N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)
SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY AND
SECTARIANISM
IN RUSSIA
(1916 - #252a)
Russian text
I.
The type of religious
thought, which conditionally might be called Spiritual Christianity,
possesses a great significance and occupies a large place in Russian
national life, but it is not [yet] altogether possible for it
to be defined through purely bookish sources or separate religious
thinkers. This current -- is from life, but not literary, and
it is moreso a matter of the people, rather than cultural. Much
is shady in this current, but it is possible all the same to discover
in it a characteristic type of religious thought and a religious
sense of life. This religious movement subsists within the very
sediment of national life, in sectarianism, in the popular search
for God and the Divine pravda-truth in life. This is a withdrawal
from cultural life, a flight from the sins of civilisation, a
search for Divine simplicity. This -- is wandering Rus’,
a total absorption by questions of faith and righteous life. Wandering
Rus’, seeking the City, having detached itself from the
way of life of Russia and from the way of life of religiosity.
To it belongs not only folk from the “people”, peasants,
but from all the levels of Russian society, beginning with the
very highest stratum, sensing the impossibility to live further
with the unrighteousness and godlessness of worldly life. The
moral pathos is very strong in this type of spiritual life, but
the moral problem is concerned here not at the summits of personal
and social life, but in the religious depths. L. Tolstoy belongs
to this type and was of influence upon all this spiritual movement.
From the vast life of L. Tolstoy and all its path there resulted
jolts felt in the spiritual life of our nation. The split of Tolstoy
from cultural society and his passionate search for the Divine
simplicity of life was felt by many, as a return to the wellsprings
of nature and national life, distorted by all the fatal process
of civilisation. And those, who directly sensed themselves as
natural or as people of the people, were wont to have sympathy
for Tolstoy and consider themselves close to him. I do not think,
that the actual teachings of Tolstoy have had so much a great
significance, as rather what might be called Tolstoyanism. The
weakness [and dullness] of Tolstoy’s religion is quite easily
discerned and to criticise the Tolstoyan doctrine is all too easy.
Tolstoyanism in the narrow sense of the word -- is an insignificant
manifestation and quite incommensurable with the greatness of
Tolstoy himself, with the extent of his spiritual thirst and his
destiny. But the tremendous significance of Tolstoy is in this,
as a manifestation of spiritual life, as a path and a destiny.
Indeed even the antipode of Tolstoy, Nietsche, is first of all
a matter of destiny, a great manifestation of life, and not as
a teacher, not as the founder of a school. It is an artistry of
life, and in its significance it goes beyond all the artistry
of thought, the artistry of writing. This artistry is altogether
not that, in which people carry out in life their idea. These
-- are people of a remarkable and exceptional inner destiny, and
not people practical in external attainments. But this current,
which thus it might be characterised, takes on all more and more
a mystical hue. The Tolstoyan and sectarian rationalism conquers
by another spirit. At the centre of this religious vital current
stands the image of Aleksandr Dobroliubov. Dobroliubov’s
trend they sometimes call a mystical Tolstoyanism. This definition
is too external. But undoubtedly A. Dobroliubov, in contrast to
Tolstoy, -- is a mystic, and he like Tolstoy flees from culture,
flees the untruth of contemporary society for the simple life,
to nature and to the people. In contrast to Tolstoy, Dobroliubov
has no set of teachings, no doctrine, nor any sort of religious
philosophy. In this, perhaps, is his superiourity. Dobroliubov
is first of all a vital destiny, a vital path, a manifestation
of Russian spiritual life. He has fled culture and fled from all
the books, from all the literary. Tolstoy to the end of his days
remained a writer, a teacher, a man of books. And indeed the recent
“withdrawal” of Tolstoy occurred only shortly before
his death. And even when he had already made his inner spiritual
“withdrawal”, he still for quite a long while continued
to live in his household, on his estate, having not the strength
to break the thread with the past. Dobroliubov withdrew more radically
and consequently attained greater simplicity. It is known moreover,
that the life of Dobroliubov was a matter of reproach for Tolstoy,
and the meeting with him heightened in him the tormenting urge
for a final withdrawal. But it mustneeds be remembered, that for
Dobroliubov it was easier to give up books, and writing, and teaching,
than it was for Tolstoy. Too tremendous was everything that Tolstoy
needed to renounce and depart from. Dobroliubov was more free
a man, for him the only thing acute was lived-through decadence,
having begotten nothing of the literary-remarkable, only essays
on Satanism in the modern style, only the deadly anguish of the
final words of a decayed culture. He knew neither great glory,
nor riches, nor the pathos of family kinship, nor sweet attachment
to his estate. Tolstoy was very burdened, weighed down, and in
comparison with him Dobroliubov was at ease and up in the air.
In Tolstoy there was an attraction towards the land, which did
not permit him to become a genuine wanderer. Dobroliubov was more
aethereal, and he became a genuine wanderer. For many years he
[was already living] (lived) with simple people at Privolzha and
[was wandering] (wandered) through the Russian land. And this
former decadent with wasted soul succeeded in seeking out a whole
religious movement amidst the wandering and searching of the City
of Rus’. He creates a new Franciscanism. And mystically
the Tolstoyans are rendered Dobroliubovians.
