This teaching made the two most important events of the Gospel - the Crucifixion and the Resurrection - a mere stage performance, so John, the Apostle of Love, forbade to welcome the Gnostic Docetists as his brothers and to receive them into his home. Can the image of Christ, who came to earth as a theatrical mask, save the Gnostic heretic, even if he gives his life for an idea, for such an illusory Christ? In apostolic times, there was a sect of the Ebionites, that is, the "poor", who taught that Christ was one of the prophets, born of Mary and Joseph, and demanded the fulfillment of all Old Testament attributes and rituals. Could such a messiah save not only others from death and hell, but also himself? For the later Gnostics Basilides and Valentinus, Christ was the power of God, an aeon that came into the material world to bring out another aeon, Sophia. This was taught in apostolic times by the first Gnostic, Simon the Sorcerer, and in the 20th century, the old Gnostic errors were collected and preached by another Gnostic, Rudolf Steiner. For the Talmud, Jesus is the son of adultery and a deceiver, for the Mohammedans he is the son of the Virgin and a prophet, who, however, was not crucified or resurrected: Simon of Cyrene was crucified for him, and Christ was taken to heaven by Allah as the prophet Elijah; he must come in the last times to die and lie in the grave in Medina, next to Mohammed. In the Qur'an it is written how Allah asks Jesus: "Did Jesus say that he was God?" Mohammed compares himself to the Spirit of Comfort, of whom Jesus announced. In theosophy, Indian and European, the image of Christ is amorphous and ambiguous, for Vivekananda, the famous preacher of yoga, Christ is a myth and a fiction, a kind of abstract artistic image; Helena Blavatsky is of the same opinion. Ramakrishna, Schürre, and others regard Christ as a great initiate on the level of Buddha and Mohammed, and with a clear preference for Buddha. Krishnas want to appropriate Christ, to pass off their teaching as a renewed Gospel. They teach that Christ is one of the many incarnations of Krishna. The massive offensive of the Eastern occult systems against Europe and America set before the Indian and Tibetan gurus the task of replacing the image of Christ with another, dark face; then, without Christ, Christianity will fall, like a fortress blown up from within, and Buddhist and Shaivite temples will be built by the hands of the Europeans themselves on the ruins of the former Christian temples. In the 20th century, dozens of provocative statements began to appear about the alleged discovery of ancient manuscripts, which say that Christ studied in Tibet, that after the Crucifixion He was in a fainting state, He was healed by lamas and helped to flee to the East, where He ended His life: some point to Tibet as the second homeland of Christ, others to Burma, and still others to Japan. There is a Japanese family that believes that her clan is descended from Christ who married a Japanese woman, and even shows someone's grave, passing it off as the tomb of Jesus. The Indian Brahmins fiercely resisted Christianity. The apostolic preaching found a basis only in South India, inhabited by the Dravidian tribes. The priests of ancient India used tactics to fight Christianity, which the elite of the Hellenistic world failed. They declared the Gospel to be an unsuccessful version of Buddhism and Brahmanism. Some of the Gospel episodes and parables have been incorporated into the biography of the Buddha and Vedic mythology as a result of complex interpretation. It is enough to look at the early and late versions of the life of the Buddha to see these insertions and interpretations, which are like patches from someone else's clothes. This method is used by their successors, the modern gurus, who are trying to prove that their teachings are elitist and esoteric Christianity. A significant role in the distortion of Christianity was played by the Gnostic and Manichaean Rudolf Steiner. For him, Jesus is the son of the marriage of Joseph and Mary, and the newborn baby is inhabited by the soul of another, previously deceased baby Jesus; Thus, two souls live in the child (recall that the word "schizophrenia" means duality, which is subjectively felt by the patient as the presence of two beings in him). Steiner's Jesus is a weak-willed, morally imperfect man. In times of threat from the pagans, he is ready to offer sacrifice to idols, that is, to renounce God, and only a deep faint saves him from apostasy. At the age of 30, Christ descends on Jesus - the solar eon, which contains 7 elohim, that is, 7 cosmic spirits. Jehovah is identified with the archangel Michael. During the burial, Jesus' body fell into a crevice in the ground, where it found a grave. There is no resurrection of Christ in the flesh. Easter is an illusion; the ethereal body of Christ is resurrected, in which He again invisibly came into the world after nineteen centuries (1914). At the opening of an anthroposophical temple in Switzerland, in which there are images of pagan gods, Steiner openly said that the mission of his life was the rehabilitation of paganism, and this ancient Gnostic heresy, or rather, a bouquet of heresies, is presented to us as true Christianity and attempts are made to convince us that it does not contradict the Gospel and the Church, but only deepens them. By the way, Steiner called his main work, for some reason little known among modern anthroposophists, "The Fifth Gospel"; Perhaps this book is deliberately hidden from a wide audience so as not to scare off proselytes ahead of time. Steiner declared Jesus himself to be the incarnations of Zarathustra and Buddha. Writers also contributed to the distortion of the image of Christ. At the head of literary profanation is Renan, who in the last century wrote a book "The Life of Jesus", similar to a romantic detective story. For this book, Renan received a pen with a golden nib as a gift from the Belgian Freemasons. On the occasion of the publication of the book written by this former student of the Jesuits, the Pope of Rome announced a three-day fast in the Catholic world, pointing to the moral decline of humanity, against which such moral dirt could appear. Renan's literary traditions were continued by Bulgakov in his novel "The Master and Margarita". There Christ is a naïve utopian, a weak-willed dreamer, who does not understand what he teaches and to whom he addresses his teaching; Bulgakov's Christ is powerless against the evil and sin of mankind. Except for pale and verbose sermons about abstract good, he can give nothing. The image of Jesus, called Yeshua by Bulgakov, was created as if in order to contrastingly emphasize another image, the image of his antipode - Woland, who is the bearer of active good. Woland is Satan not in the Christian, but in the Manichaean understanding, he is the prince of darkness, who creates good through evil. In his novel, Bulgakov tries to imperceptibly instill the idea that the Gospel is an invention of the Apostles, that is, he repeats the position of the Neoplatonist Porphyry and the eclectic Julian the Apostate, who believed that Jesus was not a bad person, but the Apostles made Him the Son of God. The apotheosis of the novel is the picture of Walpurgis Night, which in its literary skill can compete with Goethe's Walpurgis Night. There is one strange coincidence that suggests that Bulgakov's novel was written directly under the influence of demonic forces, namely, Bulgakov indicated the place of the lithostroton, which had not yet been discovered by archaeologists under the subsequent buildings of Jerusalem. Excavations in the 60s, during which a courtyard paved with stone slabs and part of the staircase of the Roman court were discovered, confirmed Bulgakov's description. Bulgakov's successor in the mainstream of literary romanticism on religious themes, but no longer mystical, but atheistic, was the writer Aitmatov. A Muslim has taken it upon himself to write about Christianity, is it because he respects it more than Islam? Not at all. If he had behaved so unceremoniously with Islam, then perhaps he would have faced the fate of Rushdie, at least a severe censure from his coreligionists; And the Christians ate the soup he had prepared, and even thanked him, without understanding what was going on. Unlike Bulgakov, Aitmatov is not a medium, but a functionary of anti-Christian forces. In the novel "The Chopping Block" he tries to show that the Orthodox Church is a long-obsolete soulless corporation that expels from itself everything honest and moral. The professor-priest and the expelled student Obadiah, representatives of what seem to be two poles in Christianity, in fact both are atheists and atheists. The professor wears the non-existent title of "coordinator" in the seminary, as if to emphasize that he is the guardian of the system, a faceless and impersonal force, and in fact he does not care about anything except the feeling of his own satiety. Obadiah is a skeptic for whom God is only a state of the soul, and objectively God does not exist (almost plagiarism of Luke's reasoning from the play "At the Bottom" by Gorky, only in an even more atheistic version). The author leads to the idea that Christ would have remained a historical nonentity, a Jewish hippie, if He had not been crucified. The glory of Christ is the glory of senseless sacrifice, of suicide on the cross, that is, the glory of Herostratus. The hero of the story, Obadiah, chooses death as a means for self-assertion: without it, he would be nobody and nothing. At present, another interpretation of Christ is being revealed - this is Christ the cosmonaut. In the English Church there is a sect ruled by Bishop Robertson, it is called "Christ the Cosmonaut". The Star of the Magi is interpreted as a spaceship, and the ascension of Christ as a return to the higher civilizations that sent Him to earth. We speak of gross distortions of the image of Christ, but any dogmatic deviation leads to a change in His image, so only in the Orthodox Church, in her liturgical existence, does the true image of Christ exist. Christ is the heart of Christianity. If we compare Christianity with other religions, we can find some similarities and analogies, but they do not have the main thing - Christ, and if a blow to the heart is made with a razor-thin stiletto blade, then even if only a few drops of blood come to the surface, a person will become a corpse. Salvation is assimilation to Christ through the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. Christ invisibly dwells in the Church, lives in her divine services, acts in her sacraments, is present in her rites, in iconography and hymns. To live in Christ means to be included in the life of the Church.

