Non-evening light. Contemplation and speculation
Thank you for downloading the book from the free electronic library http://filosoff.org/ Happy reading! Bulgakov S.N. Non-evening light. Contemplation and speculation The book of the outstanding Russian thinker and theologian Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) is his most significant philosophical work, which, according to the author, is a kind of spiritual autobiography or confession. “How is religion possible”, “faith and feeling”, “religion and morality”, “nature of myth”, “world soul”, “nature of evil”, “sex in man”, “fall from sin”, “salvation of a fallen man”, “ power and theocracy "," the public and the church "," the end of history "- these are just some of the many issues that Bulgakov considers in his book, which has long become a bibliographic rarity. In memory of the departed: my father, Archpriest Lieven, Fr. Nikolai Vasilievich Bulgakov and my mother, Alexandra Kosminichna, nee. ABC WITH A SENSE OF SPIRITUAL Fidelity DEDICATED BY THE AUTHOR In this "collection of colorful chapters" I wanted to reveal in philosophizing or embody in speculation religious contemplations associated with life in Orthodoxy. Although such a task overwhelms with exorbitantness, it also takes possession of the soul with relentlessness. And such a plan is not limited to literature, it also presupposes a creative act of spiritual life: a book, but no longer a book, not only a book! We touch the life of the Church only with the edge of our soul, burdened by sin, obscured by "psychologism," but even from such touches we draw the strength that lives and fertilizes creativity. In the light of religious experience, no matter how meager its measure, "this world" with its worries and questions is seen and evaluated. God! Our path is between stones and thorns, Our path is in the darkness. Thou, Everlasting Light, shine on us! (A. Khomyakov. Evening song) This light is scarcely sought after and weakly dawns in the soul through the dark cloud of sin and confusion, the path through modernity to Orthodoxy and back is difficult. However, is it possible to get rid of any difficulty and must it be freed? No matter how passionately I long for great simplicity, its white ray, I deny an equally false, self-deceiving simplification, this escape from spiritual fate, from my historical cross. And only as a seeker of the religious unity of life, sought but not acquired, I appear in this book. Let the spiritual being of modernity be wounded by problems and exuded with doubts, but in her heart there is no depletion of faith, hope shines. And it seems that in this painful complexity there is its own religious possibility, a special task inherent in historical age is given, and all our problematic with its forebodings and foreshadows is a shadow cast by the Coming One. To realize oneself with one's historical flesh in Orthodoxy and through Orthodoxy, to comprehend its eternal truth through the prism of modernity, and to see the latter in its light - such is a burning, unavoidable need that has been felt clearly since the 19th century, and the further, the more acute. The guiding ideas of this philosophizing are united not in a "system", but in a certain syzygy, organic articulation, symphonic coherence. Such a philosophical and artistic conception requires, on the one hand, the fidelity and accuracy of self-reflection in the characterization of religious experience, when revealing a "myth", and on the other, finding an appropriate form, flexible and capacious enough to reveal it. But even in the presence of these conditions, the internal rhythms of thought, its melodic drawing and counterpoint, the character of individual parts of the composition remain difficult to catch: philosophical art is one of the least accessible. This has to be said even about Plato, who revealed unattainable examples of philosophical poetry in his dialogues, where not so much the truth is proved as its birth is shown. Of course, such art is not only an integral part of one philosophical muse of Plato, it is generally associated with a certain style of philosophizing. Russian religious philosophy instinctively and consciously seeks such a style, and for it this search is dictated not by pretentiousness, but by internal necessity, a kind of musical imperative. In connection with the general idea, the purely research part in the presentation is reduced to a minimum: the author deliberately refuses to strive for an exhaustive completeness of the bibliographic and scholarly apparatus. The reader's attention is drawn only to those pages of the history of thought that are of direct significance for a more distinct identification of the author's own ideas (although, of course, care is taken to ensure that there are no significant gaps in the episodic presentation). In the interests of clarity and harmony of presentation, the book introduces two fonts, and the historical and literary excursions and comparisons are printed more finely and can even be omitted when reading without breaking the integral fabric of thought. This book was written slowly and with long interruptions (during 1911-1916), and it ended already under the thunder of world war. For the humanistic worldview, which was victoriously established in the "new time", this war was truly a spiritual catastrophe, unexpected and devastating. She shattered the dilapidated tablets and overturned the revered idols. On the contrary, in the religious perception of the world, this catastrophe was internally foreseen as coming along with the ripening of the historical harvest. In any case, recent events have not forced us to reconsider or change the main lines of worldview, beliefs, aspirations reflected in this book in any significant way, they even gave them even greater certainty and tragic pathos. The grandeur of what is happening does not interfere with the immediate consciousness of the participants, and the catastrophic sense of life is stubbornly (and in its own way even legitimate) opposed by the everyday, "daytime" consciousness with its attachment to the "place." Only to the extent that we succeed in religious contemplation to rise above our empirical limitation and weakness, we feel the approach of the great eves, the approach of historical achievements. “When the branches of the fig tree become soft and let out their leaves, you know that summer is near” (Matthew 24:32). Historical time has become consolidated, and the pace of events is becoming faster and faster. Not by external signs, but by the stars rising in the spiritual sky, with your inner vision you need to navigate in this thickening darkness cut through by ominous lightning. And if it may seem to others that it is inappropriate during a general earthquake with such "distractions", then, on the contrary, we see the exacerbation of the ultimate questions of religious consciousness as a spiritual mobilization for war in a higher, spiritual area, where external events. In particular, the clash of Germanism with the Orthodox-Russian world, which has externally manifested itself now, has long been brewing, not only the spiritual war has begun. A dry wind has long drawn to us from the German West, bringing drying sand, dragging the Russian soul into an ashy shroud, damaging its normal growth. This craving, having become palpable since Peter opened his window to Germany, had become threatening by the beginning of this century. And, of course, it was not the external "dominance" of Germany that was more significant here, but its spiritual influence, for which the peculiar refraction of Christianity through the prism of the German spirit became decisive. This is Arian Monophysitism, all refining and assuming different forms: "immanentism" and "monism" - from Protestantism to socialist humanism. And for conscious resistance, one must first of all know and understand the threatening element, so many-sided and creatively powerful. Luther, Bauer, A. Richl, Harnack, Eckegart, J. Boehme, R. Steiner; Kant with epigones)