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.

At the heart of Christian religiosity and culture lies the same idea of the absolute, which is expressed in a limited way by both theism and pantheism. However, the absolute is understood not as wholly incomprehensible (in contrast to theism) and not as the undifferentiated potentiality of the all-incumbent (in contrast to iantheism). For the Christian consciousness, the absolute is not unity, and the recognition of Christianity as a monotheistic religion is no less arbitrary and erroneous than the recognition of it as dualism, tritheism, and polytheism. Christian dogmatics recognizes the absolute not as three gods or essences, and not as unity, but as a trinity. The triune is the absolute, and the absolute can only be triedii. The idea of triunity elevates the absolute above the difference between potentiality and actuality, giving the principle of substantiation not only of unity, but also of multiplicity, the principle of all-unity.

The differences between Christianity and pantheism are not exhausted by this. The separation of the multitude from unity and concrete reality is an indisputable fact; And it does not allow us to identify empiricism and the absolute with pantheism. Here, Christianity, already together with theism, affirms the initial aporia of all religiosity—the opposition of the relative to the absolute. However, the aporia is overcome; and it is overcome by the fact that the relative is recognized as both existing and non-existent, and different from the absolute and one with it. This is the special, Christian understanding of the absolute, which transcends the relative human idea of absoluteness, an understanding that finds expression in the idea of creation out of nothing. The absolute is higher than our conception of it, above the distinction between itself and the other, though not in the sense that it excludes the other, but in the sense that, exceeding it, it contains it in itself. This is possible because the absolute creates (all-temporally and super-temporally – not: once created) the other out of nothing. Consequently, the other (created, relative) does not exist in itself and in itself. In the other there is no intrinsic existence (which brings Christianity somewhat closer to pantheism) and everything real is Divine (theophany). But in the other the absolute is objectified (the other accepts the absolute), and ideally and ultimately must be objectified in it (be wholly acceptable to it). Therefore, in the process of theophany (the objectification of God – the creation of God) the other acquires existence, becomes the "second subject" of the Divine, but only in the process. This brings Christianity closer to theism. The world is alien to the absolute, but it does not limit its absoluteness, for the essence of the world in itself and in itself is complete nothing, although in its acceptance of the absolute there is something different from it.

From these fundamentals follow all the other "dogmas" of Christianity. The idea of triunity requires its revelation in the doctrine of the full validity in it of both the triple and the unity, theologically speaking, it requires the teaching of the consubstantiality of the three hypostases and their equality. The idea of the other (the world, man) as an expression of absolute being necessarily leads to the doctrine of the perfect, transfigured state of the other, i.e., of the compensation of its changeability. And all this can be achieved only through the real absolutization or deification (theosis) of the world and the relativization (creation, incarnation) of the absolute. Creation is necessarily incarnation, because man is understood by Christianity as the most perfect creation, containing the whole world, like Adam Kadmon.

All of the above makes it clear why we should consider Christianity in relation to theism and pantheism as the highest form of religiosity, containing them in itself. Both theism and pantheism are the lowest forms of religiosity, its limited moments, chronologically preceding Christianity and coexisting with it. Christianity is revealed in them as well, only not completely, in a limited way; and, on the other hand, it easily degenerates in them, which is why in historical Christianity one must always reckon with the possibility of relapses of theism and pantheism. Since it is historically limited, it is inevitably colored either theistically or pantheistically. And I think it should now be quite clear to the attentive reader why the ancient religions of the Mediterranean belong to the "East" and at the same time can be regarded as the "cradle" of Christianity. Christianity did not emerge from them by way of addition, not from them, but from a potential unrevealed by them, but, as a potentiality, it was and is in them before and outside of its actualization, which contains them in itself. For the same reason and in the same sense, Christianity must outwardly "incorporate" the achievements of Eastern religious thought, or, more precisely, find these achievements in itself. I do not claim that such "finding" or self-revelation will be realized empirically. In any case, religious development is also the development of culture in general.

