“So what are we to do now? Exterminate ourselves? The Church did not end with Nikon.”
“But the Church cannot base itself on injustice.” Sanya finished in a whisper, as though keeping it secret from the sleeping Chernega, or perhaps even from the man he was talking to.
The priest answered with great assurance: “Christ’s Church cannot be sinful. The hierarchy can make mistakes, yes.” He sounded so sure of it, as though it was a lesson learned by heart.
“Now that’s an expression I simply can’t understand. Is the Church as such never to blame for anything? Protestants and Catholics butcher each other, we butcher the Old Believers—and you say the Church is without sin? And we, each and every one of us, who have lived and died in the past three centuries, are we not the Russian Church? I say we are. Why can’t we repent and admit that we have committed a crime?”
Many such tangential thoughts had occurred to Sanya in his short life, while he was arguing or reading. They did not all meet at a single point but left a crooked triangular island on which the Church, undermined, barely stood.
And when the state later on relaxed its persecution of the Old Believers, the Church itself grew harsher and badgered the state—to make it harsh again.
“And where did the Church end up? Where it is now—the state’s captive. But the Church is the hardest of prisoners to understand. It has declared all earthly ties transitory. Why then allow itself to be bound hand and foot?”
The priest peered at him closely. “Is all this your own idea, or …?”
Sanya nodded. “Yes, or … I did actually start thinking like this in the upper classes at high school. But we have a lot of different sects in the North Caucasus, and I visited several of them and learned a great deal. All sorts of theories and rival interpretations. I used to go to the Dukhobors in particular. And I read Tolstoy a lot. I got most of it from him.”
“Yes, of course.” The priest smiled as he saw the connection. “Tolstoy, that’s obvious. But what were your own family? Were they Dukhobors, or Old Believers? What are you?”
Sanya smiled shyly, apologetically. He made a helpless gesture. He didn’t know himself.
“No, I couldn’t just sit over the bread and salt like the Dukhobors. And I’m no Tolstoyan. Not now. I don’t accept that Christ’s teaching is a recipe for a happy life on this earth. Why should anybody think that? Or that love is dictated by reason. What sort of love? I wonder.”
Sanya found it difficult to go fast when he was trying to work out a problem, in contrast to expressing firm and deeply felt views. His words came slowly and hesitantly, irritating impatient students and martinet officers. He spoke like that because, however long a thought had been in gestation, at the moment of utterance it would still not be fully mature, and might prove false after all. Uttering a thought was his way of verifying it.
“Besides … Tolstoy is much too sweeping in his rejection of everything that … The faith of ordinary people, of my parents say, of our village, of everybody who … Icons, candles, incense, the blessing of the water, communion bread … He rejects them all, he leaves us nothing … Or take the singing that rises up to the dome … and the incense smoke up there is streaked with rays of sunlight … Those little candles—people put them there with a full heart, and with their thoughts on heaven. For my part I love all this, and have since I was a child. Or take Rogozhskoye—that service, would he be so nonsensical as to say that it’s all a show, something we’ve arbitrarily tacked on to Christianity? … That’s piffle. But what I felt most keenly of all is what he says about the cross. Tolstoy tells us not to regard representations of the cross as sacred, not to bow down to it, not to put it on graves, not to wear it. Such insensitivity! I can’t go along with that. You know the saying—a grave uncensed is just a black hole. And it’s even truer of a grave without a cross. No cross? Where there’s no cross I get no feeling of Christianity.”
He listened carefully to his own ringing phrases, checking for false notes.
“I tried following Tolstoy’s advice at one time, and forbade myself to make the sign of the cross. But I can’t help it, my hand moves automatically. If I didn’t cross myself while I was praying, the prayer would seem incomplete. Or when death comes flying, whistling through the air—my hand makes the sign of the cross involuntarily. What could be more natural when it might be the last thing you do on this earth? … I have this feeling that I didn’t have to learn to cross myself, that it was there inside me before I was born.”
Father Severyan beamed affectionately. If only one in twenty Russian students responded to the aura of the Church ritual as something above rational analysis, the faith was not yet lost in Russia!
“Did it ever occur to you that Tolstoy was not a Christian at all?”
“Not at all?” Sasha was stumped. His jaw dropped.
“Just read his books. War and Peace, say. He takes on 1812, an epic year in the life of a devout people, and who ever says a prayer in the hour of need? Princess Maria—but who else? Can you believe that those four volumes were written by a Christian? He found plenty of room for Freemasonry—but for Orthodoxy? None at all. I know that he did not leave the Orthodox Church in later life—but then he was never in it. Churchgoing was not part of his childhood training. He was a regular product of our freethinking gentry class. And he was not single-minded and humble enough to adopt the faith of the peasants.”
Sanya held his brow with five fingers, as though palpating it.
