those candles lit in the dim dawn of Christianity, passing Cyprus and
Patmos and a thousand nameless islands where lived mystics, hermits, and
writers of the early Church. We carried ikons brought from Jerusalem to
be carried back to Russia. The pilgrims sang Christian hymns; the Jewish
patriarchs, with phylacteries on their brows, read the Mosaic books and
the prophets. Nearly every one on the boat was bound for Russia. We went
thither the way these things have ever gone, from the desert northward
over the sea. Not in vain does the reader of the Gospel stand facing the
north; not in vain is the belfry of the cathedral built on the northern
side. The direct message of Christianity has been the message that has
gone northward.
The cathedral of Christianity, our St. Sophia in large, may perhaps be
imagined in this guise.
North
—-||—-
( )
| S S |
| U I |
| R A |
+————————+ +———————-+
| England Greece |
| |
== WEST Stalls of the choir where stand ) JERUSALEM
| the martyrs and the saints |
| Rome | | | | | | |
+————————————————————-+
EGYPT
Egypt is the choir of the cathedral where stand the martyrs and the
saints singing in white robes. Through the gates at the north and the
west come those who hear the sweet tidings and the heavenly music.
The journey from Egypt to Russia is like going across our great Sophia
from the splendid choir to the multitudes who have come out of the
forests to listen.
Christianity went over the waves to Athos and Tsargrad, to the Greek and
Roman cities of the Black Sea shores, and up the mighty rivers to Kief
and Novgorod and Yaroslaf, down the great Volga, driving the Tartar
before it, across the forests and along the rivers where lived the
primeval nature-worshippers of Russia, brought by knights in armour, by
priests and bishops, engendered by hermits and martyrs, enforced
eventually by princes and monarchs, interwoven with the splendour of
mediæval chivalry. Russia became officially Christian in 988, when King
Vladimir and his hosts were baptized in the Dnieper at Kief. A cathedral
of St. Sophia, “mother of Russian churches,” springs up at Kief, St.
Sophia appears at Novgorod, St. Sophia at Yaroslaf. At the time of our
Edward the Confessor Russia was as fervently Christian as England. And
the seed, no doubt, had sunk deeper or had been wafted into remoter
solitudes. There was room in Russia for Christianity to mature in the
popular mind.
At last the Turks streamed across the Levant, and severed the Christian
world in two. Foolish and naïve Mahomet came stamping into the great
cathedral of Sophia on horseback, shouting out at the foot of the
sublime altar, “There is no god but God, and Mahomet is His prophet.”
Legend says that on that day a priest was celebrating Mass at the altar,
and he prayed that the body of Christ might be saved from profanation.
As an answer to his prayer the stones gaped, and priest and Host were
enclosed, as the relics had been that in earlier days were placed
between the tenth stones. The priest was probably murdered as he broke
the bread, and, it is true, he has been taken into the wall and has
become part of the Bride.
Leopards have their dens where Christian hermits once prayed to God, and
they do not know that the ground is holy ground. And the ferocious yet
simple Turk has it not in his power to profane Sancta Sophia. When the
time comes he can be driven back to the wilds whence he came.
Constantinople falls. But Christianity does not fall, rather it grows.
Russian Christianity is saved from much ecclesiastical exploitation,
Levantine corruption, and materialism by the severance of the earthly
tie, the break-up of the patriarchate of Tsargrad. After the Turks took
Constantinople Russian Christianity was fed by the angels. Hence its
fair face to-day.
Over the sea to Russia, to the Kremlins round the many-domed churches,
to the gleaming ikons, to the great choruses, resplendent and triumphant
Orthodoxy; to the land where ever day and night there is witness, where
the young men see visions and the old men dream dreams; to Kief, to
Novgorod, to Moscow, to the Kremlin, to the great pink-walled hill that
stands above the mother-city crowned with churches. Bowing at the
Ilinskaya, baring the head to enter at the Spassky Gate ... my eyes rest
on the wan wall of St. John the Great. I climb to the belfry and let my
fingers pass lovingly over the bulging bells. I light a candle in the
cathedral of the Assumption. I walk across the broad open spaces where
Napoleon’s cannon are ranged and listen to the sad slow chime of the
Kremlin clock giving the hours and the quarters. Here again is a holy
city standing above a merely worldly city, this walled hill over
commercial Moscow, this Sophia exalted above Prudentia.
