Part 6

Again, I would draw attention to the far from accidental circumstances that his preaching coincided with the 'serenest' period of his life. He who had in time past been a homeless wanderer, a poor man who had not where to lay his head, had provided himself with a family and a house of his own, even with money (for his wife was saving). The failure had become a celebrity; the convict a full citizen. The underworld, where-into his fate had but lately driven him, it might seem for ever, now appeared to him a phantasmagoria which never had been real. In the galleys and the underworld had been born within him a great hunger for God which lived long; there he fought a great fight, the fight of life against death; there for the first time were made the new and awful experiments which allied Dostoevsky with everything that is rebellious and restless on earth. What Dostoevsky wrote during the closing years of his life (not merely _The Journal of an Author,_ but _The Brothers Karamazov_ as well) has value only in so far as Dostoevsky's _past_ is reflected therein. He made no new step onwards. As he was, so he remained, on the eve of a great truth. But in the old days that did not suffice him, he hungered for something beyond; but now he does not want to struggle, and he cannot explain to himself or to others what is really happening within him. He pretends to be struggling still, nay, more, he behaves as though he had won the final victory, and demands that his triumph should be acknowledged by public opinion. He loves to think that the night is already past and the actual day begun: and the galleys and the underworld, reminding him that the day is not yet, are no more. All the evidences of a complete illusion of victory seem to be there--let him only choose the text and preach! Dostoevsky clutched at orthodoxy. Why not Christianity? Because Christianity is not for him who has a house, a family, money, fame, and a father-land. Christ said: 'Let him leave all that he hath and follow me.' But Dostoevsky was afraid of solitude, he desired to be the prophet of modern, settled men to whom pure Christianity, unadapted to the needs of civilised existence in a governed state, is unfitted. How should a Christian seize Constantinople, drive out the Tartars from the Crimea, reduce all Slavs to the condition of the Poles, and the rest--for all the projects of Dostoevsky and the _Moscow Gazette_ defy enumeration? So, before accepting the Gospel, he must explain it....

However strange it may appear, it must be confessed that one cannot find in the whole of literature a single man who is prepared to accept the Gospel as a whole, without interpretation. One man wants to seize Constantinople according to the Gospel, another to justify the existing order, a third to exalt himself or to thrust down his enemy; and each considers it as his right to diminish from, or even to supplement, the text of Holy Writ. I have, of course, only those in view who acknowledge, at least in word, the divine origin of the New Testament; since he who sees in the Gospel only one of the more or less remarkable books of his library, naturally has the right to subject it to whatever critical operations he may choose.

But here we have Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Soloviev. It is generally believed, and the belief is particularly supported and developed by the most recent criticism, that Tolstoi alone rationalised Christianity, while Dostoevsky and Soloviev accepted it in all the fullness of its mysticism, denying reason the right to separate truth from falsehood in the Gospel. I consider this belief mistaken: for Dostoevsky and Soloviev were afraid to accept the Gospel as the fountain of knowledge, and relied much more upon their own reason and their experience of life than upon the words of Christ. But, if there was a man among us who, though but in part, took the risk of accepting the mysterious and obviously dangerous words of the Gospel precepts, that man was Leo Tolstoi. I will explain myself.

