In the submissive acceptance of the sinfully limited world for the sake of the perfect world, the striving for which this acceptance is justified, lies the negation of the former. He is not the goal, but the world is perfect. "My kingdom," Jesus said, "is not of this world," and it cannot be judged according to the flesh (Jn. VIII, 15, 23 el.). The kingdom of this world is the kingdom of the prince of darkness, the father of lies and the murderer; and love for the Kingdom of Heaven — hatred for the world (see § 71 el.!). The sinful world appears as an "evil being" from which it must go into the true world through a single door, through Jesus Christ, who is "resurrection and life" (cf. I Jn. II, 15). However, the denial of the imperfect world is possible only through its acceptance. The sinful imperfect is so connected with the perfect that there is not even a second without the first. The second could exist without the first, if Man had not sinned. It is this sinful world that is being perfected, it is this world that Christ saves, transforms and adores.

The Kingdom of God is not of this world, but it drew near in repentance, in the world's awareness of its insufficiency as its sin (§78 yel.) and the nearness of the "day of the Lord" (§ 56). It is "within us" and ferments the whole world like leaven put by a woman in three measures of flour. The world is not a mixture of good and evil: "In the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life are not of the Father, but of the world" (I John. II, 16). And since there is nothing but God, the world itself does not exist. And the world that we call "this world" and which we must hate is nothing but the sin of the world, which is overcome in its awareness, in repentance. But even the very limitation of being, as a punishment for sin, by which sin exists, will not perish, for it was Jesus Christ who made it into being. The Church, on the other hand, dogmatically substantiates its existence in the condemnation of Origen's teaching about the pre-existence of the soul of Jesus Christ.

87. "Do not appear that we may be." "We cannot understand how the imperfect is preserved in the perfect, for the perfect itself is known to us only through the ideality opposed to the imperfect" (§ 57). We unwittingly replace the transfiguration of reality with its belittling into spirituality. Of course, we will be "changed," the perishable and mortal will be "clothed" with the incorruptible and immortal (I Cor. XV, 51 el.) From the "natural body," as from a seed, will grow a "spiritual body" (ib. 42 el.; Col. II, 11, 20). But does the seed disappear in the universal being? Has the earthly body of Jesus passed away forever for the God of the living? Of course, it always exists in God, although it has also been transformed. It was revealed to James, Peter and John. Jesus was "transformed" before us. "The appearance of His face changed": it "shone like the sun. His garments became white and shone like light or snow" (Matt. XVII, 2; Lux. IX, 29). And together with Him appeared "in glory" Moses and Elijah, conversing with Him and, as it were, prefiguring the universal transfiguration. Only one of the moments of Jesus' body is transfigured (§ 35): before and after, until His resurrection, Jesus lives on earth in a body that is not yet visible to all, although the transfiguration not only reveals Jesus in glory to His three disciples, but is also a fact of His earthly life, revealing in Him the King of Peace. As during baptism, the voice of God is heard: "This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, hear Him." The Transfiguration is, as it were, the coronation of Jesus, who has already conquered the world inwardly (cf. § 81).

The Transfiguration does not abolish the earthly body of Jesus; equally, the resurrection. Having risen, He appears to His disciples. The myrrh-bearing women meet Him and, falling down at His feet, worship Him (Matt. XXVIII, 9). True, the resurrected Jesus is "supernatural" – "when the doors were locked." True, sometimes the disciples do not recognize Him immediately. Nevertheless, the body of the Risen One is the true body. He eats in front of his disciples (Lk. XXIV, 42 el.); and, consequently, His body somehow preserves the variability of the empirical. "Look at my hands and at my feet; this is myself; touch Me and see; for the spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have" (ib. 39). And the resurrected body of Jesus is not a general, "synthetic" image of Him, but His body at a certain moment of its earthly existence, preserving traces of wounds. In such a concrete and unique image among all the moments of His bodily existence, Jesus ascends to heaven. In the Transfiguration and in the Resurrection are revealed two moments of the transfigured and glorified bodily existence of Jesus. Of course, all his other moments are also transfigured and glorified, which in no way abolishes the reality of his limited, empirical life, and does not erase the boundary between it and his transfigured life.

Christianity's denial of the world is nothing but the denial of sin: it is directed not at the world, but at sin (§ 86). The limitation of the world also exists in the Divine. But it is the incompleteness of being, and by no means otherness or aspiration to otherness. God creates and saves the world by overcoming it through the deification of its incompleteness. Both (1) the fullness of transfigured created being and (2) the content of it is the insufficient created being, which both (a) does not strive sufficiently for its fullness and (b) strives for it sufficiently, anticipating it as its ideality and achieving it. The insufficiency of striving is overcome by the Divine-human sufficiency and suffering, which, being divinely eternal, is redemptive. In the empirical world, redemptive suffering is diminished into the creature's consciousness of its guilt and repentance, which is always insufficient. Thus the evil of the world is real, like fact and suffering; as moral evil or sin, it is "derivative" and in the highest sense imaginary, for it is justified only as being overcome by Divine-human suffering. This is comprehensible only to the extent of communion with the passion and death of Christ. "Beloved, we are now children of God, but it has not yet been revealed that we will be. We only know that when He is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, because He is pure... Everyone who abides in Him does not sin... Everyone who is born of God does not sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God" (I John. III, 2 el.; cf. § 80).

