part of the mystical tracery, so also are the tracks of the clouds, the
outlines of coasts, the ramifications of the lines of rocks.
Reflections of the labyrinth are caught in many curious pictures and
patterns: in the design on butterfly’s wings, the markings on plumage,
the lines and mottling on birds’ eggs, the frosting on the window-pane.
All the rest of nature seems unconscious of it; but we men are half
conscious, and pause and stare continually at what we call astonishing
or curious or wonderful things. Our life is a life of lisping and
marvelling. Every thrill is the accompaniment of a perception of part of
the labyrinth; death itself is our greatest thrill, and is perhaps the
necessary phenomenon of fuller initiation.
II
MARTHA AND MARY
I
THE _PODVIG_
Russian Christianity is sharply in contrast with Western Christianity in
the characteristic idea of denial of “the world,” as opposed to our
Western idea of accepting the world and “making the best of it.” An
essential idea in Russian Christianity is denial of “the world,” denial
of this mortal life as real life, denial of material force as real
force, denial of speech as real speech. An act of denial is called a
_podvig_, and a man who does some great act of denial is called a
_podvizhnik_.
The act of Jesus on the mountain denying the road that led to the empire
of the world in favour of the road that led to an ignoble death is a
_podvig_—denial of the world.
“Turning the other cheek” is a _podvig_—denial of material power.
Going two miles with the man who forces you to go one is a _podvig_.
Mary, breaking the precious box of alabaster which might have been sold
in aid of the poor, accomplished a _podvig_.
Simon Stylites, standing on the pillar when he might have been doing
“useful work in the world,” was a _podvizhnik_.
The hermits of the Thebaid were all doing _podvigs_—renouncing the
world.
Father Seraphim, who took an oath of silence and was silent thirty-five
years—proving in himself that silence was golden—accomplished a great
_podvig_.
It is difficult in Russia to carry on a discussion of any point of
religion without coming to a consideration of this idea of the _podvig_.
For instance there is a saying in Russia, “Blessed is he who can escape
and yet chooses to take the punishment the world would give him.” A
story is told in Russia that when Jesus was stretched on the cross many
of those who had accepted his doctrines were in great distress not
knowing that this had got to be; but they said among themselves, “You
will see: there will be a miracle. I wouldn’t be in the place of these
stupid and brutal Roman soldiers for worlds. You will see He will step
off the cross, and amaze and conquer the world.” And in their anxiety
and excitement they cried out: “Save thyself.” Pessimists whispered to
one another sad thoughts, “Alas, alas! has it not always been so in the
world’s history; mankind has stoned the prophets of God. Now He is going
to die, to perish miserably, and the whole new movement will be ruined.
People who never saw Him work miracles will say He was a charlatan, and
that He never had any mission or any power. But we who saw Him raise the
dead know He has the power to save Himself.” But both the optimists and
the pessimists were wrong. They did not realise that the Man on the
cross was giving the lie to the reality of death and to the material
power of the Romans and the Jews. The giving the lie is the _podvig_.
That strange German fairy tale of the three sluggards is probably taken
from conquered Slavs. There lies in it something of the Russian point of
view. The old king gave his kingdom to the son who would not save
himself from the gallows-tree, even though a knife were put into his
hand to cut himself down. The German version is that the king gave the
throne to the laziest of the three, but in reality he gave it to the one
who was most capable of denying the world.
Dostoieffsky had a habit of saying that he was glad to have gone through
penal exile in Siberia, and he felt that those revolutionaries who fled
abroad and did not accept the worldly judgment and punishment meted out
by the Russian court were not true to Russian ideas and not in reality
helping Russia. He would have preferred that they accepted the cross
which Russia put upon them. Dostoieffsky constantly refers to himself as
a slice from the loaf of Russia, a slice from the communion loaf—a share
in the sacrifice. Those who flee from punishment are outside the
communion, they have no real portion in Russia. “The religion of
suffering” does not mean “suffering for its own sake,” but rather the
religion of not avoiding suffering, not avoiding or trying to avoid
destiny. The religion of the _podvig_.
