Nikolay LOSSKY,

Professor of St. Sergius

Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris.

FROM THE AUTHOR

This book is not popularizing, but rather informational, "catechetical" in nature. For most people today, Christianity is something unknown, devoid of even its exotic appeal because of its endless distortions and caricatures. In response to numerous requests, I have tried in this book to give the floor to the greatest witnesses of the One Church, common to all Christian confessions of Tradition, which alone makes possible "ecumenism in time," that is, remembrance of primordial experience.

Tradition is not a letter repeated by some and rejected by others, or dissected for scientific purposes. Tradition is an expression of spiritus juvenescens, "the spirit of youth," as we would say after Irenaeus of Lyons. This is a deep but living memory of inspiration, of the great "Pascha," of the great transition of the God-Man to God-manhood and the universe, as the Russian religious philosophers of the beginning of the century said, whom I willingly recognize as my teachers.

Of course, our spiritual receptivity has changed profoundly since the fourth and seventh centuries. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag, in the midst of the final collapse of the society in which Christianity had been partly transformed into the grande dame of freedom, into the "dominant ideology," it is no longer possible to speak of faith in the same way as in the days of Christian civilization the Living God is no longer for us the Lord of the world, but the crucified Love. However, it should be noted that the witnesses whose voices are heard in this book lived either in an era of persecution, in a society vacillating between skepticism and gnosis, or at the moment of the birth of the monastic movement, which firmly and passionately asserted, in spite of the temptations of "order", the irreducible non-conformism of the individual, "intoxicated with God" and "after God honoring his brother as if he were God." It is also necessary to recall, together with Newman, that in the first chords of a symphony, the motifs that later develop sequentially sound simultaneously, in a single explosion of inspiration. Ultimately, the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 declared that God "accepted mortal suffering in the flesh." I confess that in the selection of material for this book I was guided by the continuity of Tradition in modern times, by the vision expressed by Dostoevsky of the intuitions and aspirations of our fruitful epoch, in the darkness of the night of which the fiery seeds are latently ripening.

The witnesses whose words I have collected in this book we call the Fathers. Some of them were martyrs, these first mystics. Others became monks, inhabitants of mountains and deserts. Still others are great minds, enlightened by the Holy Spirit even in their very recklessness (which Tradition has been able to balance through consensus, that is, their agreement with the other Fathers). Many were bishops, pastors of local Churches, which at that time enjoyed considerable autonomy even in mutual communion, pastors chosen by the community and preaching to it the only "Message" that can still break through to us today through the deepest despair of our nihilism: the "descent" of God, who became man, into death and hell in order to conquer all forms of death and hell.

At that time, mysticism was not analyzed in terms of religious psychology, as it is today in the West. The death and resurrection of Christ were the key to understanding life and the universe, the key to great metamorphoses. Some of them have become, as it were, candles or torches, concentrating the "light and flame" given to all in the fiery flesh of the Bible and the sacraments, in the Church as the "sacrament" of the Crucified and Resurrected One, who resurrects us and transforms the entire cosmos in Himself. In contrast to our never-ending debates about ecclesiastical "institution," "ecclesiastical existence," as one modern Greek theologian put it, was perceived as the very reality of the person in communion, as the Paschal being bearing within itself the promise of the resurrection of mankind and the world.

This book offers first of all a doctrinal approach, a reflection on the sacrament rather than on it, for, according to the words of the Gospel, it is necessary to "love the Lord God with all your mind." Then we will talk about the path of asceticism, "about spiritual warfare, more cruel than human battles," but waged alone. Finally, we will touch upon contemplation, the most vivid expression of which is the ability to love—creative love, for it partakes of the love of God Himself incarnate and crucified. In addition, we hope that this book will help to better define the place of Christianity in its relation to the world of religions and the world of atheistic views. Perhaps the fundamental themes of the Divine Three-Unity, as well as of God-manhood, will make it possible to concentrate and illuminate in a new way both the universal and traditional experience of the Divine and the contemporary Western experience of the human.

So, below we will find:

1) texts translated in the most understandable manner for non-specialists; some minor rearrangements or abbreviations are caused by the desire to convey the main meaning as accurately and clearly as possible;

2) the commentary following the texts, which makes up for the forced incompleteness and fragmentation of the texts and is built in the form of an essay;

3) notes in alphabetical order at the end of the book, each of which is devoted to one of the cited authors and provides data on his works used in the book. These notes form an essential part of the historical narrative. They contain brief information about the fate and way of thinking of the authors and will help you better distinguish the momentary from the long-term, and in communication with the saints, the eternal. [19]