Frank meaning of life summary. The meaning of life in philosophical works

Ideas for the work “The Meaning of Life”. Frank shows that life, as it is, reveals its meaninglessness. First of all, the personal life of each of us is meaningless. The minimum condition for achieving meaning in life is freedom, since only being free can a person act meaningfully and strive for a reasonable goal. But we are bound on all sides by the forces of necessity. We are corporeal, therefore subject to the mechanical laws of matter and the blind forces of organic life. Our life is too short, we barely have time to gain knowledge and experience when our body becomes old and decrepit, and yet we are just about to live for real.

Some waste themselves on revelry and pleasure, and when their physical strength runs out, they become convinced of the vulgarity and meaninglessness of all pleasures. Others ascetically abstain from all earthly joys, prepare themselves for some great calling and holy cause, and at the end of their lives they begin to understand that they have no calling and their work is not at all holy. Someone is afraid to burden themselves with a family and in old age becomes lonely and mourns the lack of love and comfort of the family, while others are mired in family problems and then repent that they voluntarily sold their freedom.

Frank concludes that our passions and drives deceptively present themselves as something important and precious to us, therefore, when we achieve them, we are disappointed and realize our mistake when it is difficult to correct something. Hence the inevitable consciousness of disappointed hopes and the unattainability of true happiness on earth. Even the German poet and scientist Johann Goethe, nicknamed “the darling of fate”, having lived an exceptionally long, happy and fruitful life, recognized as a genius during his lifetime, admitted at the end of his life that in 80 years of his life he had experienced only a few days of complete happiness and satisfaction.

But maybe the meaning of an individual’s life will become clear against the background of the common life of humanity and the whole world? It turns out, however, that the general life of humanity turns out to be a set of meaningless accidents, a long string of facts and events that do not lead to any goal, and again is only the result of clashes of various passions, now parties, classes and states. History constantly appears as an attempt to realize universal human ideals, but in reality it is the collapse and exposure of the illusory nature of these ideals. For example, the belief in progress, which inspired entire generations, not only did not lead to a happy life, but turned into terrible wars and revolutions. Humanity is not moving “forward” at all; rather, it is rolling back and now stands further from the goal than it was twenty centuries ago. Thus, in our progress we have lost the beauty and wisdom of Ancient Greece. And in the twentieth century, enlightened Europe, with its humane and moral ideas, was plunged into bloody revolutions and world wars. Thus, both individual human life and history show the illusory nature of universal happiness.

But maybe it is possible to comprehend the meaning of human life in the context of cosmic history? But even here it turns out that the struggle for existence comes first, blind instincts reign, and it is clear that the elemental conditions of cosmic life are incapable of giving meaning to life. Frank gives the following image. In a corner of the world space, a small lump of world dirt, called the Earth, is spinning and flying. Billions of living boogers swarm on its surface, including bipeds who call themselves humans. They are born and die a moment later according to the laws of cosmic nature, and at the same time they manage to fight and fight among themselves, and in this endless war they try to find happiness, reason and truth.

How does Frank justify the legitimacy of the search for the meaning of life? The very fact that we generally raise the question of the meaning of life means that this meaning must somehow exist in the world. In a completely meaningless world, even the question of the meaning of life could not arise. Thus, for a colorblind person living among colorblind people, the question of the colors of the rainbow cannot arise. In our conclusion about the nonsense of the world, we ourselves already rise above this nonsense. This means that we ourselves have some inner being, a special world of reason and knowledge. We are looking for eternal life, blissful peace and satisfaction, but where do we get ideas about them, if in real life isn't it? Consequently, these ideas, as well as the idea of ​​the meaning of life, arise in us from some other source, different from the world around us. And this source is the one who himself is the source of everything, including this world, that is, God. Thus Frank comes to God. Since the world is meaningless, and yet we still have a thought about the meaning of life, we receive this thought not from the world, but from God.

The meaning of life already lies in the fact that we think about it and look for it, just as our search for God already says that he is in us, since we could not look for something about which we are not at all aware. able to think, relying only on one’s own life experience. Thus, God is with us and in us, otherwise this inner restlessness that torments us cannot be explained.

Further, Frank writes that the meaning of life cannot be found in a ready-made form, given once and for all. It was given to us not from the outside, but from the inside. The meaning of life must be embedded in the very life of a particular person. And if we could find a ready-made meaning of life outside of us as a gift, it would still not satisfy us, since the meaning of a specific person’s life must be developed through the efforts of the specific person himself and become a justification for his own personal existence. To find the meaning of life, we must not look around us, but carry out a certain volitional act of intense self-deepening.

Frank shows the criterion for recognizing whether a person's activity has a truly spiritual meaning. The essence of this criterion is the following: to what extent what a person does is aimed at immediate immediate needs today, to the specific needs of the living people around him? And Frank contrasts this activity, as meaningful, with outwardly sometimes spectacular work for the sake of the distant future, the happiness of humanity as a whole. It is easy to love all humanity, but it is very difficult to love your neighbor. It's easy to worry about the hungry children of Nicaragua, but it's hard to help a specific neighborhood child. You can grieve with universal grief over the presence of eternal evil in the world, but first try to make sure that today there is a little less of this evil around you.

Considering the problem of the meaning of life, Frank raises another very important topic. Man by nature belongs to two worlds - the divine and the earthly, and the human heart is the point of connection or intersection of these two worlds. Striving for God, man at the same time lives in the earthly world and constantly and inevitably sins due to his weakness and limitations. And there are different ways to overcome one’s own sinfulness.

The shortest, but most difficult path to God is chosen by hermits and saints; they completely renounce the world, everything that does not agree with God. But there is another way to overcome your sinfulness. It consists in participating in the affairs of this sinful world, but in such participation when at the same time they strive to overcome the sinfulness of the world or at least reduce it. Let's take the example of war, which is, of course, a sinful activity. The monk and the hermit will be right in refraining from participating in it, they are right because they themselves do not enjoy the fruits of war, they do not need the state itself, which is waging the war, and everything that the state gives to a person. Among ordinary people, the one who, by participating in a war, shares and accepts sin and responsibility together with the state will be less sinful and more right, which will be more honest than refusing to participate in the war because of its obvious sinfulness and at the same time taking advantage of all the fruits of war, and shift responsibility for sin onto someone else.

Man is designed in such a way that he cannot help but sin, but he has the power to choose a life that is less sinful.

Any participation in war is sinful, but defending the fatherland with arms in hand is less sinful than participating in a predatory war. Any carnal or sexual love is imperfect and sinful, and the ideal state is, of course, monastic chastity. But it would be a lesser sin to get married and live in marriage than to have a promiscuous sex life.

That is, Frank concludes that the meaning of life is not to achieve absolute perfection and completely liken one’s life to God, but that if one cannot completely eliminate sinfulness from one’s life, then one must strive to make one’s life still less sinful. Frank writes that in principle it is impossible to completely destroy evil and create good by violence. But it is possible to limit and curb evil in the world without allowing it to destroy life.

Good can only be done with good. Frank believes that real goodness always quietly and imperceptibly grows in the souls of people away from the noise of the bustle and struggle of public life, and this is a very long and gradual process. But there is no other way to do good, and the task is to, by limiting evil in the world, create conditions for the manifestation of good.

S. L. Frank “On the meaning of life.”

Introduction.

I don't think my introduction will be long. The basic commandment of a journalist is: “Never say at the beginning of a story what you want to say at the end,” so I’ll just list a few points to explain my choice.

S. L. Frank’s philosophical treatise “On the Meaning of Life” attracted my attention because it touches on issues that are especially relevant in our time - issues of religion. “Fruiting” sects and churches throughout the country speak of the incessant interest of people, striving in their search for knowledge of the truth, striving to answer the eternal question of Russians “What to do?” Therefore, this treatise may be of particular interest both to believers, who have once again been convinced of the correctness of their religious choice, and to atheists, who have drawn food for thought and arguments for anti-religious disputes.

For me personally, the issue of faith and religion still remains very vague and controversial, which is why I take the opportunity not only to express my personal point of view, but also to try to rethink religious frameworks and dogmas, as well as find something new in them.

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank can be recognized as one of the most profound thinkers of our country's recent past. As F.A. Stepun noted, this is “perhaps the most significant Russian thinker of the turn of two centuries and the first decades of the twentieth century.” S. L. Frank continued the tradition basic research worldview problems, already established in Russian philosophy and represented by the works of V. S. Solovyov, L. M. Lopatin and others. The idea of ​​All-Unity, widely developed by V. S. Solovyov, found its worthy follower in the person of S. L. Frank.

The work in question, “On the Meaning of Life,” was written by the author in 1925; according to S. L. Frank himself, it grew up in connection with the conversations and debates that had to be conducted in the circle of the Russian student Christian movement, therefore, first of all, it is offered to the attention of young people. This determines the style of the work: the author tried to express his religious and philosophical ideas in the simplest and most accessible form possible.

I would venture to suggest that this work is a philosophical treatise, where the author most directly expresses his personal beliefs, his point of view on the problem he poses. The main theme of the work: “Does life have meaning at all, and if so, what kind?” The author expresses his opinion, giving quite convincing arguments, but without calling for sharing his point of view. He only expresses his opinion, involving the reader in resolving the issue that torments deep in the soul of every person.

There is no point in saying how important this question is in the life of any person, according to Frank, “this question is a question of life itself, it is even more terrible than, in dire need, the question of a piece of bread to satisfy hunger, therefore, I believe, it is necessary to proceed directly to a statement of the author’s opinion about what he sees as the meaning of life.

Russian intellectuals have long been accustomed to posing the question about the “meaning of life” in the form of “what to do?” Life, since it flows directly, determined by elemental forces, is meaningless; what needs to be done, how to improve life so that it becomes meaningful, what is the only thing common to all people by which life is comprehended and through participation in which for the first time it can acquire meaning? The author notes that in fact, faith in the meaning of life, gained through participation in a great common cause for the salvation of the world, is unfounded. If life, as it directly is, is completely meaningless, then where can the strength for internal self-correction, for the destruction of this meaninglessness come from? It is obvious that the implementation of world salvation is invaded by something new, something different, a principle extraneous to the empirical nature of life, which invades it and corrects it. This beginning - consciously or unconsciously - is man, his desire for perfection, for the ideal.

