The first and most important of these reasons has already been mentioned: a true verification of the truth of the position of faith is possible only through the testing of their suitability, their fruits, in their practical application to spiritual and moral life and to social construction. No theoretical discussion can yield decisive and indisputable results here, precisely because it is not a question of the truths of theory, but of the truths of life. But to this is added something else. A purely theoretical discussion here ultimately rests on faith in the authority of a particular tradition (a reference to the Gospel, as I have already pointed out, is also a reference to a certain tradition, and at the same time a particular interpretation of the meaning of the Gospel text is also based on a certain tradition). But each confession now has its own special tradition, its own authority; and theoretical discussion does not provide a precise and indisputable criterion for assessing their truth. This criterion lies only, as I have tried to show, in religious experience; and religious experience is inseparably linked with moral and general life experience and must be somehow supported by it. Finally, there is also the fact that, since we abstract ourselves from the living moral truth, the habitual forms of faith – like everything habitual in general, but to an even greater extent than in other areas of life – gradually clothe ourselves for us in the halo of something inviolable and sacred; The "faith of the fathers" becomes sacred to us not because it is the true faith, but, on the contrary, is revered as the truth – and the sacred truth – only because it is the faith of the fathers, because our religious feeling is psychologically inseparably fused with these habitual forms of its discovery and theoretical comprehension from childhood. Such everyday religious conservatism – like any conservatism in general – has its great practical value, especially in epochs when all the foundations of life begin to shake and fall apart: it protects the positive spiritual capital inherited from ancestors; The inviolability of the subjective-human form is here a protective device necessary or useful for safeguarding the inviolability of the most positive spiritual property contained in it. And yet, on this path, an element of human subjective partiality is introduced into the discussion of tradition and the dogmas of various confessions, moreover, clothed in the form of an unconditional obligation to preserve the sacred object reserved by the Fathers. This makes it largely fruitless to discuss the substance, to find a common solution that satisfies everyone.

It does not follow from this that the "Lausanne" form of the movement is entirely sterile. Theoretical theological communion between different confessions can have one relatively very valuable positive result: it can dispel mutual misunderstandings that have arisen from the previous complete alienation between them, from ignorance of the very content of other confessions and, what is even more often the case, from a false, biased interpretation of them, accumulated out of polemical bitterness, conscious dishonesty or unconscious blindness. Interconfessional theological communion can gradually cultivate a fraternal, loving and attentive attitude to other people's beliefs and create preparatory favorable conditions for an objective discussion of differences. But this, I repeat, is a relatively significant result that exhausts all that can be achieved on this path. By itself, it can never lead to a genuine overcoming of disunity, to the restoration of the unity of the Church.

In essence, the very meaning of dogmatic teachings is truly understood, and the divergence on them can be overcome only in connection with the clarification of concrete practical conclusions from them, as has just been pointed out. The experience of the ecumenical movement and the search for Christian answers to the problem of moral and social life in general shows that the solution of these problems rests on problems of a dogmatic nature. Thus, for example, it has been seen empirically that one or another solution to the question of the relationship between the "church" and the "world," of the responsibility of the church for the order of life, etc., ultimately depends on an understanding of the relationship between "grace" and "nature"; This kind of verification first of all helps to distinguish in the composition of dogmatic teachings the vital from the non-essential, the dogmas the meaning of which is clear to us and have actual significance for the regulation of our life, from the dogmas that are only potentially preserved in the religious consciousness, having no vital use (as I have already said above, in the 5th chapter of the first meditation: "Religious Experience and Dogmas of Faith"). But at the same time one curious and very comforting fact is revealed: in theoretical discussion, certain quite insoluble disputes about dogmatic formulas precisely fixed in the tradition or teaching of the Church often have no vital significance, and the most vivid meaning of these formulas remains incomprehensible, while the truly essential disagreement between confessions can and often does lie in their peculiarities. which are not dogmatically fixed at all, by virtue of which the disagreement is in principle reconcilable and reducible to a natural, mutually agreeable difference in spiritual and religious types, equally legitimate. Let me give you an example: I think that no serious and conscientious theologian can say that he understands the religiously essential meaning of the disagreement between the Catholic formula "filioque" and the Orthodox teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit from the Father (and, according to the teaching of the Church Fathers, the Spirit proceeds from the Father "through the Son") – a disagreement that has caused such fierce disputes since the time of Patriarch Photius and is hardly reconcileable in view of the sanctification of the verbal formula itself for each side. On the other hand, one of the truly essential religious differences between the Eastern and Western Christian attitudes lies in the difference between the Eastern Christian consciousness of man's mystical closeness to God, his rootedness in God, the possibility of his "deification," and the Western Christian consciousness, which comes mainly from Augustine, and the Western Christian consciousness, which comes mainly from Augustine, which feels more acutely the transcendence of God. the distance separating fallen nature from God, and therefore the need for strict religious re-education of man. There is no irreconcilable disagreement at all, expressed in the harsh form of the dividing judgment "either one or the other," but there is a legitimate variety of religious types, a variety of "abodes" harmoniously compatible in the common "house of the Father." In such a life test, a completely unexpected grouping of religious trends is sometimes revealed. Thus, for all the depth of the difference in other relations between Catholicism and Calvinism, they are in solidarity with each other – against Lutheranism – in affirming the obligatory Christian formation of all aspects and spheres of human life, in the responsibility of the Church for the moral principles of worldly life, in a word, in recognizing the common idea of "theocracy." As soon as we, following the Apostle's commandment, cease to be ministers of the "letter" and become ministers of the "spirit" of the New Testament – that is, ministers of living, active truth – the hopelessness of the disagreement between fixed, rigid formulas ends for us, and quite different, lively and flexible differences begin, and thus at least the possibility of agreement on them opens up in principle.

