In people today it is necessary to cultivate the ability to develop the intonation of a district policeman. When getting acquainted with something new, you should ask strictly, but fairly: "Citizen, show your arguments!"

"There are many people of creative professions among the readers of our newspaper. Tell us about the attitude of the Church to the creative act.

– Everything that is connected with the field of creativity, no matter whether theological, artistic, writing or theatrical, is all an area of increased spiritual risk. The Church does not forbid people to engage in creativity and even blesses them, but asks them to be more attentive to themselves, to their condition. To be extremely sober, not to allow oneself vanity, narcissism, intoxication with oneself and success [XVIII]. Avoid meditativeness, which can lead to obsession.

Even a talented person can find himself in the grip of very low-quality moods and obsessions. The Creator craves "inspiration" and "inspiration." But the quality of these "inspirations" may not be good at all. A person who opens his soul in anticipation of "insights", as well as a person who seeks to provoke a surge of "passions" in himself in order to describe them more reliably, may lose the habit of regulating his passions and feelings and, even worse, may simply become obsessed...

Unfortunately, the history of culture shows how many very gifted and talented people have become toys in the hands of dark forces. They went into drugs, committed suicide, became evil geniuses for everyone around them. Let us recall Leo Tolstoy, about whom Alexandra Andreevna Tolstaya testified that he was sometimes possessed and mad [XIX].

By the way, our famous film director Sergei Bondarchuk was brought up on Tolstoy and is literally in love with him. All his life he lived with Leo Tolstoy, that is, without the Church. His entire apartment was hung with portraits of Tolstoy. But when his soul began to part with his body and his spiritual senses became sharper, he began to see with his own eyes that there is an immaterial, spiritual world and that this world without Christ is terrible. Simply put, he began to see demons. He realized that portraits of Tolstoy would not save him from this. And he called the priest. I confessed and took communion (the priest who confessed Bondarchuk told me about this incident – without, of course, revealing what was discussed at the confession itself).

– Tell me, please: almost nothing is known about the life of Jesus Christ until the age of 33, can you clarify anything about this?

"What is there to clarify?" He lived, grew. Why clarify anything else? In ancient literature, there is simply no such genre as biography. Plutarch in his "Comparative Lives" does not describe anyone's childhood. The time of this kind of epic narrative is the time of the chess clock: when it's my turn to make a move, then my clock goes, when I do nothing, my clock stands. There is no isomorphic time that flows independently of events. Therefore, for evangelists, the time when Christ did something is significant. And this is not clever, this is stupid, this is violence against historical reality, when they begin to invent that, you know, at that time He went to India, or to Egypt, or somewhere else. These things are very easy to verify – Christ did not preach in Greek, he preached in Aramaic (this is the spoken language of Palestine). Today's linguistics is able to understand and prove where the translation is, where the original is. In translation, a certain phrase may be just interesting, but in the original language it will be stunningly bright – it is a play of meanings and shades. Now, when they began to translate the words of Christ from Greek into Aramaic, it turned out that many of His sayings have become strikingly poetic and aphoristic. So, there is nothing in Christ's speech or in His thought that would be a calque from Sanskrit or from Buddhist philosophy [141].

– And what can modern theologians add to what was said about Christ in the era of the Ecumenical Councils from the fourth to the eighth centuries?

– A most interesting feature from the history of Christianity: the theological disputes of the first centuries of Christianity were disputes about the person of Christ. Not about the teaching of Christ, not about the interpretation of one or another of His parables, but about who Christ Himself is. The main discussions were around clarifying the extent of His participation in God and the world of people.

And yet the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils consciously avoided the solution of certain problems. For example, the Chalcedonian dogma of the Fourth Council (451) says that in Christ the Divine and human natures were united inseparably, unchangeably, inseparably, inseparably. After all, this is not so much an answer as an evasion of the answer – four "don'ts". How the Divinity and humanity were actually united in Christ, we do not know. Four too hasty attempts to respond were rejected. The space of truth is fenced off, but not consecrated, not formulated.

After all, God became Man, not us. That is why here you need to clearly set a limit to your constructive curiosity. A person can only truly know what he has done himself. What was not made by us, not made by us, not with us, remains a mystery to us. Since it was not we who made God Man, but He Himself willed to become Man, there can be no positive answer to the question of how the absolute, the eternal, and the incorruptible were united with the limited, temporary, and perishable, at least until we ourselves have attained the goal of which Athanasius of Alexandria said: "God became Man so that man could become God."

What remains to the lot of modern theologians? The problem also lies in the fact that a number of definitions of the Ecumenical Councils were formulated in the language of ancient philosophy. More precisely, in the language of the late antique school. But, firstly, this language is still initially non-Christian, pagan. Secondly, today it is preserved only in church schools and is incomprehensible outside the walls of seminaries. Incidentally, even in seminaries, it is not so much the language itself and the terms themselves that become understandable, but the rules for the use of these terms in professional theological texts. For example, we say that Christ has one hypostasis. In the Trinity there are three Hypostases. What does the word "hypostasis" mean? Even the Holy Fathers in different centuries had quite different meanings behind this word.

In the pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg Theological Academy, Professor B. Melioransky raised this question. By that time, all theologians had already agreed that the word "hypostasis" most accurately corresponds to such a term of modern philosophy as "person". But this content was first put into this word by St. Philaret of Moscow at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Melioransky asked: Can we, while remaining faithful to the terms and formulas of the ancient Councils, load these terms with a different content, a content that we take from modern philosophy? After all, the Fathers of the Ecumenical Councils took it from contemporary late antique philosophy, but can we, while remaining faithful to their dogmatic formulas, fill these formulas with the content of modern philosophical culture? The Fathers affirmed the closest connection between anthropology and theology: "Therefore, if you have understood the meaning of the difference between essence and hypostasis in relation to man, apply it to the Divine dogmas – and you will not be mistaken" (142). But today anthropology and philosophical ideas about man have changed decisively. Can these changes not affect theology? The question is still open. In reality, this is happening, albeit to the disgruntled lamentations of theologians [XX].