Category: Christianity

By Prince Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy

By asserting the unlimited autonomy of subjective religious experience, Berdyaev attacks Fr. Florensky precisely for his aspiration to subordinate this experience to some objective beginning; in other words, for the fact that he invests in the belief a mental content independent of the inner experience of the person. And reproaches Fr. Florensky because he affirms external revelation and “demands a transcription of religious experience in terms of transcendent ontology.” From Berdyaev’s point of view, all this is rational scholasticism, which should be rejected. The sophisticated religious psychology of Fr. Florensky “passes with him into scholastic theology; the dogma of the Trinity, as external and transcendent to mystical experience, inevitably turns out to be theological’. Theology always rests on the idea of ​​external revelation, and is opposed to mysticism as resting on the idea of ​​inner revelation. Theology is transcendentalism, mysticism is immanentism.” In Berdyaev’s opinion, “scholasticism in disguise” is a candle. P. A. Florensky is “inevitable punishment for any admission of dogma to and in spiritual life, to and in mystical experience”.[14]

The principle that N. A. Berdyaev opposes to Fr. Florensky, is absolute freedom – the “cognitive eros” that is not restrained by dogma, nor by logic, nor by any objective principles at all; more precisely: a boundless arbitrariness of subjective mysticism. As Berdyaev himself admits, the characteristic feature of his “new” religious consciousness is his conviction that “at present the world is entering an era of anthropological revelation, the end of which must be taken upon by man himself, at his own risk and fear; that divine revelation passes into and through man and continues. This is entering the age of religious adulthood”.[15]

For the reader who is at least somewhat familiar with the history of Christian and Protestant religious sectarianism in particular, there is hardly anything very new and significant in this “new” religious consciousness. As a warning to Fr. Florensky, however, N.A. Berdyaev’s point of view retains some importance, which is why we need to dwell on it here for a bit.

It is obvious that this unlimited freedom of the human individual – “at his own risk and fear” to determine the true revelation, means in practice a final cancellation of the latter, a complete loss of any common religious principles that bind people in one. Where the criterion for the truth of revelation is simply the subjective “religious experience” of the individual, there are obviously as many conflicting revelations as there are people. Clearly, such a view is self-defeating. In the eyes of Berdyaev, does his subjective revelation deserve any greater respect compared to this objective revelation of the Church against which he is rebelling? In the name of what, on what grounds? After all, Berdyaev’s references to his “intuitions” cannot have an external authoritative meaning for other people, and even for the person who experienced the “intuition”, there is always a possible doubt: was it an authentic revelation, a subjective hallucination or an apparition of Satan in the image of the Angel of Light. Those who deny, like Berdyaev, any objective criterion in religion, for him these doubts are unconditionally insoluble.

Thus, the weakness of Berdyaev’s religious point of view is more than obvious for Fr. For Florensky, it would not be a serious danger if he stood completely consistently and firmly on the point of view of the dogmatically determinable and definite objective revelation. Unfortunately, however, in the church views of Fr. Florensky observed an inconsistency, thanks to which he was defenseless against Berdyaev’s objections, and the religious subjectivism of the latter grew into a serious danger for him.

The source of this danger lies precisely in the aforementioned tendency of Fr. Florensky to alogism—in his fascination with that current fashionable trend in religious philosophy which proclaims the subjective experience of individual “religious experience,” unverified by thought, as the supreme criterion in religion. In this direction, he makes an extremely significant concession precisely at this point, where religious subjectivism should meet the strongest resistance from his side – in the teaching about the Church – and precisely with this he gives Berdyaev the opportunity to hold an easy victory over him. As we have already seen, when it comes to Christological questions or the mutual relationship of the persons of the Holy Trinity, Fr. Florensky insisted on the need for such “mathematically precise” dogmatic definitions that would exclude the possibility of different religious interpretations from the point of view of “individual religious experience.” Whatever the “experiences” of this experience may be, it does not depend on the discretion or “inspiration of the individual” whether he will regard the Son of God as “one-person” or “sub-divine”, whether he will recognize in Him one or two natures, whether he will he believes or he will not believe in the inseparability and non-fusion of these two natures.

Such should also be the point of view on the Church. Here, too, a firm dogmatic definition is needed, which would teach people to distinguish the true church from the false one and, in this sense, set some limit before subjective “dare.” However, due to some strange inconsistency, whenever it comes to the Church, Fr. Florensky is attacked by some fear of thought and he becomes an apologist for logical, and in the given case also dogmatic formlessness.

He finds that the Church, as the fullness of divine life, “cannot be laid in the narrow grave of logical definition.” “Let,” he says, “neither I nor anyone else be able, and certainly not succeed, to define what ecclesiasticism is!” Let those who try to do this challenge each other and mutually deny the formula of ecclesiasticism! This very indeterminacy of ecclesiasticity, its elusiveness for logical terms, its ineffability, does not all this prove that ecclesiasticity is a special life, a new life given to man, but, like all life, inaccessible to reason” (p. 5).

When Fr. Florensky speaks of dogmatic definitions concerning other mysteries, he is not misled by the ambiguity of the word “definition.” He knows well that to “determine” dogmatically, this does not mean to exhaust the religious mystery by means of a reasoning formula, to lay it down without a residue in concepts. He is not disturbed by the application to these mysteries of concepts such as “Being”, “essence”, “Person”, “nature”, etc. sub., because he well understands that in the given case the concepts in no way claim to be an exhaustive expression of what they denote, but only play a necessary role of barriers to thought, guarding a certain content of faith against its possible mixing with something untrue or impure. Why, then, when it comes to the Church, does he deny the need for these epithets, and think it possible to leave in this case the religious feeling of the individual without any highly sanctified dogmatic, mental support?

In relation to the Church, he replaces this dogmatic criterion with an aesthetic one – in his thought, the only criterion for ecclesiasticity is beauty. “Yes, there is, he says, a special spiritual beauty, and it, elusive to dogmatic formulas, is at the same time the only true way to determine what is Orthodox and what is not.” Those who know this beauty are the spiritual elders, the masters of the “art of art”, as the holy fathers call asceticism. Spiritual elders have, so to speak, “acquired a skill” in recognizing the goodness of the spiritual life. Orthodox taste, Orthodox appearance are felt, but not subject to arithmetical calculation; Orthodoxy is shown, not proven. That is why for everyone who wants to understand Orthodoxy, there is only one way: the direct experience of Orthodoxy”.

And right here the question arises: where is it, this immediate experience, and how do each of us, imperfect and sinful humans, distinguish it from non-immediate experience? Since only Christ is without sin, even the experience of the greatest of saints cannot be recognized as infallible. And, finally, where are these holy elders of the “orthodox taste” whom I should trust – in our church, in the Roman church, or with the schismatics, and in which sect? If they are precisely here, in Orthodoxy, isn’t there a vicious circle here: do we only know from the “experts” and the “old men” where the true Orthodoxy is! If we start to check the experience of these “experts” from our own imperfect experience, we will probably never know with certainty where this true “Orthodox taste” is: whether among the Old Believers, whether among the Imyaslavtsev, or among the Roman Catholics, or in the Holy Synod? The aesthetic criterion is unable to give us anything but an infinite number of conflicting answers. On the other hand, he gives N. A. Berdyaev the opportunity to place Fr. A Florentine question to which the latter cannot give the least satisfactory answer.

“If ecclesiastical life is life in the Spirit, and if the criterion for a correct church life is Beauty, then why then Jacob Böhme, for example, is not in ecclesiastical life, why did he not live in the Spirit? According to the external, formal criteria for ecclesiasticism, Böhme was a Lutheran and a heretic-gnostic – in the judgment of the official Roman Catholic and Orthodox consciousness; according to the criteria of Spirit and Beauty, however, he was an authentically ecclesiastical Christian. Why, according to the internal criteria of the Spirit and Beauty, from the church should be excommunicated and recognized as heretics the many mystics, people of the righteous life, of the authentic life in the Spirit and Beauty, who do not fit into the external, formal, official criteria?”. [16] ] And so, N. A. Berdyaev accuses Fr. Florensky in internal contradiction.

“The church does not have any external, formal signs and criteria, it is a life in the Spirit and in Beauty. This is the one thesis of a candle. Florensky. His other thesis, which he uses throughout his book, sounds like this: only that life in Spirit and Beauty is religiously permissible, correct, justified, which is ecclesiastic according to the formal, external criteria of ecclesiasticity. Everything non-Orthodox in the literal, religious and external formal sense of the word is suspicious, unhealthy, all this is a charm and even fornication”.[17]

Here the thought of Fr. Florensky is subjected to a certain stylization, but really in his book there are fluctuations between two diametrically opposed criteria for churchness: subjective, aesthetic, passed to him from the “new” religious consciousness, and objective, which was given by the Church itself. I fully agree with the proposal to make a choice between one and the other, and I think that the aesthetic criterion, as decidedly incompatible with the “orthodox theodicy” of Fr. Florensky, should be provided entirely and exclusively as the property of N. A. Berdyaev. Among the duties of the Orthodox theologian is to clearly realize and accurately formulate this objective criterion for ecclesiality, which would enable us to navigate the uncertain, contradictory indications of individual “religious experience” and taste. Otherwise, we risk losing the very awareness of the unity of the Church. The inevitable logical end to which the criterion of “orthodox taste” leads is a loss of universal consciousness and an anarchy of individual experiences, in the place of ecclesiastical concord. The signs of this incipient anarchy are present in Berdyaev’s “dares”; unfortunately for him Fr. Florensky does not fight back strongly enough; in some of its positions, a collision between individual taste and the objective principles and norms in which the Church itself expresses its understanding of ecclesiality can also be traced.

