Christianity has tamed much of this evil. Although there are many evil people in it, they are all fewer in comparison with evil people in the pagan world. For example, look at Asia and its rulers: do they look like humans? Ancient pagan societies present innumerable imperfections. Terrible ferocities took place among uneducated peoples. For example, Genghis Khan, having decided to pour blood on the whole world, goes with an innumerable army, devastates cities and villages, and feasts on the corpses of the killed with his companions. Finally, at the moment of the awakening of thought, he says that he is the wrath of God. And in educated societies... What, for example, does Greece represent? All the disputes and conversations between Athens and Lacedaemon are like a fight between children: they fought and fought until they put out each other's eyes and fell under the dominion of Macedonia and Rome. In Rome it was the same: for example, in the time of Cicero, the best citizens, the fathers of the fatherland, were killed without mercy. And who ordered Cicero himself to be killed? Caesar is the first member of society. Modern times provide even more proofs of the corruption of man. That is why, with all efforts, all human codes disintegrate and disappear. In France, for example, there have been several constitutions for seven years, and all of them have been pushed off the stage by the foot of Napoleon.

 Finally, in the whole nature of the world, in many cases, traces of an unnatural state are clearly revealed. In the animal kingdom we see such vices as in humans. We ourselves admit that vices – cunning, cruelty, gluttony – are contrary to nature; Therefore, we must admit that even in the animal kingdom these phenomena are not natural. Did the Creator not give animals any other food than to torment other animals? We see people neglecting their duties; but some birds, such as the cuckoo and others, throw their children into other people's nests. We see terrible gluttony in animals: for example, some of them give birth and devour what is born (snakes, pigs). We see in them selfishness, forgetfulness of work and services. For example, bees: drones, as long as they need them, are fed, and then killed. We also see a trick: a spider, for example, weaves its webs cunningly in order to seize other insects like itself and devour them. Animals are driven by instinct, and therefore their instinct is damaged, just as our mind is damaged. In the plant kingdom there is also a noticeable unnaturalness, for example, unlawful abduction: whole families of plants, the so-called aliens, live at the expense of others, by the death of others. Stealing from another is seen in the roots of many plants; The suppression of the weak by the strong is also seen in many plants. If we descend lower, to the inorganic kingdom of minerals, then even there, under the guidance of natural scientists, corruption can be found. Hence the irritability in some substances, which, when confronted with others, produce explosions and thunders. If we look at our entire earth, it will also present us with a painful condition. At the poles it is dead from the cold, and wants to warm itself with a little northern lights; but her experiments somehow fail. In the middle, it is barren from heat. Here she wants to cool herself with terrible storms; But this does not help either. And its full life is only in the intervals between the middle and the extremes. But perhaps someone will think that it cannot be otherwise? No, it could be otherwise. For example, in Siberia there are traces that it was once warm there. In the middle of the earth, there are even more transformations. And what proves most of all its depravity is that it is filled with fire within; She looks like a person covered with artificial ulcers.

 Where did this condition start from? From the first person. The sin of man was disobedience to the will of God. And just as in the will of Adam was contained the will of the entire human race; then the falling away of Adam's will from the will of God is assimilated to all mankind. In the physical world, everything is held together by the law of gravitation: the circle is connected with the center. If something breaks away from the village, it will wander around the whole world, and cannot calm down: if the earth loses its relationship to the sun, it will not recover by itself. It is the same in the human world in relation to God. Adam's act of sin was most terrible, for it decided the fate of all existence. How does this evil spread? Originally by birth: all mankind was in the loins of Adam. This is evident from experience: from a bad tree cannot come a good tree; A sick father cannot give birth to a healthy son. How is sin born? Sin, as a free action, is not born, but only the inclination to sin is born, the source of all sinfulness, and is born not only to the will, but to the whole being of man, and with the development of man's powers it develops itself. From this we can understand the relation of the sin of our ancestors to us. Ambrose says: "We are not only born in sins, but also give birth..." Augustine provides a remarkable example in this respect. He says that he saw two babies taking away their mother's breasts, and when one sucked, the other turned pale with envy. Kant also presents a remarkable experience: he says that there are no two friends, one of whom does not feel a secret pleasure when he sees that his friend has fallen into misfortune. Of course, he will feel sorry for him, help him, but inwardly he will rejoice: this is how egoism has penetrated man. It is from this innate evil that it is explained that saints who had spent several years in asceticism, as, for example, Macarius of Egypt or Anthony the Great, suddenly had a serpent in their bosom, some evil thought, against which it was difficult for them to fight. No matter how you heal this evil, it can all regurgitate from time to time. Each person can be a hotbed of sin, one that will become for the whole world. On the other hand, everything external can incite a person to sin, for example, some animals can incite him to cruelty. So Attila, looking at a spider mercilessly devouring insects, was encouraged to cruelty. Everyone suffers from this sinfulness; not one will come out into the middle and say: I am sinless. No matter how proud a person is, he has not yet reached such unscrupulousness that he does not recognize himself as a sinner. Both kings and subjects say that they are sinful and offer sacrifices. Thus God shut everyone up in resistance, in order to bring everyone to public guilt — to force them to repent publicly; and this is in order to have mercy on everyone.

