7. In this grace-filled unity of divine Fatherhood and Sonship, lies the source of our human true knowledge of God, our education and life according to God, transmitted from the Father to the eternal Son, from the Son to His friends, apostles and saints, and through them to our fathers and to us. This mystery is expressed by Christ Himself in His Gospel words: "All things have been delivered to Me by My Father; and who the Son is, no one knows but the Father, and who the Father is, no one knows except the Son, and to whom the Son wants to reveal" (Luke 10:22). To whom does the Son want to reveal His mystery and the mystery of His Father? Only to him who will become like Him, that is, who will live and act like Him, who will acquire the character of Christ and His way of being. Sacrificial love, as the search for one's fullness not in oneself, but in another, is the main condition for such a divine-human existence, received from Christ and given to the world through His Church. This is the essence of all true fatherhood and sonship and all true authority. A true authority can only be one who is ready at any moment to become a fragrant sacrifice "for the life of the world," the essence and content of which is self-sacrifice. An authority that sacrifices another to itself, or uses him, without his free consent, as a means to achieve even the holiest goal, will inevitably turn into a "sadistic father" who leaves fetid traces of inhumanity in souls.

8. It is an indisputable fact that the tragic nightmare of the modern world, which fills the hearts of the most sensitive people of our time with gloomy premonitions about the future, has its roots, on the one hand, in objectified social structures, and on the other, in the revolt against them, expressed in the most radical way in the revolutionary upheavals of the past and this century. Beginning with the French Revolution, violence became morally justified and became the main method of achieving freedom, fraternity, and unity, i.e., a radical transformation of the world and human society. Explaining the inevitability of historical laws by natural determinism, necessity, substantiating freedom by the consciousness of this historical necessity, many modern revolutionaries have accepted the path of violence and tyranny as the only way to freedom and happiness. With religious fanaticism, these "conscious" lucky people of history tried to liken the "historical regularity" to their idea of it and of man as its main subject. Their methods are (in spirit) identical to those of the medieval Inquisition, but much more elaborate and effective. For the sake of future salvation, and the happiness of the unborn person, millions of concrete, already existing personalities are sacrificed. The absolute freedom of those who have proclaimed themselves the infallible conscience of history becomes an iron law for all who have not yet "realized" historical necessity. Therefore, very often the most zealous fighters against violence and lack of freedom become undertakers of freedom; authority, with all the features of a "sadistic father" who, for the sake of unborn children, devours those who already exist. And this is inevitable, because necessity (inevitability) and violence can only give rise to violence, which is very clearly seen in the new wave of modern organized terrorism. And its root: the thirst for liberation from total coercion, which exists in all structures of modern "bourgeois" society. Is there not a desperate cry of a new deceived generation behind this wave? But a generation that, in this desperate rebellion against the omnipotence of the state, the school system, and other inherently oppressive social structures, falls into the same mistake that has been committed so many times: it resorts to violence, remaining in the demonic vicious circle of "parricide" and sadistic fatherhood. And more and more generations will remain in this hopeless impasse, until they stop seeking their freedom with the help of violence, stepping over corpses.

It must be admitted that much of the blame for this hopeless nightmare of the modern world falls on Christians. Often in Christian practice, the idea of heavenly fatherhood was abused, disfigured. It was much easier to use God as an instrument of violence against others, to turn Him into an earthly authority, shrouded in a cloak of frightening mystery of metaphysical proportions, than, as it happened once in history, to bear witness to Him with martyrdom and sacrificial love, like the Lamb of God slain for the salvation of the world! Only the Lamb of God, the God-Man Christ, and those sanctified by His blood can and do bring true freedom to man and the world. Only one violence brings freedom: violence against one's false nature; And only one sacrifice turns human society into a union of love – sacrificing oneself for others (to others). This sacrifice is not self-destruction or the annihilation of others, but the "finding" of oneself and others, in the sacrilegious mystery of eternally bestowed fatherhood and sonship, as the mystery of mutual gift and eternal joyful unity, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Meanwhile, every time Christians left this narrow, joyful way of the Lamb, making an alliance with the "powerful" of this world, adopting their methods, authorities, and structures, they found themselves in danger of turning to the "broad path that leads to perdition," i.e., the path of coercive education and tyranny over others, slavery to themselves and their passions. In this way, not only one's neighbors, but also God Himself becomes a means of satisfying one's own selfishness (Vojin Matic, "Izmene dinamike odnosa prema autoritetu i njene posledice u okviru klinicke psihologije" Psihologija, God X, No 2, 1977, pp. 6-9.) Instead of being what it really is, God's crippled authority is transformed into a means of coercion and domination. Authority, deprived of its true content, is incapable of either regenerating or educating: it is only capable of creating blind, spiritually crippled dwarfs.

