Mazai priest. In search of truth. In your opinion, why are people cooling off towards the Church?

No one in the Church sets a person the task of conquering passions through their efforts, the scientist and theologian, teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy, Hieromonk Simeon (Mazaev) emphasized at a lecture in Arkhangelsk.

“This is unattainable. If a person could independently overcome passions, then Christ would not have to come to earth. Our relationship with them should resemble the relationship of the Zapashny brothers with tigers. They train animals to follow commands. The saints trained their passions so that they would not gnaw at them. But a tiger remains a tiger by nature - it is still a dangerous animal. Therefore, real saints did not trust themselves until the last minutes of their lives,” the lecturer noted. - No ascetic methods will defeat passion in a person’s soul. Only death and resurrection can liberate from evil.”

Father Simeon recalled that the Gospel speaks of three dead resurrected by Jesus Christ, among whom was Lazarus: “And an interesting theological question arises: was this a resurrection? After all, then Lazarus died again. Was death stronger than Christ? Theologians claim that there was only revival. Because Lazarus did not change, he returned in the same state, infected with sin, in which he was. The Lord says about Himself that He is the door, the only one through which a person can enter the Kingdom of God. This means that when a person gets there, it is as if he passes through some kind of filter that filters out evil. This is what distinguishes revival from resurrection.”

According to the preacher, the question of the meaning of Christianity begins with the question of death. To reveal it, Father Simeon turned to an image from the works of St. Gregory of Nyssa: the owner has the main value - a painted and richly decorated jug. The enemy came up with the idea of ​​sneaking into the house at night and pouring molten lead into the jug. By morning the jug was ruined. Then the owner, being versed in a meager craft, does a strange thing: he breaks the jug. In this case, the lead blank is separated from the walls and the owner coats it with clay and restores the jug to its original form. According to St. Gregory, the jug is the soul of a person, with evil “mixed” with it, and this line is so thin that it is impossible to understand where are the good intentions and where is the illness of our nature.

“What is sin? This is a virtue that turned out to be excessive; a person somewhere did not notice the shore and crossed the line. Interestingly, it can only be seen in hindsight. Good very easily turns into evil, as if it goes rotten,” said the missionary. - A person who does evil inflicts a wound on his soul. He cannot enjoy life. Such a person cannot even fall in love properly. God cannot accept the fact that His beloved creature is unhappy, so He breaks the jug. The Creator subjects us to death, just as an oncologist subjects a patient to chemotherapy. He kills passions along with us, and then does the opposite procedure - resurrects us through Himself and the Church.”

Please note that the entire lecture will be presented in video format.

Father Simeon also met with the clergy of Arkhangelsk, Severodvinsk and Novodvinsk. The conversation touched on two topics: pastoral burnout and the reasons why people leave the Church.

Hieromonk Simeon(in the world - Mazaev Sergey Andreevich) was born on August 30, 1978 in the city of Georgievsk, Stavropol Territory. In 2000 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. From 2000 to 2003 - graduate student at the Department of Ontology and Theory of Knowledge, Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. Title of the dissertation: “The Theme of Courage in Philosophy: Ontological Aspect.” Candidate of Philosophical Sciences. Lecturer at the Department of Theology at the Moscow Theological Academy. Regular author of online publications Pravoslavie.ru and Bogoslov.ru. Presenter of programs on TV channels “Spas” and “Soyuz”.

Photos were provided by Father Andrey Slinyakov.

Press service of the Arkhangelsk diocese

Videos for the news:

What is the essence of Christianity? Hieromonk Simeon (Mazaev)

The life of the Church is often discussed in the media, and not from a positive side. Our media are always very interested in the topic of people who have left the Church, become disillusioned with it, and speak negatively. They are especially interested in the fate of people who have left the priesthood. Why is that?

– This is not an easy question, and before I answer it, I’ll tell you a little story. Once I came to the military registration and enlistment office after defending my PhD thesis to get a military ID. It was summer, hot. The lieutenant colonel, having greeted me, began to fill out the form in his office. The first three columns (last name, first name, patronymic) did not cause any difficulties for him, but when it came to the “civil specialty” column, he asked: “Mazaev, who are you according to our diploma?” I say: “Philosopher.” - There’s about five minutes of foul language here: I was joking, they say. And further: “I’ll joke to you, you’ll serve in Magadan.”

I feel that serious arguments are needed, and I show the diploma - a state document, with the state round seal, signed by rector Sadovnichy. The lieutenant colonel is a serviceman and must accept it. And so he reluctantly writes this incomprehensible, strange word - he probably never wrote it, especially in official documents. And in the column “civil specialty” he writes the word “philosopher”. But then he scratches his head: this service officer’s heart is still not in the right place, he cannot understand what such a person is doing... And he asks a second question: “Mazaev, do you have rights?” “I say: “Yes, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, category “B.”

He slaps himself on the knee: “Why were you silent before?” After the word “philosopher” he puts a hyphen and adds: “driver of category “B””. That's what it says on my military ID.

Why did I tell this story? It is painfully difficult for a person to admit that there is another person in the world who is completely useless for the army, whom you cannot squeeze into a plane, into a tank, or into a trench: a philosopher is a completely useless person.

Very often we suffer from the same complex: we cannot bear the very idea that there are useless people. For example, what are monks for, why are they there at all? You hear this question very often. The deceit lies in the fact that we are forced to justify our very existence. And this is a very important thing: the view of a person as a means in itself is wrong, sinful. Even secular philosophers talk about this. Immanuel Kant formulated the so-called categorical imperative, and one of the particular formulations reads: “Always treat a person as an end, and not as a means.” Everyone can easily notice in themselves that “we all,” as the poet said, “look at Napoleons;// There are millions of two-legged creatures // For us there is only one weapon”...