 The damage extends to all the abilities and powers of man: a simple view of life serves as a guarantee of this. True, experience also presents something contrary to this. Some, for example, people are naturally more kind, others are more evil. This phenomenon may lead some to believe that perhaps the evil inheritance of Adam is not equally shared by all his descendants. But in essence they are still evil. It is possible to assume, or it is possible not to assume this inequality of evil. But if we do not assume this inequality, then how can we explain its signs in experience? By the fact that in people who are outwardly kinder, evil is only hidden further and deeper, but in some cases it can be revealed terribly. That is why people often wonder how such a good person suddenly became so evil; Cases of such a change are quite frequent. If we assume the inequality of evil, then will it be in accordance with God's Providence? For it is necessary that all men should be either equally good or equally evil, for evil began to flow from Adam through all the conductors, and of necessity flows in the same measure. There can be two reasons for inequality. Is it not the inequality of souls themselves that is the cause of this? Is there not the same thing in the human world as there is in the angelic world? In essence, human souls are the same, but in quality they may perhaps be different. All people borrowed death from Adam, but the expression of this mortality may not be the same for everyone. However, this reason is unclear and not decisive. Another reason: a person is directly born of parents; but a series of preceding parents may be one or the other. Humanity, passing through the generations, is more or less Spoiled. A number of virtuous parents also give virtuous children, and vice versa, a number of vicious parents also give vicious children. Only it is not necessary to imagine this chain of parents physically, that is, necessarily united, for even the most righteous at other moments are almost inferior to ordinary sinners; For this reason their children, who are conceived or carried in the womb at such moments, are subjected to the greater influence of evil and are born bad. And philosophy says: as the beginning, so is the consequence. Yet does the evil that came from Adam change? It changes, but this change does not depend on nature itself, not on reason, but on religion, on Christianity. In the patriarchs, for example, and in other holy men, Revelation greatly weakened the power of evil. Historically, we can hardly judge the actions of original sin. We cannot even imagine the image of fallen and unrestored man now. The whole human race took poison, but, so to speak, the poison was reduced at its very first appearance. It is not at all easier for a man who has inherited less evil; it is necessary to look at the consequences, and not at the source. A great inclination to evil is a kind of talent given for cultivation. Whoever inherits a greater evil, therefore, can defeat this evil. To complain about this would be the same as to complain to a soldier or a commander who has been instructed by his superiors to go to a dangerous place for battle, knowing that he will come out of there with success. And in judgment less is required of such a person, and a better crown is prepared for him. The lord of the harvest will be glad, so to speak, if a few fruits grow in this wild land, though less than in the other land. However, it seems more correct not to assume this inequality of evil. People are good by nature, if they are not satisfied with worldly morality, which is not far away, but want to live according to the rules of the Spirit of God, they will find something to work on in their hearts. Experience shows that the natural goodness of such people is expressed for the most part only in worldly love, in helpfulness, but is almost never revealed in true self-denial.

