One finds here, a completely different relation to one’s self, and life. It seems, almost, that it could be said, that one finds a difference so great as that between enjoying and suffering life. Such experiences of individuals, are not in any way that of any outer success, achievement or “greatness”. (Which are primary elements of the modern idea and experience of “happiness”.) Indeed, it is quite the opposite. Perhaps you might name this experience, in truthful symmetry — if from a limited perspective — an “American Nightmare”.
In the successful American Dream, the individual can often govern, control and order the world around them, in what is often truly an extraordinary amount of “freedom” of activity. In the other, one’s control is limited to one’s inner self. A maximum of outer freedom contrasts with an maximum of unfreedom.
The inner life, the integrity, the morality, the inner humanity of persons who went through such ordeals, was tried in the extreme. The respect, recognition, and audience, due such souls, is somewhat other in character, than that merited by “Hollywood Movie Stars”, globe-trotting rock musicians, multinational billionaires, and others of the world’s “rich and famous”. It is an obvious fact, that outer richness, does not necessarily entail, inner wealth and value. But it must be clearly recognized, that the first is predominately a “horizontal” accomplishment, while the latter is much closer to the “vertical” (e.g.“…such days and nights filled with the most profound questions concerning human life, nor felt so close to the essence of cosmic life.”) The strength, the inwardness, the inner greatness of those who survived such trials, with their integrity intact, is a kind which is so inward, so near to death; that it is probably amongst the closest to the edge, that die human being can experience life this side of death. It is a question of human depth; the inwardness of the human being in such an extreme.
Such extreme depth of (physical and inner) experience and suffering, is certainly not the goal of many; whether they desire the worldly American Dream, or not. Indeed, some deliberate desire for such a terrible “nightmare”, would seem to be somewhat malpsychic. But are we not spiritually mistaken, in not earnestly listening to those who have, indeed, already experienced the terrible “Gorgon faces of evil, disaster, and death”? Who have so deeply experienced the deepest questions of life and death, good and evil? Do not the best of such survivors, have tremendously valuable lessons to offer us, as to the relations of the spiritual and earthly in life? Of ‘this world’ and ‘that world’? Can we ignore those who have been so tested of “inner greatness”? Can, and will, America, and the West, learn from the suffering, and the soul and spirit of Russia and the European East [57]? Or does America naively dream, that life, world and reality, shall allow it to remain…
“…a child who has never gazed on the face of death.” [58]
TO SPIRITUALLY-SEEKING RUSSIANS:
Thoughts
It was the Communists who sought to break the Russian soul in two; to separate the intellect from the heart. “Religion corrupts the mind,” proclaimed Stalin. “The state must liberate people from such superstition,” he decreed.
“It must be understood that the structure of the Russian soul is all its own and completely different from that of westerners. The more penetrating minds of the West realize this well enough, and are attracted by the puzzle it presents.”
The Sophia, Lenin, and the Search for a New, Spiritual Russia
Those who nobly bear “Russian Soul [61] exist now — and shall for much time to come — in a tremendous tension, a great struggle between extremes, a profound contrast in their inner and outer lives, between “heaven and earth”, spirit and matter — between the solicitations and teachings of the Sophia, and “wisdom” of Marx and Lenin [62]. Between the spiritual truths incorporated into the Uspenski Sobor, and those of the Mausoleum of Vladimir I. Ulyanov.
Inside of the Moscow Kremlin, the Italian Aristotle Fioravanti’s golden, heaven-arching domes of the Third Rome [63], bespeak the heights of spirit toward which the Russian Soul may strive. Aside Red Square, stands a very earthly counterpart, which has somewhat the form of an Euclidian geometric volcanic eruption. The Cathedral is closer to a calm, consoling breath of spirit; the other to an angry stone, exploding upwards, out of the earth.
The “Assumption of the Virgin”, to heaven and eternity, is represented in that structure in which all the Czars were crowned; in the other, a (partial) earthly physical corpse of the founder of the Soviet state has been embalmed and preserved for the earthly memory ‘of all time’. [64]
The people of Russian soul, live, in their inner and outer lives, somewhere between the disparate opposition represented by these two extremes. Dimitri Karamazov felt himself to be a man tom, Orthodoxly, between the angel and insect in Man [65]. Are not the people of Russian Soul stretched, as it were, somewhere between the spiritual heights, and sub-earthly depths, incorporated in these two structures?