On the Denial of the Church

One of the important sections of Orthodox dogmatics and theology is the teaching on the Church.

The doctrine of the Church is the main boundary dividing the Orthodox and non-Orthodox worlds. The Church's teaching on the Church remains unclear to many Christians and therefore often raises doubts and perplexities. Some identify the Church with clergy and clergy and draw their own conclusions about the Church itself on the basis of their ethical and intellectual level (this is primitive concrete thinking); others, on the contrary, look at the idea of the Church as an abstraction, and therefore arbitrarily manipulate theses and texts, without taking into account the Church as a historical reality. (Such views are characterized by adogmatism, and more recently by existentialism.) The concept of the Church is now expanded to the limits of the cosmos (Origenism and sophiology: "The Church is a liturgical cosmos", S. Bulgakov), then it is narrowed to the limits of the community: sects and groups of believers in Christ (Protestantism), then it is applied to any religion regardless of its content, up to satanic religions (super-ecumenism and theosophy), then one future heavenly Church is recognized, the members of which can be people of various confessions and even non-believers. depending on their moral level (liberal Christianity). Here religion is reduced to the concept of morality, ethics and, losing its dogmatic content and mystical depth, is reduced to utilitarian norms of behavior. The center of such a religion is not God, but human society; The goal is not communion with God, but the benefit that the individual can bring to the collective. Such a non-religious religion can operate under the guise of non-traditional Christianity. The modern intelligentsia, being primarily a technocratic intelligentsia, devoid of the traditions and aristocratism of previous generations, is inclined to ignore or reject the Church in its significant part. For it, the Church is presented as the antipode of freedom, a system of prohibitions, within the framework of which the individual creativity of those who wish to experiment with religion, like physicists in their laboratories, cannot manifest themselves. The principle of hierarchy and subordination, which is necessary for the struggle against egoism and one's own passions, is alien to them. On the contrary, they are accustomed to looking upon the human mind as a universal instrument which can by its own power unravel all the mysteries of the existence of the physical and spiritual worlds, and they are inclined to repeat Whitman's words as soon as they come into contact with religion: "Tell me who has gone farthest so that I may go farther." If they fail to turn the Church into a testing ground for their inventions and ideas, they soon break with it and call themselves "free-thinking Christians" or "Christians for themselves." Then they began a period of god-building, and if there were accomplices, then church building. Close to them are the modernists, who do not deny the Church, but consider it an evolving organism and therefore try to adapt it to the tastes and concepts of contemporary society. In this case, it is not the world that follows the Church, but the Church follows the world.

They lack the aristocracy of spirit to appreciate the importance of continuity and tradition. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to hear the question: "I believe in God and accept the gospel. Why do we need the Church?" Any organism can exist only in its living environment, outside of it it dies. The Church is the living environment of a Christian, it is the spiritual atmosphere that he breathes. The Church is the mystical body of Christ the Savior. The earthly and heavenly churches are inseparably united with each other in the Holy Spirit. In the earthly Church, the Heavenly Church is revealed; it is really present in every service. The Church is the kingdom of God, which begins on earth and continues into eternity. The Church is always turned to eternity, she prepares man for eternity. In apocalyptic prophecies, the Church is represented in the image of a Mother giving birth to a child in agony. The Church in torment and pain gives birth to every Christian for eternal life. The ontological aspect of the Church is the Church as the realization of Divine promises, as the dynamics of spiritual life, as the field of Divine forces and energies in which the human soul is included. The Church is the unity of man's love for God and of people for each other. Here is the psychological aspect of the Church. A person has a need for communication: relatives gather together, friends come together; The former - as a sign of solidarity, the latter - due to the commonality of views and interests. A person feels spiritual help and support in this communication. With friends, grief becomes lighter and joy increases. If a person shares with friends what he has, he becomes richer, as it were, if he hides it from others for himself, he becomes poorer. With friends, his life expands, becomes more complete and capacious. And the Church is the embodiment of the highest spiritual love in its main manifestations: in prayer and the sacraments. In sincere communication with friends, a certain field of unity is formed, which continues to connect them even at a distance. In the Church, it is the field of God's grace and the unity of faith, the highest form of the realization of love in common prayer and in mystical participation in the sacraments. The Church is a circle of light, beyond which lies the world with its unrepentant sins and passions, with its egoism running away from God into the realm of chaos, into nowhere. Many are perplexed: "Why do we need joint prayer? At home, alone with yourself, it is calmer, easier and better to pray." The Church is unity in prayer. Small drops of rain are collected in one stream, under the powerful pressure of which even stone blocks cannot resist. The light of many candles merges into one radiance, illuminating the vast space of the temple. The prayer of the Church is a pillar of light directed towards heaven, the prayer of one person is only a spark that has flared up. But the prayer of the Church is greater than the prayer of all the people in the church, which is imputed to everyone as his own prayer. In the church, saints and angels pray together with people, so the fullness of the Heavenly and earthly Church participates in the divine services. This is the mystery of the Church. Spiritual life is an unceasing battle with the forces of hell, with the spirit of the world and with one's passions. In the Church, a Christian feels himself to be in an invincible army, outside the Church he alone goes out to fight the demonic forces of sin and evil. A temple is a spiritual rock whose top touches the sky. In the temple, not merging, but mutually penetrating into each other, the three spheres of the spiritual world are united, called heaven, cosmos and hell. In the temple, the space of the three worlds is as if extremely compressed to a density greater than that of a diamond. As an example, let us take the cosmogonic hypothesis, popular in our time, about the primary superdense matter, from which, according to this theory, the cosmos was formed; its volume was such that the entire metagalaxy could fit in the palm of your hand. For us, of course, this is only an image of that concentration of space and time when the entire sacred history and the entire universe (the visible and invisible worlds) resides in the temple not as in its model, but in reality. In the church, time in the cycles and rhythms of worship takes on the property of eternity, and eternity is revealed in the human heart through contact with grace. The meeting of the soul with Christ in the prayer and sacraments of the Church - this amazing experience of eternity - is revealed to man as a new life, where everything is different, unknown and unique. Many do not understand the meaning of church rites. It is a system of signs, a special symbolic language in which Divine revelation is contained and encoded, it is the mystical vision of the spiritual world by Christian ascetics and the path to this vision; what is written in words in the Bible is embodied in symbols and rituals in the temple. Not only from the mystical, but even from the utilitarian and psychological point of view, the church stands out as a place specially devoted to prayer and worship, different from worldly dwellings with their earthly life, where the things themselves bear the stamp of the anxieties and worries of their owners, where the usual environment, according to the law of associative connections, immerses the thought in the whirlwind of earthly affairs and concerns. A temple is a place where every object is a sacred symbol, reminiscent of eternity. The church is a theological school. Those who doubt the need for the Church forget that they received their education or profession not in their own room, but in schools and colleges, they received knowledge from their teachers. The basis of any teaching is continuity. Not only knowledge is needed, but also the presence of methods and traditions according to which this knowledge would be passed on to students. From the Gnostic side, the Church is a continuous stream of light of spiritual knowledge coming from Christ through the Apostles and their successors. Outside the Church, this light, passing through the prism of human perception, would be shattered and then extinguished. Who among the people could fully assimilate the Divine revelation and transmit spiritual light to descendants in all its purity? It may be objected that there is a Bible as the Word of God. But the Bible itself is not adequately understood. The