But when I was young, I belonged to a purely Russian Orthodox environment, where we did not even think of using foreign languages and including non-Russians in our environment. And now, over the past decades, Orthodoxy has become the faith of very many Western people. Firstly, because the fourth generation of children and young people grew up from the first emigration through mixed marriages with people of all nationalities; they no longer know the Russian language, they are not rooted in Russian culture in the sense in which people in the Soviet Union now or in pre-revolutionary Russia were culturally Russian. They are pure Englishmen, Germans, French, whatever you want. But they are Orthodox. In addition, we have several hundred converts simply from the local population; we have the English, in France the French, there are Germans – people who have nothing in common with Russian reality by blood, but who have found God, the Gospel, Christ, faith, the Church, a new life – in Orthodoxy. And it is impossible to say that these people are, as it were, second-class Orthodox; They are as Orthodox as the most native Russians.

     And the glory of Russian Orthodoxy in the West, it seems to me, is that we are not an ethnic church. We are the bearers of Russian spiritual culture, with its properties, with the experience of God as the ultimate beauty, truth, and truth, and life, embodied in divine services, in its reverent performance. The wholeness and simplicity of our theology, our openness to universal thought, the compassion that was born of great suffering – all these qualities reveal Orthodoxy to other people. Therefore, I am sure that the Russian people, Russia must speak the living word of Orthodoxy, especially after it has gone through the crucible of trials for more than 70 years, through persecution, horror, searching, through darkness and light. It can speak more convincingly than those Orthodox peoples who have not gone through tragedy, who have not regained their faith, already consciously, personally, maturely, in an adult way. But not because we are Russians, but because this was our fate.

     I say "our"... Of course, in the Soviet Union, a thousand times more was experienced than, say, my generation experienced in the West; But my generation has also experienced something. We have not sailed through the history of these seventy years without wounds, without pain, without anguish. And therefore I believe that the Russian people can be God-bearers. But this is not always visible; And sometimes you can't see it at all. There were epochs when other peoples were God-bearers; And we must be very careful, because it is very easy to fall from pride, feeling that we are the chosen ones...

     Do you think that the falling away of the vast masses from the Church, which has taken place in our recent history, is it a sign of some kind of chosenness, or is it a sin?

     This can be interpreted in different ways. We can say what I have already said: Russia was baptized, but was not enlightened; There was a lot of dark faith, a lot of superstition – and there was a lot of gold in the Russian people. But for the lack of enlightenment, for ignorance, for superstitions, the Church is, of course, responsible. I am not saying the Church as the Body of Christ, but simply a concrete church, you, me, and everyone who lived before us, who was given to teach people and who did not teach anyone or taught badly.

     That's one thing. On the other hand, it is time for judgment to begin with the house of God (1 Pet. 4:17). I remember that in my youth this phrase was used as proof that the Russian Church is the Church above all churches. I think this is a very optimistic interpretation; That might have been very pleasant, but it wasn't.

     But God did pronounce some kind of terrible judgment on the Russian ecclesiastical reality; And not only over the church, but also over the people's reality. The ways of God are inscrutable; we cannot know what God's ways are, we cannot know why, but we can know where. We can know that as a result of all the tragedies we have experienced, there has been some kind of revival, some new perception of the Gospel, of Christ, of God, of the Church as something living and completely new. And this is a great mercy of God.

"WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT MAN"[10]

     There was a time in antiquity, and not so long ago, all over the world, when the topic of our faith in God was absolutely central and unique. Over the past decades, this topic has not only been replaced by the theme of faith in man, but has been shaded by the question of whether we believe in man at all or not. And it seems to me that this topic is very modern both in our homeland and in the West. What does it consist of?