In the first autumn of the War, when I was at Moscow, I used to go to
the Kremlin last thing each night. They were beautifully starry and
peaceful nights. The churches and the low pavements that wander among
the cobbles were flooded with silver, the toothed battlements and
antediluvian old towers of the Kremlin walls seemed gigantically
exaggerated in silhouette, and yet, though exaggerated, in a way truer,
as if the ordinary vision of them we had by day was not correct, as if
they were really in themselves of enormous importance and
correspondingly enormous proportions. The moat of the Moscow river lay
murky below, and afar among the vast congregation of the houses of the
city a lamp burned here and there as if before votive shrines.
Motionless sentries stood in front of the cathedrals. One’s own steps
echoed startlingly. The single liquid melody of the Kremlin chime broke
out and poured away—_ding_, _ding_, _ding_, _ding_, _dong_, _dell_,
_dell_. Holy Russia was watching.
I went into a cathedral: still many candles were burning. I walked along
the walls: lamps were alight before holy pictures set in the old bricks.
There was a perfect stillness and serenity. I paused, and the mind went
across Moscow and beyond it fifteen hundred miles to Poland and Germany
and Austria where was another scene, a more exterior scene and
manifestation of the life of Russia,—Russia in arms against a false
ideal. Russia was serene though Russia was in deadly struggle. The heart
was beating faithfully, strong hands were smiting the foe.
In the night the hundreds of Napoleon’s black cannon had a sinister
aspect, each one seemed pointed at me. The mind went back to their real
hour of history when from them death blazed forth; when instead of this
stillness and serenity the thunder and tumult of battle was around them.
They are death’s heads of what once were live guns; they are greedy as
death, menacing as death—harmless also as death. Away above them among
the glittering stars stand the gold crosses of the churches, the
splendour of God. The mind’s eye takes in hundreds and thousands of gold
crosses, waving, dipping, lifting, triumphant, the grand processional
aspect of the Church. Even at this moment how many are dying, how many
souls are passing. In the Kremlin in the still night Holy Russia is
watching. Away on the battlefields the brave are dying. Look, in the
Kremlin you see their crosses among the stars; listen, you hear the
heavenly chorus swelling as they join the great procession of the
Church.
* * * * *
From Egypt to Russia, and then from Russia West once more to England.
The tempestuous War still rages, and in the seasons of history it is
deep winter. Ravenous winds lash the bare trees, howl through the
churchyards. Or the wind dies down awhile and bitter frost sets in, and
the merciless hungry stars stare at the dead earth. Or heavy clouds come
over and the snow sifts down, becomes deeper, communes with the breeze,
wreathes itself in fantastic drifts. On the still branches of the forest
the snow is balanced, or only disturbed by ravens flitting awkwardly
from one tree to another. It is the winter of history, but the season
will change. Under the crusted streams the water is flowing, flowers are
rising under the snow, flowers from the living seed. The seed lives
through the four seasons, and the seed is the Word of God.
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
WAR AND CHRISTIANITY
Among the Russians, as among other nations, there are many whose
conscience does not permit them to bear arms and fight, many who believe
that war is evil in itself, and that it is unchristian to oppose force
with force. Russia has its non-resisters, Dukhobors, Molokans, Quakers,
who either obtain official exemption from military service, or who
suffer punishment for refusing to obey the call. And among the mass of
the Russian people who as yet do obey the summons and shoulder the gun
for the Fatherland, the question is frequently raised, “Can we reconcile
Christianity and war? Can we reconcile the spirit of Russian religion
with the using of brute force to overcome a wrong or to defeat an
enemy?”
