We have already said that the Jews of Christ's time are often reproached, without sufficient grounds, for the "transcendence" of their concept of God, which was combined with the concept of His "holiness." Of course, Christ understood most deeply the immanent attitude to the world on the part of that omniscient and omnipotent God, without Whose will a hair cannot fall from the head of man. But on the other hand, He had a deeper understanding of His transcendence, His holiness, His opposition to the world. And if in the Gospel of John the inner side of the doctrine of the kingdom, the immanent relationship of God to man in the fullness of perfect love, is most strongly and vividly revealed, then in it the antithesis is most sharply carried out

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between God and the world. But even apart from the fourth Gospel, the Synoptics themselves reveal Christ's teaching about the holiness of the Father and His transcendence in all its fullness, especially in comparison with the teaching of the Pharisees and scribes.

"Hallowed be Thy name" is the first of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. The Pharisees honored this "holy name" and tried to evade it in their oaths; to Christ, every oath is ungodly. The Pharisees revered the temple, but allowed a market in it, the very sight of which was an insult to the shrine to Jesus. The Pharisees honored the sanctity of marriage, condemned adultery, but allowed divorce; He condemned lust and saw divorce as a violation of the sanctity of marriage. The Pharisees observed ritual purity in the name of the ideal of Levitical holiness; Christ, in the name of the same ideal – "Be ye holy, for I, Yahweh your God, am holy" – condemned inner impurity, impurity of heart and thought. Here was not a contradiction with the "law of holiness," but, on the contrary, the most intense affirmation of the holiness of God in its separation from all worldly things. From this follows all those demands of Christ which terrified the apostles themselves as immeasurable – His demands for renunciation of the world, enmity to the world and all worldly bonds. The beginning of this enmity is in the very holiness of God; and if contemporaries thought that the Messiah brought peace with him, then Jesus says that He brought the sword and division.

The same opposition between God and the world, the kingdom of God and every worldly human kingdom built on enslavement and violence (Mark 10:42), is also expressed in the apocalyptic teaching of Christ in comparison with other apocalypses of that time. The national-political element is banished altogether, and the enemy of the "kingdom" is not the Roman Caesar, not the Roman Empire or any other power, but the "prince of this world," that satanic principle, that spirit of evil which lies at the foundation of the world's enmity with God and opposes the human to the Divine. External domination over the world is acquired by compromise with it, by subordination or worship to what the world serves; To that extent the commandment: "Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve" contains not only the condemnation of the service of mammon or lust for power, but also the condemnation of those

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messianic aspirations, in which the kingdom of God was depicted in the form of a human monarchy. "No man can enter into the house of a strong man, and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man, and then plunders his house" (Mark 3:27). Christ fought against this "strong man," and not against the Romans and Greeks. It is necessary to conquer the world in its spiritual principle, in its self-assertion and self-origin, in its enmity against God.

III

It is hardly possible to find an idea more repugnant to the modern worldview than the idea of Satan or the kingdom of Satan. It does not follow, however, that scientific or philosophical research into the teaching of Christ can evade this idea, which in the life of Christ corresponded to real moral experience. The Gospels tell us that at the beginning of His ministry, immediately after His baptism, Jesus withdrew into the wilderness, where He spent forty days in prayer and fasting and was tempted by Satan. Only short-sighted criticism can recognize this Gospel story as incredible, confirmed by so many analogies drawn from the religious life of a multitude of ascetics of the most diverse times and peoples. Remaining faithful to our starting point, i.e., without leaving the ground of indubitable psychological and moral facts, we believe that even those who do not believe in either God or Satan can fully admit the possibility of visions, especially for a person who lives a spiritual life, for a faster, a man of prayer, an ascetic. Psychologists or physiologists, proceeding from the fact that all our perceptions have their physiological basis in our nervous-cerebral activity, can explain in their own way the higher manifestations of human spiritual life. But if, in explaining external perceptions, it would be absurd to confine oneself to a mere reference to the physiology of the nervous system, it would be still more absurd to confine oneself to the recognition that it also has its physical correlate. It is clear that there is no such thing for a historian or a philosopher

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