As for the proclaimed (very briefly, because it’s off-topic – V.A.), the Church baptizes not only the mind, the mind, but the whole person introducing into Divine Life, into slavery to Freedom, Truth, Love, the Kingdom of God, Happiness. Therefore, it proclaims the whole person, preparing for baptism, and the mind among them. The entire being of a person must existentially, ontologically (and not just rationally – V.A.) recognize their weakness, folly, disability, godlessness, the beginning of hellish eternal torments. Christ – the Savior, and is needed only by those who are really per ishing, not by those who are well and feel fine, and for decency repeat the words that he is a sinner, worse than all. The Church helps the proclaimed to discover the whole truth about himself, to become a righteous man in the Old Testament understanding. In the language of prototypical and depictive symbols (which in the Church after baptism for the proclaimed will become a manifestation and communion of the reality, which they depictively indicated – V.A.), addressing the mind, introduces the proclaimed into the mystery of the Old Testament, which was to show man hell, the hellish state of godlessness not rationally, but existentially. The Church does not talk about hell, it shows it to a person, and only after the hellish experience of godlessness, at the irresistible plea of the proclaimed for salvation, baptizes him (better to say, the proclaimed chases baptism by the shadow of hell, the essence of which can only be recognized in the Church – V.A.).
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When we are asked what to read, we, without discernment, advise: read the Bible, the Works of the Holy Fathers (For example: Maximus the Confessor about Deification, Gregory Palamas about the Light of Tabor and the uncreated energies of God… – V.A.). What folly! To a person who still cannot drink “milk” because they are not yet born, or to a newly born baby, we offer “solid food”… Untimely good is evil (see: “Good Works.” “Laws of spiritual life” in the second part – V.A.). Spiritual disaster; only the beginning of the journey, the beginning of the struggle, and we turn everything upside down, starting to build the house of the soul from the roof, not from the foundation… Therefore, to the question: what to read? It is more correct to answer: “Go to the Church, live the Eucharistic Life of the Church, then you will understand what you need to read, what you need…”
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To quote Scripture (in the understanding of Traditions, as various forms of expression of Life in the Holy Spirit – V.A.) or to make references, or excerpts – means to call witnesses (confirmed by every word “by two or three witnesses” – eyewitnesses, who “saw, heard, touched with their hands…” – V.A.) to the experience I have undergone, that my experience of God is true, and that God truly appeared to me, not Satan, who appears as “an angel of light.” We seem to say: “Look, and Paul, found by Christ, experienced Him as Love; John, undoubtedly, knew Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit, by God’s initiative, and only does what he testifies to the whole world, that God is Love and only Love; Peter also knew in Christ our Glory of sitting at the right hand of the Father, which already is and must be revealed in fullness, so that we “may become partakers of the divine nature” – to be deified, – all that God has by nature, given to us by Grace in Jesus Christ as an inalienable (which cannot be lost – V.A.) treasure, which we are called to accept by the Holy Spirit…”. We refer not to the flesh of the Word, but to the hypostasis, the mode of existence in which it was born. We are not interested in words as an end in itself ( “tongues will cease” – says the apostle. – V.A.). We are interested in Personality and personal communication, entry into hypostatic being, in co-communion, mutual penetration of Divine and human hypostases (“I in You, and You in Me”, “that they may be one in Us”, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” – V.A.). We are not interested in “the letter”, the form, the flesh, which kills, but the spirit, the sense, the expressed hypostatic beginning, which gives life.
“The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” The letter kills if literally read and applied instructions, advice, commandments, given and said to other people – I will perish if I do not reject and stop literally applying advice addressed to others. We are talking primarily about texts of pedagogical content, and then of doctrinal character. For example: in a male monastery, the abbot instructs young monks in writing: “Women – are an unrestrained evil, all harm to men comes from women, they are tools of Satan, with which he tempts us and catches us in his nets… And as a commandment take: avoid meeting them, even in thoughts do not mention them”; and at the same time in a female monastery, the abbess instructs young girls-novices: “Men – are pure evil, they enter homes and seduce women, they are tools of Satan, with which the devil catches in his nets… And as a commandment take: avoid meeting them, even in thoughts do not mention them.” Imagine now that such “writing” of a holy venerable father or mother falls into the hands of a young person who wants to get married. If she takes this “theology” literally, that it is just so, and not otherwise, and begins to live according to these “commandments”, given to novices (not to her!) – she will perish, in the literal sense of the word, if she does not repent! (Who said it? To whom? When? The goal? The reason? – V.A.). Or, for example, to read the advice or commandments of Venerable Macarius the Great, addressed to a beginner and apply them to oneself literally – we will perish if we do not depart from this practice. A beginner in the works of Venerable Macarius is a struggler who has been in asceticism under the guidance of holy desert fathers for about thirty years, not someone who cannot cross himself (Who said it? To whom? When? The goal? The reason? – V.A.). Or if such statements: