* * *

If, however, we understand that language is only a form of our confession, that its essence and core are not connected with it, a form that may be dearly loved, but no more, then we will quickly be cured of this rigidity (for in fact it has nothing in common with zeal for God and is only one of the types of purely Soviet "principledness") and a multitude of problems. accumulated within the walls of the Orthodox Church, will begin to be resolved. And in what language to serve, then it will not be up to us to decide – the Lord Himself will tell us this.

Descent into Hell

Over the past month, I have buried six children from the hospital, where I serve Liturgy every Saturday. Five boys: Zhenya, Anton, Sasha, Alyosha and Igor. And one girl - Zhenya Zhmyrko, a seventeen-year-old beauty, from whom the icon of the Holy Great Martyr Panteleimon remained in the iconostasis of the hospital church. She died of leukemia. She died long and painfully, nothing helped. And this month is not special. Five children's coffins a month is a statistic. Relentless and deadly, but statistics. And in each coffin is dear, dearly loved, pure, bright, wonderful. Maximka, Ksyusha, Nastya, Natasha, Seryozha... During the last day I visited three patients: Klara (Maria), Andryusha and Valentina. All three die - hard and painful. Klara is almost a grandmother, she was baptized recently, but you might think that she has lived all her life in the Church – she is so bright, wise and transparent. Andriy is 25 years old, and his son is only a year old. Dozens, even, probably, hundreds of people pray for him, get medicines, take him by car to the hospital and home, collect money for treatment – and metastases are everywhere. And this day is not some kind of special, so every day. Half a day passed. Clara died. Valentina died. Six Russian soldiers were killed in Chechnya - and how many Chechens are not reported... Katya (from the oncology department), a girl with huge blue eyes, died. I was told about this right during the service. It's easy to believe in God when you're walking across a field in the summer. The sun shines, and the flowers are fragrant, and the air trembles, filled with their fragrance. "And in the heavens I see God" - like Lermontov. And here? God? Where is he? If He is good, omniscient and omnipotent, then why is He silent? If, however, He punishes them in this way for their sins or for the sins of their fathers and mothers, as many believe, then He is by no means "long-suffering and abundantly merciful," then He is merciless. God allows evil for our own benefit, either when He teaches us, or when He wants something even worse not to happen to us, as theologians of the past have taught since the Middle Ages and Byzantium, and we assert this after them. Are dead children a school of God? Or tolerating a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater one? If God arranged all this, at least for our admonition, then this is not God, this is an evil demon, why worship him, he must simply be expelled from life. If God, in order for us to come to our senses, had to kill Antosha, Sasha, Zhenya, Alyosha, Katya, etc., I do not want to believe in such a God. Let me remind you that the word "believe" does not mean "to acknowledge that He exists", "to believe" is "to trust, to entrust, to entrust or to give oneself". Then it turns out that those who in the 1930s destroyed churches and burned icons at the stake, those who turned churches into palaces of culture, were right. Sadly. Worse than sad. It is frightful. Maybe not to think about it, but just to console? Give those who feel very bad this "opium for the people", and at least it will not be so good for them, but it will be easier. To console, to calm down, to pity. But opium does not cure, it only puts you to sleep for a while, relieves pain for three or four hours, and then you have to give it again and again. And in general, it is scary to tell lies, especially about God. I can't. Lord, what is to be done? I look at your cross and see how painfully you die on it. I look at Thy wounds, and I see Thee dead, naked, unburied... You have shared our pain with us in this world. You, like one of us, exclaiming, dying on your cross: "God, my God, why hast You forsaken me?" You, like one of us, like Zhenya, like Anton, like Alyosha, how, in the end, each of us, asked God this terrible question and "gave up the ghost." If the apostles claim that Jesus died on the cross for our sins and atoned for them with His blood, then we are redeemed (see 1 Corinthians 6:20; and 1 Peter 1:18-19), then we are not suffering for something, not for our own sins, our parents' sins, someone else's. Christ has already suffered for them – this is what the apostles teach, and on this rests the basis of all their theology. Then it turns out that we do not know why we suffer. Meanwhile, Christ, Who redeemed us from the oath of the law with