A. Drobroliubov
with his book, “From a Book Invisible” (“Iz
knigi nevidimoi”), finished with his old life in culture,
his wanton and sinful life. Of itself this book is an end of the
old life, and not the beginning of a new, it is all still within
the cultural and worldly life, and not in the life Divine. This
is felt in the non-simplicity of style, in the imitation of the
language of Nietzsche, in the fragmentedness and absence of inspiration.
This is all just a book, in the old sense of the word, and not
new life. But in the book are the remarkable words: “I forsake
forever all visible books, so as to take part in Thy Book. All
this written down I do but think little, as small the law of Moses
in front of grace. With visible paper never wilt Thou express
the Primal Truth and Mystery. Enter ye therefore into the Book
of Life”. In these words he reaches the ultimate acuteness
of the tragedy of creativity and the tragedy of culture, in them
is sensed the Russian thirst to transform literature into life,
culture -- into being, to direct the creative act onto the creation
of a new heaven and a new earth. This thirst was already there
with Gogol, with Dostoevsky, with Tolstoy. Ibsen knew also this
problem. Dobroliubov comprehended, that a book is a law and not
grace, and that in writing and art there is not wrought Life.
And his comprehension he expressed not in books, not upon “visible
paper”, but by entering into the “Book of Life”,
by his sacrificial pathway. The words of Dobroliubov very much
bring to mind the words, which conclude the book of the great
mystic Angelus Silesius, entitled the “Cherubinischerwandersmann”:
Friend,
tis enough. If thou dost wish the moreso on to read,
Go and
thyself be the writer, thyself become its source-becoming.
It is possible to doubt,
whether Dobroliubov would have become a writer and source-becoming,
and whether his thirst would be allayed. But the tremendous significance
of his life is impossible to deny. One cannot term Dobroliubov
a religious thinker, but in everything of his spiritual type it
is possible to discern a type of religious thought, characteristic
of Russian Spiritual Christianity.
II.
A. Dobroliubov, weary
and tormented, flees from man and human culture to the simplicity
of nature and the lifestyle of the people. He seeks salvation
and respite in religious populism, always connected with a religious
naturalism, with a deifying of the natural order as being benevolent.
This religious naturalism is often joined in together with the
Spiritual Christianity. Drobroliubov neither wants to nor can
he acknowledge, that culture is a pathway of the human spirit,
possessing religious meaning. Culture is rather a falling-away
from an essentially Divine world-order. Thus thought Tolstoy,
thus feels Dobroliubov, and thus too is the religious frame of
mind of all the Spiritual Christians from among the people. This
-- is not a creative religious pathway, and within it there is
not posited the religious problem about man. For this religious
type there is characteristic a denial of the religious meaning
of history and a departure, a falling out from the reciprocal
responsibilities of the world process. In it there is sensed a
passivity, an utmost submissiveness, something non-human, a tendency
towards Buddhism, towards the religious consciousness of the East,
towards pure monism, a negation of multiplicity and individuality.
With the Dobroliubovians, as regards their spiritual type, there
is no person, no man, and there is only but -- in general, only
God. The individualism of the religious path, affirmed by them,
leads to the negation of person. Only the way of Sobornost’
Communality, an avowing of reciprocal responsibility in the worldly
and historical process, leads to an affirmation of person. The
entering upon the “pathway” of the Dobroliubovian,
just as the sectarian, and also the theosophic, transforms man
into a means of a generalised oneness, an impersonal divinity.
It is a denying of the religious self worth of man, the denial
within God of an human countenance, and the denial of the need
of God within man. This -- is a Monophysite tendency. This religious
tendency always possesses its own historical denial of the mystery
of the Divine-human natures of Christ, and instead only acknowledging
the one Divine nature. Man is required to dissolve away within
God, to extinguish his own human nature, so as to give place to
God, the sole Divine power, to the Divine law, to the sole Divine
truth. For L. Tolstoy at the centre stands the Divine law, for
A. Dobroliubov -- Divine love. But with Tolstoy, and with Dobroliubov,
and a large part of the sectarians -- Spiritual Christians, there
is a denial of man as an independent being, as a religious principle,
in which is situated half of the religion of Christ. This type
of religious thought does not know a multiplicity of countenances,
as being worthy of the actual Divine efficacy. And even with the
consciousness of such mystics as Dobroliubov and certain of the
sectarians, rationally there is not the accepting of the antinomy
of the one and the many, of God and the (human) person. Man is
a downfall, false-being, which ought ultimately to be surmounted
in the Divine modality of being. Such a Christianity is interpreted
in the spirit of Eastern monism, the rational mysticism of the
One. There is no autonomous nor free human activity, only but
the singular pure Divine will. Everything human is only a covering,
and not the kernel. In the depths we find only the Divine, and
not the human “I”. Upon this spiritual ground there
can be neither justified nor conceived a world historical process.
The whole of human creativity comes off as false and an illusory
covering. There is a peculiar conjoining of naturalism with an
acosmism. The denial of man leads to a rationalisation of evil
and to the denial of everything darkly-irrational in life. Spiritual
Christianity, too smoothed-out and simplifying the complexity
of life, begets too much the happy faces and types. A. Dobroliubov
does not proceed from out of spiritual freedom, and he seeks for
the centre not within himself, but in the simplicity of the people
and the simplicity of nature.
III.
It is very difficult
to characterise the religious searchings in the people and in
that wandering Rus’, which is formed from all layers of
society, as regards books and printed sources. In this characteristically
Russian religious medium there can be met with genuine religious
thinkers, theosophists with very complete a religious system.
But these people do not write books. They enter into the Book
of Life. There exists a mistaken literature about sectarianism,
but it is devoted to some separate sects, and this literature
does not cover the deep matters of sectarian religious life. In
the majority of instances it investigates sectarianism from a
social, and not from a religious point of view, it treats only
the external and goes not to the soul of sectarianism. The missionary
investigations of the sectarians are interested exclusively in
the exposing of heresy and putting down the sectarians. The liberal
literature about sectarianism is interested exclusively in the
defense of sectarianism in legal and political regards. But neither
the one, nor the other approach can be termed free and pervasive
into the soul of that which is the subject of investigation. It
likewise would seem, that the most interesting, from the inwardly
religious point of view, are not the crystallised and formalised
and seclusive sects, but rather the individual and free searchers
of God and God’s truth, living an unconstrained, creative
religious life. Many such people have passed before me, and I
remember their faces with an altogether special sense of their
vital significance. I happened to live some years at a village
in Khar’kovsk gubernia nigh to a spiritual centre, at which
not only lived Tolstoyans, prone to mysticism, but also Dobroliubovians,
and free seekers of the truth of God, and various sectarians,
Spiritual Christians, free Christians, and fast-keepers, and constantly
also they passed through this centre seeking God from all the
ends of Russia. I spoke much with these people, and certain of
the spiritual type remain forever in my memory. I know assuredly,
that Russia is unthinkable without these people, that without
them the soul of Russia would be deprived of its most characteristic,
essential and valuable features. I would not presume to characterise
out separate images of these people. My intent only is to touch
upon the sort of general spiritual type, the typical religious
thought and religious world-perception. I met a whole series of
the self-initiated, of representatives of the people’s theosophy,
and each had his own system of the salvation of the world. None
would be reconciled with anything less, than the complete and
ultimate salvation of the world. It is a feature purely Russian,
foreign to the European consciousness. One saw this salvation
in a complete denial of good and evil, and from a burning thirst
for the good he denied the existence of evil and saw the Fall
to be in the emergence of the very distinction between good and
evil. Another saw salvation to be in this, to “be wrapped
up in the moment”, to emerge out from time, so as to conquer
the past and the future. A third saw salvation solely in a certain
non-resistance and nothing besides the non-resistance did he want
to see or know. A fourth had his own particular, firsthand revealed
to him teaching about Christ and only with it did he connect the
salvation of the world. And for all very characteristic was the
lack of desire to know the world heritage, the lack of desire
to be bound up with the experience and thought of mankind. To
these people the spirit of Sobornost’-Communality was foreign,
and even more foreign to them was any cultural tradition of thought
and creativity. This, perhaps, gives them a greater freedom and
daring, but it leads them to the revealing of the long already
revealed, and towards a reservedness in their own particular truth
as being unique. The sundering of individual religious thought
away from world thought and from the historical paths of culture
leads to simplicity. There is no shouldering of the past, there
is no feel within the soul of the array of old cultures. Every
complexity disappears, all the problems seem simple. For this
simplified monism of mind all the multiplicity of being is brushed
away. Suchlike always is the sectarian spirit.
IV.
Russian sectarianism
-- is an integral part of the spiritual life of the Russian nation.
A quite unique spiritual array can be discovered in Russian sectarianism
-- the Russian thirst for righteous life, life freed from this
world, the thirst for a life in God, but distorted and impaired.
The sectarian consciousness often becomes affected by rationalism,
but there is a great mystical thirst, hidden within some of our
sects. The sectarian -- is a man, struck and wounded by the untruth
(external) of the Orthodox mode of life and the churchly order
of things. The Russian sectarian is not to be reconciled with
the relative, he adapts the absolute towards the relative, he
wants absolute life. And in each sect there is a piece of fragmented
truth, there is a distorted truth. The sectarian is inclined always
to affirm a portion of the truth exclusively and fully, he mistakes
one ray of light for the sun. In sectarianism there is a constrictedness
and small capacity for awareness, the narrowness of an horizontal
life, a Judaeic spirit. With this is connected a self-affirmation
and exclusiveness within the psychology of the sect, and a blindness
towards the endless variability of worldly and historical life,
a disdaining of the experience of world culture. The sectarian
does not want to know anything individual, he does not value and
does not love the individual, he is immersed exclusively within
a single common principle, which he sees not in the whole, but
in the partial. The sectarian detaches himself from the world,
from the cycles of the cultural and socio-civil life. But the
attaining of the absolute in the life of this world is always
an illusion within sectarianism, it is always a self-delusion.
