The old teaching that God created man and the world, having no need of them in the least and creating only for His own glorification, must be abandoned as a slavish teaching that deprives the life of man and the world of all meaning. God with man and the world is more than God without man and the world. Man and the world are the enrichment of the divine life. Amiel says that God is a great and misunderstood unknown. Léon Blois says that God is a lonely and misunderstood sufferer. They understood God better than the theologians. Apophatic theology is always right against cataphatic theology, only it respects the divine mystery, and it does not mean agnosticism at all. This is the great truth of mysticism, which knows communion with God better than theology.

All this leads to a radical reassessment of the traditional teaching about God's Providence, which led to atheism, because it made theodicy impossible. God reveals Himself to the world and to man, He reveals Himself in the Spirit, but He does not govern the world in the sense in which the world understands management. The usual teaching about Providence, which is repeated in conventional words without comprehending it, is incompatible with the fact of the existence of evil and suffering in the world. It is impossible to believe in the old teaching about Providence and God's management in this phenomenal, broken, enslaved, and necessitated world, in which it is not even possible to find the whole cosmos. [7] We have been told that God is present in all things. But the presence of God cannot be found in plague and cholera, in murder, in hatred and cruelty, in violence, in evil and darkness. The false teaching of Providence led to a slavish worship of power and authority, to the apotheosis of success in this world, and ultimately to the justification of evil.

Этому противоположно трагическое чувство жизни. Бог присутствует в свободе и любви, в истине и правде, в красоте. И перед лицом зла и неправды Он присутствует не как судья и каратель, а как оценка и как совесть. Бог и есть Тот, к Кому можно уйти от ужасов, безобразий, жестокостей мира. В беспокойном вопрошании Маркиона была большая правда, хотя ответ его на это вопрошание был ошибочный. Он не понимал ступенности откровения и преломления его в ограниченной и жестокой человеческой среде.[8]

Философски переоценка учения о Промысле должна выразиться так: на Бога не переносимы понятия, выработанные для мира феноменального и к нему лишь приложимые. Промысл не действует в совокупности феноменального мира, и его можно обнаружить лишь путем страшных натяжек. В этом нашем мире есть много иррационального, несправедливого, бессмысленного. Но есть великая тайна в том, что в индивидуальной судьбе каждого человека можно видеть руку Божью, видеть смысл, хотя и не подлежащий рационализации. Ни один волос не спадет с головы человека без воли Божьей. В более глубоком, неэлементарном смысле это верно, несмотря на то что в мире, лежащем во зле, нельзя видеть промыслительного управления Бога. Это связано с соотношением индивидуального и общего. Аверроэс думал как раз обратно, что Бог интересуется лишь общими законами мира и родом, а не индивидуумом. Он думал, что если бы Бог знал частное, то в Нем была бы постоянная новизна, что противоречило каменному представлению о Боге.

В этом нашем мире действует не только Бог, но также рок, необходимость, случай. Рок продолжает действовать там, где мир покидает Бога и где Бог покидает мир. Минуты и времена богооставленности – роковые в человеческой жизни. Человек и мир подчиняются неотвратимой необходимости в результате ложно направленной свободы. Случай же, играющий огромную роль в жизни, есть как бы потерянность и беспомощность человека в множественном мире, в котором действует огромное количество неуловимых, не поддающихся рациональному учету сил. Несчастный случай, который представляется нам совершенно бессмысленным и жестоким, и означает, что мы живем в падшем мире, в котором нет Божьего управления целого. Но этот же несчастный случай может получить высший смысл в моей судьбе, внедренной в мир феноменальный. Веру в то, что все происходящее со мной имеет смысл, нельзя выразить в космологической системе, как делает теологический рационализм. Всегда нужно помнить, что Бог есть Дух, но не природа, не субстанция, не сила, не власть. Бог есть Дух, т. е. свобода. Бог есть Дух, т. е., значит, мыслить Его нужно апофатически по отношению к реальностям природного и социального мира. Обычное понятие Промысла взято из управления государством. Бог представляется как бы самодержавным главой государства. Огромное значение имеет освобождение от остатков древнего идолопоклонства. Идолопоклонство возможно не только по отношению к идолам, но и по отношению к Богу. Это есть очищение откровения от дурных человеческих привнесений, освобождение от рабьих религиозных идей и верований.

