This state of affairs undoubtedly contributes enormously to the movement of Christian revival, to the spiritual healing of the Church. For not only the church, which forcibly dominates the world, but also the church, which is comfortably organized and lives in the world, which in practice forgets that the whole world lies in evil, which forgets Christ's promise to His disciples: "In the world ye shall have tribulation," already loses faithfulness to its true essence and purpose. In this sense, the entire centuries-old "Constantine" epoch of the church was the epoch of its secularization; if the Church did not perish in the process of this secularization and the "gates of hell" did not prevail against her, it was only because the light of Christ's truth constantly flared up anew in the hearts of her saints and righteous and saved her from destruction. The Church at the present time, experiencing that she is despised, hated, persecuted like Christ Himself, is psychologically placed in conditions much more favorable for the observation of her true being, i.e., the light of Christ's truth. This is the similarity of our epoch with the epoch of the first centuries of Christianity.

However, we must not forget the reverse side of the matter, determined by another fact noted above, namely, that this position of the Church takes place in the composition of the world, which has passed through many centuries of the epoch of Christian consciousness. The radical currents of Christian religious thought that arise now, as it has always been at all times, recognizing the entire "Constantine" epoch of the Church as a complete misunderstanding, a centuries-old betrayal of the essence of the Christian faith and the Church, and demanding that the Church reaffirm openly and unconditionally in its early Christian essence, these currents forget the simple and indisputable fact that historical situations are in their very essence unique. Any attempt at a simple restoration of the ancient past, of a "restoration" in spiritual and religious life, is even less possible, leads even more to misunderstandings and distortions than in political life. To forget, simply to erase an experience once lived is not only in fact impossible, but even religiously inadmissible: God demands of us that we realize His truth and our duty precisely in that concrete situation which has been created on the basis of all our past (including sinful) and which includes the memory of this past; This proposition is a new proposition, and in no way a mere repetition of the old.

I will begin with the fact that the forces that are currently hostile to the Church and persecute it can only be misunderstood as "new paganism." Paganism in the strict sense of this concept is a pre-Christian faith, or, in general, a faith that did not know the monotheistic idea of God as Spirit, as the Creator and Guardian of the world.

It is not for nothing that the Apostle Paul recognized the Athenians as "somehow especially pious," and the entire Christian Church throughout its entire historical path used for its own purposes the achievements of ancient religious and philosophical thought – beginning with the idea of the "Logos" in the Evangelist John, with the Alexandrian Platonists – the Church Fathers and Bl. Augustine and ending with the influence of Aristotelianism in the worldview of the Catholic Church since the thirteenth century. It is not without reason that many historians of the Christian Church see in antiquity a "second Old Testament", which, like the Jewish Old Testament, formed the basis of the Christian faith. A completely different matter is modern godlessness and the rejection of Christianity. It is not paganism, which does not know Christianity, but the falling away from Christ and His truth of the world, which once knew them and believed in them. The assertion that the world "fell away" from Christ only because it was never truly Christian at all, and instead of Christ's truth it knew only its distortion and, without any reason, first of all imagined itself to be "Christian" – this assertion of Christian radicalism contains a distorting exaggeration. Of course, the world was only superficially Christianized and often confused the authentic truth of Christ with its human perversions. It goes without saying that "Christendom" remained an extremely dark and sinful world, and even paradoxically did and blessed evil in the name of Christ. But if he thought he was Christian, he was still right in the sense that he at least wanted to be Christian. And the light of Christ's true truth, though often only refracted and distorted by its human representatives, nevertheless reached his soul; Suffice it to recall the great contribution to European spiritual culture of genuine Christian saints and founders of monastic orders and the reverent respect for them in the Christian world. And as I have repeatedly pointed out, all the moral foundations of European coexistence are, consciously or unconsciously, the fruits and expressions of its genuine, though far from perfect, Christianization. Therefore, the forces that have now rebelled against Christian truth and the Church are not pagan forces, but demonic ones – dark forces that have renounced Christ, betrayed Him and raised a new rebellion against His cause of enlightenment and salvation of the world. It is quite natural and understandable for a believing Christian that this rebellion against Christ and His truth is thereby an attempt to abolish, to destroy the common moral principles of life, including those that were recognized as indisputable in the era of pre-Christian paganism.

And at the same time, in this situation, it is generally revealed that the most elementary, habitual – from the point of view of the absolute Christian ideal, imperfect – moral concepts and principles of human coexistence, such as freedom of conscience, the inviolability and sanctity of the human person, the subordination of the state – in its domestic and foreign policy – to the law and, through it, the principle of justice, the collective responsibility of society for the fate of all its members, The fundamental equality of all people, the sanctity of the marriage and family union are the essence of the expression and reflection, in the sphere of the law, of Christian truth itself. Along with this, there are, however, many phenomena more or less sanctioned or tolerated by legal consciousness, which directly contradict Christ's truth and express its pre-Christian consciousness. I will mention the institution of the death penalty, this greatest blasphemy against the human person, or in general the certainty of criminal law as the beginning of retribution; Assuming further moral progress, one can be sure that such phenomena and concepts will seem to future centuries as savage, monstrous, and senseless as torture or burning for heresies now seem to us.

