Since the time began and before that our God has His
existence in Trinity: three Persons in One Creature. The understanding of this
holy truth, the basis of the Christian dogma, during the number of centuries
happened to be forgotten by the Christian mankind in such a measure that the
countless multitude of the enemies of our faith quote exactly this dogma as the
one, having no sense, and those protecting the Christianity, almost agreeing
with that, demand blind taking of this truth on trust, without even any
slightest profound understanding of it, for, as it seems to them, such
understanding is absolutely impossible.
Surely, it is not possible in the fullest measure,
but the same way it is impossible to understand anything up to the end,
especially the dogmas of faith.
The profound plunging into this dogma in
particular, in the way it is possible, deeper understanding of it, is mostly
important and necessary for the correct understanding of the Church of Christ,
and human nature itself.
God created the man in His image, after His
likeness, for only a creature similar to Him can be truly kind.
God is one in His essence, but triple in Persons.
The same must become the created by God creature. Adam and Eve were each an
original personality, but together had to be one creature. The means to that
was to be the similar to Divine quality of love. Love is the incomprehensible
Divine power, which fulfills complete and absolute unity of the Divine, in
spite of the difference of personalities, and so completely typical of God,
that Apostle John says, that God is love.
Exactly this, God-resembling quality of love,
given by God to people, had to bind them between themselves into one creature,
so that this united human creature also with love, but now for God, gradually,
in the infinite joyful process of love could be joined into one creature with
God.
This is what St. Basil the Great expressed so
distinctly: "I am the man, but got the task to become God." This
process will never end, for the goal by itself is infinite.
But the man stumbled in the first step towards it.
In order to fulfill one’s task, the man had to improve himself in love, showing
it and cherishing it by the free (for love, the God-resembling quality, cannot
be forced) fulfillment of the commandment of the One, Whom he was called to
love.
The man overstrained the bounds of love for God
with breaking His commandment, and this connection of love, by throwing the
blame one at another before God.
But the human sin was not absolute, and the cast
out of the paradise people stepped onto the way of confession, and the bounds
of possessing the same essence — catholicity, being overstrained, was not
completely destroyed in the mankind.
All the manifestations of love, compassion, mutual
understanding are the manifestations of this original catholicity of people. I
can understand the other person’s thought only because according to the plan of
God I was to be of the same essence with him. But I would never completely
understand another person, his whole life, as mine, for our natural catholicity
is undermined by sin, we withdrew into our self-establishment.
The most complete manifestation of this, though
overstrained, but existing natural catholicity are marriage and motherhood.
Here, most of all, a person is living the life of another, as his own one.
In marriage two personalities strive to become one
creature, completely preserving their personal features, the individual
originality. Good marriage of two loving people is the most natural approach to
this goal’s fulfillment. Loving husband and wife really live the life of each
other, as their own one. Together with that, this unity in no way limits,
diminishes the personal originality of each of the spouses.
But even in the most perfect terrestrial marriage,
moreover in all the other manifestations of the post-sinful catholicity, the
completeness of unity can never be reached.
Meanwhile, according to the Divine plan, the man
was given the full catholic unity, perfect as in the unity of the Holy Trinity,
in the Eternal Trinity Council, in the image of Which the man was created. And,
in its turn, that longed-for, being fulfilled in the Divine Kingdom unity with
God, is called the Marriage of the Lamb, i.e. the marriage of God with the
human soul, in which the man joins God, not loosing his personality, as a
husband and a wife strive for becoming one creature.
In the light of such understanding of originality
and all-embracing character of the law of love, as the basis of the Divine plan
about the man, it becomes clear why Christ the Savior, Who had come to restore
the lost connection between people and God, made the commandment of love for
God the corner-stone of His sermon and explained, that exactly on these two
commandments are built the entire law and prophetic writings, i.e. the whole
teaching of the Holy Scripture.
To love a neighbor as oneself, to live his life,
as one’s own, means to be of the same essence with him. To love God with the
entire heart, all thoughts, all the essence means to fulfill the Divine plan in
the respect of the man, for all the spiritual sources, and the essence are
given to the man, so that he could search for God to join Him and to reach that
in the giving joy process— the marriage of the Lamb.
This highest commandment of love was brought to
mankind by Christ. But it is very short-sighted to think that with that ended
the deed of the Savior, as it is expressed by the moralists-rationalists, who
appreciate the Christianity only for its moral law. If it had been that way,
then to the considerable degree would have been right those, who, developing
this point of view, come to the conclusion, that honestly speaking, the
Christianity did not give anything new to mankind, because the founders of all
the other religions also gave high moral commandments, which often coincided
with the basic Christian laws, and even more, had been given before the Christianity.
We can partly agree with such an opinion; but not
because that the Christianity is borrowed from some outside sources, but
because the soul of the man is Christian by its nature, as one of the ancient
teachers of the Church said, and that the roots of similarity to God are deeply
based in it, guiding it to the authentic ideal.
But never and not any, even the most perfect
Christian moral law would not have been fulfilled by the man, as the result of
the corruption of his soul by sin, if Christ had not given the new power
to the people, offering them the chance to join Him in one creature in the
Church, restoring by that the lost in the downfall catholic entity of people,
similar to the entity of the Holy Trinity.
So Christ, equal in essence to God the Father and
the Holy Spirit, simultaneously became absolutely equal in essence to us in the
Church, thanks to what we obtain in It the limitless spiritual strength, which
give us a chance of eternal life in the Divine Kingdom, which is the Church
Itself, i.e. the fulfillment of the process, once entrusted to us — the most
blissful unity with God.
However it does not mean, that the Church fulfills
our salvation mechanically: one enters the Church body, joins God and is saved.
No! The being in the Church, because it exactly means joining God, demands of
the man the fulfillment of a difficult condition — the complete sinless state,
absolute purity from any spot or vice, for nothing unclean can be connected
with God. So, in order that we could really come into the Church, we should be
cleansed from sin, completely fulfill the Evangelic law of perfection.
The base of this law is love, the main element of
which is ancient, preserved in the man, original human catholicity that had
preserved the opportunity of salvation for him. Without it new, restored
catholicity — the unity of God and people in the Church — cannot be reached. It
is the sign of the soul’s health.
Let us note, how because of sins and crimes, the
natural catholicity of the man obscures; how the man, serving to his sins and
passions, looses any interest to the others, the ability to understand them,
kills in him the authentic catholicity and with that dooms himself for
melancholy and loneliness, for the moral torture. It happens because all the
joy of life is given only through that resembling to the Divine council life
with love and care for one another.
That is why, the demonic force, that had lost once
typical of it angelic catholicity, and plunged into the hopeless darkness and
torture, raises so much against the feeling of catholicity in people.
As a result of negation of God by mankind in the
contemporary époque, we clearly see this fading of the catholicity in mankind,
which in vain tries to conceal this terrible phenomenon by various
international conferences, meetings, agreements.
People lost their interest to one another, mercy,
compassion — these basic manifestations of catholicity. And finally, in our
poor motherland in the years of communism, in the nightmare of reciprocal
tracking down, penetrating everywhere espionage and lack of trust to the others
in all the spheres of life, the demonic force was trying to destroy the hated
by it catholicity of mankind.
We, the Christians, on the contrary proclaim the
catholicity of basic life. We rejoice at showing love, trust, understanding,
solidarity in people, seeing in all that the elements of ancient, originally
given to us by God catholicity.
Though knowing that this natural, damaged by sin
catholicity is imperfect, through it we reach for the highest catholicity,
which is infinite and invincible, for that catholicity in the Church, which is
in the unity with Christ and through Him —with the Holy Trinity.
Return to the first page
