original Russian
https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Filaret_Voznesenskij/pravoslavie-inoslavie-ekumenizm/
https://pravoslavie.ru/30547.html
machine translation
Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, Ecumenism
The Foreword
Metropolitan Filaret (in the world Georgy Nikolaevich Voznesensky) was born in Kursk on March 22, 1903. In 1909 his family moved to Blagoveshchensk-on-Amur. He received his higher education at the Russian-Chinese Polytechnic Institute in Harbin, where he graduated from the pastoral and theological courses. In 1931, he took a haircut with the name Filaret, soon was ordained, in 1933 he was elevated to the rank of abbot, in 1937 - Archimandrite. In 1962, he left for Hong Kong, from there to Brisbane, whose bishop was appointed in 1963. And in 1964, Bishop Filaret was elected to the place of the retired ROCOR Metropolitan Anastasia (Gribanovsky) who went to rest. Metropolitan Filaret has carried this burden for 21 years. The Lord Filaret rejoiced to the Lord on November 21, 1985. In 1998, it was decided to transfer the remains of the deceased first hierarch from the crypt of the cemetery of the Assumption Church to a new tomb of the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Jordanville. When the tomb was opened, the power of Metropolitan Filaret was incorrigable.
Metropolitan Filaret is a man of deep ascetic life. Look at his face! He was a prayer booker, - recalls the Bishop of Filaret (Voznesensky) Archpriest Alexy Kotar, abbot of the Nikolaev Cathedral in the city. Seattle (Washington, USA). Saint John of Shanghai nominated him. The candidates were then Saint John, and someone else, and as a compromise of the Lord John proposed to choose the young bishop - the Lord of Filaret.
To some extent, Bishop Filaret was like my father, because when I studied at a Russian gymnasium in New York, my parents left for San Francisco, Pope (proto-Judges Nikolai Kotar. A.N.) was transferred there, and Bishop Filaret somehow took to look after me, called me to himself, instructed me, corrected. He loved young people, often met with young people. We had mugs on Sundays; we came to him right in the rest, where he was treating us, talking to us. When he came to our house, he liked to sit down at the piano: he played some things, including his own, was a good musician and composer.
What else can I say about him? Metropolitan Filaret was very strict about the church canons, was a zealous of the church order, was very worried about the new style, because of ecumenism. But one thing is his experience, and the other is the position of the first hierarch. In a personal conversation, he once told me: "I don't know if there is a grace in Russia." But the Synod has never heard such a thing from him, it did not become the official point of view. The same is true of the calendar. He said the new calendar was unbearable. But I myself witnessed how a young Greek priest came to us one day at the feast of the Annunciation. They, in the Greek church, did not serve the communicable, and he went to us, quietly became in the temple and prayed. The father told the lord that in the temple a Greek priest-novel, and he immediately asked to invite him to the altar, briefly spoke to him and told him to bring felon. And this news priest came out with us on the shed. The Lord loved everyone, was very patient, cheered for truth and unity.
The word published below is Metropolitan Filaret - Orthodox, inchanology and ecumenism - is said at the opening of the pastoral and theological courses in Jordanville. The archival record of the word was provided by Evgeny Lukyanov (2007).
Orthodoxy, foreign and ecumenism
People of the older generation remember well what we had in Russia-mother at the time; they remember well how many we had various spiritual educational institutions. And the higher, as academ, and the middle, as seminaries, and the lower, as spiritual schools. The conditions are not the same. And as you yourself, of course, you know, we, in the Church Abroad, actually a real full-fledged spiritual institution - this is only our seminary, which is not the first and not the second year works at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville. In the possible help of this spiritual institution, spiritual pastoral courses are opened, for which thanks be to God, because in our time it is necessary to appreciate, support and protect those organizations and institutions where it is possible to offer people church teaching.
Of course, compared to the previous time, we have one plus. You know well, friends, as we used to be said in our Russia, that the most desperate blasphemers and atheists came out of the seminarians. Perhaps, in such a formulation, this sounded too sharp and exaggerated, but there is no smoke without fire, because, indeed, it was so long before. People who did not fit for her, and eventually went out to be enemies of faith.
I will allow myself to remember now what I did not mean to say at first, but now I remembered the story of the writer A. V. Amphitheaterov on how at the time at the Moscow University taught theology famous scientist, professor, Archpriest Nikolai Sergievskiy. One day, a young man from a very intelligent aristocratic family answered the exam in theology. The answer was exceptionally brilliant. There was so great knowledge of the answering young man that the answer at moments was almost in a debate between the professor and the student. He finished this nearly hour-long exam. Archpriest Nikolai Sergievski, putting him a five, said, "You are probably the most perfect atheist? He blushed: "Where did you know from?" By the nature of your knowledge and answers. You teach it to argue with us. And then, when a year later his younger brother, a very modest and God-fearing young man, answered as well, very well, but not as brilliant as his older brother, then the professor, also putting him a five, asked: "Are you not a brother of such a thing?" Your answer is brilliant, thank you. Your brother's answer was even better, but I give you a full point with much great pleasure.
