Yesterday – all day at home and, since everyone thinks I'm in Colorado, without phone calls. Bliss. I think that if I had two of these days a week, my life would be very different, not "fragmented."

Attempts to write a chapter on the Symbol of Faith in the "Liturgy". It's always the same: at first, before I started writing, it seems that this paragraph is nothing. Then you start writing – almost immediately you feel that it is not right, a dead end. You quit, thinking that you are "not in the mood". However, it soon becomes clear that the impasse was also necessary, for it debunks the original error – the feeling of "trifle" – and poses the real question: what is the unity of faith? Having reached this point, you already know that you need to start from the beginning, that is, to be surprised by this seemingly self-evident concept, to discover it anew. And a trifling chapter turns into many weeks of torment: gestation, thinking, pregnancy, childbirth...

Monday, February 9, 1976

Reading Leoto, I suddenly realized that – among other things, or perhaps before everything else – his truthfulness is both rooted and expressed in language. He was the last French writer who was painfully aware of the falsity and falsehood of the language that gradually disintegrated the French language from within, the correlation in it of words, sentences with meaning, the triumph in it of abstraction, of "ideologism". He writes "les jeunes" in quotation marks, because the word has come to mean something new, a collective "youth," something -- and that's the whole point -- which is not really there. "Non, vraiment," he writes, "la langue française, c'est ne pas cela. Tout peut s'exprimer clairement, et ne pas savoir etre clair est une inferiorite ou s'appliquer a ne pas l'etre ou s'en faire un merite, est pure sottise…"[622] (XII, 86). However, everyone writes this way now, and not only in French. Our epoch has gradually created not only a new language, but a new "sense of language." The reason for this is twofold: ideologism (the assertion of what does not exist as concrete, real: "les jeunes," "the working class," "History," "l'humain," etc.) and, more banally, the separation of culture from life, its transformation into something self-sufficient: creativity out of nothing, but therefore of "nothing," an irresponsible play of "forms" and "structures."

All these days on television - the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. It is impossible to tear yourself away. The amazing beauty of the human body, transformed into effort, movement, becoming weightless, "embodied spirit" before our eyes, releasing its own heaviness, empiricism, utilitarianism ("organs"). No, not the "prison of the soul", but its life, impulse, freedom and beauty. Of course, in sports, this victory is symbolic in the deepest sense of the word. These bodies will grow old and heavy. This is only a breakthrough and therefore a symbol. But the essence of the symbol is in what it manifests and to what, therefore, it calls... Christ walked on the water not because He was incorporeal, but because His body was Him to the end, His freedom, His life... Everything in sport – asceticism, purposefulness, inherent chastity, organic and not artificial beauty manifested in it – everything indicates, proves, and manifests the possibility of transformation. This probably does not mean that everyone should go in for sports. This, however, reveals how the body should be treated, reveals and reveals the body itself. The limit of sport is not pleasure, but joy, and that's the difference.

Yesterday is the ninetieth anniversary (!) of A.A. Bogolepov. His response was amazing – in terms of clarity, brevity, and inner discipline. Another "phenomenon" is of the same victory. A person without promiscuity.

Tuesday, February 10, 1976

A conversation yesterday with L., and today, the three of us, with Tom [Hopko] about "counseling." With L. in connection with [two young people], with Tom about an Anglican priest-psychotherapist who wants to convert to Orthodoxy and "help" us in "therapeutics". I should have sat down and thought carefully about my instinctive aversion to this whole area, which is gradually turning into a real obsession. What is behind all this? What attracts you to this? Tentatively (but what if I'm wrong), it seems to me that all this "therapeutics" are incompatible with Christianity, because they are based on monstrous egocentrism, on self-preoccupation, are the ultimate expression and fruit of "self-indulgence," that is, of the very sin from which one must be saved. Whereas "therapeutics" strengthens this "self-being", proceeds from it as its fundamental principle. Therefore, this "psychotherapy", penetrating into the religious consciousness, distorts it from within. The fruit of this perversion is the modern search for "spirituality" as some kind of special essence. The words remain the same, but their "coefficient" and "context" change radically. Hence the darkness, the narrowness of all these modern "spirit-bearers," hence the confusion of teaching, pastoring, and "spiritual care" with monstrous "psychologism." The principle of "Christ saves, regenerates, heals" is here contrasted with "self-understanding" saves and heals. "To see oneself in the light of God and to repent" is replaced by another: "to understand oneself and to be healed...".

