But how are self-revelation and life realized in the absolute trihypostatic spirit? In its general scheme, this self-revelation cannot be different from that of any spirit, even a relative one. Every spirit has its own personal self-consciousness; then, the knowledge of its nature or its self-revelation; and finally, life in this nature, the living-out of this knowledge as its own reality and life. In the self-revelation of the spirit there are, therefore, a certain ideal element, the "word," and a real element, the connection between this subject (person) and the predicate (the definition of its nature), its own being and life, its is. This scheme of self-revelation corresponds to the life of every creaturely spirit in its limitedness, which is due not only to its monohypostatizedness but also to its state of becoming. This limitedness is expressed, first of all, in the fact that nature in the self-revelation of the spirit is for it the given and, in a certain sense, an extra-positing, an object in the subject, which for this reason does not fully possess it. And therefore its life in this nature is also the given or the state of the object, which has place in it or above it, but also does not belong to it in an I-like manner, is for it a kind of "it," not fully hypostatized (whence different forms of the subconscious). Finally, the self-revelation of I is, of course, its love for this its own, a love which is its life. But this love is limited in a twofold sense: it is partial according to object and self-enclosed according to the monohypostatizedness of the subject, for which this love is self-love that does not overcome the limitedness and self-enclosedness of the subject.

1. С. Subject in relation to everything or to the world («the only one and his property»). The absolute subject possesses the world in an absolute way. The world is its self-disclosure. The absolute subject loves himself and contemplates himself in the world of absolute and self-sufficient love. But in this possession for oneself, possession for oneself and only for oneself, lies the boundary that our thinking of the absolute stumbles over. If the absolute subject is one, then he is alone in his possession of everything. Love for oneself through one's revelation is the ultimate metaphysical egoism, and at the same time limitedness, inability to get out of oneself, some ontological poverty and misery. Any being that is conscious of itself catholically is richer than this monohypostasic absolute, exhausted by its absoluteness, which has nothing to do with itself, no one and no reason to open up and no one to love. This Luciferic, egoistic selfishness (which Spinoza somehow did not feel in his Deus sive natura) destroys the dignity of the absolute, makes it the plaything of his egoism, even deprives him of his life. It is impossible to love only oneself, to live only in oneself and only for oneself, withdrawing into oneself, without going out of oneself. Loving yourself and your own, you need to love not yourself. If you have an object of absolute love, you can love it not with personal love, and in your own love not yourself, but another.

Only such love is free love, knowing no boundaries. Just as I does not exist in its uniqueness, but is a member of a certain we, so absolute love is not given to an absolute, monohypostatic, lonely subject, but requires overcoming the boundaries of metaphysical egoism. As I am a function of many-unity, catholicity, so the absolute relation to the world requires liberation from metaphysical singleness. God the despot, self-ruler, selfish, languishing in His self-isolation and having the world only to satisfy egoism, knowing no equal in himself, is not God. Thus arises the postulate of a Deity which, being one, insofar as it follows from its absoluteness, would at the same time be not-one, but in itself catholic. The concept of the absolute, as a ruler of the world, therefore also leads to an aporia, for it is contradictory. It must simultaneously satisfy the requirements of unity and multi-unity; the first corresponds to the absoluteness of being, the second to the absoluteness of the image of possession. These are the postulates.

What can the life of fallen angels be like and in what do they become firmly established? After their fall, having been torn away from God, they lost the possibility of living by divine nature and uniting with the assembly of angels to be reciprocally completed in it. Their existence was devastated and became like a spiritual death, but personal immortality and thirst for life remained inalienably theirs. They kept the spiritual-psychic structure of life with all its possibilities: will, reason, the capacity for psychic movement, but all this became without nature and empty. But up to a time this emptiness is filled up parasitically; evil is nourished by good and hatred by love through combat with them, originally in the heavenly world and after their downfall from heaven in ours. "Woe to you living on earth and in the sea, because the devil has come down to you in powerful fury, knowing that not much time remains for him" (Revelation 12:12). The fall of Satan occurred, so to say, with a view to the human world in which he desired to become "the prince of this world," its god, to ravish it away from God and thus fill up the lack in his own life.

The existence of Satan and demons is parasitical; they are nourished by the fumes of this world; they strike at its sinful passions and strive to corrupt it, making of it their own nature which they are lacking. Therefore the seducer, "the ancient serpent," already appears in the garden of paradise gaining the victory over our ancestors; so too in the desert he endeavors to tempt the Lord already as master of the world, by showing to Him in visions all his dependent kingdoms. And further he will lead an uncompromising, last struggle with the true King of the world. He enters Judas after the morsel is given to him (John 13:27) in order to destroy the Lord through him ("the prince of this world comes" [John 14:30]), but it turns out that he is "judged" (16:11) and "driven out of there" (12:31), and that "the powers are removed from the principalities and authorities" (Colossians 2:15). But until this definitive expulsion from the world and casting down "into the lake of fire" (Revelation 19:20; 20:10), the devil will wage a tireless struggle for this world, right up to the last rebellion of Gog and Magog which he will stir up (Revelation 20:7-8) and to the final attempt to become human in "the man of sin, the son of perdition" (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4). In this manner, although Satan and his angels have shut themselves off from the possibility of spiritual growth and knowledge, being separated from God, still in their parasitic existence they display a certain progress in evil and the work of evil; their metaphysical egoism becomes dynamic out of its stasis; their emptiness crosses over into efficacy.