Let us assume that the dream of universal salvation, of the establishment of the kingdom of goodness, reason and truth in the world is feasible through human efforts and that we can now participate in its preparation. Then the question arises: does the coming advent of this ideal and our participation in its implementation free us from the meaninglessness of life, does the coming advent of this ideal and our participation in its implementation give meaning to our lives? Someday in the future, all people will be happy, kind and reasonable, but what about the entire innumerable series of human generations that have already gone to the grave, including ourselves, what does it live for? To prepare for this coming bliss? But they themselves will no longer be participants in it, their life has passed or is passing without complicity in it - or is it justified and meaningful? If we believe in the meaning of life and want to find it, this means that we expect to find some inherent value or purpose in our life, and not just a means to something else. The life of a slave slave, of course, is meaningful for the slave owner, who uses him as draft cattle, as a tool for his enrichment; but as life for the slave himself, the bearer and subject of living self-consciousness, it is obviously absolutely meaningless, because it is entirely given to serving a goal that itself is not part of this life and does not participate in it.

When thinking about life and its meaning, we must recognize life as a whole. All world life as a whole and our own short life - not as a random fragment, but as something merged into unity with all world life. “The meaning of life” - whether it exists in reality or not - must be thought of as a kind of eternal beginning; everything that happens in time, everything that arises and disappears, being part of its meaning. Every deed that a person does is something derived from a person, his life, his spiritual nature: the meaning of human life must be something on which a person relies, which serves as a single, unchanging, solid foundation of his existence. All the affairs of man and humanity - both those that he himself considers great, and those in which he sees his only and greatest work - are insignificant and vain if he himself is insignificant, if his life, in essence, has no meaning, if he is not rooted in some hospitable soil that exceeds him and is not created by anything. And therefore, although the meaning of life makes sense of human affairs, on the contrary, no matter in itself can make sense of human life.

The only religiously justified and non-illusory formulation of the question “what to do?” comes down not to the question of how I can save the world, but to the question of how I can join the beginning, which is the key to saving life. In the Gospel, the answers given to this question emphasize that the “work” that can lead to the goal has nothing to do with any external human affairs, but comes down entirely to the matter of “the internal regeneration of man through self-denial, repentance and faith.” . So, the author says that the question “what to do?” means: “How to live in order to comprehend and through this unshakably affirm your life?” In other words, it is not through any special human deed that the meaninglessness of life is overcome and life is brought into it, but the only human deed is to seek and find the meaning of life, outside of all private, earthly affairs.

To be meaningful, our life - contrary to the fans of “life for the sake of life”, and in accordance with the demand of our soul - must be a service to the absolute and greater good, at the same time, is not a loss, but an affirmation and enrichment of oneself, when it is service to the absolute good, which is good for myself. Or, in other words, we can recognize as absolute, in the sense of complete indisputability, only such a good that is both a self-pressing good, exceeding all my personal interests, and a good for me.

Our life is meaningful because it is a reasonable path to a goal or a path to a reasonable higher goal, otherwise it is a meaningless wandering. But such a true path for our life can only be that which at the same time itself is both life and Truth. “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

So, in order for life to have meaning, two conditions are necessary: ​​the existence of God and our own involvement in him, the achievability for us of life in God or divine life. And it is necessary, secondly, that we ourselves, despite all our powerlessness, the blindness and destructiveness of our passions, the randomness and short-term nature of our lives, should be not only the creations of God, not only his “slaves”, fulfilling His will only for him , involuntarily, but also as free participants and participants in the divine life itself, so that by serving him, in this service we do not extinguish or exhaust our own life, but, on the contrary, affirm it, enrich it and enlighten it. This service must be the true daily bread and the true water that quenches us. Moreover: only in this case do we find the meaning of life for ourselves, if, by serving Him, we, as sons and heirs of the householder, serve in our own business, if His life, light, eternity and bliss can become ours, if our life can become divine and we ourselves can become “gods”, “deified”. We must be able to overcome all-meaningless death, blindness and the irritating excitement of our blind passions, all the blind and evil forces of the meaningless world life that suppress us or capture us, in order to find this true life path, which is for us both true Life and genuine living truth.

More precisely, in faith, as a search for and discernment of the meaning of life, there are two sides that are inextricably linked with each other - the theoretical and practical side; the sought-after “understanding” of life is, on the one hand, discernment, finding the meaning of life, and on the other hand, its effective creation, the volitional effort with which it “admires.” The theoretical side of understanding life is that, having seen true existence and its deepest, true focus, we thereby have life as a genuine whole, as a meaningful unity and therefore understand the meaningfulness of what was previously meaningless, being only a scrap and a fragment.

Next to this theoretical understanding of life comes the other side of our spiritual re-education and deepening, which can be called the practical understanding of life, the effective affirmation of meaning in it and the destruction of its meaninglessness.

That an attempt to comprehend the world and life is feasible only through renunciation of the world in the sense of overcoming its claim to have a self-pressing and absolute meaning, through affirmation of oneself in the supra-worldly, eternal and truly comprehensive basis of being - is simply a self-evident truth, which in the field of spiritual knowledge has the meaning of an elementary axiom, without knowledge of which a person is simply illiterate.

True life is life in all-embracing unity, tireless service to the absolute whole; We all truly find ourselves and our lives when we sacrifice ourselves and our empirical isolation and isolation and strengthen our entire being in something else - in God, as the primary source of all life. But in this way we connect ourselves in the deepest ontological way with everything living on earth, and above all with our neighbors and their fate. The human personality is, as it were, externally closed and separated from other beings; from within, in its depths, it communicates with all of them, merged with them in primary unity. Therefore, the deeper a person goes inside, the more he expands and acquires a natural and necessary connection with all other people, with all world life as a whole.

We are eager to fight evil, organize our lives, do real “practical” work: and we forget that this requires, first of all, the forces of good, which we need to be able to cultivate and accumulate in ourselves. Religious, inner work, prayer, ascetic struggle with oneself is such an inconspicuous work of human life, laying its very foundation. This is the main, primary, and only truly productive human activity. All human aspirations ultimately, in their final being, are the aspirations for life, for complete satisfaction, for the acquisition of light and authenticity of being. But that is precisely why all external human affairs, all methods of external arrangement and ordering of life are based on internal affairs - on comprehending life through spiritual activity, through cultivating in oneself the forces of goodness and truth, through man’s effective integration into the primary source of life - God.

This is the only, great thing with the help of which we effectively realize the meaning of life and by virtue of which something significant actually happens in the world - namely, the revival of its innermost fabric, the dispersal of the forces of evil and the filling of the world with the forces of good. This matter - a truly metaphysical matter - is possible at all only because it is not at all simply a human matter. Here only the work of preparing the soil belongs to man, while the growth is accomplished by God himself. This is a metaphysical, Divine-human process in which man only participates and that is why the affirmation of human life in its true sense can be realized in it.

The meaning of life is in its affirmation in the eternal, it is realized when the eternal beginning appears in us and around us, it requires the immersion of life in this eternal beginning. Only insofar as our life and work comes into contact with the eternal, lives in it, is imbued with it, can we generally count on achieving the meaning of life. The only thing that makes sense of life and therefore has absolute meaning for a person is nothing more than effective participation in the Theanthropic life. And we understand the words of the savior to the question “what should we do?”, answering: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”

Returning back to our formulation of the question of the meaning of life, we must remember what has already been achieved. When a person gives his life as a means for something particular, whatever it may be, when he serves some supposed absolute end, which itself has no relation to his own life, to the intimate and basic request of his spirit, to his the need to find himself in the final satisfaction, in the eternal light and peace of perfect completeness, then he inevitably becomes a slave and loses the meaning of his life. And only when he devotes himself to the service of that which is the eternal basis and source of his own life, does he gain the meaning of life. Therefore, any other service is justified to the extent that it itself indirectly participates in this only genuine service to the Truth, true life.

Thus, external, worldly work, being derived from the main, spiritual work and only comprehended by it, must stand in its proper place in our common spiritual life, so that the normal spiritual balance is not upset. The powers of the spirit, strengthened and nourished from within, must freely flow outward, for faith without works is dead, the light coming from the depths must illuminate the darkness without. But the powers of the spirit should not serve the forces of the world, and darkness should not drown out the eternal Light.

This is, after all, that living Light that enlightens every person who comes into the world - this is the God-man Christ himself, who is for us “the way, the truth and the life” and who, precisely because of this, is eternal and indestructible the meaning of our life.

So, according to S. L. Frank, social life has as its only, final purpose the realization of its true ontological nature in all its concrete completeness, that is, “the deification of man, the possible more complete embodiment in common human life of the entire fullness of Divine truth. The purpose of human life, in general, is one - the realization of life itself in all its comprehensive fullness, depth and harmony and freedom of its Divine fundamental principle.

S. L. Frank is a famous philosopher, thinker, humanist, but I allow myself to doubt a little the correctness of his assessment of the meaning of human life. The author himself said that he was not a theologian, but a free philosopher, but some parts of his work are more like a sermon delivered by a priest in order to increase his flock. This work, in my opinion, is a philosophical treatise, but based on a strong religious basis. P. Alekseev, assessing Frank’s works, claims that behind his “religious philosophy” there is definitely a philosophy. I don’t think that a second-year student (i.e. me) could argue with the venerable critics, but still I admit the possibility that this work may be an exception to the rule and is still based more on religion, otherwise how to explain the statement author, that the meaning of my life is the God-man Christ, who, moreover, must also be “the way, the truth and the life” for me?

There were several moments in the work that I did not perceive as “truth”. So Frank says that in order for life to have meaning, 2 conditions are necessary: ​​the existence of God and our own involvement in him; and our participation in the divine life itself. With this statement, he completely denies the existence of a small group of people in our time (when one can turn to faith) called atheists. And if he nevertheless admits that such exist, then his statement can be regarded as the fact that the life of atheists is completely devoid of meaning and goals, because they deny the existence of God, therefore, they are not involved in any way with God, do not take part in the Divine life, do not devote their lives to serving God. Following Frank's definition of the meaning of life, the life of an atheist is clearly meaningless, but I beg to differ.

For me, the meaning of life is to live the time allotted to me so that there will be no excruciating pain for wasted time, to live life so that something useful remains after me on earth. No, I don’t strive to be remembered by millions of people (although that would also be nice), it’s quite enough to live in the memory of children, let someone remember not even me, but my very existence, admiring the rowan tree I planted.

All this means that among atheists, for example, there are many doctors, surgeons, i.e. people who know the physiology and anatomy of man, for them God does not exist in man, they know that physically he cannot be present anywhere in man, but how many human lives were saved by the hands of those same atheist doctors! Can the life of a person who saved 1000 lives or even one be called meaningless?!

There is one more point with which I allow myself to disagree. The author claims that the life of a person who builds a “bright future” for people, but does not see this future itself, is also devoid of any meaning. He says that people who took part in the approach of bliss, the world of goodness and reason, but are no longer able (in time) to become its participants, can be compared to manure, which serves as fertilizer and thus contributes to the future harvest. The comparison below may not be appropriate these days, but...

