Father Seraphim answered: "I have already told you that it is very simple, and I have told you in detail how people are in the Spirit of God and how His manifestation in us should be understood... What do you need, father?"

"It is necessary," I said, "that I understand it well."

Then Father Seraphim took me very firmly by the shoulders and said to me:

"We are both with you now, father, in the Spirit of God; Why have you lowered your eyes, why do you not look at me?"

I answered: "Father, I can't look; for lightning pours from your eyes. Your face has become brighter than the sun, and my eyes ache with pain."

Father Seraphim said: "Do not be afraid, Your Love of God, and you have now become as bright as I myself. You're in the fullness of the Spirit of God now, or you couldn't see me like that." And, bowing his head to me, he quietly said in my ear: "Thank the Lord God for His ineffable mercy to you! You saw that I did not even cross myself, but only prayed to the Lord God in my heart in my heart and said within myself: "Lord, vouchsafe him to see clearly and with his bodily eyes that descent of Thy Holy Spirit, with which Thou vouchsafest Thy servants, when Thou deignest to appear to them in the light of Thy glorious glory," and so, father, the Lord instantly fulfilled the humble request of the wretched Seraphim... How can we not thank Him for this ineffable gift to both of us? Thus, father, the Lord does not always show His mercy to the great desert dwellers, it is the grace of God that deigned to console your broken heart, as a loving mother, but through the intercession of the Mother of God Herself. Well, father, don't look me in the eye? Look simply, do not be afraid: the Lord is with us!"

I looked at his face after these words, and an even greater awe fell upon me. Imagine, in the middle of the sun, in the most brilliant brightness of its noonday rays, the face of a person talking to you. You see the movement of his lips, the changing expression of his eyes, you hear his voice, you feel that someone is holding you by the shoulders with his hands, but not only do you not see these hands, neither yourself, nor his figure, but only one light, dazzling, stretching far for several fathoms around and illuminating with its bright brilliance both the snow veil covering the clearing, and the snow grains, showering both me and the great elder...

"What do you feel now?" asked Father Seraphim. I said, "Unusually good." "How good? I answered: "I feel such silence and peace in my soul that I cannot express it in any word."

"This, Your Love of God, is that peace," said Father Seraphim, "about which the Lord said to His disciples: 'My peace I give unto you, not as the world gives...' "Peace," in the words of the Apostle, "every understanding that prevaileth"... What else do you feel? Father Seraphim asked me. I said, "Extraordinary joy in all my heart." And Father Seraphim continued: "When the Spirit of God descends upon a person and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, then the soul of a person is filled with ineffable joy; for the Spirit of God rejoices in all that He touches... The prerequisites of this joy are given to us now, and if they make our souls feel so sweet, good, and joyful, then what can we say about the joy that is prepared there, in heaven, for those who weep here on earth? So you, father, have wept enough in your life on earth, and see with what joy the Lord comforts you even in this life! Now it is up to us, father, that, by applying labor to labor, we may ascend from strength to strength and attain the measure of the stature of the fulfillment of Christ... It is then that our present joy, which appears to us little and briefly, will appear in its entirety, and no one will take it from us, who are filled with inexplicable heavenly delights" [374].

This account of an experience contains in its simplicity the entire teaching of the Eastern Fathers about "gnosis" – the knowledge of grace, which reaches its highest stage in the vision of the Divine light. This light fills the human person who has attained union with God. It is no longer an ecstasy, a transitory state that delights and tears the human being away from his ordinary experience, but a conscious life in the light, in unceasing communion with God. Indeed, we have quoted above the passage from St. Symeon the New Theologian, where it is said that ecstatic states are especially characteristic of persons whose nature has not yet changed and who have not arranged their life in God. The transfiguration of created nature, which begins already in earthly life, is the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, the entry of the creature into eternal life until death and resurrection. Few, even among the greatest saints, reach this state in earthly life. The example of St. Seraphim is all the more striking because he resurrects in a rather close epoch the holiness of the desert fathers of the first centuries of Christianity, which seems almost incredible for our faith, rational and cool, for our mind, which has become "Kantian" as a result of the Fall. We are always ready to relegate to the realm of the noumenal, to the realm of "objects of faith," everything that does not fit into the laws, or rather the habits of our fallen nature. The philosophical defense of the autonomy of our limited nature, for which the experiential knowledge of grace is inaccessible, is a conscious confirmation of our unconsciousness, a revulsion from the knowledge of God, a revulsion from the light, a resistance to the Holy Spirit, which reveals in men the full consciousness of communion with God.

In the same spiritual discourse that we have quoted above, Venerable Seraphim says to the questioner: "At the present time, due to our almost universal coldness to the faith of the saint in our Lord Jesus Christ and our inattention to the actions of His Divine Providence for us, we have reached such a point that we almost do not understand the words of the Holy Scriptures. Some say: this place is incomprehensible, because could the apostles really feel the Holy Spirit with them so obviously? Isn't there a mistake here? But mistakes... there was and is none... All this happened because, gradually moving away from the simplicity of Christian knowledge, under the pretext of enlightenment, we have entered into such darkness of ignorance that it seems incomprehensible to us, of which the ancient Christians understood so clearly, that in the most ordinary conversations the concept of the manifestation of God between people did not seem strange to any of the interlocutors" [375].

We find the "simplicity of Christian knowledge" where this knowledge and love are one, in the hidden experience hidden from the eyes of the world, in the lives of those who are united with the eternal light of the Holy Trinity, but this experience is inexpressible. "For the objects of the future age," says St. Isaac the Syrian, "there is no true and true name, but there is only simple knowledge about them, which is above every name and every composite principle, image, color, outline, and all invented names" [376]. "This is the ignorance of which it is said that it is above knowledge" [377]. Here again we find ourselves in the realm of the apophatic, in which we began our study of the teaching of the Eastern Church. But instead of Divine darkness, it is light, instead of loss of self-consciousness, it is the consciousness of the personality, fully revealed in grace. Here we are talking about the perfection achieved, about nature changed by virtue of grace-filled union with God, about nature also becoming light. How to make this experience clear to those who have not had it? What St. Symeon the New Theologian tries to express in contradictory terms allows us to see what still remains hidden from our unenlightened consciousness: "But when we come to perfect virtue, then He no longer comes, as before, ugly and formless, but comes in a certain form, in the other in the form of God; for God does not appear in any form or impression, but appears as a simple one, formed by a light that is indifferent, incomprehensible, and ineffable. I can't say anything more than that.

The Holy Spirit is in them everything that, as we hear, is spoken of in the Divine Scriptures about the Kingdom of Heaven – namely, Margaret, mustard seed, leaven, water, fire, bread, drink of life, bed, bridal chamber, bridegroom, friend, brother and father. And why should I say much about the ineffable? For what the eye has not seen, what the ear has not heard, and what has not entered into the heart of man, how can the tongue measure, and how can it be said with words? Truly this is impossible. Although we have acquired all this and have it within us from God, Who has given it to us, we can in no way measure it with our minds or explain it in words" [378].

In the opinion of the defenders of the uncreated light, this experience of the things of the future age cannot be defined dogmatically. Thus, in the Old Testament, along with the dogmas and precepts of the law, there were prophetic insights into what was revealed and became a dogma in the Church. Likewise, in the age of the Gospel in which we live, along with the dogmas, or rather in the dogmas themselves, there appears before us a hidden depth, a mystery relating to the age to come, to the Kingdom of God. It can also be said that the Old Testament lived by faith and sought hope; that the age of the Gospel lives in hope and strives for love; that love is a mystery that will be revealed and fully realized only in the age to come. For the one who has acquired love,