"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 Over the past decades, this topic has not only been replaced by the theme of faith in man, but has been shaded by the question of whether we believe in man at all or not.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.

     You may say that there is often no such love between ideological opponents—this is even more frightening, it is not better; It is no consolation to say that I cannot talk to a person who is my ideological opponent, because I have already excluded him from the sphere of this love. Have I already condemned him in a final trial? Is there no place for him either on earth or in eternity where I hope to be? It's scary to think! And that's what we do when we refuse a human encounter. Of course, there are periods when circumstances do not allow for a conversation, an argument, a dialogue, on a large scale, but there are no such circumstances or times when people cannot even grope for each other, when people who are honest cannot try to listen to the other and understand how he can feel and think this way.

     And we have something to say.

There is no point in speaking against man; As soon as you speak against a person, he will, of course, defend himself, because everyone is afraid of being destroyed, everyone is afraid to be proven his inadequacy.

     Once, in the twenties, at a time when it was still possible, one of Patriarch Tikhon's subdeacons, Vladimir Filimonovich Martsinkovsky[12], spoke in disputes. And in one of his articles he wrote a wonderful word: never speak against your questioner, speak above him, so that he listens and grows above himself and admires what he could be, if only he could rise above his own level... You can talk to anyone like that.

     And what can we say about man? We can accept man as he is in the experience of any atheist, any atheist, any person who has never met God and who is not an ideological atheist, but simply lives practically only in the earthly, material plane, and we can talk with him about the depths we know about man.

     I want to give you an example from a related field. In the life of Elder Silouan, about whom some of you know or have read, there is a story about how he discussed missionary work with one of the Russian bishops who lived in the East. This bishop was very direct, very convinced and very fanatical. And Silouan asked him: how do you try to persuade, to convert to Christianity the people who surround you? He answered him: I go to the Buddhist temple and address all those present, I tell them: what you see, all these statues are idols, these are stones, this tree, this is nothing; throw it down, smash it, believe in the true God.. Silouan said to him: "What happens to you then?" The missionary answered him: "These insensitive, insane people are throwing me out of the church and beating me.. Silouan said to him: do you know that you could achieve better results if you came to their church, looked at the reverence with which these people pray, how they honor their faith, would call several of them to sit on the stairs outside and say: tell me about your faith... And every time what they say would give occasion for it, you could say to them: how wonderful what you just said! If only you could add such and such a thought to this, how would it blossom into full beauty.. And so you would introduce into their worldview here and there this or that thought from the Gospel or from the Orthodox faith. You wouldn't convert them right away, but you would enrich them with what Christ brought to earth...

     In a respect, as a parallel, we could do something similar when dealing with people who see in man only an earthly being, if we were to discover those depths of which they have no idea. But here we encounter another difficulty.