The all-too-serious needs of the human heart expressed themselves in the cult of art, hoping that the death of the myth would not leave a terrifying void behind it. Those disappointed could not have been expected to find consolation in philosophy. Their training in hazy visions, waking dreams, half-tones, and allusions to nonexistent depths was too one-sided, while almost nobody had a philosophical education, since what the schools and universities taught as philosophy was scarcely fit for consumption. Only mathematicians and physicists ventured into those columned rooms, where marble busts of Descartes, Kant, and Husserl presided over debates on the philosophy of the data of consciousness, or, more often, on the philosophy of language. Once it had been pushed aside into the role of servant to the exact sciences, the friend of wisdom—as philosophy had once been known—could no longer promise any wisdom at all. Ordinary people perceived a world reduced to a mere function of the mind as a pale, unreal, and repulsive one; consequently, just as their bodies rejected unhealthy food, they refused to assimilate a knowledge that seemed to degrade reality. Undoubtedly, people still yearned for a philosophy of being, but there was no longer any such thing. Theologians had so thoroughly blocked its potential with Thomas Aquinas that it had proven impossible to unblock, despite a few brilliant attempts from the Catholic representatives of realism. Meanwhile, Marxism continued to pay the price for its eschatological prophecies of man’s freedom from alienation, which had met with total failure, since the universality of art was simply a result of the process of alienation on a massive scale. Although Marxism strove for a long time to cover up its ontological meagerness with various borrowings, mainly from the French Romantic poet Teilhard de Chardin, these attempts were never successful. It was no surprise that such conditions led to the spread of another class of wisdom, which did not even call itself philosophy—a fluid, vague, and indefinite wisdom, calling to mind the tangled menageries of half-animal, half-divine beings that adorned the great architectural edifices in the jungles of southern Asia. In any case, its origins clearly suggested this region, and while the missionary journeys of various gurus from India were nothing new, they had never before attracted so many disciples and adherents. For more critical minds, it was a sham wisdom, a parasitic growth thriving on the generally poor state of education and the habits instilled by mental chaos.
This was the historical background to Ephraim’s activities. He himself was far from an eremite like his patron, Saint Ephraim the Syrian, though the times in which he lived were not entirely unlike those of the Council of Nicaea. From his earliest youth, Ephraim had found himself among a cacophonous mélange of races, languages, and traditions, in a great bouillabaisse of civilizations, and he was whirled around by its eddying movement like all his contemporaries, most of whom were the homeless descendants of the Christian churches and the synagogue, further deprived even of the surrogate religious consolations that art had temporarily supplied. He encountered a multitude of sects and fraternities, serving as shelters and sources of passable warmth for an atomized humanity, and he met more than one of their founders, yoga masters, magicians, and charlatans. The old chemical preparations, taken collectively for the purposes of spiritual elevation, still found stubborn conservative supporters, who ran countless meditation houses and Timothy Leary Institutes, but the convenient electro-exciters were much more popular, as the flow of current to the nerve centers in the brain could be regulated, so that cosmic bliss came without the transitional stages of diabolical torment that accompanied almost all the synthetic imitations of peyote. Although moral and legal acceptance had taken away much of the charm of the so-called sex orgies, they had not disappeared, and their participants insisted that this was still the most effective way to experience what a long-forgotten philosopher had once termed the Metaphysical Feeling of the Strangeness of Existence. Admittedly, all these pursuits remained on a rather folkish level, while the more intellectually active were interested primarily in religion. Yet here they hit upon certain difficulties. The era inaugurated by the Reformation and the Protestant churches—with their later cultivation of the “death of God” theology over the course of many decades—had come to an end. Since then, the churches had steadily dissolved, supplying adepts for the new Buddhist monasteries. As a result of its different civilizational foundations, this western Buddhism represented less a religion than a form of the hazy eastern wisdom we have already discussed. Religion meant the combined Roman and Orthodox churches. Yet the very type of imagination shared by the people of the time formed an almost insurmountable barrier—whether or not they desired to believe—so that even the most ardent among them were lost somewhere on the border between Christianity and agnosticism.