“I never thought of it like that.” He sounded surprised. “What makes you say so? Isn’t his interpretation true to the gospels? By now, haven’t we utterly forsaken the gospels? We recite the commandments without hearing them. But everybody heard them when he spoke. Strip away all the incrustations on Christ’s teaching, he told us. He was right. How can we commit acts of violence and still call ourselves Christians? We are told not to take oaths—but we do. Our excuse, in effect, is that Christ’s commandments cannot apply to ordinary human life. But Tolstoy says no, they can be applied. How can you say, then, that his is not a pure version of Christianity?”
Father Severyan had recovered from his despondency, the life had returned to his face, and now that he was feeling better he answered readily, as though this solitary lieutenant was precisely the audience he had long been awaiting.
“How sadly our conception of the faith must have declined for Tolstoy to look like an outstanding Christian! He pulls out a verse of the gospels here and a verse there and displays them on his hawker’s tray … The arguments that earn him such enormous popularity are those of a schoolboy. The fact is that his criticism of the Church was grist for the mill of our educated public. True, the teaching he offers society is useless—society could not exist on that basis. But the liberal public didn’t care about his teaching, his spiritual quest, it had no use for religion, reformed or unreformed. No, Tolstoy appealed to its political passions! See how the great writer trounces state and church! Fan the flames! Educated society never read any of the philosophers who replied to Tolstoy.”
“We-ell, I don’t know.” Sanya was dazed. “How can it be the pure doctrine of the gospels, and not Christianity?”
“Why, Tolstoy discarded two-thirds of the gospels! Simplify the gospels! Reject all that is unclear! He simply creates a new religion. His ‘closer to Christ’ means ‘bypass the evangelists.’ It’s as much as to say: since I’m to be your fellow believer, I’ll start by reforming this two-thousand-year-old faith! He imagines that he is a discoverer, but he’s just going down the slope with society and dragging others with him. He reproduces the most primitive variety of Protestantism. We’ll take the ethical element from religion, why not—even the intelligentsia agrees with that. But morality can be implanted in a race even by blood feud. Morality is a set of schoolboy rules, the underside of God’s farsighted dispensation.”
It was evidently not the first time Father Severyan had found himself discussing these matters, and he was obviously no ordinary prie
st.
“Tolstoy was moved by pride. He was unwilling to humble himself and adopt the common faith. The wings of pride carry us over seven icy abysses. But there is something just as important as developing our own individualities, and that is standing among the lowly and the ignorant, rubbing shoulders with them, pressing our fingers, the fingers of the elect, to the same stone floor on which others have just walked in street-stained shoes—yes, and pressing our wise foreheads to it. Waiting our turn to take communion from a spoon touched by the lips of others, some healthy, some perhaps sick, some clean, some perhaps not. One of the greatest spiritual accomplishments is knowing how to humble yourself. To remind yourself that for all your gifts and for all your prowess you are only God’s servant, no whit superior to others. No ethical system is a substitute for this accomplishment—the practice of humility.”
“That we must humble ourselves—I agree completely.”
“But Tolstoy is forever seeking God, whereas God, you might say, is really in his way. What Tolstoy wants to do is save people without any help at all from God. When he took up preaching, something seemed to happen to him: all the things in this world that elude reason, the things that govern our lives and give us strength, things that he knew when he was writing novels—he seemed suddenly to lose his feel for them. How wretchedly earthbound is his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount! It’s as though he has completely lost his intuition. Here is a great artist—and he does not touch on the immense universal design, or God’s intense concern for each and every one of us! Worse—he rejected it all as irrational. Our own immortality, our participation in the divine essence—he rejected it all.”
Father Severyan had raised himself from his pillow in his animation and his eagerness to pursue the argument. His eyes were bright and steady. He had dragged himself to this dugout on reluctant legs and with a faltering heart, and even here he was doomed to get no rest.
“There must have been times when he was appalled to find himself so helpless and insignificant. To feel himself so weak, so impotent, so much in the dark. When there is no strength left for independent action—with what strength is left we try to pray. We want only to pray, to take in the strength that flows in abundance from the Almighty. And if we succeed in it, it is as though our hearts are flooded with light, and our powers return. And we realize the meaning of the words ‘preserve and pardon us with thy grace!’ Do you know that state of mind?”
Sanya, on his stool, nodded. “That was my state of mind when I met you today. In fact, I was hoping to meet someone … I didn’t know it was you … I do often feel that I lack the strength even to think about things.”
There was a loud burst of machine-gun fire. The noise came from the outer trenches, but in the cold and rainy night they heard it very clearly. Somewhere down there a couple of dozen large rounds flew over to burrow into the ground, riddle planks, lodge in beams, and perhaps wound somebody, although these stupid shots in the night were meant mainly just to scare.
How had he come to be wearing epaulets and giving orders: “No. 2 gun, volley-fire!”
“Why did you never come and see me?”
“I told you about it. At confession once. But I don’t think you understood me.”
[6]
“At confession? When was that?”
“In Lent. You’d only just joined us.”
“Ah, that’s probably the reason. I’ve got a poor memory for faces and I see new ones all the time.”
The second lieutenant wasn’t finding it any easier now. It was like making his confession all over again.