In 1917, when hungry people, tired, war-weary soldiers rebelled, I don’t think they didn’t see the meaning of their lives. It was - the meaning was to destroy the existing system in the hope of a better life. It would be a mistake to assume that everyone who stormed the Winter Palace was young, full of strength and health, and would be able to live in a new state where there is no monarchy. There were many who knew that the seeds they had sown would be reaped by their children and grandchildren, and for their sake they went to the gates of the Winter Palace. So is it possible to call their lives meaningless if the main thing for them was the creation of a new country and society in the name of the future of their children? Considering the issue raised about the events of 1917, I would like to draw, perhaps not entirely appropriate, an analogy: the faith in God that Semyon Lyudvigovich speaks of is akin to the faith that the workers felt towards the Bolsheviks.

I understand that my speech is not devoid of some civic pathos, although, in fact, like S. L. Frank, I do not accept the revolution and its consequences. But, on the other hand, I can’t help but admire people who gave up everything in the name of their great goal.

I agree with the author that all external human affairs are based on internal affairs - on understanding life through spiritual activity, through cultivating the forces of goodness and truth in oneself, but I am not entirely sure that in order to know truth and goodness one must constantly pray, as the author claims , and be an ascetic.

Perhaps my slightly skeptical attitude towards this work by S. L. Frank can be explained by the difference in age with the author, and, consequently, the difference in views and assessment of the world. Perhaps, having reached the age at which Frank wrote his treatise “On the Meaning of Life,” I will come to a different understanding of the meaning of life. But now, with all the self-confidence of youth, I will not allow myself to agree with all the statements of the famous philosopher.

S. L. Frank “On the meaning of life.”

Introduction.

This work by S.L. Frank “On the meaning of life” touches on the most pressing problems of religion, since the church speaks of the incessant interest of people in searching for the meaning of life and the answer to the question “What to do?” Therefore, this treatise is of interest to both believers and atheists.

Semyon Ludwigovich Frank wrote this work “On the Meaning of Life” in 1925. As S. L. Frank himself says: “... it grew up in connection with the conversations and debates that had to be conducted in the circle of the Russian student Christian movement, therefore, first of all, it is offered to the attention of young people...”. Thus, the author tries to present his thoughts in a format that is accessible to young people (and not only others).

The question of the meaning of life is very important for every person. And at least once in our lives, each of us thought about this. According to Frank, “this question is a question of life itself, it is even more terrible than, in dire need, the question of a piece of bread to satisfy hunger. S.L. Frank does not try to impose his opinion on anyone; he expresses his point of view on the problem that worries everyone about the meaning of life. The main theme of the work, in my opinion, is the thought: is there a meaning to life at all, and if so, what is it? The author expresses his opinion, giving quite convincing arguments.

S.L. Frank, at the beginning of his work, notes that in fact, belief in the meaning of life through participation in any matter common to all people is unfounded, since life does not obey any laws, it flows determined by elemental forces, accordingly we can say that it is meaningless, What then needs to be done to fix it? It is logical that it cannot find the strength to fix it from the inside, then something else appears - a person, his desire for perfection and ideal. It is he who, by invading it, corrects it, corrects it, and if our dream of a good and future future comes true, and all people live in joy and prosperity, then we will get rid of the eternal question about the meaning of life? Perhaps, but who will prepare all this? who will make our life happy? All people dream about this, they think that everything is about to get better, but previous generations thought so before us, and will continue to think so, then it turns out that we are all participating in this preparation, and after us more will participate and others? It means that we make the meaning of life the search for some goal, and not the means for its fulfillment. “...The life of a slave slave, of course, is meaningful for the slave owner, who uses him as draft cattle, as a tool for his enrichment; but as life for the slave himself, the bearer and subject of living self-awareness, it is obviously absolutely meaningless, because it is entirely devoted to serving a goal that itself is not part of this life and does not participate in it.”

When thinking about the meaning of life, we must think as a single whole, not as something fragmentary, because all life, the life of many generations, is fused together. Everything that was not done before us and that we do not do will be reflected in the future. The meaning of life is some kind of eternal principle on which a person relies. All his affairs are mere vanity, even if he considers this something important and significant for other people, compared to the solid foundation of existence that we call the meaning of life.

Now let's move on to our eternal question “What to do?” Religious formulation of the question “what to do?” comes down not to the question of how I can save the world, but to the question of how I can join the beginning, which is the key to saving life. In the Gospel, the answers given to this question emphasize that the “work” that can lead to the goal has nothing to do with any external human affairs, but comes down entirely to the matter of “the internal regeneration of man through self-denial, repentance and faith.” . Thus, the author wants to say that people should not wait for the meaning of life to come to them on their own, since all earthly affairs interfere with their comprehension of it, but on the contrary, a person himself should strive to seek and find the answer to this eternal question, despite all your affairs and worries.

To become meaningful, our life must be subordinate to some higher good. It is a reasonable path to the goal, otherwise it is a meaningless wandering. But such a true path for our life can only be that which at the same time itself is both life and Truth. “I am the way, the truth and the life.” This means that in order for our life to acquire meaning, we must not only believe in the existence of God on earth, but also be involved in it. We must, despite all our imperfections, passions, shortness of life, be not only creations of God. Who carry out his will, but also enrich their lives through involvement in him. In serving him, we must not exhaust our own lives, but enlighten them. Then we will find our own meaning in life, if its light and eternity can become ours, then we will be able to overcome the blindness and anger that reigns in a meaningless life. We will find true Life, the true path of life.

More precisely, in faith, as a search for the meaning of life, there are two sides that are inextricably linked with each other - the theoretical and practical side, i.e. the sought-after “understanding” of life is, on the one hand, discernment, finding the meaning of life, and on the other hand, its effective creation, the volitional effort with which it “admires.” The theoretical side of understanding life is that, having seen true existence, we thereby have life as a genuine whole, we understand the meaningfulness of what was previously meaningless. Next to this theoretical understanding of life comes the other side of our spiritual re-education and deepening, which can be called the practical understanding of life, the effective affirmation of meaning in it and the destruction of its meaninglessness.

True life is life in unity, tireless service to the whole; we find ourselves only when we sacrifice ourselves, strengthen our being in the original source of all life, God. A person on the outside is separated from other beings, but inside he is connected with them all by an invisible single thread, and when a person withdraws into himself, he expands inward, gaining a natural connection with other people, with all world life as a whole. Ask why is this necessary? First of all, this is how we cultivate in ourselves those feelings that are necessary for every person: a sense of goodness and justice, because each of us strives to improve our lives, to do a real common cause, and this is impossible without an internal struggle with ourselves. After all, our passions confuse us, and we can lay the foundation for true life only through internal work - comprehension through spiritual activity, through accumulating light forces within ourselves, through God.

This is the only, great thing with the help of which we effectively realize the meaning of life and by virtue of which something significant actually happens in the world - namely, the revival of its innermost fabric, the dispersal of the forces of evil and the filling of the world with the forces of good. This matter is possible in general only because it is not at all simply a human matter. Here only the work of preparing the soil belongs to man, while the growth is accomplished by God himself. A divine-human process in which only man participates and that is why the affirmation of human life in its true meaning can be realized.

Understanding the meaning of life lies in understanding eternity, in affirmation in it. The eternal beginning appears everywhere around us, we come into contact with it through work, our life, which means we can count on understanding the meaning of life. The only thing that makes sense of life and therefore has absolute meaning for a person is nothing more than effective participation in the Theanthropic life. And we understand the words of the savior to the question “what should we do?”, answering: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.” When a man gives his life as a means to something particular, whatever it may be, when he serves some supposed absolute end which itself has no relation to his own life, then he inevitably becomes a slave and loses the meaning of his life . And only when he devotes himself to the service of that which is the eternal basis and source of his own life, does he gain the meaning of life.

To summarize, we can say that any person must have moral balance, i.e. external activity, which is derived from the spiritual, must be in its place, and the strength of the spirit in its place. Spiritual forces are strengthened and nourished from within a person in order to pour out, this is the very living light that enlightens every person - this is Christ - our truth and life - our meaning of life.

So, according to S. L. Frank, the deification of man is the only possible way to the search for the meaning of life. The purpose of human life, in general, is one - the realization of life itself in all its comprehensive fullness, depth and harmony and freedom of its Divine fundamental principle.

S.L. Frank is a famous philosopher, but I cannot agree with some points in this work. The author says that to determine the meaning of life, two conditions are necessary, and all of them involve God, and at the same time, at the beginning of his work, he says that this book is for both believers and atheists. What then should they do? Is their life meaningless? But they are people, just like everyone else, and they also want to know what every person wants. One contradicts the other. He also says that he is not a theologian, but his work is based on a broad religious basis, as some parts of his work read more like a sermon than a philosophical text.

There is one more point with which I allow myself to disagree. The author claims that the life of a person who builds a “bright future” for people, but does not see this future itself, is also devoid of any meaning. He says that people who took part in the approach of bliss, the world of goodness and reason, but are no longer able (in time) to become its participants, can be compared to manure, which serves as fertilizer and thus contributes to the future harvest.

So what happens is that our parents and many generations before them, while creating better living conditions for us, live their lives meaninglessly?? If we take the upcoming elections, many will go to vote and make a meaningful choice of a new government. Everyone believes that one of the parties is closest to him, and that he will provide the best life for himself and his children. Can this be called meaningless? I don’t think so, for me the meaning of life is to live my life without regretting a single day. So that children and grandchildren (and if you’re lucky, great-grandchildren) remember me, so that they leave something useful and necessary on earth. Let it be something not very important, but something that will remind you of me. And I think many more, and many more people think the same way as me. After all, we all need a very specific thing from life - happiness, even if its fleeting moments, but they are more valuable this way. And first of all, this is the internal state of a person’s soul, which is why I agree with the author that all external human affairs are based on internal affairs - on understanding life through spiritual activity, through cultivating the forces of goodness and truth, but I am not entirely sure that To know truth and goodness, one must constantly pray, as the author claims.

Of course, my skeptical attitude towards this work of S.L. Frank cannot be in line with the critics of that time, but I cannot completely agree with all his beliefs. S.L. Frank is a great philosopher of his time, but from my point of view, not everything is so right and true in his work.

PROPHET

We are tormented by spiritual thirst,

I dragged myself in the dark desert,

And the six-winged seraph

He appeared to me at a crossroads.

With fingers as light as a dream

He touched my eyes:

The prophetic eyes have opened,

Like a frightened eagle.

He touched my ears

And they were filled with noise and ringing:

And I heard the sky tremble,

And the heavenly flight of angels,

And the reptile of the sea underwater,

And the valley of the vine is vegetated.

