This is a very important moment, because then comes another moment – the moment of the incarnation of the Word of God. God becomes man, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is born of a Virgin, He receives the fullness of His human nature from the Mother of God; He has the fullness of His Divinity from eternity from God and the Father. The Word became flesh, as the Evangelist John says; all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily (Col. 2:9). He is fully God, He is fully man; He is a perfect man precisely because His humanity is inseparably and inseparably united with the Divinity. But at the same time, both natures remain the same: the Divinity does not become matter, and matter does not become the Divinity. Speaking of this, the same Maximus the Confessor gives the following image. If you take a sword - cold, gray, as if without shine - and put it in a brazier, after a while we take it out - and the sword is all burning with fire, all shining. And so much the fire, the heat, has penetrated, combined with iron, that now it is possible to cut with fire and burn with iron. Both natures united, permeated each other, but remained themselves. Iron has not become fire, fire has not become iron, and yet they are inseparable and inseparable.

When we speak of the incarnation of the Son of God, we say that He became a perfect man. Perfect in the sense I have just indicated: He is perfect because He has reached the fullness of all that man can be, He has become one with God. But at the same time He is perfect in that He is fully human; we clearly see that He became a descendant of Adam, that the corporeality that belongs to Him is our corporeality. And this corporeality, taken from the earth, makes Him, as well as us, akin to the entire material world. He is united by His corporeality with everything that is material. In this respect it can be said (again Maximus the Confessor writes) that the Incarnation of Christ is a cosmic phenomenon, that is, it is a phenomenon that unites Him with the entire cosmos, with everything that is created; for the moment when energy or matter begins to exist, it recognizes itself in Christ in the glory of union with the Divine. And when we think about the creature, about the earth on which we live, about the world that surrounds us, about the universe, a tiny part of which we are a part, we must imagine and understand that in our corporeality we are akin to everything that is material in the universe. And Christ, being a man in the full, perfect sense of the word, is akin to His corporeality to all creation: the smallest atom or the greatest galaxy recognizes itself in Him in glory. This is very important for us to remember, and it seems to me that, apart from Orthodoxy, not a single faith in the West has accepted the cosmicness of the Incarnation and the glory revealed to the entire universe through the Incarnation of Christ. Too often we talk and think of the incarnation as something that happened only for man, for humanity. We say that God became man in order to save us from sin, to conquer death, to abolish the separation between God and man. Of course it is; but beyond that is everything else that I have now tried to mention in some way, and to which I have tried to point out, at least clumsily.

Если так себе представлять вещи, то мы по-иному, с гораздо большей реалистичностью, глубиной, с ужасом и благоговением будем воспринимать таинства Церкви. Потому что в таинствах Церкви совершается нечто совершенно изумительное. Над частицей хлеба, над малым количеством вина, над водами крещения, над маслом, которое приносится в дар Богу и освящается, совершается нечто, что уже теперь приобщает это вещество к чуду воплощения Христова. Воды крещения освящены телесностью Христа и благодатью Всесвятого Духа, сходящего в них и совершающего это чудо. Хлеб, вино приобщаются и телесности, и Божеству Христову через сошествие Святого Духа. Это уже вечность, вошедшая во время; это вечность, то есть будущее, уже находящееся сейчас явно перед нами, среди нас.

То же самое можно говорить о всем, что освящается. Есть замечательные молитвы, которые мы никогда не слышим, потому что у нас нет к тому случая. Например, есть изумительная молитва освящения колокола. В ней мы просим Бога освятить этот колокол так, чтобы, когда он будет звучать, он доносил до человеческих душ нечто, что их пробудит, просим, чтобы, благодаря этому звуку, трепетала в них вечная жизнь. Есть стихотворение (по-моему Кольцова, но я не уверен), которое я сейчас попробую вспомнить:

Поздний колокол, звучащий

Над равниною большою,

Прогреми над сердцем спящим,

Над коснеющей душою.

Звоном долгим, похоронным, Всепрощающе-прощальным