Professor of St. Sergius

Orthodox Theological Institute in Paris.

FROM THE AUTHOR

This book is not popularizing, but rather informational, "catechetical" in nature. For most people today, Christianity is something unknown, and devoid of even its exotic appeal because of its endless distortions and caricatures. In response to numerous requests, I have tried in this book to give the floor to the greatest witnesses of the One Church, common to all Christian confessions of Tradition, which alone makes possible "ecumenism in time," that is, remembrance of primordial experience.

Tradition is not a letter repeated by some and rejected by others, or dissected for scientific purposes. Tradition is an expression of spiritus juvenescens, "the spirit of youth," as we would say after Irenaeus of Lyons. This is a deep but living memory of inspiration, of the great "Pascha," of the great transition of the God-Man to God-manhood and the universe, as the Russian religious philosophers of the beginning of the century said, whom I willingly recognize as my teachers.

Of course, our spiritual receptivity has changed profoundly since the fourth and seventh centuries. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag, in the midst of the final collapse of the society in which Christianity had been partly transformed into the grande dame of freedom, into the "dominant ideology," it is no longer possible to speak of faith in the same way as in the days of Christian civilization the Living God is no longer for us the Lord of the world, but the crucified Love. However, it should be noted that the witnesses whose voices are heard in this book lived either in an era of persecution, in a society vacillating between skepticism and gnosis, or at the moment of the birth of the monastic movement, which firmly and passionately asserted, in spite of the temptations of "order", the irreducible non-conformism of the individual, "intoxicated with God" and "after God honoring his brother as if he were God." It is also necessary to recall, together with Newman, that in the first chords of a symphony, the motifs that later develop sequentially sound simultaneously, in a single explosion of inspiration. Ultimately, the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 declared that God "accepted mortal suffering in the flesh." I confess that in the selection of material for this book I was guided by the continuity of Tradition in modern times, by the vision expressed by Dostoevsky of the intuitions and aspirations of our fruitful epoch, in the darkness of the night of which the fiery seeds are latently ripening.

The witnesses whose words I have collected in this book we call the Fathers. Some of them were martyrs, these first mystics. Others became monks, inhabitants of mountains and deserts. Still others are great minds, enlightened by the Holy Spirit even in their very recklessness (which Tradition has been able to balance through consensus, that is, their agreement with the other Fathers). Many were bishops, pastors of local Churches, which at that time enjoyed considerable autonomy even in mutual communion, pastors elected by the community and preaching to it the only "Message" that can still break through to us today through the deepest despair of our nihilism: the "descent" of God, who became man, into death and hell in order to conquer all forms of death and hell.

В ту пору мистика не анализировалась в терминах религиозной психологии, как это происходит сегодня на Западе. Смерть и воскресение Христа были ключом к пониманию жизни и Вселенной, ключом великих метаморфоз. Некоторые из них стали как бы свечами или факелами, концентрирующими «свет и пламя», дарованные всем в огненной плоти Библии и таинств, в Церкви как «таинстве» Распятого и Воскресшего, воскрешающего нас и преображающего в Себе весь космос. В отличие от наших нескончаемых дебатов о церковной «институции», «церковное бытие», по выражению одного современного греческого богослова, воспринималось как сама реальность личности в общении, как пасхальное бытие, несущее в себе обетование воскресения человечества и мира.

Эта книга предлагает прежде всего доктринальный подход, размышление скорее в таинстве, чем о нем, ибо, по слову Евангелия, надлежит «возлюбить Господа Бога всем разумением». Затем речь пойдет о пути аскезы, «о духовной брани, более жестокой, чем людские сражения», но ведущейся в одиночку. Наконец, мы коснемся созерцания, ярчайшим выражением которого является способность любить – творческая любовь, ибо она причастна любви Самого воплощенного и распятого Бога. Кроме того, мы надеемся, что эта книга поможет лучше определить место христианства в его отношении к миру религий и миру атеистических воззрений. Возможно, фундаментальные темы Божественного Три–Единства, а также Богочеловечества позволят сконцентрировать и по–новому осветить как универсальный и традиционный опыт Божественного, так и современный западный опыт человеческого.

Итак, ниже мы встретим:

1) тексты, переведенные в наиболее доступной для восприятия неспециалистов манере; некоторые незначительные перестановки или сокращения вызваны стремлением как можно точнее и понятнее донести основной смысл;

2) следующий за текстами комментарий, восполняющий вынужденную неполноту и отрывочность текстов и построенный в виде эссе;