Take, for example, the attitude of Fr. Florensky to Roman Catholicism: following the Slavophiles in this respect, he denied the very existence of spiritual life, and therefore of ecclesiasticism, among Roman Catholics. “Where there is no spiritual life, something external is needed, such as the provision of ecclesiasticism. A given position, the pope or a given totality, a system of positions, the hierarchy – here is the criterion for ecclesiasticity of the Roman Catholic” (p. 6). Such is the assessment of Roman Catholicism from the point of view of the old Slavophiles, to whose teachings Fr. Florensky (p. 608). Meanwhile, it is not difficult to convince ourselves that this Slavophile “taste” is in complete contradiction with the universal tradition of our church. The Orthodox Church recognizes the reality of all Roman Catholic sacraments – from Baptism to Ordination. Which in turn means that, taking into account the clear inadmissibility of the blasphemous thought that ecclesiastical sacraments can be performed outside the Church, our church thereby recognizes the Roman Church as a church. Here is a graphic illustration of the gap that can exist in individual cases between the objective ecclesiastical understanding of the Church and the individual taste of individuals, even if they were the most pious Orthodox.

For Fr. It would not have been particularly difficult for Florensky to avoid this collision with ecclesiastical tradition, if in his teaching about the Church he followed the same method which he applied with success in other areas of religious teaching. The chapter “About Sophia”, for example, in his book is a very good attempt to realize and consolidate in concepts this understanding of “Sophia – the Wisdom of God”, which was actually expressed in the life of the Church, especially in its worship and in her icon painting. Here he is not afraid to rationalize church experience, but for some reason, when it comes to the Church, his point of view radically changes – here for him “concept” means the end of spiritual life!

Meanwhile, the understanding of ecclesiality, which has been expressed in the whole life of our church, in its sacraments, in its worship and in its relation to other churches and religious societies, can be logicized, that is, it can be realized and expressed in concepts, within the same limits and to the same extent as her understanding of “Sophia” and other religious mysteries. Of course, these concepts cannot exhaust the fullness of the spiritual life of the Church, but in them we find firm principles for distinguishing and separating the ecclesiastical from the non-ecclesiastical. The main, objective criterion by which the Church recognizes one from the other has already found its expression when St. Ap. Peter confessed Christ: “Son of the Living God.” Which, according to the Savior, becomes the foundation stone of the Church (Matt. 16:15-18). As in the words of St. Ap. John, who teaches us to distinguish the Spirit of God from the spirit of deception (1 John 4:2-3). This criterion is the actual, real incarnation of God: the manifestation of Christ, the Son of God, who came in the flesh. This criterion, of course, is expressed not in the letter, but in the meaning of the sacred texts. It is the incarnation of God taken in its universal meaning of content and meaning of all the life of mankind and creation. Not something else, but a social incarnation of the God-man Christ, His universal body wants to be the Church itself: where this continuous active God-incarnation is present, there she is, and outside of it she is nothing. Here we are given, as in a grain, the whole teaching of the Church about herself; here is also the reason for the inclusion in it of all those human communities in which the mystery of the incarnation is constantly at work; and here again is the reason for excluding from it all those societies which do not recognize this secret or for some other reasons do not possess it!

Closely related to this is the formal sign by which the Church distinguishes itself from all other purely human organizations. Through the sacraments, the Incarnation of God takes place continuously in the Church, and the authority to perform the sacraments belongs only to the apostles and their successors, who are ordained by them, and therefore only this Church can be the environment of the actual Incarnation of God, to be the body of Christ, which has apostolic succession. In this way, the statement of Fr. Florensky, that the concept of the Church is almost indefinable. This concept is defined dogmatically by the Church itself, which in the Creed itself calls itself “conciliar and apostolic”; The church, therefore, defines itself through clear logical terms, enabling in a number of cases to accurately distinguish the ecclesiastical from the non-ecclesiastical. And these definitions, these external formal signs, although they do not exhaust and do not pretend to exhaust the vital content of the Church, they necessarily logically derive from this content, form together with it an inseparable whole. The incarnation of God, the humanity of God, the deification of men, the sacraments, the hierarchs-mystagogues, these human mediators in the divine-human mystery that takes place in the Church – all these are different expressions of the same meaning, units of an inseparable vital and, at the same time, logical system. Because the logical and the vital in the Church are one and the same. From here it is also clear how groundless the fear of Fr. Florenski to define the Church in concepts: both congregationalism, apostleship, and succession are all concepts not only definable, but also strictly defined. Anyone who knows the teachings of the Church can accurately convey their meaning, and the Church, which knows nothing about the “aesthetic” criterion of Fr. Florensky, is not afraid to express his vital essence in them. If we are told that the dogmatic definitions which the Church gives to herself are incomplete and imperfect, that many questions concerning the Church remain unanswered in them, for example, the question of the grounds and limits of the dogmatic authority of council decrees, then this will not be an objection against what has been said here, but an indication of the need for new dogmatic definitions and, therefore, for new tasks before ecclesiastical thought. To point out the incompleteness of the existing definition does not mean to deny its existence, but to seek its completion. In any case, the demand for a definition of ecclesiality in terms of word and thought means ecclesiality to be affirmed, not erred to. After the Logos, having become flesh, Himself expressed Himself in human language, after He united with human speech and thought, by this very fact He already sanctified both the one and the other. And vain fear of thought must be abandoned. This alogism, which denies the embodiment of the Word of God in human speech and human thought, thereby commits a sin against the mystery of the Incarnation. That is why it, like many other delusions, must be cut off in the name of the criterion of the Incarnation.

It is especially important for us to establish here that this criterion by which the Christian is recognized from the non-Christian, the ecclesiastical from the non-ecclesiastical, is not transcendental, but immanent in thought, i.e., in it we have not only a living but also a logical criterion. After all human nature is deified in the Church, this deification is also experienced by thought itself: without ceasing to be human, thought becomes deified. And therefore, even in this act of deification, no violation of her laws, i.e., of logical laws, is required of her: the superhuman, the divine, which she is called to express, is a crowning, not an abrogation, of the logical.

Logic is precisely one of the characteristic distinguishing features of the church’s understanding of religion as a new religious consciousness. Meanwhile, while Berdyaev teaches us to perceive the “intuition” of religious experience without any mental examination and consideration, the criterion of St. Ap. John, by whom the Church is guided, subordinates all the “revelations” of subjective experience to the judgment of discursive thought: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have appeared in the world” (1 John 4:1).

The meaning of these words is clearest of all: every spirit, both foreign and our own, is to be subjected to a mental test in the way of comparing its testimony with the appearance of Christ come in the flesh. To do this is not to be satisfied with the evidence of “orthodox taste”, but to subject this evidence to the most severe criticism: all that, after examination, turns out to be in clear and irreconcilable contradiction with the mystery of the Incarnation, must be with the very this and rejected. The criterion of St. Ap. John contains in himself the categorical demand that the divine humanity should be the beginning of a logical connection of all our thoughts about faith. And in the fulfillment of this requirement is concluded this mental foretaste of the Tabor light, which is also the highest task before the human mind.

I could end with this, but in conclusion I would like to repeat once again that my criticism comes from a positive and deeply sympathetic attitude towards the book of Fr. Florensky: the meaning of this criticism of mine is reduced to the wish that he would think through the deep thought that lies at the basis of his book. Truly, the Light of Tabor is not a fleeting phenomenon, but an eternal reality in which all our earthly sins, sufferings and contradictions find healing; and it shines not only in the other side of the universe, but also “enlightens every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). And that is why even here, in this life, this universal transformation begins, which will end and become evident in the future resurrection of every creature. Even here, at the prayer of the apostles, Christ came down from the mountain and manifested the healing of the raging life. This Tabor light coming down from above brings with it not only physical healing, but also spiritual healing: the whole composition of man must restore its lost wholeness in it: the spirit, the body, the heart, and the mind. With all his nature, man must participate in this ascent of the mountain, and therefore also with his thought – does not our thought share the common lot of this sinful life, which periodically rages “and suffers badly, because it often falls into fire and often into water” (Matt. 17:15). It was only because of their unbelief that the apostles could not heal these contradictions in life. In the same way, it is only because of our unbelief that these contradictions of thought remain unhealed, which are expressed in its manifold leaps and wanderings.

Complete faith, rising above doubt, must herald that universal healing, which is expressed not only in the transformation of the heart and in the spiritualization of the flesh, but also in the enlightenment of the mind. This revelation of the holy ascetics of our church concludes the fulfillment of the expectations of Russian religious thought. In it and Fr. Florensky has found his Pillar and Support of Truth. Let us wish him to continue to build on this foundation, which is so well and firmly laid.

Source in Russian: Trubetskoy, E. N. “Svet Favorsky and the transformation of the mind” – In: Russkaya mysl, 5, 1914, pp. 25-54; the basis of the text is a report read by the author before a meeting of the Russian Religious and Philosophical Society on February 26, 1914.

Notes:

[14] Berdyaev, N. A. “Stylized Orthodoxy” – In: Russkaya mysl, January/ Бердяев, Н. А. „Стилизованное православие“ – В: Русская мысль, Январь, 1914, p. 114.

[15] Ibid., p. 121.

[16] Ibid., p. 117.

[17] Ibid.

By Prince Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy

4

The stamp of the truly religious spirit and, in particular, of the folk-Russian religious genius Fr. Florensky sees “not in the cutting off, but in the transformation of the fullness of being” (p. 772), and we cannot but agree with the correctness of the statement of the main religious task here. However, has this task been fully thought out by the esteemed author? Is he clearly aware of all the requirements arising from it? Here I have enough substantial doubts.

