In theism, the Deity (God or gods) is thought to be completely detached from the world possessing a certain intrinsic existence, extra-worldly. From this it inevitably follows that the relationship between God (gods) and the world, and in particular people, is represented by the type of external relations between people or between man and a thing. Even if theism recognizes the creation of the world by God, it presupposes the pre-existence of matter (i.e., it is dualistic), or it becomes theism only after the act of creation and to the extent of the originality of the world. Theism is fundamentally mechanistic, although to emboldened mechanics God may seem to be an "unnecessary hypothesis." Theism, if it is permissible to say so, is the most "spatial" of religious worldviews, and therefore, since spatiality (or rather, the empirical limitation of spatiality) cannot be overcome by thought, the theistic element cannot be eliminated from the sphere of religion. It is self-evident that the conceptions of the Divine (and without them religion cannot do without themselves) are inevitably conditioned by visible reality: by nature, by the animal world, and, above all, by man, the highest known and predominantly religious being. All theism is necessarily anthropomorphic (in zoolatric cults the animals themselves are represented anthropomorphically), sometimes in the concrete material images of the Hellenic religion, sometimes in the less perceptible assimilations of God and the gods to the human spirit, examples of which are the ancient Roman religion, Judaism, and the philosophical forms of theism. <>Therefore, theism is the cult of the sun and heavenly bodies, the cult of natural phenomena, and most of all the cult of ancestors, family, society, and the state.

However, in theism, by its very ideological essence, there can be no genuine knowledge of the absolute. After all, otherwise the absolute is not outside the world, not external to the world and man. Theistic religion must be defined as religious representationism; And this is not a simple analogy, but the very essence of the matter, which is inseparably intertwined with theism and philosophical representationism, i.e., skepticism, as is especially clear in the example of Jewish religiosity or in the example of skeptical currents in the philosophy of the Arabs. By virtue of this, the system of theistic religious ideas is doomed to self-decay: sooner or later, it will be recognized as a construction of the human mind. Partly in connection with the feature of its nature that we have noted, theism, along with its expression in a developed and colorful mythology, is expressed in the abstract religion of an incomprehensible Spirit or spirits, as in the American Indians, in the ancient Romans, in Judaism, among the Arabs and Chinese. It is also natural that such a spiritualization of theism and its inclination towards agnosticism are considered a progressive phenomenon: anthropomorphism is not so noticeable. But I allow myself to hold a special opinion on this matter.

Peering into the religiosity of the non-Christian world (the "East"), we easily find in it a strongly expressed theistic element. It is before us in the zoolatrical polytheism of Egypt, in the anthropomorphic polytheism of Hellas, the ancient Germans and Slavs, in the spiritualism (actualism) of ancient Rome, in India, in China, in Japan. And if Hellenism gives us the most developed expression of polytheism, China, in its traditional religion and Confucianism, most vividly and consistently develops theism's consciousness of the transcendence of the Godhead, while at the same time displaying a characteristic indifference to any specific ideas about Him. In this respect, only Judaism can be placed "above" the Chinese religion. I formulate my statements cautiously: I am not talking about theism, but about the theistic element of the East, the meaning of which will become clear later.

