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.

Christian student circles were formed in 19161918, Mitya said, in many higher educational institutions in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Samara and other cities. Their original organizer was Vladimir Martsinkovsky, I don't remember his patronymic. The task of the circles was to study the Gospel and the Old Testament. The groups consisted of 1520 people, mainly students, but there were also older people. The composition was extremely heterogeneous: Orthodox, Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, Evangelicals. The presence of students of different denominations left a certain imprint on the activities of the circle members, but in no way affected friendly relations with each other. In my opinion, Mitya said, the circles were very useful, involving students in Christianity, helping them to study the Holy Scriptures, understand and interpret them, and the free exchange of opinions made it possible to assimilate more deeply what they heard and read.

Usually, a member of the circle took a certain text of the Holy Books, worked it out at home, and at the next meeting made a report and immediately gave his interpretation. It happened that the leader of the circle recommended (there was no coercion) that two or three members of the circle study the same text, give an interpretation and at the next meeting all three should make their reports, after which a general discussion began and it became clear who most correctly revealed the passage taken from the Gospel or the Old Testament.

Mitya spoke in detail about the work of the circle and gave two or three examples of the interpretation of individual texts: the parable of the prodigal son, one of the beatitudes Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Now few people know about the activities of Christian student circles, said Fr. Arseny, but I knew many of their participants. The Moscow clergy had a negative attitude towards the members of the circle, in some churches the priests did not always allow them to go to confession, which, of course, was a big mistake, especially since later many members of the circles became priests, secret monks and nuns, two even bishops. Hundreds of them came to the Orthodox Church, became her faithful children and died in camps and exiles; However, some Orthodox members of the circle converted to Protestantism, Baptism, and a certain part became active theosophists and anthroposophists; however, the majority later departed from these teachings and came to the Church. I knew Marcinkovsky, he was a good, not fanatical person, with a completely clear Protestant mindset. Of course, at one time Christian student circles were of great benefit to young people, but their combined confessionality had a harmful effect on some of the members of the circle.

You said that Fr. Sergius Mechev, whose spiritual son you were, believed that the circle was useful by attracting young people to God, to the study of the Bible. Perhaps so, but it seems to me that in the difficult 19171928 years the best spiritual refuge for students was the Russian Orthodox Church, its churches, services, purifying confession, and communion.

From the expression on Dmitry's face, I understood that he did not fully agree, Fr. Arseny noticed the same and, after a pause for a while, continued: Dmitry Evgenievich! I had and still have several spiritual children, former members of a Christian student circle. I saw that when they came to the Church, they accepted everything rationally, especially at first, I will not say critically, but cautiously. Most of them did not have a childlike faith, accepting the Lord God, the Mother of God, the saints with all their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul. They analyzed the spoken word as if filtering; Then it passed. Apparently, the independent study of spiritual scriptures and their own interpretation left in the souls of the members of the circle the need to pass what was said through reason. I was far from the circle, something else, complex and difficult, occupied me in those difficult years. By the way, Dmitry Evgenievich! There is a former member of a Christian student circle among us. Who is it? Mitya asked. A woman of about sixty-five, a good friend of mine, Anna Vladimirovna, rose from the table and said: Dmitry Evgenievich! Mitya! Forgot? Didn't you recognize her? Mitya jumped up, with the words Anya! Anya! rushed to her, and they embraced. The three of us were going to Moscow. Mitya and Anya talked all the way, forgot about me, and I was lying on the top shelf, reading a book. I did not go to Fr. Arseny with Mitya again, he already knew the way and came without me.

In recent years, Dmitry and I have rarely seen each other, that's how life turned out.