However, at least in the advanced, morally responsible part of humanity, the sense of Christian truth is acute enough to condemn such phenomena and strive for their abolition. No matter how tormented our conscience may be by such manifestations of still more or less legalized or tolerated untruth, it would be wrong and unjust to deny that the centuries-old Christian education of mankind – for all its elementary and insufficient nature – has brought forth its fruitful fruits, hopefully already ineradicable in the human soul. By virtue of this, the Christian revival can and must be adjacent to the same realized Christian upbringing, it must be precisely the rebirth of the sprouts of Christian seeds that have already broken out, a new awakening of the dormant and weakened Christian consciousness. Overcoming everything that is dead and sinfully human in the traditions of the Church, it must rely on everything that is alive, righteous and creative in these traditions, it must not be a destructive revolution that sweeps away the entire past of Christian culture as evil, but an evolution, an awakening of this past to a new, stronger and more creative life. In the face of the evil of anti-religious and anti-humanitarian beliefs that are approaching the world, our religious and moral thought must become both more responsible and more modest. The dream of the fullest possible realization of Christian truth should not displace from our consciousness a loving union with all people who recognize themselves as Christians and wish to remain Christians, with all homines bonae voluntatis.

We must burn with the Christian zeal of the apostles and early Christians, but we must avoid conceit, identify ourselves with them; Remembering that we ourselves are epigones, that we ourselves have been weakened by centuries of cooling faith and distortion of Christian truth, we must not exalt ourselves and exaggerate our own spiritual powers. It is precisely because even the most elementary and imperfect, but nevertheless positive achievements of the Christian consciousness are now beginning to crumble, stand under the threat of oblivion and death, that we must carefully observe them – appreciate and support everything that is good and true in them. And in the face of the ever-approaching danger on the part of the principal enemies of the Christian faith – I do not mean those who intellectually reject it, but its real enemies, who in practice reject its moral principles and precepts – what is needed is not disunity, but the unification of the entire Christian world, meaning by it, as indicated above, all of humanity, no matter how imperfect it may be. because it either reverently preserves within itself the image of Christ, or at least actually recognizes the truth of Christ as obligatory, without even realizing that this truth has been revealed to it and revealed to it by Christ. We must, following the example of the father of the Gospel parable, with loving condescension, nay, with rapturous joy, go to meet every prodigal son, since he preserves at least a vague memory of his father's house and at least a timid dream of returning to it stirs in his soul.

This means, in short: the cause of Christian revival must overcome in itself every temptation of sectarian narrow-mindedness and sectarian conceit. Christ's truth is not only not invented by us, but also not realized for the first time (or for the first time after the first Christians) by us, it has never died in the soul of mankind and unites into one holy church all, even the weakest and most sinful people, in whose souls it at least barely flickers. The Christian revival, like any collective human cause, presupposes, of course, the leadership of a minority – a close, intimate union of ascetics and soldiers of Christian truth, which guides this cause in all its diverse tasks: many are called, but few are chosen. But this necessary and valuable spiritual aristocracy of the leading minority, which presupposes a certain separation of it from all that is sluggish, dissolute, and dull in the broad masses of the Christian world, must be combined with broad democracy, or, more precisely, universalism, which is grounded in the very essence of Christian truth – with loving attention to any, even the weakest Christian (in the above-mentioned sense) soul, with the recognition of each such soul as a brother and accomplice in the common cause. A firm and hardened warrior of God's army will only be a true Christian if he combines strict self-discipline with a broad spirit of love, forgiveness, and solidarity toward others.

This brings us to the problem of a task which has never ceased to be presented to the most sensitive souls of the disunited Christian world, but which has only in our own time formed the basis of the Christian social movement. I have in mind the task of reuniting the Christian Church, which has disintegrated empirically into separate, isolated confessions, and often bitterly fighting among themselves. It is striking that it is only in very recent times (apart from isolated temporary movements of this kind in the Middle Ages and in the fifteenth century, caused mainly by the political danger threatening the Byzantine Empire and the Church) that Christendom has become acutely aware of the abnormality and sinfulness of the fact that the holy Church of Christ, the universal unity of men in love and faith, has disintegrated in human empiricism into a multitude of alienated "churches" or confessions. The so-called ecumenical movement is still very weak; Not to mention the fact that the main branch of the Christian Church, the Roman Catholic Church, stands outside of it and rejects it on principle, it embraces only a small minority of Christian believers in the composition of other Christian confessions, and is still groping, as it were, looking for the right path. But covertly and potentially, it has already touched many hearts; Those confessions that officially remain alien to it (such as the Catholic Church) also respond to it, in the person of its individual representatives.

