It seems to us that even then, in the fifth century, when Christological dogma was blazing like an inextinguishable fire in the brains of the Hellenized Eastern peoples, a purely philosophical, theoretical interest in it was realized, strictly speaking, only in the school-enlightened minority, i.e., among the leading theological elite. In wide circles and in the mass consciousness, interest in it was nourished by the subconscious, but no less ardent sphere of religious feeling, i.e., by the dominant tone of Eastern piety. This piety, the feeling, so to speak, by touch, of what is holy and what is not holy, what leads to God and what leads away from Him, is characterized by a keen sense of the opposite, the polarity of God and the world, not only as Creator and creation, Infinite and finite, but also as Pure and impure, Holy and Sinful, almost as Good and Evil in the ontological sense. This is the subsoil that favors the imperceptible distortion of the dogma of the Incarnation. It is characteristic that in the period of Christological disputes, monastic armies in the figurative and even literal sense of the word come to prominence. The zealots of asceticism were not primarily inspired by the kenotic ideal of the debasement of God to the image of man, but, on the contrary, by the elevation of the carnal nature to the fire and light of the divine nature, which sublimates the flesh to its complete transformation and even absorption. Thus, on the basis of asceticism, piety of the Monophysite tone arose, and after it heretical theology.

In contrast to this extreme Monophysite deviation, the positive, calm thought of Rome, through the mouth of Pope Leo, supported the healthy aspiration of Antiochian theology and saved the proper balance in the affirmation of the reality of the two natures in Christ. Through this sound and sober theology, a sound criterion was established for determining the norm of catholic church piety. It was guarded against the danger of heretical, anti-cosmic, Buddhist spiritualism. In other words, in the atmosphere of Orthodox-catholic Christology, i.e., a comprehensively harmonious theology about the reality of the two natures in Christ, the moral and practical side of the life of both the individual Christian and the whole Church instinctively fit into a healthy channel, alien to heretical extremism. And this Orthodoxy is not in a distinct theoretical consciousness, accessible only to a theological minority, but Orthodoxy in practice, in the vital practical instinct of the masses, and is and still remains a new, undying experience of the same ancient Chalcedonian dogma. In the movement of centuries and the changes of the historical environment, only the forms of its comprehension, only its theological armature, changed.

In addition to the positive Roman dogmatic help to the East, which had fallen ill with Monophysite distortion, the East's own Church-wide experience also served as a counterbalance and antidote on the spot at the present moment and in the following centuries. This was the theocratic principle of the blessed connection of the church with the Roman Empire and its culture for the sake of historical service to the kingdom of God. In this dogmatically substantiated and meaningful theocratic ideal of the "symphony" of church and state, both natures are given in perfect fullness and in perfect unity, without diminishing one at the expense of the other. The earthly, defective nature of the state, with its sinful human and cosmic materials, and the heavenly, divine, miraculous nature of the church, with its mystical essence of the Body of Christ, are irrationally united in the image of the mystery of the Incarnation, without confusion and mutual absorption. This is the Chalcedonian dogma in the life of the Church, embodied in its practice, in its morality and sanctifying and liturgical theurgy. For what is quite normal and even perfect by humanitarian and ethical standards does not satisfy the Church's conscience. According to the wise teaching of the Church, ethically perfect only that which is sustained in the liturgical atmosphere of the Church, which has passed through the crucible of its sanctifying actions and has become mystically transfigured for us, no longer just natural, profane, but holy. With the eyes of faith and in spiritual experience, we are vouchsafed to behold, by analogy with the essence of the Chalcedonian dogma, the truly Orthodox path of the inevitable, heroic (because antinomian) combination of the divine and the human, the absolute and the relative, the eternal and the temporal, the holy and the profane. And this is not only in the mystagogy of personal Christian podvig, but in the feat of social and cultural-creative, world-historical, universal, i.e., truly universal.

This practical experience of the Chalcedonian dogma in the task of theocratic creation of the symphony of the church and the churched empire with the inclusion in this concept of the churching of all life and culture, was carried by the ancient church through the Middle Ages to the modern ones, when the theocratic task encountered its great, also universal opponent, i.e., non-religious humanism, or secularism, that great all-pervading heresy of modern times. This is Monophysitism turned upside down: the elimination or expulsion from the field of activity of the state and humanistic earthly culture of any religion, of all mystical, divine principles of the Church. The formula of this heresy begins with the tolerant slogan of the separation of church and state, with the admission of religion as a personal, private affair of everyone (Privatsache).

Further, it dialectically passes into open struggle and persecution. This new persecution of the Church is the result of a new-pagan, monistic sui generis "theologizing," of idolatry before the materialistically understood cosmic being. This is materialistic Monophysitism.

The Chalcedonian Problem in the Understanding of Russian Thinkers.