Whether theism strives for a conception of the Divine or confines itself to a human attitude towards it, the structure of its religiosity will remain in general the same. Theistic religiosity does not go beyond the boundaries of the immanent world. It lives by the needs and tasks of the surrounding reality, one way or another, depending on a variety of conditions. And where can she get the otherworldly, since the otherworldly is driven by the incomprehensible? It associates itself with beneficial or terrible phenomena of nature, sanctifies the family, clan, state, the life of the farmer or nomad, sedentarism and peaceful labor, as in China, or the desire for conquest, as in Islam. On the other hand, the more concrete the culture, the stronger its attention to the concrete and only the concrete, the closer religiosity is to theism. It is clear that theism easily degenerates into ritualism, often cold, narrowly formalistic, as in ancient Rome, into the ritualism of everyday life, as among the people of Ezdra. The norms of theistic religion seem to be, and indeed are, a formal deification of the established, traditional life and the past. In this sense, the example of Confucius, who began his religious development in childhood by imitating the ceremonies of the cult and never departing from the golden mean and the rules of decency, is extremely indicative. Confucius is a conscientious and conservative public and political figure, a keeper of antiquity and etiquette, a lover of history, as revered in China as neglected in India. But he did not teach or talk about the supernatural, nor about spirits, and was not distinguished by the special zeal of a man of prayer. And we understand why concrete life is so dear to theistic culture, why the concrete, the earthly lies at the heart of Hellenic art, and what explains the separation of the world of ideas from empiricism in the philosophy of the greatest genius of Greece, Plato. True, the Hellenes are unhistorical in spirit, indifferent to their past, as Spengler wittily shows. But historicity is not at all a necessary element of theistic culture, which can equally live in limiting itself to the present and in worshiping its past. In any case, the historicism of Christian culture is fundamentally different from the historicism of theistic cultures. In the first, the understanding of unity and integrity, the organicity, and not the mechanicality of the historical process, is most clearly manifested, and the guiding metaphysical ideas appear. In the second, attention is directed to external consistency, and history is often replaced by a search for the natural lawfulness of development, sociologism (let us recall Aristotle and Thucydides), which is also characteristic of theistic-positive trends in Christianity itself. The concreteness of culture in art is especially clear. I am only reminding you of the keen observation of a Chinese or Japanese artist, of the charm of the clearly conveyed flight of a bird, of a characteristic stylistic device — some small piece is snatched from the world: a leaf on a twig with a bug crawling on it. Realism in art is correlated with theism in religion, and grows from the same root.

The goal of human life is the well-being on earth of oneself – then the best expression of the ideal will be the ancient "seize the moment!" – or of one's people, future generations, which, under certain conditions, leads to the theory of progress. Traditional forms of life are jealously guarded to the point of ossification in the caste system, although it is justified only in a different way, by appealing to the non-theistic aspects of religiosity. Or, on the contrary, rationalistic experiments on reality are carried out, as in the Greek polities. The state existence of culture fences itself off from the world with a great wall or tries to assert itself and blossom in the evil infinity of conquests, examples of which are the histories of Rome and Islam.

Theism is a kind of religious positivism. By virtue of his inner dialectics, he easily degenerates into pure positivism and, denying himself, becomes atheism. Theistic culture ends with atheism and perishes in it, revealing its primordial vice, relativism. The purpose of earthly existence and order cannot be determined by Him himself, which at least the Greek philosophers, even the Epicureans, understood better than we do, and what our hotbed philosophers, or rather the philasopists, i.e., those who are "friends with wisdom," who with youthful enthusiasm and touching naivety see something unheard-of new in the hysterical cry: "Forward, with the banner of Epicurus!" how to lift yourself over the lanes. And the attempt to create and maintain a purely empirical unity must inevitably end in failure and lead to the disintegration of the already existing unity. For there is no unity in empiricism: its distinguishing feature, without which it would not be empiricism, is disunity. As will be clear from the whole context, theism is a certain limitation, and consequently a separation of religiosity, which is why, bearing within itself the principle of decay, it must disintegrate itself and, through itself, the culture it contains. The self-understanding of theistic culture leads it to the realization that it is not one by absolute unity. The absolute is at best incomprehensible and unworldly. Relative unity, the unity of the mechanical sum, is pure chance, absolutely unsubstantiated, and, moreover, as has been pointed out, the unity is not complete. It can only be a moment. In fact, the history of every theistic culture (Roman, Muslim, etc.) shows how this culture, after a more or less long flowering, loses its short-lived value and becomes an element of a new, already non-theistic cultural world.