In this connection, it is revealed that the movement of the reunification of confessions not only encounters the subjective and psychological difficulty of overcoming the differences between different traditions, sanctified by a long history, but must also reckon with the objective difficulty, namely, the need to combine conservatism in religious life, fidelity to tradition with living religious experience and creative religious thought. As has just been mentioned above, the collective power of Church Tradition, in which the memory of the great and valuable achievements of the creative epochs of the Church's life is preserved, has a tremendous systemic and pedagogical significance, especially in epochs of spiritual turmoil and religious decline. If we do not understand much in Church Tradition now, then we must first of all have a humble awareness that this may arise from our religious weakness, from the elementality of our religious thought, or from its poisoning by the prejudices of the era of unbelief and rationalism. And even the most refined and sensitive individual religious thought cannot save humanity from the fanatical onslaught of godless and demonic forces, but only (if we do not speak of the power of personal holiness) the great and powerful spiritual forces accumulated and preserved in the collective Church tradition. In the religious sphere, more than anywhere else, Goethe's wise words express the true power of conservatism are valid: "Das Wahre war schon längst gefunden, hat edle Geisterschaft verbunden, das alte Wahre, fass'es an." On the other hand, every tradition carries with it the danger of ossification and necrosis; And besides, the presence of many competing traditions in the face of different confessions simply forces a creative resolution of the essence of the disagreements between them. Thus, a reverent and careful attitude to tradition is equally necessary, because it preserves the authentic divine truth, which is sometimes inaccessible to personal experience, and the independence of creative religious thought, of living religious experience, without which we run the risk of replacing God's covenant with human tradition. Here, as elsewhere, healthy spiritual development must be a peaceful evolution, in spite of the inevitability of frequent dramatic conflicts, and not a violent uprising that breaks with the whole past at once and completely and daringly dreams of creating the fullness of truth anew, "out of nothing." [35]

From this we find another general correlation, which is often overlooked and is of essential importance in determining the ways and forms not only of the ecumenical movement, but also of the cause of the Christian revival in general. In an epoch of decadence, the Church usually forgets that the Christian construction of life is the work of the whole Church as a whole, of the entire "body of Christ" in all the fullness of its organs and functions. This construction is accomplished in particular through the opposing harmony, the concordia discors, the two eternal and indispensable organs of religious life, the "priestly" and the "prophetic" office. (Whereas I have taken the term "priesthood" in its broad sense, in which it presupposes a universal priesthood and includes a prophetic calling, I return here to the common usage in which "priesthood" is opposed to both "laity" and "prophecy.") The task of the priestly office is, first of all, the careful preservation of the holy things preserved in the church, and the inculcation of them in the members of the church; the task of the prophetic office is the search for living religious truth, as it is required by the conditions of the time and the present spiritual state of the world – attention to the voice of God as it is addressed to people at a given moment, in their given concrete situation. This prophetic office is primarily and in principle the office of the "laity," the members of the church, who actively participate in the fullness of human moral and social life and are less bound by the duty of observing tradition. If it were permissible to use a well-worn but useful term, I would say: "Christian progress" is, at least to a large extent and first of all, the work of the laity, while the work of the "priesthood" is the preservation of the sacred, which has already been attained by the Christian religious consciousness and has entered into the general use of the Church. I think that this position can be confirmed by the entire history of the Church, especially if we remember that "monasticism" as such, from the point of view of the church hierarchy of ranks, is a religious grouping of the laity. The same applies in our time to the work of Christian revival, and in particular to the work of the reunification of confessions.