The Russian Soul exists, I believe, somewhere between the inner heights of Sophia [66] and the outer, worldly remains of Lenin. Seven decades after the triumph of the revolutionary — with his Western, profoundly secular doctrines — when now his earthly wisdom and accomplishment is in profound question and re-examination; perhaps it is again time, that the deep, religious, “Sophianic” aspect of Russian history and soul can be publicly considered, as fair and essential portion of the spiritual and intellectual worries and concerns of current and future Russia.
It was once said, that ‘if you scratch a Russian, you find a Tatar.’ [67] Would it not be better — and more hopeful to the spiritual progress of Mankind — if it were now more truthful to say: ‘scratch a Soviet, find a Christian’? However that may be — and the reception of a film like “Repentance”, and the thought of someone like Nicolas Berdyaev, certainly gives one much cause to wonder — while Russia has been “Soviet” for seven decades; it has been Christian, in one way or other, for ten centuries. In other words, it has been officially an atheist state for only seven percent of its history since the mass baptism in Kiev in 988 AD. That leaves ninety-three percent of its past history, heritage and traditions influenced by Christianity. Statistics of spiritual history perhaps worth considering.
A militant earthliness did its horrible best, to destroy a perhaps too otherworldly spirituality. Now that the wearisome failure of this enforced communism — to achieve an earthly utopian brotherhood, “a heaven on earth” — is no longer an endangered, fear-filled “heretic”’s truth; it is time that Russia and Russian souls look wisely and clearly at the truths of heaven and earth, history and Man, spirit and matter, all from which they must learn.
[57] While these words were being written, the battle for Bucharest, and the bloody civil war in Rumania was occurring. The football games seems to have been considered more important to be broadcast in America on television; but on one of the brief, hourly radio news reports, a story was reported, of a woman who — while crying uncontrollably because of the death of her fifteen year old son in the civil war — said that such sacrifice was necessary, if Rumania is finally to be free of the totalitarian regime. This bespeaks a painfully real, spiritual sense of the cost of “freedom”.
The people of Eastern Europe, who Solzhenitsyn included in his Harvard speech (see page 15), are now in a new move towards “freedom”; freedom in the social, political, economic and practical-material realities of life. Let us hope that the best people of these countries, maintain a clear, vital sense of inner freedom; as the realities of their outer lives, cultures and civilizations change. (I hope that I am among a host of “Westerners”, who are sincerely waiting to see what will develop, grow and emanate from this suffered East.)
On 16 January 1989 a documentary was broadcast on television entitled “Czechoslovakia; the Long wait for Spring”. Upon that program a woman described the condition of the younger generation as being one of “inner exile” — from their own lives and country. With the dramatic changes which have occurred “behind the Iron Curtain” in and since 1989, let us see what shall become of such “inner exiles” when they come home, to their own lives! And let us clearly listen to what they have to say!
Certainly the West has truths of life to learn from Eastern and Central Europe; if it interested to listen. I do not wish to imply, by my focus on prison experience, that this is the only source of those unique realities which the European East can give to the West. But those sensitive Westerners who have truly experienced the people in these lands, often have found the richness in their inner and relational lives.
[58] If Americans — in the nation which describes itself as the leader of the “Free World” — do not, in and with their freedom, choose to deepen their lives, so as to be able to face the “Gorgons of evil, disaster and death”; it is this author’s opinion that, either it shall continue to send spiritual children “to heaven”; or that perhaps indeed the “Gorgons” will indeed someday “freeze our unlined…[faces] into eternal stone”!
Americans “must”, in tremendous freedom, choose to face the “Gorgons”, which many others in the world have had as a fate
Free deeds vs. fated acts; outer freedom vs inner freedom; outer greatness vs. inner greatness; there is more than a little, being expressed about the inner psychology of these two worlds, in these few words.
[59] “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather”, November 29, 1989, was broadcasting from Rome, where President Gorbachof had traveled to meet with the Pope, and then to meet with President Bush in Malta. These words were spoken by CBS News Moscow Bureau Chief Barry Petersen to Anchorman Dan Rath.
[60] These words of Nicolas Berdyaev will serve here to “document” the subtle but actual fact of the Russian soul. Though there are more that enough un-“penetrating minds of the West”, and literate “Westernized” Russians, that this will probably be disputed, the quotation by the earlier United States Ambassador to the USSR George Kennan (see pages 50-1) is a contrasting but complementary view of “Russian”.
