Christ Pantocrator. Mosaic of the southern dome of the Church of Christ the Savior in the Fields (Chora Monastery). XIV century.

Throughout the development of culture, as we search for answers to emerging questions about God, both man’s attitude to the world of the Divine and man himself change. But there is a point in human life from the moment of creation at which human nature received, in the words of a physicist, “an order of magnitude acceleration,” that is, a point that radically transformed the human world, opening up for him the opportunity to enter into connection with the world of the Divine in a completely different quality. This is the birth point of Jesus Christ. It was at the point of Incarnation that the Path to God was revealed to humanity.

What is the essence of the difference between the Path opened to people by Jesus Christ and any other experience of deification, since before Him people had such experience? Yes, definitely so. But, nevertheless, to call this experience the Path would be a great exaggeration. There is a Path when there is a walker, here attention must be focused on the walker, then it will become clear why outside of Christ there is experience, but there is no Path.

The most striking example of the Path in the pre-Christian world can be considered the teaching of Socrates, who with his “I know that I know nothing” for the first time brings human consciousness closely to the One Who in his saying is the unknowable, in fact - to God. Socrates for the first time really unfolds the efforts of human thought, directs the vector of thinking to the thinker himself. By saying “I don’t know,” Socrates means that God is not comprehensible to the extent that one can say “I know.” And at the same time, Socrates says “I know,” that is, somehow he still recognizes the incomprehensibility of God and for the first time draws human thought onto the path of knowledge of this unknown God. It is this “knowledge of ignorance” that is the experience that can be considered a prerequisite for the Path. Socrates emphasizes the knower, that is, the human understanding of God. In essence, Socrates lays the first foundations of theology as knowledge of the unknowable. P.A. Sapronov in his book “The Reality of Man in Theology and Philosophy” very accurately characterizes the Socratic stage of philosophy as the beginning of man’s self-affirmation in existence not through wisdom, that is, knowledge of God, but through love for wisdom, that is, through God himself. “It turns out that you can know and not know. It turns out that the reality of the human is such that it exists in knowledge, although it is not at all clear what its existence consists of. It turns out, finally, that the path of knowledge is not so much a path to knowledge as a way of human existence.”

To talk about faith and reason and not to talk about Socrates would mean starting from the beginning. Socrates can rightfully be considered the forerunner of Jesus Christ, who, just like John the Baptist, predicted the coming of Christ, only he did it in a philosophical mind.

More than once, researchers will turn our attention to the realities of ancient philosophy and the Jewish faith, and in this work the title itself refers to St. Justin the Philosopher. But before we continue, we must clearly understand the difference between the Path to God and the experience of deification. The path to God, first of all, presupposes a person’s self-awareness; it is this fact that makes the Path the Path, and for each individual person. The Path was laid by God himself through the birth of Jesus Christ. The sacred formula of this Path is once and forever embodied in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan dogma - the Symbol of the Orthodox Faith. Therefore, the research in question can only bear fruit when it is built in the Light of the Christian Faith.

The point is that no matter how a person tries to carry out research into the unity of faith and reason, giving them a scientific approach or taking a position of so-called “religious neutrality,” nothing will come of it! As soon as a person sets out on the path of such research, he steps on the Path to Christ. And if you don’t understand this from the very beginning, the movement will become like running in a circle. The unity of faith and reason became possible only with the coming of Jesus Christ, for He is the Way. Consequently, only in the Church of Christ is the separation of faith and reason in man overcome. In no religion in the world can reason claim to interact with faith in a single “reaction” as an equal and necessary “reagent” other than that exuded by Jesus Christ. The Incarnation put an end to the one-way relationship in which man was only a passive participant in God's Providence, a circumstance with which we associate the use of the word “experience” here. The birth of Jesus Christ and the subsequent Apostolic movement became the beginning, the reason for the emergence and spread of a new worldview of people, a new view of man on his relationship with God.

Christian apologetics is a phenomenon that arose not so much as an attempt to defend the right of Christian teaching to exist, but as an effort of the human mind to grow itself into a new, hitherto unknown reality of the Divine nature. Christian apologetics is the first island of that very “good land” about which the Savior speaks in the parable of the sower: “And to sow in good land is like one who hears the word and understands it: he will also bear fruit, some a hundredfold, some who is sixty-fold, who is thirty-fold” (cf. Matt. 13:23). Is it not today that the Lord speaks, forestalling and warning us against the disastrous consequences that a superficial and unreasonable attitude to faith entails?!

During the first four centuries of Christianity, human thought, enlightened by the light of Christ, was able to enter into conjugation with a reality beyond itself - God-manhood - and was expressed in the formula of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Symbol. Between the first “I Believe in One God, the Father Almighty” and the last “Tea... of the life of the next century” all three Divine hypostases are miraculously focused, opening up for man the opportunity not only to accept the incomprehensible God, but also to cognize his incomprehensibility, thereby restoring in himself the image His likeness.

Between the saving action - death on the cross and the miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ - and the formulas of the dogma, the milestones of the Expedition and the names of the associates, the builders of the Church of Christ on earth. Along with the holy apostles, apologists took on no small share of the work in the first years of the Christian economy. The first conscious steps of humanity along the Path to God laid by Jesus Christ and his holy Apostles are associated with the names of Christian apologists. In order to see more clearly the process of the emergence of Christian apologetics, you need to look at Christianity not as a new religion for its time, but as a unique phenomenon in the life of mankind.

People's lives today are divided into religious and secular components to such an extent that this has caused severe and sometimes pathological consequences in society. Where Jesus Christ was incarnate, there is no such division. If we perceive the works of the first Christian apologists as an apology, then there is a risk of seeing the apologists as defenders of the Christian doctrine, and nothing more. In fact, in early Christian apologetics the first forms of human awareness of the fact of the Birth of God on earth were manifested. A hitherto unprecedented Divine reality - Christ - entered the world of human existence, illuminating human consciousness with the previously unknown light of the Christian faith. An unprecedented metaphysical explosion occurred, which did not destroy, but, on the contrary, restored the connection between man and his highest Divine principle. Christian apologists are those gardeners who were the first to not only accept the new reality, but to cultivate the human mind in it, thereby causing the flowering of Christ's faith in the fields of earthly existence. Christian apologetics is not apologetics in its pure form, since it lays the foundations of Christian philosophy, that very “good land” about which the Lord speaks in parables. The Christian faith differs from any other religious experience in that it requires not blind obedience, but understanding. Only meaningful obedience will have an effect, since love is at the core of Christian teaching. Love, which does not push a person’s consciousness into the background, does not degrade, but, on the contrary, elevates and leads to a meeting with the Divine.

One of the first Christian philosophers, whose life and works history has preserved and carried through time, is the holy martyr Justin the Philosopher. The period of persecution of Christians occupies three centuries in history. Three centuries full of tragic events in the lives of people who converted to Christianity. It was only in 313 that the free practice of Christianity was proclaimed in Rome by the Edict of Milan. And the life and ministry of St. Justin the Philosopher falls on the years from the 110th - the approximate date of his birth, and the 165th - the date when he died, suffering martyrdom. It was the height of persecution when Marcus Aurelius, the “Philosopher on the Throne,” passed a law banning Christianity. And what, Justin didn’t know what awaited him for sympathy, and even more so for accepting the Christian faith? He knew, nevertheless he accepted Holy Baptism. What motivates him? Understanding this will help you see how the Path develops.

What force moves Justin on the path to holy baptism, how does this happen? In my opinion, Justin’s movement, using the terminology of I. Kant, can be called “pure” or “a priori”, and it seems all the more interesting and relevant today. The time of Justin is such that for a whole century humanity, which has not been able to accommodate Jesus Christ into the consciousness, has been living with Him and without Him. Justin can no longer see and hear Jesus Christ the man; he can now see Christ only epistemologically, that is, through knowledge. But this path does not yet exist, and Justin himself does not yet know that it is he, the pagan philosopher, who will be one of the first to pave the way to the possibility of cognizing the human nature of God. What makes Justin's path even more attractive for us is the fact that he is connected with the holy apostles only indirectly, for he is neither their listener nor disciple.

Justin is a philosopher. The time of Justin is the point in history when the Roman Empire, being in a state of disintegration and transformation and on the eve of agony, rapidly absorbs the flows of other cultures associated with the Roman one as a result of military expansion. Mainly, Rome either dresses itself in the clothes of Eastern mysticism, or returns to the draperies of the toga of Greek philosophy. It’s not that the Romans don’t like their own religion, it’s just that it has become something too familiar.

Nearby, or rather, inside the Roman Empire, lives another, no less high reality - Judea. Unlike the Romans, the Jewish people came to true faith in the One God and were able to maintain it until the Savior came into the world. We see how, by the will of Divine Providence, Divine revelation and the highest wisdom came together closely at one point in space. Jerusalem became the place of humanity's breakthrough to God - the coming of Jesus Christ.

Even a shallow dive into history is enough to see the realities of that part of God’s birth on earth that can be called human. In addition to the main thing - the Divine expression of will, humanity called on God, was attracted to Him and prepared to accept Grace. Prepared by both prophets and philosophers. Reducing the above to man, we can see that Grace sent by God connects two parts of consciousness: the one that is capable of perceiving and the one that is capable of reproducing. In this reaction the Path is manifested, and nowhere except Christianity is this unity embodied to such an extent as to become the Path to deification. And here, too, the personality of St. Justin the Philosopher, who through his life and work proved and demonstrated the legitimacy of Christian teaching to be called the Way.

Along with prayer, philosophy can and should, in my opinion, be considered as a kind of maximum possible effort in a person’s movement towards God. Only in knowing the meaning of Revelation can one reproduce the essence - the movement towards God. Revelation to a greater extent, if not entirely, belongs to the fields and forces of Divine influence in which man receives the opportunity to ascend to God. The movement begins when Revelation reaches a person’s consciousness and the latter comes to life, just as the motionless mirror of a forest lake comes to life with the first drops of rain.

