The concept of heroic virtue

Exclusive. When talking about holiness and virtue, it is necessary to understand that people are far from ideal. And indeed there are no angels among people. All people are sinful. All people are vicious and hypocritical, just some more and others less. There are no perfectly morally perfect people, just as there are no perfectly healthy people, just as there are no perfectly educated people.

As if a doctor, before treating, should be perfectly healthy. As if a lawyer should be perfectly fair.

As if the priest, before listening to confession, must be perfectly righteous.

As if a professor, before he teaches, must be omniscient.

And we know very well that such people do not exist at all. There are no supermen. There are just people. And people, even whom we recognize as saints, were not morally sterile angels.

St. John Chrysostom, recognized as the Father of the Church, had an unholy character, a stomach ulcer and a habit of snacking on cottage cheese right during the service.

St. Gregory the Theologian, a patrician and philanthropist dying, according to his will freed only the Christian slaves, and left the pagan slaves in slavery.

Saint Teresa/Mother Teresa, for a long time did not react to fraudsters collecting donations in her name.

Usually, all these facts serve primitive cynics to justify their denial of the existence of holiness in general. Especially the "tired of life" critics of life 13-18 years old. (True, as an example old man Hlebych  shows the thinking of a teenager, it is possible to have it even in the eighth decade). After all, it is so easy to raise one's own self-esteem by denying "authorities" in any field (Turgenev is a masochist; Kant is an onanist; Leonardo da Vinci is gay; Martin Luther King is a womanizer; Churchill is an alcoholic; Tesla is a schizophrenic). But in matters of Christian morality, such an approach leads straight to hell, because it makes the idea of ​​holiness accessible to every person inaccessible.

The image of the saint as an unapproachable superman, "do not bite the milk of the mother's breast on Wednesdays and Fridays..." closes the way to God for a "simple person" who was not carried away by asceticism in infancy. Therefore, the demand for a saint to be a morally sterile angel is a false demand.

Heroic virtue is a mandatory element of holiness, not equal to moral sterility. Moral impeccability cannot even be its mandatory element, if only because moral impeccability is unattainable. But heroic virtue is quite attainable. This is a path that can be taken. This is the meaning of intimacy with God.

Because in reality the opinions of critics are private nonsense. Neither insults nor praise are worth anything. The opinion of only one God is important, who knows each person much better than a person knows himself. God, to whom all genuine movements of the inner human "ego" are known. And it is only His opinion that should be guided.

A person is not born with heroic virtue. In general, a person is not born virtuous. Therefore, first of all, simply about virtues. She is brought up gradually. And it is natural that it goes through stages of development, when the declared goals of virtues and means are quite different from what is obtained and achieved. This is a natural part of the development process. I will give a sports example. Fitness centers are created not for ducks, but for slobs who want to become, if not fitness models, then at least not to touch the bellies of pedestrians on the sidewalk. It is the same with virtue, no one becomes virtuous from one declaration.

But in order for regular repetition (I would like to write "good-natured exercise in virtue") of the practice of virtue to lead to any noticeable changes, it must be stable and long-lasting.

Therefore, at a short distance, there is a feeling of some kind of schizophrenia: huge goals are declared, huge forces and resources are invested, and the output is small, which is felt as "none". Like the absence of virtue.

Therefore, a person who strives for virtue in his own eyes, and moreover, in the eyes of others, especially haters, looks like a hypocrite and a hypocrite. Moreover, he begins to behave outwardly in a similar way. That is, by publicly declaring one's goals, one weakens and gives up. Again, using a sports example - declaring sports goals, nevertheless, periodically scoring in training.

Dietrich von Hildebrand in his "Etiquette" points out the inaccuracy of an unequivocal assessment of behavior as a hypocrite. The divergence of episodes or parts of the way of life with declared goals can testify not to hypocrisy and hypocrisy in the strict sense of the word, but to the presence of constructive self-criticism with the desire to protect others from the harmful influence of one's own excesses of behavior. That is, such "duality" is the result of realizing the inconsistency of behavior and declared goals.

Here it is important to distinguish between the concepts of excess and norm.

The norm is what is declared and desired, the excess is what happened against the declared goals. Here is an example, traffic rules are the norm, traffic accidents are excess. The presence of traffic accidents on the roads cannot serve as a basis for negating traffic rules. Or, returning to sports examples, every athlete has pauses in training for a variety of reasons, from laziness and stupidity to illnesses and injuries, but achieves results if he returns to training and does not abandon it. That is, virtue is achieved by the one who returns to its path after each "off the track", and not by the one who does nothing.