A paralytic was brought to Jesus (Matt. IX, 2; Mr. II, 3; Lux. V, 18). Jesus saw the "faith" of the sick and the bearers, in which the beginnings of overcoming sinful limitations, and therefore repentance and forgiveness of sins, had already been given. Perfecting this faith, Christ says: "Be of good cheer, child! thy sins are forgiven thee." To the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus' words seem blasphemy: "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Modern scribes would say: "If sin exists, how can it be forgiven, i.e., abolished, made non-existent? This is also impossible for God, for all existence is created by God, and in Him there is not even a shadow of change." Jesus answers, "Sin is not what you think; the forgiveness of sin is the overcoming by the power of God of the limitation that you revere as intrinsic. "Which is easier to say, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk? But so that all may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, then He says to the paralytic; "Arise, take up thy bed, and go to thy house."

Thus, the very disunity of our world is ontological. And the imperfect world cannot be all-unity, but only a harmonious system striving towards all-unity (§ 52). The world is always presented with an empirically unattainable ideal of all-unity, and, as an approximation to it, a certain ideal system higher than the one existing at the moment (§§ 72, 75). The world moves from one ideal system to another, and each one, being realized, ceases to be ideal and reveals the higher. Empiricism exists as a movement towards the ideal and a movement towards the ideal. This is its nature and the meaning of its being. But the empirical ideal is always relative, from which it is not its negation that becomes clear, but the absolute meaning of its very relativity or perfection. "Every empirical ideal must be replaced by a higher one: this is the meaning of life. But while changing the lower and striving for the better, one cannot do it insufficiently, by means of evil. It is also necessary to find in what is being overcome that is subject to improvement, and not to abolition, and to oppose to empirically irresistible imperfection not the desire to destroy it, but one's own striving for the higher. This will be the recognition of the hierarchy of the imperfect world (§54 e.), the fulfillment, but not the violation of the "law." It is necessary not out of fear, but out of conscience, to recognize the God-ordained in the hierarchy of imperfect being, submitting to its necessity, but not making the relative absolute. If it is impossible to conquer with good, one must preserve one's aspiration to the highest and one's faith even in empirical destruction. This destruction will be the supreme victory over the world (§ 81).

88. Only by the Divine Incarnation (§§ 4-7, 18, 24 el., 36 f.) and by the Incarnation of God are our empirical being, our knowledge, and our faith (Chapter II). And it is clear from all that has already been said how the limitation of our world is the limitation that can be overcome (§78 el.), how its limit is not a wall, immovable and indestructible, but something that is always running away into the distance and looming before us in the distance. Jesus Christ destroys "the barrier that stands in the middle." The Kingdom of God is becoming (cf. §§ 65, 87, 75, 20).

Suppose that the limit of the sinful world is an insurmountable and immovable, impenetrable and opaque barrier. Then the humanity of Christ is not equal to His divinity and cannot be lifted up and transfigured to Her height. Then the Filioque (§44 el.). For this speculation belittles the Holy Spirit and is blasphemy against Him. And the Holy Spirit, as the Divinity who gives life, perfects and "comforts", is no longer able to raise created existence to the perfection of the Son and the Father, and the Son says to us in vain: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." In the Son Himself, His humanity, perfected and given life by the Holy Spirit (§§ 81, 84), turns out to be inferior to His Divinity. In Christ the fullness of the Godhead no longer dwells bodily; and His corporeality is no longer lifted up into the bosom of the Most Holy Trinity, into the midst of Her. Humanity is separated from the Divinity of the Logos by an indestructible limit. There is no deification, there is only "salvation" in "great ignorance." There is no Incarnation of God, there is only the Incarnation of God, i.e. there is no Incarnation of God.

Christ's humanity is His Body or Church (§§ 48, 58, 84). It follows from the Filioque that the empirical being of the Church (to a certain extent, at least) is something alogical, only human, a temporary illusion whose existence is inexplicable, and the fullness of the Church (assuming that it exists in the Logos) is devoid of its empirical qualities. Religious consciousness no longer rests on faith but on "trust," not on the Absolute, but on the "absolute" (?) limit, which is insurmountable for consciousness, and since the limit fluctuates as it recedes into the distance, it also wavers and comes to skepticism, which naively proves the existence of God by the theory of probability (Blaise Pascal and Pragmatism).