Has the Church of our epoch, of our modern times, worked out a clear answer to this Monophysite heresy in the form of monism, a doctrinal answer, a response of theoretical theology? It must be admitted that we do not yet have a clear, church-approved, generally accepted catechetical answer. But the search for it has irresistibly begun and will continue, perhaps, for centuries, if some acute drama in the life of the Church does not induce it to give another conciliar teaching directive for the solution of this question.

The absence of a theoretical current answer to this problem does not mean, of course, that the Church cannot give it. Always, at all times, the Church gives answers to her faithful sons, who theologize in her bosom with their minds and hearts, practical answers, answers by the very life of the Church, her spirit, her piety.

It is the task of theological thinkers to extract from the conciliar consciousness and even the subconscious of the Church guidance in theological creativity to the extent of the urgent needs of the Church itself. And this enormous, often intense and inspired work of theologians of all Christian confessions, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is growing continuously. Without drowning in this sea of literature on the relationship between Christianity and civilization, we want to confine ourselves here to a simple indication (and not elaboration) of the special and peculiar interest of theological thought on this problem in our Russian Orthodoxy.

The history of Russian philosophical and theological work on this Chalcedonian theme can be a grateful subject of extensive special study.

What brilliant Russian people, what great names, what bright and original personalities of Russian culture stand as landmarks on the path to the development of the great mystery of God-manhood, Christology in its latest understanding and experience! How many daring attacks on the Chalcedonian dogma in its modernist interpretations! And what an obvious powerlessness of the questioners to give their own satisfactory answer to their own question!

Gogol, passionately, religiously and prophetically captured by serving God through art, was overwhelmed by this excess of attachment to "this world." With childish naivety, he tried to project in "Correspondence with Friends" a synthesis of serf police statehood with Orthodox-monastic piety for a people who knows who knows what means, frozen in their primitiveness, and went further, finding direct or indirect encouragement from his spiritual father, Father Matthew Konstantinovsky. Horrified by the depth of his immersion in the pathos of artistic creation, he repentantly rejected everything carnal and starved himself to death in the feat of spiritualism. From his youth, recklessly following the ultra-Nestorian path of serving the call of human nature, he came to his senses, became exhausted at the Orthodox crossroads, at the attempt to connect the human and the divine, and, losing his balance, slipped into spiritualism, i.e., into the Monophysite heresy.

Archimandrite Theodore (Bukharev), professor of the Moscow Theological Academy and inspector of the Kazan Theological Academy, responded to Gogol's torments. In the wilderness of the 1940s and 1950s, he sang an extraordinarily pathetic hymn to the union of the two natures in Christ and to the combination in Orthodoxy in the image of this mystery of the truth of the Kingdom of God, both in heaven and on earth in the historical and cultural creativity of mankind. In other words, he sang a hymn to the Chalcedonian dogma. He did not convince either Gogol, with whom he corresponded, or the official censorship, which banned the publication of his works. Ardent and rebellious, he resigned his dignity and continued his preaching until his death. The rehabilitation of Theodore Bukharev's Orthodoxy and the objective criticism of his constructions await a benevolent researcher who will probably calmly prove that Fr. Bukharev, in justifying the bright sides of cultural construction in Christ, was alien to the Nestorian deviation, i.e., the worship of culture as an intrinsic value, but subordinated and subjugated it to Christ in an irrational synthesis. The Chalcedonian yardstick justified Fr. Bukharev in the main and in the main, and not the official censorship, which rejected such theology in the name of Monophysite disregard for human truth. Dostoevsky also theologizes with his artistic images. Having completely given his heart and will to obedience to the Orthodox Church, he, however, from the depths of his conscience protests against the Church's Monophysite indifference to earthly truth, even "most respectfully returns to it the ticket to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," secretly thinks that the Most Holy Theotokos includes "Mother Raw Earth" and sanctifies her, and in the elder Zosima pours out the dreams of her heart about the revelation in Orthodoxy of an optimistic life-loving path of salvation. All this does not go beyond the framework of the scheme of the Chalcedonian dogma, but within its boundaries it strongly emphasizes the correctness of the nature of the cosmos and man. Konstantin Leontiev would soon call it "pink Christianity" and oppose it with genuine Athonite Orthodoxy, harsh to the edge of practical Monophysitism.

