Report of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk at the XXVII International Symposium on Orthodox Spirituality “Called to Life in Christ”

Report of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk at the XXVII International Symposium on Orthodox Spirituality “Called to Life in Christ” Доклад митрополита Волоколамского Илариона на XXVII международном симпозиуме по православной духовности «Призваны к жизни во Христе» print version September 6, 2019 12:38 On September 5, 2019, the Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, with the blessing of His Holiness Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, as the head of the delegation of the Russian Orthodox Church, took part in the XXVII International Symposium on Orthodox Spirituality on the subject “Calls to Life in Christ”, which takes place in the monastic community of Bose (Italy). 1. “Life in Christ” and “imitation of Christ” The expression "life in Christ", widely used in Orthodox theology, describes the very essence of that being of the "new creation" to which all who believe in the Son of God who came in the flesh are called. “Life in Christ is born in the life here, and the beginning accepts here, and is accomplished in the next life, when we reach that day” (Word I, 1) ¹. With these words, the holy righteous Nicholas Kavasila (1322-1398) begins his classic work on the mystagogy, “Seven Words about Life in Christ”. Based primarily on the teachings of the Apostle Paul on the revival of the "old man" in the "New Adam", the Byzantine ascetic argues that the new gracious life bestowed by believers in Christ is obtained by them and supported in them by the power of the Saving Sacraments, and also thanks the efforts of believers themselves, seeking to live in accordance with the law of Christ. “In the sacred Sacraments, depicting His burial and proclaiming His death,” writes St. Nicholas, “we are born and formed, and unanimously unite with the Savior. For through them we, as the apostle says, “They live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28) ”(Word I, 35) ². This union with Christ here on earth reaches its highest manifestation in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the believer becomes a partaker of the Risen Savior spiritually and physically. The holy righteous John of Kronstadt also taught about the transforming power of the Eucharist in his spiritual diary “My Life in Christ”: “For through the communion of the pure Body and Blood of Christ we become flesh from His flesh and bone from His bones” ³. In the Western Church in the Middle Ages, the ascetic tradition of "imitation of Christ" (imitatio Christi) was developed, which, like the Eastern Christian tradition of "living in Christ", goes back to the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, instructing the Corinthians: "Imitate me, as I am to Christ" (I Cor. 4:16). St. Augustine already considered likening to Christ as the fundamental goal of Christian life and as a means of overcoming the consequences of original sin. But it would be a mistake to think that this tradition has an exclusively ethical meaning. Ascetics in the West were also convinced that it was impossible to become Christlike by human efforts alone. It is necessary to really unite with Christ so that He can change a person by His Divine grace. In the most famous monument of Western asceticism, bearing the title “On the imitation of Christ” and attributed to Thomas Kempius (1420s), the author points to the person and earthly path of the Lord Jesus Christ as a model for every Christian: “Remember often the earthly path of Jesus Christ , and you will be ashamed of kindness that you have not yet tried to reconcile your life with His life, although you have long been standing in the way of God ”(pr. I, 25, 6) ⁴. At the same time, he points out the insufficiency of the efforts of the man himself, who is always too weak to change: “You will never find peace if you do not unite inwardly with Christ” (pr. II, 1, 3) ⁵. This connection is achieved, first of all, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist: “Through holy communion a person joins God, is renewed, recalls the reverential sacrament of the Incarnation of Christ and His Passion and is ignited by the love of Christ” (pr. IV, 10, 6) ⁶. Thus, both in the Orthodox tradition, the doctrine of "life in Christ", and in the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of "imitation of Christ" always emphasized the same fundamental idea, without which there is no genuine Christian faith - the living person of the God-man Jesus is the focus of the life of a Christian Christ, who, in His own words, abides with His disciples “all the days until the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). And nowhere does this fundamental truth find such a real embodiment as in the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. 2. Jesus Christ - the meaning of Christianity and world history A concept that is quite common in religious studies and even among Christians seems to be deeply erroneous, according to which Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, should be attributed to the so-called “book religions”. If this is true in relation to Islam and, to a lesser extent, in Judaism, then this is completely untrue in relation to Christianity. The Bible, and especially the New Testament, undoubtedly have unquestioned authority for Christians, but the recorded Word of God cannot replace the eternal Word of the Father, embodied in the Lord Jesus Christ and directing the history of the world and the life of every person. The outstanding Russian thinker of the beginning of the 19th century, Pyotr Chaadaev wrote about this in the eighth “Philosophical Letter”, objecting to those who see in Christianity the “religion of the Book”: “The word - a verb addressed to all centuries is not only the Savior’s speech, it’s all His heavenly image, crowned with His radiance, covered with His blood, with a crucifix on the cross ... When the Son of God said that He would send the Spirit to people and that He Himself would remain among them forever, did He think of this book, compiled after His death, where it is bad whether it’s