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

In the "Frank Tales of a Pilgrim" it is said that three paths lead to God: a slave, a hireling, and a son. When a person abstains from the sins of "fear for the sake of torment," it is unsuccessful and fruitless, such is the way of a slave who is guided by the fear of punishment. The path of a mercenary is associated with the desire to earn a reward for himself. "Even desires for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, if someone begins to perform feats," exclaims the pilgrim, "then the Holy Fathers call this a mercenary deed. But God wants us to follow the path of our sons to Him, that is, out of love and zeal for Him, to behave honestly and enjoy the salvific union with Him in our souls and hearts." In the past, there may have been three roads leading to God, but now, by the end of the twentieth century, it has become clear that the first and second are dead ends; Walking along them, you can only come to a nervous breakdown, destroy yourself and many people around you.

And yet, even we ourselves sometimes scare each other that God will punish us for something. "God punished," we say of people who have had something happen if we think they deserve to be punished. It turns out that we fear God, like the Greeks fear Zeus, the Egyptians fear Amun, and the Romans fear Jupiter. And at the same time, we do not notice how we ourselves become pagans.

And yet, it is impossible without the fear of God! This expression occurs many times in the Bible, and it is certainly not accidental. It is only necessary to understand what this fear is, which teaches wisdom (Proverbs 15:33), leads away from evil (ibid., 16:6) and leads to life (ibid., 19:23), it is pure (Psalm 18:10), and, above all, consists in hating evil (Proverbs 8:13). However, this is not a horror of God or a fear of punishment. God does not watch or watch over us, but we can easily hurt Him.

To the question of what the fear of God is, the Bible in Latin, the Vulgate, gives an exhaustive answer. For a thousand years of history, the language of Horace, Tibullus, Ovid and other great poets of mankind has accumulated a huge vocabulary, Latin words convey the subtlest shades of meaning where almost any other language would be powerless. One Greek word "phobos" (fear) in Latin is "pavor", "metus", and "terror", but there is also the word "timor", and it is this latter word that translates the word "phobos" when it comes to the fear of God. "Timor" (hence the French "timide" and "timidement") is joyful timidity or fear of hurting, offending, or losing. It is very important to understand this in order for our spiritual life and our life in general to become normal.

I am afraid of the wolf or the rhinoceros, but when I see birds in the garden, I am also afraid, but I am afraid to frighten them away with a loud voice or sudden movements. Someone is afraid of their mother, because she can whip her, and someone else is afraid to upset or upset their mother. This is where the difference lies between a purely human fear of something terrible and that fear of God, which is the most precious treasure for all of us.

Those angry Orthodox young people of the 1990s, for whom religion is primarily associated with fear of the Ustav, of breaking the fast or committing some other sin, gloomy, stern, outwardly resembling monks and nuns, today have chosen the path of the slave. It is clear why: in Soviet times, we were slaves for too long, so now it is difficult, even almost impossible, for us to get rid of the slave mentality. But this is necessary, otherwise we will lose faith, as our great-grandfathers and grandfathers lost it, who rejected God, because they saw a lack of freedom in God. You can understand them. Rejecting God with their minds, they pushed their way to Him with their hearts; rejecting the lack of freedom, they yearned for God, but they did not know that the one they needed so much, whom they lacked so much, was Him, and not someone else.

The atheists of the end of the last century, who went to the hinterland, became there zemstvo doctors, midwives and teachers, were a thousand times closer to Jesus than the puffed-up hunters and officials who did not miss a single mass. But these wonderful young men and women of our past, who could have become real saints, in their hearts burning with God, alas, rejected Him in their minds, not only did they not accept Him, but they despised and even hated Him. In fact, they did not reject God, but only the slavish path to Him. So why are we now turning back onto this dead-end road?