In the relative purity of its manifestations, in its relative separateness, theistic culture is typical of the East or the non-Christian world. In Christianity, it is something foreign, not yet overcome and corrupting, or a conditioned aspect of Christianity. This moment is justified by the whole and, as a moment, is necessary, since rationality is necessary and inevitable; religiosity. Thus, the categories of theism are useful in analyzing the problems of the relationship between will and grace, guilt and punishment, although they do not contain the solution to these problems. However, one should not exaggerate the purity and peculiarity of theism in the East, much less consider it the only category of non-Christian religiosity. The very idea of the transcendence of the Divine to the world already presupposes a certain non-theistic comprehension of the Divine, i.e., a certain immanence of Him. Otherwise, where would the idea of transcendence come from? The absolute is so irremovable from religious experience that even atheism cannot do without it, as evidenced by its emotional imbalance and naïve absolutization of such concepts as "humanity," "state," "the good of all," etc. Looking attentively at the historical forms of theism, we encounter a number of facts that are incompatible with its nature. Thus, with the affirmation of the incomprehensibility and transcendence of the Deity, the mysticism of the incomprehensible coexists, which, for example, in the Kabbalah and among the Arabs, imperceptibly leads to pantheism. In the same way, the deification of the forces (by the way, in empiricism forces as such are not given) of nature draws into that realm of religiosity which is characterized by direct contact with the Divine, or at least by the feeling of such contact, and hence by the consciousness of a certain immanence of the absolute. And for the interpretation of the relationship between God and man, not only external relations between people, between people and things are involved. Love-physical fusion is no longer an external juxtaposition, but needless to say: what significance does it have in the interpretation of the connection of the Divinity with the world? Let us recall the first part of the myth of the birth of Aphrodite from the foam of the sea, the very part about which textbooks are shamefully silent. It is enough to point to naturalistic myths and cults, to the role of the phallus, easily traceable in architecture, to orgiasm. And all this is observed in the bosom of any theistic religion. On the basis of a very abstract understanding of the Deity in Judaism, the sexual theories of the Kabbalah grow. On the other hand, the creation and dissolution of organisms draw thought to the idea of a unity closer than the external, and this idea finds expression in the religion of a dying and resurrecting god. Very often it is difficult to recognize this or that religion as theistic, despite the undoubted signs of theism. Such is the case with Mazdaism, with Manichaeism, which is related to it. In the depths of theistic religiosity, another powerful element reveals itself. Often, if theism is polytheistic, it appears in a monotheistic tendency, for example, among the Greeks, among the Chinese in Taoism; if it is monotheistic, it is manifested in a polytheistic tendency, for example, in the development of angelology among the Jews; why neither monotheism nor polytheism in themselves testify to the highest form of religiosity. However, please do not understand me in the sense that the possibilities of the "other element" are exhausted by the ways indicated above: it manifests itself in everything and everywhere. And like theism, it is found in a purer form.

This second element of religiosity is primarily characterized by a sense of direct contact with the Divine, i.e., a sense of the immanence of the Divine. In its comprehension, it leads to a greater or lesser identification of oneself with God, which becomes a religious ideal. If so, then the second element must be recognized as pantheistic; all the more so since the Divinity is felt behind everything and in everything: "the world is full of gods." But the Divine is comprehended not as the world itself, but as something that lies in its deepest foundation, as the true essence of everything, which cannot be conveyed in human words, ideas, and concepts. Tao is "that which sustains heaven and earth. It has no limits, no boundaries. Neither its heights nor its depths can be measured. It embraces the universe and gives visibility to the invisible and the ugly. It is so refined that it penetrates everywhere, like water. With it the mountains rise and the abysses yawn; with it the beasts move and the birds fly; the sun, moon and stars shine with it. The spring wind blows with it, the rain falls, everything lives and everything grows. The winged world lays eggs to them, animals multiply, plants bloom. His deeds are invisible outside, but visible in every way. It is illusory and indefinite, but its powers are limitless. It is hidden and invisible, but it brings everything into being. It is everywhere, everywhere, and not a single action of it is lost." The religious concept of pantheism is formulated even more clearly in Brahmanism. But in every formulation the idea of one Deity leads to the transformation of empiricism into an illusion^ something either quite unreal or real temporarily and limited: empiricism is the incomprehensible "agitation" of the absolute.

It is enough to understand the basic idea of pantheism in order to imagine how and why, at its very first manifestations in the sphere of theistic religiosity, the whole world of religious ideas, and not only ideas, is distorted in a peculiar way. "The whole culture is changing. Religious plasticity and painting no longer liken the gods to animals and people – this would be a wrong limitation of the absolute. Art is looking for new forms, unprecedented images, soon moving from unsatisfactory attempts to express its idea of grandeur of size to a struggle with nature. There appear many-armed freaks, many-faced deities, half-beasts, half-people, incomprehensible and terrible, so familiar to us from the sculpture of India, part of China and Egypt, finding an echo even in the harmonious sculpture of Greece, in the many-breasted Diana of Ephesus. Art neglects the clarity and naturalness of forms in the name of grandeur or sophistication, and strives for unnatural combinations. The temples of India are carved out of the rocks and filigree processed. Stone columns are trying to blossom into wonderful flowers. The image of a person is fantastically stylized and unexpectedly turns into a hieroglyph. The knick-knacks of applied art tantalize with an extraordinary combination of sharply noticed reality and unbridled fantasy of lines. A different ideal of culture arises, far from empiricism; and in empiricism itself, unheard-of forms of life are invented. Asceticism becomes a struggle with the natural: saints spend their lives in the incredible poses of Indian hermits. The worldly, the human, the traditional loses its value and significance. History becomes a myth about the gods, playing with numbers of years inaccessible to human understanding. The ideal lies outside of life – in hermitage, self-denial, loss of one's "I". The established historical forms of life become indifferent. At best, they are only a reflection of the absolute (do not ask where and in what!), and, perhaps, even a distortion, a vicious "agitation" of it. Do not change them: they will die themselves! They can be tolerated as Buddhism tolerates; it is best to get away from them externally and internally. The goal of pantheism is not in an active struggle with the world, not in its transformation. It is in withdrawal from the world, in indifference to it, to everything that exists, up to one's personality. What is the point of struggling with the temporal agitation of the absolute? "This excitement will calm down by itself. And by rejecting castes, there is no need to destroy them.

