Let us now go inside the cathedral. Inside, the impression remains the same impression of artistic unity. Here, only the general tone is lighter: not dark gray, almost black, as outside, but gray-yellow. And here, inside, countless columns stretched upwards, which were intertwined with each other in complex vaults. But it's so high that it hurts your head when you tilt it back to see the vaults. Inside, the pattern is also complex: after all, there is not a single round column, each column seems to be connected from a dozen separate columns. However, inside you soon notice - and even with an unpleasant feeling - monotony. The whole interior is filled with the same columns, and the columns are all exactly the same.

Some time passes and you begin to feel that something is missing in this beautiful, artistically built temple, and something essential is missing. Thought begins to work, trying to answer the question of what the Cologne Cathedral and every Gothic church lack. The answer soon emerges by itself: there is a lack of God, a lack of holiness, a lack of life. Look at the interior of the cathedral! You will see that only two rows of statues along the columns of the middle nave adorn the cathedral, but these statues seem to be frozen, frozen - they are as gray as the columns. There is no what we call ecclesiastical splendor here. What remains? Only the architect's artistic tricks remain. The eyes run away over architectural details - and that's all. And enter our Orthodox church, adorned with all the beauty of church splendor, for example, the Trinity Cathedral of our Sergius Lavra. (I can't find an equal church anywhere!) Everything here is saturated with holiness; first of all, at the entrance you feel that you have entered the house of God, and involuntarily your hand is raised to make the sign of the cross. In Orthodox churches, architectural art itself stands behind, as it were. I do not recognize Orthodox churches without ecclesiastical splendor at all, and I cannot in any way approve, for example, of the majority of Petrograd churches. Enter, for example, the cathedral of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra! Many times you need to remind yourself that you have entered a church, and not just some gallery. We began to build empty churches when we got in touch with Western heretics and began to imitate them. Our pious ancestors always built churches with full church decoration. Sacred painting covers the entire interior of our ancient temples. And in the new churches of the St. Petersburg era of Russian history, only here and there they began to hang framed paintings and paintings that were completely ugly. It is remarkable that these paintings do not evoke primarily religious pious moods, but only artistic emotions, as it would be outside any church, for example, in an art gallery. That is why many people visit such churches in a way that should not be visited in a church, but in a way that only art galleries can be avoided. I will not forget how once in the cathedral of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, a lady-tourist, looking at the guidebook, turned to me with a question:

- Tell me, where are the icons of Van Dyck and Rubens?

I answered:

-Madam! We do not have such saints.

Such churches, which can only arouse sorrow and despondency, appeared in our country, I say, only in the unfortunate period of St. Petersburg, when we lived with someone else's mind and turned away from our native historical treasures.

But the Gothic style is such that a church built in this style can in no way be decorated in a church way to resemble God's dwelling. Columns, columns, a whole forest of columns - and there is nowhere to paint a sacred picture. They came up with the idea of making mosaic transparent windows, but from the middle nave you can't see the images of the windows, and sometimes there are just carpet decorations, without any sacred paintings. And so the heretical Gothic churches stand - empty, as if uninhabited, somehow soulless. Take out furniture, paintings and everything else from any well-furnished apartment - it will be uncomfortable, unpleasant, you want to leave as soon as possible. I will make, my friend, one sharp comparison. If in a Gothic church, for example, in the Cologne Cathedral, rails are laid and steam locomotives with wagons are put in operation, then, in fact, there will be no insult to religious feeling. And if you try to do the same in our Trinity or Assumption Cathedrals, it is simply terrible to imagine such blasphemy!

In Dante's Inferno, heretics are tormented in red-hot cramped coffins. This means that the sin of heretics is their narrowness, their one-sidedness. Everywhere outside of Orthodoxy one senses precisely narrowness, a kind of shortsightedness. For example, Western heretics care so much about the comfort of their own homes, how many styles they have invented more conveniently than one another! But for God's dwelling place they invented the Gothic, completely uncomfortable, gloomy, dry and dead. Obviously, life departed from religion when heretics departed from the Church. It is remarkable that Gothic developed during the reign of scholasticism. It seems to me, dear Friend, that Gothic and Scholasticism are related to each other. The scholastic system, like the Cologne Cathedral, can be complex and harmonious: there are many trifles in it, but all these trifles are connected with each other, hold on to each other. But if you approach any scholastic system, you will see that, for all its harmony, it is lifeless, it smells of death. Gothic is scholasticism in stone. Scholasticism among the Western heretics replaced religious life with its diverse colors of feeling, with its beautiful outbursts of will. In Western religious thinking, scholasticism dominates: Catholics study according to Thomas Aquinas, Protestants took up religious thinking for his own sake, without any connection with life. Even ancient church writers reproached heretics for rationalism and Western heretics for rationalism, while Orthodox theologians, beginning with A.S. Khomyakov, began to reproach them. It is precisely this rationalization of Christian life, I think, that the Gothic architecture of Western churches also preaches. For this, Western heretics should be tortured in cramped coffins. It is impossible to imagine narrower and more one-sided people than rationalists.

