Russia's self-isolation would not have been too terrible if it had been in the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. But on the threshold of the XVIII century, it would have become disastrous. The era of technology competition was beginning. Now the fate of battles and countries was no longer decided by the number of sabers or the thickness of the fortress walls. The quality of gunpowder and cannons, the maneuverability of ships and the accuracy of engineering and sapper calculations predetermined the outcome of wars. It is impossible to master military technologies without borrowing industrial technologies. It is impossible to master industrial technologies without mastering scientific technologies. Scientific technologies require the adoption of many features of thinking, behavior, value orientations, including those that were quite unusual for the way of life of Muscovite Russia.

And they would have been met with Avvakum's lamentations: "Oh, oh, poor Russia, why do you want German actions and customs!" 271. And this "poor Russia" would have followed the example of its supreme moral teacher and would have boasted of its intellectual integrity: "Yes, all the saints teach us that rhetoric and philosophizing are outward whoredom, peculiar to inextinguishable fire... I am neither a rhetorician nor a philosopher, I am unskilful in didaskalism and logotheticism, a simple man and full of ignorance."272 Let me remind you that in those days the word "philosophy" absorbed all non-theological sciences, including natural science.

Tsar Peter would then have embarked on the path of reforms, and he would have had to face the unanimous resistance of the entire Russian Church, "raised" on Avvakum. And here one of two things: either Peter would have broken the back of the Russian Church (and he had plans to introduce Lutheranism in Russia), or the church opposition would have broken the neck of Peter and his reforms. And then, in a few decades, Muscovy would have to choose which colony – Swedish, Polish or Turkish – to become by the end of the 18th century. And the corresponding faith would have been implanted in place of Orthodoxy in this colony.

But the schism led to the fact that the spirit of Avvakum "flowed" from the Church. Kiev rhetoricians and philosophers arrived and "replaced" Avvakum. They brought with them the spirit of the West, the spirit of scholasticism and secularism. The intellectual life of the Russian Church became more diverse and even contradictory (in the clashes between the Western spirit and the spirit of the Holy Fathers). But in the end, Peter's reforms found supporters in the Church itself (Saints Mitrophan of Voronezh and Dimitry of Rostov, Metropolitan Stephen (Yavorsky) of Ryazan and Murom, Archbishop Theophan [Prokopovich] of Novgorod). Peter's war with the church structure did not turn out to be total. In the Church there were forces that supported both his reforms and the transformation of Russia into a new, imperial Russia. Russia survived the cataclysms of the eighteenth century without severing its ties with Orthodoxy. And already in the XIX century, she healed most of the wounds that were inflicted on her church life by Peter's reforms.

Today, the "spirit of the Old Believers" is again condensing in the Church. As for the Internet, they scoff: "Internet". When you hear the word "computer", there are immediately associations: "beast", built in Brussels, and "mark of the Antichrist". And again the same readiness to sacrifice the future of one's country, one's children, and one's Church to gossip and prejudice.273

I myself was prejudiced against the Internet, as it is "accepted" in church life. But once, in a conversation with me, an Orthodox person who works professionally in the world of computers mentioned the Internet. I gave out a couple of routine "pious" phrases about the connection between the Internet and the Antichrist. And my interlocutor calmly noted that if the Internet is to be connected with the prospect of the reign of the Antichrist, then it is just the opposite. The Internet can become an outlet for Orthodox Christians and a means of fighting against antichrist propaganda. After all, the Internet is inherently uncensored. Related to this are its problems (the uncontrolled distribution of electronic, as well as sectarian ideas, moreover, with the deepest and most shamelessly blasphemous, often openly satanic criticism of Christianity), but this same uncensored nature and anonymity can enable Orthodox Christians to explain their views on what is happening in conditions where TV channels, schools, printing houses and newspapers are tightly controlled by the enemies of the Church. In the United States, the Internet has already become one of the most effective ways of preaching Orthodoxy and, in particular, polemics against Protestantism.

It's not about the dirt that is on the Internet. The point is in the "climate" that the person himself maintains in his soul. Biologists know the so-called "Cannon's Law": The constancy of the internal environment is a condition for free life. A warm-blooded animal is more independent of temperature changes in the external environment. But the same is true in asceticism, as well as in contacts on the Internet: everything is clean for a clean person, but a pig will find dirt everywhere: whether in virtual reality, or in ordinary reality. You need to enter virtual reality, but not live in it. You need to use it, but not live in it.

The virtual reality just mentioned is another hieroglyphic horror story for some Orthodox leaflets. What's it? A person is immersed in a world simulated by a computer, his thoughts and feelings work with the images that the machine prompts him. Dangerously? Yes, you can play around here! It may turn out that the sensations acquired in the virtual world seem more acute, more real and more desirable than those that a person experiences in everyday life. But I will say again: anything can be perverted. Abortions are performed with a surgical instrument. But this is not a reason to condemn all surgery in general and demand that scalpels be beaten into censers.

Without virtual worlds, it is impossible to train people of many professions today. Pilots, cosmonauts, submariners are trained on complex computer simulators. Today, Russian aviation has no money for fuel. The rocket men have no money for real shooting. And what will happen if the Department for Cooperation with the Army of the Moscow Patriarchate suddenly listens to the "ultra-Orthodox" fighters against computers,275 and the General Staff listens to the advice of its church interlocutors? Through the efforts of Orthodox radicals, Russian military power will be finally ruined...

In general, any culture is a virtual game with artificial images.276 Reading any book moves a person from the world of everyday life to the world of other names, other plots, other problems, anxieties and joys. Even our worship (which is by no means reducible to its "cultural-symbolic" side, but undoubtedly has this side) includes this moment of man's removal from his everyday thoughts and feelings and his transfer to the world where "today Jesus is coming to Jerusalem."

And there is a danger of playing with the secondary reality of culture, forgetting that it, this reality, is not primary. There is a danger of getting carried away by collecting and comparing the shades of the palette, the features of the composition – and through absorption in the aesthetic, forget about the ethical. Archpriest George Florovsky, even before the invention of the computer, called this danger "the heresy of aestheticism."

Man has always overestimated the creation of his own hands – he has created idols. There are no new sins in the virtual world. Everything is old. Does a person not want to leave virtual reality for the real world? But what is in this passionate captivity of the new? Was not the dream of "Anna around the neck" the same passion, the same excessive absorption of man in a completely imaginary world? Isn't it in virtual reality that a careerist lives (even a church careerist who dreams of a "cross with decorations")?

This is a manifestation of the most banal paganism: the worship of the creature instead of the Creator. And it doesn't matter what this creature will be: an idol, an order, money, human glory or some other "virtual reality"... But it does not follow from the fact that creation can deceive us that God's creation must be hated or destroyed. You just need to learn how to use it correctly. The fact that an idol can be made of anything does not mean that we should create a desert around us, destroying everything that can, hypothetically, become an idol. In the end, the struggle with idols can itself become an "idol" when a person makes the struggle "against" the meaning of his life.

But if a person has not learned to cry in virtual reality – over a book or a movie – he may never learn to have compassion for living people. After all, the maximum that a book character demands from you is feelings of compassion. It does not require real deeds, real help (whether it is prayer or charity), it does not require any sacrifice. And yet, as one poet said, "why does the word cry take your breath away. Does it mean anything – on paper, and not out loud?" So, if the virtual cry of a fictional character left a person indifferent, did not cause the slightest response in his soul – will such a person notice the pain of a real neighbor, especially if it is not written out so artistically and openly, but is hidden or manifested not at all "aesthetically"?