In the saint who lives among us, I am struck by how simultaneously and equally strongly he feels the power of God and his own human weakness, which, moreover, necessarily condition each other. When, at the Byzantine Liturgy, the priest breaks the Eucharistic bread before Communion and exclaims: "Holy to the holies!", the choir on behalf of the congregation retorts to him: "One is holy, one is the Lord Jesus Christ..." Since humility is a sense of our insignificance — and, according to John Climacus, the highest step on the ladder of virtue — it allows us to see how wretched we are, the more clearly we are given to contemplate the light of the Lord. Here is a double paradox, dogmatically affirmed. If holiness is the meeting of grace and good will of man, that is, synergy, then the reality of man in his sanctification never disappears.

Man is placed by God before His face forever. Therefore, our love for Him is not merging with Him. If it were a fusion, it would be a rejection of creation. No one has penetrated the mystery of the mutual love of God and man. Here we are confronted with the impossibility of union in mystical marriage: "I behold Thy refurbished nuptial rest, O Lord, and I have no garment to enter it." This is the eternal nakedness of man in prayer and the eternal protection that God gives him.

However, the great St. Symeon the New Theologian, who lived in Byzantium in the tenth and eleventh centuries, taught that the spiritual man exists in the realization of grace, the new birth in the Spirit, which is identical with the knowledge of the Spirit Himself. Of course, a person is carried out for this birth by Baptism, and there are no sudden breakthroughs of grace outside of church life. But, as St. Simeon asserts, Baptism is only bathing in water, if it is not combined with the gift of tears.

The grace given to us never makes us feel important, for we know that we are always "useless slaves." We are aware of God's holiness in us, our purpose as transmitters, and our total unworthiness. The divine-human work is still ineffable.

Holiness is incomprehensible outside the category of eros. When St. Ignatius of Antioch said of Jesus: "My Love (Eros) is crucified," he was aware that through martyrdom he would come to marital peace. The concepts of agape and eros are always opposed, but it is precisely the passion for man that God nourishes. He gives himself to him in the death of the Son and evokes in him a reciprocal passion for God. Man examines his own heart and by his obedience entrusts his thirst for God: "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15).

The Face of God that we see becomes the power of the Transfiguration. A person believes because his heart is touched. Faith is the first thing that begins the betrothal to our Lord. The face of God is still hidden, for its light is too bright for us. But when the Beloved leads us into His hiddenness, the boundary between faith and vision is erased and the promises of the future life blossom. We realize that the kingdom is within us. Everything is illuminated by the petition from the Lord's Prayer, which St. Gregory of Nyssa pronounced thus: "Thy Holy Spirit come," instead of: "Thy Kingdom come." Love for God itself becomes the power of faith, generates it, revives it, and, burning it to a flame, surrounds it with itself.

In the depths of holiness, faith and hope seek to merge with love. Whoever has truly come to the full realization that he is loved by God has already been transferred to the kingdom and takes it with him into death. To whom God has trusted, whom He has adopted in the Son, he already sees the unsetting light. In a sense, he has already risen from the dead. He alone clearly sees the Resurrection of Christ as Holy and as Lord. We are alive in the Living One, Who is resurrected in us by the Spirit. There is no knowledge outside of the vision of this eternal Passover, which we eat in the purity of our hearts.

The Christian knows that he depends only on God, because by denying himself, he has freed himself from everything. Always doing what is pleasing to the Father, He is led by the Word and, according to His obedience, is "purified, illumined, enlightened, and vouchsafed to see the revelation of great mysteries, the depths of which no one has ever seen or would ever see" [1]. When Jesus says that the pure in heart will see God, he means a direct view of the Creator and the creature. A Christian introduces the Lord into his relations with people and, becoming His servant, serves Him. In the hope of the glory to which the universe is destined, he already sees the world transformed. Other people can see the light and unity of the world through the saints.

Indeed, it is important to believe that holiness illuminates not only our brothers but the cosmos as a whole. The fate of the world is in the freedom of matter. Now it is enslaved, but "the creation was subjected to vanity, not voluntarily, but by the will of Him who subjected it, in the hope that the creation itself would be freed from slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God" (Romans 8:20-21). God has liberated the cosmos through the saints and for the symphony that is to reign in the transfigured universe.

In the hope of this transfiguration, in the historical formation, the purpose of which is to approach the fullness of times, holiness belongs to the ecclesial community as a whole. This is the building which, in the words of the Apostle Paul, "being built up in order, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, on which you also are built up into the habitation of God by the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:21-22).

This completely excludes the individualistic understanding of salvation and the moment of salvation. We are all carried by a single stream of God's love. St. Isaac the Syrian could not bear the thought that someone would remain in hell forever: "And what is a merciful heart? Kindling of the heart for all creation, for men, for birds, for animals, for demons, and for all creation. At the remembrance of them, at the sight of them, the eyes watered from the great and strong compassion that envelops the heart. And the heart is softened, and it cannot endure, or hear, or see any harm or even a little sorrow experienced by the creature. Wherefore he prayeth hourly for the dumb, and for the enemies of the truth, and for those who do him harm, that they may be preserved and purified. And he prays for the nature of those who crawl out of great pity. It is aroused in the heart without measure of assimilation to God in this" [2].

No one works out his salvation alone or only for himself. A person is a fact of love. If the Lord lives in his heart, He expands it into infinite spaces, and this is what gives him an understanding of the mysteries of the new creation. "Joined together," as the Apostle says, believers will attain "a perfect understanding of the mystery of God" (Col. 2:2). Only together with one another will we accomplish the work of "edifying the body of Christ, until we all come to the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:12-13). We do not strive for the solitary perfection of the believer, but for the perfection of the "perfect man" in the conciliar sense, that is, Christ as a whole, as Head and as Body.

Any theological conversation about holiness must begin with the Trinity, since holiness is the Trinitarian life in us. "No one knows the Son except the Father; and no one knows the Father except the Son" (Matt. 11:27). If we are once and for all transferred into the bosom of the Divine Trinity, if we participate in this unceasing life of love, then we turn to people to bear our witness to them; and if we are transformed into fire together with them, then the world will burn and be transfigured in its march to the age to come.

We proceed from the deep conviction that the source of our knowledge of man is God. Only God reveals the nature and destiny of man. From this point of view, the foundation of Christian anthropology lies in the New Testament assertion that we are "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4). First of all, from this revelation comes the famous patristic formula: "God becomes man so that man may become God." With this formula begins the doctrine of the deification of man. The fundamental thing here is that man does not abandon his humanity in order to remain an image and become the likeness of God. And God, by giving Himself to man, does not become smaller, and man does not become more human when he is torn away from God. Humanity in this case becomes, so to speak, a weakness and a compromise with sin. In view of this, the Fathers strive to substantiate the idea that our nature is ascent, and not fall. Accepted by Christ, at once glorified and hidden in Him, our nature sits at the right hand of the Father, sharing the dignity and majesty of the divine nature. Our sanctification is a ceaseless ascent, the transformation of our being into a new creature. This transformation began with the Head. "Since God became man, man can become God. He ascends in the Divine ascent to the same extent as God humbled Himself out of love for people, when, without changing, He took upon Himself the worst in our situation," writes St. Maximus the Confessor.