good, is told about his life His speeches and some notes of His disciples have been collected? .. He wanted to say that after Him there will appear people who will so much delve into the contemplation and study of His perfections, who will be so filled with His teaching and example of His life that they morally form one with Him ; that these people, following each other from generation to generation, will pass from hand to hand all of His thought, all of His being: that’s what He wanted to say, and that’s exactly what they don’t understand. His divine mind lives in people such as we are and what He is, and not at all in the book compiled by the Church. ” These words of Chaadayev clearly set forth the concept of the essence of Christianity as “life in Christ”, the highest evidence of which is the Eucharist: “And this is why the stubborn attachment of the faithful to the amazing dogma of the real presence of the Body in the Eucharist and their unlimited worship of the Savior's Body so worthy of respect ... It is in this that the source of Christian truth is best understood: here it is most convincingly revealed that it is necessary to try to make the reality by all available means th presence among us of the God-man, incessantly invoke his body image to have it constantly before our eyes, in all its glory, as an example of the eternal lesson of the new humanity »⁷. The Eucharist and other Church Sacraments are the highest and necessary form of participation in the Living Christ for salvation. At the same time, it is very important to emphasize that Christ, as the Savior of the world, is involved to one degree or another both believers of other religions and all of humanity as a whole. Just think, was there a different personality in history that would have such a profound, comprehensive and fertilizing influence on the development of human culture? It was Jesus Christ who for many centuries set the vector for the cultural development of several continents. Starting in the Middle East, Christianity spread very quickly across the territory of Asia Minor and North Africa, and then spread to Europe - East and West. Subsequently, Christian civilization encompassed both America, Australia, a significant part of Africa and Southeast Asia. And in each of these regions, Christianity had a huge, in many cases decisive influence on the development of culture, formed the cultural codes of entire nations. Can any other person be compared with Jesus Christ by the degree of influence on the development of morality? With the complete absence of any features of a social reformer from Him, His teaching over the centuries has caused deep, radical changes in the entire system of relationships between people - not only at the level of personal morality, but also at the social level. Jesus did not call for the abolition of slavery, but it was thanks to the Christian understanding of the natural equality between people that slavery was eventually abolished. He did not call for a change in the political regime or reform of the legal code, but it was thanks to Christianity that the human community created the legal mechanisms that today underlie the vital activity of many states. Jesus was not a fighter for social rights, but it is the Christian teaching that is based on the understanding of human rights that enabled women and children to become full members of society, eliminated inequalities in public rights, discrimination based on nationality and race, and many other defects in social structure that are characteristic for the ancient world. Many moral teachers left behind compositions that we admire and study, but at the same time we can know very little about these teachers themselves and not feel any personal connection with them. If we talk about the teachings of Jesus Christ, then it is inseparable from His person, and following the teachings of Christ implies an indispensable personal connection with Him. This may seem paradoxical. Is it not enough to learn the moral lessons He taught and to follow them in life? Some thinkers of the past, for example, Leo Tolstoy, believed that enough. But separating Christianity from Christ, rejecting the basic tenets of Christianity - about His Divine Hypostasis, about the birth of Christ from the Virgin, about His miracles, about the redemptive nature of His death, about His resurrection - Tolstoy, together with water, splashed out a child from the bathtub. In Tolstoy’s version, there was nothing left of Christianity except banal moralizing; it completely lost its inspiring and transforming power. What is the secret of this unique personality? Why, two thousand years after the birth of Christ, do people continue to orient all the dates of their calendar on this event? Why, two thousand years after His resurrection, millions of people around the world on Easter, and many on every Sunday day, come to the temples to celebrate this event? Why does the book about Him remain the most read, published, translated, quoted of all ever written? Why does the person of Christ remain relevant and significant on the threshold of the 21st century? These burning questions compel more and more new generations of scholars to take up the pen in order to present their contemporaries as fully as possible the image of Jesus Christ, starting primarily from the gospel narratives. 