1944-1945

Chapter I: Impious Meditation. The crisis of Christianity. Criticism of Revelation

There are two crises: the crisis of the non-Christian and anti-Christian world, and the crisis of the Christian world, the crisis within Christianity itself. The second crisis is deeper than the first. Everything that happens in the world and that gives us the impression of something external and even grossly material, has its source in the internal, in the spiritual. In a sense, it can be said that Christianity is coming to an end and a revival can be expected only from the religion of the Holy Spirit. Which will revive Christianity itself, being its fulfillment. The weakness of Christianity in a world embraced by movements full of dynamic forces and often demoniacal is the weakness of historical Christianity and signifies the transition to an eschatological Christianity, turned to the light of the future. Christianity is eschatological and will be the religion of the Spirit, the religion of the Trinity, fulfilling promises, hopes and expectations. We are, as it were, in an intermission, and this is the torment of our epoch.

The world passes through abandonment by God. It is difficult to understand the mystery of God's abandonment of the world and man, one should not rationalize this mystery, and this most mysterious fact clashes with the traditional teaching about God's Providence. The crisis of Christian consciousness is deep, it goes back to the very idea of God and to the understanding of revelation. Christians will have to learn a great deal from movements that appear to be anti-Christian, from atheism itself. For in these movements one must feel the breath of the Spirit. That which rebels in human suffering against God in the name of man is the rebellion of the true God himself. Rebellion against God can only be in the name of God, in the name of the higher idea of God. Most rebellions against God, especially moral ones, presuppose the existence of God. There are no truly atheists, only idolaters. Atheism, deepened and suffering, not frivolously cheerful or maliciously hateful, is the affirmation of God.

The God-forsaken nature of the world is its heaviness. Fr. Baader says: heaviness means that God is absent. And the world is now both very heavy and completely liquid. This heaviness of the world and this fluid are interconnected. There is nothing sadder than the fate of Christianity, the religion of redemption and resurrection. The very idea of God and God's Providence was distorted, the slavish idea of God triumphed, and instead of God, an idol was worshipped; the relationship between God and human freedom was misunderstood; the relations between Christianity and the kingdom of Caesar, between the church and the state, were badly realized; the judicial understanding of Christianity and redemption, humiliating for God and for man, triumphed, turning religious life into a judicial process.

The perception of revelation was determined by the human environment, which is changing, can improve, and worsen.

Up to now, no critique of revelation has been written that could be analogous to Kant's critique of pure and practical reason. [2] This critique of revelation is intended to reveal what man brings into revelation. Revelation is two-member, divine-human. There is one who opens, and there is one to whom it is revealed. To a piece of stone or a tree, God could not reveal Himself. But no, even a stone or a tree in an elementary form reacts to the action of higher forces. This is even more true of the animal. Revelation is colored in different colors, depending on the state of human consciousness and on the integral orientation of the human being. There is, as it were, a priori in relation to revelation. If there were no loftiness and loftiness of man, he would never have reached the idea of God and would not have had the power to receive the revelation of God. Not only man's thought about God, but also revelation is colored by anthropomorphism and sociomorphism.

It is true that man creates God in his own image and likeness, as he once created gods. And the most important thing is that this human image and likeness should come close to the image and likeness of God. There is a mysterious dialectic of the two, and not the action of one from top to bottom. Man created God in his own image and likeness – evil or good, cruel or merciful, rapist or liberator, etc. People and whole groups of people, entire nations adapted Christianity, like all religions, to their level and imprinted their desires on the image of God, and imposed their limitations on this image. This provided an excellent reason for denying the very existence of God. Bad anthropomorphism was not in giving God the character of humanity, compassion, seeing in him the need for reciprocal love, but in giving him the character of inhumanity, cruelty, lust for power.

In true humanity, not only the nature of man is revealed, but God Himself is revealed. The social categories of domination and power were transferred to God, which was a bad sociomorphism. But truly God is neither master nor ruler. A bad cosmomorphism was the transfer of the category of force to God. But God is not at all a power in the natural sense of the word. God is truth. The cult of God as a force is still idolatry. Nor is God being, for this would mean transferring the category of abstract thought to God. God is super-existent non-being. God is being, but not being. God is Spirit, but not being. Spirit is not being. The understanding of God as a concretely existing Spirit is taken from deep spiritual experience, and not from limited, objectified natural and social experience, which imposes on the idea of God a bad cosmocentrism and sociocentrism. It must always be remembered that in the subconscious layer of every man, the most modern man, the soul of the ancestors slumbers, ascending to the most primitive times. What were the beliefs of this primitive soul, above which only a select few towered?

