«...Иисус Наставник, помилуй нас!»

However, as Lossky 1975, 95; Lossky 1995, 26; Lossky 1967, 7, neither the iconographic "anti-naturalistic" apophaticism can be defined as iconoclasm, nor the negative, anti-rationalistic path of negation can be identified with the rejection of knowledge, with epistemomachy, for "this path cannot lead to the abolition of God-thinking; for this would affect the main factor of Christianity and Christian teaching – the incarnation of the Word – the central event of Revelation, which made possible the emergence of both iconography and theology." In this context, and in the historical perspective of the development of Christianity, the situation did not become clear immediately and not everywhere in the same way. The iconographic aspect of the problem seems to be more diagnostically important in practice. After a certain initial period of "indifference", which manifested itself both in the appeal to pagan means of expression, on the one hand, and in the ignorance of the "iconographic" image of Christianity ("iconographic" apophaticism), on the other, there comes a period of transition to religious art, in which the use of "old" means for the expression of "new" ideas is avoided. A certain barrier arises between the old and the new: although there is a tendency, which is gaining more and more strength over time, to get rid of "naturalism", from schemes such as "x depicts y", the "old" expressive heritage, its alphabet, and partly its language (in the semiotic sense of the word) are still used, but the direct connection between the image and the depicted becomes different, mediated: it is no longer "x depicts y, and "x refers to y", "x reminds of y". The Holy Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, proclaiming the dogma of the veneration of icons, recognized that, first, the nature of fine art is undoubtedly valuable, and that, second, art itself is "reminiscent," not in the spirit of subjectivism and psychologism, but ontologically, in the sense in which Plato uses the word άνάμνησις, recollection, the manifestation of the idea itself in the sensual (see Florensky 1969, 80, etc.). This is what has been clearly manifested in Christian fine art since the time of the great "Trinitarian" fourteenth century, when allusions, allegory, and symbolism began to play an increasingly important role in this art: the image is preserved, but what is "depicted" in it fades and recedes into the background, which retains its value only for pagans; A Christian, on the other hand, reads the old image in a new way, if you will, more subtly, assuming in it a different and at the same time greater depth. A "new" pictorial language appeared, which was destined to develop into a new genre of Christian art – icon painting and which implied a new projection of Christian values. Neither Old Testament apophaticism with its ban on the sphere of the depicted, nor the full-blooded "naturalism" of ancient art, both Greek and Roman, were assimilated by the emerging Christian art, but were taken into account by it and played, each in its own way, a significant role in the formation of Christian art, primarily icon painting. What this cost is best evidenced by the more than a century of Byzantine history from the ascension to the throne of Leo III the Isaurian (717) and the triumph of the iconoclasts to the restoration of the veneration of icons (843) soon after Michael III became emperor, under whom the lands confiscated from the monasteries were also returned to him.

Before leaving the topic of apophaticism, it is necessary to point out a certain connection, or rather, the fraught with connection between it and the idea of trinity, Trinitarian theology itself:

The Old Testament apophaticism, expressed in the prohibition of any image, was eliminated by the fact that the very "Image of the essence of the Father" was revealed, which took upon Himself the nature of man. But a new negative aspect enters the canon of iconographic art: its sacred schematism is a call to detachment, to the purification of the senses, so that the senses could perceive the contemplated image of the Divine Person who came in the flesh. Likewise, what was negative and exclusive in the Old Testament monotheism, in the thinking of God in the New Testament disappears before the need to recognize in Christ the Divine Person, One in Essence with the Father. But for the possibility of the emergence of Trinitarian theology, it was precisely the apophase that had to guide the purification of thought, for this thought had to rise to the concept of God, transcendent to all created being and absolutely independent in what He is, from created existence.