We view the world like Bazarov, a character in Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons,” who says: “Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man is a worker in it.” If the world is a workshop and not a temple, then everything that is not a person himself is only a means for him. The question is – who is the target then? The goal is only him. Such an instrumentalist, pragmatic approach to people is nothing more than a manifestation of pride itself.

With this approach we often come to the Church and extend it to God: we are not interested in Jesus Christ, the Personality of God does not interest us - we are interested in His power, strength, His ability to bestow blessings or take them away. Remember how the Jews, who followed Jesus in a crowd of thousands, at some point dispersed, disappointed? They expected that He would be an earthly king, that He would use His power that could control the wind and the waves, that could multiply the loaves and fishes and feed 5,000 people with loaves, the power that could turn water into wine and raise the dead, and they hoped that With this power, he will become an earthly king, leading an uprising against the Romans, against the comprador government of the Jewish elders. But He refused, at some point he said: “My kingdom is not of this world.” And everyone, except a small group of people, dispersed. And Christ asked: “What are you? Would you like to leave too? As the Gospel reports, Peter was responsible for everyone. He was also confused, but he answered: “Lord, where should we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.” This is called fulfilling the fourth commandment from the Decalogue of Moses.

We mainly focus on the commandments “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt not commit adultery,” but all commandments are important. And the fourth of them: remember the Sabbath day. We generally ignore it - we don’t particularly honor the Sabbath, it’s a Jewish holiday. But we are talking about the fact that a person learns to love God through the fourth commandment: like a young man who is in love with a girl, he is able to throw everything away, give up everything, turn off the phone: “I am going to the one I love, and let the whole world wait.” "? He can make this gesture. But it turns out that often a person who loves God cannot, for His sake, abandon everything that makes up his life, his worries, the subject of his care for one day a week in order to go to church. A person cannot make such a gesture, which means he does not love God.

This ability to act unreasonably for the sake of the one you love, to throw everything away - and let the whole world wait, is such an anti-pragmatic approach. Like, for example, the artist Niko Pirosmani sold all his modest property and bought his beloved Margarita a million scarlet roses. Essentially, the fourth commandment says this. The Apostle Paul speaks of the same thing: And I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish, that I may gain Christ. That is, he shows that he can simply follow Christ without expecting anything in return from Him. Dostoevsky has a good idea: “Moreover, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and it really were that the truth is outside Christ, then I would rather stay with Christ than with the truth” (letter to N.F. Fonvizina, No. 61, February 1854). These are the words of a real Christian!

And we are always looking for some blessings from God, even spiritual ones. Sometimes you hear people complain: before, after Confession, the heart sang (imagine a dog sitting on a chain all day, and then the owner came and set it free to run, frolic, take a walk...): “The heart felt such delight before. Previously, you took communion and grace obviously descended into your heart, you were touched by everything around you, every manifestation of life makes you happy, but now you seem to be confessing, as if you are taking communion, but your heart remains empty. Why is that? Maybe I'm doing something wrong or something else?

We have such a temptation - to follow not Christ, but what He gives, grace. A person develops a taste for grace; he can, like a drug addict, “get hooked” on some high, spiritual experiences. And here Christ no longer becomes for him the final goal, not the Alpha and Omega, not the Beginning and the End, but only a means: “I am following You so that You will give me this “drug” - high spiritual experiences: grace, inspiration.” Apparently, this is why the Lord allows us periods of spiritual cooling - He is silent and gives us the opportunity to be real Christians and prove by deed that we came to the Church for Him, for Christ, and not for what He is able to give us as King and God. We came for Jesus first, not just the King.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “thorns and flints nourish love, and prayer is blessed by the silence of the Lord.” There are also periods of cooling in monastic life (and, probably, in family life). When you are tonsured a monk, the first months are an ecstatic state, you just fly. And there are periods when prayer becomes mechanical, all monastic deeds also do not respond with grace - a feeling of being abandoned by God. And so the fathers say that there is nothing terrible in this: the Lord gives you the opportunity to test yourself, why did you come to monasticism - for Christ or for what He is able to give, for some high spiritual experiences? Apparently, the same thing exists in marriage: the Lord gives a person the opportunity to express himself, to know himself and to prove that he took a person into his life for his own sake, and not for the sake of that feeling of deep moral satisfaction that communication with him gives. We must learn to think of man and God as the ultimate goal and to follow Christ, and not what He is able to give us, even in the form of the greatest gifts - in the form of grace in answer to prayers.

At some point, Christ deliberately humbles himself and becomes useless to us, becomes a philosopher in front of the lieutenant colonel. So can we pass this temptation? There is nothing more joyful than to follow the triumphant Christ, the Christ who raises the dead, but can anyone follow the crucified and dead Christ, the inglorious Christ?

People who are disappointed in the Church, in fact, have not reached the very heart of the Church. Only those who do not reach the Church Citadel - to Christ Himself - leave. I can assume that these people were looking for anything, for example, some spirit-bearing elders, or revelations, or the meaning of life - anything, but not Christ Himself. And in the Church everything is transitory, except for its Founder. Once upon a time there were miracle workers and miracles, time passed - the elders appeared, now this time is passing, or maybe it has already passed. Perhaps there are still reasonable, intelligent, smart priests in the Church; most likely, there will be a time when they will not be there either.

Everything in the Church is transitory, so if a person is looking for something other than Christ in the Church, sooner or later he will be disappointed. Even if he had a thousand years of life and remained in the Church, he would certainly be disappointed in it: everything in the Church is transitory, except Jesus Christ Himself.

Can you not be selfish? Can you admit the existence of another personality in the world other than your own? Can you put up with a God who is of no use to you at some point in time, who does not answer your prayers? You can tolerate a silent God in your spiritual life, then you are a Christian. See how the Apostle Peter expresses the situation when Christ became poor and lost His supporters. He says: “Lord, where should we go?” Only that person will not be disappointed in the Church who does not look for anything else in it except Christ, and can say from the heart: “Lord, where should we go? We know no other God besides You.” This is how I would answer this question.