     An atheist will say that modern humanity does not need God, because man has replaced Him, with all the richness of his mind, with all the depth of his personality, with all the possibilities of his activity, his knowledge, which seem so inexhaustible. The believer, on the other hand, will say that he believes in man, but he does not believe in the empirical image of him which is presented to us in history, but in another man, who, of course, includes this image, but surpasses it considerably. For a non-believer, a person is the limit of a kind of evolutionary development, which, of course, can continue, but continue along the same line. For us, Christians, the idea of man is somewhat different. For us, man in the full sense of the word can only be understood as the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, as the God-Man, as a man who has not only an earthly dimension, but also a heavenly dimension. A person in the atheistic world exists, as it were, in two dimensions: time and space. Man, as a Christian sees him, has another dimension – the Divine. Christ shows us the capacity of man, his amazing depth, amazing size. After all, think about it: if indeed, as we believe, God could become man in the full sense of the word, and at the same time, the Man Jesus Christ did not become a super-man, did not become another being, unlike other people in His humanity, this tells us that man has such depth, such breadth in himself that he can contain the Divinity. Archbishop Michael Ramsay once said that in man there is such a depth and such a breadth that nothing created and earthly can fill, that in him there is some kind of abyss into which all knowledge, all love, all human feelings, everything created can be dropped, and it falls into certain depths and does not even touch some bottom, from which there could be an echo; that only God Himself can fill this infinite depth. Here are two pictures, two ideas about man.

     But at the same time, both believers and non-believers are equally concerned about the same being: about man; and man is the only meeting point, as it were, between a complete atheist and a conscious believer. This meeting can be polemical if we approach with a desire to destroy our mutual ideas; it can be a very in-depth, thoughtful meeting, which can enrich both of them; But it is a meeting place, and it is a remarkable phenomenon. Because one of the most tragic things in the world is when two people or two groups of people cannot meet, not only do they not have a common language, but they do not even have a point of contact, when they, like two parallel lines, go each in their own direction, like two opposite infinities. And this first task, which in our time, both in the West and in the East, can be posed with particular seriousness. Now both here and there passions have burned out to a large extent, we can look at each other with a certain degree of friendliness and with a desire to understand each other, not with a desire to necessarily destroy each other, and not even with a desire to immediately convince each other; Because the first stage should be to listen and look at each other. You've probably noticed how rare it is for two people to talk, they listen to each other. For the most part, while one is speaking, the other is preparing an answer; while one is talking, the other chooses in what he hears what he can answer, what he can say, "I know better, and I can tell you something even more striking," and he objects. It is very rare that we listen to each other with such an open mind, with such a passionate desire to understand the other, especially when what he says is foreign to us.

     We do not treat our research in science in this way. In science, we peer into reality, into various phenomena of physics, chemistry, biology without bias; In some respects, it is reality that is important to us, not our idea of it. In the ideological field (including religious beliefs expressed in an unsatisfactory way), it seems to us that it is important to be right, that it is not so much objective reality that is important, but to defend our idea. And this is very difficult to implement; It is not at all easy to learn to listen with the intention of hearing, it is very difficult to look with the intention of seeing.

     I was once, many years ago, a doctor, and I often saw friends visiting the sick. A man comes to a dying man, and he is afraid to talk about death with the dying man; he is also afraid that the dying person will talk about it; and so the man cautiously asks: "Well, how do you feel today?" and the dying, seriously ill person, seeing in the eyes of the visitor that he is afraid that he does not want to hear the truth, answers evasively or outright untruthfully: "No, better than yesterday..." And the one who was afraid to hear the truth grabs hold of these words and says: "Oh, I'm so glad that you're better!" – and shortens the meeting so that the truth does not come out... Perhaps this has never happened to you, but I have a great experience in this regard, I have been a doctor for fifteen years, of which five years in the war, and I have seen a large number of dying; And I saw this terrible picture, how a person is left alone, because they do not want to hear, they do not want to see, because they themselves are afraid. And here it is necessary to detach oneself from oneself, to be ready to peer into the other person, to hear not only his words, but the intonation of his voice, the sound of this voice, weakened, sometimes trembling, to see the eyes that say the opposite of what the mouth says, and not to be frightened, but to say to the other tenderly, lovingly: do not deceive me, do not deceive yourself, I know that this is not so; let's talk; let us break this circle of silence, let us break down this wall that makes you lonely, but also makes me hopelessly lonely, separates us so that our mutual love can no longer unite us.