NOTES for Php 2:1-4

Speaking about relationships among Christians, Paul gives special attention to avoiding ambition and vanity. Of course, in any undertaking ambition and vanity do more harm than good. Either one can spur a person into activity and even sometimes make him effective. But the benefit brought by a person in such a state is usually more than outweighed by the imbalance that his ambition and vanity bring into the common work and into the atmosphere of the team.

Yet the apostle has in mind not only this side of the problem. The issue also concerns a person's inner, spiritual state. It is no accident that Paul mentions what is usually translated into Russian as "humility of mind": an intellect that has made itself small, diminished, and inconspicuous. The point is not that the apostle is against reason or that intellectual activity as such is repugnant to him. He simply understands that no human activity can be left to run on its own, including intellectual activity. And when disputes and discussions are involved, intellectual activity especially must not be left on its own.

Indeed, the intellect, like every psychic capacity of the human being, is a purely natural phenomenon. If we speak about 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. The intellect, just like the emotions, is connected with purely natural, psychic processes. And nature, as we know, abhors a vacuum, and every natural substance fills all the space available to it. Emotions, imagination, and intellectual constructions alike, if given free rein, can seize a person's inner world completely. Then everything beyond their boundaries ceases to matter: one's neighbor, the problem being discussed as such, even reality itself.

The call in a discussion to place one's neighbor above oneself is simply a way to limit self-sufficient intellectual activity and to lead the person's will beyond its boundaries. The issue here is not only the neighbor, who can easily go unnoticed. The issue is also that, carried away by one's inner activity, one can easily fail to notice life itself, including the life of the Kingdom. And that is already a question of salvation, which it is deadly dangerous to neglect.

In the passage from the letter to the Philippians that we read today, the apostle Paul speaks of the greatest of miracles: God, the Creator, became man. He, the Lord, not only lived an ordinary human life, but accepted death, a death by no means ordinary, but the most shameful. We know that both for Israel and for the Roman Empire, execution on a cross was the most terrible and humiliating possible. In the Law of Moses it was said that everyone hanged on a tree is cursed (Deut. 21:23); the Romans did not subject citizens of the Empire to such an execution. But almighty God, by His own will, accepted precisely such a death, because sin is so strong and terrible that redemption was possible only at the highest price. And precisely because He agreed to the most terrible pain and the most terrible humiliation, heaven and earth bow before His name.