This spiritual transformation, which is destined to become bodily in the future age, must encompass the whole nature of man: it must begin in the heart – the center of his spiritual life, and from there spread to the entire periphery. And from this point of view, I decide to put Fr. Florensky a question arising from reading his book. Human nature, in addition to the heart and body, which are about to be resurrected, also belongs to the human mind. Is he also subject to transformation or cutting down? Does Fr. Florensky in the transformation of the human mind, does he recognize in this transformation as a necessary moral task, or does he simply think that the mind must be cut off, like the seductive “right eye”, so that “man” himself can be saved; and is it possible to speak of the salvation of the “whole man”, in case his mind is destined to remain “in the outer darkness” until the end, even if it is only within the limits of this, earthly life. However, this transformation must begin and be foretold here. Must the human mind take an active part in this foretaste, or is it required merely to withdraw from all activity, from that which is its necessary law?

To put these questions to a man whose book is, in any case, a remarkable mental feat seems odd. Nevertheless, I am obliged to set them down: therefore because, paradoxical as it may seem, a writer who has labored so much and so fruitfully at the solution of the task of transforming the mind, does not clearly enough realize what that task consists in. concludes.

In its earthly reality, the human mind suffers from that distressing disorder and that division which are the common stamp of all sinful life; this, as we have already seen, is shown with great brightness and clarity by Fr. Florensky in his chapter on doubt; however, if this is so, then the transformation of the mind must be expressed precisely in the healing of this sinful decay and of this division, in the restoration of its inner integrity in the unity of the Truth. Is this what we see with Fr. Florensky? Unfortunately, it is at this point that the truth, which is generally so clearly realized by him, suddenly turns out to be obscured, literally hidden by a cloud. Instead of a clear solution to the question posed, in his book we find only vague and contradictory answers, like an unresolved struggle of opposing aspirations. This is revealed in his doctrine of antinomianism. Here, in his thought, two not only irreconcilable, but irreconcilable situations collide. On the one hand, antinomianism – internal contradiction – is a property of the sinful state of our reason. From this point of view, it is necessary to seek a reconciliation, a synthesis of contradictory principles – a gracious illumination of the mind, in which the contradictions are removed, although “… not rationally, but in a super-rational way” (pp. 159-160).

On the other hand, in a row of pages of the same book, it is asserted that truth itself is antinomian (that is, “truth” with a lowercase letter, not a capital letter – the truth about Truth), that true religious dogma is antinomian; contradiction constitutes the necessary seal of the true in general. “Truth itself is an antinomy and cannot but be so” (pp. 147, 153).

And accordingly our author wavers between two radically different attitudes to human thought.

On the one hand, it must enter the mind of truth, become whole, like the God-bearing minds of the ascetics (p. 159).

On the other hand, it must be silenced, i.e. simply cut off as fundamentally contradictory and essentially antinomian – the very pursuit of “reasonable faith” is the beginning of “diabolical pride” (p. 65).

Can it be affirmed at the same time that as sin is antinomian, so that truth is antinomian? Does this not mean, in simpler language, that truth is sinful, or that truth itself is sin?

They may, of course, object to me that here we have an “antinomy for the sake of antinomy,” that is, a necessary contradiction. And that is why we must carefully look at the contradictory theses of Fr. Florensky: do we really have in them an objectively necessary antinomy, or just a subjective contradiction of the individual mind?

The thesis of Fr. Florenski, that the antinomies of our reason are in themselves a property of his sinful state, must be recognized as entirely true. “Looked at from the angle of dogmatics,” he says, “antinomies are inevitable.” Since sin exists (and in its recognition is the first half of faith), then our whole being, as well as the whole world, are broken” (p. 159). “There, in heaven, is the one Truth; in our case – many fragments of it, which are not congruent with each other. In the history of the flat and boring (?!) thinking of the “new philosophy”, Kant had the audacity to utter the great word “antinomy”, which violated the decorum of the supposed unity. Even for that alone he would deserve eternal glory. There is no need in case his own antinomies fail – the work is in the experience of antinomies’ (p. 159).

By not sharing this sharp review of Fr. Florensky on the new philosophy, I think that the diagnosis of the disease of human reason was made by him perfectly correctly. From this point of view, however, it would seem that precisely these internal contradictions – this antinomy, represent an obstacle to our thought in achieving the Truth, separate it from God. To my great surprise, however, the antithesis of Fr. Florensky says just the opposite. Truth itself constitutes an antinomy: “only the antinomy can be believed; and every judgment which is non-antinomial is either simply recognized or simply rejected by reason, since it does not exceed the limits of its egoistic individuality” (p. 147). According to the thought of Fr. Florenski, the very salvation of dogma is determined by its antinomianity, thanks to which it can be a reference point for reason. It is with dogma that our salvation begins, because only dogma, as antinomian, “does not narrow our freedom and gives full scope to benevolent faith or malicious unbelief” (p. 148).

To affirm that antinomianism is the stamp of the sinful division of our reason, and at the same time to reason that it is precisely in it that the power that saves us is contained, means falling into a contradiction which is not at all rooted in the essence of the matter and has no character of objective necessity, but should be fully recognized as the fault of Fr. Florensky. Precisely on the question of the “antinomian” of the Revelation, we have the quite unequivocal answer of St. Ap. Paul: “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom I and Silas and Timothy preached among you, was not ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but in Him was ‘yes’, because all the promises of God in Him are ‘yes’, and in Him “amen,” to the glory of God through us” (2 Cor. 1:19-20). How are we to reconcile with this text our author’s assertion that the mysteries of religion “… cannot be put into words in any other way than in the form of a contradiction, which is both yes and no” (p. 158)? I draw attention to the extreme community of this situation. Well, if it is really true that every secret of religion is both yes and no, then we must recognize as equally true that there is a God, and that He is not, and that Christ is risen, and that He was not risen at all. On Fr. Florensky, in any case, has to introduce some limitation in his statement and admit that not all, but only some religious secrets are antinomian, i.e. contradictory in form. But even such an understanding of “antinomianism” does not stand up to criticism.

It asks, above all, what is inherently contradictory or antinomian: the dogma itself, or our imperfect understanding of the dogma? On this matter, the thought of Fr. Florensky hesitates and splits. On the one hand, he affirms that in the Tri-Ray light revealed by Christ and reflected in the righteous, “… the contradiction of this age is overcome by love and glory”, and, on the other hand, for him, the contradiction is “a mystery of the soul, mystery of prayer and love”. “The whole church service, especially the canons and sticharies, is overflowing with this ever-boiling wit of antithetical juxtapositions and antinomian assertions” (p. 158). Moreover, in the book in question there is a whole table of dogmatic antinomies. However, it is precisely from this table that it becomes clear what the main error of the respected author is.

He simply uses the words “antinomy” and “antinomianity” in two different senses. As a characteristic of the sinful state, antinomy always means contradiction – in relation to reason from this point of view, antinomianism denotes internal contradiction. When the author talks about the “antinomian nature of the dogma” or of the church chants, this should mostly be understood in the sense that the dogma is a kind of union of the world’s opposites (coincidentia oppositorum).

It is not particularly difficult to be convinced that precisely this mixing of the contradictory and the opposite is the error in a whole series of examples of “dogmatic antinomies” in Fr. Florensky. In fact, we have no antinomies in them at all.

For example, despite the respected author, the dogma of the Holy Trinity is not at all antinomian, since there is no internal contradiction in it. There would be an antinomy here if we were stating contradictory predicates about the same subject in the same relation. If, for example, the Church taught that God is one in essence and at the same time not one but triune in essence: this would be a real antinomy. In church dogma, however, “unity” refers to the essence, “trinity” – to the Persons, which from the point of view of the Church are not the same. It is clear that there is no contradiction, that is, no antinomy here: “yes” and “no” refer to the same thing.[9]

The dogma of the mutual relationship of the two natures in Jesus Christ is also non-antinomic. There would be an antinomy here if the Church claimed at the same time both the separation and the inseparability of the two natures; and their fusion and non-fusion. But in the doctrine of “inseparability and non-fusion” of the two natures there is no internal contradiction and, therefore, no antinomy – because logically the concepts of inseparability and non-fusion are not at all mutually exclusive, so here we have opposites (opposita), not contradictory (contraria) concepts.

With these examples, it is possible to clarify not only the error in the book under consideration, but also the essence of the correct understanding of antinomy and antinomianism. We have already convinced ourselves that these dogmas are not in themselves antinomies, but to the flat mind they inevitably become antinomies. When gross human understanding makes the three Persons into three Gods, the dogma indeed becomes an antinomy, for the thesis that God is one cannot in any way be reconciled with the antithesis that “there are three Gods.” In the same way, that crude understanding, which grasps the union of the two natures on the model of the material union of bodies, turns the dogma of the two natures into an antinomy, because it cannot in any way imagine how it is possible for two materially conceivable natures to be unite into one and not merge.

Antinomy and antinomianism are generally rooted in the intellectual understanding of world mysteries. However, when we rise above rational understanding, this alone already resolves the antinomies; the contradictions now become a union of opposites – coincidentia oppositorum – and their resolution takes place according to the measure of our elevation.

This essentially concludes the answer to the question of the solvability of antinomies in general and religious antinomies in particular. On this question, Fr. Florensky gives a negative answer. “How cold and distant, how ungodly and hard-hearted, seems to me that time of my life when I thought the antinomies of religion solvable but not yet resolved, when in my proud folly I asserted the logical monism of religion” (p. 163) .