It is not in vain, my friend, that some art historians have called the Gothic style the German style; the French disowned this style as early as the XVIII century. But not in vain, because rationalism seems to have captured the German soul more than any other. It was the Germans who decided to replace theology with theological science. It was the Germans who in philosophy did not spare peace for the sake of the triumph of abstract thought. The typical German Kant turned the whole world into an incomprehensible and incomprehensible Ding an sich [2]. A Slav is not a rationalist by nature. The Slav is disgusted with rationalism. Do you remember how Tolstoy writes about self-confidence? "Germans are self-confident on the basis of an abstract idea, science, that is, an imaginary knowledge of perfect truth... The German is the most self-confident of all, and the hardest of all, and the most disgusting of all, because he imagines that he knows the truth, the science which he himself has invented, but which for him is the absolute truth" (War and Peace). Here I hear the voice of a Slav. It is only a pity that Tolstoy himself, as a religious false teacher, took himself entirely on the soil of German rationalism, German science. In "The Unification and Translation of the Four Gospels" he has on almost every page a German named Reiss, one of the unimportant German scholars. It is no accident, I think, that the Gothic style could not take root in Slavic countries: it certainly does not fit Orthodoxy, and even without Orthodoxy it will not find a sympathetic response in the Slavic soul. The Czechs in Prague have a Gothic cathedral, but there is no love for it: it is extremely neglected and so crowded with buildings that it can only be seen from a distance.

But You, my dear Friend, may object to me: "Is it possible that the whole religious life in the West has been replaced by scholasticism and rationalism? Oh, undoubtedly there is, but only mysticism and religious feeling in the West bear an unhealthy imprint.

And you know, my friend, it seems to me that the shades of this unhealthy feeling, by the way, are also materialized in the Gothic style. We can find these shades with You in the same Cologne Cathedral. Where did Gothic come from? To this question some answered as follows: "The primary seed of Gothic is in the dense forests of Gaul and Germany, with their intertwining peaks, with their high and smooth trunks, with their mysterious twilight." Chateaubriand, for example, said that in Gothic temples there is the same religious horror and mystery as in a dense forest. Religious horror... I like this expression; It conveys the impression of Gothic temples well. Take a look at the interior of Cologne Cathedral. Imagine that you are there, that twilight is thickening behind the patterned windows. Only a lamp flickers on the altar. The vaulted ceiling is completely immersed in darkness. Involuntarily, religious horror will creep into the soul...

I can recommend to You, Friend, one experience. Look more closely and longer at the image of the interior of the Cologne Cathedral. Even the picture breathes some kind of spirit of dreaminess. Isn't it? And in the cathedral itself, just sit on a bench closer to the column - now dreaminess will attack. And I imagine how it is possible to sit in the semi-darkness of the cathedral! The sounds of the organ are rushing, drowning in the darkness under the arches, echoing in the far corners of the temple behind the rows of bizarre columns... Horror and dreaminess - this, I think, is what should fill the soul of a person praying in a Gothic temple! Remember how Victor Hugo describes "Notre Dame de Paris"! There are also a lot of creepy and dreamy, sometimes even scary things.

Slavish fear and sentimental daydreaming are what materialized in the Gothic style of Cologne Cathedral, but it is precisely these features that distinguish Western religious feeling, Western religious mysticism. Lately, we have been remembering Francis of Assisi more often than we should. But I personally cannot stand the sentimentalism of this Western mystic with his "sister swallows" and so on. Take St. Sergius. How different his holy soul is from the enthusiastic and sentimental soul of Francis! Thanks to M.V. Lodyzhensky for the fact that in his mystical trilogy he showed the superiority of the soul of St. Seraphim over the soul of Francis ("Invisible Light"). Our saints have not a shadow of dreaminess, let alone "religious horror." And in general, in this point, Russian Orthodox psychology differs significantly from Western, heretical psychology. Idealism and realism, positivism and mysticism are combined together in the Russian soul. This was also noted as a feature of the Russian soul by the Frenchman Leroy-Beaulieu (L'empire des tsars et les russes. Vol. III). It is not without reason that sometimes Russian monasteries lead an excellent household and conduct them in simplicity of heart, without feeling any collisions or doubts.

Perhaps You, dear Friend, will think: "What is wrong if the Gothic style produces religious horror?" But I think that religious horror should not be the goal of a Christian church at all. After all, the church is the place of the liturgical assembly of the Church, here the "sacrament of assembly or communion" takes place, as the author of the work "On the Church Hierarchy" says. Any communication, of course, drives away any "horror" from the soul. There is absolutely no sentimentality in the church services, in the church melodies of the sacred Osmoglas. But how much of this disgusting sentimentality there is in various sectarian meetings! It's sickening to listen to!