“I complained to you … that I found fighting difficult. I told you I’d joined up without waiting to be drafted. I could have finished my university course. But I volunteered. Which means that I voluntarily took all the sins and murders committed here upon myself.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” Father Severyan had remembered. “Of course! It was the only confession of that sort I heard from an officer, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. We’d have gone on from there if it hadn’t been in my first few days. Absolutely everybody was coming to confess—it was Passion week. But why didn’t you come again?”
“I had no way of knowing that it had made any impression. I thought maybe others talk like that and you were a bit bored with it all. Or maybe there was no answer. The main thing was that you gave me absolution for my sin and my doubts—but I hadn’t absolved myself. It all came back to plague me again. Should I have gone back to you? A second and a third time? To repeat what I’d already said, in the very same words—as if I was rejecting the absolution you’d given me? And even if you didn’t reproach me, what could you do? Only repeat: ‘I, an unworthy priest, by the authority given to me by God …’ And I would be answering back, as you covered my head with your robe: ‘No, don’t forgive me, it won’t help!’ In confession there’s no avoiding it: you have to pardon me in the end.” He looked at the priest quizzically. “Couldn’t you not forgive me? If I’m to bear the very same burden tomorrow, because you can’t relieve me of it, don’t forgive me! Send me away unrelieved. That would be more honest. How can I ever relieve myself of it while the war goes on? I can’t. The fact that I can’t see the people I’m killing doesn’t change matters. I wonder what the final score will be. And how I shall justify myself? The only way out is for me to get killed. I don’t see any other.”
Father Severyan followed closely the movements of Sanya’s mind and his eager interest showed in his mobile young features.
“Well, you know, in the ancient Church warriors returning from a campaign were not immediately absolved. They were made to do penance first. But there is another way out: change your ideas.”
“I’ve tried. Tried to see things simply. Like all the others, like Chernega, for instance. He fights—and is cheerful about it. I tried to do the same. For several months. It didn’t work. You bombard the enemy and get no answer. It’s Cheverdin who gets the answer.”
The priest wasn’t at all put out by the second lieutenant. His keen gaze searched the features of his slow-spoken companion.
How unusual it was to meet such a person among the officers of this brigade (most of them regulars, following their vocation formally, shamefacedly or laughingly)—and a student at that. Such people were even more unusual among students. Back home in Ryazan, Father Severyan’s activities were conducted in a murky atmosphere of ridicule and contempt created by the whole educated stratum of society—contempt not just for him but for the whole Orthodox Church. Repulsed by their contempt, he, who came from the same sort of family and the same cultured milieu, was driven back toward the ignorant and uneducated petty bourgeois who still thickheadedly saw some sense in lighting candles and going to church instead of reading newspapers and attending theaters and lectures. Father Severyan did not blush for his calling and his costume, and would have been content to remain with the educated stratum to which he belonged, but he was forced out of it. He had had to come all the way from the Ryazan diocese to the front line to hear a student talk like this.
But Sanya went on bitterly. “Besides, the way I look at it, Father Severyan, since we’re in the same brigade and your job is to contribute to the success of Russian arms, there’s little comfort you can give to me. You are too involved in it all, and—forgive me for saying so—may be sinning yourself. You distribute amulets, and make sure every last man has one around his neck. You carry the cross along the trenches before an attack, and sprinkle the men with holy water. Or you take an icon around the dugouts for tomorrow’s corpses to kiss. Priests have been known, when there are no officers left, to jump at the chance of relaying their regimental commander’s battle orders. But the most dreadful thing of all is when a service is held in the field, and the candles are placed on pyramids of four rifles leaning together.”
Father Severyan did not lower his head. Father Severyan did not avert his eyes. He listened attentively to the second lieutenant’s reproaches, even urging him on with expressive movements of
his eyebrows, asking for and welcoming more of the same.
“I realize that you did not come here of your own free will, that you were sent.”
“You’re mistaken. It was my idea.”
“Yours?”
“Well, what about you? Priests aren’t drafted. Either they volunteer or their diocese sends them to fill an official quota. But a diocese will keep back those it thinks best, and send the dross to the army in the field: the weak ones, those who have been convicted of offenses, political undesirables. Though I myself might well have been included in the last category because of my reformist ideas. But I didn’t wait for that, I volunteered. I actually thought that this was the more natural place for me to be in time of war.”
“For most men, yes.” The second lieutenant still wasn’t convinced.
“For a priest too,” the priest insisted with the stubbornness he had shown in learning to ride. “Life as it is must be our field of action.”
It was strange to hear a priest speak like that. Something along the lines of “Love those who hate you” is what you would have expected. The second lieutenant smiled and murmured, “The overturned cart.”
“What?”
“I think the same, just the same. But you … Your position is a special one, a delicate one. Can a priest voluntarily go to war?”
Father Severyan propped himself up higher, on his elbow. His eyes blazed.
“Isaaki …”
“Filippovich.”
“Isaaki Filippovich!” All that he had not managed to say at confession came tumbling out in one breath. “At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church—none of them has been able to stop it. And don’t succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions.” Father Severyan’s enunciation was very precise. “War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from violence.”
November 1916 Page 10