Virtue requires motivation, including to overcome the feeling of unattainability of the goal as a result of excesses of violation of declared norms. Virtue hides the danger of building only an external form without internal content, only declaring goals without achieving them. And this danger is natural, like the danger of falling for someone who wants to go. But this is about ordinary virtue.

But with heroic virtue, everything is much more complicated. Much more complicated. It requires much more motivation, super-motivation.

Heroic virtue is most easily explained by the example of martyrs. I do not like this Slavic word, because it does not correspond to the meaning of the Greek word μάρτυς, μάρτῠρος - witness. That is, a person who clearly and publicly demonstrated the heroic virtue of faith in God and loyalty to God. A witness of faith as a heroic virtue. And just with such a witness of faith, who preferred death for faith to the prospect of life after renunciation of faith, everything is also difficult.

Historically, we know examples when conversion to faith preceded martyrdom. There is even a martyr who was falsely accused of belonging to the Christian faith, already in prison he became acquainted with faith in Christ, converted and was baptized. Everything is much more complicated when heroic virtue requires not a single act of manifesting a choice in favor of the Truth, but a whole sequential chain ("from treasury to treasury to lie".... "to the very end, Markovna, to death"). Moreover, this path will inevitably be associated with falls, excesses and punctures, just as high-achieving sports are inevitably associated with injuries.

And, of course, in heroic virtue, the danger of "going off the track" is much higher and spiritually traumatic. And the feeling of unattainability of the set goal is more realistic. Therefore, recovery, repentance after the experienced experience is longer and requires a lot of effort. By and large, heroic virtue is a battle in which for one victory there are many defeats...

Now it's time to talk about the heroic virtue of fighting external evil. It is on this path that many mistakes are made. And the very first mistake is to give in to the temptation of refusing to fight. "Our work is faith, a spiritual work, the Kingdom of Heaven is not of this world," etc. Many reasons can be found, calling on believing people to withdraw from the struggle. And it sometimes happens that all these arguments look very convincing.

The first. Because the fight against evil contains many dangers. And vivid examples of how, in the process of fighting external evil, a person can get carried away by the struggle itself, elevate it to an absolute, and start committing numerous crimes, multiplying evil in society "in the name of good." The history of mankind is full of such examples. Here it is important to understand that such a situation is precisely what is a "step off the track", an excess and a mistake that cannot serve as a justification for the needlessness or value of the fight against external evil, or the denial of its character as a virtue...

The second. The idea that if a certain type of activity was not directly blessed in the Scriptures, then it cannot be blessed in principle. This approach is also wrong. In the Scriptures, there is no blessing for the fire service, although at the time of the Apostle Paul, such a service already existed in Rome and Antioch. The conclusion does not follow from this: if the work of a fireman cannot be a heroic feat blessed by God. Moreover, the danger to which people of "heroic professions" are exposed directly requires blessing and sanctification, which they themselves can bring with their faith and Christian virtue.

The same is true for people who have taken upon themselves the feat of virtue in the form of a struggle against external evil. Their activities can be blessed and sanctified if they themselves strive for personal sanctification by faith in Christ.

Many Christians are used to thinking in the category of "avoid temptation." And if temptation can be avoided, then it is better to do it. But there are situations when the step to virtue is inevitably a path through the thorns of temptation.

The most difficult temptation is to become infected with the very evil with which you are fighting. I cannot accurately describe the mechanism of this process, but this is what happens when a person who is fighting some kind of evil becomes possessed by it himself. External evil provokes a response in a person in the form of rage and hatred, and the temptation to give in to them and "whip hatred with glasses" can be extremely difficult to overcome. Try to restrain yourself when "noble rage boils up like a wave." However, overcoming this internal defeat with evil is necessary.

Let's consider the following moment. The intoxication of one's own right, which leads to the rejection of morality in the choice of means to achieve the goal. In fact, to the rejection of moral restrictions. "We are for everything good and against everything bad, so everything is possible for us." Another trick of the devil here is that they will perceive the specific earthly evil that you are fighting against as some absolute evil, and then sanction yourself for any actions. This "intoxication with righteousness" and the pathos of one's own infallibility kills the ability to critically assess the situation much more than alcohol.

In fact, the fight against external evil puts a person in a situation of being in the middle of a storm, a storm, where the wind of lies and violence rages. And overcoming all these temptations requires enormous spiritual strength. Therefore, God's help is important for a person in such a situation. The virtues of Faith in God, Hope in God, and Love for God and others are necessary, I would even argue. Only they, that is, the virtues that are of key importance for salvation, are able to give strength to overcome the described temptations.