We often meet people who are disappointed not in the Church and its people, but in themselves, they say: I’ve been going to church for 20 years, but there’s no effect.

– Yes, in my small pastoral practice I have often encountered such situations. A person is disappointed not in the Church, but in his ability to change something in life. He says: “Maybe I’m some kind of damned person? Church sacraments do not work in my case. I’ve been going to church for 20 years, fasting, praying, in general, I’m doing as I was taught, but I can’t say that I’ve become even one iota better, the old sins still exist. So you come to Confession to your confessor, and he greets you like a wolf from the cartoon “Once upon a time there was a dog”: “What, again?” “Yes, twenty-five again: the same sins have not gone away, the same passions have not gone away. And it doesn’t work.” And in this case, the person thinks that either he is somehow especially sinful, unworthy, so why torture himself in vain... He becomes despondent and closes the doors of the Church to himself from the outside. Or he thinks that God exists, but He is not in the Byzantine sacraments, not in that Church - the Church as an instrument of communication with God does not work, the sacraments do not work. In any case, he is already close to ending his relationship, if not with God, then with the Church.

What can we say here? It is very important in spiritual life to clearly and distinctly know its purpose and objectives. Such a person has set himself a deliberately impossible task - to make himself better by himself, by the hardening of his will, to overcome his passions or overcome his sins.

A simple consideration: if a person could get rid of his passions himself, there would be no need for Christ to come. Once again we must recall the important point that the Gospel speaks of: it says that a person is spiritually sick, damaged by sin, like a cancerous tumor. A cancerous tumor is treated with chemotherapy: they simply kill a person - they also kill living, healthy cells in the hope that the cancer cells will die a little earlier than the healthy ones. Then, by stopping chemotherapy, it will be possible to “fatten” the person to a healthy state. The Lord does the same: He takes a person through death and resurrection, kills a person along with his evil and resurrects him, passing him through Himself, as through a kind of filter, through the communion of His Flesh and Blood.

If a person could defeat evil himself, there would be no need to carry out such a painful operation, expose him to death and teach him resurrection. The gospel would be different. And if so, then the lifelong task that most of us set for ourselves - to become better - is impossible. We cannot defeat the beast of our passions in our own strength, but we can prevent this beast from defeating us. Like the Zapashny brothers in the circus? After all, they don’t kill their tigers, they simply don’t let them kill themselves: they train them, put them on a chain. And the goal of our spiritual life is to put our passions on a chain, to prevent the tigers from devouring us and becoming stronger. Our task is not to become better in the Church. The challenge is to not get worse.

Look at the everyday life of a soldier at war: he does not think about whether victory is far away, does not set it as his personal goal, but simply pulls out the soldier’s burden. An enemy appears - he shoots, there is no enemy - he gets ready, digs a trench, smokes a pipe, brews tea. And he thanks God that the day has passed and he remains alive. Just recently we celebrated Victory Day, and already in television reports there was a noticeable difference in the perception of war and Victory between veterans and us, who did not know the war. We celebrate the victory over a terrible enemy, we celebrate the power of Russian weapons, on occasion we generally say something stupid that we can repeat - this is the boasting of a man who, perhaps, has never even seriously starved. What can we repeat? 872 days of the siege of Leningrad or 27,000,000 dead?

The veteran says: “And I’m glad that I’m alive.” And on May 9, 1945, they were not happy that they had won, no one even thought much about it, they were happy that the boring war was over, that they could finally get married, start families, and take care of their children. You can work, sow grain, build a university, study, and so on. So, the soldier does not think about victory, as it became clear from the dialogues of journalists with veterans. A soldier wonders how to get through the day.

And we, as soldiers of Christ, must imitate them in our spiritual life. We should not think in general terms. Conquering our passions is not our task. Our task is to overcome daily temptations. This also makes some sense. It’s not even about defeating temptations, but about resisting them. There is nothing particularly terrible if it didn’t work out and the battle ended in a loss - he got up and moved on. There is no need to despair because you fall into sin and even over the years you cannot become better: this is a false task. Here the enemy intervened somewhere - we ourselves set ourselves a deliberately impossible goal, which no one else set for us, including the Lord. Naturally, we were not able to achieve it, and this becomes a reason for us to be disappointed in ourselves. Isn't it stupid?

A person can say that since the Spirit breathes where it wants, it means there is no need to go to God’s church. I was disappointed in the Church, the people there are bad, but God is everywhere: God is at home, God is in my heart?

- This is a simple question. You can’t take communion at home, but that’s the way it is, of course. In addition, the Church is a two-thousand-year-old organism; it is a culture of spiritual life - prayer, congregational prayer, pious life (at least attempts at pious life).

You can, of course, do without all this and say that intermediaries are not needed. Then let's be consistent and not send our children to schools. For what? The child has a mind. And the whole world, the results of whose research are captured in textbooks. There is a lively, inquisitive mind and, on the other hand, peace. Why school? Why teachers? Why are there intermediaries between the eye and the world? Why conservatories and music schools? You can buy a piano: you have fingers, you have ears - listen, try, learn, reinvent the wheel, going through all the experiences that people have created centuries before you. Of course, you can do this, but for the next 30 years you will be doomed to play some “Dog Waltz” on this piano with one finger. So it is in spiritual life. You can, of course, ignore the Church and reject all the experience of spiritual life that has accumulated in it over a millennium. In this case, you are doomed to remain self-taught.

Unfortunately, it's time to finish. Let's summarize.

– In order not to be disappointed in the Church, firstly, you should not look for anything in the Church other than Christ, and you should not expect anything from Christ Himself other than communion with Him. As the Lord Himself says: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, and everything else will be added to you.” Everything will work out – you can hope for it, but you shouldn’t expect it, so as not to be disappointed. We must remember that we are all affected to one degree or another by the cancer of egoism, and we cannot bear it if we see something in the world that cannot be used. And with exactly the same eyes we look at our neighbor and at God - this is already wrong. We must look at God as God, and not as a force capable of giving life or punishing. And in the Church one should not expect anything other than a meeting with Christ.

