Buka (A. I. Arkhangelsky)Бука (А. И. Архангельский)

2. The whole matter lies in this: to believe or not to believe in the reality of the spirit. In the spiritual sense, people are divided into the living and the dead, that is, into believers and unbelievers.

The unbeliever says: “Spirit, indeed… But what I have eaten and enjoyed, that is mine!” And without much thought he cares only for what is outward, doing his carnal and evil deeds; he lies, gives himself airs, is servile, and does not feel in himself the higher needs: for freedom, truth, love. Such a man hides from the light of reason, because he is dead, and because light gives life only to what is living, and withers and rots what is dead.

Faith in the reality of the spiritual life gives a man’s thoughts another direction.

The believer in the spiritual life turns his attention inward, tries to sort out his feelings, his thoughts, tries to direct his life according to the higher demands: to make it free, truthful, loving; he tries by his deeds to build his life out of such thoughts and feelings as best answer to the aims of the good. Such a man seeks the truth and reaches toward the light, because the life of the spirit is impossible without the light of reason, as the life of the visible world is impossible without the light of the sun.

Among people there are neither those who dwell wholly in darkness nor those who dwell wholly in light; all are at the crossroads, and each, having in himself the power to go, goes this way or that. And everyone who believes in the reality of the spirit and lives under the light of reason abides in the kingdom of God and has eternal life.

Buka.

5. The gospel consists precisely in this: that the truth about the life of man is a door opened for men to pass from a life elementally unconscious to one rationally conscious; so that suffering remains suffering and death remains death, but in rational consciousness they are accepted as good — the good of the life that is common, universal, God’s, eternal, immortal.

Buka.

5. There are two views of life among people. Some look at life from the sensual, personal side, supposing that the world is arranged for them and that God was invented to serve man’s needs, and they are indignant at senseless sufferings and senseless death. Others hold the opposite view of life, a spiritual one, by which, on the contrary, man lives for the world, for God, and by which it is clear that if a man suffers and dies, then this must be needed for the life of the world, this must be pleasing to God. By this second view there is meaning in our birth, and in our life of suffering, and in our death of suffering; by this view the world is ordered rationally and purposefully, whereas by the first view everything is senseless and purposeless.

And in accordance with these two views of life, people come by two paths to the truth, to one goal. By the first, sensual view, man, not wishing to be defeated, struggles, meets on every side with failures, griefs, weariness, satiety, and illnesses, fills his life with suffering, but in the end submits to the force of things, that is, to the law and will of God; he submits unconsciously, involuntarily, like a slave on a chain, with far greater toil and with far less good for himself. By the second, divine view, man consciously goes to meet the truth and, as a rational child of the heavenly Father, the Father of truth, passes by all those sufferings that make up the lot of the unconscious slave on a chain. And the joys of life, joys and goods that are not artificial but real, natural, and therefore the most precious, are given equally to all, whatever their view; and as people enjoy them by the first view, so they are not taken from people by the second view of life either.

Buka.

4. The time is coming when ritual and verbal divine service, which draws people to itself by its poetry and splendor, and the coercive social order, which is held to be an inevitable condition of life, will be displaced by the understanding of the life of man. The time of the kingdom of heaven is coming, the time of the kingdom of God on earth, when our very life, in our deeds, will be wholly filled with the conscious fulfillment of God’s law.

One main thing is required; what is required is to understand religion in its true meaning: not in the sense of sorcery and the hoodwinking of people, but in the sense of true science, of the understanding of the life of man — to understand it so as to mean by divine service not something mysterious, supernatural, which cannot be done without a priest, without grace, but to understand by divine service love for God and one’s neighbor, service to one’s neighbor, activity for the good of one’s neighbor, for the common good — to understand by divine service the doing of good.

Buka.

6. It is clear that my life in this world of God’s has a significance not of its own, but of service. It is clear that in the fleshly sense we are destined to be defeated and destined to die; our eyes see this, our reason tells us this, all nature bears witness to this; such is the law of life in God’s world, so it pleases God. And the man who has reached this understanding, little by little, as this simple truth grows clearer to him, loses more and more the wish to struggle and be at enmity with people for the goods of his fleshly life, for the goods of this master who, as it turns out, is alien, temporary, and cruel.

Buka.