9. This acquires a special significance for the pre-eminent bearers of heavenly fatherhood in the Church: the bishop, the presbyter, the spiritual father. The Lord forsook them and appointed them to bear witness to His eternal fatherhood and sonship, to be their bearers, educators, for the mystery of God's life; as a criterion of our human existence. The glory which God the Father gave to the Son, the Only-begotten Son gave to them (cf. Jn 17:28). This is the very mystery of the Holy Spirit. Traditions: it is the succession in the Church of the eternal glory of God from father to son, just as it is transmitted by the eternal Father to His Only-begotten Son. Therefore, the Church, by its nature, is the Church of the Holy Fathers, prophets, apostles, bishops, monks and martyrs. The Holy Fathers themselves, with their own lives, bore witness to the Gospel of Christ and thereby acquired the ability to be the spiritual parents of many generations. By such a grace-filled witness and manifestation of the mystery of heavenly fatherhood and sonship on earth, they make the Church a living union in divine humility and love. They, spiritually born, do not rule over souls by force, but "give birth in pain" to Christ. Their will is one with the will of the Heavenly Father, their life with the life of His Only-begotten Son, therefore they, who have attained deification, deserve boundless love and trust in their holy thought, transformed into God-thought. Symeon the New Theologian calls us all to this: "Let us learn to have sincere faith in God, to our fathers and teachers in God, so that we may have contrition of heart, a humble mind and a soul cleansed of all sin by tearful repentance," only in this way can we acquire the blessings of Divine light and glory. (Symeon le Nouveau Theologien, Cathecheses II, Sources Chretiennes 104, Catech. XVI, 155–160, p. 250). The Holy Fathers testify by their example and experience to one truth: life in the Church, or rather, the very essence of the Church is faith and humility.

The eternal call of the Church, of her entire Tradition, to follow the example of the holy God-bearing Fathers in no way means the establishment of some kind of authority standing between God and man; This appeal does not contain a demand for a literal "quotation" of patristic thoughts or an external imitation of their deeds. Trusting them and following their example implies the belief that the Lord is really present and active in human souls, in all human history, that "He is wondrous in His saints," that He dwells in them. Hiding in their holy humility, they give a living "tangible" God, and a way of being according to God. In order for the love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit to be incarnated on earth, so that people can become one, just as God is one, there must be in the Church (and the whole cosmos is called to become the Church) there must be a relationship of humble offering of oneself as a gift to another, loving interpenetration and obedience, expressed in the words of Christ: "I seek not my will" (John 5:30). This is the deep meaning of following the Holy Fathers – following by humbly offering oneself as a gift, "ourselves... and all life to Christ God." Just as the Father does not exist and cannot exist without the Son and the Holy Spirit, so man cannot exist without another, without his neighbor, the living without the dead, sons without fathers, parents without children. The Holy Fathers, as God-bearers and Christ-bearers, discover and embody this conciliar "ontology" of the Church; awaken in every humble and faithful soul the living memory of the Church, help her to gather within herself all her historical and eternal Being, by the power of the life-giving Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the giver of spiritual power, which gives freedom in the Truth, and can in no way be the bearer of sadistic authority. The Holy Fathers reveal God by themselves, pointing to the worship of His Name, Which is above all names. The essence of their power and authority is that with all their being, with every step, they joyfully exclaim: "Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to Thy Name!" Bearers of Divine beauty, with the beauty of God's face reflected in them, with the ineffable Divine goodness that permeates their every deed, imperceptibly and unobtrusively, they appear to every spiritually awakened person, the measure of his own perfection, as his own beauty, as yet unknown to himself. In this lies their parental transforming power, i.e. their grace-filled fatherhood, assimilation to heavenly fatherhood.

10. If it happens that a bishop, a presbyter, a spiritual father, an educator, ceases to be such truly holy and spiritual fathers, i.e. parents reborn in God, giving birth to their spiritual children in agony, then they can try to cover up their powerlessness and barrenness with the veil of the dignity entrusted to them, i.e. false authority, violence, coercion and other external effects. This happens with any other authority, parental, educational or social, then coercion and domination over souls and conscience become inevitable. Thus, heavenly fatherhood is replaced by false, earthly, violent by its very nature, the main property of which is the destruction of trust and love born of trust, as the only healthy educational climate, and human communication as a whole. The holy mystery of spiritual fatherhood and fatherhood is replaced by tyrannical guardianship, from which grow the poisonous flowers of slavery, rebellion and mutual destruction.