The Church is a "societas humana," one of many. Religious life is determined by an external "law" (§ 66), law by an external "authority" (§ 21), authority by a visible hierarchy, hierarchy by an infallible pope. And dad?.. In reasoning according to the elements of this world, the idea of the Kingdom of God degenerates into the ideal of progress or an earthly millennium, Catholicism into socialism, inevitably materialistic and culminating in atheism (cf. § 59). Such is the end of empiricism, foreshadowed by the Gospel narrative. The Pharisees tried to explain the miracles of Jesus Christ "by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons," i.e., purely empirically, for Beelzebub is the "prince of this world" (§ 57), or, as they say now, "scientifically," with the help of Aristotelian or some other logic. The Pharisees denied the deification of the human nature of Christ, denied Jesus Christ as the God-man, not seeing the Spirit of God in His works. This was "blasphemy against the Holy Spirit." It is not forgiven in this world, for without the Holy Spirit the world is "divided into itself," decays. It is not forgiven in the age to come, for the world can come out of the metaempirical hellish existence only through a single "door" – through Jesus Christ – by the power of the Holy Spirit, equal to the Father and the Son. The belittling of the Spirit is the denial that empiricism is adorable, and hence the denial of empiricism. The denial of empiricism is the belittling of the Holy Spirit and the Triune God.

However, Catholicism can exist only at the cost of an internal contradiction: in that it combines the Filioque with the belief in the equality of the Hypostases professed in the Symbol, i.e., with the recognition of the deification of the world. However, the harmful action of the Filioque does not disappear – it is not the world that is adored, but the sinful empiricism, it is adored in such a way that there is no perfection and the Incarnate One does not "increase", remaining only a Man (§ 79). Therefore, the forms of empirical being are irregularly absolutized and without any hesitation are transferred to God. For the Filioque itself is nothing but a bad anthropomorphization or "psychologization" of the Presv. The Trinity, understood in the categories of sinful human love. Thus Catholicism became a rationalistic system and a doctrine of words. — God is limited to a system of attributes. God's Justice is understood in a human way and is colored by human cruelty (§ 76). Teachings about purgatory (§§ 77, 74), the treasury of good works, indulgences (§ 66), etc. The deification of the human body of Christ takes on a naïve, anthropomorphic and dangerous form in the cult of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus." The meaning of the descent of the Holy Spirit on Jesus is lost (§ 84), for the Spirit is considered powerless to live Jesus in His humanity: and it is no longer the Spirit, but the Logos Himself in Christ Jesus who adores Himself, which is a preaching of self-deification or pride, characteristic, as we know, of the entire psychology of Catholicism. And the Holy Spirit no longer "enlightens" the world, does not "sign upon us." And the voice of the Church is not heard: "Come, receive ye all the Spirit of wisdom, the Spirit of understanding, the Spirit of the fear of God, the manifested Christ." Baptism did not change anything in the nature of Jesus: it was only Theophany, and not ontological, but empirical. But then the deified humanity of Christ in the Virgin Mary (§ 84) is deified and perfected not by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Her, but by Christ Himself, God the Father, or by the indifferent "Essence" of the Godhead, which the Catholics try to separate from the Hypostases under the pretext of the indistinguishability of the Hypostatic actions in the world (ad extra).

Hence the conjecture of the "immaculata conceptio" of the Virgin Mary herself, "by the sole grace of Almighty God and by privilege" (privilegium = privata lex) by the "view of the merits" of Jesus Christ, "free from all defilement of original sin at the first moment of her conception." Thus, if it is blasphemous not to consider the Holy Spirit as the substitute of Mary's husband (§ 84), His descent on Mary is unnecessary; the conception of Mary (conceptio passiva) is seductively identified with sin. But conception is a sin only for those who, following Augustine, confuse lust with lust, interpret marriage as a "remediurn concupiscentiae," and consider celibacy necessary for the clergy (§ 70), i.e., do not truly adore, but reject Manichaean empiricism. Naturally: unjustified deification is negation. But Mary's perfection is not at all freedom from all-human, "original" sin—only Jesus Christ is free from it. Mary is blameless through Christ by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, just as after Her, through Her intercession and through Christ Jesus, all the sons of God must become blameless. And it is not created by a special law: the children of God are not slaves under the law; and if even one person could be saved by the "law" and "privilege," what was the use of the Incarnation? We revere the perfection and chastity of the Ever-Virgin because it is Her podvig, so perfect only by Him, and because it is the pearl of great price brought to God by Her. It is not Her birth that is miraculous, but Her birth, the replenishment of the Immaculate Virgin by God the Holy Spirit to the fullness of holy motherhood.1

89. The entire Holy Trinity is revealed and "acts" in the world through the Son (§§ 46, 48). And Her activity is one, inseparable from Her, fully expressing itself in each Hypostasis and in the substantiation and development of § 88 in my articles: "Lessons of the Renounced Faith" (Eurasian Vremennik No 4) and "Dostoevsky and Catholicism" (in the collection in memory of F. M. Dostoevsky under the editorship of Dolinin, Pet. 1922).