Church preserves the interpretation of the Bible, which goes back to the apostolic tradition, and worship as an analogue of the Bible. Outside the Church, not only is the meaning of Holy Scripture obscured and lost, but outside the Church of the Old Testament and the New Testament there was no collection of biblical books; outside the Church, there could not be a division of books into canonical, non-canonical, apocryphal. Outside the Church, a patristic commentary on these books would not have been compiled, since there would have been no exegetical and hermeneutical traditions. Everyone would be left to understand the Bible to the best of his ability and knowledge, which is always inadequate, and also under the influence of his passions and pride, which often dominate the intellect. Such a person would remain in the circle of his own ideas without objective reference points. Outside the Church, Christianity would have turned into an amorphous, vague teaching, there would have been no dogmatics as a distinction between metaphysical truth and metaphysical falsehood. Those who do not give importance to dogmas forget that each dogma is a truth, imbued with eternal light, which brings life and light into the soul and consciousness of man, making it capable of communion with God. False dogmas are a distorted view of the Godhead, a lie against God that introduces death and decay into the soul and mind, and heresy is an injection of poison injected into the main nerve of human consciousness. Outside the Church, there would be no difference between worldview truth and falsehood, Orthodoxy and heresy. Outside the Church, there would be no symbolic language of icons, rites, sacred objects of the church, the divine service itself, uniting people in its one heart. Outside the Church, people with spiritual and mystical needs would be forced to create their own individual sign systems, which would possibly fix the images of their subconscious, giving these images a sacred meaning. Religious art outside the Church would degenerate into abstraction or into poetic illustrations, allegories of individual states; At the same time, demonic images emerging from the depths of the subconscious, from the depths of the soul, could be perceived as visions of the spiritual world. Without tradition, sacred symbols, torn from their roots, would be distorted and replaced by new ones, and since man in his sinfulness and passion is closer to the demonic world than to heaven, these signs and images would become a manifestation of demonophilia, as in modern avant-garde art. In the light field of the Logos, the people are transformed into the Church, into a spiritual body, united by love and faith, by a single goal and a community of means (sacred symbolism). The people outside the Logos turn into a crowd that lives by the concentrated passions and impulses of their dark subconscious. In the Church, man is created as a personality (spiritual and moral monad), outside the Church either an impersonal collective or individuality is declared to be the highest value. Personality is the identification and implementation of a person's target idea, something that brings people closer to each other. Individuality is those qualities of a person by which he differs from another; It is characteristic that among modern secular philosophers the concept of personality has merged with hyperbolized individuality, and non-ecclesiastical religious art is engaged in the search for opportunities to reveal and reflect individuality or replace it with abstractions. One of the means of this is hyperbolized laughter and hyperbolized horror - attributes of the demon.

On the rites of the Church

A rite is an established sign system that plays an informational and communicative role. Church rites are the Gnostic layer following the Holy Scriptures, which has similarities and differences with sacred symbolism. A rite differs from a symbol in that it is more concrete, narrower in its scope than a symbol, more subject to historical factors and diverse in its forms, that is, more conditioned. The symbol has an analogical meaning: it raises the human mind from the lower to the highest, from the known to the unknown, from the invisible to the visible. The rite includes a person in an already known given. But usually the rite is not separated from the symbol; It is based on the foundation of symbolic signs, only it takes a certain aspect of a multifaceted symbol, as if it concretizes the symbol and adapts it to the target task. A religious rite includes a person in the sphere of spiritual realities, in the field of eternal Divine energies, in the world of timeless, extraspatial dimensions. In our everyday life, we express ourselves through a system of symbols and rituals, without which man would remain a self-contained being, a thing in itself, and since man is a social being, then, by discarding and breaking images, he turns out to be a destroyer of social ethical structures. A rite, like a symbol, cannot be true or false, good or evil, reality or illusion, it is a means of expression. (Moral categories refer to the content that a symbol or rite is supposed to express, but not to the rite itself as a means of expression based on tradition, on the experience of mankind crystallized over the centuries - the experience of communication.) A vivid attempt to think outside of symbolism and rituals was made by the Cynics, who called on man to directly reveal his essence. The Cynics entered the stage of world culture as the destroyers of all intellectual and moral values in the name of the freedom of the human spirit, but instead of becoming liberators from slavery, they turned into clowns and clowns of history. Destroying social rites, they at the same time created their own rites and symbolic actions, for example, the barrel of Diogenes. By destroying images, they created their own image of a cynic. Madness strikes first of all two faculties of the human soul: creativity and self-awareness. A mentally ill person usually either loses the ability to create, or it acquires a sporadic character; The same happens with self-knowledge as an assessment of one's internal state. A mentally ill person is mainly an egoist who has lost sympathy for the world around him. Creativity and self-knowledge are based on symbolism. We are aware of ourselves as a personality only from the time when our psyche began to be organized and included in the sign system of the word (human speech). The Cynics identified ritual with evil, but as a philosophical system, Cynicism turned out to be an empty flower - except for witticisms with a wide range, from funny aphorisms to vulgarities, it could not give anything. He was a parasite that fed on the blood of the victim he ridiculed, but he himself was sterile. Diogenes committed suicide, having become convinced during a fever that no amount of sarcastic ridicule of the disease could destroy the heat in his own body and the pain in his bones; another of his disciples followed his example when he realized that he could not conquer time and old age. Diogenes was called the mad Socrates. Cynicism was like hydrochloric acid, which, falling into the cracks of society, corroded them. But denial and caustic irony could not give an answer: who is man and why did he come into this world; On the contrary, the Cynics denied spiritual substance and spiritual values, they dealt with empirical man. The idea of the rebirth of man seemed to them senseless and illusory; They did not want rebirth but liberation, which in its logical end led to the identification of man with his physiological functions. The first was liberation from one's own soul, the second liberation was liberation from society. By destroying rites and symbols, the Cynics severed the connection with the past, the future, and the environment in which they existed; Ethical and philosophical anti-symbolism inevitably led them to extreme individualism and isolationism. One of the varieties of modern cynicism is existentialism, which considers man as an empirical given, while including in empiricism the entire mental content of the human individual. The philosophy of existentialism, this decadent cynicism, looks at traditions, rituals and symbolism as slavery of the spirit. Sartre is the Diogenes of the XX century, only less talented and courageous than the "dog of Sinope". Art is the intimate side of philosophy. The art of the Cynics was a caricature; The art of the existentialists resulted in madness and delirium, what is commonly called absurdity. By destroying the rite and the symbol, they destroy the logos of the human soul; Then, from the black abysses of individuality, combined with the cosmic and spiritual abysses, there burst forth the phantoms of death and destruction, like the formless dreams of an opiophage. The destruction of ritualism as a sign system of religion leads to two opposite poles; or to the rationalization of religion, to the replacement of liturgical depths by a shallow verbal interpretation, or to ecstatic mysticism, ancient Dionysism. Modern so-called avant-garde art, which denies the principles of harmony (as the Cynics denied symbolism), is painted in the black colors of demonic mysticism, so the state of the crowd after rock music concerts often resembles a bacchanalia. Church rites are not something external and mechanical in relation to the human soul, they are channels through which the grace of God is communicated to the human soul, they are the core of the divine service, based on which people present in the church can spiritually draw closer to the understanding of the one living mystical body. The church rite has two directions: vertical and horizontal; vertical - as communion with God, the direction of the soul from the material