Under the influence of this feeling, if only the character of the fallen spirit can be judged by all its subsequent actions in human history, it probably burst out with a bold blasphemy against God, probably precisely – it tried to ascribe to God all those moral shortcomings that grew out of its own pride and distorted in it its God-created nature. At least, otherwise it is absolutely impossible to explain, even if only relatively, the success of his plans. According to indirect biblical indications (e.g., Ephesians 6:72), he undoubtedly carried with him a considerable number of disembodied spirits[279]. But in order for pure spirits, with a positive knowledge of their existence as a free gift of God's goodness, to be able to cling to an obvious enemy of God, it is necessary that a feeling of hostility towards God should be aroused in them. Consequently, the author of their downfall managed to arouse this feeling in them, and in this case there can be no doubt that he went to his goal by way of slander. If we ask the question: how could good spirits really suddenly turn out to be ungrateful in relation to the Creator of their lives? Psychologically, there is only one possible answer: they could be ungrateful to God only in one and only case, if it occurred to them in some way that God created them only for His own sake, so that He would have someone to rule over and someone to praise Him. Such an idea of the foundations of divine creativity, of course, can not determine a feeling of gratitude, but rather a feeling of dislike for God, because it presents God in the unworthy light of selfish motives, i.e. it directly deprives God of his divinity. And if we ask the question: how could good spirits suddenly become hostile to God? –

Such a conception of God, of course, could only determine a feeling of hostility towards Him, because by presenting God as such a being who, out of a desire for the good of his rational creatures, deliberately hinders them from achieving their urgent goals, it thereby naturally presents God as an open enemy of its creatures, and consequently it must naturally evoke precisely such an attitude towards God. which is possible only in the reasoning of a personal enemy. Consequently, bearing in mind the necessary conditions under which the fall of spirits could actually take place, and considering the possible existence of these conditions from the point of view of the criminal mood with which the first culprit of the fall was seized, it seems to us that we have sufficiently weighty grounds to determine, at least, the psychologically probable process of the ancient celestial catastrophe.

It goes without saying that one can not accept these thoughts, because it is very easy to expose their gross falsity; but if anyone has accepted these thoughts, it can be said directly that he has fallen, because to accept these thoughts is the same as to determine oneself on the path of senseless enmity towards God.

According to the biblical testimony, some of the disembodied spirits really joined their rebellious leader and formed a proud host of open enemies of God. But the perverse designs of their ambitious leader were not justified in this rebellion against God, because he was not able to carry the entire spiritual world with him. In the words of the Bible, "there was a war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought against them, but they did not stand, and there was no longer a place for them in heaven, and the great dragon was cast out, the ancient serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world, cast out to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Obviously, among the best part of the bodiless world, the sly intrigues of the skillful seducer not only did not find any sympathy, but also aroused outright indignation. Rational spirits evidently fully understood that under whatever conditions they existed, they would never become equal to God, precisely because they could exist only under conditions, i.e., they could only be limited. Therefore, for morally pure rational spirits it was obvious that in their God the Creator they have the eternal and only image of infinite perfection, so that if they really wish to follow the path of moral perfection, then in this case only one path is undoubtedly possible for them – the path of possible assimilation to God, because any deviation from God, as a deviation from the real image of true perfection, is a deviation towards emptiness, i.e. towards a complete loss of moral existence. On this basis, the pure spirits, of course, could only express their decisive condemnation of the false ideas about God and about their own created greatness. And as their former leader persisted in his conception, they naturally saw in their lives the first sad necessity of beginning the obligatory struggle against the first error. According to the Biblical account, one of the leaders of the spiritual world, the Archangel Michael, came out as an energetic defender of the truth, around whom all the heavenly defenders of the truth were united. Both sides, as the apostolic word puts it, then fought against each other, i.e. each of them tried to prove its rightness, and the culprit of the fall could not resist in this spiritual struggle, i.e. could not prove his lie. However, instead of confessing his error and thereby showing that he had only unwittingly made a mistake, due to the limitations of his imperfect mind, he nevertheless continued to repeat his lie with the stubbornness of savage hatred of God, and thus clearly showed the whole bodiless world that he was not mistaken at all, but deliberately invented his lie. Therefore, the defenders of the truth could without any difficulty penetrate into the hidden secret of his irreconcilable hatred of God. They understood that God prevented the proud spirit from being the only supreme being for the world, and that it was precisely for this reason that he tried to draw them away from God in order to replace God for them; they understood this circumstance, and instead of divine glory and honor, they covered their former leader with the shame of a slanderer.