Not that any great number of the Russian peasant soldiers ask themselves
questions about the ethics of war. They go forward gladly to fight for
the Tsar, and to defend their country. With them fighting is a
tradition—Christianity is Christian warfare, not warfare with sin and
disease and crime, but war against the heathen. Since the pagan god
Peroun was rolled down the cliffs, and the army of Vladimir stepped into
the Dnieper and was baptized as one man, Russian Christianity has been a
Christianity in arms, in arms against Tartar and Mongol and Turk. The
spirit that prompted the Crusades perseveres. That is why a war against
the Turk is a great national war; it is still something in the nature of
a great religious pageant. More than half the man saints on the Russian
Calendar are warriors, and the rest are simply monks and hermits.
Still as wars go on they change in type. Fighting has ceased to be a
praising of God. There is no raining of splendid blows on the Saracen’s
head. War for the common soldier has ceased to be fighting, and has
become “obeying orders.” The soldier does not even know whither his shot
has sped. He seldom or never shoots at a man; he shoots at a vague
general man called the enemy. He also knows that no one is trying to
kill him personally, and that he in his turn is also part of a vague
impersonal man—the enemy of the man on the other side.
War becomes a standing to be killed for one’s country, and an obeying of
orders.
It is a noble and a Christian thing to die for one’s native land. It is
also one’s duty to obey the orders of those put in authority over us.
The question is, Are those who direct the war acting in a Christian
spirit? They in their turn obey orders of those in authority over
them—the Generals, the Commander-in-Chief, the Government, the Tsar.
They must render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.
Is it then Christianity in the Tsar to make war, or to answer force by
force? Some Russians say, “It depends on the cause. A war to protect
little Servia is a good and Christian war.” Others say, “It does not
depend on the cause. No cause, not even the best in the world, can
justify the carrying on of war; of that wholesale and organised murder
which goes by the name of war.” So we come to the Russian pacifists, and
those who believe that any peace is better than the justest war. They
declare that war is evil in itself. They offer no compromise on the
subject. In time of peace the Pacifists have a great following, and they
seem to be in a majority; but when war breaks out a great number who
merely sympathise, but do not absolutely believe, fall away and leave
the true Pacifists standing, as they have stood in each war up till now,
in a hopeless minority.
They hold that war is a survival of barbarism, or, to put it in the
words of Solovyof, “Something like cannibalism, a barbarous custom that
must in time be isolated and localised among the more savage regions of
the world, and then slowly but steadily disappear till it becomes merely
a historical curiosity.”
The simplest way to test this notion of war would have been to survey
the modern history of the civilised world and see if war between
civilised community tended on the whole to be less. But here and now as
I write is the vast conflagration of the German war. If this war had not
come about it might have been possible to say, “Man is on the whole
tending towards universal peace.” The Spanish-American War was scarcely
a war at all. The South African War was an example of the power which
could be brought to bear on an uncultured and wild people to make them
behave themselves and be peaceful. The Russo-Japanese War was begun in
the misconception that the Japanese were yellow devils, and if the
Russians had known with whom they had to deal they could have arranged
matters. The Italian-Turkish War was simply a cultured nation taking
over territory of the wild and warlike Turks, and so precluding war for
the future. The wars in the Balkan States were the natural conflicts of
wild tribes not yet properly civilised. Up to that point war could be
explained away, but then we come to July 1914 with its European
conflagration, and the Pacifist inference cannot be made.
For the time being war is redeemed from the imputation of savagery by
the great German conflict. It can no longer be classified as a
disgusting practice such as cannibalism or sutteeism.
But the minority, those who still take peace as a golden rule, are even
now unconvinced. At the best they hold that this war is a war to prevent
war in the future, a war for the establishment of the Federation of
Europe, a war that will make possible universal peace.
Still they hold that notion as a makeshift opinion. They would never in
the palmy days of peace have thought it possible that mankind would go
to war in order to get a better peace afterwards. They held that war was
always avoidable, and that you could not by Satan cast out Satan.
They hold that nationally as individually we should give back good for
evil. Amongst the educated Russians there are many pacifists, many
non-resisters, a number also of quaker-like people who refer all war
arguments to the one simple commandment—“Thou shalt not kill!”
