Main news for 11 October 2018

Speaking about relationships among Christians, Paul gives special attention to avoiding ambition and vanity. Of course, in any work ambition and vanity do more harm than good. Both can move a person to activity and even sometimes make him effective. But the benefit brought by a person in such a state is usually more than offset by the imbalance that his ambition and vanity introduce into the common work and into the team's atmosphere. Yet the apostle has in mind not only this aspect of the problem. The matter also concerns a person's inner, spiritual state.

It is no accident that Paul mentions what is usually translated into Russian as "humble-mindedness": an intellect diminished, made small and unnoticeable. The point here is not that the apostle is against reason or that intellectual activity as such repels him. He simply understands that no human activity may be allowed to run by itself, including intellectual activity. And when the matter concerns disputes and discussions, precisely and especially intellectual activity. In fact, the intellect, like any psychological capacity of a person, is a purely natural phenomenon. If we speak of a person's inner life, only the will can be considered its spiritual component.

It is the will, the intention, that determines a person's spiritual state and spiritual activity. But the intellect, like feelings, is connected with purely natural psychological processes. Nature, as is known, abhors a vacuum, and any natural substance fills all the space available to it. Emotions, imagination, and intellectual constructions, if given free rein, can wholly seize a person's inner world.

Then everything beyond their boundaries ceases to matter: the neighbor, the problem under discussion as such, even reality itself. The call in discussion to regard one's neighbor as higher than oneself is only a way to limit self-sufficient intellectual activity, to bring a person's will beyond its boundaries. And the issue here is not only the neighbor, whom it is easy not to notice. The issue is also that, carried away by one's inner activity, it is easy not to notice even life itself. Including the life of the Kingdom. And this is already a question of salvation, which it is mortally dangerous to neglect.