The Christian revival is at its core the awakening of the prophetic consciousness, the search for God's authentic truth in the concrete conditions of life in our time. It is, therefore, primarily the work of the laity, of free Christian minds, of course, not of the "libre penseurs" in the historical sense of the word (such are, on the contrary, slave minds, fettered by all the narrowness of unbelief, and in our time, moreover, hopeless conservatives, servants of the dead tradition of the recent past), but genuinely free-thinking and believing minds. Such were, for example, the great Russian religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, or Charles Péguy in France. Drawing their inspiration from the purest sources of traditional faith, they also draw it from a responsible moral conscience, from a sensitive attention to the spiritual needs of their time. Recognizing themselves as faithful sons of the mystical Church of Christ, they find themselves in inevitable opposition to the "scribes and Pharisees," to all those who are proud of their orthodoxy, to the dead and sinful, purely human tradition of the empirical Church. If a Christian cannot be a "revolutionary" – neither in the sense of a demagogue who expects to achieve his ideal by unleashing the blind, dark, evil passions of the masses, nor in the sense of a utopian who dreams of bringing about the kingdom of truth and goodness on earth by an external political upheaval – then he, on the other hand, must be a fighter for God's truth, if necessary, against all earthly instances; he must always be ready to be a "revolutionary" on the model of Sophocles' Antigone.

But in addition to such chosen leaders and heroes of the cause of Christian revival, there are still many simple, ordinary warriors – the entire mass of religiously active laypeople. The Catholic Church has the honor of discovering the full significance of this often forgotten element of Christian activism and its organization in the so-called Action Catholique. According to this model, there must arise an organization of the common Christian efficacy of the laity, with the task of active renewal in the spirit of Christian truth of all life in all the diversity of its spheres: Christian unions of different classes and professions, Christian societies for the satisfaction of human need, Christian organizations for the reconciliation of all kinds of human conflicts, of which I have already spoken above. And if here first of all organizations united by a common confession are natural, then along with this, associations of members of different Christian confessions on the basis of common Christian work can have a very special, providential mission.

This also includes the leading role of the laity in the great work of reuniting and reconciling confessions. It must be realized that this matter is not primarily a matter of ecclesiastical (in the narrow sense of the word) thought, but a matter of Christian conscience – that, as we have seen, it is organically connected with the matter of general moral reconciliation in humanity. It must be realized that what is impossible or extremely difficult for people here, because they are inevitably constrained by their subjective predilections and the difference of traditions that nourish them, is easily possible for God, who, through the great trials and tragedies of historical life, educates and enlightens human souls. However valuable the ecumenical movement is in the form of a rapprochement between various church organizations and their official representatives, this form of movement must be based on the spontaneously growing movement of broad strata of the Christian world, which in the terrible hour of world trials are animated by the search for Christian truth and are less bound by rigid traditions. In this respect, the very sad fact of the secularization of public opinion, its passing through the experience of unbelief and falling away from the church, has its good side. Insofar as this worldliness and unbelief are overcome from within, it leaves behind a trace in the form of spiritual freedom, in the form of a truly Christian readiness to learn what is right and righteous even in theoretically unbelieving champions of truth. The Christian revival in general, as well as the reunification of confessions, the restoration in empiricism of the holy catholic Church of Christ, is possible only in an atmosphere of freedom.

"To this day, when they read Moses, a veil lies over their hearts. But when they turn to the Lord, then this veil is removed, the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:15-17).

The world in our terrible days and in the difficult era that must follow them in one way or another stands at a crossroads. There are only two possibilities before him: either to roll further along the path into the abyss, or to be saved from death by the heroic effort of Christian revival. May the Lord help us!

Notes