And he came to my lips,

And my sinner tore out my tongue,

And idle and crafty,

And the sting of the wise snake

My frozen lips

He put it with his bloody right hand.

And he cut my chest with a sword,

And he took out my trembling heart,

And coal blazing with fire,

I pushed the hole into my chest.

I lay like a corpse in the desert,

And God’s voice called to me:

"Rise up, prophet, and see and listen,

Be fulfilled by my will

And, bypassing the seas and lands,

Burn the hearts of people with the verb."

Analysis of the poem by A.S. Pushkin's "Prophet"

This poem was written by A.S. Pushkin in 1826. This poem is philosophical, in which the author talks about the purpose of the poet.

The first thing that catches your eye is that in the entire poem there is not a hint of the pure teachings of love and truth, of the demands of a distinctive sermon. Pushkin points out that the whole truth is in every person, it only needs to be awakened.

For Alexander Sergeevich, a prophet is a poet, i.e. a messenger of God on earth performing a specific mission. This prophet will “burn” the “hearts of people” with his “verb.” It is “hearts”, not minds.

With the appearance of the six-winged seraphim, the spiritual rebirth of man begins:

He touched my eyes.

The prophetic eyes have opened,

Like a frightened eagle.

He touched my ears,

And they were filled with noise and ringing.

A person receives qualities ancient world nature. Moreover, the seraphim delivers a person from his sinful essence, but this was accompanied by torment and suffering, because only suffering can lead a person to spiritual cleansing:

And my sinner tore out my tongue,

And idle and crafty,

And the sting of the wise snake

My frozen lips

He put it with his bloody right hand.

And he cut my chest with a sword,

And he took out my trembling heart,

And coal blazing with fire,

He pushed the hole into his chest.

To become a prophet, you need to renounce the world around you, from fear and everyday life, and this is how a poet becomes. He immerses himself in himself; nothing should distract him from his creativity. I believe this is why Pushkin writes:

We are tormented by spiritual thirst,

In the dark desert I dragged myself

The hero receives all the necessary qualities of a prophet, but remains inactive; he lacks the most important thing - a goal.

The theme of the poem is the problem of the purpose of the poet and poetry. A true poet is a person endowed with the ability to penetrate into the mysterious depths of the surrounding world. The mystery of existence is revealed to his eyes, his hearing is unusually sensitive, and his goal is determined by God.

Does life have meaning at all, and if so, what kind of meaning? What is a sense of life? Or is life simply nonsense, a meaningless, worthless process of the natural birth, flowering, maturation, withering and death of a person, like any other organic being? Those dreams about goodness and truth, about spiritual significance and meaningfulness of life, which already from adolescence excite our soul and make us think that we were not born “for nothing”, that we are called to accomplish something great and decisive in the world and thereby to realize ourselves, to give a creative outcome to the spiritual forces dormant in us, hidden from prying eyes, but persistently demanding their discovery, forming, as it were, the true being of our “I” - are these dreams justified in any way objectively, do they have any reasonable basis, and if so, what? Or are they simply lights of blind passion that flare up in a living being according to the natural laws of its nature as elemental attractions and yearnings, with the help of which indifferent nature accomplishes through our mediation, deceiving and luring us with illusions, its meaningless, repeating task of preserving animal life in eternal monotony in generational change? The human thirst for love and happiness, tears of tenderness before beauty, a trembling thought about the bright joy that illuminates and warms life, or rather, realizing true life for the first time - is there any solid ground for this in human existence, or is this just a reflection? in the inflamed human consciousness of that blind and vague passion that also possesses insects, which deceives us, using us as tools for preserving the same meaningless prose of animal life and condemning us to pay with vulgarity, boredom and languid need for a brief dream of the highest joy and spiritual fullness narrow, everyday, philistine existence? And the thirst for achievement, selfless service to good, the thirst for death in the name of a great and bright cause - is this something greater and more meaningful than the mysterious but meaningless force that drives a butterfly into the fire?

These, as they usually say, “damned” questions, or rather, this single question “about the meaning of life” excites and torments in the depths of the soul of every person. A person can for a while, and even for a very long time, completely forget about it, plunge headlong either into the everyday interests of today, into material concerns about preserving life, about wealth, contentment and earthly success, or into any super-personal passions and “affairs” - in politics, the struggle of parties, etc. - but life is already so arranged that even the dumbest, fattest or spiritually sleeping person cannot completely and forever brush it aside: the irreducible fact of approaching of death and its inevitable harbingers - aging and illness, the fact of dying, transient disappearance, immersion in the irrevocable past of our entire earthly life with all the illusory significance of its interests - this fact is for every person a formidable and persistent reminder of the unresolved, put aside question of meaning life. This question is not a “theoretical question”, not a subject of idle mental games; this question is a question of life itself, it is just as terrible - and, in fact, even much more terrible than, in dire need, the question of a piece of bread to satisfy hunger. Truly, this is a question of bread that would nourish us and water that would quench our thirst. Chekhov describes somewhere a man who, all his life living with everyday interests in a provincial town, like all other people, lied and pretended, “played a role” in “society”, was busy with “affairs”, immersed in petty intrigues and worries - and suddenly, unexpectedly, one night, he wakes up with a heavy heartbeat and in a cold sweat. What's happened? Something terrible happened - life has passed, and there was no life, because there was and is no meaning in it!

And yet the vast majority of people consider it necessary to brush aside this issue, hide from it and find the greatest life wisdom in such “ostrich politics.” They call this a “principled refusal” to attempt to resolve “insoluble metaphysical questions,” and they so skillfully deceive both everyone else and themselves that not only to prying eyes, but also to themselves, their torment and inescapable languor remain unnoticed, to be maybe until the hour of death. This technique of instilling in oneself and others oblivion to the most important, ultimately the only important issue of life is determined, however, not only by the “ostrich policy”, the desire to close one’s eyes so as not to see the terrible truth. Apparently, the ability to “settle in life,” to obtain the benefits of life, to assert and expand one’s position in life’s struggle is inversely proportional to the attention paid to the question of the “meaning of life.” And since this skill, due to the animal nature of man and the “sound mind” defined by him, seems to be the most important and first urgent matter, then it is in his interests that this suppression of anxious bewilderment about the meaning of life is carried out into the deep depressions of unconsciousness. And the calmer, the more measured and orderly outer life The more she is occupied with current earthly interests and has success in their implementation, the deeper is the spiritual grave in which the question of the meaning of life is buried. Therefore, for example, we see that the average European, the typical Western European “bourgeois” (not in economic terms, but in spiritual sense words) seems to be no longer at all interested in this question and therefore has ceased to need religion, which alone provides an answer to it. We Russians, partly by our nature, partly, probably, by the disorder and lack of organization of our external, civil, everyday and social life, and in previous, “prosperous” times, differed from Western Europeans in that we were more tormented by the question of the meaning of life - or were more openly tormented by it, more admitted to their torment. However, now, looking back at our past, so recent and so distant from us, we must admit that we too then “swimmed with fat” to a large extent and did not see - did not want or could not see - the true face of life and therefore little cared about solving it.

The terrifying shock and destruction of our entire social life that took place brought us, precisely from this point of view, one most valuable benefit, despite all its bitterness: it revealed to us life How she really is. True, in the order of philistine reflections, in terms of ordinary earthly “life wisdom” we often suffer abnormality our present life and either with boundless hatred we blame the “Bolsheviks” for it, who senselessly plunged all Russian people into the abyss of misfortune and despair, or (which, of course, is better) with bitter and useless repentance we condemn our own frivolity, negligence and blindness, with which we allowed to destroy all the foundations of a normal, happy and reasonable life in Russia. No matter how much relative truth there may be in these bitter feelings, in them, in the face of the final, genuine truth, there is also a very dangerous self-deception. Reviewing the losses of our loved ones, either directly killed or tortured by wild conditions of life, the loss of our property, our favorite business - our own premature illnesses, our current forced idleness and the meaninglessness of our entire current existence, we often think that illness, death, old age , need, the meaninglessness of life - all this was invented and first brought into life by the Bolsheviks. In fact, they did not invent this and did not bring it into life for the first time, but only significantly strengthened it, destroying that external and, from a deeper point of view, still illusory well-being that previously reigned in life. And before, people died - and they died almost always prematurely, without completing their work, and senselessly by accident; and before all the blessings of life - wealth, health, fame, social status– were shaky and unreliable; and before, the wisdom of the Russian people knew that no one should renounce scrip and prison. What happened only seemed to remove the ghostly veil from life and showed us the undisguised horror of life as it always is in itself. Just as in cinema, by arbitrarily changing the tempo of movement, through such distortion it is possible to show the true, but not noticeable nature of movement to the ordinary eye, just as through a magnifying glass you see for the first time (albeit in altered sizes) what is always there and it was, but what is not visible to the naked eye, the distortion of the “normal” empirical conditions of life, which has now occurred in Russia, only reveals to us the previously hidden true essence of life. And we, Russians, are now idle and meaningless, without a homeland and home, wandering around foreign lands in need and deprivation - or living in our homeland as if in a foreign land - aware of all the “abnormality” - from the point of view of ordinary external forms of life - of our present existence, at the same time we have the right and obligation to say that it was in this abnormal way of life that we first came to know the true eternal essence of life. We are homeless and homeless wanderers - but isn’t a person on earth, in a deeper sense, always a homeless and homeless wanderer? We have experienced the greatest vicissitudes of fate on ourselves, our loved ones, our being and our careers - but isn’t the very essence of fate that it is vicious? We felt the closeness and menacing reality of death, but is this only the reality of today? Among the luxurious and carefree life of the Russian court environment of the 18th century, the Russian poet exclaimed: “Where there was food on the table, there is a coffin; where cries were heard at the feasts - the gravestone faces groan there and look pale at everyone.” We are doomed to hard, exhausting work for the sake of daily food - but wasn’t Adam, during his expulsion from paradise, already predicted and commanded: “in the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread”?