Every even domestic act leads the sectarian into the world cycle
and subjects him to culture. Planting a potato, the sectarian
or Tolstoyan already accepts the kingdom of Caesar, he lives in
law and by law. The impossibility of overcoming the order of nature
and the laws of nature in this sinful world limits every striving
to live by absolute, by Divine truth, of repudiating every compromise.
The sectarian consciousness of the Spiritual Christians, the Tolstoyans,
the Dobroliubovians, etc., posits all untruth and all sin only
within human life, in the human community and culture, whereas
the natural order they regard as beneficent and Divine. Problems
of cosmic evil do not exist for this consciousness. This type
of religious thought possesses no sort of cosmology. In it human
life is sundered from cosmic life. And this leads always to utopianism.
This consciousness is helpless in the delimiting of the absolute
and the relative, it absolutises the relative. Upon this soil
are begotten exaggerated trifles and the readiness to die for
trifles. I have in mind the features, common to all the Spiritual
Christians of various shades. A weakness of awareness is characteristic
to all the sects. And the very search for light by the sectarians
is immersed in darkness.
Moralism is
common to almost all the sects, except the Khlysti. The moralistic
trifling and pedanticism of many of the Spiritual Christians is
intolerable. This is indicative of too external an attitude towards
the evil in life. Of interest to us is the type of religious thought
which denies the self-sufficiency of law, of the kingdom of Caesar.
But the obverse side of this denial appears to be a subordination
of the spiritual life to law, legality, the Old Testament understanding
of Christianity. The imputing of an absolute significance to the
relative, the small the trifling -- is from an insufficiency of
spiritual freedom and enlightenment. This absorption with moral
trifles, for which some Tolstoyan or sectarian is prepared to
undergo great sacrifices, gives rise to an unique sort of Sabbath-keeping,
from which it would seem, Christ has forever set man free. Man
is higher up than the Sabbath, man -- is lord also of the Sabbath.
The fear to profane oneself, to dirty one’s white clothes
-- here is a moral Phariseeism, completely foreign to the spirit
of Christ. Christ ate and drank with publicans, He preferred the
sinner over the righteous Pharisee, He did not fear to transgress
the law, and love became higher than any norm of purity. The Gospel
morality is infinitely free, and this is not a normative, not
a legalistic morality, this -- is a morality of love, an inner
morality. The meekness of the Russian non resisters, the Tolstoyans,
the Dobroliubovians -- is not a Christian, but rather a Buddhist
meekness. In it there is a sense of a deficiency of life, a withdrawal
from being, the righteousness of law, but not the righteousness
of grace. The non-resisters too much fear the suffering in the
world and they would prefer to withdraw from the suffering. But
man is bound to bear out the suffering, he is bound to temper
his spirit. It is a mistake to confuse the spirit of Christianity
with the spirit of sheep. A sheepish irresponsibility and passivity
is altogether unbecoming a Christian. Bloodlessness and passionlessness
cannot at all be acknowledged as a favourable ground for a Christian
tempering of spirit. The religion of the God-Man Christ first
of all presupposes man and human nature, which can lift itself
up upon the Cross, which can assume great sacrifices and renunciation,
but which mustneeds also forever be human. And the most evil human
passions ought to be transformed and transfigured into good, and
not be extinguished and eradicated. All evil in man is but the
distortion of the Divine good.
There is rationalism
also in the so-called mystical sects. This is shown first of all
in the rejection of all the antinomic, out of a fear of dogmatic
folly, and in the constant tendency towards monism and Monophysitism.
The sectarian consciousness does not admit of the two natures
and the two wills, the Divine and the Human, co-united and rendered
in unity. This consciousness recognises only the Divine nature
and the Divine will, but from the human however it flees. There
is rationalism also in the iconoclastic tendency, in the lack
of understanding of the symbolics of the cultus, and in the estrangement
from religious aesthetics. All the sectarians and all the Spiritual
Christians do not ultimately understand the mystery of Redemption,
the mystery of the Eucharist, its power -- the setting free from
sin and transgression. For them the very chief thing -- is a moral
perfection, the fulfilling of Divine law. The sects of a rationalist
tendency deny grace and their approach is to a religion of moral
law. The sectarians have almost no sense of the Church, not only
in the external sense, but neither also in the cosmic sense. The
whole of sectarianism is in opposition to the universality of
spirit. immersion within oneself, self absorption, makes contact
with the world impossible. Certain of the sects attempt to create
their own church, cleansed of all the accretions of the world
and history, and also too their own sacramental-mysteries. But
religious creativity cannot be directed upon an arbitrarily created
church, upon its invented mysteries. Religious creativity is not
a denial of the old sanctities, their re-minting and replacement
by the new, -- it is connected with new religious themes and new
revelations. But in sectarianism never will there be new revelations,
it is always occupied by the re-minting of the old revelations
as regards some sole fragmentary, partial truth, assumed of as
in entirety. Sectarians usually want to return back, to some sort
of lost primordial purity, and not go forward.
V.
