Aleksandr Dmitrievich Schmemann. (№ 403666)

What does it mean to "believe in a person"? What can such faith be based on and what can it be? And then - what kind of person are we talking about? About some abstract, a team man with a capital letter, who does not yet exist and who will appear, so to speak, in the future? Or about each individual, living, specific person? From a Christian point of view, there are no difficulties here. When Christianity speaks of man, it really means every single living person. For his sake, it is said in the Gospel, ninety-nine other people must be abandoned, he is clothed with the image and likeness of God, he is called to eternity, and therefore his fate, the fate of even the most insignificant and socially insignificant person, is as important as the fate of the leader, genius, scientist. Even the Christian doctrine of death and salvation, the doctrine over which the propagandists of godlessness are so fond of mocking, is based on faith in the personal responsibility of each person and on faith in his freedom: I want - I am saved, I want - I die; and no one, not even God, can do anything against this freedom. I repeat: when Christianity talks about faith in man, it is clear. This doctrine can not be shared, it can be argued with, but it is impossible to deny that it is based on the affirmation of each individual human person as an infinite value, and value, moreover, eternal. "What good is it for a man if he acquires the whole world, and damages his soul?" (Matthew 16:26). As long as these words are heard on earth, as long as people remember the paradoxical Evangelical arithmetic, according to which one is always more valuable and more important than ninety-nine, it will not be possible to destroy the human personality, it will not be possible, therefore, to build to the end an already collectivized humanity, which will call its slavery freedom, its subordination to the impersonal benefit - rights, its prison - an earthly paradise. How terrible that so many do not yet understand that totalitarianism in all its forms is opposed on our earth only one thing - faith in God, who created man in His image and in his likeness, who called him to freedom and to eternity - this, and nothing else. The dispute of our age is a religious dispute and a dispute about religion; not to understand this, not to see the connection of all the terrible problems of our time with the depths of religious worldview - this is the same as hiding your head in the likeness of an ostrich under the wing. Distant or near? Man or humanity? Where to start, in the name of what to create? - Here are the questions that sooner or later, but will have to be answered by all mankind.