Apophaticism, in which the character of the entire contemplation of God in the Eastern Church is manifested, is an unceasing testimony to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who fills up all deficiencies, who overcomes all limitations, who imparts to the knowledge of the Unknowable the fullness of experience, who transforms the Divine darkness into the light in which we partake of God.

That is why the unknowable God reveals Himself as the Holy Trinity, why His unknowability is represented by the mystery of the three Persons and one nature, that the Holy Spirit reveals to our contemplation the fullness of the Divine being. Therefore, in the Eastern Church, the day of Pentecost is called the feast of the Trinity. It is the absolute immutability, the limit of all contemplation, of all ascent, and at the same time the beginning of all theology, the primordial truth, the primordial datum from which all thought and all being originate. St. Gregory the Theologian, Evagrius of Pontus, St. Maximus the Confessor, and other Fathers identify the perfect knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity with the Kingdom of God, the ultimate perfection to which created beings are called. The mystical theology of the Eastern Church always asserts itself as triadocentric. For him, the knowledge of God is the knowledge of the Most Holy Trinity, a mystical union, a single life with the Three Persons of the Godhead. The antinomy of the Trinitarian dogma, the mysterious identity of the Unity-Trinity, is jealously guarded by the spirit of Eastern apophaticism, which opposes the Western formula of the procession of the Holy Spirit à utroque, so as not to emphasize the unity of nature to the detriment of the personal fullness of the "Three Shrines, which converge in one Lordship and Divinity" (386). The unity of command of the Father, the one Source of Persons, in Whom dwells the infinite richness of the one nature, is always affirmed.

Constantly striving to perceive ever greater fullness, to overcome all the restrictive concepts that define the Divinity in a rationalistic way, the theology of the Eastern Church refuses to give the divine nature the character of an essence enclosed in Itself. God, the one essence in the Three Persons, is greater than His essence: He transcends His essence, manifests Himself outside of it, the Incommunicable by nature communicates to the created. The processions of the Godhead outside His essence, the outpourings of Divine abundance, are the energies, the mode of existence proper to God, who pours out the fullness of His Divinity through the Holy Spirit on all those who are able to receive it. Therefore, in one of the troparia of the canon to the Holy Spirit at Compline of Pentecost, it is said about the Holy Spirit: "For Thou art the river of the Godhead, proceeding from the Father by the Son."

The same striving for completeness is manifested in the doctrine relating to the creation of the world. If the existence of the created world does not have the character of necessity, if its creation is accidental, then it is precisely in this absolute freedom of Divine will that the created world finds its perfection. For God has created out of nothing an entirely new work, the cosmos, which is not a bad copy of God, but a work of desire, "conceived" in the "Divine Council." In fact, in the theology of the Eastern Church, the Divine ideas, as we have seen, are presented in the dynamic aspect of forces, volitions, and creative words. They define created beings as their external causes, but at the same time they call them to perfection, to "well-being," ευ ειναι in union with God. Thus, the created world appears to us as a dynamic reality, striving towards the fullness of the future, which for God is always the fullness of the present. The unshakable foundation of the world created out of nothing lies in its perfection, as the end of its becoming. But He Who completes, Who imparts fullness to every being, is the Holy Spirit. A created being, considered in itself, is always incompleteness; considered in the Holy Spirit, it is the fullness of the deified creature. Throughout its history, the created world has been between these two limits, and it is never possible to conceive of "pure nature" and grace as two realities that would be added to each other. The Tradition of the Eastern Church speaks of a creature striving towards deification, constantly perfecting itself in grace; it also speaks of a fallen creature separating itself from God and entering a new existential plane, the plane of sin and death; but it avoids attributing a static perfection to created nature, considered in itself. Indeed, this would mean giving a limited fullness, a natural self-sufficiency, to those beings who were created in order to find their fullness in union with God.

In anthropology and the asceticism that follows from it, the limitation that we must transcend is the limitation of the individual, the individual being, the result of the confusion of personality and nature.

In the unity of the common nature, the personalities are not its parts, but each is a certain whole, completing its perfection in union with God. The person, the indestructible image of God, always strives for this fullness, although he sometimes seeks it outside of God; it knows, desires, and acts according to a nature darkened by sin, according to a nature that no longer has the likeness of God. In this way, the mystery of the Godhead, the distinction between the one nature and the Divine Persons, is reflected in humanity, which is called to participate in the life of the Most Holy Trinity. The two poles of man, nature and personality, find their fullness: the first in unity, the second in absolute difference, for each person is united with God in the image that is peculiar to him alone. The unity of purified nature is recreated and "headed" by Christ; the plurality of persons is affirmed by the Holy Spirit, who communicates Himself to each member of the Body of Christ. The new fullness, the new existential realm that entered the universe after Golgotha, the Resurrection, and Pentecost, is called the Church.

