One can look at the world even with reverence, and in its harmony one can hear a reproach to oneself – for Christianity says that it is man who has entered sin and death into the world. The world, the cosmos is less sinful than man, and suffers because of our infirmities, and not through our own fault...

It is not so with the Theosophists, Pantheists, and Gnostics: in these systems, evil (disintegration, isolation, induction, fragmentation, materialization) appears in the world long before the fall of man, as a result of the error of the Deity himself... But the Christian takes upon himself the responsibility for the evil in the world ("by one man sin entered into the world" - Rom. 5:12), and therefore he does not attribute to his God the error that led to the creation of the world. The world is not the mistake of a God who has fallen asleep, but His gift.

And if God "so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16), then man also has the right to love the world.

But not love for those spirits who dictate to Theosophists that God the Creator is only a "deception of man's senses", a phantom, but they say about the God-created cosmos – "our dirty world".

16. Arguing about tastes.

It seems that there is no argument about tastes. And I said this in my book. And Myalo in response said the same thing – that "Kuraev's personal tastes are his business" (p. 165). Awesome. It would seem that the topic is closed.

But no, Myalo throws himself into very unprofessional comparative studies of the religious symbolism of different traditions in order to prove to me that I have no right to use Voloshin's epithets to explain my impressions of Roerich's paintings.

With my consent, I quoted the review of Maximilian Voloshin: "The plant kingdom is mysteriously alien to Roerich's work. The trees in his paintings are found only in the form of rough-hewn logs, from which the log houses of the hillforts are built and pointed palisades are built, similar to bared teeth, or in the form of heavy, richly and crudely painted ships, reminiscent of predatory amphibians. There are so many stones and so little soil on Roerich's land that there is nowhere for a tree to grow there. He is indeed an artist of the Stone Age, because of the four elements he has known only the earth, and in the earth only its bony basis – stone. In front of his paintings, all the Celtic legends about evil stones living a magical life are involuntarily recalled... And in the rest of the growing, singing, shining and speaking world, Roerich sees only what is blind, dumb, deaf and stony in it. The sky becomes an opaque stone for him, sometimes red-hot during sunsets, and under the dull crimson vault he throws heavy stone clouds... And not only does Rörich see the air, the trees, the man and the flowing sea as stone, but even the fire becomes the caustic teeth of yellow stone... And people, animals are visible to him only from the point of view of a stone. Therefore, his people do not have a face. This happens when you walk through a museum of weapons among forged armor that preserves the likeness of a person... Roerich has no people – there are only robes, armor, animal skins, shirts, ports carved from stone, and they all walk and act on their own. There is no face, no look... The horror of a gaping emptiness is in this absence of face" (Maximilian Voloshin)[561].

And then something strange begins.

As soon as Voloshin says that there are too many stones and too few human faces on Roerich's canvases, Myalo rushes to be indignant at "Kuraev's strange disregard for stones" (p. 170) and to prove that a stone can be a good symbol...

It is worth mentioning the permeation of Roerich's canvases with cold, the non-warmth of their color scheme (by the way: "N.K.R. loves cold more. He says that his occult work should always be done in clean air and cold")[562] - and Myalo again rushes into battle, proving that cold is a symbol of grace (p. 166), and ice in the Orthodox tradition is supposedly "one of the principles on which the world has been established" (ibid.).

And when I said that I was alarmed by Roerich's vision, in which, "like lightning, the Giant Fiery Scaly Fish falls to the ground, head down", Myalo again hastens to make a diagnosis: "Fire in general is somehow incomprehensible and alien to Kuraev in its Divine, bright hypostasis and exists only as hellfire. And therefore the deacon is ready to interpret almost any fiery or lightning vision as an unequivocal evidence of the seer's commitment to Lucifer – deliberately "forgetting" other Gospel texts and images. Thus, speaking of the vision of the Fire Fish falling from heaven, visited by E. I. Roerich in 1911 (i.e. even before its direct contact with the "poisonous"); He comments: "At the same time, E. I. Roerich quite rightly explains that the Fish is a symbol of Christ. But the fact is that Christ Himself says: "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18). In Roerich's vision, Christ falls from heaven like lightning..." (vol. 1, p. 221). When I come across this, I ask myself: does Kuraev really believe that no one else has read the Gospel? Opening the Gospel freely, we can read: "For as the lightning proceedeth from the east, and is seen even unto the west, so shall the coming of the Son of man be" (Matt. 24:27). Or: "As the lightning flashing from one end of heaven flashes to the other end of heaven, so shall the Son of Man be in His day" (Luke 17:24)" (p. 69).

That's right – fire and lightning can be symbols of God. But let's take not one, but two key words of Roerich's vision: "lightning" and "overthrow". The simultaneous use of these two symbols is found only in one biblical passage - the one that speaks of the overthrow of Satan... [563]