world to the spiritual, and horizontal - as the unification of people standing in the temple in one faith, in one mystical experience, in one prayer stream. The destruction of ritual is the destruction of spiritual communication, it is the relegation of religion to the plane of philosophical abstractions or to the dark realm of Dionysian mysticism, chaos, to the realm of the subconscious and instincts, to the realm of ghosts and dreams. In this demonic state, the ancient legend of how the Bacchantes kill Orpheus is repeated; Frenzied feelings kill the spirit. The church rite is a reality of another dimension than the word, therefore it cannot be revealed and replaced by the word, just as a ray of living light, which carries warmth and life, cannot be replaced by a verbal theory about the nature of light. A church rite can be understood only in church, in direct experience, so in liturgics the explanation of rites and the commentaries of the liturgy occupy a comparatively small place: religious realities are understood to the extent that they are perceived. The rite is understood as it is accepted, that is, through the change and rebirth of the human soul itself. The liturgy cannot be explained. It is a mystery, it can only be explained, it can be pointed out to certain target ideas and analogies, but it will forever remain a mystery that the human heart must reverently experience. Therefore, the rite simultaneously hides and reveals; it hides the inner life of the Church from outside, curious and insolent eyes - it hides it as with a thick veil - and at the same time it opens the veil to the believing soul in the "Holy of Holies" - but gradually, to the extent of its inner preparation, so that too bright a light does not blind it. For the rationalist sects, which destroyed the symbolism of worship, religion froze at the level of catechetism; For ecstatic sects, it has turned into a return to ancient chaos, into a game with their subconscious and the world of fallen spirits. The Cynics hated the Christian teaching especially maliciously. If the Stoics treated Christianity with cold contempt, considering it the property of one ignorant crowd, and the Pythagoreans and Platonists, who possessed greater insight, as their main intellectual opponent, then the Cynics hated Christianity as their fierce enemy and during the period of persecution of the Church often acted as provocateurs and informers (the life of Justin the Philosopher), and the Roman emperors themselves often resorted to the services of the Cynics in the struggle against Christianity. But the syncretic philosophy of paganism proved powerless against the heavenly light of the Gospel. The huge state machine of the empire could not break the spirit of Christian communities. Then the Cynics and actors entered the arena with their weapons: ridicule, lies, slander - the demon took the guise of a monkey imitating God. The basis of Christianity is love and reverence for the sacred, the basis of cynicism is pride and contempt for everything in the name of oneself. Sectarians often call temple worship and the performance of sacraments witchcraft, and church rituals magical rites, so let us dwell on the fundamental difference between mysticism and magic. The basis of Christian mysticism is love for God; Christian rites and sacraments are a means of communion with God. The basis of magic is pride, the desire to subjugate the world around you through the influence of occult forces. For mysticism, God is the highest value, the ultimate goal and the main content of existence. For magic, the highest value is fallen man with his unbridled passions, which he strives to realize by any means. Christianity demands that man become like God. The mystic's desire is to be obedient to God; the manifestation of this feeling is the prayer: "Thy will be done!" Practicing magic is aggression towards the world, the desire to subjugate the world by means of certain magical formulas and actions. The goal of magic is always utilitarian and does not go beyond the limits of earthly life. The goal of mysticism lies beyond the boundaries of earthly existence, it is inclusion in eternity. The magician uses the powers of the demonic world, but at the same time he is afraid of it. The appearance of demons causes a feeling of horror in the magician. The mystic strives to meet Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit in his heart, and the state of communion with God is for him the most joyful and radiant event, which is forever imprinted in his memory. The appearance of spirits in magical rites occurs in visual or auditory forms. The mystic sees in man the image and likeness of God; Forgiveness of offenses becomes a need of the spirit for him. Magic looks at a person as a tool; The concept of personality does not exist for it. Forgiveness of offenses and pity in magical rituals are considered cowardice. The mystic says, "I want to die to myself, that I may live for You." The magician says: "I want to live only for myself." Mysticism and magic are opposite to each other not only in their content, but even in their sign systems, but it is better to keep silent about magical rites. Tertullian said that this is a parody of the liturgy, a black mass that is celebrated in hell to Satan, that is, a gloomy caricature of the sacred. In many witchcraft rites, ritual desecration of the shrine is used. Whoever claims the similarity of church rituals and magic is either a completely ignorant person or a demon-possessed person. Mysticism is inseparable from the moral rebirth of the human personality. The higher a person's morality and the closer it is to the Gospel commandments, the more the circle of man's spiritual knowledge expands. Spiritual wisdom has its source not in external knowledge, but in the inner state, of which it is said: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." Magic does not require morality from a person, but only concentration of attention. Magic, in its creeping unitarism, unscrupulousness in means and orientation towards occult, cosmic and psychic forces, aims for man to assert himself in this world, develops pride and egocentrism in him, which in turn are the substrate of all passions and psychic complexes. The main means of mysticism are prayer, gratitude to God, reverent conversation with Him, confession of sins, request, glorification of God. In magical rites there is no gratitude, no confession, no request as a plea for help, no reverent conversation of the soul with God; In magic, there is another form of communication: a command, a contract, an agreement, an order. The magician addresses the spiritual world in the tone of imperative. The mystic experiences grace as a renewal of the soul, as peace and eternity. A magician, receiving its black energy in communication with the demonic world, experiences it as a surge from the outside of someone else's force, somewhat reminiscent of the sensation of electricity. His condition is the heaviness of the soul, confusion of the heart, ruthlessness even to the closest people, rivalry and at the same time a secret desire for death. The mystic's heart is open to God, the magician's heart is closed to everyone. God is alien to him, from indifference to hatred; He commands the demons as a trainer commands bound beasts, but always with the secret fear that these fetters may be broken and the beast will kill him. Christian mysticism is man's appeal to God as a Person. A person, not an impersonal force, can be the object of love. In magic, demonology, personal communication is absent; Magic spells are addressed to the demonic world, to the world that is destructive, and therefore impersonal. Demons possess individuality according to the former angelic hierarchy as a level of strength and capabilities, moreover, this hierarchy is overturned like a pyramid, and whoever stood at the head fell below all. But demons are devoid of personal qualities, morality and self-knowledge; their self-knowledge degenerated into knowledge of the material world and evil. They are conditioned by their hatred of God and people to the point of complete loss of free will as a choice between good and evil, therefore, they are impersonal individuals. Sometimes spells are addressed to the personified (personified) forces of nature, here - the replacement of God with the cosmos. It is characteristic that in the esotericism of paganism the main role was played by chthonic (earthly) and underground deities (Pan, Dionysius, Demeter, etc.), magic is addressed not to heaven, but to earth and hell. The magician, like a hypnotist, through a conspiracy forces force the dark forces to come out of their gloomy dungeon and serve him. The center of mystical experiences is the human heart. Under the influence of grace, it becomes soft, like wax. Magic has human reason as its tool; In magical rites, the heart seems to die, it shrinks and becomes hard as a stone. Mysticism has its rituals, but for it the main thing is not the form, but the content, the feeling of love and unity with God. Magic puts form over content; It strives for an outwardly accurate form of magical rituals, their content is reduced to mysterious signs and names that become the password for the hellish world. In magical rituals, two types of sorcery can be distinguished: 1) shamanism, when the magician artificially brings himself to ecstasy and his soul, separating from the body, descends for a while into the world of hell; 2) summoning spirits from the underworld to oneself by means of spells and magical rites. For a Christian mystic, asceticism is necessary, including asceticism in the world, life according to the commandments, participation in the sacraments of the Church. This is not required for magic, there is only one condition-consequence: that a person should make his soul a hostage of the hellish world. Communication is assimilation. To become like the light world requires great effort and struggle with oneself, and the dark world, seething with anger and passions, is close to the state of fallen man, so nothing is needed to communicate with the demon except turning to him. Often a person looks at conspiracies and fortune-telling as an innocent game; In this case, he is like a child who makes a fire in his own house, not knowing and not understanding what will happen next. Any contact with the demonic world causes deep psychic traumas. Any recourse to any kind of magic, even in the form of a joke, must be confessed as a grave sin. Some say that with the help of magic it is possible to do good: to cure a disease, to warn of danger, and so on, but we must not forget that lies use good and truth as bait in order to more easily and completely possess their victim. Metaphysical evil cannot do true good.

