NOTES for Jo1 4:1-6

The apostle speaks to us about the necessity of testing the spirits, that is, distinguishing what is God's and what is satanic in life. Before these words the apostle stresses that what is characteristic of a Christian is faith, keeping the commandments, and a heart open before God. And he formulates the famous words sometimes called "the criterion of the apostle John." Every spirit, says the apostle, that confesses Christ come in the flesh is from God. If we look attentively at the history of the dogmatic development of Christianity in the era of the Ecumenical Councils, we will see that in the end all false teachings were rejected by the Church precisely according to this criterion. And conversely, correspondence to it helps distinguish Christian confessions from quasi-Christian sects.

But besides their dogmatic and historical significance, these words are also very important in the practical life of Christians. First of all, the apostle John speaks about distinguishing the spirits that speak in the human heart. What is right and what is wrong, what is worthy of a Christian and what is unworthy: to a significant degree, for distinguishing this in one's own life, one must use precisely the criterion of the apostle John.

The apostle proposes testing the spirits because many false prophets have gone out into the world. John does not write about this, but we are entitled to develop his warning: we ourselves might mistake a voice from the darkness for a voice from above and become such false prophets. To prevent this, John offers a simple criterion: pay attention to how the spirit claiming to be prophetic responds to Christ. Such a spirit will not necessarily reject Him openly; it may even speak respectfully of Him. Yet even then, sooner or later, it will inevitably begin to qualify its praise of Christ with numerous “buts,” whose ultimate purpose is to deny the real Christ who came in the flesh. Thus we can distinguish what we are dealing with: differences of opinion, whose inevitability the Apostle Paul wrote about, or a distortion of the very foundations of the Gospel.

False prophets often claim to possess special knowledge, but as a rule they have no love, which is unsurprising because they do not have Christ. The presence or absence of love may seem to many an overly simple and unreliable criterion, especially in our time, when the accumulation of information has become one of the foundations of civilization. Both ancient false teachers and modern ones lay claim to knowledge, not to love; love seems insufficiently serious to them, and if it is acknowledged at all, it is reduced to something else, such as sentimentality, and that is not even the worst possibility.

But there is no sentimentality in the sacrifice of Golgotha.

"Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God..." The heart... but why the heart? After all, the ability to make judgments would seem to belong to the mind, not the heart. There was a man who was not religious at all, a man of the modern age (he lived in the seventeenth century), Francois de La Rochefoucauld, a moralist who anticipated the appearance of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, and he said this: the mind is always the dupe of the heart. He may have meant something other than what we are about to make him say. But here is another opinion, from a very different person who lived at about the same time, the words of Spinoza: passions are not overcome by reason, but only by stronger passions. We are not speaking of this by chance now, and it is not by chance that the Apostle speaks of the heart not condemning us, for we are standing at the doors of Great Lent. We will eat less and feed our brains worse in order to make the heart more sensitive and to let it tell us whether it condemns us. Very often, if not always, we repent of what our mind offers us for confession. And what are our sins? Almost all of them are passions, and so we try to overcome them with the mind. Of course, we try to make it look as though we conquer them by asceticism... But what asceticism can there be for a modern city dweller who has to go to work every day and think at work despite hypoglycemia, who has to run around with children and elderly parents? Asceticism in the true sense is impossible under such conditions; all of this is only self-restraint within our strength. So only the mind remains to help us with the passions. Yet here is the witness of two very different people that this may be completely useless. And now let us return again to the Apostle's words: "...if our heart does not condemn us..." Let us look at this wondrous organ, the heart. It is one of the most frequent words in the Bible. Here is what B. Vysheslavtsev, the philosopher of the heart, as some call him, writes: "It is necessary to recognize the heart as the primary organ of religious experience. In the simplicity and accessibility of this word 'heart,' this symbol constantly present in ordinary speech, lies its high religious value. A person 'without a heart' is a person without love and without religion; irreligion is, in the end, heartlessness." Let us dedicate Great Lent to receiving the Sacred Heart of Jesus into our own heart and to finding, in the boundless Sacred Heart of Jesus, a little place for our heart.