Many Russians hold that Christ substituted for the Jewish law “Thou
shalt not kill!” the moral principle “Thou shalt not hate!” And they
understand the chastisement of war as performed more in sorrow than in
anger.
Those who try to follow out literally the patterns of behaviour set out
in the Gospel ask what would the Good Samaritan have done if he had come
earlier than he did and had met the man who fell among thieves just at
the moment when the thieves were attacking him with apparently murderous
intent. Would he then have had to pass by on the other side like the
Levite, or should he have fallen on his knees and prayed, or should he
have rushed to the physical assistance of the man who was being
attacked. Many held that it would have been the Samaritan’s duty to
defend his neighbour with all the means in his power. As the General
says in Solovyof’s conversation, “I prayed best when giving commands to
the horse-artillery.” So in August 1914, when Austria fell upon Servia
and Germany fell upon Belgium, Russia in the East and Britain in the
West rushed generously to give their physical assistance to the nations
in distress. America, like the Levite, averted his eyes and said, “It is
no concern of mine.”
The action of Britain and Russia is no doubt popular Christianity. It is
the way of the world. Christianity was not preached to nations but to
individuals.
The true Christian attitude of the man who falls among thieves is to
give up his money and strip off his clothes and hand them to the thieves
saying, “Would to God there were more for thee!” He would offer no show
of defence, but, on the contrary, would rejoice. For in taking away
money and clothes they took away earthly material things, things that
should be lightly prized. To have given them freely and affectionately
to those who wanted them was to blossom spiritually or, to use another
figure, it was to quicken the circulation of love. And directly he gives
up these things the Good Samaritan comes along and he, out of pure
affection, gives from his superfluity the means to the naked one to be
clothed and restored.
If the Good Samaritan had come up in time he would as a Christian have
been ready to give his things also to the thieves. Or if the thieves had
been actuated by the impulse of murder, he would have fallen on his
knees and prayed. Such is the way of those who deny “the world,” and
with it deny also the power of physical force.
Somewhat of this interpretation of Christian impulse is given in the
following Russian conversation taken from the book on War and
Christianity written by the great Russian philosopher, Vladimir
Solovyof:[13]
_Prince._ He who is filled with the true spirit of the Gospel will
find in himself when necessary the ability by words and gestures,
and by his whole spiritual demeanour so to act upon the soul of his
unhappy brother who would commit a murder, that the latter will be
suddenly overwhelmed and converted, and will see the error of his
ways and turn away from the wrong road.
_General._ Holy Martyrs! Is that the way you’d have me behave
towards, for instance, the Bashi-Oozooks, who in Asiatic Turkey
massacre the women and children of the Armenian villages. You think
I ought to stand before them making touching gestures, saying
touching words and making a tender religious appeal to them.
_Mr. Z._ Your words would not be heard owing to the instance of the
murderers, and if heard would not be understood since you know not
one another’s languages. Then as regards gestures, as you will of
course, but I should have thought that under the circumstances the
best gesture one could think out for the occasion would be the
firing of a few volleys.
_Lady._ But, seriously, could the General have explained his
Christian sentiments to the Bashi-Oozooks?
_Prince._ I did not at all assume that the Russian army should have
acted according to the spirit of the Gospel when dealing with the
Bashi-Oozooks. But I do say that a man filled with the true spirit
of the Gospel would have found even the possibility then of
awakening in dark souls that good which lies hidden in every human
being.
_Mr. Z._ You really think that!
_Prince._ Not a whit do I doubt.
_Mr. Z._ Well, do you think that Christ Himself was sufficiently
filled with the true spirit of the Gospel?
_Prince._ Is that a question or a joke?
_Mr. Z._ I put the question because I’d like to know why Christ did
not so apply the true spirit of the Gospel as to awaken the good
hidden in the souls of Judas and Herod and of the Jewish chief
priests and of the wicked thief of whom we commonly forget when
speaking of his repentant brother....
Which confuses the issue because Christianity is not a converting of
non-Christians to itself, it is a way of bearing oneself with regard to
the world and God, a witnessing of the truth. This life is not truth.