***

Our opponents often ask: "Why do we need symbolism and rituals at all, isn't it better to pray to God in simplicity of soul?" "Worship should not be symbolic, but real," they say. However, there is a contradiction here. The word itself is already a conventional sign, it is not a reality in the sense of identity with the denoted object or event, but a conventional, sign, abstracted reflection of reality in a system of sounds and graphics, therefore, encoding the content in the form of a word, we already resort to an abstract system of modeling reality, which is one of the characteristic differences between man and other creatures inhabiting the earth. Without words, our thought cannot rise above the level of earthly material objectivity and gain some knowledge of the spiritual world, which is beyond the limits of our sensory perception. We perceive the world not adequately, but through its energies, which are transformed in our consciousness into models of reality. For example, colors and sounds are transformations of waves that are refracted through our senses, so under the cover of materiality we do not see the world as it is, in the very essences of objects, but only properties, actions and energies that depend on the possibility of the mechanism of our perception. In the future life, we will see the world in other dimensions. Our view of the world is also conditional and modeled. Cognition is the revelation of the invisible; eternal life will be eternal knowledge, the revelation of the eternally new; In this revelation, the previous will relate to the subsequent as a likeness to reality, and this reality will turn out to be only a likeness in the transition to another state at a new level of communion with God. Therefore, it is impossible to talk about reality as adequacy outside of symbolism. The Apostle Paul writes that here we see indistinct reflections, as in a dim mirror, and there we see with our own eyes. Plato and other philosophers compared our sensory vision of the world to shadow reflections of objects. To deviate a little, we will say that mathematics, the "soul" of the other sciences, is entirely based on conventionality and abstraction; All digits, numbers and formulas are symbolic signs. Any science resorts to modeling and schematization. Letters, notes, astronomical tables and geographical maps are all conventional signs that expand the possibilities and boundaries of human knowledge. The temple is a model of the universe and a symbol of the heavenly Church, which fills this symbol with real content. The cycle of the annual liturgics recorded in the liturgical books can be conventionally compared to a map of heaven, only it is the spiritual heaven through which the path of the human soul passes. Without the symbol and rites, common prayer and common worship are impossible, where order and rhythm are necessary. Therefore, those who deny church rites in the name of immediate reality (which for us is a goal, not a given) are actually forced to create their own rites, for example, the rite of breaking bread among Baptists, collections of chants, and so on. It can be seen that each community and sect has created its own ritual, which eventually turns into a tradition. The revolution seeks to destroy rituals so that people forget their past, but then it is forced to hastily create its own new artificial rites. In most cases, they turn out to be stillborn and are gradually replaced by the resumption or imitation of previous rites. The hippie movement as a revolution against social ethics, the desire for freedom from morality also begins with the rejection of the norms of behavior as secular rituals, and ends with the creation of its own system of values - anti-ethics, for the maintenance of which it is necessary to have its own sign system. A church rite is a traditional sacred symbol through which a person has the opportunity to enter into communication with the symbolized, to perceive his energies, to be included in the world of spiritual realities. Therefore, modernism is the enemy of Orthodoxy. Not knowing the depth of church symbolism, he strives to bring the rites closer to the state of mind of a person, his aesthetic needs, the intellectual level of perception, and so on, that is, the symbol from a means of spiritual communication (which requires internal preparation and purification of the person himself) turns into a way of satisfying spiritual needs. In fact, the earthing of the Church itself is taking place here. Any composing of sacred symbols is like the creation of a new reformed Church, and from the Orthodox point of view it is a ritual heresy. A rite and a symbol have neither an objective nor a mimetic property with the semantic gnosis contained in them, with the secret writing of spiritual realities or the events of sacred history. Here the connection is in terms of ideas and energies, so the liturgy is as much a revelation as the Holy Scriptures. The conservatism of Orthodoxy is the preservation of secrecy. A ritual invented by man quickly exhausts itself, it can be effective, but remains devoid of depth, its effect is the novelty of spiritual sensations, that is, that which contradicts spiritual contemplation, and such a principle of modernization requires a constant change of rituals and attributes, like boring songs or boring clothes, so reformism is doomed to constant composing. At the same time, the rite is transferred from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the soul, takes on aesthetic and entertaining functions that are not characteristic of it, does not help, but opposes prayer or, which is no less dangerous, distorts the inner character of the prayer, making it sentimental, enthusiastic, and often simply familiar. Therefore, Orthodoxy represents not only the purity of dogmatics, but also the purity of worship, the traditionalism of rituals. The spiritual and material worlds have differences and similarities between each other as the creation of a single Creator, like two paintings painted by an artist: one with color paints, the other with fine strokes of ink, where the contours of objects are barely outlined. If the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds consisted only in similarity and the degree of their perfection, then the depiction of the spiritual world would have a figurative and pictorial character; If the relations between them consisted only in dissimilarities and negations, then the depiction of the spiritual world would have a completely conditional, arbitrary, and abstract character, like a kind of contractual sign. But since the relationship between the two worlds has the character of similarity and difference, the symbol and the rite contain elements of one and the other, just as a hieroglyph contains an abstract allusion to a picture, having the character of associations rather than similarities. Let us consider the temple as a sacred symbol. A temple is a house, in the highest sense of the word, the abode of the soul. The temple is an image of the spiritual aeon, the mystical path of the soul to God, eternity, where the events of the past and future pass into the present; A physical place where the spiritual world is present, a space that encompasses infinity, a place where the earth is connected to heaven. Each temple is not a spatial, but an energy center of the universe, from where waves emanate like radii, but there is no circle as such. At the same time, the temple is a coded model of the universe: its dome is a semblance of the firmament, the wall is a horizon, the altar rises above the common hall of the temple - the land inhabited by people, rising from the depths of the sea. This, so to speak, is the lower aspect of the symbol, and the higher is the heavenly Church, the spiritual world, where the upward aspiration signifies the eternal forward movement of the soul towards God. The circumference of the dome is eternity, the cross at the base of the temple is love as the content of eternal life. At the same time, the church is not a static, but a dynamic symbol: it not only points to the future transfiguration of the world into the universal Church, but lays the foundation for this transformation. The dome of the temple, narrowing to a point, means the growth of the cosmos into the spiritual eon, and the rounded dome in the form of a flame means fire that will transform the world, separate good from evil, darkness from light, and spiritualize materiality itself. Thus, the symbol is the key to the truth, and the rite is the channel of grace, which the Lord called living water. Without the symbol, human thought about the spiritual world would either hang in emptiness or would be locked in the circle of fantasy, that is, in the realm of human ideas based on the metaphysical lie of fallen spirits.