This does not mean that consciousness was absolutely static - no. To clarify the above, let’s try, by looking closely at the word “Revelation,” to figure out what stands behind it, and not so much in the ontological, but in the epistemological sense.

What was revelation for Justin the Philosopher before he came into contact with the Revelation of the New Testament? Could this be the world of Plato's eidos? Of course he could. What about the worlds of Heraclitus and Socrates? Without a doubt. Could it have been Moses with His Decalogue? Undoubtedly. I am convinced that among both the Stoics and the Pythagoreans, through whose schools Justin's path ran, he was repeatedly exposed to the power of Revelation, either indirectly or directly. And one more question that will bring us closer to understanding the essence of human activity on the path to Christ: was Justin the Philosopher looking for Christianity or was he looking for something else, and found Christianity?

Here at this point the essence is most clearly manifested: Saint Justin, being a philosopher, sought the Truth and found It in the face of Christianity.

The New Testament is the highest Revelation to which a person can come, and the highest does not cancel the lower, it contains, but does not cancel. Before Justin the Philosopher was able to let in the Revelation of the New Testament, he is convinced that his consciousness went through many contacts with the Revelation.

When I read in numerous descriptions of the saint’s life that the knowledge of the pagan philosophers Plato and Pythagoras did not open the way for Justin to know the true God, at least bewilderment arises in me. And who, then, if not Socrates and Plato, Pythagoras and Aristotle, could open the Path to Christ to the pagan philosopher Justin? How and through what can the philosophical mind break through to the true God, if not through philosophy itself? In my opinion, Justin’s meeting with the Christian elder, the one who showed the essence of Christian teaching to a man seeking God, was not the beginning, but rather a kind of logical conclusion of a large and significant period in the life of a suffering philosopher seeking the Truth. The elder’s instructions to prayer and the study of Holy Scripture became for Justin the turning point at which his consciousness received the missing quality of Light and, finally, was kindled by the Fire of Truth, desired and sought after!

Is the human mind capable of carving out Revelation from itself on its own? No. “They became futile in their speculations, and their thoughtless hearts were darkened; calling themselves wise, they became fools” (Rom. 1:21–22). Listening to these words of St. Apostle, you involuntarily ask yourself: why does Justin the Philosopher and in his person philosophy, and not anything else, react with Divine Revelation in the first place? Why are philosophers the first after the Holy Apostles to burn so brightly and so accurately reproduce the New Testament with God to the world? After all, it would seem that the Jews are closer, and even Eastern wisdom in the persons of its teachers could well accommodate and proclaim the Christian teaching to the world, and God chooses the sons of ancient philosophy as his heralds? Why? I could answer like this: The East listened to God, and the West thought of God. In this synthesis, in my opinion, the “metaphysical matrix” of man is formed. One part of it questions, listens to God, the other thinks, reproduces. Faith makes it possible to call on and accept God the Holy Spirit; philosophy gives the God who has entered human nature. One without the other will not give birth to wisdom. Hence the Apostle: “Calling themselves wise, they became fools.” There will be no wisdom without faith, just as there will be no wisdom without philosophy. Jesus Christ was born on Earth precisely at the point of convergence of faith and reason: Jerusalem and Athens. Some called Him with the boundless faith of the prophets, others, with the unprecedented feat of philosophers, prepared human consciousness for His coming. Jesus Christ - God - again connected the spheres of the human and Divine cosmos, broken by sin, and man secured this connection forever with the dogma of the Christian faith. What does it mean, enshrined in dogma? This means: I realized it, put it into words, made it my property. This awareness was initiated by many of the first Christian philosophers - apologists, whose leader can rightfully be considered St. Justina.

The saint does not need philosophy, but only because his mind is already illuminated by the Light, and it is not the mind, but the Light Itself that moves a person. The task that faced the dawn of Christian philosophy was prohibitively difficult. The only thing, in my opinion, that allowed the first Christian philosophers to carry out the mission entrusted to them by God was the proximity in time to the point of the birth of Jesus Christ and the apostolic ministry. The heavens literally glowed with Christ and His Holy Apostle Diamond. At that time, between the revelation of the New Testament and the human mind there was not yet a layer of the viscous mass of heresies and speculations that cover the Christian doctrine today with a thick veil. There was no soot of Gnosticism, no blood shed in religious wars, no cracks of schism. The facets of Christian teaching, carved by the holy apostles, shone in the rays of Christ God with all the power of their pristine purity.

And yet the mission of the first Christian philosophers was prohibitively difficult. The light of faith has been shed, and this is only one, albeit the main, component of Christ’s teaching. Now with this light it was necessary to educate the human mind, to root faith in human nature. At the same time, I note: the world around us is not only unfriendly, but completely irreconcilable and aggressive. Paganism and Judaism are now fighting for power over the minds and hearts of people, for the well-being of the top is entirely based on this power. One came into the world who abolished, as “first believers,” any power on earth except God’s, and, naturally, those in power have absolutely no need for this: they are not going to give up their positions. But no matter how much Christian blood has been shed, the efforts of human power have been and will always remain in vain if they do not accept Christ. The power of Christian teaching does not come from minds, even very bright ones, and not from hearts, even if absolutely open to God. The teaching was proclaimed by God himself who became man, and therefore no effort can interfere with the triumph of Christian truth.

Christian philosophy was formed in the process of assimilation of this truth by its ascetics, the first Christian apologists. It is philosophy that gives revelation the channels along which Christianity flows into the mind, conditions and strengthens it so that there is no “erosion” or fruitless “flowing out”, which happens especially abundantly in our time. However, let us return to Saint Justin.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Dogma, which became a symbol of the Christian faith and at the same time the pinnacle of thinking, owes its birth to both the power of Divine Revelation and the power of human thought. Let's try to find more precise words: Christian dogma is the power of Divine Revelation, embodied by the human mind and captured in words. Dogma is a line that combines human and Divine nature. Dogma is the metaphysical center around which the human cosmos moves. The magnet from which human thought comes and flows. Saint Justin and the first Christian philosophers are those builders who, having accepted the essence of faith, laid the foundation for the Dogma of the Christian Faith.

It is necessary to clearly understand that the foundation was not laid for a new religion, nor for a new, even the most perfect, current of philosophy. Justin and his companions took the first conscious steps on the Path paved by Jesus Christ, who reconnected the connection of human and Divine nature that was once interrupted by sin. By examining the work of Justin the Philosopher, we can see the essence of the first efforts made in this direction, which will have a beneficial effect on our own attempts to follow this path.

The saint himself expressed his mission with utmost precision in the words: “Whoever can proclaim the Truth and does not proclaim it will be condemned by God.” Like Heraclitus and Socrates, Justin, now in the light of Christianity, makes the ineffable utterable, the incompatible one, bringing to the mind of humanity the main impulse of the Revelation of God - the Divine Trinity.

On the one hand, there are the Jews, for whom Jesus Christ is a “temptation,” on the other, the Greeks, for whom He is “madness.” Why temptation? Because Jesus Christ is the embodiment of the Jewish faith, the crown and the result. They did not accept God without accepting Jesus Christ - they did not have enough strength. But we must not forget that the Jews at that time possessed the religion closest to the truth, which the New Testament did not abolish, but contained and crowned. Why madness? Because the thought of the Hellenes, in the person of their philosophers, came to understand the incomprehensibility of God, being at the same maximum “speeds” for that period as the Jewish religion, and the reaction of philosophers is completely understandable and natural.

Justin insists on the unity of the two Testaments, which are both given by one God and are resolved one into the other: “Old into New, eternal and perfect.” Based on the Old Testament, Justin, being a philosopher, calls the Jews, and in their person all of humanity, to reason. He speaks of Christianity through the Old Testament because the human mind must be brought to the realities of the New Testament before it can be nourished. Justin finds words, confirming them with the very faith of the Jews, and conveys to them the thought of Christ and the trinity of God. The main action - a breakthrough similar to the one that God carried out in relation to faith through the holy apostles - in relation to reason is accomplished through St. Justin and others like him. The work of Saint Justin is an illumination, or rather, an irrigation of the human mind with the light of the Christian faith. Now the human mind, and therefore man himself, guided by faith, ascends to a new stage in his return to God.

St. Augustine would later formulate this new state of man: “To believe in order to understand.” This formula opens the gates to Christian philosophy - the only one possible now. Just as the Revelation of the New Testament absorbs and nourishes the Old Testament, Christian philosophy absorbs and nourishes the ancient one. Just as now there is only one highest Divine Revelation - the Bible, there is also one highest philosophy - Christian, as Justin Philosopher speaks about in the “Dialogue ...” through the lips of an old man he met by the sea: “So you are a lover of speculation, and not of the deeds of Truth?” - this phrase and their entire conversation, in my opinion, is a kind of manifesto of higher philosophy. Christian faith allows the mind to no longer be an outcast in heaven and a captive on earth. Philosophy, irrigated with the light of Christ, allows a person to not only be open to the Divine will, but makes this will a creative force that allows him to move along the Path of return to God. Here the elder gives Justin key: “But first of all, pray that the doors of Light will be opened to you, for these things cannot be seen or understood by anyone unless God and Christ give Him understanding.” Now, nearby, or rather, in the bosom of Revelation, the word appears understanding, two such profound realities of human existence as revelation and philosophy, separated by a previously insurmountable barrier, received the opportunity for interpenetration in Jesus Christ. In this reaction a new person is born. Its novelty is the restoration of the integrity of its parts and their unification in the One: Faith-Reason-God.

Justin directly draws a connection between faith and reason, speaking about this in the First Apology: “And in everything that philosophers and poets spoke about the immortality of the soul, about punishments after death, about heavenly contemplation, and about similar subjects, they used the Prophets - through them they could understand and express it.” Justin does not simply argue with the pagan view of the world, but proves and shows that the best in pagan philosophy is inextricably linked with the Jewish prophetic tradition. Drawing attention to Plato and Moses, the saint, with the light of Christ, metaphysically connects through himself the previously incompatible, pagan philosophy with the Jewish religion, thereby clearly demonstrating the miraculous power of Christianity. The apology of Saint Justin is the basis for the further spiritual transformation of philosophical thought, which occurred during the formation of Christian dogma and beyond - when the Symbol of Faith itself became that highest shining peak, attracting more and more new associates to the Path of ascension.