The second point is that you need to correctly, clearly and distinctly set a spiritual goal for your life perspective. Our task is not to overcome our passions, this is impossible, Christ will do this by subjecting us to death and resurrection. Our task is to prevent passions from gaining victory over us and finally turning us away from Christ.

And the third important thing is the ability to peer, listen, the ability to do good, finishing the work that the Lord began and offered to complete for you. This is how good is done.

This concludes our meeting. Bless our viewers.

– May our Lord Jesus Christ bless and have mercy on us all.

Recorded:
Ksenia Sosnovskaya

How “the smartest young man in the world” became disillusioned with the subjects of the smartest faculty, why is human destiny a protected channel of communication with God, and monasticism is love? Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, teacher at the Moscow Theological Academy and publicist Hieromonk Simeon (Mazaev) talks about this in an interview with our publication.

Reveal the truth to me

Father Simeon, you have had an interesting path from philosophy (alma mater - Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University) to monasticism...

Many have followed this path, and among my church-going friends there are many university graduates. Sometimes we joke among ourselves that Moscow State University has given the Church more priests and monks than some seminaries. Until my third year, I was an unbeliever, I even made fun of religious people. And so, you see, I laughed enough (the guest smiles)... The Lord humbled me. And then I conducted an experiment. The study of religion itself is fascinating, and during my studies I studied this subject with interest, with an external, cultural interest. It was impossible to escape the thought: we are scientists, and scientists must test everything in practice. Including the existence of God. I decided that every day for a week I would briefly pray, “Lord, if You exist, reveal the Truth to me.” Well, a week is enough for the Almighty Creator to answer my question!

However, a negative result is also a result. In this case, I will have the right to say that there is no God, because I cried out and did not hear an answer. But the Lord deprived me of this right. I saw what is called in our language the Providence of God - a series of amazing coincidences. You have to be the most die-hard atheist to accept them as an ordinary coincidence.

The Lord speaks to man in the language of fate and strange coincidences. This is an extremely secure “communication channel”. The fact is that some visions, signs, voices in the head can be the result of a mental disorder or one’s own emotional pumping. In the pagan world there are many religious practices where people stimulate their own imagination and see something like hallucinations. Voices, visions, signs - can be, as patristic asceticism teaches, charm. Such unusual impressions are most often the result of the intervention of other forces, which the Lord only allows. And the only truly secure “communication channel” is the destinies of the world and human destinies, because no one has power over them, only God Himself. Thus, when I saw a series of startling coincidences, it became impossible to remain in the same position.

As for monasticism, it is love. Like a young man who definitely decided to get married, not just go to the movies with a girl, walk with her under the moon, sing songs with a guitar. He looks at this girl and feels annoyed that their existence is divided: she went to the dacha with her mother and father, and he went to the sea with his parents. So the sea is not a joy for him, the young man is mentally with his girlfriend. At some point, the separation of their existence becomes unbearable. It's the same with monasticism. One day I saw how the monks of the Sretensky Monastery were leaving the church after the Liturgy, the rite of Panagia was being performed, they proceeded with chants to the refectory. I admired the beauty of monasticism... And then the feeling I spoke about above began to develop. No matter what I did, I was mentally among the brethren, realizing that I wanted to be one of them, to share my work and life with them. Until the bishop's scissors touched my head, until I spent 40 nights in the altar according to tradition, this feeling did not disappear. Now I am calm and happy, as much as possible in my entire life.

I wanted real wisdom

- Well, what about philosophy, which you loved to study? After all, it was she who became the subject of the initial choice.

To be honest, I was motivated by completely ridiculous motives. While studying at school in Pyatigorsk, for some reason I thought that I was the smartest in the world, as many young men at the age of 16-17 probably think. Where should the “smartest young man in the world” go if not to the smartest department of the smartest university? It's funny, but that's how it was. Then I was completely disappointed: what I heard at Moscow State University was not at all what I had dreamed of. At the university, philosophy is taught as a science, and the meticulous scientific approach was not close to me. I wanted real wisdom. I found it rather in the field of theology, where there are much more interesting subjects to consider, which can really ignite, inspire.

The main topic of the lectures in Arkhangelsk is “What is the essence of Christianity?” Can I summarize it briefly for the impatient?

I remembered a literary joke. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, when asked to briefly explain the main idea of ​​“War and Peace,” said: “To do this, you will have to retell the entire novel.” And when asked to comment on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein simply whistled. It’s difficult to say briefly, but I can explain why exactly this idea arose. If there was an opportunity to give a series of lectures, I would structure them differently, but since there is only one speech in front of an audience, I want to talk about the most important thing - what the Gospel is about, what is the essence of our faith. Such an example. People come to baptize a child, I ask: “Why come to us? Why not to the synagogue, not to the mosque? They answer: “Well, we are Russians.” I explain that Russians are not necessarily Orthodox and vice versa. How does Orthodoxy differ from Judaism and Islam? People don't know. At a certain moment of the Sacrament, the godfather must read the Creed, but he does not understand what he is reading. This is theological terminology that is difficult to understand. This means that it is important to talk about what is special about Christianity, about how “the Word became flesh”, in the language of everyday examples, images close to modern man.

A lot of questions immediately arise: why “The Word became flesh”? Why did God become incarnate? A person needs to be shown the idea, the whole picture. We have to choose other words and images, not philosophical, but ordinary, everyday ones, so that people understand what we, for example, do during the Liturgy. I often hear the question: “How do you eat the Body and Blood of God, who is the Spirit? You can honor God, show submission to Him, pray to Him, but why eat Him?” Another question from this series: “What do you celebrate on Easter”? In the Easter sermon of John Chrysostom there are the following lines: “Death, where is your sting? Hell, where is your victory? But yesterday you held a funeral service for a person... Christ conquered “death by death,” but people did not stop dying after Him. And there are a lot of questions, both from our critics and from people who cannot understand what we teach and what we talk about. There is no clarity in our minds. This is how my text appeared - an exposition of faith not in the language of dogma and high philosophy of theology, but in the language of understandable images.

Preaching in the Modern World

Why is Christianity a true religion and what can be said to atheists and those people who believe that God is in their souls?

Several religions can be compared. I will tell you that philosophically the most consistent and thoughtful, the most perfect is Christianity. It is difficult to come up with a more tragic and sublime plot than in the Gospel. For example, what did Muhammad, the founder of Islam, do? It seems to me that he was a straightforward, truth-loving man, but simple and unlearned. This psychotype is characterized by a peculiarity: he does not like complexity, and where he sees it, he suspects deception. Those questions that we talked about above and which were not understood by Muhammad, he simply threw out of his teaching. In my opinion, Islam is a stripped-down, primitive Christianity.

What can you answer to those who claim that God is in the soul? Such a statement is a kind of marker that shows that a person is not familiar with the practice of religious life. Let's say on Mount Athos there are hermit monks living on the mountain, in crevices, rocks. They have God in their souls, that’s for sure. However, they periodically leave their crevices and go to the monastery to receive the Holy Mysteries of Christ and participate in conciliar prayer. Why is this so, why is this necessary? The practice of religious life shows: if congregational prayer stops, if a person does not participate in it, then soon his personal, secret, cell prayer ends, and all communication with God ceases. If the name of Christ leaves the lips, then it very soon leaves the mind and heart. This is shown by the practice of spiritual life. If you don’t go to church, then you’ll abandon your cell prayer rule. For some reason this is exactly the case.

Humans are social creatures, and there is no escape from this. Religion is not a personal, but still a public matter, therefore, if religious practice disappears from the public sphere, then soon a person comes to complete inaction in religious terms. To the question “Are you a believer?” he will answer “yes,” but in fact the spiritual life in him has frozen.

Preaching in the modern world. What should it be like to touch the hearts and minds of people immersed in their own world?

It is important not what to say, but at what moment to say it. Pushkin has a wonderful epigram: “There is no grace for you in anything; There is a discord with your happiness: you are beautiful at the wrong time, and you are smart at the wrong time.” The most important thing is not to construct some brilliant word, decorating it according to the rules of rhetoric and oratory, it is important to find the right moment. There is a time in every person's life for truth. It's useless as art. This is if phrases express a thought from Oscar Wilde's aesthetic theory, "art is completely useless." The truth is useless. It is impossible to find a utilitarian use for it. She is inspiring in herself, beautiful in herself.

But the time comes when a person is ready to listen to interesting things, new theories, talk about the truth, and this, as a rule, is the time of studenthood. First of all, you need to go to this environment, to universities, to interest them in what you yourself are passionate about. There is no need for special words, it takes time - student life, high school, when a person strives to understand life, and not just obediently, like a first-grader, does his homework, but reflects and tries to find the truth.

- Then what should middle-aged people do, how can they find time and where can they hear words about the truth?

In this sense, the Church is wise. It gives the priest many reasons to come to the person. For example, the consecration of an apartment. What will change if you consecrate the apartment? Apparently nothing, but this is a very good reason to come to a person’s house and pray with him. An unchurched person, coming to church, will feel, like any living creature in a new place, a little “nailed down.” Even if you bring a cat into a new apartment, it will feel insecure at first. And so each of us, coming to a new place, feels awkward. But at home a person is relaxed, he is the master there. Let’s say the priest has blessed the apartment, and over tea we can talk about the most important thing - what the Gospel tells about. Or the blessing of a car. On a consecrated car, of course, the wheels will not spin faster, but this is a very good reason for the priest to talk to the person personally about important things.

I am faced with the fact that people do not really know what rituals are for. I come to the apartment, the owner says: “You know, I had a llama, I cleaned it here, but I feel that he couldn’t cope. Maybe you can do it...” People resort to the help of the Church, often without realizing what it involves. They may not be religious, not churchgoers, but they will come to baptize the child, because “well, how could it be otherwise, this is our national tradition.” It’s stupid... but the priest can use this as an excuse to talk about God.

An ambush for those who do not seek Christ

- In your opinion, why do people cool down towards the Church?

First of all, they are disappointed. Not because the Church is bad, but because they were obviously fascinated by it and were looking for anything there, just not Christ. Some were looking for a national idea, others were looking for spiritual elders.

Everything in the Church is transitory, except Christ. Once upon a time there lived apostles who healed, resurrected, and performed miracles, but their time has passed. Then the ascetics appeared. It is difficult to believe that a person is capable of withstanding such labors and exploits as those demonstrated, for example, by Saints Anthony the Great and Simeon the Stylite, but their time has passed. The time of the elders has come. Schema-Archimandrite Zosima (Sokur) predicted (however, perhaps these words were attributed to him): “We are the last, no one is following us anymore,” that is, the times of old age are also passing. Perhaps the time will come for people with the gift of reasoning, but it will also end. Thus, if a person is looking for something other than Christ in the Church, sooner or later he will be disappointed.

The second point is disappointment in myself: here, I have been in the Church for 20 years and have not become one iota better, the same sins and passions, which means the Sacraments do not work, the Church does not work. The fact is that it should not work the way you thought, because in your spiritual life you have set obviously unattainable goals. My dear person, if you yourself, through willpower, exercise, and practice, could overcome the passions in yourself, then Christ would not have to be incarnated, suffer, be crucified, die, or be resurrected. If a person could overcome passions by his own effort of will, the Gospel would be different, Sacred history would be different. If you can do it yourself, why should Christ help you? Therefore, there is no need to set yourself unattainable goals and be disappointed that you have not achieved them.

