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Today it is very important for us to understand that faith in God is a feeling. If we believe, it means that we feel Him as we feel cold, hunger and thirst, smell, taste, etc. In general, it can probably be said that the sense of God and His presence among us is the very sixth sense that poets sometimes think of. If we forget about this, then we are doomed: we ourselves will not notice how we too will begin to understand by faith some special knowledge, discipline or way of life, but, in any case, not an open heart to God.

Fear of God. What does that mean?

In the religiosity of many people today, the fear of punishment occupies a very prominent place. In Soviet times, there was an opinion that believers believe in God only because they do not want to suffer in Hell after death. It was precisely as a fear of the hellish torments that await disobedients after their death that atheistic propaganda presented the Orthodox faith. And I must say, she did it quite professionally.

Getting rid of fear

Without a doubt, the fear of death and the punishment that follows it is a form of faith, but only a purely medieval one. Artists then depicted in frescoes and paintings the Last Judgment, hellfire, devils who torment sinners and with vile laughter drag them to hell, and so on. Such images can be found in almost any medieval temple, both in the East and in the West. It was then that the expression "The Last (!) Judgment", which is absent in the Holy Scriptures, appeared – there is no such expression in the Gospel, and the Christians of the first centuries did not know it either. And now we understand that this judgment is terrible only in one way – the extent to which it is simple. The Judge will not ask us how we fasted or how we read the rule, nor will He ask us what Church we belonged to, what Creed we professed, and how we understood this or that dogma. He will say simply, "I was naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me," or vice versa: "I was naked, and you did not clothe Me; I am sick and in prison, and have not visited me" (Matthew 25:36ff.).

However, in the Middle Ages, the religion of the majority (of course, not the faith of St. Sergius, but of many of his contemporaries) was based precisely on the fear of posthumous or even lifetime punishment. "Fear created the gods," exclaimed a Roman poet, and he was right in his own way, for he was not speaking of our faith, not of God, but of the gods, and consequently of the pagan religions. Christians inherited this fear from the pagans, especially those for whom the faith was based not on the Gospel, but on the natural human desire to protect oneself in the face of an incomprehensible and, in general, hostile world, where everyone at every step lies in wait for some kind of trouble.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, under the influence of the rapid development of the natural sciences and as a result of the fact that during these two centuries man gradually began to realize what human rights were, and to feel the need not to be a slave in the social sense, this fear began to pass. As a result, man, having freed himself from fear (which can only be rejoiced, since fear is always slavery, depression and constriction, and our Lord calls us to freedom), at the same time began to lose faith (and this is already a misfortune!), but only for the reason that this faith was mixed with fear that was purely pagan in nature. As early as the fourth century, this fear was brought into the church walls by those nominal Christians of whom Bl. Augustine, people who were baptized and outwardly became Christians, but in fact remained pagans.

Hence the French atheism of the epoch of Voltaire, Diderot, and d'Alembert, and ours of Pisarev, Dobrolyubov, and others. The tragedy of the people of this time, and among them brilliant thinkers, scientists, and poets, is that they rejected God at the very moment when amazing opportunities arose to feel Him, to discover Him for themselves and for the future. Everything happened as in the proverb: the baby was thrown out with the bathwater, along with medieval prejudices, which inevitably had to go away (and thank God, in many ways have already passed away), humanity lost faith. The child thrown out turned out to be the Baby, born in Bethlehem.

Children who are taught to fear God and how He will punish at some point in their lives experience the same thing that our entire civilization had to go through in the time of D. Diderot. They cease to be afraid, become atheists, and as a result renounce all morality. Jean-Paul Sartre tells how as a child he burned a carpet while playing with matches; at first he waited for God, Who sees everything, to punish him for it, and then, when there was no punishment, he realized that there was no need to fear Him, which means, as Dostoevsky said, "everything is permitted." Thus, the first shoots of unbelief began to sprout in the heart of the future philosopher.

Three Roads to God