And again returning to the “Dialogue with Tryphon the Jew,” one can see the same luminous Christian thought, aimed at calling now the Jew to think about Christ:

“I am so amazed by so many passages of Scripture that I do not know what to say about the passage from Isaiah where God declares that God will not give His glory to anyone else, saying: I am the Lord God, that is My name, and My glory, I will not give My virtues to another. (Isa. 42:8).

Icon of Justin the Philosopher. Russia, XIX century Church of the Resurrection on the Assumption Vrazhek, Moscow.

“If you, Tryphon,” I said, “in citing these words, simply and without guile stopped, without introducing the preceding words and without adding subsequent words, then you can be excused; but if you did this in the thought that you could confuse my speech and force me to say that the scriptures contradict each other, then you are mistaken, for I will never dare to think or say this. If I come across a passage of Scripture that seems to be like this, and seems to contradict another: then, fully convinced that no passage of Scripture contradicts another, I would rather admit that I myself do not understand its meaning, and I will try to convince those who do the same to think the same. allow for contradictions in Scripture."

The entire dialogue is imbued with analogies and connections of the Old and New Testaments, demonstrating the unity and regularity of Divine Revelation, and at the same time the thought, metaphysically transformed by Christianity. Justin is a philosopher.

Saint Justin is not a prophet, but a master of Christ, who managed to weave His single doctrine with the luminous threads of Revelation, accessible to the understanding of not only a Jew or a Greek, but also of any sane person.

Magazine "Nachalo" No. 17, 2008

Sapronov P.A. The reality of man in theology and philosophy. St. Petersburg, 2004. P. 137.

One of the main problems of the philosophy of the Middle Ages was the problem of the relationship between faith and reason, theology and philosophy. As noted earlier, this problem arose during the period of apologetics. and there the approaches to solving it were mutually exclusive. But both of these approaches could not suit the church. The Church could not share Eriugeni’s position, according to which “any authority not approved by true reason is weak,” since many provisions of the Bible (the same idea of ​​​​the virgin birth, the death and resurrection of God, etc.) really go beyond the limits of reason. But she could not be satisfied with the position of Tertullian with his principle “I believe because it is absurd,” because, firstly, in this case many thinking people, not satisfied simply with the principle of faith, would remain outside the church, and, secondly, and methodologically this principle cannot be understood: Why did God endow man with reason and thereby put her at the top of the world, if reason cannot say anything about God?

This problem finds a classic solution in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas, the son of an Italian count, became a Dominican monk against the will of his parents and studied in Cologne and Paris with the outstanding representative of mature scholasticism, Albertus Magnus. He set out to combine the philosophy of Aristotle, which at that time had become known in the Middle Ages, with the Christian religion. The Church was at first wary of Thomas's works, since it distrusted the philosophy of Aristotle with his faith in reason, but after his death Thomas received the title of "angelic doctor" and in 1323 was canonized, and his philosophy became the official philosophy of the Catholic Church . The teachings of Thomas Aquinas are still recognized by the Catholic Church today as the only true philosophy.

Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between “truths of reason” and “truths of revelation”, the fields of philosophy and the field of theology. But since God is ultimately the source of truth, these truths cannot contradict each other. But the human mind is limited in time and space, it deals with phenomena of the objective world, therefore the scope of its judgment is limited and not all truths of revelation are subject to it. But this does not mean that the truths of revelation, not subject to the mind, are pro-mind, they are simply super-mind. And therefore, if philosophy comes into conflict with theology, it must reconcile itself and coordinate its conclusions with the latter. It is worth adding to this that, according to Aquinas, the object of knowledge in them is one - God. But reason is not able to answer the question about the essence of God. But at the same time, he is not helpless in the question of the existence of God.

Of course, the question of the existence of God is, first of all, a question of faith. But for an unbeliever, the mind can provide indirect evidence of the existence of God, conclusions by analogy. At the same time, Thomas Aquinas does not support the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God put forward by Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm believed that we have the idea of ​​God as the idea of ​​absolute Perfection. But absolute Perfection is unthinkable without existence. Therefore God must exist. According to Thomas, there can only be indirect evidence of the existence of God. He provides five such proofs.

The first two proofs are similar. The first argument is based on the fact that there is movement in the world, and any movement arises as a result of external influence and, if we follow the chain in the opposite direction, we must come to the prime mover, which we call God.

The second argument: changes occur in the world, but any change has a cause that is external, and the chain of causes cannot be endless, there must be a first cause, and we call this cause God.

The third argument is that, according to Thomas, every thing on Earth is random. However, it cannot be assumed that everything in the world is accidental, therefore, there must be an absolutely necessary being, which we call God.

The fourth argument is based on the existence in the world of different degrees of perfection. All phenomena of the world exhibit different degrees of perfection, and therefore different degrees of being. But this is only possible if there is an absolutely perfect being in the world, which we call God.

The fifth proof is teleological. We see, says Thomas, that the world is orderly and expedient. All phenomena, especially living beings, consciously or instinctively strive for the best. But this world order cannot be explained by natural causes; we must assume a supernatural intelligent being who determined this expediency, and we call this being God.

Thus, according to Thomas Aquinas, faith and reason must interact in such a way that reason, through its capabilities, must provide faith with arguments for its correctness, and this thesis becomes the official principle of the relationship between faith and reason, religion and philosophy.

REASON AND FAITH- the fundamental relationship between the two abilities of the human soul, which has been the most important philosophical and theological problem throughout the history of thought.

In Antiquity, questions of faith were discussed in the context of knowledge, to substantiate the original self-evident axioms and principles or to characterize the sphere of opinion. The right to be whole was recognized for the Mind.

In the Middle Ages, with changes in ontological principles, the meaning and meaning of faith changed. The methods of human existence now presupposed confession, prayer, instructions (conditions of faith), which were the path to the acquisition of eternal and unchanging truth.

We can distinguish three periods during which the angles of view on the problem of the relationship between reason and faith shifted. The first - before the 10th century, when reason and faith were thought of based on authority . The second is the 10th–12th centuries, when disciplinaryly divergent theology and philosophy raise the question of justifying authoritative judgment by reason. The third is the 13th–14th centuries, when we are talking about two truths: the truths of faith, which are accepted without proof and are justified by references to the Holy Scriptures, and the truths of reason, which require evidence. However, all three periods share common features. The Christian idea of ​​the creation of the world by the Trinity God - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, i.e. Omnipotence, Word-Logos and Goodness, based on the revelation of Holy Scripture. The recognition of a higher power, which creates the world with reason and good will, gave grounds for the demand for faith, which, due to the incomprehensibility of this act of creation, could not be considered exclusively in a cognitive context. Recognition of the limitations of the human mind in comparison with Divine Wisdom meant that the mind participates in the knowledge of God together with other, no less important abilities: a person was considered concentrated only when his intellect was concentrated in the heart, i.e. when the mind became zealous and the heart prophetic. Man henceforth appeared not in two dimensions - soul and body, as in Antiquity, but in three - body, soul and spirit, where the spirit carried out the communion of man with God through goodness, thereby giving ontological status to faith. Philosophy, directed to the beginnings of being, could no longer ignore faith and certainly had to be included in the search for correspondence between reason and faith. Already in the 2nd century. a counterweight Gnosticism , who preached the impossibility of the unity of reason and faith, representatives of the Alexandrian catechetical school and, above all, Clement of Alexandria proclaimed their harmony, believing that the harmony of faith and knowledge can make a person a conscious Christian. Belief in the good and reasonable foundation of the world is the beginning of philosophy. A properly directed mind helps to strengthen faith.

Faith presupposes the existence of indefinable principles (Light, Cause, Beauty, Life, Good, Wisdom, Omnipotence, One, Thought, Love), which can be witnessed or contemplated, as well as the transformation of the entire human being, aware of its contact with God, who enlightens person. This inner light overshadows philosophy itself. In this sense, the philosophical mind goes into voluntary slavery to religion. Philosophy is seen as the handmaiden of theology.

Tertullian focused on faith, which lies at the basis of being, because he considered the very name of Christ to be the object of faith, which, in his opinion, comes from “anointing” or “pleasantness” and “kindness.” The meaning of this name refers, therefore, to the foundation of being (which is Kindness) as an unshakable principle, and to the originality of being, the path to which is cleared by communion and anointing. Attention to the idea of ​​a name is connected with the idea of ​​creation according to the Word, which at the same time is both a deed and a witness to the deed through the name. The name as the “last word”, which has survived the vicissitudes of pronouncing, thinking, collapsing, becomes an object of faith. The name is evidence of a tradition that cannot be fiction, for fiction is peculiar to one person; it is a truth accessible to all and existing for all. Tradition as a universal is the principle of trust, which is always ready for verification, which is actually faith. That which is not ready for testing is a superstition unworthy of a Christian.

The guardian of continuity is the soul, “simple, uneducated, rude.” This soul is not a Christian, since Christians are not born, but it has reasons to become a Christian, arising 1) from the unreflected use of words of ordinary language (“God is good”, “God gave, God has taken”, “God will give”, “God will judge”) ", etc.), into which a person is immersed from birth, which makes him actually a person, i.e. speaking inexperiencedly about the name of God; 2) from the coordination of this simplicity with sacred institutions. The soul is sacralized by virtue of its nature, close to God as the first essence. Primacy allows us to judge the authority of the soul. Since its knowledge is received from God, the soul is a prophetess, an interpreter of signs, a seer of events. It is the first stage of God-given knowledge. On this basis, Tertullian builds a unique ontology of knowledge: “the soul is older than the letter, the word is older than the book, and feeling is older than style, and man himself is older than the philosopher and poet.” The soul “speaks” in any composition; since she speaks in it, who is by nature close to God, then “you must trust your writings” ( Tertullian. Favorite op. M., 1994, p. 88), especially to the Divine writings, for chronologically they are older than any other writing. With such a hierarchy of knowledge (God - nature - soul, which intuitively, which is faith, contains wisdom in a compressed form), the priority of Jerusalem over Athens is natural, i.e. the priority of “simplicity of heart” over stoic, platonic and dialectical reasoning.