In spiritual life, the task is not to conquer passions, but to prevent them from completely biting us. It's like the Zapashny brothers train tigers. But, obedient and trained, they do not cease to be tigers. They are still fierce, powerful, scary creatures. Trainers do not change their nature, but to some extent subjugate them - they put them on a pedestal. The task of a Christian is not to get rid of passions in himself, but to “put them on a pedestal”, not to give them free rein; we cannot do more.

If a person could overcome passions, God would not need to subject him to a painful and terrible operation - death and resurrection. The Lord resurrects through Himself, passes through Himself, as through a door near which He Himself stands as a guard: everything good that is in a person passes through, but evil cannot seep through.

At the end of the conversation we return to where we started. Confusion in the head regarding one's own faith, the lack of a clear understanding of what is written in the Gospel and of Christianity itself leads to the fact that a person makes cruel mistakes in his spiritual life. Here’s the trick: setting yourself a goal that is obviously impossible to achieve, naturally, you won’t achieve it and you will become disillusioned with the Church.

Interviewed by Lyudmila Selivanova

- Father, you have the Faculty of Philosophy and graduate school at Moscow State University behind you. Does your path to faith have anything to do with your choice of education?

The main thing is that education is not over yet... In 1995, I entered the university, came to study from my native Pyatigorsk, in the Stavropol Territory in the North Caucasus, as a pure atheist. And mainly through philosophy, communication with believers, churchgoers, in the process of debate, learning some interesting things that were not taught in philosophy lessons at school, my conversion occurred.

- However, there is an opinion that philosophy is in complete antagonism with faith...

In fact, world philosophical experience shows that philosophy is a very heterogeneous phenomenon. For example, the texts of Plato and, say, Sartre are completely different things: in genre, in style, and in subject.

Philosophy is a word that is accepted as if on a residual principle: many texts cannot be included in any specific science, and some kind of general space arises that begins to be filled with texts. This is what everyone calls the general word “philosophy.”

- Can you remember a certain turning point from which the path from an atheist student to a Christian and priest began?

You know, when a person moves from unbelief to faith, it is a mystery of two: God and man. In hindsight, of course, you can see some guidelines, some special signs. The time of my admission, 1995, there was a surge of interest in church life, church topics, and religious issues. Wonderful people came to our university who truly believed in what they said - unlike secular teachers who read their subject somewhat detached, and others even confused, because all their lives they taught dialectical and historical materialism, scientific atheism . In any business, a real sincere person is in charge. Even if he is mistaken in some particulars, people follow him and believe him. These people were unusual, and youth, apparently, is characterized by an interest in everything bright, living, and genuine.

- Don’t you think that today young people are less interested in religious issues? What is stopping them?

I don't think there are any fundamental obstacles. It’s just that every berry, every fruit ripens in its own time. For everyone, the time has come to talk about life, about existence in the world, truly seriously. Some simply haven’t gotten to this point; they have many other interests and topics.

- You teach and communicate a lot with young people. How do you build a conversation about faith with teenagers during a period of rebellion and denial?

It is important to remember that religion is, indeed, a rebellion.

A person of religious culture is a person opposite to another type, the type of tradesman, about whom Pushkin said: “always happy with himself, his dinner and his wife.”

Do you ride a bicycle, father?

- It happens.

Can you imagine the mechanics of this device? You can sit in the saddle and stay upright as long as the bike is in motion. And it is in motion while you pedal. It’s interesting that faith and religious culture are such a bicycle. Many people discuss the problem of burnout and cooling of faith. You just need to remember that faith is a bicycle. And a man of religious culture is a man of path and goal. A man of guiding star culture. Here is a classic question from a seminarian from the series “wake up at night - he will answer”: why did Moses lead his people for 40 years in the desert? They walked in circles. The seminarian will say: so that all those born in slavery die out. And one of my friends says that Moses wanted to create a new type of person. Anti-philistine. A person of path and purpose. A person for whom the journey, the journey, is something familiar.

What is this path? First of all, the path of reason in search of truth, says our Alexey Ilyich Osipov. This is philosophy. Now you and I are wearing cassocks. And people who are more witty than knowledgeable will say that these are some kind of dresses, something effeminate. But an experienced person knows where the cassock came from. Pagan philosophers wore such clothes. This is a philosopher's travel clothes. Philosophical cloak. Even if the philosopher lived in one city without leaving it all his life, like Immanuel Kant. It was clear from the cloak what type of person he was - the type of wanderer. A person who never stops does not strive for comfort. His mind constantly wanders in search of truth, even if his body is present in one city. Nothing exists outside the path and goal, according to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

- Often in practice, Christians, a few years after conversion, feel as if their path has stopped and they have found all the basic answers to their questions. Stagnation and burnout begin. Talk about Groundhog Day.

The Apostle-Evangelist John the Theologian says that if we talk in detail about what Jesus said and did, the whole world would not contain the books written. We need to remember this. The situation of the mind, when it seems to it that it has received all the basic answers to the questions, means only one thing: this mind is locked in its stereotypes. But God is not what man imagines him to be.

A well-known scene, the description of which wanders through various Orthodox books: the beginning of the twentieth century, a priest gets on a train to Moscow - St. Petersburg. He finds a student in the compartment and they begin to communicate. The student is naturally an atheist. He immediately warns: “Father, I don’t believe in God.” The priest responded in the same tone: “I don’t believe it either.” And while the student picks up his jaw, the priest explains: “I also don’t believe in a God like you don’t believe in. I don’t believe in a gray-bearded man who sits on a cloud, like on a sack of flour, and watches through binoculars as people swarm around below.” Naive ideas about God are not included in the content of faith. But completely church-believing people also perceive God as a man with a gray beard.

But my situation is different, I am constantly “disappointed” in Christ, because He refuses to correspond to my theological ideas about Him.