So now, through the magnifying glass of our current disasters, the very essence of life clearly appears before us in all its vicissitudes, transience, burdensomeness - in all its meaninglessness. And therefore, tormenting all people, the persistent question about the meaning of life has acquired for us, as if for the first time tasting the very essence of life and deprived of the opportunity to hide from it or cover it up with a deceptive appearance that softens its horror, a completely exceptional acuteness. It was easy not to think about this question when life, at least outwardly visible, flowed smoothly and smoothly, when - minus the relatively rare moments of tragic trials that seemed exceptional and abnormal to us - life appeared to us calm and stable, when everyone of us was our natural and reasonable business, and behind the many questions of the current day, behind the many living and important private affairs and questions for us, the general question about life as a whole only seemed to appear somewhere in the foggy distance and vaguely secretly disturbed us. Especially at a young age, when the resolution of all the issues of life is foreseen in the future, when the supply of vital forces requiring application, this application for the most part was found, and living conditions easily allowed us to live in dreams, only a few of us suffered acutely and intensely from the consciousness of the meaninglessness of life. Not so now. Having lost my homeland and with it natural soil for a task that gives at least the appearance of understanding life, and at the same time deprived of the opportunity to enjoy life in carefree youthful joy and in this spontaneous fascination with its temptations to forget about its inexorable severity, doomed to hard, exhausting and forced labor for our food - we are forced to put The question to yourself is: why live? Why pull this ridiculous strap? What justifies our suffering? Where to find unshakable support so as not to fall under the weight of life's needs?

True, the majority of Russian people are still trying to drive away these menacing and dreary thoughts with a passionate dream about the future renewal and revival of our common Russian life. Russian people generally had the habit of living with dreams of the future; and before it seemed to them that the everyday, harsh and dull life of today was, in fact, an accidental misunderstanding, a temporary delay in the onset of true life, a languid wait, something like languor at some random train stop; but tomorrow or in a few years, in a word, in any case, soon in the future everything will change, a true, reasonable and happy life will open; the whole meaning of life is in this future, and today’s life does not count. This mood of daydreaming and its reflection on the moral will, this moral frivolity, contempt and indifference to the present and internally deceitful, unfounded idealization of the future - this spiritual state is, after all, the last root of that moral disease that we call revolution and this is the reality that ruined Russian life. But never, perhaps, has this spiritual state been as widespread as it is now; and it must be admitted that never before have there been so many reasons or reasons for it as now. It cannot be denied that the day must finally come, sooner or later, when Russian life will get out of the quagmire into which it has fallen and in which it is now frozen motionless; It cannot be denied that from this day onwards a time will come for us which will not only ease the personal conditions of our life, but - what is much more important - will place us in healthier and more normal general conditions, will reveal the possibility of rational action, will revive our strengths through a new immersion of our roots into native soil.

And yet, even now this mood of transferring the question of the meaning of life from today to the expected and unknown future, expecting its solution not from the internal spiritual energy of our own will, but from unforeseen changes of fate, this is complete contempt for the present and capitulation to it for due to the dreamy idealization of the future - there is the same mental and moral illness, the same perversion of a healthy attitude towards reality and the tasks of one’s own life, arising from the very spiritual being of a person, as always; and the exceptional intensity of this mood only testifies to the intensity of our disease. And the circumstances of life develop in such a way that this gradually becomes clearer to us ourselves. The onset of this decisive have a bright day, which we have been waiting for a long time almost tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, is delayed for many years; and the more time we wait for it, the more our hopes turned out to be illusory, the more vague the possibility of its occurrence becomes in the future; he is moving away for us into some elusive distance, we are waiting for him not tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but only “in a few years,” and no one can predict how many years we should wait for him, or why exactly and under what conditions it will come. And many are already beginning to think that this desired day, perhaps, will not come in a noticeable way, will not lay a sharp, absolute line between the hated and despised present and the bright, joyful future, but that Russian life will only be imperceptibly and gradually, perhaps a series of small shocks to straighten and come to a more normal condition. And given the complete impenetrability of the future for us, with the revealed fallacy of all the forecasts that have already repeatedly promised us the coming of this day, one cannot deny the plausibility or at least the possibility of such an outcome. But the mere admission of this possibility already destroys the entire spiritual position, which postpones the realization of true life until this decisive day and makes it completely dependent on it. But besides this consideration, how long should we and can we wait, and is it possible to spend our lives in an inactive and meaningless, indefinitely long waiting? The older generation of Russian people is already beginning to get used to the bitter thought that it may either not live to see this day at all, or will meet it in old age, when all active life will be in the past; the younger generation is beginning to become convinced at least that best years his life is already passing and, perhaps, will pass without a trace in such anticipation. And if we could still spend our lives not in a senseless and languid expectation of this day, but in its effective preparation, if we were given - as was the case in the previous era - the opportunity for a revolutionary actions, and not just revolutionary dreams and word debates! But even this opportunity is absent for the vast, overwhelming majority of us, and we clearly see that many of those who consider themselves to have this opportunity are mistaken precisely because, poisoned by this disease of daydreaming, they have simply forgotten how to distinguish between genuine, serious, fruitful case from simple word disputes, from senseless and childish storms in a glass of water. Thus, fate itself - or the great superhuman forces that we dimly perceive behind blind fate - wean us from this lulling but corrupting disease of dreamily transferring the question of life and its meaning into the indefinite distance of the future, from the cowardly deceptive hope that someone or something in the outside world will decide it for us. Now most of us, if not clearly aware, then at least vaguely feel that the question of the expected revival of the homeland and the associated improvement in the fate of each of us does not at all compete with the question of how and why we should live today - that Today, which stretches out for many years and can drag on for our entire life - and thus with the question of the eternal and absolute meaning of life as such - does not at all obscure this, as we clearly feel, yet the most important and most pressing question. Moreover: after all, this desired “ day The future will not by itself rebuild the entire Russian life and create more reasonable conditions for it. After all, this will have to be done by the Russian people themselves, including each of us. But what if, in languid waiting, we lose the entire reserve of our spiritual strength, if by that time, having uselessly spent our lives on meaningless languor and aimless vegetation, we have already lost clear ideas about good and evil, about the desired and unworthy way of life? Is it possible to update common life, not knowing, for myself, why do you even live and what eternal, objective meaning does life have in its entirety? Don’t we already see how many Russian people, having lost hope of resolving this issue, either grow dull and spiritually freeze in everyday worries about a piece of bread, or commit suicide, or, finally, die morally, out of despair becoming wasters of life, going to crimes and moral decay for the sake of self-forgetfulness in violent pleasures, the vulgarity and ephemerality of which their chilled soul itself is aware of?

No, from the question about the meaning of life we - namely, we, in our current situation and spiritual state - cannot go anywhere, and hopes are vain to replace it with any surrogates, to kill the worm of doubt sucking inside with some illusory deeds and thoughts. Our time is such - we talked about this in the book “The Collapse of Idols” - that all the idols that seduced and blinded us before are collapsing one after another, exposed in their lies, all the decorating and clouding veils over life fall down, all illusions perish on their own yourself. What remains is life, life itself in all its unsightly nakedness, with all its burdensomeness and meaninglessness - life, tantamount to death and non-existence, but alien to the peace and oblivion of non-existence. That task set by God on the Sinai heights, through ancient Israel, to all people forever: “I have offered you life, blessing and curse: choose life, so that you and your descendants may live” - this task is to learn to distinguish true life from life, which is death - to understand the meaning of life, which for the first time makes life life at all, that Word of God, which is the true bread of life that satisfies us - this task is precisely in our days of great catastrophes, the great punishment of God, by virtue of which all the veils are torn and we all again “fell into the hands of the living God” stands before us with such urgency, with such inexorably menacing obviousness that no one, having once felt it, can evade the duty of resolving it.

<…>Let’s try first of all to think about what it means to “find the meaning of life,” or more precisely, what are we actually looking for, what meaning do we put into the very concept of “meaning of life” and under what conditions would we consider it realized?

By “meaning” we mean roughly the same thing as “reasonableness”. “Reasonable” in a relative sense, we call everything expedient, everything that correctly leads to a goal or helps to realize it. Reasonable behavior is that which is consistent with the set goal and leads to its implementation; reasonable or meaningful use of the means that helps us achieve the goal. But all this is only relatively reasonable - precisely on the condition that the goal itself is undeniably reasonable or meaningful. We can call, in a relative sense, “reasonable,” for example, the behavior of a person who knows how to adapt to life and earn money; We recognize wealth and high social position as indisputable and, in this sense, “reasonable” benefits. If we, having become disillusioned with life, seeing its “meaninglessness,” at least in view of the brevity, precariousness of all these blessings, or in view of the fact that they do not give our soul true satisfaction, have recognized the very purpose of these aspirations as controversial, the same behavior, being relatively, i.e. in relation to his goals, reasonable and meaningful, will seem absolutely unreasonable and meaningless to us. So this is true in relation to the prevailing content of ordinary human life. We see that most people devote most of their energy and time to a series of completely expedient actions, that they are constantly concerned about achieving some goals and act correctly to achieve them, i.e. for the most part they act quite “reasonably”; and at the same time, since either these goals themselves are “meaningless”, or at least the question of their “meaningfulness” remains unresolved and controversial, all human life takes on the character of a meaningless whirling, like a squirrel whirling in a wheel, a set of meaningless actions that unexpectedly, without any relation to these goals set by man, and therefore also completely meaningless, they end in death.

Consequently, the condition for genuine, and not just relative rationality of life is not only that it rationally realizes any goals, but that these goals themselves, in turn, are reasonable.

But what does a “reasonable goal” mean? A means is reasonable when it leads to an end. But the goal - if it is a genuine, final goal, and not just a means for something else - no longer leads to anything, and therefore cannot be assessed from the point of view of its expediency. She must be reasonable in herself, as such. But what does this mean and how is it possible? This difficulty - turning it into absolute unsolvability - is the basis of the sophism with the help of which it is often proved that life is necessarily meaningless, or that the very question of the meaning of life is illegitimate. They say: every action is meaningful when it serves a purpose; but the goal or - which seems to be the same thing - life as a whole no longer has any goal outside of itself: “Life was given to me for life.” Therefore, either we must once and for all come to terms with the fatal “meaninglessness” of life that follows from the logic of things, or - which is more correct - we must admit that the very statement about the meaning of life is illegal, that this question is one of those that cannot find a solution simply in the force of his own inner absurdity. The question of the “meaning” of something always has a relative meaning; it presupposes a “meaning” for something, expediency in achieving a certain goal. Life as a whole has no purpose, and therefore the question of its “meaning” cannot be raised.

No matter how convincing this reasoning may be at first glance, our heart instinctively protests against it first of all; we feel that the question of the meaning of life in itself is not at all a meaningless question, and, no matter how painful its insolubility or unresolved nature may be for us, reasoning about the illegality of the question itself does not reassure us. We can brush aside this question for a while, drive it away from ourselves, but in the next moment it is not “we” and not our “mind” that poses it, but it itself persistently stands before us, and our soul, often with mortal torment, asks : “What to live for?”