Христианство учит о распятии Бога, что было для иудеев соблазн, для эллинов безумие. Но великую идею страдания и распятия самого Бога человеческое сознание исказило привнесением понятий, взятых из падшего социального мира, и отношений, существующих в нем. Таково унизительное и для Бога, и для человека понятие искупляющего значения крови: Христос вместо нас испытывал страдания за наши грехи, Бог принес в жертву Своего Сына, чтобы получить сатисфакцию за грехи людей, и т. д. Грехопадение понимали как непослушание. Вводились нелепые идеи, что Бог может быть оскорблен. Искупление основывалось на идее justitia vindicativa.[9] Жозеф де Местр говорит, что человек живет под раздраженной властью и раздражение может быть ослаблено лишь жертвой, что невинный может заплатить за виновного, что очищение требует крови, что мучение невинного приятно Божеству.[10] Этому противоположно более высокое, так называемое физическое или мистическое, понимание искупления (св. Афанасий Великий). Очищенное богопознание должно признать таинственность, непостижимость распятого Бога, т. е. Бога нуждающегося.

В тотемистических культах жертвоприношение было средством сообщения со священным. Жертва как бы создает священное. В этом было еще темное, непросветленное предчувствие тайны, которая будет явлена крестной жертвой Христа. Но и внутри христианства первоначальная языческая тьма не была еще окончательно преодолена. Есть парадокс религии, и особенно религии христианской: спасение есть вместе с тем угроза гибелью. Христианство было понято как ловушка. Из запугивания гибелью сделали главное орудие религиозного управления человеком и человеческим обществом. Раскрытие бескорыстной любви к Богу представилось Боссюэту в его спорах с Фенелоном ересью. Торжествовал теологический утилитаризм. Часто думали, что нужно защищать Бога, хотя в действительности надо защищать человека.

Strong faith and intense religiosity have been expressed in two ways in history: either in striving for perfection, for love, for the Kingdom of God, or in fanatical and cruel persecution of other believers. Two types of understanding of God correspond to these two types. Final victory over darkness and joy are possible only with apophatic thinking about the Divine. Ancient worldviews that infect theological teaching cause gloomy thoughts. Purgatory, paradise, hell – all this is still worldly. To test our concepts of God, imagine that an omnipotent God recognized the eternal suffering of creatures as the highest good. Would it be possible to put up with this? Only the terrible intimidation of man explains the fact that they reconciled themselves to Calvin's teaching about predestination. A higher and liberated consciousness must recognize the humanity of God. Otherwise, the one who is idolatrously called God is the devil, and not God. God, like man and the world, cannot be understood otherwise than through evaluation, while evaluation is creative activity.

Kierkegaard has a wonderful passage about the relationship to Jesus Christ. [11] The call to those who labour and are heavy laden came from Christ who was humbled, and not in glory. But the Christian Church does not want to recognize the kenotic Christ. Nor does he want to admit that Christ is a contemporary, which Kierkegaard especially values. Christ was in the world incognito, and this was His kenosis. Therefore, the perception of Him requires faith, i.e. freedom. Direct recognition of Him without the possibility of temptation would have made the God-man an idol. Christ speaks only in humiliation, not in exaltation. A person wants to start with exaltation, not humiliation. For Kierkegaard, the transformation of the church into a glorified church on earth was its undoing. Christ considered suffering to be a triumph. And He should be imitated, not admired or worshipped. I will say that not only Jesus Christ, but also God is incognito in the world, and the freedom of man is connected with this. This is the mystery of revelation. But they wanted to remove this mystery and make the revelation compulsory.

The reverse side of the denial of mystery and divine kenosis was atheism. Man is not able to deny the things that are visible, which compel him, he bows down before their reality, but he is able, or thinks he is able, to deny the reality of God. Man is given freedom in the experience of denying God, and this freedom is guaranteed by the kenosis and incognito of God. Atheism is only an experience in the life of man, a dialectical moment of the knowledge of God. Going through the experience of atheism can be a purification of the human idea of God, a liberation from bad sociomorphism. But there are two types of atheists – the suffering atheist and the evil atheist. I will not talk about a frivolous atheist. Dostoevsky depicts suffering atheists. Nietzsche was a suffering atheist. But there are malicious and self-righteous atheists who say: "Thank God that there is no God." Suffering atheism is a form of religious experience and even piety. Evil atheism usually means that man has not withstood the test of the exorbitant sufferings of the world and man, it is worse than the first type of atheism, but it also means, first of all, education against false, humiliating ideas about God. Therefore, believers should not look down on atheists, they should delve into other people's experience, into other people's trials. Moreover, believers sometimes got faith too easily for them. Feuerbach was a pious atheist, and through him the human concept of God was purified. A person, society, the world can go through abandonment by God, and in the limited consciousness of people this can be reflected as atheism. People can hardly endure the incognito of the Godhead, the kenosis of Christ. They would like the royal majesty of God and the God-man. They first rationalize, adapt God's Providence to their level. Then they rebel against their own false ideas, become atheists. In the first case, they were no closer to God than in the second.