Wednesday, February 11, 1976

Why can't a woman be a priest? A long conversation about this yesterday with Tom, against whom, according to rumors, Orthodox women are also rebelling for his article in the last Quarterly. Since this storm began (in connection with the Anglicans), I am increasingly surprised not by the topic of the controversy itself, but by what it reveals about theology. The impossibility of finding decisive arguments either for or against is decisive in the sense of their objective persuasiveness for both sides. Everyone turns out to be right for himself, that is, within his perspective, the "causal connection" of his argument. "Our" side sometimes reminds me of Fr. John of Kronstadt's denunciation of Leo Tolstoy: "O frantic count! How can you not believe the Holy Apostles..." However, is it not the whole point that it all began – in L[iv] T[olstoy] – with "disbelief" to the Holy Apostles. Therefore the ex tradition argument simply misses the mark. "Heresy" is always something very integral, not far-fetched, it is really first of all a choice in depth, and not a correctable error in details. Hence the hopelessness of all "theological dialogues," as if it were always a question of "dialectics," of arguments. All arguments in theology are post factum, all rooted in experience; if the experience is different, then they are not applicable, which becomes – for the umpteenth time! – evident in this controversy about the "priesthood of women." Tom: "How do you explain, for example, that a woman can be president of the United States and not a priest?" But no one is saying this right now, and to say this would be to immediately provoke resentment. And you can't offend either, and here we are in a vicious circle. This vicious circle is inevitable if some organic, primordial, and eternal experience is broken. Meanwhile, our culture basically consists in its rejection and violation, so that its very essence, in fact, consists of this rejection, it constitutes its experience. It is only an experience of negativity, of rebellion, of protest, and the very concept of "liberation" is also entirely negative. On our consciousness, on our "primordial" experience, modern culture throws an arcana of principles which, although they seem to be "positive", in fact are negative, do not follow from any experience. "All men are equal": this is one of the roots, the most false of all a priori. All people are free. Love is always positive (hence, for example, the justification of homosexuality, etc.). Any restriction is repressive[628]. As long as Christians themselves recognize all these "principles," as long as they, in other words, recognize a culture built on these principles, no arguments about the impossibility for women to be priests simply do not sound, they smack, in fact, of hypocrisy and self-deception. In short, if we start with some abstract, non-existent equality between men and women imposed on nature, then no argument is possible. And this means that it is necessary to begin with the exposure of these very principles as false – freedom, equality, etc., false precisely because of their abstraction, "fiction". It is necessary to reject the whole of modern culture in its spiritual – false, even demonic – presuppositions. The deepest falsity of the principle of "comparison", which lies at the basis of the pathos of equality. Nothing is ever achieved by comparison, it is the source of evil, that is, envy (why am I not like him), then malice, and, finally, rebellion and division. But this is the exact genealogy of the devil. There is no positive in any point, not in any stage, everything is negative from beginning to end. And in this sense, our culture is "demonic", because it is based on comparison. And since comparison always, mathematically, leads to experience, knowledge of inequality, it always leads to protest. Equality is affirmed as the absence of any differences, and since they exist, to fight against them, that is, to forcibly equalize and, what is even more terrible, to deny them as the very essence of life; That "person," male or female, no matter what, who yearns for equality is already in fact desolate and impersonal, for the "personal" in him was precisely that which is "different" from all others and which is not subject to the absurd law of "equality."

Christianity opposes the demonic principle of "comparison" to love, the whole essence of which is precisely in the complete absence of both as a "source" and as an "essence" – comparison. That is why there is no equality in the world, and there cannot be, because it is created by love, and not by principles. And the world craves love, not equality, and nothing – we know this – kills love so much, replaces it so much with hatred, as this equality constantly imposed on the world as an end and "value".

Namely, in love, and in nothing else, the duality of man as a man and a woman is rooted. This is not a mistake that humanity will correct with "equality", not a flaw, not an accident – it is the first and most ontological expression of the very essence of life. Here the fulfillment of personality is realized in self-giving, here the "law" is overcome, here the self-assertion of a man as a man and a woman as a woman dies, and so on.

But all this means precisely that there is no equality, but there is an ontological difference that makes love possible, that is, unity, and not "equality". Equality always presupposes a plurality of "equals," which is never transformed into unity, because the whole essence of equality is in its jealous guarding. In unity, difference is not annihilated, but itself becomes unity, life, creativity...

The "masculine" and "feminine" principles are co-natural in the world, but only man transforms them into a family. The hatred of our culture for the family because it denounces the evils of "equality."