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.

Spiritual literature, the ancient sacred wisdom of the Bible, the dogmas of the Church are built on the principles of symbolism. They are signs that transmit to people the Higher Reality, which has been revealed to them in all its paradox. Sometimes people ask why God is One, and in three persons. Wouldn't it have been easier to say that He was simply One? Probably, logically, it would be so. But the spiritual experience of Christianity was different, and it was necessary to sacrifice rational logic and create an antinomic, paradoxical, or dialectical dogma, whatever you call it. The same applies to the dogma of Christ. Who is he? Person? Yes, the Church, the true Man, answers. Does He mean that He is not God? No, says the Church, He is the true God, the true God. A paradox, a contradiction? Would it be easier to remove one of the statements so that everything fits logically? But no. In fact, the Higher Reality was revealed as a superlogical secret. And there was nothing left to do but to accept it in a paradoxical form, as it was revealed.

Comprehending the laws of the universe, man gradually came to the conclusion that nature in its depths is also built on paradoxes. Let's take a textbook example.

Henri Bergson said that our elementary logic is the logic of solids, that is, of some simple relations. Meanwhile, physics already knows so many paradoxes that our rational thinking seems to stop before them. We know that there are other systems of mathematics. For simple rational logic, parallel lines will never converge, but for non-Euclidean geometry they do; For logic, a thing is either continuous or discontinuous—for physics, particles are also continuous waves.

In other words, human thinking cannot encompass the whole of reality. Therefore, physicists have created the so-called complementarity principle. This is a very important scientific principle. It fully applies to dogmatics, moreover, the principle of complementarity was used in the dogmas of the Church long before Niels Bohr and others who put forward this principle in science. It consists in the fact that significant and fundamental phenomena of reality can only be described in contradictory terms; It is impossible to find an integral description connecting them in principle—it does not exist.

Father Pavel Florensky, one of the outstanding Christian thinkers of the 20th century, said that the whole truth, falling from heaven, seems to be broken into separate parts, and we see it in such a split state. Hegel noted that the Nicene-Constantinople Creed is not presented in a speculative form, that is, it is not a philosophical or theological system, it is a chain of images. I would say, artistic, capacious images that hint at the reality that stands behind these words.

The first word that is pronounced by the reader of the Symbol of Faith is "I believe." Often this word is used in a negative context, for example, "blind faith". We strongly oppose such a definition. On the contrary, faith is not blind, but clairvoyant. Each cognition requires a certain approach. As the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, one of the greatest metaphysicians of the 20th century, said, it is necessary to carry out the "right act" (he had such an expression). He said that if a person wants to see a painting, he must have eyes – a blind or blindfolded person will not see the painting. If you want to listen to a Beethoven symphony, you need to have ears and ears. If you want to know any thing, the smallest object, you need a microscope and other devices; for distant objects, radio and other telescopes. In order to comprehend the highest reality, the spiritual reality, our own spirit serves as an instrument. And when people say that they need to "touch God with their hands – where He is, show me!" – there is a certain misunderstanding here: after all, the most important things in the world cannot be touched. Show me a person who has ever felt conscience, love, inspiration, wisdom. That which makes man human, that which is the main feature of our human existence, is based on things that cannot be touched.

From a certain time in history, about 300 to 400 years ago, there has been a growing temptation among mankind to attach the greatest importance to things that can be touched, measured, and weighed. No one objects – these things exist, and it is necessary for a person to study them, and use them, and create them. But when there was an infatuation with them, when there was nothing left but the sensual world, man stepped on the wrong path of development. Because it differs from the animal world in that it is possible to develop supersensible powers and faculties. Knowledge, love, freedom are all supersensible things, super-temporal. I emphasize that they are potentially embedded in a person as capable of becoming super-temporal. But we are facing a great temptation. Man set himself the task of having as much food, clothing, and good material conditions for his personal life as possible. Is it good? In principle, yes, but only if the human in him also develops. For having as much shelter, clothing, and so on as possible is not human, it is common with all living beings. And the bird must have a nest, and the animals must have a burrow, and the antelope must have a place where it will graze, and each bird has its own hunting region where it can feed. This is a general biological regularity, a struggle for existence. Of course, plants, animals, and humans have it.