About Baptism

One of the main fundamental differences between the Orthodox and the Baptists is the question of infant baptism.

Are there analogies to baptism in the Old Testament, and if so, what is the Old Testament's attitude toward children's participation in them? Can a child be deprived of the fruits of baptism without harming himself? The basis of Christian soteriology (the doctrine of salvation) is the following three universal facts: the fall of Adam as the source and potential bearer of all mankind was a stigma of rejection and curse on his descendants, who lived, live and will live on earth until the end of its existence; The Son of God, having become the Son of man, took upon Himself the curse and sins of the whole world. His crucifixion was a sacrifice and a sacred act; in the sacrament of baptism, the Sacrifice of Golgotha is assimilated to each person as a sacrifice offered personally for him. How does sin spread to subsequent generations? The creation of the human soul is an act of the creative power of the Godhead, but at the same time it is accomplished with the participation of the souls of the parents. Therefore, a person is a unique and inimitable phenomenon, and not a copy of his parents, and at the same time he is genetically connected with them, as evidenced not only by bodily, but also by spiritual similarity. In this participation of the souls of the parents, the transmission of original sin takes place, just as muddy waters flow from a polluted spring. How is hereditary damage transmitted? Through the material substrate or in other ways unknown to us? We don't know - it's a mystery. But what is important for us is the fact that sin in its boundless universality has swallowed up all of humanity, like the waters of the Flood, and therefore the seal of sin already lies on the unborn child. With age, the will of the child is included in sin, and then it becomes an arbitrary, personal sin. Therefore, the chastity of a child is a very conditional expression. This is rather a non-manifestation of his depravity at the level of consciousness and will. Sin is a break between God and man, and only the grace of God can restore the lost bond and union. Is it possible for grace to work on a child? The Holy Scriptures answer this Question in the affirmative. The prophet Jeremiah was sanctified by grace even before his birth. The Prophet and Forerunner John rejoiced in the womb of the righteous Elizabeth, when she met the Virgin Mary. This means that babies are subject to the action of grace. To deprive a child of baptism means to forcibly remove him from the influence of grace, that is, to hinder the purpose and purpose of his life. An infant who has not yet learned to pronounce a human word can in no way be compared to an animal. The most intensive mental life takes place at an early age, when the child receives and processes the largest amount of information. With age, the volume of this information decreases sharply, and its assimilation becomes more superficial, so psychologists look for the roots of character, habits and diseases in the impressions of early childhood. The child reacts emotionally sensitively to the environment around him, only he relies not on the word, but on a more direct perception of the world, so our childhood memories, which pass in terms of reflections, usually begin with the period when we have mastered coherent speech. Infancy is the most important period for the formation of the human psyche. A child's vision of the world is a mystery to us, but direct perception in experience and information that lies deeper than words give him the opportunity to experience the phenomena of the spiritual world, perhaps with greater intensity than that of an adult. With age, the soul darkens and coarses from the passions and sins of will that have been revealed in it. The Holy Scriptures and the experience of life speak about the child's reaction to the sacred. Many mothers notice the special state of the child on the day of communion, as if illuminated by inner light and peace. Apparently, the world of light and dark forces is open to a child more than to an adult. A child, like an adult, bears within himself the image and likeness of God, therefore, he needs a spiritual life, and parents should try not to stifle this life, but to awaken this life through church sacraments and prayers, as well as home prayers in the presence of the child.

