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The Ever-Holy Trinity — The Image of Catholicity.


Since the time began and before that our God has His existence in Trinity: three Persons in One Creature. The understanding of this holy truth, the basis of the Christian dogma, during the number of centuries happened to be forgotten by the Christian mankind in such a measure that the countless multitude of the enemies of our faith quote exactly this dogma as the one, having no sense, and those protecting the Christianity, almost agreeing with that, demand blind taking of this truth on trust, without even any slightest profound understanding of it, for, as it seems to them, such understanding is absolutely impossible.

Surely, it is not possible in the fullest measure, but the same way it is impossible to understand anything up to the end, especially the dogmas of faith.

The profound plunging into this dogma in particular, in the way it is possible, deeper understanding of it, is mostly important and necessary for the correct understanding of the Church of Christ, and human nature itself.

God created the man in His image, after His likeness, for only a creature similar to Him can be truly kind.

God is one in His essence, but triple in Persons. The same must become the created by God creature. Adam and Eve were each an original personality, but together had to be one creature. The means to that was to be the similar to Divine quality of love. Love is the incomprehensible Divine power, which fulfills complete and absolute unity of the Divine, in spite of the difference of personalities, and so completely typical of God, that Apostle John says, that God is love.

Exactly this, God-resembling quality of love, given by God to people, had to bind them between themselves into one creature, so that this united human creature also with love, but now for God, gradually, in the infinite joyful process of love could be joined into one creature with God.

This is what St. Basil the Great expressed so distinctly: "I am the man, but got the task to become God." This process will never end, for the goal by itself is infinite.

But the man stumbled in the first step towards it. In order to fulfill one’s task, the man had to improve himself in love, showing it and cherishing it by the free (for love, the God-resembling quality, cannot be forced) fulfillment of the commandment of the One, Whom he was called to love.

The man overstrained the bounds of love for God with breaking His commandment, and this connection of love, by throwing the blame one at another before God.

But the human sin was not absolute, and the cast out of the paradise people stepped onto the way of confession, and the bounds of possessing the same essence — catholicity, being overstrained, was not completely destroyed in the mankind.

All the manifestations of love, compassion, mutual understanding are the manifestations of this original catholicity of people. I can understand the other person’s thought only because according to the plan of God I was to be of the same essence with him. But I would never completely understand another person, his whole life, as mine, for our natural catholicity is undermined by sin, we withdrew into our self-establishment.

The most complete manifestation of this, though overstrained, but existing natural catholicity are marriage and motherhood. Here, most of all, a person is living the life of another, as his own one.

In marriage two personalities strive to become one creature, completely preserving their personal features, the individual originality. Good marriage of two loving people is the most natural approach to this goal’s fulfillment. Loving husband and wife really live the life of each other, as their own one. Together with that, this unity in no way limits, diminishes the personal originality of each of the spouses.

But even in the most perfect terrestrial marriage, moreover in all the other manifestations of the post-sinful catholicity, the completeness of unity can never be reached.

Meanwhile, according to the Divine plan, the man was given the full catholic unity, perfect as in the unity of the Holy Trinity, in the Eternal Trinity Council, in the image of Which the man was created. And, in its turn, that longed-for, being fulfilled in the Divine Kingdom unity with God, is called the Marriage of the Lamb, i.e. the marriage of God with the human soul, in which the man joins God, not loosing his personality, as a husband and a wife strive for becoming one creature.

In the light of such understanding of originality and all-embracing character of the law of love, as the basis of the Divine plan about the man, it becomes clear why Christ the Savior, Who had come to restore the lost connection between people and God, made the commandment of love for God the corner-stone of His sermon and explained, that exactly on these two commandments are built the entire law and prophetic writings, i.e. the whole teaching of the Holy Scripture.

To love a neighbor as oneself, to live his life, as one’s own, means to be of the same essence with him. To love God with the entire heart, all thoughts, all the essence means to fulfill the Divine plan in the respect of the man, for all the spiritual sources, and the essence are given to the man, so that he could search for God to join Him and to reach that in the giving joy process— the marriage of the Lamb.

This highest commandment of love was brought to mankind by Christ. But it is very short-sighted to think that with that ended the deed of the Savior, as it is expressed by the moralists-rationalists, who appreciate the Christianity only for its moral law. If it had been that way, then to the considerable degree would have been right those, who, developing this point of view, come to the conclusion, that honestly speaking, the Christianity did not give anything new to mankind, because the founders of all the other religions also gave high moral commandments, which often coincided with the basic Christian laws, and even more, had been given before the Christianity.

We can partly agree with such an opinion; but not because that the Christianity is borrowed from some outside sources, but because the soul of the man is Christian by its nature, as one of the ancient teachers of the Church said, and that the roots of similarity to God are deeply based in it, guiding it to the authentic ideal.

But never and not any, even the most perfect Christian moral law would not have been fulfilled by the man, as the result of the corruption of his soul by sin, if Christ had not given the new power to the people, offering them the chance to join Him in one creature in the Church, restoring by that the lost in the downfall catholic entity of people, similar to the entity of the Holy Trinity.

So Christ, equal in essence to God the Father and the Holy Spirit, simultaneously became absolutely equal in essence to us in the Church, thanks to what we obtain in It the limitless spiritual strength, which give us a chance of eternal life in the Divine Kingdom, which is the Church Itself, i.e. the fulfillment of the process, once entrusted to us — the most blissful unity with God.

However it does not mean, that the Church fulfills our salvation mechanically: one enters the Church body, joins God and is saved. No! The being in the Church, because it exactly means joining God, demands of the man the fulfillment of a difficult condition — the complete sinless state, absolute purity from any spot or vice, for nothing unclean can be connected with God. So, in order that we could really come into the Church, we should be cleansed from sin, completely fulfill the Evangelic law of perfection.

The base of this law is love, the main element of which is ancient, preserved in the man, original human catholicity that had preserved the opportunity of salvation for him. Without it new, restored catholicity — the unity of God and people in the Church — cannot be reached. It is the sign of the soul’s health.

Let us note, how because of sins and crimes, the natural catholicity of the man obscures; how the man, serving to his sins and passions, looses any interest to the others, the ability to understand them, kills in him the authentic catholicity and with that dooms himself for melancholy and loneliness, for the moral torture. It happens because all the joy of life is given only through that resembling to the Divine council life with love and care for one another.

That is why, the demonic force, that had lost once typical of it angelic catholicity, and plunged into the hopeless darkness and torture, raises so much against the feeling of catholicity in people.

As a result of negation of God by mankind in the contemporary époque, we clearly see this fading of the catholicity in mankind, which in vain tries to conceal this terrible phenomenon by various international conferences, meetings, agreements.

People lost their interest to one another, mercy, compassion — these basic manifestations of catholicity. And finally, in our poor motherland in the years of communism, in the nightmare of reciprocal tracking down, penetrating everywhere espionage and lack of trust to the others in all the spheres of life, the demonic force was trying to destroy the hated by it catholicity of mankind.

We, the Christians, on the contrary proclaim the catholicity of basic life. We rejoice at showing love, trust, understanding, solidarity in people, seeing in all that the elements of ancient, originally given to us by God catholicity.

Though knowing that this natural, damaged by sin catholicity is imperfect, through it we reach for the highest catholicity, which is infinite and invincible, for that catholicity in the Church, which is in the unity with Christ and through Him —with the Holy Trinity.

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