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).

all three. But by acknowledging, contrary to the groundless conjectures of Catholicism, the difference between the Hypostases that manifest themselves in the world, we thereby distinguish Their activities as well. Divine Activity in the world is always the activity of the entire Triune God, but every act of God is "originally," "pnncipaliter," always an act of one of the Hypostases. Thus we speak of the creation of the world by the Father through the Son, of the Son incarnate and saving the world, of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and of the Holy Spirit, who, as God who gives life and perfects, completes and perfects the Virgin Mary and the human nature of Christ (§§ 45, 84).

Catholics are compelled (§88), consciously or unconsciously, to attribute the completion and perfection of the Virgin Mary not to the Holy Spirit, but to Jesus Christ. This is expressed dogmatically timidly, in the words: "intuitu meritorum Chnsti" and "omnipotentis Dei gratia et pnvilegio." However, it is obvious that "Almighty God" is not the Father here, for the Virgin Mary is not first affirmed (not created), but is reunited and fulfilled, which is the action of the Holy Spirit. But since the Spirit, by diminishing Him in the Filioque, is powerless to complete completely, it remains to understand by "Deus omnipotens" the Logos, i.e., Christ. Even if it is wrong to abandon the distinction between hypostasis activities, the activity that completes the Virgin Mary is also Filial; if it is nevertheless recognized as the activity of the Spirit, it is primordially Sonial, for the Son of the Spirit also produces (Filioque).

The perfection of the Virgin Mary is the perfection of the Body of Jesus Christ (§ 84). Consequently, in Catholicism we have before us the Self-perfection or Self-assertion of Christ, i.e. sinful pride. (On the basis of the mutual opposition of the Logos and Christ-Jesus, a dogmatic construction is inadmissible – § 4, 9 note; and this will not help). The Catholic consciousness is inaccessible to the true and primary meaning of self-giving: it replaces it with empirical self-giving and empirical self-assertion (§ 61). In this way, the Divine and fully consistent with it, human will of Christ turns out to be sinfully and proudly affirming itself. And this exalts the human created itself, which leads the Catholic in the cult of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus", the Body and Eucharistic Body of Christ, to self-worship or self-deification, to the sin not even of Adam, but of Lucifer.

Reaching the final consequences of the Filioque, the self-solitary self-assertion of Western Christianity is revealed in the efforts of the church hierarchy to subordinate all spheres of life to itself (cf. the "index hbrorum prohibitorum", in which both Kant and Flaubert have fallen, the now abandoned prohibition for the laity to read the Scriptures, and many other things, the Latin language of worship incomprehensible to the laity, the celibacy of the clergy). It is clear in the struggle for temporal power, in acquisitions, in the papal state, which, depending on the circumstances, acted as "the patrimony of Bl. "Peter" — as a state. But solitude or pride is already separation and disunity, the beginning of a church schism, to which A. S. Khomyakov pointed out in his time with great force. The "Christianity of the Filioque" was to be the culprit of the disintegration of the Church. And one must be unscrupulous or blinded, or thoroughly ignorant of church history. so as not to see who is involved in the destruction of church unity and who to this day retains within himself the will to a proudly solitary existence. Of course, the sin that split the Church has not passed without a trace for anyone: everyone suffers from it more or less and is infected with it. But here we are talking about the source and beginning of sin. Separation is already an internal disintegration in schism and heresy, characteristic precisely of Western Christianity, caused by its very nature.

In Russian religious-philosophical literature, on the basis of an incorrect understanding of A. S. Khomyakov's thoughts, there has been an inclination to simplify Protestantism: outwardly attaching to its name, it is considered its essence to be "protest." Naively. The very protest of Protestantism was in the name of "something" and was conditioned by certain motives of German Christianity, which have a place in the Universal Church, but not in the sphere of Roman religiosity, which have a place as yet insufficiently revealed. Like all religiosity, Protestantism, which has already come to self-revelation several times and again, perhaps now has come to self-revelation, but has never yet recognized itself, proceeds from the basic religious aporia. Hitherto he had tried to overcome it by removing the metaphysical dualism between man and God, i.e., pantheistically. But at the same time, like Catholicism, it strives to preserve moral dualism in all its meaning. Transferring dualism to the Divinity understood by it pantheistically, Protestantism either breaks into pure dualism, exaggerating the importance of the devil and evil (Marcionism), or sees struggle and even original evil in the bosom of the Godhead (Boehme, Schelling). The first tendency, connected with the exceptional moral pathos of Protestantism, makes it akin to Mazdaism, the second to Indian pantheism, which is not accidentally so attractive to the German spirit. But Indian pantheism dissolves man and the world in God; Germanic — tries to dissolve the Divine in the human, adoring the human: "consciousness", "reason", "will" and "I". The Germanic spirit gravitates towards empiricism, in the early period towards nature, later towards man; And it is no accident that Arianism turns out to be the favorite German heresy. Here is the connection between Germanic Christianity and Romano-Catholic Christianity. Luther is conditioned by Augustine. The pride of the Filioque leads to "protest" – to separation and self-disconnection. In self-disunity, Protestantism is given the opportunity to "find itself" and realize in itself one of the expressions of Western Christianity, for this is no longer the congealed pride of Catholicism, but the pride that leads to destruction, through which life comes.

In the religiosity of the Filioque, the separation of the "church" (properly ecclesiastical) and the "world" is natural, and in the "church" – the hierarchically divided clergy and the flock, obedient "laity". That is why the problem of the "relationship of the church to the state", their separation and struggle, the legal contract between them, as well as the secular denial of its religious (church) nature (of course, imaginary) are characteristic here: the secularization of culture, "secular" philosophy and science. And in the pseudo-non-religious currents of the West, in its bad religion and superstitious science, the same religious problems are repeated. Chiliastic religiosity (§ 59) degenerates into the ideal of progress and the materialist-socialist ideal necessarily engendered by it; religious dualism and anthropocentrism into positivistic and relativistic philosophy and into atheism; pantheism into a religion of mankind and nature, which does not become a science because it calls itself monism or anything else. The most apparently religion-free philosophical system is easily understood as essentially religious. In the same way, Kant's Cartesianism is religious not only in that, seeing the "thing-in-itself," Kant approaches apophatic theology and builds a religion ("metaphysics") of moral duty. Having understood the limitation of empiricism (§ 65), he absolutizes the limit, i.e., he understands it in the categories of Western Christianity, he does not recognize that Christ was incarnate and incarnate, affirmed and overcame the limit. In comparing Kant's system with the systems of German idealism conditioned by it, but which also bring us back to German mysticism, it is not difficult to show in it a typically German system.

CHAPTER NINE