And he can question his idea because he does not hesitate for a single minute in the reality that is around him.

A believer and a theologian could do the same; when he begins to find that one or another of his ideas about God, about man, about the world does not satisfy him, then instead of being frightened, he could say: "How wonderful, how wonderful! It means that I, as a particle, a conciliar particle of the Church, have grown into a new measure, doubt is beginning to arise in me, which means that there are new answers, new data, a new depth of knowledge, which now, now, can open up before me." And this is very important; This does not mean that we should lightly destroy and shake the foundations of our faith, but it means that all that has been said is unsatisfactory. As one of the Fathers of the Church said, everything we say about God in accordance with His own revelation and with the experience of the Church may be the ultimate truth for the earth, but it is not the entire truth for God; God is always more than anything we can say about Him. Truth is an expression of what is, but not reality itself. Reality is both incomprehensible to the end and inexpressible to the end. It could, although if reality and truth do not coincide, be expressed adequately by a pure symbol. In the twelfth century, the Jewish writer in Spain, Maimonides, said that if we want to find a way to express God directly, without evoking any mental representations and therefore without causing any prejudice or negative reactions, we must single out one musical note that we have no right to use for anything else. And this note should sound every time we want to say the word God or express the concept of God; because it would be a pure symbol that carries nothing in itself except what it signifies. But even so, it is a designation, not God Himself.

And here in our thinking it is very important, it seems to me, to remember that no matter how we express our knowledge, our experiential knowledge about God, about man, about the universe, about the spiritual world, it is only an expression; and that even when we take the Holy Scriptures as revelation, it is a revelation according to the measure of man, and not according to the measure of God; it is revelation in the sense that it says all that man could comprehend about God, but not all that God is. It is an expression of what a human word should convey about God, and nothing more.

And therefore, however sacred, however dear this or that truth may be to us, we must remember that it is a designation, not the thing itself. Only once Truth and reality were perfectly combined: in Christ, Who says: "I am the truth" (John 14:6). He is God and He is the revelation of God. But here we encounter something else: that Christ as truth is not a concept, but a living being; the truth in Christ is not something, but Someone. The truth-Christ can coincide with the reality of God, because it is a personal phenomenon. But if we try to express Christ in words, we again descend to the level of designation.

God, on the other hand, transcends all our perceptions, reveals Himself by truth, expressible and inexpressible experience, in contemplative silence and in theological affirmation, and is revealed beyond all expression in silence and in the sacraments, which, according to the teaching of the Ancient Church, are the door to the knowledge of God, because they are the way of our communion with Him, of communion with Him, and communion is always deeper, always wider and more significant. than all that can be said about him. This is the realm of faith, and the realm of faith, theologically, is not only the realm of formulations, but the realm of what the Greek Fathers called apophatic theology:20 a theology that accepts all affirmations, but says: when all this is said, the whole mystery of God remains before us, and we enter into this mystery through the sacraments, prayer, and contemplative silence.

About God[21]

To speak of God is audacious, perhaps even more than bold, especially within the confines of the Sergius Lavra and the Trinity Academy, for a person who has not himself studied theology. I have decided to tell you something about God in the way that I have to talk about Him in the West in very different circumstances.

Believers come to me who can no longer contain the childish idea they received about God, either in secondary school in England, where the Law of God is taught, or in the family, and questioning the very truths about God, because the idea they were given in childhood is shattered by a more mature, serious thought and often by the experience of life. prayers that they have accumulated over the years. There are also people who simply raise the question of God, being unbelievers themselves and wondering what this word means, what is hidden behind this word for a believer. And so I will approach this conversation not from the point of view of a theologian, which I am not, but from the point of view of a believer who has made an attempt over the past decades to comprehend for himself those words, those concepts, and those experiences that make up the life of the Church.

I will begin with the fact that a lot can be given to us by thinking about the words that we use every day, but which we do not think about. We are talking about God, and in the believing milieu everyone understands what we are talking about; and we do not ask ourselves what this word says to us or could say to an unbeliever or a seeker. We use many such words, taken from church-religious experience and have lost their original meaning, and at the same time, these words were not born from a dictionary, they were born from experience. When people began to look for a way to express the ineffable, they were always looking for words, expressions that would make sense in their language. I remember once reading a book on the history of religion, and it spoke of certain tribes who, wishing to express the thought of God, or rather, wishing to speak of Him, felt that there was no human word that could be worthily used; and therefore, every time in their conversation, in their speech, in any circumstances, they wanted to say something that we would say with the word God, they fell silent for a moment and pointed with their hands to heaven.

Based on the Holy Scriptures, on the experience of the Church, we use a great many words to express our experience of God; but we must remember that ultimately our experience of God is beyond all expression. The Jewish writer Maimonides gives an example of how a young man stood up for prayer and exclaimed: Lord, Thou art great, Thou art glorious, Thou art omnipresent, Thou art omnipotent... — and his teacher stopped him and said: "Do not blaspheme; every time you add a new adjective to the word God, you make Him smaller and smaller, you draw a boundary around Him, as it were, and make Him a prisoner of our language.

All this boils down to the fact that I want to think over a few concepts about God and emphasize throughout this conversation that those concepts about God, those words that we use, must lead us to the moment when we silently, in contemplative horror, bow down before Him and pass into that depth of mysterious silence where the living soul meets the Living God.

The English word God, as far as we know, comes from the Sanskrit bha ga, which means rich. This is what is expressed in Church Slavonic by the word all-satisfied, which, of course, does not mean that He is "satisfied" with everything, but that He has everything, that there is nothing that He lacks, neither in His being, nor in His essence, nor in His manifestations. This shows that He Himself is a fullness, a fullness so deep, so mysterious, that we can only touch it when grace descends upon us, when He reaches us with His energies and His sacraments. He is rich, He is all-satisfied, He is everything, He, in this sense, is the light in which there is no darkness. He is light in the sense that He alone enlightens every man who comes into the world, but He is essentially light, and there is nothing in Him that requires or admits of a new revelation — everything in Him is revealed to the end: in Him there is no becoming, in Him there is a primordial, royal, wondrous