[61] The unique “Russian Soul” is a somewhat elusive
I have deliberately selected to stress the character of “Russian Soul”, in this essay, by capitalizing “Soul”, in those contexts where it either is being considered as an entity in itself — for so distinct I believe it is -, or I would like especially to emphasize it grander, nobler character, separate from those persons who may “have it”. While it has not always possible, according to context, to maintain such a distinction, I have generally not capitalized it use, when it’s meaning and significance or use is more restricted and limited — especially when it is use in relation to persons. See also Note 60.
[62] There will certainly come a time when even the ideological remnants of Marx and Lenin shall be overcome en toto. Socialism, of course, did not begin, nor does it completely fall, with them.
“Philosophy” came to mean “Marxist-Leninist Theory” in the Soviet Union — at least until perestroika. But philosophy, in a land so spiritually bound to the being and idea of Sophia, must eventually become true philo-sophia. It is symptomatic of such conditions in the USSR, that a work entitled
[63] The Uspenski-Sobor was held by the monk, Philotheos of Pskov, to be the “Third Rome”. Both the Church of Rome, the “first” Rome, and the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople — established by Constantine the Great as the New (Second) Rome; i.e. the center of political and spiritual power — had, to the views of the Russian division of the Orthodox Christian Church, fallen into heresy. And like the woman who fled into the wilderness in
The relation of Sophia (Zoe) Paleologos, niece of the last reigning Byzantine emperor, to the Italian architect Fioravanti, who, after having viewed the churches of Novgorod, Suzdal and Vladimir in Russia, designed and built the Uspenski-Sobor inside the Moscow Kremlin, is an important link here. This also established a mythical, historical link of the Second to the Third Rome (via the “First Rome”!). The non-political aspect of the idea of the “Third Rome” is seldom, in my opinion, sufficiently stressed, or recognized, in the numerous studies and articles which have been done on this subject. The political (“horizontal”) sense of this idea is considered to the detriment of the spiritual aspect, which itself relates deeply and profoundly to the relation of the “Sophia” in regard to Russia’s religious, cultural and intellectual past, as well as to its spiritual future. (See Note 66 below.)
Immediately proceeding the visit of the President of the United States (Reagan) to Moscow, and the Millennial celebrations of Christianity in Russia, in 1988, I had lectured to small, private audiences in Moscow and Leningrad on this theme of the Uspenski-Sobor, the Third Rome and the Sophia. When CBS (one of the major national television networks in the USA) began its special coverage of this historic visit, the “anchor man”, Dan Rather, began their week’s special broadcasts from Moscow, from Cathedral Square inside of the Moscow Kremlin. Dan Rather introduced the program by announcing that he was speaking from “the Third Rome”. Regrettably, of the many millions who saw this evening news of May 27, 1988, it is safe to say that extremely few had any idea, or notion, that very deep realities and issues were being, unintentionally, indicated by these words which he spoke.
During the Moscow Summit “the First Lady”, Nancy Reagan, was given a tour of the Uspenski-Sobor by Raisa Gorbachof. It is interesting to consider, that it was the idea and theme of an Icon of the Vladimirskaya, which Mrs. Gorbachof described to Mrs. Reagan, and which was shown on national television in America, and reported in
[64] The Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin, perhaps the most important church of pre-revolutionary Russia — and here not considering its themes and religious meanings — is not only a place of burial for Metropolitans and Patriarchs, but was the setting for the coronation of Grand Princes, Tsars and Emperors. The sacred act of “crowning” was originally felt to be a recognition and bestowal of wisdom and divine guidance, onto the head of the religious body or political state, that they might rule wisely and fairly, with divine inspiration and guidance.
Not intending to be macabre — rather just factual — it is worth considering that the physical brain of the “great leader”, entombed in the Mausoleum on Red Square, was removed for the study and examination of his great, wise mind. The contrast here, is worth noting; it bespeaks the profound contrast of a spiritual and a very earthly, physical view of man, and his inner life.
[65] See Dostoyevsky’s
[66] There exists a significant amount of written material on this elusive subject, dispersed in articles throughout many publications and languages. In regard to the special relation of the Sophia, to Russian religious and spiritual history, see, for example, Vladimir N. Iljin, “Die Lehre von Sophia, der Weisheit Gottes, in der neuesten russischen Theologie”, in
[67] Though I have been unable to locate a particular citation source for this phrase, I am certain that I have seen it included in some study or other of Russian history or character. It basically refers to alleged Asiatic/Oriental aspects of Russian character, history, social-political order, etc. The oven flourishing of interest and involvement in religion in the USSR — with the “liberalization” which began in the mid to late 1980’s — supports my alteration of the original expression.