Issue #54

Abstract: In an article written on the basis of a report given at the Round Table „You don’t choose times. Cunning of the Mind“ (2025), dedicated to the memory of A.P. Ogurtsov, we are talking about what sacred experience is as a necessary basic component of any form of mortal life. The concept of life in the book by L.S. Chernyak and M. Roklin „Testament and Metaphysics“ is compared with that concept in the article by A.P. Ogurtsov „Life“. The authors of „Testament and Metaphysics“ see the fundamental importance in comparing the concepts of „life“ and „sacred“ and „sacred experience“. They called the constant constitutive component of every mortal life the cunning of life, meaning by this also sacred dying. The question is raised about the compatibility of this statement with the well-known fact that already in early modernity the tendency for the theological component of culture to die out and continues to grow until our time, as Ogurtsov recalls. The very idea of cunning, historically comparable to wisdom, is seen as interchangeable tropes. When considering life as an essential philosophical-theological concept and a scientific concept that deals with the general characteristics of plant or biological life, the use of analogies and metaphors is obvious, which inevitably leads to the analysis of both the sacred sacrifice and the Word in which it is clothed and which in Christianity has the Supreme status: It is God. In a word, when pronouncing it, a double sacrifice is made: the sacrifice of God, because He is the Word, and of man, because man himself finds the words and pronounces them himself, distorting their original basis.