In this community of too sharp a formula, the book under consideration is a combination of truths and fallacies. To dream of some perfect and final resolution of all antinomies in this life is, of course, just as insane as to imagine that we can in the earthly stage of our existence be entirely free from sin. However, to affirm the final unsolvability of all antinomies, to deny the very legality of attempts to resolve them, means in our thought to submit to sin. As the fatal necessity of sin in this life does not exclude our duty to fight against it and with God’s help if possible to free ourselves from it, so the inevitability for us of antinomianism does not take away the duty that lies upon us: to strive to rise above this sinful darkness of our rational consciousness, to try to enlighten our thought by this only inherent light, in which all our earthly contradictions also fall away. To reason otherwise means to affirm flat rational thinking not only as a fact of our life, but also as a norm of what is obligatory for us.[10]

Splitness and contradiction is a factual state of our reason: it is also what constitutes the essence of reason; only that the true and authentic norm of reason is unity. It is no coincidence that even bl. Augustine saw in this search of our mind, in this aspiration of his, his formal godlikeness, a search for connection with the One and the Unconditional, because truly the One, that is God. Augustine quite rightly observes that in all the functions of our reason stands before him the ideal of unity: both in analysis and in synthesis I want unity and I love unity (unum amo et unum volo[11]). And indeed, the ideal of knowledge, realized to a greater or lesser extent in every cognitive act, consists in connecting the knowable with something that is unified and unconditional.

Here it is necessary to explain a paradoxical phenomenon that seems to contradict what has just been said, namely: when man, in the spiritual upsurge of his earthly perfection, begins to approach the Truth, then the amount of contradictions that he notices , is not reduced in the least. On the contrary, as Fr. Florensky, “… the closer we are to God, the more distinct the contradictions become. There, in upper Jerusalem, they are gone. And here – here they are in everything…”. “The more brightly shines the Truth of the Tri-Ray Light shown by Christ and reflected in the righteous, the Light in which the contradiction of this age is overcome with love and with glory, the more sharply the cracks of peace also blacken. Cracks in everything’.

Psychologically, the observations of Fr. Florensky are perfectly correct here; nevertheless, his understanding of “antinomianism” is not only not confirmed by them, but on the contrary – it is refuted. Contradictions are discovered and seem to multiply in proportion to the enlightenment of our mind, not at all because the Truth is antinomic or that it is contradictory – quite the opposite: they are laid bare in proportion to the contrast with the unity of the Truth. The nearer we are to the Truth, the more deeply we realize our sinful division, the clearer it becomes to us how far we still stand from it, and in this is the basic law of both moral and mental enlightenment. In order to realize that you have no garment to enter the marriage hall, it is necessary to see this hall at least from a distance with your mind’s eye. It is the same in the knowledge of the Truth – here, as well as in the process of moral improvement, the higher a person rises from degree to degree, the brighter the Truth, unified and all-encompassing, shines upon him, the more perfectly he realizes its own incompleteness: the inner contradiction of its reason.

To be aware of sin, however, means to take the first step towards freeing yourself from it; in the same way, to be aware of rational antinomies means already to a certain extent to rise above them and above our own rationality and take the first step towards overcoming it.

An important consideration must be added to this. Not only in the future, but also in this life of ours, there are many planes of being and, accordingly, many degrees of knowledge. And so long as the process of our improvement is not completed, so long as we ascend spiritually and mentally from degree to degree, the very antinomies of our reason do not all lie on the same plane. Ascending to the pi-higher degree, with this alone we already overcome the contradictions characteristic of the lower lying degrees; on the other hand, new tasks are revealed before us, and therefore also new contradictions, which were not visible to us while we were in the lower. Thus, for example, for the person who has outgrown that degree of understanding, at which the three Persons of the Holy Trinity are mixed with “three Gods”, the antinomy in the dogma of the Holy Trinity disappears or “takes away” by this very thing. So much more clearly, however, do other profound antinomies of our misunderstanding stand before his mental gaze, such as, for example, the antinomy of human freedom and divine predestination, or of God’s justice and all-forgiveness. Generally speaking, antinomies form a complex hierarchy of degrees and in their degrees of depth represent the multiplicity of differences. On the one hand, Kant’s antinomies remain antinomies only for undeveloped, flat reason, which seeks an unconditional basis for phenomena in the order of temporally determined causes. These antinomies are easily overcome by the independent powers of thought: as soon as it rises into the domain of that which is beyond time. On the other hand, for deep religious understanding such contradictions are discovered, the solution of which exceeds all that depth of knowledge that has hitherto been accessible to man. However, what has so far been inaccessible can become accessible to a person at a different, higher level of spiritual and intellectual ascent. The limit of this rise has not yet been pointed out, and no one should dare to point it out. Herein lies the chief objection against those who affirm the final indissolubility of antinomies.

In the opinion of Fr. Florensky’s reconciliation and unity of antinomian claims is “higher than reason” (p. 160). We could probably agree with this position, as long as it were not ambiguous, that is, as long as the concept of reason was more clearly defined, which would exclude the possibility that the word “reason” itself could be used in different senses. Unfortunately, for our author, as well as for many other adherents of these views, reason is sometimes understood as a synonym for logical thinking in general, sometimes as a thought stuck to the plane of the temporal, which is unable to rise above this plane and is therefore flat.

If we understand reasoning in the sense of the latter, then the thought of Fr. Florensky is perfectly correct; naturally the resolution of antinomies is higher than the plane of the temporal and therefore lies beyond the limits of “reason.” Moreover, in order not to fall on this plane of rational understanding, a certain act of self-denial is required of our thought—that feat of humility in which thought renounces its proud hope of drawing from itself the fullness of knowledge and is ready to accept in itself the Revelation of the superhuman, of the divine Truth.

In this sense, and only in this sense, we can agree with Fr. Florensky that “true love” is expressed “in the rejection of reason” (p. 163). Unfortunately, however, in other places in our book, this same requirement of “renunciation of reason” is received by Fr. Florenski’s other meaning, which from a Christian point of view is absolutely unacceptable.

It requires that for the sake of God we give up “the monism of thinking”, and precisely in this he perceives “the beginning of true faith” (p. 65). Here at Fr. Florensky is far from talking about some metaphysical monism – the logical monism that he rejects is precisely the aspiration of reason to bring everything to the unity of the Truth, precisely in this he sees the “diabolical pride”. According to his thought, “monistic continuity is the banner of the seditious reason of creatures, which is torn from its Origin and root and scatters in the dust of self-affirmation and self-destruction. Quite the opposite: “… dualistic discontinuity is the banner of reason, which destroys itself because of its Beginning and in union with Him receives its renewal and its fortress” (p. 65).

It is precisely in these lines that the fundamental error in the entire teaching of Fr. Florensky on antinomianism. To renounce “monism in thinking” means to renounce not the sin of our thought, but its true norm, the ideal of all-unity and all-wholeness, in other words, the very thing that constitutes the formal godlikeness of our reason; and to recognize “dualistic discontinuity” as a standard means to normalize the sinful bifurcation of our reason.

In general, the attitude of Fr. Florensky’s approach to reason can hardly be seen as something that accords with his essentially Christian worldview. This is clearly revealed when comparing it with this criterion by which St. Ap. John teaches us to distinguish the spirit of God from the spirit of deception. Both for religious life and for religious thought, the absolute norm is given to us in the image of Christ, who came in the flesh (1 John 4:2-3). Does the teaching of Fr. Florensky on the mutual relation of God’s nature and human nature in the knowledge of God?

The reconciliation of the divine and the human, which is revealed to us in the image of the God-man, is not violence against human nature. The basis of our hope lies precisely in the fact that nothing human is cut off here, except sin: the perfect God is at the same time a perfect man, and therefore the human mind also participates in this union without violating its law and norm – it is subject to transfiguration rather than mutilation.

What is an accomplished fact in Christ the God-man must become an ideal and norm for all humanity. As the union of the two natures in Christ was not forced, but free, in the same way the union of the divine principle and the human mind in the knowledge of God must be free; no violence should happen here; the law of human reason, without which it ceases to be reason, is not to be violated, but fulfilled. In the unity of Truth the human mind must find its unity. And no difference between the truth with a small letter and the Truth with a capital letter does not take away from us the responsibility to strive for this very goal: to seek the unity of truth. For this truth, which bears upon itself the stamp of our sinful division, is no truth at all, but a delusion. The monism of thinking in Christ must be justified, not condemned.

And the mistake of Fr. Florensky’s conclusion is precisely that with him the free attitude of the human mind towards the Truth is replaced by a violent one: before us he puts an alternative – or to accept the truth about the Holy Trinity, which from his point of view is antinomic, i.e. contradictory, or die in madness. To us he says: “Choose, worm and nothingness: tertium non datur[12]” (p. 66).

Christ, who wanted to see in His disciples His friends and not slaves, did not address their consciousness in this way. He who in deed revealed the trinity to them, showing, in answer to the doubts of Philip, in His own person the Heavenly Father, made this mystery intelligible to them, intelligible to the lover, because He contrasted it with the love that brings about unity in the multitude: “that they may be one, even as we are” (John 17:11). Such an appeal to human consciousness persuades, not coerces; it heals not only the heart of man, but also his mind, because in it our reason finds fulfillment of its norm of unity; in such a discovery of the trinity for our thought already here, in this life, the antinomy of unity and multiplicity is removed, its multiplicity appears not torn and not split, but united from the inside, connected.

A. Florensky may object to me that this resolution of the antinomy is beyond our reason, but there is also a dangerous ambiguity in this statement that must be removed – I repeat that, if by “reason” we understand thought, which has stuck to the temporary, then Fr. Florensky will be perfectly right, for Truth is beyond time. If, on the other hand, the meaning of the doctrine under consideration is that the resolution of the antinomy takes place only beyond human thought in general, then such a meaning is unconditionally unacceptable, since with this alone the human reason is thrown alone into the outer darkness, depriving itself of participation in the joy of universal transfiguration.

5

The question of the Christian attitude towards the human mind is inseparably connected with the question of the Christian attitude towards the representative of the mind in human society – towards the intelligentsia.

