Who suggested the plot of the auditor in Gogol. “Gogol’s “auditor’s situation”

Some people, far from Orthodoxy, mainly sectarians and atheists, argue that = Christianity is engaged in seeking out sins so that a person feels guilty =

Let's figure out what sin, guilt, guilt are and how to get rid of them.

1. Sin, in short, is a violation of the Divine, moral Law.
Sin is a voluntary deviation from what is in accordance with nature into what is unnatural (St. John of Damascus).
Sin is deviation from the goal assigned to man by nature (Blessed Theophylact of Bulgaria).
In the Russian language, the word “sin” (Old Slavic gr;хъ) originally corresponded to the concept of “error” (cf. “error”, “fault”). Similarly, the Greeks denoted the concept of sin with a word meaning “failure, error, fault,”

Everyone has sins, whether they look for them or not. Only, some see their sins, while others “do not see” theirs, while in others they see a great many of them.

The Church teaches us to see, first of all, our sins, and to cleanse ourselves of them as if they were dirt, and not to condemn others. The Lord says: “You hypocrite! First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:5)

2. Guilt - 1. Guilt, misdemeanor, crime, trespass, sin (meaning misdeed), (According to Dahl)
That is, guilt is an offense or crime against the Law or a sin against GOD, man, nature.

If a person does not repent, does not confess, does not compensate for the damage, does not make amends, that is, does not act according to his conscience with a sense of responsibility for what he has done, then a “feeling of guilt” develops in him, a destructive and painful feeling. Sometimes this feeling arises from imaginary guilt, when a person feels guilty for something that does not depend on him.

3. Guilt is a consequence of unrepentant sin and back side pride. Both are unacceptable for a Christian.

Guilt causes deep harm to a person. The feeling of guilt, unlike the feeling of responsibility, is unrealistic, vague, and vague. It is cruel and unfair, deprives a person of self-confidence, and reduces self-esteem. Brings a feeling of heaviness and pain, causes discomfort, tension, fears, confusion, disappointment, despondency, pessimism, melancholy.
The feeling of guilt devastates and takes away energy, weakens, reduces a person’s activity and leads to neurasthenia and other diseases.
The feeling of guilt, in essence, is aggression directed at oneself - it is self-deprecation, self-flagellation, and the desire for self-punishment.

This is what happened to Judas after his betrayal of Jesus CHRIST. He realized what he had done terrible sin, and an unbearable feeling of guilt made him think that he has the right and must punish himself for the sin of betrayal. And instead of true repentance, prayer appeal Judas went to Jesus CHRIST, who of course would have forgiven him, and hanged himself.

4. How to get rid of sin and guilt? In Orthodoxy there is a remedy that has been successfully helping millions of believers for 2 thousand years, and without which the improvement and spiritual growth of a person is impossible. This remedy is called repentance.

Repentance is a change in oneself and one’s attitude towards a given sin. You need to hate it (not yourself!), and have a firm intention not to repeat it in the future.

So, instead of feeling guilty, self-flagellation - having realized your sin, your guilt, it is necessary, without delay, to bring repentance to the Church in the Sacrament of Confession and do everything to more than compensate for the damage caused by sin, showing compassion and help to the victim. And henceforth, with a firm determination to change, try not to repeat this sin. Only in this way will a person be completely freed from the devastating, enervating feeling of guilt, and from the oppression of sin, which will disappear as if it never existed.
But it happens that, due to our weakness or carelessness, we commit this sin again and repeat. And then in no case should you despair! You need to repent of your newly committed sin and, having hated this obsessive demon (sin), try to defeat it with even greater persistence. With each repentance, sin weakens and the moment will come when you forget about it, as if it did not exist.

“And the Lord said to Moses...: if a man or woman commits any sin against a person, and through this commits a crime against the Lord, and that soul is guilty, then let them confess the sin that they have committed, and pay back in full what they have committed. what they are guilty of, and they will add a fifth part to it and give it to the one against whom they sinned; if he does not have an heir to whom the guilt should be returned, then dedicate it to the Lord;” (Numbers 5,5-7).
You can help the sick, the infirm, the elderly, abandoned children, those in need, or donate to the construction of a church. Says the Lord: “... truly I say to you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did it to Me. (Matt.35,30)

Our task is to transform the powerful destructive, destructive and killing energy of guilt into positive energy of changing ourselves for the better, into creating a New morally perfect person in ourselves.

Fragments used from the article http://www.psynavigator.ru/articles.php?code=519 Point of view: guilt - spirituality or immaturity?

Depression, suicide attempts, causeless anxiety and fears - people often turn to a psychologist with these serious problems. To help a patient, a specialist must understand the cause of his suffering. And often this reason turns out to be a feeling of guilt that remains unrepentant, often deeply hidden. Sin without repentance committed in the past germinates in the present mental tragedy. And people often don’t understand: why? And the cure, it turns out, is very close.

Man has centuries of experience with guilt. Back in paradise, Adam accused Eve of temptation, Eve accused the serpent of temptation. From the first sin, sinners try to shift their guilt onto someone else. Each of us, one way or another, knows this painful feeling: we did something that should not have been done, we crossed a certain law that our conscience knows. Over the years of my clinical practice, I have observed a strange phenomenon: the obvious confusion of psychologists in the face of guilt as an ineradicable symptom of serious pathologies and disorders.

Whatever theories and methods have been developed, whatever scientific works nothing is written, but the feeling of guilt still continues to disturb human mind and psyche. Classical Freudian psychoanalysis, in my opinion, hardly coped with the task, offering a dubious “cure for guilt” - justifying it by the actions of other people, and especially parents. In modern pop psychology, especially Western psychology, there are widespread theories and practices designed to increase human self-esteem by any means.

It is believed that people should stop judging themselves and feel important regardless of their actions or circumstances. It is assumed that a person is destined to satisfy his needs (“I deserve it because I exist”), and therefore there can be no guilt. Some go even further, declaring guilt a wrong emotion, and propose simply destroying the “guilt zone” forever, as a useless experience, as something shameful and negative. The result of attempts to “heal” or “cancel” guilt has been an increase in the number of people with chronic depression, states of pathological anxiety, neuroses, psychoses, and suicides.

The number of those who try to drown “guilt in wine” or escape from it in a drug frenzy does not stop increasing. Often people themselves come to a psychotherapist in order to immediately get rid of a painful feeling, and, often revealing their moral failings, they expect to hear that there is always something or someone - a husband, wife, parents, children, a difficult childhood, society , lack of money, etc., which forced them to commit a bad act, to violate the moral law. In a word, the blame for what they did does not lie with them at all, which means there is no responsibility. But the formal justification of sin in a psychotherapist’s office has only a temporary effect, and only then in rare cases. Unconscious and unacknowledged guilt, like a hidden abscess, continues to carry out its destructive work in a person.

Get the skeleton out of the closet

Here are some examples from my practice. Patient Mikhail K. (real names of people have been changed), 45 years old, two attempts at suicide, changed several psychotherapists, suffered from depression, uncontrollable anxiety, insomnia for many years, is aggressive with people, hates women. I was married for a short time, had no friends, and never stayed at any job for more than six months. After several weeks of psychotherapy, the root of his problems was revealed - a deeply hidden feeling of guilt towards his mother.

IN adolescence, in a quarrel, Mikhail pushed her against the wall. After an unsuccessful fall, the mother fell ill for a long time, and the son, unable to bear the situation, left home. He returned three years later, when his mother was no longer there.

Another patient, Boris A., 64 years old, was a former successful businessman, the head of a large company, divorced, suffering from depression, irritability and sudden mood swings. At the very first session he admitted to an uncontrollable fear of death. The only son lives in another city, we haven’t seen each other or communicated for more than twenty years. After several months of therapy, I recognized my main problem- a hidden feeling of guilt in front of his son, whom he had bullied and humiliated all his life because he did not live up to his father’s hopes, did not learn and did not become big man and disgraced his name by choosing the ordinary profession of tiler.

One more example. Dina S., 40 years old, suffers from severe depression, chronic anxiety, fears, auditory hallucinations - she constantly hears children's voices. She lives alone, finds it difficult to get along with people (according to her, she runs away from them, as if afraid of some kind of exposure (a sign of paranoia). A terrible self-destructive force and total internal terror possessed her most life. It took six months of intensive therapy before the mental abscess broke through and she said that at the age of 18 she left her one-year-old child with the man she was living with at the time and ran away with someone else. Telling your tragic story, splashing out of her like stagnant water from a dam, she admitted: “I tried to justify myself for a long time, I thought, because I was still a child. But now I realized that the child was my daughter, and I was the mother.” All these destinies and many others similar to them are united by one thing - a feeling of guilt hidden in the very depths of the being. Often, caring for the well-being of the external facade, we do not even suspect what terrible destructive work the worm of suppressed guilt is doing in our soul.

In these destinies there is also something else, obvious to me as an Orthodox psychologist - a complete absence of love. Furthermore, inexplicable fear of any of its manifestations. Each of them reacted almost inadequately to my simple question: are there people in their lives whom they could truly love?