Only in the Church, only through the eyes of the Church, is Christ perceived in the spiritual life of the Eastern tradition. In other words, He is seen in the Holy Spirit. Orthodoxy always sees Christ in the fullness of His Divinity, glorified and triumphant even in suffering, even in the grave. Exhaustion, κενωσις, is always replenished by the splendor of the Divine. Dead and resting in the tomb, Christ descends into hell as a conqueror and forever crushes the power of the enemy. In the resurrected and ascended Christ to heaven, the Church can see only one of the Persons of the Most Holy Trinity, "trampling down death" and "sitting at the right hand of the Father." The "historical" Christ, the "Jesus of Nazareth" as He appeared to the eyes of foreign witnesses, Christ outside the Church, is always completed in the fullness of Revelation given to His true witnesses, the sons of the Church, enlightened by the Holy Spirit. The cult of Christ's humanity is alien to the tradition of the Eastern Church, or, rather, this deified humanity is clothed here in the same glorified image as the disciples saw Christ on Mount Tabor; it is the humanity of the Son, through whom His Divinity is visible, common with the Father and the Spirit. The spiritual life of the Eastern Church does not follow the path of imitation of Christ. And indeed, it would seem to be somewhat inferior here, it would be some kind of external relationship to Christ. For the spiritual life of the Eastern Church, the only way that likens us to Christ is the path of acquiring the grace communicated by the Holy Spirit. The saints of the Eastern Church never had stigmata, external imprints that likened some of the great saints and mystics of the West to the suffering Christ. But, on the other hand, the saints of the Eastern Church were very often transfigured by the inner light of uncreated grace and were illumined, like Christ in His Transfiguration.

The source of fullness, which makes it possible to overcome any ossification, any limitation in teaching, is the experience and life of the Church. The beginning of this wealth and this freedom is the Holy Spirit. As a perfect Person, He is never perceived in His hypostatic being as a "bond of love" between the Father and the Son, a functional unity in the Trinity in which there is no place for functional definitions. Confessing the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father, His hypostatic independence from the Son, the tradition of the Eastern Church affirms the personal fullness of the work of the Comforter who came into the world. The Holy Spirit is not a unifying force by which the Son would unite the members of His mystical body. If He bears witness to the Son, then as a Divine Person, independent of the Son, a Divine Person who communicates to each human hypostasis, to each member of the Church, a new fullness, in which created persons are revealed and freely and directly confess the Divinity of Christ, confirmed by the Holy Spirit. "Where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom" — the true freedom of individuals who are not blind members in the unity of the Body of Christ, who are not annihilated in their unity, but find their personal fullness; each becomes a kind of "whole" in the Church, for the Holy Spirit descends on each human person separately. If the Son communicates His Hypostasis to the renewed human nature, if He becomes the Head of the new body, then the Holy Spirit, who came in the name of the Son, communicates the Divinity to each member of this body, to each human person. In the kenosis of the Son who came to earth, the Personality is clearly manifested, but nature remains hidden under the "shadow of the slave." At the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Godhead reveals Himself as a Gift, while the personality of the Giver remains unrevealed. As if belittling Himself, as if hiding Himself as a person, the Holy Spirit bestows uncreated grace on human personalities. Man unites with God, adapting himself to the fullness of being revealed in the depths of his very personality. In unceasing labor on the path of ascent, in cooperation with the Divine will, created nature is more and more transformed by grace until its final deification, which will be fully revealed in the Kingdom of God. The same fullness of the Holy Spirit, the same striving for ultimate completeness, which transcends all that affirms and limits itself, is also manifested in Eastern ecclesiology. The Church is historical, concrete, precisely defined by space and time, unites in itself earth and heaven, people and angels, living and dead, sinners and saints, created and uncreated. How to recognize the glorified Bride of Christ under the external shortcomings and weaknesses of her historical existence,

"having no defilement or blemish, or any of these"

(Ephesians 5:27)? Could we not fall into temptations, into doubts, if the Holy Spirit did not constantly make up for human weakness, if historical limitations were not always overcome, if incompleteness did not always turn into fullness, just as water turned into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee? How many people pass by the Church, not noticing the radiance of eternal glory in the form of humility and humiliation. But did many recognize the Son of God in the "man of sorrows"? One must have eyes to see, and feelings open to the Holy Spirit, in order to recognize fullness where the outer eye sees only limitation and insufficiency. "Great epochs" are not needed to affirm the fullness of divine life that is always present in the Church. In the time of the Apostles, in the era of persecution, in the centuries of the Ecumenical Councils, there were always "secular-minded minds" who remained blind to the evidence of the manifestation of the Spirit of God in the Church. It would be possible to point out examples closer to our time... Crucified and buried Christ would not have been subjected to any other judgment by those who do not see the light of the resurrection. In order to be able to discern victory under the appearance of defeat, the power of God, accomplished in weakness, the true Church in its historical reality, it is necessary, in the words of the Apostle Paul, to accept