There are different degrees of mystical giftedness; but to one degree or another (sometimes, however, insignificant) it is characteristic of every person. And the duty of every person gifted with reason is not at all to neglect this gift of God and to accept with blind faith everything that is "revealed" to holy and brilliant mystics. "We must understand as much as possible and, having understood, check and evaluate. From this follows no right to frivolous and hasty denial that we are "incomprehensible" and "unconvincing," but only an imperative duty to reach a state where we understand and, having understood, are able to accept or reject. Negation is something quite different from doubt; and one must learn to wait and abstain for the time being, both from unfounded denial and from blind or, even worse, humble faith. This abstinence does not at all coincide with passive indifference. It contains a greedy search and heavy torments of doubt. It is our religious duty. And the way out of it is not in the self-abasement of a saint, not in oblivion and not in an attempt to affirm one's limited subjective thought, but in the acquisition of true authenticity.

Ineffability is not an authority or a confirmation of the Truth, although truth is ineffable, but a call to seek it. The ineffability of mystical experience is referred to by people who are little acquainted with mysticism, who hastily leafed through several mystical creations and came from them to a state of admiration, not admiration. It is also referred to by secret or explicit, conscious or unconscious positivists. They make a beautiful and generous gesture with this. "Such is our breadth of vision and what impartiality! We are zealots for exact knowledge; and we say neither yes nor no about what we ourselves have not experienced. Maybe there is some undeniable mystical experience. But it is subjective and ineffable, and without it, we do not consider ourselves entitled to refer to it." "Think what impartiality! In fact, such "impartiality" and such "zeal for the truth" are subtly negligible and religious indifference. And it is good to have "exact" knowledge that turns away from the cognizable without even making an attempt to look at it! Not only does he turn away, but he also teaches others to do the same, since the "noble gesture" has a great effect on the gullible admirers of "exact" science.

The ineffability of mystical experience is still appealed to by people of little faith or by those who believe timidly. For them, the words of mystics are not convincing, but they want to believe. In such a case, however, the strengthening of one's faith by reference to the authority of "ineffability" has a very calming effect: doubts weaken to the point of imperceptibility, and no religious labor is needed, since "how can we, weak people, comprehend the incomprehensible!" However, more malicious are the references to ineffability on the part of religious impostors, in the old terminology – false prophets. We must be fair to them as well. "Sometimes they feel something. Sometimes the Divine flashes over them. And they only do not want to bother to clarify what they have vaguely felt, but prefer to rest on the recognition of what flashed in their consciousness as the "ineffable," and themselves as clairvoyants.

In part, the mystical is rationally provable, although in such a way that in mystical experience itself the rationally justified acquires even greater certainty, as if "certainty over certainty." But the mystical cannot be rationally substantiated in part. Nevertheless, in the second case, it is rationally expressible or symbolized. This must be remembered in our time. "Not so long ago, they tried to deny everything that has not been proven by reason and experience, that cannot be felt and weighed. Now fashion is changing. They want to put the "irrational", which is understood in a very diverse and vague way, the "antinomic", which is taken on faith, as the basis of everything. Now it is enough to express one's thought in the form of a logical conclusion to meet with disbelief and denial. The twilight of ignorant faith is approaching. Philosophers stop reasoning and prove their thoughts by saying that "there is something irrational here," and ordinary people are called a "philosopher" and are proud of it if they have the courage to use philosophical terminology. Having believed, they guard their "faith", as a miser guards his dead treasure; — they do not want to think about it, to delve into it; — are afraid to move and look beyond its boundaries. And when they vaguely see something, they hasten to declare: "This is the Truth! Those who doubt a new find are advised not to trust the human mind, but to believe in the "spiritual experience" of the finder.

Since "spiritual experience" means the connection of religious knowledge with religious life, the integrity of religiosity, we do not reject it and will return to it in Chapter II. But we must resolutely reject the concept of "spiritual experience" when its content is defined as rationally inexpressible, and its subject is endowed with the privileged position of its sole interpreter. In this case, "spiritual experience" becomes an "asylum ignorantiae" and a very bad argument. It is not enough to "spiritually experience" or to perceive mystically. It should be remembered that both "reason" and "spiritual experience" must permeate each other, and that the value of each of them is not great in isolation from the other. On every "spiritually experiencing" something lies the duty of truthfulness and work, i.e., the duty to express what he experiences rationally. Having found a precious stone, you need to cut it; and the "discovered" must be processed and expressed with the help of concepts. It also does not hurt to remember that behind the arguments of reason and dialectics there is always a certain "spiritual experience", the disdain of which is not justified by anything except the self-confidence and self-will of those who neglect it.

