What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose
belief in the existence of God. I should long ago have killed
myself had I not had a dim hope of finding Him. I live, really
live, only when I feel Him and seek Him. "What more do you seek?"
exclaimed a voice within me. "This is He. He is that without
which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the same
thing. God is life."
"Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God."
And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and
the light did not again abandon me.
And I was saved from suicide. When and how this change
occurred I could not say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force
of life in me had been destroyed and I had reached the
impossibility of living, a cessation of life and the necessity of
suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force of life
return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which
returned to me was not new, but quite old -- the same that had
borne me along in my earliest days.
I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and
youth. I returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and
desires something of me. I returned to the belief that the chief
and only aim of my life is to be better, i.e. to live in accord
with that Will. and I returned to the belief that I can find the
expression of that Will in what humanity, in the distant past
hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I
returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a
tradition transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this
difference, that then all this was accepted unconsciously, while
now I knew that without it I could not live.
What happened to me was something like this: I was put into
a boat (I do not remember when) and pushed off from an unknown
shore, shown the direction of the opposite shore, had oars put into
my unpractised hands, and was left alone. I rowed as best I could
and moved forward; but the further I advanced towards the middle of
the stream the more rapid grew the current bearing me away from my
goal and the more frequently did I encounter others, like myself,
borne away by the stream. There were a few rowers who continued to
row, there were others who had abandoned their oars; there were
large boats and immense vessels full of people. Some struggled
against the current, others yielded to it. And the further I went
the more, seeing the progress down the current of all those who
were adrift, I forgot the direction given me. In the very centre
of the stream, amid the crowd of boats and vessels which were being
borne down stream, I quite lost my direction and abandoned my oars.
Around me on all sides, with mirth and rejoicing, people with sails
and oars were borne down the stream, assuring me and each other
that no other direction was possible. And I believed them and
floated with them. And I was carried far; so far that I heard the
roar of the rapids in which I must be shattered, and I saw boats
shattered in them. And I recollected myself. I was long unable to
understand what had happened to me. I saw before me nothing but
destruction, towards which I was rushing and which I feared. I saw
no safety anywhere and did not know what to do; but, looking back,
I perceived innumerable boats which unceasingly and strenuously
pushed across the stream, and I remembered about the shore, the
oars, and the direction, and began to pull back upwards against the
stream and towards the whore.
That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars
were the freedom given me to pull for the shore and unite with God.
And so the force of life was renewed in me and I again began to
live.
XIII
I turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours
is not life but a simulation of life -- that the conditions of
superfluity in which we live deprive us of the possibility of
understanding life, and that in order to understand life I must
understand not an exceptional life such as our who are parasites on
life, but the life of the simple labouring folk -- those who make
life -- and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest
labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to
them and to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if
one can put it into words, was as follows: Every man has come into
this world by the will of God. And God has so made man that every
man can destroy his soul or save it. The aim of man in life is to
save his soul, and to save his soul he must live "godly" and to
live "godly" he must renounce all the pleasures of life, must
labour, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. That meaning the
people obtain from the whole teaching of faith transmitted to them
by their pastors and by the traditions that live among the people.
This meaning was clear to me and near to my heart. But together
with this meaning of the popular faith of our non-sectarian folk,
among whom I live, much was inseparably bound up that revolted me
and seemed to me inexplicable: sacraments, Church services, fasts,
and the adoration of relics and icons. The people cannot separate
the one from the other, nor could I. And strange as much of what
entered into the faith of these people was to me, I accepted
everything, and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in
prayer, fasted, and prepared to receive the Eucharist: and at first
my reason did not resist anything. The very things that had
formerly seemed to me impossible did not now evoke in me any
opposition.
My relations to faith before and after were quite different.
Formerly life itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith
presented itself as the arbitrary assertion of propositions to me
quite unnecessary, unreasonable, and disconnected from life. I
then asked myself what meaning those propositions had and,
convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on the contrary
I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no meaning,
and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me
as unnecessary -- on the contrary I had been led by indubitable
experience to the conviction that only these propositions presented
by faith give life a meaning. formerly I looked on them as on some
quite unnecessary gibberish, but now, if I did not understand them,
I yet knew that they had a meaning, and I said to myself that I
must learn to understand them.