Ephraim had drawn certain conclusions from the collapse of the myth of art. For there was much to ponder: the doctrine of “correspondences,” once stolen from Emmanuel Swedenborg, had served poets and their disciples, rhetoricians and grammarians, in defense of the symbolic code that permitted human beings to communicate their moments of illumination—their brushes with the impenetrable core of being—to one another. The whole movement that gave birth to abstract art over the course of 150 years ultimately reduced itself to this principle in various forms. Yet the promise of communication led to its negation, raising a Tower of Babel in the hubbub of pianos clamoring to drown one another out. If the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments remained the only fully formed voice of man, in spite of all the efforts of this crowd of talents and geniuses, then one had to acknowledge that divinity had penetrated humanity only once, and that the fundamental error of art was the error of all surrogates. Perhaps Ephraim would not have been so harsh had he not observed at such close quarters the miracle workers prescribing their chemical and electric “shortcuts” to the inexpressible, and had he not even taken part in some of these experiments in his youth. The connection between these “shortcuts” and the dreams of artists was beyond doubt to him. After all, had the poets not been the first to discover the “artificial paradises” of hashish and opium back in the age of steam and gas lamps, thus revealing what they were truly striving toward—for instance, as one of them put it, “through the disorganization of all the senses”? Ephraim was neither a philosopher nor a theologian. He wished to communicate with others beyond a domain that had been thoroughly compromised, even if the fanatics of aesthetic experience still defended it here and there. He resisted the silence that had been imposed on all by the disintegration of speech into mere sounds, mutterings, and shrieks. The presence of men and women gathered together to experience their own fragility and impermanence in time—their humanity—was crucially significant, but it was necessary to put speech into their mouths, and that speech could be imparted only by ritual. From the moment of the abolition of Latin, the Catholic liturgy had turned increasingly toward the remnants of local folk traditions, which had retained their simple and comprehensible language, until finally Negro spirituals came to form the very foundation of the ceremony. Without denying the merits of this genre, Ephraim—who understood his own craft as an ability to shape ready-made material, just as the painters of icons had once done—turned to forgotten liturgical texts in Latin and Old Church Slavonic, as well as to the Bible. The thinking of his patron, author of hymns and homilies, was apparently not without influence on his intentions. “The History of Ephraim, Deacon of Edessa,” preserved in the manuscript of Palladius’s “Paradise,” tells of a dream that Ephraim the Syrian once had in his youth, before he had written any of his numerous works. He dreamed that a vine heavy with grapes grew from his mouth, and great flocks of birds swooped down upon them, but the more they ate, the more numerous and abundant the grapes became.
If Ephraim entertained any hope that he might help somebody, then we can imagine that this hope must have been modest, as he showed a good sense of the moderation appropriate to his time. He was active within his own community or congregation, which did not differ in any fundamental way from similar spontaneously arising groups, all of which were loos
ely associated with one another, a circumstance made possible by the blurring of divisions between believers and nonbelievers, as they had once been known, and by the decision of the Church to relinquish all administrative control—in short, the changes delivered by the First Council of Jerusalem. Since mass appeal and universality were synonymous with degradation and contamination, nobody was keen to share with other groups the forms of ritual they had invented for themselves. Accordingly, the variations introduced by Ephraim—for instance, the sermon in rhythmical speech and the confession as a kind of therapy session with the whole congregation instead of a doctor or priest—were the property of a single group, and remained unknown outside it. We publish them here for the first time, drawing on the extant notes and recordings.
FROM PART TWO: THE MASS OF THE CATECHUMENS
DEACON:
I go to the altar of my God.
CONGREGATION:
To the God who makes joyful my youth.
DEACON:
Judge me and put not my case with the case of the godless.
Let not the debased and cunning man have power over me.
CONGR.:
You are my strength; why have you spurned me?
Why do I walk the earth in sorrow, while my enemy remains with me day and night?
DEACON:
Send light and truth, for they shall lead me to your mountain, to your sacred home.
CONGR.:
I go to the altar of my God, to the God who makes joyful my youth.
DEACON:
I shall praise you on the zither, for you are my God. Why does my sorrow cease not and why do I live with the fear of death?
CONGR.:
Lay your hope in God, for time shall be fulfilled and you shall praise him in the glory of your body.
DEACON:
I go to the altar of my God.
CONGR.:
To the God who makes joyful my youth.
DEACON:
I call to him and he comes to my aid.
CONGR.:
He who created heaven and earth.
DEACON:
Before him, my God, I confess.
CONGR.:
May God almighty have mercy upon you and heeding not your errors lead you into eternal life.
DEACON:
Amen.
CONGR.:
I confess before God almighty and before those who died long ago yet still live and hear me, whatsoever were their names—Mary, Peter, John, Paul—before all their holy congregation, and before you, my brother, that I have erred greatly in thought, word, and deed. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.
Therefore I ask the people here with me, Mary, Peter, John, Paul, and all their holy congregation, and also you, my brother, to pray for me to the Lord of heaven and earth, our God.
DEACON:
May God almighty have mercy upon you and heeding not your errors lead you into eternal life.
CONGR.:
Amen.
DEACON:
May our hidden, merciful, and almighty God show us his mildness, his goodness and his forgiveness of sins.
CONGR.:
Amen.
DEACON:
You shall not hide yourself from us and you shall restore us to life.
CONGR.:
And your people shall be joyful in you.
DEACON:
Let us come to know your mercy.
CONGR.:
And give us faith in salvation through you.
DEACON:
Hear my prayer.
CONGR.:
And let my cry come to you.
DEACON:
Take us away, we beseech you O Lord, from our iniquities, that we might become worthy to accept the words of your mysteries with pure mind.
Through our oneness with your son Jesus. Amen.
Through the good deeds of those whose hands have touched this stone and of all who love you, send forth my sins into oblivion. Amen.
Here I lay you into the flame; may you find the blessing of him in whose name you shall burn.
Peace be with you.
CONGR.:
And with your spirit.
Lesson (Ecclesiastes 12: 1–8)
1Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw nigh, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”;
2before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain,
3in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look through the windows are dimmed,
4and the doors on the street are shut; when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the voice of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low;
5they are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails, because man goes to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets;
6before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, 7and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
8Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity.
CONGR.:
In you, O Lord, have we abided from generation to generation.
DEACON:
As you cleansed the lips of the prophet Isaiah with a burning coal, may you cleanse my heart and my lips, almighty God, so that I may become worthy to proclaim your good news. Through Jesus your anointed one, our Lord. Amen.
Peace be with you.
CONGR.:
And with your spirit.
Gospel (Matthew 21: 18–22)
18In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he was hungry. ‘19And seeing a fig tree by the wayside he went to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once. 20When the disciples saw it, they marveled, saying, “How did the fig tree wither at once?”21 ‘And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and never doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it will be done. 22And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”
Sermon
He was hungry. That, brothers and sisters, is all we can understand
when we ponder, and I know that each one of you must ponder,
upon this extraordinary meeting of our congregation here.
For you and you and I repeat the words to ourselves: I am,
I am here. My hand, my knee, my face, so familiar to the touch,
my face, from reflections in mirrors and the eyes of other people.
My hunger, my bodily greed, my tears, my weariness.
And yet—how is it possible?—we come together to say “we,”
recognizing ourselves in others. Oh, among all the world’s riddles,
this one torments us most: the particular and the general.
For is not each of us here the one and only to himself,
desiring the other only insofar as the other might pay homage to him,
strengthening him in his ambition, bestowing gifts and tending to him?
Is not each of us the one and only truly called to exist?
So whence this word “we,” brothers and sisters?
He was hungry. Only in the most simple and elementary things
do we recognize ourselves. For who can truly be certain
that another person has ever known joy or sorrow?
Only in hunger and in thirst, our common infancy.
He became angry, like a child unable to comprehend
that there are laws for things, just as we rebel every day
against the immutable order of cause and effect
&nb
sp; that turns our dreams about ourselves into nothing.
Yet the fig tree has withered. A childish victory,
a divine victory! And so the child is elevated,
and so our own naïve power is acknowledged.
We exist under an iron law: what lives must die,
what would exist alone is sealed in a number,
vanishing into millennia, into billions of billions.
Yet the fig tree has withered. Can you hear the cry of the disciples,
who have seen and touched, and yet can scarcely believe?
* * *
The Mountains of Parnassus Page 8