The easiest thing for us, of course, is to withdraw from the world and create our own closed society. But this closed society, in my opinion, is a negation of our calling. Because Christ came to save the lost. He came to save sinners, not the righteous. He came to bring peace with people who were at enmity with God. I remember talking with Patriarch Alexy (Simansky, † 1970 – Ed.) and asking him: how would he define the Church? He answered: The Church is the body of Christ, crucified for the salvation of the world... I knew him quite well, and he, of course, did not think only about the fact that the Church is a society of people who pray for the salvation of the world: they must go into the world. Christ told us that we are light – we must go into darkness; that we are the salt that keeps from rotting, we must go where rot begins (all this because we have faith, that is, confidence in the existence of God).

     The divine scale of man is that every person is called to become a partaker of the Divine nature, as the Apostle Peter says. It is this faith – not only in God, but in man – that we must bring to the world. We must bring to the world confidence that God did not create people in vain, that He believes in every person, that He hopes for everyone, that He loves every person until death on the cross; and therefore there is no such person, no matter how far he may be from God in his own eyes, who would not be infinitely close to God, Who loved us so much that on the cross He partook of the horror of our abandonment by God and exclaimed: My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? He died our death, our God-forsakenness, and no one can measure the tragedy of an unbeliever or an atheist, a conscious atheist, as Christ could then have experienced it. He partook of all that is created, leaving sin aside, but taking upon Himself all the tragic consequences of sin. And therefore we are inseparable from the world, we exist for the sake of the world. And this is a very important point, in my opinion.

     If we talk about conversion, that is, about people who meet Christ in adulthood, find faith – to some extent I belong to this kind of people... Of course, the first thing you strive for is to forget everything and be only with Christ, only in prayer, only in reading the Holy Scriptures, only in deepening the miracle that has been revealed. But here we must remember what happened to the Apostles Peter, James, John, whom Christ took with Him to the Mount of Transfiguration. They saw Christ in glory there. But in glory He appeared to them at the moment when He spoke to Moses and Elijah about His departure from the world on the cross. The fullness of divine radiance is the love of the cross. And when Peter said to Him: "Let us remain here, it is good for us to be here," Christ answered: "No, let us go from here." He led His disciples into the valley, and there they met a demon-possessed child, the grief of the father, his half-faith, the powerlessness of the disciples to heal this child... From the Mount of Transfiguration, where the disciples wanted to stay forever, He led them into the thick of human grief.

     This, of course, is more understandable to us than immersion in culture in its heights. But we must be able to read: to read works of art, to read literature, to read God's ways in history, both in the personal history of a person and in the history of a nation. And there is nothing human that should be alien to a Christian (these are not my words, but Tertullian's). Now I have quite a lot of experience of people who find God, who turn to God, and I always remember the words of Isaac the Syrian: If you see a novice ascending to heaven, seize him by the legs and throw him to the ground, because the higher he flies, the more painfully he will hit himself when he falls... And I think that's very, very important to remember. Sobriety, fasting attitude: that is, without greed both in prayer and in reading, in everything... Readiness, as one of the writers of antiquity said, to leave God for God's sake, that is, to abandon prayer, communion in order to serve one's neighbor. St. John of the Ladder says: if you are in contemplative prayer and hear that your neighbor in the cell asks for a cup of water, leave your prayer and give him water, because prayer is your private business, and this cup of water is a divine matter.

     Tell me, can an Orthodox learn from other cultures and other faiths, is there anything spiritually useful in an Orthodox person partaking of the treasures of, say, Catholic or Protestant spirituality, or Hinduism, or Buddhism through culture or directly through reading the corresponding doctrinal literature? What do you think is more useful now – an isolationist or, on the contrary, an open strategy of spiritual self-development?

     There is, of course, an obvious danger in the fact that a person who is inexperienced, religiously inexperienced, or intellectually unprepared may fall into the captivity of minds much more developed and refined than his own, and therefore be drawn into some path of untruth. I am now thinking more about Catholicism than about Protestantism, because (I think) there is much more untruth in Catholicism, and much less truth in Protestantism. Protestantism lacks much, while Catholicism has a great deal perverted. But reading, pondering, comparing everything with the teaching of Orthodoxy can be a very useful exercise in the sense that if we do this, continuing to pray, continuing to live the life of the Church, continuing to communicate with God in all available ways, that is, by silence, and prayer, and reading, and the sacraments, then we can gradually see more and more clearly the beauty, depth and truth of Orthodoxy.