In spite of the irrefutable fact that the negative elements of the progressive purification of the thought of Christian theologians are usually associated with the speculative technique of middle and modern Platonism, it is wrong to see in Christian apophaticism a sign of the Hellenization of Christian thought. Apophaticism, as a transition beyond everything that is connected with the inevitable end of all creation, is inscribed in the very paradox of Christian Revelation of God: the transcendent God becomes immanent to the world, but in the very immanence of His economy, culminating in the incarnation and death on the cross, He reveals Himself to be transcendent and ontologically independent of all created being.

Without this aspect, we could not comprehend either the essence of the voluntary and perfect gift of redemption, or in general the essence of the entire Divine oikonomia, beginning with the creation of the world, when the expression ex nihilo precisely indicates the absence of any need ex parte Dei (on the part of God), indicates, we dare say, a certain Divine arbitrariness: in the act of creative "volition," oikonomia is a manifestation of will, the trinitarian being is the essence of the transcendent nature of God.

This is the principle of that theological distinction between economy (οικονομία) and theology (θεολογία) [...] θεολογία, which for Origen was the knowledge, the gnosis of God, of the Logos, in the fourth century has in mind everything that relates to the doctrine of the Trinity, everything that can be said about God in Himself, independently of His creative and redemptive economy. Thus, in order to arrive at this "pure theology," we need to go beyond the aspect in which we know God as the Creator of the universe, to free the concepts of "theology" from the cosmological elements inherent in "oikonomia." To the "oikonomia" in which God reveals Himself by creating the world and becoming incarnate, we must respond with "theology," with the confession of the incomprehensible nature of the Most Holy Trinity in that mental ascent which will always be moved by apophase.

(Lossky 1975, 95–96 [Lossky 1995, 26–28]) [402]

This conclusion, confirmed by the consideration of the relationship between the apophatic method and Trinitarian theology in Clement of Alexandria and Dionysius, the author of Mystical Theology, cannot but throw a ray of light on what most fully characterizes the mystical principle in Sergius, his silence and his confession of the Trinity, and what unites Sergius with the great mystical tradition of the Church Fathers and with the trend of theological thought that was acquired and continued after the Council of Nicaea. This assertion seems to be essential both because nothing of the kind has yet been expressed in the literature devoted to Sergius, and because the theological and intellectual potential of the religious thinkers of the third and sixth centuries, who combined the entire flower of Greek philosophy in the form of its Platonic tradition and Christian theology, perhaps in its most creative period, is incomparable with that of the religious thinkers of the third and sixth centuries. what Sergius possessed in the field where the Church Fathers, the creators of developed Christian theology, worked. We have to assume that Sergius's intuition, life in God, his inner qualities, which determined his holiness already at the beginning of his ascetic path (if not earlier), explain what he felt, experienced, or rather, experienced, and assimilated to himself as the main thing on the path to God that to which his distant predecessors, whom he had not read, and about some of whom he had hardly heard, came along the complex path of theological and philosophical research (of course, not without mystical illuminations, but this path did not begin with them).

Of course, the "Life" of Sergius provides little material for judging the personality of the monk in the sense that Christian anthropology puts into this word [403] with its distinction between nature-substance and personality-hypostasis. Empirical facts on the basis of which it would be possible to form an idea of the personality ("who?") Sergius, are given in the "Life" in a disparate form and, for all their value, cannot give a sufficiently complete and reliable idea of the whole. The nature of Sergius, his substance ("what?") is much more open to us, but in this case the focus of attention is still who? is the personal that overcomes the individual [404]. But there is something which is more than less likely to be judged by whom? — about the scale of the so-understood personal, which was reflected in the conciliar people's consciousness and was assimilated by it, which obviously arises from scientific and theological research, from experiments in the artistic comprehension of the image of Sergius. This general idea of Sergius is striking in its unity (the degree of detail of the representation, its development and the level of comprehension of the image in this case are not so significant), despite the differences in the ways in which this image is formed and the difference in the perceiving consciousnesses. This amazing unity of the image and its evaluation allows us to believe that there is something real, trans-subjective behind it, correlated with the very essence of Sergius' personal principle and, more broadly, with the very spirit of Orthodox holiness, with its best times.

