(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).

The growth of the "personal" principle and, more broadly, the importance of the spiritual sphere in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is evidenced by the texts whose purpose was to show what a true Christian, a spiritual man, should be, and by the texts in the center of which was the problem of sin and its redemption and repentance, and by the "neutral" texts, between the first and the second (what could be called fiction, spiritual and teaching literature, the epistles of pastors, even that new, emphatically spiritual translated literature that allows us to guess what attracted the special attention of readers). It is not always easy, or rather, almost always difficult, to single out the "personal" layer in these texts, but its presence and the internal dynamics of the growth of this principle can hardly be disputed. Moreover, it is possible, apparently, to expand the sources to some extent. Thus, for example, it has recently been shown what a valuable source in connection with the question under discussion are the so-called "Penitential Books", penances and renewals, which served for confession and are similar in function to Catholic penitentials. This most popular source [407] on Russian spiritual culture, which has been repeatedly studied (although in a slightly different aspect, as a source for the study of everyday life and customs) and earlier (see Almazov 1894; Pavlov 1902; Smirnov 1912; cf. also Shchapov 1972 and others, who contributed to the study of the correlation between the Penitential Books and the canon law of the Church), appears in the last book of A. I. Klibanov as material which also testifies to the spiritual state of Russian society (Klibanov 1996, 35–45), to the continuing process of Christianization of Russia (it can be added with a high degree of certainty that this "second" Christianization embraced, firstly, a very wide stratum of the population and, secondly, was not a formal, not superficial Christianization: it was in the fourteenth century, especially in its second half, that the process of internal assimilation of Christianity began as a guide for life "in truth". in any case, "not according to lies"); about the expansion (extensive aspect) and deepening (intensive aspect) of the space of Christianity, both in the human soul and throughout Russia; that people themselves went towards Christianity, consciously and willingly, that it became not only a fact of man's religious consciousness, but also a factor that determined all life – everyday life, work, family relations, civic behavior, morality, self-consciousness; about that religious phenomenon of holiness, which so unexpectedly for the external eye, but nevertheless prepared and justifiably miraculously manifested itself in the fourteenth century, and not so much in the person of princes – defenders or martyrs, as it was before, as in the person of representatives of the new asceticism – the desert dwellers (repentance and the sacrament of communion with God), who in time passed over to communalism, when the tasks of monastic "oikonomia" were added.

It should not seem strange that the fourteenth century, when holiness again flourished abundantly and grace-filled in Russia and passed the baton to the next, the fifteenth century, also became the century of a noticeable strengthening of religious freethinking, expressed in heretical movements and heresies. Of course, most often they represented a deviation from Christianity (not always, however, consciously), but not so much as an attempt to overcome it and criticize it, but as a search for "genuine" Christianity, the Christianity of Christ and one's own hopes and hopes. Undoubtedly, much in these movements is explained by social protest, but something essential must also be explained by the omissions, and sometimes by the obvious guilt of the Church in the person of many of her pastors. Studies of recent decades on heretical movements in Russia, which took place in the fourteenth century and later, mainly concerned the aspect of social protest, the "anti-feudal" orientation of these movements (cf. Kazakova–Lurie 1955; Klibanov 1960; Snigireva 1982; cf. also Klibanov 1977 and others); unfortunately, less attention was paid to the religious aspect of this phenomenon proper, although the autonomy of religious communities associated with such a phenomenon of Russian social and religious life as the "world parish", which in fact contributed to the initiative in the field of "its own" interpretation of questions of faith, to a significant extent explains both the level of peasant self-consciousness in the North of Russia and the very intensity of religious searches (cf. Pavlov-Silvanovsky 1910 [Pavlov-Silvanovsky 1988]; Yushkov 1913; Kopanev 1980; Tcherepnin 1984, 293–294; Klibanov 1996, 15–20 and others).