A tempter once came to a hermit living in a cave, and told him about the
pain and misery and poverty of his fellow-men living in the world, and
asked him what he would do if a million of money were brought to his
cave and put at his disposal. The hermit crossed himself and muttered,
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” The tempter was annoyed and urged his
point. “But what would you do?” he asked.
“I should not alter my way of life,” said the hermit.
That was a _podvig_, a denial of the reality of misery on earth, a
denial of the power of money to gain real happiness for man.
One of the most interesting of Russian mystery plays, Andreief’s
_Anathema_, is concerned almost wholly with this idea. A man after God’s
own heart succumbs to the temptation of thinking he can put the world
right with money. He inherits a million from a relative who has died in
America, and he sets to work to alleviate human suffering. But the more
suffering he tries to remedy the more appears before him, till finally
he is drowned in suffering, and God says to Human Reason, “Not by these
measures shall it be measured, nor by these numbers shall it be counted,
nor by these weights shall it be weighed, O Anathema, dwelling among
numbers and measures, and not yet born into light!”
This idea is so pervasive, so characteristic, that I would call it an
extra letter in the alphabet of Russian philosophy.
* * * * *
The history of literature is the history of ideas.
Man first made sounds to represent elementary ideas such as hunger,
cold, warmth, danger, death. Then he made signs to represent sounds, and
invented reading and writing. The signs were systematised; they were
split up into letters and then remade as words. Alphabets and
dictionaries were made. Languages grew.
At first people spoke only of hunger, cold, pain, pleasure, fighting,
death, and such simple things. They had perhaps only five hundred or so
words. But year by year they added to words as they discovered new
things in the world and in themselves.
At first clever men, brave warriors, intrepid hunters gave us words;
then philosophers and astrologers and historians; then priests and
minstrels and poets. They named all the things on the world and their
feelings about the things; they named the ideas for which men fought,
for which tribes and nations fought. They named the things of which they
were afraid, the evil spirits in the darkness, in the forests, in the
earthquakes and tempests. Last of all, when they found and considered
the great spirit of man, the spirit in themselves, they named the gods,
and they named the transcendental glories and sorrows of man.
The minstrels struck their harps and sang of the great deeds of famous
men, and then poets without harps wrote of the same deeds, changing into
words the music of the harp as well. Priests burned sacrifices on
altars, and the poets wrote of it and changed the smoke of the incense
into words. Great warriors fought before Troy, and the poets changed
their passion into words. They sailed the terrible seas ten years to get
home, and the poets changed the storms into words. The poets found out
the assonances of mankind, what every one admired, and they gave to
whole generations watch-words, words that were battle-flags. The poets
described the gods.
Poems were so much read that whole lines and verses were as familiar as
ordinary words, and people could quote a line of poetry and everybody
would know the idea that was meant. And when the name of a god or a hero
was mentioned there rose at once to people’s minds stories about him,
poems about him.
Stories became like extra words in the language. That is what the
wonderful Greek stories such as those of Narcissus, Demeter, and
Persephone, and the labours of Hercules became—extra words in the
dictionary or, better still, extra letters. For simple people took them
into their lives, and combined them with their own thoughts, and made
new words of their own. People learnt to use these stories in their
prayers and in all their thoughts of mankind.
Some nations like the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, grew to great
culture, and the peoples in their beautiful capitals struck thousands of
harps and sang thousands of songs, whilst away in the backwoods and lost
places of the world the rest of mankind lived almost inarticulate,
almost like beasts,—in Germany, in Gaul, in what is now Russia, in
Britain. But their upward movement was at hand. A new idea came into the
world and all the old order changed, giving place to new. The last of
the stories which became a word was the story of Christ on the cross.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” An extraordinary new letter
was given to the world, and people fitted it into their thoughts and
made new words, new languages, new cultures.
The savage races of Western Europe came turbulently to the knowledge of
the God-like in themselves, and threw the world into confusion,
observing the old words and stories and culture of the ancient world.
They followed the word-flags of Christianity, the watchwords. Once more
the making of language was first in the hands of clever artificers,
brave warriors, intrepid hunters, adventurous sailors. It passed into
the hands of mediæval philosophers, alchemists, and scholars, to
minstrels, priests, and poets. At last they realised a wide and wondrous
culture, and they took from the ancient world all the stories and extra
words and letters now called myths, and they added them to their own
stories and words, as one might add strings to a stringed instrument.
They learned to praise God on many strings.
To-day we express ourselves with great orchestras as formerly, long long
ago, man, emerging from the animal, the rude Pan learned to express
himself on a simple reed.
The discovery of words has been the history of self-expression. Words
have no value in themselves. They are symbols or tokens of ideas in us.
And when we find words continually adding themselves to our vocabulary
and our culture, we know ourselves increasing in the knowledge of
ourselves and of the beauty and passion which lie latent in our souls.
Education in its highest sense is the learning of words and the learning
how to use them, learning the notes of the great instrument, learning
how to play the music of the ages, and to express with that music and
with that playing the passion and the mystery of our own souls.
The highest of literature, like the noblest of music, is that wherein
the great stories are used as extra letters and words. Rich writing is
that which is full of allusions which we all understand. Poor literature
is often that in which the author is frequently making allusions to
events and stories which are known only to a few and have no strong
significance. To use stories as words when the majority of people do not
know the stories is to write in a language that is not understood, it is
to write in words that are not in use. The reality of a book that draws
its allusions from the Bible and from the Greek myths and general
European history is immeasurably greater than one that is constantly
referring to the Koran or the stories of the Buddha or Zoroaster or
Khrishna or Confucius. That is in itself an adequate defence of
Christianity as a religion for us. Its stories are our stories. Its Word
is the living Word. The other stories are not our stories. Christianity
is our language. If ever asked to defend Christianity, the defence lies
not in the historical accuracy of Christian documents or the verity of
records. Christianity is the _Word_. All words are at our disposal for
the expression of our passion and the sense of our mystery. The
Christian story is the word that fits.
Our golden deeds, the deeds we consider as golden, are our extra
letters. Let the poets and musicians blend them into their music. Every
time a golden deed is made to sound beautifully in allusion a common
chord is struck in the souls of men.
* * * * *
And the _podvig_ is an extra letter. There are many who claim that it is
the word itself; that denial of “the world” is actually the _logos_ of
Christianity. Even in Russia, where there is also the richer and grander
conception of the Church, there are those who stand for the _podvig_
only, for denial of the world and material force only. Witness Tolstoy
and many of his followers. It is even held by some that the whole of
true and vital and historical Christianity is founded on—“If thine eye
offend thee, pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”
The important sect of _Skoptsi_ go so far as to say that the begetting
of children is sin, and they mutilate themselves, and in that way deny
life in the name of the spiritual life.
II
THE HERMITAGE OF FATHER SERAPHIM
Thinking of the _podvig_, I made a pilgrimage to the hermitage of Father
Seraphim, a few hundred miles from Moscow.
Over treeless wastes and desolate commons, where far-away churches on
the sea of snow look like ships sailing under full canvas; through
snow-blown forests of pines, through woods of tall birch trees; very
seldom past villages or human beings—to the holy city of Arzamas in the
Government of Nizhni-Novgorod. A night in an inn among the many churches
of Arzamas, and then on the road across fifty miles of desolate
snow-covered moor that lie between the city and the great monastery. I
hear of the terrible hurricane that has swept southern Russia, and the
flood that has drowned hundreds of poor fisher-folk and workmen on the
shores of the Azof. To-day there is bad weather all over Russia. It is
ten degrees colder, it still snows, and a high easterly gale is blowing
up the fallen snow and the drift-tops and drift slopes in blinding
clouds that look like engine smokes and volumes of vapour. A bitter day.
There are no pilgrims on the way, the weather is too heavy for them.
