Молчит, наконец, и сама земля, чье безмолвие как бы передается ее детям и наследникам — людям, лучшие из которых — святые, и Сергий — по достоинству среди них. Концовка «Слова похвального» и, следовательно, всего «Жития» (в широком понимании его объема), приобретает символическое значение, и в сердцевине ее — идея молчания–безмолвия. Исходя из известных слов Иисуса Христа, произнесенных в Нагорной проповеди, — «Блаженны кроткие, ибо они наследуют землю» (Мф. 5: 5) [401], — Епифаний продолжает, подхватывая эти слова:

Яве, яко праведници, и кротци, и смирены сердцемь, ти наследят землю тиху и безмлъвну, веселящу всегда и наслажающа, не токмо телеса, но и самую душю неизреченнаго веселиа непрестанно исплъняюще, и на ней вселятся въ векъ века.

Тако и съй преподобный отець нашъ Сергие того ради вся краснаа мира сего презре и сиа въжделе, и сиа прилежно взиска, землю кротку и безмлъвну, землю тиху и безмятежну, землю красну и всякого исплънь утешениа, яко же сама истинна рече въ святомь Евангелии: «Толцай отвръзет себе, и ищай обрящете безценный бисерь», рекше Господа нашего Исуса Христа, и царьство небесное от него въсприат […]

В этой концовке тема безмолвия, тихости, кротости так умело и естественно соединена с темой веселия и радости, что внимательный читатель не ошибется, не увидев здесь и малейшего следа противопоставления, и догадается, что это веселие души и радость сердца тоже безмолвны и что это описание имеет в виду то же, что и laetitia spiritualis западноевропейской мистики той же эпохи (perfetta letizia Франциска Ассизского, с которым нередко сравнивают Сергия, но только «с русским именем и в шубке меховой»), как скажет поэт о другом примере подобного сходства — пятиглавых московских соборах в Кремле «с их итальянскою и русскою душой».

Тема молчания–безмолвия, снова напомнившая о себе в самом конце «Жития» как об одной из наиболее важных и глубоких для понимания сути сергиевой святости, дает повод высказать несколько соображений о том круге идей, центр которого образует эта тема.

Silence forms an important means of ascetic practice in many religious traditions, most often in those variants where the mystical flavor is clearly felt. The discovery of this means and the formation of the corresponding ascetic technique and its theoretical comprehension do not presuppose a single center and take place under certain circumstances quite independently, which, however, does not at all remove the question of influences and borrowings. It is worth recalling that even at the non-religious level, an individual, purely personal appeal to silence as one of the types of reaction to a certain deficit and/or crisis (usually acute) situation takes place in everyone independently (although needless to say that not everyone has the ability to react in this way?) and moreover, more often spontaneously, without the participation of reason, relying on the deeper layers of consciousness and the unconscious. on intuition, in a word, on what is better adapted both to catching the whole and to choosing the most adequate reaction to the obstacles that arise on the way to the goal.

For Sergius, the main goal, constantly realized, but never approaching exhaustion, was that unceasing and ever-present movement towards God, which constitutes life in God. God was the absolute and most real of all realities, revealed by the power of faith. Such a reality presupposes both the maximum striving towards it, and at the same time the openness of God to those who aspire to it. All this can be understood only within the framework of some ultimate divine-human contact, a meeting where words are not needed. But Sergius was a man, and the language given to him was human. Moreover, the tongue remained in him and exerted its influence even when the mouth was closed. Even silent prayer presupposed a certain Self and a certain You, and this already referred to the power of the tongue, albeit essentially hidden. As soon as God moved from the sphere of personal communication to the liturgy, all statements about him involuntarily became "linguistic," and language could not but be tasked with being as adequate as possible to convey the essence of God. And it is in this situation that the question arises of the expressibility of this essence in language.

In the tradition of Christian apophatic theology (as well as in a number of other religious movements) they came to the conclusion early on about the inexpressibility of God's essence, and since it was impossible not to speak, not to think, not to experience the image of this essence, the only way to designate this essence was only "negatively", apophatically. A well-known theologian of our time writes:

The apophatic (or negative) path of knowledge of God is a mental ascent, gradually stripping off all its positive properties from the object of knowledge, in order to reach in the end, through complete ignorance, a certain knowledge of Him Who cannot be the object of knowledge. It can be said that this is an intellectual experience of impotence, of the defeat of thought in the face of the transcendence of the intelligible. Indeed, the consciousness of the affliction, of the weakness of human understanding, is an experience common to all that may be called apophatic or negative theology, when, remaining within the boundaries of the intellectual, it is simply convinced of the radical inadequacy of our thinking with the cognizable reality, or, striving beyond the boundaries of understanding, it perceives its bewilderment at what God is by His inaccessible nature as a kind of superior, mystical knowledge of the "super-mind" as knowledge ΰπερ νοΰν.

(Lossky 1975, 95 [Lossky 1995, 26]; Lossky 1967, 7–23; cf. also Lossky 1991, 87–102; Lossky 1975a [Lossky 1995]; Lossky 1995a and others).

Apophaticism and apophatic theology, indeed, must be understood as the awareness of the "intellectual defeat" in the implicit presence of dependence on language, albeit in its "negative" variants (God is incomprehensible, unknowable, inexpressible, etc.), which, however, do not abolish this "linguistic" captivity. At the same time, this dependence of the expressed (God) on the means of expression, of course, is not exhausted only by the sphere of language; As is known, it extends to the sphere of fine arts, and history knows many examples of fierce polemics between iconoclasts and their opponents, sometimes turning into undisguised violence.