In the realm of the spirit world, the slanderer had nothing to do. After the exposure of his plans, he, of course, could not count on the success of his propaganda and therefore transferred his criminal activities to the borders of our land. There were also free-rational beings and reverent worshippers of God, these were the first people. According to the biblical story (Gen. 2. 9, 17, 3, 22), they lived in a special garden, in the middle of which grew two trees: one was called the tree of life, because God's promise that by eating its fruit people would not see death; and the other was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because God's commandment was bound up with it, not to eat of its fruit on pain of death[281]. And the people were so obedient to God's will that they even strengthened the content of the commandment given to them and resolved not only not to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, but, in order to avoid temptation, not to touch it at all (Gen. 3:3). It was these most sincere servants of God that the devil decided to destroy.

In order to achieve his goal, the devil, of course, could not influence people by spiritually instilling criminal desires in them; because, despite their undoubted desire to be obedient to God's will, although evil thoughts could, of course, arise in them, they could not be so grafted on them as to become sufficient motives for the beginning of criminal activity. Therefore, the devil decided to act on people in a special way, not by the inner voice of their own thoughts, but by the external voice of physical nature. He once struck Eve with the unusualness of such an event that during her walk in the Garden of Eden a serpent suddenly spoke to her. Of course, the presence of animals in Paradise could not have seemed surprising to Eve in the least, but the fact that animals can speak must have naturally astonished her, because such an ability of animals must undoubtedly have appeared to her as a completely unexpected discovery. It is therefore quite understandable and very natural that she should have taken an interest in this discovery, and, under the influence of this interest, could calmly listen and seriously consider such a report of the serpent, which she would have always and unquestionably rejected with resolute indignation, if only it had arisen as her own consideration. In fact, her conversation with the serpent began, in fact, with a harmless question of imaginary ignorance. The serpent supposedly heard that God had given people paradise and at the same time forbade them to enjoy its fruits, and now he does not seem to know how he should react to this strange rumor – whether he was told the truth or not. His wife explained to him the truth, that in fact they used the fruit of all the trees of Paradise, except only the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, since God had indeed forbidden them to eat the fruit of this tree on pain of their death. In this way, the conversation naturally turned to the fact of God's commandment, and the serpent took advantage of this circumstance to slander God's commandment and express his slander against God: "No," he objected to his wife, "you will not die; but God knoweth that in the day that ye eat of them your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:4-5).

By this cunning interweaving of pretended knowledge and feigned surprise, the serpent naturally aroused confidence in his words, and naturally obtained such a result that his wife was not in the least indignant at his message, but, on the contrary, treated it with great attention, and began to consider it quite seriously. According to the Biblical story (Gen. 3:6), the wife saw that the forbidden tree was good for food, i.e. it apparently did not differ in any way from other trees, the fruits of which were eaten by people and about which the wife knew from experience that they really bore good fruit, and the wife also saw that the forbidden tree was pleasing to the eyes, i.e. it did not have such signs at all, which might have indicated the deadly quality of its fruits, so that it was not at all frightening in appearance, but, on the contrary, very beautiful, and pleasant to look at. Therefore, this examination of the forbidden tree clearly spoke in favor of the serpent, and therefore the wife had sufficient reason to believe him that the tree was not really deadly and that people really had nothing to fear from eating its fruit. And yet its name directly suggested that it could impart to people the knowledge of good and evil, and this knowledge, in any case, is not frightening, it is only highly desirable. Therefore, the wife gathered the fruit of the forbidden tree, ate it herself and fed it to her husband.

