In 415 in Alexandria, the circumstances were in many ways similar to ours today. Christianity from a religion that was forbidden, persecuted, and in any case not recommended for confession by the authorities suddenly turned into the religion of the majority, caressed by the state. Yesterday's pagans become Christians for various reasons (some due to unconscious conformism, some for some career reasons, thanks to some inner impulses), but having accepted Christianity outwardly, primarily as a style of behavior and a set of certain rules, they are not yet able to open their hearts to God. They accept Christianity not as a faith, but as an ideology, as some kind of new worldview, a new way of life, a new morality. In order to "propagate" Christianity, they begin to mechanically apply the very "methods" that only yesterday were used in relation to the Church by the authorities in order to combat it. They use these methods not at all because they want evil, but only because they do not suspect the existence of other methods.

First, they declare Christianity to be the only correct worldview, i.e., they perceive it as an ideology, and in fact not even Orthodoxy, about which they really know nothing yet, but only that version of it, that form of it, one of many, which they have only recently and rather superficially assimilated. In our case, Orthodoxy mechanically replaces Marxism and scientific atheism, in the case of late antiquity, the cult of the Roman emperor.

Secondly, everyone who disagrees with them, even in small things, they immediately count as heretics. At the same time, as I have already had occasion to write, customs and local traditions are taken by them as dogmas, and therefore everything that falls out of these traditions is immediately declared by them to be non-Orthodoxy. Even the Patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch, Bulgaria and others are almost mechanically included in the number of heretics, for they use the new calendar.

From faith in the grace-filled presence of Jesus among us, Orthodoxy is transformed into a rigid system of views. Thus, our task today is, first of all, to make it cease to be our ideology, but become the cherished truth of our hearts. It will be truly Orthodoxy without malice, without hatred, without violence and the desire to impose one's opinion, without the search for enemies, which is indispensable for any ideology formed in the conditions of totalitarianism.

Finding, exposing, neutralizing the enemy is an attitude typical of any society where a totalitarian regime reigns or has recently reigned. This enemy can be anyone, anyone who is somehow different from the rest: a person of a different nationality, a non-Orthodox, a redhead, a "bespectacled man", a believer or, on the contrary, a non-believer, someone who smiles, or, on the contrary, for some reason does not want to smile, and so on. The search for the enemy and, most importantly, the fight against him always unites the crowd, unites it on a base understandable to everyone: "him!"

When totalitarian power leaves and society, it would seem, is freed from the tutelage of various ideological departments, this reflex ("him!") is preserved in the behavior of people brought up under totalitarianism. They begin to look for enemies no longer on orders from above, but of their own free will, uniting for this purpose in groups, voluntary societies, teams, brotherhoods, and so on. In fact, even under totalitarian rule, society did not always look for enemies on command, in many cases these searches began spontaneously, simply for the reason that people were already oriented towards this search.

Christianity, as we believe, is also oriented towards fighting the enemy, but only with the enemy that nests within myself – with my own laziness, inactivity and passivity, with my malice, with my own egoism and despondency. It is as a struggle with the passions that ascetic literature interprets Christianity. Perhaps it is this orientation that makes it so vulnerable to the penetration of the ideology of searching for enemies, heretics, etc.

The fact is that there is no attitude to struggle with the passions in the Bible. The New Testament, through the mouths of the holy apostles, calls us not to struggle with anger, rage, malice, and so on. (cf. Col. 3:8), but to "lay aside" (apotithemi), that is, to take off oneself, as one takes off one's old clothes, or "to put off oneself" (apekduomai) all these vices. It is these two words that are repeatedly used in Scripture when it comes to passions and vices, but the struggle with passions is nowhere mentioned here. It must be thought that everything that concerns the struggle with the passions that dominate us and nest within us came into Christian literature from Stoic and ancient philosophy in general in later times.

The Holy Apostles see the path of a Christian not as a path of struggle with passions, but precisely as throwing off old clothes, as growing out of these clothes. Just as a child grows out of his clothes, a Christian must grow out of his sins, out of his laziness and malice, out of his egoism and rancor. And this is fundamentally important, because if we believe that evil is like a garment that can be thrown off, it means that we understand that it is something external, inorganic in relation to the depths of our "I", it does not touch these depths, just as clothes do not touch our heart, which do not stain the soul, but only the skin. A dirty dress must simply be thrown off, and the disease of internal organs must be fought, its essence must be delved into, pondered, its features and course of course must be studied, analyzed, etc.

The apostles advise us to throw off sin like a garment – not to think about what it is, not to analyze it, but simply to reject it – and that's it. And Jesus Himself says the same thing: "If your right eye offends you, pluck it out and cast it from you" (Matthew 6:29). Of course, the Sermon on the Mount is not talking about self-mutilation, it is about not keeping in mind, not considering one's evil thought, but immediately throwing it away from oneself, not fighting against it, but in an instant, sharply and irrevocably, really throwing it away from oneself.

If we begin to dissect sin bone by bone, subject it to analysis, then we are inevitably captured or sucked in by the very process of struggle, we turn into fighters, and our Christianity simply ends there. From the depths of our consciousness, we transfer the struggle to the outside world and begin to fight with everyone who, as it seems to us, thinks wrong, does the wrong thing, etc.

The triumph of lack of culture

When Christians killed Hypatia or burned books in Constantinople, it was not a statement by the Church against paganism, it was simply a triumph of lack of culture over culture. Christianity was used by this crowd simply as a pretext, as a pretext, or as a purely external argument. Her hatred, directed exclusively against culture, culture, and learning, was, of course, dressed in the garb of Christian piety, but it did not become Christian because of this.