From the evil one - From the Bible.
Jesus, having forbidden swearing by heaven, by earth, by the head of the swearer, said: ◆ But let your word be: yes, yes; no no; and anything beyond this is from the evil one. Meeting from the evil one, Polyanskaya, Alla. Angelina Yablonskaya, head of the advertising department, one day found dubious documents with her signature. The New Testament (Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Art. 37) says that Jesus Christ forbade his followers to swear, as they were accustomed to, by heaven, earth, and their own heads.
Encyclopedic Dictionary of winged words and expressions. In the Gospel, for example, the following rule was given: “Let your word always be: “yes, yes,” “no, no,” and anything beyond that is from the evil one.” The evil one walks the earth. And on the shoulder is his seal. He is friends with the demon and it is not for me to shout about this in your ear.
What can you take from the evil one? It was believed that whoever swears on his head, heaven or earth, does so at the insistence of the devil. Now we say: “Well, this is from the evil one,” when we point out any complicated arguments with which they want to hide the weakness of their reasoning.
See what “From the Evil One” is in other dictionaries:
This is called beautifully - literary struggle” (A. Afanasyev). Therefore, here we need to deeply understand that it is not in our power to enter into battle with the devil, this strong and terrible fighter, it is not in our power to withstand his attacks and resist his violence.
There is more to this petition than meets the eye. The evil one (from the famous bow - bend) is one of the names of the devil. I wrote to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (1 John 2:14). This word is used to translate the Greek poneros (bad, wicked, nasty) in the Slavic and Russian Bibles.
The Russian word evil indicates the moral distortion, deceit, and insincerity of the demon. The adjective of this word has the corresponding meaning. St. Apostle Paul uses this word to characterize the era: The Lord Jesus Christ “gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil age” (Gal. 1:4-5).
PORTAL CONTACTS
The word “passion” itself means a certain force influencing a person, forcing him to move in a certain direction. Hence the question of the compatibility of this or that hobby with spiritual, church life. This question arises often: both because the modern world offers a person many hobbies, and because many of these hobbies enter the Church along with people. Metropolitan Longinus of Saratov and Volsk answers questions about hobbies and their consequences for a person.
— Hobby means a person is carried away, carried away, attached to something.
Isn’t such a state fundamentally sinful? The saints were not carried away by anything, and they teach us not to become attached to anything earthly. — If I had answered this question fifteen years ago, I would have firmly stated that attachment to anything is incompatible with spiritual life. But now, having extensive experience communicating with other people and observing myself, I will no longer answer this question so categorically. It is difficult to imagine a person who is not interested in anything at all, who is not attached to anything. I will say more: if a person is generally incapable of becoming attached to something and being carried away by something, then, it seems to me, he is unreliable even for salvation. After all, nothing touches such a person at all: well, eternity, but what does it have to do with me?
A person has the right to have attachments and hobbies. Another thing is that they should be aimed at worthy objects and should not occupy more space in the heart and consciousness of a person than is allowed by the natural course of things. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a saint or ascetic who would be interested in collecting stamps or something like that. But a saint is a person who has overcome the earthly in himself. Moreover, he overcame not only the bad, not only the sinful, but also all other things that in themselves are not sinful: natural attachments to home, to friends, to relatives, to things. But a saint can overcome all this only because he has real passion, real affection. He is attached to God, passionate, so to speak, about the salvation of his soul, about life with God.
Is it bad if we teach a person who grew up far from philharmonic societies and symphony orchestras to listen to classical music? OK good. And if we taught him to understand more or less serious music, that’s just a huge victory. Now let’s imagine a hermit who suddenly became interested in musical works... What for one person is an elevation, even a breakthrough to something higher, for another, who has reached the heights of spiritual life, is a fall.
Man is called to develop from lower to higher, but there are few examples of direct forward movement. In most cases, personality development is by no means linear, it is complex, multidimensional, and the whole question is when, at what stage of its development and what a person is interested in, how it affects his spiritual state. If this elevates him, raises him above everyday life, makes him a participant in sublime feelings, frees at least part of his nature from a carnal, stout state, then this is very good. If, on the contrary, it does not allow spiritual aspirations and feelings to develop, then this is certainly bad.