There is a deep
mystical thirst lodged within our sectarianism. And truly amazing
is the spiritual effort and energy of the Russian people comprising
the sects, wandering through the Russian land, aspiring to the
City of Kitezh, conversing about faith in the “Yama-Pit”
-- a Moscow inn. But this exertive religious searching is beset
with darkness. The consciousness of the mystical sectarianism
-- is of the night, and not of the day. This darkness and night
is sensed with the Khlysti, the Bessmertniki, the Netovsi, and
with many, many others. Passionately our mystical sectarianism
yearns for deliverance from the falsehood of the world and the
untruth of outward life, passionately it desires to pass over
into the kingdom of Spirit, tensely it awaits the end of the old
world and a new advent of the Holy Spirit. But at present, spiritual
freedom and the religious deliverance of person within sectarianism
is not achieved. In Russian sectarianism, even in the most remarkable
of its forms, the person is not yet fully emerged from a primordial
naturalistic collectivism. And the truth about man, about the
human person, remains undisclosed. In the popular sectarianism
there is then a flight from man to God, which we [saw] (see) in
the religious currents of the Intelligentsia. There is no purely
human principle, of human activity. Human activeness is acknowledged
in the sects even less, than it is in Orthodoxy. The revelation
about human creativity can least of all be found in our Spiritual
Christianity. That religious populism, which seeks for a religious
centre within the spiritual life of the people, in the people’s
sects, is [false and] self-deluded. [From it -- it is necessary
for us to be set free.] The People -- the common-folk -- are however
people the same as is everyone, and within the People is much
darkness, greed and limitedness, not only in the ranks of its
masses, but also in its chosen parts. The best people from among
the People themselves seek light, an egress from the darkness
characteristic of the People’s life, and least of all do
they themselves revere themselves, as the People, as the source
of the light. Those, which are closely in contact with these finest
people from among the People, know well the untruth of religious
populism. At a certain depth of spiritual and religious association
there vanishes completely every distinction between the
simple peasant and the man of culture, whether the nobleman or
of the intelligentsia, and there is found a common language and
the possibility of a most intimate mutual understanding. The “muzhik-peasant”
in spirit might sense the “baron” as closer to himself,
than his fellow muzhik-peasants. At the beginning of the XIX Century,
during the Alexander era, there was a rapprochement and the kinship
of a mystical stirring in the upper stratum of Russian society,
in the aristocracy, and also in the lower stratum, among the people.
1 Populism is the transference of social categories
upon spiritual life, which essentially is not connected with these
categories. This -- is an intelligentsia tendency, all the more
difficult an approach to the people. I know through personal experience
the possibility of spiritual association with people from among
the People, and have heard their own testimony about the untruth
of Populism.
Never shall I forget
my mystical talks with a simple peasant unskilled-worker, a genuine
mystic, very sophisticated, so curiously memorable for me in his
mannerism, in semblance of Andrei Bely. The most sophisticated
problems of mystical gnosis he understood better, than many people
of the upper cultural strata, readers of Eckhardt and Boehme.
He related to me the extraordinary facts of his life, his inner
experience. As a twelve year old lad he was pasturing the cattle
and he went along the field on a bright sunny day. And heavy doubts
tormented him. He was doubtful about the existence of God, and
as the measure of his doubt in God grew, he began to doubt everything.
And he sensed, that nothing was. And suddenly for him the sun
darkened and amidst the white daylight there became darkness,
and he was plunged into complete darkness and nothingness. And
here suddenly he perceived, that he himself was nothingness. And
from this nothingness everything began to emerge, everything was
begotten anew. Again it became very light, again he beheld the
field and the bright sunny daylight. And he discovered anew not
only the world, but also God, begotten out of the nothingness,
from the darkness. This -- is a very keen and clear description
of mystical experience, of the mystical path, which can be found
with the greatest mystics. This simple peasant had not read Eckhardt
nor Boehme, he had not even heard about them, but there was revealed
to him what had been revealed to them, and he comprehended the
begetting of light from the primordial darkness, from the Ungrund.
When we spoke about his undergoing of the experience, he was not
a muzhik-peasant, and I was not a man of culture and of the nobility.
The very question about “the People” vanished. This
mystic from among the People very much esteemed knowledge and
he sought knowledge, the People’s darkness was dreadful
for him, and he valued people of learning, thinkers moreover,
than even the people of culture tend to value. The highest type
of spiritual life needs to be searched out not in crystallised
sects of the People, and not in the lifestyles of the religiosity
of the People, but with the individual innately-talented, full
of a flaming religious thirst, and those from among the People
that are theosophists, and wanderers, contented by nothing, never
cooling. In the sects it is unacceptable to detach oneself off
from the world and guard one’s purity. The sects start out
with a spiritual fieryness, with a spiritual ascent, but they
end up with the mannerisms of s self-satisfied sectarian way of
life, cooled down, congealed and limited. Most unacceptable is
the spirit of the Baptists, who in going about in the circles
of the sects pride themselves as saved, whereas all the rest of
the world -- are dwellers of darkness and wont to perish. This
element is in all the sects. The sects have an innate tendency
towards degeneration.
VI.
A significant segment
of the sectarians strives purely towards a Gospel-evangelical
Christianity, cleansed from all the layers of historical developement.
And all our sects can be divided into two basic types as regards
their various attitudes towards the Gospel. For some the Gospel
text possesses an external authority, and in this type prevails
a literalism, which is not in the Church, which acknowledges Holy
Scripture as but part of Holy Tradition. For others the Gospel
is an inner spiritual fact, and in this type the attitude towards
the Gospel text is completely free. The first type of sectarianism,
which can be called Evangelical Christianity, is of little interest
to me. More interesting and more remarkable is the second type,
which can be called Spiritual Christianity. But this Spiritual
Christianity also is inclined to deny the historical religious
unfolding, and to affirm a certain static spiritual evangelism.
These features have a kinship with Protestantism, which [always]
seeks for purity backwards, in primieval Christianity, and it
repudiates the dynamic process of churchly developement. Even
with the spiritual, rather than the literalist understanding of
evangelism, the Gospel is understood statically, and not dynamically,
only as a prepared revelation and not as itself new life, discovered
and unfolded by mankind. Religious dynamism is not characteristic
of sectarianism, neither to the Evangelical nor to the Spiritual
Christianity. Churchly Christianity is more dynamic as regards
its religious principle, although it can chill down in certain
epochs. And the modernist Catholics have [every] basis to look
upon Protestantism, as upon a reaction, turned backwards, denying
the principles of religious developement. This particular reaction
is also in Russian sectarianism. The pathos of sectarianism --
is not a dynamic, but rather a static pathos: this is a search
for a lost and primordial purity, and not for a new creativity.
The return to a primieval Christianity is not in any sense possible
nor desirable, just as a return to primieval nature is neither
possible nor desirable, to a naturalness, a spiritual elementalness
and non-revealedness. The Gospel is not a collection of congealed
laws and commands, it -- is the leavening of new life. And we
ourselves ought to uncover that, which in elusive and unrevealed
form is enclosed within the Gospel. In Russia a repeat of the
Reformation of the Lutheran type, of the Protestant spirit, is
both impossible and undesirable. In Russia, among the Russian
people there is the potential of an other, of an higher religious
life, a creative life, oriented forwards, towards the end. And
in the chaotic sectarian elements, in which form and vanish the
unseemly multiplicity of sects, it is necessary to discern the
genuine mystical thirst, the apocalyptic presentiments, the tellings
of the City to Come, the wanderance away from the rationalistic
and Protestant spirit. Sectarianism -- is twofold, it is religiously
revolutionary and it is reactionary, it is oriented forwards and
backwards, dynamic and static, mystical and moralistic, elemental
and rational. An extreme iconoclasm, an extreme attitude towards
the churchly cultus and churchly dogmas, a disdain for the foreignly
sacred is of the abstractive rationalism and the abstractive moralism
in sectarianism, and an insensitivity towards the mystical in
history. In the sectarian pathos too much is defined negatively,
-- the baseness of our Orthodox manner of life, the corruptness
of the clergy, the sins of the churchly establishment. The official
ecclesiality does not satisfy the spiritual thirst of the Russian
people, it leaves them insatiable seekers of the water of life,
alone, left to themselves. But a definition of religious life
by means of negative sanctions evidences a spiritual slavery,
an insufficiency of spiritual freedom. It is needful likewise
to distinguish within sectarianism the searching for the City
to Come, of the Kingdom of God, as distinct from the false presentations
of an earthly paradise, easily to be attained by a carrying out
of the evangelic law. Sectarianism - is extraordinarily
complex a thing. And it is with great difficulty that there can
be discovered within this chaos certain typical elements of religious
thought.
In Russian
sectarianism there is prevalent a type of Dukhoborism, altogether
an unique and peculiar religious type. This religious type is
more extensive than that which appeared as, and which in the narrow
sense of the word is called, the Dukhobor movement. Nearly within
every Spiritual Christian there sits a Dukhobor. In his spirit
there is a narrowness, a diminishing of the scope of being in
the name of a righteous life. This spirit has no room for history
nor for all the multiplicity of created values. The Dukhobor is
too much beset by evil. Diabolic temptation besets the Dukhobor
with an affirming of the Divineness of beauty. Only the most simple,
the most elemental, presents itself to him as Divine. All the
flesh of history is repudiated by him with disgust. In Dukhoborism
there coincide religious searchings at the bottom of Russian life,
together with religious searchings at its summit, as in L. Tolstoy.
The spiritual turn-around in such a remarkable man, as Prince
D. Khilkov, occurred under the influence of the Dukhobors. And
many a religious seeker from among the Intelligentsia has an attraction
towards the Dukhobors. Of the actual Dukhobors there are already
almost none in Russia, for they have resettled (to America), but
there remains a Dukhobor ferment. The Dukhobor thirst for truth
passes over into an eradication of the richness of being. Dukhobors
have no love for creative richness, for creative surfeit. Dukhoborism
was begotten as a negative reaction to a dark and oppressive untruth,
and it was poisoned by the old crush of external evil. And its
positive and creative attainments were thus crippled and impoverished.
Divine being was presented in the form of a diminished, castrate
manner of being. This was not the Franciscan cult of poverty,
from which was born the beauty of the early Renaissance, this
was not the Gospel poverty of the lilies of the field and the
birds of the air, this -- is the poverty of a fulfilling of the
law, dull and despondent, not mystical, but moralistic. The Dukhobor
consciousness does not recognise steps of developement, the hierarchy
of values. From it is spun a cold attitude towards the individual
man, as in general towards everything individual.
