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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The affirmation will not move a single step. For if we see in Christ only a man, only an ascetic, like the others, then even then it is important for the historian of Christianity to know whether these visions of Him are reduced only to the accidental, morbid arousal of the hallucinatory imagination without any connection with spiritual life, or whether they are, as it were, the objectification of inner spiritual experience, the expression of real facts and the beginnings of spiritual life, which has reached its greatest intensity, overcoming the power of external impressions?

The Gospel story tells us about the spiritual struggle that Jesus experienced in the wilderness, after He heard the voice of the Father at Baptism, recognizing Him as His "beloved Son," i.e., the Messiah. In the visions narrated by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the great moral meaning of this struggle is revealed to us, the result of which determines all the subsequent activity of Christ: He overcame the temptations of Jewish (false) messianism. If He, at least in spirit, at least in vision, could fall down before them and bow down to the "prince of this world," He would not be the "Son of God" that He recognized Himself to be; if He had agreed to turn stones into bread at least in a vision, to seek external witness to His messianic dignity by tempting God, or if He had been deceived in the wilderness by the phantasmagoria of "all the kingdoms of the world with their glory," the world could have followed Him, but there would have been no "anointing from above" in Him. The temptations that He overcame were against Christ's temptations, and He overcame them forever. From the height of His God-consciousness, in the immaculate purity of His spirit, He sees these temptations as something absolutely different from Him, contrary and hostile to Him, like Satan. And He contrasts them with God, by Whose word He lives and Whom alone He serves and worships. This struggle was the feat that began the ministry of Jesus, and His cross was only the end of this feat; the beginning and the end are interconnected, and it is not for nothing that in the voice of Peter, who "rebuked" Him to the cross, He hears the voice of "Satan" tempting Him in the wilderness.

Such is the moral meaning of the story of the temptation of Christ; such an explanation can be admitted by an unbeliever (as a depiction of a moral struggle), and

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believer (who recognizes the real metaphysical basis of this struggle). If there is a God, then the moral experience that is experienced in him is not imaginary and serves as a real source of knowledge of spiritual principles; if there is God, then that will or spirit which in this moral experience is recognized as evil and ungodly is different from God and different from that man who wills God by his own will. This is how a believer can judge him. But in any case, even those who do not believe in God should see in Christ's temptations not hallucinations of madness, but, on the contrary, the victory over evil madness, won in prayer and fasting. For if many other fasters and hermits fell under the charms of daydreaming in their very solitude, if it was in spirit, precisely in thought and imagination that they performed all sorts of imaginary signs and gave themselves over to of sensuality, spiritual pride and lust for power, tempting God, themselves, and then their neighbors, then Christ defeated the "evil spirit" already in the wilderness. "I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning" (Luke 10:18), – He says to His disciples, – again a vision, the meaning of which becomes clear after the previous one.