 Examining human nature in parts, we discover the damage in each of them. Holy Scripture finds different parts in man; in its entirety it represents it as consisting of soul, body, and spirit. "May the God of peace Himself sanctify you who are all perfect (in all things): and may your spirit, soul, and body be perfect without blemish at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. 5:23). These words of the Apostle represent the most complete description of man. In other places of the Holy Scriptures there is no such distinction; it speaks either of two opposite parts, soul and body, or of only two higher parts, soul and spirit; or about two opposing ones – the spirit and the body. This is because man is usually divided into two sides, the inner and the outer, and that in man the spirit and the soul are as it were merged into one, and in him there is a great opposition between the spirit and the body, the visible and the invisible. But the tripartite nature of human composition has always made itself felt. Thus, in ancient times, philosophers, in addition to the spirit and the body, ascribed to man the soul and called it the animal, irritable, dominating soul (Plato, Aristotle and others). In modern times, psychologists have solved this ancient question of human composition easily – they have turned to the commonly used division into soul and body. But those who have delved deeper into the nature of man even now admit in man the spirit and the soul. At the same time, it is only necessary to note that the spirit is usually called that part which in psychology is called the highest cognitive and moral faculty, the highest pure mind and rational will with their principles; but by the soul they understand what is known in logics under the name of reason, and in moral philosophy under the name of the lower will. But the main feature is that in our spiritual being it is necessary to distinguish two sides: ours and not ours. Ours consists in freedom; not ours, inviolable for us, these are the laws of the mind, its moral and theoretical ideas; we look only at them, we conform to them, but we cannot change them. This is the realm of the spirit, something inaccessible, Divine. Hence, in the Scriptures, our spirit is presented as something else good: it could not be damaged much, because it serves as a bond between God and us. Yet all other parts of man are too corrupt. There is nothing to say about the depravity of the body. Even in antiquity it was said that the source of moral evil lies in the body, that it is the product of the evil principle, that the perfection of man consists in the separation from the body. All pious people who wanted to soar to heaven felt that the body was a burden for them. The soul consists of reason, will, and heart, and all these faculties are bad according to the Scriptures. Experience shows this. Reason, even when educated, in reasoning about higher subjects, lives, so to speak, by sophistry, nourishes doubts, builds syllogisms as fortresses, against the immortality of the soul, against the truths of faith. For the most part, the will is low, the heart is impure. Almost all the activity of worldly, worldly people consists of cunning, deceit, and deception. It would be more proper for the soul to strive after the spirit, and yet it is in an incessant struggle and opposition to it. The goal of her aspirations is to move the spirit and remain one with the body. In philosophical systems, for the most part, they try to establish empiricism, reject ideas, decapitate man, and brutize him. For this reason the Holy Scriptures condemn the soul to a great and heavy penance; and worldly wisdom, though in a silent but firm voice, says that the lower will must submit to the higher: this is the same as in the language of the Scriptures it speaks of the destruction of the soul, of the taking away of its life. Finally, even in the spirit, Holy Scripture finds a kind of defilement. It commands us to strive to acquire a contrite spirit and a renewed heart. The spirit has become hard, petrified, whereas it is destined to be the connection of man with God, and therefore must be, as it were, pervasive, soft; he became insensible to receiving sensations from above and to communicating them to the other faculties of man. Some letters of the law remained on it, but as on a stone; and therefore it must be melted down, remade, as artists do with some damaged tools.

 We have already said that according to the Scriptures, all spiritual faculties are bad, that is, sick, impure, and damaged. And indeed, it speaks of the heart, for example, as the source of all evil. It says that serpents nest in it, that evil thoughts proceed from it, and therefore advises how one can guard one's "heart, for from these proceed the life" (Proverbs 4:23). Even in the antediluvian world, this came out in all its thinness (Gen. 6:5); and now, if we examine the thoughts of men, the greater part of them will turn out to be evil. Apparently, a person sometimes turns his thoughts not to evil, but to good; but if we pay attention to its ends, to the means, and so on, we will see evil here as well. A merchant, for example, thinks about the successful conclusion of a well-known trade—there seems to be nothing wrong with it. Then he thinks about building himself a house, and this does not seem to be evil. But the evil is in the purpose for which he undertakes all this and how he will use it all afterwards.