It is obvious that our life, the simple spontaneous process of living it out, being in the world and being aware of this fact, is not at all an “end in itself” for us. It cannot be an end in itself, firstly, because, in general, suffering and burdens prevail in it over joys and pleasures, and, despite all the strength of the animal instinct of self-preservation, we often wonder why we should pull this heavy strap But regardless of this, it cannot be an end in itself because life, in its very essence, is not motionless abiding in oneself, self-sufficient peace, but doing something or striving for something; the moment in which we are free from any activity or aspiration, we experience as a painfully melancholy state of emptiness and dissatisfaction. We cannot live for life; we always - whether we want it or not - live for something. But only in most cases this “something”, being the goal towards which we strive, in its content is, in turn, a means, and, moreover, a means for preserving life. This results in that painful vicious circle, which most acutely makes us feel the meaninglessness of life and gives rise to longing for its comprehension: we live in order to work on something, strive for something, and we work, care and strive in order to live . And, exhausted by this circling in the squirrel wheel, we are looking for the “meaning of life” - we are looking for aspirations and deeds that would not be aimed at simply preserving life, and life that would not be spent on the hard work of preserving it.

We thus return back to the question posed. Our life is meaningful when it serves some reasonable purpose, the content of which cannot simply be this empirical life itself. But what is its content and, first of all, under what conditions can we recognize the final goal as reasonable?

If its rationality does not consist in the fact that it is a means for something else - otherwise it would not be genuine, ultimate goal, - then it can only consist in the fact that this goal is such an indisputable, self-sufficient value, about which it is already pointless to pose the question: “For what?” To be meaningful, our life - contrary to the assurances of fans of “life for the sake of life” and in accordance with the obvious demand of our soul - must be serving the highest and absolute good.

But this is not enough. We see that in the sphere of relative “reasonableness,” cases are possible and often occur when something is meaningful from the point of view of a third person, but not for itself (as ... the example of slave labor is meaningful for the slave owner, but not for the slave himself). The same is conceivable in the sphere of absolute rationality. If our life were given to serving at least the highest and absolute good, which, however, would not be good for us or in which we ourselves would not participate, then for us it would still remain meaningless.<…>Life is meaningful when it, being a service to the absolute and highest good, is at the same time not a loss, but an affirmation and enrichment of itself, when it is a service to the absolute good, which is good for myself. Or, in other words: we can recognize only such as absolute in the sense of complete indisputability. good, which is both self-sufficient, exceeding all my personal interests good, And good for me. It must be both good in both the objective and subjective sense and the highest value to which we strive for its own sake, and a value that replenishes and enriches myself.<…>

Specific example- and more than an example - we have such a blessing in the face of love. When we love with true love, what do we look for in it and what satisfies us in it? Do we only want to taste the personal joys of it, to use the beloved being and our relationship to him as a means for our subjective pleasures? This would be debauchery, not genuine love, and such an attitude would first of all be punished by spiritual emptiness, coldness and melancholy of dissatisfaction. Do we want to give our life to serve our beloved being? Of course, we want to, but not in such a way that this service devastates or exhausts our own lives; we want service, we are ready for self-sacrifice, even death for the sake of a beloved being, but precisely because this service, this self-sacrifice and death are not only joyful to us, but give our life fullness and peace of satisfaction. Love is not a cold and empty, selfish thirst for pleasure, but love is not slavish service, the destruction of oneself for another. Love is such an overcoming of our selfish personal life, which precisely gives us blissful completeness true life and thus makes sense of our life.<…>

And, however, love for an earthly human being in itself does not give the true, final meaning of life. If both the lover and the beloved being are engulfed in the flow of time, plunged into the meaningless cycle of life, limited in time, then in such love one can temporarily forget oneself, one can have a glimpse and an illusory foretaste of true life and its meaningfulness, but one cannot achieve the ultimate satisfaction that makes sense of life. It is clear that the highest, absolute good that fills our lives must itself be eternal. For as soon as we conceive of it as any temporary state, be it human or world life, the question arises about its own meaning. Everything that is temporary, everything that has a beginning and an end cannot be an end in itself, is unthinkable as something self-sufficient: either it is needed for something else - it makes sense as a means, or it is meaningless. After all, the flow of time, this motley, dizzying cinematic change of one picture of life by another, this floating out from somewhere unknown and disappearing into an unknown place, this engulfment in anxiety and instability of continuous movement makes everything in the world “vain”, meaningless. Time itself is, as it were, an expression of the world's meaninglessness. The objectively complete and well-founded life we ​​seek cannot be this restlessness, this fussy transition from one thing to another, that inner dissatisfaction, which is, as it were, the essence of the world flow in time. She must be eternal life. <…>But even this is not enough. Since my life still has a beginning and an end and exhausts itself in this short-term duration, this eternal good still remains unattainable for it - because it is unattainable precisely in your eternity. I can, it is true, catch it with my thought - but you never know what is alien and extraneous to me, I catch with my thought. And if mental possession were tantamount to real possession, then all people would be rich and happy. No, I have to truly to possess it and, moreover, precisely in eternity, otherwise my life is still meaningless, and I am not a participant in the meaningful highest good and only touch it fleetingly.<…>Infinitely exceeding my limited empirical personality and the short, temporary course of its life, being an eternal, all-encompassing and all-illuminating principle, it must at the same time belong to me; and I have to have them, and not just strive or touch him. Consequently, in another sense it must be, as already said, identical with my life - not with its empirical, temporary and limited nature, but with its ultimate depth and essence. Living good, or good as life, must be eternal life, and this eternal life must be my personal life. My life can only be meaningful if it has eternity.

Thinking even deeper, we notice the need for one more, additional condition for the meaningfulness of life. Not only actually I must serve the highest good and, by abiding in it and permeating my life with it, thereby gain true life; but I must also be continuously and intelligently aware of this whole relationship; for if I unconsciously participate in this service, it only unconsciously enriches me, then I still I realize my life in the darkness of nonsense, I have no consciousness meaningful life, without which there is no meaningfulness of life itself. And moreover, this consciousness should not be accidental, it should not, as it were, from outside approach your content of “meaningfulness of life” and be an outsider to it. Our consciousness, our “mind” - that beginning in us, by virtue of which we “know” something, itself, as it were, requires a metaphysical foundation, confirmation in the final depths of being. We only truly have a “meaningful life” when we don’t We, somehow from the outside, on our own human initiative and through our own efforts, we “recognize” it, and when it itself becomes aware of itself in us. The peace and self-affirmation of the final achievement are possible only in our complete and perfect unity with absolute good and perfect life, and this unity exists only where we are not only warmed and enriched, but also illuminated perfection. This good, therefore, must not only objectively be true and not only perceived by me as true (for in the latter case the possibility of doubting it and forgetting it is not excluded), but it itself must be the Truth itself, the very light of knowledge illuminating me.<…>

And now we can briefly summarize our thoughts. For life to have meaning, two conditions are necessary: existence of God and our own participation in Him, achievability for us life in God or divine life. It is necessary, first of all, that, despite all the meaninglessness of world life, there should exist general condition its meaningfulness, so that its final, highest and absolute basis is not blind chance, not cloudy, throwing everything out for a moment and absorbing everything again in the chaotic stream of time, not the darkness of ignorance, but God as an eternal stronghold, eternal life, absolute good and all-encompassing light mind. And it is necessary, secondly, that we ourselves, despite all our powerlessness, despite the blindness and destructiveness of our passions, the randomness and short-term nature of our lives, should be not only “creations” of God, not only earthenware that a potter sculpts according to his will , and not even only “slaves” of God, fulfilling His will involuntarily and only for Him, but also free participants and participants in the divine life itself, so that, while serving Him, in this service we do not extinguish and exhaust our own life, but, on the contrary, it was affirmed, enriched and enlightened.<…>

Wherever we cast our gaze, from whatever side we look at life - since we try to honestly comprehend the empirical, objectively given essence of life - everywhere and through everything we are convinced of its fatal meaninglessness. We saw the conditions for the attainability of the meaning of life: the existence of God as absolute Good, eternal Life and the eternal light of Truth and the divinity of man, the opportunity for him to join this true, divine life, to establish it, to completely fill his own life with it. But the world is not God, and its life is not divine life... And if this is the world, do we have the right to at least infer from it the existence of God? All attempts of human thought in this way to reach the recognition of God turned out to be and are turning out to be futile. No matter how much we admire the harmony and grandeur of the universe, the beauty and complexity of living beings in it, no matter how much we tremble before the immensity of its depth - both contemplating the starry sky and realizing our own soul - but the presence of suffering, evil, blindness and corruption it contradicts his divinity and does not allow us to discern in him, as he is and is directly given to us, decisive evidence of the presence of an omniscient, all-good and omnipotent Creator. As one insightful... German religious thinker (Max Scheler) says: “If we were to conclude from knowledge of the world to the existence of God, then the presence in the world of at least one worm squirming in pain would be a decisive contraindication.” Considering the world as it is, we inevitably come to a dilemma in the question of its first cause or the action of God in it. One of two things: either there is no God at all, and the world is a creation of a senseless blind force, or God, as an all-good and all-knowing being, exists, but then he is not omnipotent and is not the Creator and sole Provider of the world.<…>But in both cases - and if there is no God, and if He is not able to help us and save us from the world's evil and meaninglessness - our life is equally meaningless. But as we have seen, even the existence of God is not enough to find meaning in our lives: this requires the possibility of our human participation in the light and life of the Divine, we need eternity, perfect enlightenment and peace of satisfaction in our own, human life.<…>

The fact is that we simply cannot be satisfied with the affirmation of the universal meaninglessness of life, we cannot - regardless of everything else - already because it contains internal logical contradiction. Namely: it contradicts the simple, obvious and, precisely because of its obviousness, usually unnoticed fact that we understand and reasonably affirm this nonsense. Since we understand and reasonably affirm it, it means that not everything in the world is completely meaningless; there is at least meaningful knowledge - at least knowledge of the mere meaninglessness of world existence. Since we we see clearly our blindness, which means that we are still not completely blind, but at the same time we are not completely sighted. A being absolutely and completely devoid of meaning could not be aware of its meaninglessness. If the world and life were a continuous chaos of blind, meaningless forces, then there would not be a being in them who would recognize and express this. Just as the statement “truth does not exist” is meaningless, because it is contradictory, since the one who affirms it considers his statement to be the truth and thereby immediately recognizes and denies the existence of truth, so the statement of a perfect and universal meaningless life is itself meaningless, for, being itself an act of rational knowledge , it in its own person reveals a fact that refutes its content.