It was then. Now the possibility that the opponent of faith can come out from the spiritual educational institution is much less, because now a person who is really looking for spiritual and spiritual enlightenment will go to the seminary and even pastoral courses. And God would give that our humble undertaking should go and be the support of our only seminary.
Once in Harbin I had to read the book of one Theosophist, who, defending his Theosophical doctrines, said: "There is no religion above the truth." This is our main dogma, theosophical. All religions are valuable that they are all seeking the truth. As if even a rather attractive statement, which, however, is internally false. Why? Why? For if all religions seek the truth, and speak of it differently, can they be considered equivalent? It's like hanging on the wall twelve identical hours and showing different times, and we will say: since they are all made to show time, all of them are equal. In fact, some show right, the others are wrong, and maybe everything is wrong. In any case, the truth is one, and, showing different things, they all cannot tell the truth.
You can also say about religion. Of course, religion is the highest point of man's spirit, so a believing Christian will never laugh at someone else's religion, however primitive it may be. But that's one thing. On the other hand, if this Theosophical statement is so false, then externally, I repeat, it seems quite attractive. And here is the author of this book, Theosophist, says: "We have succeeded in bringing together representatives of almost all religions, in particular, almost all Christian faiths, except for one stubborn Orthodoxy. It doesn't want to be on that point. It says that the truth is not sought, and it is in fullness, it has nothing to seek. Therefore it can offer this truth to anyone who wishes, anyone who seeks it, is sick of it with his soul. And there is nothing to seek Orthodoxy, it is a religion that contains the truth of the revealed. And since the truth is one, then, therefore, with no other religion, Orthodoxy does not want to unite.
That's right. In Orthodoxy, it is valuable that it professs his faith, the revealed truth that not men invented in their contemplations of God and faith, but brought from heaven to the earth the Lord Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, God's reason, God's power, God's power, God's wisdom. Therefore, this determines the eternity, perseverance and permanence of our Orthodox religion, our Orthodox faith, this true true Christianity. The Lord Jesus Christ said to His apostles, "All that I have heard from my Father have said all things. That is why the apostle Peter in his time pointed out that all that is needed for life and piety is given to us from the Lord. These words of the Savior do not contradict His other words, said at the same secret evening, when He said: "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot wear it now." It is not that they were told the incomplete truth, but only that they could not fully accommodate it. And when the the Locomerator Spirit comes, He will remind you of what he has told you, and ilcal your mind so that he will understand the truth and will be fully. The Church always teaches that the fullness of truth, the fullness of the vision belongs to the whole Church of the Universal, and not to any man. Therefore, the content of our faith is already given. It is formulated at the Ecumenical Councils, concisely concluded in the exhaustive Symbol of Faith. Further, the Church says that it is revealed in its depths in the history of the Church, in the creations of the patristic, assimilated as a saving truth by every human soul in the feat of life, in the study, in the reverential perception of what the Church offers as a God-baptized truth. But you can't add anything else.
Our Orthodox Church stands on this. The foundations of this understanding in their time were warned by the apostle Paul, who wrote to the Galatian Christians: "If not only we are, and the angel from heaven will not be vague to you what you have received (means something completely new), anathema will be. Therefore, if the truth is revealed to you in a new way, in order to accept this explanation, a Christian must first of all take care of the full compliance with the truth that is already in our Orthodox Church. This should not be any innovation, but only a conclusion from what the Church is proposing, by revealing what has already been given. And in this, I repeat, permanence, faithfulness, strength and perseverance of our Orthodoxy.
Once upon a time in Russia, an original thinker, philosopher, Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov, a large original. A man who sometimes thought not only not quite the church, but also not yet quite non-church, at least, spoke out. He made paradoxes, sometimes he simply attacked Christianity, saying that Christianity was taking away its light from life, taking away its joyful sides, and making it something dark, completely bleak for the soul. But if they talk about a Russian person that he has not a mind and his heart in the palm, then this was the original, Rozanov. His mind clearly rebelled against Christianity often, and the pen went after the mind and wrote many things that the Christian should not have written. But his heart was drawn to the Church, reaching for Orthodoxy. He himself said that if he dies, he wants to invite his father before his death and confess him in all his sinful life before his death.
So, this original thinker said, "Why, when I enter the church, my mint-bearing soul feels calm? Why, when I enter the smallest, rural church, there is a jedoc-psalasman on the clergy, something is read and sings, perhaps not always understanding the words he sings and extinguing, old girls are standing and praying well, and they are hardly half of what they do understand, but why such a world is on the soul? Because we have entered the atmosphere of eternity, because here is the power of our faith, our Orthodoxy, the meaning of our Orthodox Church.
This humble servant of the Church - the psalmist, the servant of God - reads and sings in his place, and I know that for hundreds of years the same thing has been read and sang. The church sang and read it, the Church offered it to the children. We will not be, Церковьwe will be followed by others, and they will hear the same, feel the same gracious atmosphere. What about the fact that these old girls are not all, maybe they understand? They eat here, they feel this gracious atmosphere, they live it. And my sinful soul, he says, also feels the vitality of this spiritual atmosphere and feels the stone, feels the rock on which one can lean on, this permanence, this immutability. It is, as he correctly noted, only in the Orthodox Church. Outside the threshold of the temple are sometimes the most amazing changes. Generations are replaced by generations, states disappear, and in their place others appear. And the Church does its work as it did in the time of the apostolic, as it does now and will do it to the end until this earthly history of mankind is over.
If we move on to the non-Orthodox religion of Catholicism, we know that its honest and sincere representatives openly admit that it is the Orthodox Church that preserves the truth as it was under the apostles and Ecumenical Councils, and Catholicism has added something new to it. They consider these additions inspired, consider them dogmas, but they recognize that it is the Orthodox Church that indestructantly keeps what is in it. And Catholicism, as you know, has made a lot of new things. There is no time to talk about it in detail, you know many points on which Catholicism has moved away from Orthodoxy, has moved away from true Christianity.
Leah trouble is the beginning. Suppose something new, let some innovation, as if on an inclined plane, a stone rolls, and life shows how terrible it is, how dangerous it is. The terrible tragedy of Catholicism we are now seeing. Once a philosopher, it seems, Vysheslavtsev, wrote, remembering the terrible years of life in the Soviet Union in the first years after the revolution: Many decrees were issued by the Soviet authorities, made many orders. How did we live? We lived when we walked around them, we did not perform, because to perform - means to perish. And this is what I remember all the time, when I now have to hear that pious Catholics, brought up in the faith of the fathers, just try to preserve the former and live some pious aspiration, in so far, because they do not accept the innovations of Catholicism, the destructive that is associated with the so-called innovations of the so-called Roman high priest.
You see what is being done here, you see the tragedy of Catholicism, which seemed to be a rock indestructible. They used to look at us from the top down before, saying that we always have some unrest, no unity, no unity, no one center, no single power, and we are firm like a rock. That's how it crumbled, this rock, or at least begins to crumble now.
As for Protestantism, which appeared as a protest against those, I will put it directly, the ugliness that disgraceded Catholicism by the time of the Middle Ages, it appeared as a healthy protest against these distortions of truth. But, alas, it turned out that he protested, and moved to the other side from true Christianity, from Orthodoxy further than the Catholicism departed from it. If you imagine a directly and peacefully hanging pendulum (this will be Orthodoxy), and Catholicism has swung somewhere away from it, Protestantism has made a pile in the other direction, but did not stop where Orthodoxy, and, evabsh, turned out to be even further.
Protestantism also broke with many of what was still stored in Catholicism. In Protestantism, there is neither the continuity of ordination, nor many mysteries, and hence the result that in such a lack of inner fidelity to the apostolic doctrine, with such arbitrariness, Protestantism is crushed, is divided, divided and divided into sects, on the point, on all kinds of branching and divisions, sometimes almost excluding in their extreme conclusions, they reach almost to the complete negation of Christianity. And the Mother of God they do not honor and even doubt the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, that is, in essence, they depart from Christian principles and beliefs.
And these are the tragedies of non-Orthodox religions and gave rise to the phenomenon that is now poisonous temptation before many souls who have a weak or not sufficiently understanding the cause. This is what we call ecomenism. Once again, there is no way to talk about it in detail. But I will say, first of all, that, in a few words I will try to point to the main point of his insolvency. The ecumenists say that we call on all Christian religions to unite, to unite. Each of them has some truth, they teach differently, they speak differently. And if they merge, share the truth, and their misconceptions will be discarded, then a new Church, the true Christian one in full unity, will be a new Church, a true Christian one.
As if, again, a rather attractive prospect. But look at what price we are offered it? They say to us, like all other religions, you have some truth. The share! This means that in our faith, in our holy saving faith we must recognize only the share, and the rest to be misguided. So I ask: what conscience is the Orthodox, what heart, the soul of the Russian Orthodox man will agree to such a thing? In the saving faith that people once lived in ancient times, lived the holy fathers, our pious ancestors, the flames of Father John of Kronstadt and our great righteous, to declare only a share of the truth, and the rest to error? Never, of course, the consciousness of an Orthodox person, the Orthodox soul, will not agree to anything like this.
Delayed a little bit on this scheme, we and I can see the paradoxes of ecumenism, which indicate, again, its insolvency with the seeming some external attractiveness. First of all, what caused this? Of course, the world is experiencing an era of all shocks and shaking. In order to calmly experience all this, you need to have a spiritual foundation. The scattered Christianity, especially the fragmented pushes of Protestantism, have lost their unity, lost strength, lost a sense of a possible connection with the celestial triumphant Church, which they do not think of, turning their eyes to the earth, all interpret in order to arrange the Kingdom of God on earth.
They think that if fragmented, insolent, cowardly different directions and professions merge, then in unity they will create something powerful and spiritual, whereas it is known that how many zeros do not fold - will still be zero. Ecumenism is based on the assertion that all religions are only partly correct, and it is concluded that if they are united, then a new doctrine, real Christianity, will be obtained. But it's paradoxical and implausible. And, in addition, the basic idea from which it emerges is that there is no quite true Church on earth among mankind. Because if it were, it did not need ecumenism, and just everything would join this Church. And ecumenism therefore preaches its teaching, that he believes that there is no true Church that truly possesses its fullness, but only confessions, groups of people who have pieces, pieces, some truth. I repeat: for Orthodox self-consciousness, such a statement of the question is completely unacceptable.
I wanted to say something else. If you and I, of course, as Orthodox as the children of the Church, and never think about the ecumenism, which says that the truth you have only partly, and otherwise you are mistaken, but to meet the dissidents we still have to, you, the future shepherds. Remember, please, that if you have to talk to dissidents, then you need to take into account several circumstances. On the one hand, as the late Lord Anthony pointed out, conversing about our faith and offering her truths to dissidents, it is necessary to offer our faith as it is, without at all reducing its strict exact demands and began high in order to please anyone - whether his interlocutor or any dominant currents.
The Lord Anthony once pointed out that the so-called adaptability of the Catholic clergy to the flock is explained by the fact that it does not raise the flock to the top, but to his faith to belittled. But this should never be done by an Orthodox pastor, a missionary, in general, the one who has to talk about faith. Expose it as it is, in all its height, in all its purity, in all its purity, in all its light-bearing, but strictness, not belittled and not cut off, I repeat, in order to please anyone.
And on the other hand, with dissidents talking, you always need to talk with a certain warmth, kindness, offering all this in the spirit of love. As Lord Anthony said: "Remove as much as possible all that can offend the interlocutor, scratch, push away. The truth of the faith, offer as they are, but that it be warmer by the warmth of sincere benevolence.
One church writer wrote: "I was recently on the disputation of an Orthodox missionary with a sectarian. The Orthodox missionary challenged his interlocutor to celebrate, the joy of Orthodox listeners. But, the narrator says, I left with the heaviest feeling. They operated on the texts of the Holy Scriptures both opponents and beat each other with texts on the head like sticks. With some kind of ill-will, with fierceness, with bad notes. It was a struggle. It is not a Christian-friendly discussion of the controversial issue in order to find out the truth, to reveal it before the misguided, namely the desire to win at all costs, and therefore a form of militant turned out. And it is not known what it would be, - says the narrator, - if the sectarian was more acquitted to the dispute, more read, more powerful in dialectics and logic. I don't know what else would have happened. But it is necessary that the interlocutor, to whom you explain, feel that the Orthodox Church is light and warmth.
I'll tell the Orthodox pastors. Especially now the soul hurts for the young people, who are under the winds of a variety of anti-church, anti-religious, anti-moral influences. From everywhere on a young soul it collapses like a hurricane. What can be contrasted with this? Not just the head learning. And it is necessary that children, young people, youth feel the warmth and light around the Church. There are such young people, we have here, there is everywhere where only our Church has its own foci and nests. If young people felt warmth and light near the Church, it is already ours. But, alas, it's quite a bit. And it is necessary for the shepherds to take care that it is the youth to attract and not just to prove something to her logically, but that the young blooming soul, I repeat, feel comfortable near the Church, feel at home, feel the light and warmth that the Orthodox faith and the Church spread around themselves. And when the young soul feels it, I repeat, it is ours, because the taste of the sweet bitter will not want.
