Others say: let us draw near the Kingdom of God by our own strength, let us not be mere contemplators; These are zealots, zealots. They raise their sword and are always ready to hurry up the story.

And finally, there was another group that called themselves the Essenes, that is, in Greek, the pious ones. They said just like many of us now: the world will perish anyway; God, when He appears on earth, will destroy all this sinful wicked race. There is only one way out – to leave this world, to hide from it, to curse it, because only "sons of darkness" live in it, and we will be "sons of light". We are the true Israel. Jews and pagans are all scoundrels; all will perish when the Deliverer appears, because He will crush the head of the serpent, and this serpent represents the entire human race. This happened about 120-140 years B.C. They were headed by a man whose name we do not know and whom we learned about only recently, in the middle of our century. His followers called him respectfully: the Teacher of Righteousness, or the Righteous Teacher. They settle near the Dead Sea and try to break all ties with the surrounding life as much as possible. This is a closed semi-monastic order. They say, "We are the ones of whom the prophet foretold," the voice of one crying in the wilderness. And I must tell you that more than five centuries before Christ, one of the biblical prophets foresaw that God would come to earth to help the human race move on. He wrote as follows: "The voice of the herald cries in the wilderness (or, in Church Slavonic, "the voice of one crying in the wilderness"): prepare the way of the Lord, level the hills and raise up the valleys."

The Essenes who lived on the shores of the Dead Sea interpreted the Scriptures and said: "We are the voice of the herald, and we are those chosen ones, we are the true people of God among all, who will be saved." God will make with us the New Covenant (Brit Hadashah) that He promised to the prophets of old.

And now you have a panorama of the whole world in front of you. High science, high art, Euclid, Archimedes, engineering, philosophy, biology, Aristotle, the military art of the Romans, strict Roman law, the Buddhist desire for salvation. At the turn of the new era, a belief arose among Buddhists that a new Buddha would soon appear – Maitreya, the Conqueror, who would reveal something new. In Hinduism, there is a belief that a new incarnation of the god Vishnu will appear - Kalki, who is coming on a white horse. In Iran, among the adherents of the Zoroastrian cult, they also talk about the advent of the Deliverer – Saoshianth. The whole world is in tense anticipation.

This idea can be developed for a long time, I will not dwell on it now. When Christ was to be born, many put their trust in the power of the king-god. At the behest of Augustus, sacred games were arranged in his honor. The people sang the praises of the emperor and glorified the eternal reign of the ruler, who took upon himself what the people could not bear.

In all the diversity of human searches, we must respect and love this openness of man to mystery. Although there were many mistakes and zigzags, each of these stages had its own important element, its own goal, its own find. Because that great mountain, on which the Cross will later be erected, is like any mountain: it has belts with various forms of vegetation, it combines a lot of things. Because when the words of Jesus of Nazareth about repentance and the nearness of the Kingdom of God sounded on the Galilean hills, it was the answer to all the riddles over which philosophers racked their brains, to all the mysteries that the mystics strove for, to all those problems that tormented statesmen, crowds and sages. It was a turning point. For until now, humanity has only asked the question. And then the answer should have come. And this answer was contained in the word, in the short Aramaic word Besora, in Greek Evangelion, the Good News proclaimed by the Son of Man and the Son of God.

FIRST CONVERSATION

Each of you, if you go to any of the Christian Orthodox churches during the Liturgy, can note that at some point in the service the choir stops singing and all the people sing. This ancient tradition was revived relatively recently, in the first years of the revolution, on the initiative of Patriarch Tikhon. This initiative was not accidental: the Nicene-Constantinople Creed is sung – according to the saint, it was supposed to remain in the memory of people in case they were deprived of everything, even a written text. And this Symbol itself is extremely important for the Christian Church; every Christian should know it by heart and understand its meaning. Therefore, for those people who are preparing to receive the sacrament of baptism, for those people who were baptized in childhood, but were not churched, for those people who want to get acquainted with the basics of the Christian faith, for those people who want to know the basics of world European and Russian culture contained in Christianity, knowledge of the main points and essence of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed is necessary. For historians, literary critics, art critics, writers, poets, people of various creative specialties working in various fields of humanitarian knowledge, it is also necessary to know this fundamental Symbol. Therefore, in briefly presenting its meaning to you, I will focus on all people: those who are preparing for baptism, those who have been baptized, and those who want to look at it simply through the eyes of a cultured person. We are not imposing anything—the idea of agitation is alien to the Church—we are simply witnessing.