For that reason among others, Christ does not save Himself from death;
material gains on earth are not real gains, so to the man who would take
the coat the cloak is given also; the kingdom of this world is not a
real kingdom, so Christ turns His back on the Devil when the presidency
of the world is offered to Him on the mountain. When St. Peter smote off
the ear of the High Priest’s servant, Christ restored the ear as a sign
that His kingdom could not be won by the sword. When war is brought to
the test of Christian idealism, especially as interpreted by the
Russians, it is found to be of the world—a rendering to Caesar of the
things which are Caesar’s.
Nevertheless, if we say that war is unchristian, or if we hold that
those waging war are by their very behaviour unchristian, we are wrong.
We are mistaking the true spirit of Christianity. For Christianity is no
rule which people must obey; it is no set of rules for people. The
deepest thing in Christianity is personal choice. Those who are saved
are those who personally choose. If a man goes to bear arms for love of
his country, if he offers his life as a sacrifice on the altar of his
Fatherland, he is still a true Christian though engaged in violence. Or
if a man stands out to refuse to go like the peasant in _Peer Gynt_, who
cut off one of his fingers so as to be rejected by the army doctor, we
still have Christianity exemplified in personal choice and in the
readiness to sacrifice material things for spiritual gain.
What, then, of the peasant soldiers who presumably make little choice?
Of them it must be said, they are Christians on the emotional plane, not
on the intellectual. By their splendid enthusiasm it is evident that the
peasants do make an emotional choice. Perhaps in that choice lies their
Christianity with regard to war.
They are Christians also in that they do not regard death as something
terrible. Death for them is a sacrament, a new baptism, a second time
going down of the warriors of King Vladimir to the River Dneiper.
Footnote 13:
_War and Christianity_, by Vladimir Solovyof, now translated into
English—Constable’s Russian Library.
APPENDIX II
THE CHOICE OF EAST AND WEST
An interesting new domain of study is opening for the Bible student in
the comparison of what the various nations have taken to themselves in
their understanding of the Gospels. Translation itself inevitably
changes the emphasis, the _accent_ of various passages. And Slavonic
perception, British perception, German perception, American perception
necessarily differ. It is a truism to say that we each take from a book
only what we wish to take from it. To one who knows Russia and has the
feeling for Eastern Christianity, there is no more enthralling
occupation than to read the Gospels with an eye to discovering which
parts Eastern Christianity has emphasised, which parts Western
Christianity has taken; which parts, for instance, Russia has
emphasised, which parts America has emphasised.
One evening in Vladikavkaz I had a long talk with Russian friends about
this difference in emphasis, and we went through the whole of St.
Matthew and discussed many texts of the New Testament.
We started with the Beatitudes, as they are the beginning of the
Christian teaching. We agreed that “Blessed are the poor in spirit” was
a stumbling-block to the West, a phrase that preachers had to interpret
very carefully as having a meaning other than “Blessed are the
poor-spirited.” In Russia, however, it is perhaps the most important
beatitude—at least, two of my Russians held it to be so. In the Russian
translation it runs, “Blessed are those who are beggars in spirit.”
Russia sees blessedness in the state of beggars, in the state of those
who have nothing; a beggar in Russian is one who has no earthly
possessions. The beggar is a national institution. No one purely Russian
in temperament wants to get rid of the beggar—the man who has nothing.
Even Gorky calls the beggar the bell of the Lord, the reminder to man
that he can have no true possessions here in the world.
The second beatitude, “Blessed are they that mourn,” we also took to
mean more to the East than to the West. The East feels the blessing of
mourning, the West the blessing of being comforted.
The third beatitude, “Blessed are the meek,” meant more to the West we
concluded. We in England and America look forward to what Tennyson calls
“the reign of the meek upon earth.” We remember the promise that the
lion shall lie down with the lamb. One of the most popular of Western
pictures is that of the child carrying a palm-branch, “A little child
shall lead them.” The East, however, feels that the lions will always be
lions, that “the world” will remain “the world” without much change,
full of the faithless, the cruel, the predatory, mingled with the
faithful, the gentle, the self-abnegatory.