We are told that Tolstoi made the attempt, in his works published abroad, to explain the miracles of the Gospel in a way intelligible to human reason. Dostoevsky and Soloviev, on the other hand, readily accepted the inexplicable. But generally the miracles of the Gospel attract the people who believe least, for it is impossible to repeat the miracles, and this being so, then it follows that a merely external faith is sufficient, a mere verbal assertion. A man says that he believes in miracles: 'his reputation as a religious man is made, both in his own mind and in others', and as for the rest of the Gospel, there remains 'interpretation.' Consider, for instance, the doctrine of non-resistance to evil. It need not be said that the doctrine of non-resistance is the most terrible, and the most irrational, and mysterious thing that we read in the Gospel. All our reasoning soul is indignant at the thought that full material freedom should be given to the murderer to accomplish his murderous acts. How can you allow a murderer to kill an innocent child before your very eyes, and yet not draw the sword? Who has the right to give that abominable precept? Soloviev[3] and Dostoevsky alike repeat that question, the one in a disguised, the other in an open attack on Tolstoi. Yet since the Gospel plainly declares 'Resist not evil,' both of our believers in miracles have suddenly remembered reason and turned to its testimony, knowing that reason will naturally destroy any meaning whatever that may be in the precept. In other words, they repeat the question of the doubting Jews concerning Christ: 'Who is He that speaketh as one having authority?' God commanded Abraham that he should offer up his son. By his reason, his human reason, Abraham refused to acknowledge any intelligible meaning in the cruel command, but yet made ready to act according to the word of God and made no attempt to rid himself of the hard and inhuman obligation by cunning interpretation. But Dostoevsky and Soloviev refuse to fulfil Christ's demands so soon as they find no justification in the human reason. Yet they say that they believe that Lazarus was raised from the dead and that the man who was sick of a palsy was cured, and all the other miracles which are related by the Apostles. Why then does their belief end just at the point where it begins to place obligations upon them? Why the sudden recourse to reason, when we know exactly that Dostoevsky came to the Gospels only to be rid of the power of reason? But that was in the days of the underworld. Now the 'serene' period of his life has begun. But Soloviev, evidently, had never even known the underworld. Only Tolstoi boldly and resolutely tries to test the truth of the Christian teaching, not in his thoughts alone, but in part in his life also. From the human point of view it is mad to make no resistance to evil. He knows that every whit as well as Dostoevsky, Soloviev and the rest of his many opponents. But he is really seeking in the Gospels that divine madness, since human reason does not satisfy him. Tolstoi began to follow the Gospel in that clouded period of his life when he was haunted by the phantoms of Ivan Ilyich and Pozdnyshiev. Here belief in miracles, belief in the abstract, divorced from life, avails nothing. For belief's sake one must surrender all that is dearest--even a son--to the sacrifice. Who is He that spake as one having authority? We cannot now verify whether He did in truth raise Lazarus from the dead, or satisfy thousands with a few handfuls of loaves. But if we unhesitatingly perform His precepts, then we may discover whether He has given us the truth.... So it was with Tolstoi; and he turned to the Gospel which is the sole and original source of Christianity. But Dostoevsky turned to the Slavophiles and the teachings of their state-religion. Orthodoxy infallible, not Catholicism nor Protestantism nor even simple Christianity; and then, the original idea: _Russland, Russland über alles._ Tolstoi could prophesy nothing in history, but then, as if deliberately, he does not interfere with the historical life. For him our present reality does not exist: he concentrates himself wholly upon the riddle which God set Abraham. But Dostoevsky desired at all costs to prophesy, prophesied constantly and was constantly mistaken. We have not taken Constantinople, we have not united the Slavs, and even the Tartars still live in the Crimea. He terrified us by prophesying that Europe would be drenched in rivers of blood because of the warfare between the classes, while in Russia, thanks to our Russian ideal of universal humanity, not only would our internal problems be peacefully solved, but a new unheard-of word would still be found whereby we should save hapless Europe. A quarter of a century has passed. So far nothing has happened in Europe. But we are drowning ourselves, literally drowning ourselves, with blood. Not only is our alien population oppressed, Slav and non-Slav alike, but our own brother is tortured, the miserable starving Russian peasant who understands nothing at all. In Moscow, in the heart of Russia, women, children, and old men have been shot down. Where now is the Russian universal soul of which Dostoevsky prophesied in his speech on Pushkin? Where is love, where are the Christian precepts? We see only 'Governmentalism,' over which the Western nations also fought; but they fought with means less cruel and less hostile to civilisation. Russia will again have to learn from the West as she had to learn more than once before. And Dostoevsky would have done far better had he never attempted to prophesy.

But there is no great harm done even if he did prophesy. I am glad with all my heart even now that he rested a little while from the galleys at the end of his life. I am deeply convinced that even had he remained in the underworld until the day of his death, yet he would have found no solution of the questions which tormented him. However much energy of soul a man puts into his work, he will still remain 'on the eve' of truth, and will not find the solution he desires. That is the law of human kind. And Dostoevsky's preaching has done no harm. Those listened to him who, even without his voice, would have marched on Constantinople, oppressed the Poles, and made ready the sufferings which are necessary to the soul of the peasant. Though Dostoevsky gave them his sanction, on the whole he adds nothing to them. They had no need of literary sanction, quite correctly judging that in practical matters not the printed page, but bayonets and artillery are of deciding value.

All that he had to tell, Dostoevsky told us in his novels, which even now, twenty-five years after his death, attract all those who would wrest from life her secrets. And the title of prophet, which he sought so diligently, considering that it was his by right, did not suit him at all. Prophets are Bismarcks, but they are Chancellors too. The first in the village is the first in Rome.... Is a Dostoevsky doomed eternally to be 'on the eve'? Let us once more try to reject logic, this time perhaps not logic alone, and say: 'So let it be.'

[Footnote 3: _War and Christianity,_ by Vladimir Soloviev.]

