This is Herod's leaven, a kind of heart defect. In the realm of the mind, in the realm of thought, there is often another vice that makes a person unfit for the Kingdom of God, a vice that the Lord calls the "Sadducean leaven."

The exact origin of the word "Sadducees" has not been established. It comes either from the name of the high priest Zadok, or from the Hebrew word "uedakah", which means "just". This name seems to have signified, first of all, in the time of John Hyrco, a party consisting mainly of priests, and, contrary to the exaggerations of the Pharisees, content with justice as the text of the law demanded it. They were positive minds of their time. Being devoted to sensuality and imbued with materialism and doubts, they did not believe in the existence of another world. The thought of the afterlife seemed madness to them. They did not hold the prophets in high esteem and accepted the law in the narrow sense as a wise rule concerning material benefits and earthly things. They asserted that nothing in the law proved immortality, which is why they denied the resurrection of the dead. Being limited minds, they found absurd teachings that were alien to their wisdom, which was based on the letter of the law. They can be called skeptics, because they had a negative or great doubt about many questions and phenomena of the spiritual world and spiritual life. Only perceptible, tangible phenomena were indisputable for them. Everything that was inaccessible to their understanding or went beyond the limits of their sensory experience and their bookish learning, they simply denied. In this respect they resemble the realists or positivists of our time of the worst shade.

At the same time, consisting mainly of priests and men of great, though false, learning, the Sadducees were accustomed to feel themselves the leaders of the intellectual life of the people, who, it must be said, were treated with great contempt for their ignorance and lack of education.

This position of intellectual leaders they would never yield to anyone, and therefore they treated with extraordinary fanaticism and intolerance all opinions and teachings that did not come from their camp and did not agree with their views. They were generally mentally arrogant and liked to resort to malicious ridicule.

Thus, their basic mood and their main vice can be defined as mental pride. If in general the greatest defect and ineradicable vice among men is secret pride, then perhaps the most dangerous variety of it is the pride of the mind. Its essence consists in the fact that man, bowing down to self-adoration before his personality and especially before his mental faculties, begins to consider himself the only infallible authority in the solution of all questions and consequently rejects everything that he does not understand, because in his self-deification he does not admit the idea that there can be things beyond his understanding. In people of the Sadducean bent this inevitably leads to materialism, skepticism, and unbelief, for in the field of faith it is necessary to recognize the limitations of the human mind, to humbly bow before the mystery that surrounds man everywhere, and to accept many of the explanations of this mystery without one's own rationalistic verification, since in many matters of faith such a test is quite impossible. But it is this limitation of the arbitrarily seized rights of the mind that the Proud people do not want and cannot allow. In consciousness, it is formulated as follows: "I can understand everything. If I do not understand this and I am told that such an understanding is even impossible for me, then it is clear that this is nonsense, a fairy tale, a fable!" Thus, a negative attitude towards the spiritual world, inaccessible to the human mind, is inevitably born.

There can be no simplicity and integrity of faith in such people, for such faith requires of a person the ability to completely abandon his own considerations and, not trusting the power of his mind, to seek the truth only in God with full readiness to accept this truth without any doubt, in whatever form it may be given to human consciousness by God. Intellectual pride prevents this, and doubts arising from the contradiction of given truths and one's own considerations are inevitable here. And yet, as the Apostle James says, the doubter is like a wave of the sea, raised and tossed by the wind. Let not such a person think to receive anything from the Lord. A double-minded man is not firm in all his ways (Jas. I, 6-8).

This sad, constantly repeating history is centuries old and dates back to the fall of the first ancestors. Let us recall that the essence of this fall was precisely that, having renounced in a fit of false pride the childish trust in God and trying to acquire the Divine knowledge of good and evil by their own efforts, people turned out to be in fact only a laughing stock and a deceived victim of the tempting serpent. Whoever does not want to be a servant of God inevitably becomes a slave of the devil. This eternal law is as immutable in the intellectual realm as in all others.

Psychologically, this is explained simply.

We, ordinary people, without much spiritual experience, almost never realize that the thoughts born in our heads are inspired by some external force. They always appear to us to be our own, and by this circumstance alone they are decisive for the direction of our activities. "I will do this because it is my desire" is the usual suggestion of self-willed selfishness, but humble people, who do not trust their reason too much, peering into the moral badness of their thoughts, can relatively easily admit that they are the fruit of the devil's whispering and suppress them in the bud. A person who is mentally proud is a different matter. He simply cannot admit that he is possessed by the devil, and his reasoning, conscious or unconscious, in this case is something like this: "This is my thought... It originated in a brilliant head, came from my "I" and should be good, because my "I" is beautiful. And if the thought is good, then is it possible to recognize it as the fruit of the devil's suggestion?! Rather, it is given by God, working through me, as the highest illumination of the spirit. At the very least, this is my own thought, and if it is mine, then it is good!" And the consciousness, befogged by self-adoration, ceases even to distinguish between the really bad and the good: everything that is mine, that comes from me, is good—this is the whole moral criterion. The devil skillfully takes advantage of this and, instilling evil thoughts and desires, which a proud person takes for his own, forces him to do with slavish obedience whatever pleases the tempter, although the person is always sure that he is doing only his own will, and often achieves its fulfillment with stubbornness and fanaticism. These blind people, who do not understand what is being led by them, are the best servants of the devil.

Этим-то особенно и опасна саддукейская закваска умственной гордости. Этих людей трудно образумить, трудно открыть им глаза на их истинное положение, убедить их, что мудрость мира сего есть безумие пред Богом (1 Кор. I, 20) и что со .всем воображаемым превосходством своего ума они не более, как слепые одураченные глупцы. Признаться в этом для них невозможно, ибо этому препятствует гордость.

Есть хорошая турецкая басня.

В одном из вилайетов Оттоманского государства жил когда-то старый огородник Ибрагим. Он недурно знал свое дело и хорошо торговал овощами. Плохо было лишь то, что он считал себя самым умным человеком в вилайете, а может быть, и во всем султанате. Особенно убеждался он в своей мудрости, когда разговаривал или советовался со своей женой фатимой. Ее речи настолько были глупее его мыслей, что он невольно восторгался своим умственным превосходством. Поэтому у него было даже правило: "В трудную минуту жизни спроси совета у жены и поступи как раз наоборот".

Однажды сосед затеял с ним тяжбу, и Ибрагима вызвали к кади для допроса.

Известно, что правосудие во всех странах, где сияет вера пророка Магомета, с трещиной и, прежде чем довериться ему, надо эту трещину заткнуть.