In its essence, which manifests itself in such developed forms as Brahmanism, Buddhism, and primary Taoism, pantheism recognizes the absolute as the potency of everything: in it, too, it is all, but not separately, of the individuality, the manifestation of each one, but is indifferent and indistinguishable. True being for pantheism is indifferentiation, unconsciousness, while individualized being is illusion, imaginary reality, Maya. This is the internal contradiction and limitation of pantheism, which can be realized and be only when it ceases to be, since it must overcome itself. Pantheism is inherently contradictory because it recognizes the absolute as not absolute, because the absolute cannot be imperfect, and it is imperfect if it is reduced only to potentiality, if it does not contain the individual, if it is unable to explain reality, its own "agitation" and diminution, which is all variability and all separation. In so far as pantheism exists, it is held together by that moment of opposition between the absolute and the relative, which, as we have seen, is expressed in a limited way by theism. And there is no pantheism without theism, in various forms and phases of development of which it manifests itself. But on the other hand, it is the vital foundation of theism itself, and all non-Christian, and partly Christian mysticism, is connected with it.

Nevertheless, pantheism denies and disintegrates, discolors and makes an illusion every concrete manifestation of itself and of itself. And the self-dissolution of pantheistic religiosity must also be the disintegration, the extinction of the entire culture that is formed in it and expresses it. As has already been pointed out, with pantheistic religiosity, no society and statehood are essentially impossible, broad plans of conquest, the development of technology, and, in general, to put it in lofty language, an earthly order are inconceivable. In the disclosure of pantheism, only the development of mysticism of a certain direction and certain philosophical-religious currents are natural. Of course, in reality in pantheistic cultures we also observe "earthly construction", but it exists in defiance of pantheism and does not stem from it. By virtue of its organic indifference to culture, pantheistic mysticism disintegrates it, although, I repeat, not actively. It simply moves away, moves away from culture, leaving it untouched in its tradition, but no longer alive, a "dreamy dream".

It is not for nothing that contemporary Buddhists of Central Asia look with regret at the bustling pursuit of Europeans for technology and comfort.

Both theism and pantheism, two different determinations of religious consciousness, understood here by us more broadly, in the way in which they express the corresponding types of culture, have never existed in their pure form. We can only talk about the predominance of one or the other in this particular case; And we always have before us a certain unity of religiosity (resp. — culture), in which both are incompletely and to varying degrees actualized, but they do not express either separately or in combination the whole unity. The fullness of religiosity and the culture it expresses remains potential. Both pantheism and theism can be observed in Christian culture, but only as moments of it, far from exhaustive of what it actualizes, not to mention its potentialities. On the contrary, it is characteristic of the non-Christian cultural world (pre-Christian and contemporary to us) that its actualization in the sphere of religiosity does not go beyond pantheism and theism. Nourished by the higher idea, living by it, in the East they themselves are its highest actualization: outside of them it is potential. On this difference between the West and the East rests the indisputable advantage of the former. And, in my opinion, it is ridiculous to talk about some kind of long-term "yellow peril", about the "Light of Asia", "light from the East", etc., while the cultural world of the East remains itself, and in the West and in Russia the highest form of religiosity and culture is actualized. If the East also reaches the highest form of religiosity, it will cease to be the "East" and will become Christianized. And in this case, it will either merge with the West, or contribute to the further development of Western religiosity and Western culture.

III.