- “A harsh statement,” the reader will think...

And a very severe disappointment. It comes once every two weeks. You are trying to build a relationship with Christ based on the idea that you have about Him. But for me, as an MDA teacher, it is not “simple.” And yet it, my idea, turns out to be stereotypical. That's not who He really is. Yes, we know some of His features. But He always eludes a specific, final definition, from any specific image. Therefore, if a person has already calmed down in his search, this speaks only of one thing: he did not have enough intelligence to notice that everything is far from being exhausted by this.

- Sometimes people are simply afraid that if they continue on the “path of reason”, they will wander into heresy...

If you're afraid of wolves, don't go into the forest. The problem is that if a person stops this search, stops pressing the pedals, takes off the philosophical cloak of a wanderer on the path to truth, then very soon it will all end. Look at what Orthodox discourse is like today. What do priests and monks talk about among themselves? About the weather, about the construction of the temple, about gasoline prices. This is not yet the worst case scenario. And in the worst case, gossip begins. A holy place is never empty. If our mind is not occupied with Christ, theology, if we have taken off our philosophical cloak, we remain in the T-shirt of a gossip. About the hierarchy, about their brothers and co-workers, about all sorts of nasty things.

According to my observations, gossip today is the main sin of a monk and priest. Not what they are talking about, but the very fact of empty conversations with some spice.

Faith cools, and people become disillusioned and leave the Church, partly because they forget that in order for a bicycle to move, you need to pedal. These pedals are the philosophy. Theology, reflection on oneself, on one’s life, destiny, judgment about the destinies of the Church, about Christ, about the truth of the revelations given to us.

- As a priest and philosopher, what food for thought would you recommend to our readers?

It's not the books that I would recommend. Books are of little use if you start with them. I would recommend that people go out and preach. A person preaches, communicates, suffers defeats in disputes, endures reproaches, experiences shame, but this is his life. The truths that he preaches are implanted in his life and become its content. And defeat in an argument is an excellent reason to look into the right book and find the answer to the question.

All Christians are called to preach, and not just the apostles, bishops, and priests - the professional core of the Church. The layman is also called. There is a law of our understanding: the best way to understand something is to try to explain it to someone else. Maybe someone won’t understand you, maybe it will be embarrassing. But the Lord says: whoever is ashamed of me before men, of him I will be ashamed before My Heavenly Father. But for some reason we tend to believe that this is none of our business; everyone is afraid of seeming funny. Such passivity ends with the fact that if a person does not bear the name of Christ on his lips, then he will very soon lose it both from his mind and from his heart.

The Apostle Paul says: “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.” In what sense? It’s just that if he stops going and preaching, then his mind will be occupied not with Christ, but with gasoline prices and the construction of another temple. And therefore, the heart will be occupied with completely different things. And Christ will go to the periphery of life. Why then be surprised that you yourself have grown cold towards Christ if He is not the center of your life.

- There is also another extreme: “Orthodox activism” with strange antics, rudeness and hooliganism under the guise of “defense of holy places”....

This is a question of education, a question of method.

A well-mannered person knows at what moment it is appropriate to talk about the most important thing. He can turn any topic towards Christ. The question here is to do it tactfully. You cannot break into a person’s house for three hours to preach the word of God to him.

- And yet, sometimes tactless, stupid or downright sinful antics of believers become the reason for scandals in the media.

Yes, today topics related to religion in mainstream journalism are covered mainly in a negative way. There is a law of journalism - no one is interested in trains arriving on time. In principle, modern journalism, it seems to me, gravitates towards gossip. And the subject of gossip in major publications cannot be a priest who adopted ten children. There is nothing for the journalist to talk about here. But the scandal associated with church life causes resonance and echoes throughout all publications.

- But even in Soviet times nothing good was written about the Church. So we should get used to this by now... Still, how seriously should we take scandalous publications? Can they really push someone away from the Church?

They can alienate people from the Church who are already moving in the opposite direction from it, because these scandals can only provoke those who are moving towards it. I have a friend at the Moscow Theological Academy, about whom some nasty things were written out of the blue. I know him well, and I don’t even need to justify him. He was having a lot of fun and said that even bad fame plays into his hands. Now people who had previously walked by come up to him for blessing with horror in their eyes... So it all depends on the person: for serious people, scandals can make them want to figure out what is really going on there. And they will only turn away those who are not capable of critical thinking.

- Let's talk about information about the Church and faith - not scandalous, but missionary. We have all heard about “clip thinking”, about the shift in audience interest towards the most “easy to digest” formats, short videos. Today, does it make sense to continue the conversation with the reader within the classical framework of a coherent text?

I think we need to master new information technologies. I myself am a bookish person; it’s not interesting for me to even watch or listen to some lecture on the radio or watch a video on YouTube. I find it easier to work with printed text. But to my surprise, I became convinced that my personal speeches, which students recorded on their own initiative and posted on the Internet, had a larger audience than all my books and articles combined. So you need to learn to “fit” into new formats.

Look, young guys in their twenties, by and large, have nothing to tell the world. But among them there are bloggers with millions of views. This is at the same time when our academic teachers have an audience of ten to fifteen thousand at most. What does this mean? The fact that we simply have not mastered the technology.

The issue is clearly not the content of the speech addressed to the world. I think that this gap can still be reduced by mastering technology. And we already have such attempts, mainly among young priests who run their own blogs. We have a priest in the Krasnogorsk deanery who regularly appears on Periscope. And this is generally a very interesting format of communication. It has no barriers and is not pre-censored in any way. They send questions to the priest: outright swearing, rudeness, and so on. And he is already, apparently, an experienced fighter: he smiles, which attracts even more sympathy from the audience. Someone knows how to work with this format and has enthusiasm. For example, I don’t have one. The academic environment is closer to me. So to speak, I won’t go to the square - I just won’t be able to do it, I don’t have the nerves. And there are steely priests who know how to turn boorish attacks addressed to them into a joke. Charm people in the square.

