giving up the world, in pilgrimaging, praying, fasting, and only a few
can necessarily take to that way, yet it is that way which speaks
triumphantly in the Church. The great majority of human beings must
always remain behind “cumbered about with many things,” though loved by
the Master they will not be able to sell everything, take up the Cross
and follow to the place of the Skull. They will keep the commandments of
Christ and enter on set occasions the temples we have set up. They will
receive confirmation in their life and in the love of the Lord, they
will pray for what they will, and confess themselves. They will praise
and be in communion. They will recognise that they belong to another
kingdom, and their hearts will swell with the triumphant and passionate
affirmation of the Godhead which each finds in his poor conditional
existence as man. The way of Martha and the way of Mary.
XIII
THE FESTIVAL OF THE DEAD
At Easter I was at my old home, Vladikavkaz, and on the second Tuesday
after Easter Sunday went through one of the most characteristic of
Russian holidays—Krasnagorka. It is half-Christian, half-pagan—a
festival of spring and of new life, but celebrated almost entirely in
graveyards and cemeteries. At Krasnagorka almost the whole population of
the town goes on an outing or a picnic—to the cemetery.
Early in the morning I received a message from a Russian friend, “Come
to our church; you’ll see an interesting sight.” The church was crowded,
but I got in, for nobody objects to your pushing. It was an unusual
service. The whole centre of the floor of the church, a space of some
twenty feet by seven, was covered with napkins in which lay lumps of
cake, brightly coloured eggs, basins of rice and strawberry jam, basins
of rice and raisins. In each basin, and there were some hundreds of
them, a lighted wax candle was stuck in the rice and gave a little
flame, and beside each lay the little red book in which the peasant
records the names of his relatives as they die.
“What is it all for?” I asked. “It is the food for the dead,” my friend
answered.
A priest and a deacon were standing at the near end of the spread of
illuminated food, and they read aloud from sheaves of papers the names
of dead persons whom members of the church had wished to have
remembered. Each person who had brought in food for sanctification
brought also a slip of paper with the names of his dead. It took hours
to read them all out, and when at last the task was finished, the deacon
took a smoking censer, and walking round the feast flung incense over
it, the chains of the censer rattling as he made the Sign of the Cross.
We sang once more the festal hymn of Easter, _Christos voskrese iz
mertvikh_—“Christ is risen from the dead,”—sung at every service until
Ascension, and then, after kissing the cross in the priest’s hand, each
person sought out his special basin of rice and pieces of cake and bowl
of coloured eggs and moved out of the church.
At the door of the church stood many beggars, six or seven bearded,
tattered, and dirty old men, and a score or so of women and children.
All the old men had their mouths open, and each worshipper, as he made
his exit, helped a beggar liberally to rice and jam, scooping out great
spoonfuls with wooden spoons and poking them into the open, waiting
mouths. Many beggars had cotton bags hanging from their necks, and into
these were promiscuously flung spoonfuls of rice and raisins, eggs,
biscuit, cake. The beggars were told to eat what was given them in the
name of the dead. My friend fed at least ten beggars before she left the
church, and gave eggs and bits of cake, but she did not give all that
she had. A great quantity was reserved for a spread in the graveyard.
Many cabs were waiting at the church door, and the worshippers stepped
into them with their napkins of sanctified food, and drove to the
cemeteries of the town. From ten o’clock in the morning until sunset,
the cemeteries were as thronged with people as Hampstead Heath on
Whit-Monday.
Nearly every grave in a Russian churchyard has seats round it, and it is
possible to go to the family grave and sit down and think a little, or
pray a little when you wish. I went to the graveyard where my friend’s
sister lies buried, an acre of cypress and pine and gentle mounds, where
the dank earth seems like bed-clothes laid over the dead. To-day this
wide melancholy collection of green mounds and wooden crosses was alive
with the laughter and songs of children. On the heaps of mouldering
earth samovars were humming, and little candles gleamed against a
background of lilac blossoms and spring flowers.
