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

ON CONFORMING TO JESUS CHRIST, MIRACLES, SACRAMENTS, AND THE HOLY UNIVERSAL ORTHODOX CHURCH

90. Anything can be absolutely justified (Chapter II) only in duality with the Absolute. But the empirical is always separated, solitary, and disconnected. Therefore, in order to substantiate empiricism, the Incarnation of God is necessary, as the duality of the Absolute with the concretely separated or empirically individual. And such a duality in the entire imperfect world can exist only once: otherwise it is no longer "so" (§ 82). If all the moments of the world were equal, each in its own solitude, deified, their separation would remain and the perfection of the imperfect would be impossible. The Incarnation of God would simply not have happened then. By the fact that the Incarnation of God is singular, empirical gives a principle and a criterion for the justification of the concretely limited, for there is a Person who, although limited, is nevertheless absolutely justified by a special duality with God, and therefore is not only limited, but also universal. Its foundation is accomplished and comprehended through faith, i.e. entirely (§ 85, Chapter II – See the first chapter of the Gospel of John!).

Does not a new aporia arise before us here, which, however, has long awaited us? For the foundation of any empirical personality, the preeminence, singularity, and uniqueness of Jesus are necessary. But the true foundation and deification of every person requires the same unity with the All-Unified Christ as in Jesus, the namelessness of Christ. If there is only one moment of absolute significance in a disconnected world, the absolute significance of all the others, of all solitary being and knowledge, has not yet been substantiated. If there are many such moments, there is no unity, i.e., there is none. It is necessary, while preserving the uniqueness of Jesus, to affirm His real connection with all other people, which would make possible both their complete unity with Him and the separateness of each. And this means to reveal not only the meaning of the birth of Jesus from a man, the Virgin Mary, but also the meaning of His birth according to humanity from God, His "first-birth," as well as the meaning of His sonship with God through Christ Jesus.

The justification of any moment through the validity of the empirical Person of Jesus is obviously impossible, if we assume an absolute or irreconcilable separation of personalities. But it is precisely on the basis of the absolutization and exaggeration of the™ disconnected world that our new aporia arises, so characteristically expressed in modern philosophical pluralism, but in fact imaginary. The disconnection of the moments of empirical is relative; and they are separated because they are one. The Incarnation of God in Jesus does not deny this unity, but affirms and "fulfills" it, being in the disunited™ beginning of the incarnation of the All-One Christ. In Jesus begins the Divine-human event, spreading from Him in the world affirmed as the one race of God. Recognizing in Jesus the "fulfillment" of the Incarnation, we dare to affirm the validity of all empirical existence (§§ 85-87). Through Jesus, the Son of God, and in mankind begotten of the One and Reuniting God, we become sons of God by the grace of the Spirit, not figuratively, but in the most real sense of the word. Every person can justify himself by individualizing himself through his relationship with Jesus as His brother.

The Incarnation of God is a singular and therefore universal act, the focus of the temporal-spatial order (§§ 54-56). Spreading in empirical being from Jesus Christ forward and backward, it empirically actualizes the incarnation of God; However, in such a way that it ends beyond the boundaries of empiricism. Everything empirical stands in real connection with Jesus; but this connection has a different measure of reality. Believing in God, comprehending our duality with Him, recognizing ourselves as the acquired and individualized all-unity of the created world, the "microcosm" (Chapters I and III), we already confess the One Christ incarnate and incarnate in our brother Jesus. But we still "do not remember our kinship" and are only preparing for our journey to Damascus. In the same way, "before" the appearance of Jesus Christ on earth and outside the knowledge of Him, the world lives by a vague foreknowledge of Him, hope in Him, types and prophecies.

91. In an imperfect world, the relationship of the moment with the other moments of its series is concrete and primary, although this is possible only through the moments of the higher series (§§ 46 f., 54-56). It is to this sphere that the empirical personality is predominantly limited, diminished in its interrelations by both higher and lower moments, in its "upward and downward movement," which is possible only from itself as from the center. The centrality of the empirical self is a necessary condition for the existence of the personality and its knowledge, which, being a partaker of the "Knowledge" of God, is absolutely valuable in all its specificity.

In every act of our knowledge it is possible to reveal and distinguish in the abstract the types of knowledge already established above (§ 36): dialectical, historical, logical, and natural-scientific. But it is quite obvious that the preponderance of our element is historical knowledge. It is this which proceeds from the empirical personality and is most of all in the main sphere of its being. Abstract knowledge is a partaker of the knowledge of the highest moments, which in itself is no less "historical," but is given to the empirical personality in acquisition. Natural-scientific knowledge, on the other hand, is separated from personality in another sense. It diminishes the personal, lowering the sphere in which the personality is, and needs to be substantiated by the abstract. From all this, of course, it does not follow that other kinds of knowledge do not possess a special value of their own, which is equally inaccessible to historical knowledge. There are areas of existence in the cognition of which the predominance of natural-scientific and abstract methods is inevitable for the empirical personality. On the other hand, these methods are to a certain extent inseparable from the historical. But the more fully being is given to us, the more historical it is. The sphere of the most actualized being and of our predominant being is the world in its development (§§ 55, 59). The essence of cosmic life appears to us as a historical process, the Divine-human through the historical fact of the Incarnation of God. Christian metaphysics must be the Christian history of the world (see my Philosophy of History, especially §§ 13, 28, 37, 44-51).