First, what is the Nicene-Constantinople Creed in the literal sense of the word? Nicaea is an ancient city in Asia Minor, where in 325, under Emperor Constantine the Great, an all-imperial congress of bishops of the Christian Church was convened to solve the most important spiritual and organizational problems. It was called the Ecumenical Council, the first in a row. The universe, the ecumene, was synonymous with the Roman Empire at the time. Sobor is an old Church Slavonic word that means a gathering of people, a gathering of representatives of the Church. And at this First Ecumenical Council in 325, that is, a few years after the Emperor Constantine the Great proclaimed freedom of religion in his empire, a short confession of faith was recorded, which a person entering the Church had to pronounce at baptism, in the process of the rite that precedes baptism. We call this rite catechesis, when a person who has received instruction in the fundamentals of the faith testifies not only to his desire, but also to his conscious desire to enter the path to which Christ calls. Additions to the Symbol of Faith were made half a century later, in 381, at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople. In Ancient Russia, this city was called Tsargrad, and therefore this confession of faith began to be briefly called the Nicene-Tsargrad Creed.

Why the symbol? Symbol is a very capacious and polysemantic word. A symbol is a sign that denotes a certain reality behind it (an entire literary-philosophical trend — symbolism — was built on this). After all, our language, our art, and so much of what permeates human civilization and spiritual culture are unimaginable without symbols. I will not list them, but I will draw your attention to only one. Not to mention signs, emblems, all kinds of symbols, let's take just a word. A word is an amazing thing. It is a signal that one soul transmits to another soul. The signals that animals give to each other are simple signals: danger, a call, a warning, a statement of the fact that, say, the place is occupied – here is my nest. These are the signals (or we can say "symbols", but in quotation marks) in the animal world. Human symbols are different. They are mysterious connections between individual island souls. Because each soul lives in a special world. And it is not for nothing that Tyutchev said: "A spoken thought is a lie." It is easy to imagine how difficult it is to convey genuine deep feelings. Experiences of the mystery of the world, experiences of love, experiences of fullness of life or despair do not fit into words at all. But I ask you to pay attention to one remarkable thing. When Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev said: "A spoken thought is a lie," he nevertheless expressed this thought, and in a beautiful poetic form.

No matter how imperfect our language is, no matter how little it is able to embrace the mysterious layers of existence, we still need it. Here is an elementary example. When a person says that he loves another person, each of us puts into these ancient words something of his own, unique, and yet he says the same words that his fathers, grandfathers, distant ancestors said. It turns out that these words continue to work when there is a certain spiritual and spiritual reality behind them.

So, any word is a symbol. But symbols are especially important to us when we come into contact with the reality of the ineffable, with the reality of that which transcends easily transmissible events and facts. Music exists in order to convey these experiences in its own way. Poetry is the same. But note that true poetry, when it speaks of the highest, of the mysterious, of the spiritual, of the divine, achieves its goal only when it speaks indirectly, by hint. Those who are more or less familiar with poetry will probably agree with me that when a poet, even a great one, tries to speak head-on about things beyond our usual level, his strength leaves him. The final lines of Dante's Divine Comedy are always recalled. When, describing the entire universe, he approaches the mystery of the eternal motion machine of the world, the First Cause of the world, the Creator, he tries to grasp, to realize this, and says that here the soaring of his spirit has become exhausted. There was nothing he could do. Therefore, symbolic spiritual poetry is most adequate here, which speaks to us in a hint, which signals from soul to soul only slightly, so that those who can understand understand understand, those who do not understand pass by.

By the way, icon painting is built in the same way. It does not at all pretend to be an adequate depiction of any material reality. This is the sum of the characters. Remember the Novgorod icon of Elijah the Prophet in the Tretyakov Gallery with its blood-red background: this tense color is a symbol of a storm, a thunderstorm, that inner fire that burns the prophet. Remember the soft, smooth lines of the "Trinity" of St. Andrei Rublev, a mysterious circle that can be drawn by looking at these three figures. These are symbols. The iconographer does not at all pretend to depict the indescribable, to depict God; it was forbidden in the Bible, because Divine Eternity is absolutely superior to all earthly things. And so a true artist gives us a symbol. What is depicted on the icon of Rublev? Love incarnate. Three of them are engaged in a silent conversation. Between them is this bond, this field of love. They are similar to each other and at the same time they are different; They are one and the same at the same time. They are connected by the mystery of love – love that bestows. The table with the sacrificial animal denotes the sacrifice of Eternity, which God offers in order to bring the world closer to Himself and save it.

Later, in the era of the decline of spiritual and artistic taste, they began to depict the so-called New Testament Trinity, where one person of the Godhead was depicted in the form of an old man, another in the form of Jesus Christ (as He was incarnated), and the third in the form of a dove. This is no longer a symbolic image. This is an extremely unsuccessful attempt at realistic depiction.