Thus, the culprit in the world of evil, according to biblical teaching, is undoubtedly an intelligent creature of God – the highest spirit in heaven and the first pair of people on earth. Consequently, the Biblical teaching decisively affirms the very proposition which has always led philosophical thought to a whole series of profound perplexities and has always made it impossible to construct a strictly philosophical conception of the world.

Meanwhile, biblical teaching is not a philosophical doctrine; it does not at all have in mind the questions we have posed, as natural perplexities of human thought, and consequently it does not at all give a direct answer to these questions in the sense of scientific agreement of its assertions with the fundamental concept of God. Consequently, philosophical thought must necessarily seek this agreement by means of independent philosophical speculation.

On the basis of the concept of God as omniscient and omnipotent, we must necessarily think that God foresaw the appearance of evil and that He could always have prevented its appearance, if only He did not want to allow it. Hence, on the basis of this concept of God, we can very easily arrive at a certain reconciliation of God with evil. We may think that the actual existence of evil derives from the idea of its existence in the divine plan of creation, i.e., we may think that God Himself wanted the existence of evil, only, of course, He did not want it as a permanent existence, but only as a temporary moment in the world's existence, precisely such a moment which is needed only as a contributing condition for the positive development of good, and which therefore must necessarily disappear from being. as soon as the good becomes the absolute principle of world existence[283]. However, this possible explanation of evil is decisively refuted by its real significance in human life, and therefore it cannot be accepted as the true formula of being. Evil could contribute to good only in the only case if the sphere of its existence were limited only to the sphere of human ideas, i.e. if people only fought it as a temptation and never realized it in reality. Then it would not in the least destroy the divine world order, and then it would really be possible to say of it that its idea was part of the divine plan of the universe, because all the particular ideas about it in the human spirit would then really only contribute to the embodiment of God's thought about the world in the exact realization of the ultimate goal of world existence. But in fact, man experiences evil: he either suffers from evil or perishes in evil, and, in any case, he not only fights evil, but also creates the very evil against which he is obliged to fight. Under such circumstances, evil obviously does not contribute to the development of good, but only destroys it, and therefore it is God who cannot will its existence, since in this case the will of evil would in essence be the unwill of what God really wanted to create. But why, then, did He allow him to appear in the world?

The solution of this question logically and quite naturally leads to the construction of the following consideration: if God really cannot will the existence of evil, and yet evil exists in the world, then it means that God did not foresee its appearance, because otherwise He would undoubtedly have prevented the catastrophe of the first fall, and then no evil would have existed and could not exist. This consideration can also be partly supported by the fact that evil, according to Biblical teaching, has its basis in the personal freedom of rational creatures, so that it does not follow from a chain of necessary causes, but each time enters the world process as an event which, by the nature of created being, is undoubtedly only possible. But if the omniscient God could not positively foresee what would actually come out of His creations, then He would have no reason to create a world being, because under this condition He would clearly run the risk of not fulfilling His intentions and could mistakenly be the cause of such a being that it would be better not to create at all. Consequently, by limiting divine omniscience, in essence, only the eternal absurdity of the world's existence is affirmed, but in order to explain its real absurdity, it is not at all necessary that the world necessarily appeared in existence through divine creation. In affirming the reality of this creation, we can affirm only the eternal rationality of the world's being, and in affirming this rationality, we absolutely cannot admit that the real foundation of divine creation is only God's divinatory assumption whether the world will not actually turn out to be what God wished it to be. If the world is really God's creation, then God undoubtedly contemplates it as His finished work, and therefore in the process of world existence there can be absolutely nothing that is not in God's contemplation of the world.

We do not have divine knowledge and cannot embrace the world's existence in God's contemplation of its entire reality. We see only that there is evil in the world and that its existence contradicts our concept of God; And from this we inevitably have serious perplexities, because we really cannot think of the world in any other way than in contradictory formulas. But for all the limitations of our understanding, we can nevertheless understand that the creative idea of the world, according to which it is realized in being, and the objective contemplation of the whole world history in God's mind do not in the least negate each other, so that the divine mind, which thinks the idea of the world and contemplates its reality, simultaneously contemplates in it not only the appearance and existence of evil, but also the actual realization of the pre-eternal idea of being.

3.