The fact of the primordial and universal nature of religion in the history of mankind testifies not only to the theoretical satisfactoriness of the idea of God as the unconditional Source of all life and all good, but also to the profound correspondence of religion to human nature, to its all-round justification in historical, social, and individual experience.

The essence of religion is usually, and rightly, seen in the special unity of man with God, of the human spirit with the Spirit of God. At the same time, each religion indicates its own path and its own means to achieve this goal. However, the postulate of the general religious consciousness about the need for the spiritual unity of man with God to achieve eternal life always remains unshakable. This idea runs like a red thread through all religions of the world, embodied in various myths, legends, dogmas and emphasizing in different planes and from different sides the unconditional significance and primacy of the spiritual principle in human life, in the acquisition of its meaning.

God, having only partially revealed Himself in the Old Testament, appeared in the fullness that is extremely accessible to man in God the Word incarnate, and the possibility of union with Him became especially clear and tangible thanks to the Church created by Him. The Church is the unity in the Holy Spirit of all rational creatures, following the will of God and thus entering into the Divine-human Organism of Christ – His Body (Ephesians 1:23). Therefore, the Church is a society of saints. However, membership in it is conditioned not simply by the fact of the believer's acceptance of Baptism, the Eucharist and other sacraments, but also by his special participation in the Holy Spirit. So a member of the Church who is indisputable by all external indicators may not be in it if he does not satisfy the second condition. This thought may seem strange: has not a Christian partaken of the Holy Spirit in the sacraments? And if so, what other communion can we talk about? This question is of fundamental importance for the understanding of holiness in Orthodoxy.

STAGES OF LIFE

If the old nature (Ephesians 4:22) was inherited by the descendants of Adam in the natural order, then the birth from the Second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47) and communion with the Holy Spirit takes place through the conscious-volitional process of personal activity, which has two fundamentally different stages.

The first is when the believer is spiritually born in the sacrament of Baptism, receiving the seed (Matt. 13:3-23) of the New Adam and thereby becoming a member of His Body – the Church. Prep. Symeon the New Theologian says: "... who believed in the Son of God... repents... in his former sins and is cleansed of them in the sacrament of Baptism. Then God the Word enters into the baptized as into the womb of the Ever-Virgin, and dwells in him as a seed"[2] But by Baptism a person is not "automatically" transformed from the "old man" (Ephesians 4:22) into the "new" (Ephesians 4:24). Being cleansed of all his sins and becoming like the first-created Adam, the believer in Baptism, nevertheless, preserves, in the words of St. Maximus the Confessor, passion, decay and mortality [3], inherited by him from his sinful ancestors, there remains in him a susceptibility to sin.

Therefore, the holiness to which a person is called is not yet attained by the sacrament of Baptism. This sacrament is only its beginning, and not its fulfillment, a person is given only the seed, but not the tree itself, which bears the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

The second step is that right (righteous) spiritual life, thanks to which the believer grows into a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Ephesians 4:13) and becomes capable of receiving special sanctification by the Holy Spirit. For the seed of Baptism among evil and slothful Christians (Matt. 25:26) remains unsprouted and therefore barren (Jn. 12:24), but when it comes to good ground, it sprouts and bears the corresponding fruit. This fruit (and not the seed) signifies the sought-after communion with the Holy Spirit – holiness. The parable of the leaven, which the woman took and put into three measures of flour, until everything was leavened (Matt. 13:33), clearly expresses the nature of this mysterious change of man and his communion with the Holy Spirit in the Church, and the real significance of the sacraments in this process. Just as the leaven put into the dough exerts its effect gradually and under very definite conditions, so the "leaven" of Baptism "leavens" the natural man into a spiritual one (1 Corinthians 3:1-3), into a "new dough" (1 Corinthians 5:7) not instantaneously, not magically, but in time, with the corresponding spiritual and moral change indicated in the Gospel. Thus, it depends on the Christian who has received the talent of justification freely (Rom. 3:24) to destroy it in the ground of his heart (Matt. 25:18) or to multiply it.

The latter means a special communion with the Holy Spirit of the baptized person. And this is one of the most important principles of the Orthodox understanding of spiritual life, Christian perfection, and holiness. Simply and briefly it was expressed by St. Symeon the New Theologian: "All the efforts and all the podvig of him (the Christian - A. O.) must be directed to acquiring the Holy Spirit, for this is the spiritual law and well-being"[4]. The same thing was spoken of in one of the discourses by St. St. Seraphim of Sarov: "The goal of the Christian life is to acquire the Spirit of God, and this is the goal of the life of every Christian who lives spiritually"[5].

Thus, it turns out that the believer, who has received in the sacraments the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, also needs His special "acquisition," which is holiness.

SCRIPTURE AND THE CHURCH

There is, at first glance, a kind of discrepancy between the concept of holiness in Holy Scripture, especially in the New Testament, and the tradition of the Church. The Apostle Paul, for example, calls all Christians saints, although in their moral level there were also people among them who were far from holiness (cf. 1 Corinthians 6:1-2). On the contrary, from the very beginning of the Church's existence and in all subsequent times, Christians distinguished by special spiritual purity and zeal of Christian life, podvig of prayer and love, martyrdom for Christ, etc., have been called saints by her.

However, both of these approaches do not mean a difference in the understanding of holiness, but only an assessment of the same phenomenon on different levels. The New Testament use of the term stems from what believers are called to be who have made a promise to God of a good conscience (1 Peter 3:21) and have received the gift of the grace of Baptism, although at the moment they are still carnal, that is, sinful and imperfect. Church tradition, on the other hand, logically completes the New Testament understanding, crowning with a halo of glory those Christians who have fulfilled this calling by their righteous life. That is, both of these traditions speak of one and the same thing - about the special participation of a Christian in the Spirit of God, and determine the very possibility of such participation by the degree of zeal of the believer in the spiritual life. "Not everyone who says to Me, Lord! God! He shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven............ depart from me, you workers of iniquity" (Matt. 7:21-27). "The kingdom of heaven is taken by force, and those who use force take it away" (Matt. 11:12).

Out of his calling to another, new life in Christ, the Apostle calls all Christians saints, and by this name he emphasizes the opportunity that has opened up for all believers to become a new creature (Gal. 6:15). Those who have become different in relation to the world, who have acquired the Holy Spirit and manifested His power in our world, have been called saints by the Church from the very beginning of its existence.