An animal has an emotional world, perhaps no less dynamic than the emotional world of a person. In animals, there exists in primitive forms what can be called reason, that is, the ability to find a connection between causes and remote effects and to make choices in changing situations. Animals have instincts more subtle than man, but no religious feeling has ever been found in animals. Here is the fundamental difference between a person and those who are used to calling him "lesser brothers". But religious feelings, like other faculties of the human soul, can be developed and suppressed. The religious life of man is a synergism of two wills: the Divine and the human, two actions - the grace that performs and the response of the person who receives grace. The will has not only an aspect of choice; A more important property of the will is concentration and attention, so in spiritual writers will and attention are often synonymous. The child, even in the mother's womb, perceives the signals coming to him, that is, listens to them; This is already an important action. However, the choice is largely determined by parents and the environment. Psychologists have noted an interesting fact: learning before birth. It turns out that a child is drawn to his mother because he recognizes her voice. This learning takes place in a plan that is not yet accessible to our analysis. This includes the state of the mother's soul, what can be called spiritual hygiene. The spiritual experience of the people prescribed that the mother read long prayers during pregnancy and take communion often. Naturally, the mother reads prayers and takes communion without asking the child whether he wants to listen to prayers or participate in the church sacraments through the mother's state. Can the mother's reading of prayers be considered as a forced participation of the infant in this? It has also been noticed that the sins and crimes committed by the mother during pregnancy are heavy impressions on the child's soul and subsequently predispose him to the same sins. A child must be surrounded by a certain spiritual atmosphere, which is necessary for him, like light to a plant. There are no neutral states in the spiritual world. When the field of light forces disappears, the vacuum is filled with dark satanic energies; Where there is no good, there evil arises. All Christian denominations, as well as sects that deny the baptism of infants, agree that religious feeling is innate in man, as an instinct of eternity, it can be distorted and suppressed, but it is impossible to completely destroy it. It is a given of a person that needs to be developed. Children stand closer to the spiritual world. Observing young children, psychologists testify that they see things in physical space that we do not see. Often the child's gaze fixes the place that seems empty to us, he emotionally reacts with facial expressions or crying to the presence of some spiritual beings, and the child's crying is a means of self-manifestation, a signal that can reflect a whole range of his emotions that are inaccessible to our decipherment. Is the baptism of an infant a violation of his free will? If free will is seen as a possibility and a right of choice, then there is a choice between spiritual life and spiritual death. In this choice, parents are not outsiders, but people united with the child by love and responsible for him. What does a child gain at baptism? He becomes a member of the Church, receives grace as an indestructible seal in his heart. His life passes under the cover of a bright spirit, which is called a guardian angel; thus baptism is the beginning of life in Christ. The sooner grace begins to act on the child's soul, the less he is subject to the cosmic impulses of evil and sin, the more correctly his character will be formed, the deeper and more effective will be his communion with God. What does a child lose when he is baptized? We will be answered: he was not asked, that is, he was deprived of the opportunity to choose. But the main question is whether the choice was made correctly or not. If Christianity is true, then the organic inclusion of a child in the Church as in the field of truth is the greatest good that parents can do for him. But even if Christianity were not the truth, the child would lose nothing; baptism would be an empty rite. We may be answered: but man as a free being has the right to make a mistake of choice. There is no right to error, as well as to sin; there is a possibility of error. But let's assume this too. In such a case, a person who prefers another religion to Christianity will convert to it without taking into account baptism, since by rejecting Christianity, he rejects both the power of baptism and the responsibility for it; Therefore, here Christianity is not some kind of physical barrier or deprivation of a person's right to spiritual self-determination [1]. Baptists say that a person who has received grace prematurely may not understand this gift, sin against grace and lose it. First, without grace, the same person would have sinned even more; Secondly, after baptism, a person who has experienced the action of grace does not become sinless in the sense that no one retains the fullness of grace within himself. Every day of a Christian is darkened by sin, and the whole life of a zealous Christian is a hard, painful struggle with sin and evil in his soul. Here victories alternate with defeats, which is why the wise Solomon writes: "Seven times the righteous shall fall, and shall rise" (Prov. 24:16). The light of grace reveals in man the abyss of his sin. On the contrary, it is not uncommon for vicious, depraved people to consider themselves righteous and sinless. The question of baptism is connected with the different views of Orthodox and Protestants on the consequence of original sin and the action of grace on man. The Orthodox believe that original sin brought a deep disorder into the psychophysical organism of man at all its levels, but did not destroy the image and likeness of God in man as a potential for good and a volitional self-governing monad. Protestantism is inclined to think that original sin destroyed the good in man, and man himself is capable only of sin and evil. In Orthodox soteriology, a person is an active participant in his salvation, a co-worker with God in the field of his soul. Affirming that salvation is accomplished through the action of grace, Orthodoxy emphasizes the need for the human person himself to cooperate with it. These interactions of the soul with the grace of God and, on the other hand, with the impulses of satanic forces penetrating into the soul from without, and with the passions nestling in the soul itself, create a complex picture of the spiritual states of man. The assimilation of grace, this inner path to God, is an unceasing spiritual struggle that ends only with the death of a person. Protestantism adheres to the idea of the passivity of the human principle before the action of grace, therefore it considers the reception of the Holy Spirit not as a process, but as an act that is supported by a person's faith, confidence in his salvation; A person who has been saved in baptism expresses his gratitude through good works. In Protestantism there is no deep analysis of the inner life of man. The strategy of combating demonic temptations and passions, the teaching of prayer and so on, carefully developed in Orthodox asceticism, are alien to Protestantism. Protestantism developed a vigorous missionary activity, developed methods of conversations and sermons, discussions and polemics with the involvement of a vast arsenal of scientific discoveries and hypotheses, and widely used the method of psychological influence. He practices charity, contributed to the translation of the Holy Scriptures into the languages of various peoples and tribes, but froze on catechesis. If spiritual birth is an act of inspiration and grace, and a person is already saved, if only he has confidence in his salvation, then liturgics and asceticism become of little value. Protestantism has lost its mystical depth and has made the Church an assembly, an expression of human solidarity. The faith of a Baptist is a certainty of one's salvation, that is, a subjective process. For this reason, the Baptists have entered into an alliance with the Evangelicals and Pentecostals, who deny the necessity of baptism, as well as with the Mennonites, who, like the Calvinists, teach of divine predestination, which has divided the world into two parts: the saved and the lost, outside the life and will of the people themselves. Sectarians ignore the long struggle between grace and sin in the human heart, and consider salvation to be an instantaneous act of transfiguration of the soul by grace. They reduce faith from the level of spiritual intuitions and penetrations into the world of eternal essences to the subjective experience of joy at one's chosenness. For them, faith is the conviction of their salvation. Baptists do not understand why it is necessary to baptize an infant, in what inner torments the soul is born for Christ, until, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "Christ is formed in the soul" (Gal. 4:19). Family life and raising a child is a complex process. In the family, multifaceted relationships between spouses and children are realized, but the main idea of the Christian family is the union in Christ, as the Apostle Paul says, "the house church" (Romans 16:4). For a Christian, the religious aspect of the family is of primary importance. The basis of the family is a triangle: husband, wife and child. Other terms may be included here, but the main triangle remains. Children before baptism are members of the family in the biological, psychological and legal senses, and in the religious aspect they fall out of the concept of members of the house church; Consequently, the spiritual unity of the family has not yet been realized, and the main idea of unity in the mystical life of grace is only assumed, but actually absent. A family without children has always been regarded as defective; there was only one exception: when the spouses voluntarily renounced married life and devoted themselves to God, but then a different form and structure of relationships was formed, which did not coincide with the concept of family. When the rights of parents to baptize their child are restricted, the religious aspect of the family is destroyed, the child is reduced to the level of a catechumen, who is only a disciple, but not a member of the Church. We are talking about the right to baptize children because, in the words of an ancient apologist, "the soul is Christian by nature." If there were a choice between religions as a choice between mystical paths and paths to God, then it would be understandable that a person can choose a path that corresponds to his vocation and individuality. But Christianity has no alternative to replace it. There are two paths before man: to life and to death, to God and to the devil. Outside of baptism, a person is under the seal of original sin, in the power of eternal death. Parents don't know if their children will be saved, but they hope. Faith, hope and love of parents, wishing the child good as yourself, and his participation