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."

Friday, February 13, 1976

Two days of lectures and intensive work in the seminary – letters, dates, conversations. Today is breakfast with [O.]Iv. Meiend. [orff] and Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky: discussion of the question of the admission of Anglicans. Always set on edge by talk about the Church and its "empirical situation". Internal alienation from everything that makes up this situation. It is always the same: I love Orthodoxy, I do not love, I cannot love the Orthodox Church, the nominalism, inertia, triumphalism, lust for power, the deification of the past, pseudo-spirituality and women's piety that triumph in it.

Получил сегодня сборник о Хартфорде: Against the World for the World[629]. В общем доволен своей статьей.

Все эти дни – наслаждение от зимних Олимпийских игр в Иннсбруке по телевизии. Пропорциональное отвращение от commercials[630] и новостей.

В связи с написанным выше (11 февраля) мысли о культуре грешной и культуре еретической . Мы живем в культуре (или цивилизации) именно еретической. Думать, развить это во второй серии скриптов для "Свободы", обещанных мне в начале лета. Внести туда все размышления о "правом" и "левом", об утопизме и т.д. О современной "духовности" как реакции, то есть об определенности ее тем, на что она реагирует…

Странное состояние: масса мыслей и потому – увиливание от работы…

Суббота, 14 февраля 1976