A modern theologian rightly wrote that in the image of Sergius Orthodox holiness was resurrected in its entirety. From going into the wilderness, through physical asceticism, self-crucifixion, humility to subsequent illuminations by the Light of Tabor, to the "tasting" of the Kingdom of Heaven is the path of St. Sergius and the path of all the great witnesses of Orthodoxy from its first centuries. The main thing in Sergius is that "absolutism" of Christianity, that image of the complete transfiguration of man by the Holy Spirit, the aspiration to the highest, to the highest, "life in God." This made Sergius the center of Russian Orthodoxy in the dark years of its history, paved so many roads to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (Schmemann 1985, 354–355).

Indeed, in the fourteenth century, the process of spiritual emancipation began in Russia, which continued in the next two centuries. This process took place (and, accordingly, was reflected) at different levels and in different forms. Its subjects were people of very different types, different positions, different beliefs. And the initial impulses were in many cases very different, and yet they were all focused in this idea of spiritual liberation. But liberation is different from liberation, although these differences also presuppose something initially common: that spiritual "wind" the first signs of which date back to the fourteenth century. These signs also manifest themselves in the appearance and noticeable growth of the personality [405], implicitly present, and sometimes explicitly expressed in a certain circle of literary texts, and partly even in those tendencies that are discernible in icon painting and which are reflected in such complete completeness in the work of Andrei Rublev. Much has been written in recent decades about the new understanding of the value of the human personality, about the self-value of man in relation to the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, cf. Likhachev 1970; Likhachev 1979; Klibanov 1996, 109 et seq.; cf. also, though in a slightly different aspect, on the other hand, Rauschenbach 1985. It should be recalled that the personal principle is not yet personality (both in Russia and even in Europe, the process of the formation of personality and its very emergence is a rather late and rare fact at first), but its substratum, fraught with the possibility of personality, is a kind of guarantee of it. And in this sense, one can justifiably speak of the personal principle not only in relation to the artistically gifted Daniil Zatochnik, a bookish man who quotes the Song of Songs, but also in relation to the "black" peasantry as a whole, to free communal farmers, who know both the "harsh reality" of this day and that ideal "antiquity" when other, "just" orders prevailed on the earth, violated when, in the debate between Pravda and Krivda, the latter defeated the former. / Righteousness went to heaven / To Christ Himself, the King of Heaven; / And Krivda went all over the whole earth, / Throughout the whole Russian world, / Over all the Christian people.

Of course, the "peasant consciousness" did not embrace the entire complexity of the world in which the bearers of this consciousness lived, but behind them there was a tradition, a legend dear to their hearts about a certain "golden age" of their forefathers; in the light of this tradition and peasant notions of customary law, they perceived the attack on their lands and their rights on the part of those on whose side there was power—the "noble" people, the boyars, and, unfortunately, often the Church (Tcherepnin 1960, 263–266, 274–275). This contradiction between the ideal and reality gave rise to the crack from which the consciousness usually awakens, evaluating the world, and then, according to the inevitable logic, of itself, the first sign of the formation of a "personal" layer. For a long time, the last island where people lived "in truth" was the community, which at the same time was the most reliable guardian of the community, the product of the "internal" creativity of the peasant world [406]. At first, this "worldly" island was organically correlated with the parish as a primary church unit, in which civil and ecclesiastical functions were combined (see Klibanov 1996, 7–20); we must also remember what E. E. Golubinsky once said about the rural priesthood: "Our priests were mainly not priests, but peasants, and for them the priesthood was, so to speak, only an addition to the peasantry and an addition, undoubtedly, not without profit." As has recently been shown, "[...] The phenomena of spiritual life within the framework of this structural unit had not a partial (intra-church) significance, but a general significance for the population of the volost-parish organization. And the very position of the local clergy as laity, i.e., appointed and dismissed by lay parishioners, being in direct material dependence on them, determined both their actions and their preaching" (Klibanov 1996, 20).