PENULTIMATE WORDS

I

_De omnibus dubitandum_

There are but few orthodox Hegelians left among philosophers nowadays, yet Hegel is still supreme over the minds of our contemporaries. It may even be that certain of his ideas have taken deeper root nowadays than when Hegelianism was in full bloom: for instance, the conception that history is the unfolding of the idea in reality, or, to put it more briefly and in terms more familiar to the modern mind--the idea of progress. Try to convince an educated person of the contrary: you are sure to be worsted. But, _de omnibus dubitandum,_ which means in other words, that doubt is called upon to fulfil its mission above all in those cases where a conviction is particularly strong and unshakable. Therefore one must admit, whether he will or no, that progress so called--the development of mankind in time--is a fiction.

We have wireless telegraphy, radium and the rest, yet we stand no higher than the Romans or the Greeks of old. You admit this? Then, one step further: although we have wireless telegraphy and all the other blessings of civilisation, still we stand no higher than red-or black-skinned savages. You protest: but the principle compels. You began to doubt: then what is the use of drawing back?

For myself, I must confess that the idea of the spiritual perfection of savages entered my mind but lately, when, for the first time for many years, I looked through the works of Tylor, Lubbock and Spencer. They speak with such certainty of the advantages of our spiritual organisation, and have such sincere contempt for the moral misery of the savage, that in spite of myself stole in the thought: Is it not exactly here, where all are so certain that no one ever examines the question, that the source of error is to be found? High time to recall Descartes and his rule! And as soon as I began to doubt, all my former certainty--of course I fully shared the opinion of the English anthropologists--disappeared in a moment.... It began to appear that the savage indeed is higher and more important than our savants, and not our materialists only, as Professor Paulsen thinks, but our idealists, metaphysicians, mystics, and even our convinced missionaries (sincere believers, not the profit-mongering sort), whom Europe sends forth into the world to enlighten the backward brethren. It seemed to me that the credit transactions common among savages, with a promise to pay in the world beyond the grave, have a deep meaning. And human sacrifices! In them Spencer sees a barbarity, as an educated European should. I also see in them barbarity, because I also am a European and have a scientific education. But I deeply envy their barbarity, and curse the cultivation which has herded me together with believing missionaries, idealist, materialist, and positivist philosophers, into the narrow fold of the sultry and disgusting apprehensible world. We may write books to prove the immortality of the soul, but our wives won't follow us to the other world: they will prefer to endure the widow's lot here on the earth. Our morality, based on religion, forbids us to hurry into eternity. And so in everything. We are guessing, at the best we are sicklied with dreams, but our life passes outside our guesses and our dreams. One man still accepts the rites of the Church, however strange they may be, and seriously imagines that he is brought into contact with other worlds. Beyond the rites no step is taken. Kant died when he was eighty; had it not been for cholera, Hegel would have lived a hundred years; while the savages--the young ones kill the old and ... I dare not complete the sentence for fear of offending sensitive ears. Again I recall Descartes and his rule: who is right, the savages or we? And if the savages are right, can history be the unfolding of the idea? And is not the conception of progress in time (that is the development from the past to the present and to the future) the purest error? Perhaps, and most probably, there is development, but the direction of this development is in a line perpendicular to the line of time. The base of the perpendicular may be any human personality. May God and the reader forgive one the obscurity of the last words. I hope the clarity of the foregoing exposition will to some extent atone for it.

II

_Self-renunciation and Megalomania_

We are obliged to think that nothing certain can be said either of self-renunciation or of megalomania, though each one of us in his own experience knows something of the former as well as of the latter. But it is well known that the impossibility of solving a question never yet kept people from reflecting. On the contrary: to us the most alluring questions are those to which there is no actual, no universally valid, answer. I hope that sooner or later, philosophy will be thus defined, in contrast to science:--philosophy is the teaching of truths which are binding on none. Thereby the accusation so often made against philosophy will be removed, that philosophy properly consists of a series of mutually exclusive opinions. This is true, but she must be praised for it, not blamed: there is nothing bad in it, but good, a very great deal of good. On the other hand, it is bad, extremely bad, that science should consist of truths universally binding. For every obligation is a constraint. Temporarily, one can submit to a restraint, put on a corset, fetters; one can agree to anything temporarily. Rut who will voluntarily admit the mastery over himself of an eternal law? Even from the quiet and clear Spinoza I sometimes hear a deep sigh, and I think that he is longing for freedom--he who wasted all his life, all his genius in the glorification of necessity.... With such an introduction one may say what he pleases.

It seems to me that self-renunciation and megalomania, however little they resemble one another apparently, may be observed successively, even simultaneously, in one and the same person. The ascetic, who has denied life and humbles himself before everybody, and the madman (like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky), who affirms that he is the light, the salt of the earth, the first in the whole world or even in the whole universe--both reach their madness--I hope there is no necessity to demonstrate that self-renunciation as well as megalomania is a kind of madness--under conditions for the most part identical. The world does not satisfy the man and he begins to seek for a better. All serious seeking brings a man to lonely paths, and lonely paths, it is well known, end in a great wall which sets a fatal bound to man's curiosity. Then arises the question, how shall a man pass beyond the wall, by overcoming either the law of impenetrability or the equally invincible law of gravity, in other words, how shall a man become infinitely small or infinitely great? The first way is that of self-renunciation: I want nothing, I myself am nothing, I am infinitely small, and therefore I can pass through the infinitely small pores of the wall.