Another type
of Russian sectarianism -- is Khlystyism. Khlystyism, as a type
of popular mysticism and Russian thought, are widespread sects,
called by this name. Dukhoborism is not ecstatic, not orgiastic.
Khlystyism -- is first of all, ecstatic and orgiastic. Wherein
Dukhoborism seeks truth, Khlystyism seeks joy and blessedness.
Both the Dukhobors and the Khlysty want to pass over from this
world into spirit, and they seek after inspiration. But how different,
how opposite the paths by which the spirit is inspired in the
Khlysty and in the Dukhobors. Both Khlystyism, and Dukhoborism
-- are a Spiritual Christianity, but spirit and spirituality within
these two religious types is denoted altogether differently. [Actually,
whether with these or others, it is difficult to consider them
Christians.] With the Khlysty there is a “spiritual drinking”,
an ecstatic drunkenness, completely unknown to the Dukhobors.
Khlystyism -- is Dionysian, and its origins mustneeds be sought
out in the ancient Russian paganism of old. In Dukhoborism there
is no Dionysianism, there is rather more a tendency towards Buddhism.
Khlystyism is erotic right through and through. The ecstasies
of the Khlysty -- are erotic ecstasies. In an offshoot of the
Khlysty -- are the Skoptsi-castrates -- for whom the religious
problem of sex is perceived as a fiery problem. In Dukhoborism,
as also in Tolstoyism, there is something sexless. In this religious
type the erotic is completely absent. For the Khlysty what is
important is not the occasion of the orgiastic ecstasy, what is
important is what follows, the actual energy of the ecstasy. The
Khlysty seek joy, blessedness upon the earth, they seek it within
the body and they want to make with the body something, such that
it not meddle with nor hinder the joy of the spirit. They seek
this upon the paths of a collective ecstasy, in the collective
act they spin round in the Khlysty spirit. The Dukhobors seek
individual paths, and their social life in common is devoid of
any ecstaticism, of any community in spirit. The Dukhobors --
are monists, they want to live a pure spiritual life, in this
world so as to overcome the world. The Khlysty -- are hidden dualists,
they live a twofold life -- in the world, in the natural order,
and in the spirit, in the Divine order. Both with the Khlysty,
and with the Dukhobors, there is a breaking off from the regular
lifestyle and manner of religiosity, the forsaking of kin, and
the repudiation of fleshly life. But how varied is this withdrawal.
The Dukhobors form farming colonies, as an oasis within the worldly
wilderness, and they arrange their life domestically without conflict
or force. The Khlysty arrange their vigils, and in a collective
ecstasy the spirit spins round in them. Both the one and the other
seek an inward Christ, -- a Christ, born within them. But both
the one and the other misuse the Christian name for designating
an experience not Christian, a mystical religious experience of
the East, a Buddhist or perhaps pagan an experience, not knowing
the human face. Khlystyism -- is a most remarkable manifestation
in our popular mysticism. But it is twofold. In the Khlysty experience
there is always the assumption of a Khlysty Christ and a Khlysty
Mother of God, always connected with the concrete figures of people,
situated on the edge, so that a split is possible on the opposing
sides. One subtle, hardly perceptible feature separates these
two religious assumptions: either in this Ivan -- is the Christos,
the reincarnated Christ, or else in that Ivan -- is the Christos.
The Khlysty seek after the bodily concrete in the assuming of
Divine life. This leads them to the edge of the abyss. And eternally
they break off into the abyss, and tumble down into the element
of darkness. The Khlysty want to transfer the whole of the Gospel
history over into themselves, into their ship, into their brothers
and sisters. But this great mystical task is accomplished by them
not in the depths of the life of the spirit, immersed in the life
Divine, but upon the superficiality of body, immersed in the pagan
naturalistic element. In Khlystyism there is a great mystical
thirst, a [rightful] anguish as regards the ecstatic life of spirit.
But in Khlystyism also is a pagan darkness and demonic frustration.
Khlystyian Russia is immersed in the dark, the non human East.
And man vanishes, he drowns in this dark primordial element. Within
Orthodoxy itself the ecstatic tendency tends frequently and imperceptibly
towards Khlystyism. (Such as with John of Kronstadt.) In the expression
of the eyes can be discerned people of this tendency. But it mustneeeds
be acknowledged, that in the Khlysty religious type there is an
immeasurably deeper positing of the problem of sex and the problem
of community, than there is in Dukhoborism, which always tends
towards moralism. The Khlysty element among the Russian people
ought to be enlightened, and logos ought to penetrate this darkness.
And then an enormous mystical energy would be discovered for the
religious rebirth of Russia. Without this dark element of the
Russian Land there would be held back the human developement
in Russia.
VII.