The philosophical task of Tertullian, who lived in an era when Christianity had not yet been consolidated, was the discovery of a faith based on the idea of ​​creation. Another task faced Augustine , who lived during the period of established Christian dogmas: the emphasis was on the mutual basis of reason and faith, in particular in the prayerful beginning of his “Confession”: “Grant me, Lord, to know and comprehend whether to begin by calling on You, or from in order to praise You; whether it is necessary to first know You or call upon You. But who will call to You without knowing You?.. Or in order to know You, one must “call to You”? An ignorant person can call not to You, but to someone else. I will seek You, Lord, calling on You, and I will call on You, believing in You, for this has been preached to us” (Confession. M., 1989, p. 53). We are talking here about a consistent understanding of God through reason and faith: “I believe in order to understand, and I understand in order to believe.” Understanding is the reward of faith - Augustine’s main idea: “A person must be reasonable in order to want to seek God” (“On the Trinity”). Faith for him is indistinguishable from authority. Authority and reason are two principles that attract a person to knowledge under the condition of personal transformation.

John Scott Eriugena separates the concepts of faith and authority: authority is born from true reason and is the name of the bearer of this reason, while faith is the correctness of reason and in this sense reason itself, “true religion”, he identifies with “true philosophy”.

The second period is associated with the beginning of the disciplinary delimitation of the functions of philosophy and theology, which occurred at the time of the emergence of scholastics . Development of logical research techniques, taking logic beyond the boundaries of grammar associated with works Anselm of Canterbury , Gilbert of Porretan , Peter Abelard , led to the fact that the demonstration of the order of analogies of thinking was replaced by a system of proof of the existence of God, which served as a formal basis for the autonomization of reason. It became necessary to prove religious truths by rational means. Anselm of Canterbury presented the first proof of the existence of God. In the “Monologion” he gave 4 a posteriori proofs (the first comes from the premise that everything tends towards good; there are many good things, but only one gives rise to others; the second - from the idea of ​​​​non-spatial magnitude along the vertical, where there is a peak in relation to which everything else will be inferior; the third - from being as a whole, the fourth - from the stages of perfection: the highest perfection crowns the hierarchy); in the Proslogium there is an a priori (ontological or simultaneous) proof: from the analysis of thinking about God, the inevitability of his existence follows. Reason here begins to act not just in the mode of faith, it articulates its own positions, different from faith, logically verifying the fundamental principles of religion. And although ultimately their principles coincide, there are attempts to separate reason and faith. This was expressed most clearly in Peter Abelard’s treatise “Yes and No,” where the opposing statements of different authorities on the same religious issue were brought together: the coordination of human freedom and Divine predestination, the relationship between the two (Divine and human) natures of Christ, human responsibility in context of Divine omniscience, unity and trinity of God. And although both Anselm and Abelard still repeat Augustine’s formula “I understand in order to believe, and I believe in order to understand,” the tendency towards its internal rupture, opening up the possibility of philosophizing outside of faith, is obvious.

In the 12th century There already exist such diversely oriented philosophical schools as Chartres, Saint-Victor, Lansk, Paris. The first explored the problems of mechanical-mathematical cosmology, the laws of which applied to the world of living nature, considered as the Book of Nature (Theodoric and Bernard of Chartres, Gilbert of Porretan). The Saint-Victorian school was an example of speculative philosophy. Hugo of Saint-Victor in his Didaskalikon compiled a pyramid of sciences with hierarchical division and subordination, distinguishing them from the “seven liberal arts.” The Lanskaya school developed issues of ethics, which were originally part of theology. Abelard's secular school explored, in line with meditative dialectics, the problems of speech utterance, ethics and theology as a rational discipline.

The rational function of philosophy is emphasized in the treatises of John of Salisbury, who wrote that he preferred to doubt with academics than to invent definitions for what is hidden and obscure. However, although a person strives to comprehend with his mind everything available to him, he must have the courage to admit the existence of problems that exceed the capabilities of his intellect.

In arose in the 13th century. The University of Paris, a free association of masters and students, was officially allowed to discuss questions of faith, which until then had been the responsibility of church hierarchs. There, for the first time, faculties of theology and philosophy began to exist autonomously. Almost simultaneously with the emergence of universities, monastic orders of Franciscans and Dominicans were created, which actively participated in scientific disputes. Philosophical treatises become the subject of widespread discussion. The scope of the study includes the ideas of Avicenna ( Ibn Sina ) and Averroes ( Ibn Rushda ), Aristotelian originals of “Physics” and “Metaphysics”, which significantly transformed the intellectual image of the world. The main subjects of discussion were questions about the eternity of the world, the primacy of philosophy and the unity of intellect. According to Averroes and his followers at the University of Paris, primarily Siger of Brabant, there is only one truth, it is reasonable, therefore, in case of discrepancies between philosophy and theology in the interpretation of essential principles, one must take the side of philosophy. Truth also testifies to the eternity of the world and the unity of the intellect. The dispassionate, isolated, universal intellect (Averroes calls it possible) has an immortality, which the individual mind, which receives energy from the Divine mind, lacks. The latter influences the former through fantasy, imagination, and sensory sensations, due to which forms of individual cognition are created.

The thesis about the immortality of the only possible, universal mind, self-sufficient and not part of the individual soul, came into conflict with the Christian dogma of the personal immortality of man. The idea of ​​the disintegration of everything individual upon death negated the question of a person’s personal responsibility for his actions. Therefore, again, the problem of the foundations of reason and faith becomes the main focus - and this is the third period. Thomas Aquinas , criticizing the Averroists for the idea of ​​the intellect as a substance, “in its being, separated from the body” and “in no way united with it as a form,” he wrote, “that the above-mentioned position is an error that opposes the truth of the Christian faith; this may seem quite clear to anyone. But deprive people of diversity in relation to the intellect, which alone of all parts of the soul is indestructible and immortal, and it will follow that after death nothing but a single intellectual substance will remain from human souls; and thus there will be no distribution of rewards or retribution, and all difference between them will be erased" ( Thomas Aquinas. On the unity of intellect against the Averroists. – In the book: Goodness and truth: classical and non-classical regulators. M., 1998, p. 192–193). The five paths to God, pointing to his existence, together are the paths leading to the unity of faith and reason.

Considering the problem of the autonomy of philosophy, Bonaventure believes that a person, even if capable of knowing nature and metaphysics, can fall into error outside the light of faith. Therefore, according to Bonaventure, who follows Augustine in this matter, it is necessary to distinguish reason guided by faith, the goal of which is “to seek God,” from self-sufficient reason, which in fact can only be an instrument of theology, since it writes down what faith prescribes.

John Duns Scotus rejects Thomist attitudes towards the reconciliation of faith and reason, believing that philosophy and theology have different objects and methodology. Unlike philosophy, which presents methods of proof and demonstration, theology offers a path of persuasion, the former based on the logic of the natural, the latter on the logic of the supernatural and revelation. If the Averroists promote the replacement of theology with philosophy, then the Thomists and Augustinians promote the opposite. To avoid such substitution, Duns Scotus proposes to criticize theological and philosophical concepts in order to develop a new philosophical discourse. To replace the principle equivocation the principle of the uniqueness of existence must come. This principle assumed "merely simple concepts", not identified with others and unambiguous. The concept of existence was applied to God, which was neutral regarding created and uncreated. Consequently, it met the requirements of simplicity and unambiguity. Duns Scotus called this concept imperfect. It is the first object of the intellect and helps to understand, through the study of modes of being, that the cause of things is beyond the world of things, and this is proof of the existence of God.

William of Ockham believed the mediation of reason and faith by philosophical or theological concepts to be futile, since the levels of rationality, based on logical evidence, and faith, based on morality and not a consequence of obvious conclusions, are asymmetrical. Therefore, the spheres of reason and faith do not intersect.

The theory of the duality of truth led not only to the disciplinary separation of philosophy and theology, but also to the almost complete disappearance of such a movement as conceptualism (until the modern era). However, the phenomenon of the “believing mind” did not disappear in subsequent times, becoming either a part of the universal basis of thinking, or the basis of individual disciplines, primarily theology.

In modern times, attempts at the philosophical return of the “Living God” in contrast to the infinitely extended and external world of God the Object were made B. Pascal . His religious philosophy was a unique reaction to the emerging scientific methodological approach to thinking. The mind and heart, according to Pascal, are “the gates through which the worldview creeps into the soul” and to which correspond natural, clear and mutually valid principles - understanding and will ( Pascal V. Pensees. P., 1852, b. 32). The order of the mind is beginnings and demonstrations, the order of the heart is love. These fundamental principles are not subject to proof, for “man does not have such natural knowledge that would precede these concepts and would surpass them in clarity” (ibid., p. 21), and Pascal considers such a lack of evidence “not a defect, but rather a perfection” (ibid., p. 20). Neither the immensity of space, nor the immensity of time, number or movement, neither the immeasurably small nor the immeasurably great, can be substantiated, “but only through confident reasoning do both acquire the utmost natural clarity, which convinces the mind much more powerfully than any speech” (ibid., R. 20). The foundations of the heart and mind, according to Pascal, are the features of human nature, which in fact is “the union of two natures” - physical and Divine. Bi-nature determines human freedom, since it is impossible to imagine the unfreedom of that which has the Divine essence. Focusing on human existence with its natural oddities, which forced the introduction of such concepts as Horror, Longing, Fear, and on the application of the method of experimental science to questions of faith, Pascal, of course, belongs to the founders of new thinking, although he reveals a medieval religious reaction to logicism and the methodological approach of the emerging scientistic movement, which allows for the idea of ​​a Creator only to set the world in motion. Opposing all philosophy, Pascal believes theology to be the “concentration of all truths,” and philosophy to be a mediating discipline that “imperceptibly leads” to it.