Are there people who are guilty without guilt?

What does the band-aid of self-justification hide?

Our moral ideal is nothing more than our conscience, which contains within itself God’s Law of good and evil, of what is good and what is bad. We always have a choice - to cover it with a band-aid of self-justification or to open our spiritual wounds, believing in their healing. The first one is undoubtedly easier to do. Even if at first our conscience, tormented by sin and confusion, resists and demands cleansing from dirt, the second, third and subsequent attempts to muffle these impulses are easier for us. The heart grows colder, the mind becomes more cynical, and the soul shows fewer and fewer signs of life.

From all this it is not far to the most disastrous outcome - the spiritual decay of the individual and spiritual death. Many of my patients have paid a high price for guilt - this unresolved emotional wound - through years of despair and illness. In my practice, working with unhappy and restless people, I constantly observe this fine line, beyond which human life can plunge into impenetrable darkness if there is no light of faith in it. Guilt and forgiveness are constant topics in my conversations with people during psychotherapy sessions. And for those of them who do not reject faith, but try to find their way to it, it is always easier to realize the important truth that when we violate the laws written in our conscience, we are guilty, regardless of whether we feel guilty or not. When we sincerely repent, we are forgiven, even if we do not feel forgiven.

Guilt, guilt and the conflict generated by this feeling is a spiritual loss. And therefore, one must seek its resolution in a person’s spiritual life, in faith. As an Orthodox psychologist, I try to rely primarily on faith in the therapy process itself. When people realize their responsibility for what they have done, they themselves seek purification through repentance and deep regret. And only then - through pain and joy - in human soul peace begins to come, only then does healing come.

One of my former patients, who once had seven abortions in her youth and was left without children and without a family, came to repentance through terrible mental anguish. Continuous prayer for the souls of her unborn children, for the sending of God's light and mercy to them, gave birth to hope for a new life. As Saint Demetrius of Rostov said, repentance restores the fallen soul, makes it from alienated to friendly to God; repentance encourages a tormented soul, strengthens a wavering soul, heals a broken soul, and makes a wounded one healthy.

Free gift

In “Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky, Sonya Marmeladova asks Raskolnikov to repent of the murder: “Get up!.. Come now, this minute. Stand at the crossroads, bow down, kiss the ground that you have desecrated, and then bow down to the whole world and say out loud: I killed. And then God will send you life again... What a torment to bear! But a whole life, a whole life!.. “I’ll get used to it,” he said gloomily...” Raskolnikov was not used to it. And after many years of ordeal and mental suffering, already in prison, he came to faith. No matter what theories and mechanisms a person comes up with in the fight against guilt, sooner or later they stop working. And the moment will come when the external noise and vanity with which we are trying to drown out the voice of conscience will finally fall silent, and then in deep silence we will hear the bitter truth: “I overstepped... I disobeyed God.” Repentance is impossible without humility and meekness. The realization that I personally, as a person, am weak and unable to resolve my guilt myself, to modern man It’s not easy: our pride, inflated to gigantic proportions, gets in the way. Pacify her - big victory. The ancients said: of two people, the first of whom defeated the army, and the second - himself, the second emerged victorious. God knows our guilt, but believes in our ability to be cleansed.

Purification does not occur at the level of the intellect, but occurs in the heart. Often we hide emotional traumas deeply, like a terrible secret that we cannot tell even to our loved ones, for fear of losing their love or respect (“if they find out “this” about me, they will stop loving me”).

Faith - and this, as an Orthodox psychologist, I am convinced of every day - breaks this dangerous concept that gives rise to alienation. True love unconditional and unconditional. It is impossible to lose her. Repentant guilt only restores our unity with God. Repentance is God's gift, given to us, to each of us, irrevocably and free of charge. How we use this gift: whether we consign it to oblivion due to inconvenience and uselessness, or carefully carry it through life, is up to us to decide. Psychotherapy can be useful at the first stage of personality awakening, when a person learns to distinguish between his true and false feelings, the motivation of actions, the causes of conflicts, to overcome mistrust and fear, to recognize and pronounce guilt.

Real cleansing occurs in higher spiritual realms, and I always advise my patients to seek it in communion with the Church. The doors of God's temple are open. It is our choice to pass by, comforting our conscience, or to go inside and face our guilt before God, the only one who can truly console our pain. One warrior asked the elder: “Does God accept repentance?” The elder replied: “If your cloak breaks, will you throw it away?” The warrior says: “No! I'll sew it up." - “If you spare your clothes this way, won’t God spare his creation?”

Natalia Volkova
Orthodox psychotherapist