- Both can happen. Let me remind you of the words of Bulat Okudzhava: "And the soul - this is for sure - if it is burned, it is fairer, more merciful and more righteous." In the Christian tradition, the traditional image is linen. In order to get a soft, wonderful fabric from hard linen, from which you can sew a vest for a baby, this linen needs to be crumpled for a long time. And the Lord, it happens, for a long time to crush the human soul with failures, so that it becomes softer.

- "It is better for us to die than to go to the enemies of God, what is the use of healing the body, and destroying the soul..." Can this statement of John Chrysostom be applied to folk healers?

- Yes, but not for everyone. If this healer treats with herbs, manual therapy, then there is nothing wrong with it. But if all this is superimposed with some kind of religious understanding like "this herb is good because it was harvested when the moon was in the third quarter, and it happened exactly at midnight, because the spirits flew to this daisy" - then this is magic. Then you can't resort to it.

- How unacceptable are non-traditional methods of treatment – homeopathy, acupuncture, hypnosis – from the point of view of the Church?

- I think that in all three cases there is no unconditional rejection.

Recently in Moscow, after a lecture, a woman turned to me with a question: "I am a homeopathic doctor and an Orthodox Christian. I replied that homeopathy is, in principle, a pagan practice, but if a discovery was made by non-Christians, this does not mean that it is non-Christian in itself. For example, Saints Theophan the Recluse259, John of Kronstadt, and Ignatius Brianchaninov used homeopathy260. However, the woman says: "I know this, but I am still restless, because I do not know how I treat."

An amazing situation has developed: she, a homeopathic doctor, feels that this is not good, and I, a theologian, persuade her that it seems possible to do this. But the problem here is really serious: no homeopath is able to explain the mechanism of the homeopathic method of treatment. It reminds me of Pavlov's dogs. Perhaps the dog realizes that if you bark here and press this button with your nose, you will be given a piece of meat, but it does not know how this button is related to the meat that has fallen into the bowl.

To be honest, I'm always afraid of being in the position of Pavlov's dogs, when we do something, the effect happens, but it's not clear where it came from. Are there really material mechanisms of interaction here, or is there some kind of psychotherapy that perhaps borders on some kind of spiritual and religious interaction (quite possibly not Christian)? What kind of "black box" is hidden there? It is the presence of this "black box" of homeopathy that does not allow us to say that everything is clear and safe here. Moreover, today it is clear how easily homeopathy is interpreted within the framework of fashionable occult jargon, which includes all the same "energy-informational carriers", "thoughtforms", etc. And homeopaths themselves too often resort to an occult interpretation of their methods...

I would liken the situation with acupuncture to a city captured by barbarians. Imagine that a city is captured by the most complete barbarians who do not know what electric light is. And in this city there is an autonomous nuclear power plant, which will work for a hundred years without control. There is light in some places, not all wires are broken. And these barbarians eventually notice that if you press that button, then a light bulb lights up here. They clearly understand that there is some connection here, but they do not know how the button and the light bulb are connected. And then they develop their own mythology: the spirit of this door influences the spirit of the Sun, and if you spit over your left shoulder and jump diagonally across the room on your right foot, you bring a bunch of sacrificial bananas to the window, then you can press this button and the Sun god will send his part to that lamp under the ceiling. A myth can be based on quite real observations, on which the explanatory attempts of mythology are layered. It seems to me that acupuncture is a similar thing. In time, quite materialistic explanations for the connections between the outer integuments and the internal organs (after all, they developed from the same original cell of the embryo) will probably emerge. Therefore, if a doctor uses acupuncture without using Chinese philosophy, I think he is not sinning.

In any case, St. Nicholas of Japan did not see anything magical in acupuncture, although he had a negative attitude towards it: "Stephen Kondo served as a catechist several times and left the service several times to earn his bread by acupuncture. Art is something like charlatanry... Kondo wanted to make his way to a new, very crowded place on the ridge of the church, to quack with his acupuncture."261

As for hypnosis - again, it all depends on who and for what purpose uses it. Purely medical hypnosis is one thing, when the task is to save a person from some obsessive memory of some trauma... But in general, the Church has a negative attitude towards any situation when you enter a state that you yourself do not control. You have to be extremely picky, and even more so when people like Alan Chumak or Kashpirovsky try to hypnotize you, then you can't open up to them in any case.