The Enlightenment turned reason into the original principle, identifying faith with prejudice and error. I. Kant , seeking to limit faith, along with liturgical religion, presupposes the existence of faith of reason (“religion within the limits of reason alone”) as pure faith in goodness, moral laws, love and duty. F.W.J.Schelling , starting with the establishment of a religion of reason, at the end of his life he came to the establishment of the philosophy of revelation and theosophy as the highest development of religious faith. For G.W.F. Hegel the ascent from the abstract to the concrete is the way of introducing a person to faith and the truths of religion, which led him from criticism of Christianity and the affirmation of “positive religion” to the rationalization of the Christian faith.

A. Schopenhauer , speaking against Hegelian panlogism, attached great importance to the idea of ​​believing reason, considering science not so much a cognitive activity as a function of the will. It is precisely this distinction that determines his idea that “true virtue and holiness of thoughts have their primary source not in deliberate arbitrariness (deeds), but in knowledge (faith)” (The world as will and idea. - Collected works in 5 vols. , vol. 1. M., 1992, p. 374). S. Kierkegaard , speaking against any philosophical system capable of “containing the entire content of faith in the form of a concept,” considers himself a “free creator” who does not promise or create any system, since only in the free study of the basic categories, the relationship between the ethical and the religious, “teleological elimination” ethics, it is possible to discover the paradox of faith and “how we enter faith or how faith enters us” ( Kierkegaard S. Fear and trembling. M., 1993, p. 16–17).

The problem of reason and faith is the most important for Christian philosophers and theologians, both Catholic - Augustinians, neo-Thomists (E. Gilson, J. Maritain), Jesuits (F. C. Copleston), and Protestants (P. Tillich). Their studies emphasize the theological context of medieval philosophy, although reason and faith are largely divorced in their analysis of the issues. But the very introduction of the theological context into the study of medieval philosophy significantly expanded the scope of philosophy itself, since regardless of the approaches (theological or logical), we are talking about addressing topics that arise in any philosophy as “eternal.” This approach contributed to the detailed study of medieval philosophy, which was until the beginning of the 20th century. in an abandoned state, as evidenced by the fundamental research of Gilson, Maritain, and Copleston. Tillich places theological reason within the field of culture, believing that both are based on ideas of personalism, and linking the revival of "living religion" with the concept of a personal God as a symbol indicating that "the center of our personality is perceived through the manifestation of an unattainable ground and the abyss of being" (Theology of Culture. M., 1995, p. 332).

The problem of the believing mind (the term belongs to A.S. Khomyakov ) is the focus of Russian religious philosophy. In Russian philosophical thought (works V.S. Solovyova , V.I.Nesmelova , L. Shestova , N.A. Berdyaeva , P.A.Florensky , G.V.Florovsky etc.) faith was the fundamental basis of all knowledge. The emphasis was placed precisely on faith, since the basis of such consciousness was dissatisfaction with secular, non-religious culture, social and state hostility towards the individual, and the superficial nature of spiritual values. Such differences from the Western European understanding of the leading role of reason in knowledge were caused not only by criticism of the idea of ​​classical reason, but also by a general belittlement of the role of reason, which, on the one hand, strengthened the position of faith, and on the other, led to occultism and theosophical, anthroposophical and primitive mysticism. In the 2nd half. In the 20th century, however, philosophical trends appeared that defended not just the importance of reason for modern thinking, but showed the weakening of the position of explaining the world, bypassing rationality as the most important cognitive ability of a person. These philosophical trends simultaneously showed the limitations of the natural-scientific, cognitive (scientific) mind of the New Age, and defended the ideas of neo-rationalism (G. Bachelard , I.Prigozhin ). J. Searle, analyzing Western European thinking, which he calls the Western rationalist tradition and developing the ideas of cognitive reason in its two types (theoretical reason and practical reason), believes that rational faith does not belong to disciplinarity, but to the property of one of the types of cognitive reason, namely theoretical ( Searle J. Rationality and realism: what's at stake? – “The Way”, 1994, No. 6, p. 203).

In concept dialogue of cultures V.S. Bibler generally questions the single definition of reason for all eras. “At one point, the ancient, medieval, and modern European spiritual spectra concentrate and mutually determine each other, revealing simultaneous (actually cultural) existence” ( Bibler V.S. From scientific teaching to the logic of culture. Two philosophical introductions to the 21st century. M., 1991, p. 263). Turning to the original principles of philosophy is a condition for human self-determination. The believing mind, participating in a single universal subject, turns out to be one of the forms of this self-determination.

Literature:

1. Garnak A. The essence of Christianity. – In the book: General history of European culture, vol. 5. St. Petersburg, 1911;
2. Nesmelov V.I. Faith and knowledge from the point of view of epistemology. Kazan, 1913;
3. Shestov L. Sola fide - By faith alone. Paris, 1966;
4. Soloviev V.S. Op. in 2 vols. M., 1988;
5. Gaidenko V.P., Smirnov G.A. Western European science in the Middle Ages. M., 1989;
6. Petrov M.K. Language, sign, culture. M., 1991;
7. Meyendorff I. Introduction to Patristic Theology. Vilnius-M., 1992;
8. Berdyaev N.A. Free spirit philosophy. M., 1994;
9. Neretina S.S. Believing mind. On the history of medieval philosophy. Arkhangelsk, 1995;
10. Synergy, Problems of asceticism and mysticism of Orthodoxy. M., 1995.

Basic theology, or Christian apologetics (Lecture course, Far Eastern State University, 2000) Lega Viktor Petrovich

Faith and Reason

Faith and Reason

Today we will dwell in detail on the problem of the relationship between faith and reason. This problem moves from particular scientific problems to a general philosophical level. What about these two abilities of human nature? Can faith and reason be united, or do they contradict each other?

Before I offer you an Orthodox solution to this problem, I will allow myself to spend a few tens of minutes on such a brief historical and philosophical excursion into medieval philosophy so that you know how this problem was solved in the first centuries after Christ, what solutions proposed by philosophers and Church Fathers of the first centuries. The problem of faith and reason was one of the problems that was immediately recognized by the first church thinkers, for in the first centuries of Christianity it was understood as a problem of the relationship between Christianity and ancient culture.

Ancient philosophy relied, of course, primarily on reason, and philosophy then was a science. Therefore, anyone who called for abandoning man’s rational abilities, sacrificing reason to faith, was always looked upon as an unreasonable person. The word "unreasonable" speaks for itself. Hence the statement of the Apostle Paul, who said that our faith is a temptation for Jews, and madness for Greeks. For the Hellenes, that is, the ancient Greeks, Christianity with its teaching about the risen Christ is madness, for it contradicts all the arguments of reason. And as it is said in the New Testament: “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God,” and, conversely, what seems foolish is wisdom. These words show that the attitude towards reason in Christianity is somewhat different.

But, nevertheless, a person has a rational ability. There are laws of thinking, laws of logic that no one is going to cancel. And the Christian, and the Hellenic, and the pagan, and the Jew think according to the same laws of reason, the laws of formal logic, which were discovered by Aristotle. Therefore, the confrontation between Christianity and ancient Greek culture in religious terms does not exhaust all methods of relations. Of course, the Christian Church was looking for ways of interaction between Christianity and ancient culture, Christianity and ancient philosophy. Therefore, various concepts of the relationship between faith and reason arise.

Some church writers begin to argue that faith and reason do not contradict each other. Others think differently. They believe that Christianity has completely abolished all human claims to the reasonable possibility of knowing the truth, and knowledge of the truth is possible only by faith.

Proponents of these two different concepts include Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian. Clement of Alexandria (II - III centuries AD) is a typical representative of the Alexandrian school, which always treated ancient culture with more restraint and tried to absorb everything positive from the ancient Greek heritage. Clement of Alexandria pointed out that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. True Christianity, in the figurative expression of Clement of Alexandria, can be compared to a building that stands on a certain foundation. The foundation of this building is faith, and the walls and roof are reason. Any knowledge is always based on faith. A person always believes in something. He believes his parents, the student believes his teachers, the reader believes the author of the book he is reading, the scientist believes his predecessors who discovered some laws before him. If a person always doubted everything and tried to achieve everything on his own, then no knowledge would be possible. Faith is always the basis of knowledge. Then, on the basis of this faith, as a foundation, a person builds some of his own reasonable arguments, reasonable theories on the basis of his reason. This is Christian gnosis, translated from Greek this is true knowledge, which harmoniously combines both faith and reason.

The disadvantage of ancient culture was that ancient culture underestimated faith, trying to comprehend everything only with the help of reason. The disadvantage of the Old Testament religion was that the Old Testament religion preferred only faith, removing reason from human abilities. The truth of Christianity lies in the fact that Christianity combined the virtues of ancient culture and the virtues of the Old Testament religion, united it in true knowledge, harmoniously combining faith and reason.

This tradition, dating back to Clement of Alexandria, has a long history. Its supporters are Blessed Augustine - one of the greatest teachers of the Church, especially revered in the West by the Catholic Church, but in the tradition of the Orthodox Church he is also one of the most authoritative fathers of the Church, identified by the Ecumenical Councils as one of the twelve especially revered. In the West, Anselm of Canterbury, the famous scholastic, and Thomas Aquinas belong to this tradition.