Here, too, I cannot be satisfied with the decision of Fr. Florensky. His extremely passionate, and at times cruel, judgments of the intelligentsia, of what he himself calls “graceless” and “earthly” souls, sound like a sharp dissonance in his profoundly Christian book. In the very immensity of the negation here, one feels a sore point of the considered work and of its author. As we have already seen, Fr. Florensky recalls that “godless and hard-hearted” time in his own life when he intellectually believed in the logical monism of religion. The former intellectual also feels in his fascinating descriptions of the skeptical hell he once experienced. In general, for our author, “intelligence” is an internal enemy, not an external one. In himself there is still that hateful intellectual which he himself denies; and therein lies the reason for this extremity of negation, which excludes the possibility of justice.

In places it even seems that not only the “intellectual”, but even the own human thought of Fr. For him, Florensky is an enemy that he wants to get rid of. It goes without saying that such an attitude to thought and to “intelligence” cannot be crowned with complete victory. Doubts in thought cannot be overcome by a denial of logic, by a leap into the unattainable and the unknowable; in order not to be overcome, they must be thought through. Likewise, the “intellectual” cannot be defeated by negation, but by satisfying his legitimate mental demands. The truth of Revelation must become immanent to thought; only on this condition can it triumph over irreligious thought. Then, when the content of the religious teaching insistently asserts itself as something external, beyond thought, with this itself, thought asserts itself in its state of separation and separation from religion, and thus condemns itself to cruelty. Thinking that has been expelled from the realm that is opposed to religion inevitably remains “intellectual” – in the bad sense of the word: rational, devoid of content.

The original sin of the book of Fr. Florensky concludes precisely in this her dependence on this “intelligence”, which he denies. Precisely “antinomianism” is a point of view that is too typical of the modern intellectual, and that is why it is extremely popular. There is, no more, no less, an unconquered skepticism, a split in thought, elevated to principle and norm. This is such a point of view of thought that asserts itself in its contradiction. Paradoxical as it may seem at first glance, between rationalism and “antinomianism” there is the closest kinship, more than that: an immediate logical and genetic connection. Rationalism exalts in principle the self-sufficient thought, the thought which derives the knowledge of truth from itself, while antinomianism liberates this same thought from its immanent religion and norm, from that commandment of unity which is the likeness of God in it. He proclaims to be the property of truth what in reality is the sin of reason—its inner decay. In practice, “antinomianism” is a purely rational point of view, because it affirms the contradictions of our reason as finally insoluble and invincible – more than that: it elevates them to a religious value.

At Fr. Florensky, as with a deeply religious thinker, this alogism fashionable in our time does not reach its ultimate consequences. Today, a typical representative of this direction is N. A. Berdyaev, who finally broke with the point of view of objective revelation and in the entire teaching of Fr. Florensky sympathized almost exclusively with his “antinomianism,” i.e., with his weakest.

On Fr. Florensky this sympathy should serve as a warning; it contained within itself the instruction that, raised in principle, antinomianism was fundamentally opposed to his own religious point of view. This is a dangerous deviation of thought, the natural end of which has manifested itself in Berdyaev as decadent dilettantism, giving itself the appearance of victory over prudence.

6

Decline is the inevitable fate of that thought which has lost its immanent criterion. Once freed from the logical norm of all-unity, it inevitably falls into captivity, into slavish dependence on illogical experiences: having no criterion to distinguish in these experiences the higher from the lower, the superconscious from the subconscious, such thought gives itself up uncontrollably to all the suggestions of affect, taking them as prophetic intuitions. Elevating the “irritation of captive thought” to a principle of philosophizing is also the most characteristic feature of modern decadent philosophy.

Carried to the end, this trend inevitably leads to a denial of objective revelation, to a rebellion against every religious dogma as such. And this is so for the simple reason that each dogma has its own strictly defined mental, logical composition that anchors the content of faith: in each dogma there is a precise logical formula that strictly separates the true from the untrue, the worthy of belief from delusion. This places a limit on affect in the realm of religious life and gives the believer a firm guide to distinguish truth from falsehood within subjective religious experience. These dogmatic definitions, through which the possibility of mixing the Truth with anything foreign and external to it is cut off for the believer, are often examples of logical elegance and Fr. Florensky knows this – something more: he glorifies St. Athanasius the Great, who was able to express “mathematically precisely” even in a later age the truth about the Oneness that “eluded accurate expression in intelligent minds” (p. 55).

It is understandable that for modern religious decadence, which upholds the freedom of affect against thought, such a subordination of religious feeling to rigid logical determinations is something absolutely unacceptable. Well, precisely because of his worship of the “mathematically accurate” dogmatic formulations of the Church, Fr. Florensky was subjected to fierce attacks by Berdyaev.[13] Undoubtedly, the valuable aspect of the latter’s objections lies in the fact that these objections put Fr. Florensky faced the need to more sharply distinguish himself from this decadence of alogism, a typical representative of which in religious philosophy is N. A. Berdyaev.

Source in Russian: Trubetskoy, E. N. “Svet Favorsky and the transformation of the mind” – In: Russkaya mysl, 5, 1914, pp. 25-54; the basis of the text is a report read by the author before a meeting of the Russian Religious and Philosophical Society on February 26, 1914.

Notes:

 [9] This opponent of mine, who has noticed “Hegelianism” in these words, has apparently forgotten Hegel. It is Hegel who teaches that all our thinking moves in contradictions. From his point of view, the dogma of the Holy Trinity is also contradictory or “antinomic”. While I maintain that there is no contradiction in it.

[10] It is worth noting that even Fr. Florensky, faced with the antinomy of divine justice and mercy, does not remain at the apparent contradiction of thesis and antithesis, but tries to give it a solution.

[11] Cf. my essay: Религиозно-общественный идеал западного христианства в V веке. Миросозерцание бл. Августина, M. 1892, pp. 56-57.

[12] From Latin: “third not given”.

[13] Berdyaev, N. A. “Stylized Orthodoxy” – In: Russkaya mysl, January, 1914, pp. 109-126.

(to be continued)

By Prince Evgeny Nikolaevich Trubetskoy

On the occasion of the book by candle. P. A. Florensky “Pillar and Support of Truth” (Moscow: “Put”, 1914)

1

In the Gospel there is a wonderful image, personifying the unceasing division in the earthly life of mankind. On Mount Tabor, the chosen apostles contemplate the bright face of the transfigured Christ. Down below, at the foot of the mountain, in the midst of the general vanity of the “unfaithful and depraved” kind,[1] a madman gnashes his teeth and foam comes from his mouth,[2] and the disciples of Christ, because of their unbelief,[3] are powerless to heal.

This double image – of our hope and our grief, beautifully combines into a complete picture, which several centuries ago Raphael tried to convey in full. There, on the mountain, that radiance of eternal glory appeared to the elect which must fill both the human soul and external nature. This glory cannot remain forever in the hereafter. In the same way all human souls and persons should shine as the sun in Christ; in the same way the whole corporeal world must become the bright shirt of the transfigured Saviour! Let the eternal light descend from the mountain and fill the plain with it. In this, and in this alone, lies the final path to the actual and complete healing of the demon-possessed life. In Raphael, this thought is expressed through the raised finger of the apostle, who, in response to the request for healing of the madman, points to Tabor.[4]

The same contrast that is embodied in this painting is also a major motif in Russian religious art. On the one hand – the great Athonian ascetics, and after them also the ascetics in the Russian Church, have never stopped proclaiming that the Light of Tabor is not a fleeting phenomenon, but a permanent, eternal reality, which even here, on earth, becomes clear to the greatest by the saints, crowning their ascetic feat. On the other hand, the more the saints and ascetics climbed the mountain, the more they abandoned the world in their search for the Light of Tabor, the stronger down below, on the plain, the dominion of evil was felt, the more often there gave out the cry of despair.

“Lord, have mercy on my son; at the new moon he is seized with rage, and he suffers badly, for he often falls into fire and often into water” (Mat. 17:15).

All over the world there is this irreconcilable opposition of the upper and the lower, of the mountainous and the plain. However, probably nowhere else does it manifest itself so clearly and so sharply as here. And if there is a soul that is torn, divided and tormented by contradictions, then this is by far the Russian soul.

The contrast between transformed and untransformed reality is everywhere in one way or another. However, in countries where European civilization prevails, it is obscured by culture and therefore not so noticeable to the superficial observer. There the devil walks “with a sword and a hat”, like Mephistopheles, while here, on the contrary, he openly shows his tail and hooves. In all these countries, where even a relative order and some kind of prosperity reigns, Beelzebub is in one way or another chained. In our country, on the contrary, he was destined for centuries to rage at will. And probably it is precisely this circumstance that causes those unusual upsurges of religious feeling which the best disciples of Christ in Russia experienced and are experiencing. The more boundless is the chaos and ugliness of turbulent flat existence, the stronger is the need to ascend into the realm of the high, into the immovable repose of unchanging, eternal beauty. Until now, Russia has been the classic country of life’s misfortune – isn’t that the reason why it is precisely that region where in the religious inspiration of the elect the ideal of universal transformation has shone especially brightly!