In the 70s, the gigantic figure of Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov rises for this issue. A philosopher by vocation, a brilliant publicist, a preacher of the Christian-ecclesiastical worldview, for three decades he persistently and emphatically called upon the theological thought of the Russian Church to reveal concretely, in its application to our historical epoch, the directive of the Chalcedonian Creed on the unification of the two natures in the process of the creative work of Christian humanity in the spirit and power of theocracy. Solovyov rushed impatiently and searched for ready-made forms of this theocracy. He made an instructive experiment of accepting the theocracy of the Roman Church. For this purpose, boldly, single-handedly in his heart, he united the churches. But not in these extremes, which he himself has lived out for — alas! — his very short life, his merit and enormous influence on the entire generation of Russian religious philosophers up to the present day and, probably, for a long time to come. Solovyov's talent and merit, after his quick victory over his youthful worship of the idol of materialism, fashionable in the 1960s, lies in the heroic paving of the way to the ideal of "integral knowledge," in the all-embracing synthesis of philosophy and Christian dogma, in the creation of a theocratic church historiosophy in the light and on the basis of the dogma of God-manhood. Solovyov's system for Orthodox theology is a brilliant illustration of the modern revelation of the undying vitality and salvific nature of the Chalcedonian dogma. Quite consciously and directly, relying on the definition of faith of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, Solovyov ascribes the divine-human nature and the divine-human meaning to the process of the earthly history of mankind, included on the same basis in the framework of general cosmic life. And he does this in contrast to the practical distortion even in Orthodox dogmatism and Orthodox practical piety of the norm of full God-manhood, when the Church indifferently evades an active role in earthly history, drawn by the one-sided spirit of Monophysitism. As a fighter against a one-sided, ahistorical deviation in theology, Solovyov is an example of an orthodox theologian, a Chalcedonian theologian. But his ideas and constructions within the Orthodox framework of the Chalcedonian oros are a new, free addition of the philosopher. While welcoming the orthodox framework adopted by Solovyov as the precept of Chalcedon, we are critical of his theological constructions within this framework. The human mind, of course, can never stop in search of a solution to the mystery of the relationship between the Creator and the creature, the Infinite and the finite, the Deity and humanity, although it is not given to us to explain this mystery, as well as the mystery of any dogma. But the feasible feat of the mind in clarifying the infinite horizon of mysteries, of course, lies on the holy path of serving the truth of Christ. Solovyov, on this, so to speak, inner front of dogma, within the Chalcedonian barriers, erected two philosophical landmarks: "all-unity" and "sophiology." "All-unity" for him, as for any philosopher, is a seductively universal, all-embracing, all-crowning focus, in which the entire composition of relative being is crossed and by which the entire composition of relative being is crossed and connected, and together with... Absolute! It is this salto mortale from the finite to the Infinite that no philosophical ecstasy obliges us to admit. This is one of the swamp lights that lead philosophers into a silent failure at the heights of their latest achievements. Another winged horse, not only rational, but also mystical, on which Solovyov flies over the terrible yawn of the abyss between God and the world, is the long-abandoned and half-forgotten Sophia. Repeating the thousand-year-old attempts of Hellenic philosophy, and Biblical chochmism, and Rabbinic Kabbalah, and stormy Gnostic fantasy to illusorily fill the abyss between the Creator and creatures, Solovyov chooses as a tool for this the purest image of Sophia, sanctified by the biblical language, and by this inertia for a long time infects our religious-philosophizing thinkers and poets. Without arguing about the legitimate boundaries of the Sophian mythologeme, we only want to point out the fundamental logical depravity of the very idea to find in the fog of "all-unity" and on the wings of the "Sophian aeon" something intermediate between One and Zero, between Being and Nothing, Absolute and Relative, between God and everything conceivable outside of God. There is a qualitative, quantitatively unfillable antinomy between plus and minus, between yes and no. No gradualness, no bridges of eons can cover up the ontological gap between the two polarities. It is manifestly absurd and self-deceptive that it is possible to ontologically combine the Absolute with the relative by gradually subtracting from it certain particles of absoluteness and replacing them with equal parts of relativity until the complete transition or transformation of the Absolute into the relative. The reverse procedure is equally absurd. In fact, each stage or each moment of such a procedure is simply a moment of the abolition of the existence of one category by another, and not of their combination, unification. The multiplicity of such procedures is the purest logical illusion, philosophical self-deception. All the impotent fantasy of Gnosticism, its aeonomania, is built on it. But it is completely useless in comprehending the paralogical mystery of the relationship between the Creator and creation. This secret is an indisputable fact. It is given. It cannot be understood, but you just need to accept it, without deceiving our weak mind. "Neither intercessor nor angel, but the Lord Himself was incarnate and saved all of me." Mediators in essence, in being, ontological mediators are excluded here. No crescendo-diminuendo from creation to God et vice versa can create a continuous continuity, and into any of the millimeter slits the entire structure falls, as into an abyss. If, even in the world of relative things, we are compelled to operate with antinomies, how can we not bow down before the antinomy of antinomies, and cease to encroach upon the comprehension of the incomprehensible by reason? And the idea of "all-unity," i.e., its illegitimate claim to the merging of the Absolute with the relative, must be thrown into the ontological boundaries of the created cosmos. Yes, cosmic existence is universal and not in itself, but by the will of the Creator and "Almighty", "containing" and "life-giving" all creation, but in no way containing it.