But there is another tradition - a tradition that goes back to Tertullian. Tertullian, like Clement of Alexandria, is a resident of Africa. If Clement lived in Alexandria, then Tertullian lived in Carthage, closer to the Western tradition. In general, the problem of the relationship between faith and reason was of more interest to the Western tradition. I'll tell you why later. Tertullian offers a completely different approach: there can be nothing in common between faith and reason - “what Athens is to Jerusalem, what the academy is to the church.” That is, what can Athens give to Jerusalem, and what can the Academy of the Church give? Nothing! They can't have anything in common. For, as Tertullian writes, the Son of God was crucified. This is true because it is impossible. The figurative aphoristic expression goes back to Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” Faith is incompatible with reason. Faith always contradicts reason. As Tertullian writes: “It is no coincidence that Jesus Christ took as his disciples not wise theologians, say, the Pharisees, but simple tax collectors and fishermen who did not possess excessive wisdom. They had a simple soul, not contaminated by any knowledge. And this soul, being pure and unspoiled, could be filled with true knowledge. She was sanctified by the true light of the Christian faith."

And what kind of knowledge can there be, what kind of rational knowledge can there be of the truth of Christ, when the whole history of Jesus Christ is contradictory? It begins with the Virgin giving birth to God. There are already two contradictions here. God is not born by definition, and suddenly he is born. A Virgin cannot give birth to a son, nevertheless, She gives birth to a Son, remaining a Virgin. And then, through other contradictions, it all ends with God dying on the cross, God suffering, being impassive. He dies while existing. God is resurrected even though He should not have died. God inhabits the body, being infinite, etc., etc. Everything is full of contradictions. No mind can comprehend this, and this speaks of the truth of Christianity: that Christianity is based on faith. We must believe, because all the provisions of Christianity are absurd from the point of view of reason. This position of Tertullian has a tradition, perhaps less long, but no less authoritative.

Among the most famous supporters of Tertullian's position, one can name Martin Luther with his position - “by faith alone,” i.e., a person is saved only by faith, and not by any philosophical concepts, scientific knowledge or good deeds. In Russia, this is Lev Shestov, our famous philosopher, one of the founders of existentialism. You can name other more famous thinkers: Kierkegaard is a Western existential philosopher.

But the problem of the relationship between faith and reason is not limited to these two positions. More concepts will appear later. Let's say, in the 12th century, the concept of Pierre Abelard, the famous scholastic, one of the greatest representatives of the Paris School, the man who stood at the origins of the University of Paris, appeared. Tertullian's position and Augustine's position were expressed in aphoristic form by Anselm of Canterbury, who said the famous formula: “I believe in order to understand.” The phrase has a very clear meaning.

As I told you yesterday, in order to know nature, you must first believe that this nature exists. A physicist who does not believe in the existence of nature is nonsense, and a physicist, naturally, will not prove that nature exists. It is based on the fact that this nature exists, the belief that there are laws that describe this nature, the belief that these laws are expressed in mathematical language, etc. Albert Einstein said about this: “Without belief in the existence of nature and its subordination to the laws of physics cannot exist.” According to him, without faith in God, the theory of relativity hangs in the air. The same is true with any other sciences. Any scientist always believes in the existence of the subject of his research, and by believing in this, he can further understand and describe the reality in which he believes. So we believe in order to understand what we believe. And if we try to combine all this, then we must believe in God, who unites all sciences, conceivable and inconceivable, unites all existence and is the Creator of this existence. Therefore, at the basis of all private faiths: faith in nature, faith in history, faith in culture - lies faith in God. Therefore, all our understanding, all our knowledge becomes possible only when it is based on true faith, faith in God. This is where this phrase of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury comes from: “I believe in order to understand.”

Abelard proposed, as if in contrast to Anselm’s phrase, a different formulation: “I understand in order to believe.” What is the meaning of this concept? Christianity is the true religion. For Abelard, although he was persecuted by the Catholic Church and accused of certain heresies (Pelagianism and Arianism), this was certain. But what does true religion mean? Truth is known through reason. The truth is revealed, proven, argued. A truth that a person can prove is an undeniable truth. A person does not believe that two plus two equals four. He knows this because he can do the math. A person does not believe that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°. Each of you, remembering your school years, can simply prove this simple theorem. This is specific knowledge.

If a person simply blindly believes something, then such faith will be blind, it will depend on some external factors. Let's say I can believe that I am a psychic, I can read thoughts from a distance. But, trying to test these abilities of mine, I understand that I do not have such an ability, and I give up my faith. I can believe that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 200°. But if I try to prove this theorem, I will realize that I was wrong and find out that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180°.

This faith, to be true faith, must be based on knowledge. If I simply believe that Jesus Christ was on Earth and was crucified and resurrected, but I do not read the Gospel, I do not know real historical events, then my faith will be blind, it will be weak. And any representative of another religion will easily refute me. Tomorrow I can follow a Muslim, and the day after tomorrow - the first pagan I come across. Therefore, faith must be on a serious foundation, on the foundation of knowledge, then this faith will be strong. Therefore, to have true faith, you need to know the basics of your faith.

Here, in a nutshell, is Abelard’s position: “I understand in order to believe.” Otherwise my faith is worthless. Many of us first go to Sunday schools, then to an Orthodox educational institution. They do this in order to place their sincere faith on a solid foundation, so that this faith actually acquires the character of truth. Therefore, Abelard’s position is also justified.

But this is not limited to the options for the relationship between faith and reason that the history of Western religious philosophy includes. In the 13th century Another option arises, called the concept of two truths. VHS century An event occurred in the West that can be called tragic for the Western Church. Aristotelian philosophy penetrates into Europe through Arab countries in the Arabic version, in the interpretation of the Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd, in the Latin transcription of Averroes. This interpretation of Aristotle was called Averroism, named after the Arab philosopher. Aristotle is an extremely logical thinker. No wonder it was he who discovered and created formal logic, the science of thinking, and syllogistics. And all his works are written in exactly this manner. If you have tried to read Aristotle, you have seen with what logical rigor this thinker tried to know the truth.

Aristotelian philosophy produces the effect of a bomb exploding in the West. The concept of science did not yet exist. But Aristotle penetrates not only with his logical treatises, but also with metaphysics and other works, including physical ones. Therefore, Aristotle stands for all scientific knowledge. This is not just philosophy, as we now tend to say: this is science, this is philosophy. No, Aristotle was the pinnacle of science. This was a scientific truth, and by reading this scientific truth, people discovered amazing things. It turns out that the Universe is eternal and not created by God, and this is strictly logically proven. It turns out that the human soul is mortal, not immortal, and this is also proven. It turns out that only the impersonal mind is immortal, not the personal soul. It turns out that God exists in himself, and He does not know what exists in the world. Therefore, people’s prayers to God are meaningless, because He does not hear this, and God does not know what we are doing. And all this is proven, as people believed, with absolute scientific certainty. An Averroist crisis arises, which can be compared with the crisis of the 19th century. in the West and Europe, there is a crisis in the spread of science, when, as they say, science has proven that there is no God. Then Thomas Aquinas played a huge role in resolving this crisis. He showed that Aristotle’s provisions can and should be understood Christianly, that Aristotle was misunderstood. In fact, Aristotle does not contradict Christian truths at all, he just needs to be corrected in some ways. The trouble with Aristotle is that he lived before Christ. and I didn’t know something. But before Thomas Aquinas there was Siger of Brabant.

Seager of Brabant was the founder of the theory of two truths. According to the famous French Catholic philosopher Etienne Gilson, Siger of Brabant is a tragic figure. On the one hand, this is the man who discovered Aristotle for the West and saw in him the greatest wisdom. On the other hand, he was a true Christian, believing in what the Christian Church teaches. And Seeger finds himself faced with a very difficult problem: how to combine the incompatible - how to combine the scientific conviction in the temporal infinity of the world and the creation of the world, which is spoken of in the Bible, how to combine the mortality of the soul and the immortality of the soul, which every Christian speaks of. One thing is proven by reason. You need to believe in something else. Seeger says that there appear to be two truths: one truth is scientific and the other truth is religious. They both exist. They contradict each other, it is unknown how to understand this, but it is a fact. There are two truths. It is under this guise that this concept of Siger of Brabant went down in history and was called the concept of two truths.

I often dwell on these concepts much longer in my lectures precisely because I believe that the concept of two truths did not disappear from history with Seeger’s death, and not because it was held by William of Ockham and other Western thinkers after Seeger, but precisely because that the concept of two truths is implicitly adhered to by very, very many modern Christians, without realizing it: some, perhaps, due to their scientific illiteracy, and others, due to the fact that they do not pay attention to it. One way or another, people understand that God exists, that He is immortal, that there is God’s providence, etc. But on the other hand, the world is infinite, as they say in science. Yes, man evolved from apes. There are two truths. We believe in one of them in church, in the other we believe at work, but how to combine them together, a person simply does not think about it. Now we simply close our eyes, being slaves of two truths, but the truth is one. This truth is God. You should never forget this. This is exactly what Thomas Aquinas tried to show in all his works.

Here are four concepts of the relationship between faith and reason. Faith and reason are in harmony, and faith is the foundation for reason. Faith contradicts reason, and therefore faith excludes reason according to Tertullian’s concept, therefore reason must be expelled from culture. Reason dominates faith, faith is based on reason according to the concept of Pierre Abelard. Both reason and faith contradict each other, they are two contradictory sides of human nature.

Western culture settled on the first concept - the concept of Clement of Alexandria, Blessed. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas that faith is the foundation on which reason further builds its evidence. Eastern culture, Orthodox culture, actually did not know such a dispute. Why? Yes, because the Western and Eastern Churches often understood completely different things by faith. The trouble with real Russian society is that Russian society has become a prisoner of Western concepts. The trouble is that faith, starting from Tertullian and Augustine, has been psychologized in the West. And this is especially noticeable now, when a person claims that he can believe in whatever he wants. Faith is an act of my free will. As they say, I believe in what I want. If I want, I believe in God; if I don’t want, I don’t believe in Him. I want - I believe that spirits exist, I want - I believe that something else exists. Man does not bother to compare his faith with the truth. Faith must be true. And the truth, which is known by reason, thus shows that faith and reason must come from a single source. And in the West it unwittingly happened that they have two independent sources. Faith is the ability of human will, and reason is the ability of rational human activity. Hence the mutual opposition of faith and reason.