 Further, the Holy Scriptures ascribe darkness to the human mind, and impurity to the will; he also ascribes vanity to the mind, dead deeds to the conscience, and so on. It is impossible not to pay attention here to the fact that the source of everything in man in the Holy Scriptures is called the heart, the feeling. Apparently, this name is a consequence of the sensory view (anthropomorphism) of the object; But in fact, the reason for this is deeper. The basis of mental movements and actions is not the mind, not the will, but feeling. Feeling is combined in the heart; the heart sees, hears, and feels rather than other faculties; A thought, conceived in the mind, passes through the heart, appears in the form of wishes. If we pay attention to the human mind, we find that in millions of people it is occupied with absolutely trifles. For example, as many as millions of people are tied to the land – farmers. Of course, we will not degrade this work, which is now the most natural and necessary: in the Gospel, Jesus Christ Himself took many parables from the fields and fields; only the people who practice this art do not always use its lessons. Nomadic peoples are engaged in catching animals; hence their language is the language of these animals. The concepts of merchants and industrialists have been removed from those objects that are in their hands. Even people with a high mind have very few unearthly concepts. Hence worldly writers, when they begin to talk about spiritual subjects, babble like a baby, and sometimes admit that this cannot be understood. But should it be so by nature? In man there is a higher faculty, which, if well revealed, would not be dead and humiliated as it is now. Each person loves himself very much, and often forgets about his present and future state. Everyone knows that he will surely die, but what will happen to his soul — how many have tried to find out? So little are we disposed to spiritual things..

 In the way people perceive spiritual things, coarseness is generally noticeable: they represent everything heavenly in a carnal way. Instead of seeing carnal objects in the spirit, in the light, they drag everything spiritual, so to speak, to earth, directing them to their perishable forms. A striking example of this is seen in the state of some of the apostles. They were surrounded by miraculous events and guided by a Divine Teacher; but while in His word all that is carnal is spiritualized, in their words all that is spiritual is earthen, for example, in their petition to sit at the right hand and at the right hand of Jesus Christ. The Holy Scriptures call this state covered. This veil is our flesh, which, according to Solomon, weighs down the soul. People do not at all place the goal of knowledge in heaven: such a distance is not according to them. The most sublime goal of philosophers and poets is to live in posterity, to gain fame among their contemporaries, and that their successes should be known in heaven, the clever earthly do not think about this, and indeed cannot do so. But even this goal, which in their opinion is lofty, is not set by many; and the greater part of them are limited to immediate gains, such as the sale of their writings, the love of money.

 The faculty of judgment consists in comparing two things or concepts. It borrows the matter of comparisons from impressions which are either stored in the memory, or at the present time strike it. But this ability in people is also erroneous and weak, because it compares two things without being able to. This inability is constantly expressed, for example, in the comparison of the temporal with the eternal, the Divine with the human, and in the preference of the latter to the former. In the life of Jesus Christ we see that the Jews, for example, compared Him as teachers with their teachers, while He was perfectly holy, and in the Pharisees, their teachers, righteousness was for the most part counterfeit. That is why they held on to their teachers, but rejected Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus Christ said to them more than once: "Judge righteous judgment, do not look at faces." That is why the Evangelist John, at the end of his Gospel, as if trying to give himself an account of why the Jews did not believe in the Son of God, turns to prophecy and says (John 12:38) that they did not believe, but Isaiah says: "Blind" God... "Their hearts..." In the moral life of man, the same ability to judge sensibly is noticeable. The natural man not only falls himself, but wants to drag others with him into the fall, wants his errors to become general. If someone does not share some prejudice with such a person, he considers him completely incapable of judging. In its direction, the faculty of judgment usually tends to where it should not. Man is closest to delving into himself; for this purpose a court was instituted within it, but the natural man does not like to sit in this court; his case is almost settled, that he is good and right, and therefore he exercises his ability to judge more in the judgment of others, and even in the judgment of God. Listen to general conversation, to general gossip: the most stupid people become witty in judging the ends and motives of certain actions of others. In people who are engaged in science, the desire to judge the judgments of God is revealed most of all. There is a well-known example when a philosopher condemned God for allegedly creating the world badly, and said that He Himself would have created it much more perfectly. Anyone who has carefully read people's writings about nature or the world may have noticed that for the most part people approach the world not as a Divine creation: they walk inside this huge building, and leave it, sometimes never even remembering that there is a Master in it. They look at things as existing in themselves, they do not see the Creator in nature; and sometimes the things themselves, having gone out of patience, so to speak, from this coldness of man, push the wise men to the true path. In spite of his great desire to judge everything, when the truth is revealed, man seems to lack judgment; he does not know what to do in such a case, and misses such phenomena. For example, in the life of Jesus Christ, how many took advantage of His appearance and miracles? In these cases, a person's mind becomes stagnant and, as it were, immovable. Ignorance, or some prejudice, is one of the favorite principalities on which the mind rests in such cases. Preach, for example, the faith of the Mohammedans: as many as thousands, without reasoning, will answer you with one voice: so our fathers believed, so shall we believe. And where better to judge than here?