11. Salvation from false authorities, mutilated fatherhood, is possible only by returning to the true, forgotten fatherhood, which belongs to the divine nature and the nature of man, created in the image and likeness of God. If He had not existed, parricide, and the suicide that followed it, would have been the last word in life and history. Without an eternal Father, human eros, and himself in him, are consubstantial with time and, through this, with death: time makes death the content of lust (eros, and therefore of man, who feeds only on it). Only in the Jewish subconscious, formed on the idea of the terrible Yahweh, lust and the forbidden fruit (cf. Gen. 2:17; 3:6), which gives rise to death, could the myth of Oedipus acquire such a scale as in Freudianism. Freudianism, in its essence, is a new agreement with the diabolical lie about the heavenly Father, and submission to the incestuous embrace of death, the mother of the earth: everything here is woven from the lust of the flesh, the "lust of the eyes" (= eros) and the prideful rivalry with the so-called "sadistic father". Marxism is the same (with its amendments), it is a shoot from the same root. When Marx "throws down his gauntlet in the face of the whole world, wishing to overthrow this pygmy giant in order to walk through its ruins and feel himself equal to the Creator" (See Maurice Clavel, "The Greatness of Marx," Vestnik RKhD, No 122, Paris, 1977, p. 94), he is making nothing more than an attempt to carry out Satan's plan for the world and man in the same magically serpentine way. His secret, apparently most intimate desire is to "abolish God." "Seized with anger," Engels recalls his first meeting with him, "it is as if he wants to reach out to the heavenly tabernacle and smash it on the ground" (Ibid., p. 96). Obviously, both Freud and Marx know no other God than the terrible Jewish Yahweh, for whom man is always only a slave. Hence their rebellion against Him, and the creation of their "god" (libido, revolution) in His "image and likeness."

Unfortunately, for them, as well as for some witnesses of the New Testament events, the mystery of heavenly fatherhood and sonship remained unknown, for the reason that both were deaf and blind to Christ, who revealed and gave it to the world. And without Him, violence will forever remain the essence of any earthly authoritativeness, and education, built on such authority. On the bloody stage of this world, man, through the tyranny of death, which lurks at the root of eros and in "homo ekonomicus" himself, is condemned to existence, the end of which is destruction and non-existence, and his historical path is only a preparation for disappearance and non-existence. This would be inevitable if there were no spiritual fatherhood, which liberates from the tyranny of death, elevates man from a slave to the dignity of a free child of God. Therefore, the struggle against it is nothing but a latent thirst for self-destruction, condemning oneself to this tyranny of death through tyranny over others, in the name of a common future happiness. The stronger this struggle is, the greater the helplessness a person will feel before himself, the eruption of primitive principles in himself, and before external violence, but the more the heavenly fatherhood will reveal to him its light, the light of the only salvation and fullness of being. It is the image of Divine existence, and through our participation in it, following the example of the Holy Fathers, the only way of existence of God's rational creation. Only where it is nurtured and incarnated, only there does the authority of the "sadistic father" cease to exist, and man turns from a slave into a son. "And because you are sons, God has sent into your hearts the Spirit of His Son, crying out, 'Abba, Father, forgive you! Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son; and if a son, then also an heir of God through (Jesus) Christ" (Gal. 4:6-7). Heir of whom? Heir of the one Father and partaker of the one fatherhood, in which all become one, in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

THE MEETING OF THE MODERN WEST WITH EASTERN SOTERIOLOGIES

The concept of "Eastern soteriology" is very broad and rather vague. Therefore, it is necessary to emphasize at the outset that we are not talking about the traditional ancient Eastern religions (Hinduism, Brahmanism, Buddhism or Islam) and their soteriological teachings, but about the soteriological concepts of some new spiritual movements that grew out of the religious traditions of the ancient East, especially after its encounter with modern Western culture.