With revelation, which is the basic phenomenon of religious life, the same thing happened as with all manifestations of the Spirit: it was objectified. [12] It must be admitted that Christian revelation could not play a social role, could not become a driving historical force, if it were not objectified, i.e., socialized, adapted to the level of the masses. This is a contradiction from which it is impossible to get out within the phenomenal world. Objectification is a distortion of spirituality, and at the same time objectification is necessary in realizing the fate of mankind and the world, in moving towards the kingdom of the Spirit. But on the way it is necessary to expose the illusions and distortions of objectification, there must be purification. And this is the mission of the prophetic side of religion and philosophy. Revelation cannot be understood in the spirit of naïve realism, as it is almost always understood in theological treatises. Revelation does not fall from the outside on the human head, it is not at all the revelation of some objective reality. The philosophical critique of revelation, which has not yet been created, must be above all a critique of this naïve realism, just as Kant's critique of reason was an exposure of the illusions of naïve realism. This, in fact, should be the final liberation from the illusions of religious and metaphysical naturalism. The criticism of revelation that has taken place in recent centuries has been in essence the ultimate triumph of naturalism and the rejection of God, the Spirit, and religion. I am talking about the criticism of revelation, which should lead to the triumph of spirituality, to the liberation of the spirit from naturalistic and materialistic distortions. God is not an object, is not an object. God is Spirit. The mystery of the Spirit cannot be partaken of in any objectification, it never manifests itself in the object, only the symbolism of the Spirit is possible in the object, but not reality.

Revelation is an event of the Spirit in me, in the subject, it is a spiritual experience, a spiritual life. The intellectualistic interpretation of revelation, which is expressed in dogmatics, is the objectification of revelation, an adaptation to the average normal consciousness. But the events of the Spirit described in the Holy Scriptures, the manifestations of the Spirit in the lives of the apostles and saints, were not of an intellectual nature, the integral spiritual nature of man was at work in them. Thus, the intellectualistic, rationalistic doctrine of God as a pure act, which played such a role in Catholic scholasticism, is taken not from the Bible, not from revelation, but from Aristotle. This teaching, which seems to satisfy an abstract mind, turns God into a stone, deprives him of all inner life, of all dynamics. [13] But God is life, life, and not being, if by being we understand the rational concept of being. Being is secondary, not primary, it is revealed only after the division into subject and object, it is already the product of thought, of rationalization. In this respect, Hindu religious philosophy is higher and deeper than Western ontological philosophy, which is too subordinate to the categories of Aristotle. [14]

The only true way is the path of intuitive description of spiritual experience. And it reveals that both God and man are active in revelation, that revelation has a divine-human character. The religious phenomenon is dual, it is the revelation of God in man and man in God, it reveals man's longing for God and God's longing for man. This longing of God for man is denied by traditional, rational theology, fearing to introduce into God an affective, passionate life, since the rational concept of perfection does not admit of longing and the need for fulfillment, and prefers stony perfection. At the same time, the relationship between God and man ceases to be a drama of the two, resolvable in the third. Revelation is a creative act of the spirit, it has a theogonic and anthropogonical character. Above the naïve realistic understanding of God rose only mysticism, which found another language, and Christian theosophy. And perhaps the most successful symbolic expression of the mysteries of the divine life is that of J. Böhme, the great mystic-theosophist. Spiritual experience can be expressed only in symbols, not in concepts. Philosophical criticism must understand this symbolic character of the language of religious metaphysics. But the most important question of the criticism of revelation is not a question of metaphysics, but of metahistory.

In the criticism of revelation, the problem of the relation of revelation to history is of great importance. Christianity is the revelation of God in history, and not in nature. The Bible tells of the revelation of God in history. The mystery of Christianity is connected with the Incarnation. It is usually said that Christian revelation is not the revelation of an abstract Spirit, but of a Spirit active in history. God enters history, metahistory enters history. The appearance of Jesus Christ is a historical phenomenon, it is a historical fact in time. But this creates the most complex problem, which is exacerbated by biblical criticism, the scientific and historical study of Christianity. Christianity was formed and crystallized when myths and legends were credulously accepted as realities, when historical criticism and historical science did not yet exist.