 The faculty of inference suffers from the same ailment. The Apostle says of the Gentiles that they are vain in their thoughts (Romans 1:20). Διαλογισμος, used in this passage by the Apostle, means the same as inference. How vain are these thoughts, and without the complaint of the Holy Scriptures, one can see by experience. Philosophy gave rise to many skeptics and sophists in antiquity. On the one hand, these people show pride in the overthrow of all previous systems; on the other hand, they hesitate in the most pitiful way themselves, questioning everything. What is this pleasant activity, what is this gratifying exercise? At the same time, they also imagined the funniest things in their logical toys, and all these absurdities were produced by excessive hope in their speculations... In the modern world, this disease has yielded the same results. It is enough to point to Fichte's system alone. As a result of such experiments, not only "the Lord is the message that human thoughts are vain," but also people themselves begin to see this. That is why a clever philosopher recently said at the end of his work that logic, if given absolute value and importance, est scientia non veratatis, sed errorum. And Carpe has the idea that logic is only the instrumentum of truth, and does not give the truth itself. How many errors occur when truth is demanded of logic! For this reason the Scriptures directly say that "obstinate thoughts are separated from God" (at leisure it is useful to read Schad's work: De libertate mentis humanae; it shows how philosophers fell into error, hoping for their syllogistic).

 After this, if we ascend to the very top of human faculties, to the mind; then even there will not be much that is gratifying for the student of human nature. Scripture says that in man there is a light that enlightens every man who comes into the world, that is, the mind, and that this light remains with man for life; but at the same time it says that this light is sometimes eclipsed. The entire first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans consists of complaints about this. Experience, on the other hand, shows that the ideas of the mind, these universal notions, which are supposed to be the seeds of all truths, are now so deeply hidden and repressed, that many people, even those who think, do not recognize their existence at all. For example, how many philosophers were there before Plato discovered the ideal world? And although all these philosophers had ideas, as did Plato; but they did not present themselves to them; That is why they turned to the elements of the world: air, fire, earth, water... After long experiments, these ideas finally began, so to speak, to be dug up, purified, peered into their meaning; But even here it was not without a dispute. Some said that they were innate, others that they were accidentally formed in the soul. And when philosophers appeared who admired them, invited them to follow them, tried all their lives to convert people to ideas, not many followed their path. And Plato's followers themselves have distorted faith in his ideas: after such an idealist as Plato, it is strange to meet many centuries later any English moralists who set up material principles of morality; even after such an experience, they could not ascend to ideas and base their science on them! The ideas of God, freedom, and peace, which lie deep in the soul, if used in action, bear good fruit, but in the whole history of philosophical systems we see that Kant alone reached these ideas; and he also dwelt only on their proper merit. These ideas cannot be completely damaged: they are remnants of the image of God; Only they are stifled and suppressed by the laboratory of reason, the multitude of memory stores, the figurative memory of the imagination. Another lower principle is the principle of understanding, or syllogisms. They also flow from the mind, but are given to the intellect, so to speak, for its use; these are the principles of unity, the causes of the excluded third, contradictions, and the like. These principles are not corrupted, they have retained their strength; but in their use there is more evil than good. Thus, for example, the principle of unity, which holds the whole intellectual world, when applied to God, produced pantheism (one and all), excluding real multiplicity; when applied to the material world, it gives crude materialism; when applied to the intellectual world, it gives idealism (there is only one spiritual; consequently, everything sensuous, visible is a phantom, a dream). The beginning of the cause makes the world eternal, because it represents the world in a continuous relation of causes and effects. For better information about these principles, one can read Kant's antinomies, how to defend one truth on both sides. Kant did not penetrate the mystery of this error. Hegel showed from what it derives. This is due precisely to the fact that there are higher principles in our soul, and the fruit of this is that the realm of the intellect is the exact opposite of the realm of the intellect. It is good that this is known when it is also known that logic is an inferior region: and if this had been known before, great harm would have occurred. Finally, the fruit of the mind shows that this tree of life is damaged; and judging without any partiality, one can philosophically arrive at the truth that the fruit of the tree of knowledge is nothing but death in various forms. There is no need to condemn all philosophers; it is only necessary to distinguish between what is their own and what is not their own. Some of them wrote well; reassured humanity about the future; but they did so because they followed the syllogistic less than others, and reasoned under the influence of Revelation. Such is Jacobi's philosophy. Others of them were directly guided by the Holy Scriptures. But what happened to those who followed their minds directly? They preached either doubt or indifference to various melodies, and many openly went against everything sacred. A curious phenomenon is now represented by the mental world. This Babylonian pillar (philosophical systems) is already built high, carried behind the clouds, and still the builders are trying to climb higher, where it is difficult to breathe because of the cold; therefore, some of them hasten to descend from this height and warm themselves by the fire of Revelation. Now we have almost reached the limits of human knowledge. Formerly, it was thought that, having reached these limits, they would learn that which God Himself knows no more; but when they reached it, they saw that there was not yet the end, that there was an impenetrable abyss; therefore, we decided that besides our intellectual world, there is also a higher, Divine world, which is still inaccessible to us. The same thing happened to philosophers as sometimes happens to small children, who, living from birth in one place, think that ten versts from their place of residence, for example, where the visible horizon ends, the end of the whole world. And the philosophers formerly thought that their absolutes were superior to all things, but now they are beginning to see that these absolutes are only sublime images of the mind, and that God is above all these images. Consequently, from Him alone we must expect Revelation in order to know Who He is.