The Orthodox Fathers of the Church have always emphasized that faith is not a psychological ability of a person. There is no such ability of knowledge as faith. In their teaching about the soul, the Orthodox Church Fathers adhered to the classical tradition, arguing that the soul has three abilities: reason, feelings and free will. The soul is one and simple. But in this simple single soul there are three of its components, or rather, principles: reason, free will and feelings. Each of us understands this. It doesn't take much effort to imagine what a soul is. We can think. We can direct our thoughts this way or that way with our free will. We can experience certain feelings: love or hate, desire or not desire. Therefore, the soul is not divided into parts. So, the Orthodox Church argued that there is no faith in this list, as a feature of knowledge.

And what is said in the Gospel, in the New Testament, in the epistles of the holy apostles about faith? Faith is an organ of the heart: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul.” We also see the other side: “And the fool said in his heart, “There is no God.” Thus, the heart is the organ of faith or unbelief.

What is a heart? According to the Orthodox tradition, the heart is understood as the totality of all mental activity: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”

The fact is that as a result of the Fall, a division of our nature occurred. The soul, while remaining simple, nevertheless divided into three abilities, which are perceived by man as independent of each other. Free will is understood as being independent of reason, and reason is understood as being independent of free will. In reality, the soul is simple, integral, and man’s task is to unite his soul in God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ into a single whole, which it possessed before the Fall, that is, to acquire a state of chastity. This is the same prayer that many of us repeat during Lent - the prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian: “Give me the spirit of humility, chastity, patience, and love.” Chastity here is understood not in a sexual sense, but in this original patristic sense, as the spirit of holistic wisdom, the spirit of a holistic soul. The soul in its integrity does not experience any contradiction between reason, feelings and free will. This ability of the integral soul is called faith according to the Orthodox patristic tradition. Faith cannot contradict reason, because reason is a special case of faith. She does not experience a contradiction between reason, feelings and free will.

If you allow me, I will give you this image from geometry. Reason is a correction of faith as a more voluminous geometric body. Another projection is feelings. The third projection is will. We live in this world of projection. We cannot enter another dimension, we are in a fallen world, but on our own, of course, we cannot enter this divine dimension. For this we need grace God's To do this, we must believe in Jesus Christ, through whom we achieve chastity. That’s why we pray: “Give me the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love.” I don’t seek this myself, but I ask God to give me chastity. Then everything becomes clear. Faith does not exclude truth, for it includes reason. Faith does not exclude freedom; it includes volitional activity. Faith does not exclude feelings, but includes them. Therefore, the emotional attitude towards God seems free: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” Reasonable knowledge is possible: “Know the Truth, and the Truth will make you free.” Free, volitional knowledge is also possible, for the task of every Christian is free faith in God. And all this is called faith in the Orthodox tradition.

This is why in the Eastern tradition there are no problems in the relationship between faith and reason. Faith and reason were understood chastely, in contrast to the Western tradition that distinguished them, and therefore faced the fact of contradiction. Why and how do these contradictions arise? It is no coincidence that I draw your attention to the fact that these four relationships of faith and reason arise. It can't be like that. I tried to show you the fluidity of the constructions of Augustine, Tertullian, Abelard and Seager. Indeed, we see that each of them thought correctly, but it cannot be that all of them were right. They are right because they thought about faith intuitively correctly, but explained it incorrectly. I will again resort to a geometric comparison, but please do not take me literally, because this method of understanding gives rise to many errors. Why do people say that our world is multidimensional, in this physical sense? Why is it believed that there are beings living in the fifth dimension, in the eighth dimension, and that they can pass into our world? And we know all sorts of UFOs, etc., etc. This is nonsense that has nothing to do with knowledge of nature. I want to once again give a figurative comparison to help us understand, but nothing more. Please don't take my words so literally. I am forced to resort to figurative comparisons, knowing that the language of figurative comparisons is necessary in Orthodox theology, because the Lord Jesus Christ Himself spoke the language of images. He always spoke in parables. If anyone has read the Gospel, then he knows that the entire Gospel is full of parables, and Jesus Christ Himself explained it this way: “My kingdom,” He said, “is not of this world.” Man cannot recognize with his created nature, cannot cognize the Divine Essence with his mind. He must understand it at the level he is at. Therefore, He spoke in the language of parables, and I also do not avoid the help of these images.

It is clear that there can be no contradiction between reason and faith. If there can be a contradiction here, then it can be expressed as a contradiction between a ball and a circle. Therefore, the flat thinking of modern man contributes to the fact that a person invents this contradiction, transferring scientific knowledge to the entire area of ​​​​human activity. When a person believes that nothing exists except the material world, then he begins to assert such nonsense: the soul is not detected during a surgical operation, which means it does not exist; people flew into space and did not see God, etc. Of course, all of existence is not reduced under the roof of the material world - a world that can be touched with your hands and seen with your eyes. The world is much more complex and deep.

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FAITH AND REASON Faith calms, but reason leads to doubt... In response to your letter about the thoughts that torment you, and now I will say that they do not occur from the outside, but from the inside. Faith intercedes for us with all good things, but unbelief is contrary; and reason is contrary to faith, when we follow it and faith

Problems of the relationship between faith and reason, individual and general, questions about the existence of God, the possibility of saving the soul, etc. continue to be the most important topics. The central problem of mature scholasticism is the dispute about universals - general ideas, about the relationship of the individual to the general and about the reality of the existence of the general. Depending on the answer to this question, three positions were formed in medieval philosophy. Realism, whose representatives argued that the general really exists, in the form of an ideal or real “thing” and is not a simple construct of the human mind. Realism was supported by the church because it did not conflict with official dogma and served as an additional justification for the existence of God. Representatives of realism were Eriugena, Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas.

The opposite position to realism is nominalism. Nominalists argued that universals are simple names of things, and therefore exist only in the human mind, and do not have independent existence as a thing. Nominalists do not answer the question about the primacy of matter or spirit; for them, as for all medieval philosophers, spiritual reality remains primary. Nominalism became widespread in late scholasticism, its representatives being John Roscelin and William of Ockham.

Conceptualism is a philosophical position that reconciles realism and nominalism, according to which individual things really exist, and the general finds reality in the sphere of the mind in the form of concepts. The creator of conceptualism is Pierre Abelard.
Question 12. Basic philosophical ideas in the culture of the Renaissance (Francesco Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Nikolai Cusansky)

The Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance or Renaissance (XIV – XVII centuries). During this period, in socio-economic terms, there was a transition from feudalism to capitalism. This era is characterized by the development of industry, trade, navigation, military affairs and, accordingly, technology, natural science, mechanics, mathematics, an unprecedented creative upsurge in the field of art, literature, science, and socio-political thought. The considered features of socio-economic and cultural-scientific development also predetermined the main features of philosophical progress. The very name of the era speaks of a revival of interest in ancient philosophy and culture, perceived as a model for modernity. The Christian tradition is being rethought, and social life and culture are becoming secularized. Philosophy ceases to be the handmaiden of theology. The ideal becomes not religious, but secular knowledge. During this era, a new philosophical worldview was developed thanks to the work of a whole galaxy of thinkers: Francesco Petrarch, Michel Montaigne, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Tomaso Campanella, Niccolò Machiavelli and others.

Distinctive features of the Renaissance worldview:

· human orientation (anthropocentrism). If the focus of medieval philosophy was the relationship between God and man, then the philosophy of the Renaissance was addressed to man. Formally, God remained at the center of the universe, but primary attention was paid to man, his nature, independence, beauty, creative abilities, forms of self-affirmation;

· orientation towards art and postulation of the creative essence of man. In the process of creative activity, a person creates a new world and the highest thing that exists in the world - himself according to the laws of beauty. It is no coincidence that it was during this period that the idea of ​​Prometheism appeared in philosophy;

· orientation towards a personal-material understanding of the world. Everything that exists is understood in its projection onto a person with maximum regard for the bodily principle (the body is not a “shackle of the soul”, as it was in the Middle Ages, bodily life in itself is valuable in itself). The aesthetics of the Renaissance is characterized by syncretism of the spiritual and personal-material (painting and sculpture depict, first of all, the human face and the human body in harmony with the spiritual);

· orientation towards humanism (from the Latin humanus - “human”), towards the recognition of a person as an individual, his right to creativity, freedom, happiness.
Question 13. Philosophy of the 17th century: problem field, specificity, characteristic features.
XVII – the century of great systems, the century of the mechanical map of the world and classical rationalism. Great philosophical systems of the 17th century. They did not arise in conditions of peace and contentment. Central Europe was destroyed by the 30 Years' War (1618-1648). Spain was under the gloomy domination of Philip, France under the dictates of Mazarin and Richelieu. England went through the revolution and the reign of Cromwell.

XVII century - the time of development of manufacturing production, the national market, the emergence and development of capitalism.

Changes are also taking place in the social sphere - feudal principalities are turning into centralized bourgeois states, new forms of public power are emerging. People's consciousness and worldview as a whole is changing. It was in this century that the great geographical discoveries of the century were used: New York was founded in 1674, Philadelphia in 1693, science and technology were rapidly developing, primarily mathematics (geometry) and experimental mathematical natural science, the foundations of which were laid by G. Galileo . In this century, the most famous Academies of Sciences in the world arose: the French Academy - 1635, the English - “Royal Society” -1662.
Question 14. Philosophy of the Enlightenment: specifics and characteristic features.

The Enlightenment is usually understood as a cultural, ideological and philosophical conviction of social thought associated with the era of the establishment of capitalist relations.

The characteristic features of the era of enlightenment are: democracy (the need for familiarization with the culture and knowledge of wider sections of society); rationalism (have the courage to think for yourself).

The slogan of enlightenment is culture for the people. The main task is upbringing and education, introducing everyone to knowledge.