3. Biography of Jesus Christ in the series “Life of wonderful people” I tried to answer these questions in a six-volume work under the general title “Jesus Christ. Life and doctrine. " Work on this book series gave me the opportunity to thoroughly study the historical context of the life of Jesus Christ, to give a detailed analysis of His teachings with reference to the interpretations of ancient authors and modern scientific literature. Based on this extensive work, which not all readers will be able to familiarize themselves with because of its volume, I compiled a one-volume biography of Jesus Christ, which was published in the biographical series “The Life of Wonderful People”, popular in our country. While preparing this publication, I was absolutely convinced that the name of Jesus Christ should be included in the series “The Life of Wonderful People,” the biography of this Man should be known not only to church people, not only to those who revere Jesus Christ as God and Savior, but also all those who are simply interested in this very bright, wonderful personality. Somehow they asked me a question: how is it that the book about Him will be on the shelf in the same series with books about terrorists, revolutionaries - is it not humiliating for Jesus Christ? But I have an answer. I think that if Jesus Christ did not shy away from being crucified between two robbers, then He would not shun so that the book about Him would be in the series of books about a wide variety of people, including people about whom it could be said that they went down in history with minus sign. The fact that more and more biographies of Jesus Christ are being created, some of these biographies containing His distorted image and, in fact, offering a false interpretation of His life and teachings, makes us, church people, again and again turn to the person of Christ , talk about him and write. There are so many hypotheses about who Jesus Christ was. For at least two hundred and more years, various theories have been put forward that try to contrast themselves with the church concept of Jesus Christ. At the end of the XVIII century, authors appeared who began to say that the image of Christ was distorted by the Church, but in fact He was a completely different person, not the way the Church depicts Him, and in order to get to the bottom of the “historical Jesus”, it is necessary to clear this image of all sorts of church strata. Very diverse theories began to appear. For example, German writer Herman Samuel Reymarus was the first to put forward the theory that Jesus Christ was supposedly a rebel who wanted to raise an armed uprising in Israel in order to overthrow the Romans, but nothing happened - He was crucified on the cross, and after the death of Jesus His disciples began invent all kinds of stories and fables about Him. The theory has received a certain circulation, and there are still authors who preach it. More recently, a book was published in Russian, which presented the same theory: that Jesus Christ was a terrorist, that He captured the Jerusalem temple and held it for several days, and then He was expelled from there, and He fell into depression, which was reflected in the story about Gethsemane prayer; then He was crucified on the cross, and after the disciples of Jesus began to invent all kinds of fairy tales about Him. After the French Revolution of 1789, it was in France that the so-called “mythological theory” emerged, according to which the person Jesus Christ did not exist at all - this is a literary character that is modeled, in particular, on the basis of the Egyptian myth of Osiris and other myths. In the Soviet Union, this theory was given official status, and atheistic propaganda proceeded precisely from it. Some still adhere to this theory. For example, in America there is a person who once was, it seems, a Baptist pastor, and then took the position of atheism. He says that we will never know if Jesus Christ existed unless someone finds his bones or his diary. In my book, I answer that we will never find the bones of Jesus Christ, because He has risen from the dead, and we will not find His diary, because in general no ancient writers have left any scriptures of their own, which is not a reason for that to question the existence of these people. If we turn to sources that speak about the life of Christ, we will see that, perhaps, not a single person associated with ancient history has received such a documented biographical description as Jesus Christ. We have four of his biographies in the form of the four gospels. In addition, there is a significant body of apocryphal literature (in my book I talk about why such literature should not be perceived as a reliable source of information about the life of Jesus Christ). His life is very well documented, and this gives the right in our time to turn to the Gospel as a biographical source. In my book, I look at the sources on which our knowledge of Jesus Christ is based, and talk about their quality and reliability. In particular, I am considering the question of the validity of the Gospels. It is known that the gospel story for some time - maybe for several decades - existed only in oral tradition, and only then it was put on paper or, more correctly, on papyrus. On this basis, many scholars say: how can we judge the reliability of certain information given in the Gospel, if all this was recorded only a few decades later? The speech of Jesus Christ was very bright, very aphoristic, it was poetic and remembered as poems. So it would not be surprising that the disciples of Jesus Christ, even if they wrote many decades after the death and resurrection of Christ, reproduced what He said, word for word. And so it happened. I also consider the time of writing the Gospels, and contrary to the existing hypothesis that they were supposedly written almost at the end of the 1st century, I say that this happened before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, that is, before the year 70. And this is proved by a very simple fact: the Gospel of Luke was not the first, it begins with the mention of the fact that many have already begun to compose the narratives. It ends with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the book of the Acts of the Apostles serves as the continuation of the Gospel of Luke, ending with the fact that Paul comes to Rome and lives there for two years. The author of Acts, at the time when he was finishing this book, still did not know anything about the death of the Apostle Paul, who was executed in 67. It turns out that the book was written before this happened. And since the Gospel was written before the Acts of the Apostles, it means that in search of the time of its writing we are leaving in the 50s and early 60s of the 1st century. And I think that all the Gospels were written during this period. In my book, I look at the life of Jesus Christ from the very beginning to the very end. I am talking about who the brothers and sisters of Jesus were, where He was born, how he was raised, and why there are two versions