From a broader point of view, this ecumenical movement in essence coincides in some way with the common cause of Christian revival. First of all, it can only be the fruit of an inner religious revival, and it is fruitful, or even possible at all, only by flowing from it; On the other hand, such an internal religious revival has it as its perfectly necessary consequence. For, like any human disunity, the separation between confessions is the very expression of religious decadence, the victory of human passions over the spirit of love, the loss of a living sense of the unity of the mystical Church of Christ – the unity of all in God. Therefore, the overcoming or even only the weakening of this separation is possible only through a new awakening of the spirit of true faith, the consciousness of the rootedness of everything and everyone in God. As one ancient Eastern ascetic, Abba Dorotheus, said, God is the center, and people are the periphery of his circumference; the closer to God, the smaller the distance between people, the individual points of this circle. This obviously holds true in the relationship between confessions. However important the differences of dogmatic and canonical order between the various confessions may seem, and in part they really are, the awakening of genuine religious faith, and especially of the Christian faith in the God of love, nevertheless automatically leads to an experienced realization that these differences are insignificant in comparison with the fraternal unity of all in Christ, in the one faith in the saving power of love. Only on this path, i.e., with a true burning in the hearts of that which forms the very essence of the Christian faith, is the basic condition for unification possible – the awakening of the awareness of that often completely forgotten fact that, despite all the differences, all Christian confessions have remained faithful to the basic, identical dogmas of the Christian faith – faith in Jesus Christ Himself, in His Divine-human nature, in the salvific nature of His redemptive feat and, what is even more important, faith in the above-mentioned the basic dogma that God is love or that love is a divine saving force. This consciousness alone is enough for any separation to be potentially overcome, as it were, and the conviction of the inseparably common belonging of all to the one holy Church of Christ is resurrected; Then all disputes begin to feel as relatively insignificant disagreements within the fraternal solidarity of members of the same family, as was the case in the era of the early Christian Church.

But you can go even further. In accordance with the true concept of the Church outlined above, it can be asserted that the work of uniting the faithful and regenerating the Church of Christ, strictly speaking, is not at all limited to the unification or rapprochement of confessions that openly and consciously recognize themselves as Christian; from a broader – from a truly Christian – point of view, it means in essence, and especially in the face of the onslaught of anti-Christian, demonic forces, the unification of all people around Christ's truth – including members of other, non-Christian confessions, or even people who, according to their theoretical views, are non-believers – since in their hearts there actually lives the power of love and faith in its salvific and in the necessity of serving it. This, of course, does not contradict the fact that, on the other hand, such true missionary work – the conversion of unconscious Christians to Christ – as well as the success of Christian moral regeneration, has as its condition a preliminary "truce" between all conscious Christian confessions, an end to the scandal of the "civil war" between them – this greatest temptation of the Christian Church.

The "ecumenical movement" arose, as is well known, in two forms at the same time: in the form of the "Stockholm" movement of uniting all Christians in the common cause of the moral regeneration of the world, on the unity of Christian life and activity (Life and Work), leaving aside all dogmatic and canonical differences, and in the form of the "Lausanne" attempt to come to an agreement and approach precisely on questions of a dogmatic and canonical order (Faith and Order). After a decade of parallel work, partly by the same persons, in these two directions, it was recognized (in 1937) as necessary to merge the two movements into one. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the details of the problems of the "ecumenical movement." I confine myself to a few indications of fundamental importance.

First of all, it seems quite obvious that the "Stockholm" form has a certain natural primacy over the "Lausanne" one. For, as I tried to explain in detail in the first reflection, religious and even more so Christian truth is not in its very essence theoretical truth, but living truth, truth as "the way and the life." A true Christian is not one who confesses Christ in words or minds, but one who does His works, or at least actively seeks to follow His way. And the true truth of Christ is exposed only by its practical fruits. "The children of God," according to the words of the Apostle, are those who do what is righteous and love their brethren. "Dogmas", as I tried to understand it above, are the truths that help to find the right way of life and create moral truth. Only such a test will make it possible to distinguish in the dogmatic (and canonical) teachings of various confessions the authentic truth of God – God's covenant – from the subjective, or erroneous, or religiously insignificant "human tradition." Therefore, from a subjective, human, psychological point of view, people of different convictions can most easily come together, understand each other, overcome their differences, participating in the common work of moral improvement of life, which animates them all. It is pedagogically useful to forget for a while about all theoretical differences and to unite in fraternal solidarity on the common task of fighting for the triumph of the beginning of love over world evil.

This does not mean that the very task that the "Lausanne" form of movement sets itself is aimless and should be abandoned. On the contrary, it follows from what has just been said that the distinction between true and false "dogmas" and between the degree of Christian legitimacy and expediency of certain "orders" of church life is of extremely significant importance. If it be admitted that in certain epochs of its past the Church has fallen into unnecessary and harmful exaggerations in judging the significance of certain dogmas and canons, not to mention the mortal sin of hatred and persecution, which it has sometimes practiced and approved of in this connection, it remains indisputable that in religious life, as elsewhere, The distinction between truth and error is essential, of paramount importance. If the very salvation of the human soul – contrary to the view often prevailing in church circles – does not depend on opinions and theoretical views, but only on the depth and intensity of the very search for truth and God, the volitional readiness to serve them, then it still remains true that a person can always get lost in this search and, imagining to do good to himself and others, actually do evil. not to heal life, but to destroy it. But this task of finding true faith alone is impossible in the form of an isolated "Lausanne" movement, and for a number of reasons, which I would like to briefly state here.