Dante, who, according to one of his first biographers, "already fell in love with the Holy Scriptures as a youth," is one of those who felt the Word of God especially subtly and perceived it incredibly deeply. At the same time, however, although thousands of books and articles have been written about Dante in all languages of the world, the scattered reflections on biblical texts and individual phrases of the Scriptures, translated by him from Latin into Italian, are still little understood by researchers. But they give amazing food for thought to the attentive reader!

It is difficult to say whether for this reason or for some other reason, but it was Dante Alighieri who became for the author of this book in his school years what Virgil was for Dante himself – lo mio maestro e 'l mio autore, that is, "my teacher and the reason for my writing". That is why in this book, which is devoted to the Gospel of John, that is, the part of the New Testament that touches the inner world of each of us most of all, where it is said, in the words of Dante from the seventh canto of Paradise, how Verbo di Dio dis-cender piacque u' la natura, that is, "the Word of God deigned to descend into human nature", the author simply could not do without relying on the spiritual experience of who have long become his eternal companion and irreplaceable mentor.

Part I

THE BOOK OF SIGNS

Chapter 1

A TOUCH OF GOD

What is the almost two-thousand-year history of Christianity? This, of course, is the history of the preaching of faith in the Resurrection of Christ from the time of the Apostles and their first disciples to the present day, and consequently the history of those who preached this faith, the saints and righteous of all times, in "every generation" (that is, in each generation), as the anaphora of the Liturgy of Basil the Great says, who pleased God. This is the history of glorified and unknown martyrs who gave their lives for the right to believe and not to renounce their faith, the history of disputes about doctrine and theological searches, the history of monasticism and the embodiment of the Christian ideal in the lives of specific people.

But first of all, this is the history of the reading of the Gospel. Both the daily reading of Scripture during the Liturgy or Liturgy within the framework of any (Byzantine, Roman, Armenian, Coptic) tradition, the reading that is necessarily associated with the sacrament of the Eucharist, or "remembrance", as Jesus himself says in the Gospel of Luke, about the last, or Mystery, Supper that He celebrated with His disciples on the night when He was betrayed, and the private reading of the Word of God by Christians of all ages and peoples. Reading, which a person approaches in silence and complete silence – alone with God and himself. Therefore, this is also the story of the prayer that is born in the human heart during the reading of the Bible.

But it is also the history of the preservation of the text of the Gospel itself, the fate of its most ancient manuscripts, the copying of old manuscripts in the silence of ancient monasteries and the making of new copies of it, the history of the translation of its text into new languages – Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic, and so on – and the painful search for those linguistic means that would help in translating into a new language as accurately and correctly as possible to convey the meaning of the original. The story of Blessed Jerome, who translated the Scriptures into Latin, and Mesrop Mashtots, the author of the oldest Armenian translation of the Gospel. Saints Cyril and Methodius and their successors with their Slavonic text of Scripture and St. Philaret (Drozdov) with his collaborators as the creators of the Russian, so-called Synodal, translation of the Bible.

Finally, the history of Christianity is the history of each Christian's personal response to the call that he finds in the pages of the Gospel. For example, this was the case with St. Anthony, who lived in Egypt in the fourth century A.D., who decided to go into the wilderness and became the founder of Christian monasticism, reflecting on the words of the Gospel: "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor; and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" (Matt. 19:21). Accidentally entering the church at the very time when they were being read during the service, the future saint and ascetic ad se Dominicum traxit imperium, that is, "accepted the command of the Lord as addressed to him personally" and his auditis aliud non quesivit ("when he heard these words, he asked nothing else"), as Francesco Petrarch puts it in a famous letter, where he tells how he ascended Mount Ventosa on April 26, 1336, and on that day he himself felt that God was speaking to him through the mouth of Blessed Augustine.

Augustine speaks of the same personal call to God at the very end of the eighth book of his Confessions. He says that once, during prayer, he heard "a voice from a neighboring house, I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, often repeating in a chant: 'Take it, read it! Take it, read it!" stood up, interpreting these words as a divine command for me to open the book and read the first chapter that came to my eyes." The passage that opened up was the passage in Romans 13:13-14 where the apostle Paul says:

"Not in feasts and in drunkenness, not in bedrooms and in debauchery, not in quarrels and in envy: put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not turn the care of the flesh into lusts."

"I did not want to read further," Augustine continues, "and I did not need to: after this text my heart was flooded with light and peace; the darkness of my doubts has disappeared" (translated by M.E. Sergeenko).