We will, of course, be answered: this traditional objection is an empty and pathetic sophism based on a play on words. By affirming the meaninglessness of life, we, as you yourself found out above, mean the absence of absolute good in it and the possibility of filling our lives with it, we deny the existence of God and the divinity of man. That this “absence” can be seen and understood by us does not change anything in its content; that the affirmation of the meaninglessness of life is itself reasonable and in this sense, “meaningful” knowledge does not in the least shake the content of the statement, for “meaning” here simply means theoretical validity or evidence, and not at all the practical, vital meaning that we are looking for. On the contrary, cash consciousness the meaninglessness of life aggravates rather than diminishes it; This consciousness itself, in its powerlessness and in its aimlessness, is evidence of the utter meaninglessness of life; Why was the presence of human thought needed in this blind chaos if it cannot help anything, cannot save us from the meaninglessness of life and only dooms us to powerless suffering from it? Isn’t this, on the contrary, a special and special senseless mockery of the world’s fate against a person - to grant him spiritual sight, so that he sees his powerlessness before blind forces and is hopelessly tormented by it?<…>

So, the world is so structured that, being blind and senseless in its flow, in its effective forces, it, in the face of the human mind, is at the same time penetrated by a ray of light, illuminated knowledge of oneself. This light of knowledge - no matter how insufficient it may be to transform the world and disperse its darkness, for it can only see this darkness itself, and not defeat it - is still something completely alien to this darkness and, in general, to all forces and realities empirical world. Knowledge is neither a physical collision of realities, nor any interaction between them; it is a completely unique, indescribable principle in terms of empirical reality, by virtue of which being is revealed or illuminated, conscious and cognizes itself. This is still, despite all the evil of real powerlessness, in its originality and incomparability a great and wonderful fact. Peering at him, Pascal called man a “thinking reed” and said: “If the whole universe falls on me and crushes me, then at this moment of my death I will still rise above it, for it will not know what it is doing, but I I will know it.” <…>They will say: it is little consolation to be aware of it at the moment of one’s death. Yes, weak - and yet a consolation, or a possible beginning of consolation. For, at least in the face of our knowledge, we clearly no longer belong to this world and are not subject to its meaningless forces; we have contact with something else, a small point of support, which is still some genuine, motionless and unshakable support. In the face of our knowledge, which is clearly super-spatial and super-temporal (for it is capable of surveying and cognizing both infinite space and infinite time), we have the presence in us of the beginning of another, eternal being, the action in us (albeit clouded by our sensual limitations and weakness) of a certain supra-mundane, divine power. In it, a completely special, supra-empirical and at the same time absolutely obvious existence is revealed to us - most immediately, the inner being of ourselves.<…>And along with this unique and super-empirical inner existence of ourselves, something even more significant is immediately revealed to us - the self-evident and in itself affirmed existence of Truth itself, although here only in the one-sided form of the light of theoretical knowledge. Indeed, in the act of our cognition, it is not we ourselves who do something, and it is not born from ourselves, as limited and separate beings: we only recognize the truth, we are illuminated by the light of knowledge, the evidence of what truly is - regardless of whether we know it or not, whether it is revealed to our consciousness or not.<…>

Thus, the simple and inconspicuous fact of our knowledge - even if only knowledge about the meaninglessness and darkness of our life - confirms us not only in our own, internal super-empirical existence, but also in the existence of the divine, eternal and all-encompassing, super-worldly principle of Truth, if only as light pure knowledge. Realizing the fact of knowledge and its nature, we for the first time discover, along with the empirical objective world, the presence of another, absolute being - although only in its first, unclear and most general outlines - and our direct, primordial belonging to it. And this opens up new perspectives on the question of the meaning of life. No matter how painful the meaninglessness of all empirical life may be for us, no matter how difficult it makes us in search of the meaning of life, we are now beginning to understand for the first time that we were looking for this meaning not where there is any hope of finding it, and that in this dark and chaotic region Being is not exhausted at all: we have left unexplored that primary, deeper layer of it, which is given to us in the person of our own, directly revealed inner being and in the person of those final, absolute depths that we touch from the inside.<…>

Not just one fact of meaningful knowledge leads us to it. After all, we not only dispassionately objectively we know the fact of the meaninglessness of life - we languish with this knowledge, are not satisfied with it and are looking for the meaning of life. Let this search remain in vain; but in the face themselves we also have a significant fact, which also belongs to the reality of our inner being. Let's look at ourselves and ask: where does this yearning come from, where does our dissatisfaction and attraction to something fundamentally different come from, to something that, as we have seen, so sharply and decisively contradicts all the empirical facts of life? If we pointed out earlier that a being completely immersed in the world’s meaninglessness and overwhelmed by it, could not know, then we now have the right to add: it could not suffer from it, be indignant and seek the meaning of life. If people really were only blind animals, creatures who are driven only by elemental passions of self-preservation and the preservation of the race, they, like all other animals, would not languish at the meaninglessness of life and would not seek the meaning of life. The underlying attraction to absolute good, eternal life and complete satisfaction, the thirst to find God, to join Him and to find peace in Him, lies at the basis of this longing and searching. great fact of reality human existence; and upon a more attentive and sensitive examination of human life it is easily discovered that all of it, with all the blindness, depravity and darkness of its empirical forces, is a vague and distorted revelation of this fundamental fact. When we seek wealth, pleasure, honor, when we cowardly towards ourselves and coldly cruelly towards our loved ones fight for our own existence, especially when we seek oblivion and consolation in love or practical activity - we are everywhere in fact We strive for one thing: to “save” ourselves, to find genuine soil for our existence, truly satisfying food for our spirit; blindly and pervertedly, but we always strive for absolute good and true life.<…>

Let it remain unknown and in doubt where this longing for true life and absolute good came from in us and what it itself testifies to. But let's take a closer look at the content itself of what We we strive, and let’s ask a question about it: where does it come from and what does it mean? Then we will immediately, with careful attention to the matter, comprehend that all the possibilities of a naturalistic explanation end here. After all precisely because that, as is already recognized, there is nothing in the empirical world that would correspond to the object of our aspirations, it becomes inexplicable how it could take possession of our consciousness and what it even means. We seek the absolute good; but in the world all goods are relative, all are only means to something else, in the end, means to preserve our life, which itself is not at all an indisputable and absolute good; where do we get this from? concept absolute good? We seek eternal life, for everything temporary is meaningless; but everything in the world, including ourselves, is temporary; where does it come from within us? concept eternal? We are looking for peace and self-affirmation of the fullness of life - but in the world and in our lives we know only excitement, the transition from one thing to another, partial satisfaction, accompanied by need or the boredom of satiety. Where did this concept of blissful peace of contentment come from in us?

They will say: you never know where crazy dreams come from in a sick human brain! But those who answer this question so easily do not realize its difficulty. We are asking here not about the origin of the fact of our dreams, but about content his subject. All other, even the craziest and most unrealizable human dreams have as their subject the empirical content of life, known from experience: whether we dream - without any reason - of unexpectedly receiving a million-dollar inheritance, or of world fame, or of the love of the first beauty in the world - In our dreams we always operate with what, generally speaking, happens in the world, even if it is rare, and is familiar to us at least by hearsay, from our knowledge of this world; or, at worst, our dream simply quantitatively exaggerates the realities given in experience. Here we are striving for something that we have never, even on a quantitatively small scale, met or seen in the world, which we have never could to see and know, because by its very concept, by its very qualitative content, it is impossible in the world. The object of our dreams, therefore, has a supra-mundane, supra-empirical content; he has something different from the whole world; and at the same time - it is given to us . This is a fact that one cannot help but think about; and it opens up wide, yet unexplored horizons for us. Not given do we, in fact, have exactly what we are looking for, are we not already owners of what you are looking for? <…>

And now we can combine the two conditions for the meaning of life that we have found. We saw through the analysis of our very understanding of the “meaninglessness” of life that in it itself the action of the existing Truth as the light of knowledge is revealed. And we saw further that in our very search, in our very dissatisfaction with the meaninglessness of life, the presence and action of principles is revealed, opposite this meaninglessness. Both of these moments are not as heterogeneous and incoherent as it seemed from the very beginning. Because in the very knowledge the meaninglessness of life, the coldest theoretical statement of it, of course, unconsciously contains a moment of searching for meaning, a moment of dissatisfaction - otherwise we could not form a theoretical judgment that presupposes assessment life from the point of view of its desired ideal. And, on the other hand, we could not seek anything, be consciously yearning for anything, if we were not conscious beings at all, if we could not know both our need and what we need to satisfy it.<…>

But, of course, this is not enough for us. What we need to find the truly essential meaning of life is, as we know, firstly, the existence of God as the absolute basis for the power of goodness, reason and eternity, as a guarantee of their triumph over the forces of evil, meaninglessness and corruption and, secondly, secondly, an opportunity for me personally, in my weak and short life, to join God and fill my life with him.<…>

Both conditions turn out to be unfulfilled. Moreover, we seem to clearly see their impracticability. For if we could recognize the very existence of Truth, despite the meaninglessness of all empirical life, precisely as a special principle, super-mundane and super-empirical, then its omnipotence or its all-unity - outside of us and in us - we clearly do not have the right to recognize, for it contradicts the indisputable fact of the meaninglessness of life.

No logical tricks, no subtle reasoning can unravel this contradiction or overcome it honestly and completely convincingly. And yet our heart overcomes it, and in faith, in the special, highest act of “heart knowledge,” we clearly see the self-evident presence of the conditions for the meaning of life - the evidence of the omnipotence of Truth and the complete perfect affirmation of ourselves, our entire being in it. And this faith is not just “blind” faith, not “credo quia absurdum”; with logical paradoxicality, with “incredibility” it combines the highest, perfect certainty and self-evidence. And it is only because of our weakness that in life we ​​constantly lose the already achieved self-evidence and again fall into the consciousness of its “improbability”, into painful doubts.<…>

Our sensual nature requires that the triumph of God over the blind forces of the world be certified in the empirical, sensory world, otherwise we do not want to believe in Him; and the Jews demanded for faith in Christ that He come down from the cross. And our reason, our need for logical evidence, requires us to be philosophical proven that there is meaning in being, that God truly exists. But faith, being “certainty of things not seen”..., with self-evidence testifies to the fact that it diverges from the empirical facts of sensory existence and exceeds all logical persuasiveness. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” This is not a call to blind faith, to slavish obedience to authority, to childish gullibility; this is a call to spiritual vision, to a readiness to see and recognize higher evidence contrary to evidence inferior obviousness. After all, in other areas, and in the field of scientific knowledge, a similar faith is needed. When Galileo, contrary to the evidence of sensory evidence and the insistence of authorities, asserted that the Earth rotates, he also sacrificed the evidence of a lower order for the sake of the relatively higher evidence of mathematical speculation. The will to believe, perseverance in defending the faith is not needed to blindly trust the impossible and senseless; they are needed to persist in the consciousness that supreme evidence has advantages over the lower, which, although psychologically acts more strongly on our nature, but logically has fewer grounds behind it than the higher evidence, and, in essence, can never refute the latter, but can only, due to our weakness, unlawfully displace it from our consciousness, to drown it out in us.<…>

