But here again the old question of man's legal capacity to deserve eternal bliss before God is raised. Merces, a reward, a payment, according to the understanding of the Catholic theologians themselves,[81] is that which is paid for someone's work or work, as if at a certain price of the latter. Hence, As to give a just price for a thing received from someone is a matter of justice, so to give a reward for a deed or work is a matter of justice." The relation of work and reward, in order to be a matter of justice, requires first of all equality, while the relation of human good deeds and eternal bliss does not represent this equality. The main thing is that no matter how zealous a person may be in doing good, he will always remain a sinner before God, he must first be forgiven, and only then think about the reward; and his deeds will always bear the traces of his imperfection and sinfulness. Merit, therefore, is out of the question. Catholicism thinks to remove this perplexity by its teaching on the difference between de condigno merits and de congruo merits. In the first case, merit in the proper sense, and in the second only in the figurative sense. The former are possible with complete equality of relations. But there is no equality of relations between God and man, therefore there is only quiadam modus iustitae (a kind of justice) between them,82 and therefore human merit can only be de congruo,83 Nevertheless, it is a merit. But against this Protestantism sharply and quite justly objected that it was only a trick devised to conceal its Pelagianism; The essence of the case remains exactly the same, whether a human action is recognized as a merit de condigno or de congruo in both cases, the reward equally necessarily follows the work, the legal significance of the case remains in all its force. Consequently, the question of man's legal capacity for merit before God is by no means eliminated.

Catholics try to remove this obstacle by ascribing to human action a Divine character: the work of man, after justification, is the work of the righteousness of Christ poured into him, and, consequently, Divine. At the same time, the Divinity of this action is protected from all impurities, from any touch of human impurity, since the will is recognized only as the receiver, and not as the real creator of spiritual holiness. In this case, the deeds of a person can acquire the meaning of merit, as divine deeds, and can be merit, moreover, not only de congruo, but also de condigno [85]. In such a formulation, the recognition of man's merit does not contradict salvation by Christ alone, since it leaves the power and significance of the merit of Jesus Christ in its complete inviolability. "Just as," says Perrone, "how nothing is diminished from the glory of the vine, if its branches bear great fruit; on the contrary, the more fruit the branches bear, the more praise the vine deserves, because all the life-giving juice and moisture that is only in the branches comes from the vine; in the same way, the glory of Christ's merits does not diminish from our merits in the least, since the latter come from the former (Christ); on the contrary, the merits of Christ through our merits become more and more evident (commendantur)" [86].

But here again the question arises: if man's deeds are not essentially his deeds, then what can there be about man's merit and his right to a reward? In order to evade this objection, the Catholics admit the following conditional device: they recognize the will as the second cause of good works. "Human merit to speak more closely, if we define it more closely, is not at all absolutely pure merit, since the grace of God is the first and main cause of the good done in man and through him, but it is not completely absent, because man is nevertheless the second cause of the good done in him and through him" [87]. Let's consider this statement. The will may be recognized as the second cause of action, in the sense that it receives and contains the righteousness of its actions poured into it through itself. If a good deed is accomplished, it means that the grace that dwells in a person strives to accomplish this deed, and since this striving is accomplished in a person, then, naturally, for his consciousness it appears to be his own deed, and he decides, as it were, arbitrarily whether to actually perform a certain good deed. Everything is from grace: to it belongs the beginning of movement [89]; and the will is the conductor of that current of grace which, so to speak, moves man's hands to a good deed, no more than in this sense alone the will can be called the helper and servant of grace. This idea of the illusory nature of the active participation of the will in good deeds is beautifully expressed by Klee himself, who says: "(Man) must do what he can, and what he can and how he can, God does" [91]. Translating this Orthodox expression into Catholic language, we get that a person must do what seems possible to him, and he will do it, recognizing himself as the cause of his actions, but in fact, his ability to perform a certain action and the very way of revealing this ability is not his – this belongs to the grace that lives and acts in him.

Thus it is evident that the recognition of the will as the second cause of good deeds does not at all resolve the question posed, but only rejects it; that even after this it is impossible to understand on what basis a good deed is known by the merit of a person, when the will of the latter serves only as a conductor of the influence of grace that is alien to it. True, the Catholics answer for this, that the recognition of the complete absence of merit on the part of man rests on the false assumption that man is completely deprived of freedom in relation to the divine life, and that in the matter of sanctification and justification he acts only sufferingly"; and that, "on the contrary, with the recognition of the truth that man freely goes to meet the excitation, direction and every action of grace, and then, after its action and together with it, independently participates in the accomplishment of good, with the recognition of this truth, the merit of man must be consistently established as possible and admissible, as really existing" [92]. But we have seen how fair it is to call the deeds of a Catholically justified person "free participation." By this name they can only be called by those who forget or try to forget what has been said before about the essence and consequences of Catholic justification. Righteousness infused into man, this self-moving and self-acting property, or appendage of his spirit, tolerates freedom side by side only as the second cause described, and consequently admits only the phantom of freedom, at the same time the possibility of merit on the part of man is completely denied.