In a word, religious life in Russia in the fourteenth century became more and more Christian, rich, dense, and intense. Along with (and also in parallel) with external piety, a deeper layer was formed, in which the emphasis on the "inner," spiritual presupposed the emergence and actualization of the "personal" principle, the realization (or approaches to it) that there exists that equality of all people in God, in which the Holy Spirit can act in every person of high Christian merit. Awareness of one's openness to Him, of one's potentialities on the path to God, marked the most important milestone in the history of Christianity in Russia and raised the question of practical ways to embody these possibilities in one's own life, of a new personal responsibility for this incarnation.

This general context of spirituality in Russia in the fourteenth century makes it possible to return to the theme of Sergius' silence and, on the one hand, to emphasize the essence and meaning of this type of asceticism, i.e., to clarify the narrower, but also more tense and profound context of the phenomenon under consideration, and, on the other hand, on the contrary, to define an even broader, one might say, the broadest context of those that they were present in the "general" context of Russian spirituality in the fourteenth century, which was known in Russia and, of course, in Sergius himself, and could have exerted a certain influence (at least theoretically) on Sergius's choice.

Like apophasis, silence is the path to God, to His immediate proximity, the path of spiritual ascent (άνήβασις), in which all that is accidental, subjective, psychological, and cosmological in its contact with Divine oikonomia is successively removed. This purification, the devastation (κένоσις, cf. the kenotic type of holiness in Russia) of the image of God from everything superfluous, secondary, distracting from a genuine encounter with God, is at the same time the purification of oneself on the chosen path to God. In the non-strict approach, silence is placed in the same space as άπόφασις, but the latter is still a certain position, albeit a negative one, and moreover, it is not isolated from the linguistic form of expression. In this respect, silence is a more powerful means than the apophatic definition of God: it is precisely this that does not define God, but makes possible that spiritual growth which leads to prayerful deepening, to God.

The general context of Sergius' silence mentioned above presupposes, of course, that powerful spiritual movement among the Byzantine silent hesychasts, which, to a large extent, like that of its opponents, the Barlaamites, became responsible for the outbreak of the civil war that shook Byzantium from 1341 to 1347. Sergius of Radonezh was his younger contemporary, and it is in this connection that the question arises about the dependence of Sergius' practice of silence on the corresponding forms in Palamism, and in a broader sense, about the possibility of the influence of Byzantine, specifically Palamite, hesychasm on Sergius. Although Gregory Palamas was indeed the main figure of this movement, hesychasm in Byzantium did not begin with Palamas, and a certain tradition had already developed before Palamas. Gregory Palamas himself was undoubtedly influenced by his teachers, among whom are Gregory, Patriarch of Cyprus (1283-1289), and St. Theoliptus, Bishop of Philadelphia (died before 1327), to whom Palamas himself refers. If the influence of Gregory of Cyprus, in the opinion of one of the best specialists on hesychasm and on Gregory Palamas, "can be traced more in the field of theological formulations than in the spiritual plane" (Meyendorff 1997, 5), then the influence of Theoliptus was not only more significant, but also related to a more special field, namely, to hesychia itself. It is known that Theoliptus lived in a coenobitic monastery, but, however, he was also familiar with the tradition of hermit hesychasm, which, however, he did not treat "entirely favorably." Theoliptus was characterized by a sense of historical responsibility, rare among many of his contemporaries, who were not interested in anything but their inner perfection, for the historical fate of the Church, for its gathering into a whole, for its grace-filled unity, for the nourishment of the people, for whom he constantly prayed. The Bishop of Philadelphia repeatedly spoke out against internal strife in the Byzantine Church, and this combination of two ideas – the disastrous nature of strife and the gathering of the unity of the Church – can be considered with sufficient reason to be evidence of the same paradigm that would soon determine the behavior of Sergius of Radonezh, his attitude to that "hateful separateness of the world" that must be overcome by the gathering of spiritual forces in Russia in the name of their concord and unity.

The researcher of Palamism, emphasizing the presence in Theoliptus of "a subtle sense of local church unity and sacramental unity of the faithful," confirms this thesis with reference to the words of the saint himself: