“Orthodoxy,” wrote Pobedonostsev, “is a religion of prostitutes and publicans, who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the lawyers and Pharisees” [Imprecisely quoted from K. P. Pobedonostsev, Moskovsky Sbornik (1896), 201]. Leskov and Dostoevsky understood Orthodoxy in the same way, and they are unparalleled in describing the deep essence of the people’s faith. The power of God is manifested in powerlessness: if God himself came in a powerless and humble form, how can we despise powerlessness and humility? Perhaps, grace is revealed precisely in what is powerless and humble? Therefore, Orthodox believers never judge by appearances. They are in no hurry to be outraged and to condemn; inwardly, they even sympathize with the drunk, the poor, the tattered, the ignorant, and the outright foolish. They do not seek brilliance, magnificence, and power; on the contrary, they are wary when they see magnificence and power, which they always view as something “human, all too human.” Orthodoxy is wholly opposite to the pagan and contemporary European view (expressed most powerfully by Nietzsche) that a person’s value is directly proportional to the excellence of his external qualities — that the more intelligent, attractive, and powerful in body and will he is, the more divine he is. Orthodoxy’s revaluation of values is even much more radical: it is not only dubious about such a direct proportionality between a man’s value and his human qualities, but it even tends to understand this proportionality as an inverse one. To be sure, this tendency characterizes not only Russian Orthodoxy; it is the view of the whole apostolic church, although in the Western confessions it has been supplanted by pagan and positivistic valuations.

The human world is incommensurable with the divine world; things that are small in the human world turn out to be great in the kingdom of heaven; the ways of the Lord are unfathomable. Human beings are unable to understand the meaning of the historical process as a whole, and this leads to two conclusions: irrationalism and obedience. Here, again, Orthodoxy is wholly opposite to Catholicism and Lutheranism. In those two we find faith in the human mind, a striving not only to attain knowledge of the divine but also to subordinate it to the laws of reason. We find this tendency not only in Lutheranism (whose essence consists in rationalism), but also in Catholicism. In contrast, in Orthodoxy we find faith in the most irrational and absurd things, faith understood as a rejection of reason, and finally an actual rejection of reason in religious questions and therefore a ready acceptance of facts contradictory and inaccessible to rational understanding, facts that make the rationalist fall into convulsions.