith in God.

The question was asked: do healthy people exist at all? Dmitry answered: A strange question. Of course, there are, and most of them, but many have their own peculiarities, maybe even oddities; These are not mental illnesses. Sometimes these are slight shifts in the psyche, which can be called mental runny noses, caused by strong tension, shocks, disorders. They can turn into serious mental illness if the necessary measures are not taken in advance. Some oddities of a person are the result of upbringing, the influence of the environment, a difficult childhood, harmful communication with bad people. The influence of faith and the Church is especially fruitful for such people, they get rid of their insignificant ailments or oddities, in advanced cases psychoanalysis helps, quickly relieving the patient of these frivolous, but restless habits, oddities, bad character traits.

I agree with many things, said Fr. Arseny, but I will add to what you have said: spiritual illness, unlike mental illness, is terrible in that under the influence of dark forces it is contagious and spreads with the speed of an epidemic. Take our leaders in the past, they were seriously spiritually ill, dark forces completely took possession of their souls, evil filled their whole being, and they infected the souls of millions of people with it, and the result was the creation of the Gulag. The famous aphorism expressing the rule of evil: Here the power is not Soviet, but Solovetsky, symbolizes the millions of tortured in the camps, shot, starved, frozen, and all these unfortunates went through brutal torture and humiliation. The destruction of churches, the mass extermination of bishops, priests, deacons, and believers could occur only because the germ of dark malice was thrown by the leaders into the human mass.

Their faith in demonic Evil had no boundaries, millions of people infected with evil supported the cult of personality, participated in repressions, denunciations, created the Gulag and worked in it, not understanding in the name of what they inflicted torture, killed people. Or rather, they understood: it is necessary to denounce, kill, torture, this is what the supreme Evil demands, which means that it is necessary and useful; and only when they themselves were interrogated and tortured in the Gulag, did they see the light, beginning to recover, but not all of them. Some believed that by signing thousands of sentences earlier, dispossessing the peasantry, condemning them to starvation or indiscriminately slandering innocent people in denunciations, they did the right thing and would continue to do so, but ended up in the camp by mistake. These people were incurably ill with Evil, possessed by demons.

In the camp, I had occasion to meet with prisoners who had previously been at the heights of power, informers, and even former interrogators infected with evil. Kindness, kind words, and help were able to save their souls, help them realize the sinfulness of what they had done earlier and lead them to God, but it was a difficult path for them and no less difficult for those who helped them. If they broke with Evil and came to God, faith, and the Church, then nothing could force them to turn away from the chosen path.

Among the imprisoned criminals there was a special stratum called the camp punks, who hovered around major recidivists, thieves in law, and lived off petty thefts, handouts from the lord's table of strong and cruel criminals, bullying and robbing the weak. Prisoners from the camp punks did not have a drop of conscience, demonic evil was the basis of life in them; It was not possible to etch or remove it. A major recidivist, a thief in law, as a rule, was a gifted, intelligent person who went down the road of evil; It was possible to talk to these people, to prove something to them, and they quite often turned to faith. I had to confess them many times, and the confessions were of a deeply penetrating nature, full of sincerity and a desire to be reconciled with God.

Demonic evil spreads like an epidemic, and to a large extent this is facilitated by books, newspapers, magazines, radio, and especially the rapidly emerging and spreading television. All this freely enters the human house and poisons the soul of a child, a young man, an adult.

On my third visit, Dmitri had an interesting conversation about the Christian student circle, of which we had both been members in the past.