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.

For the topic of the relationship between the divine and the human, the mystic is very difficult. A certain type of mysticism has a bias towards monism, towards the recognition of only one nature, towards the extinction of human nature in the Godhead. Such is all quietism. For the dialectics of God-manhood, Jansenism is interesting. A classic example of mystical monism is found in the religious philosophy of India. Such is the religious philosophy of Shankara, for whom our soul – Brahman, the One, Sat – is opposed to all origin and becoming. [21] Aurobindo, the most remarkable of India's modern religious philosophers, teaches that we must abandon the idea that we are the authors of our actions, that the universal acts through our personality. Impersonality is a condition of union with the Divine, it is necessary to attain impersonality and indifference. [22] The soul is a particle of the Divine.

Mysticism is often accused of deviating towards pantheism, and this is often abused. This is due to a lack of understanding of the language of mysticism. But it must be said that when pantheism really exists, it is not so much a heresy about God as a heresy about man, a belittling of the significance of man, a belittling of the role of human freedom and human creativity. The fate of European humanism, its internal drama, poses a completely new religious theme. This is the theme of God-manhood.

For the dialectic of the divine and the human, the fate of German mysticism and German philosophy is of great importance. In German thought, the category of fate (Schicksal) plays an enormous role. This word is constantly used in German philosophical books. Nothing of the kind can be found in French and English books. And this is no coincidence. The German people is a tragic people in its fate. This is due to the spiritual qualities of this metaphysical people and to some of their spiritual illnesses. It has become a common opinion that German thought, German mysticism, always inclines towards pantheism, that such are the qualities of the German spirit. Despite the fact that this opinion is too widespread, there is a grain of truth in it, which we will try to reveal. I would say that the fate of German thought is a drama in three acts, and the whole drama is played out on the theme of the relationship between the divine and the human. Kroner, who has written the most remarkable history of German idealist philosophy, says with enthusiasm that the metaphysical renaissance of the early nineteenth century in Germany was prophetic, messianic, eschatological. [23] And this is quite true. Such a spiritual uplift is not to be found in either French or English philosophy. In France, messianic and prophetic ideas were mainly associated with social thought. The spiritual breakdown of German thought lies in the extraordinary difficulty for it to recognize the mystery of God-manhood, the mystery of duality, in which the union of two natures takes place without their displacement. But this means difficulty in recognizing the mystery of personality. Anti-personalism is characteristic of all German idealist metaphysics, with the exception of Kant, who occupies a special place. But it must be admitted that in German thought, in German spirituality, there was a brilliant dialectic that was of great importance for the fate of European consciousness. How to describe the acts of this great drama, not only intellectual, but also spiritual?

Act I. German mysticism and Luther. German mysticism is first of all Meister Eckhardt. He was more complex than previously thought, he was not only a mystic, but also a theologian, although a greater mystic than a theologian. [24] As a theologian he is even close to Thomas Aquinas. But I am only interested in the mystic, interested in when he speaks the language of mysticism and not the language of theology, that was his genius and his significance. And so Eckhardt the mystic had an undoubted inclination towards mystical monism. His teaching was proposed to be called not pantheism, but theopantheism, but this does not change the matter much. Eckhardt stands in the line of Neoplatonic mysticism, he is related not only to Plato, but also to Hindu religious philosophy. This does not in the least doubt Eckhardt's Christianity. I do not at all think that the religious philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is more Christian than the religious philosophy of Eckhardt, who, in any case, went into the depths of spirituality, to the Innerlichkeit.

Eckhardt's deepest and most original is his idea of Gottheit, the Deity, which reveals a greater depth than the idea of God the Creator of the world, and is beyond the opposition of subject and object. God is already secondary, not primary. Gottheit can only be thought of in a completely apophatic way. Eckhardt's failure was not in the fact that he asserted perfect monism in relation to Gottheit, but in the fact that he asserted monism in the relation between man and God, i.e., he was a Monophysite. For him, the creation turns out to be insignificant, devoid of essence and value. Everything created is nothing. The very existence of man is, as it were, a sin. Here the contradiction of German thought is already revealed. The great freedom of man in his movement inward, towards spirituality, towards God, is affirmed, and at the same time the independence of human nature, the freedom of man, human freedom is denied, and mystical determinism is affirmed. R. Otto, comparing the mysticism of Shankara and Eckhardt, says that both seek salvation, existence, and for them knowledge is the path of salvation. [25] In Otto's opinion, Eckhardt's mysticism does not belong to the type of Gnostic, theosophical mysticism, like the mysticism of J. Böhme. The distinction is correctly grasped, but exaggerated, for Eckhardt has a strong metaphysical element which distinguishes it from Christian mysticism, which is concerned exclusively with the description of the soul's spiritual path to God. The theme of German mysticism is always metaphysical and cosmological.

For the existential dialectic of the divine and the human, Luther is very important, who is associated with German mysticism, although he himself cannot be called a mystic. Of particular interest is his book De servo arbitrio, directed against Erasmus. This is a very poignant book. The paradox is that in the struggle for the freedom of the Christian against the power of authority over conscience, Luther completely denies the freedom of man and affirms the exclusive action of God and God's grace in religious life. The only thing that should come from a person is faith. Only faith, which is also of grace, can save us, and this was seen by Luther as liberation from the power of authority. Man has no independence in relation to God, in relation to God there can only be faith. But at the same time, a person can be very active in the world. The traditional Catholic doctrine of free will, with the consequent good works necessary for salvation, seemed to Luther almost blasphemous, encroaching on the omnipotence and majesty of God. He denied not only free will, but also recognized human reason as the devil. He accused Catholicism of Pelagianism. Luther's doctrine of the slavery of the will was often crudely understood, and it was not at all seen what a deep and complex metaphysical dialectic flowed from it. It was difficult to foresee that in the future the German metaphysics of the early nineteenth century would emerge from this. The divine absorbs the human. This is an internal process in which the human is not violated from the outside. But the mystery of God-manhood disappears, as it disappears in Eckhardt.

The last and most interesting phenomenon of Protestantism in Europe, the dialectical theology of Karl Barth and his associates, is in the same line of rejection of God-manhood. For K. Barthes, God is everything, while man is nothing. And here we encounter a paradox in which everything turns into its opposite. K. Barthes is a dualist, not a monist, he asserts the gap between God and man, the abyss separating man from God. But if man is nothing, and God is everything, is the only reality, then this is another, disguised form of monism and even pantheism. In order for there to be no monism and pantheism, it is necessary that man should not be nothing, that there should be dignity and freedom of man in him. In the same way, Calvin was the ultimate enemy of pantheism, but paradoxically it can be said of him that he is a pantheist, because he belittles man and belittles his reality, and for him true being is only God and God is everything. So complex and intricate is the dialectic of the divine and the human, so difficult is it to contain the mystery of God-manhood. This is brilliantly revealed in the German philosophy of the nineteenth century. The only German thinker who was closest to the idea of God-manhood and God-manhood, and therefore the closest to Russian religious philosophy, was Fr. Baader. [26] But he stood aside from the main path, on which the dialectic of the divine and the human was revealed.