Could Aesop have been known to the children of Galilee?

Priest Athanasius Gumerov, monk of Sretensky Monastery Comparing the Jews of His time, who stubbornly resisted the truth, the Savior likens them to capricious children who do everything out of stubbornness. In the words of Jesus Christ there is a thought: I and John came in opposite ways, but you did not accept either my testimony or his. One was accused of not keeping the fast, and the other of observing it. Aesop's fable "The Fisherman" tells about a trapper who knew how to play the pipe. He took a pipe and a seine, went to the sea, stood on the ledge of the rock and began to play the pipe, hoping that the fish would come out of the water on their own to these alluring sounds. But this did not happen. Then he took the nets, threw them into the water and pulled out many fish. When he took them ashore, they began to jump. Looking at how they were fighting, he said: "I played with you - you did not dance, I stopped - you dance." The Gospel story and Aesop's fable, despite certain similarities, have semantic differences. In the first one, the ethical aspect is clearly expressed. The fable speaks of those who unwittingly do everything inappropriately.

Where did the Holy Grail come from?

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)  

The Holy Grail (Old French. Graal, Latin. Gradalis) in Western European medieval legends is a mysterious vessel with the blood of Jesus Christ, which was collected by St. Joseph of Arimathea, who performed the burial of the body of the Savior of the world taken down from the Cross. The sources were some apocrypha.

The oldest literary treatment of the legends about the Holy Grail in Western European literature belongs to Chrétien de Troyes, a French writer of the late twelfth century (the novel Perceval). The story of this vessel, which acquired miraculous powers, was described in detail by another French writer of the early 13th century, Robert de Boron, on the basis of apocryphal stories. Robert's work consists of three parts: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin and Perceval. The first part tells the original story of the Holy Grail and tells about its transfer to England. It is also told about the search for this mysterious and miraculous vessel by the knight Perceval. After Perceval's death, the Holy Grail ascends to heaven. In Robert's work, the Christian apocrypha is combined with the Breton cycle of legends about King Arthur.

In medieval knightly legends, the Holy Grail is a mysterious symbol of the highest spiritual good, for the sake of which fearless feats are performed.

In The Da Vinci Code, the theme of the Grail is nothing more than a detective fantasy, behind which it is not difficult to see the author's painfully obsessive feminism. "The Grail," said Langdon, "is a symbol of the lost goddess. With the advent of Christianity, the old pagan religions did not die. And the legends about the knights' search for the Holy Grail were in fact stories about the forbidden search for the lost sacred feminine principle" (ch.58). Such an arbitrary interpretation becomes possible because numerous readers of this detective story (both in Russia and in the West) are cut off not only from Christian roots, but also from classical culture. They do not know the most elementary things in this area. The topic of the Holy Grail has been professionally studied by prominent historians and philologists. Some major works can be mentioned: Dashkevich N.P., The Legend of the Holy Grail. — in his book: From the History of Medieval Romanticism. Kiev, 1877; Veselovsky A.N., Where was the legend of the Holy Grail formed? St. Petersburg, 1900; Marx J., La legende arthurienne et le Graal, P., 1952; Markale J. Le Graal, Paris, 1982 and others.

How to evaluate the main ideas of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment" from a Christian standpoint?

Hieromonk Job (Gumerov)  

This work was first conceived as a "psychological account of a crime." The original idea can be judged from a letter (mid-September 1865) from F. Dostoevsky to the editor of the "Russian Herald" M. Katkov, with whom he negotiated the publication. The writer was going to show the state of painful struggle in the soul of the "ideological" murderer after the crime he committed: "Unsolvable questions arise before the murderer, unsuspected and unexpected feelings torment his heart. God's truth, the earthly law takes its toll, and he ends up being forced to denounce himself. Forced to perish in penal servitude, but to join the people again; The feeling of disconnection and separation from humanity, which he felt immediately after committing the crime, tormented him. The law of truth and human nature have taken their toll... The criminal himself decides to accept torment in order to atone for his deed" (Poln. sobr. soch. V 30-ti t. L., 1985. Vol. 28, kn. 2, p. 137). Notes made in a rough notebook show that the writer first wanted to write a confession on behalf of the main character, written down shortly after the murder. F. Dostoevsky penetrates deeply into the inner world of man and accurately depicts what the Holy Fathers comprehended through spiritual experience. Later he wrote in "The Diary of a Writer" (1873): "I was in penal servitude and saw criminals, "solved" criminals... But, I am right, perhaps none of them has escaped a long spiritual suffering within themselves, the most purifying and strengthening. I saw them lonely thoughtful, I saw them in church praying before confession; he listened to their individual sudden words, to their exclamations; I remember their faces—oh, believe me, none of them considered himself right in his soul! I would not like my words to be mistaken for cruelty. But still I dare to express it. I will say frankly: by severe punishment, imprisonment and penal servitude, you would perhaps have saved half of them. They would have eased them, not burdened them. Self-purification by suffering is easier—easier, I tell you, than the fate which you make for many of them by the sheer justification of them in judgment. You only instill cynicism in his soul, leave him with a seductive question and mockery of you. You don't believe it? Over you, over your judgment, over the judgment of the whole country! You pour into their souls a lack of faith in the truth of the people, in the truth of God; you leave him confused." St. Gregory the Theologian writes about the judgment of one's own conscience: "It is impossible to escape from this one thing – from the judgment seat within ourselves, which one can look at and follow the straight path."

In the course of working on the work, as the plot became more complex and the ideological plan expanded, F. Dostoevsky realized that the form of confession limited his capabilities: "Confession in other points will not be chaste and it is difficult to imagine what it is written for. But from the author. It takes too much naivety and frankness. It is necessary to assume the author as an omniscient and infallible being, exposing one of the members of the new generation to everyone."

For a religious assessment of the novel "Crime and Punishment", it is important to turn to the draft notes made for the third (final) edition of the novel: "The Orthodox view of what Orthodoxy is: there is no happiness in comfort, happiness is bought by suffering. Such is the law of our planet, but this direct consciousness, felt by the process of life, is such a great joy that one can pay for it with years of suffering" (PSS, Vol. 7, p. 155).

The author significantly complicates the plot, and shifts the ideological center: the main idea in the novel is the resurrection of a spiritually dead person. The Gospel narrative of the resurrection of Lazarus constitutes the spiritual nerve of the entire work, its ideological and compositional center.