And now we understand that our complaints about the meaninglessness of life, about the impossibility of finding meaning in it are at least partly simply illegal. Life It has meaning, and this meaning can be easily and simply realized for each of us - for God is with us, in us.<…>

“But why was the existence of this meaningless world necessary at all? Why couldn’t God create man and universal life in such a way that it would immediately and once and for all be in Him, imbued with His grace and His mind? Who needs our suffering, our weaknesses, our blindness and why? Since they exist, life is still meaningless, and no justification can be found for it!” This objection is constantly raised triumphantly by non-believers, and, like doubt, it often confuses believers as well. At the same time, we forget that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, we forget that God, being all-good and all-knowing, knows those depths of goodness and reason that are inaccessible to us.<…>

But we do not need to limit ourselves to a simple reference to the incomprehensibility of God’s providence for us. For God, being incomprehensible, at the same time always reveals himself to us, and we only need to learn to perceive His revelations.<…>

However, in one respect, and in the most important respect, we are even able to understand this. Somewhere in the Talmud, the fantasy of Jewish sages talks about the existence of a holy country in which not only all people, but all nature obeys the commandments of God unquestioningly, so that in fulfillment of them even the river stops flowing on Saturdays. Would we agree that God from the very beginning created us such that we would automatically, of our own accord, without thinking or rational free decision, like this river, fulfill His commands? And would the meaning of our life be realized then? But if we automatically did good and were reasonable by nature, if everything around us naturally and with complete, forced evidence testified to God, to reason and goodness, then everything would immediately become completely meaningless. For “meaning” is the rational implementation of life, and not the course of a wound clock, meaning is the true discovery and satisfaction of the secret depths of our “I”, and our “I” is unthinkable outside of freedom, for freedom, spontaneity requires the possibility of our own initiative, and the latter presupposes that not everything goes smoothly, “of course,” that there is a need for creativity, spiritual power, and overcoming obstacles. The Kingdom of God, which would be obtained completely “for free” and would be predetermined once and for all, would not be a Kingdom for us at all God's for in it we must be free participants in the divine glory, sons of God, and then we would not only be slaves, but a dead cog of some necessary mechanism. “The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force, and those who use force take it,” because in this effort, in this creative feat is a necessary condition genuine bliss, the true meaning of life. So we see that the empirical nonsense of life, with which a person must fight, against which he must strain his will to achieve feat, his faith in the reality of Meaning, to the maximum extent, not only hinders realization of the Meaning of life, but in a mysterious, not entirely comprehensible and yet experimentally understandable way to us, there is itself necessary condition its implementation. The meaninglessness of life is needed as an obstacle that requires overcoming, because without overcoming and creative effort there is no real discovery of freedom, and without freedom everything becomes impersonal and lifeless, so without it there would be no realization our life, life itself my "I" nor the implementation of it itself life in its final, true depth.<…>

From here it is clear why the “meaning of life” cannot, so to speak, be found in a ready-made form, given once and for all, already established in existence, but one can only strive for its implementation. Because the meaning of life is not Dan- He given Everything “ready-made,” everything that exists outside and independently of our will and of our life in general, is either dead or alien to us and is only suitable as an auxiliary means for our life. But the meaning of life must be the meaning of our life itself, he must be in it, belong to it, he himself must be alive. Life is effectiveness, creativity, spontaneous flowering and maturation from within, from its own depths. If we could find There is a ready-made “meaning of life” outside of us; it still would not satisfy us, would not be the meaning of our life, the justification of our own being. The meaning of our life should be in us, ourselves they must demonstrate it with their lives. Therefore, the search for it is not an idle exercise of curiosity, not a passive look around oneself, but is a strong-willed, intense self-deepening, a genuine immersion into the depths of existence, full of labor and hardship, impossible without self-education. “To find” the meaning of life means to make it exist, to strain your inner strength to discover it, moreover, to realize it. For although its first condition - the existence of God - is from eternity the existent fundamental principle of everything else, but, since this existence itself is life, and since we must join in with it, God is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living, then we must, through maximum tension and disclosure of our being, “search” for the meaning of life and capture it in the creative process of acquiring and communing with it. Therefore, there is always a search for the meaning of life struggle for meaning against nonsense, and not in idle reflection, but only in the feat of struggle against the darkness of meaninglessness we can get to the meaning, affirm it in ourselves, make it the meaning of our life and thereby truly see it or believe in it.<…>

But what about all the other human affairs, all the interests of our empirical life, all that surrounds us from everywhere and fills our ordinary life? Should the comprehension of life be redeemed by the renunciation of everything earthly, the renunciation of all its empirical content? Love, family, worries about daily food, as well as those goods that we usually consider objectively valuable and to which we devote our lives, giving it to their service - science, art, justice in human relations, the fate of the homeland - do they remain the same? Are they still meaningless, are they illusions, will-o’-the-wisps, the pursuit of which wastes our lives and which we should therefore simply turn away and abandon? In this case, isn’t the acquisition of meaning in life redeemed by its horrific impoverishment, and isn’t this too high a price?

This is how our unconquered pagan nature asks us. And to this first of all you need to answer like this. Who does not understand that the “meaning of life” is a good that exceeds all other human goods, that its true acquisition is the acquisition of a treasure that immeasurably enriches the human soul, moreover, that it is the only thing a real, and not an imaginary and illusory good, and therefore cannot be paid for at “too high a price” - it means that he simply has not yet experienced real thirst, and that is not why these words are written.<…>

Once forever and unshakably one result of our reflections stands: in order to seek and find absolute good First of all, we must abandon the delusion that sees the absolute itself in the relative and particular; we must understand the meaninglessness of everything in the world out of touch with a truly absolute good. No matter how often our soul, oscillating between two worlds, returns to the more natural and easier thought for it, that in wealth, fame, earthly love, or even in super-personal goods, such as the happiness of mankind, the good of the motherland, science, art, lies the “real life.” ”, the “real” satisfaction of the human soul, and everything else is a foggy and illusory “metaphysics” - awakening, she again understands and, remaining truthful, cannot help but understand that all this is decay, vanity and that the only thing that is truly true for her there is a need, there is a meaning of life, contained in a genuine, eternal, enlightened and calm life. The relative and particular will always remain only relative and particular, it is always needed only for something else - the absolute - and is easily given up, or at least should be given up for it. This hierarchy of values, this primate ends over means, primary over secondary and derivative must be unshakably established in the soul once and for all and protected from the dangers of clouding and hesitation, to which it is always exposed when it takes possession of us passion - at least the purest and most sublime passion. Life is comprehended only by renouncing its empirical content; We find firm, genuine support for it only outside of it; Only by stepping beyond the boundaries of the world do we find the eternal foundation on which it is established.<…>

Expressed abstractly, we can say: the absolute is sought through its opposition to the relative, it is outside and above the latter; but it would not be absolute if it did not at the same time penetrate and embrace everything relative. No earthly human business, no earthly interest can comprehend life, and in this respect they are all completely meaningless; but when life is already meaningful another beginning - its final depth, then it is fully comprehended and, consequently, all its content. In darkness one cannot find light, and light is the opposite of darkness; but the light illuminates the darkness.<…>All human life, enlightened by its connection with God and confirmed through it, is justified; all of it can be accomplished “for the glory of God,” lightly and meaningfully. The only condition for this is the requirement that the person not served world, “did not love the world and what is in the world” as the last self-sufficient goods, but so that he considers his worldly life and the whole world as a means and instrument of God's work, so that he may use them for service absolute goodness and authentic life. Life as pleasure, power, wealth, as intoxication with the world and with oneself is nonsense; life is like service, is a divine-human work and, therefore, is fully comprehended. And every imaginary human good - love for a woman, wealth, power, family, homeland - used as service, as the path to true life and illuminated by the rays of “quiet light”, it loses its vanity, its illusory nature and acquires eternal, i.e. authentic, meaning. <…>

And, returning back to our formulation of the question of the meaning of life, we must remember what we have already achieved. When a person gives his life as a means for something private, whatever it may be, when he serves some supposed absolute goal, which itself has no relation to his own, personal life, to the intimate and basic request of his spirit, to its need to find yourself in final satisfaction, in the eternal light and peace of perfect completeness, then he inevitably becomes slave and loses the meaning of his life. And only when he devotes himself to the service of that which is the eternal basis and source of his own life, does he gain the meaning of life. Therefore everything other service is justified to the extent that it itself indirectly participates in this only true service to the Truth, true life. “You will know the Truth, and the Truth will free you” - it will free you from the inevitable slavery in which the idolater lives; but worships idols, by nature human nature, every person, because he is not enlightened by the Truth.

There is one fairly simple external criterion by which one can recognize whether a person has established a correct, internally justified attitude towards his external, worldly activity, whether he has established it in connection with his true, spiritual work or not. This is the degree to which this external activity is aimed at the immediate, urgent needs of today, at the living concrete needs of the people around us. Whoever is completely immersed in work for the distant future, in the benefit of distant, unknown to him, alien people, the homeland, humanity, the coming generation, is indifferent, inattentive and careless in relation to those around him and considers his specific duties to them, the need of today, as something... then insignificant and insignificant in comparison with the greatness of the cause that has captured him, he undoubtedly worships idols. Whoever talks about his great historical mission and the hoped-for bright future and does not consider it necessary to warm and illuminate today, to make it at least a little more reasonable and meaningful for himself and his neighbors, is, if he is not a hypocrite, idolaters. And vice versa, the more concrete a person’s moral activity is, the more it takes into account the specific needs of living people and is focused on the present day, the more, in short, it is imbued not with abstract principles, but with a living feeling of love or a living consciousness of the duty of loving help to people, the more closer a person is to subordinating his external activities to the spiritual task of his life.

Frank S.L. The meaning of life // Frank S.L. Spiritual foundations of society. M., 1992. S. 163-169, 177-183, 186-188, 194-198, 206-208, 214-215.

As Diana Young, a dissertation candidate at the University of Berkeley, was able to show with the help of statistical processing of test data, the feeling of meaninglessness is much more common among young people than among older people. This confirms our theory that the loss of tradition is one of two reasons that give rise to a feeling of loss of meaning; after all, according to this theory, the rejection of traditions so characteristic of young people cannot but give rise to an intensive spread of the feeling of meaninglessness.

This, in fact, should not surprise us, since we are of the opinion that even someone who is not religious at a conscious level may well be unconsciously religious, even in the broadest sense of religiosity that, for example, Albert Einstein had in mind .