I speak not only of the high apostles who were given to see the Light of Tabor face to face – Russia did not lack those lesser disciples of Christ who did not see the Transfiguration with their bodily eyes, but who foretold it in the contemplation of the mind and of faith, and have awakened that faith in others, heralding in the plain the healing that comes from above. Following the ascetics, great Russian writers also sought the Tavor Light. The apostle, who, when asking for healing, points his finger to the mountain and to the Transfiguration, thereby expresses the deepest thought of Russian literature – both artistic and philosophical. Pure, abstract reasoning, as well as “art for art’s sake” alienated from life, have never been popular with us. Quite the opposite: from both thought and artistic creation, Russian educated people have always expected a transformation of life. In this respect, such antipodes as Pisarev – with his utilitarian view of art, and Dostoevsky – with his slogan “beauty will save the world” are similar in our country. Our creativity, the spiritual, and the philosophical, has always longed, not for some abstracted truth, but for actual truth. The greatest that is in our literature was created in the name of the ideal of the whole life. Consciously or unconsciously, the greatest representatives of Russian folk genius have always sought that light that heals from within and transforms life from within: both spiritual and physical. Universal healing in universal transformation: we find this thought under various modifications in our great artists – in Gogol, in Dostoevsky, and even, be it in a distorted, rationalized form, in Tolstoy, and among the thinkers – the Slavophiles, Fedotov, Solovyov and the many continuations of the latter.

And always the search for the Light of Tabor is evoked in our writers by life, a painful feeling of the power of evil that reigns in the world. Whether we take Gogol, or Dostoyevsky, or Solovyov, in each of them we will see the same source of religious inspiration: the contemplation of suffering, sinful and demon-possessed humanity – this is what evokes the greatest upheavals in their work. Before them stands not just one sick person, but the great nation as a whole – like the never-suffering native country, periodically possessed by a mute and deaf spirit, which constantly calls for help and constantly seeks help. This sense of hell reigning in our earthly reality has incited the exponents of our religious idea to various deeds and exploits. Some have completely fled from the world and climbed the mountain – to those highest peaks of spiritual life, where the Tabor Light really becomes tangible, visible; others, remaining at the foot of the mountain, mentally foretold this vision and prepared human souls for it. In any case, however, the object of religious search, the main source of religious creativity, was the same for ascetics, artists, and philosophers.

2

This source has not dried up even nowadays. A vivid proof of what has been said is the recently published remarkable book by Fr. Pavel Florensky Pillar and support of truth. In our country, he is not the progenitor of some new direction, but a continuation of the Christian tradition, which in the life of our church counts many centuries, and in Russian literature – both in art and in philosophy, it has already found not one or two talented and even genius exponents. However, the said book of his is a sequel that is deeply original and creative; in her person we have a work of extraordinary talent, which is a genuine phenomenon in modern Russian religious-philosophical literature.

The movement of his thought is determined by this fundamental contrast, which has determined the entire course of the development of Russian religious thought: on the one hand, it is the abyss of evil, the sinful, internally disintegrated world, the world that has “disintegrated into contradictions si”, and on the other hand – the “Tavor light”, in the eternal reality of which the author is deeply convinced. All this is still the same ideal of the perfect, complete life, which before Fr. Florensky was repeatedly embodied in the works of Russian religious thinkers. Sophia – Wisdom of God – type of all creation; The Immaculate Virgin Mary – the manifest embodiment of this wholeness, manifestation of the deified creature on earth; finally – the Church, as a manifestation of this same totality in the collective social life of humanity – all ideas that Russian religious thought has long absorbed, which have entered into circulation in our country and are therefore well known to the educated Russian reader interested in religious matters. Father himself. Florensky wants to be the exponent not of his personal but of the objective, ecclesiastical wisdom, and therefore it is understandable that he does not claim novelty of the basic principles.

In his words, his book “is based on the ideas of St. Athanasius the Great” (p. 349) and is completely alien to the desire to set forth any “system of his own” (p. 360). Of course this desire to renounce one’s own system for the higher divine system of Revelation is quite understandable on the part of a religious writer. Nevertheless, Fr. Florensky vainly thinks that all these “own views” such as he has in his work originate only from “his own misconceptions, ignorance or misunderstanding” (p. 360). This book certainly cannot claim the absolute value of Revelation, but only the relative value of human interpretation of Revelation. And here, in this subordinate area of ​​human creativity, something no less valuable is said, of course, precisely because it is its own.

In this sense, this precious thing that Fr. Florensky, is concluded above all in the unusually bright and strong depiction of the main opposition, from which the search for our religious thought was determined and is determined. On the one hand, a clear and deep awareness of the eternal reality of the Tabor Light, which is the supreme beginning of the universal spiritual and physical enlightenment of man and all creatures, and on the other hand, the overwhelmingly powerful sanctification of the chaotic sinful reality, of this furious life, which touches Gehenna. I do not know in recent religious-philosophical literature an equal in depth analysis of this inner splitting and disintegration of the personality, which is the very essence of sin. In the literature of the past centuries, this theme was developed with incomparable brightness in Confessions of bl. Augustine and in this regard Fr. Florensky can be called his student. His main source, however, is not any literary examples, but his own painful experiences, verified through the collective, ecclesiastical experience.

The book Pillar and Support of Truth is the work of a man for whom Gehenna is not an abstract concept, but a reality that he has experienced and felt with his whole being. “The question of the second death,” he says, “is a painful, sincere question. Once in my dream I experienced it in all its concreteness. There were no images, only purely internal experiences. A bottomless, almost substance-dense darkness surrounded me. Some forces drew me towards the end, and I felt that this was the end of God’s being, that outside of it was absolute Nothingness. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. I knew that just one more moment and I would be thrown into the outer darkness. Darkness began to permeate my entire being. My self-consciousness was half lost, and I knew that this was absolute, metaphysical annihilation. In utter desperation, I screamed not with my voice: “From the depths I cried to You, Lord. Lord, hear my voice.” In those words at that moment my soul poured out. Someone’s hands powerfully grabbed me – me, the sinking one, and threw me somewhere far from the abyss. The thrust was sudden and powerful. Suddenly I found myself in a familiar setting, in my room, as if from some mystical non-existence I fell into my usual existence. And immediately I felt myself before the face of God, and then I woke up, all wet with a cold sweat” (p. 205-206).

That sin is “a moment of disorder, decay and corruption in the spiritual life”, this was said with incomparable eloquence, although expressed differently, by St. Ap. Paul (Rom. 7:15-25). Here the merit of our author lies only in the remarkably vivid revelation of the vital meaning of the formula in question, in the subtle psychological depiction of the sinful condition. In sin, “the soul loses consciousness of its creative nature, loses itself in the chaotic vortex of its own states, ceasing to be their substance: the Self suffocates in the “thought flow of passions… In sin, the soul slips away on its own, loses myself. It is not by chance that the language characterizes the last degree of the moral fall of women as “loss”. No doubt, however, there are not only “lost” women, who have lost themselves within themselves, their god-like creation of life, but also “lost men”; in general, the sinful soul is a “lost soul”, moreover, it is lost not only to others, but primarily to itself, since it failed to preserve itself” (p. 172). The sinful state represents, first of all, “a state of depravity, depravity, i.e. destruction of the soul – the integrity of the person is destroyed, the inner layers of life are destroyed (which should be hidden even for the Self itself – such is preferentially the sex), are turned outward, and what is to be discovered, the openness of the soul, i.e. sincerity, immediacy, motives for actions, precisely this is hidden inward, making the personality secret… Here it receives a face, and even as it were a personality, that side of our being which is naturally faceless and impersonal, for this is the ancestral life, whatever happens in the face. Having received the phantom likeness of a person, this generic sub-basis of the person acquires independence, while the actual person is falling apart. The ancestral domain is separated from the personality, and therefore, having only the appearance of a personality, it ceases to obey the dictates of the spirit – it becomes unreasonable and insane, and the personality itself, having lost from its composition its ancestral basis, i.e. its root, loses consciousness of reality and becomes the image no longer of the real basis of life, but of emptiness and nothingness, i.e. of the empty and gaping mask, and, concealing with itself nothing that is real, itself realizes as a lie, as acting. Blind lust and aimless mendacity: this is what remains of the personality after its depravity. In this sense, depravity is a duality” (pp. 181-182). It represents “the pre-Genetic decay of the personality.”

Doubt of the Truth and, ultimately, its loss, is only a variety of the general sinful condition, a particular manifestation of that inner decay of the personality which is the very essence of sin. The fascinating description of this mental foretaste of Gehenna in Fr. Florenski again unwittingly makes us remember this same example, which obviously stood before the author: Confessions of bl. Augustine.

“There is no truth in me, but the idea of ​​it burns me.” However, the doubt carried to the end makes us doubt the very idea and the fact that we are looking for it. “It is also untrustworthy that I expect the Truth. Maybe it just seems to me too. And besides, perhaps, costing itself is not costing? Asking myself the last question, I enter the last circle of the skeptic’s hell, the compartment where the very meaning of words is lost. There they cease to be fixed and fall from their nests. Everything becomes everything, every phrase is perfectly equivalent to every other; any word can change its place with any other. Here the mind loses itself, is lost in the formless and disordered abyss. There is feverish delirium and disorder here.’

“However, this extreme skeptical doubt is possible only as an unstable equilibrium, as a limit of absolute madness, because what else is madness if not mindlessness, if not an experience of non-substantiality, non-support of the mind. When it is experienced, it is carefully hidden from others; once experienced, it is remembered with extreme reluctance. From the outside it is almost impossible to understand what it is. From this extreme border of orb reason drifts the chaos of delusions and an all-piercing chill deadens the mind. Here, behind the thin partition, is the beginning of spiritual death” (p. 38-39).

The end of these earthly foretastes of spiritual death is the authentic Gehenna itself. “The wind that sows sins, will reap in this age a storm of passions; and, caught in the whirlwind of sin, he will be always whirled by it, and will not come out of it, that not even a thought of it will cross his mind, because he will not have a dispassionate fulcrum” (p. 241). This burning in the fiery Gehenna is actually taking place here on earth – in this Fr. Florensky sees the very essence of possession and rage (p. 206).