The ancient soul was immersed in magic. By means of magic, she tried to fight the elemental forces of nature, inhabited by spirits, threatening her from all sides. Magic was a primitive technique of man. Primitive agricultural cults were magical in nature. Magic wanted to learn the secrets of the spirits of nature in order to master them, to be able to command the gods themselves. To know the name of a creature means to master it. Mana is a magical power, and a person's social position depends on it. The magical element in religion is non-moral, and it is only through a long process that the moralization of religions takes place. [3] The material element has always been strong in religions, and it remains to this day. It is well known what role the grain of bread, the emblem of human existence, played in the Eleusinian mysteries.

Religious materialism, which plays an enormous role to this day, is hostile to the spirit and freedom, it always means magical chaining. Magic promises power to a person, but it leaves him shackled by the cosmic cycle. The ancient beliefs of the pagan world remain in the Christian world and distort the very idea of God. And this is after Christianity freed man from the power of demons and spirits of nature. The ancient soul of the ancestors believed that the gods needed propitiatory and nourishing sacrifices, blood, and human sacrifices. In its transformed form, it remains in the belief that human suffering is needed to propitiate the wrath of God.

The old slavery of man manifested itself in the judicial understanding of redemption, in the experience of the relationship between God and man as a judicial process. The modern Hindu philosopher Aurobindo says that the concept of ransom corresponds to slavery. The ancient Hebrew prophets rose above the religious consciousness, which demanded first of all sacrifices, and placed above all the truth in the human heart. But the prophetic element has never been predominant in the history of Christianity adapted to the average social level. It is a great honor for the Russian religious thought of the nineteenth century that it has always had a negative attitude towards the judicial understanding of Christianity. Low-level human consciousness understood Christianity as a very cruel religion. An element of a cruel understanding of Christianity can be found in Syrian asceticism, in monasticism, brought up on the "Philokalia", in Bl. Augustine, in the official Catholic doctrine, in Calvinism, in the doctrine of predestination, in the doctrine of hell. Opponents of Christianity might have the impression that the coming of Christ worsened the condition of man.

The division into two races, the elect and the condemned, is contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, which, however, is also distorted by the human environment that received it. When man is a wild beast, he imagines God to be a wild beast. When he is human, he imagines God to be human. The inhuman idea of God is a remnant of the ancient darkness that provoked the protest of the new humanity. A person who has risen in dignity cannot reconcile himself to the religion of fear, revenge, hell, to the religious justification of cruelty on earth. And this was the process of purification of the knowledge of God. Already the transition of the Jews to monotheism was a huge step forward. But pure monotheism, which Judaism valued so much, was still a monarchical-despotic understanding of God. Only God, revealed in the Son, in the God-man, ceases to be God, a despotic monarch, and becomes a God of love and freedom. This is the revelation of God in spirit and truth. The Divine Trinity means the overcoming of monarchical concepts of God, which depict God as an Eastern tyrant and transfer sociological relations of domination to God. But slowly, too slowly, the ancient slave beliefs are being overcome. It should be noted that in Hindu religious philosophy there is no judicial understanding of the relationship between man and God, but in it it is connected with monism. Sankara's concept of God is static, while Eckhardt's is dynamic. [4] This is Christian dynamism. [5]

Deity is understood either by social images – master, king, father, or by dynamic images – the power of life, light, spirit, truth, fire. Only the second understanding is worthy of God and worthy of man. And here there must also be a huge change in God-consciousness, which will be liberating. It is not easy to awaken man from ancient nightmares in which the "I" tyrannized both itself and God, hence the crucifixion of God. The "I" was the fate of myself with God. [6] It cannot be strongly insisted that God is not a reality like the realities of the natural and social worlds. God is Spirit, God is Freedom and Love. It is finally revealed in the creative act of the Spirit, in the creative act of the Spirit, God is realized. In the creative act of the Spirit, in the creative act of knowing God and testing God, the birth of God takes place in life.