Often as you stand and try to go forward over the uneven road, the wind
sets you sliding backward on the clumps of ice, and you suddenly blunder
into two feet of soft snow. You come to little cottages on the Sarof
side of which stand drifts higher than the cottages themselves; they
look like cliffs, and the snow blowing off unceasingly and tempestuously
above the cottage roofs looks like long white grass going in all
directions at the sport of the gale. In the afternoon the snow ceases to
fall from the sky, but it still rises in smokes and sprays over the
rolling plains. Far away on the horizon to which I am journeying the
black line of the wolf-haunted forest is visible. At night I sleep in a
peasant’s hut, on felt spread on the floor. A whole family goes to sleep
in the same room, and as I lie stretched flat on this primitive couch,
resting my weather-beaten limbs, each of the others says his prayers
before the many ikons. There are many ikons in the room, and besides
them, holy oleographs enough to give the idea that the bare wooden walls
have been papered on some religious design. Chief among the pictures is
a representation of the Tsar and the Grand Dukes giving their shoulders
to the triumphal carrying of the relics of the Father Seraphim, on the
occasion of the canonisation of the Russian hermit and _starets_.
Father Seraphim was a saintly monk and ghostly counsellor of the type of
Father Zosima, familiar to English readers of _The Brothers Karamazof_.
He accomplished extraordinary holy exploits during his youth and middle
age, conquering the flesh and denying the world, and in his old age
became famous for his godly sagacity and humility. When he died his body
was reputed to have in it holy charm, and thousands of peasants brought
their sick and their blind, and their sins and their sorrows to the
miracle-working relics. Finally the Empress, wishing to have a male
child, abode at the monastery and prayed, and Father Seraphim gave
Russia a Tsarevitch. The Tsar named Seraphim as a saint, and the shrine
of Sarof, already astonishingly sought of pilgrims, gained a great
ecclesiastical distinction. Hence this grand oleograph on the wall.
I slept as one sleeps who, after weeks in town, is one day surcharged
with open air. Next morning the whole family was up before dawn, and the
samovar was on the table in the grey light of sunrise. A man from the
village decided to accompany me to Sarof.
“Haven’t been there for four years,” said he, “and now I’m homesick to
see it again. I think I’ll go and pray a little.”
We talked of Father Seraphim on the way.
“Is the cell still there where he fed the bear with bread?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s there; about five versts from the monastery away in the
woods. There is a shrine there now. You’ll see the stone, too, on which
he prayed a thousand days and a thousand nights without moving away. And
the spring that he found. Many people have been cured there. It’s quite
unusual water. Will you bathe?”
“Perhaps,” said I. “But the weather’s cold.”
“No one ever takes cold there,” said the peasant. “It’s quite safe. The
water is very very cold. But there’s something about it. You take it
home, it doesn’t go bad like ordinary water.”
“He was a great saint, this Father Seraphim!”
“Of course; he was a God-serviceable man, he did many _podvigs_.”
When we arrived at the monastery in the holy wood we were accommodated
in a cell, and a novice brought in the samovar at once. No passports
were required, no charge was made. We found at the monastery some two or
three hundred other pilgrims, most of whom had been there several days.
A pleasant collection of churches, hostelries, little shops, and
work-sheds set on a fair hill among ancient pines, a peaceful shelter
and sanctuary after the wild weather and desolation of the moors. We
wandered about the buildings in the dusk, listened to the antique
chimes, and then returned to sleep a few hours before the midnight bell
to the first service of the morrow. About one in the morning we left our
cells and all muffled up and mysterious followed other pilgrims across
the soft new snow to the door of the Cathedral of the Assumption. Then
in the witching hour of night we entered the church—such an immense
church it seemed, barely lit by the few struggling tapers, and we such a
few people in it. The peasants, however, paid no attention to numbers,
and they stood and prayed and crossed themselves and gave the responses
for hours and hours, at last receiving the blessing of the priest,
kissing the cross in his hand, being marked on the brow with holy water,
stepping up to the altar and kissing through a hole in some canvas a
part of the remains of the saint. There was nothing touching in the
service except the demeanour of the pilgrims, no music worth mentioning.
Our leaving our beds to come and stand for hours on the cathedral floor
without an inclination to shirk or go out was a _podvig_—an inbred part
of the Russian character now.