[An unique
religious thinker, having developed an entire system of Spiritual
Christianity, is M. M. Tareev, who stands apart amidst the professors
of the Spiritual Academy. 2 With Tareev there is a stronger consciousness than
that, which is in our popular sectarian Spiritual Christianity,
and he succeeds consciously in delimiting the sphere of the absolute
and the relative. He is decidedly also an extreme dualist, and
all his system is constructed upon the opposition of the absolute
Divine life, in contrast with that of the relative naturo-historical
life. Christianity is exclusively a personal religion, oriented
towards the infinite spiritual life of the person, and it is completely
inapplicable to life that is fleshly, natural and historical,
whether of the state, society, family or culture. The sphere relative
to the natural life ought to be liberated and it ought to be developed
according to its own laws. But in the spiritual Christian life
there are no sort of steps, no sort of evolution, nothing relative;
there everything is absolute, everything is incompatible with
natural life. The concepts of Tareev have much in common with
R. Aiken, 3 though evidently it is arrived at quite independently.
Tareev is stronger in his critique, in his negative delimitations
and oppositions, than he is in his positings. He is unable to
tie up the loose ends, and his dualism is fruitless, there are
neither paths nor egress. Tareev -- is a Monophysite. His absolute
spiritual life -- is Divine life, and in it man sinks down and
disappears, as does also his activity. The religious question
about man and human creativity is not set forth by him. But in
his critique of historical Christianity there is much that is
noteworthy and true, much that is made clear. This critique, regretably
for him, goes astray towards Protestantism, and he does not see
and does not want to acknowledge the cosmic hierarchy.]
VIII.
The feeling of the
co-incidence of spiritual life at the summits, at the peaks of
culture, and at the bottommost popular life, makes for a very
strong joy and hope for an impending Russian religious renaissance.
A religious renaissance can only be with the people. But the people
is something qualitative, and not quantitative. The depths of
the spiritual life of the people is locked up within select individuals,
and not in the masses, not in the People’s lifestyle, which
is always but peripheral. The tearing away of more spiritual the
Christians from their innate lifestyle is happening both above
and below. The falsehood and untruth of visible life is unmasked,
and the searching for the invisible meaning of life has begun.
The spiritual wandering -- is a supreme manifestation of the Russian
soul. But for an authentic religious renaissance and the onset
of religious creativity to ensue, there is necessary a liberation
from the sectarian spirit, which is always a false direction for
spiritual energy. The will for unity and universal (churchly)
reunion ought to prevail over the will for discord and closed-off
separateness. A true esotericism is non-sectarian, and in it is
lodged a true universalism, a true affirmation of cosmic hierarchy.
To the national religious stirring there ought to open up the
religious meaning of culture, as a pathway of mankind. In the
spiritual life of the nation, J. Boehme, -- in the so-called “masonic”
translations of the beginning XIX Century, and the other mystics
also, would be preserved yet more and more alive, than it is in
our cultural strata and in our literature. But in this national
spiritual life there ought to enter in all the fruits of culture,
and there ought to be manifest their religious meaning.
At present the religious
stirring in Russia still has not begun. But there are the great
possibilities of such a stirring in the spiritual life of Russia.
In all the types of Christian religious meaning there is its own
truth. All seek to get out from the ossified, petrified, deadening,
external lifestyle of the civil-utilitarian religiosity, and all
variously seek a new religious life. Invisibly is begotten the
new man. And in Russian religious thought there is always the
propheticism about a new world epoch, there is always a sensing
of the end of the old world. The religious shifting ought to go
down into the depths of the Divine-human nature. But this creative
shifting cannot and should not be sectarian nor a mutinous split
from the OEcumenical Church, from its inner essence. A creative
religious revolution will happen within the Church (itself), in
its hidden depths. And at the same time there are wrong both those,
which cleave (only) to the external trappings of the Church, and
also those, which deny its (eternal) inner core. [The religious
will ought to be directed towards creative revelation, the principle
of which is a safeguard for man himself.]
Nikolai Berdyaev
1916
© 1999 by translator Fr. S. Janos
(1916 - 252a - en)
DUKHOBNOE KHRISTIANSTVO I SEKTANTSTVO
V ROSSII. Russkaya Mysl’. nov. 1916.
Reprinted in YMCA Press Paris in 1989 in Berdiaev Collection:
“Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii”, (Tom III), ctr.
441-462.
N.B. The Klepinina Bibliographie lists as #252 this article
together with the article “Theosophy and Anthroposophy in
Russia”, which also appeared in the nov. 1916 issue of Russkaya
Mysl’. Neither the Klepinina Bibliographie nor the YMCA 1989
reprint indicate the page numbers for either article in the nov.
1916 Russkaya Mysl’; I however follow the sequence suggested
in the YMCA text and also by Y Krotov, and consider this other named
article on “Theosophy and Anthroposophy...”
to be the second in sequence, thus encoding it (1916 - 252b - en).
1
It is very characteristic, that the upper strata of the nobility
were attracted to the mystical popular sects, but never to the
rationalistic. Vide: A. S. Prugavin, “Raskol vverkhu”
(“Schism at the Top”).
[ 2
Vide his four volume “Fundamentals of Christianity”
(“Osnovy khristianstva”). Very much of interest is
the second tome, “The Gospel”.]
[ 3
R. Aiken affirms the dualism of the spiritual world and the natural
world, and the breaking through of spiritual energy from within
into this world.]
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