in your good grace - these are the moral foundations of baptism. A child may not justify baptism, but he who was baptized in old age may also not justify it. Pride opposes faith, and depraved will opposes commandments. When a mother gives birth to a child physically, she also does not know what will come out of him and whether he will justify the name of a person in his life, but she hopes that her child will be her consolation and happiness, so even bodily birth is combined with faith, hope and love. The Lord, after being baptized by John, withdrew into the wilderness, where He was tempted by demons. A Christian faces temptations and struggles. After baptism, rest is only a brief consolation, as if rest, and true rest is in grace, in the state of the future life, in the mystery of eternity, peace that is won in a fierce struggle. The Old Testament contains not only the prophecy of the Messiah, but also the prototypes of the New Testament. The sacrament of baptism is the reunion of a person with the fullness of the Church through the sacrifice of Christ in the Holy Spirit. The first fruit of baptism is the forgiveness of original sin, through which the demon's power over man was realized. The prototype of this sacrament in the Old Testament was the rite of circumcision, which became obligatory from the time of Abraham, but existed even before Abraham among many peoples of the world. The first fruit of this rite was the inclusion of the child in the Old Testament Church. He became a member of the religious community. The rite was performed on the eighth day. Eight is a sign of eternity. The rite indicated the destiny of a person to eternal life. During the ceremony, the baby was given a name, a sign of salvation. The metaphor of a name recorded in the book of life is often found in the Bible. A name is an attribute of a person. Angels and people have names. Animals do not have a name, but have a nickname as a sound signal. The name is the dignity of a person, the name carries the idea of the possibility of belonging to the heavenly Church. Circumcision of the foreskin had two meanings: the first was moral, the struggle with the passions. Here sexual passion is taken as a concentrate of all passions, which must be curbed by the power of mind and will. This indicates the future cleansing of the soul from original sin, which a person receives in baptism. The second is the mystical aspect, the dedication of the offspring to God, since the Descendant of Adam must, according to the divine promise, "erase the head of the serpent"; in other words, the rite supported the belief in the birth of the Messiah. Baptism is the fulfillment of a promise and the remembrance of the death and resurrection of the Savior. The rite of circumcision is combined with the shedding of the blood of a child, which indicates an expiatory sacrifice. The Bible contains a categorical command to Abraham to circumcise his family, household members, and slaves. This commandment is given again to Moses, it applies to strangers living among the Israelites and forming one religious community with them. A type cannot contain a false idea; the circumcision of infants in the Old Testament testifies to the need for the infant to join the Church (Old Testament), which in New Testament times is accomplished through the sacrament of baptism. All the objections of the Baptists to infant baptism can be applied to the rite of infant circumcision with the same reason. The divine command confirmed the necessity of this rite; therefore, the revelation and fulfillment of its symbols and prophecies in the New Testament, that is, the sacrament of baptism, is even more necessary. If the Baptists say that the time of the Old Testament has passed, then we agree with this, but precisely because the Old Testament was revealed, fulfilled, fulfilled in the New Testament, as a grain dying in the ground, continues to live and unfold in an ear of wheat. In the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Colossians, the connection between the rite of circumcision and baptism as a type and its fulfillment is clearly indicated. Circumcised by circumcision not made with hands, by putting off the sinful body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ; being buried with Him in baptism (Col. 2:11-12). Without baptism there can be no salvation, because only in the sacrament of baptism does the Sacrifice of Golgotha become a sacrifice in relation to the person being baptized, as if offered personally for him. Before the coming of Christ to earth, the souls of the dead descended into hell, including the souls of infants. If infants could be saved by their personal innocence alone, by not committing conscious sins at the level of the reflexive solitude of their actions, then even in Old Testament times the souls of infants would not have descended into hell, waiting for the time of redemption and salvation. Who will be born clean from the unclean? Not one (Job 14:4). In the Epistles, and especially in the Acts of the Holy Apostles, it is told about the baptism of entire families. After the preaching of the Apostles in Samaria, the villages, that is, all their inhabitants, were baptized. In the Acts of the Apostles it is indicated that the house of the jailer and the house of the ruler of the synagogue Crispus (Acts 16:33; 18:8), the house of Stephen (1 Corinthians 1:16) were baptized. The house means all members of the family, relatives, as well as servants and slaves, if they agree to stay with the master until death in the years of jubilee. The objection that there were no children in these families is unconvincing, it does not stand up to criticism. Crispus, who was baptized with his house, was the ruler of the synagogue. According to the laws of the Talmud, a person who does not have children has no right to be either a rabbi or a ruler of the synagogue, since this was perceived as a sign of punishment and rejection. The large number of children and descendants was considered a reward for righteousness, so the childlessness of a Jew or his adult children blocked his way to any office in the synagogue. In the Book of Genesis (17:11) circumcision is called the sign of the covenant, the sign of union (baptism is the entry into the New Testament, the fulfillment of the union). This rite disappeared in the New Testament Church not because it was recognized as erroneous, but because it was carried out with the coming of the Messiah. Uncut... male... on the eighth day he will be destroyed... for he has broken the covenant (Gen. 17:14). This execution of covenant breakers is a type of eternal death for those who have not been baptized. The second prototype of the sacrament of baptism in the Old Testament is Noah's ark (1 Pet. 3:18-21). At the same time, it is an image of the Church, which a person enters through baptism. In the waves of the Flood, all mankind perished, except for those who entered the ark, including children and infants. Sin was destroyed together with sinners, since at that time there was still no Church of Christ and no regenerating action that could heal the soul of man, put a separation between man and sin, give man strength to resist the flood of sin, evil and depravity that covered the earth before the flood. Another Old Testament prototype of baptism is the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea. Everyone went through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea (1 Cor. 10:1-2). The cloud is a symbol of grace, the sea is the baptismal fonts. Moses himself is a type of Christ in the sense of prophetic ministry. Through Moses the Old Testament was given, through Christ the New Testament. The Israelites came out of Egypt with their families, they walked along the bottom of the parted sea, holding their children and babies in their arms, therefore, babies participated in events that have a preformative meaning. If infants are not capable of conscious faith at the level of judgment, then they are not devoid of another aspect - faith at the level of intuitions and mystical experiences. The Lord was surrounded by children; Christ's disciples, apparently believing that their children were incapable of understanding the Gospel, did not allow them to come to Christ, but the Lord said: "Forbid them not to come to Me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven" (Matt. 19:14). It is unlikely that these words can be understood only in the literal sense. The soul comes to Christ through the action of grace. The children felt grace, so they hurried to Christ, met and surrounded Him, while their fathers, who had been taught the letter of the law, showed great coldness. This was especially evident during the Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem, called Palm Sunday. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings Thou hast ordained praise (Matt. 21:16; cf. Psalm 8:3). The hearts of the children turned out to be more receptive to the Light of the Gospel than the sophisticated minds of the Jewish scribes. In the Gospel of Mark it is written that the Lord blessed the children and laid His hands on them. A blessing is a sacred action, which means that the children were able and ready to receive the grace of God. One of the important reasons for the baptism of infants at a very early age is the uncertainty of the length of human life. The Apostle Paul says that the day of salvation is today, and tomorrow is unknown to us. Death visits not only the very old men who stand on the edge of the grave, but kills the children, just as the farmer's sickle cuts off the flowers that have not yet blossomed along with the yellowed grass. She snatches babies from their mothers' arms. Inscriptions on tombstones tell how many children's souls went to the unknown world even before they began to pronounce their first words. We do not own time, but time owns us. The future is unknown and impenetrable to man, like a dark abyss. Death is the separation of soul and body. After death, the baptism of the soul is impossible. The soul goes into eternity with the stigma of original sin, not as a volitional participant in the crime, but as a potential bearer of evil, it leaves, not regenerated by grace, without receiving the baptism of water and the Spirit, without which, according to the word of the Savior, no one can receive the Kingdom of Heaven (Christ's conversation with Nicodemus). It is necessary to bring the child into the field of grace as early as possible. Before baptism, the grace of God acts from the outside, after baptism it dwells in the heart of a person. The ancient sages already knew that a child should be brought up from birth. One day, the mother brought the child to Socrates with a request to teach him how to raise him. Socrates asked, "How old is he?" and his mother answered, "Two years." Socrates said: "It is too late, now it is necessary to re-educate."In the baptism of a child, we strive for grace from a very early age, acting in him, invisibly educating and teaching him. In modern church practice, there are appeals to the clergy with a request to "baptize" from those who fall into one or another form of Satanism. At the same time, the petitioners claim that baptism interferes with their occult activities. -Ed. ^

On the veneration of saints