What are the principles of Christian culture? I speak of Christian culture, distinguishing it as a certain abstraction from its individualizations in the cultures of the West and Russia, and further individualizations in the cultures of the Middle Ages, Romance, Germanic and Slavic, French and Spanish, English and German, etc. It is clear that such individualizations are necessary and real, justified by the very idea of all-unity, and that our characterization is necessarily abstracted: the general is real only in the unity of the individual-concrete. It is also clear that there is no reason to assume that the individualizations of Christian culture have been exhausted. On the contrary, new individualizations are very likely, the carriers of which will be new, not yet existing state and ethnographic units. Perhaps the European West and Russia have already expressed themselves, their individuality (I doubt the latter); And yet, Christian culture is as much about the past and the present as it is about the future, which is not going to be abolished, but to fill in the present and the past. Without knowing the highest form of religiosity – and we really do not know such a form outside of Christianity – it is impossible to know and imagine the highest form of culture. After all, we must stand on the ground of reality, and not soar in the empyrean of our dreams and desires. If the highest form of religiosity and culture "will be", it is already potentially present in Christianity, since Christianity is universal; universal not in the sense of an abstract general concept, but in the sense of concrete all-unity. In contrast to theism, which is always concretely and limitedly historical, and in contrast to pantheism, which denies history, Christianity is all-historical or supra-historical, inconceivable and unreal outside of its historical manifestations, but not wholly connected with any of them.

The foundation of Christian culture is the recognition of everything that is real in reality as its absolutely, valuable and imperishable – this is the meaning of the dogma of the Incarnation. Christian culture affirms the absolute value of the individual, of every person – the individual, the people, humanity, and all its manifestations – morality, law, science, art. But the value of reality is recognized as absolute only to the extent of its validity, insofar as it exists, and is not a limitation and insufficiency. Such recognition, therefore, implies the comprehension of the absolute as an ideal task, and consequently the striving for the absolute, not in its incomprehensibility (or not only in its incomprehensibility), which pantheism desires, but in its actualization and realization in the concrete, in its full reality in the relative and for the relative. Thus, Christian culture is by no means a negation of reality, just as pantheistic "culture" does not contain a fundamental renunciation or withdrawal from the world. And here, more than anywhere else, it is necessary to distinguish the essence of Christianity from its historically limited discoveries, conditioned by the unidentified principle. The striving for the ideal is inevitably expressed in a certain construction of an ideal state, a "new world," a "new society," and a "kingdom of heaven." But, according to the basic idea of Christianity, this ideal state should in no way be understood as excluding what is and what was, concrete reality. It includes and contains in itself the entire reality of the present and the past, contains it entirely, without belittling. It is not otherworldly, but comprehensive; The movement towards it is not a departure from existence and a metaphysical leap into another world, not a salto mortale from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, but the transfiguration and salvation of all that exists, even that which has apparently perished empirically. The task of culture is to triumph over oblivion and time, over the past and the future, over death. But for victory it is necessary to realize all the concrete, empirical, future, the fullness of earthly reality. Such is the meaning of the Christian dogma of the resurrection, the resurrection of the whole: not only of the soul, but also of the body. And this meaning of it, usually obscured by mythology, does not in the least contradict the strictest ΜΙ of the most demanding scientific thought. On the contrary, he crowns her achievements.

This reveals the relationship of Christian culture to theistic culture. The first, like the second, affirms the earthly order, but, unlike the second, recognizes it as unnecessary and meaningless in its relativity and limitation, justifying all earthly labor by substantiating not only its relative, but also its absolute significance, its immortality, and not only as a whole, but also in each moment. Such "absolutization" does not at all imply a search for unprecedented, unnatural, or supernatural forms. All-unity becomes relative not by leaving the concreteness of the relative, but by revealing all concreteness, by means of creative development. In this sense, the different attitudes of Christianity and theism to the idea of progress are very characteristic. For the shadow, progress is the future state that will replace the present, and the present will perish forever and irretrievably, just as the past perished forever. For theism (positivism), the present is only a step and a means to a better future, and in itself has no value. The value of the present, and, therefore, its science, art, and morality are relative. For Christianity, every moment has its imperishable and necessary value in impenetrability; and therefore the best, perfect being cannot be limited only to the future, but must contain everything in itself, be all-temporal. There is no progress, as a period limited in time, for Christianity. It does not indulge in guessing whether life will be better or worse than it is now, but strives to make everything better, and above all the present. Strange as it may sound, Christian culture is the most realistic, although without theistic relativism, and at the same time symbolic, in each of its manifestations putting forward the relevance of cm to its other manifestations and the absolute.