The meeting of European civilization and the ancient East caused a strong shock, disturbed its centuries-old peace and tranquility, but also the richest thousand-year religious experience of the East, unexpectedly became a challenge for the entire Western civilization, as it was formed, starting with the epoch of the Renaissance. What are the main features of modern Western culture? It arose as a protest against medieval acosmism and the juridical understanding of salvation. Returning to the Hellenic criteria of truth, it was more and more built on faith in man and his reason, more and more trusted sensual knowledge and science, more and more oriented towards time and matter (nature), losing the sense of the reality of the presence of God and the spiritual world, the ability to see the true relationship between God, nature and man. Western medieval religious utilitarianism in modern culture has grown into a utilitarian attitude to nature, while Protestant utilitarian individualism has become the starting point of ideological and social movements and religious movements that have lost the sense of true unity and genuine community. Having inherited the ancient Roman idea of universalism, in its Roman Christian interpretation, with a parallel borrowing of the principles of natural inevitability, modern culture from the very beginning sought to dominate the world by force. Its inherent greed and the technocratic civilization born from it have put man in serious danger – to become a slave of his own creation, and sooner or later to find himself in metaphysical loneliness, alienated not only from his Primary Source, but also from other people and from the world around him. All this fills modern Western man with anxiety and thirst for salvation, deliverance from imbalance and anxiety, pushes him to search for peace and balance. This search is noticeable even where at first glance it cannot exist – in drug addiction, sex, the emergence of sects. Through all this, and much more, the search for warmth, unity, escape from depersonalization and transformation of a person into an object, among the same soulless objects, is manifested.

In this search for oneself and one's own balance, many turn, and this is not accidental, to Eastern religions and philosophies, amazed and attracted by their mystery and depth. It was thanks to these searches and meetings with the ancient East, whose representatives act in the West as "enlighteners", the spiritually impoverished man of Western civilization, that the transplantation of Eastern soteriological teachings to the soil of European-American civilization took place.

One of the main properties of their bearers is the spirit of syncretism. It has been inherent in the East before, and has become a great temptation for modern man, who has come into direct contact with all the religious and philosophical traditions of the past and present. The first place among the bearers of the spirit of syncretism is occupied by theosophy. Its goal, from the moment of its origin, was the study of the laws of nature, the comparative study of all sciences, philosophies and religions, for the sake of acquiring a "holistic" perception of the world and the creation of a universal brotherhood of man, on the basis of "a broad consciousness and wisdom, and a new religion of peace" (Anna Besant, Helena Blavatsky, etc.). In theosophy, the cosmos is understood as something living, the world is guided by a "higher mind", history develops "cyclically", according to the laws of reincarnation and evolution from "chaura" to "adept", from dogmatism of various kinds, to "new thinking". The ancient Indian doctrine of the Avataram as periodic incarnations of a deity is one of the foundations of theosophical soteriology and some other Eastern currents that claim universality and the development of a new consciousness. Accepting a partly pantheistic, partly polytheistic vision of reality, based on the doctrine of the incarnation of a deity (deities) and reincarnation, syncretic movements of this kind include in their theory the personality of Jesus of Nazareth, considering Him one of the incarnations of God, rejecting His uniqueness, uniqueness and all-humanity as the only Savior.

Akin to Theosophy is the Krishna Murti movement. The above-mentioned Anna Besant proclaimed a "teacher of peace", a person who, in her opinion, would serve as a "milestone" – a vessel for Lord Maitreius – the new messiah. This spiritual being, of whom the Buddha taught, and who probably incarnated for the last time in Jesus of Nazareth, must descend from heaven and give the world a new religion. But Krishna Murthy himself, this "miracle child", leaves the Theosophical Society (1925), renounces his messianism, leaves his palace and the treasures collected by his admirers, and sets off on wanderings around the world like a wandering philosopher. Since then, he has spoken of truth as "a land to which there is no way," to which one cannot enter by the beaten path, to which no religion can lead. He teaches that the need to know God and the search for truth is the only need of man. When this search ceases, there is a disintegration of all forms of life, social, religious, political, and economic. To his many adherents, he spoke about life, truth, love, goodness, emphasizing that the purpose of existence is to reach Reality from the other side of time and space, from the one where Freedom, Love and Truth are. In order to create a new world, he calls for a total revolution, but a revolution on the individual plane. The impregnable wall that separates us from true life, built of prejudices, school, family, social, religious, can only be destroyed by all-embracing love, love for everyone and for everything, love without which man is dead. To the one who has cultivated such love, the truth is revealed in everything that exists, without an intermediary. In 1968, Krishna Murthy set up a foundation in England to spread his ideas.