His precious blood, walks the earth not as a conqueror, but precisely as a vanquished. He will be captured, crucified, and die a painful death, saying, "God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Everyone will abandon him, even his closest students. His witnesses will also be captured and killed, imprisoned and imprisoned. From the time of the apostles to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the mother of Maria and Maximilian Kolbe, to the thousands of martyrs of the Soviet Gulag. What is all this for? I don't know. But I know that Christ unites with us in trouble, in pain, in God-forsakenness – at the grave of a dead child, I feel His presence. Christ comes into our lives in order to unite us in the face of pain and misfortune into one whole, to gather us together so that we are not left alone with this misfortune in a moment of trouble, as He once did. By uniting us as one in the face of adversity, He is doing what no one else can do. This is how the Church is born. What do we know about God? Only what Christ has revealed to us (John 1:18). And he has shown us, among other things, his abandonment by God and people, and it is in this abandonment that he is most united with us. The Greeks, and after them the Romans, always wanted to know everything. The entire ancient civilization is based on this. It is on this irrepressible, seething and tireless thirst for knowledge. And about God, when they became Christians, they also wanted to know whether He could do everything or not. Hence the word "Almighty" or Omniрotents, one of the epithets of Jupiter in Roman poetry, which Virgil is very fond of using in his Aeneid. And God is "ineffable, unknowable, invisible, incomprehensible" (we know this not from theology, which often fell under the influence of ancient philosophy, but from the prayerful experience of the Church, from the experience of the Eucharist – it is no accident that every priest invariably repeats these words during every Liturgy), so we are simply unable to answer the question "Can God do everything?" with either "yes" or "no". Therefore, I do not know who is to blame for the pain, but I know who suffers with us – Jesus. How, then, can we understand the evil that is happening in the world? Yes, you don't need to understand it - you need to fight it. To overcome evil with good, as the Apostle Paul calls us: to heal the sick, to clothe and feed the poor, to stop the war, and so on. Relentlessly. And if you can't, if you don't have enough strength, then bow down before Your cross, then grasp at its foot as the only hope. "No one has ever seen God." And there is only one thread that connects us to Him, a man named Jesus, in whom all the fullness of God dwells bodily. And there is only one thread that connects us to Jesus – the name of this thread is love. He died on the cross as a criminal. Painfully. The Shroud of Turin with terrible traces of bruises, with traces of ulcers, by which modern pathologists reconstruct in detail the clinical picture of the last hours of Jesus' life – this is truly a true shrine for the twentieth century. All the horror of death, not covered up by anyone and in any way! Looking at Holbein's painting "Dead Christ", Dostoevsky's hero exclaimed that from such a picture you can lose faith. And what would he say if he saw the Shroud of Turin, or Hitler's concentration camps, or Stalinism, or just the morgue in a children's hospital in 1995? What happened next? At the beginning of the 20th chapter of the Gospel of John, we see Mary Magdalene, then the Apostles Peter and John, and feel the piercing pain that permeates everything on the spring morning of Easter. Pain, anguish, despair, fatigue and again pain. But the same piercing pain, the same piercing hopelessness, about which the Gospel of John tells so vividly, I feel every time at the grave of a child... I feel and with pain, through tears and despair, I believe that You are truly risen, my Lord. While this essay was being written, Klara died, then Valentina Ivanovna, and the last to die was Andryusha - three more coffins. A boy confided to me the other day that he did not believe in an afterlife and therefore feared that he was a bad Christian. I replied that the difficulty of perceiving life beyond the grave was a testimony to the opposite—to the honesty of his faith. And here's why. A priest who was not very young once told me that it was very difficult for him to judge death and teach his parishioners not to be afraid of it, since he himself had never lost a truly close person. Honestly. Very honestly. And very true. I am always afraid to look at yesterday's seminarian, who solemnly and gently, but a little condescendingly, explains to a mother who has lost a child that it is actually good that God has blessed him so much, and therefore there is no need to be too upset. "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. For