     As for non-Christian religions, I think that no one can invent God, and therefore any religion that speaks about God speaks from within some direct experience of the Godhead. This experience may be very incomplete, but this experience is real; it may be partly distorted precisely by its incompleteness, because nature abhors a vacuum; but at the same time there is some direct knowledge, experiential knowledge, to which we can join or which can reveal something. The Greek word "theos" – God – has two roots. One root speaks of Him as the Creator, and the other root seems to direct the thought to the fact that He is the One Who is worshipped. And the German word Gott or the English word God comes from a pre-Germanic root meaning "the one before whom you fall on your knees"... I think that there is not a single person on earth who has not ever fallen on his knees before the Living God, Whose nearness he has suddenly felt, and who has not met the Living God. How he will then begin to express this experience mentally, what forms he will give it, how he will interpret it – this is where deviations and mistakes can begin, but the fundamental experience, it seems to me, is always real.

     Of course, we can say that a person can become the subject of temptation from Satan, but there is a criterion here. St. Seraphim of Sarov said that if the inner experience is accompanied by the light of the mind, the warmth of the heart, joy, a feeling of deep humility and gratitude, one can think that this experience is from God. The devil is cold; when we are under its influence, we enter the realm of darkness, cold, pride, etc. If there is the first in a person, then we can say that he has touched the edge of the robe of Christ. I do not say that he has communed with God completely, but his experience belongs to the realm of God. Of course, every time God approaches a person, a dark force also approaches, wanting to tear him away... But this is also true of Orthodoxy: as soon as you begin to pray, temptations begin; As soon as you look for an integral spiritual life, there are difficulties – from without, from within; This is a general law.

     Perhaps I will say this to my disgrace, but I understood a great deal in Christianity and in the Orthodox faith from reading and communicating with non-Christians, simply with secularized people, with non-believers, who were, if I may say so, "people", that is, in whom I saw a real person, capable of love, of sacrifice, of compassion, of mercy. to all that the parable of the sheep and goats says. Not a single word is said there about the fact that people will be judged according to what theological convictions they had; The only question is: Were you a human or inferior to a human? If you were a man, the divine path is open to you; If you were not even a man, then do not demand heavenly things. And it seems to me that everywhere you can find a lot of valuable things – not by opening up to everything, but by peering into everything. As the Apostle Paul says: "Try all things, hold fast to what is good" (1 Thess. 5:21). But if we do not "test," that is, if we do not peer, peer, try to understand what is outside of us, we will, of course, narrow down to such an extent that we will cease to be the embodiment of Orthodoxy. Because Orthodoxy is as spacious as God Himself. If it is not the size of God, then it is one of the religions, it is not an experience of God.

     Tell me, why does the Lord often not send faith consciously expressed to people who are sympathetic and kind, due to the natural inclination of their souls? Is good possible without faith?

     I cannot answer this; If I could, I would be glorified throughout the Orthodox world as a sage... But it seems to me that it is possible to point out some milestones. First of all, there is not a single person in whom, perhaps, the buried but still living image of God does not continue to live and act. There is not a single person who is not an icon and in whom his iconism, his similarity with the Living God does not work.

     It follows that a great deal of what we call human is actually a facet of the divine. When you read the Gospel, you meet not only the Living God, but the true, the only true Man in the person of Christ, Man in the full sense of the word. And therefore every man – by being a man – is already a partaker of this mystery of Christ.

     The other (but this is my calculation, and therefore I am not sure of the objectivity of my thought): humanity does not consist of separate, disparate individuals. Each of us is born not as a new creature, but as the heir of all previous generations. This is confirmed by the fact that in the Gospel – in both Matthew and Luke – we are given the genealogy of Christ. If genealogy has any meaning for Him, it also matters for us. He is the heir of all the races of mankind from Adam to the Most Pure Virgin Mother of God. In all these generations there are saints, there are those whom we would call ordinary sinners, imperfect people, and there are very notorious sinners; for example, Rahab the harlot is a clear example, and she is an ancestor of the Savior Christ.

     Can we imagine what makes them part of this stream that ultimately leads to the incarnation of the Son of God? It seems to me that, sinful or righteous, they strove with all their being (successfully or completely, in our opinion, unsuccessfully) to the fullness of being, as they understood it, that is, to God. They lived for God. In the Jewish people, of course, this is seen even more clearly than in paganism, because the entire Jewish people was directed solely to this. And it seems to me that each generation inherits from all the previous ones – in particular, the child from his parents and immediate ancestors – the qualities of the mind, heart, will, bodily characteristics and resolved and unresolved problems. That is, if the parents solve some problem in themselves, they pass on to their children a more refined humanity, freed from this "accursed question", to use the words of Dostoevsky. If they fail to resolve it, the next generation will sooner or later face it. And I met people who told me: "This or that temptation comes upon me, this or that problem arises in me, which is completely alien to me. And digging into their past, I was able to find the same unsolved problem in my ancestors and parents several times: it arose before this person, who solved it precisely because he knew that it was inherited and that by solving this problem, he was solving it for his grandmother, for his grandfather, for his great-grandfather and for his parents.