3

The more painful the feeling of Gehenna, the more understandable that passionate urge to the Truth that is heard in the words of prayer: “From the depths I cried to You, Lord.” In it is hidden that immediate transition to the Light of Tavor, which was once depicted in fiery features by bl. Augustine: “And You struck my feeble sight, shining strongly upon me: and I trembled with love and with fear, that I am very far from You – in the land of difference from You. And as if I heard Your voice from on high: I am food for the great: grow and you will eat from Me. And you will not turn Me into yourself, as it happens with the food of the flesh, but you will turn into Me” (Confessions 7, 10, 16).[5]

This transition takes place not in the process of logical reasoning, but in the passionate urge of the human soul: “and I woke up in You” – says bl. Augustine (Confessions 7, 14, 20).[6] And this awakening is impossible with human forces alone. It is a miracle of grace that is above human nature – in this sense, Fr. Florensky.

“In order to get to the truth, you have to give up your individuality, get out of yourself, and for us this is absolutely impossible, because we are flesh. However, I repeat – how exactly in this case can you grab hold of the Claw of Truth? This we do not know and cannot know. We only know that through the gaping cracks of human reason one sees the azure of Eternity. It’s unattainable, but it’s true. And we know that “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, not the god of philosophers and scientists” comes to us, comes to our bedside, takes us by the hand, and leads us as we could not even imagine. For humans this is impossible, but for God everything is possible” (p. 489).

But what is this Pillar and Support of truth, to which we thus arrive? “The Pillar of Truth – answers our author, this is the Church, this is credibility, the spiritual law of identity, the feat, the triune unity, the Tabor light, the Holy Spirit, Sophia, the Immaculate Virgin, this is friendship, and this again is the Church.” And all this multitude of answers in his exposition is one whole. Because the Truth, that is all. According to Christ’s prayer, the unity itself must reign in the enlightened creature, which has always been realized in the Holy Trinity. In this is concluded the transfiguration, the deification of creation, which – through the action of the Holy Spirit – fills it with the light of Tabor; this transfiguration is the same as the adequate incarnation of Sophia in creation. On earth, however, Sophia appears mainly in the perfect virginity of the Mother of God, gathering humanity in the one temple of God, in the Church, and the highest degree of ecclesiality is the realization of friendship or, more precisely, the perfect friendship of people in God. And universal healing of creatures is expressed above all in the restoration of perfect wholeness or – of chastity.[7]

In all these situations, we need to see, of course, not some “new teaching” of Fr. Florensky, and his original attempt to bring the faith of the fathers closer to people’s consciousness – this ancient Christian tradition, which, fortunately, managed to become such in Russian religious philosophy. In this regard, Fr. Florensky takes a new and extremely important step, which before him had not really been taken by anyone, but was only noted by Vladimir Solovyov. In religious teaching, he tries to use the centuries-old religious experience, which has found its expression in Orthodox liturgy and in Orthodox iconography – here he finds and discovers an astonishing wealth of inspired intuitions, supplementing religious understanding with new features and which have not found expression in our theology. I remember how in oral talks the late Vladimir Solovyov liked to point out the striking backwardness of Orthodox theology from Orthodox liturgy and from icon painting, and especially as regards the veneration of the Holy Mother of God and Sophia.[8] It was especially pleasant for me to find in the book of Fr. Florensky, who apparently did not know about these talks, an almost literal reproduction of this same thought. “Both on the iconostasis and in the liturgy, the Mother of God occupies a place that is symmetrical and, as it were, almost equivalent to the place of the Lord. We turn to her alone with the prayer: “Save us.” If, however, we turn from the living experience given by the Church to theology, we feel transported into some new realm. Psychologically, the impression is undoubtedly such that scholastic theology does not speak of quite the same thing that the Church glorifies: the scholastic-theological teaching about the Mother of God is disproportionate to her living veneration; the awareness of the dogma of the priesthood in scholastic theology lagged behind his experiential experience. Worship, however, is the heart of church life” (p. 367). Recently, in our country, eyes are beginning to open to the wonderful beauties of old Russian icon painting, regardless of the fact that for now this is only a revival of aesthetic interest. The defense of Fr. Florenski concludes that he has shown how much these beauties – both of icon painting and of worship – can contribute to the deepening of the religious and philosophical understanding of the faith. In his book the heart of church life has really come close to the mind of the modern educated man. In this lies his capital merit, compared to which all the rest are more or less interesting details. Into these particulars, though they are extremely valuable, I cannot, unfortunately, enter into consideration, owing to the short length of the present paper. What I would like to do is, above all, to introduce the spirit and mood of this book by Fr. Florensky, as well as thinking with him about a religious-philosophical problem, which, as it seems to me, did not find a completely satisfactory solution with him.

Source in Russian: Trubetskoy, E. N. “Svet Favorsky and the transformation of the mind” – In: Russkaya mysl, 5, 1914, pp. 25-54; the basis of the text is a report read by the author before a meeting of the Russian Religious and Philosophical Society on February 26, 1914.

Notes:

 [1] Cf. Matt. 17:17.

[2] Cf. Mark 9:18.

[3] Cf. Matt. 17:20.

[4] The author is referring to the painting “Transfiguration” (1516-1520) by the Italian artist Raffaello Santi.

[5] Saint Aurelius Augustine, Confessions.

[6] In Prof. Nikolova’s translation – on p. 117 (trans. note).

[7] See in particular p. 350 [of the first Russian edition of Столп и утверждение Истины, 1914]

[8] It is known how much the image of St. Sophia in Novgorod gave to his teaching; see his article “The Idea of Humanities in Augusta Comte” – in the eighth volume of the first edition of his collected works, pp. 240-241.

(to be continued)

By prof. A.P. Lopukhin

Acts. 2:26 a.m. Therefore my heart rejoiced, and my tongue rejoiced; and also my flesh shall rest in hope.

Acts. 2:27. Because You will not leave my soul in hell and You will not allow Your saint to see corruption.

“My flesh shall rest in hope, for Thou wilt not forsake,” in Greek ἡ σάρξ μου κατασκηνώσει ἐπ᾿ ἐλπίδι, ὅτι οὐκ ἐγκαταλείπεις τὴν ψυχήν μου. The Slavic translation is more accurate than the modern one: “my flesh is filled with hope, you did not leave it.” It should be said in a modern translation: “my flesh will dwell” (ie in the grave) “in hope, because You will not leave”. On the occasion of these words, blessed Theophylact notes: “since Jesus, perceiving death, put off that flesh which he assumed according to the plan of the household, in order to raise it again from death: it is fair [to say] that His flesh nourished by the hope of expected immortality’.

“Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell,” i. you will bring her out of hell again for life, which will be completely possible with the incorruption of the body – “you will raise her up” already for a new and better life (verse 28).

Acts. 2:28. You have given me to know the ways of life; You will fill me with joy through Your face.”

“Thou hast given me to know the paths of life; You will fill me with joy through Your face.” Blessed Theophylact writes: “It is not without reason that [the apostle] used these words when he mentions the resurrection, teaching that instead of sorrow [He] will be in eternal joy, and becoming passionless, unchangeable, and immortal in human nature; since God has always been such, it is not difficult for Him to make human nature a partaker of this soon after its formation in the mother’s womb, but suffered His adopted nature to pass through the path of suffering, so that He might thus , having destroyed the power of sin, to put an end to the torments of the devil, to destroy the power of death, and to give all men the opportunity of quickening. Therefore, as a man, he receives both incorruption and immortality.”

Acts. 2:29. Men brothers! May I be permitted to tell you boldly about the patriarch David, that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.

“Let me boldly tell you.” The apostle will speak of the greatest and most honored of the ancestors of the Jewish people as inferior to the Crucified Jesus, and for this reason he uses such a mild expression.

“died and was buried” – as an ordinary person, with whom nothing special or unusual happened after his death and burial, i.e. it is implied that he did not rise from the dead, which means that it was not on him that was fulfilled what was said about the righteous who will not remain in the grave.

“his grave is with us to this day”, i.e. the grave with the remains of his body, which is subject to decay like the bodies of all other men.

Saint John Chrysostom says, passing on to the further interpretation: “now he [Peter] proves what he needed. And then he still does not pass to Christ, but again speaks with praise of David…, so that his listeners, at least out of respect for David and his family, will accept the word about the Resurrection, as if otherwise their honor would suffer.”

Acts. 2:30. And being a prophet and knowing that God had promised him with an oath from the fruit of his loins to raise up Christ in the flesh and place Him on his throne,

“God promised with an oath.” This promise, fulfilled only upon the Messiah, is contained in 2 Kings. 7:12-16; cf. Ps. 131 In its essence, it is also a prophecy about the Resurrection, without which it could not be fulfilled.

“to place Him on his throne,” i.e. namely as the Messiah (cf. Luke 1:32). “As in many places of the Divine Scripture, so here throne is used instead of kingdom.” (blessed Theophylact).

Acts. 2:32. God resurrected that Jesus, of which we are all witnesses.

“His Jesus” – This one, not someone else, namely Jesus of Nazareth.

“of which we are all witnesses,” because we have seen Him, the Risen One, talked with Him, eaten with Him, touched Him, and by all this have been convinced of the reality of His resurrection, so that we may be entitled to testify about Him and to others .

Acts. 2:33. And so He, having been exalted to the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, poured out what you now see and hear.

“And so, He, after being ascended to the right hand of God” – in Greek: τῇ δεχιᾷ οὖν τοῦ Θεοῦ ὑψοθεις, in Slavic: десницию убо Божиею вознесеся – an expression allowing for two interpretations: or “being ascended” to heaven by God’s right hand , in the same sense in which it is said above that God raised Him from the dead (verse 24); or “being taken up” ie. exalted to sit at the right hand of the Father in His glorified human flesh. Both interpretations are equal and equivalent.