with Him all are alive," yes, Christ tells us this in His Gospel (Luke 20:38). But in order for this message to enter the heart, each of us needs a personal experience of troubles, grief and losses, an experience that plunges us into the abyss of real despair, anguish and tears, not days or weeks, but years of piercing pain. This message enters our hearts – only without anesthesia and only through our own losses. You can't learn it as a school lesson. I dare say that whoever thinks he believes without having experienced this experience of pain is mistaken. This is not yet faith, it is a touch of the faith of others, whom we would like to imitate in life. And moreover: he who claims to believe in immortality and refers to the corresponding page of the catechism, does not believe in God at all, but in an idol, the name of which is his own egoism. The belief that everyone is alive with God is given to us only if we do everything possible to save the lives of those around us, only if we do not cover up with this faith for purely selfish purposes, so as not to be too upset, to fight for someone's life, or just so as not to be hurt. But where does evil come from in the world? Why do children get sick and die? I will try to express one guess. God has given us peace ("Behold, I have given you" – Genesis 1:29). We all together, having ruined it, are to blame, if not all, then very many troubles. If we talk about war, then our guilt is always visible here, about diseases – it is not always visible, but often (ecology, poisoned environment, etc.). Peace in the biblical sense of the word, the world that lies in evil, i.e. society or all of us together, is who is to blame. In our churches, among the holy icons, the "Descent into Hell" occupies a rather noticeable place – Jesus on this icon is depicted descending somewhere into the depths of the earth, and at the same time into the depths of human grief, despair and hopelessness. The New Testament does not mention this event at all, only in the Apostolic Creed there are two words about it – descendit ad inferos ("descended into hell"), and quite a lot in our church hymns. Jesus not only suffers himself, but also descends into hell to share the pain of others. He always calls us with Him, saying to us: "Follow me." Often we really try to follow him. But here... Here we try not to see someone else's pain, close our eyes, plug our ears. In Soviet times, we hid disabled people in reservations (as, for example, on Valaam) so that no one could see them, as if feeling sorry for the psyche of our compatriots. Morgues in hospitals were often hidden in the backyard so that no one would ever guess that people sometimes die here. And so on and so forth. Even now, if we consider ourselves unbelievers, we try to play "cat and mouse" with death, to pretend that it does not exist, as Epicurus taught, to fence ourselves off from it, and so on. In other words, in order not to be afraid of death, we use something like an analgesic. If we consider ourselves believers, then we do no better: we say that it is not terrible, that it is God's will, that we should not grieve for the departed, because by doing so we murmur against God, and so on. One way or another, but like non-believers, we also fence ourselves off from pain, we shield ourselves from it instinctively, as if from the blow of a hand raised above us, that is, we also use, if not a drug, then at least an analgesic. This is for myself. And for others, we do even worse. We try to convince a person who is in pain that it only seems to him, and it seems, because he does not love God, etc., etc. And as a result, we leave a person who is bad, hard and hurt alone with his pain, we leave him alone at the most difficult place of life's path. And it would be necessary just to descend with him into hell after Jesus – to feel the pain of the one who is next to him, in all its fullness, openness and authenticity, to share it, to experience it together. When my eighty-year-old relative's sister, with whom she had lived in the same room all her life, died, about a year later she said to me: "Thank you for not comforting me, but just being there for me all the time." I think that this is what Christianity is all about, to be together, because you can console a person who has lost money or put a grease stain on a new suit, or broken his leg. To console means to show that what happened to someone is not such a big trouble. Such consolation has nothing to do with the death of a loved one. Here it is more than immoral. We are the people of Holy Saturday. Jesus has already been taken down from the cross. He has probably already been resurrected, for this is what the Gospel read during Mass tells us, but no one knows about it yet. The angel has not yet said, "He is not here. He is risen", no one knows about it, as long as it is only felt, and only by those who have not forgotten how to feel...

