Knowledge is possible only through experience – it is impossible to know, recognize something about which one has not the slightest experiential experience. And experience is granted to us exclusively by God’s initiative: ‘it is not from us – it’s a gift from God’. God, being Yahweh-Personality, reveals Himself, allows Himself to be known, when He wants and how He wants, and, of course, to those capable of containing Revelation and to the extent that a person can bear (God gives the Holy Spirit not by measure, but we contain it each in our own measure, directly proportional to our humility – V.A.). Any revelation can be perceived. There is no revelation where there is no correspondence between the subject of the revelation and the receiver. Otherwise, there would be no understanding, no knowledge, no perception. On the other hand, we must remember that any revelation is given at the level of human capabilities, even at the highest, extreme level of human capabilities, and beyond these capabilities lies the entire mystery of the Living God. The revelation given to us is the revelation of Personality, and it is given to personalities in their entirety. It is not an explanation or a formulation that could express the inexpressible (to express the unspeakable – V.A.). The revelation of God is a face-to-face meeting with the Living God, which each of us must grasp with all the forces of mind, and heart, and soul, and body, all the forces that each of us has in his uniqueness and all of us together in our community (universality – V.A.).
So, if we are asked: What (or Who – V.A.) is God? Who is your God, the basis of your being, the model for humanity and the realization of the highest human dream (the goal, the purpose which a person must achieve to attain ‘his own’ Happiness – V.A.)? Two answers can be given, both (both) hard to accept without church experience and tradition. The first answer is paradoxical: our God is a Man named Jesus. The second answer is hard to accept because it seems anthropomorphic (taken from the experience of ‘ordinary’ human life, naturally experienced by every ‘normal’ person – V.A.) and describes God in terms that are too small even for a man. When it is said that God is Love (1 John 4: 8-16), many imagine that the word ‘love’ is given too much significance – after all, a person, apart from love, ‘consists’ of mind, body, her nature is extraordinarily complex. How can God be what only makes up part of a person? This misunderstanding arises from the fact that we think of love in terms of emotions, feelings, affections, not in its true sense – the fullness of triumphant, celebratory life.
What we learn from the fact that our God is the Man Jesus Christ, as the Apostle Paul writes about Him (Rom. 5:15)? First: this is a personal God, Personality. Only a personal God can unite with a human personality. There can be no union between an abstract, blurred, faceless, impersonal god and a person, a human personality can be absorbed by such a god, but cannot unite with him. And this is extremely important for understanding revelation because the highest revelation given to us in Christ is a face-to-face meeting of a person and One of the Faces (Hypostases – V.A.) of the Divinity, which is offered to us.
There is something else very important in the name Jesus. Becoming the Son of Man, the Son of God unites with the entire material (created – V.A.) world. In Him all creation (the visible and invisible world – V.A.), renewed and renewed, finds a leader and head, becomes part of a complex whole, which is no longer inert matter (and was creation ever such?), but a harmonious Being. Thanks to this connection of God with history and with man, the intertwining of the divine and the created (created – V.A.), we are given the opportunity to speak about God anew.
But what is very important – we repeat what we have already said, and we will try never to forget, – revelation is the revelation of Personal Divinity to a person, as a personality, not the disclosure of systems of truths that are grasped by the mind, and the reason for this lies at the very heart of the mystery of the Incarnation. There is a difference between truth and reality. Reality is all that exists, created and uncreated, including God. Truth is an adequate expression, a description of reality, to the extent that it is comprehensible and accessible to us, as it reveals itself to us, and as we are able to understand it and partake of it. But in the Incarnation, reality and truth, expression and the subject of it coincide. The Incarnate – and the fullness of reality, created and uncreated: this is the content of the Incarnation, and at the same time the absolute, complete, ultimate revelation about the fullness of both God and the created world.
But this truth, perceived, revealed, opened in the Face (Hypostasis – V.A.) of the incarnate Lord, cannot be expressed, heard, described simply in rational categories, because we stand before the Truth that has become (which Is in the ontological sense – V.A.) Personality. And we again encounter what we have already pointed out: the revelation of Personality, which can be grasped, experienced in one’s own experience, about which one can speak only a whole personality, a whole person, that is, all humanity as a whole and the Church (primarily the Church, as the Pillar and Bulwark of the Truth – V.A.). The knowledge of God ultimately takes place not by way of intellectual or other assertions, but through the mediation of all the richness, all the variety of assertions in words, paints, lines, music, rites, movements, grandeur, humility and at the same time, and primarily, through the mysterious communion established thanks to Divine acts, which we call sacraments. They commune us to what we cannot know except by communion, co-communion of shared life (in the following chapters we will detail these issues and most importantly – the Mystery of the Eucharist, to which this booklet is dedicated – V.A.).