In the moral-religious sense of such acuteness and consistency of problems, it will invariably turn out that there is more sin in human life than light and fire, that light and fire come from above, not from below, that a person gravitates through desire and passion toward darkness, murk, even enjoys them, and that it is natural for human nature to take the easy way down through wide gates, because the way up, through narrow gates, is difficult and sorrowful.
But this religious perception of sin is not exhausted. The thing is that a person of integral religiosity is inclined to feel and contemplate each of their sins (and any sin) as their own fault. Looking at the sins of others, approaching them with spiritual caution and heartfelt goodness, such a person is ready to admit that there is an ancestral sin in a person, which is difficult to attribute to them and them alone.
That is, there is a natural sin (original), conditioned by their earthly way of existence, – bodily-material, subjectively-individual, instinctively-egoistic, erotically-passionate, – the spiritual overcoming of which is assigned to each of us, but is not easily and quickly given to any of us. There is involuntary sin, the sin of passivity (idleness), the sin of helplessness and inability, the sin of carelessness, forgetfulness, omission, laziness. Therefore, for a person with a living conscience, it is clear that each sin of each person represents a unique, unique combination of soul difficulties, failures, and falls.
Therefore, human sins cannot be reduced to a catalog of permitted, prohibited, semi-permitted, simple, and semi-simple, which, contrary to all Christian conscience, are offered in the moral theologies of Jesuits. Moreover, they cannot be covered, nor redeemed, nor retroactively, nor at the expense of the future – by means of material donations for the benefit of the church (Catholic indulgences, or the modern consumer consciousness of Christians: where to travel, who and what candle to put, where to donate money, how to change outwardly, not inwardly, in essence…
Sin cannot be forgiven, sin can only be healed!
Sin in its very essence is overcome, corrected, and healed only spiritually: by spiritual cleansing and returning to the stream of Divine life.
Spiritual growth of a person requires not self-justification, but self-condemnation.
From every fault leads a thread into the depths of human instinct, the movements of human nature. No fault is a random state that suddenly arose. On the contrary, the soul of a person is a living organism, in which there are no accidents or isolated events. Every fall of a person, every sin has its history in the personal life of a person and its roots in original sin. To recognize one’s guilt and lament it with repentance does not mean to find those soul wounds (possibly, wounds of childhood), in which the evil act originated, and all the more does not mean to heal them, weaken their destructive and inflaming power, and heal the roots of one’s instinct. True cleansing is not accomplished by one, even a sincere impulse to goodness, to God; it requires a whole life until the last breath.
Great ascetics and lovers of goodness of Orthodoxy knew this and acted accordingly. One such example is St. Sisoes the Great, who, on his deathbed shining like the sun with uncreated light of grace, prayed for God to give him more time for repentance, the beginning of which, according to his words, he had not yet laid.
We can go further, open up greater depths of human life. We all form one organism. We hold on to each other, we support one another – and at the same time we bring each other down. There are no detached or isolated people, despite all spiritual, spiritual loneliness. From the indifference of one, the whole world becomes indifferent, a licentious person debauches everyone; every transgression arises in the entire universe and is transmitted to all ends; every personal falsehood and malice brings slander upon the whole world and destroys love in the entire universe.
In order for our nature to begin living according to its purpose, it is necessary to put an end to its rebelliousness, rooted in its very biological hypostasis, individuality – in natural will and in unconscious desire, instinct, in sexual energy and blind striving for self-preservation.
Overcoming one’s own nature is impossible. A person strives to tame the rebellion of their being, but to accomplish this by their own effort alone is impossible. They are unable to pull themselves out of the mire by their own hair, as the saying goes: “You can’t pull yourself out of the swamp by your hair.”
A person who contemplates any spiritual imperfection as sin, and every sin as guilt, and in fulfillment experiences the general human guilt in everything and for all, affirms that sin leads to suffering, and that in this property of sin its overcoming is laid. Having fallen through transgression from the stream of Divine life, humanity began to exist in an unnatural as in a natural, normal state. Sin leads to suffering, which, in turn, should teach a person spirituality and self-knowledge. Suffering is given to a person for their purification, its root and source – in the way of life that is rooted in nature, passionate,