The Easter Victory of Jesus and Horace

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) once remarked that it is our attitude to death that can help us understand whether we are Christians or not. First of all, by virtue of the fact that Christ truly "trampled down death by death", not symbolically, but in reality, conquered death and made us, Christians, participants in this victory. Everything else in His mission is subordinated to this, and therefore the Apostle Paul, not quoting the prophecy of Isaiah very accurately, exclaimed: "Death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54; cf. Isaiah 25:8). Knowing these words, we usually do not guess how deeply they reveal the essence of what happened on the night when Jesus rose from the dead.

Death is swallowed up in victory

Death is consumed. The subject of the verb "absorb" can be only one word – water. It is this river, the river of time, to use the well-known words of Derzhavin, that carries away all the affairs of people and drowns them in the abyss of oblivion, that is, in the end it swallows everything. Both in ancient mythology (NB: the rivers of the underworld – Lethe, Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon and Styx), so in the Old Testament, water symbolizes the kingdom of death. The Greeks liken death to crossing underground waters on Charon's boat, in the Bible – dying, a person seems to drown in these waters. "As it was in the days of Noah... until the day that Noah entered into the ark... until the flood came and destroyed them all" (cf. Matthew 24:37-39), and in other Old Testament texts, water is almost always a sign of death. In the Psalms, where water is mentioned, death is actually spoken, and immersion in water during baptism, according to the Apostle Paul, means that we die together with Christ and are buried together with Him, so that, united with Him in the likeness of His death, we may be together with Him and in the likeness of the resurrection (Romans 6:3-5). What happens when death is swallowed up by victory? It (death!) dies by itself. Exactly what she used to plunge all people indiscriminately into is happening to her. In the twentieth century, we do not quite understand what the apostle means when he joyfully announces that death is dead, but it was clear to his addressees. This was also clear to John of Damascus, who in the 7th ode of the canon of St. Pascha rendered this formula of the Apostle Paul in different words, but absolutely accurately: "We celebrate the mortification of death." What is the matter here?

Historical Context

It was during the years when Jesus preached and then died on the cross that the poems of Quintus Horace Flaccus (died 8 BC) spread around the world. The leitmotif of Horace's poetry is the fear of death and ways to overcome it. From book to book, from ode to ode in different, really beautiful from any point of view and extremely elegant poems (it is a pity that Horace is not read now!), the poet varies the same idea: whoever you are, a poor peasant or a descendant of ancient kings, you will die anyway, everyone will have to get into a boat and see the dark waters of Cocytus up close, everyone is destined to ride this wave, each of us is waiting for this hour, Pluto is implacable and no sacrifices can persuade him to spare you. Your most worthy, exclaims the poet with infinitely sad irony, the heir will get to your goods and will spill on the stone floor the wines that you have stored behind a hundred locks. Sooner or later, everyone will die, etc. That's all, Horace can't even think of anything else. The meadows are dressed with grasses, leaves appear on the trees, and snow has already fled from the mountains (hence the Pleshcheyev's "The snow is melting, the streams are running..."), the nymphs and graces are already dancing, and we are getting closer and closer to the places where the ancient Roman kings are now, for we are dust and shadow. Everything that you have accumulated during your life will fall into the greedy hands of the heir when you get to the court of Minos, where neither eloquence, nor piety, nor the nobility of the family will help you. Fear of death seems to be the main feeling that possesses both the poet and his readers. Moreover, Horace is far from the first, but rather, on the contrary, one of the last authors, Greek and Latin, who speaks of the fear of death.

For an entire historical epoch, starting from the fourth century B.C., the entire ancient world was engulfed in this fear as if by fire. Philosophers (Epicurus and his entire school and the Stoics, one of the last of whom was Marcus Aurelius, who lived already in the second century A.D.) painfully searched for remedies for this fear, pharmacists sadly reported that there was no cure for death among the healing herbs, and poets invited people to forget, at least for a minute, to escape from the fear of death into the world. where wine flows like a river, where the smell of various dishes delights the smell, where flutists, harpists, etc., delight the ear with their wonderful play, in general, live according to the principle: "Eat, drink, be merry" (Luke 12:19) or "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (Isaiah 22:13 = 1 Corinthians 15:32). It is quite easy to forget while following this path, but the effect of such a drug quickly ends. You have to turn to him again, and each time increasing the dose, and then again melancholy, and again despondency, and as a result, there is only one way out - suicide. Horace, as a truly subtle person who deeply feels how our heart beats, and moreover, in many ways very similar to the intellectuals of our twentieth century, offers another remedy for this fear – immersion in the world of artistic images, withdrawal into art and contemplation of beauty, but this does not help either.