It is well known how history was falsified on this basis. But spiritual religion must recognize that there is no religion higher than truth, for God is truth and is known in spirit and truth.

This means that the concept of historical revelation is contradictory and is a product of religious materialism, corresponding to the stages of revelation that have already been passed. There is only spiritual revelation, revelation in the Spirit, and historical revelation is the symbolization in the phenomenal historical world of events taking place in the noumenal historical world. But the whole mystery is that noumenal events break through and enter the phenomenal world, the metahistorical breaks through and enters the historical world, there is no absolute gap between these two planes. But when metahistory enters history, it is not only revealed in history, but also adapts itself to the limitations of historical time and historical place. Light is emitted in a dark environment. The Infinite God speaks in a limited human language, in the limited conditions of a certain age and a certain people. Revelation is always concealment, in revelation there is the exoteric and the esoteric.

Scientific historical criticism must be completely free, and its work can have a purifying and liberating significance for the Christian consciousness. But historical criticism cannot solve any religious, spiritual question, it has fundamental limits. These limits can be seen in the so-called mythological theory, which denies the historical existence of Jesus. [15] Mythological theory, historically very dubious, has even been useful in discovering the limits of historical criticism.

The so-called "Jesus problem" is insoluble by historical research, it remains elusive. There is not enough historical evidence to write a biography of the man Jesus. And religiously it was supposed to be so. [16] This mystery, invisible from the outside in history, was revealed in the religious experience of the Christian community. The solution of the "problem of Jesus" lies in the area where the historical plane comes into contact with the metahistorical plane. But for historical science, the metahistorical exists not as a reality, but as the beliefs and ideas of church societies. The error of the epoch, which did not yet know historical science and historical criticism, was that the historical was considered metahistorical, i.e., sacred, and therefore human introductions and distortions were considered an integral part of divine revelation. This is especially clear in the Bible, in which there is religious light and phenomena of a religious nature, but ordinary historical events and distortions of the limited consciousness of the Jewish people were very much mixed with this. The ancient Hebrew understanding of God was a product of the still dark consciousness of the Jewish people, and only the prophets rose above this limited consciousness. In the same way, the Gospel, which tells about metahistorical events, bears the stamp of the limitations of the language and concepts of the Jewish people in a certain period of its existence, in which only the eternal divine light breaks through. The Bible and the Gospel were created historically, with all the limitations and intricacy of the historical, but they also radiate the super-historical.

There can be no historical authority. But thanks to the introduction of the metahistorical into history, the historical acquires meaning. Christian revelation has both been active in history and has been distorted in history. This is the complexity of the relationship between the divine and the human, the complexity of the interaction of God, human freedom and necessity. Infinite revelation manifests itself in the finite, but the finite can never contain the infinite, there always remains the perspective of the infinite, infinite creativity and infinite revelation. Man is not a static creature, once and for all given in a ready-made form. Man is a dynamic, creative and developing creature, infinity is hidden in him. The volume of human consciousness changes, consciousness can expand and contract, deepen and be thrown to the surface. This already determines the degree of revelation and its incompleteness. Infinity is possible in the revelation of the Spirit and the spiritual world. The crystallization of the finite distorts the perspective not only of the future, but also of the past. A limited consciousness, narrowed and superficial, the consciousness of the average man of the ordinary, and accepts revelation in accordance with its nature. It is possible to object to the possibility of a new revelation, a revelation that continues and completes, only with a static view of man, with the assumption of man's complete passivity in the perception of revelation. But revelation is divine-human.

Historicity has a positive and negative meaning. Everything that exists, everything that is alive is historical, has a history. Historicity indicates the possibility of novelty. At the same time, historicity indicates relativity and limitation. Historicity distorts. Christianity is historical, this is its strength, its dynamism. And Christianity is distorted by historicity, distorted by historical time, relativized. Historicism is a fundamentally false philosophy, the historian. Historicism, in fact, makes impossible a philosophy of history, which always rises above the relativism of historicism. Historicism knows no meaning. Only messianic consciousness has constructed the historical and makes it possible to reveal the meaning of history. The messianic consciousness awaits revelation in the coming phenomenon, which communicates the highest meaning of history, the appearance of the Messiah and the messianic kingdom. Greek thought did not know messianic expectation, history was a cycle for it, and the golden age was in the past, so it did not have a philosophy of history and did not know the meaning of history. Messianism had ancient Hebrew and partly Persian-Iranian sources. [17]

Christianity remains messianic, it awaits the second appearance of the Messiah and the messianic kingdom. But Catholic theology resists any introduction of the messianic idea into Christianity for fear of prophetism. [18] Early Christianity was undoubtedly eschatologically attuned. But the prospect of a long historical path between the two appearances of Christ the Messiah was revealed, when the Church was formed instead of the Kingdom of God; Christianity, which had become historical, began to adapt itself to this world, to the kingdom of Caesar. Only a few in "historical Christianity" awaited a new revelation of the Holy Spirit, and then often in a distorted form. The prophetic side of Christianity was weakened and disappeared almost completely. Historical Christianity took on an organized, dogmatic and authoritarian character. The historic church was recognized as the coming of the Kingdom of God. The idea of the Kingdom of God, which permeates the Gospel, is a prophetic idea. "Thy Kingdom come." The kingdom of God does not yet exist, our world is not like the kingdom of God. It can only be thought of eschatologically.