My friend and I sat down. The mother of the dead one came, deep in crape
and laden with gifts. We planted our candles, and on this grave as on
all the others round about the wan flames flickered. We took
bright-coloured eggs—our Easter eggs dyed purple and crimson and
brown,—dug holes in the mould with our fingers, buried the eggs, covered
their brightness over with mould again. Then we put down slices of
Easter cake on the grave, and emptied there saucers of rice—that the
dead one might share in. We sat on the crazy wooden seats around, and
looked at the earth and were silent.
The mother went away to find a priest, and presently brought a
purple-cloaked greybeard to sing over the grave and burn incense. His
red and wrinkled face was all red and fresh from the open air, for he
had been in the graveyard all day singing over the graves. He was tired,
but he raised his head and his voice and called forth his little
memorial prayer in an antique musical bass: “Grant to her who has passed
away, O Christ, to obtain Thy unspeakable glory.... Give rest, O Christ,
to the soul of Thy servant....” We all stood around, silent and
awe-stricken, and listened and crossed ourselves, and kissed the cross
in the priest’s hand.
He received a rouble, then went away to another grave; beggars besought
us; and as if they had not been satisfied at the church door, but were
taking enough to last them a whole year, they received helping after
helping of rice and cake and eggs. This, I felt, was the great beggars’
day in the year. They were important people. They were necessary to the
feast. Strange that they should appear as proxies for the dead and eat
for them. A beautiful reminder that in the living we find all our dead
again.
We had stood to meet the priest and to give the beggars the food we had
brought, so now that the beggars had eaten all the rice and raisins and
rice and jam and had gone farther to eat at other graves, we sat down
again in the still presence of the green mound and we talked of the
virtues of the dead one, of how old she would have been and how beloved
she was, and of how often she had been remembered, and how soon we
should join her. Evidently the mother assumed that what she said was
heard by her whose body lay in the earth. We were all quietly joyful—not
sad. We had the spirit of children making believe; we had also the calm
faith and knowledge of elders—that there is no death, that those who
have passed out of sight have not ceased but are alive for evermore. I
felt the Russians, and indeed mankind altogether, to be very dear at
this festival; they were doing things that must touch those invisible
ones who know more than we do and look on, bring tears to the eyes of
angels, and not as often in man’s history and the spectacle of his
civilisation and abomination call down the wrath of higher powers.
We talked ... and then as we became silent again we heard the music of
man’s life, and listened with our souls.
At some graves there was boisterous jollity, at others terrible anguish
and grief. Near where we sat a woman lay moaning on the grave of her
husband, her red tear-washed cheeks and her lips on the earth; and she
called to him with sobs, telling him all that had happened during the
year, how the children were, how often they had thought of him. It was
heart-rending to listen to her. And yet, mingled with her terrible
lament, came the sound of mumbling priests, the buzz of conversation,
the laughter of children wrestling among the graves and gambling in the
eggs that had been given them, the tinkle of the guitar and of light
songs, the strains of the concertina.
We walked by winding ways across the graveyard and saw many an old man
and woman knocking at the door of the earth they would soon enter,
dropping placid tears and thinking what it would be like some years
hence when they would be under the earth and this festive crowd of live
beings above, candle-lighting, feasting, singing, thinking, praying. And
there were young men and women walking arm-in-arm, looking brightly into
one another’s eyes, strengthening their bonds of love and of life. There
were also little children, boys and girls, thoughtless, indifferent to
death and to the dead, waiting for the older people to go away, so that
they might forage among the graves and dig up again the red and blue
eggs that had been buried there.
“Are they allowed to do that?” I asked in horror.
“Yes,” said the sister. “Every one knows that directly evening comes and
we elders go home the poor children will come and dig up the eggs and
take them away, and take also the wild flowers we have brought. Let
them! It is quite good that they should. You know it is the festival of
spring and of life.” I realised that she was right. It is the way to
give to the dead—give to the beggars and to the children. The dead get
what we send them, surely.