People who are overly developed mentally are sometimes incapable of breaking through to the next level, the spiritual - the spiritual component, extremely developed, blocks and makes this breakthrough seem unnecessary for them. This is often characteristic of people who professionally engage in art. They are very interesting, deep, it is pleasant to communicate with them, but they often live without God and do not seem to feel any harm. The one-sided development of a person, the suppression of one of his principles by others (suppression of spirituality by intellect, for example, if we are talking about a great scientist, or emotions, if he is an artist) often leads to the fact that such a person not only does not need God, but also relationships with people, responsibilities towards loved ones seem to him to be something completely unimportant.
— You said that a hobby should not occupy a place greater than that allocated by God. How can we determine this, how can we see that it has crossed this border and has begun to take up too much space in the soul and consciousness?
“If a hobby overshadows and replaces prayer, the Church, and loved ones, if it makes a person forget about his responsibilities towards others, then it has truly become dangerous.
— Hobbies can be healthy and unhealthy, everyone seems to know this, but where does an unhealthy hobby begin? There are a lot of seemingly innocent hobbies: cats, for example, dogs. Well, what's wrong with that: the cutest creatures. But sometimes it takes completely ugly forms...
“There shouldn’t be anything excessive in a person’s life.” Even excessive love for a child destroys both the child and the parent. Everything that is beyond measure is not from God. We've all met those animal lovers who don't like people. This Vinogradov, who shot seven of his colleagues in the office, was a professional misanthrope, his Internet page is full of gloomy outpourings, but this did not stop him from becoming a volunteer for some society in defense of birds; he traveled to environmental disaster zones and washed birds from fuel oil. People like him sometimes hate humanity because it destroys living nature. And the addiction of many city residents to dogs or cats often affects those around them - they have to shy away from a dog that snaps its teeth menacingly or endure the proximity of an apartment in which there are forty cats. Do I need to explain that something is clearly wrong with the owner of such an apartment?
Loving animals is truly a beautiful thing. I myself love animals - since childhood, all my adult life some animals, aquarium fish have lived with me... But we live in a world distorted by sin. Our human truth is not identical to God's truth. Therefore, even good, wonderful things are very often turned into their opposite by people. The need to surround yourself with “lesser brothers” - this can be a way to make up for the lack of communication with people, communication for which a person for some reason turns out to be incapable, and, moreover, a way to disguise for yourself the fact that you don’t love people so much, as it should.
“Once I heard about one archimandrite that he was a big football fan, and this really upset me and caused me to distrust him as a monk and priest. And not because it was “indecent”, “indecent” (after all, he was not a fan at the stadium, he watched the match on TV in his cell), but for another reason. I had a question: what does he lack, what does spiritual life, life in the Church not give him? What is he looking for when supporting Spartak? Hence the mistrust - something is missing... What would you say to this?
- This is a difficult question, and I am afraid to be biased. Personally, I have never liked football or other spectator sports, and it is difficult for me to understand why a person in holy orders would be so passionate about football. Perhaps this is a “rudiment” of our former life in the world: we quite often take many of our passions with us into monasticism. We, of course, know that this is wrong, and we can explain to others that a person taking monastic vows must leave everything that comes from the previous, worldly custom and start a completely new life, but in practice we do not always succeed in this. Monastic life is a full life, and, in my opinion, there should be no place for football in it. But, again, I'm afraid to be subjective. One of my predecessors, Archbishop Pimen (Khmelevskoy), was a passionate fan of classical music and collected a huge music library. In his diaries (the last two volumes will soon be published by our diocesan publishing house) we read about how, being seriously ill or tired, he constantly listened to classical music. Is this good or bad? I think it's good because it helped him. I can judge for myself. Classical music has helped me, frankly speaking, to survive more than once. And in my youth, in addition, she contributed to my final coming to the Church. In the first years of my monasticism, I moved away from music, and then it came back to me, and I don’t regret it. A person has different states and situations, and thank God if he has learned to cope with even the most hopeless ones. Therefore, I cannot tell my brother that he has no right to love football, while I have the right to love classical music. Because someone can say about me: a good monk - instead of praying, he listens to Beethoven!