The impotence of historical Christianity, which has been revealed in our epoch, is determined and explained by the weakening of the prophetic spirit, by the ossification in the spirit of the exclusively sacramental-priestly. The expectation of a new revelation of the Holy Spirit. The spirit went into the depths. This will be discussed in the last chapter of this book. Now this problem interests me exclusively from the point of view of criticism of revelation. It cannot be repeated often enough that revelation is divine-human, that Christianity is a religion of God-manhood and presupposes faith not only in God, but also in man, the activity not only of God, but also of man. Only then can we understand the tragic fate of Christianity in history. Fr. Baader famously says that man also wanted to be man without God, but God did not want to be God without man, and so He became man. The idea of continuing revelation must not be confused with Lessing's rationalistic idea of the religious education of mankind. There is a complex existential dialectic between the divine and the human, and it is found most acutely in German thought.

Chapter II: The Dialectics of the Divine and the Human in German Thought. The meaning of Nietzsche. Dialectics of Trinity

The theme of God-manhood is the main theme of Christianity. I would prefer to say not God-manhood – an expression beloved by Vl. Solovyov, but God-manhood. Christianity is anthropocentric. It heralds the liberation of man from the power of cosmic forces and spirits. It presupposes faith not only in God, but also in man, and in this it differs from abstract monotheism, Judaism and Islam, from Brahmanism. It must be emphatically said that Christianity is not a monistic and monarchical religion, it is a divine-human and Trinitarian religion. But the dialectic of life between the Divine and humanity was so complex that the human was often humiliated in the history of Christianity. In the historical fate of God-manhood, the divine absorbed the human, the human absorbed the divine. The very dogma of the divine-manhood of Jesus Christ expressed the mystery of God-manhood, the union of the two natures without confusion and identity. It was a symbolic expression of the mystery. But the monarchical and monistic tendency has always existed in Christian history and has sometimes prevailed.

In my old book, The Meaning of Creativity, I said that a new anthropology, the Christology of man, must correspond to Christological dogma. But only in the future can it fully unfold. There was no real Christian anthropology yet. In patristics, St. Gregory of Nyssa, the most philosopher of the teachers of the Church, came closest to it, he tried to raise the dignity of man. [19] But he was not followed much. Only Christianity teaches that God became man. [20] The gulf between God and man was bridged. The humanity of God is revealed, not only the divine in man, but also the human in God. If we think over the humanity of Christ to the end, then we must admit that the second person of the Holy Spirit. of the Trinity is the pre-eternal man. And this mystery does not at all mean the assumption of identity between man and God, which would be tantamount to a rational denial of the mystery.

In the first centuries of Christianity, when dogmatic disputes were conducted and dogmatic formulas were worked out, in which they wanted to express the events of the spiritual world in symbols, a complex dialectic about the relationship between the divine and the human unfolded. Both the emergence of heresies and the denunciation of heresies are connected with this topic. Arianism, Monophysitism, Monothelitism, Nestorianism – all these are heresies about God-manhood. The controversy was confined to the problem of Christology, i.e. the relationship between the two natures in Christ. But the problem itself is broader and deeper, it affects the relationship between the divine and the human in general. Let the Christological problem be solved already in the first centuries and a form of correlation between the divine and the human in Christ was found, beyond monism and dualism. But in our world epoch – I speak of the epoch of the Spirit – the question becomes different, for the question of man, whom the patriotic epoch has not yet known in such a form, becomes with unprecedented acuteness, and the very consciousness of God changes depending on the change in man's consciousness.

The new soul came to know freedom – the search and temptations of freedom and slavery from freedom in such acuteness, in such depth, as the former Christian souls had not known. The soul of man has not improved, but has become very complex and unfolded, and this corresponds to a different consciousness.

Man became less whole, more divided, and new troubling questions arose before him. Catechisms do not answer these questions. In world culture, in literature and philosophy, people of the prophetic type have appeared; such are Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Vl. The Fathers and Teachers of the Church, the Scholastic Theologians Cannot Answer the Themes They Posed. Prophetic fire has always been a regenerating force in a stiffened, chilled spiritual life. Another regenerating force was mysticism.