The thought of a soul that must be hated may seem strange and even absurd. Why, indeed, should a person hate the most precious thing he possesses, the very thing that makes him himself? For the sake of precision, however, it must be noted that the subject here is not the soul in the sense in which we use the word today, but simply life. Yet even with this understanding the question remains: why should a person hate his own life, given to him by God?

The simplest answer might be to refer to the Fall, which distorted this very life and turned it into a pitiful likeness of what it was meant to be according to God's plan. Such an answer, however, would be more characteristic of a Pythagorean or a Platonist than of a believer in Yahweh. In the pagan world, the idea that earthly life was an improper state for a human being was fairly widespread, among philosophers, mystics, and ascetics, of course. They saw the life of fallen humanity in all its ugliness and could imagine no other way out than rejecting it, a rejection which they thought freed a person from the power of the evil in which the world lies and in which the life of everyone who inhabits it unfolds. The Bible, however, nowhere speaks of rejecting life as a way of escaping evil; the spiritualism of the Platonists or Pythagoreans is alien to it. And Jesus' words about hating one's own life can hardly be understood in a spiritualist sense, whether that spiritualism is of the Greek or the Indian kind.

One Indian parallel, however, might be relevant here: the parallel with Buddhism and with the concept of nirvana that is central to Buddhism. Contrary to the widespread view, this is not a departure into non-being, but rather an experience of being, a being that is revealed only when a person distances himself from illusory, imaginary, inauthentic being, which he usually regards as real life. The Buddha suddenly realized that authentic being and true life are not at all where most people see them. That is why he came to hate life in an almost Gospel sense, not with the hatred that desires the destruction of what is hated, but with hatred in the biblical sense of the word, when a person distances himself completely from what is hated and excludes it from his life. To exclude illusion for the sake of reality: such was the Buddha's experience.

Christ Himself is this reality. He bears the fullness of the Kingdom within Himself, and everyone who comes to Him faces a choice: whether to remain with his own life, which sooner or later will run dry, or to renounce his own separate existence, giving his life to Christ and allowing Him to dispose of it. This is somewhat reminiscent of Buddhism, with the difference, however, that Buddhism is apophatic, while Christianity is cataphatic. With Christ and in Christ, the authentic being and true life that the Buddha sensed at the moment of his enlightenment entered the world. And to find them requires the same renunciation of what is one's own, separate, finite, and therefore inauthentic. Without such a renunciation, reality cannot be attained, whether it is the enlightenment of the Buddhists or the fullness of Christ's Kingdom.

The evangelist describes the reasons for unbelief in Jesus quite exhaustively. He divides all unbelievers into two categories: those who do not want to see the truth and those who are simply afraid. The second case is more or less understandable: in every age fear and cowardice have been among the chief obstacles on the path of righteousness, preventing those who walk or want to walk that path from making the right decisions. The first category is more complicated. It is probably hard to imagine a person who in ordinary life voluntarily blinds himself or simply closes his eyes so that, no longer seeing the reality around him, he can replace that vision with fantasies. And understandably so: in everyday life the consequences of such an act can be most unexpected and unpleasant. Yet in spiritual life many people apparently make just this choice, and quite often, although the consequences here are hardly less serious. Why is that?

The Athenian philosopher Socrates, who lived five centuries before the birth of Christ, seems already to have understood the reason for such behavior. He said that people often take a small good for a great one and a great evil for a small one, as well as the reverse, simply because what is large looks smaller at a distance than it really is. This applies to spiritual life just as much as to everyday life.

Giving up comfortable and familiar views and a settled worldview, especially a religious one, is at the very least uncomfortable. The day of Judgment seems so distant, so small compared with this discomfort, that... it is disregarded—perhaps in the hope that by the time it comes, things will somehow have settled down, worked themselves out, and resolved themselves, and that we will somehow enter the Kingdom after all at little cost, without any particular sacrifice or loss.

And it is best to get rid of those who, as the saying goes, care far too much. There will be no quiet life with them anyway. How to get rid of them is merely a technical question.

There are only two causes of unbelief: unwillingness to see the obvious, and fear. But if we think about it, it is not hard to understand that the root is one, and it is precisely fear. Only, as we see, fear comes in different forms. There is open, unconcealed fear: in such cases a person usually admits simply and directly that he refuses to see and hear certain things only because he is afraid. He understands that once he hears and sees something, he will have to draw certain conclusions from what he has seen and heard, and then change something in his life, and the changes can bring at least undesirable consequences. Here everything is clear: a person does not want to listen to Jesus or follow Him because he does not want extra problems. This is, of course, bad, but still not the same as in the second case. Here everything is fairly open, and the fearful person understands it all himself: he knows that he is being cowardly and realizes what his problem is. Besides, although overcoming such fear is not easy, in general it is not so difficult either: this is precisely an external fear; it binds a person from outside, frightening him above all with external consequences.

The second cause is more serious and deeper. Here too there is fear, but a different kind, an inner fear. From the outside such a person may fear nothing at all. He may not tremble at the thought of the consequences of his choice. But such a person can fear for his inner world, and fear very much.

Usually the first type of fear seizes a secular, unbelieving person who tends to rely on external things and to attach great importance to what can easily be lost in the event, for example, of persecution. The second fear is more characteristic of a religious person, for whom the chief value is his inner world. Such a person is certain that this world cannot be taken from him even if his life is taken, and therefore he has nothing to fear from outside. But from within, the world of a religious person is very vulnerable, and such a person constantly watches carefully to make sure that no one somehow destroys his religiosity. If he senses in someone's words a threat to his religiosity, he at once becomes blind and deaf, simply for the sake of self-preservation.

Only the Savior can free us from both of these fears, for He can unite everyone who trusts Him to the life of His Kingdom. And the breath of the Kingdom that has entered a person's heart cannot be taken away from that person or destroyed. Then fear disappears too, because there is nothing more to fear.