— If music helped in certain critical situations, then why wasn’t prayer enough to help?
“Because, probably, we are weak, and our prayer is weak.” We know the ideal, we strive for it, but we are not always able to achieve it. Therefore, music is needed, and an aquarium with fish is also needed, sometimes it helps.
A person has different conditions. He finds himself in different situations. At some point he needs a crutch. And sometimes you need to throw away the crutch and walk on your own two feet. As a medicine, some of the reproachful things that we are talking about now are quite acceptable. I repeat: if they do not take up too much space in human life.
- A passion, a hobby - it can be not only a compensation for some kind of deficiency, but also a kind of refuge, the creation of a kind of niche for oneself, or a “parallel world.” And a Christian, by definition, should not run away from reality. Is there a spiritual danger in hobbies, based on this?
- Of course have. But life in general is a dangerous thing. Even when praying, instead of the desired states, you can fall into a state of delusion. Chesterton’s thought is close to me: there is a curvature in a person, like a curved bow, and in order to hit the target, you need to make allowances for this curvature. The consequence of this curvature is that some things that are in themselves blameless, that is, ethically neutral, can turn into their opposite and cause harm. As for the parallel world created by passion, it will not harm a person who remains sober, has a healthy assessment of himself, his condition, and his place in the world.
— A special topic is hobbies in an area that we have already partially touched upon, that is, culture: music, literature, etc. It seems that you can’t object to this, but if the choice of an object is not determined by a person’s spirituality, then this also makes you think? We have young priests who are passionate about rock music and are not going to break with this hobby. What hobby of a young or not so young priest in the cultural sphere would make you wary of him?
— This is not a simple question at all: where is the line between culture, real Culture with a capital C, and what it has been degenerating into over the last century. When and where exactly does culture degenerate into its opposite? We can only briefly touch on this topic here. A priest who loves rock, of course, upsets me. I myself can’t stand such things. Of course, someone may say that I simply don’t understand this, that this is, they say, a matter of taste, etc. But the fact is that learning to understand classical music is work, this is the growth of a person, and many types of modern music - on the contrary, the absence of work, the subordination of a person to a low, passionate principle. I have always tried to instill in the young people who came to me as a priest a love of classical music. First of all, to get me away from this disgrace called modern music. I can’t say that I made them big classical lovers, but I managed to make them understand that music is not exactly what they are used to listening to.
— What happens when people elevate their hobbies to the rank of Christian virtues and try to churchize hobbies that are not entirely church-like? For example, a passion for singing songs with a guitar. What does this threaten - only a bad concert by an “Orthodox bard” or a profanation of the sacred?
— This question is also difficult to answer categorically. Of course, many try to bring some of their hobbies with them to the Church and churchize them, give them new life, explaining this with some lofty goals, but in reality only wanting to keep them for themselves. But here, too, you can approach it from different angles. I am by no means a fan, for example, of the work of Father Roman (Matyushin), but I know that in the 90s, if not all of Russia, then at least a lot of people listened to him, and this was - albeit from the back porch, but everyone -the entrance into the world of the Church, no matter how peculiarly in this case this world is perceived. Therefore, I cannot say unequivocally that the songs and poems of Father Roman are bad and unnecessary. But another thing is the crowd of his epigones, mixing sacred concepts with prison jargon and having rather vague ideas about Orthodoxy - it is already completely impossible to listen to them. The trouble here is also in the general level of culture, which among our people is not increasing, but, on the contrary, is decreasing, and that is why the people are ready to consume everything that is presented to them, and this is really dangerous. Here the question already arises of what will happen next to the great Russian culture.
Journal “Orthodoxy and Modernity” No. 24 (40), 2012