But after the final division, when the world will become the Kingdom of God, Satan and his angels will be left again definitively without nature; they will be submerged in the state of metaphysical emptiness: a hypostasis thirsting for natural life and not having it — the fire that does not go out and the worm that does not sleep — "the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" through his expulsion from the world. This state of naked subjectivity without any possibility of being freed from it and of slaking it, which people who have devastated themselves also share, represents the hellish fire of ultimate metaphysical suffering, the state of hypostatic life without nature. It has as its source the cold of egoism, freedom in non-love. God leaves Satan in his own wilfulness, in that spiritual blind alley to which he led himself. Can this experience of emptiness, of the definitive bankruptcy of rebelling creatureliness remain fruitless and is there no longer any path of repentance? The church keeps this question under the ban, as one that cannot be accommodated to our current consciousness.

One ought to note particularly the consequence of natural sin indicated above: human personality is born in it not only as a hypostasis created by God in His image, but also as an individuality, which keeps aloof and separates itself from others. Through this the natural, ontological equality of people as multiple centres not only of a similar but also of a common single life becomes obscured and perverted. The wholeness of the human race collapses and comes unravelled together with the loss of chastity, and in place of multi-unity multi-difference appears, bad plurality, in place of concentricism there is eccentricism. This plural number contains the satanic lie, namely the like gods, which knows not only good but also evil, i.e., its own limitedness, and which is always carrying with itself its own shadow. Individuality is the reflected light of the Morning Star on a human being whom he desired to pervert according to the image of his metaphysical egotism — a multi-hypostaseity without love. It is in this sense the consequence of original sin: fallen humankind knows hypostasis only in the form of individuality, and the whole of humanity decomposes into individualities which logic considers possible to unite only in the abstract, by mentally inferring in brackets universal signs.

The loss of one's soul for the sake of Christ, that is, liberation from the captivity of individuality, is the condition of Christian salvation. But in the fallen world individuality is the sole form for the life of the soul, just as a sinful body is for the life of the flesh, and only life in Christ liberates the hypostasis from individuality, leading it into the multi-unity in love that is necessary for it, into the Church. Thus, we repeat once again, quite out of place is the question of whether the individuality of Adam has no decisive meaning for original sin: before the fall into sin there was no individuality, separating him from others, and Adam really was the representative of the entire human multi-hypostatic race. In him and his person every human hypostasis lived and acted harmoniously. So it was before the fall into sin, but after the fall it became otherwise: every hypostasis began to live after its own reckoning, as an individuality, and together all proved to be enslaved to the debt of sin, and became children of wrath — tekna orges (Eph 2:3).

… The fullness of the human race, as well as of the angelic assembly, exists from all eternity in Divinity, and this fullness is revealed in the simultaneous creation of the angels and in the gradual creation of human beings in the course of time. The entire fullness of humanity, however, which is actualized in reproduction, is already precontained and precreated in Adam. But this pre-eternal eternal existence in God does not signify some other, preexistent life of the creaturely spirits, a life that is replaced by earthly life and represents a segment of it, as it were. The human world does not preexist «in heaven» as in another world, but it does find there a sufficient basis for itself: as far as its nature is concerned, the human world is based on the Proto-Images of the Divine world, and its hypostases are rooted in divine life. The creaturely hypostases are images of the noncreaturely Divine hypostases. These multihypostatic images, in their singularity, do not reflect God's trihypostatizedness; they can only reflect its individual hypostases. But can the Paternal Hypostasis be the Proto-Image for the creaturely hypostases when it itself is revealed in Sophia, the Divine world, not in its own countenance, but through the Son and the Holy Spirit? Even if one can admit the existence of holy angels corresponding to the Paternal Hypostasis, angels who are always submerged in Divinity as in Mystery and Silence, the image of the human hypostasis can only come from the hypostases that reveal the Father, both in His proper divine world and in the creaturely world.

The first of these hypostases is the hypostasis of the Logos; He is the Proto-Image of the creaturely human hypostases, and they are His rays: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9). The human spiritual countenances are images of the Logos, the Man from Heaven. Insofar as the Logos as Christ gathers them into His body, into the Church, it is said about them that “there is neither male nor female” (Gal. 3:28).

Together with the Logos, the Third hypostasis is also the Proto-Image for the human hypostases, because the Third hypostasis reposes upon the Son and, together with Him, reveals the Father in the heavenly humanity. (In the Incarnation this hypostasis corresponds to the divine maternity, manifested by the Virgin Mary, the Spirit-bearer.) In other words, the human hypostases have a double Proto-Image, which belongs to the heavenly humanity in its two countenances: the Logos and the Holy Spirit. This also corresponds to the fact that man, created in the image of God, was created as both male and female, and the context of Genesis 1:26-27 compels one to see the fullness of the image of God precisely in this bi-unity. In man, a clear distinction is established between male and female, expressed in the fact that the female was made out of one of the male's ribs (not directly out of the dust of the earth) and, in general, in the fact that the male plays the dominant role, since he bears the image of the demiurgic hypostasis, the Logos. Male and female, differing as two distinct images of man, bear, in their unity, the fullness of humanity and, in this humanity, the fullness of the image of God: they bear the imprint of the dyad of the Son and the Holy Spirit, who reveal the Father. In their ability to reproduce, they contain the image of multi-unity that is inscribed in the human race as a whole. Thus, man is an uncreated-created, divine-cosmic being, divine-human in his structure by his very origin. He is the living image of the trihypostatic God in His Wisdom.