“and received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit,” i.e. having received from the Father the authority to send to those who believe in Him the Holy Spirit, promised by the Father and proceeding from the Father.

Acts. 2:34. For David did not ascend into heaven; but he himself spoke: “said the Lord to my Lord: sit at my right hand,

Acts. 2:35. until I make Your enemies your footstool.”

After confirming the truth about the resurrection of Christ based on David’s prophecy, the apostle finds it necessary to also confirm the truth about the ascension of Jesus, the immediate result of which is the outpouring of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. This truth the apostle affirms by referring to the prophetic sentence of David in Ps. 109 (verse 1), attributing the fulfillment of these words entirely to Christ. The Lord Himself also applies this sentence to Himself in His conversation with the Pharisees (Matt. 22:42, etc.).

Acts. 2:36. And so, let the whole house of Israel know for sure that God has made Jesus, whom you crucified, Lord and Christ.

“the whole house of Israel,” i.e. the entire Jewish people.

“This Jesus, whom you crucified, God made Lord and Christ”, in other words: “God made it so that this Jesus, whom you crucified, is also your true Lord and Christ”, or Messiah (double designation of His messianic dignity – general and private).

“Whom ye crucified.” According to the remark of St. John Chrysostom, “the apostle admirably ends his speech in this way, that he may thereby shake their souls.”

Acts. 2:37. When they heard this, their hearts were moved, and they said to Peter and the other apostles: what shall we do, men and brothers?

“their heart became tender” – the listeners of the Apostle Peter fell into heartbreak, because they had done this with the Messiah and showed readiness in their hearts to erase their guilt with faith in Him, which is why they ask further: “what shall we do? “

“men, brothers” – full of trust, respect and love address of the apostles, on whose behalf Peter speaks.

Acts. 2:38. And Peter said to them: repent, and let each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

For reconciliation with God and the unaccepted Messiah, Peter offers repentance and baptism, with their blessed fruits – forgiveness of sins and receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

“everyone… to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ”. According to the interpretation of blessed Theophylact, “these words do not contradict the words “baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19), because the Church thinks of the Holy Trinity as indivisible, so because of the unity of the three hypostases in essence, the one who is baptized in the name of Jesus Christ is baptized in the Trinity, since the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are inseparable in essence”. It is obvious that when the apostle calls for baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, he only indicates with this the basic content of our faith and confession, which conditions the recognition of everything that was discovered by the Son of God who came to earth.

Acts. 2:39. For the promise is to you, to your children, and to all who are far off whom the Lord our God would call.

“for you . . . and for your children,” i.e. of posterity in general, “and for all distant,” i.e. for those who stand in the remotest degrees of kinship and affinity with the Jewish people. Here we may also think of the Gentiles, of whom the apostle speaks covertly, sparing the weakness of the Jews, who might see something seductive in giving the Gentiles an equal share in the Messiah’s kingdom. This matter should have been resolved from the very beginning; here, however, everything that could cast a shadow on the dignity of the new truths being preached had to be avoided.

“whom the Lord our God would call.” The Lord calls all, desires salvation for all; obviously, here are meant those who, responding with their free will to the Lord’s call, fulfill their calling in action by repenting and accepting baptism in the name of Jesus Christ.

Acts. 2:40: And with many other words he testified and invited them, saying: be saved from this wicked generation.

“And with many other words”, which the author does not cite, presenting only the main content of what the apostle Peter said.

“save yourselves from this wicked generation.” In Greek: σώθητε ἀπὸ τῆς γενεᾶς τῆς σκολιᾶς ταύτης. It is more accurate to say: be saved from the modern wicked, obstinate human race (σκολιός means crooked, and then cunning, crafty), from God’s judgment and punishment awaiting those people who by their obstinacy have come to reject the Messiah and His work, and not to believe in Him. This admonition of the apostle is also applicable to all subsequent times, pointing out the need for all Christians to be saved from the world lying in evil by pure faith in Christ and living according to that faith.

Acts. 2:41 a.m. And so those who gladly accepted his words were baptized; and about three thousand people joined that day.

“were baptized.” As there is no water so abundantly collected in Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity that so many people can be baptized by immersion at once, we may suppose that the baptism itself followed a little later, individually for each, in homes, or in groups with more or less sufficient reservoirs, by one of the apostles and disciples of the Lord.

Acts. 2:42. And they persisted in the teaching of the apostles, in communication, in the breaking of bread and in prayers.

“And they persisted.” In Greek: ἦσαν δὲ προσκαρτεροῦντες, the Slavic translation is more accurate than the modern one: they were patient, literally – they were tireless in the teaching of the apostles, etc.

Of course, it is difficult to suppose that all this mass of people (3,000 people, besides the previous considerable number of believers) assembled in one place or in one house. It is more likely that the believers, divided into several groups or communities, gathered in several places where the apostles taught them the new truths, prayers and sacraments. Between all these communities there existed the closest communication, which united them in one fraternal family, whose soul was the apostles.

“in the breaking of bread.” In Greek: τῇ κλάσει τοῦ ἄρτου. this expression usually means eating food (Luke 24:30, etc.), but at that time it was also used in another, higher sense – as performing and participating in the sacrament of the Eucharist (1 Cor. 10:16). Both meanings can be implied here, both separately and together, especially since this was a time when the Eucharist was usually a supper of love, with the participation of all the faithful, in a spirit of fraternal equality, love and mutual communication. This is how the main characteristics of the original Christian worship, separate and independent from the Old Testament worship, are outlined: teaching, breaking of bread (Eucharist) and prayers, although the apostles and other believers do not sever the connection with the Old Testament temple and its services (Acts 3:1 and etc.).

Acts. 2:43. Fear gripped every soul, because many miracles and omens were happening through the apostles in Jerusalem.

“Fear fell upon every soul,” i. the soul that does not believe. The unexpected and astonishing manifestations of divine power, the extraordinary success of Peter’s preaching, his fervent warnings and sermons, the miracles and signs of the apostles – all this could not fail to startle the impressionable soul and plunge it into deep reflection.

Acts. 2:44. And all the believers were together, and they had everything in common;

“were together.” In the Greek text: ἦσαν ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτὸ. The Slavic text of this verse, compared to the Greek original and the Russian translation, has an additional line (repeating the beginning of verse 43): “a great fear was upon all of them. Все се верующие были вместе” (All believers were together”), i.e. gathering in certain places (cf. Acts 1:14, 2:1), for teaching and prayers, all together formed a united family, with strong brotherly love and fellowship.

“they had everything in common.” The distinguishing feature of the first Christian fraternal family or community was the sharing of property, which was neither forced nor legal, but entirely voluntary, due to the sublime impulse of the living faith and brotherly love of the first Christians among themselves. There was no destruction of the right of property (cf. Acts 5:4), but a completely voluntary distribution or relinquishment of that right, wholly and privately, in favor of others in need.

How long this distinctive feature of the first Christian communities persisted is not known; in any case, the traces of it are lost in history very soon. It can be considered that the disappearance of this feature and its removal is due to the significant difficulties that the rapid growth and multitude of Christ’s followers gave rise to (cf. Acts 6:1).

Acts. 2:46 a.m. And every day they unanimously stayed in the temple and, breaking bread from house to house, they ate with a cheerful and pure heart,

“every day with one accord they stayed in the temple,” i.e. attended the Jewish temple service, “because, as St. John Chrysostom says, they had not yet rejected anything Jewish; and the very respect for the place was transferred to the Lord of the temple”…. The whole temple service contained at its core and embodied the aspiration to the Messiah; this made this service useful also for the Christians, who differed from the Jews in this case only in that they believed not in the Advent, but in the Messiah who had already come.

“breaking bread from house to house.” In the Greek original: κλῶντές τε κατ᾿ οἶκον ἄρτον. The expression κάτ’ οῖκον allows one to say both “in the houses” (different, several) and “in the house” (one). Both have their reasons (cf. v. 42), depending on the multitude of those gathered and the capacity of the meeting place

“they ate with a cheerful and pure heart.”

Cf. Acts. 2:12 and Acts. 20:7 – 11. From these passages it can be concluded that in the earliest times of Christianity there were two kinds of love suppers (αγάποι): those which were held in different houses and therefore by separate societies of believers ( chiefly in Jerusalem), and those which on certain days, namely, Sundays, were held by the whole assembly of the faithful. The dinner opened and ended with prayer and washing of hands. During the dinner itself, psalms and other sacred songs were sung, excerpts from the Holy Scriptures were read and interpreted.

In the beginning, the evenings of love were very common and, together with the Eucharist, took place too often, almost daily. But even in the first centuries of Christianity there were churches in which no traces of these evenings could be seen. St. Justin Martyr, speaking of the performance of the Eucharist and the services of the Roman Christians of his time, does not mention agapi. St. Irenaeus of Lyons also says nothing about them. With the spread of Christianity, the initial life of Christians, having a family character, more and more took on the vast dimensions of public, ecclesiastical-folk life. This led to the disappearance of the original agapes because of the inevitable undesirable abuses and irregularities mixed with them.

Acts. 2:47. praising God and being loved by all the people. And the Lord daily added to the church those who were saved.

“as they praised God” is a general designation of the exalted religious mood of the spirit of the first Christian society (Luke 24: 53).

“being beloved by all the people”—no doubt because of their strict religiosity, pure life and virtues, peaceful and joyful benevolence towards all.

“The Lord daily added to the church those who were being saved.”

Here, the growth of Christ’s Church appears not as a work of the ordinary development and growth of a society, but as a direct work of the Lord Himself, who invisibly governs His Church.

Source in Russian: Explanatory Bible, or Commentaries on all the books of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments: In 7 volumes / Ed. prof. A.P. Lopukhin. – Ed. 4th. – Moscow: Dar, 2009, 1232 pp.