I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of
faith flows, like all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious
source. That source is God, the origin both of the human body and
the human reason. As my body has descended to me from God, so also
has my reason and my understanding of life, and consequently the
various stages of the development of that understanding of life
cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in must be
true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and
therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means
that I have not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the
essence of every faith consists in its giving life a meaning which
death does not destroy. Naturally for a faith to be able to reply
to the questions of a king dying in luxury, of an old slave
tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child, of a wise old man,
of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of a youth
tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions
of life and education -- if there is one reply to the one eternal
question of life: "Why do I live and what will result from my
life?" -- the reply, though one in its essence, must be endlessly
varied in its presentation; and the more it is one, the more true
and profound it is, the more strange and deformed must it naturally
appear in its attempted expression, conformably to the education
and position of each person. But this argument, justifying in my
eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not
suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life -- religion --
to do things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I
wished to be in a position to mingle with the people, fulfilling
the ritual side of their religion; but I could not do it. I felt
that I should lie to myself and mock at what was sacred to me, were
I to do so. At this point, however, our new Russian theological
writers came to my rescue.
According to the explanation these theologians gave, the
fundamental dogma of our faith is the infallibility of the Church.
From the admission of that dogma follows inevitably the truth of
all that is professed by the Church. The Church as an assembly of
true believers united by love and therefore possessed of true
knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself that divine
truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is revealed
only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain
truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must
love and must endure things one may not agree with.
Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the
rites of the Church you transgress against love; and by
transgressing against love you deprive yourself of the possibility
of recognizing the truth. I did not then see the sophistry
contained in this argument. I did not see that union in love may
give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth
expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did
not perceive that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an
obligatory condition of union. I did not then see these mistakes
in the argument and thanks to it was able to accept and perform all
the rites of the Orthodox Church without understanding most of
them. I then tried with all strength of my soul to avoid all
arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably as
possible the Church statements I encountered.
When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason
and submitted to the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united
myself with my forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I
loved. They and all my predecessors believed and lived, and they
produced me. I united myself also with the missions of the common
people whom I respected. Moveover, those actions had nothing bad
in themselves ("bad" I considered the indulgence of one's desires).
When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing well, if
only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental
pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries,
and for the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same
with my preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily
reading of prayers with genuflections, and also with the observance
of all the fasts. However insignificant these sacrifices might be
I made them for the sake of something good. I fasted, prepared for
Communion, and observed the fixed hours of prayer at home and in
church. During Church service I attended to every word, and gave
them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most important
words for me were: "Let us love one another in conformity!" The
further words, "In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and
Holy Ghost", I passed by, because I could not understand them.
XIV
In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live
that I unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and
obscurities of theology. but this reading of meanings into the
rites had its limits. If the chief words in the prayer for the
Emperor became more and more clear to me, if I found some
explanation for the words "and remembering our Sovereign Most-Holy
Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we
give our whole life to Christ our God", if I explained to myself
the frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations
by the fact that they are more exposed to temptations than other
people and therefore are more in need of being prayed for -- the
prayers about subduing our enemies and evil under our feet (even if
one tried to say that *sin* was the enemy prayed against), these
and other prayers, such as the "cherubic song" and the whole
sacrament of oblation, or "the chosen Warriors", etc. -- quite two-
thirds of all the services -- either remained completely
incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made
me feel that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to
God and depriving me of all possibility of belief.
I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays.
To remember the Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was
something I could understand. But the chief holiday was in
commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality of which I could not
picture to myself or understand. And that name of "Resurrection"
was also given the weekly holiday. [Footnote: In Russia Sunday
was called Resurrection-day. -- A. M.] And on those days the
Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite
unintelligible to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays,
except Christmas, commemorated miracles -- the things I tried not
to think about in order not to deny: the Ascension, Pentecost,
Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin, etc.
At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance was
being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative
importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my
eyes in order not to see what tempted me.
Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most
usual Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism
and communion. There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully
