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.

     About twenty years ago, a very interesting experiment was made in America. The doctor-researcher experimented on himself with medicines that seemed to destroy the line between the conscious and the subconscious, the unconscious. He describes it in a very interesting way. He increased the doses under the control of his colleague. At first he felt himself as he was, then he discovered depths in himself that he did not know about... As he walked on, various images suddenly surfaced: images of ancestors, images of people who, in their clothes, in language, belonged to this or that era of the past, who were his flesh and blood, who seemed to live in his soul and whose fate was decided in his fate...

     That's my calculation, so you have no reason to believe what I'm saying. But for me it is very vivid, very convincing. And therefore, the fact that a person has not acquired faith does not mean that he is not preparing the ground for the opening of faith to some of his descendants. And through this descendant, he himself will be justified by God, because he will prove to be the soil on which this faith could grow. These may be my fantasies, but I'm not sure if they're fantasies. I am sure, for example, that Rahab the harlot was justified in Christ.

     That's my only explanation; Although there is another side. Faith comes from hearing, hearing from the word of God (Romans 10:17), but not only from hearing it, but from the one you meet. And aren't we, believers, to blame for the fact that the people around us, when they meet us, do not meet Christ? Do we dare to reproach the unbeliever for not being able to believe in Christ when he looks at us? Even the Apostle Paul said: "For your sake the name of God is blasphemed" (Romans 2:24). People would be happy to believe, but they think: "Lord, if these are Christ's disciples, then why should we join them?.." And for this we are responsible; And we condemn ourselves when we say: behold, these people do not believe, in spite of what we say... My spiritual father once told me: no one can turn away from the fallen world and turn to God if he does not see either on the face or in the eyes of at least one person the radiance of eternal life... If people now met Seraphim of Sarov, Sergius of Radonezh, John of Kronstadt (you can name a host of saints), they would stop, look and say: "What is there in this man that I have never seen anywhere before?.." The English writer Lewis says in one of his books: Every unbeliever who meets a believer should stop and exclaim: "The statue has become a living man, the stone statue has come to life.." But can this be said about us? And the answer to the question "why don't they believe?" is very simple: because they have not found in any of us a revelation about what a person who has met God is.

     Vladyka, one more question. There are Christians, at least people who call themselves so, who in some way identify Christianity, or at least Orthodoxy, with the Russian idea, with the Russian faith, who are convinced that the Russian people have a messianic destiny, in the sense that they bring God's truth to all other peoples. Is this possible after the "limited" messianic – that is, within the specific historical period spoken of in the Old Testament?

     I think that we can return to the thought of the chronicler Nestor; he says that each nation has some personal, peculiar qualities that it must include in the general harmony of all Christian peoples (this is not a quotation, but it is his thought); that all Christian nations should be like voices in a choir or like musical notes. Each of them should sound its own sound, with the utmost purity, but at the same time they should merge into one harmony, into one single complex, rich sound. In this sense, Christ is all-man, He is neither a Jew, nor a Russian, nor a German, nor a nobody; He is neither white, nor black, nor yellow; He is a Man through a capital "H". And quite rightly, the Chinese, the blacks, and the blacks – all – paint the image of Christ in their national form. There is an English Christ, there is a German Christ, a Russian icon, a Greek icon, etc. Therefore, we cannot say that any people is unique in its ontological essence.

     It can be said that historically this or that people, in this or that epoch, is destined to play this or that role. For example, there was a time when Orthodoxy flourished in Byzantium; Now we can't say that. Today's Constantinople is not ancient Byzantium. It can be said that in the Russian people there are such spiritual qualities that, perhaps, make it broader, more all-embracing. But this is accidental, it may be the work of a certain era.

     Let's say from my experience here: Russian Orthodoxy is understandable and accessible to the West, to Western people, but Greek Orthodoxy is not. Because the Greek is so ethnically conditioned, so Greek (I don't say "Hellenistic" because it presupposes culture, but Greek in the sense of narrow ethnics) that it does not reach the Westerners. I know two Orthodox Englishmen: a bishop and an archimandrite in the Greek Church; They were talking in front of me after the service in the Greek cathedral, and one of them said: if there were only Greek Orthodoxy, none of us would become Orthodox. Russian Orthodoxy is revealed to people in the West, just as Greek or Arabic Orthodoxy is not revealed.