It is no coincidence that the 18th century in the history of thought is called the Age of Enlightenment: scientific knowledge, which had previously been the property of a narrow circle of scientists, now began to spread in breadth, going beyond universities and laboratories to the secular salons of Paris and London, becoming the subject of discussion among writers who popularly presented the latest achievements of science and philosophy. Confidence in the power of the human mind, in its limitless possibilities, in the progress of science, which creates conditions for economic and social prosperity - this is the pathos of the Enlightenment. One of the most important characteristics of the philosophy of the Enlightenment is rationalism. Rationalism is interpreted as an epistemological doctrine that asserts that the main instrument of cognition is the mind, sensations and experience have a secondary meaning in cognition. Voltaire in his “Metaphysical Treatise” writes: “We must no longer rely on simple hypotheses; we must no longer begin with the invention of principles with which we then proceed to explain all things. On the contrary, we must begin with an accurate statement of observed phenomena. And if we do not resort With the help of the mathematics of the compass and experience, we will not be able to take even one step." Voltaire often said that “when a person wants to penetrate into the essence of things and know them, he soon finds himself in the position of a blind man who is asked to speak out about the essence of color. However, benevolent nature has put a stick in the hands of the blind man - analysis; with its help he can move forward in the world of phenomena, to notice their sequence, to ascertain their order - and all this thanks to his spiritual orientation, thanks to the education received from life and science." Voltaire wrote: “It seems obvious to me that there is a necessary Impersonal rational principle, eternal, supreme; it ... is not the truth of religious belief, but the truth of reason.” It becomes clear that if the mind can comprehend, accept and affirm only these religious truths, then rituals, sacred stories, all the contents and institutions of the so-called “positive” religion or “religion of Revelation” are only superstitions - the fruit of fear and ignorance. However, after Voltaire, both faith in God and religion often become the subject of attacks, portrayed as an obstacle to progress, an instrument of oppression and a causative agent of intolerance, as the cause of erroneous and inhuman ethical principles, as the basis of a vicious social order. Voltaire did not seek to define the political and legal ideal of the future “kingdom of reason” in all details. He focused his attention on promoting the ideas of legality and liberal methods of exercising power, leaving other educators to develop projects for the ideal structure of the state. One thing was quite clear to him: only owners should govern the state. While recognizing natural equality, Voltaire resolutely rejected both social and political equality. “In our unhappy world, it cannot be that people, living in society, would not be divided into two classes: one class of the rich who command, the other of the poor who serve.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his socio-political teaching, proceeded, like many other philosophers of the 18th century, from ideas about the state of nature. However, his interpretation of the state of nature differs from previous ones. The mistake of the philosophers, Rousseau wrote, referring to Hobbes and Locke, was that “they spoke of a wild man, but depicted a man in a civil state.” It would also be a mistake to assume that a state of nature ever actually existed. We should accept it only as a hypothesis that contributes to a better understanding of man, the thinker pointed out. Subsequently, this interpretation of the initial stage of human history was called the hypothetical state of nature. According to Rousseau, law does not exist in the state of nature. At the earliest stages of human history, people, according to the philosopher, had no ideas at all about law and morality. In his description of the “happiest era” preceding the emergence of property, Rousseau uses the term “natural law”, but uses it in a specific sense - to designate the freedom of moral choice that people are endowed with by nature, and the feeling that arises on this basis that everything is natural for everything human. a kind of justice. I would like to note that it was on the basis of natural law that the theory of human and civil rights was developed, which found its most vivid embodiment in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen”. The law is the same for everyone and establishes the exact scope of the powers of the executive branch in order to protect individual freedom, religion

Question 15. Classical German philosophy as a world-historical and cultural phenomenon.

At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. Germany, overcoming economic and political backwardness, was approaching the bourgeois revolution, and just as in France in the 18th century, in Germany in the 19th century a philosophical revolution preceded a political revolution. Marx considered German classical philosophy as the German theory of the French revolution. The achievements of natural science and social sciences played an important role in the formation of German philosophy: physics and chemistry began to develop, and the study of organic nature advanced. Discoveries in the field of mathematics, which made it possible to understand processes in their precise quantitative expression, Lamarck’s doctrine of the conditionality of the development of an organism by the environment, astronomical, geological theories, as well as theories of the development of human society - all this, with all its severity and inevitability, brought to the fore the idea of ​​development as a theory and a method of understanding reality. One of the greatest minds of mankind, the founder of classical German idealism, who revived the ideas of dialectics, was Kant. It was with Kant that the morning dawn of the philosophy of modern times began. But not only in philosophy, but also in science, Kant was a deep, insightful thinker. The concept he developed of the origin of the Solar System from a giant gaseous nebula is still one of the fundamental ideas in astronomy.

The highest achievement of German classical philosophy was Hegel's dialectic. He developed the doctrine of the laws and categories of dialectics, for the first time developed in a systematized form the basic principles of dialectical logic and criticized the metaphysical method of thinking that was dominant in both idealistic and materialistic teachings of that time. Hegel's philosophical views are imbued with the idea of ​​development. He believed that it is impossible to understand a phenomenon without understanding the entire path that it has taken in its development, that development does not occur in a vicious circle, but progressively from lower forms to higher ones, that in this process there is a transition from quantitative changes to qualitative ones, which is the source of development are contradictions: contradiction moves the world, it is “the root of all movement and vitality”, it constitutes the principle of all self-motion. In Hegel's philosophical system, reality is presented as a chain of dialectical transitions. However, Hegelian philosophy is permeated with deep internal contradiction. What kind of contradiction is this? The method developed by Hegel is aimed at the infinity of knowledge. Since its objective basis is the absolute spirit, and its goal is self-knowledge of this absolute spirit, knowledge is, of course, limited. That is, the system of knowledge, having gone through a cycle of cognitive stages, will end with the last stage - self-knowledge, the implementation of which is Hegel’s philosophy itself. Thus, the contradiction between Hegel's method and system is a contradiction between the finite and the infinite. The philosophical system is divided by Hegel into three parts: 1) logic, 2) philosophy of nature, 3) philosophy of spirit. Logic, from his point of view, is a system of “pure reason coinciding with the divine reason. The philosophical system of Hegelian objective idealism has some features. Firstly, pantheism. Divine thought does not hover somewhere in the heavens, it permeates the whole world, constituting the essence of every, even the smallest thing. Secondly, panlogism. Objective divine thinking is strictly logical. And thirdly, dialectics. Hegel considers nature to be the second stage in the development of the absolute idea. Nature is the creation of the absolute idea, its otherness. Philosophy of spirit. This is the third stage of the Hegelian system, which is a synthesis of the previous two. Here the absolute idea awakens, as it were, frees itself from natural bonds and finds its expression in the absolute spirit. Man is part of nature. However, the human spirit is not a product of nature, but of the absolute spirit. And nature itself is generated by the spirit. Above the state are art, religion and philosophy in Hegel's system. And not just any philosophy, but the philosophy of Hegel himself. It was in it that the absolute idea found its full embodiment. Hegel believed that the essence of the world is as it is depicted in his philosophy, especially in the Logic. His philosophy is “the only”, “absolute”, “philosophy in general”.
Question 16. Marxist philosophy: main stages, problem field and significance in the history of the development of philosophical thought.

Marxist philosophy is a system of philosophical ideas of Marx, Engels and their followers, which is based on a dialectical-materialist approach to knowledge and practice. Marxism realizes the main intention of the philosophy of the New Age - the achievement of the identity of object and subject - through the transformative practical activity of man. Cognition - the central process in Hegel's dialectic - in Marxist philosophy becomes a subordinate, secondary aspect of practice, which, in fact, is the main philosophical idea of ​​Marx and Engels.

Theoretical background of philosophy

* Dialectical method in Hegel's system of objective idealism.

* Materialistic philosophy of the French Enlightenment, as well as the materialism of the German philosopher L. Feuerbach.

* Socialist ideas of French utopian thinkers.

Social and historical background of Marxism

* Social and economic transformations caused by the formation of capitalist relations.

* The emergence and strengthening of the proletarian class.

* The emergence of the first unions and parties of the proletariat, increased political activity of the working classes.

Scientific background of Marxist philosophy

* Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

* Law of energy conservation.

* Theory of the cellular structure of organisms.

* L. Morgan's works on primitive history and ethnography.

Marxist philosophy arose in the 40s of the 19th century ( Karl Marx(1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820- 1895)).

Marxism is exceptionally rich in theoretical generalizations and conclusions, ideas and propositions. However, among them, one of the most thoroughly developed philosophical ideas is the idea materialistic understanding of history. Materialistic understanding of history proceeds from the fact that the conditions of human life, determine social existence people's views, their goals, values, theoretical concepts. Social existence is a real process of people's lives, a kind of social matter that is reflected in public consciousness. Social consciousness- This is a reflection of social life. Social consciousness is society’s awareness of itself, its social existence and the surrounding reality. Social existence determines social consciousness - this conclusion became the main prerequisite for a materialistic solution to the main question of philosophy as applied to society.

Considering the question of structure of society, its structure, Marxism operates with the categories “base” and “superstructure”. Basis is a set of production relations, the economic structure of society. Rising above the base superstructure, which includes social consciousness, ideological relations and public institutions and organizations that consolidate them. The superstructure is determined by the base. Thus, the state, law, and the spiritual life of society are superstructural.

The materialist understanding of history allowed Marx to discover common recurring features in the economic basis of a number of countries and come to the definition socio-economic formation.

An economic social formation is a special historical type of development of society, determined by the form of ownership, the level of development of productive forces, and social structure. The basis of a socio-economic formation is the method of production of material goods.

The doctrine of classes and class struggle as the driving force of history is the most important part of Marxism. The class approach to the analysis of social phenomena assumes that nothing in society can be explained outside the context of class interests and relations.

Marxist philosophy presents an original human concept. According to Marx, a person not only lives, feels, experiences, exists, but, first of all, realizes his strengths and abilities in an existence specific to him - in production activity, in labor.

Among the most significant achievements of the philosophy of Marxism is the development problems of practice. practice in all its manifestations, including production activity and people’s transformation of themselves, was conceptualized as the basic, initial basis of the spiritual world, culture, etc. From this follows the conclusion of major importance: any activity, even spiritual, cannot be carried out without reference to to practice.