 There is much that is theoretical in conscience; it prescribes the law, it administers judgment, but its object is action; it does not judge things, but actions, the actions of people according to the prescription of the law. With it goes hand in hand the testimony of these actions, and at the same time rewards or punishments; and therefore it is already something practical. Its activity is threefold, and can be compared with inference. The first part—what to do—is like a large premise; the second produces a consequence on the action, saying that the action is done, and done freely: this is a lesser premise; the third compares the act with the law and deduces from it rewards or punishments: this is the conclusion. But conscience legislates badly, bears false witness, and gives false sentences. Yet it is something that has been most indelibly preserved in man: the most vicious man has some conscience; only there is a conscience that is sometimes wavering, sometimes completely erroneous; who calls bitter sweet and sweet bitter. If conscience were preserved in all its purity, it would soon see the truth. In legislating, conscience is sometimes silent, or pronounces the law in favor of vice, and neglects the law of righteousness. In witnessing, she testifies for the most part falsely. Judgment is also incorrect: the righteous often do not feel pleasure within themselves, and sinners do not feel remorse.

 The natural man's sense is as corrupt as the other faculties. The human spirit can be called a huge pillar, the height of which reaches God. Feeling is stretched everywhere along the height of this pillar: there is the sense of the Divinity, the instrument that accepts the influence of the spiritual world; it is an instrument that accepts the attachment of intermediate objects, such as truth, goodness, and beauty; there is, finally, a lower feeling, directed towards low, coarse objects. The corruption of feeling can be seen in all these three degrees. How rare and dark is the sense of spiritual peace! How spoiled is the average feeling! There is nothing to say about the latter.

 Will. The spring of the will is the striving that strives to embrace everything that enters the soul and to unite with it. And how boundless is this striving for unity! Nothing in the world can satiate him (this idea is developed by Metropolitan Philaret in his homily on the consecration of the church, from the text: "If Thy dwelling is beloved..."). The will of the natural man has almost no pure desires, especially spiritual ones: as the Apostle says, it smolders in the lusts of the charming. For the most part, the will chooses the most evil means for the attainment of the desired objects. For example, what means did ancient and modern states not use for domination? And people call the most terrible diplomats geniuses!