I went to a fuller service later in the day, in a church much more
alight with candles, taken by a deacon with a deep spirit-summoning
voice, and mellowed by wonderful choral accompaniments, a long service
requiring patience from the aged folk who came to take part in it.
A seventy-five-year-old dame explained in one of the monastery
dining-rooms, as some twenty of us with wooden spoons sat round four
huge Russian basins of soup and helped ourselves together—“I felt I
might die before it ended, but I prayed to the holy _Ugodnik_, Father
Seraphim, to ask God to give me strength to stay till the end of the
service.”
“Why not to God direct?” I asked.
“It’s not for a poor creature like me to trouble God to attend to me,”
said she. “No, I ask the _Ugodniki_, if they have time, to go to Him and
ask Him at a convenient moment....”
“As to the Tsar,” said some one.
“But God has time for every one,” said another, “and can attend to
everything at once....”
“_Pozhalui_, I suppose so ...” said the old woman meekly in a cracked
voice, and went on with her soup.
I talked with one of the monks about Father Seraphim. What a character
the Russian hermit was; there is material in his life for the pen of
another Carlyle writing a new Past and Present. He was silent all those
thirty-five years, and then opened his mouth. Alas! no one could tell me
the first words that he spoke. He was actually silent all the time that
Napoleon was ravaging Russia, during the time when he was in occupation
of the holy mother of Russian cities, Moscow. Napoleon was popularly
understood in Russia as Antichrist, and when the news of the terrible
French sacrilege spread over Russia there were all manner of extravagant
rumours about the end of the world.
By this time Seraphim had obtained a name of great sanctity. Sick men
had been restored to health by drinking from the hermitage well, the
leprous had discharged their disease by touching the garments of the
holy but silent man. So when Napoleon came to Moscow, the crowd appealed
to Seraphim to work a miracle.
“They are burning our sacred shrines,” they cried, “they are using our
cathedrals as places of execution, they are murdering our priests and
our pilgrims. Is it naught to thee, Father?”
But Seraphim was silent.
And others said, “He is called Napoleon, but he is in reality
Antichrist. Lead us, O Seraphim, against him in the name of the Lord.”
But Seraphim was silent. His face retained unchanged its look of
exaltation; his uplifted eyes still seemed bent on some unearthly
vision; his attentive ears seemed to be listening to some other voices.
The old monk never spoke a word. Napoleon and the world had no power to
shatter his vision. Napoleons might come and go, but the truth to which
he was a witness remained unchanging, unchanged. And if Napoleon had
come to Sarof and pulled the hermitage down about Seraphim’s ears, the
old monk would still have prayed on in silence.
Almost every characteristic of the Father and every circumstance of his
life had something in it that is emblematic and suggestive. In his old
age, when he became so famous, he received thousands of letters, most of
which, however, he answered without opening! It is told how in his old
age the light of sainthood shone from his brow, and on one occasion a
holy man coming to visit him in his cell found the light too strong for
his eyes and shielded them with his hands.
“What is the matter?” said Father Seraphim.
“The light shines from your head, O holy one.”
“Do not be afraid,” said the Father. “You also are bright as I am or you
could not have seen me thus. I see you also a shining one. Thank God
that it has been given to miserable Seraphim to see a manifestation of
the Holy Spirit.”
The Father during his hermitage scooped out of the trunk of a
lightning-stricken oak the coffin that should hold his remains when he
died, and he pulled it in at the door of his hut, slept in it at night,
and prayed beside it by day.
He was an extraordinary ascetic, and yet in the picture that you get of
him in his old age, when he relaxed his asceticism, he is distinguished
by the warmth of his love and the sweetness of his counsel. The pilgrims
who come to him he calls his “joys”; before even the wicked he falls
down and he kisses their feet. When he gives his benediction he also
gives a handful of that dried black bread, _sukaree_, with which he fed
Mishenka, the bear which he tamed in the woods—Father Seraphim’s bread
which came down from heaven, the bread of the _podvig_.