3. Neither the assertion of the absolute incomprehensibility of the Godhead (§ 1) nor the assertion of His absolute inaccessibility to rational thought, which is tried to be justified by unjustified references to mysticism (§ 2), has been proved. Nor are references to apophatic or negative theology any more convincing.

Apophatic theology rejects the applicability of any "name" or definition to God. However, by doing so, it applies to God not only the concept of ineffability, but also other "names" that it rejects by apophatic theology. Theologians who understood apophatic theology in the sense of purely negative always pointed to its connection with positive or affirmative, "cataphatic" theology. And if we do not want to consider apophatics as mere mystical idle talk, like the inarticulate cries of ecstasies or modern glossolalia, we must admit that it is not accidental that it denies the applicability of these names to God. Thus it teaches that God is not God, is not Good, Truth, Beauty, etc. But it does not say that God is not pen, paper, ink, stone..., although it would seem that the second series of negations is not less true, but more than the first. By denying the applicability of such names as Truth or Good to God, apophatics denies their applicability to Him as "definite," limited, and limiting. God, of course, is not the Truth, for the Truth is perceived in a necessary opposition to non-Truth or falsehood, i.e., to a certain being outside the Truth. And outside of God there is nothing, there is no non-Truth, as a certain being; Truth, which in itself contains non-Truth, must be called something else. Denying that God is Truth, we affirm that He is the source or beginning of Truth, that He contains all that is true in Himself and is higher than Truth, which, in itself, diminishes Him, although He is also Truth. And we deny only on the basis of this statement. God is not absolute, because He is not thought of in a necessary relation to creation, although He, being truly absolute, is both the Creator and the Almighty. God is not God. After all, we perceive God only by contrasting Him with something else, even if we ourselves. But although we are really opposed to God, there can be nothing outside of Him, if only He is really God. And is it still necessary to say that God is not God in the sense of the naïve and vulgar understanding of God, against which militant atheism falls with such fury (partly justifiable)? Incidentally, in the most naïve conception of God there is a certain contact with Him, which is not denied by apophatics, on the contrary, which is found and revealed by it. A naïve idea of God is often closer to Him than a developed and well-founded one. The second is too clear and definite, which is why it often leads to that which is lost. the consciousness of its insufficiency and its inconsistency with the Incomprehensible Divinity: breaking away from God, it moves away from Him. And it is necessary to reveal all its insufficiency in order to feel God through it. This is what apophatic theology does.

In its very negation, apophatics affirms both that which is denied by it, from which it removes its limitations, and the incomprehensible, ineffable fullness of the Godhead. In true apophatics there is a true contact with God, a true abiding of God in the God-speaking. It is a special kind of comprehension of the Divinity, an integral, mystical one, which reduces our opposition to God to the limits of the possible and thereby limits God the least. It leads to the Abyss of Divine Incomprehensibility, not in order to reject what is achieved by positive theology, but in order to plunge what it has achieved into Incomprehensibility and to recognize its insufficiency.

However, apophatic theology also limits God. It is not an integral acceptance of God, for even in it the one who attains it opposes God and thereby limits God. Apophatics is a limited-cognitive acceptance of God, although not logical-cognitive. It is an approach to God; and to the extent of the remoteness of the attainer from God, it is not substantiated. Not being a complete communion of God, apophatic theology does not attain complete certainty. And since he who comprehends God is not one with God, he doubts. And any empirical comprehension of God presupposes a lack of unity with Him.

Our goal is in the knowledge of God, and — since there is no longer a childlike faith in us — in the knowledge of God through rational knowledge and doubts (§ 1). But God, Who is, as will be shown later, the All-Universal Truth and the True All-Unity, cannot be accepted or retained within oneself by thought alone. We seek Him by the way of knowledge and strive to cling to Him forever. But in order not to be torn away from God and not to fall again into the utter darkness of doubt and confusion, it is necessary to participate in Him completely, not only with thought, but with all one's being: thought, active love, and all life. The Universal Truth does not hide Itself, and more than once, dear reader, in our search, She will allow us to touch Her and for a moment illumine us with Her unflickering Light. We ourselves fall away from Her into our searches and doubts. But perhaps even the short and few illuminations of Her undoubted radiance will give you and me the strength to survive the times of separation from Her and, having been nourished by Her fragrance, not to fall away from Her too far and too long. Perhaps, after many falls and many new contacts, we will be able to unite with Her more firmly and completely. And this will only be the beginning of our true existence. The more fully and clearly we come to know the Truth, the more we realize its inexplicability and the infinity of our movement in it and towards it. Unquenchable is the thirst for the Infinite Truth; And joyful is this insatiability, which, while remaining itself, is also quenched only in the overcoming of earthly existence. We complain that God does not reveal Himself to us enough—we lie. For God reveals Himself to us so generously, so assures us of Himself, that we lose the consciousness of His incomprehensibility. Everything seems to us to be clear, so authenticated that we cease to notice and recognize what is verified, but we reject the indubitable and, not realizing the incomprehensibility, we lose the last faith. And it is not to prove and substantiate everything, dear reader or even dearer reader, that you and I should strive, but to see and comprehend God's Incomprehensibility, unfathomable depth and completeness behind what is verified and already clear. It is impossible to know what it is, but it is necessary to know what it is, and to cling to it by "learned ignorance".

Doubt is completely insurmountable if there is no way to overcome the separation of™ man from God, the limitation of the comprehendor, the limitation of the Comprehensible by him. The position of the one who seeks God is hopeless if he can never go beyond the boundaries with which he himself delineates the Divine. But he is aware of these boundaries and even draws them himself. This means that he is already in the middle of them, in a sense, and behind them. Somehow he has both a certain and what he determines. The very thought of definiteness, the very consciousness of the boundary, is already the thought of something that exceeds the limit, the consciousness of something higher and containing the boundary in itself. By limiting myself to cognitive communion with God, I am already partaker of Him, and more than cognitively. Otherwise, I would not be aware of my limited-cognitive Communion of God as such. In each act of my knowledge of God there is my actual Communion with God, which is less limited than knowledge. Rational reasoning about God implicitly contains both a deeper intellectual (intellectual) comprehension, and a mystical comprehension (§§ 2, 3), and a total or universal comprehension, which can no longer be called comprehension, because it tends to lose the opposition of man to God, as only oppositions. it is never wholly explicit in empiricism. In empiricism, the spheres of the knowledge of God that are "farthest" from God seem to break away from those "closer" to God and containing them (())(p), less definite or limited.

No one will dispute the possibility and legitimacy of doubts in the field of our sensory knowledge, although for us the sensual in itself seems to be the most indubitable, and doubts about it are usually deceitful and perhaps caused by the fact that we boast of our imaginary spirituality. With even greater readiness everyone will agree with the doubtfulness of the rational sphere, which is even more doubtful for us in practice. But it seems that the predominant domain of doubt is precisely the very beginnings of knowledge and being. But it is easy to see that in them doubt is of a very different character from that in the realm of rational and sensory experience, where doubt rests on the recognizable or assumed (even if only for the time of doubt) certainty of a higher sphere. When we doubt the experience of the senses and the conclusions of reason (and reason, or reason, as distinct from the contemplating mind, intellectus, always only "deduces," "concludes"), we do not in the least shake the higher sphere, on the contrary, we most often clarify and strengthen it, at any rate we penetrate into it and doubt it on the basis of it. That is why doubt is the path to true knowledge, and skepticism reveals a psychological kinship with mysticism. In doubting the higher sphere, we in no way remove the lower doubts: they remain in the same force and even acquire a greater one: the vibration of the principles shakes the beginning. It is obvious that our highest doubt rests not on the certainty of the lower spheres, but on the certainty of something higher. And if there is a way to overcome skepticism at all, it can only be found in the highest – beyond the principles of being and knowledge. Thus, the problem of doubt is nothing but the problem of the religious act.

4. In every religious act there is a confrontation between man and God. The insurmountable difference between man and God, their dualism, lies at the basis of all religious experience, being a necessary precondition for religious activity, thinking about God, prayer, and mystical ecstasy. Without this dualism, there is no religion and there cannot be.

Many mystics, describing and comprehending their experience, are inclined to assert the "dissolution" of the soul in God, its "destruction" or "death" in Him, its complete merging with Him. They liken their "soul" to a drop of water: plunging into a cup of fragrant wine, it accepts its color and aroma, disappearing in it without a trace. But here we have a hasty and incorrect theorizing. In fact, before and after ecstasy, the mystic undoubtedly opposes God and distinguishes himself from God. He further identifies himself before ecstasy with himself after ecstasy. With all this, the mystic affirms a certain continuity of his being distinct from God, denying the discontinuity of his being proclaimed by him in his words about merging with God. Such continuity is impossible if ecstasy is a moment of absolute interruption in the mystic's being, a moment when it and its opposition to God completely disappear. If the confrontation ceased and the mystic's being disappeared, even for the most instantaneous moment, he would not be able to "remember" himself to the point of ecstasy and "return" to himself. And it is very significant that Christian mystics, free from heresy, affirming their "unity" with God in the "raptus" or "procession" (extasis) from themselves, insist on the "diversity of essence" of God and man. They reduce the "mystical union" (unionem mysticam) to the "conjugation of wills" (voluntatum conjunctio), although they attach the least importance to their personal being. The Christian ideal of the unity of man with God is most fully expressed in Jesus Christ, in whom the Divine and the human are one "inseparably and unmerged," in Whom there are two natures, two wills, two souls, although one person is the Hypostasis.