of the Nativity of Christ: one version is in the Gospel of Matthew, and the other is in the Gospel of Luke in the same way that they exist in these Gospels and two dissimilar genealogies of Jesus Christ. I consider this issue in detail and talk about why they do not match and why there are two versions. A separate chapter in the book is devoted to Jesus Christ as a person, His human personality, and His character traits. We learn from the gospel that Jesus Christ was a full-fledged person. Jesus was not some kind of superman - He, like other people, was tired, hungry, sleepy; He was angry, rejoiced, cried. All this is spoken of in the gospel. And the Gospel provides enough material to restore what might be called a “psychological portrait” of Jesus Christ. A separate chapter of my book is devoted to the Sermon on the Mount as the quintessence of the moral teachings of Jesus Christ. Another chapter is about the miracles of Christ. I classify them into several categories and say, in particular, that in history there was no other person who would perform so many miracles. Separately, I examine the parables of Jesus Christ and answer the question of why He spoke in parables. There are several theories. One of them suggests that Christ spoke in parables in order to make it easier for people to perceive His teachings, the other, on the contrary, that Jesus uttered parables in order to make it difficult to understand. I consider both theories and come to the conclusion that they have a right to exist, because a parable is a special genre that was used by Jesus Christ for specific didactic purposes. Of course, the parable made the perception of His teachings more laborious, but at the same time always required an answer from a person. And until now, any parable of Christ appeals to a specific person, and everyone answers this parable in one way or another. Separately, the book considers the material from the Gospel of John that other gospels do not duplicate. Finally, I look at the history of the Passion of Christ in great detail, I talk about the Last Supper, about how Jesus Christ entered the Jerusalem temple and overturned the tables of the money changers, about His last conversations with his disciples, disputes with the Jews, about arrest, interrogations, crucifixion and death on the cross. I consider all this material not only on the basis of the Gospels, but also on the basis of available historical information about the era of Jesus Christ and how these or those events occurred. For example, we do not know the details of the terrible execution through the crucifixion, because, before our eyes, thank God, no one is crucified, and the evangelists left no details. But there are many sources that talk about how this execution was carried out. Often, when we read the Gospels, we ask ourselves why Pontius Pilate, who seemed to be convinced of the innocence of Jesus Christ before he was crucified, still gave him to be scourged? Why was this needed? But historical sources show that in almost all cases when a person was crucified on the cross, this execution was preceded by a very cruel flagellation. Moreover, some people could not stand the torment and died under the scourges before they were tied or nailed to the cross. A lot of this kind of information, which is little known even to believers, allows us to understand what happened then. The last chapter of my book is dedicated to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Here I consider in detail all the criticism to which this event was subjected in the scientific and popular literature, and those so-called contradictions between the evangelists that were noticed by scholars. I am talking about why faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ was, after all, not only approved by the Church, but also became the property of millions of people. Unbelievers, coming to Easter to watch the procession, are always amazed that when the priest says “Christ is Risen!”, Those gathered (and this may be thousands of believers) answer: “Truly Risen!”, And many of these words are uttered with tears at eyes, as if it was not a question of a man being resurrected somewhere in Judea two thousand years ago, but your closest relative was back from the war or your closest person who was dying suddenly turned out to be alive and healthy. Why does the person of Christ still have such a personal impact on millions and even billions of people? I try to answer all these questions in my book and I really hope that not only Orthodox Christians, but also those people who are far from Christianity and religion in general, will get to know this really wonderful Person through this book - Jesus Christ, and thanks meeting many of them will have a desire to enter into fellowship with Him and follow Him. The modern French philosopher Rene Girard, the author of the "mimetic theory", argues that there is no person completely free from imitation: each in his life is formed according to one or another model. Truly, there is only one alternative - either following Christ, imitating Christ, who gave a new model of life as selfless and sacrificial love, or imitating his fellow man, guided by impulses of rivalry and desire for possession. In the first case, the model will be personal spiritual perfection, the desire for forgiveness, peace and social justice, a loving attitude towards creation. In the second - indulgence of one’s own passions, endless struggle of interests leading to conflicts and wars, deepening environmental crisis. What the world will be like tomorrow, along which path civilization will develop, largely depends on who our contemporaries will choose as a role model. We, Orthodox and Catholics, must make joint efforts so that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, becomes this model. ¹ Holy rights Nikolay Kavasila. Seven words about life in Christ, M. 2006, p. 7. ² Ibid., P. 12. ³ Cit. by: Metropolitan John (Fedchenkov), Father John of Kronstadt, St. Petersburg 2005, p. 84. ⁴ Thomas Kempisky, On the imitation of Christ, trans. K.P. Pobedonostsev, Rome 1949, p. 66. ⁵ Ibid., P. 72. ⁶ Ibid., P. 314. ⁷ P.Ya. Chaadaev. Complete Works and Selected Letters, vol. 1, M. 1991, ss. 438-439.