The other way is megalomania. I am infinitely strong, infinitely great, I can do all things, I can shatter the wall, I can step over it, though it be higher than all the mountains of the earth and though it has hitherto dismayed the strongest and the bravest. This is probably the origin of the two most mysterious and mighty spiritual transformations. There is no single religion upon which are not more or less clearly impressed the traces of these methods of man's struggle with the poverty of his powers. In ascetic religions the tendency to self-renunciation predominates: Buddhism glorifies the suppression of the individual and has for its ideal Nirvana. The Greeks dreamed of Titans and heroes. The Jews consider themselves the chosen people and await the Messiah. As for the Gospel, it is hard to say to which method of struggle it gives the preference. On the one hand are the great miracles, the raising from the dead, the healing of the sick, the power over the winds and the sea; on the other: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit.' The Son of God who will sit on the right hand of power now lives in the company of publicans, beggars, and harlots, and serves them. 'Who is not for us, is against us'; the promise to thrust down his enemies into the fiery hell; eternal torment for blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and equal with these the exhortation to the extreme of humility and love to the enemy: 'Turn to him the other cheek also.' Throughout, the Gospel is permeated with contradictions, which are not extraneous and historical, concerned with facts, but intrinsic, contradictions of mood, of 'ideals,' as the modern man would say. What is in one chapter praised as the noblest task is in the next degraded to an unworthy labour. It is in no way strange that the most opposite teachings should find justification in this little book, which is half composed of repetitions. The Inquisitors, the Jesuits, and the old ascetics called themselves. Christians; so do the modern Protestants and our Russian sectaries. To a greater or less degree they all are right, even the Protestants. Such contradictory elements are intertwined in the Gospel, that men, above all those who travel the high road, who can move in one direction only, and under one conspicuous flag, who have become accustomed to believe in the unity of reason and the infallibility of logical laws, could never fully grasp the teaching of the Gospel, and always aspired to give to the words and deeds of Christ a uniform explanation which should exclude contradictions, and more or less correspond to the common conceptions of the work and problems of life. They read in the mysterious book, 'Have faith and thou shalt say to this mountain: be thou removed,' and understood it to mean that always, every hour and every minute, one must think and desire the self-same thing, prescribed beforehand and fully denned; whereas in these words the Gospel allows and commends the maddest and most perilous experiments. That which is, did not exist for Christ; and only that existed, which is not.

The old Roman, Pilate, who was apparently an educated man, clever and not bad at heart, though weak in character, could neither understand nor elucidate the cause of the strange struggle which took place before him. With his whole heart he pitied the pale Jew before him, who was guilty of nothing. 'What is truth?' he asked Christ. Christ did not answer him, nor could He answer, not through ignorance, as the heathen desired to believe, but because that question cannot be answered in words. It would have been necessary to take Pilate's head, and turn it towards the other side, in order that he might see what he had never seen before. Or, still better; to have used the method to which the hunch-backed pony turns in the fairy tale, in order to change sleepy Ivanushka into a wizard and a beauty: first, to plunge him into a cauldron of boiling milk, then into another of boiling water, then a third of ice-cold water. There is every reason to suppose that with this preliminary preparation Pilate would have begun to act differently, and I think the hunch-backed pony would agree that self-renunciation and megalomania would be a fair substitute for the cauldrons of the tale.

Great privations and great illusions so change the nature of man that things which seemed before impossible, become possible, and the unattainable, attainable.

III

_Eternal Truths_

In the _Memorabilia_ Xenophon tells of the meeting of Socrates with the famous sophist Hippias. When Hippias came to Socrates, the latter as usual held forth, and as usual asked why it is that men who wish to learn carpentry or smith's work know to whom they should apply, but if they desire to learn virtue, cannot possibly find a teacher. Hippias, who had heard these opinions of Socrates many times before, remarked ironically: 'So you're still saying the same old things, that I heard from you years ago!' Socrates understood and accepted the challenge, as he always accepted challenges of this kind. A dispute began, by which it was demonstrated (as usual in Plato and Xenophon) that Socrates was a stronger dialectician than his opponent. He succeeded in showing that his conception of justice was based on the same firm foundation as all his other conceptions, and that convictions once formed, if they are true, are as little liable to the action of time as noble metals to rust.