* * * * *
Strange to notice in this acre of God some graves that had not been
visited this day—old graves. I reflected on many a country walk in
England, culminating in a visit to an old church and graveyard, and the
tracing of the names and dates of people long since passed away. It is
somewhat strange. When we are in an old graveyard and looking at the
graves of people who have died centuries ago we feel, instead of grief,
a sort of quiet satisfaction, and that even when those whose burial is
recorded are of our own name and family. We dare not even contrast our
feeling with the poignancy that is attached to a new grave—with its
garish stone, fresh clods, and wilted flowers.
I often wonder where the dead are. Neither in heaven nor hell, I
suppose, nor waiting for a last day and dreadful judgment, nor going
through the circles of purgatory, nor just simply under the earth....
We know that they exist and are alive, and the knowledge is of that more
certain kind that does not spring from our mentality but is felt in our
bodies. The grief we have when sons or daughters or fathers or mothers
die is a _physical_ anguish, and is akin to the pains of birth. Some one
has been cut off, deceased—cut off from us. Even in a dream to lose one
of those _nearest_ to us is to suffer a sort of physical mortification,
to weep senselessly, lose control of nerves, and be prostrated.
The fact is we are all one. Even the death of some one who is quite
remote jars upon the soul.
We were talking one evening of death and some one said to me:
“... to die and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
—that is what I fear in death. They tell me I am a pagan, but I feel the
dead are under the earth. I hate to think of lying in a damp churchyard
and decaying all alone, through days and nights and spring rains, summer
storms, autumn winds, winter snows. The rain must be terrible for the
dead—to be all wet and old like a fallen leaf.”
Another said he did not mind the idea of lying under the earth in the
rain and changing into mould. It was gentle and restful. And it was
beautiful too, for flowers would rise from where the body slept. One
recalled the lines:
Oh, never blows the rose so red
As where some buried Caesar lies;
and another, the beautiful lines of Nash:
Worms feed on Hector brave,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eyes.
But to my mind came some words said to me by Algernon Blackwood the
first day we met:
“You know we all came out of the earth; somehow or other we have got to
get back to her. The Earth is not dead, she is living.”
* * * * *
He was right. And the dead under the earth are in living care. All that
is is One and is beautiful. Life and death make a unity. Everything in
the world and without it, in the past and in the future, is to me a
unity, and I am calm and happy in it. In me, in you, are all the
dead—they crowd behind my eyes and look out, one above another’s
shoulders like the people at a great spectacle. There are myriads of
them—I hold them. In this sense they are under the earth, in that you
and I are earth, and they are in us, and look out of us. We are all
windows through which there glance at times faces of each of all there
ever have been.
III
THE DESERT AND THE WORLD
I
A CHAIN OF HAPPENINGS
Winter changing to summer I gave up life in towns and set off upon a new
adventure. In May I was looking at Bokhara and the gay-coloured
meditative Mohammedan world. In June I was tramping across Russian
Central Asia the way the pioneers go to find new land and new life. My
road companions were people who had given up the old and were seeking
the new—not farther West but farther East. By July I had crossed to
southern Siberia, and was away on the Altai Mountains when the War with
Germany broke out. In the autumn I returned in the wake of the mobilised
Russian army, and was in Moscow during the first month of its
enthusiasm, then at Libau and Vilna and Warsaw, at Petrograd, and home
to England. I wrote my book on the War. All the winter I wrote and spoke
for Russia. Life resolved itself into lectures, speeches, addresses,
meetings, and all with the view of making Russia and especially Russian
Christianity better known in England. Time flies in such a way, and very
quickly it was May again and time to set out upon a new adventure. So I
took up my quest of Martha and Mary once more and set out for Egypt,
hoping to be able to go from Egypt to Russia the way Christianity came
to her. For a great deal of Russian Christianity came from the Egyptian
deserts and had its source in the life led there by the hermits during
the first five centuries after Christ.
Doubtless the quiet life of the hermit saints had more power to change
the world than all the clangorous wars of their time, than the talk and
the gossip and the cheering and the hooting, than the foes laid low or
tyrants raised to power. There is a beautiful passage of Nietzsche—“The
thoughts that change the world come on doves’ feet. The world revolves
round the inventors of new values; noiselessly it revolves.” So if we
would know what sort of a Europe is going to be, or of Russia what sort
of an East she will be—
Oh! Russia, what sort of an East will you be,
The East of Xerxes or of Christ?
it is necessary to seek the ideas of to-morrow in the quiet places where
they lurk unseen, not in the clash of the Great War. The trenches are
pungent with fumes, the earth itself deaf from the sound of artillery,
both Nature and Man’s work lie blasted and ruined along a long but
narrow stretch of land—that is the front, the War, the biggest and only
thing in the world. But I must leave it and go southward and eastward to
the places where ideas are born.
In May when I left England the streets of London were flocking with
merry crowds; there was a vigorous popular optimism in the air. At night
the Soho restaurants were packed, the theatres ablaze with the glamour
of success. Paris was different. One European capital was bright;
another silent, vigilant, and clad in serious garb. The enemy was
encamped and militant and near. South to Marseilles, to the vivacious,
light-hearted, southern port! The ship by which I sailed for Egypt was
painted an austere leaden colour to resemble a man-of-war or armed
merchantman, and so deceive the enemy lurking under the waves—a masked
ship. We were delayed a week in the port through lack of labouring
hands; for every one had gone to the War. We watched liner after liner
go out of the harbour laden with young soldiers going to fight the Turk
and win Constantinople.
My slow ship left the land and slipped away through the night as it
should, towards Egypt, unhasting, unresting, over the calm shadowy
Mediterranean ... an almost fourth-dimensional progress, a mysterious
magical journey. The stars looked through soft vigils and possessed a
mystery; they dreamed over us as we went. We disturbed nothing; we went
on. I sat up in the prow of the vessel and looked forward—the eye of the
boat.
... Everything is akin to me
That dwells in the land of mystery.
The ship is masked; its colour is the colour of the waves at night. The
ship is pleased. A shadowy blue-grey ship going forward calmly, equably,
yet triumphantly, ever gently forward, towards the unknown, the
mysterious....
II
THE HERMITS
The first effort of the Apostles towards the establishment of
Christianity was along the way of Martha—the sharing out of the money
and the starting of a sort of Christian-socialist state. But life taught
them that this was impracticable, and they and all the early Christians
soon found themselves working and living and praying in an altogether
different way—driven into the wilderness, stoned out of cities, hounded
into gaol, faced with the horrors of torture or barbarous execution.
There were soon more Christians in the desert places of the earth,
living in caves and in forests, than there were in the towns and
villages. Some fled from persecution, others were driven by the Spirit;
and no doubt all, when they found themselves cut off from the world,
began to share in the meditative idea of Christianity. They obtained the
consolation of wanderers, and found a new significance in the promise of
the Comforter. They had visions; they met the resurrected spirits of
those who had died in the Lord. The strange life they had to live
brought a romantic mystery into the possibilities of the road and the
outside world, so that when one met a stranger there was the doubt that
he might be an angel, that he might even be the risen Lord Himself. The
heavens opened, and sweet music accompanied the vision of the Grail. The
stigmata appeared on the hands and bodies of those who had attained to
unity with Christ.
Yet those who went out into the wilderness, alike those who fled
persecution and those who went out voluntarily to seek and be alone with
God, were tempted “of the devil” as they phrased it. The town and the
world which they wished to overcome tempted them back. They had left
behind in “the world” fathers, mothers, brides, children, friends,
money, position, pleasure. They lived on locusts and wild honey and
grains and roots—and they longed for the good meat of the city. They
were ragged, unwashed, bruised, unkempt—they longed for the freshness of
the bath, white linen, and clean clothes. Their bones ached and they
were tired—they longed for soft beds. They were solitary and longed for
company, longed especially for the company of women. And the devil who
tempted them was a dragon that could never be killed, which, slain, but
changed to a different shape. The temptation was put forward in new
guise, and the lure of sin more subtly baited. They entered into the
temptation of Jesus as they entered also into his sufferings.
They drew men unto them. All those whose minds were troubled by the
monstrous woman—Babylon—thought of the Christian solitude in the desert.