And, of course, supporting Christian virtues, courage, humility, sobriety, honesty, trust, prudence ... in principle, everything, even chastity, are necessary. That is, the fight against external evil, to be less traumatic, must be combined with the fight against internal evil, including...

I will say a very unpopular thing, but the fight against external evil, in such a way that it does not destroy either the fighter himself or the people around him, must be accompanied by enormous internal work. And the support of the Church (in the sense of the entire People of God, not just the hierarchy) can be very important here. Not only with the message that God with his grace will help "to walk from treasury to treasury" and not get angry, but also by the very prayers of the People of God to support the person who took on such a task.

Here, of course, I will refer to our dogma about the Church, where everything is connected with everyone in a mystical, supernatural way. Where in the midst of heavy storms, a tempted person is not alone, even if he feels alone, and his body is closed in a frozen concrete box.

He is not alone. Because God is with him, if he is with God.

And now let's talk about why the heroic virtue of fighting external evil among modern Christians suddenly became a vice instead of a virtue. How did it happen that the main "saint" of modern Christianity is the "wise sandman" Saltykov-Shchedrin.

The European peace after the Second World War began to rest on two main ideas, "there is no meaning in life, and it is not necessary to look for it", "there is and cannot be any higher goals for the sake of which it is possible to sacrifice anything."

And further. "Comfort is the highest value" (they write pathetically, but hypocritically - "human life is the highest value", but this is a lie. How many other people's human lives the average child of "civilization" is ready to give for the sake of his own comfort - it is difficult to specify, but the number is in the thousands). And in this world, it is natural that there is a categorical rejection of virtue in general, and heroic virtue in particular.

The maximum possible positive is moral support. No one can sacrifice half a gram of their comfort. And this state of affairs completely disarms the modern man against external evil.

Let's also note that the modern ideology of "peace at any price" actually led to war. That is, the practice of pandering and "appeasing" the aggressor led to war. This ideology is based not at all on the desire to minimize the victims of a hypothetical war, in fact it maximized them, but on the reluctance to violate the comfort of the commoner, which de facto is the "meaning" of his life.

And it is clear that this ideology of "peace at any price" could not but influence Christian theology. In Christian moral theology (teaching about sins and virtues) narratives of "peace at any cost" have firmly entered, even at the cost of complete capitulation to evil. And they gave their "fruits", in particular, in the representation of the "Christian character" of not resisting evil with violence, created its own version false teachings of "satyagraha".

In turn, this "Christian satyagraha" coincided with the tendency of many Christians to a kind of social gnosticism, where the Church is thought of as a group completely excluded from the life of society (this is especially characteristic of the followers of the Moscow Patriarchate, they even have an unofficial, albeit unofficial, doctrine of urano-politicism, "heavenly fatherland"). Their church sometimes becomes something like a ghetto of lovers of the "unearthly" and "spiritual" who are not at all interested in what is happening. Thus, there is such a thing as the stigmatization of activity aimed at fighting external evil, and then the stigmatization of virtue. First, heroic, and then generally any.

As a result, a person ready to fight evil looks ridiculous in the view of modern "Christians", like a scuba diver in the subway of a metropolis.

The fight against evil (love) is always a sacrifice, at least a sacrifice of one's own comfort. But for modern "Christians", comfort is the highest value. Because in order not to sacrifice anything, it turns on when faced with obvious evil mechanism of victimblaming. Victims' egos begin to be blamed for crimes of evil.

Of course, the modern Church needs healing and liberation from the darkness of "refusal of meaning" and "comfort at any price", which can be observed now. In fact, we see that it has even become unacceptable to remind people about the observance of the commandments and the prospect of eternal punishment for sin. It's so uncomfortable...

It is worth remembering that the Gospel is generally uncomfortable. There is no search for "dialogue" with evil in it, there is no "peace at any price" in it. Moreover, even comfort in it is declared as something not too important. But closeness to God is declared to be more valuable than comfort.

There is a quote circulating on the Internet, which is attributed either to Churchill or to Stepan Bandera, but in fact it is something from an ancient author. "He who exchanged freedom for bread will not receive either freedom or bread." There is a similar passage in the Christian faith. About the fact that whoever "loses his life for the sake of the Gospel will gain it, and whoever fears to lose his life for the sake of the Gospel will lose it." Whoever is not ready to sacrifice comfort for the sake of fighting evil will be defeated by evil. And not some kind of abstract evil, but quite earthly evil. In the form of an aggressor's army or a terrorist organization.

Yakov Yasinsky, theologian for Newsky