- But sometimes in the church environment they start to be “poked.” Especially if one of the missionaries, targeting young people, uses slang.

The fact is that the modern world, apparently, gravitates towards constant performance, theater, shocking, and clownery. And in the content of our faith there are things that cannot fit into the format of kitsch or shocking. This is the problem of any missionary. On the one hand, you need to show that you are not from another planet, because there will be no dialogue with an “alien”. You need to show that you have something in common with the audience you are preaching to. On the other hand, if you are too “on board,” then what are you teaching us, what new have you brought? The missionary's experience, his upbringing, and self-esteem should tell him where to find the golden mean.

- Speaking of shockingness and the “middle ground”: what, in your opinion, is the golden mean in the reaction of believers to anti-church provocations?

You see, there was a French philosopher, one of the ideologists of the student revolution in Paris in 1968, Guy Debord. He wrote a very interesting little book called “The Society of the Performance.” Please note that in the Gospel Christ speaks to everyone: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the high priests, the Roman procurator, even the traitor Judas. And he refuses to dialogue with only one person. This is the tetrarch Herod. Despite the fact that Herod did not seem to do anything bad to him.

When Christ was brought to trial before Herod, the latter rejoiced, as the evangelist tells us. He greeted Him and said that he had long wanted to see Him. He did not curse Him in any way, did not insult Him, did not beat Him, and even justified Him in the end. But for some reason, it is precisely him who Christ refuses dialogue at all.

Why? Pay attention to the small point that Guy Debord points out: before allowing Christ to say something, Herod asked to show some miracle. One small remark - and he seemed to put Christ on the stage. He made Him an actor, He offered Him to be a clown. Guy Debord writes that the society of the performance excludes the possibility of dialogue precisely because in such a society there is a spectator and an actor. Everything an actor does or says will be judged in terms of his acting skills. There have been cases when an actor died on stage and could not ask for help. He fell - the audience applauded. He tried to say, “I’m not kidding, I really feel bad.” And the audience could not distinguish the words of a real person from the remarks of his character. They thought the brilliant actor was improvising.

Whatever Christ did or said in front of the audience would be greeted with applause or whistles. Therefore, the only method when we are drawn into provocation is to remain silent, not to say anything, because modern actionism is, in fact, not art, but provocation. Marat Gelman, for example, does not exhibit exhibits at his sites. He posts bait in the form of some blasphemous images. And exhibits in the form of “Orthodox activists” come to him on their own, and it turns out to be a show. In this sense, any remark - “impalement”, “soldering a two-piece” or “feeding pancakes” - means that we are involved in a provocative dance on the sole.

Where there is dialogue, there is different criticism of the church. One assumes that we can at least explain our actions. And the other denies the possibility of dialogue, tries to drag us into the satanic society of the performance.

- And then there is no point in answering...

By the way, Guy Debord, when he realized that the society of the spectacle could turn even the rebellion against itself into a spectacle, became an alcoholic and committed suicide. But this is not a solution for a Christian. We have a different role model. So this Role Model was silent. That is, we need some tact to understand who is criticizing and provoking us.

In one case, one can and must “give an answer about one’s faith with meekness and trust,” according to the words of the apostle. Otherwise, you need to remain silent so as not to end up in the position of a clown.

For example, it is impossible to talk about faith with Nevzorov, because asking Nevzorov about his real worldviews is the same as asking Zhirinovsky about his political position. She simply doesn't exist. Here Nevzorov plays the role of an educator a la Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Voltaire. In some ways he is quite witty. Somewhere you can even giggle at what he says. But you can’t seriously enter into a dialogue with an actor. You will simply become part of his game. It is necessary to distinguish between the moments where a person acts and involves us in the society of the performance, and where he speaks seriously, then a dialogue about faith is possible.

- In your articles and lectures, you often invite those who are ready for dialogue to engage in dialogue. Let's talk about your creativity. Your book “Male Philosophy” is being prepared for publication - what is it about? What is involved in choosing a topic?

My purpose for writing was extremely specific, and the audience was extremely specific. These are my seminary students.

There is a problem that theological school does not solve. According to our church laws, a person who wants to become a priest can only marry once. But my boys are not taught to build relationships with the opposite sex at the Moscow Theological Academy. Even when they talk to girls, they quote the holy fathers. “Holy fathers rekosha” - how can you say such a thing in a live conversation and intend to make an impression? It's all funny, but when they get married more or less randomly and don't know "the way a man to a woman's heart," it ends in disaster because the mothers leave them. Now I am observing the divorce rate among the clergy in our region - it is terrifying.

- Unthinkable things. This was not even discussed before.

Absolutely right.

The most important thing is that it is not husbands who leave their wives, but wives who leave their husbands. Mother says: no, I can’t live with the priest anymore, and leaves.

I personally know people who are experiencing tragedy. And imagine this man: he cannot marry a second time. He must remove himself from the rank, give up his dream, give up his ministry, the path he was on, turn away from it. This is a catastrophe. Or a person is forced to live as a monk, when, again, he did not strive for this, he has no calling.

The tradition of the theological school does not provide immunity against this scourge. Therefore, I decided to pose this question. And we discuss this with the guys at lectures. Eventually it turned into a book. Moreover, I want to say right away that I do not teach them how to build relationships with the opposite sex. I'm a monk and I don't want to expose myself to ridicule by trying to teach students how to pick up girls. I just wanted to start a conversation with them about courage. About what there is in our gender that can be infinitely attractive to a woman. So that my guys would pay attention to this and try to cultivate and educate it in themselves.

- You're like Socrates...

It's funny that you remembered the dialogue between Socrates and Laches about courage. It ends with Socrates’ remark: “Well, that means we haven’t figured out what courage is”...

Interviewed by priest Dimitry Fetisov and Elena Fetisova