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

completeness. And when saints, for example, Gregory of Nyssa [22], tell us about the "darkness" of the Divine, they do not say that there is some kind of darkness in Him, but that if we look with human eyes not only at Him, but in the direction of God, we are blinded by the abundance of this light, we enter into darkness, because the light is too great for us.

This is one thing, and it already tells us that God is incomprehensibly great, that in Him there is a fullness that surpasses all our understanding and our very ability to fully partake of this essential Divine mystery.

In Western languages of Germanic origin, the word God—whether God in English or Gott in German—comes from an ancient Gothic word that does not describe Him, but which means: He before whom one prostrates oneself in worship in sacred terror. People who in early times strove to say something about God did not make an attempt to describe Him, to delineate Him, to say what He is like in Himself, but only to point out what happens to a person when he suddenly finds himself face to face with God, when suddenly Divine grace, Divine light, shines upon him. All that man can do then is to prostrate himself in sacred terror, worshipping the One Who is incomprehensible and at the same time has revealed Himself to Him in such intimacy and such wondrous radiance.

It seems to me that we also need to remember this, because too often, when we are asked the question of God, we immediately try to somehow give outlines and descriptions of Him in human language, and in the language of fallen humanity, and instead of God we get a caricature. St. Gregory the Theologian [23] says in one of his works that if we were to collect all the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures and all the experience of the Church, saints and sinners, and from all this we would create, as it were, a complete picture of what God is and what He is, we would create an idol, but we would not create God, because everything we know and everything we comprehend is infinitesimal in comparison with what is Who He is and what He is like. All our theological descriptions, everything that is said by saints and theologians about God, can be compared to the starry sky. Stars enable us to discern shapes in the deep darkness of space, but these stars, these constellations, these combinations of light, make sense only because they are separated by a vast space where there is nothing. And when we talk about God, we must remember that each of our words, the most significant, even if it be said by the greatest theologians or saints, is only one lit candle, one star, which gives us the opportunity to know more deeply the depths of heaven and to revere the mystery.

But God is not only a mystery and such a depth, a bottomless incomprehensibility; It is both incomprehensible to us and, at the same time, experiencedly cognizable to us. Those of you who know the secret prayers [24] of the Divine Liturgy remember that after the exclamation "Singing, crying, crying out, and saying," the priest says: ... Thou art holy and most holy, Thou and Thy Only-begotten Son, and Thy Holy Spirit... I don't know if you have paid attention – even to the celebrants, even to those celebrating the Liturgy (this hurt me after many years of service) – to this small, short word "You". Thou art without an adjective, Thou art without any descriptive words, as the almighty, the all-wise—only this word is Thou. And if we think about this word in the context of all those languages where we make a distinction between the word you, which is addressed to the closest ones, to relatives, to friends, and you, which we address to people standing a little further away from us, then we cannot help but catch two things. You're the second person. To tell a person "you" means to recognize his personal existence, outside himself. To tell a person you means to admit (both in relation to God and to man, this recognition should be extremely deep and reverent) that this person exists apart from me, outside of me, to admit that he exists not because I exist, not because I perceive him, but he is in himself. We rarely treat each other like that, it's true; Very often we treat each other, either as individuals or as collectives, as if the people around us exist only insofar as they have something to do with me; And the pastoral approach to a person is precisely to see him as an individual, as a person who exists, which is, and which does not depend on the fact that I exist, or on how I relate to him.

And this, of course, applies to God more than to anyone else. God exists in Himself, He existed when the world did not exist, He exists apart from His relationship to us; and therefore to say Thou art to God is to say: Thou IST, Thou art the Being, Thou art not dependent on my faith, not on me, not on us, Thou art royal in Thyself.

But, at the same time, to say to a person or to God You is to recognize a wondrous closeness. You say to your mother, father, brother, sister, bride, bridegroom, close friend, the person whom you want to caress, to accept, to whom you want to make it clear that he is your own, not some stranger, but your own. And thus the Apostle says of us in relation to God: "We are our own to God, our kinsmen" (Ephesians 2:19). And therefore, to say to God "You" or to understand with amazement that He addresses us with this word, means to understand that He recognizes in us our uniqueness, that we, each of us, are unique and infinitely close to Him. This means that God, before Whom we prostrate ourselves in worship, in love, in amazement, in holy horror, at the same time (this is the word of Nicholas Cabasilas [25]) is nearer to me than my life itself; that stream of life, that current of life, that power of life that lives in me, is less close to me, less permeates me, than the grace and presence of God, communion with Him.