Catholics, after all, themselves had to realize the inadequacy of their legal point of view and its inadequacy to explain the salvation of man. Here, for example, is how the possibility of merit is proved. Council of Trent: "Although Christ Himself, as head in the members or as a vine in a branch, constantly pours out virtue in the justified themselves (which precedes and accompanies the good works of the righteous and concludes the procession of works, and without which in no case can works be pleasing to God and deserving), nevertheless it must be believed that there is no harm to the justified themselves; it must be thought that nevertheless by these works, which are accomplished in God, they have satisfied the Divine law for the state of this life, and have truly deserved eternal life, which must follow in due time, if, however, they have departed into union with grace" [93]. In other words: although a man's deeds are not his works, and, consequently, cannot be his merit, nevertheless one must believe"... "must think" that they "truly deserve." Why do they deserve it? This cannot be explained by a council and must demand only blind faith, based on nothing, hiding behind its external right. All Catholic theologians must and do come to the same end. Let us recall the words of Perrone quoted above [94]: "God did not want the merits of Christ to benefit us without any assistance on our part"; or more clearly and more clearly Klee: "Inasmuch as God was pleased to acknowledge the good, begun by his grace and accomplished with the assistance of man, by man's own work, he was pleased to recognize in it the character of merit, and to recognize the increase of active and intermediary grace and, in the end, eternal life as a reward, a recompense, a fruit, and an inheritance, and the reward being a matter of righteousness and faithfulness of God; – then the validity of human merit can by no means be denied. Thus, neither Klee nor Perrone, remaining true to their point of view, can in any way justify the necessity of human participation in salvation: Christ's merit, as a magnitude as a value, is too sufficient to satisfy God's truth for any other human merits to be needed, the very possibility of which, moreover, is still subject to strong doubt. Why, then, are these merits required for salvation, and why can they be recognized as merits? "So it pleased God," Catholic scholars are forced to answer. But why did He favor? After all, there must be any meaning in this God's determination? Surely it cannot be only an empty, causeless desire, as if it were a whim? For Catholics, however, the will of God is precisely the will, the command of the Lord of the world. They, as true adherents of the law, bow down only before the right of God to command the universe and do not think to find consolation for themselves in the fact that God, although He "possesses the kingdom of man," does not arbitrarily – that He desires goodness and holiness, not because He wills, but because "He Himself is holy", because holiness is an immutable law of world life, that it is good itself. "For Thy power is the beginning of righteousness, and the very fact that Thou hast dominion over all, disposes Thee to spare all" (Wis. 12, 16).

Thus, Catholic dogmatics, which tried to build the doctrine of salvation on legal principles, resorted to all sorts of tricks for this purpose, finally came to the realization of the impossibility of doing this, and to all the objections of reason only blindly points to the demand of revelation, and this requirement it hastens to misinterpret in its legal sense: it cannot be proved that works are merits, but the Word of God tells us that works are necessary for salvation and do save – consequently (conclude the Catholics, making a logical leap), works, be that as it may, have the meaning of merit.

Such is the conclusion to which Western Christianity leads with inexorable necessity by its fundamental lie, the legal understanding of salvation and of all religious life in general.