It became a not infrequent phenomenon—the going into the desert “to save
one’s soul.” The wild places of the earth began to have names and fame.
Hermits lived in places where no one had ever lived before, and the
curious came out to see them. By their spiritual virtues they made the
desert, which was barren in the material sense, blossom as the rose.
The caves in the mountains by the Dead Sea filled with anchorites, and
the holy men looked upon the dead salt lake that had once been the gay
world of Sodom and Gomorrah. The mountain supposed to be the mountain of
Christ’s temptations became honeycombed with the abodes of
world-forsakers. “If a man does not say to himself in his innermost
heart, God and I, we are alone in the world; he will never find rest,”
said one, and betook himself to Mount Sinai. The Virgin Mary sailing in
a boat with St. Thomas and St. John was wrecked off the coast of
Macedonia and miraculously washed ashore on the mountain of Athos; and
in due course there appeared on the strange uninhabited mountain an
antique Greek, lean, long-haired, unutterably devout, and he lived in a
cave and meditated on the Mother of God. Another followed and another,
till a laura was founded.
The hermits gave Christianity a new bias. One has only to compare an
ascetic’s dream, the majesty and the mystery of the Revelation of St.
John, with the sweet reasonableness of the Gospels ... “A sower went
forth to sow,” and the like ... to see how great is the change in the
spirit of the Church under the influence of the anchorites. Such a
sentence as—“To him that overcometh I will give of the hidden manna, and
will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which
no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it,” comes straight from the
desert and is part and parcel of the spiritual fervour of the early
Church.
The hermit based his life on Christ’s wanderings in the wilderness and
His denial of the world, on the idea of bearing the Cross, and on the
promised second coming of Christ. As Christ renounced the power of
changing stones into bread, so they renounced the power of bread, the
feeding of the hungry, _i.e._ service in the world, the way of Martha.
As Christ refused the throne of Caesar when the devil was ready to show
him the way to obtain it, so they refused to try to establish Christ’s
kingdom in a material form. They denied all material power—denied that
the power of Caesar was real power, that physical force had power, that
money had power. St. Arsenius, the anchorite, was offered all the
revenues of Egypt by the Emperor Arcadius and asked to use them for the
help of the poor, the hermits, and the monks; but Arsenius refused,
saying that such work would be worldly and was not for him. The same
Arsenius inherited a great fortune, his cousin’s estate, but refused it.
“When did my cousin die?”
“Two months ago,” he was told.
“Oh, then the estate is not mine, for I died long before that,” said
Arsenius.
He had died to the world, and to money among other worldly things.
The hermits also denied the physical senses—our ordinary sight, hearing,
touching.... “Grieve not that thou art without what even flies and gnats
possess,” said Antony, the father of Egyptian hermits, to blind Didymus;
“rejoice that through thy physical blindness thy spiritual sight has
become more clear.” The hermits took upon themselves oaths of silence,
went into remote places where was the most abject barrenness of earth,
the utter negation of all physical life and material power. Not content
with the privations of the Sahara they went into abominable marshes like
the soda swamps of Nitria, where they mortified even the most innocent
of the senses, the sense of smell. They strove to be as it were dead in
all the physical body and limbs, and in the physical senses. “Unless a
man imagines to himself that he has been lying for three years in the
grave and under the earth, he will never die to himself,” said Moses the
Ethiopian, a simple negro anchorite, who though he seemed black in the
body was all white in the soul.
In this denial they did things which seem fantastic to the modern world.
They dug their graves in advance and lived in them till they died. They
stood on one leg, the foot of the other leg on their knee, their arms
outstretched as if crucified to the air; they climbed to the height of
ancient pillars and remained there praying for years. Pachomius is said
to have prayed for days together, standing with outstretched arms as
immovably as if his body had been fastened to a cross. His eyes were
lifted upward at a strange angle and were full of light, he gazed in
fixed rapture as if his eyes were resting on a celestial vision. In this
Pachomius praying thus an artist might show a picture of what the hermit
stood for. These hermits were not foolish; they were mighty and
wonderful like the living word of God itself. They were living
hieroglyphics.