The legal system knows only external relations and does not care about the internal content hidden behind these relations. Without asking about the internal structure of the thing, he wants to know its value, and when he finds out, he considers his work finished. If, according to Christian teaching, a person is saved only through Jesus Christ and only in the case when he does the works commanded by Christ; then for the mind of the scholastics, this means that Christ and man, each in his own right, present to the truth of God a quite sufficient price for the promised eternal life. But if the work of Christ is the work. They are mutually exclusive: the more the value of human merit increases, the merit of Christ becomes unnecessary; Christ came because man could not be saved on his own. And yet the Word of God and conscience require both, and precisely together, and precisely as indispensable causes of man's salvation. This is the basic lie of Western Christianity, which leads it to all sorts of tricks: its basic premise requires one conclusion, and the life and the direct teaching of the Word of God, with which it does not want to break ties, require another. In their essence, both Catholicism and Protestantism teach and say the same thing: both are sick with the same incurable disease, the only difference is in the coverings with which each of them tries to calm itself. Both admit (Protestants openly, and Catholics under the line) that strictly speaking, human deeds are not necessary, should not have justifying force. Both of them, in order not to go directly against the truth and at the same time not to depart from their reasoning, must recognize the making of man involuntary (Protestant sanctification and Catholic conversion – infusio gratiae). The only difference is that the Protestants, not forgetting or concealing their thoughts, think only of somehow making up for its disagreement with life, pointing to its safety: deeds, they say, will necessarily follow, and there is no need, therefore, to worry about their absence when justified. Catholics, on the other hand, try to cloud the very thought and, forgetting their basic premises, only try to shut their eyes to say that deeds are still necessary, that they still deserve salvation, not being able to explain how these deeds deserve it.

From what has been said, it is clear which path should be taken in the scientific study of the Orthodox teaching on salvation. It would be wrong and useless to take the writings or symbolic books of Protestants and Catholics and try only to destroy their extremes, for such a path, as we see, will never lead us to anything clear and definite, stable. The extremes in the West are not accidental, they are a natural deduction from a false basic principle. It is necessary, therefore, first of all to reject this basic principle (the legal understanding of life) and then, independently of it, to begin the study of truth, drawing information not from ready-made Western writings, but from the Holy Scriptures. Scriptures and Works of the Holy Fathers. In this way, only we can clarify for ourselves the basic principle of the Orthodox understanding of life. Having clarified this principle, it will not be difficult to reveal the very teaching about salvation. Therefore, in the following chapters, we must first of all decide how the Holy Scriptures relate to the Holy Scriptures. Scripture and Tradition to the legal understanding of life, do they recognize it? After answering this basic question, let us reveal the doctrine of the eternal; life, and the beginning of Orthodox theology will become clear to us. From this teaching there will necessarily follow the teaching about the meaning of retribution and, further, about salvation and its conditions.

CHAPTER ONE

Legal Understanding of Life before the Court of St. Scriptures and Traditions

We believe that we are saved by Jesus Christ alone, that only "through Christ alone can we be received by God",[95] but we also believe (and in this we find a constant witness in our conscience) that God vouchsafes a part of each one according to his good works,"[96] that "there is no other way (to receive remission of sins and hope of inheriting the promised blessings) than to receive the remission of sins. so that, having come to know our Christ and been washed by that baptism for the remission of sins of which Isaiah proclaimed, you may then live without sin" [97]; that "after the grace of God, the hope of salvation must be placed only in one's own deeds (oiceioi cator Jwmasi)" [98]. The Kingdom of God is wanting" and only "needy," i.e., those who use effort, who labor "rapture it" (Matt. XI, 12). I. Christ came not to destroy the law, but to fulfill it (Matt. V, 17). A person who is justified and sanctified does not do good out of necessity, but must do good, because "everyone will receive from the Lord according to the measure of the good he has done" (Eph. VI, 8). Good, therefore, is not the fruit or the testimony of salvation alone, but one of the direct culprits of the latter, by which "the free entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is opened to man" (2 Pet. I,11).

Therefore, the life of a person after baptism is by no means a state of inactive bliss and involuntary good deeds (as it should be presented in the West), but on the contrary, an active following of Christ (Col. III, I – 14). Earthly life is sowing, and the afterlife is harvest, and therefore man must sow good in order to inherit bliss later (Gal. YI, 7-10), he must, like a diligent ant, accumulate fruits for the future life [99]), he must gather for himself that "unfading wealth, the gathering of which is not only not a vice, but also a great virtue and reward" [100].

Thus, the justified man does good voluntarily and is constantly aware and convinced of what he does "for the sake of honor in the kingdom of heaven," in order that he may "deserve the praise of God as a good servant, and be worthy of some honors" [101]; so that if there were no such conviction, if man did not expect this reward in heaven, then a virtuous life would be meaningless and therefore impossible. "Who would want to take upon himself such bitter labors, if he did not have a sweet hope in Christ?" [102]. "Would we keep ourselves so pure if we did not acknowledge that God watches over the human race? Of course not. But since we believe that we shall give an account of all our present life to God, Who created both us and the world, we choose a life of abstinence, philanthropy, and humiliation, knowing that here we cannot tolerate, even if we are deprived of life, any evil that would be equal to the blessings prepared for us by the Great Judge for a meek, philanthropic, and humble life" [103]. Good works, therefore, are a necessary condition for salvation.